News

Clara wilch’s (24-26) podcast series Arctic Representation: Conversations with Inuit Artists released through LENS.cast (Spring 2026)

This is a three-part mini-series produced by Clara Wilch, Postdoctoral Fellow at Vanderbilt University and LENS scholar (PhD in Theater and Performance Studies, UCLA), and Spencer Robins, Professor at Saddleback College and LENS.cast lead producer (PhD in English, UCLA). Each episode features Clara in conversation with an artist in Iqaluit, Nunavut whose work guides audiences to better understand the many-dimensional Far North and how we might confront social and environmental injustices. These conversations address the artists’ relationships to land, identity and settler colonialism, and Arctic imaginaries.

July 7, 2026

Peter chesney’s (23-26) Op-ED “Why Nashville should be renamed, and who deserves the honor” published in The tennessean (Spring 2026)

In his recent op-ed for The Tennessean, Chesney calls for Nashville to reconsider its namesake, Francis Nash, a slaveholder and Revolutionary War figure from North Carolina. The piece proposes renaming the city in honor of civil rights leader Diane Nash. Drawing on the history of Nashville’s role in the Civil Rights Movement, including the Nashville sit-ins, Chesney argues that Diane Nash’s legacy offers a more fitting namesake for the city. Chesney frames his proposal in the context of the upcoming 250th anniversary of the United States and situates it within broader discussions of public naming practices, including the relative absence of places named for women of color in the United States. The full op-ed piece can be found here.

July 1, 2026

Nathalie Barton’s (24-26) article “Good Landlords Make Good Neighbors: Tenant Complaints, Social Policing, and the Responsibilities of Landlords in Interwar Chicago” recently published in the journal of urban history (Spring 2026)

By the 1920s, apartments were among the prototypical living arrangements for urban tenants in cities like Chicago. These tenants found their domestic lives constrained by the spatial realities of apartments and the landlord-tenant relationship. Through an examination of complaints filed with one landlord across multiple apartment buildings in Chicago, this article explores how tenants wrestled with constrained domesticity and the responsibilities of landlords. In doing so, tenants took up a long-running debate about the obligations of landlords, including to regulate the social world of buildings. Through complaints, tenants leveraged the property rights of their landlord to their own ends. They pushed for their landlord to police their neighbors as a means of enforcing gender and sexual norms, while upholding racial categories and segregation. This article argues that tenants worked to shape, contain, and harness the power of their landlord in ways that offer new perspectives on tenant activism and urban domesticity. An online version can be found here, with a print version forthcoming.

May 20, 2026

Re’ee Hagay’s (24-27) edited volume “critical jewish studies now: the relational politics of memory” soon to be published with springer press (June 2026)

This book is a multidisciplinary discussion of the possibility of Jewish critique, addressing intersections between Jewish Studies and critical paradigms in this moment of crisis. It traces how dominant modes of critique at times reproduce supersessionist and progress-oriented perspectives that foreclose critical possibilities offered by non-linear temporalities and only partially representable pasts. The contributors explore unexpected resonances between Mizrahi critique and Black thought, between the Palestinian and Jewish questions, and between Jewish practice and queer disruptions of traditionalist continuity, among others. It will be published in the series “Jewish Thought and Philosophy.”

May 11, 2026

Nat Rivkin’s (25-28) article “”Nevermore a Manly Shape Retaine”: Francis Beaumont’s Salmacis and Hermaphroditus, Fairness, and Trans Femininity c. 1602,” recently published in College Literature: A Journal of Critical Literary Studies 52:4 (Fall 2025)

In this article, Rivkin considers how Francis Beaumont’s Salmacis and Hermaphroditus depicts feminizing transition as itself a function of early modern race-making. Rivkin argues that Beaumont’s epyllion dramatically reshapes those we now call assigned male at birth using the uneven and erotic vocabulary of early modern English racial hierarchies. Salmacis and Hermaphroditus’s portrait of a fair hermaphrodite requires the disavowal of those who are not white and, in the case of Egypt, European. Rivkin maintains that Beaumont’s verse sutures a nymph to a boy only by continually signaling their racial sameness through anaphora and hyper-bole. That the poem so explicitly aligns feminizing transition with whiteness unsettles more recent, colorblind narratives of trans womanhood that can otherwise overlook the effortful makings of race. Beaumont’s blunt expressions of fairness many times over create what we may now recognize as a trans girl, softening a so-called “manly shape.”

May 11, 2026

Helen makhdoumian (23-26) awarded acls fellowship

Helen Makhdoumian (CHPP Fellow and Department of English) has won a prestigious ACLS (American Council of Learned Societies) fellowship for the next academic year. The ACLS announcement can be found here, and her project description can be found here. This is no small feat and we are very proud! 63 awardees across the US and in the humanities and social sciences were selected from a pool of over 2,000 applicants through a multi-stage peer review process and represent a broad range of institutions, fields, and career stages.

April 29, 2026