Fellowship Recipients

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Arts & Humanities Faculty Fellowship Recipients

Abstract emblem of three books one dark blue, one crimson, and one gold, with the text "Arts & Humanities Faculty Fellowships""

2024 - 2025 Fellows

Diana Denham

Assistant Professor

Department of Geography and Environmental Sustainability

Indigenous Markets and the Struggle for Food Sovereignty in Urban Mexico

Dr. Denham’s project "Indigenous Markets and the Struggle for Food Sovereignty in Urban Mexico" is an urban ethnography and historical account of the survival of a mainstay of urban foodways since precolonial times - open-air markets held in streets and plazas best known by their Nahuatl name, tianguis. Against the tide of urban renewal and a supermarket explosion that has taken hold of global South cities, Indigenous markets have not only survived but also multiplied, in rhythm with growing cities across Mesoamerica. The surprising persistence of these markets, I argue, is due to a combination of survival tactics, organized resistance, and cultural resurgence. Together, these factors constitute both a movement for food sovereignty in the city and a form of Indigenous production of urban space. The book project reflects two years of ethnographic research conducted in Oaxaca, Mexico that aims to historicize tianguis while offering a contemporary account of the lived experiences of the marketgoers, cooks, activists, farmers, and vendors who propel their resurgence. Focusing on one of Mesoamerica's most ancient urban foodways, the book casts new light on the history of spatial exclusion of Indigenous people from Mexican cities while foregrounding Indigenous struggles against peripheralization and erasure.

Stephanie Pilat

Associate Professor

Gibbs College of Architecture

Cultivating Creativity

Cultivating Creativity draws on the newly created American School archive to tell the story of how a small group of faculty at the University of Oklahoma developed a radical approach to teaching architecture in the mid-twentieth century. Through a narrative non-fiction account of the American School’s history, the book details how the faculty built a culture and a curriculum to reflect their shared values. Cultivating Creativity highlights the dramatic and at times tragic human story at the heart of this history by centering on Bruce Goff, chair of the school from 1947-56. Goff led the faculty to design a remarkably successful curriculum that prized originality instead of imitation. Recent scholarship on teaching and learning is woven throughout to help explain why these new methods were effective; we now know, for example, that the harsh learning environments typical of architecture schools negatively impact student learning. Examining the history and pedagogy of the American School, the book considers, how is creativity taught? What kinds of learning environments, practices and assignments best cultivate it? Cultivating Creativity is a book about the history of the American School and a book for the future of design education.

Sarah Hines

Associate Professor

Department of History

Glacier Fathers and Mother Earth: Race, Gender, and Climate Change in the Bolivian Andes

2023-2024 Fellows

Melinda Chen

Assistant Professor

Women's and Gender Studies

Killing Radicalism: Neoliberalism, Normativity, and the Anti-Rape Movement

Dr. Chen’s project, Killing Radicalism: Neoliberalism, Normativity & the Anti-Rape Movement, explores diversity in rape victim advocacy. Victim advocates are designated anti-rape workers at nonprofit rape crisis centers who emotionally validate survivors’ experiences with sexual violence and connect survivors to resources, such as counseling and housing support. While advocates are overall helpful at reducing survivors’ trauma, many scholars have overlooked the ways that advocates can hurt underrepresented ‘marginalized’ survivors, such as people of color and LGBTQ+ people, when they separate anti-rape work from activism against interlocking oppressions. Drawing on qualitative interviews with 63 victim advocates and queer methodologies, Killing Radicalism illustrates that even the best intentions can have dire consequences when they are not thoughtful about minority cultural representations.

Tess Elliot

Associate Professor

School of Visual Arts - Art, Technology and Culture

Ultimate Sim

Ultimate Sim is an interactive artwork, online game, and speculative design tool to tackle the climate crisis. It sits at the intersection of two important contemporary art movements: critical art games and climate-activist art. The project reimagines the popular 1990’s video game SimCity, mimicking its graphics and game mechanics while inverting the overall narrative structure and gameplay of the original. Climate change is a “hyperobject”: an immense, structural force that we cannot comprehend, but strive to, through computer modeling. By shrinking space and time scales of climate change and its array of challenges to the size of a standard 2D video game in a layout that provides its players a gods-eye perspective and modular control, the hyperobject becomes accessible for a broad public to play/test emerging and speculative climate solutions for real world locations. This framework energizes active participation in imagining climate futures and solutions for one’s local environment. Ultimate Sim will be free and accessible online to engage a global, general audience.

