Jayedi Aman
Assistant Professor, Architectural Studies
2025-26

Project: "My project, titled “Geospatial Intelligence-Based Urban Building Energy Modeling (UBEM)”, addresses the need for scalable, data-driven energy modeling approaches to support sustainable urban planning. As cities grow, understanding and managing the energy demands of urban buildings becomes essential for achieving sustainable development goals. This research focuses on integrating three key building characteristics—window-to-wall ratio, building height, and infiltration rates—that significantly impact energy performance. However, these characteristics are often difficult to measure accurately due to data limitations, which often necessitates calibration processes to account for uncertainties and enable more reliable energy assessments.

To address these challenges, I am developing a comprehensive dataset using mass thermal imaging and LiDAR technology from Columbia, MO. By applying Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and advanced computer vision techniques, I will analyze these parameters and incorporate them into a validated UBEM model. This model aims to provide an accurate assessment of urban buildings' energy use, enabling data-informed decisions for sustainable urban planning.

The goal of this research is to demonstrate how UBEM can support carbon reduction by offering a robust foundation for sustainable urban planning, aligned with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). As a pilot study, the findings will contribute to policy development for the City of Columbia, MO, with applications that can extend to a variety of urban contexts.

During the A&S Writing Fellows Program, my primary objective is to complete an article detailing these findings. This article will contribute to the literature on sustainable urban planning and support the growth of the Spatial Intelligence Lab at MU. Additionally, it will lay the groundwork for future research and grant applications, driving further exploration into scalable urban energy solutions."

Dorothy Atuhura
Assistant Professor, Black Studies
2025-26

Project: "With the hope that this fellowship will offer me a unique opportunity to immerse myself in an environment that supports rigorous writing, during the writing program fellowship, I plan to dedicate my time to advancing my book manuscript. My manuscript tentatively titled “Voices and Shadows: African Intersex Life” explores the intersections of differences of sex development (DSD), traditional cultural narratives, and social justice in Africa. The prevalence and management of DSD in Africa is shaped by and presents a complex interplay of colonial medical history, harmful traditional cultural practices, and problematic socio-political framing of the sexuality, gender and human rights. My manuscript has three objectives: (1) it documents local and indigenous epistemologies on prevalence and management of DSD; (2) examines political and sociocultural ramifications for individuals born with DSD, highlighting how these interact with historical legacies of colonial medicine, legislation and lexicon; (3) produces knowledge about and challenges harmful cultural practices surrounding DSD. During my tenure at the Writing Fellowship Program my goal will be to complete a comprehensive draft of the manuscript’s first chapter to submit with my book proposal by the end of the fall semester 2025. The chapter examines the sociocultural dynamics mainly focusing on understanding African cultural beliefs, traditions, and practices surrounding DSD and the sociocultural consequences. I hope to refine this chapter through the interdisciplinary writing workshops and peer collaboration offered by the Writing Fellowship Program through feedback from other fellows in the program and its coordinators. By the end of the program, I hope to have laid a solid foundation for the book proposal which I hope to submit to university presses focused on Black Studies, African studies, sexuality and gender studies, such as Duke and Rochester University Presses."

Beiyin Deng
Assistant Professor, Classics, Archaeology, and Religion
2025-26

Project: "The Cultural Revolution is infamous for its violent destruction of religious icons, yet the subsequent surge in demand for Buddhist images in the post-Mao Buddhist revival in China have received scant attention. My research monograph project, tentatively titled "Seeking Magnificence: Material, Labor, and Buddhist Economy across Myanmar-China Borders," argues that the post-Mao Buddhist revival cannot be understood solely within the confines of China; materially, it is and must be viewed as a transnational phenomenon.

