2022-2021
Work Progressin
3WORK IN PROGRESS | 2021-2022 Table ContentsofDirector’sNote 4 Environments Harry C. Howard Jr. Lecture Faculty Fellows Theme Fellows Graduate Fellows Events and Programs RPWUndergraduatesSeminarsHumanitiesinConversationCenterStaffandAdvisoryCommittees 6 10812 15 3628241834 Keyword 2022-2023 39
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AFTER 31 YEARS as executive director of the RPW Center, Mona Frederick retired in 2019. Faculty, staff, students, friends, and family joined together to thank Frederick for her years of service and dedication to the humanities and the people engaged in that work.
“Into the same river we step and do not step; we are and we are not” --Heraclitus When I began as Director in Fall 2019, I anticipated change. After thirty years of devoted stewardship of the Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities, Mona Frederick was retiring. The Arts & Science Dean’s Office was doubling down on its support for the Center. We were hiring our first Associate Director to help expand our programming. The Vaughn Home was getting a facelift for the first time in decades. Two years ago, the staff and I had also started designing a new annual magazine. More dynamic than an annual report, it would serve instead as a snapshot of RPW’s multi-dimensional priorities as well as its annual keyword focus. COVID had, of course, other plans. The RPW magazine was put on hold. But the work of the Center never stopped. This issue of Work in Prog ress captures this most recent academic year. Over the next few months, we will recapture lost time in backdated editions. There has simply been too much great work on “Borders and Belonging” (2019-2020) and “Imagining Cities” (2020-2021) for it to be lost to history. I remain grateful to our colleagues and students who stayed the course under the most unusual and ever-changing Forcircumstances.Heraclitus,the only constant is change. To illustrate this, he offered the example of a river. Ever flowing, a river is never the same from moment to moment. But, of course, the river itself remains recognizable. So too has the Humanities Center experienced important changes over these past two years. But it remains what it has always been: home to a strong and generous community.
Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities
Leadership Change
Director’s Note
ELIZABETH MEADOWS (English) was appointed associate director of the RPW Center in July 2019. Her focus is on undergraduate and immersion programming, community engagement projects in public humanities, and non-tenure track faculty development in the humanities. Previously, Mead ows was assistant director of the Curb Center for Art, Enterprise, and Public Policy.
Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities
HOLLYDirector,TUCKERRobertPenn Warren Center for the Humanities Mellon Foundation Chair in the Humanities
HOLLY TUCKER, Mellon Foundation Chair in the Humanities and Professor in French, was appointed director of the RPW Center in July 2019. Tucker has long been an active member of the RPW Center community, including serving as co-director of the Faculty Fellows Program on Scholarship in the Public Humanities and being awarded two additional fellow ships with the center. Tucker's research and teaching focuses on early-modern European medicine and crime. She is author of three books, most recently City of Light, City of Poison: Murder, Magic, and the First Police Chief of Paris (Norton).
7WORK IN PROGRESS | 2021-2022 Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities KEYWORD 2021-2022 Environments AT ANY GIVEN TIME, EACH OF US INHABITS AND PARTICIPATES IN A MULTITUDE OF ENVIRONMENTS (e.g., natural, built, social, familial, etc.). How do these environments shape us, and we, them? What can a study of envi ronments bring to understandings of our lived experiences, the stories we tell, and the ways we care (or not) for one another and our planet?
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PROFESSOR AND AUTHOR DAVID HASKELL discussed the sensory environment — both as a place of marvels rooted in deep time and as a place of present-day crisis at the 2021-2022 Harry C . Howard Jr. Lecture on April 7th.
David Haskell is a professor of biology at Sewanee: The University of the South, whose work integrates scientific, literary, and contem plative studies of the natural world. His most recent book, Sounds Wild and Broken (Penguin Random House, 2022), offers a lyrical exploration of the diverse sounds of our planet, the creative processes that produced these marvels, and the perils that sonic diversity now faces. — “ We live on a planet alive with song, music, and speech, and Haskell explores how these wonders came to be. His previous book, The Songs of Trees: Stories from Nature’s Great Connectors (Viking, 2017), examines the many ways that trees and humans are connected. The book was the winner of the 2018 John Burroughs Medal and the 2020 Iris Book Award. It was also named one of the Best Science Books of 2017 by NPR’s Science Friday His first book, The Forest Unseen: A Year’s Watch in Nature (Viking, 2012) was winner of the National Academies’ Best Book Award for 2013, finalist for the 2013 Pulitzer Prize in nonfic tion, and winner of the 2013 Reed Environmental Writing HaskellAward.hasalso written about biology, ethics, and human culture for The New York Times and other publications. The Atomic Tree, a virtual reality adaptation of the last chapter of The Songs of Trees, premiered at SXSW festival in March 2019. It was awarded the Best VR Experience and Jury Prizes for Immer sive Impact and Journalistic Achievement at the Social Impact Media Awards, and has played at dozens of festivals around the world. The film was directed by Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee and Adam Loften, with screenwriting by David Haskell, Adam Loften, and Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee.
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HARRY C. HOWARD JR. LECTURE APRIL7TH2022
Carwil Bjork-James
Jessie’s works on English and French early modern poetry, classical reception history, the history of philosophical materialism, and contem porary theory and continental philosophy. Her 2021 book, The Erotics of Materialism: Lucretius and Early Modern Poetics, was published by the University of Pennsylvania Press, and she has articles and book chapters on Lucretius, Remy Belleau, Gilles Deleuze, John Milton, Margaret Cavendish, and Michel de Montaigne.
Carwil conducts immersive and historical research on disruptive protest, environmental struggles, state violence, and indigenous collective rights in Bolivia. His research project, “Perspectives on Space and Territory in Socio-Environmental Conflicts,” looks at the political, ethical, and legal tensions that surround resource extraction projects pursued by “post-neoliberal” governments in South America. Building on his past work in this area as both a researcher and a policy advocate, this project focuses on indigenous opposition to environmentally damag ing projects on their traditional territories. He is also the author of The Sovereign Street: Making Revolution in Urban Bolivia (University of Arizona Press, 2020)
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RPW Center Environments Faculty Fellows
Associate Professor of Medicine, Health & Society and Anthropology
Ken’s research focuses on bodily and emotional experiences of contemporary war; the emergence and contestation of war-related illness and injury; and the representation of US war-making in policy, veteran care practices, and American public culture. He is the author of Making War at Fort Hood: Life and Uncertainty in a Military Community (Princeton University Press, 2013), and his scholarship has appeared most recently in BioSocieties, Ethnos, Security Dialogue, and Cultural Anthropology.
Teresa A. Goddu Associate Professor of English and American Studies
11WORK IN PROGRESS | 2021-2022 2021–2022
Karen Ng Associate Professor of Philosophy
Teresa specializes in nineteenth-century American literature and culture, slavery and antislavery, as well as print, material, and visual culture. She is the author of two books: Gothic America: Narrative, History, and Nation (Columbia University Press, 1997) and Selling Antislavery: Abolition and Mass Media in Antebellum America (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020). Her current research focuses on the environmental humanities, specifically contemporary climate fiction.
