Emerging Technologies in Human Context: Past, Present, and Future Faculty Fellows
Lydi Conklin Department of English
During my fellowship year at the Robert Penn Warren Center, I plan to work on my novel-in-progress, Cast of Cowards. The novel follows a group of seven high school students in the year 2000 as they attempt to write a devised ensemble play about an antigay hate crime that occurred at their school. The book deals with early school shootings, the first years of internet-based communication, betrayal, and sexual violence. I have been working on the novel for some years, and am in the middle of deeply restructuring and editing it. I would love to finish a polished draft by the end of the academic year.
Fun fact: I’ve fostered 40 rescue dogs.
Julie Gamble Department of Gender and Sexuality Studies
My research focuses on how gender informs urban experience and how to build fairer cities, and my approach intersects quantitative and qualitative methods that I look forward to sharing in a collaborative setting. As an Emerging Technologies in Human Context’s Fellow, I plan to rework and reshape data sets collected from GPS and cellular devices on urban mobility in Quito, Ecuador, to prepare them for separate journal publication. As a second-year faculty member, the RPW fellowship opportunity will also help integrate me into Vanderbilt’s scholarly environment.
Fun fact: I have summited several active volcanoes in Ecuador!
Huan He
Department of English
I am completing a draft of my book project, currently titled The Racial Interface: Asian Racialization and the Dreams of the Digital The project explores how Asian American writers and artists represent technological labor and worlds, creatively highlighting the human stakes that undergird abstract projections of digital futures. In addition to writing a new chapter on Asian American metaverse narratives, I hope to learn from other faculty who draw from multidisciplinary, creative approaches, especially those who are committed to building just and equitable technological futures.
Fun fact: I am a big fan of horror movies, especially anything of the experimental variety.
David
Hess
Departments of Sociology and Communication of Science and Technology; Director of the Program in Climate and Environmental Studies
I have been working at the intersections of the humanities and social sciences for most of my career. In graduate school, I studied anthropology and Latin American history. I later was hired into a tenure-track position in a science and technology studies department that had a wide-ranging interdisciplinary conversation with its faculty in both the humanities and social sciences. I also worked with architects, designers, and engineers in an interdisciplinary program on socially responsible product design. Since coming to Vanderbilt, I have continued to enjoy interdisciplinary research, curriculum development, and discussions both in the college and across the campus. One of my advisers once commented that in the interdisciplinary conversations, you’ll find new ideas, and I couldn’t agree more.
Fun fact: In grad school I spent about two years doing fieldwork and archival research on Spiritism and science in Brazil.
Laura Stark Department of Medicine, Health, and Society
Laboratories are more common in the sciences than in the humanities. And yet they seem really helpful for the humanities, too. I’ve admired humanities-oriented labs, like Professor Aimi Hamraie’s Critical Design Lab, as a way to spark collaboration and focus priorities. My goal is to design a lab on AI inputs and impacts, with an emphasis on the environmental costs of AI.
The beauty of wrapping up a big book project is getting to start a new one—to learn new things and tell new stories. In the final stages of one book project, I am excited to share time and ideas (and snacks!) with the other RPW Fellows to plan my new project on the Movement for Green AI.
Fun fact: My favorite color is high viz yellow.
David Thorstad Department of Philosophy
My goal during the fellowship is to study the relationship between bounded rationality and artificial intelligence. I plan to work on two papers. The first paper looks at recent studies of cognitive bias in the outputs of reasoning by large language models. The second looks at how methods for preventing overfitting in artificial systems (regularization methods) can help us to understand problems of overfitting in human cognition.
Fun fact: I’m an identical twin. He’s seven minutes older, which doesn’t count (we were born extremely premature, and it’s his fault).
Hannah Ziegler Department of Teaching and Learning, Peabody
Collaborative Humanities Postdoctoral Program 2024-2025 Fellows
Jason Ahlenius
Center
for Latin American, Caribbean & Latinx Studies
Jason Ahlenius’s research examines the politics of labor and race in nineteenth-century Mexico’s borderland regions through literature, visual studies, contract, and other media.