"Seeking Magnificence" investigates contemporary craftsmanship in the trade of marble Buddhist images across the Myanmar-China border to reveal the influence of regional economic integration on the material construction of the Buddhist world. It traces the cultural traditions and political-economic conditions that have contributed to these transnational circulations of religious material and labor from Myanmar to post-Mao China. Furthermore, it analyzes the processes of material sourcing, artisan recruitment, carving and polishing, and transcultural marketing within this trade to explicate how a particular form of Buddhist magnificence derived from white marble, or white jade (C. baiyu) in vernacular Chinese, is religiously and economically cultivated, crafted, and promoted through the collaboration between Burmese artisans and Han-Chinese workshop owners. In analyzing the encounters between Burmese artisans and Han-Chinese Buddhist clients and workshop owners, it highlights this trade as a religious-economic entanglement where ethnic-cultural, national, and Buddhist sectarian boundaries of participants are constantly crossed, negotiated, reformulated, or reinforced, thus challenging conventional and static academic boundaries between Myanmar and China, Southeast and East Asia, and Theravada and Mahayana Buddhism.

During the Arts & Science Writing Fellowship Program (2025-26), I will finish writing and revising the Introduction and two chapters (out of five) of my book manuscript. My goal is to submit these chapters to editors to secure a book contract by the end of my second year at MU."

Raghda El-Behaedi
Assistant Professor, Department of Classics, Archaeology, and Religion
2025-26

Project: “As part of the program, I plan to complete a book proposal, along with one body chapter of the book manuscript, which will be based on my ongoing research on the ancient hydraulic landscape and settlement development of the Fayum Depression, Egypt. The issue of diminishing water supplies due to climate change is an increasingly urgent global challenge. As water resources diminish, the consequences extend beyond environmental concerns, triggering social impacts such as mass migration, shifting settlement patterns, and economic collapse. However, the struggle to manage and adapt to water scarcity is not unique to the modern world. It is a challenge that spans both time and space. Just as today’s societies grapple with dwindling water supplies, ancient populations faced similar challenges. My book will examine how the ancient Egyptian community in the Fayum responded to prolonged environmental stress caused by the gradual retreat of Lake Moeris over the course of 5,500 years. By using cutting-edge remote sensing technologies, including satellite imagery, geophysical analysis, and field surveys, I aim to explore three key questions: (1) How did Lake Moeris evolve from the Neolithic to the Ptolemaic Period? (2) What patterns of water advancement and retreat can be identified, and what factors contributed to these shifts? (3) How did human activity in the Fayum adapt to the changing hydraulic landscape? By investigating these questions, my monograph will explore human adaptability and resilience in the face of environmental changes. My aim is to show that the experiences of the ancient Fayum community reflect a broader truth: that throughout history, even in the face of adversity, humanity has continually adapted, innovated, and found ways to thrive.”

Anna Fett
Assistant Professor, Black Studies and Peace Studies
2025-26

Project: "During the A&S Writing Fellows Program, I will write and revise my first book manuscript, tentatively titled “Democratic Double-Talk: Interfaith Dialogue, Intergroup Education Programs, and U.S. Imperialism, 1937-1967.” By tracing the transnational history of the National Conference of Christians and Jews (NCCJ), this project demonstrates how voluntary nongovernmental interfaith dialogue and intergroup education programming became tools of midcentury U.S. imperialism. First, the project examines how NCCJ leaders worked alongside other intergroup educators to cast healthy “intergroup relations” as the heart of American spiritual and psychological morale—and thus the key to winning the Second World War. The project then investigates why U.S. military officials invited NCCJ representatives, acting as “intergroup relations” experts, into the U.S. occupation zone in Germany to “democratically” rehabilitate German hearts and minds. Finally, the project considers how the NCCJ’s transnational ventures forced the organization to reshape its domestic mission, as it was forced to confront American (inter)religious and (inter)racial conflict and inequalities amidst a globalized Cold War environment.

This project draws on a range of English-language archival materials housed at six U.S. university libraries and governmental repositories. I will conduct further research at the University of Southampton’s Special Collections in Southampton, UK, in the summer of 2025. My book is five chapters in length. I have already written Chapter 3 with plans to complete the book proposal and Chapter 1 by the spring of 2025. After completing additional research in the summer of 2025, I will be prepared to use my time with the WFP to write Chapter 2 and complete revisions on Chapter 3 in the fall of 2025. Participating in the WFP will provide crucial feedback for me as I continue writing and making revisions on this manuscript, the major publication critical for my tenure. In particular, this revision process will facilitate securing a book contract with a university press."