Assistant Professor of Anthropology
Samira is wrapping up a book on the hectic politics of Bharuch, a small town in Gujarat, India, on the eve of British colonialism in the eighteenth century. She has previously written on fifteenth-century South Asia, Isma‘ili and Hindu devotionalism in Gujarat, the notorious Mughal emperor Aurangzeb, and early colonial land-revenue systems. Her early work on an eighteenth-century Gujarati pilot book is the jumping-off point for a new project on knowledge systems and politics in Gujarati maps from the eighteenth century.
Jessie Hock Assistant Professor of English
Samira Sheikh Associate Professor of History
Karen specializes in nineteenth-century European philosophy and the Frankfurt School Critical Theory. Her book, Hegel’s Concept of Life: Self-Consciousness, Freedom, Logic, is published with Oxford Univer sity Press (2020). In addition to research in post-Kantian philosophy, she is also interested in the ongoing influence of Hegel and Marx for critical social theory, particularly as their legacies help us understand the relation between human beings and nature, possibilities and failures of mutual recognition, and conceptions of progress and critique.
Ken MacLeish
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Laura is a fourth year Ph.D. student studying how the performing arts—especially dramatic improvisation—can create collaborative and emotionally engaging learn ing environments. Her career in education began while teaching public school students in rural settings, where issues of social, educational, and environmental injustice are intertwined. She explores how students and teachers might develop harmful ways of thinking about the natural world.
Madeline is a second semester Ph.D. student in the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department and received her B.A. in Earth and Environmental Sciences from Vanderbilt University in 2019. She is currently exploring the ways humans interact with and alter the landscape through the built environment. Her research focuses on studying the intricacies of how decisions are made by individuals in relation to their perception of flood risk, as well as developing a methodological framework to conduct comprehensive flood risk and resilience assessments at the community-level scale.
Kaelee is a third year student in Sociology at Vanderbilt University. Her main research areas include health and environmental justice, with special focus on rural publics. Most recently, Kaelee’s work has focused on the relationship between community-level social actors and the processes of energy transitions, fossil fuel opposition, and pollution remediation. Her project through the RPW Environments Graduate Fellowship focuses on water quality, industrial contamination, and remediation efforts in communities within the rural United States.
Laura J. Carter-Stone Teaching, Learning, and Diversity
Kelsea Boehner Best Earth and Environmental Sciences
Sarah is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Philosophy at Vanderbilt. Her research interests lie primarily in environmental philosophy and ethics, as well as the intersection of these fields with feminist philosophy and phenomenology.
She is currently working on a dissertation project that explores how recognizing the normative ethical force of kinship can transform the ways that we conceive of our relationships with—and, therefore, ethical obligations to—both other humans and non-human parts of nature.
Madeline Allen Civil and Environmental Engineering
StudentGraduateEnvironments2021–2022Fellows
Sarah C. DiMaggio Philosophy
Kelsea is a fifth year Ph.D. candidate in Earth and Environmental Sciences at Vanderbilt University. Her dissertation work focuses on using quantitative methods, including machine learning and agent-based modeling, to study envi ronmental and climate migration in coastal Bangladesh. She is also the PI of a Graduate Pursuit grant through the National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center (SESYNC) which uses machine learning to study climate gentrification along the east coast of the United States.
Kaelee M. Belletto Sociology
DISSERTATION TITLE: BLACKIMMORTAL: Immortality as Aesthetic Practice in Contemporary Black American Literature and Visual Culture
Jennifer's article “Cyborg Storytelling: Virtual Embodiment in Jennifer Egan’s ‘Black Box’” was published in Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction
Miguel Chávez William J. Vaughn Fellow (History)
Miguel is a Ph.D. candidate in History at Vanderbilt University. He is both a William J. Vaughn Graduate Fellow at the Robert Penn Warren Center and the J. Léon Helguera Graduate Fellow in the History Department. His dissertation, “Profes sionalizing Science,” traces the evolution of British geography from 1830 to 1935. He examines the ways in which geographers presented themselves as men of science; how they leveraged institutional support from the Royal Geographical Society; and how the work of field scientists in 20th-century Sudan echoed the moralizing mission of the heyday of Nile exploration.
Courtney is a poet and scholar, currently working on her Ph.D. in English at Vanderbilt University, where she recently received her M.F.A. in Poetry. Her schol arship focuses broadly on race, racial authenticity and ambiguity, black interiority, shared and/or inherited experiences of blackness, and the way that these expe riences are portrayed in literature and visual media, particularly through such genres as horror and fantasy. She is most interested in the way contemporary black artists utilize surrealist techniques in order to convey very real joys and traumas.
2021–2022
GraduateStudentFellows
Jennifer is a fifth-year, joint-Ph.D. candidate in English and Comparative Media Analysis & Practice (CMAP) specializing in contemporary Anglophone fiction, theory of the novel, and environmental humanities. Her dissertation explores how contemporary realist novels respond to the distinct forms of crisis, risk, and uncer tainty that characterize life and loss at the onset of the Anthropocene.
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Jennifer M. Gutman English
Djenanway L. Se-Gahon
DISSERTATION TITLE: Professionalizing Science: British Geography and the Exploration of Africa, 1830-1935
English Djenanway is a Seattle-born writer of Ivorian and Canadian descent. She received her MFA in creative nonfiction in 2019 from California College of the Arts. She is a third year Vanderbilt English Ph.D. student. Her research interests include African American literature, Black Atlantic studies, plants, and water. For her project, she aims to engage with the slow violence of climate change and implicitly ask the question, “what does it look like to mourn something before it is gone?”
Courtney Brown Mona C. Frederick Fellow (English)
Eric MacPhail George J. Graham Jr. Fellow (Philosophy)
Willnide's research examines the intersection of rhetoric and race to explore how even as racist tropes were ossifying in the early modern period, nuanced depictions of blackness were being generated by non-black writers in different genres as a freeing identity. Her other research interests include Renaissance Lyric Poetry and Drama, Early Modern Race Studies, Gender and Sexuality, and Postcolonial Theory.
Willnide Lindor Elizabeth E. Fleming Fellow (English)
Eric specializes in social and political philosophy, the philosophy of race, and 19th and 20th century continental philosophy. His dissertation draws on 20th century Hungarian philosopher György Márkus’ critical reception of Karl Marx’s historical materialism to advance critical theory’s contemporary efforts to provide a structural, yet non-reductively materialist account of racist ideology.
DISSERTATION TITLE: Constructing Alternate Identities: Rhetoric and Fantasies of Blackness in Early Modernity
Hannah Hicks American Studies Fellow (History)
Zachary Feldman William J. Vaughn Fellow (German, Russian and East European Studies)
TITLE: Terrains of Tension, Mapping Violence in Medieval Islamic Society
DISSERTATION TITLE: Racism and Ideology: Unlocking the Potential of Historical Materialism for Anti-Racism
DISSERTATION
TITLE: Art, Artifice, and Artifacts: Seeking Reality in the Documentary Form
17WORK IN PROGRESS | 2021-2022
Hannah’s research focuses on legal history, gender, and race in the nine teenth-century American South. Her dissertation, “Troubling Justice: Women on Trial in the American South,” examines Black and White women’s appearances in local criminal courts after the Civil War.
