Presenters | Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes

Public Humanities Network Meeting - May 11, 2020

Shaul Bassi, Ca’Foscari University of Venice

Shaul Bassi is associate professor of English literature. He has taught at Ca' Foscari University of Venice since 2000. His research, teaching and publications are divided between Shakespeare, postcolonial theory and literature (India and Africa), Jewish studies and environmental humanities. He has taught at Wake Forest University-Venice, Venice International University, Harvard-Ca'Foscari summer school and has been visiting professor at the University of California at Santa Cruz. He is the co-founder of the international literary festival Incroci di civiltà. He is the director of the International Center for the Humanities and Social Change at Ca'Foscari.

John Paul Christy, American Council of Learned Societies

John Paul Christy is Senior Director of U.S. Programs at ACLS, where he helps maintain and enhance the Council’s peer-review processes while also developing and implementing new fellowship and grant programs, with special focus on programs that highlight the public dimensions of humanities scholarship. As director, he frequently represents ACLS and its work to various stakeholders in the academic and philanthropic communities, and to the wider public. Before joining ACLS in 2012, Christy was a Presidential Management Fellow in Washington, DC, where his portfolio included projects related to US public diplomacy, Internet anti-censorship programs, and the public humanities. He received his PhD in classical studies from the University of Pennsylvania.

Daniel Fisher, National Humanities Alliance

Daniel Fisher leads Humanities for All, an initiative to promote publicly engaged humanities work in U.S. higher education. Prior to joining NHA, he held fellowships at the École Biblique and the Albright Institute in Jerusalem. He holds a B.A. from McGill University, an M.A. from Vanderbilt University, and a Ph.D. in Near Eastern Studies from the University of California, Berkeley, where, as a graduate student, he taught and co-curated a publicly-engaged research-driven exhibition.

Jennifer Ho, University of Colorado Boulder

The daughter of a refugee father from China and an immigrant mother from Jamaica, Jennifer Ho is the director of the Center for Humanities & the Arts at the University of Colorado Boulder, where she also holds an appointment as Professor in the Ethnic Studies department. Ho is the author of two co-edited collection of essays: Narrative, Race, and Ethnicity in the United States (Ohio State University Press 2017—co-editors James Donahue and Shaun Morgan) and Teaching Approaches to Asian North American Literature (forthcoming Modern Language Association—co-editor Jenny Wills), along with three scholarly monographs, Consumption and Identity in Asian American Coming-of-Age Novels(Routledge 2005), Racial Ambiguity in Asian American Culture (Rutgers University Press 2015), which won the South Atlantic Modern Language Association award for best monograph, and Understanding Gish Jen (University of South Carolina Press 2015). She has published in journals such as Modern Fiction Studies, Journal for Asian American Studies, Amerasia Journal, The Global South, Southern Cultures, and Oxford American. Her next two academic projects are a breast cancer memoir and a monograph that will consider Asian Americans in the global south through the narrative of her maternal family's immigration from Hong Kong to Jamaica to North America. In addition to her academic work, Ho is active in community engagement around issues of race and intersectionality, leading workshops on anti-racism and how to talk about race in our current political climate.

Teresa Mangum, University of Iowa

A Professor in the Departments of Gender, Women’s, and Sexuality Studies and English, Mangum was appointed as Director of the Obermann Center for Advanced Studies in 2010. She is the author of Married, Middle-brow, and Militant: Sarah Grand and the New Woman Novel (1998); editor of A Cultural History of Women: Volume 5: The Age of Empire, 1800–1920 (Berg 2013); and guest editor of special issues of Philological Quarterly, Nineteenth-Century Contexts, Victorian Periodicals Review, and the Journal of Aging Studies. With Anne Valk of the City University of New York, she co-edits the book series Humanities and Public Life for the University of Iowa Press. She has published numerous articles and book chapters on the ways that nineteenth-century British novels shaped readers' understanding of women, of late life, and of connections between humans and other animals. She also publishes on current issues: publicly engaged pedagogy, the place of service in an academic career, and graduate student placement. Mangum has served in a number of administrative roles, both on campus and nationally. At the University of Iowa, she has been Associate Chair for undergraduate studies in English, Associate Dean of International Programs, Co-director of the Public Digital Humanities Cluster, Faculty Associate Director of the Obermann Center, and Faculty Senate Secretary. She recently co-directed a four-year Mellon-funded project, Digital Bridges for Humanistic Inquiry: A Grinnell College and University of Iowa Partnership, and currently directs a second Mellon-funded initiative, Humanities for the Public Good, which will create a cohort-based, interdisciplinary, experiential Ph.D. focused on preparing students for careers in the public sector.

