Center for Humanities & the Arts Faculty Fellows
The CHA Faculty Fellowship program is designed to support CU 麻豆影院 faculty in the humanities and the arts by providing a two-course teaching reduction to advance their research and creative projects. This competitive fellowship allows faculty to dedicate focused time to their scholarly work, fostering significant progress on projects with the potential for meaningful impact.听
The program emphasizes intellectual merit, feasibility, and alignment with the arts and humanities, and it seeks applicants whose projects demonstrate academic excellence and relevance at this stage in their careers. Awardees are expected to engage with their peers through regular meetings and submit a final report detailing their research outcomes and plans for publication. For more details visit the full page: www.colorado.edu/cha/funding-and-resources/faculty-opportunities/cha-faculty-fellowships
2025-2026
Natalie M Avalos,听Ethnic Studies - College of Arts & Sciences
Decolonizing Metaphysics: Transnational Indigeneities and Religious Refusal
Settler colonial and decolonial theory often focuses on the material and epistemic dimension of colonial dispossession. This ethnographic study posits that settler colonialism鈥痠s enabled to monopolize Native resources by monopolizing metaphysical narratives that pathologize Native land and peoples as primitive and in need of development. Combining ethnographic fieldwork with Tibetan refugees and urban Native American peoples from 2012 to 2018 in Santa Fe and Albuquerque, with a phenomenological analysis of religious life, this study demonstrates that a contemporary focus on religious continuity acts as a decolonizing force, supporting new commitments to transnational peoplehood (nationhood) in diaspora. Religious practice provides the practical tools for socio-political mobility but also acts as a spiritual salve, healing both the material and psychological effects of colonialism. Although their struggles for sovereignty are multivalent, placing Native American and Tibetan decolonization movements in conversation illustrates the way religious identity re-imagines nationhood and belonging in an increasingly globalized world.听听
Emmanuel David, Women & Gender Studies - College of Arts & Sciences
Trans-American Orientalism: The Asia-Pacific Encounters of Transgender Pioneer Christine Jorgensen, 1961鈥1969
Drawing on multilingual sources from archives in Asia, Australia, Denmark, and the United States, David鈥檚 project explores Jorgensen鈥檚 little-known performance tour across Asia and the Pacific, especially her extended stay in the Philippines. By chronicling this understudied chapter of Jorgensen鈥檚 life, David reassesses her place in mid-twentieth-century trans history from a transpacific perspective. "Sonic Transness," an article drawn from the larger book project, appeared in 2023 in American Quarterly.听
Hilary Kalisman, History, Program in Jewish Studies - College of Arts & Sciences
Standardized Testing: An Imperial and National Legacy of the Modern Middle East
Standardized Testing: An Imperial and National Legacy of the Modern Middle East recovers the origins and consequences of school examinations: one of the most important, durable, pervasive, and under-analyzed legacies of imperialism in the Middle East.鈥 Focusing on Britain's Middle Eastern Mandates (Iraq, Palestine/Israel, Transjordan/Jordan), I argue that standardized tests outlasted the governments that set exams in motion because they could be used both as a repressive tactic and as a promise, albeit often illusory, of social mobility. This project brings to light the politics behind standardized tests, in one of the regions of the world where testing holds the most importance.鈥听
Isabel K. K枚ster,听Classics - College of Arts & Sciences
Justice beyond the Courts: Divine Punishment in the Roman World
In my book project, Justice beyond the Courts: Divine Punishment in the Roman World, I explore how the inhabitants of the pre-Christian Roman world used appeals to divine retribution to obtain justice against those who had wronged them. By tracing the rhetoric of divine punishment across inscriptions, poetic texts, philosophical works, oratorical handbooks, and speeches, produced primarily between the first century BCE and the first century CE, I demonstrate that Romans from all social classes saw the gods as essential, but capricious, partners in addressing injustice who could be incentivized to help individuals negotiate a deeply unequal and unfair world.听
Adrienne Merritt, Germanic & Slavic Languages & Literatures - College of Arts & Sciences
A Playlist for Black Germany: Hapticity, Future Worlds, and Joy
A Playlist for Black Germany: Hapticity, Future Worlds, and Joy focuses on contemporary literature, art, museum installations, and hip-hop by Black artists and writers in the German context to explore the reality of being both Black and German. Highlighting creative works from the past decade, I argue that Black German artists and scholars use cultural production to open possibilities for imagining new worldviews that disrupt normalized concepts of time, space, and being while also attending to the lived reality in a world preoccupied with Black necropolitics (i.e., how governments assign differential value to human life). Forging new paths of inquiry through cultural production, Black German creators acknowledge the historical lineages and social-seismic aftermaths of racialization and colonial fantasies in Germany while also imagining and dreaming worlds where Blackness is central to the conceptualization of humanness and subjectivity. I connect this concept of worldbuilding to Black joy and hapticity to highlight Black German cultural production as a joyful celebration of Black creativity, ingenuity, and lived reality, one that seeks to build community and connection across the Black diaspora.听
Dianne Mitchell, English - College of Arts & Sciences
Renaissance Women and the Poetics of Erotic Life
How did Englishwomen in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries theorize their experiences of sex, desire, refusal, and longing? Literary studies of erotic life have long prioritized male accounts or female "voices" that are actually staged characters, performed by men and boys. But poems, letters, and other literary documents by women offer a compelling counterarchive of feeling. My project insists that women are best placed to unfold their own erotic lives, and dives into manuscript archives in order to explore the language and literary resources available to them for doing so. I argue that our scholarly methodologies and ways of knowing must change if we are to accord women's distinctive strategies for expressing desire or disgust a prominent place within our histories of sexuality.听
Dimitri Nakassis, Classics - College of Arts & Sciences
Reassembling Mycenaean Greece
My project proposes a new way of understanding Late Bronze Age Greece (ca. 1650鈥1050 BCE) by taking apart interpretations premised on its essential unity, which fail to account for much of our archaeological and textual evidence. It reconfigures the study of Mycenaean Greece by breaking its study down into distinct practices whose histories can be traced temporally and spatially, and then reassembling these to produce rich, textured historical understandings.听
Paul Sutter,听History - College of Arts & Sciences
Pulling the Teeth of the Tropics