Zachary is a scholar and curator of media art and film. In addition to his grad uate studies, he has worked at institutions such as the Zentrum für Kunst und Medien (Center for Art and Media, ZKM) in Karlsruhe, Germany and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. His research interests include production under late-stage capitalism, archaeologies of past and future, and documentary representations.
DISSERTATION
DISSERTATION
TITLE: Troubling Justice: Women on Trial in the American South, 1865-1900.
Taryn specializes in medieval Islamic history, with research interests in social power and group identity, violence and space, crime and punishment, and urbanization under Abbasid rule. Her dissertation, “Terrains of Tension, Mapping Violence in Medieval Islamic Society,” reveals how urban spaces shaped and were shaped by violence in the mid-ninth to mid-tenth century Middle East.
Taryn Marashi Stella Vaughn Fellow (History)
J. Drew Lanham (Sparrow Envy: Field Guide to Birds and Lesser Beasts)
Hosted by Carlos Alonso Nugent (Assistant Professor, English; Vanderbilt University) September 23, 2021
• Nature writers including J. Drew Lanham (Sparrow Envy: Field Guide to Birds and Lesser Beasts), Kath leen Dean Moore (Earth’s Wild Music: Celebrating and Defending the Songs of the Natural World), and Aimee Nezhukumatathil (World of Wonders: In Praise of Fire flies, Whale Sharks, and Other Astonishments), whose books remind us of the beauty of the world around us.
Justin Parker Jones, Leadership Alliance/ VU-EDGE Program Fellow, University of Pittsburgh, “Mapping the Diaspora of the Black Auxiliary Troops of Carlos IV of Spain”
• Novelists Benjamin Labatut (When We Cease to Under stand the World), Jeff VanderMeer (Hummingbird Sala mander: A Novel) and Kim Stanley Robinson (Ministry for the Future), whose books have earned great criti cal and popular acclaim, using climate change as the literary jumping off point for imagining different worlds.
, Ford Foundation, Post-Doctoral Fellow at Vanderbilt, “Ephemeral Dominions: Black Fugitivity in the Caribbean and Hispaniola”
Kim Stanley Robinson (The Ministry for the Future)
As last year, the Festival will take place entirely online due to worsening public health conditions related to the Covid virus. While we deeply regret that we are unable to gather in person as we had hoped to do, we are grateful from the lesson of 2020 that online sessions can be deeply meaningful and rewarding, and that they have the benefit of being available to much larger audiences than the in-person event. The full schedule of events is posted at www.humtn.org. We will be streaming sessions live on Facebook and Youtube. We look forward to the conversations.
These authors and others will share their knowledge, their experiences, and their thoughts with Festival audiences about where we go next. As with all Festi val sessions, the audience is a key component, as the interaction and engagement in the humanities between writer and reader is the core of the event. In addition to the environments track, we are exploring vital conversations around equity with a series of sessions around the theme “A More Perfect Union.”
Serenity Gerbman, Director of Literature and Language Programs at Humanities Tennessee
RPW Center “Environments”SponsorsTrack at 2021 Southern Festival of Books
Courtney Brown (2021-22 Mona C. Frederick Graduate Student Fellow, English)
Conference
Holly Tucker (RPW Center Director)
JesúsOctoberPRESENTERS:1,2021Ruiz
September 20, 2021
Through a series of online sessions, we will talk about climate change with scholars, scientists, and novelists whose work helps us to understand what is happening and to imagine a different way forward. Some highlights:
Miriam Erickson, Academic Support Coordinator, The Writing Center, “African Diaspora in the Spanish Atlantic World, 1791-1818”
Other African Diasporas
Hosted by RPW’s Circum-Atlantic Studies Seminar. Additional co-sponsors: Department of History, the Center for Latin American, Caribbean, and Latinx Studies, the Graduate School VU-EDGE Program, and the Program in African American & Diaspora Studies
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Caree Banton, Director of African and African American Studies, University of Arkansas, “‘More Auspicious Shores’: Barbadian Post-Emancipation Emigration and Settlement of Crozerville, Liberia”
• Environmental justice advocate Miguel De La Torre, whose book, Gonna Trouble the Water: Ecojustice, Water, and Environmental Racism, asks hard ques tions about how systemic inequities means that climate change will most deeply affect those who are in the worst position to withstand and recover from it.
As I write this, our neigh bors in Humphrey County are grieving and just beginning to rebuild after horrific flash floods, while our friends along the Gulf Coast still lack power and face tremendous damage after Hurricane Ida. It feels as if half the country is either under water or on fire, and the effect on us as individuals can feel overwhelming and hopeless. We see that climate change is upon us, but what can we do? As citizens and public humanists, we can educate ourselves, and we can remind ourselves of the wonders of our planet that are visible in everything that blooms, flies, or walks. This year, we at Humanities Tennessee are especially pleased to partner with the Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities on a track of sessions at the Southern Festival of Books called “Environments.”
EventsFall2021 Programs&
Danyelle Valentine, Assistant Professor of Gender and Sexuality Studies, “A Rhetoric on Emigration: How The Pine and Palm Incentivized Black American migration to Trinidad & British Guiana” Elvira Aballí Morell , Department of Spanish & Portuguese, “Anarquistas y Cuatreros: The Deportation of Abakuá Society Members to Fernando Po” Selena Sanderfer Doss , Assistant Professor of History, Western Kentucky University, “Black Emigration Movements in the Post-Civil War South”
Participants in these sessions include authors Kristin Kotes du Mez (Jesus and John Wayne), Brian Broome (Punch Me Up the Gods: A Memoir) and National Ambassador of Young People’s Literature Jason Reynolds (Look Both Ways: A Tale Told in Ten Blocks).
James Moore (VU Landscape Architect) Georgann Eubanks (Saving the Wild South)
Kathleen Dean Moore (Earth’s Wild Music: Celebrating and Defending the Songs of the Natural World)
Miguel De La Torre ( Gonna Trouble the Water: Ecojustice, Water, and Environmental Racism) September 29, 2021
Aimee Nezhukumatathil (World of Wonders: In Praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks, and Other Astonishments)
The RPW Center for the Humanities co-sponsored a series of talks at the Southern Festival of Books based on this year's key word, "Environments." The talks below were livestreamed on YouTube. September 22, 2021
Cynthia Kaufman (The Sea is Rising and So Are We)
Rick Bragg (The Speckled Beauty: A Dog and His People)
Hosted by Sophie Bjork-James (Assistant Professor, Anthropology; Vanderbilt University) September 28, 2021
Jeff VanderMeer (Hummingbird Salamander) October 9, 2021
Hosted by RPW’s Indigenous Studies Seminar. Additional co-sponsors: George Barrett Social Justice Program (Law School), Energy, Environment and Land Use Program (Law School), Program in Environmental and Sustainability Studies, and the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences.