Waleed Mahdi

Associate Professor

International and Area Studies
Modern Languages, Literatures, and Linguistics

From Drones to Travel Bans: US Violence and Yemeni Visual Narratives of Resistance

Dr. Mahdi's project explores how US security, diplomatic, and cultural sites of influence have produced visual modes of seeing Yemen that renders the country and its people unseen, or more accurately, seen through the global war on terror. He also offers a multi-layered analysis of the aesthetics of Yemeni and Yemeni American visual artists’ responses, ranging from street art campaigns and political cartoons to films, posters, and art exhibitions. The context of his research draws from US-Yemeni cultural politics at the interplay of the tragic attacks of 9/11 (2001) and the revolutionary fervor of the Arab Spring (2011). Seeing Yemen moves us beyond a US-securitized lens characterized by violence and imperial amnesia to a Yemeni lens marked by witnessing, grieving, and defying erasure.

2022-2023 Fellows

Erin Duncan-O'Neill

Assistant Professor

Art History

In Jest: Satire and Politics in the Art of Honoré Daumier

This book traces the centrality of literary and theatrical sature in the political expression of artworks by Honoré Daumier. Most famous as a political cartoonist in nineeenth-century Grance, Daumier developed a deep and abiding engagement with the seventeenth-century satire during periods when explicitly political material was censored in the illustrated press. Duncan-O'Neill examines how Daumier drew on theater and literature at moments of intense repression, contextualizing his citations withing the broader popular revivals of the authors, to show that they offered important representational strategies to the visual arts in the face of stifling censorship.

Joseph Mansky

Assistant Professor

English

Seeds of Sedition: Plays, Libels, and the Public Sphere in Shakespeare's England

This book tracks libels through and around the early modern theater. In the 1590s, a series of crises--simmering xenophobia, years of dearth and hunger, surges of religious persecution--sparked an unprecedented explosion of libeling. The same years also saw the first appearances of libels on the London stages. These defamatory, seditious texts were launched into the sky, cast in a window, affixed to a statue, recited in court, read from a pulpit, and seized by informers. These overlooked representations of libel have much to tell us about England's nascent public sphere and the place of drama within it.

Peter Soppelsa

Assistant Professor

History of Science

The Fragility of Urban Modernity: Living with Infrastructure in Paris, 1870-1914

This book examines the lived experience of housing, transportation, water, and sanitation infrastructures as complex and fragile networked systems that are social-technological-environmental hybrids. During this period of intensive infrastructure development known as “Haussmannization,” infrastructures inspired new political conflicts due to their complexities, failings, fragility, and risks. Cascading infrastructure failures, critical resource shortages, physical accidents, and the upheavals of demolition and construction demonstrated the challenges of deepening dependence on infrastructures in a highly networked city. These challenges called into question what scholars call the “modern infrastructural ideal,” the idea of standard, ubiquitous infrastructure networks bringing social progress, which owes much to Paris’s experience of Haussmannization.

2021-2022 Fellows

Kalenda Eaton

Associate Professor

African and African American Studies

Black Women Writers and the New Plains Narrative

Dividing Lines: Black Women (Re)Writing the Great Plains examines historical fiction by contemporary Black women in the United States and Canada representing key moments of conflict and contact on the Great Plains in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The fictional accounts position the Great Plains as space where ideals of democracy and freedom for African Americans were imagined, attempted, but not fully realized. The writings enhance historical research andprovide expanded discussionsof "race," identity, and displacement through their concern with communalism and economoc self-sufficiency on the frontier.

Laurel C. Smith

Associate Professor & Associate Chair

Geography and Envuronmental Sustainability

The Emergence and Agency of Tribal Environmental Professionals in Oklahoma

My project examines the cultural and political geographies from which Tribal environmental programs emerged in Oklahoma during the 1990s. It also documentsthe activities, aims, and partnerships of the Tribal environmental professionals (TEPs) who design and deliver theservices these programs currently provide humans as well as the more than human actors (e.g., plant and animals) sustained bythe land and waters under Tribal jurisdiction. This project explores community resilience and environmental justice and mobilizes a geographical approach to study the cultural and political entanglements characterizing Native nations, sovereignty, and partnershipsin Oklahoma.