Pulling the Teeth of the Tropics is an environmental and medical history of U.S. public health efforts during era of canal construction in Panama. The manuscript examines American perceptions of the tropics and tropical nature, how those perceptions informed U.S. sanitary and other administrative practices in Panama, and how those practices resulted in the creation of a Canal Zone landscape that mixed marked public health improvements with profound racial and medical inequalities. I also argue that the environmental changes wrought by canal construction created many of the conditions conducive to malaria and yellow fever transmission, conditions that U.S. officials and observers often naturalized as tropical. The manuscript concludes by tracing the diverse legacies of this pivotal moment in the history of U.S. public health administration.听
Anna Tsouhlarakis, Art & Art History - College of Arts & Sciences
Reparative Faculty Fellowship to Address Settler Colonialism
Indigenous Femininity
Throughout my art practice I have continually worked to stretch concepts and understanding of Native American identity through sculpture, video, photography, installation, and performance art. In my current research, I explore notions of Indigenous femininity in relation to illustrations of power and aggression while reconsidering how Indigenous female presence can be recovered from a place of obscurity within the archives of the Western canon of art. This year I was awarded a 2024 Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship and have begun research in the archives of three Smithsonian collections, with a focus on imagery and objects depicting Native American women. For the CHA Reparative Faculty Fellowship, I will continue my research by visiting collections, historical sites, and museums in Italy and Greece that house classical artworks of women from times of antiquity. The culmination will be a new body of work derived from my research.听
Marcia Yonemoto, History - College of Arts & Sciences
The Changing Logics of Adoption in Japan, 1600-1912
Japanese history offers a unique window onto a universal question: what is a family? For most of Japan鈥檚 past, frequent adoption鈥攐f males, females, adults, children, even married couples鈥攑layed an essential role in constituting families over time. By examining the changing meanings of adoption across the early modern/modern divide (c. 1600-1912), my project brings various humanities disciplines into conversation in new ways that reveal the centrality of family in an era marked by continuity as well as transformation.听
听
2024-2025
Michela Ardizzoni, French & Italian - College of Arts and Sciences
Black Italian Imaginaries
Black Italian writers, performers, and media makers have been contributing to a new understanding of identity and belonging in contemporary Italy, a country that for decades has described itself as white and Catholic. The creative work of the children of immigrant parents reveals a hybrid mix of cultures, languages, religions, and customs鈥攁ll held together by their common identification as Italians. But the narratives of these new generations of Italians have thus far been marginalized or outright silenced in mainstream records. In a public landscape that stifles diverse voices, the narratives of Black Italian performers, writers, and filmmakers have become an urgent call for a need to redress the space of Blackness in the Italian听imaginary. Far from being a mere reaction to this marginalizing rhetoric, my book project Black Italian Imaginaries probes the politics and aesthetics of the multivocality of Italian identity, a way of being Italian that is not dictated by the nationalistic fervor of current mainstream discourse. Black Italian Imaginaries brings together postcolonial studies, decolonial theory, and Black aesthetics in analyzing the history and poetics of Blackness in Italy to show and analyze the existence of a specific cultural production of Black Italianness embedded in the narratives (written, oral, sung, filmed) of contemporary media makers and practitioners.
Thora Brylowe, English -听College of Arts and Sciences
Rag Paper and its Transatlantic Ecologies, 1770-1860听
Rag Paper and its Transatlantic Ecologies, 1770-1860听is an听interdisciplinary book that invites its readers to rethink the physical medium on which culture was (and is) transmitted and stored. It brings theories of media together with attention to paper鈥檚 impact on papermill workers and ecosystems, contributing to a growing body of environmental studies in the humanities. This book produces a fuller picture of media ecology as a dynamic system of mobility, use and reuse.
Marjorie Burge, Asian Languages and Civilizations - College of Arts and Sciences
Unearthing Written Cultures of Early Korea and Japan
My book project,听Unearthing Written Cultures of Early Korea and Japan听explores the adoption of the Chinese script in Korea and Japan in the sixth through eighth centuries. Through focusing on caches of inscribed wooden strips known as听mokkan听recovered in archaeological excavations throughout Korea and Japan, I explore multiple local script communities operating to varying degrees as part of a larger written network that mirrored prestige good distribution networks of earlier eras. Further, because it was through the immigration of Korean scribes that writing first took hold in Japan, my work underscores the connections between specific regional written cultures across the peninsula and in the archipelago.
J Calder, Linguistics -听College of Arts and Sciences
Handsome Women听
Handsome Women听is a scholarly monograph exploring the linguistic and embodied practices of a group of radical drag queens in the South of Market (SoMa) neighborhood in San Francisco, California. This ethnography employs a multi-modal analysis to explore the relationship between the visual gendered body on the one hand, and the medium of language as a means to articulate gender on the other. Many of the SoMa queens identify as transgender and nonbinary in their daily lives, and their visual gender presentation varies between one that is often read by normative society as 鈥渕ale鈥 when they are out of drag, and one that is more likely to be read as 鈥渇emale鈥 when they are in drag.听听Many of the queens recount how their feminine voices and mannerisms are stigmatized when they visually appear 鈥渕ale鈥, but these same voices and mannerisms allow them to receive social capital when in feminine drag. In navigating a gendered landscape that expects voices and bodies to ideologically 鈥渕atch鈥 in normative ways, the SoMa queens leverage visual materials and vocal techniques to create ideological space for themselves as gender-expansive individuals within a wider cisgender society.
Arne H枚cker, Germanic & Slavic Languages & Literatures -听College of Arts and Sciences
Paranoia and the Totalitarian Drift of Modernity听听
My book analyzes the history of paranoia and how it can help us understand the re-emergence and rise of sovereign forms of authority in Weimar Germany. Clinically characterized as mental delusion of persecution, jealousy, and grandeur, paranoia became popular in modern psychiatry around 1900 and took on special importance in Freud鈥檚 psychoanalysis. Against this historical-epistemological background and informed by philosophical explanations of paranoia as 鈥渁n illness of power鈥 (Elias Canetti), my study develops an understanding of paranoia as a theoretical figure offering a critical response to two of the central crises of modernity: the crisis of reality and truth; and the crisis of authority. Based on empirically rich case studies from psychiatric, journalistic, literary, and sociological contexts during the Weimar era, my book analyzes the shifting of the forces of modernity towards totalitarian forms of power and control.
