Author
Adapting Galeano’s “Magical Marxism”
Oct. 17, 2023—Jefferson Cowie, 2023-24 RPW Center Faculty Fellow. This year’s group is exploring the theme of “The Place of Memory.” “Memory of Fire” Who is responsible for this forgetfulness? "It's not a person. It's a system of power that is always deciding in the name of humanity who deserves to be remembered and who deserves to...
What Makes a Successful City?
Oct. 12, 2023—Peter Chesney is a Collaborative Humanities Postdoctoral Program Fellow with the Department of History of Art & Architecture. The Successful City Vanderbilt University hosted a symposium, “Universities, Cities, and Communities,” on September 21-22, 2023, to examine the question, “What makes a successful city?” A successful city is defined by the resilience of its long-standing...
Ethics of Memory: Remembering the May 18th People’s Uprising in South Korea
Oct. 5, 2023—Seulbin Lee, 2023-24 RPW Center Themed Graduate Fellow. This year’s group is exploring the theme of “The Place of Memory.” The Martyrs of Gwanju During the 2023 national commemoration ceremony of the May 18th People’s Uprising in 1980, held in the city of Gwangju, a small group of activists who had traveled from Seoul raised...
The Politics of Developmental Disruption: Memory, Place, and the Pandemic in Southern Brazil
Sep. 27, 2023—Dominique Béhague, 2023-24 RPW Center Faculty Fellow. This year’s group is exploring the theme of “The Place of Memory.” How and with what consequences do everyday people push against standardized views of “normal” and “healthy” development? Can reclaiming memory and place from the way developmental sciences conceive of these play a role in challenging developmental...
Bad Faith
Sep. 20, 2023—Tan Fireall, 2023-24 RPW Center Themed Graduate Fellow. This year’s group is exploring the theme of “The Place of Memory.” As we are born, we emerge through a kind of rupture. There is blood, tissue, and sometimes wailing from the pain and perhaps the existential quandary of being born to die. I wonder if this...
Malagasy Beekeepers: Cultural Meanings and Practices
Sep. 13, 2023—Tasha Rijke-Epstein, 2023-24 RPW Center Faculty Fellow. This year’s group is exploring the theme of “The Place of Memory.” So Many Beehives The knowledge, techniques, and practices of relating to the more-than-human world accrued by the Malagasy hold possibilities for imagining alternatives to contemporary predicaments of capitalism and environmental change. On an expedition to the...
Mobilizing Legacies: The Vocational Singlewoman and Nineteenth-Century Travel Memoirs
Sep. 7, 2023—Kelsey Rall, 2023-24 RPW Center Themed Graduate Fellow. This year’s group is exploring the theme of “The Place of Memory.” Single Ladies The word “spinster” usually connotes images of older women in dusty houses surrounded by mountains of knitted products, feelings of loneliness and superfluousness, and the derisive language of “old maids,” “shrews,” and “cat...
Caliban Untamed: In/security, Memory, and the Unmaking of Postcolonial Jamaica
Sep. 1, 2023—Kimberley D. McKinson, 2023-24 RPW Center Faculty Fellow. This year’s group is exploring the theme of “The Place of Memory.” Crime & Punishment The popular perspective on Jamaica is that it is enveloped by spectacular violence. Kingston, Jamaica’s capital city and its cultural, political, and economic hub has historically represented the hotbed for most of...
Barbenheimer and the Humanities
Aug. 24, 2023—Can the two blockbuster movies of the summer save the movie theater business, luring enough viewers off their couches and into the multiplex to stanch the flow of content to streaming services? I have no idea. What I do know, having shelled out my money to join the crowds flocking back to the movies this...