Emerging Technologies 2024-25

2024 - 2025

Work in Emerging Progress Technologies 2024-2025

To celebrate our theme of Emerging Technologies, the front and back cover images were generated

by AI to show the Vaughn home in block form.

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.

20242025

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).

2024- Emerging 2025 Technologies

Graduate Student Fellows

Sarah Hagaman

Department of English

Katrina Rbeiz

Sung Jun Han

Department of Philosophy

Department of Psychology

Emily McCabe

Department of Mechanical Engineering

Hannah Ziegler

Department of Teaching and Learning, Peabody

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.

2024-2025 Fellows

Collaborative Humanities Postdoctoral Program

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

Cady Butcher

Ilana Drake

Izoduwa Ighodaro

Hanna Kostiv

Jaylan Sims

Jason Vadnos

Shunnar Virani

20242025

Biological Sciences; Creative Writing

Economics and History; European Studies

Electrical and Computer Engineering; Law, History, and Society

Public Policy Studies; English

Communication Studies; Communication of Science and Technology

Medicine, Health, and Society; Spanish

Human and Organizational Development; Culture, Advocacy, and Leadership

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

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Matthew Worsnick (HART) and Benjamin Sawyer (History, MTSU)

Film Theory and Visual Culture

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)

Remaking South Asia

Adeana McNicholl (Religious Studies), Akshya Saxena (English), and Anand Taneja (Religious Studies)

Rights and Resistance

Elizabeth Covington (GSS/English), Kristin Rose (GSS), Stacy Simplican (GSS/Political Science), and Danyelle Valentine (GSS/American Studies)

Science and Technology Studies

Eric Moses Gurevitch (Asian Studies), Tasha Rijke-Epstein (History), and Laura Stark (MHS)

The Novel

Jay Clayton (English) and Scott Juengel (English)

Holly Tucker, Director Matt DiCintio, Associate Director Terry Tripp, Program Coordinator Cassie Kirchmeier, Program Specialist