{"id":172032,"date":"2021-04-29T07:00:12","date_gmt":"2021-04-29T11:00:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/?p=172032&preview=true&preview_id=172032"},"modified":"2022-12-02T15:52:37","modified_gmt":"2022-12-02T20:52:37","slug":"20th-class-of-humanities-institute-fellows-pursue-wide-range-of-scholarship","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/2021\/04\/20th-class-of-humanities-institute-fellows-pursue-wide-range-of-scholarship\/","title":{"rendered":"20th Class of Humanities Institute Fellows Pursue Wide Range of Scholarship"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

The 2021-22 class of University of Connecticut Humanities Institute (UCHI) Fellows will pursue projects from the Renaissance to the present that cover a wide range of topics from racism in the academy to environmental justice.

This year\u2019s class of Fellows is the twentieth cohort and includes two visiting residential fellows, four dissertation scholars, and nine UConn faculty fellows, including the Henry Luce Foundation Future of Truth Fellow and the Mellon UCHI Faculty of Color Working Group Fellow.

The Fellows represent varied disciplines including History, English, Philosophy, Political Science, Sociology, Communication, Anthropology, Women\u2019s, Gender, & Sexuality Studies, Africana Studies, Asian & Asian American Studies, Human Development & Family Sciences, and Art & Art History. The 2021-22 Fellows and their projects are:

Faculty<\/strong>

\u2022 Meina Cai, assistant professor of political science and Asian and Asian American Studies; \u201cThe Art of Negotiations: Legal Discrimination, Contention Pyramid, and Land Rights Development in China\u201d identifies negotiations as a strategy for land-dispossessed villagers to protect their property rights in a context where the legal framework discriminates against them.

\u2022 Haile Eshe Cole, assistant professor of anthropology and Africana Studies; \u201cBelly: Topographies of Black Reproduction\u201d explores the impacts of racism-induced stress on Black women\u2019s health and addresses the ways in which geo-political processes such as segregation, institutions, policy, and community organizing have larger impacts on the reproductive health and well-being of Black women in the United States.

\u2022 Shard\u00e9 M. Davis, assistant professor of communication and Africana Studies\/Women\u2019s Gender and Sexuality Studies and UCHI Faculty of Color Working Group Fellow; \u201cBeing #BlackintheIvory: Contending with Racism in the American University.\u201d She will edit a volume of personal stories from Blackademics to reveal the through line of how anti-Blackness and racism eats its way through the ivory tower and offer prescriptions about how academic institutions, and its individual members, might make lasting change.

\u2022 Prakash Kashwan, associate professor of political science; \u201cRooted Radicalism: Transformative Change for Food, Energy, Water, and Environmental Justice in an Age of Climate Change\u201d will be a book manuscript that develops a holistic view of justice in the critical sectors of food, energy, water, urbanization, and ecological protection.

\u2022 Laura Mauldin, associate professor of human development & family sciences and Women\u2019s Gender & Sexuality Studies\/sociology; \u201cFor All We Care\u201d is a book project based on the stories of spousal\/partner caregivers who everyday provide extraordinary care to their partners despite near total abandonment from the state. Mauldin uses interviews with dozens of spousal caregivers across the country, as well as her own experience, to reveal the realities of this untenable arrangement.

\u2022 Micki McElya, professor of history; \u201cNo More Miss America! How Protesting the 1968 Pageant Changed a Nation\u201d is a character-driven work of history examining beauty, feminism, race, women\u2019s rights, and politics in the twentieth-century U.S. through the events of the 1968 Miss America Pageant.

\u2022 Kathryn Blair Moore, assistant professor of art & art history; \u201cThe Other Space of the Arabesque: Italian Renaissance Art at the Limits of Representation\u201d aims to deconstruct a still prevalent contrast between Islamic art, understood as inherently non-representational and abstract, and European art, understood as inherently naturalistic and representational.

\u2022 Fiona Vernal, associate professor of history and Africana Studies; \u201cHartford Bound: Mobility, Race, and Identity in the Post-World War II Era (1940-2020)\u201d integrates oral histories, archival research, and GIS methodologies to reframe the history of how Hartford became an African American and a Caribbean city.

\u2022 Sarah S. Willen, associate professor of anthropology and Future of Truth Fellow; \u201c\u2018Chronicling the Meantime\u2019: Creating a Book about the Pandemic Journaling Project\u201d will be a book about the innovative, \u201cborn-digital\u201d interdisciplinary archive that as of February 2021 had resulted in 725 people in 31 countries contributing over 6,500 journal entries about their experiences during the COVID 19 pandemic.

Visiting Residential Fellows<\/strong>

\u2022 Sherie M. Randolph, associate professor of history and sociology, Georgia Institute of Technology; \u201c\u2018Bad\u2019 Black Mothers: A History of Transgression\u201d is a book that examines Black mothers who fashioned lives driven by a commitment to artistic, political, and intellectual work\u2014but mothering their children was not a priority. The life histories will include artists such as Camille Billops, Howard University professor Marion Thompson Wright, Black Power activist Nehanda Abiodun, and writer Alice Walker.

\u2022 Shiloh Whitney, associate professor of philosophy, Fordham University; \u201cEmotional Labor: Affective Economies and Affective Injustice\u201d is a book that aims to ameliorate the concept of emotional labor, clarifying what is salient about it for intersectional feminist purposes and developing an analytical and normative framework for understanding and evaluating it. \u201cEmotional labor\u201d is characterized as work done by domestic workers, university professors, girlfriends, call center agents, flight attendants, and feminist activists.

Dissertation Scholars<\/strong>

\u2022 Erik Freeman, doctoral candidate in history and Draper Dissertation Fellow; \u201cThe Mormon International:
Communitarian Politic and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, 1830-1890\u201d explores the convergence of faith and politics during the nineteenth century through the lens of transnational Mormon communitarianism.

\u2022 Carol Gray, doctoral candidate in political science; \u201cLaw as Politics by Other Means: An Egyptian Case Study as a Template for Human Rights Reform\u201d examines how law is both a sword and shield, and how Egypt\u2019s human rights movement can be a template for reform in other authoritarian countries.

\u2022 Drew Johnson, doctoral candidate in philosophy; \u201cA Hybrid Theory of Ethical Thought and Discourse\u201d applies prominent recent philosophical theories of expression and representation to develop a novel \u201chybrid\u201d theory recognizing the joint role of reason and emotion in ethical judgment.

\u2022 Anna Ziering, doctoral candidate in English; \u201cDirty Forms: Masochism and the Revision of Power in Multi-Ethnic U.S. Literature and Culture\u201d explores masochism\u2014erotic pleasure derived from consensual pain\u2014as a site of and tool for anti-racist work.

For more information about UConn Humanities Institute Fellows, visit the website.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This year\u2019s class of fellows includes two visiting residential fellows, four dissertation scholars, and nine UConn faculty fellows<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":18,"featured_media":162443,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_crdt_document":"","wds_primary_category":0,"wds_primary_series":0,"wds_primary_attribution":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2275,2226,2430,1914,2235],"tags":[],"magazine-issues":[],"coauthors":[1918],"class_list":["post-172032","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-academic-affairs","category-clas","category-philosophy","category-sfa","category-today-homepage"],"pp_statuses_selecting_workflow":false,"pp_workflow_action":"current","pp_status_selection":"publish","acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-05-29 17:04:55","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/172032","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/users\/18"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=172032"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/172032\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":192969,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/172032\/revisions\/192969"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media\/162443"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=172032"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=172032"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=172032"},{"taxonomy":"magazine-issue","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/magazine-issues?post=172032"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=172032"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}