Kari A. B. Chew

Assistant Professor

Educational Leadership and Policy Studies

Enacting Relationality in Online Indigenous Language Revitalization Efforts

Indigenous language revitalization and reclamation (ILR) responds to enduring legacies of colonization that have threatened natural processes of intergenerational knowledge sharing and the continuance of Indigenous languages. Within this work, Indigenous cultural values of relationality are of the utmost importance. Indigenous understandings of relationalisty hold that people are related to one another, the land, the spirits, and to language itself. Utilizing an Indigenous methodology rooted in a relational epistemology, this research explores how Indigenous communities enact relationality in online space which support ILR efforts.

2020-2021 Fellows

Nancy LaGreca, Professor, Spanish

"Latin American Women Novelists of Modernismo: The Dawn of the New Woman" is the first book-length study of women narrators of Latin American modern-ismo from the 1890s to the early 20^th century (not to be confused with Anglo modernism). Few scholars are aware that women wrote modernista fiction, infamous for its risqué, morally questionable content. LaGreca’s study makes a new contribution by raising awareness of bold women novelists from across the continent who dared to tell the untellable, availing themselves of the literary tropes of the modernista novel. The primary texts present the free-thinking New Woman through a heroine who is a breadwinner; eschews marriage; self-reflects on her non-conformist feminine identity; and/or leads a life independent of men. Women fiction writers of modernismo, riding the rule-breaking wave of the movement, explore the freedoms and dangers that women faced in a moment of cultural transition, between an era dominated by the traditional image of the Angel of the House and the dawn of the New Woman in print culture.

Aparna Nair, Assistant Professor, History of Science

Dr. Nair's project, "Lives Worth Living: Disability Histories of the Global South, 1900-1980," asks how disabled people in India in the 20th century understood and experienced technology? Since the 19th century, technology has routinely been presented as a particularly important ‘panacea’ to the 'problem' of disability, whether it was artificial limbs that promised the restoration of function and form or devices for the deaf that promise to 'cure' deafness. Technology is often seen as central to global development ventures targeted at disabled populations, as it is believed to facilitate anti-poverty efforts, increasing social and economic participation and improving access. But is technology truly liberatory or transformative for disabled people in spaces like India, and if so, to what extent? This project examines the complicated relationships between disability, technology and biomedicine in India, by focusing on the histories and use of prosthetic limbs, Bharatiya Braille presses and texts, hearing aids and orthotics. Using mixed methods, including research in multiple archives as well as oral histories, this project will create a public physical exhibit and an online digital exhibit on disability, technology and experience in the spaces of the Global South from the period between 1900 to 1980.

Jennifer Saltzstein, Anadarko Petroleum Corporation Presidential Professor of Music (Musicology)

Dr. Saltzstein's book, "Song, Landscape, and Identity in Medieval Northern France: Toward an Environmental History," investigates how northern French vernacular poets and musicians writing in the late middle ages expressed relationships between people and their environments during the last major era of climate change—the shift from the temperate Medieval Climate Anomaly to the Little Ice Age. By integrating an analysis of medieval French songs, many of which feature outdoor settings, within the context of medieval farming and land management, urban studies, landscape architecture, and climate history, the book positions medieval song as a privileged vehicle through which songwriters expressed relationships between nature, place, and class.

Zoe Sherinian, Professor, Ethnomusicology

The parai frame drum is still considered “untouchable” in Tamil Nadu, India. Yet, activists in the contemporary Dalit (outcaste) civil rights movement have embraced it as a tool and symbol of liberation. Dr. Sherinian's book "Drumming Our Liberation: The Spiritual, Cultural, and Sonic Power of the Parai Drum" is grounded in contemporary ethnomusicological theories of the study of instruments and phenomenology (experience of the body) showing how Dalits have shifted the parai’s understanding from a ritual object to a political symbol, which empowers Dalit youth and women, expresses political agency, and through which sonic impact creates social change. In this study, Dr. Sherinian uses historical iconographic and textual data, film as a template for phenomenological music-dance analysis, and ethnographic research including self-study. She shows how the parai has become a political tool in the public sphere of caste politics, invoking catharsis to transform internalized casteism, sexism, and cultural identity within the oppressed. The broader humanities impact of this book is on intersections of caste and gender oppression, film in activist ethnography, and distribution through a digital humanities package of the book, films, and a website.

Previous Fellowship Recipients