Susan Youngblood Ashmore is the Charles Howard Candler Professor of History at Emory University's Oxford College and a scholar of the modern U. S. South. She is the author of Carry It On: the War on Poverty and the Civil Rights Movement in Alabama, 1964-1972 (Georgia, 2008). Her new book project considers the contested meaning of citizenship in Alabama through Federal District Judge Frank M. Johnson's landmark decision Wyatt v. Stickney (1972) that acknowledged the civil rights of patients committed to Alabama's state mental hospitals. He ruled that patients in Alabama's state hospitals had the constitutional right to adequate treatment under the Fourteenth Amendment's due process clause, and he issued seventy-four specific guidelines for the proper care of these patients. The U. S. Supreme Court affirmed the case upon appeal making this a landmark decision that established the standards of care for the treatment of the mentally ill and the mentally disabled across the country. As a President's Humanities Fellow she hopes to deepen her understanding of how civil rights and being a citizen is claimed and expressed across disciplines that will illuminate the medical, legal, theological, philosophical, social justice, and southern aspects of this study.

Irene Browne is Associate Professor of Sociology at Emory University. Her work centers on issues of race, social class, and U.S. immigration.  She is the author of numerous articles and the book, Latinas and African American Women at Work: Race, Gender and Economic Inequality.  She is currently engaged in a project investigating the economic and political processes affecting immigrant social mobility through a “double squeeze” from restrictive immigration policy and anti-immigrant rhetoric or a “double boost” from economic growth and returns on education.  As part of this project, she is writing a book that focuses on whether and how the election of Donald Trump and the COVID-19 epidemic have affected Latinx immigrants who are most economically and politically secure.  This project is based on interviews with Dominican and Mexican professionals and entrepreneurs in Atlanta, and is supported by the Russell Sage Foundation and the Emory University Research Committee.  Prof. Browne is also collaborating with Prof. Beth Reingold on an NSF-funded project investigating Black elites and the racial politics of immigration.   

 

Lynne Huffer is Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Emory University. She is the author of Foucault’s Strange Eros (2020); Are the Lips a Grave?: A Queer Feminist on the Ethics of Sex (2013); Mad for Foucault: Rethinking the Foundations of Queer Theory (2010); Maternal Pasts, Feminist Futures: Nostalgia, Ethics, and the Question of Difference (1998); and Another Colette: The Question of Gendered Writing (1992). She has published academic articles on feminist theory, queer theory, Foucault, ethics, and the Anthropocene, as well as personal essays, creative nonfiction, and opinion pieces in mass media venues. She is also the author, with Jennifer Yorke, of Wading Pool, a collaborative artists book http://www.vampandtramp.com/finepress/h/Lynne-Huffer-Jennifer-Yorke.html. Her project at the Fox Center is a book-length autotheory entitled Respite: 99 Anthropocene Fragments.

 

Joy Ann McDougall is Associate Professor of Systematic Theology at the Candler School of Theology. She is the author of The Pilgrimage of Love: Moltmann on the Trinity and Christian Life (Oxford University Press, 2005), as well as numerous articles and book chapters in contemporary systematic theology, feminist theology and theological education. Professor McDougall’s current project, The Bondage of the Eye/I: A Feminist Transfiguring of Sin and Grace, develops a new feminist symbolic for sin and grace through a sustained conversation with ancient and contemporary theological resources and feminist critical theory. Drawing on a range of visual metaphors, this work transfigures the trope of “the bondage of the will” in order to analyze the personal and structural dimensions of sexism and gender oppression. So, too, her work re-envisions the nature of grace as illumination and empowering friendship with God, self, and others.

Donald Tuten is Associate Professor of Spanish and Linguistics in Emory’s Department of Spanish and Portuguese & Program in Linguistics. His research focuses on questions of language change in Spanish and other languages, with particular attention to how social, cultural, and political factors interact to influence change. He is the author of Koineization in Medieval Spanish (Mouton de Gruyter 2003) as well as numerous articles and book chapters. His current book project, Pronoun Anxiety, aims to explain how and why radical changes in address (in connection with other practices of politeness and civility) took place in Castile and its colonies between about 1400 and 1700. It foregrounds how tension between geographical/social mobility and an imperial ideology of static hierarchy led to extreme status anxiety and compensatory behaviors, including adoption of new, changing, and conflicting forms and norms of address and a more general “inflation” of courtesy. This project also explores how changes in address reinforced and further disseminated status anxiety and the ideologies that fueled it, as evidenced in letters, legal records, literary representations of social interaction, and metalinguistic commentaries.