Beyond the University, she serves on the advisory boards of Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies; Age, Culture, Humanities; Victorian Review; and Victorian Periodicals Review. She is Vice President of the Board of Directors of the National Humanities Alliance and Co-chair of the Council on the Status of Women in the Profession of the Modern Language Association. In the past, she has served on the National Advisory Board and Executive Committee of Imagining America: Artists and Scholars in Public Life; as secretary of the Women’s Caucus for the Modern Languages (affiliated with the Modern Language Association); Chair of the Delegate Assembly Organizing Committee of the Modern Language Association; President of Interdisciplinary Nineteenth-Century Studies (INCS); and Associate Director of the Dickens Project, a consortium of 70 international universities.

Phoebe Stein, Federation of State Humanities Councils

Phoebe Stein became President of the Federation of State Humanities Councils effective May 1, 2020. Prior to this position, stein had served as the executive director for Maryland Humanities since 2008 and as an advocate for the humanities at local, state, and federal levels for more than 20 years. During her tenure, Stein has expanded the council’s partnerships and resources and hosted a radio spot, “Humanities Connection,” while advancing several of the council’s flagship programs, including Maryland History Day, Museum on Main Street, and One Maryland One Book. She served on the Federation Board of Directors from 2013 to 2017 as both vice chair and as a member of the Legislative Committee. In 2016, she was recognized as one of “Maryland’s Top 100 Women” by The Daily Record. Before joining the Maryland council, Stein was the director of public affairs and the communications coordinator at the Illinois Humanities Council, now called Illinois Humanities. She received her Ph.D. and M.A. in English from Loyola University of Chicago and her B.A. in English from the University of Michigan.

Pauline Strong, University of Texas at Austin

Pauline Strong does research on the humanities and higher education today. She has published on the representation of Native American cultures and identities in North American literature, scholarship, film, art, museums, sports events, legislation, social movements and youth organizations. Her current research concerns the role that 20th-century youth organizations played in the development of racialized and gendered U.S. citizens.

Strong is the author of "American Indians and the American Imaginary: Cultural Representation Across the Centuries" (2012) and "Captive Selves, Captivating Others: The Politics and Poetics of Colonial American Captivity Narratives" (1999). She is also co-editor (with Sergei Kan) of "New Perspectives on Native North America: Cultures, Histories, Representations" (2006). Her articles appear in journals and anthologies in the fields of American Studies, cultural studies, history, media studies, Native American Studies, sports studies, as well as anthropology.

Strong also directs the Humanities Institute at the University of Texas at Austin, which offers a variety of programs for interdisciplinary intellectual engagement across the campus and community. Previously she served as President of the Society for Cultural Anthropology and Councilor of the American Society for Ethnohistory. Her community service includes serving as President and Director of the Board of the Balcones Council of Camp Fire USA.

Kathryn Temple, Georgetown University

Kathryn Temple is a professor in the Department of English in the College at Georgetown University and a senior fellow with the Future of the Humanities Project. She joined the Georgetown faculty in 1994. Education: PhD and MA, University of Virginia; JD, Emory University School of Law; BA, Georgia State University Teaching and Research Interests: 18th century British literature and culture, particularly the literature of women; cultural legal studies; history of intellectual property; feminist jurisprudence. Temple has published on eighteenth-century authorship and "crimes of writing," the gothic, legal literature for women, affect and justice, the history of emotion.

Nicholas Allen, University of Georgia (Chair)

Nicholas Allen is the director of the Willson Center for Humanities and Arts and Abraham Baldwin Professor in Humanities at the University of Georgia. He has published several books on Ireland and its literature, has been the Burns Visiting Scholar at Boston College, and has received many grants and awards, including from the Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Irish Research Council. His new book, Ireland, Literature and the Coast: Seatangled, will be published shortly.

Directors Meeting - May 13, 2020

Simon Goldhill, University of Cambridge

Simon Goldhill is currently Professor of Greek at the University of Cambridge, and Foreign Secretary and Vice-President of the British Academy. He has just finished his time as director of the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities at Cambridge (CRASSH). He is a Fellow of the British Academy and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and of King’s College, Cambridge. Prof Goldhill’s research interests include: Greek Tragedy, Greek Culture, Literary Theory, Later Greek Literature, and Reception. His latest book is A Very Queer Family: Sex, Religion and the Bensons in Victorian Britain. He is the author of many influential monographs including Foucault’s Virginity: Ancient Erotic Fiction and the History of Sexuality, The Temple of Jerusalem, Who Needs Greek and Language, and Sexuality, Narrative: The Oresteia. Prof. Goldhill directed the ERC-funded project, “The Bible and Antiquity in Nineteenth-Century Culture."

