DISSERTATION FELLOW

JeMiah Baht Israel, History
Unburying the Past: The Commemoration, Preservation, and Historical Recovery of African American Life and Death

My dissertation examines the preservation of African American burial grounds as critical sites of historical recovery and identity formation, focusing specifically on Cincinnati’s Union Baptist Cemetery and United American Cemetery. By blending methodologies from public history, archaeology, and African American Studies, my research explores how Black cemeteries serve as repositories of cultural memory, contested spaces of racial injustice, and sites of reclamation. It interrogates the systemic neglect and erasure of Black burial sites and highlights silences in both archives and public narratives. Through archival research and oral histories, I examine descendant communities’ efforts to preserve and interpret these sacred spaces. I argue that interdisciplinary approaches to cemetery preservation and interpretation can not only reconstitute African American lives but also establish model public history practices.

POSTDOCTORAL FELLOW

Harshavardhan Bhat, Taft Research Center 
Maḷḷæ

This project explores the death of seasonalities and politics of a global story of rain, at a time of breakdown. It takes into consideration concerns of an abolitional meteorology, exploring the archives of global climatic logistics and its accounting categories, in unpacking stories of race, tropical meteorology and decarceration. 

DISSERTATION FELLOW

Stephen Bryant, School of Public & International Affairs
Identity, Emotions, and Leaving: Everyday Experiences and Drifting Away from the Islamic State (IS)

Leaving the Islamic State (IS) is often presented as religiously or economically motivated. However, limited scholarly work engages former IS members or local actors familiar with former IS members to understand their motivations for leaving IS. By interviewing local actors, I assess the influence of everyday experiences and emotions on decisions to risk leaving IS. I compare the data from these interviews with narratives of former IS members published in books and online platforms. I argue, within the context of Turkey, former IS members’ decisions to leave IS are linked to shifts in individual priorities due to changes in their personal lives, and accepting the risk that comes with leaving is influenced by people’s emotions, often emotions regarding their potential future outside of IS.

CENTER FELLOW

Tony Chemero, Philosophy

Embodiment

Embodied cognitive science has grown in popularity and prominence and has been taken up in neighboring academic fields. It seemed to me that embodied cognitive science was on sound footing. For the last few years, however, that seems to have changed, at least on blogs and what used to be called Twitter. First, it was suggested that the so-called replication crisis in psychology had hit embodied cognitive science especially hard. Then the widespread advent of virtual reality both in empirical research and in commerce seemed to some to indicate that they real body and the real world were inessential to the having experiences. Most recently, the successes of large language models and other artificial intelligence, which seem not to be embodied, has caused some to question the role of the body in intelligence.

This book is a response to these challenges, all of which are easily dismissed once one understands embodiment correctly. Most basically, embodiment is not about how the body influences our experience but is rather about how experience is partly constituted by the body. To say that the mind is essentially embodied is to say that the only things that have minds are alive, control their own movement, and are inseparably enmeshed in social, cultural, and technological contexts. The chapters of this book spell out the concept of embodiment in detail and affirm that, despite the challenges described above, the mind is essentially embodied.

POSTDOCTORAL FELLOW

Alexandra Dantzer, Taft Research Center
Awake in the World: Insomnia and the Arts of Living in Belgrade

My book manuscript explores how the elusiveness of sleep shapes people’s daily time management. I draw on over 20 months of ethnographic fieldwork with self-described insomniacs in Belgrade, whom I refer to as “non-normative sleepers.” Through interviews, focus groups, sleep diaries, sound mapping, and decoding of sleep and time-management app data, I trace how they struggle with (a)synchrony in a city where foreign capital and authoritarian rule restructure the rhythms of life. Through rest, stillness, and wakefulness, they navigate “new” rhythms and challenge the medical and capitalist logics that define a “good night’s sleep” and a healthy life. I demonstrate that insomnia, in this light, is not simply a disorder, but rather, a quiet rebellion and an insurgent mode of being against regimes of productivity and biomedical control. I argue that being out of sync is a symptom of a specific form of body-mind colonization, which I explore at the intersection of urban and technological environments, therapeutic and labor institutions, and everyday routines. 