Angelica Lawson, Ethnic Studies and听Cinema & Moving Image听Studies听-听College of Arts and Sciences
Inaugural听Reparative Faculty Fellowship to Address听Settler Colonialism
Enacting Our Futures: Resistance and Resilience in Indigenous听Women鈥檚 Resurgence Media
鈥淓nacting Our Futures: Resistance and Resilience in Indigenous听Women鈥檚 Resurgence Media,鈥 explores the intersections of Indigenous digital studies, literature, and ecocinema through Native American women鈥檚 creative works using resurgence theory鈥攁n Indigenous feminist framework most notably developed in the work of Anishinaabe scholar Leanne Betasamosake Simpson. Indigenous resurgence specifically refers to political strategies and cultural practices aimed at strengthening Indigenous peoplehood in ways that elevate our epistemologies and ontologies while interrogating legacies of colonialism in our societies, especially inequities along lines of gender and sexuality.听Historically, art served both practical and ceremonial purposes, richly layered with symbolic meaning and deeply rooted in Indigenous thought systems. Today鈥檚 writers and filmmakers are doing similar work, invoking new modes for insuring continuance, and while the听last three decades have seen a proliferation of Indigenous women鈥檚 literature, film, and digital media using Indigenous languages created by women who are heavily invested in community engagement鈥攂oth of which are elements central to Indigenous resurgence, these works have received scant attention in听literary听and film听scholarship. My project seeks to reverse this trend, and to contribute to Indigenous feminist resurgence theory by engaging the work of four lesser-known Native women writers and filmmakers. I demonstrate how, through their community engagement and creative cultural productions, they assert Indigenous presence and futurity in the face of ongoing settler-colonial forces of erasure.
Natalie Mendoza, History -听College of Arts and Sciences
Good Neighbor at Home: Mexican American Politics in the World War II Era
My book, Good Neighbor at Home: Mexican American Politics in the World War II Era, shows how Mexican Americans used geopolitics to demand the U.S. government take an active role in ending anti-Mexican racism in the Southwest (1930s-1940s). During World War II, the nation鈥檚 hypocrisy became clear: claiming to be a beacon of democracy, the U.S. failed to address its own racism. U.S.-Latin American foreign policy amplified this paradox. The Good Neighbor policy (est. 1936) aimed to repair relations in Latin America by emphasizing a common American heritage, regardless of race, in the hemisphere. Mexican Americans used this moment to call out the government鈥檚 reluctance to address racism at home as an affront to its egalitarian ideals. My book makes a case for possibilities in advancing racial equity in the present through grassroots activism and federal action.
Omedi Ochieng, Communication -听College of Media, Communication and Information
Keywords for a Black Ecology
What would be the form and contours of the ecological imagination if one started from practices that unfold from fugitive and insurgent Black populations and movements? This is the central question animating听this book project.听My听study seeks to contribute to the invention of a theory, language, and praxis of Black radical ecology. Drawing mainly on visual and print media produced by insurgents, activists and organizers in the numerous protests, riots, and civil unrests that have unfolded across the United States鈥攎ost notably, the George Floyd, Atlanta, Kenosha, and Ferguson rebellions鈥攖his research study asks: how does our conception of ecology change when we attend to the lives, theories, and practices of people whose struggles have focused on the abolition of policing, prisons, and empires writ large? How are keywords of ecology鈥攕uch as 鈥渟ustainability,鈥 鈥渞esilience,鈥 鈥渁daptation鈥濃攖ransfigured when seen through the eyes of those who are fighting for survival in food deserts, halfway houses, and听in sacrifice zones such as听the inner city, the听prison, the听coal camp, and the听hollow?
Tracy Quan, Spanish & Portuguese - College of Arts and Sciences
Being Latinx and Asian in the United States: Ethnolinguistic Identities, Multilingual Practices, and Raciolinguistic Ideologies
Being Latinx and Asian in the United States听is a sociocultural linguistic project that explores how individuals who identify as both Latinx/Hispanic and Asian confront and contest racio- and ethnolinguistic assumptions about who they are and who they can be. First, Latin Asians are subject to raciolinguistic ideologies鈥搑acialized ideas about the language(s) people speak based on their phenotype, race, and ethnicity鈥揳nd monoglossic and monoracial ideologies that result in complex forms of inter- and intra-group marginalization based on their perceived linguistic and cultural background. Second, Latin Asians reconcile their intersecting identities in light of these ideologies in听multiple ways, ranging from dress and appearance to language use to sociocultural practices to the adoption of exclusionary language ideologies to claim or reject identities that are not automatically ascribed to them. I employ critical discourse analysis to analyze survey and interview data from US-based Latin Asians to study the way power, legitimacy, and belonging are enacted, reproduced, and resisted by text and talk in participants鈥 narratives in an effort to understand, expose, and ultimately resist discrimination reproduced in discourse. Ultimately, this project uses the case of Latin Asians to problematize monolithic views of who Spanish speakers and Latinxs/Hispanics are in the US context, and in so doing, expose and contest the raciolinguistic discourses that marginalize Latinxs/Hispanics and Spanish speakers who fall outside stereotypical expectations.
Jeanne Quinn, Art &听Art History -听College of Arts and Sciences
Looking Glasses
Looking Glasses听proposes using mirrored surfaces in a sculptural installation that creates a space where we may see ourselves as we are.听听While mirror-like glazes have been possible for ceramic artists for centuries, the technique of using metallic lusters to create a reflective surface on clay has not been fully exploited by ceramicists in a conceptual register.听听Mirrors reflect, but also reverse front to back鈥攄escribed by mathematicians as inside-out.听 Covering the walls in the corner of a room, viewers will be reflected on two sides. Mirrors at a ninety-degree angle to one another form a 鈥渢rue mirror鈥 or non-reversing mirror, creating an uncanny sensation as left and right are inverted from the conventional mirror image, and allowing us to see ourselves as others do.