 

Subha Xavier is Associate Professor of French at Emory University. Her scholarly work focuses on migration and diaspora studies, especially as these two fields relate to contemporary film and literature. In her first book, The Migrant Text: Making and Marketing a Global French Literature (McGill-Queen’s UP, 2016), Xavier proposes a new framework for studying immigrant writing as a strategic mode of materialist practice that combines — but does not defer to — postcolonial theory, racial politics and nationalist discourses. Her second monograph is tentatively entitled Transcultural Fantasies: China, France and the History of Sino-French Literary Exchange. Surveying over a century of cultural relations between China and France, the book disentangles the complexities of translation and mis-translation that occur as cultural products travel across languages, cultures and thought traditions. Drawing on a diverse archive of comparative French and Chinese thought — from 19th century race theory to world politics and modernist philosophy — Transcultural Fantasies illuminates the fraught dynamics of a recent body of literary and film texts by Chinese authors in France, who cull a fragile beauty from the onerous weight of the past.

Martha Groppo (Ph.D., History, Princeton) is a historian of medicine. At the Fox Center, she is working on her first book, which explores efforts to stem growing rural medical inequality in the British Empire and United States in the late nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries. Speaking to histories of empire, gender, class, and reform, this study follows the rise and fall of an extensive network of innovative philanthropic healthcare associations founded by elite women with the purpose of sending nurses into the homes of the rural poor. Telling a story that stretches from the Yukon to the Outback and from the Indian Hill Stations to the Appalachian Mountains, she is interested in the interconnection that occurred between “isolated” locales, and in the forces that interested outsiders in rural welfare.



Byrd McDaniel (Ph.D., Ethnomusicology, Brown University) is an ethnographer of popular music, digital cultures, and listening. His work examines how people stage themselves as popular music consumers, by turning listening into a performance. While at the Fox Center, he will work on his first book manuscript, Spectacular Listening: The Performance of Music Consumption. The book features a range of case studies in which people present music reception as a public practice—air guitar competitions, lip syncing apps, karaoke, reaction videos online, and music podcasts. By focusing on listening norms and spectacular alternatives, Byrd’s work addresses the abilities, disabilities, impairments, and bodily possibilities inherent in practices that frame listening as an expressive act.



Julie Miller (Ph.D., History, Harvard University) is a historian of the United States. At the Fox Center, she is at work on her first book, an intellectual and political history of the idea of a “person” in America from the Declaration of Independence to Reconstruction. Bridging debates among intellectual and legal historians and historians of slavery, race, and freedom, this work investigates the content and contours of personal liberty and civic belonging, and aims to tell a story that has not yet been told. Here and as ever, she is interested, too, in American fiction and poetry and conceptions of justice in human politics.

Mike Lehman is a PhD Candidate in the Department of English. While a Fox Fellow, Mike will be completing his dissertation project, titled “Border Agency.” In his dissertation, Mike explores alternative conceptions of citizenship and human rights by exploring literature that focuses on the border. He argues that reading the border involves not only the thematics but also the formal and aesthetic troping of movement as integral to an implicit argument about rendering an imagining of the border as generative and creative rather than the limit space of nations.

Abby Scribner is a PhD candidate in the Department of Comparative Literature. Her dissertation analyzes literary experiments in forms of subjectivity and their relationship to both nineteenth-century and contemporary incarnations of liberalism through readings of novels by Austen, Charlotte Brontë, Dickens, and Eliot. It focuses specifically on the figures of the robot, the corpse, and the plant in order to examine their limits and possibilities for rethinking the subject of politics. Abby’s broader scholarly interests include political and literary formalisms, spatial studies, feminist theory, Marxism and anarchism, Walter Benjamin, and Michel Foucault. Her work is forthcoming in NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction (November 2020).

Norah Elmagraby (2018-2020) is a doctoral candidate in Islamic Civilizations Studies (ICIVS) at Emory University. She specializes in Islam and Ecology, with certification in Global Practice. Prior to her scholarship at Emory University, she earned a Masters in Sustainability Management from Columbia University and had an industry practice as a sustainability consultant for two years in the Middle East. Norah’s research examines the perception of Climate Change and natural disasters in the Middle East and North Africa. This work is an interdisciplinary effort that examines the intersection between science and Islamic theology, drawing from the fields of Critical Disaster Studies, Religion, Ecology, and Sociology. As a HASTAC scholar, she aims to incorporate a digital component to her research by examining the virtual discourse of Islamic environmentalism in the Arab World.

Kayla Shipp (2018-2020) is a doctoral candidate in English studying nineteenth-century American literature and digital humanities. Prior  to coming to Emory,  she received her M.A. in Digital Humanities from King’s College London. She thinks the best old texts work  best in new interactive digital environments; her research explores innovative ways  to use digital publications to allow old (and  new) texts to better express themselves. As a HASTAC scholar, she will continue working to define what “digital scholarship” can  mean and explore how it opens intellectual inquiry to new creative possibilities.