Nathalie
Barton
Department of History
Nathalie Barton investigates how changing ideas of race and ownership have shaped experiences of home, real estate, and the urban built environment.
Peter Sebastian Chesney
Department of History of Art & Architecture
Peter Sebastian Chesney uses sensory studies, urbanism, and the history of technology, to map routes through Los Angeles that do not rely on sight.
Lee Ann Custer
Department of History of Art & Architecture
Lee Ann Custer’s current research focuses on the social, spatial, and environmental politics of urban air and its visualization by modern artists living in New York City from 1880 to 1940.
Lidiana de Moraes
Center for Latin American, Caribbean & Latinx Studies
Lidiana de Moraes specializes in postcolonial and decolonial feminist discourses, particularly the interconnected narratives of contemporary African and Afro-Brazilian female artists.
Eric Moses Gurevitch Department of Asian Studies
Eric Moses Gurevitch’s work explores the emergence of practical sciences in vernacular languages in South Asia and the debates that arose around them in the medieval and early modern periods.
Re’ee Hagay Department of Jewish Studies
Re’ee Hagay focuses on Mizrahi Jews, the ethno-class of Jewish immigrants from the Middle East and North Africa who have been segregated as human frontiers at the margins of the evolving national territory.
Anna Hill Department of English
Anna Hill’s research examines representations of environmental crisis in twentieth- and twenty-first-century literature, with emphasis on the U.S. and questions about memory, affect, and the ecological afterlives of empire.
Jonathan Karp Program in Culture, Advocacy & Leadership
Jonathan Karp investigates how racial regimes were challenged and reestablished during and in the wake of the East St. Louis massacre of 1917.
Lara Lookabaugh Department of Gender & Sexuality
Studies
Lara Lookabaugh’s current project explores how the everyday political and artistic practices of Indigenous women create space to envision and enact alternative futures.
Helen Makhdoumian Department of English
Helen Makhdoumian’s research expands upon discourses in trauma, memory, and genocide studies, as well as diaspora, transnational, and migration studies.
Ana
Luiza
Morais Soares Department of Anthropology
Ana Luiza Morais Soares focuses on the history of Indigenous child separation and labor exploitation in the Brazilian Amazon, practices which played a significant role in ethnic identity erasure.
Matthew Plishka Center for Latin American, Caribbean & Latinx Studies
Matthew Plishka works at the intersection of social and environmental history to examine how marginalized communities navigate ecological crises.
Clara Wilch Program in Communication of Science & Technology
Clara Wilch researches how environment and performance interrelate with a focus on philosophical and creative approaches to climate change mitigation and adaptation.
Undergraduate Humanities in the Real World Fellows
Biological Sciences; Creative Writing
Economics and History; European Studies
Public Policy Studies; English
Communication Studies; Communication of Science and Technology
Medicine, Health, and Society; Spanish
Jason
Human and Organizational Development; Culture, Advocacy, and Leadership
Electrical and Computer Engineering; Law, History, and Society 2024-
2025
Cady Butcher
Izoduwa Ighodaro
Ilana Drake
Hanna Kostiv
Vadnos
Jaylan Sims
Shunnar Virani
Seminars 2024-25
This year’s seminars cover a broad spectrum of humanities topics and issues. To learn more about these seminars, visit our website at vu.edu/rpw.
AI and the Human
Alexis Finet (French and Italian) and Cameron Pattison (Philosophy)
Black Worlds and World-Making
Brandon Byrd (History) and Anthony Reed (English)
East Europe and Eurasia: Critical Engagements
Matthew Worsnick (HART) and Benjamin Sawyer (History, MTSU)
Film Theory and Visual Culture
Sign up here
Sasha Crawford-Holland (CMA/Communication Studies), Jennifer Fay (English/CMA), and Huan He (English)
Indigenous Studies
Susan Dine (HART) and Jana Harper (Art)
Nashville Bestiary Project
Elizabeth Meadows (English) and Chris Vanags (Peabody)
Ottoman History Workshop
Julia Phillips Cohen (Jewish Studies) and Samuel Dolbee (History)