Charlie Samuelson, French & Italian -听College of Arts and Sciences
Sexual Consent in High Medieval French Literature听
Sexual Consent in High Medieval French Literature听takes to task an entrenched notion: that the history of sexual consent is one of progress forward from a backward Middle Ages. Reading twelfth- and thirteenth-century literary texts associated with a variety of genres (romances,听chansons de geste,听saints鈥 lives, lyric poetry) alongside medieval canon law and theology,听as well as modern moral philosophy and legal and feminist theory, this monograph seeks to do justice to both the sophistication and the limitations of the engagement with sexual consent in literary works. It emphasizes how texts long read as uninterested in sexual consent can reflect on it in intricate ways that intersect with medieval and modern thought; it also stresses how this pushes us to think in new ways about both the concept鈥檚 messy history and听its fraught theoretical relation to feminist politics today.
听
Past CHA Fellows
David Boonin, Philosophy
Recent technological advances have transformed government use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in a variety of ways. Police departments depend on crime prediction algorithms to tell them where and when to send officers on patrol. Cities deploy massive networks of closed-circuit television cameras to engage in public surveillance on an unprecedented scale. Courts making decisions about bail, parole, probation, and even sentencing increasingly rely on proprietary recidivism prediction algorithms. And military powers around the world are engaged in an escalating arms race to develop increasingly autonomous AI-based weapon systems capable of selecting and lethally engaging enemy targets on their own. My book project,听Artificial Intelligence, Ethics, and the State, critically examines the main ethical objections that have been raised against each of these developments, focusing on four features of the latest form of AI that give rise to the objections: (1) advanced machine learning algorithms can inadvertently replicate, strengthen, and even introduce racial bias, (2) they can interact with each other on a scale so massive that they threaten to invade our privacy, (3) they can be so complex that it鈥檚 impossible to explain the basis of the conclusions they reach, and (4) they can operate in increasingly autonomous ways that raise puzzling questions about who, if anyone, can be held responsible for the results of their behavior.
David Glimp, English
Digital Humanities and Arts Fellowship (CHA/CRDDS)
Drama, Romance and Political Life in the English Renaissance: A Computational Approach
This project utilizes computational methods for text analysis to augment our understanding of the politics of Renaissance English literature.听 Focusing on two important forms of literary听production鈥攄rama and proto-novelistic romances鈥攖his study examines the usefulness of computational approaches for deepening our knowledge about the complex interplay between political controversy and artistic practice in sixteenth and seventeenth-century England.听 The proposed study will strive to understand: 1) when and how distinct political vocabularies and concepts develop in the available corpora; 2) which kinds of political ideas are most prevalent on stage and in romance; 3) differences between the political dimensions of romance and drama; and 4) to what extent literary works lead, lag, or parallel the development of political discourses.听 Drawing on new methods for textual inquiry this research aims to augment our understanding of how political discourse鈥攊deas about the nature and scope of sovereign authority, about the nature and responsibility of government, and about identity and community鈥攖ransform across the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and interact with Renaissance English literature.
Patrick Greaney, Germanic & Slavic Languages & Literatures
My project examines the central role played by the consumer products company Braun in mid-twentieth-century West German culture. Braun has long been considered by historians to be West Germany鈥檚 exemplary design-oriented company, and the firm鈥檚 canonical style is often credited as an inspiration by contemporary designers. Drawing on extensive archival research, my project is the first critical history of Braun that shows how the company presented itself as a lifestyle brand for a postfascist culture and responded to 1950s conceptions of race, gender, and sexuality. By fully situating Braun in postwar culture, my project transforms the history of a global brand and design style and deepens the understanding of the tensions between past and present that shaped West Germany鈥檚 first decades.
Zachary Herz, Classics
The God and the Bureaucrat: A Story of Roman Law considers how the Roman Empire, an autocratic state ruled by leaders of variable competence and governed according to aristocratic etiquette, could generate the documents we now understand as foundational to liberal legal order. In the third century C.E., jurists (legal philosophers) like Ulpian wrote elaborate treatises on the application of abstract legal doctrine, even as most Roman adjudicators lacked the training to understand the texts written for their ostensible benefit. Men like Ulpian鈥攚ho briefly served as a regent for the child-ruler Severus Alexander before dying in a military coup鈥攁nd his mentor Papinian, who was put to death in 212 for refusing to endorse imperial fratricide, wrote guides to a law that did not actually exist. The God and the Bureaucrat argues that these texts are properly understood as an archive of political imagination: of smart men, in perilous circumstances, dreaming of a world that was fairer than their own. These men drafted off of a longstanding tendency in Roman discourse that equated law with archaism, formality, and impersonality; from the speeches of Cicero to the poetry of Horace, Romans viewed law as a set of values as much as statutes. This fantastical jurisprudence would combine with the autocratic legalism emerging from the imperial court into a new kind of law that was abstract and suprapolitical, but nevertheless socially powerful: in other words, into the normative order we now understand as 鈥減ositive law鈥 and treat as Rome鈥檚 greatest legacy. My research roots this legal transformation in the literary movements and political chaos of Imperial Rome; by showing the fantastical origins of the documents we now know as Roman Law, The God and the Bureaucrat sheds new light on how Rome鈥攁nd law鈥攐rganize our own fantasies.
Marina Kassianidou, Art and Art History
A Partial History of Touch: Volume I is a mixed-media installation that explores the relational character of mark-making as well as the multidimensional characters of language,
embodiment, and knowledge. The installation revolves around a collection of 19th and early 20th-century Greek schoolbooks that belonged to my grandparents and great-grandparents. I trace marks of use and time found on the pages of these books, such as folds, creases, tears, stains, discolorations, and worm holes, and recreate them as artist鈥檚 books and large-scale sculptural drawings. The recreated books and drawings act as records of the history of handling of each original book. The 鈥渦nreadable鈥 marks that these records hold鈥攎arks that may be more readable to a non-Greek audience than the Greek characters in the original books鈥攅nable an embodied and potentially shared mode of knowing, one that depends on touching, feeling, and handling objects as we move through the world.
