2022 - 2023
Work in Progress
Director’s Note Each year the RPW Center selects a keyword theme to serve as a touchstone for our event and fellowship programming. This year’s theme is The Place of Memory, and we have a terrific cohort of faculty members and graduate students whose research embodies this topic through capacious and creative scholarship. Additionally, this year we welcomed Matt DiCintio as our second Associate Director. He’s taken the lead on the Collaborative Humanities Postdoctoral Program in collaboration with the A&S Dean’s Office, and he’s overseeing the Center’s humanities graduate student programming with exciting new opportunities for article writing and dissertation bootcamps. Our undergrad progamming continues to flourish under Associate Director Elizabeth Meadows who hosted a Humanities in the Real World dinner series, an immersion creative writing project, and accompanied students Coco Randolph and Shunnar Virani to Washington, DC, where they participated in the National Advocacy Day for the Humanities. While we were sad to see Program Specialist Phoebe Thompson leave to pursue her Ph.D. at Penn, we were very fortunate to have Constance Priddy join our team fresh off the completion of her MA from Vanderbilt’s History Department. She had big shoes to fill, and she’s done a terrific job in filling them.
HOLLY TUCKER Director, Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities Mellon Foundation Chair in the Humanities Meanwhile, Terry Tripp continues to promote the humanities and the many Center events through posters, announcements, invitations, newsletters, and this magazine. We hope you enjoy this look back at our previous year’s work, while also getting to know the people at the forefront of this year’s programming.
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The RPW Center is exploring the theme of The Place of Memory in 2023-24. In addition to our faculty fellows and themed graduate student fellows programs, this theme will also inform our Harry Howard Lecture and other programming thoughout the year.
This year’s graduate theme fellows bring a wide range of research interests such as public health policy; nineteenth-century literature; Christian social ethics and political theology; creative writing; youth power-building in neighborhoods and schools; and metaphysical poetry, poetics, and science in literature.
THE PLACE OF MEMORY
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GRADUATE THEME FELLOWS
FACULTY FELLOWS Meet this year’s faculty fellows whose research and projects focus on the theme of The Place of Memory. Some of the topics this year’s fellows will work on include building computational models of how the transmission of human culture within and between generations is affected by both place and memory; how the COVID-19 pandemic is reconstituting the role of memory and place in the reproduction -- and disruption -- of expert-driven models of “human development;” looking at the history of places and
memories to repair our understanding of the past by breaking it apart; a film project that explores the electrification of the psyche—the way it can both preserve memories and obliterate thought; a look at how more-than-human beings—including cattle, insects, and fungi— have been enrolled in competing projects of worldmaking in Madagascar; and interrogating the ways in which crime and insecurity are rooted and routed together in Jamaica.
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UNDERGRADS The Humanities in the Real World Fellowship program offers undergraduate students of any major the opportunity to examine and articulate connections among their coursework, humanities scholarship and learning, and urgent concerns in the world around them. From Fall 2023 through Spring 2024, HRW Fellows will develop and employ critical thinking, storytelling, and communication skills.
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POSTDOCTORAL FELLOWS The Vanderbilt Collaborative Humanities Postdoctoral Program (CHPP) supports a cohort of postdoctoral fellows in the humanities and humanistic social sciences to conduct research and teaching on interdisciplinary topics in the collaborative humanities.
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SEMINARS Our seminars and reading groups provide an opportunity for faculty, postdocs, and grad students to engage in deep dives and interdisciplinary research and conversations about an array of humanities topics and disciplines.
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HARRY HOWARD Cal Flyn, an award-winning author and journalist who has written extensively on nature and environmental issues, delivered the 2023 Harry C. Howard Jr. Lecture. She discussed her book, Islands of Abandonment, which examines the ecology and psychology of abandoned places. Her book has been shortlisted for numerous literary awards, including the Wainwright Prize for writing on global conservation, the British Academy Book Prize, the Ondaatje Prize and the Baillie Gifford Prize for nonfiction.
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FACULTY FELLOWS
GRADUATE FELLOWS This was the last year of the center’s longtime graduate fellowship program designed for exceptional graduate students in their final year. They met weekly during the fall and early spring semester before giving a public lecture about their research in late spring.
Meet the 2022-2023 Mending and Transforming Faculty Fellows. These fellows met bi-weekly to discuss a workin-progress related to our annual theme. Photo credit: Vesna Pavlović
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GRADUATE THEME FELLOWS
Photo credit: Kristi Irving
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In addition to the themed faculty fellowships, the RPW Center also offers an opportunity for graduate students at any school at Vanderbilt to participate in a themed fellowship just for them.
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SEMINARS Seminars allowed faculty and graduate students to engage in rich conversations and innovative scholarship with colleagues from a wide range of disciplines.
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UNDERGRADS Undergrads joined faculty for our Humanities in the Real World dinner series, allowing students to interact with and learn about the research of humanities faculty in an informal setting.
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ADVOCACY Two members of the RPW Center Student Advisory Council, Coco Randolph and Shunnar Virani, traveled with Associate Director Elizabeth Meadows to DC to advocate for the humaniites.
SOUTHERN FESTIVAL OF BOOKS
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The RPW Center hosted a track at the 2022 Southern Festival of Books related to the “Mending and Transforming” theme. It featured 23 authors and moderators exploring a wide range of topics and genres.
IMAGINING AMERICA A group of Vanderbilt faculty members, including Elizabeth Meadows, Leah Lowe (Theatre), and Diana Heney (Philosophy), presented a workshop on “Creating an Archive of Renewal: From Routine to Ritual” at the 2022 Imagining America conference.
49 THEMED EVENTS In addition to our standard programming, the RPW Center sponsored or co-sponsored other “Mending and Transforming” events.
The Place of Memory
This year, the RPW Center is focusing on the theme of “The Place of Memory.” With equal emphasis on “place” and “memory,” we explore what it means to navigate remembering and forgetting in our post-COVID, algorithmic world. Where does memory live in the body and how is it communicated through our actions in the world? How do places—geographical, corporeal, conceptual—inform memory? How do memory and place(s)—individual, collective, or historical—influence and shape each other? How do we memorialize so as to preserve, do justice, heal, and move forward? And when is it necessary to forget?
2023- RPW Center The 2024 Faculty Fellows Dominique Béhague
Dominique Béhague is Associate Professor in the Department of Medicine, Health, and Society at Vanderbilt University and holds a summer appointment in the Department of Global Health & Social Medicine at King’s College London. Béhague’s long-term research in Southern Brazil explores the intersection of psychiatry, politics, activism, and the emergence of adolescence and other life-cycle transitions as objects of developmental expertise. She co-designed the longitudinal ethnographic sub-study the 1982 Pelotas Birth cohort, one of a handful of interdisciplinary cohort studies taking place in a country in the Global South. Her research has received funding from the US National Science Foundation, the Fulbright Foundation, the World Health Organization, the UK Economic and Social Research Council, and The Wellcome Trust.
