SYRACUSE UNIVERSITY HUMANITIES CENTER - Key Persons
Job Titles:
- Member of the Advisory Board
- CNY Humanities Corridor Program Manager
- Program Manager ( Ex Officio )
- Program Manager for the CNY Humanities Corridor
As Program Manager for the CNY Humanities Corridor, Aimee Germain works collaboratively with the Corridor's multi-institutional leadership team to provide strategic direction, fiscal management, and programming. She is a resource for humanities faculty seeking to forge intellectual and pedagogical partnerships with colleagues across the region.
An academic and non-profit administrator for over 20 years, Aimee has worked at a variety of institutions, big and small. Most recently, she served as Program Manager for the Gund Institute for Environment at the University of Vermont. Aimee's areas of expertise span budgeting, alumni and foundation relations, graduate student admissions, event management, and diversity, equity, and inclusion. A Michigan native who was an opportunity program alumna and first-generation college student, Aimee received her Bachelor's degree from the University of Michigan and her Master's degree from the London School of Economics and Political Science.
Job Titles:
- Assistant Professor of Writing Studies, Rhetoric, and Composition. Humanities Center Faculty Fellow from Arts & Sciences
This book project makes a case for counterstory as methodology in rhetoric and writing studies through the well-established framework of Critical Race Theory (CRT). Martinez specifically review the counterstory work of Richard Delgado, Derrick Bell, and Patricia J. Williams, termed "counterstory exemplars." Delgado, Bell, and Williams are foundational critical race theorists whose respective counterstory genres of Narrated Dialogue, Fantasy/Allegory, and Autobiography have set precedent for others who would research and compose with this method. Shaped by Martinez's standpoint as a scholar in the Humanities, this project in critical race methodology applies racial and feminist rhetorical criticism to the rich histories and theories established through Delgado, Bell, and Williams' counterstory genres, all the while demonstrating how CRT theories and methods can inform teaching, research, and writing/publishing of counterstory.
Job Titles:
- Student in Anthropology. Humanities New York Public Humanities Graduate Fellow
Employing interactive mapping software, Warner-Smith maps the life histories of Irish immigrants who lived in nineteenth-century New York City. These maps will be available as a digital public exhibit that presents archival images, footage, and data from archival documents. Historic maps may also be included to further elaborate on the sensorial urban landscapes they experienced. Integrating diverse media allows the viewer/user to envision the lived experiences of New Yorkers in the past, particularly immigrants making new homes and communities in New York City.
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor, History. Humanities Center Fellow, Maxwell School
- History
Hanson explores how single mothers in higher education across geographic locations, academic ranks, disciplines, and identities build support systems and draw on rhetorical strategies derived from their embodied knowledge to survive and navigate in academia. Single mother experiences are underrepresented in scholarship about parenting in higher education (Téllez 2013; Nora et. al. 2017; Vieira 2018). This absence is evidenced in policies, systems, and structures that prioritize the needs of heteronormative family units. The lived experiences and material realities of single mothers reveal how their lives outside academia shape and are shaped by their lives within it, including scholarly activity, interactions with colleagues, and relationships with their children. This dissertation argues that higher education needs to make shifts to better support single mothers, thereby benefitting others who are marginalized due to race, class, gender, and ability.
Job Titles:
- Student, English. Humanities Center Dissertation Fellow
O'Connell argues that discourses surrounding self-harm have played a central role in shaping the intersections between citizenship, sexuality, and mental health in the postwar United States. Within both dominant national narratives framing the AIDS epidemic and abortion debates, and within queer communal rhetoric about BDSM and transness, the idea that certain subjects were inflicting harm on themselves has incited intense anxiety, moralizing, and rationalization for exclusion and devaluation. O'Connell's project analyzes how both national hegemonic and queer politics have demarcated certain sexual practices, bodies, and relations as shameful and harmful to oneself, which then serves as an unstable ground for reiterating and contesting hierarchies of value. Attending to these processes and their personal and communal narrations provides an opportunity for ethically dwelling with and reorienting understandings of sexual violence and communal relation.
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor, Linguistics. Humanities Center Faculty Fellow from Arts & Sciences
Job Titles:
- Professor, Communication and Rhetorical Studies
Kiewe's areas of research are in rhetorical theory and criticism, political communication, presidential studies, argumentation, and persuasion. Most recently he began teaching and researching with students unsolved Civil Rights murders.
Kiewe has published in such journals as Communication Studies, Legal Studies Forum, Journal of American Culture, Argumentation and Advocacy, and Southern Communication Journal. He is the author of several books, including FDR's First Fireside Chat: Public Confidence and the Banking Crisis (Texas A&M Press, 2007), co-authored FDR's Body Politics: The Rhetoric of Disability (Texas A&M Press, 2003), A Shining City on a Hill: Ronald Reagan's Economic Rhetoric, 1951-1989 (Praeger, 1991), co-edited Actor, Ideologue, Politician: The Public Speeches of Ronald Reagan (Greenwood, 1992), and edited The Modern Presidency and Crisis Rhetoric (Praeger, 1994).
Job Titles:
- Member of the Advisory Board
- Assistant Professor of Middle East History
Amy Kallander is assistant professor of Middle East History, and associated faculty in the department of Women's and Gender Studies. She came to Syracuse from the University of California, Berkeley where she earned a PhD in Middle East history in 2007, and teaches courses on the Ottoman Empire, the modern Middle East, Orientalism, Gender, Race and Colonialism, and Popular Culture in the Middle East. Her first book project is a social history of women and the family that governed Tunisia in the Ottoman period (18th and 19th centuries). Since the Tunisian Revolution she has turned to more contemporary events, current projects include bloggers and the Tunisian revolution, French support for Tunisian authoritarianism, women, family and representations of Tunisian modernity.
Job Titles:
- Member of the Advisory Board
Job Titles:
- Member of the Advisory Board
Job Titles:
- Professor, Linguistics. ( Former SU Faculty )
Professor Kahnemuyipour received his PhD in Linguistics from the Department of Linguistics at the University of Toronto in 2004. He taught at Syracuse University from 2004 to 2010. He joined the Department of Language Studies at U of T Mississauga in 2010.
His areas of expertise are syntax (sentence structure), morphology (word structure) and the interface between syntax and phonology (the sound system). He has worked on a number of languages including his native Persian, as well as English, Armenian, Turkish, Niuean, among others. He has published a book with Oxford University Press and articles in top ranked journals such as Natural Language and Linguistic Theory and Linguistic Inquiry. His project while serving his Humanities Center fellowship was cross linguistic investigation of verb agreement in copular sentences.
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor in the Creative Writing Program at Syracuse University
- Associate Professor, Creative Writing
Arthur Flowers is an Associate Professor in the Creative Writing Program at Syracuse University. He is author of novels and nonfictions, including Another Good Loving Blues, Mojo Rising: Confessions of a 21st Century Conjureman, and I See The Promised Land, Tara Books, India. He is a Delta based performance poet, webmaster of Rootsblog, and has been Executive Director of various nonprofits and the Harlem Writers Guild.
