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Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities

Staff

Holly Tucker, Director

Holly Tucker is the Mellon Foundation Chair in the Humanities and Professor in French. She teaches a wide range of classes at Vanderbilt, from first-year seminars to graduate-level seminars on medicine, literature, and culture. Across her research, Professor Tucker focuses how literature and medicine intersect in the early-modern period. Her work has been reviewed in Nature, The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Economist, among others, and has been featured as well on NPR, The Atlantic, Scientific American, in addition to journals specific to her field. Tucker is the recipient of VU Chancellor’s Award for Research and the Ellen Gregg Ingalls Award for Excellence in Classroom Teaching.

Professor Tucker’s publications include:

  • City of Light, City of Poison: Murder, Magic, and the First Police Chief of Paris (W.W. Norton, 2017)
  • Blood Work: A Tale of Medicine & Murder in the Scientific Revolution (W.W. Norton, 2011)
  • Pregnant Fictions: Childbirth & the Fairy Tale in Early-Modern France (Wayne State UP, 2003)

 

Elizabeth Meadows, Associate Director 

Elizabeth Meadows is associate director of the Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities, where she develops and leads undergraduate programming and community engagement projects in public humanities. Meadows spent six years at Vanderbilt’s Curb Center for Art, Enterprise, and Public Policy, where she led the Curb Scholars Program and the Creative Campus Initiative, offering faculty, staff, and students opportunities to engage in creative practice and fostering innovative collaborations with our campus and local community. At the Warren Center, Meadows is piloting the Humanities in the Real World Fellowship for undergraduates and developing an interdisciplinary project examining the intersection of built and natural environments. Meadows has published in Dickens Studies Annual, The Oxford Companion to Victorian Literary Culture and has collaboratively guest edited a special issue of Victorian Review.

 

Matt DiCintio, Associate Director

Matt DiCintio is associate director of the Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities, where he oversees general operations and graduate student programming. He returned to academia after a career in professional theatre as a playwright, dramaturg, and producer. As a historian, DiCintio specializes in early American popular entertainments (freak shows and animal displays) and how performance regulated access to political and cultural citizenship. He holds an MA in Romance Languages from the University of North Carolina, an MFA in Pedagogy from Virginia Commonwealth University, and a PhD in Drama from Tufts University. He is a member of The Dramatists Guild.

 

 

Terry Tripp, Activities Coordinator

Terry Tripp joined the Warren Center in 2013. Before that, she worked as an administrative assistant in the A&S Dean’s Office. She also worked with the ACLU of Tennessee and did freelance writing and editing for CABLE, a professional women’s organization. She has a B.A. in communications and minors in journalism and French, however, she has forgotten all of her French – even the swear words. She has one husband, two sons, two cats and one dog. Her children have rebelled against her in the cruelest way possible, by refusing to watch the “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” TV series. She hopes they see the error of their ways soon so she can say, “I told you so!”