Jefferson Cowie
Jefferson Cowie is the James G. Stahlman Professor of History. Cowie’s work in social and political history focuses on how class, race, inequality, and labor shape American politics and culture. In 2023, he won the Pulitzer Prize for History for his book, Freedom’s Dominion: A Saga of White Resistance to Federal Power (Basic, 2022). He is also the author of The Great Exception: The New Deal and the Limits of American Politics (Princeton, 2016); Stayin’ Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class (New Press, 2010); and Capital Moves: RCA’s Seventy Year Quest for Cheap Labor (New Press, 2000). His essays and opinion pieces have appeared in the New York Times, NPR Music, TIME magazine, Foreign Affairs, Chronicle of Higher Ed, American Prospect, Democracy, The New Republic, Dissent, and other popular outlets.
e Place of Memory Nicole Creanza
Nicole Creanza is an Assistant Professor of Biological Sciences at Vanderbilt University. Her laboratory studies behavioral evolution: how behaviors that have to be learned, such as bird songs and human languages, change across generations. Her research builds on knowledge about learned behaviors from linguistics, animal behavior, and anthropology by integrating techniques and data from mathematical modeling and population genetics. As an RPW Center Fellow, she will use her background in cultural evolutionary theory to build computational models of how the transmission of human culture within and between generations is affected by both place and memory.
Tasha Rijke-Epstein
Tasha Rijke-Epstein is a historian and cultural anthropologist, whose research centers on questions of belonging, materiality, environment, and the politics of placemaking in Madagascar and the broader Indian Ocean. Her first book is Children of the Soil: The Power of Built Form in Urban Madagascar (Duke University Press, 2023). Her articles have appeared in a range of journals including Comparative Studies in Society and History, History and Technology, and The Journal of African History. She is currently Assistant Professor in the Department of History.
Carmine Grimaldi
Carmine Grimaldi is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Cinema and Media Arts, where he teaches filmmaking. He received his Ph.D. in history at the University of Chicago and trained as a filmmaker at Harvard’s Sensory Ethnography Lab. His films have screened at festivals such as True/False, Visions du Reel, The Museum of the Moving Image, Camden, RIDM, Sheffield Doc/Fest, and DokuFest, where he was awarded the prize for best short film, and in 2017 he was named one of the 25 New Faces of Independent Film by Filmmaker Magazine. His writings on film and media have appeared in Representations, LARB, Millennium Film Journal, Mubi Notebook, and The Atlantic.
Kimberley McKinson
Kimberley D. McKinson is a cultural anthropologist whose research interests lie at the intersection of insecurity, memory, postcoloniality, and storytelling in Jamaica. Her writing has appeared in Cultural Anthropology, the Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology; Surveillance and Society, and Sapiens. Kimberley’s in-progress book manuscript is titled Caliban Untamed: In/security, Memory, and the Unmaking of Postcolonial Jamaica. Her research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the UC Center for New Racial Studies, and the UC Collaboratory for Ethnographic Design. Kimberley is an Assistant Professor in Vanderbilt University’s Department of Anthropology.
2023- The Place of 2024 Memory Graduate Student Fellows Tandria Fireall
Department of English Tan Fireall is an MFA candidate in Poetry. Her research interests span various topics such as film theory, the Renaissance and early modern era, metaphysical poetry, poetics, and science in literature. She is currently researching the theme of violence and victimization within communities. Her research is framed as a critical essay focusing on tragedy as a genre and invites readers to consider the complexities of violence, acts of desecration, and the prevention of burial.
Kanak Kapur
Department of English Kanak Kapur is a writer from Dubai and Los Angeles. Her fiction has previously appeared at The Rumpus, the cyber zine CodeLit and Black Warrior Review. She has received support through a scholarship from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, where she was a Tennessee Williams Scholar. She is currently an MFA candidate in fiction at Vanderbilt University.
Seulbin Lee
Graduate Department of Religion Seulbin Lee is a Ph.D. student in Ethics and Society in the Graduate Department of Religion. She specializes in Christian Social Ethics and Political Theology, and her research interests include transnationalism, democracy, liberative historiography, and feminist decolonial praxis. Her current research explores the moral agency of transnational activists who carry the memory of the May 18th People’s Uprising in South Korea into the U.S. through the lens of religion. As a certified candidate in the United Methodist Church, her passion lies in connecting the traditions of UMC to her teaching of ethics as cultivating good troublemakers in the world. She is excited to co-teach “Religion and Social Movement” as a teaching associate, with Dr. Melissa Snarr.
Melissa Luong
Human and Organizational Development, Peabody Melissa Luong is a second-year Ph.D. student in Community Research and Action. Her work aims to reorient public health study and practice around an examination of power and the social systems that produce and reproduce health inequities in communities as a result of structural violence. Through exploring community organizing and social movement-building efforts to advance health equity, she focuses on how communities resist, contest, and transform social structures that create and reinforce harm. Her work draws from community psychology, public health, critical ethnic studies, and anthropology.
Megan McCormick
Human and Organizational Development, Peabody Megan McCormick is a second-year doctoral student in Community Research and Action in the Department of Human & Organizational Development. She is an interdisciplinary critical youth scholar who uses participatory, qualitative, and critical methodologies to think about youth power-building in neighborhoods and schools. She is interested in youth-led transformation processes (in schools and cities), youth-adult partnerships, youth organizing, and conceptions of schools as place and as sites of resistance. She proposes a novel synthesis in the form of a scholarly article that outlines practices for re-building and/or transforming schools as sites of memory and healing. She is interested in expanding on “place fracture,” a framework for understanding how people respond when a physical place, like a school, is disappeared from the community.
Kelsey Rall
Department of English Kelsey Rall is a fifth-year Ph.D. candidate in the English Department. She specializes in nineteenth-century literature, and her research interests include queer theory, gender and sexuality studies, spinsterhood, and genre studies. Her dissertation, titled “Seeing Through the Spinster: The Nineteenth-Century Single Woman in Literature and Theory,” analyzes how single women redefine notions of gender, kinship, and temporality in nineteenth-century texts. In particular, she proposes that various “genres” of nineteenth-century single womanhood simultaneously structure and destabilize the major literary genres in which they appear.
Undergraduate Humanitie in the Real World Fellows Matt Brolund Matt Brolund is a senior double majoring in Economics and Law, History, and Society from Nashville, TN. He is interested in learning and applying political history to Western politics and a court of law. Matt loves the humanities as a vehicle for facilitating conversation between other areas of study such as science and research.
Armani Dill Armani Dill is a sophomore at Vanderbilt, studying the French language. She primarily lives in the suburbs outside of Atlanta, and her experience mentoring others inspired her passion for the humanities. This took her to the College of Arts & Science, where she complements her French studies with perspectives from law, history, society, and politics. An eclectic thinker who is deeply intrigued by how language and culture affect our engagement with reality, she hopes to gain the skills to navigate these complexities and educate others.
es 20232024 Brayden Thomas Edman B.T. Edman is a junior at Vanderbilt University where he pursues majors in electrical and computer engineering and philosophy and minors in nanoscience and nanotechnology and physics. He specializes in radiation-hardened microelectronics and designs computer chips for mission-critical applications, and he is also the Director of Control Electronics for the Vanderbilt Fusion Project. Because of this, he is often asked what he feels philosophy brings. Brayden Thomas considers philosophy to be a method, and by studying how thought and reality interact, one can improve their own ability to think. He believes people are complex, intelligent and thoughtful, and he hopes to inspire this perspective.