DISSERTATION FELLOW

Shepherd Ellis, History
Aviaries on the Atlantic: Exotic Birds as Invasive Species in England & Spain, 1550-1850

England and Spain were early had early and long-lasting colonial empires that spread across the Atlantic, and ultimately, the Pacific. They are famous for instigating the “Columbian Exchange” which introduced plants and animals from Europe into their colonial territories. However, they also imported animals, especially exotic birds like peafowl and parrots. These birds served as living attractions in menageries, and then later naturalized, before finally becoming invasive species. This dissertation examines their introduction into Europe, their spread, and ultimately how zoology created the concepts of naturalized and invasive species to describe these birds.

DISSERTATION FELLOW

Ingrid Gonzalez, Romance and Arabic Languages & Literatures 
Identity: An Analysis of "Por los Valles de Arena Dorada"

DISSERTATION FELLOW

Junghyun Lee, Mathematical Sciences
Mathematical Modeling of PER Protein Dimerization in the Mammalian Circadian Clock

Circadian rhythms are 24-hour periodic biological processes within an organism, driven by an endogenous internal clock. When the circadian rhythm gets interrupted, the results can be catastrophic, causing a number of diseases. In the mammalian cells, the phosphorylation profile of clock protein PER is known to introduce a critical time cue to the circadian rhythm. Recent findings suggest that dimerization of PER is required for its excessive phosphorylation (i.e., hyperphosphorylation), which raises the question on the role of PER dimerization in the circadian clock. This research aims to build a mathematical model on the mammalian circadian clock that is intended to answer this question. The model is expected to provide insights to treating and predicting disorders due to a malfunction in the circadian clock. 

TAFT–CLASSICS FELLOW

Michelle Lessard, Classics
Studiorum Claritate Memorabilior: the Statesman-Scholar in Pliny the Elder's Naturalis Historia

In the first century CE, Pliny the Elder produced one of the world’s first encyclopedias, the Naturalis Historia, by drawing on sources from across the ancient Mediterranean. My dissertation examines how Pliny prioritizes information from sources who are both scholarly writers and political actors, a role I am defining as the “statesman-scholar.” I argue that Pliny views statecraft and scholarship as mutually reinforcing practices: positions of power provide access to information while scholarly knowledge helps leaders command more effectively. Furthermore, I will show that Pliny uses the NH to demonstrate that he is also a statesman-scholar, whose work should be valued by his contemporaries. In addition to contributing to the study of Pliny’s sources, this dissertation creates a new lens for understanding how knowledge and authority were conceptualized in the Roman world.

CENTER FELLOW

Eduardo Martinez, Philosophy
Civic Approaches to Governing Diversity

Many scholars and public commentators express concerns about the performance and stability of democratic institutions in light of polarization and entrenched social conflict. Some even suggest that we are currently experiencing the “twilight of democracy” whereby democratic and self-governance practices deteriorate, giving rise to either unstable political orders or authoritarian-driven ones. This project explores a cluster of responses to these concerns that focus on how decentralized and nesting governance structures, alongside civic innovation and organization, could better manage and leverage the value of diversity for democracy. In light of the interdependence between institutional design and civic action, this project will process and engage with research from multiple strands of political philosophy/theory and social science that focus on each of these kinds of interventions and provide action guidance that is sensitive to their interaction. 

This project consists of three distinct papers: the first paper, “Democracy’s Attention Problem,” concerns democratic performance and resilience, specifically the civic attention monopoly and its relationship to the monocentric order of institutions that it reinforces; a second paper, “Civic Policymaking,” takes up concerns about the twin dangers of unresponsive policymaking on the one hand, and intractable or stability-threatening forms of civic participation on the other; and a third, solo-authored paper, “Democratic Learning and Civic Advocacy,” argues that citizens engaging in advocacy through social movements can, and should, contribute to democratic learning.