November 9, 2021
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September 27, 2021 Tara Houska (Couchiching First Nation Anishinaabe) is a tribal attorney, founder of Giniw Collective, and a former advisor on Native American affairs to Bernie Sanders. She spent six months on the frontlines fighting the Dakota Access Pipeline, and is currently engaged in the movement to defund fossil fuels and a years-long struggle against Enbridge's Line 3 pipeline. She is a co-founder of Not Your Mascots, a group committed to positive representation of Native peoples.
A Conversation with Aaron Deter-Wolf and Phil Hodge September 19, 2021
Reading withDiscussion&NatalieDiaz
The Climate of History in a Planetary Age
The Great Acceleration:ChernobylEnvironment and Health in the Nuclear Age
The RPW Center’s Contemporary in Theory Seminar discussed Dipesh Chakrabarty’s The Climate of History in a Planetary Age. For the past decade, historian Dipesh Chakrabarty has been one of the most influential scholars addressing the meaning of climate change. Climate change, he argues, upends longstanding ideas of history, modernity, and globalization.
October 22, 2021 What do we know about the Chernobyl disaster? Working through Soviet archives, Kate Brown (Thomas M. Siebel Distinguished Professor in the History of Science, MIT) encountered many contradictory accounts of the catastrophe and its effects. Local doctors reported “a public health disaster” among people exposed to Chernobyl fallout. International experts refuted that claim. Realizing that although people and archives lie, trees probably don’t, Brown turned to scientists—biologists, foresters, physicians, and physicists—to help her understand the ecology of the greater Chernobyl territories.
Aaron Deter-Wolf is the co-author of Mastodons to Mississippians: Adventures in Nashville's Deep Past, which is described as "the first public-facing effort by legitimate archaeologists to articulate the history of what happened here before Nashville happened." Deter-Wolf talked about what Nashville was like 14,000 years before "Illinois lieutenant-governor-turned-fur-trader Timothy Demonbreun set foot at Sulphur Dell." He also discussed the thriving Native American culture that lived here from CE 1000-1425 known as the Middle Cumberland Mississippians. He was joined in conversation by Tennessee State Archaeologist Phil Hodge. Hodge previously worked in the private sector and with the non-profit Center for American Archaeology and has a broad range of experience with prehistoric and historic sites.
September 17, 2021
RPW EventsEnvironments
The burden of The Climate of History in a Planetary Age is to grapple with what this means and to confront humanities scholars with ideas they have been reluctant to reconsider—from the changed nature of human agency to a new acceptance of universals.
Fossil Fuel Divestment and Anti-Pipeline Activist Tara Houska
Natalie Diaz was born and raised in the Fort Mojave Indian Village in Needles, California, on the banks of the Colorado River. She is Mojave and an enrolled member of the Gila River Indian Tribe. She is the author of the poetry collections Postcolonial Love Poem (2020), winner of the Pulitzer Prize; and When My Brother Was an Aztec (2012). She is a 2018 MacArthur Fellow, as well as a Lannan Literary Fellow and a Native Arts Council Foundation Artist Fellow, among others. Diaz is Director of the Center for Imagination in the Borderlands and is the Maxine and Jonathan Marshall Chair in Modern and Contemporary Poetry at Arizona State University Environments Lightning Talks and Happy Hour RPW Faculty Fellows and Theme Graduate Fellows each presented lightning talks based on their current Environments-themed research.
Sponsored by the RPW’s East Europe: Critical Encounters Seminar.
Haitians deserve dignity, certainly not whips and mass deportations.
On September 19, 2021, at Del Rio, Texas, U.S. Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) officers used their horse reins as whips on Haitian migrants seeking asylum in the United States.
A History of Refuge and Sanctuary
Exile and “Deterrence”
Haiti’s historic roles and interventions in the global antislavery movement are directly linked to its rich emancipatory history. The latter is rooted in shared experiences on the island of Hispaniola, where older notions of rights and liberties drew African diasporic communities to its Thus,shores.2inlight of the recent events at Del Rio, and of the ongoing racism and xenophobia against Haitian migrants all across the hemi sphere, we should take note that Haiti once opened its borders to those in need. Perhaps it is time the U.S. Government do the same.
Jesús G. Ruiz is a National Academy of Sciences Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow in Caribbean History in the Department of History at Vanderbilt. featuring short articles covering a wide spectrum of humanities-related topics, such as Environments, social justice, science + humanities, career diversity, and public humanities. It also introduces readers to fellows and guest speakers affiliated with the RPW Center.
23WORK IN PROGRESS | 2021-2022 2021-2022Humanities WhiteConversationinHostileEnvironments:SupremacyattheBorder-Haitians,HistoryandaFightforDignityOURHUMANITIESINCONVERSATIONBLOG
NOTE: For a deeper dive, check out The Washington Post article by Ruiz.
The agents, in order to prevent Haitian asylum-seekers from crossing back into the United States after retrieving food in Mexico, whipped their reins as a lash. By definition, they effectively used their horse reins as a whip to whip Haitians into fear and impede their crossing into U.S. territory.
The American Historical Review 117:1 (2012): 40-66 [43].
To justify the mass deportations of Haitians seeking asylum, the Biden administration is using a Trump-era public health order. But the so-called “Title 42” has since been blocked by a U.S. District Court Judge who has ruled that the order does not give the U.S. Government the authority to expel migrants nor to deny them the opportunity to seek asylum. Thus the current administration, in line with the U.S. Government’s historically discriminatory practices against Haitian refugees, is in violation of both domestic and international law.
2 At the Circum-Atlantic Studies Seminar “Other African Diasporas” (Oct. 2021), presented the 1763 legal cases of two French-speaking formerly enslaved fugitives who sought religious sanctuary (asylum) on the island of Hispaniola.
Haiti’s Example
1■Ada Ferrer, “Haiti, Free Soil, and Antislavery in the Revolutionary Atlantic,”
The images of white men on horseback whipping Black men, women, and children no doubt evoke scenes of the violence of plantation slavery not only in the U.S., but also across the Caribbean and the broader Americas, where such slave patrols and racial violence were commonplace. But the act of providing refuge—and ultimately citizenship—to those from other lands, is part of a story that is as Haitian as racism is to U.S. immi gration policies. Article 44 of the Haitian constitution of 1816 explicitly stated that all “Africans and Indians, and the descendants of their blood, born in the colo nies or in foreign countries, who come to reside in the Republic will be recognized as Haitians, but will enjoy the right of citizenship only after one year of residence.”1 Haiti’s nineteenth century laws, therefore, granted citizenship to anyone stepping foot on Haitian soil, after one year of residency. Insofar as the timing-to-citizenship is concerned, Haiti’s nine teenth century laws are actually more progres sive than how asylum in the U.S. works. If you are granted asylum in the U.S., after one year you may apply for your permanent resident status—aka “green-card”—and thereafter one has to wait four years to apply for citizenship.