M Folescu
Associate Professor, Philosophy
2025-26

Project: "Thinking through the Past: Reid on the Epistemic Value of Memory

I am applying for the A&S Writing Fellows Program to write one chapter of a book-length project designed to give us a better understanding of some of the hard problems of memory. The book, titled Thinking Through the Past: Reid on the Epistemic Value of Memory, is an incursion into the philosophical history of memory, as well as a re-evaluation of current trends in the philosophy of memory.

Memory is essential to our functioning as fully developed individuals. Being in the world presupposes our remembering most of what we did; without access to this information, we would be unable to acquire and process any kind of knowledge about ourselves and the world we live in. Memory, however, is often unreliable. My book will offer an analysis of Thomas Reid’s (1710-1796) philosophy of memory. Reid scholarship has primarily focused on explaining his contributions to the philosophy of perception, but what remains understudied is what his work can help us understand about memory. What emerges is a picture of the interplay between perception and memory in constructing our knowledge of the present, not just the past.

The book is designed to have 6 chapters, as well as an Introduction and a Conclusion. I have already written 2 of the core chapters. As a Fellow, I would write another core chapter: “Memory’s role in self-knowledge". We all know immediately and without the possibility of error when we are in pain; is this true for thoughts of every kind? There is currently little research on how we structure knowledge of ourselves, based on more complex mental states like desires, beliefs, and imaginings, and on memory’s contributions to such knowledge. We need such research to explain the extent and limits of self-knowledge."

Emmett Harsin Drager
Assistant Professor, Women's and Gender Studies
2025-26

Project: "I hope to participate in the A&S Writing Fellows Program during the Fall Semester of 2025 to advance my book proposal and prepare a chapter of my manuscript. Currently, I am a first-year assistant professor in the Department of Women’s and Gender Studies. Before my tenure-track appointment, I spent two years as a teaching postdoc in WGST, where I taught a 2-2 course load.

As I begin to work towards tenure, my initial focus is on drafting a book proposal and preparing 1-2 manuscript chapters for my project, To Be Seen: Transsexuals and the Gender Clinics. The book explores the history of trans therapeutics in the U.S., particularly focusing on the university-based gender clinics of the 1960s and 70s. The project narrates the emergence of “transsexuality,” as a category of person, clinical diagnosis, identity formation, and embodied practice. Interdisciplinary in approach, the book integrates queer and gender theory, transgender studies, Black feminist theory, critical archival studies, narrative studies, and science and technology studies. It offers an account of how transgender medicine’s therapeutic logics are rooted in U.S. histories of racial exclusion, eugenics, and ideals of productive citizenship.

The book manuscript will build on my dissertation (of the same title). Content from two of the chapters have already appeared in GLQ: A Journal of Gay and Lesbian Studies and the anthology Turning Archival: The Life of the Historical in Queer Studies. The A&S Writing Fellows program’s course release and weekly writing sessions would provide me with invaluable time and writing support to complete my book proposal and develop a chapter of the manuscript, positioning me for a publishing contract and success on the tenure track. Thank you for your time and consideration."

Anna Marrero
Assistant Professor, School of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures
2025-26

Project: "My research project is aimed at improving teacher preparation in mixed-language classrooms, those that serve both Spanish heritage language (SHL) and second language (L2) learners. It explores the effectiveness of integrating SHL-specific pedagogy and Critical Language Awareness (CLA) into teacher training programs. The goal is to address a gap in existing language teacher education by developing pedagogical strategies that more effectively prepare teachers to manage the unique linguistic and cultural needs of SHL students alongside L2 learners. This research is based on the fact that traditional teacher training frequently overlooks the distinct needs of SHL learners, who bring varied linguistic experiences to the classroom. Teachers, therefore, need specialized training in recognizing and valuing these diverse language practices. By incorporating CLA, the project also aims to help teachers become more critically aware of the power dynamics and social hierarchies embedded in language use, equipping them with tools to challenge deficit perspectives toward SHL learners' language varieties.

