Fellows Celebration 2025

’25

Fellows Celebration January 21, 2025

Every January, the Institute for the Arts and Humanities hosts a Fellows Celebration, which allows us to recognize major artistic and scholarly achievements from the previous year.

Table of Contents Inger S.B. Brodey (FFP ’11, ’24) Samba Camara (FFP ’23) Tim Carter (FFP ’15) Kathleen DuVal* (FFP ’13, ’22) Carl Ernst (FFP ’01, ’14) Julia Gibson (FFP '24) Lawrence Grossberg (FFP ’96, ALP ’06) Shakirah Hudani* (FFP ’22) Mark Katz (FFP ’12, ALP ’13) Michelle King* (FFP ’23) Lloyd S. Kramer (FFP ’89, ’10) Cary Levine* (FFP ’15) Pamela Lothspeich (FFP ’12, ’23) Suzanne Lye* (FFP ’24) Jodi Magness (FFP ’10) Townsend Middleton* (FFP ’21) C.D.C Reeve (FFP ’10) Michele Rivkin-Fish* (FFP ’13) James Seay (FFP ’90) Bland Simpson (FFP ’98, ’06) Lien Truong (FFP ’17) Joseph Viscomi (FFP ’88, ’01) Rick Warner (FFP ’15) Benjamin Waterhouse* (FFP ’22, ALP ’24)

About the Institute Housed within the College of Arts and Sciences, the Institute for the Arts and Humanities was founded in 1987 by religious studies professor Ruel W. Tyson Jr. and approved by College dean Gillian T. Cell.

Today, the Institute empowers faculty to achieve their full potential by creating community and cultivating leadership.

At the heart of this mission is the affirmation of the crucial value of the arts and humanities to the life of the university and the world.

The Institute’s flagship Faculty Fellowship Program provides on-campus, semester-long leaves for faculty members in the College to pursue research and creative work that leads to publication, exhibition, composition, and performance. The Institute is honored to celebrate and recognize all work produced by Faculty Fellows throughout their careers.

* Published works made possible by the Faculty Fellowship Program Find a digital version of, and learn more about, this below.

Inger S.B. Brodey (FFP ’11, ’24) English and Comparative Literature

Jane Austen & the Price of Happiness, Johns Hopkins University Press. Brodey studies the contradictions and distances presented in the “happy endings” of Austen’s romances.

Read a Q&A with Brodey about the book.

Supported by the Arts and Humanities Publication Support Grant.

Samba Camara (FFP ’23) African, African American, and Diaspora Studies

Co-editor, African Languages, Literatures, and Postcolonial Modernity, Cambridge Scholars Publishing.

This book explores postcolonial modernity in Africa through the lens of African languages and literatures, particularly in African novels, films, poetry, and popular music.

Tim Carter (FFP ’15) Music

Monteverdi’s Voices: A Poetics of the Madrigal, Oxford University Press.

Carter’s book offers the first comprehensive survey of the madrigals published by Renaissance and Baroque composer Claudio Monteverdi between 1587 and 1638. Read a music department Q&A on the book.

Read an e-book (Onyen protected).

Kathleen DuVal (FFP ’13, ’22) History

Native Nations: A Millennium in North America, Penguin Random House.

Beginning with the millennium-long histories of 16th-century Native American societies, DuVal contextualizes early encounters between Europeans and Native nations, foregrounding the political power Indigenous people continue to exert over their lands and institutions. Recipient of the 2024 Cundill History Prize.

Supported by the Arts and Humanities Publication Support Grant. Completed with support of a Faculty Fellowship.

Carl Ernst (FFP ’01, ’14) Religious Studies

Breathtaking Revelations: The Science of Breath, from The Fifty Kamarupa Verses to Hazrat Inayat Khan, coauthor, Sulūk Press.

Ernst and co-author Patrick J. D’Silva explore the ways in which Sufism intersects with breath-based meditation and practices.