Dr. Jesús G. Ruiz is currently a National Academy of Sciences Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow in Caribbean History in the Department of History at Vanderbilt. Dr. Ruiz earned his Doctorate with distinction in Latin American Studies from Tulane University. More recently, he was an ACLS Emerging Voices Postdoctoral Fellow at the Franklin Humanities Institute at Duke University. His research focuses on the histories of the Black Atlantic, Afro-Latin America, and Haiti, specifically the revolutionary period.
JESÚS G. RUIZ
The Indigenous Studies Seminar provides an opportunity for sharing research on critical Indigenous and Native American issues. The seminar is an inclusive, interdisciplinary space where faculty, students, and staff come together to dialog, discuss works-in-progress, share networks, and ask questions about what it does and can mean to engage Indigenous Studies at Vanderbilt.
The Islamic Studies Seminar is a collaborative academic space where students and faculty critically evaluate the study of Islam. The goal of the seminar is to establish a cross-disciplinary conversation at Vanderbilt, engaging diverse fields across the Humanities to examine and discuss works-in-progress. With presentations spanning various subjects in Islamic Studies from the medieval to modern era, the seminar is an opportunity for academic enrichment and outreach. The seminar also highlights the work of both Vanderbilt and non-Vanderbilt academics, generating networks of scholarly review that go beyond the University.
As the RPW Center explores the theme of "Environments," this year's Islamic Studies Seminar focused on the Islamic topography of Cairo and its interconnected web of sacred spaces and embodied agency. Religious rituals, pilgrimages, and processions are woven up with devotional textuality, both historical and poetic, to produce the topographies of Islamic piety.
Seminars & Reading Groups
The Circum-Atlantic Studies Seminar focuses on the themes of Atlantic slavery, colonialism, and/or postcolonialism, with most sessions centering on an invited talk and/or a discussion of a pre-circulated paper. The research links Africa, Europe, the Americas, and the Caribbean, and addresses a range of constituencies on campus. This seminar also created, with support from the RPW Center, a Black Atlantic History Speaker Series. The Series invites major scholars of the Black Atlantic to campus every February to discuss their research and publications. This seminar provided scholarly discussions of the field through presentations from invited speakers as well as faculty and graduate students on campus.
Circum-Atlantic Studies
The Art Seminar brings together Vanderbilt faculty who conduct or reflect on creative research. Consisting of makers/researchers from 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.
East Europe: Critical Encounters Co-directors: Kathryn David (German, Russian, and East European Studies) and Allison Schachter (Jewish Studies/English) East Europe: Critical Encounters explores a range of humanistic topics concerning the region of Russia and Eastern Europe, including distinct East European frameworks of culture; the complexities of empire (both past and present); questions of religion, law, and political authority; socialism and post-socialism; minority rights and mass violence; and Russia’s place in defining scholarly conversations and methods of inquiry. While closely analyzing humanistic questions of the region, our seminar uses the lens of Eastern Europe to probe global and theoretical frameworks for thinking about art, architecture, culture, literature, and history. Consequently, each meeting aims to rethink and reframe a critical question of the region from interdisciplinary perspectives, while also providing participants an opportunity to situate these questions in broader humanistic inquiry.
The Economy and Society Seminar brings together in conversation economists, humanists and social scientists from across the university. Scholars will discuss and debate their diverse methodological approaches, which are often poorly understood by each other. Among the topics the group will discuss are wealth inequality, the migration of workers, the nature of labor forces, racial and gender disparities, public finance, state formation, trade networks, globalization, institutions, behavioral patterns and aspects of the so-called “great divergence”—east/west. We encourage both informal individual presentations of works in progress, more formal presentations of finished work, joint critical readings of works of common interest, and mini-colloquia among faculty with diverse perspectives.
Islamic Studies Seminar Co-directors: Richard McGregor (Religious Studies) and Ida Nitter (Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, Univ. of Pennsylvania)
The Contemporary in Theory Seminar examines contemporary issues that range from global capitalism, critical race theories, climate change, digital media and technology, and the definitions and boundaries of the human. The seminar fosters innovative approaches to the contemporary across diverse disciplines and methodological backgrounds, addressing these pressing topics through our shared intellectual and theoretical concerns, while bringing to bear our disciplines and areas of expertise. In the fall semester, the seminar focused on The Climate of History in a Planetary Age (Dipesh Chakrabarty), All Incomplete (Stefano Harney and Fred Moten), and The Feminist International: How to Change Everything (Verónica Gago).
GuateSeminar Co-directors: Miguel Cuj (Anthropology) and Juan Jose Lopez Juarez (Anthropology) GuateLab (IximLab) is a students' 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. GuateLab is a site that is not academic, so each point of view is welcome when expressed in a respectful way. Open to the Vanderbilt community (staff, scholars, graduate & undergraduate students, and companions) and people interested in Guatemala.
Contemporary in Theory Co-directors: Alex Dubilet (English), Simone Stirner (German, Russian and East European Studies), and Ben Tran (English/ Asian Studies)
Co-directors: Stan Link (Blair School of Music), Leah Lowe (Theatre), Vesna Pavlović (Art), Jonathan Rattner (Art/ Cinema & Media Arts), Nancy Reisman (English), and Rebecca VanDiver (History of Art/Architecture)
Art Seminar
The seminar hosts conversations between the Vanderbilt community and Indigenous Scholars and Knowledge Keepers. One of our main goals is to support relationshipbuilding, both within and outside the University, by committing to establishing and nurturing lasting relationships with local and removed Native communities.
Indigenous Studies Seminar Co-directors: Brooke A. Ackerly (Political Science) and Jana Harper (Art)
25WORK IN PROGRESS | 2021-2022
Film Theory and Visual Culture
Economy and Society Co-directors: William Caferro (History/ Classical and Mediterranean Studies) and William Collins (Economics/History)
Co-directors: Jane Landers (History), Daniel Genkins (Executive Director of the Slave Societies Digital Archive, VU), and Theron Corse (History, Geography and Political Science, TSU)
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. Each semester we host scholars from leading programs in film and media studies (and adjacent fields), as well as scholars from our own Vanderbilt community.
Co-directors: Iggy Cortez (Cinema & Media Arts/English), Jennifer Fay (Cinema & Media Arts/English), and Lutz Koepnick (Cinema & Media Arts/German Studies).
Equity-focused transportation planners and activists coined the term “mobility justice” to describe equitable access to transportation, particularly in contexts where racial, class, gender, and disability disparities have historically created uneven access. In this seminar, urban transportation scholars and advocates will study the insights of mobility justice in relation to the emerging framework of “transformative justice,” which seeks to find alternatives to policing through community accountability. This framework could inform how we study and make policies regarding transportation, for example in the case of pedestrian and cyclist safety. We will meet monthly to study scholarly, activist, and practitioner literatures on these topics, and then host two community events in Spring 2021.