Job Titles:
- Professor of Political Science. Humanites Center Faculty Fellow from Maxwell
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor, Anthropology. Humanities Center Faculty Fellow from Maxwell
Stop by and enjoy our art-filled spaces, including pieces by Light Work artist Barry Anderson, commissioned in 2009 by the Gregg Lambert, the Center's founding director. And, thanks to the SU Museum, several contemporary prints, paintings, and collages.
Job Titles:
- Member of the Advisory Board
- Dean 's Professor of Community Engagement, WSRC
Job Titles:
- Professor of English, College of Arts and Sciences
Born and raised in Philadelphia, PA, Smith attended Bucknell University where he stayed to earn a MA in English and work at The Federal Penitentiary in Lewisburg. He has taught at Tufts, Boston, and Harvard Universities, on the West Coast at Portland State and Lewis & Clark College, and at University of Alabama before coming to Syracuse in 2002. He is the author of six books of poems, The Common Wages, Silver and Information (National Poetry Series, selected by Hayden Carruth), Mercy Seat, The Other Lover (University of Chicago), which was a finalist for both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize, Songs for Two Voices, and Devotions, (Chicago, 2011). Devotions has been named a finalist for the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Award. Poems in this collection have appeared in The Best American Poetry, 2003 and 2004, The New Yorker,The Nation, The New Republic, The Paris Review, The Partisan Review, Kenyon Review,Poetry, The American Poetry Review, and were included in the Best of the Small Presses anthology for 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010. Essays and reviews of his have appeared in Harvard Review, Boston Review, and Newsday. He has been a fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center and was a winner of the Discovery/The Nation prize. In 2000 he was a Guggenheim fellow and has twice been a recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment of the Arts. In 2010 he received an award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor, English. Humanities Center Symposium Faculty Fellow from Arts & Sciences
Fadda studies literary texts, testimonials, and films that capture the experiences of incarcerated and tortured Arabs and Muslims in local and global contexts. She draws on feminists of color and anti-imperial critiques of the US prison industrial complex and its connections to incarceration sites in the Global South, with particular focus on narratives coming out of secret and extra-legal incarceration sites within and outside the US in the ongoing "Global War on Terror."
Job Titles:
- Student, English / Film and Screen Studies )
About Caroline: Charles is primarily interested in African-American film history, Black visuality studies, and archives. Her research questions how visuality participates in our understanding of race, and it seeks to discover how Black archival engagements and practices disrupt dominant ways of seeing. Caroline has been a teaching assistant for the courses World Cinema, Interpretation of New Media, Interpretation of Film, Hip Hop and Race, and was an African-American Studies External Fellow in 2019-2020. She earned her B.A. in English at Williams College.
This project provides a literal understanding of the common expression of grief that in losing a loved one, the bereaved loses part of herself. Call these, ‘grief utterances.' They are commonplace, and their accompanying phenomenology suggests they are true. Yet, few have considered the extent to which a philosopher's toolbox, well-equipped with notions like parthood and persons, can help establish an account of what makes them so. Garland uses these neglected resources to establish two potential answers to this question. We may either accept a view on which two individual persons can form a plural person to which is identical; or accept a view on which the practical identity of an individual can be bound to and constituted by a plurality of other persons. Regardless, to account for the grief utterances, we must accept that persons are not simple, isolated agents.
Job Titles:
- Member of the Advisory Board
Job Titles:
- Student, Cultural Foundations of Education )
About Chelsea: Bouldin is pursuing a Certificate of Advanced Study in Women's and Gender Studies. Her work and embodied ethos co-creates worlds that embrace expansive processes of knowing, expression, and being. "How do us Black women, girls, and femmes know ourselves with/in proximity to literature?" is her most persistent query. As an interdisciplinary scholar, her work and writing style embraces a multiplicity of non-conventional practices and angles. She is the current lead for the Graduate Student BIPOC Alliance (GSBA) and is a facilitator for the Breedlove Readers program- a YA bookclub for Black girls in central New York. Her current research interests include Black feminist (endarkened) epistemologies, Black woman literacies and self-making, Afrofuturism, and decolonial methodologies.
Job Titles:
- Member of the Advisory Board
- Geography and the Environment
Job Titles:
- Member of the Advisory Board
- School of Education
Job Titles:
- Assistant Professor, Languages, Literatures, and Linguistics. Humanities Center "Symposium" Faculty Fellow
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor
- Member of the Advisory Board
Olwan's project traces changes in marriage and divorce laws within a context of legal and personal status reforms that have swept through the Middle East and North Africa, impacting the lives of Arab and Muslim women in major ways. She argues that such changes must be understood in relation to state-backed efforts to assert and extend state sovereignty over women's rights and women's bodies. Taking a critical stance towards legal reforms and celebratory accounts of rights-based gains, Olwan's work contributes to growing scholarship in the field of Feminist Middle East Studies that critically examines activism for women's rights that moors justice to the domain of the legal. The project also engages core questions about the politics of agency, freedom, and justice, issues that are central to research inquiries based in the humanities.
Dana Spiotta is the author of four novels: Lightning Field, published by (Scribner, 2001); Eat the Document (Scribner, 2006), which was a finalist for the 2006 National Book Award and a recipient of the Rosenthal Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters; Stone Arabia (Scribner, 2011), which was a National Book Critics Award Finalist in fiction; and Innocents and Others, which will come out from Scribner in 2016. Spiotta was a Guggenheim Fellow in 2008, a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellow in 2009, and she won the 2008-9 Rome Prize form the American Academy in Rome. She is an Associate Professor in the Syracuse University MFA program.
Job Titles:
- Member of the Advisory Board
Job Titles:
- Assistant Professor in the Sociology Department of the Maxwell School of Citizenship
- Assistant Professor, Sociology
Dawn Marie Dow is an assistant professor in the sociology department of the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University. Professor Dow earned a Ph.D. in sociology from University of California, Berkeley and a J.D. from Columbia University, School of Law. She is a Faculty Fellow in the both the Institute for the Study of the Judiciary, Politics, and the Media and the Humanities Center. Professor Dow's research focuses on the intersection of gender, race, and class within the context of the family, the workplace, educational settings and the law. She is currently preparing a book manuscript that examines African American middle-class mothers' views and decision-making about work, family and childcare and how they approach parenting their children.
Job Titles:
- Member of the Advisory Board
- Assistant Director, Humanities Center
- Humanities Center ( Ex Officio )
Diane Drake joined the Syracuse University Humanities Center in July 2015, fresh from fulfilling a Canon Fellowship and chairing an events committee while assisting the Associate VP/Dean of Students at Northern Illinois University. Prior to bringing her versatile writing, design, and project management skills to higher education, Diane served as communications and events manager, creative services director, and writer-producer for various public and commercial broadcasters in the Midwest, having earned her Bachelor's degree in Radio-Television from Southern Illinois University.
Diane is instrumental in conceptualizing, promoting, and administrating the Center's annual programming and fellowship initiatives and counsels the director on a broad portfolio of collaborative projects related to both the Humanities Center and the CNY Humanities Corridor (administratively housed at Syracuse).
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor, English. Humanities Center "Symposium" Faculty Fellow
Beam's book project seeks to invigorate a historical context in which U.S. writers of the 1850s and 1860s engaged with, and even modeled in the literary systems they built, theories of collectivity and relationality that have more to do with utopian socialism than the American. In particular, this project places the Fourierist critique of the family at the center of social movements and literary experiment alike and asks to what extent we can understand radical sexual politics to animate questions of belonging, personhood, and collectivity that are central to major texts of the American Renaissance. Using Fourier's theory of serial relation, his primary tool for disrupting the "isolated family," Beam argues that the poetics of serial assemblage evident in an array of literary projects, from Whitman's Leaves of Grass to late radical Abolitionist novels, is central to their urgent address to questions of social organization.
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor, Political Science
Cohen's areas of specialization include contemporary and modern political theory, history of political thought, immigration and citizenship. During the term of her Humanities Center fellowship, Cohen's research focused on "Jus Temporis and the Sovereignty of Time in Citizenship." This project develops and illustrates the theory that the variables of date and time serve a role equal to that of place and lineage in the assignment of citizenship. Much like sovereign physical boundaries, boundaries in time clearly delineate the people for whom a polity is responsible and in exactly what capacity. The establishment of pivotal dates and durations of time reflects a set of beliefs and commitments about what time represents for political life and for the normative underpinnings of a political community.
Job Titles:
- Member of the Advisory Board
Job Titles:
- Student, Literacy Education. Humanities New York Public Humanities Graduate Fellow
Lauria's project puts Indigenous and Latinx Studies in dialogue by examining border narratives in contemporary novels and films. This work considers the political tension between Latinx migration and Indigenous sovereignty, claiming that their uneasy relation demands sustained critical and political attention. Rejecting the fusion implied by Gloria Anzaldúa's borderlands, Lauria's research engages concepts such as disjointedness, refusal, turbulence, and horror as a means of coming to terms with the incommensurabilities among different experiences of borders. In doing this, she challenges the liberal humanistic impulse towards resolution, looking instead for a way to remain attentive to entanglements that are non-resolvable under conditions of ongoing structural oppressions and exclusions in the context of so-called "American" borderscapes. The project is ultimately interested in forging solidarities rooted in difference between Indigenous peoples and migrants and working towards transforming violent relations underwritten by settler colonialism and capitalism.
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor, Religion. Humanities Center Faculty Fellow
Fisher explores the creation of religion under secularism through an ethnographic examination of monastic leaders and laypersons involved in the construction and expansion of Buddhist temples in China. Under strict political secularism of China's ruling communist state, religions such as Buddhism are restricted to "Religious Activity Sites" to prevent spilling over into secular society. While the state's aim is to contain religion, the monastics and laypersons building the new temples aim to use them to experiment with moral orientations and forms of sociality not acceptable within mainstream society, thereby exploiting the religious-secular dichotomy as the means to create social imaginaries that are "otherwise." Building on fieldwork conducted from 2010 to 2018, this project considers how Chinese Buddhist religious sites can foster anti-materialistic critique, the questioning of gender identities and roles, and inversions of class structure.
Job Titles:
- Student in Literacy Education.
Job Titles:
- Member of the Advisory Board
- Senior Associate Dean for Academic Affairs - Humanities
In addition to serving as Syracuse University's 2015 Jeannette K. Watson Distinguished Visiting Professor, Gesa E. Kirsch won the Mee Family Prize for Distinguished Research from Bentley University in 2015 and the Winifred Bryan Horner Outstanding Book Award for Feminist Rhetorical Practices: New Horizons for Rhetoric, Composition and Literacy Studies (co-authored with Jacqueline Jones Royster) in 2014. She has held visiting appointments at UC Santa Barbara, Syracuse University, the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, the University of New Hampshire, and the University of Orgeon.
Kirsch co-founded and co-directed the Women's Leadership Institute (now the Center for Women and Business) at Bentley University. Her research and teaching interests include feminist rhetorical studies; ethics and qualitative research methodology; archival research and methodology; women's rhetorical education, past and present, feminist pedagogy, and environmental rhetoric. She has written and edited many books, including Feminist Rhetorical Practices: New Horizons for Rhetoric, Composition, and Literacy Studies (with Jacqueline Jones Royster); Beyond the Archives: Research as a Lived Process (with Liz Rohan); Feminism and Composition: A Critical Sourcebook (with F. Maor, L. Massey, L.Nickoson-Massey, and M. P. Sheridan-Rabideau); Ethical Dilemmas in Feminist Research; Women Writing the Academy: Audience, Authority, and Transformation; Methods and Methodology (with Patricia Sullivan); and A Sense of Audience in Written Communication (with Duane Roen). Formerly Associate Executive Director for Higher Education, National Council of Teachers of English, Urbana IL and faculty member at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign; Director of Women's Studies at University of Oregon, Eugene, and Wayne State University, Detroit.
Gregg Lambert was the founding director of the Syracuse University Humanities Center and Principal Investigator of the CNY Humanities Corridor, establishing the permanent endowment of the Corridor in 2014 through a 3.5 million dollar matching award from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Professor Lambert has also created several other multi-institutional and collaborative research initiatives, including the Society for the Study of Biopolitical Futures and the Perpetual Peace Project. In 2013, he was elected as a member of the International Advisory Board of the Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes. Author of more than fifteen books in contemporary philosophy and critical theory, he currently serves in the Humanities Center as Dean's Professor of the Humanities.
Job Titles:
- Women 's & Gender Studies Tolley Professor
Job Titles:
- Graduate Director, Philosophy. Humanities Center Faculty Fellow
Project Abstract: Syracuse University and the Skä·noñh-Great Law of Peace Center sit on top of traditional Onondaga Nation land in Central New York. Both institutions are committed to education, diversity, and inclusivity in public and private spheres. They understand and acknowledge the Onondaga Nation as first peoples to Central New York since time immemorial and are committed to working in collaboration with the Onondaga Nation. However, institutional, structural, and cultural barriers challenge and impede meaningful collaboration between these three entities. Burnam's project brings these communities together to create significant meaningful and impactful relationships between these three entities, to give voice to Indigenous peoples', to create spaces of conversations across differences, and provoke transformational dialogue for all communities engaged in this public education.
