Current Faculty Fellows
2023-2024 Faculty Fellows – The Place of Memory
The Robert Penn Warren Center’s theme for AY 2023-24 is The Place of Memory. With equal emphasis on “place” and “memory,” we invite you to create, research, and (re)think what it means to navigate remembering and forgetting in our post-COVID, algorithmic world. Where does memory live in the body and how is it communicated through our actions in the world? How do places—geographical, corporeal, conceptual—inform memory? How do memory and place(s)—individual, collective, or historical—influence and shape each other? How do we memorialize so as to preserve, do justice, heal, and move forward? And when is it necessary to forget?
Dominique Béhague
Dominique Béhague is Associate Professor at the Department of Medicine, Health and Society at Vanderbilt University and holds a summer appointment at the Department of Global Health & Social Medicine at King’s College London. Béhague’s long-term research in Southern Brazil explores the intersection of psychiatry, politics, activism, and the emergence of adolescence and other life-cycle transitions as objects of developmental expertise. She co-designed the longitudinal ethnographic sub-study the 1982 Pelotas Birth cohort, one of a handful of interdisciplinary cohort studies taking place in a country in the Global South. Her research has received funding from the US National Science Foundation, the Fulbright Foundation, the World Health Organization, the UK Economic and Social Research Council, and The Wellcome Trust
Jefferson Cowie
Jefferson Cowie is the James G. Stahlman Professor of History. Cowie’s work in social and political history focuses on how class, race, inequality, and labor shape American politics and culture. In 2023, he won the Pulitzer Prize for History for his book, Freedom’s Dominion: A Saga of White Resistance to Federal Power (Basic, 2022). He is also the author of The Great Exception: The New Deal and the Limits of American Politics (Princeton 2016); Stayin’ Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class (New Press 2010); and Capital Moves: RCA’s Seventy Year Quest for Cheap Labor (New Press, 2000). His essays and opinion pieces have appeared in the New York Times, NPR Music, TIME magazine, Foreign Affairs, Chronicle of Higher Ed, American Prospect, Democracy, The New Republic, Dissent, and other popular outlets.
Nicole Creanza
Nicole Creanza is an Assistant Professor of Biological Sciences at Vanderbilt University. Her laboratory studies behavioral evolution: how behaviors that have to be learned, such as bird songs and human languages, change across generations. Her research builds on knowledge about learned behaviors from linguistics, animal behavior, and anthropology by integrating techniques and data from mathematical modeling and population genetics. As a Robert Penn Warren Faculty Fellow, she will use her background in cultural evolutionary theory to build computational models of how the transmission of human culture within and between generations is affected by both place and memory.
Tasha Rijke-Epstein
Tasha Rijke-Epstein is a historian and cultural anthropologist, whose research centers on questions of belonging, materiality, environment and the politics of placemaking in Madagascar and the broader Indian Ocean. Her first book, Children of the Soil: The Power of Built Form in Urban Madagascar is forthcoming with Duke University Press (October 2023), and her articles have appeared in a range of journals including Comparative Studies in Society and History, History and Technology, and The Journal of African History. She is currently Assistant Professor in the Department of History.
Carmine Grimaldi
Carmine Grimaldi is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Cinema and Media Arts, where he teaches filmmaking. He received his PhD in history at the University of Chicago, and trained as a filmmaker at Harvard’s Sensory Ethnography Lab. His films have screened at festivals such as True/False, Visions du Reel, The Museum of the Moving Image, Camden, RIDM, Sheffield Doc/Fest, and DokuFest, where he was awarded the prize for best short film, and in 2017 was named one of the 25 New Faces of Independent Film by Filmmaker Magazine. His writings on film and media have appeared in Representations, LARB, Millennium Film Journal, Mubi Notebook, and The Atlantic.
Kimberley D. McKinson
Kimberley D. McKinson is a cultural anthropologist whose research interests lie at the intersection of insecurity, memory, postcoloniality, and storytelling in Jamaica. Her writing has appeared in Cultural Anthropology, the Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology; Surveillance and Society, and Sapiens. Kimberley’s in-progress book manuscript is titled Caliban Untamed: In/security, Memory, and the Unmaking of Postcolonial Jamaica. Her research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the UC Center for New Racial Studies and the UC Collaboratory for Ethnographic Design. Kimberley is an Assistant Professor in Vanderbilt University’s Department of Anthropology.