Co-directors: Sophie Bjork-James (Anthropology) and Eric Ritter (Racial Justice Lab/Philosophy)
Analysts like Manning Marable describe the aftermath of the US Civil War (1867-1877) and the heyday of the US black freedom movement (1955-1965) as the first and second thoroughgoing attempts at reconstructing a US society built on white supremacy, racist violence, and racial oppression. The Racial Justice and the Third Reconstruction (RJ3R) initiative begins with the thought that the current moment – a moment defined in part by the unjust killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor and by the summer of protest that resulted – shows the need for a third attempt. In the grip of this thought, the initiative aims to promote productive reflection on the meaning of racial justice and the requirements of reconstruction.
Rereading French Theory: Aesthetics, Metaphysics, Politics Co-directors: Alex Dubilet (English/ Political Science) and Jessie Hock (English)
Political Ideology in Modern Life
The Racial Justice reading group complements the RJ3R monthly event series, bringing together VU faculty, postdocs, and graduate students from various fields to read and discuss recent writing on issues of racial justice. Reading group participants have the opportunity to workshop works-in-progress and help select speakers for the meetings. We also reserve time to study and discuss anti-racist pedagogies and to grapple with the current state of US public education and miseducation on matters of race, justice, and democracy.
Learn more or sign up for seminar announcements through our website at https://www.vanderbilt.edu/rpw_center/
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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 hypermediated 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. While largely focused on the Anglophone world, the seminar welcomes scholars working in a range of national literatures and disciplines to share work and join the discussions.
Co-directors: Robert Engelman (Philosophy) and Emanuel Stults (History)
Racial Justice Reading Group
The Political Ideology in Modern Life Seminar cultivates dialogue among scholars and students across disciplines interested in reflectively examining the discursive and cognitive facets of modern political life. With good reason, political life is a lively topic of discussion on and off campus, and political ideology is increasingly becoming both a compelling sub-topic and a popular explanation for troubling political trends.
The Novel Seminar Co-directors: Jay Clayton (English/CMA) and Scott J. Juengel (English)
Transportation and Transformative Justice Co-directors: Aimi Hamraie (MHS/American Studies) and Brenda Pérez (Walk Bike Nashville)
Religion as Resistance: AfroLatinx Diasporic Identities Co-directors: Candice Amich (English), William Luis (Spanish and Portuguese), and Gretchen Selcke (Center for Latin American, Caribbean, and Latinx Studies)
By bringing together philosophical work in political epistemology and critical theory, social-scientific studies of political movements and regime change, communication theory and media studies, as well as historiography of politics and political thought, we look to gain insights into political ideology that challenge us to generate innovative, interdisciplinary modes of investigation into the problems we face in modern life.
The “Rereading French Theory” seminar is an interdisciplinary space to encounter anew classic theoretical works of major 20th-century French thinkers. In its inaugural 2021-2022 academic year, we will focus on the thought on Gilles Deleuze, especially his magnum opus, Difference and Repetition, which we will approach via close reading, secondary readings, and workshops by visiting Deleuze experts.
This seminar focuses on Afro Latinx religions as forms of resistance in places like Brazil, Cuba, Hispaniola, Puerto Rico, Benin, Nigeria, and the US mainland. We seek to understand the intersections between African religious practices and resistance, both in historical and contemporary contexts. How do writings of and about enslaved people, Black people, and their African religious practices represent a counter discourse to what is promoted by dominant societies? How does religion function as a means of resistance? Our goal is to amplify interdisciplinary scholarly discussions through presentations from invited speakers, development of grant opportunities, and dialogue between faculty and graduate students on campus and beyond.
ON A BRIGHT FALL MORNING, a small group of students gathered in the front room of one of the original homes on Vanderbilt’s campus. The space, dating from 1875, had once been packed with thousands of books collected by Professor William Vaughn, the university’s original librarian and one of its earliest faculty members. Now, many generations later, students—focused on maintaining appropriate physical distance and securing their masks amid a historic pandemic—headed to the home’s dirt-floor cellar to dig for clues and an understanding of the school’s past.
Student Advisory 2021-2022Council: Dylan Kistler (Senior, Cognitive Studies, Economics, & English) Morgan Elrod-Erickson (Senior, English) Induja Kumar (Sophomore, Undeclared) Srish Kumar (Junior, Psychology & Political Science) Becca Mendez (Senior, Human & Organizational Development & English) Clara McMillan (Junior, English) Briana Finocchiaro (Senior, Human & Organizational Development) Ashruta Narapareddy (Junior, Medicine, Health, & Society & Neuroscience)
Assistant Professor Matthew Worsnick and students show Chancellor Daniel Diermeier clues they found to the origins and changes in the structure of the Vaughn Home. (John Russell/Vanderbilt)
DIRECTOR ELIZABETH MEADOWS, the RPW Center expanded its programming and outreach to undergraduates. Elizabeth created a Student Advisory Council made up of undergraduates from a range of majors which hosted events at the RPW Center, organized the Humanities Think Tank programming, and developed The Scholarship of Everyday Life, a new program for undergraduates, connecting liberal arts coursework to real world problems and future career paths. The RPW Center is also now the campus home of Vanderbilt Lives, the undergraduate creative non-fiction journal, providing meeting space for the editorial team and financial and programming support for student-focused storytelling and writing events.
WITH THE ADDITION OF ASSOCIATE
—Undergrads
29WORK IN PROGRESS | 2021-2022
It’s all part of a series of trans-institutional courses designed through the Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities that uses Vanderbilt’s campus as a kind of living lab, giving future historians, architects, archaeologists, curators and engineers unique hands-on experiences.
“Where else are you going to get students doing archaeological digs and delving into historical archives and curating museum exhibits and doing land-use design projects?” asks Holly Tucker, the Mellon Foundation Chair in the Humanities and director of the Robert Penn Warren Center. Tucker led the development of a proposal that earned a highly competitive grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, which is partially funding this series.
New series of classes highlights diverse disciplines, with Vanderbilt at the core
This article was originally published in MyVU
While each of the classes is creating historical records, exhibits and reports to help tell the fuller Vanderbilt story, one interdisciplinary class in the series will change the landscape of the university itself.
archival material in the context of the struggles of the 20th century—tied to race, ethnicity, gender, economic inequality and war—allows us to see the impact behind New landscape
“And someday,” she says, “decades or centuries from now, people will look back at the in-depth and personal work done in these classes to better understand Vanderbilt and our world.”
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Architect and historian Matthew Worsnick’s and archaeologist and historical anthropologist Steve Wernke’s classes use the Vaughn Home and the land surrounding it to investigate multiple aspects of the site. One student in the class even uncovered clues to show that it was originally two separate buildings, suggesting the existence of previously unknown servants’ quarters.
Steve Wernke’s anthropology class excavated a site that used to hold servants’ quarters dating back to the founding of the university. Through their research, two post-emancipation African American women who worked in the Vaughn Home are now a written part of Vanderbilt history. (Photo taken 2019, Susan Urmy/Vanderbilt)
First-year economics major Lyndon Shi from Memphis, Tennessee, says he was struck most by the uphill battle for women’s rights in the U.S. and on Vanderbilt’s campus over the past century. “When you really dig into the archives, you can see almost a foreshadowing of women’s rights,” Shi says. “Maybe the progressions seemed smaller when they were actually happening, but we get to see the whole overarching change.”