Teresa Mangum, University of Iowa

Health and Medical Humanities Network Meeting - May 19, 2020

Steering Committee

Rishi K. Goyal, Columbia University
Rishi K. Goyal is Director of the Medicine, Literature and Society major in the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia University, and an Attending Physician in the Emergency Department of Columbia University’s Medical Center. Dr. Goyal’s research, writing and teaching focuses on the reciprocal transformation that results when new ideas about health, disease and the body find forms of expression in fiction and memoirs. His most recent work explores the political, aesthetic, and social dimensions of the representation of physical trauma in literature. His writing has appeared in The Living Handbook of Narratology, Aktuel Forskning, Litteratur, Kultur og Medier, and The Los Angeles Review of Books among other places.

Deborah Jenson, Duke University
Deborah Jenson co-directs the Duke Haiti Humanities Lab (with Laurent Dubois), focusing her work on the history of cholera in Haiti and the Caribbean, and mental health issues among survivors of the Haiti earthquake. Her other research areas focus on traumatic stress, cognition and culture and the ethnic identities of African slaves in 18th century Saint-Dominique. She also serves as a Co-Convener of the DIBS/FHI Neurohumanities Research Group. In the summer, she directs Duke in Paris. Her most recent books are a literary history of the Haitian Revolution, called Beyond the Slave Narrative (2011, paperback Feb. 2012) and a volume on the global legacies of psychoanalysis: Unconscious Dominions (with Anderson and Keller, 2011). Earlier work includes Trauma and Its Representations, Sarah (A Colonial Novella) (with Kadish) and "The Haiti Issue" of Yale French Studies. She is writing a book of essays, Mimesis from Marx to Mirror Neurons. Current collaborative book projects include a biography of Dessalines, a volume of the letters of Toussaint Louverture, and an edition of an 18th century Creole opera.

Chisomo Kalinga, University of Edinburgh
Dr. Chisomo Kalinga is a Wellcome-funded postdoctoral fellow in the medical humanities at the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Edinburgh. She is the founder of the Malawi Medical Humanities Network (www.malawimedhumsnetwork.com), a research network for the medical humanities based in Malawi. Her research interests are disease (specifically sexually transmitted infections), illness and wellbeing, biomedicine, traditional healing and witchcraft and their narrative representation in African oral and print literatures.

Maheshvari Naidu, University of KwaZulu-Natal
Maheshvari Naidu is an NRF-rated scientist and senior lecturer in Anthropology in the School of Social Sciences, University of KwaZulu-Natal. She is a feminist anthropologist and her recent research focus is women’s health issues, within and against her landscape of work in feminist anthropologies and female body construction. Maheshvari has presented papers at several international conferences and delivered keynote addresses and research seminars locally, as well as internationally (Turkey, Malaysia and Mauritius). She is widely published, both in regional and international journals and has acted as Guest Editor for national and international journals. She has been in the Top 30 Researcher rankings of UKZN thrice. In 2013 she was one of the National Winners of the Department of Science and Technology ‘Women in Science’ Award for research excellence. In 2014 Maheshvari was announced the Top Published Female Researcher at UKZN and featured third overall in the UKZN Top 30 rankings. She is a recipient of an African Gender Institute Grant and part of a collaborative project with the University of Cape Town. The project, funded by the Ford Foundation, is inter-institutional across Zimbabwe, Botswana, Namibia, South Africa and Mozambique, focusing on issues of sexual health and rights.

Kathryn Rhine, University of Kansas
Kathryn A. Rhine is a medical anthropologist and associate professor at the University of Kansas. She is editor (with John M. Janzen, Glenn Adams and Heather Aldersey) of Medical Anthropology in Global Africa and her work has appeared in Anthropological Quarterly, Africa Today, and Ethnos.

Academic Freedom, Artistic Freedom, and Free Speech on Campus - May 21, 2020

Jonathan Friedman, PEN America

Jonathan Friedman is the program director for campus free speech at PEN America, where he oversees PEN America’s advocacy, analysis, and outreach in the national debate around free speech and inclusion in higher education. He served as lead author on PEN America’s 2019 report, Chasm in the Classroom: Campus Free Speech in a Divided America, and on the production of its digital Campus Free Speech Guide. Friedman holds a Ph.D. in international education from New York University, and has previously taught courses at NYU and Columbia University in comparative and international education, higher education, and social theory. His research on American and international higher education has been published in leading academic journals, and he regularly provides commentary on campus free speech issues for national news media. He has previously received awards for his teaching, research, and leadership.