CENTER FELLOW

Holly McGee, Africana Studies
Race Work, Memory, and the Troubles Between Us: Kivie Kaplan and the NAACP 

Black and Jewish communities have consistently interacted with one another- whether in moments of cooperation or conflict- throughout the twentieth century, most especially and strategically during the Civil Rights Movement. Social and political controversies, however, have conspired to separate the two groups. Since the 1970s, Blacks and Jews have drifted further apart, creating social and political rifts seemingly impossible to overcome. Race Work attempts to address this phenomenon by asking a series of questions aimed at bridging the divides between these marginalized, activist communities by exploring such concerns as the extent to which the removal of Kaplan from his contributions to the NAACP (and larger civil rights struggle) is a manifestation of the larger areas of contention between Jews and Black Americans; the ways in which Kaplan understood the underlying rifts that brought these groups into more overt conflict; and how Kaplan’s position in the NAACP affected Black members and their perception of respective roles (and rights) in the larger civil rights struggle during that period. Ultimately, the work is concerned with uncovering the historical and social conditions that moved Jews in America and African Americans towards different approaches to civil rights, and the ways in which the two communities can re-develop authentic relationships today.

DISSERTATION FELLOW

Ana Maria Molina, Romance and Arabic Languages & Literatures
New Theater and Contemporary Collective Creation in Colombia: Dialogue with a Method that Reveals Arm Conflict and State Violence in Colombia´s Last Century

This project explores the methodology of collective creation from its beginning in The New Theater to the last decade. It takes into account the characteristics and social contexts that took place in the movement of New Theater and the relations between El Teatro Experimental de Cali with El Teatro La Candelaria. It explores the connections between the representations of state violence in the New Theater, and the contemporary representations of it, considering three historical moments: “The massacre of the bananas” (1928), “La Violencia” (1948-1956), and the “Falsos positivos” (false positives) (2000). It ponders Brecht´s theory of the estrangement and the concept of Modernity/Coloniality and Cruel Modernity, as well as it embraces two approaches: an academic approach and a creative one.

DISSERTATION FELLOW

Carlos Munoz-Serna, Philosophy
A Philosophical Study of Nostalgia

This project studies nostalgia’s standard model, which identifies three key components: cognitive (autobiographical memory), conative (the desire to return to a past time or place), and a negative or ambivalent affective element. I contend that this model falls short, as it fails to capture the complex phenomenology of nostalgia and its role in personal psychological well-being and group dynamics. Rather than merely adjusting the components, I challenge the cognitive theory of emotions that underlies the standard model. Through an interdisciplinary approach that combines qualitative research with a philosophical approach, I argue that nostalgia is an embodied experience that enables us to regain a sense of familiarity, belonging, and security by revisiting memories where we felt most at home.

DISSERTATION FELLOW

Saani Rawat, Economics
The Effect of Cutting Local Road Tax Levies on House Values

We investigate the economic impact of cutting taxes that fund maintenance of local roads. Using Ohio Secretary of State data, we design a quasi-experiment to study city-level referendums introduced to renew local road taxes, which are typically levied via property taxes. We compare housing sale prices between similar cities that narrowly pass or fail road tax levies and use satellite images to fine-tune an Artificial Intelligence (AI) model for classifying road quality. For cities that cut their renewal tax levies, we estimate the amount of drop in road maintenance funds. Our results show that cities which decide to cut local road taxes have lower funds for road maintenance, poorer road quality and suffer an average decrease in housing prices of $15,350 (9%) over 10 years relative to cities that renewed funding. Heterogeneity analysis reveals differential decline in urban and rural areas and for expensive homes relative to their cheaper counterparts.

DISSERTATION FELLOW

Justin Reed, English
The Hidden Heart

The Hidden Heart is a novel that follows Imogen, a cartographer in a Boston ravaged by climate change. When her parents, Elara and Lucas, mysteriously disappear, they leave behind a single clue: an article about a decades-old act of ecoterrorism that sparked a series of water wars in the Colorado River Basin. After an agent from a privatized security firm reveals that Elara and Lucas are implicated in this crime, Imogen embarks on a perilous journey with her technology-obsessed nonbinary teenager, Alix, seeking answers. Accompanying the novel is a critical essay, “A Research Paper by Any Other Name: Storytelling, Argumentation, and Citizenship,” which argues that integrating creative writing into first-year composition can foreground marginalized voices and foster active citizenship.