The writing project will consist of drafting a manuscript that presents findings from a semester-long intervention in a Heritage Language Pedagogy course. The study will analyze how SHL-specific training impacts teachers' classroom practices and attitudes toward linguistic diversity, drawing on data collected from reflective assignments and teacher feedback. The methods will include qualitative analyses of teacher reflections to assess the training’s impact on their approaches to teaching SHL learners. The goal is to publish this article in a peer-reviewed journal to contribute to the broader conversation on inclusive teaching practices in language education. During the program, I will set clear writing goals each week, with milestones that include outlining the article, drafting key sections, and revising. Participating in the Writing Fellows Program will provide the necessary time, structure, and support to complete this research, while improving my writing habits and ensuring timely progress toward publication."

Victor McFarland
Associate Professor, History
2025-26

Project: "I am applying for the A&S Writing Fellows Program in SP 2026 to finish my book on the history of nuclear fracking. It examines a little-remembered effort by the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) to produce oil and gas with the aid of nuclear explosives, fracturing underground layers of rock and releasing previously trapped hydrocarbons.

The AEC carried out three tests of this technique in 1967-1973. Planned commercial deployment would have been on a massive scale, with around 30,000 nuclear explosives. The project ran into a variety of technical and political challenges, however – including opposition from local citizens – and was abandoned after the early 1970s.

This book project is already at an advanced stage. I have completed extensive archival research supported by an MU Research Council Grant (URC-23-014). I have presented my findings at several major scholarly conferences, including the annual meetings of the Society for the History of Technology, the American Society for Environmental History, and the Canadian Historical Association.

I was also invited to a fully funded international conference at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. My paper from that conference, “The Waters of Project Plowshare: Hydraulic Engineering and Fracking with Nuclear Explosives,” is now a chapter in page proofs with the edited MIT Press volume THE NUCLEAR-WATER NEXUS (Per Högselius and Siegfried Evens, eds.). MIT is interested in publishing my full book, and their acquisitions editor has asked me to submit a proposal.

The research for this project is complete, and the writing is underway. I plan to finish by the end of SP 2026. An A&S Writing Fellowship would be extremely beneficial, giving me the opportunity to join a cohort of fellow writers at the Conley House, and providing the dedicated time needed to finish the manuscript and submit it for publication."

Megan Moore
Professor & Department Chair, SLLC
2025-26

Project: "For the fellowship, I will complete chapter two of my book project, Strange Figures, entitled “Law of the Land: Subjectivity, Emplacement, & Courtly Legal Claims: The Case of Tristan.” This chapter focuses on the interplay between law, epistemology, and disability in medieval romance, with Tristan's story as the central case study. Tristan’s depiction, especially in scenes where he is framed as disabled, such as when Iseut orchestrates a ploy involving him disguised as a hunchback, serves to destabilize the court’s legal authority. I argue that the manipulation of disability in these texts underscores the broader precarity of courtly systems, framing them as vulnerable ecosystems rather than fixed institutions of power.

My project explores how disabled figures and marginalized spaces in courtly romance, such as forests and their inhabitants, offer alternative epistemologies. By reading from the perspective of the forest-dwelling figures often “othered” in these narratives, I seek to rethink hierarchical social structures embedded in medieval texts. Drawing on Deleuzian theory and feminist ecocriticism, I explore how resistance is possible through the recognition of these entanglements, which challenge the perceived stability of power systems like the court.

This study contributes to several modern theoretical debates, particularly those on posthumanist frameworks, the representation of marginalized voices in medieval contexts, and the relevance of medieval texts to contemporary issues like climate change and global inequality. The chapter will show how medieval romance, through its portrayal of disabled bodies and marginalized spaces, offers insights into resistance, embodiment, and the interconnectedness of power structures that resonate with modern concerns."

Emily Regier
Assistant Professor, Political Science/Kinder Institute on Constitutional Democracy
2025-26

Project: "My research challenges the dominant political science approach to analyzing judicial decisions as the product of judges’ ideological preferences and proposes, as a more productive alternative, a framework based on the underappreciated mid-twentieth century jurisprudential school of thought known as Legal Process Theory. This past academic year (my first at Mizzou), I was able to develop the main theoretical chapters of my dissertation – which connect Legal Process Theory to the participatory and experience-driven paradigm of democratic pragmatism – into two papers. One is currently under review (after a Revise & Resubmit) at a highly regarded journal of legal philosophy and the second will be submitted for publication shortly. This leaves for me the important work of developing the principal argument of my dissertation into a high-impact article with significant and timely implications for the political science study of courts, which I propose to do in the A&S Writing Fellows Program.