Julia Gibson (FFP ’24) Dramatic Art

Starred in What the Constitution Means to Me, PlayMakers Repertory Company.

Gibson brings her wit and emotional depth to the role of Heidi Schreck, who reflects on her teenage self as she debates the Constitution’s impact on her life. Watch a trailer for the play.

View more on Gibson’s play.

Lawrence Grossberg (FFP ’96, ALP ’06) Communication

On the Way to Theory, Duke University Press.

Grossberg introduces the major ways of thinking that provide the backstory for contemporary Western theory.

Shakirah Hudani (FFP ’22) African, African American, and Diaspora Studies

Master Plans and Minor Acts: Repairing the City in Post-Genocide Rwanda, The University of Chicago Press.

Through extended ethnographic and qualitative research in Rwanda in the decades after the genocide of 1994, Hudani questions how repair after conflict is realized amidst large-scale urban transformation. Read a Q&A with Hudani about the book.

Supported by the Arts and Humanities Publication Support Grant. Completed with support of a Faculty Fellowship.

Mark Katz (FFP ’12, ALP ’13) Music

Rap and Redemption on Death Row: Seeking Justice and Finding Purpose Behind Bars, co-author, UNC Press.

Alim Braxton, imprisoned on North Carolina’s death row, uses his rap and rhyme as a form of therapy and to advocate for prison reform. The book focuses on the correspondence — now more than 175 letters and hundreds of pages — between Braxton and Katz, who has been studying and writing about hiphip for 25 years. Read a story about the book.

Michelle King (FFP ’23) History

Chop Fry Watch Learn: Fu Pei-Mei and the Making of Modern Chinese Food, W. W. Norton & Company.

King weaves together stories from her own family and current cooks with research about cookbook author, culinary teacher and TV personality Fu Pei-mei.

Read a review from The New York Times and a feature in The Washington Post and Carolina Arts & Sciences. Listen to an interview with King on NPR's Weekend Edition and The Institute podcast.

Completed with support of a Faculty Fellowship.

Lloyd S. Kramer (FFP ’89, ’10) History

Traveling to Unknown Places: Nineteenth-Century Journeys toward French and American Selfhood, UNC Press.

Traveling to Unknown Places presents a compelling analysis of how French and American writers reshaped their personal and collective identities as they traveled in foreign countries after the social upheavals of the 18th-century Atlantic revolutions. Listen to an interview with Kramer on WCHL.

Cary Levine (FFP ’15) Art and Art History

The Future is Present: Art and Technology in the Work of Mobile Image, co-author, MIT Press.

This book details the history and impact of pioneering art group Mobile Image, which utilized new media and emerging technologies.

Supported by the Arts and Humanities Publication Support Grant.

Pamela Lothspeich (FFP ’12, ’23) Asian and Middle Eastern Studies

The Epic World (editor), Routledge.

This book offers a broad look at epic literature, exposing the false premises of "Western civilization" and "Classics" and bringing new global questions and perspectives to epic studies.

Read an e-book (Onyen protected).

Suzanne Lye (FFP ’24) Classics

Life / Afterlife: Revolution and Reflection in the Ancient Greek Underworld from Homer to Lucian, Oxford University Press.

Lye traces the development, evolution, and uses of underworld scenes in ancient Greek literature and society.

Supported by the Arts and Humanities Publication Support Grant. Completed with support of a Faculty Fellowship.

Jodi Magness (FFP ’10)

Asian and Middle Eastern Studies Jerusalem through the Ages: From Its Beginnings to the Crusades, Oxford University Press. Magness introduces readers to the city’s complex and layered history, providing a broad yet detailed account, including recent archaeological discoveries.

Ancient Synagogues in Palestine: A Reevaluation Nearly a Century After Sukenik’s Schweich Lectures, The British Academy/ Oxford University Press. First given as the 2022 Schweich Lectures in Biblical Archaeology at the British Academy, this book re-evaluates Eleazar Sukenik’s conclusions on typologies and chronologies of ancient Palestinian synagogues in light of recent discoveries.