DISSERTATION FELLOW

Bilgen Turkay, School of Public & International Affairs
The Impact of NGOs and International Organizations: A Comparative Analysis of the Syrian and Ukrainian Refugee Crises

Millions have been forced to leave their home countries due to civil wars and international conflicts. Since the Syrian civil war began, over 14 million Syrians have sought refuge elsewhere. With Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, nearly 6.5 million Ukrainians have crossed into other countries. Despite different political contexts, both crises forced governments to act immediately, collaborating with NGOs and international organizations. This dissertation focuses on Germany, Canada, and the U.S., using qualitative interviews and quantitative social media analysis to explore how NGOs and international organizations responded to these crises and the factors shaping their decision-making strategies. By contributing to the comparative politics field, it highlights the complexities of refugee protection and humanitarian response strategies.

CENTER FELLOW

Felicia Zamora, English 
El Cielo En Nuestros Ojos :: Ecological Inamorata Pulse

This book-length hybrid text of vignettes, microessays, docupoems, images, and scientific data/graphs uses “undulations” (Zuihitsu vignettes/poetic fragmentation) in the voice of a future Latina researcher investigating the collapse of human civilization from climate disaster in 2098. This book uniquely explores Latinx experience and futurity in the time of climate disaster, examining the disproportionate ways climate change/environmental decline impacts Latinx communities and peoples at the beginning of the 21st century. Poems, data, and ephemera trace contemporary environmental issues and historical trends leading to human destruction of viable living on the Earth. Poems use imaginative means and critical fabulation to incorporate ancient Mesoamerican knowledge, older ways of knowing, and magic as modalities of survival of Latinx people to adapt after the state of collapse. 

The work evolves the epic form by using a term I call “undulations” or fragments of thought, research, images, incantation, data, and voice as the key modality of the writing. Associative and disparate undulations allow for the form of the docupoem to resemble that of a crumbling humanity and society. The key component is research- speaking with and gathering thoughts from various scientists, scholars, artists, and thinkers to gain specific context and knowledge of how climate disaster impacts Latinx communities now. These conversations will be the entire pulse of the work. With this project, I seek to honor past, present and future poetics and histories of impact of climate change to my communities.

DISSERTATION FELLOW

Saskia Ziemacki, Asian, East European, and German Studies
“Playing Authority”: Das Experiment – Transcultural Adaptations and Remakes

What does it mean to “play authority”? In my dissertation I am investigating this question in analyzing the adaptations of the Stanford Prison Experiment (SPE). My analytical gaze focusses on the topic of power and how it is not just held but performed. I am interested how adaptations of the SPE depict/narrate this idea of performative authority by examining the recurring tropes across different media and cultures. 

The SPE, conducted in August 1971 by Philip Zimbardo aimed to explore how people react to roles of power and obedience within a simulated prison. Alongside Stanley Milgram’s earlier Obedience Experiment (1961), the SPE must be interpreted within the historical context of growing unrest in 1960s/70s America. A climate in which experiments foregrounded themes of systemic power, obedience, and institutional control – issues that remain politically urgent today. Since the early 2000s, the SPE has been adapted across different media, such as feature films (Das Experiment 2001; The Experiment 2010), novels, documentaries, television series, and games like Prison Architect. These adaptations resonate with cultural reflections on state violence in the United States and Germany, from Abu Ghraib to Stasi surveillance. 

They mobilize tropes like the “mad scientist” figure who transgresses ethical boundaries; symbols of authority such as uniforms and numbers. Power is shown through mechanisms of control, punishment, and psychological manipulation, echoing the Foucauldian disciplinary systems and Bentham’s Panopticon. 
The dissertation is situated at the intersection of adaptation theory, performance and performativity theory, media theory, surveillance studies, and cultural studies. 

Infrastructures of Discomfort and Bullshit Access: Public Toileting in NYC in the 20th & 21st Centuries with Matthew Wolf-Meyer 

Wednesday, January 21, 4pm | Taft Research Center | Register
co-sponsored by the Department of Anthropology 

Disability rights and justice movements have spurred the development of accessibility across public and private spaces in the United States. This has included infrastructural reforms to everyday institutional and shared spaces, including curb cuts and ramps, as well as the availability of accessible toilets, with wide stalls and hand bars. But how do we reckon with accessible toilets that are actually inaccessible because they are dangerous, costly, or policed? In this talk, I develop “bullshit access” to account for how accessibility has become a means of publicity with little consequence when it is ultimately unavailable. I focus on the history of publicly accessible toilets in Manhattan to develop these ideas, showing how inaccessible public toileting shapes public life in New York City, ensuring that only some people can participate in the public sphere. I suggest that the lack of public toilets is an “infrastructure of discomfort” that some people have found ways to unsettle through social and technological practices that upset expectations of bodily comportment in the American public sphere.