Specifically, this article will (1) demonstrate that analyzing judicial behavior through the lens of judges’ ideological preferences is both empirically and normatively short-sighted; and (2) delineate an alternative approach based on Legal Process Theory. Empirically, the conventional approach fails to capture judges’ self-understandings, and in many cases, the actual constraining power of law. In contrast, the powerful purchase of Legal Process Theory in the midcentury legal academy and the institutional-competence based approach to law that it prescribes position it to significantly shape judicial conduct in empirically discernible ways. I plan to demonstrate this by identifying, through case analysis, the empirical variables associated with a Legal Process Theory model of judicial decision making and analyzing their occurrence in judicial opinions. I also plan to develop my normative argument that Legal Process Theory’s institutional allocation of decision making authority properly attunes us to how judges can contribute to a system of constitutional democracy."

Nancy West
Professor, English
2025-26

Project: "I plan to spend my course-release time finishing the final draft of my memoir, Moviemade Girl. Spanning 1969-1977, the book explores a moment in history when a particular group of people in a particular place went to the movies with love in their hearts and an unquenchable desire to experience as much cinema as possible. That moment is the late 1960s through the mid 1970s, the place is New York, the people, all sorts: including my alcoholic, con-artist father and me, an only child living in the devastated city of Newark with her immigrant mother. This was the era of the New Hollywood, a time when young directors were crafting films that aspired to art. They paid their homages to beloved directors like John Ford and Alfred Hitchcock while experimenting with radical styles and techniques. Their output? Films consistently appearing in AFI’s or BFI’s top films of all time: Bonnie and Clyde, Midnight Cowboy, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Chinatown, Paper Moon, The Godfather 1 and II. Their passion for film inspired a whole culture of movie-love. It was a heady, fervid, fanatical, greedy, euphoric time: a time I capture in Moviemade Girl. Doing so allows me to make a timely, significant contribution—which is to explain, in vivid detail, why movie going matters.

I am requesting a course release for Fall 2025 to complete the project. The memoir’s thirty-two scenes are now drafted; during the next ten months, I will complete a second draft of the book. The third and final draft will be completed during AY2025-2026. It is during this final stage that the hardest work of writing occurs, where I need long, uninterrupted periods of time to revise and polish scenes, dialogue; and characterization, and to think deeply about the structure and narrative arc of the book. A course release will afford me that kind of time."

Michael Jirik
Assistant Professor, Black Studies
2024-25

Project: "My book manuscript, tentatively titled Dissenting Forces: A History of Abolition and Black Thought in Higher Learning, 1704-1855 traces the ideas, experiences, and activism of diverse peoples who challenged slavery and racism at colleges. Based on rare and mostly unknown documents drawn from archives in the United States and Britain, this project disrupts the narrative of complicity in most studies of universities and their connections to Atlantic slavery."

Timothy Langen
Associate Professor & Director, Russian
2024-25

Project: "I am finishing a book on Nikolai Gogol, is the first major writer of prose fiction in Russian and a touchstone for the entire Russian literary tradition. My book addresses the relation of Gogol’s prose aesthetics to intellectual history and specifically to the rise and increasing importance of the periodical press in Russia. I argue that Gogol’s quirky literary style is a way of processing the increasingly heterogeneous material that was flooding the Russian idea-space of the 1830s. Gogol’s aesthetic innovations turned prose fiction, and the literary criticism that addressed it, into the single most important vehicle for Russian thought of the mid- to late-nineteenth century."

Philip Robbins
Associate Professor & Department Chair, Philosophy
2024-25

Project: "I am working on a short monograph, tentatively titled Moral Minds in the World, in which I develop a general theory of moral categorization, drawing from research in both philosophical and scientific moral psychology, and focusing on the contribution of mind perception to the assignment of individuals (human, animal, or technological) to moral categories."

Mike Schneider
Assistant Professor, Philosophy
2024-25

Project: “Science depends on creativity. My book project focuses on how to understand the concept of creativity in science, so that the previous statement is 1) true, but 2) noteworthy rather than trivial, and 3) in keeping with traditional interest in methodology (studying the dynamics of science by means of the rules of the game that scientists play). The main claim on offer is that creativity in science may be understood fruitfully in terms of an activity that occurs during speculation within the course of research, which amounts to the scientists involved overcoming uncreativity. This, in the first place, requires an answer to the novel question: when does scientific research count as uncreatively done?”

Valerie Kaussen
Associate Professor, French
2024-25

Project: "My book manuscript, Cosmopolitanism and Communication:  The Literatures of Haitian Disaster is comprised of two parts.  Part I analyzes the multiple ways that Haiti became the object of global attention following the 2010 Port-au-Prince earthquake, focusing on its status as the first “Web 2.0 disaster.” It explores the mass consumption and circulation of digitized images of the destruction, US-based post-quake digital advocacy and do-it-yourself humanitarian action, and the discourses of global humanitarian actors, who sought to give affected Haitians “voice” through the vehicles of new communications.  Part II turns to literary representations, arguing that Haitian writers responded to and resisted the global commodification, spectacularization, and consumption of the earthquake and the population it affected in one of two ways:  by articulating Haitian versions of globality or cosmopolitanism or by engaging what Edouard Glissant calls “opacity,” a counter-poetics that resists the construction of “the Other” as an object of knowledge, understanding, and assimilation."

Roberta Tabanelli
Associate Professor, Italian / Affiliate Faculty, Film Studies & Women's and Gender Studies
2024-25

Project: "My book tentatively titled Transnational Cinema, Italian Cinema. Analyzing Transnational Cinema through Contemporary Italian Film" aims at combining theories of transnational cinema with an extended case study based on Italian cinema. To do so, I envision five categories of transnational Italian cinema and employ a macro-level approach based on a large corpus (about 400 films) of Italian feature-length films produced between 1990-2019."

Mar Soria
Associate Professor, Spanish
2024-25

Project: "My book, Imperial Desires and the Economics of Race: Embodying Blackness in Spanish Culture (1880-1975) analyzes the representation of black people in Spanish culture from the end of the nineteenth century to 1975. Despite the lack of a significant black population living in Spain at that time, black bodies were frequently depicted in cultural artifacts throughout this period. I propose that these racialized depictions reinforced and redefined dominant models of Spanish masculinity and femininity that symbolized a true national identity when domestic and international socio-political instability threatened national cohesion. These portrayals also allowed Spaniards to imagine themselves as citizens of a superior white nation with the same imperial designs as other European countries. While the study of the representation of black people brings to light Spain’s ongoing imperial desires, it also unveils the anxieties arising from the nation’s struggle to become a modern economic and political colonial power with international projection."

Carsten Strathausen
Professor, German & English
2024-25

Project: "In my current book project entitled Kafka’s Adaptations. Evolution, Media, Aesthetics. I argue that there is no “real” Kafka to go back to (was he a Jewish writer? homosexual? a hypochondriac?), nor is there a ground zero for his stories, many of which are incomplete or exist in multiple versions. There are no “origins” in Kafka; there is only a continuous series of modifications, translations, and adaptations that keep moving forward and offer fresh incentives for re-reading and re-imagining Kafka."

Kerri Mcbee-Black, PHD
Assistant Professor, Textile & Apparel Management
2024-25

Project: "In 2023, I received a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Planning Connections Grant to establish a Disability Studies Minor (DSM) through the College of Arts & Science (CAS). The next step is to apply for the NEH Implementation Grant (NEHIG) to ensure the DSM curricula are developed, and infrastructure is established to ensure long-term support. Therefore, I am applying for the ASF to support the research and development of a DSM at the University of Missouri. The implementation grant is a 3-year grant that supports expanding the role of humanities in undergraduate education by encouraging partnerships between humanities and non-humanities faculty."