A. Marie Ranjbar, Women & Gender Studies
From Persian Empire to Pariah State: Environmental Injustice, Racialization, and Coloniality in Iran听aims to untether understandings of empire and colonialism from the West, demonstrating how environmental injustice in Iranian Azerbaijan functions as a form of coloniality that is under-theorized in decolonial and postcolonial scholarship. Bridging historical analysis of Iran鈥檚 imperial pasts with ethnographic work on contemporary social movements, this book project examines how the desiccation of Lake Orumiyeh disproportionately impacts ethnic minority communities and reproduces relations of coloniality. Using the example of Lake Orumiyeh as an entry point into the history of imperialism in Iranian Azerbaijan, I analyze how conflicts over this region during the 18th听and 19th听century by the British, Persian, Russian, and Turkish empires shape current struggles over land, environmental resources, and minority rights in Iranian Azerbaijan. While anticolonial scholars have established how Iran has been deeply impacted by Euro-American imperialism, I posit that Iran鈥檚 encounters with non-Western empires have created different forms of coloniality not adequately accounted for in Anglophone theory that are critical for understanding environmental violence. The book demonstrates how the racialization of ethnic minorities in Iranian Azerbaijan reflects forms of coloniality that both replicate European racial logics and the current embodiments of non-Western empires (i.e., Russia, Turkey), thereby broadening current debates on imperialism, ontology, and the environment.
Annika Socolofsky, Composition
Sentinel, Socolofsky's debut full-length opera, intimately captures the internal struggles of an agoraphobic woman battling against the realities of her own trauma and attempting to escape her pain through the construction of her own virtual reality. Created by Danielle Birritella,听Sentinel鈥檚 creative team consists of librettist Claressinka Anderson, projection designer Hana Soonyeon Kim, and music director Marc Lowenstein.听Sentinel听is first and foremost about the journey of healing鈥攁 rare objective in a medium historically obsessed with the themes of trauma, pain, and sexual violence. This project builds upon Socolofsky's past work with themes of physical and emotional trauma, rage, and neurodivergence as it relates to queerness in her most notable vocal works听Don鈥檛 say a word听and听I Tell You Me. A workshop of the initial compositional material is slated for Fall of 2023 at Montclair State University, presented and funded by PEAK Performances.
Nishant Upadhyay, Ethnic Studies
Indians on Indian Lands听studies dominant caste Indian diasporic formation within the Canadian settler state. Specifically, it theorizes Indian immigrant labor in resource extraction industries, logging and canneries in unceded lands of British Columbia in the 1960s-90s and the tar sands in Treaty 6 lands of Alberta presently. The book examines these sites as simultaneous spaces of Indigenous dispossession, spaces of racialized-classed-gendered-casted labor formations, and spaces that are further fueling the climate crises. Weaving theory, interviews and conversations, ethnography, cultural and literary analysis, archival research, analysis of recent events, and secondary literature, the book forms the archive of Indigenous and Indian spatial and affective intimacies that exist within and across the afterlives of imperialism. This multi-sited, multi-method, interdisciplinary approach traces the interwoven and simultaneous relationalities, intimacies, and complicities of dominant caste Indian diasporic communities.听Indians on Indian Lands听adds to the growing scholarship on Indigenous and Asian relationalities within Canadian and U.S. settler states and offers first of its kind multi-sited exploration of contemporary Indigenous-Indian intimacies using mixed-methods interdisciplinary approaches. Overall, the book is an exploration of what it means for brahmin and dominant caste Indians to be on Turtle Island, and what it means to engage in decolonial ways of knowledge production, ethical relationalities, and solidarity praxis.
Terri S Wilson,听School of Education
Schools of choice often focus on the needs, interests, and identities of particular communities. These schools raise philosophical questions about justice and recognition. What kinds of identity should be recognized by the state, and how might such identities be supported through public education? My project,听How Different Should Schools Be? Justice, Recognition and Choice in Education,听explores debates about the purposes and limits of school choice. Drawing on original research in three distinctive schools, my project leverages concrete cases of school choices to build novel, textured arguments about the justifiable limits of choice. I argue that claims of recognition must be considered alongside the broader structural forces that shape identity differently for different students. Certain non-dominant communities do have powerful reasons to establish schools that support their cultural and linguistic identities, but such claims do not apply to more privileged communities that seek to create schools of their own. Identity claims are neither听equal nor interchangeable.
Tim Weston, History
My book project,听Dying to Speak: The Perilous Life of the Journalist in Modern China,听is about freedom of speech in twentieth-century China. It revolves around the careers of four celebrity journalists from the early part of the century, all of听whom were brutally killed because their newspaper work threatened the interests of powerful political figures. In addition to examining the four听men鈥檚 colorful careers, I analyze the process by which, after their deaths, they were transformed into martyrs, idealized representations of the crusading, justice-seeking journalist prepared to speak truth to power. Finally, I assess the ways,听over the last forty years, the four men have been remembered in the People鈥檚 Republic of China, where journalists are forced to tow the Communist Party line and, along with all Chinese citizens, are denied freedom of speech, despite its being guaranteed in the Chinese constitution.听
Maisan Alomar, Women & Gender Studies
Race for the Cure听examines the transhumanist movement鈥搘hich positions itself as a cutting-edge and future-oriented endeavor to eliminate mortality鈥揳s part of a long historical arc of medically rehabilitative research and practice that has exploited and exacerbated gendered, race, and class inequality. It analyzes key moments in the post-WWII 鈥渞ehabilitative turn鈥濃 including a new look at the origins of the Tuskegee Study 鈥 to situate the contemporary transhumanist movement as part of this history of research ethics, gendered and racial subjectivity, and unequal access to healthcare. Amidst the present global health crisis, which understandably has led to the proliferation of hurried efforts to develop rehabilitative technologies, examining this precedent shows: At every stage from conceptualization to testing to distribution, the development of rehabilitative medical technologies risks exploiting and reproducing historical inequities evident in earlier attempts to define and rehabilitate disability.
Angie Chuang, Journalism
American Otherness听examines journalism鈥檚 cultural role in producing American identity and navigating racial equity through case studies. The book project focuses on eight distinct news-media narratives that span the听first two decades of this century,听bracketed by the 9/11 terrorist attacks and the COVID-19 pandemic. These narratives include the news coverage of the undocumented mostly-Latinx youth pursuing residency through the DREAM Act/DACA, the Barack Obama 鈥渂irther鈥 debate, and the Atlanta spa shootings.听My research argues that journalism鈥檚 struggle to embody an ideal of racial equity mirrors a broader cultural struggle over Americanness鈥攁nd that the mainstream news media are very much enmeshed in this process, at once hindering and enabling progress and self-reflection.