Townsend Middleton (FFP ’21) Anthropology

Quinine's Remains: Empire’s Medicine and the Life Thereafter, University of California Press.

Quinine – the only treatment for malaria until the 20th century – was vital to the British Empire, which maintained cinchona plantations in India’s Darjeeling Hills. Quinine’s Remains chronicles the history and aftermaths of quinine and the efforts to redefine the land.

Supported by the Arts and Humanities Publication Support Grant. Completed with support of a Faculty Fellowship.

C.D.C Reeve (FFP ’10) Philosophy

Aristotle's Dialectic: Topics, Sophistical Refutations, and Related Texts, Hackett Publishing. In a new translation, Reeve provides a detailed introduction, endnotes, and index.

Nicomachean Ethics, Hackett Publishing. In this second edition, Reeve adds sequentially numbered, cross-referenced endnotes and a detailed index.

Michele Rivkin-Fish (FFP ’13) Anthropology

Unmaking Russia's Abortion Culture: Family Planning and the Struggle for a Liberal Biopolitics, Vanderbilt University Press.

As the predominant form of birth control in Soviet society, abortion reflected key paradoxes of state socialism: women held formal equality but lacked basic contraceptive needs. Rivkin-Fish examines the creative strategies of Russians who promoted family planning in place of routine abortion, emphasizing the benefits it brought to the country.

Supported by the Arts and Humanities Publication Support Grant. Completed with support of a Faculty Fellowship.

James Seay (FFP ’90)

English and Comparative Literature Come! Come! Where? Where? UNC Press.

In this book of essays, Seay brings readers on a journey around the world and through various topics, often using literature as a means of understanding culture and place.

Bland Simpson (FFP ’98, ’06) English and Comparative Literature Clover Garden: A Carolinian’s Piedmont Memoir, UNC Press.

With a naturalist’s eye, a storyteller’s mind, and a poet’s soul, Simpson guides readers into a deep engagement with the Piedmont, both as a material place and as an idea. Read an interview with Simpson about his book.

Lien Truong (FFP ’17) Art and Art History

An Unbearable Lightness Between Sky and Water, Galerie Quynh Contemporary Art, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.

In this solo exhibition, Truong weaves languages of paint, textile, and food, forming a hybrid, diasporic language of love dedicated to her late mother.

View more on Truong’s exhibition.

Joseph Viscomi (FFP ’88, ’01) English and Comparative Literature

Digital publication for the William Blake Archive: Songs of Innocence, copies D, O, Q, and S 18 Heads of Poets, digital edition of tempera paintings, April 2024, co-ed.

Robert N. Essick, Morris Eaves For Children: The Gates of Paradise copy A, August 2024, co. ed. Robert N. Essick Viscomi is co-editor for the William Blake Archive, which provides a digital repository of critical editions of Blake’s prints, paintings, and poems.

Each publication links to Viscomi’s editions.

Rick Warner (FFP ’15)

English and Comparative Literature The Rebirth of Suspense: Slowness and Atmosphere in Cinema, Columbia University Press.

Warner offers a redefinition of suspense by considering its unlikely incarnations in the contemporary films that have been called “slow cinema.” He shows how slowness builds suspense through atmospheric immersion, narrative sparseness, and the withholding of information, causing viewers to oscillate among boredom, curiosity, and dread.

Benjamin Waterhouse (FFP ’22, ALP ’24) History

One Day I'll Work for Myself: The Dream and Delusion That Conquered America, W.W. Norton & Company.

Waterhouse traces a narrative history of business in America with vivid characters — from the activists, academics and work-from-home gurus who hailed business ownership as our economic salvation to the upstarts who took the plunge. Read an interview with Waterhouse about his book.

Supported by the Arts and Humanities Publication Support Grant. Completed with support of a Faculty Fellowship.