Nicc Forster-Benson Nicc Forster-Benson is a junior from Nashville, Tennessee studying Economics and Quantitative Social Science (QSS). As a Humanities in the Real World Fellow, Nicc is interested in exploring the full range of the humanities to understand how individuals and societies make political choices. He hopes that this fellowship will enhance his ability to mesh humanities scholarship with tangible policymaking to answer pressing societal questions. Beyond the Robert Penn Warren Center, Nicc studies Nashville’s housing inequality as an Urban Studies research assistant.
Aashi Gurijala Aashi Gurijala is a junior majoring in Neuroscience and Creative Writing from Phoenix, AZ. In her free time, she writes novels in the genres of sci-fi or fantasy. Aashi’s research interests are in the intersection between science and the humanities, specifically with how the humanities build bridges between the objectivity of the sciences and the nuances of human experience.
Andrew Kyung Andrew Kyung is a junior from Demarest, New Jersey, studying Political Science and American Studies. As an active researcher on campus, Andrew explores the relationship between social and political systems in the United States. The Humanities in the Real World fellowship presents Andrew the opportunity to further understand how the humanities can solve pressing political issues in America.
2023-2024 Fellows
Collaborative Humanities Postdoctoral Program
Peter S. Chesney (History of Art & Architecture)
Lee Ann Williams Custer (History of Art & Architecture
Eric Moses Gurevitch (Asian Studies)
Anna A. Hill (English)
Jonathan Karp (American Studies)
Lara Lookabaugh (Gender & Sexuality Studies)
Helen Makhdoumian (English)
Lidiana De Moraes (CLACX)
Elvira Aballi Morell (Spanish & Portuguese)
Seminars 2023-24 Matthew Plishka (CLACX)
This year’s seminar options cover a broad spectrum of humanities topics and issues. To learn more about these seminars, visit our website.
Black Worlds and World-Making Seminar Directors: Brandon Byrd and Anthony Reed
East Europe and Eurasia: Critical Engagements Directors: Matthew Worsnick and Ben Sawyer
Film Theory and Visual Culture Seminar Jesús Ruiz (American Studies)
Directors: Jennifer Fay, Lutz Koepnick, and Carmine Grimaldi
Generative A.I. and the Humanities Seminar Directors: Holly Tucker, Ole Molvig, and Michael Bess
Nashville Bestiary Project
Directors: Elizabeth Meadows and Chris Vanags
Ottoman History Workshop
Directors: Julia Phillips Cohen and Samuel Dolbee Ana Luiza Morais Soares (Anthropology)
Remaking South Asia Seminar
Directors: Adeana McNicholl, Akshya Saxena, and Sahaj Patel
Rights and Resistance Seminar
Directors: Elizabeth Covington, Stacy Simplican, Danyelle Valentine, and Kristin Rose
Spatial Histories Seminar
Directors: Samira Sheikh, Sara Safransky and Carwil BjorkJames Anna C. Tybinko (Spanish & Portuguese)
The Novel Seminar
Directors: Jay Clayton and Scott Juengel
Mending & Transforming
The past two years have generated new forms of trauma and exacerbated transgenerational forms of suffering and precarity—locally, nationally, and globally. The theme of Mending and Transforming asks how we might work collectively to acknowledge and reckon with such pain and vulnerability, undo interwoven structures of oppression, and create new ways of being together in the world. How might humanistic scholarship amend the terms through which such conditions have been created and work toward mending tears to the social fabric that are new and old, recent and longstanding?
HARRY C. HOWARD JR. LECTURE
AWARD-WINNING WRITER CAL FLYN
discussed her latest book, Islands of Abandonment: Life in the Post-Human Landscape, at the 2022-2023 Harry C. Howard Jr. Lecture on April 4, 2023
Cal Flyn, an investigative journalist, exceptional nature writer, and promising new literary voice, visits the eeriest and most desolate places on Earth that, due to war, disaster, disease, or economic decay, have been abandoned by humans. What she finds every time is an “island” of teeming new life: nature has rushed in to fill the void faster and more thoroughly than even the most hopeful projections of scientists. In Chernobyl, following the nuclear disaster, only a handful of people returned to their dangerously irradiated homes. On an uninhabited Scottish island, feral cattle live entirely wild. In Detroit, once America’s fourth-largest city, entire streets of houses are falling in on themselves. Exploring extraordinary places where humans no longer live – or survive in tiny, precarious numbers – Islands of Abandonment gives us a
and it is ultimately a story of redemption: the
glimpse of what nature gets up to when we’re
most polluted spots on Earth can be rehabilitated
not there to see it. From Tanzanian mountains to
through ecological processes and, in fact, they
the volcanic Caribbean, the forbidden areas of
already are.
France to the mining regions of Scotland, Islands of Abandonment is a tour through these new
The Harry C. Howard Jr. Lecture Series was es-
ecosystems, in all their glory, as sites of unex-
tablished in 1994 through the endowment of Mr.
pected environmental significance, where the
and Mrs. Thomas E. Nash Jr. and Mr. and Mrs.
natural world has reasserted its wild power and
George D. Renfro. It honors Harry C. Howard Jr.,
promise.
who earned his bachelor’s degree from Vanderbilt in 1951 and allows the Robert Penn Warren
And while it doesn’t let us off the hook for ad-
Center for the Humanities to bring an outstanding
dressing environmental degradation and climate
scholar to campus annually to deliver a lecture on
change, it is a case that hope is far from lost,
a significant topic in the humanities.
2022- RPW Center Me 2023 Faculty Fellows Laura M. Carpenter
Laura M. Carpenter, Ph.D., is Associate Professor of Sociology. An expert on gender, sexuality, and health over the life course, she is author of Virginity Lost: An Intimate Portrait of First Sexual Experiences (NYU Press, 2005) and coeditor of Sex for Life: From Virginity to Viagra, How Sexuality Changes Throughout our Lives (NYU Press, 2012). She is currently completing two books, one about public controversies over male circumcision, the other about road trips and family stories. Her newest project explores how needlecraft, like knitting and crochet, helps people form and sustain social relationships. Her research has received support from the National Science Foundation, National Institute of Aging, Social Science Research Council, and National Institutes of Health.
Diana Heney
Diana Heney is Assistant Professor of Philosophy. She specializes in American pragmatism and bioethics. Her book, Toward a Pragmatist Metaethics, is published with Routledge (2016). Her current research on the theme of Mending and Transforming focuses on stigma reduction in mental health care. This project draws on contemporary philosophical and sociological research in order to assess the efficacy of typical stigma reduction strategies, as well as the need to co-produce new strategies for the myriad contexts in which mental health care takes place.
ending and Transforming Vesna Pavlović
Vesna Pavlović (MFA Visual Arts, Columbia University 2007) is recipient of 2022 TAC Arts Access Grant, 2021 Current Art Fund Grant, 2020 Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship, Fulbright Scholar Award in 2018, and George A. and Eliza Gardner Howard Foundation grant in 2017. She exhibited widely including Phillips Collection in Washington, DC, Frist Center for the Visual Arts in Nashville, the Untitled, 12th Istanbul Biennial, 2011, Turkey; MAC – Metropolitan Arts Center in Belfast, Northern Ireland, Württembergischen Kunstverein, Düsseldorf, Germany, among others. Her work is included in major private and public art collections, including Phillips Collection, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Museum of Women in the Art, and Museum of Contemporary Art, Belgrade, Serbia. Recent publications include Vesna Pavlović, Stagecraft (Vanderbilt University Press, 2021) and Vesna Pavlović’s Lost Art: Photography, Display, and the Archive (Hanes Art Gallery, Wake Forest University, 2018).
