Blog
Needlework saved my mother’s life. Literally.
Sep. 6, 2022—Laura Carpenter is a 2022-2023 RPW Center Faculty Fellow. This year’s group is exploring the theme of “Mending and Transforming.” Needlework saved my mother’s life. Literally. On a Monday evening in February 2021, I got a text from one of my mom’s cronies. Carole hadn’t logged on to Zoom with her crochet and knitting group...
Thinking in Language
Apr. 25, 2022—Meet Laura Carter-Stone, a 2021-2022 RPW Center Environments Graduate Student Fellow. She is a PhD student in the Teaching, Learning, and Diversity program at Peabody College. Her research explores how the performing arts–especially the art of dramatic improvisation–can create emotionally engaging and collaborative language and literacy learning environments. What is your research about and why does...
Expanding the Renaissance
Apr. 18, 2022—Willnide Lindor is the 2021-2022 Elizabeth E. Fleming Fellow from the Department of English. Her research interests include: Renaissance Lyric Poetry and Drama, Early Modern Race Studies, Gender and Sexuality, and Postcolonial Theory. What is your research about and why does it matter? My current research explores nuanced depictions of blackness through the intersection of...
Migrating in Climates
Apr. 11, 2022—Meet Kelsea Best, a 2021-2022 RPW Center Environments Graduate Student Fellow. She is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, and her dissertation is entitled “Dynamics of Changing Landscapes, Livelihoods, and Migration in Bangladesh.” What is your research about and why does it matter? Climate change is one of the most urgent...
Musings on the Spaces of Violence
Apr. 4, 2022—Taryn Marashi is the 2021-2022 Stella Vaughn Fellow from the Department of History. Specializing in medieval Islamic history, her research interests include social power and group identity, violence and space, crime and punishment, and urbanization under Abbasid rule. The first time I read Henri Lefebvre’s book The Production of Space, I was a first year...
The Rare Maps of Guajarat
Mar. 28, 2022—Meet Samira Sheikh, a 2021-2022 RPW Center Faculty Fellow. This year’s group is exploring the theme of “Environments.” I was a graduate student at Oxford, writing a dissertation on politics in fifteenth-century Gujarat, in western India, when I received an intriguing stack of photocopies through the Pigeon Post, the university’s internal mail. A prominent historian...
Podcasting the Humanities
Mar. 21, 2022—Steven P. Rodriguez is a PhD candidate in history at Vanderbilt University. The growth of podcasting has made many of us in the humanities reconsider how we interact with the public and each other. In the best of cases, the quality and rigor of these shows is as high as any academic publication or conference...
What is Ideology?
Mar. 14, 2022—Emanuel Stults is a Doctoral Candidate in History at Vanderbilt University and co-organizer of the Political Ideology in Modern Life seminar at the Robert Penn Warren Center. For the past six months a small group of graduate students have been meeting at the Robert Penn Warren Center to discuss readings on the topic of ideology...
The Immortality of Blackness
Feb. 21, 2022—Courtney Brown is the 2021-2022 Mona C. Frederick Fellow from the Department of English. Her research focuses on the use of immortality as aesthetic practice in contemporary Black American art and literature. I specialize in 20th- and 21st-century Black American literature and visual culture. Currently, my research focuses on the use of immortality as aesthetic...
On the Nature of Things
Feb. 14, 2022—Meet Jessie Hock, a 2021-2022 RPW Center Faculty Fellow. This year’s group is exploring the theme of “Environments.” What does the phrase “Environments” mean to you? When I think of “environments,” I think about the set of interlocking circumstances that makes a surrounding. This is intentionally abstract: the project I’ll be working on as an...