Hugh Burnam (Mohawk Nation, wolf clan) is a Ph.D. candidate in Cultural Foundations of Education at Syracuse University (M.A., Adult Education, Buffalo State College, 2011; B.S., Individualized Ethnic and Minority Studies, 2010). His research interests include social justice in education, community engagement efforts, language revitalization, environmental advocacy, and Indigenous genders. Hugh's dissertation explores Indigenous student experiences in higher education, nation-building, and Indigenous masculinities. As a Public Humanities Fellow, Hugh proposes a project called The Haudenosaunee Thought Project, which will generate critical intergroup and intragroup conversations about Indigenous identities within Haudenosaunee and neighboring communities.
Job Titles:
- Member of the Advisory Board
- Administrative Specialist, Humanities Center
- Humanities Center ( Ex Officio )
Prior to joining the HC team in July 2023, Jacqulyn worked as the Assistant Director for STEP and CSTEP at Le Moyne College where she advised students at the college and in high schools throughout the Syracuse County School District. Originally from Mississippi, Jacqulyn received her Bachelor's degree in English Literature from the University of Mississippi before completing her Master's degree in English at Syracuse University. In this new role at the HC, Jacqulyn provides key operational and administrative support to the Humanities Center, CNY Humanities Corridor, and Engaged Humanities Network.
Job Titles:
- Assistant Professor, African American Studies. Humanities Center Faculty Fellow from Arts & Sciences
Project Abstract: Williams' work tells a compelling story about African American musicians who use improvisational, compositional, and technological practices to create complex commentaries on black life. The musical choices that a musician makes are shaped by both her understanding of musical practices and by social life. Building on critical improvisation studies scholarship, his book features case studies of musicians whose body of work has been created between the 1960s and our modern time. This text contributes to the vibrant discussion on how African American artists use musical practices as a way of creating spaces for black civil society within the dominant white society and how these spaces energize marginalize communities.
Job Titles:
- Member of the Advisory Board
- Professor, Religion. Humanities Center Symposium Faculty Fellow from Arts & Sciences
Watts' career-long research on the biblical book of Leviticus now hones in on chapter 25. It contains utopian legislation for resetting agriculture, land transactions, and slavery every 50 years, during what it calls the "Jubilee" year. While the surrounding story of the exodus to the promised land is famous for both inspiring freedom movements as well as being used to justify settler colonialism in the Americas, Africa, and the Middle East, the influence of this chapter's vision of a static agrarian community is less well known. Later Jewish and Christian traditions have often used the Jubilee as a symbol of release and freedom. Yet the distinction between native and foreign slaves, freeing the former but not the latter in the Jubilee, has been used to justify racialized chattel slavery. Watts' exploration of the history of Leviticus 25 in interpretation and economic practice offers a vantage point for observing some of the social effects-both oppressive and liberating-from envisioning economic futures based on a utopian vision of the past.
Jason Luther is completing a dissertation in cultural composition and rhetoric in the College of Arts and Sciences. As a former writing center director and longtime self-publisher, Luther is interested in what multimodal, self-sponsored composing spaces can teach about identities, counter/publics, processes and pedagogies. He's currently working toward a dissertation that surveys the process and performances of 21st-century zine authors. Luther blogs at http://taxomania.org. With the Public Humanities Fellowship, he will work toward the creation of a city-wide self-publishing festival in Syracuse.
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor, Religion. Humanities Center Faculty Fellow
Jouili studies an emerging Muslim popular culture scene in urban Britain in a context where Muslim youth cultures have become sites of intervention for security-oriented government policies. This work investigates how British Muslims related to this scene continuously to critically (re)negotiate-within a political climate that positions them as directly connected to "violent extremism"-a range of potentially contradictory conventions: piety and ethical norms; definitions of what it means to be a Muslim, British, and a citizen; and ideals concerning ‘authentic' Muslim artistic creativity. Jouili explores the possibilities for collective self-making within and against this network of conventions taking place within the Muslim arts and culture scene, for communities that have become the target of state policies and public discourses, defined by the War on Terror language.
Job Titles:
- Assistant Professor, Political Science. Humanities Center Faculty Fellow - Maxwell
Project abstract: Quinn's research investigates large industrial mining projects the adirondacks. He spent five years producing wildlife documentaries for National Geographic Television before returning to graduate school, and he plans to continue using these skills in this public humanities documentary
Brown V. The Board of Education (1954) as a turning point in the modern Civil Rights Movement has been used by many to create and uphold a narrative of Southern exceptionalism regarding racist Jim Crow policies and practices. Elliott's project seeks to upend that narrative by illuminating the voices of the children who lived through the experiences of school desegregation in Syracuse, New York from 1960-1970. Seniors in age now, there are a wealth of African American people who were students at Washington Irving Elementary, Madison Junior High School, and Central Tech High School and want to make contributions to the discipline of History: this project will be their gift to the future.
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor, African American Studies and Undergraduate Studies Director. Humanities Center Symposium Faculty Fellow from Arts & Sciences
In her project, Bryant explores the meanings of place using the record book of Asa Valentine, a free man of color in southwestern New Jersey. The journal, which he began in 1845, documents eighteen years of his life. This unpublished, never-referenced document is a starting point for mapping the contours of Black life in a place situated on the edge of the free North.
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor, Languages, Literature & Linguistics
Professor von Tippelskirch's fields of interest include 20th century and contemporary German literature and culture, translation, transnational literary and cultural movements. Her research areas are German exile literature, German-Jewish and Yiddish literature and culture. Her publications include books and articles on Rajzel Zychlinski, a major Yiddish poet, whose poems she also translated, articles on Rose Ausländer, Anna Margolin, Mascha Kaléko, Marica Bodrožić and Daniel Kehlmann. Her current research project is on the American journalist Dorothy Thompson who befriended and ultimately helped to rescue many German and Austrian writers and intellectuals from Nazi-occupied Europe.
Job Titles:
- Member of the Advisory Board
Job Titles:
- Member of the Advisory Board
- Professor of Spanish. Humanities Center Symposium Faculty Fellow from Arts & Sciences
Job Titles:
- Professor, Languages, Literatures and Linguistics and B.G. Rudolph Chair of Judaic Studies
Professor Frieden takes a comparative literature approach to Yiddish and Hebrew writing, in the broader contexts of European and world literature. From this perspective, he recently completed a book on Travel and Translation in Jewish Literature.
Job Titles:
- Assistant Professor, Philosophy
Kevan Edwards primarily works in philosophy of mind, philosophy of language and cognitive science. He is especially interested in a framework that combines a use-theoretic conception of natural language with a compositional and referentialist-cum-representational account of mental content. He has side-interests in related areas of metaphysics and epistemology.