Invited by Postdoctoral Fellow Alex Dantzer, Matthew Wolf-Meyer is an anthropologist and historian of science and medicine in the U.S. Wolf-Meyer marries ethnographic research with patients, their families, and patient support networks, participant-observation of scientists, clinicians, and health care workers, and archival analysis of scientific monographs and public policies to show how thorny, contemporary problems have developed out of longstanding ideas about health and disease, disability and normalcy, and nature and civilization. 

The Breakthrough: A Talk for Scholars, Artists, and Thinkers with Hannah Dela Cruz Abrams 

Wednesday, February 4, 4:30pm | Elliston Poetry Room, 646 Langsam | Register
co-sponsored by the Department of English

This generative talk focuses on astonishment. We will explore what Queneau and his contemporaries called “potential literature.” Using a movement founded by writers and mathematicians as a reference point, the session will demonstrate how to harness potential and how to let it loose. Our rationale is that we routinely run the risk of getting in our own way—of confining ourselves to the concepts and vocabularies with which we set out. So, how do you outfox your own mind? Trick your way into the revelatory and surprise yourself into beauty? We will examine representative texts and experiment with the constraints that can help us discover transformative dimensions and insight. Our goal is to locate the places on the page where, unexpectedly and exquisitely, a boundary may be breached. Rachel Carson said, “The more clearly we can focus our attention on the wonders and realities of the universe about us, the less taste we shall have for destruction.”The strategies here may be applied not only across genres but stretched across disciplines. In a world that stultifies and isolates, we—the artists, researchers, and philosophers—are called upon to stay curious, to invent new literatures and realities that startle us into connection. 

Invited by Center Fellow Felicia Zamora, Hannah Dela Cruz Abrams received the Whiting Writers’ Award for her novella The Man Who Danced with Dolls and her memoir-in-progress, The Following Sea. She has been further supported by a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award and a North Carolina Arts Council Fellowship. Her work has appeared in Orion, the Oxford American, StoryQuarterly, the Southern Humanities Review, The Pinch, Chautauqua, the Raleigh Review, and elsewhere. Originally from the Pacific Islands, she now lives in North Carolina andteaches in the English Department at UNC Wilmington.

The "Destruction"—and "Reconquest"—of Louisville: Strikes, Militias, and Blue-Gray Reunion in Gilded Age America with Matt Stanley 

Thursday, February 19, 3pm | Taft Research Center | Register
co-sponsored by the Department of History 

This talk explores how business and political elites in the aftermath of the Great Railroad Strike of 1877 leveraged Civil War veteranhood to reassert control over workplaces, boost industrial development, and promote a range of pro-owner, anti-worker ideas.  In Louisville, those direct efforts led to the reformation of the Louisville Legion, an upper crust militia and de facto anti-labor instrument, and culminated in the city's 1895 "Blue-Gray" encampment and the Legion's celebrated role in the Spanish-American War.  Idealized as an institution in which elite Union and Confederate veterans clasped hands in the name of "public order," the Legion came to serve as a powerful symbol of North-South accommodation in a mercurial border region whose civic leaders had long prided themselves on being the nation's political as well as geographic "middle."  The Legion's form and function--its social makeup and synergy with emergent business owners' associations--also underscored the central role of capital organization and anti-labor repression, in the Ohio Valley and beyond, to the broader process of sectional reconciliation.

Invited by Center Fellow Chris Phillips, Matt Stanley is a historian of the U.S. Civil War and Reconstruction, with particular emphases on race, radicalism, regionalism, and collective memory.  He is the author or editor of three books, including the prize-winning The Loyal West: War and Reunion in Middle America (Illinois, 2017) and Grand Army of Labor: Workers, Veterans, and the Meaning of the Civil War (Illinois, 2021). Stanley’s forthcoming book, Free White Labor: Race and Capitalism in an American Borderland (Monthly Review), is set to be published in 2026. Currently, