2022-2023 Faculty Fellows – Mending and Transforming

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.

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, 1965-2020.