Hannah C. Griggs (2019-2021) is a doctoral student in English and Assistant Managing Editor of Southern Spaces. Prior to Emory, she received an MA in English from Boston College. Her research focuses on nineteenth and twentieth century American literature, the U.S. South, and foodways. She explores representations of consumption, leisure, and excess in the literature of the American South, broadly defined. As a HASTAC scholar, she will deepen her understanding of digital methods, and explore the ways those methods can be applied to her research and pedagogy. 

Claire Beiter is a senior majoring in American Studies and minoring in French. Her honors thesis explores the work of the Music Maker Relief Foundation, a non-profit and record label headquartered in Hillsborough, North Carolina that partners with traditional musicians in the southeastern United States to ensure that their voices are not silenced by poverty and time. Claire’s thesis considers the historically exploitative relationship between collectors and musicians in the American South and the work of other contemporary organizations who seek to preserve southern traditions. Her project includes an organizational history of the Music Maker Relief Foundation, an analysis of their COVID-19 response, and an exploration of their network of Atlanta-based artists.

Yiqing Hu is a senior double-majoring in International Studies and East Asian Studies. She is currenting writing an honor thesis on Chinese literati during the transition from Republican China to Communist China. Amid waves of radical mass political movements, literati from the “old society” were subject to criticism yet struggled to find their place in the new society. They stood out as a vibrant example of how some Chinese people reacted to the dramatic change of the social, political, and cultural environment. Yiqing decides to do a comparative study on three literati who experienced this era but responded to it differently—Shen Congwen, Qian Zhongshu, and Fu Lei. She aims to show how individuals stood up and tried in their own ways to hold out against the macroscopic howling storm brought about by a new era. 

Colin Hutton is a senior majoring in History. He is working on an honors thesis that investigates the roles of vegetable gardens in West Virginian coal company towns beginning in the late-nineteenth century as Northeastern industrialists brought capitalist transformation to the Appalachian landscape. His project will explore how coal miners and their families came to undertake strategic subsistence labor alongside coal work and use garden produce as a strategy of maintaining independence from wages and town authority. It will use gardens as a lens into the social and cultural effects of company town living.

Cameron Katz is a senior double majoring in History and English Creative Writing. She is currently working on an honors thesis about the history of felony disenfranchisement in Florida, a provision that has prevented incarcerated individuals from exercising their right to vote since 1868. While the achievements of the Civil Rights Movement eventually dismantled other Reconstruction-era voter suppression tactics targeting Black political power, felony disenfranchisement remained. Today, it continues to influence Florida's electoral process. Cameron's thesis argues that the reason for this provision's persistence is its link to criminality, which allowed legislators to adjust their justifications of felony disenfranchisement to fit the racial climate and national crime discourse of the time.

Ryan Kelly is a senior joint major in history and art history, with a co-major in the visual arts. His honors thesis examines visual cultures of syphilis in early modern Europe to construct a visual
iconography of the disease in Italy. This work emphasizes early modern understandings of the diseased body, and how visual representations of illness worked to reinforce conceptions of disease as an indication of the subject’s inner state. Additionally, his project hopes to expand the scope of “plague imagery” in scholarship by suggesting a deictic relationship between image types, and analyzing depictions of causal actions which were believed to manifest illness in the body.

Carissa Martin is a senior double majoring in Classics and Chemistry. In their thesis, they explore how tests of sophrosyne (chastity or self-control) create the false sense of closure necessary for ending two ancient Greek novels, Leucippe and Cleitophon and the Aithiopika. Through close reading at the narrative and metanarrative levels, Carissa's thesis aims to show that these tests of sophrosyne use deception and performativity to resolve two problems: the difficulty of ending a polyphonic novel and the anxiety about the hero/ine’s chastity in the face of rape, violence, and captivity. Their project calls into question assumptions about the 'happy' and 'simple' endings of the ancient Greek novel, and therefore promotes a fuller understanding of the drama, the subtlety, and – most importantly – the humanity of this genre.

Halla Maynard is a senior at Emory University in Interdisciplinary Studies. She combines psychotherapy, music, and linguistics to create a template for therapeutic songwriting. Therapy models, lyricism, and languages empowered Maynard to realize the power of navigating and mediating conflict in a client's internal dialogue to increase internal communication skills. Her thesis, In Empathy and Diplomacy, Navigating and Mediating Internal Conflict after Trauma, is geared toward reducing the extreme positions of internal polarizations after sexual trauma by building understanding through curiosity, communicating between internal disagreements, and expressing polarized positions in the creative medium of songwriting based in an analytical template. 