Allison Schachter
Allison Schachter is Associate Professor of Jewish Studies, English, and East European Studies at Vanderbilt. A scholar and translator who works on modern Jewish literature and culture, she is the author of Diasporic Modernisms: Hebrew and Yiddish Literatures in the Twentieth Century (Oxford UP, 2012) and Women Writing Jewish Modernity, 1919-1939 (Northwestern UP, 2022). Together with Jordan Finkin she translated, From the Jewish Provinces: Selected Stories of Fradl Shtok (Northwestern UP, 2022).
Arleen Tuchman
Arleen Tuchman is Nelson O. Tyrone Jr. Chair in the Department of History. She is an historian of medicine. Her research interests include the cultural history of health, disease, and addiction in the United States and Europe. Her most recent book, Diabetes: A History of Race and Disease (Yale University Press, 2020), won the 2022 George Rosen Prize in the history of public health from the American Association for the History of Medicine and the 2021 PROSE Book Award in History of Science, Medicine, and Technology from the Association of American Publishers. She is currently working on a history of addiction and the family in the United States.
Rebecca VanDiver
Rebecca VanDiver is Associate Professor in the History of Art and Architecture Department. Professor VanDiver received her A.B. from Harvard University and an M.A. and Ph.D. from Duke University. Her research and teaching focus on African American and Black Diasporic art with an emphasis on 20th-century Black women artists and more recently the use of ephemeral print in African American art. She is the author of Designing a New Tradition: Loïs Mailou Jones and the Aesthetics of Blackness (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2020). At present VanDiver is writing a book on African American artistic interventions in moments of racial turbulence titled, States of Emergency: the Politics of Ephemerality in African American Art, 19652020.
2022- Mending and 2023 Transforming
Graduate Student Fellows André Ramos Chacón
Department of Spanish and Portuguese André Ramos Chacón (Cuzco, 1989) is a Ph.D. candidate in Spanish. He studies 16th and 17th centuries Spanish-American literature, and 20th century Latin American literature focused on indigenous people and heritage languages. His dissertation bridges 16th century Spanish, Mexican, and Peruvian colonial studies through the analysis of post-conquest writing and identity in the Muslim Kingdom of Granada, the Indian Government of Tlaxcala, and the Inca State of Vilcabamba. He focuses on three authors: Miguel de Luna, Diego Muñoz Camargo, and Titu Cusi Yupanqui André also studies Quechua, Nahuatl, and Latin and favors interdisciplinary research through close reading, archival work, and second language acquisition studies (SLA).
Alex Korsunsky
Department of Anthropology Alex Korsunsky is a Ph.D. candidate in Anthropology finishing a dissertation on Mexican immigrant farmers in Oregon’s Willamette Valley, where he grew up. His ethnographic research focuses on food justice, labor, and the complex factors that lead farmers to embrace conventional or alternative environmental practices. He is also a grant writer with CAPACES Leadership Institute’s Anahuac Farm, an indigenous migrant food sovereignty program based in Turner, Oregon.
Maren Loveland
Department of English Maren Loveland is a dual-Ph.D. student in English and Comparative Media Analysis and Practice whose research focuses on the relationship between media, infrastructure, and the environment. She specializes in twentieth-century literature and film studies, documentary studies, energy humanities, and critical race theory.
Nicholas Tyler Reich Department of English
Nick Reich (he/they) studies how racialized gender and sexuality undergird energy infrastructure, as represented in regional literature and media. Check out their latest article in the Transgender Studies Quarterly: “Truck Sluts, Petrosexual Countrysides, and Trashy Environmentalism.”
2022- Graduate 2023 Student Fellows Emerson Bodde
George J. Graham Jr. Fellow, Department of Philosophy A Philosophy of Class in the Twenty-First Century Emerson Bodde’s research interests mainly revolve around the history of political philosophy and the development of socio-political concepts, with an emphasis on the 19th and 20th centuries. Bodde’s dissertation project is centered on reviving the mid-20th century debate on how social class ought to be defined in philosophy, in light of the recent reemergence of class-related theories of justice, social identity, and a relative absence of both clarity about the concept or continuity with the old debates. In part, this conceptual ambiguity can be alleviated by an interdisciplinary engagement by philosophy with the theoretical debates within both history and sociology.
Cameron Clark
Elizabeth E. Fleming Fellow, Department of English Black Queer and Trans Anthropocenes Cameron Clark is a joint Ph.D. candidate in English and Comparative Media Analysis and Practice at Vanderbilt University. He received his MA from Michigan State University in 2017 with a specialization in film, visual culture, and digital media. His research interests are at the intersections of gender and sexuality studies, theories of de/coloniality, global film history, and the environmental humanities. His dissertation “Black Queer and Trans Anthropocenes” reads post-1970s Black queer and trans studies, aesthetics, politics, and modes of affiliation for their insights into various ecological and climatological crises.
Caroline Beard Colquhoun
Joe and Mary Harper Fellow, Department of Spanish and Portuguese Narrative Nomads: Resistance in the 21st-Century African Hispanophone (Equatorial Guinea and the Western Sahara) Caroline Beard Colquhoun is a Ph.D. candidate in Spanish Literature and Comparative Media Analysis & Practice. She specializes in contemporary Spanish literature and film, and her research interests include migration, economic crisis, historical memory, gender, sexuality, and decoloniality. Her dissertation analyzes contemporary representations of the Western Sahara and Equatorial Guinea, two former Spanish colonies in Africa. She proposes that works by younger Sahrawis and Equatoguineans challenge the current regimes’ monolithic discourses and defy binary conceptualizations of postcolonial domination and resistance. Her work is published in Arizona Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies, Revista de ALCESXXI, and Divergencias.
Sahai Couso Díaz
Mona C. Frederick Fellow, Department of Spanish and Portuguese Literature, Images, and Collections: Assemblages of Settler Colonialism in Latin America Sahai Couso Díaz is a sixth-year joint-Ph.D. candidate in Spanish Studies and Comparative Media Analysis and Practice at Vanderbilt University. Sahai received her B.A. from the University of Havana in 2013 and her M.A. from Vanderbilt University in 2019. She was a HASTAC scholar and she received a 20202021 Mellon Graduate Student Fellowship in Digital Humanities. Her essays have appeared in Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, Chasqui, and Confluencia: Revista Hispánica de Cultura y Literatura.
Rachel Heath
Stella Vaughn Fellow, Department of Religion Christianity in Relationship: The Lure of Superiority in a World of Religious Diversity and Multiplicity Rachel A. Heath is a Ph.D. candidate in religion, specializing in Christian theologies. Her research explores the intersections of theories of multiplicity, queer and feminist thought, affect theory, and interfaith praxis in U.S. contexts. She has previously published on themes of multiple religious belonging and feminist approaches to multifaith chaplaincy. During the 2021-2022 academic year, she had the honor of serving as a Visiting Lecturer in the Religious Studies Department at Vanderbilt. She holds an M.A. in Religion from Vanderbilt and an M.Div. from Yale University. When not writing her dissertation, she is an avid runner and occasional poet who loves spending time under the trees in Percy Warner Park.
Alexandre Pelegrino
William J. Vaughn Fellow, Department of History Transamazonic Bondage: Violence, Networks, and Race (Maranhão, Brazil, 1688-1798) Alexandre Pelegrino is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of History. His dissertation considers the persistence of Native American enslavement and how socio-racial classifications operate to reshape the continuation of slavery. Before pursuing his Ph.D. at Vanderbilt, Alex received his BA and MA from the Fluminense Federal University (UFF, RJ, Brazil). His broader research interests include Latin American history, labor history, colonialism, and imperialism. Alex’s research has been funded by the CLACX at Vanderbilt, a James Scobie Award from the Conference in Latin American History (CLAH), the Luso-American Development Foundation (FLAD), and the Social Science Research Council – International Dissertation Research Fellowship (SSRC-IDRF).
Martina Schaefer
American Studies Fellow, Department of History Black Power and African Diasporic Religions: The Spiritual and Cultural Trajectory of Black Empowerment, 1965-1998 Martina Schaefer is a final year Ph.D. candidate in the History Department. A scholar of modern U.S. history, she specializes in African American history, with a particular focus on the Black liberation struggle. Her dissertation centers on the work of activists who started organizing during the Black Power era and were subsequently initiated into African diasporic religions. It seeks to understand the activists’ motives for adopting these religions and examines how their religious practices affected their approaches to communal liberation. Martina received her M.A. in North American Studies, Modern History, and Political Science from Freie Universität Berlin in 2013.
2022- Seminars & Reading 2023 Groups
Art Seminar Co-directors: Stan Link (Blair School of Music), Leah Lowe (Theatre), Jonathan Rattner (Art/ Cinema & Media Arts), and Nancy Reisman (English) The Art Seminar brings together faculty who conduct or reflect on creative research on the Vanderbilt campus. Consisting of makers/researchers from the art, creative writing, cinema and media arts, art history and theatre departments, along with the Blair School of Music, this seminar creates a forum for sharing and comparing processes of production and discussing current topics relevant to our work as creative research academics.
Black Worlds Seminar Co-directors: Brandon Byrd (History), Anthony Reed (English), and Eric Ritter (Philosophy) The Black Worlds Seminar is about Black people and the modern world. It attends to the historical and current thought and subjective experiences of the people who have claimed Blackness as a political, social, and cultural identity. It is about Black world-making, too. Once a month, our meetings will convene scholars from Vanderbilt and beyond who will share new and in-progress research on topics such as interrelated struggles
for racial justice, practices of resistance, and dreams of freedom across Africa and its Diaspora. Co-sponsored by the Racial Justice Grand Challenge Initiative.
Circum-Atlantic Studies Seminar Co-directors: Jane Landers (History and Director, Slave Societies Digital Archive) and Daniel Genkins (History and Executive Director, Slave Societies Digital Archive) The Circum-Atlantic Studies Seminar meets to discuss interdisciplinary work on the Atlantic
World linking the Americas, Africa, and Europe. Sessions focus on an invited talk and/or a discussion of a pre-circulated work and address a range of constituencies on campus. In addition to junior and senior faculty from a wide variety of domestic and international universities, CASS has featured seminars of graduate students from Vanderbilt, visiting international graduate students, and Masters of Liberal Arts and Science students.
Contemporary in Theory Seminar Co-directors: Matthew Milbourne (English) and Simone Stirner (German, Russian and East European Studies) The Contemporary in Theory Seminar collaboratively thinks through some of the most important, cutting-edge theoretical engagements with contemporary reality. Contemporary issues and theoretical discourses range from climate change and ecocriticism to critical race theories and from feminist and queer theory to aesthetics and poetics.
Film Theory and Visual Culture Co-directors: Iggy Cortez (Cinema & Media Arts/ English) and Jennifer Fay (Cinema & Media Arts/English) The Film Theory and Visual Culture Seminar fosters dialogue among faculty and graduate students interested in film, visual culture, art history, literature and media studies, as well as in theories of the image, philosophies of perception, aesthetics and critical theory, media histories, and the history of vision.
Gender and Sexuality Studies Seminar Co-directors: Elizabeth Covington (GSS/English)
and Stacy Clifford Simplican (GSS/Political Science) The Gender and Sexuality Studies Seminar examines new trends and classic ideas in feminist and queer scholarship. Working across disciplinary boundaries in a dynamic and inclusive scholarly community, we address emergent and significant contemporary issues, new scholarship, and applications of feminist and queer concepts to teaching and research.
GuateSeminar Co-directors: Maria Corado (Anthropology) and Juan Jose Lopez Juarez (Anthropology) GuateLab (IximLab) is a student initiative to discuss social problems that have implications in Guatemala (Iximulew). The main idea is to have a site to discuss, propose, give critiques, and give solutions from students’ perspectives to social problems such as access to education, inequalities, racism, violence, hunger, health issues, migration, etc.
Mind, Image, Body Seminar Co-directors: Sohee Park (Psychology) and Vesna Pavlović (Art) Mind, Image, Body is a multi-disciplinary and experimental seminar that considers the intersection of scientific processes of remembering and the role that visual representation plays in that process. The seminar will try to define, gauge, and bridge this gap between the objectively quantified memory ability of the brain and the embodied memory experiences to culminate in the creation of a shared memory archive.
The Novel Seminar Co-Directors: Jay Clayton (English/CMA) and Scott J. Juengel (English) The Novel Seminar brings together the Vanderbilt community and visiting scholars to engage with groundbreaking scholarship on the history, theory and politics of the novel form, from its early modern provenance to its contemporary persistence in a hyper-mediated public sphere. Our sessions explore matters of fictional world-building and narrative form as they intersect with pressing questions in multiple fields of inquiry, from climate change to racial capitalism, sexual politics to social justice.
Transdisciplinary Asia Seminar Remaking South Asia Seminar Co-directors: Mabel Gergan (Asian Studies), Akshya Saxena (English), and Samira Sheikh (History) Political turmoil and daily violence in South Asia have been making headlines for a while now: whether it is the ascendance of Hindu nationalism in India, the economic crisis in Sri Lanka, the climate crisis in Bangladesh, or the military coup in Pakistan. The Remaking South Asia Seminar will foster discussions of the long histories and future implications of these issues. At the same time, wary of studying South Asia only as a problem, it will aim to transform and remake knowledges about South Asia by highlighting its anticolonial, anti-caste, and Indigenous art and activism that have lessons for transnational issues.
Co-directors: Isidora Miranda (Blair School of Music), Ruth Rogaski (History), and Guojun Wang (Asian Studies) The Transdisciplinary Asia Seminar aims to bring together Vanderbilt scholars and students interested in Asia to explore cutting-edge research across disciplinary and national boundaries. While furthering our multi-dimensional understanding of Asian languages, cultures, and political histories, the seminar also explores theoretical contributions afforded by Asian Studies to the study of the environment, global health, colonialism, and transnationalism, among other topics.
Trends in Social Criticism Seminar Co-directors: Robert Engelman (Philosophy) and Emanuel Stults (History) The Trends in Social Criticism Seminar is a virtual seminar that explores currents of social criticism
this relationship and fully embrace the diversity of those influences and reception. An overarching conversation will extend throughout the year, focusing on the production, transmission, and reception of aesthetic impulses with a Middle Eastern inspiration. Our goal is to illuminate the Middle Eastern contributions to our evolving contemporary aesthetic lives.