Hannah Paul
Assistant Professor, Truman
2024-25

Project: "My project titled, I’m Every Woman? Critical Mass Theory, Political Parties, and Women’s Legislative Representation, revisits the popular theory that women must reach a certain numeric threshold – or critical mass – in the legislature before they will be able to influence legislative outcomes. With co-authors Drs. Kendall Funk (Arizona State University) and Andrew Q. Philips (University of Colorado Boulder), I have created a dataset that accounts for the distribution of women legislators across political parties of varying ideologies and sizes as well as other key factors for all lower chamber and unicameral legislatures in the world from 2000-2019. Using this extensive database, we plan to examine a variety of representation outcomes related to women’s interests that will generate 2-3 research articles. The project promises to contribute a nuanced examination of how women legislators’ preferences, incentives, and environments shape their ability and willingness to represent women’s interests."

Rob Walker
Associate Professor, Anthropology
2023-24

Dennis Trout
Professor, Ancient Mediterranean Studies & Adjunct Professor, History
2023-24

Frances Dickey
Associate Professor, English
2023-24

Trudy Lewis
Professor, English
2023-24

Alexandru Radulescu
Associate Professor, Philosophy
2023-24

Sean Prall
Assistant Professor, Anthropology
2023-24

Michelangelo Landgrave
Assistant Professor, Truman
2023-24

Samuel Cohen
Associate Professor & Associate Chair, English
2023-24

Emma Liption
Professor & Department Chair, English
2023-24

Marta Heckel
Assistant Professor, Philosophy
2023-24

Kaleea Lewis
Assistant Professor, Womens & Gender Studies
2023-24

Jocelyn Burney
Assistant Professor, Classics, Archaeology, and Religion
2023-24

Daniel Sipe
Associate Professor, French Studies
2023-24

Ilyana Karthas
Associate Professor, History
2022-23

Project: "I am offering a new paradigm for understanding modernism in Paris. My book project titled "Arbiters of Taste: Women, Modernism, and the Making of Paris" analyzes the cultural labor undertaken by women to propel modernization of the arts in France, to internationalize French artistic tastes, and to cultivate Paris’ reputation as the center of avant-gardism.  As patrons, salonnières, teachers, promoters, entrepreneurs, artists, and expert critics, women played a crucial role in fashioning Paris as a laboratory for artistic innovation."  

Kristin Kopp
Associate Professor, German
2022-23

Project: "My book "Disrupting “Race”: on the History of the African Diaspora in Germany," aims to help readers recognize (and then address) erroneous, subconsciously ingrained preconceptions about human geography, mobility, and agency that undergird vestiges of racist thought that continue to affect even those consciously working to combat racism."

Johanna Kramer
Associate Professor and Associate Chair, English
2022-23

Project: "As part of the A&S Writing Group, I have been working on my current book project, "The Use of Proverbs in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales," necessary to apply for promotion to full professor.

The book has two goals:
1) present an unprecedented study of the use of proverbs and other proverbial materials in Chaucer’s "The Canterbury Tales"
2) demonstrate an innovative critical methodology by showing that critically reading medieval texts through the genre of proverbs can attend to long-standing and current questions in literary criticism."

Judith Mabary
Associate Professor, School of Music
2022-23

Project: "My project is a book on the patronage of Jeannette Thurber in the United States, especially that which brought Czech composer Antonín Dvořák to New York to be the Director and Professor of Composition at the National Conservatory of Music of America, an institution she established to provide education in fine-art music for which aspiring musicians and composers would previously have had to travel to Europe to obtain. My efforts this semester have been devoted to writing the section of the book that details Thurber's biography as related to her earliest charitable efforts and promotional activities in which she sought to improve the working conditions of women and offer them greater opportunities in the second half of the nineteenth century. These efforts culminated in her founding of the American Opera Company and the National Conservatory of Music, institutions that together sought to serve American singers as well as composers and musicians from underprivileged and underrepresented populations, primarily African Americans and women."