Julie Trébault, PEN America

Julie Trébault is the director of PEN America’s Artists at Risk Connection project. A highly respected leader in the art world, she brings skills, experience, and a network to launch a new support system for artists at risk worldwide. Prior to joining PEN America, she served as director of public programs at the Museum of the City of New York, where she built a robust roster of panel discussions, performances, screenings, and symposia spanning New York City’s arts, culture, and history. She previously was director of public programs at the Center for Architecture. Before moving to New York, she worked at the National Museum of Ethnology in The Netherlands, where she built a network of 116 museums across the globe that shared a virtual collection of masterpieces and developed an innovative array of online and mobile applications and exhibitions to make the collection as widely accessible as possible. From 2004 until 2007, she was Head of Higher Education and Academic Events at the Musée du quai Branly (Paris), where she conceived and implemented a policy for higher education by creating an international network of universities, graduate schools, and research institutes. Trébault holds a Master’s Degree in Arts Administration from the Sorbonne University, a Master’s Degree in Archeology from the University of Strasbourg, and teaches at Fordham University.

Associate Directors and Administrators Meeting - May 26, 2020

Executive Committee

Noemí Fernández, Haverford College

Noemí Fernández is the program manager for the Hurford Center at Haverford College. She oversees the events the Center hosts, including symposiums, artist talks, and performances. She collaborates with and supports the other members of HCAH on their projects, as well as those students and faculty who receive funding through the HCAH. Noemí keeps the Center and all its projects running smoothly. She earned her B.A. from Williams College and M.S. at the University of Pennsylvania.

Christina Chia, Duke University

Christina Chia has been Franklin Humanities Institute Associate Director at Duke University since 2014. She received her PhD in English from Duke in 2004, and worked at the Center for Multicultural Affairs prior to joining the Institute in 2006. At the FHI she has administered a range of research and education programs, including the Humanities Laboratories, the FHI-North Carolina Central University Digital Humanities Fellowships, the Graduate Digital Scholarship Initiative, and Story+. A member of the Associate Directors and Administrators Network of the Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes (CHCI), she participates regularly in panels and workshops on non-faculty academic careers. In Fall 2019, she joined the Board of Trustees of the North Carolina Humanities Council.

Outside of her work as an academic administrator, she maintains a strong research interest in the social worlds human beings share with non-humans. Trained in American Studies and Ethnic Studies, she is particularly interested in how multispecies relations shape and are shaped by hierarchies among human beings (for example, how slavery and its afterlives haunt contemporary "dog culture" in the US). In 2013 she was part of an interdisciplinary group that curated Recording the Anthropocene, a public exhibit exploring scientific, cultural, and artistic visions of the planetary impact of the human species. She has taught courses in the English Department, Program in Women's Studies, and Center for Documentary Studies. Her current (non-academic, or quasi?) project is a Southeastern native plant garden.

Susannah Smith, University of Minnesota

Susannah L. Smith is the Managing Director at the University of Minnesota Institute for Advanced Study and a historian of Russia and modern Europe. Her research focuses on the intersection of national identity, official arts policy, and Russian folk music in the Soviet Union, 1917-1945. She studies and performs traditional Javanese music with the Sumunar Gamelan Ensemble. Before coming to the IAS, she was the managing editor of the Journal of Asian Studies, developed the Population Studies minor program and coordinated administration on the IPUMS-International projects at the Minnesota Population Center, and was assistant director of the Making of the Modern World/Writing Program at Eleanor Roosevelt College, University of California, San Diego.

Amanda Jeanne Swain, University of California, Irvine

Amanda Jeanne Swain is Executive Director for the Humanities Commons in the School of Humanities at the University of California, Irvine. Swain received a PhD in History, as well as a Master’s degree in International Studies, from the University of Washington. She works closely with faculty and graduate students in the School of Humanities to develop proposals for funding ranging from individual fellowships to major collaborative projects. She has written and helped develop successful proposals for research and program funding from federal agencies, academic associations, other universities, foundations and individual donors. She has over twelve years’ experience in program development and program management in the humanities, including university-community partnerships, grant-making, multi-disciplinary collaborations and exhibitions. Her own research focuses on the intersections of national, Soviet and youth identities in youth protests in the 1970s, as well as on tensions between national and European identities in Eastern Europe after the end of communism.

2020 CHCI Annual Meeting

Online Sessions