Author
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...
Common Ground?
Apr. 27, 2023—Rachel Heath is a 2022-23 Graduate Student Fellow from the Graduate Department of Religion. In the fourth quarter of the 2021 Superbowl, a commercial sponsored by Jeep called “The Middle” aired. It begins with a voiceover from Bruce Springsteen: “There’s a chapel in Kansas. Standing on the exact center of the lower-48. It never closes. All...
Literature, Images, and Collections: Assemblages of Settler Colonialism in Latin America
Apr. 25, 2023— Sahai Couso Díaz is a 2022-23 Graduate Student Fellow from the Department of Spanish and Portuguese. My current research builds upon the growing engagement by decolonial scholars and public intellectuals with long-lasting, pseudoscientific rhetorics of race. I fold together poetry, natural history, proto-anthropological debates, archival documents, scientific collections, and images to elucidate the local...
My Journey as a Literary Scholar: From Theory to Archives
Apr. 21, 2023—André Ramos-Chacón is a 2022-2023 “Mending and Transforming” Graduate Student Fellow For five years, as an undergraduate student of literature in Peru, I was taught to understand, appropriate, and apply theory for my study of books. Though, arguably, I was being taught at the margins of the academic establishment —in a State University in Arequipa,...