Blog
Plastic and Rust: Memory Through the Lens of Early Videotape Psychotherapy Archives
Feb. 1, 2024—Carmine Grimaldi is a 2023-24 RPW Faculty Theme Fellow. This year’s cohort explores the theme of “The Place of Memory.” The Introduction of Videotape My research focuses on the early social history of videotape, when the electronic image crept into and profoundly reshaped the institutions and daily experiences of postwar America. In contrast to film,...
Indigenous Removals and Their Legacies: A Reading Guide to Start Campus Conversations
Jan. 18, 2024—Helen Makhdoumian is a Collaborative Humanities Postdoctoral Program Fellow with the Department of English. Last semester at Vanderbilt, I attended talks for “Cherokee and Chickasaw Students at Vanderbilt, 1885-1899,” a library exhibit organized by Professor Daniel Sharfstein, and the panel “The Land We Occupy: Vanderbilt Past and Present,” organized by the RPW Center’s Spatial Histories...
“I was born to be a wanderer”
Jan. 11, 2024—Aashi Gurijala is a 2023-24 Humanities in the Real World Fellow. This year’s undergraduate cohort are blogging their interviews with professionals who majored in the humanities. “I was born to be a wanderer,” Cat said boldly. As a humanities major, it’s hard to ignore the power of words and their ability to change us. What...
Urban Borderlands
Nov. 10, 2023—Anna Tybinko is a Collaborative Humanities Postdoctoral Program Fellow with the Department of Spanish & Portuguese. Slicing through the hillsides of North Africa there are two enormous, steel mesh barriers that divide the autonomous Spanish cities of Ceuta and Melilla (often referred to as enclaves) from Moroccan territory. These double-facing fences, or vallas, are nearly...
My Journey as a Literary Scholar: From Theory to Archives
Oct. 23, 2023—André Ramos-Chacón is a Mending and Transforming Fellow from the Department of Spanish and Portuguese. For five years, as an undergraduate student of literature in Peru, I was formed to understand, appropriate, and apply theory for my study of books. Though, arguably, I was being formed at the margins of the academic establishment —in a...
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...