Job Titles:
- Member of the Advisory Board
Job Titles:
- Member of the Advisory Board
- Humanities Council Chair Writing Studies, Rhetoric, and Composition
Job Titles:
- Member of the Advisory Board
Job Titles:
- Assistant Professor, African American Studies
Dr. Dixon (Ph.D., Clark-Atlanta) specializes in Latin America and the Caribbean, Afro-politics and democracy in Latin America and the Caribbean, human rights and civil society, social movements,
Larry Blumenfeld is a culture reporter, music critic and lecturer, who writes regularly for The Wall Street Journal, and has contributed to many newspapers, magazines, scholarly essay collections and websites. His work focuses on jazz and Afro-Latin music, and on the intersections between culture, politics and activism. His research as a Katrina Media Fellow for the Open Society Institute inspired a book about cultural recovery in New Orleans, due next year from the University of California Press. He was a National Arts Journalism Fellow at Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism. He curates Spoleto Festival USA's jazz series; the Deer Isle Jazz Festival in Stonington, Maine; and the National Jazz Museum in Harlem's series, 'Jazz and Social Justice.'
Born in Barcelona in 1958, Freixas published four novels, several short story collections, a memoir, and numerous studies on women's writing and feminist issues. She has translated the works of Virginia Woolf and Andre Gide, among others. Her writings have been featured in Babelia of El País, Revista de libros, Letras libres, Mercurio, and Barcelona's daily newspaper, La Vanguardia. Freixas is also president of the Classics and Moderns organization, which promotes culture created by women.
Featured activities while Freixas served as Syracuse University's 2016 Watson Professor:
Conversation with Writer, Critic, and Feminist Laura Freixas
The First Page: The Importance of Beginning a Novel
Women Writers and Autobiography: A Gendered Genre
The Pitfalls and Promises of Translation
Cooper's youth-focused public writing project is designed to generate humanities-based responses to environment, nature, and place. Drawing from diverse backgrounds and individual experiences, local students from the North Side Learning Center, La Casita, and the YWCA's Girls Inc. participate in writing workshops coordinated with a speaker series featured within the Syracuse University Humanities Center's "REPAIR" symposium (2022-23). In light of climate change, models of collective interpretation and expression are vital to understand our relationship to the environment. This project encourages students to express their environmental experiences and understandings through deep reading, creative writing, and scientific inquiry.
Li Kang is a PhD candidate in Philosophy at Syracuse University. Prior to her PhD study, she received her MPhil from the University of St Andrews (UK), and her BA from Wuhan University (China).
Kang's current research is in structuralism. Roughly, structuralism says that inter-relations between things are important; often they are more important than the things themselves and their intrinsic nature. Structuralist ideas are popular in philosophy of physics, philosophy of mathematics, social and political philosophy, Buddhism, etc. In her dissertation, "Spreading Structures," Kang explores new applications of structuralism in philosophy. Part of her work connects philosophy to science, and to Buddhism.
Job Titles:
- Composition and Cultural Rhetoric, Writing Program
A person's experiences may be good or bad for her, but why? Value theorists often presume that, if experience is intrinsically valuable, our answer can only appeal to the state of a person's sensory system. This follows from a widespread assumption in the philosophy of mind, according to which all conscious experience is sensory. This assumption, however, has been challenged in recent years and should not be taken for granted. D'Angelo shows how its rejection engenders a richer, more plausible account of the value of experience for well-being. In particular, she argues that attending to the non-sensory constituents of experience leads to a better understanding of the most cognitively sophisticated varieties of human happiness and suffering. D'Angelo's dissertation advisor is Ben Bradley.
Job Titles:
- Member of the Advisory Board
- School of Architecture
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- Syracuse University Libraries, Special Collections Research Center
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor, Philosophy. Humanities Center "Symposium" Faculty Fellow
Job Titles:
- Leadership Professor, and Co - Director of the Transformative Justice
- Professor. Professor, Chancellor 's Leadership Professor
Maisha T. Winn is Professor, Chancellor's Leadership Professor, and Co-Director of the Transformative Justice in Education Center (TJE) at UC Davis. Winn's research examines the intersectionality of language, literacy, and justice with attention to how to prepare teachers to "teach freedom" in both spaces of confinement and across the humanities. She considers the ways in which restorative justice practices have the potential to change languages, literacies, and social relations across our schools, institutions, and communities. Winn will draw from two of her books-Justice on Both sides: Transforming Education Through Restorative Justice and Restorative Justice in the English Language Arts Classroom-as bases for discussion with TJE Center collaborators and other panelists during her residency. [Photo credit: Hope Harris Photography]
Job Titles:
- History, Political Science
Project Abstract: Carson's dissertation explores the prolific writings of Abraham Joshua Heschel, an important Jewish thinker and rabbi from the 1950s-1960s. His longest and most well-known works, Man Is Not Alone, God In Search of Man, and The Sabbath all deal with the transcendent at what, at first glance, appears to be the expense of the immanent. Heschel rarely talks explicitly about bodies or the gender of these bodies. He does, however, talk quite expansively about affect. A robust understanding of Heschel's thinking on bodies and affect helps us to place together his own life story as a refugee from the Holocaust and his political/activist work alongside his theological work. Looking at his political and theological works together with an eye towards bodies and affect, this methodological approach can generate new ways of thinking about transcendence, immanence, and the Jewish post-Holocaust experience in America. Furthermore, this methodological approach can identify three pervasive moods or structures of feelings in his work: (1) how Heschel uses nostalgia when talking about the loss of Eastern European Jewry, (2) his ambivalence towards 1950s-1960s America and (3) how his political/political-activist work is framed through an articulation and/or desire to make the world a place more befitting of God's creation.
Maria Carson is a Ph.D. Candidate in Religion at Syracuse University (M.A., Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 2011; B.F.A., Theatre Management, DePaul University, 2009). Her dissertation project uses affect theory to discuss how nostalgia permeates the work of rabbi, activist, and scholar Abraham Joshua Heschel. This research reflects her larger interests which lie in the intersections of Jewish theology, Jewish cultural studies, and gender theory. In her spare time, she enjoys archery and writing fiction.
Huambachano explores how the Quechua of Peru and Māori of Aotearoa New Zealand describe, define, and enact well-being through the lens of foodways and how they operationalize their understanding within the broader goals of promoting physical and spiritual health and community wellness. Indigenous peoples' traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) and philosophies must be understood and recognized in relation to Indigenous efforts for safeguarding sustainable food systems because they hold the solutions to global food security. Taking a critical stance towards environmental injustices and inequalities in food security and nutrition, this study engages with the politics of food, settler colonialism, and food sovereignty undergoing rapid social-political changes. The project contributes to growing scholarship in the Indigenous Studies, Food Studies, and Environmental Studies fields, critically examining the role of Indigenous knowledge in providing tools to respond to food insecurity, structural racism, and climate change.