Civil and environmental engineering professor Lori Troxel, who is an expert in human-centered design, is leading a sustainable development class in partner ship with the FutureVU Land Use Planning Initiative.
One of the foundational courses in the series examines the history of the United States, from the post–Civil War era to the modern day, through the lens of the American research university, using Vanderbilt as a case study.
The goal is to create a public space on the Vaughn Terrace, which sits squarely between the engineering school’s Featheringill Hall and the Vaughn Home.
Active historians
The class first looks at literary and artistic works in each era, then explores Vanderbilt archival material, such as faculty and student correspondence, newspapers, yearbooks, student-led publications, administrative records and personal papers, to examine historical changes. This creates an opportunity to see events and decisions through a more personal “Examininglens.this
“Using Vanderbilt’s own history allows students to be at a granular level of how and why decisions may have been made and how those choices play out in every day people’s lives up to today,” says Elizabeth Mead ows, senior lecturer in English and associate director of the Robert Penn Warren Center.
History in their own words
“Because we were all physically meeting in the Vaughn Home, other than one virtual student whom we carried with us on a laptop, we were able to immediately examine where there were two thick nesses of walls connecting a main living space and a space that was originally for servants,” Worsnick says. “By combining structural information with historical information, we found where and when the home was integrated.” Discoveries like these show a bigger picture about the people who lived in the Vaughn Home, especially the untold history of the servants there. Students also conducted archival research under the guidance of Professor Wernke and anthropology graduate student Jennifer Foley (MA’08, PhD’17) in the Archaeological Excavation course. As Wernke relates, “In that process, Foley identified staff of the Vaughn family in U.S. Census records—two first-generation, post-emanci pation African American women, who are otherwise absent in the historical record.” Wernke and undergraduate and graduate students are currently analyz ing the excavated material in this semester’s Digital Archaeology course.
Trans-institutional discovery
“I’m excited about helping students design an inclu sive, sustainable, environmentally friendly community space that takes in the history of both the Vaughn Home and Featheringill and has the potential to create greater interaction between the sciences and the humanities,” Troxel says.
The course comes alive when students get a chance to work in the University Archives and Special Collections. The materials pulled by archivists, and the projects created through the various classes, ultimately will populate a digital archive at the library as well as potential exhibits on campus.
One class group studied the Black Power movement at Vanderbilt. This photo shows Vanderbilt students in 1973 holding protest signs during a Commodore football game. (Vanderbilt Library Archives) Briana Finocchiaro, a human and organizational devel opment major from Delray Beach, Florida, worked on a group project about the Black Power movement on Vanderbilt’s campus during the 1970s. “It’s been so inspir ing to relive what students my age were feeling during very different and often difficult times,” Finocchiaro says.
One of the goals of this humanities series is to make students active historians and hands-on participants in research and discovery, so they can learn more about Vanderbilt and see the intrinsic value in inves tigating all aspects of history and culture over time.
certain decisions and how institutions like Vanderbilt are intersecting with the larger historical narratives,” says Christopher Loss, associate professor of public policy, higher education and history.
Excellence in Podcasting award winners honored at reception
First-place winner
Winning pieces will be featured on the upcoming season of VandyVox, a podcast from the Center for Teaching and Vanderbilt Student Media that showcases the best of student-produced audio at Vanderbilt University.
The two first-place winners received $500, and five runners-up received $250 in graduate and undergraduate categories. The winners and their submissions are as follows:
“We launched VandyVox a few years ago because an increasing number of faculty and students were exploring audio production as academic work,” said Derek Bruff, assistant provost and executive director of the Center for Teaching. “I’m excited to use VandyVox to connect the winners of the first Excellence in Podcasting competition with a bigger audience for their fine work.”
First-place winner • “How Real is Silicon-based Life?” by Nicole Kend rick and Natalie Wallace Runners-up
Graduate professionalandstudents
“All of these students, representing a wide range of disciplines, have excelled as storytellers,” said Holly Tucker, director of the Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities, professor of French and Mellon Foundation Chair in the Humanities. “Whether their stories start in a lab or through literature, they all showed imagination, technical proficiency and strong communication skills as they made their topics accessible to a broad audience.”
• “My Humanities Moment: Children’s Experiences and Voices in Social Research and Literature” by Marta Eugenia Zavaleta Lemus
“I think what really stood out for me was how many ways you can do science communication,” said Nicole Kendrick, first-place winner in the graduate and professional cate gory. “When we started this podcast, there was the writing of the podcasts, doing the audio, social media, just word of mouth, and talking to your friends about it. It helped us shape how we talk about science to everybody.”
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This article was originally published in MyVU
• “Going Viral: Basics of Epidemiology” by Pranoti Pradhan and Saimrunali
UndergraduateDadigalastudents
The Office of Immersion Resources collaborated on the competition because student-produced podcasts and audio documentaries are examples of potential immersion projects. “For a student to take what they’ve learned through their immer sion experiences and reflections and share that through audio storytelling is very exciting,” said Carolyn Floyd, director of the Office of Immersion Resources. “I hope we will see some impressive audio productions as immersion projects in the coming years.”
• “PRISM: NSA’s Information Net” by Rishabh Gharekhan • “Anchor Down, Burn Out” by Abhinav Krishnan and Julia Tilton
The award recipients of the inaugural Excellence in Podcasting competition were honored at a reception on Aug. 24 at the Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities. (John Russell/Vanderbilt)
Vanderbilt University’s first-ever Excellence in Podcasting competition was held in spring 2021. Awards were presented in July to the students whose podcast submissions exemplified the goals of the competition: using audio storytell ing to communicate ideas, share perspectives, make arguments and persuade others. Under graduate, graduate and professional students were invited to participate. Original audio pieces produced in the past year with some critical or creative storytelling were accepted. The award recipients were recognized at an Aug. 24 reception at the Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities, which sponsored the compe tition in collaboration with the Office of Immer sion Resources and the Center for Teaching.
• “Noise Pollution, COVID-19, and Your Health” by Emma Fagan Runners-up • “Gene Drives” by Olivia Pembridge
“This was the first podcast I’d ever created,” said Rishabh Gharekhan, BA’24. “One of my favorite parts about creat ing a podcast is seeing how much goes into it—the music, the background noises, your own voice, the story, and how to make it a really cool narrative that actually attracts viewers without the visual portion of things. Podcasts are an awesome and great tool to learn and to discover new things that you never really thought about.”