David Ciarlo, History
Ciarlo's听new book project,听Selling War: Advertising, Propaganda, and the Origins of the Fascist Aesthetic in German Visual Culture, 1910-1925听offers a visual history of the First World War, using images that were widely seen at the time, but are now largely ignored or forgotten鈥攏amely, those of advertising. 听My research shows how belligerent, warlike imagery circulated widely in German commercial culture long before the German state begin its (better-known) efforts to disseminate official propaganda. 听Moreover, my exploration of advertising shows how graphic designers were the first to craft the听themes听that would be picked up by later official propaganda:听 advertisers created and circulated visions of hyper-masculine militarism, of smugly-confident technophilia, and of a type of German-ness that was increasingly racialized (as "whiteness") and these widely-circulated visions became an important means by which ordinary Germans at home or at the front actually "saw" the war.听 Selling War, then, will argue that even the horrors of trench warfare could be re-imagined through the ceaseless repetition of martial themes in mass-produced commercial imagery.听 Moreover, the imagery of the hyper-masculine, militarized, and racially-pure "German" that emerged in the advertising of the war years formed the core of a "fascist aesthetic" which the National Socialists (Nazis) would first borrow from and then coopt.
Brianne Cohen, Art & Art History
Cohen鈥檚 The听Empathic Lens: Contemporary Art, Ecology, and Kinship in Southeast Asia听is the first study to explore a 21st-century efflorescence of artistic projects in Southeast Asia that urge widescale publics to prevent socio-environmental violence by envisioning ecological empathy through more sustainable, Indigenous cosmologies. This artwork employs the camera lens not only to document destruction of local landscapes, but also to galvanize feeling for inanimate matter, plants, animals, and humans through the imagining of more embodied, interconnected forms of kinship, an understanding of familial, environmental relations central to Indigenous knowledge. Major听museums and cultural venues throughout the world widely exhibit the work of these artists from Cambodia, Vietnam, and Singapore, yet publics in the United States and Europe听may not recognize their names yet because they remain marginalized and understudied in Euro-American scholarship听鈥 names such as Khvay Samnang, Tuan Mami, or Nguy峄卬 Trinh Thi.听The Empathic Lens听analyzes and听introduces English-speaking, arts-and-humanities audiences to this body of environmentally engaged, camera-based artwork, which presents an alternative, more ethical picture for planetary living through the lens of sustainable, Indigenous worldviews.
Celine Dauverd, History
All the Kings听of the Mediterranean听examines听the conquest of听North Africa (1450-1620) through the prism of seven Renaissance popes. By investigating on the one hand soft power through rhetoric and authority, and, on the other, raw power through secular jurisdiction and alliance politics, it argues that popes sought leadership over all confessions. By examining 15-17th听c. documents in six different languages, I reveal that popes鈥 ecumenical identity was the signifier of their redefined imperium. Acting as potent ideological fuel whose imperial interests choreographed wars in Africa, popes adroitly consolidated their sovereignty over the Mediterranean world at the expense of Iberian rulers and Muslim warlords. Bridging classical studies, religious history, and international relations, this project听brings an alternate history to the Maghreb conquest.
Mithi Mukherjee, History
The Asian Dissent听examines the dissenting judgment of the Indian jurist Radhabinod Pal in the Tokyo Trials of 1946, held by the victorious powers of the Second World War to try Japanese wartime leaders. In this lone dissent Pal mounted the most significant legal challenge from the colonized world in Asia to the existing discourse of international law and its connections to empire and race in the twentieth century. By exploring the complex and conflicting geopolitical and cultural discourses that undergirded this historic act of defiance,听The Asian Dissent听seeks to insert anticolonial resistance into the heart of the story of international law, empire, and international relations. As the search for a new post-imperial international law that could meet the challenges of a globalized world becomes ever more urgent, Pal鈥檚 anticolonial perspective has become particularly salient.
Yumi Roth, Art & Art History
Filipiniana Americana听is a play on words and the associations we have with terms like 鈥淎mericana鈥 and, to a lesser extent in the US, 鈥淔ilipiniana.鈥 As categories, 鈥淎mericana鈥 and 鈥淔ilipiniana鈥 seem to describe quintessential aspects of each culture, yet, when combined, what can the new, hybrid term suggest? Though Filipinos were present and represented in the American West from the late 19th c. (e.g. the 1899 Greater America Exposition in Omaha, NE and Buffalo Bill's Wild West show), the myth of the American West does not include Filipinos. As an artist, I am interested in the forms that these stories and knowledge can take, from objects to video to site-based installation.听Filipiniana Americana听describes the larger project of locating the intersection between 鈥淔ilipinoness鈥 and 鈥淎mericanness鈥 couched in the American West.
Honor Sachs, History
Sach鈥檚 project, 鈥淔reedom by a Judgment,鈥 which traces the story of a mixed-race family of slaves named the Colemans as they sued for freedom claiming Indigenous ancestry over multiple generations. The Colemans claimed descent from a maternal Indian ancestor named Judith, an Apalachee woman born in Spanish Florida who was captured by the English and sold into slavery. As Judith鈥檚 children and grandchildren were sold, they initiated freedom suits by claiming Indigenous heritage. This project documents their complex personal histories as they worked within the evolving legal system of the early United States to define their own understandings of race, rights, and family.
Emilie Upczak, Cinema Studies & Moving Image Arts
Digital Humanities and Arts Fellowship (CHA/CRDDS)
Feminism and Queer Identity in a 1970鈥檚 Commune: The Ann Roy Collection
The Rare and Distinctive Collections was gifted Ann Roy鈥檚 collection of work in 2012. The substantial and uniquely diverse materials cover Roy鈥檚 life as a young girl in Tulsa, Oklahoma; as the wife of an historian writing about the Ute Indian Territory; as an ex-patriot living in Mexico and raising two sons; as an instructor at Ivan Illich's center in Cuernavaca, and as a feminist working to bridge the cultures of Mexico and the United States. The collection includes Super-8 films that were taken in Tepoztl谩n, Morelos, Mexico where Roy lived in the 1970鈥檚, a center for international spiritualists seeking answers and exploring identity, often through performance and under the influence of hallucinogens. The Super-8s also point to the emergence of a queer community. The final project will be a Digital Exhibition that will include audio recordings, digitized films, photographs, drawings, clothing designs, writings, lectures from the collection while giving a historical overview of the group of people, location, and movements within the collection, and engage creative projects and ask questions through the making and presentation of, experimental films, scholarly articles and interviews.