Job Titles:
- Cultural Foundations of Education
Project Abstract: Stewart's work gathers local leaders to prepare experiential presentations that promise explorations of the places that they love with the people of Syracuse. These leaders will guide groups on walking tours and discussions in places shaped by four themes: what the place has meant to others in the past, what it means to people in the present, how the place might be best shared with the whole city, and then how the place might be protected ecologically for the enjoyment of future inhabitants. Using place as a starting point can bring fresh insight and imagination into not only the ecological issues that affect us all but also into new understandings of citizenship and community. Reflection on place also offers opportunities for imagining ways to bridge the social divisions-race and class, among others-that have plagued Syracuse in the past and continue to do so today.
Matt Stewart is a Ph.D. Candidate in the History Department and Graduate Intern for the Grants Development Office in the Maxwell School at Syracuse University. His dissertation uses the career of the writer Wallace Stegner to examine the intellectual history of the American West in the latter half of the twentieth century. He is active in the public humanities. He has served as a judge for the Central New York History Day and New York History Day competitions for several years, and has also been a scholar-facilitator for a Humanities New York Reading and Discussion Group in Marcellus, New York. He also serves as scholar-facilitator for the Idaho Humanities Council's Summer Teacher Institute (Summer 2017), "Wallace Stegner and the Consciousness of Place."
Melissa Welshans is a PhD Candidate in English who specializes in early modern English literature. Her research interests center on gender and temporality in the seventeenth century, with an emphasis on the ways in which marriage shaped the temporal experiences of men and women in early modern literature and culture. She is currently working on her dissertation project, "The Many Types of Marriage: Gender, Marriage and Biblical Typology in Early Modern England," which argues that the life cycle event of marriage, especially for early modern women, could be understood to follow the same pattern of fulfillment and supersession usually ascribed to biblical typology. Considering marriage in this light raises provocative questions regarding marriage's impact on an individual's social standing and spiritual salvation, particularly for those who exist on the periphery of the married state.
Job Titles:
- Member of the Advisory Board
- Associate Professor, English. Humanities Center Faculty Fellow from Arts & Sciences
- English Tolley Professor ( 2022 - 2024 )
- Professor
Job Titles:
- Assistant Professor, Philosophy. Humanities Center Fellow, Arts & Sciences
A remarkable fact about language is that we can understand all manner of sentences, even ones we have never encountered before. We are able to do so on the basis of understanding the individual words they contain. Yet, Rieppel asks, what do individual words mean, or denote? One category of expressions for which the answer might seem obvious is that of singular terms: words, such as proper names, that we use to refer to particular things. Doesn't a name like 'Alice' just denote the individual we use this name to talk about? Rieppel explores reasons for rejecting this "Aboutness Thesis," and the consequences of doing so.
Job Titles:
- Member of the Advisory Board
- Budget Associate, Humanities Center and CNY Humanities Corridor
- Humanities Center ( Ex Officio )
Miguel Rodriguez is a lifelong central New Yorker, having earned his Bachelor's degree in Finance from LeMoyne College. Prior to joining the Humanities Center team in January 2022, he worked with local and offshore clients of BNY Mellon and most recently administrated payroll and payables for the employees and programs of Syracuse Abroad. He's also the proud owner of two beautiful, active dogs. Miguel appreciates how the Humanities Center and CNY Humanities Corridor provide unique opportunities for people to connect in ways that help better the world.
Miguel plays key roles in the forecasting, accounting, and reporting needs of both the Humanities Center and the CNY Humanities Corridor (administratively housed at Syracuse).
Job Titles:
- Disability Studies, Cultural Foundations of Education
Job Titles:
- Member of the Advisory Board
- Assistant Provost for Arts / Community
Lacroix coordinates a Syracuse-based writing group for queer youth that aims to foster community through collaboration, experimentation, and self-publishing. In addition to this pursuit, Lacroix serves as editor in chief of Salt Hill Journal. Her work has appeared in Blue Mesa Review, Litro, and Vancouver Magazine. She was a finalist in the Gigantic Sequins Flash Fiction Contest, and was nominated for a Best of the Net Award.
Job Titles:
- Student, English. Humanities Center Dissertation Fellow
El-Eid's dissertation draws attention to the heavily understudied and undertheorized Druze community, especially the political, social, and theoretical implications of their belief in reincarnation, which she outlines in a tripartite argument. Examining narratives of Druze "telling" across media forms and oral interviews, she expands and reconfigures the concepts of transnationalism, in-betweenness, witnessing, testimony, and post-memory as currently theorized within and across Transnational, Trauma, and Memory studies. El-Eid also contends that an examination of transnational Druze communities helps scholars of Critical Race and Ethnic studies rethink and resist hegemonic understandings of transnational Arab and Asian identities across nation, gender, sexuality, and religion. This work points to alternate ways of knowing and understanding the transnational Druze in connection to minoritized knowledges of other racial and ethnic groups who believe in reincarnation.
Job Titles:
- Co - Director, Center for Black Digital Research / DigBlk Professor of English, African American Studies and History and Paterno Family Chair of Liberal Arts, Pennsylvania State University
- Professor of English, African American Studies
P. Gabrielle Foreman is Professor of English, African American Studies and History, the Paterno Family Chair of Liberal Arts at Pennsylvania State University and Co-Director of the Center for Black Digital Research/#DigBlk. She was formerly the Ned B. Allen Professor of English and Professor of History and Black American Studies at the University of Delaware and has been a Ford Foundation Fellow, a Kellogg National Leadership Program fellow, and a fellow at the National Humanities Center and the Huntington Library, among others.
Foreman has a long-standing commitment to the intersection of Black digital humanities, race and public history. She is the founding faculty director of the award-winning Colored Conventions Project (CCP), which brings seven decades of nineteenth-century Black organizing to digital life at ColoredConventions.org. CCP's interactive exhibits highlight records from their online collection and tell the hidden stories of these Black-led gatherings for economic, educational and political justice. Through its North American Teaching Partners, CCP has involved over 3000 students in finding records and creating digital exhibits through CCP's curriculum. It holds an international transcribe-a-thon every year on Feb. 14th, Frederick Douglass's birthday, resurrecting "Douglass Day" as a day of collective love for Black history. The guide Foreman curated, "Writing about Slavery? Teaching about Slavery? This May Help," has been used by museums, journals, historical societies, presses, and in classrooms worldwide.
Foreman has published extensively on issues of race and reform in the nineteenth century. She is the author of widely-read essays, books and editions including Activist Sentiments: Reading Black Women in the Nineteenth Century and a ground-breaking Penguin edition of Our Nig: or, Sketches from the Life of a Free Black by Harriet Wilson. Her co-edited volume The Colored Conventions Movement: Black Organizing in the Nineteenth Century will be published by University of North Carolina Press in March 2021. Her volume Praise Songs for Dave the Potter: Art and Poetry for David Drake by Jonathan Green and Glenis Redmond will be in press shortly and she is currently completing The Art of DisMemory: Historicizing Slavery in Poetry, Performance and Material Culture. Foreman's ongoing collaboration with poets, choreographers and composers who transform Foreman's research into performance pieces have been performed and adopted in classrooms across the country.