NEH Environmental Humanities Seminar Co-Directors: Teresa Goddu (English), Eric Gurevitch (Asian Studies), Matthew Plishka (Latin American Studies), and James Pilgrim (History of Art and Archetecture)
across historical, geographical, political, and cultural lines. The seminar seeks to deepen our understanding of social criticism and foster self-reflection as social critics in modern, media-saturated, liberal-democratic societies. Social criticism is a widespread practice through which we identify, interpret, and address our most pressing concerns. In times of conflict over our concerns and strategies for addressing them, we are prompted to reflect upon our practices of social criticism and think creatively about how to better engage in them.
Visions of Diversity: Middle Eastern Arts and Aesthetics Co-directors: Raheleh Filsoofi (Art) and Richard McGregor (Religious Studies) The relationship between the humanities and the cultures of the Middle East is a long and complex one. Visions of Diversity: Middle Eastern Arts and Aesthetics will explore some of the nuances of
Members of the Environmental Humanities Seminar engage in lively interdisciplinary discussions about how people think about, represent, interact with, and change/are changed by their environments. Our invited speakers, works-in-progress talks, excursions, films, and reading groups provide a forum to discuss the history and culture of ecological sensibility, environmental management, climate change, and environmental justice, among other topics. We invite those interested in the environmental humanities to bring their interests, expertise, curiosity, and questions to our community.
NEH Global Humanities Seminar Co-Directors: Celso T. Castilho (History), Elvira Aballi Morell (Spanish & Portuguese), Jesús Ruiz (American Studies), and Lidiana de Moraes (Latin American Studies) Members of the Global Humanities Seminar center their work on the humanistic study of the implications of global movements of people, goods, and ideas. Our scholarly programming particularly focuses on dislocation, belonging, and citizen-
ship issues. Although we ground our intellectual pursuits within disciplinary leanings – such as History, Anthropology, Modern Languages & Literatures, and Cultural Studies – the implications of our seminar are deeply transdisciplinary and take a bottom-up approach to examine matters of race, ethnicity, migration, gender & sexuality, and other pursuits.
NEH Urban Humanities Seminar Co-Directors: Letizia Modena (Italian), Lee Ann Custer (History of Art and Architecture), Ana Luiza Morais Soares (Anthropology), and Anna Tybinko (Spanish and Portuguese) The Urban Humanities Seminar offers a forum for interdisciplinary dialogue on and collaborative approaches to the study of the past, present, and future of cities and their inhabitants, viewed through the lens of spatial justice. Situated at the intersection of humanities, urban planning and design, and civic engagement, our discussions consider how the stories that are told about cities reveal spatial relations and social inequities— and how, by examining the cultural, economic, political, gendered, and racialized memories embedded in these stories, we might collectively work toward a more just future. We invite those interested in the interplay between people and the urban environment to share ideas and projects, especially as they concern: the ability of arts and literature to reflect and shape affective and cognitive relationships to the urban environment; identity and the experience of place; issues of inclusion and exclusion in cities as they pertain to in/visibility, belonging, livability, mobility, migration and movement; place attachment and place making.
Undergrads Does this sound familiar? “Undergraduates don’t want to major in the humanities; the humanities are not useful or relevant; majoring in English, Philosophy, History, French, Religious Studies and other similar fields means you’ll be a barista, struggling to pay off your loans for years.” It should—it’s an old story. But here at the RPW Center, we are hearing, sharing, and shaping a different story. We hear from students that they love the classes they’re taking in History of Art and Architecture, in Law, History, and Society, in English and Philosophy, but that they don’t have enough time to take enough of these classes. We also hear that undergraduates want to address urgent problems they see and experience in the world beyond the university and believe they need to major in fields like Electrical Engineering, or Econ, or Poli Sci, to have the positive impact on the world that they aspire to create. So we asked our 2022-23 Student Advisory Council to develop programs and events that offer students a way to engage with the humanities and understand its impact beyond academia. They invited the faculty whose classes have changed their thinking, challenged their assumptions, and enlarged their worldviews to share informal dinners with small groups of students from across the university creating our Real World in the Humanities dinner series. The Student Advisory Council also brought their wide range of interests and majors to the task of advocating for the humanities on Capitol Hill, participating in National Humanities Advocacy
Day in March 2023. To share their view that the humanities are important to all students, even—or especially—those who were majoring in STEM fields, our SAC members created a video capturing how students across the university define and explain the impact of the humanities in fields from Engineering to Poli Sci to Earth and Environmental Sciences. This year, with funding from an Immersion Scholars’ Grant from the College of Arts and Science, we have created the Humanities in the Real World Undergraduate Fellowship, enabling six undergraduates to shape a new story about humanities majors. Our HRW Fellows are examining the impacts of humanities skills and expertise on the complex problems our world faces, while connecting humanities coursework to an exciting range of career opportunities. Stay tuned to hear more from this year’s Humanities in the Real World Fellows, as they use the insights from their interviews and research to shape and share a new story about the humanities and making meaning from experience. Elizabeth Meadows is Associate Director of the RPW Center where she focuses on undergraduate and immersion programming, community engagement projects, and non-tenure track faculty development.
Induja Kumar Named 2023 Udall Scholar From article published in MyVU about RPW Center Student Advisory Council member Induja Kumar
Student Advisory Council: Induja Kumar (Junior, Political Science)
Ashruta Narapareddy (Senior, Medicine, Health & Society)
Lipika Narisetti (Junior, Medicine, Health, & Society and Neuroscience)
Vanderbilt rising senior Induja “Indu” Kumar has been selected as a 2023 Morris K. Udall and Stewart L. Udall Foundation Scholar. The scholarship program focuses on dedication to issues affecting Indigenous lands and people and the stewardship of nations’ land and natural resources. Kumar is the 11th Vanderbilt student to win this award and the university’s first recipient since 2019.
Sophia Podolsky (Junior, Psychology and Cinema & Media Arts)
Comfort Randolph (Sophomore, Cognitive Science and Psychology)
Shunnar Virani (Sophomore, Computer Engineering and
Kumar is one of 55 Udall Scholars selected nationally from a pool of 384 applicants nominated by 172 U.S. colleges and universities. She will travel to Arizona to participate in August Udall Scholar Orientation with her Udall Scholar peers. A junior from Chandler, Arizona, Kumar is a climate studies and political science double major. A Cornelius Vanderbilt Scholar, she serves as the president of Hidden Dores and as a resident adviser in Zeppos College.
