Faculty
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...
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...
On Images
Mar. 22, 2023—Vesna Pavlović is a 2022-2023 RPW Center Faculty Fellow. This year’s group is exploring the theme of “Mending and Transforming.” Images have taken an unprecedented role in our lives. Vast amounts of existing and newly taken photographs, found and computer-generated, are widely and instantaneously disseminated through social media platforms. My photography challenges these conditions by exploring...
The History of Radical Women in the Cold War Era
Mar. 7, 2023—Allison Schachter is a 2022-2023 RPW Center Faculty Fellow. This year’s group is exploring the theme of “Mending and Transforming.” I am currently working on the history of radical women in the Cold War era. My research focuses on Black and Jewish women intellectuals who were the subjects of censure as leftists, feminists, and Jewish...
Stories We Tell about Addiction
Dec. 8, 2022—Arleen Tuchman is a 2022-2023 RPW Center Faculty Fellow. This year’s group is exploring the theme of “Mending and Transforming.” The stories we tell matter. They can do harm, as do the stories we tell about addiction in the United States today. They create borders, separating people with addictions and their families from their communities....
“It’s been getting weirder. I can’t wait for next year.”
Nov. 15, 2022—Diana Heney is a 2022-2023 RPW Center Faculty Fellow. This year’s group is exploring the theme of “Mending and Transforming.” “It’s been getting weirder. I can’t wait for next year.” This is the insight a colleague shared with me in the final session of my first trip to Imagining America. They had been to several previous...
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...
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...
Surviving in the Environment
Feb. 7, 2022—Meet Karen Ng, 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? In my research, I explore how concepts of life and organic nature played a central role in nineteenth-century German philosophy, especially in their theories of mind, agency, and community....