Job Titles:
- Composition and Cultural Rhetoric, Writing Program
Paul Arras is a Ph.D. candidate in American cultural history at Syracuse University. He researches community fragmentation in late 20thcentury America - the decline of civic participation, the culture wars, and other problems and barriers impeding social interaction. His dissertation, The Lonely Nineties: Visions of Community on Television from the End of the Cold War to 9/11, examines how television grappled with fragmentation, reimagining traditional community structures and values to produce new visions of social interaction. During the Fellowship, Paul will be working with the Near Westside Initiative in Syracuse to develop a public history project for the neighborhood.
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor, Faculty of Arts, Humanities / University of Auckland
Job Titles:
- Member of the Advisory Board
- Collection Development & Analysis Librarian / Syracuse University
Job Titles:
- Assistant Professor, History. Humanities Center Faculty Fellow from Maxwell
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor, Arabic and Linguistics Arabic Program Coordinator
Dr. Habib specializes in sociolinguistics particularly language variation and change. Other interests include bilingualism, cross-cultural communication, child and adolescent language and Second Language/Dialect Acquisition, phonology, Pragmatics, and Syntax. Her research is interdisciplinary as it combines a number of subfields of linguistics, applying formal linguistic theory such as Optimality Theory and the Gradual Learning Algorithm to sociolinguistic variation. She has also applied qualitative and quantitative methods of analyses to sociolinguistic variation and change. Her present research deals with dialectal variation in the Arab World particularly the colloquial Arabic of rural migrant speakers to urban centers and the change that their speech undergoes because of social factors, such as prestige, age, gender, and residential area, contact, etc. She is also interested in the influence of urban dialects on rural ones without undergoing migration to urban centers. She is currently investigating the spread of urban linguistic features in the Syrian Arabic of rural children and adolescents.
Born in Kolkata, India, and having lived briefly in Great Britian, Rina Banerjee is currently a New York City based artist who draws on her multinational background for her work. She focuses on ethnicity, race, migration, and American diasporic histories in her sculpture, drawings, and video art. Banerjee's works are included in many private and public collections such as the Foundation Louis Vuitton, Whitney Museum of American Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and others. Banerjee returned to teaching in 2020 as a critic for the Yale School of Art Graduate Program and recently served a prestigious artist's residency at the Centre Pompidou in Paris.
Rinku Chatterjee's dissertation,"Peripheral Knowledge: The Witch, the Magus and the Mountebank on the Early Modern Stage," argues that there was a strong Humanist intellectual investment in various forms of liminal knowledge embodied by arguably socially marginalized figures. While Humanist philosophers like Ficino and Pico della Mirandola glorified the pursuit of limitless knowledge, Humanism itself was grounded within social institutions, and was invested in maintaining their integrity.
In addition to prior posts at Michigan, UCLA, Oxford, and most recently as Distinguished Research Professor of Philosophy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Adams is the author of more than a hundred articles, essays, and book reviews. He is a fellow of both the British Academy and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor, Geography. Humanities Center Faculty Fellow - Maxwell
- Geography
Wilson's working on a major article retheorizing landscape studies in geography and allied fields. Landscape is a central concept in geography and the focus of some of the most innovative scholarship in the discipline over the past thirty years. But most of this work treats landscape as the intentional outcome of human action and has downplayed the role of nonhuman forces. However, the climate crisis has rendered this anthropocentric view of landscape untenable. Sea level rise is inundating cities, megafires are incinerating communities, and other phenomena exacerbated by human-caused climate change are refashioning landscapes around the world. Arguments revealed by this project will retheorize landscapes studies for the Anthropocene--our new geological epoch where human actions have become dominant force reshaping the Earth--and will contribute to humanities perspectives in campus sustainability discussions.
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor, English. Humanities Center Faculty Fellow from Arts & Sciences
Job Titles:
- Member of the Advisory Board
Salaria Kea was the only African-American woman to serve with the second American Medical Unit to Republican Spain in 1937 as part of the effort to combat fascism during the Spanish Civil War. Her letters and diaries reveal the unique experience of a committed activist who fought for racial and gender equality both in the U.S. and in Europe. Her perspective counters dominant European narratives about the conflict in Spain and gives voice to the buried experience of women and African-Americans. Through archival research, Everly's project aims to begin to fill the void by giving voice to Kea's experience, analyzing her own writing about the Spanish conflict and reflecting on the oftentimes deafening silence of the canon and archive.
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor in the History Department at Syracuse University
- History
Samantha Kahn Herrick is an Associate Professor in the History Department at Syracuse University. She holds a Ph.D. from Harvard University, an M.Phil. from Oxford University, and a B.A. from Columbia University. Her research explores how medieval Christians constructed, used, and shared history by examining the stories they told about their local saints. Her first book, Imagining the Sacred Past: Hagiography and Power in Early Normandy (Harvard University Press, 2007), demonstrated that such stories could legitimate new and controversial political regimes. Her current research focuses on legends honoring the saints who, ostensibly, brought Christianity to northern Europe. These legends were local productions designed to serve local needs; yet they also circulated widely and thus reached distant audiences, who often reworked them to give them new meaning. This research explores the shifting networks that enabled these stories to travel over space and time, as well as the process of historical construction in which far-flung authors, scribes, and audiences collaborated. The goal is to learn how medieval communities shared ideas and how medieval people collectively constructed and understood history.
Sandeep Banerjee's dissertation,"Landscaping India: From Colony to Postcolony," traces the transformation of the colonial space of British India to the Indian nation-space by examining colonial and counter-colonial representations of the Indian landscape during the Indo-British colonial encounter of the late nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. By scrutinizing textual and visual representations of the colony, its built form, and their relationship to each other, it investigates the historical processes underlying the spatial production of the Indian nation.
Sarah Barkin is currently a PhD student in the Department of English, specializing in documentary film and visual culture. She is currently writing her dissertation, "Reframing the Conflict: The Politics of Subjectivity in Israeli and Palestinian Documentaries, 2000-2012." Her research focuses on the ways in which documentaries and photography employ different kinds of aesthetic experimentation as a means of (re)framing the politics of violence in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, drawing attention to the interplay of history/memory, geography, gender, and trauma in Israel, Palestine, and Lebanon.
Job Titles:
- Member of the Advisory Board
- Proposal Development - Humanities
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor, Art and Music Histories. Humanities Center Symposium Faculty Fellow from Arts & Sciences
Project Abstract: Scott's research foregrounds the art of five Pueblo painters (circa 1910-1950) to highlight the various ways in which indigenous artists in the United States have asserted their aesthetic agency in the face of the harsh realities of ongoing colonialism. Her work is concerned with how Native artists creatively adopt, confront, transform, and subvert colonial culture and structures, and how their art serves the creative, economic, and political needs of the artists themselves and often their communities.