History)
Ziqi Zhan (Sophomore, Undeclared)
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Humanities Advocacy Day 2023 This article was originally published in MyVU
In March, humanities advocates converged on Washington, D.C., for the first time since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic to advocate in person for funding for the National Endowment for the Humanities. Elizabeth Meadows, associate director of the Robert Penn Warren Center, was joined by two undergraduate students and members of the RPW Student Advisory Council— Coco Randolph and Shunnar Virani—to discuss how the humanities are shaping their education. The NEH provides essential support for humanities programs at universities like Vanderbilt. From the Challenge Grant that helped establish a permanent endowment for the Robert Penn Warren Center in 1989 to the recent Connections grant that is supporting innovative curriculum development, NEH funding at Vanderbilt supports the university’s humanities research and teaching endeavors. “The NEH ensures that we all have the resources necessary to understand the world around us,” said Heather Bloemhard, associate director of federal relations, who organized the meetings and accompanied the group on the Hill. “Our students are phenomenal advocates for how NEH funding directly connects to their education and professional development. We are grateful for RPW’s partnership and the students’ hard work on this advocacy.” When asked why they chose to participate in the advocacy day, Randolph shared: “As a student
who aspires to work in a space where change is created, my beliefs in what it means to act intentionally have been deeply shaped by the humanities. Working on the Student Advisory Council of the Robert Penn Warren Center inspired me to advocate on the Hill this spring.” Virani echoed this sentiment and explained: “The humanities span a great range of subjects from history and economics to art and music; these disciplines dive into inquiries and analysis of humans and how their societies function. I appreciate the opportunities the Robert Penn Warren Center and the NEH have given me, and I was
glad to have a chance to explain why the humanities matter for me.” The Vanderbilt Office of Federal Relations organized meetings with staff in the offices of Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) and Reps. Mark Green (R-TN), Chuck Fleischmann (R-TN) and Beth Van Duyne (R-TX). In these meetings, the group shared their stories about what federal support for the humanities has meant to them and why federal funding for the NEH is so critical. The humanities advocacy community, including Vanderbilt, is asking for $225 million for the NEH in fiscal year 2024, which would be an increase of $18 million over the fiscal year 2023 funding level. “In our meetings, Nar and Coco told policymakers how their coursework in philosophy, history, literature and other humanities disciplines prepares them to apply their learning in computer science or psychology to complex problems in our world today. Our students were pleased to discover that many of the staff we met had also taken humanities courses in their college years,” Meadows commented. “In addition to providing a point of connection, this confirmed their belief that the interpretive and cultural skills developed in humanities courses are valuable in careers where people can have lasting public impact.” As part of their preparation for this advocacy, Randolph and Virani prepared four short videos that compile their peers’ responses to the prompts “Humanities are …,” “Humanities changed my perspective by/on/about …,” “Humanities taught me …,” and “Humanities help address ….” “Nar and Coco argued that although science and technology can offer tools for creative problem-solvers, the problems we face are not merely
scientific or technological; they are problems that stem from and impact human behavior and cultures,” Meadows explained. “Our students know this, and they are eager to use what they’ve learned in humanities courses and programs in conjunction with the skills they are developing in STEM fields.”
Humanities in the Real World As part of its Humanities in the Real World programming, the RPW Center hosted a dinner series for small groups of undergraduate students to interact with and learn more about the research of humanities faculty over an informal dinner. Selected by the center’s Student Advisory Council, Dinner and Conversations with Faculty, featured humanities faculty whose courses council members found exciting, whose teaching they thought more students should know about, and whose research offered compelling evidence of the importance of the humanities. Faculty included: Madeleine Casad (Cinema and Media Arts/Digital Humanities Center), Phillip Lieberman (Jewish Studies) and Dan Levin (Psychology and Human Development).
Immersion A Hands-On History of the American Research University (RPW 2610) This course examines the history of the United States through the lens of the rise of the American research university after the Civil War, using Vanderbilt as a case study. Integrating the study of literary and artistic works from the same period, the course will be divided into six thematically and chronologically anchored segments: Rise of the University; Student Life and Cultures; Great Depression; World War II and the Cold War; the Civil Rights Movement; and the Contemporary Era. In addition to readings, lectures, and discussions, the course involves an archival component that will require students to conduct hands-on work in the University Archives and Special Collections. Students will get the chance to work with primary documents (e.g., newspapers, yearbooks, and other student publications; administrative records; letters, correspondence, and personal papers; ephemera; and so on) related to the history of Vanderbilt University, placing them in context with the nation’s history and Vanderbilt’s role within it.
Writing Outside the Lines Writing Outside the Lines is a collection of stories, personal essays, and poems from three Vanderbilt students of the class of 2023. Zhixian (Alex) Li, Alexandra Rahill, and Emma Swenson. In this collection, each writer found a unique way to reflect on and express their experiences, their learning, and the questions that drive them. For these students, creative work in the humanities goes beyond the boundaries of their majors, their academic work, and their career aspirations; in these works, they capture the connections that illuminate and give meaning to their experiences here at Vanderbilt, both in the classroom and elsewhere.
Humanities in Conversation Our blog featuring short articles covering a wide spectrum of humanities-related topics. It also introduces readers to fellows and the programming of the RPW Center.
“It’s been getting weirder. I can’t wait for next year.” This is the insight a colleague shared with me in the final session of my first trip to Imagining America. They had been to several previous IA (Imagining America) gatherings and kept coming back. Although it was my first IA, I found myself instinctively agreeing.
RPW Center Associate Director Elizabeth Meadows’ panel presentation packed suitcase.
For context: we were painting with soil samples. Specifically, painting pictures of our home-places, our rooted relations to land or to the concepts that helped us to make sense of having a place in the world, our place in the world. The session facilitators were a wonderfully reflective group of Latine/x/a/o scholars centering their inquiry around the theme of Tierra Madre. If this was weird, it was a profound and satisfying goodweird. I’m proud to say that our Vanderbilt team also brought some of that good-weird. When I say “our team,” I really mean “our ringleader:” the associate director of the Robert Penn Warren Center, Elizabeth Meadows, whose carry-on was both absolutely stuffed and absolutely bizarre.
Our session, “Creating an Archive of Renewal: From Routine to Ritual,” was spectacularly supplied with objects around which rituals might be centered at different times of day. Tea cup, check. Running shoe, check. Gorgeous novels, check. Leaves foraged from the Tulane campus, check. [Insert the voice of Leah Lowe (Theatre, Director of the Curb Center): “overly reliant on props!”] Our aim was to invite participants to reflect on a time of day that they have a routine – or would like to have a routine – that could become a restorative ritual. We would think and share together about how to rest, how to resist being governed by expectations of productivity at every moment, how to commit to renewal in daily practices. Part of what I had to offer in our session were a philosopher’s usual tools: drawing distinctions, clarifying concepts. But the distinction at the heart of our session – the difference between a mere routine and an honored ritual – is so deeply human that all of our participants were invested in thinking it through. The concept of rest reframed as a necessity and a right, not a luxury or something to be earned, is so critical in this moment. At the end of our session, we gave our participants the option to include a reflection on how they wanted to move from a routine to a ritual for a practice in their own lives. We would produce an archive we could then share, an archive of rest. Every single participant gave us permission to include their reflection. That generosity – of engagement, of exchange – encapsulates my experience of Imagining America. People came to be generous and generative, to be involved fully, to imagine freely. The tone for that came from day one, session one. Ashé Cultural Arts Center offered up an
incredible opening. Every performance was a lesson; every lesson was a performance. The power of words and of names. Building something beautiful and trusting someone else to carry that beauty forward. Community and culture. The tone came from New Orleans, the city that had waited to host us through a pandemic. The tone was consistent across all the sessions I attended at Tulane, including gatherings around reparative storytelling, mentoring graduate students as equity-minded scholars, and arts-based collaboration in nursing research and practice. I had no idea what I would be imagining at Imagining America. I left enriched and enlivened, imagining new directions for my own work in the medical humanities and new possibilities for Vanderbilt students. I can’t wait for next year. Diana Heney is Assistant Professor of Philosophy. She specializes in American pragmatism and bioethics. Her book, Toward a Pragmatist Metaethics, is published with Routledge (2016). Her current research on the theme of Mending and Transforming focuses on stigma reduction in mental health care.