Laura Winkiel,听English
Modernism and the Middle Passage听is a literary history of modernism written from the vantage point of the sea and the legacy of the slave trade.听 The sea has long been viewed in the West as wasted, empty space and a lawless zone that hides its history and swallows its traumas, especially the mass atrocities on board slave ships.听Modernism and the Middle Passage鈥檚 attention to the ocean and its role in slavery remaps modernist literary history across centuries, nations, races, and even the nature/culture divide that defines the human.听It compares Anglophone writing from Africa, Britain, the Caribbean, and the US within the common frame of Atlantic history and situates newly published works by Zora Neale Hurston and Claude McKay within modernist writers鈥 focus on the aftereffects of the slave trade. The book presents the sea as a material entity that invites new kinds of planetary connectivity, new histories of slavery and colonization, and new modes of thinking the human to emerge.
Robert Buffington, Professor of听Women & Gender Studies;听Spectral Children and Haunted Modernity in Turn-of-the-Century Mexico (1880-1910).
Julie Carr,听Professor of English;听Mud, Blood and Ghosts: Populism, Eugenics, Spiritualism 1870-1930.听
Erin Espelie, Associate Professor of听Cinema Studies and Moving Image Arts and Critical Media Practices; A Free Inquiry Into Air.
Vilja Hulden, History;听Speaking to the State: Representation at U.S. Congressional Hearings since 1877
Peter Hunt, Professor of听Classics;听The Dilemmas of Defeat and the Afterlife of Phocion the Good: a Commentary on Plutarch鈥檚 Life of Phocion.
Javier Krauel,听Associate Professor of听Spanish and听Portuguese;听Sentimental Publics: Struggles for Freedom and Equality in Modern Spain(1812-2017).
Mitzi Lee,听Associate Professor of听Philosophy;听What we owe to others: Justice in Aristotle's Ethics and Political Philosophy.
Samira Mehta,听Assistant Professor of听Women & Gender Studies and Jewish Studies;听God Bless the Pill: Contraception and Sexuality in Tri-Faith America.
Helmut Muller-Sievers,听Professor of听German German & Slavic Languages & Literatures;听Literature and Pure Experience.
Myles Osborne,听Associate Professor of History;听The World of Mau Mau: Africa and Black Power in the Caribbean.
Jillian Porter,听Associate Professor of听Germanic & Slavic Languages & Literatures;听P.S. The Art of the Queue: From the Revolution to Putin.
Seema Sohi,听Associate Professor of听Ethnic Studies;听Race Radicals: Civil Rights and Immigration Reform during the Cold War, 1946-1968.
Julia Staffel,听Associate Professor of听Philosophy;听Unfinished Business: Examining Our Thoughts in Progress.
Lauren Stone, Assistant Professor of听German & Slavic Languages & Literatures;听The Small Worlds of Childhood in Stifter, Rilke, and Benjamin.
Aun Ali, Assistant Professor of听Religious Studies; Why Hadith Matter: The Evidentiary Value of Hadith in Shii Law (7th/13th to 11th/17th Centuries).
Thomas Andrews, Professor of听History; Sickness and Power: The Great North American Epizootic Flu of 1872.
Cheryl Higashida, Associate Professor of听English; Social Movements and Sound Media in the Twentieth Century.
Rahul Parson, Assistant Professor of听Asian Languages and听Civilizations; Confluences at the End of the Ganges: Modernity, Migration and Hindi Literature in Kolkata.
Stephanie Su, Assistant Professor of听Art & Art History; Entangled Modernities: Constructing East Asian Classicism in Early Twentieth Century Chinese and Japanese Art.
Levi Thompson, Assistant Professor of听Asian Languages and听Civilizations; Re-Orienting Modernism: Mapping A Modernist Geography Across Arabic And Persian Poetry.
Betsey Biggs, Assistant Professor of Critical Media Practices; MELT: A live music-film and installation in collaboration with the San Francisco Girls Chorus and the M6 vocal ensemble.
Emily Harrington, Associate Professor of English;听Ripe Time Pending: Waiting in Victorian Poetry and Poetics.
Sarah James, Assistant Professor of Classics;听The Archaeology of Hellenistic Economies: Corinth and Mediterranean Trade in the 4th-1st centuries BCE.
Ramesh Mallipeddi, Associate Professor of English;听Expendable Lives, Disposable Lands: Racial Ecologies in Eighteenth-Century British Literature and Culture 1627-1834.
Kelly Sears, Assistant Professor of Cinema Studies &听Moving Image Arts;听Make Hay While the Sun Shines.
Evelyn Shih, Assistant Professor of Asian Languages and Civilizations;听The Cold War Comic: Power and Laughter in Taiwan and South Korea, 1948-1979.
Brian Valente-Quinn, Assistant Professor of French & Italian;听Senegalese Stagecraft: Decolonizing Theater Making in Francophone Africa.
Paul Youngquist,听Professor of English; Creole Dreams: Insurrection & Indigenization in Plantation Jamacia.
Katherine Alexander, Assistant Professor of Asian Languages and Civilizations;听Imperial Values and Private Virtues: Popular Morality Literature and the Late Qing.
鈥Samuel Boyd, Assistant Professor of Religious Studies and Jewish Studies;听The Borrowed Bible: The Role of Colonial Administration and Language Contact in the Development of the Hebrew Bible.
Thora Brylowe, Assistant Professor of English;听Impressions and Folds: The Ecology of Romantic-Era Paper.
Kieran Murphy, Assistant Professor of French & Italian;听Literature, Science, and the Birth of the Electromagnetic Age.
Stephanie Spray, Assistant Professor of Critical Media Practices;听Edge of Time: Filming the Labor of Science at Sea.