Anne Meyers
Associate Professor, English
2022-23

Project: "My project is a chapter of a book I am writing on the significance of monuments in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. During this period, the word “monument” could mean either a built architectural fixture or a written text. While scholars have already written on the possibility of reading built monuments in a textual or narrative fashion, few have considered in detail what it could mean for a text to be monumental. This chapter focuses on the massive 1688 publication "The Academy of Armory" by the herald Randle Holme, considering how Holme used heraldry—a visual/historical lexicon traditionally associated with monuments and the preservation of history—as an organizing principle for the materials of seventeenth-century life and experience."

Michelle Morris
Associate Professor, History
2022-23

Project: "I am currently completing an article on lay understandings of witchcraft in seventeenth-century New England. This article is a lead-in for my ongoing book project on the Hartford witchcraft trials of the early 1660s."

Karthik Panchanathan
Associate Professor, Anthropology
2022-23

Project: "I started writing a book titled "Divided We Stand." The book will be comprised of three sections. The first section is a review of theory in evolutionary biology attempting to explain the evolution of (human) cooperation. This section will also link this theory with a broader history of political philosophy attempting to understand human social evolution (e.g. Rousseau’s argument that society emerged from voluntaristic cooperation, Hobbes’ argument that society resulted only after the emergence of social sanctions from the state). The second part of the book applies this theory to the story of human evolution after our split with the ancestors of chimps."

Srirupa Prasad
Associate Professor, Art History, Women's and Gender Studies
2022-23

Project: "A Global History of Tuberculosis" investigates key moments in the conceptualization of susceptibility as they have been articulated and practiced regarding TB in the context of India from the colonial to the postcolonial period. These successive iterations of the concept of susceptibility took shape as physicians, medical research ers, medical missionaries, and political figures in India, the US, and Britain debated the capacity to be affected."

Stephen Quackenbush
Associate Professor, Truman School of Government and Public Affairs
2022-23

Project: "I am working to complete my book titled "Peace Through Victory: Imposed Settlements and Recurrent Conflict." In the book, I develop my deterrence-based theory of recurrent conflict and conduct a variety of quantitative tests of the primary theoretical expectation that imposed settlements are more stable than other types of settlements along with a variety of other empirical expectations stemming from my theory. In the process, I test my theory against alternative explanations stemming from the bargaining, rivalry, and conflict management perspectives."

Anne Stanton
Associate Director, School of Visual Studies
2022-23

Project: "My project is to complete the last body chapter of my book, "Turning the Pages: the Power of Narrative in English Gothic Prayerbooks," under contract with Brill."

James van Dyke
Associate Professor, Art History
2022-23

Project: "I am writing "The Social Production of Otto Dix in Critical Detail: A book on the early twentieth-century German painter Otto Dix," drawing attention to overlooked but significant material and iconographic details in selected paintings that help us to understand the social dynamics of the German art world in the 1920s and 1930s."

André Ariew
Director, A&S Writing Fellows Program
Associate Professor, Philosophy

I am an historian and philosopher of science particularly interested in the development of evolutionary theory from Darwin to the current day. I am currently finishing a book manuscript about Darwin’s applications of statistical methods that aided him in developing his ideas about evolution. 

We owe the existence and funding of the A&S Writing Fellows Program to generous gift donations provided to the College of Arts & Science. In its pilot year, we targeted our efforts to associate professors primarily in the humanities who were finishing up book manuscripts which would allow them to get promoted to full professor. For the next cohort we have accepted faculty from all tenure track ranks. I am hoping that the program will continue to grow as more faculty realize the benefits of the program.

Christy Goldsmith
Associate Director, Campus Writing Program
Assistant Teaching Professor of English Education 

Through my narrative inquiry into English teachers’ identities as writers and as teachers-of-writing, I explore the tensions inherent in teaching writing in secondary schools. My other scholarly interests revolve around the teaching and learning of disciplinary literacy, including professional development design and practice at the secondary and postsecondary levels.
 
I became the co-director of this group rather serendipitously and accidentally. It has been the happiest accident of my academic career thus far. Interaction with the cohort’s diversity of disciplines, approaches, and writing styles has made me a stronger writer. Not only have I been held accountable to achieving my short- and long-term writing goals, this community has bolstered my feelings of scholarly belonging.