Rachel Silver is a senior majoring in Women’s, gender, and Sexuality Studies with a minor in Economics. Her research critiques the national security narratives justifying Japanese American Internment after Pearl Harbor and Muslim American surveillence after 9/11. She analyzes how the Executive Order 9066 and the Special Registration project replicate traditional, neorealist frameworks of Security Studies. Ultimately, her goal is to integrate feminist theory with Security Studies to provide an alternative view of (in)security from the standpoint of disenfranchised groups.

Tara Djukanovic is a senior in the pre-law track, double majoring in International Studies and Philosophy, Politics, and Law. She is currently writing an honors thesis examining cross-national government responses to victims between sending and receiving migrant countries—primarily Serbia, the United States, and the Netherlands. Her thesis explores how previous histories of ethnic conflict continue to influence migrant policies and anti-human trafficking material through the use of media content analysis spanning a decade, an analysis on the evolution of anti-trafficking legislation within each country, as well as surveys designed to gauge how certain anti-trafficking material has influenced citizens perceptions of the ‘innocent’ and ‘guilty’ victim.

Jiarong (Vincent) Fan is a senior double-majoring in East Asian Studies and Film and Media. His is currently conducting a research for his capstone project of East Asian Studies on the New Hanfu (traditional Han Chinese ethnic clothing) culture and its socio-cultural influence in contemporary China. Vincent conducted his research during the summer of 2020 through interviewing Hanfu scholars, historical museum curators and the new Hanfu culture’s leading supporters in several major cities in China. His research explores the historical development of Han Chinese ethnic clothing from premodern period, the reason for Hanfu’s  temporal gap in the recent few centuries, and also analyses the development of the recent popular new Hanfu culture phenomenon. 

Nayive Gaytán is a senior double-majoring in Spanish and History. She is currently writing an honors thesis on the role of auto folklorization in the construction, commodification, and exportation of Mexican national identity in the 21st century. Her work is centered on a case study of the town of Tequila, Jalisco which has been recognized as a Pueblo Mágico (Magical Town) by the Mexican Ministry of Tourism and is frequently featured in film and broadcast media. She hopes to learn more about the ways these state-sponsored and privately funded narratives interact with each other to promote a curated image of Mexico on a (trans)national scale.

Madelyn Haden is a senior majoring in Middle Eastern Studies and Human Health. Madelyn spent the 2020 summer conducting remote research with sub-Saharan migrant communities in Morocco, focusing her work on access to health care before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. Her MESAS honors thesis will evaluate the impacts of the "securitization" of migrant communities, the inter-personal consequences of medical discrimination, and the relationships between language and race in accessing equitable care.

Christie Jones is a candidate for a Bachelors in Environmental Sciences, as well as a Masters of Public Health through the Rollins School of Public Health. As a Halle/Fox Undergraduate Fellow, Christie is completing a senior capstone investigating rabies transmission dynamics in Costa Rica. Titled “Land-use as a factor in the re-emergence of rabies in Costa Rica,” her project explores the prevalence and transmission of the virus from a spatial-temporal perspective. She aims to improve understanding of vampire bat ecology and landscape-related risk factors for rabies in order to limit viral zoonotic spillover in humans.

Faith Kim is a senior majoring in Art History and minoring in Political Science. She is currently writing an honors thesis on sites in or near Johannesburg, South Africa, namely Freedom Park and the Constitutional Court of South Africa, which respond architecturally and symbolically to their white supremacist counterparts, the Voortrekker Monument and the Old Fort Prison, respectively. Her thesis embraces the virtual setting in which she is having to conduct this research, and as such she hopes to explore the ways in which encountering these sites using geographic information systems like Google Earth alters, and even skews, the ways in which global citizens encounter these sites. 

Shreya Pabbaraju is a double senior majoring in Political Science and English and Creative Writing. Her honors thesis examines how histories of colonization, partition, and nationalism have affected inter-religious attitudes toward violence against women in India through a surveys design. She further examines the media’s labeling of Jyoti Singh as “India’s Daughter” as an example of the Hindu-dominated efforts toward mitigating gender violence. Through the theories of Amartya Sen and Gayatri Spivak, she hopes to investigate religious intersectionality within feminist movements in India. 

Kassie Sarkar is a senior majoring in Interdisciplinary studies and minoring in African American studies. She is currently constructing her honors thesis which investigates racial identity, resistance, and community belonging in the lives of individuals with mixed-race identities in the U.S., specifically mixed-race people of South Asian descent. Her work seeks to understand these issues through the framework of storytelling, storytelling that occurs through a variety of media including the written, the oral, the visual, and the structural, all of which provide insight into the ways non mixed-race entities do or do not represent mixed-race communities, as well as the ways mixed-race peoples represent themselves. With critical race theory and anti-racist, decolonizing methodologies at the core of her work, she intends to center the stories, voices, and experiences of marginalized communities in order to advance equity and justice through her scholarship.