鈥Davide Stimilli, Associate Professor of German & Slavic Languages & Literatures;听The Manic Moment.
Tiffany Beechy, Assistant Professor of English;听Flesh of the Word: Materiality, Aesthetics, and the Incarnation In Anglo-Saxon England.
Loriliai Biernacki, Associate Professor of Religious Studies;听Who Says "I?"
Scott Bruce, Professor of History;听Reinventing the Rule in Medieval Monasticism: The Rule of Benedict in its Manuscript Habitats, ca. 700-1700.
Arne H枚cker, Assistant Professor of Germanic & Slavic Languages & Literatures;听The Case of Literature: Literary Case Histories from Goethe to Kafka.
Katie Little, Professor of English;听Reading for the Moral in Late Medieval and Sixteenth-Century England.
Antje Richter, Associate Professor of Asian Languages and Civilizations;听Illness Narratives in Early Medieval Chinese Literature.
Michelle Ellsworth, Associate Professor of Theatre & Dance;听The Rehearsal Artist.
Miriam Kingsberg, Assistant Professor of History;听The Objectivity Generation: Japanese Human Scientists in the Transwar World.
Rebecca Maloy, Associate Professor of Musicology;听Sung in Honor of Sacrifice: Text, Melody, and Exegesis in the Iberian Offertory.
Lauri Reitzammer, Assistant Professor of Classics;听Resident Aliens and Sacred Sightseers: Female Immigrants and Travelers in Greek Drama.
Phoebe Young, Associate Professor of History;听Sleeping Outside: Histories of Camping and Public Nature in American Life since 1860.
Sue Zemka, Professor of English;听Disabled Hands and Reimagined Bodies in the Age of Idustry and Modern War, 1815-1946.
David Atherton, Assistant Professor in the Center for Asian Studies;听Writing Violence in an Age of Peace: Breaking Bodies and Provoking Passions in Early Modern Japanese Literature.
Chris Braider, Professor of French & Italian;听Persons and Portraits: Experimental Selves in Early Modern Europe.
Matthew Gerber, Associate Professor of History;听Colonizing Law: Property, Kinship and Race in the Early Modern French Atlantic.
Sungyun Lim, Assistant Professor of History;听Rule of Custom: Colonial Law and Women's Inheritance Rights in Modern Korea.
Sasha Senderovich, Assistant Professor of Germanic & Slavic Languages & Literatures and Jewish Studies;听Borderline Culture: Mobility and the Creation of the Soviet Jew, 1917-1936.
Nuria Silleras-Fernandez, Assistant Professor of Spanish and Portuguese;听Three Mad Queens: Gender and the Politics of Court Culture in Late Medieval and Early Modern Iberia
Masano Yamashita, Assistant Professor of French & Italian;听Static: Rousseau and Public Culture in the Age of Englightenment.
Katherine Eggert, Associate Professor of English;听Renaissance Happiness.
Holly Gayley, Assistant Professor of Religious Studies;听Buddhist Modernism and Ethical Reform on the Tibetan Plateau.
Nan Goodman, Professor of English;听The Puritan Cosmopolis: Internationalism in Early Modern New England.
Peter Hunt, Professor of Classics;听Thrace in Athens/Athens in Thrace.
Suzanne Magnanini, Associate Professor of French &听Italian;听Love on Trial in Renaissance Venice.
Laura Michaelis, Associate Professor of Linguistics;听Construction Grammar and Linguistic Innovation.
David Shneer, Professor of History and Jewish Studies;听Redeeming Germany: Yiddish Music Between Fascism and Communism.
John Willis, Assistant Professor of History;听After the Caliphate: Mecca and the Geography of Crisis and Hope.
Thomas Andrews, Associate Professor of History;听An Animals' History of the United States.
David Ciarlo, Assistant Professor of History;听Selling War: Consumerism, War, and the Roots of Fascism in German Visual Culture, 1910-1920.
Adam Hosein, Assistant Professor of Philosophy;听Immigrants and Immigration.
Catherine Labio, Associate Professor of English;听The House of Comics.
Elias Sacks, Assistant Professor of Religious Studies and Jewish Studies;听The "Living Script": Moses Mendelssohn's Philosophy of Judaism.
Suyoung Son, Assistant Professor in the Center for Asian Studies;听Publish or Perish: Literati and Print Culture in Late Imperial China.
Amma Ghartey-Tagoe Kootin, Assistant Professor of Theatre & Dance;听At Buffalo / Laughing After Slavery.
Adam Bradley, Associate Professor of English;听Why Song Lyrics Matter.
Carlo Caballero, Associate Professor of Musicology;听Ballet and Ballet Music in France, 1849鈥1909: A Missing History Between Two Golden Ages.
Brian Catlos, Associate Professor of Religious Studies and Jewish Studies;听Paradoxes of Plurality: Ethno-Religious Diversity and the Medieval Mediterranean.
Jackie Elliott, Assistant Professor of Classics;听Fragments of the Roman Epic Past: Ennius听Annales.
Mitzi Lee, Associate Professor of Philosophy;听Aristotle鈥檚 Theory of Justice.
Myles Osborne, Assistant Professor of History;听Making Mau Mau: Publicity, Propaganda, and the Press in Kenya, 1940-1963.
Lucy Chester, Associate Professor of History;听Networks of Decolonization: Britain鈥檚 Withdrawal from South Asia and Palestine.
Beth Dusinberre, Associate Professor of Classics;听Persepolis and the Art of Imperial Administration.
Jill Heydt-Stevenson, Associate Professor of English;听The Afterlife of Things.
Janice Ho, Assistant Professor of English;听Liberal Englishness, Alterity, and the Twentieth-Century British Novel.
Michael Huemer, Associate Professor of Philosophy;听The Illusion of Authority.
Karen Jacobs, Associate Professor of English;听Trace Atlas: Itineraries of Postmodern Literary Space.
Mithi Mukherjee, Associate Professor of History;听The Right to Just Wars and the End of the Idea of Empire: The Indian National Army Trial of 1945 and the Reconstruction of the Discourse of International Law.
John Slater, Assistant Professor of Spanish and Portuguese;听Momentary Monuments: The Reign of the Spanish Hapsburgs and the Vegetable Kingdom听