Scarlett Rebman is a Ph.D. student in the history department at Syracuse University where she is specializing in modern American social and political history. She received her bachelor's degree in history and education from Ohio Wesleyan University. Her research interests include the history of social movements; federal anti-poverty and civil rights policies; and the construction of race, gender, and citizenship. Her dissertation explores the intersection of grassroots activism and federal policies in Syracuse, New York between 1935 and 1970. With the Public Humanities Fellowship, she plans to design a curriculum on Syracuse civil rights history for high school students.
Job Titles:
- Member of the Advisory Board
- Associate Professor, Native American Studies and Director. Humanities Center Faculty Fellow from Arts & Sciences
Job Titles:
- Member of the Advisory Board
- Newhouse Communications
Job Titles:
- Italian Program Coordinator
Stefano Giannini teaches Modern Italian literature. His research focuses on the historical novel and the dialectis memory/oblivion. A graduate of the University of Genoa (Italy), he studied at the University of Oregon and completed a Ph.D. in Italian Studies at the Johns Hopkins University. He taught at Wesleyan University in Connecticut, and at the University of Calgary (Canada). At SU he is the coordinator of the Italian program.
Job Titles:
- Student, Writing Studies, Rhetoric, and Composition. Humanities Center Dissertation Fellow
Jones examines artists' creative use of tools such as world-making, rhetorical root working, and activism to enact an Afrofuturism that recognizes and disrupts normalized genres of futurity in ways that are anti-racist. She explores Afrofuturist feminist storytelling practices as central to the recovery of African American history, demonstrating how the collective sharing of stories is fundamental to building community and how Black feminist intersectional practices can influence public discourse about race and technology in ways that positively impact our ability to learn in community with one another.
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor
- Associate Professor, Writing and Rhetoric
Steve Parks is an associate professor of writing and rhetoric. His work explores how marginalized communities can use writing and publication to gain increased political and cultural efficacy. He is author of Class Politics: The Movement for the Students' Right to Their Own Language as well as Gravyland: Writing Beyond the Curriculum in the City of Brotherly Love. He is also co-editor of Circulating Communities, Listening to Our Elder s, and Republic of Letters (scholarly edition).
Job Titles:
- Member of the Advisory Board
Job Titles:
- Professor of English at the University of California
- Professor. Associate
Susan Schweik is Professor of English at the University of California at Berkeley, where she has worked since 1984. She is the author of The Ugly Laws: Disability in Public (NYU, 2009) and A Gulf So Deeply Cut: American Women Poets and the Second World War (1991) and is completing a book tentatively titled Unfixed: How the Women of Glenwood Changed American IQ, and Why We Don't Know It. She served as Associate Dean of Arts and Humanities at UCB from 2007-2015.
Job Titles:
- Member of the Advisory Board
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor, History. Humanities Center Faculty Fellow - Maxwell
Murphy is currently working on her second book manuscript. Drawing on detailed British colonial registries of enslaved people that have previously been used primarily for demographic purposes, Slavery in the Age of Abolition focuses instead on the life histories and genealogies derived from close engagement with these archival documents. Focusing on British Crown colonies in the circum-Caribbean, such as St. Lucia, Trinidad, and Berbice, she is at work on a publicly-accessible database and associated book project designed to make the lives and experiences of enslaved people accessible and meaningful to students, researchers, and members of descendant communities. By centering the lived experiences of enslaved people during an era in which the prevailing scholarship focuses on abolition, Murphy's work connects with a variety of disciplines, including Slavery Studies, Disability Studies, and English.
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor, Art and Music Histories. Humanities Center Faculty Fellow
Thomas A. Guiler is a Ph.D. candidate in American social and cultural history in the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs. In particular, he studies intentional communities and communal groups, with special emphasis on the intersections among their ideals, economic production and culture. His dissertation will examine communities in the Arts and Crafts movement-Byrdcliffe, Roycroft, Craftsman Farms and Rose Valley-as unique transitional communities that marketed community, the simple life, handcraftsmanship, art and architecture as powerful forms of "progressive purchasing" to transform the harsh inequalities of modern industrial capitalism. Guiler plans to install a renewed public history program at Byrdcliffe in Woodstock, N.Y.
Job Titles:
- Assistant Professor of Geography. Humanities Center Faculty Fellow from Maxwell
Hammond's work examines the shifting practices through which Islam has come to be located in Istanbul over the past century. Drawing on archival and ethnographic fieldwork, this project shows that Eyüp's Islamic identity - and thus the place of Islam - is in fact considerably more complex. Examining forms of connection that range from story-telling to prayer to urban transformation to neighborhood sociability, this project helps articulate an approach for understanding Islam that takes its geographies as a starting point to explore the links between religion, social relationships, and urban life.
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor, Philosophy. Humanities Center Faculty Fellow from Arts & Sciences
Job Titles:
- Member of the Advisory Board
- Director, Humanities Center / Principal Investigator, CNY Humanities Corridor / Professor of Women 's and Gender Studies
- Director, Humanities Center Director, CNY Humanities Corridor
- Humanities Center Administration
Vivian M. May has published widely on Black feminist intellectual histories, intersectionality, and feminist theory and literature. In addition to numerous articles and chapters, she is author of two books: the first, Anna Julia Cooper, Visionary Black Feminist (Routledge, 2007), shows how Cooper deserves a much wider audience for her innovative and often daring contributions to a Black feminist public sphere. Her most recent book, Pursuing Intersectionality, Unsettling Dominant Imaginaries (Routledge, 2015), demonstrates how often intersectionality is resisted, misunderstood, and misapplied and pushes for more meaningful engagement with intersectionality's radical ideas, histories, and justice orientations. She also served as President of the National Women's Studies Association (2014-2016).
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor, English. Humanities Center Faculty Fellow from Arts & Sciences
Peace coordinated "Lives Worth Living," a daylong symposium on disability, bioethics and contemporary medicine, while serving as 2014's Watson Professor. Barbara Farlow and Brenda Brueggemann joined the symposium to address issues of life, death and disability. The closing event featured a keynote presentation by Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Sheri Fink, reading from her book, Five Days at Memorial.
Job Titles:
- Assistant Professor of Religion
William Robert is an Assistant Professor of Religion. He is also an affiliate faculty member in the Department of Women's and Gender Studies and in the Programs in LGBTQ Studies and in Medieval and Renaissance Studies. His research concerns the limits of "the human" and what happens when human beings approach, touch, or cross those limits. He explores these limits by examining experiences of mysticism and sexuality. He does so at intersections of religion, philosophy, history, and culture. His research project during his time as a Humanities Center Faculty Fellow focuses on Angela of Foligno, a thirteenth-century Christian mystic. He reads her extraordinary experiences as a limit case of what he calls "extreme humanity." His readings are also a test case of different corporealities, different sexualities, and different sexual differences across human-divine edges.