In April 2019, I returned to campus to deliver the Harry Howard Lecture for the Robert Penn Warren Center. I had spent my career as a book and magazine editor and as a NEA and NEH grant-maker to universities, cultural organizations, and writers. I was chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities at the time, but, at the chancellor’s house after my speech, I found it hard to call my old professor “Vereen.” I felt that had not earned it yet. (As his student, I did not ask him for a reference letter for graduate school for the same reason.) We enjoyed catching up at the reception. He did not pretend to remem ber me as a twenty-one-year-old, and I did not mention the few letters that we exchanged over the decades. He had a cane for support, remained seated throughout the event, and was clearly in fragile health. He had come to the reception not for me the successful alum, but for me, his oft befuddled student. He came as a kindness. Not knowing if he could attend the lecture, I made this statement to the audience: “I studied Eliot on this campus some thirty years ago under Professor Vereen Bell—an experience more exacting and nerve-racking than my confirmation by the U.S. Senate—so I am not about to hazard an academic lecture on the poet or poetry or the essay in question, lest Professor Bell get word of my folly.”
The displacement of what came before—that is a difficulty not easily handled. It is heartening to read the numerous remembrances by Vanderbilt faculty about Vereen’s role in creating a more racially and ethnically diverse English department. In my time, the faculty regrettably was not diverse, though it was remarkable. Ruth Fainlight on Sexton and Plath, Roy Gottfrield on Joyce, Kreyling on Southern lit, Leonard Nathanson on Milton, Walter Sullivan on the short story, Cecelia Tichi on American culture, they were lead ers in the field. Some might include Harold Weatherby, but I never studied with him because it was rumored that he failed students for a mere comma splice. I wasn’t sure what a comma splice was. But I was Baptist enough to fear that I had committed such an offense, at least in my Withheart.thebrilliant
With Professors Susan Ford Wiltshire, Kreyling, and Bell in mind, I continued: “My own fondness for tradition may be tied to my professors—for they gave me a way of seeing the world that has had such lasting value that I would not wish it to perish without some attempt to illuminate it, to affirm it, to claim it, even as am engaged daily in funding the very scholars and humanistic projects that are expand ing and occasionally displacing their lives’ work.”
Jon Parrish Peede, B.S. ’91, served as the eleventh chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities in Washington, DC. He is the former Literature Grants director of the National Endowment for the Arts and co-editor of a book of essays on Flannery O’Connor. Vereen Bell taught at Vander bilt for more than 50 years. (Daniel Dubois/Vanderbilt)
Humanities Conversationin
In “Vereen Bell: In Awe and JonformerRemembrance,”NEHChairmanandVanderbiltAlumnusParrishPeedewritesabouthowoneprofessorinthehumanitieschangedhislife.
Major Jackson (author of Roll Deep) as the new director of creative writing, with Kate Daniels holding the prestigious Mims Chair with a student-centered approach that its namesake lacked, I feel that a balance of old and new has been found for my beloved English department. Many, not just Vereen Bell, planted these seeds. In May of this year, I had the honor of delivering the Phi Beta Kappa Society address for the new Vanderbilt inductees as I joined as an alumni member. I said this in closing: I still remember how the sunlight slanted through the high, narrow windows in Benson Hall, as Professor Vereen Bell recited from T. S. Eliot’s poem “Four Quartets.” I hear his bold voice, and these words: We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time.
Do I see Vereen, in warm hindsight, as such a majestic creature? No, not exactly. His feet were too firmly on the ground for him to ever fly away. And yet I sentimentally picture him on the edge of still water with a book in hand to aid the crossing over. Some professors ask about your life, but Vereen didn’t with me. He knew I was from Mississippi, a fellow southerner, but it did not unite us in any particular way. He was not aloof, but above. He was, I must say, nonpareil. I was as proud of receiving a B+ in his modern poetry class as any grade I ever received in my academic studies.
So, it is. Thank you, Vereen, for pointing your students toward lives of meaning.
Hearing of his death at 86, my mind immediately went to Yeats’ “The Wild Swans at Coole,” which concludes: Among what rushes will they build, By what lake’s edge or pool Delight men’s eyes when I awake some day To find they have flown away?
Photo VincentCredit:Ricardel
35WORK IN PROGRESS | 2021-2022
Thirty years ago, I had two mentors as a Vanderbilt undergraduate. Vereen Bell was not one of them. To call him such would be like calling Virgil a close friend. I himremain—unreservedlywas—andfondofandinaweofhishardearned and easily worn encyclopedic knowledge. He had a rugged face of the type that Walker Evans so often captured, with an expressive brow, and a smile that turned down at the corners, not in a frown but in a state of amusement and curiosity. Frankly was intimidated by him as a student. His Cormac McCarthy book came out my freshman year, and there was a waiting list to check it out from the Heard Library. Back then, we read our professors’ books as an act of respect. remember devouring Mark Jarman’s Black Riviera and Donald Davie’s Trying to Explain and the defunct Cumberland Poetry Review, each of which I came across in the stacks when I was supposed to be studying the life sciences. If I thought Professor Bell was going to be lighter on the page than in person, I was sorely mistaken. still cannot decide who is more complex and brilliant in his literary taxonomy, McCarthy or his critic? By my senior year, I had switched majors from chemistry to English and had found a mentor on Southern literature in the Welty scholar Michael Kreyling. But the pull of poetry was still there. I decided to tackle English 256 “Modern British and American Poetry” under Professor Bell. I soon saw a first-rate literary mind up close; forever after, I had little patience for mere performers. With his Georgia drawl, he recited so many lines from memory that I often hear his voice in my mind when I read Yeats, among others. He was not emotional but allowed emotion to pour out from the flat page.
Jon Parrish Peede, B.S. ’91, served as the eleventh chair man of the National Endow ment for the Humanities in Washington, DC.
JON PEEDE,PARRISHB.S.
Administrative Assistant II Srish
Graduate Student Assistant Terry
2021STUDENT2022ADVISORY COMMITTEE
Coordinator
Undergraduate Student Assistant Ariel
Harper Art Scott Juengel English Claire Sisco King Communication Studies James McFarland German, Russian and East European Studies Letizia Modena French and Italian Samira Sheikh History Anand Vivek Religious Studies Steve Wernke Anthropology RPW CENTER STAFF Holly Tucker Director Elizabeth Meadows Associate Director Mary Gray
Dylan Kistler
Senior, Cognitive Studies, Economics and English Morgan Elrod-Erickson Senior, English Induja Kumar Sophomore, Undeclared Srish Kumar Junior, Psychology and Political Science Becca Mendez Senior, Human & Organizational Development and English Clara McMillan Junior, English Briana Finocchiaro Senior, Human & Organizational Development Ashruta Narapareddy Junior, Medicine, Health, and Society & Neuroscience
37WORK IN PROGRESS | 2021-2022 RPW Center Staff CommitteesAdvisoryand 2021 –FACULTY2022ADVISORY COMMITTEE
Jana Lindstrom Kumar Le Duc Tripp Program Phoebe J. Thompson Program Specialist Danielle Wilfong 2019-2021 RPW Center HASTAC Scholar
39WORK IN PROGRESS | 2021-2022 Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities KEYWORD 2022-2023
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 TRANS FORMING asks how we might work collectively to acknowledge and reckon with such pain and vulner ability, 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?
2021-2022
Work Progressin