2022 Southern Festival of Books After two years online during the pandemic, Humanities Tennessee welcomes back authors and audiences for an in-person Southern Festival of Books October 14-16. We are back. But we are not the same. And we know you’re not either. We hope you will join us at the Southern Festival of Books to once again be part of a community that engages with books and ideas. Each year, we are proud to partner with the Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities on a themed track at the Festival. This year’s theme is “Mending and Transforming,” perhaps the most appropriate and timely ever. What do we want to keep, repair, and treasure? And what must we leave behind or make entirely new? The series of sessions at the Festival will explore this idea through multiple genres. They include: Author Ada Calhoun, discussing art and familial relationships in her memoir, Also A Poet: Frank O’Hara, My Father, and Me. The arc of social justice is explored through historic and very contemporary stories with authors Thomas E. Ricks (Waging a Good War: A Military History of the Civil Rights
Movement, 1954-1968), Justin Jones (The People’s Plaza: Sixty-Two Days of Nonviolent Resistance), and Chris Joyner (The Three Death Sentences of Clarence Henderson: A Battle for Racial Justice at the Dawn of the Civil Rights Era). David Haskell explores sound and nature in his groundbreaking book, Sounds Wild and Broken: Sonic Marvels, Evolution’s Creativity, and the Crisis of Sensory Extinction. Podcast host (Terrible, Thanks for Asking) and author Nora McInerny writes humorous essays (“Bad Vibes Only”) that share her journey of grief and beginning her life over. Margaret Renkl, New York Times opinion columnist, will be in conversation with two authors, Silas House (Lark Ascending) and Mary Laura Philpott (Bomb Shelter: Love, Time, and Other Explosives). We will explore gay and trans rights with Lydia Conklin (Rainbow Rainbow: Stories), Z. Zane McNeill (Y’all Means All: The Emerging Voices Queering Appalachia), and Casey Parks (Diary of a Misfit: A Memoir and a Mystery), and racial justice and reckoning with Margaret Burnham (By Hands Now Known: Jim Crow’s Legal Executioners) and Imani Perry (South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon Line to Understand the Soul of a Nation).
Liberating Structures Workshops The RPW Center sponsored three workshops for faculty, staff, and grad students with Liberating Structures consultants, Anna Jackson and Fisher Qua
Authors Ben Raines and Kristen Green and Moderator Danyelle Valentine (GSS; American Studies) Kristen Green (The Devil’s Half-Acre: The Untold Story of How One Woman Liberated the South’s Most Notorious Slave Jail) and Ben Raines (The Last Slave Ship: The True Story of How Clotilda Was Found, Her Descendants, and an Extraordinary Reckoning) demonstrate how history is being properly re-written through recent discoveries. Gal Beckerman will discuss his groundbreaking exploration of how small ideas germinate and grow into world-changing concepts with his book, The Quiet Before: On the Unexpected Origins of Radical Ideas. Through all of these sessions, we will be hearing, learning, and sharing our stories of the past few years and the opportunities that lie before us. Each author will sign books following the session, and all books will be sold onsite courtesy of Parnassus Books. Serenity Gerbman has served as Director of Literature and Language Programs at Humanities Tennessee since 2001.
Liberating Structures is a methodology grounded in the idea that the strategies commonly used to organize collaborative discussion often end up stifling creativity and a sense of belonging.
Reflecting and Connecting Grad students engaged in playful-yet-serious reflection on what it means to be a graduate student--and how to do your best work in challenging contexts.
Including and Unleashing Everyone Faculty and staff learned new ways to encourage students and colleagues to take risks, tolerate ambiguity, and engage other’s perspectives both critically and generously. (Co-sponsored by Peabody)
“Mending and Transforming” Using RPW’s theme of “Mending & Transforming,” faculty explored how Liberating Structures can be used to build more more inclusive and engaged teaching and research communities.
Singer/Songwriter Mary Gauthier Grammy-nominated folk singer and songwriter Mary Gauthier will offer writing workshops for students, staff, faculty and postdocs Jan. 24–25, followed by a reading and performance for the Vanderbilt community on Wednesday, Jan. 25, beginning at 5 p.m. at the Bishop Joseph Johnson Black Cultural Center. The events are sponsored by the Margaret Cuninggim Women’s Center. Co-sponsors include the Office of LGBTQI Life, the Office of Undergraduate Education and the Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities.
Gauthier is the author of the acclaimed memoir Saved by a Song: The Art and Healing Power of Songwriting. Article originally published in MyVU
Dinner Show
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In support of colleagues and students in the Department of Theatre and at Fisk University, the RPW Center hosted dinner at Nada followed by a performance of Sweat, written by Lynn Nottage. This first-ever joint production between Fisk University and VU Theatre, the Pulitzer Prize-winning play was directed by Chuck Smith of Chicago’s Goodman Theatre and featured a cast and crew from Fisk and VU. Dinner + Show was co-sponsored by the Department of Theatre at VU.
Postcards from the Vanishing Point The Robert Penn Warren Center’s Art Seminar hosted a creative blind date between four different artistic disciplines. In a meeting of imagery, poetry, theater, and music sponsored by the Robert Penn Warren Center, this collaboration had Vanderbilt Professors Jonathan Rattner, Nancy Reisman, Leah Lowe, and Stan Link combining forces in the most direct way possible: “you do you.” Conceived as a kind of permanent work-in-progress, the starting point was a series of photographs--ranging in spirit from landscapes to abstracts--by Jonathan Rattner. From there, Reisman, Lowe, and Link each responded
separately in their own terms and in their own media. Nancy Reisman’s texts evoked unseen dimensions of the photos. Leah Lowe’s theatrical setting embodied their human presence. Cast for solo oboe and live electronics, Blair School of Music’s Prof. Jared Hauser performed Link’s musical replies. As part of the Blair School’s Living Sounds Concert, all four elements were combined in an experimental multi-media performance in which each appeared as itself while also disappearing in their amalgam.
Photo credit: Jonathan Rattner
RPW Center Staff and Advisory Committees
RPW CENTER STAFF Holly Tucker Director Elizabeth Meadows Associate Director Matt DiCintio Associate Director Terry Tripp Program Coordinator Constance Priddy Program Specialist
2022-2023 FACULTY ADVISORY COMMITTEE
2022-2023 STUDENT ADVISORY COMMITTEE
Scott Juengel English
Induja Kumar Junior, Political Science
Claire Sisco King Communications Studies
Ashruta Narapareddy Senior, Medicine, Health & Society
James McFarland German, Russian and East European Studies
Lipika Narisetti Junior, Medicine, Health, & Society and Neuroscience
Karen Ng Philosophy
Sophia Podolsky Junior, Psychology and Cinema & Media Arts
Betsey Robinson History of Art and Architecture Laurel Schneider Religious Studies Samira Sheikh History
Comfort Randolph Sophomore, Cognitive Science and Psychology Shunnar Virani Sophomore, Computer Engineering and History Ziqi Zhan Sophomore, Undeclared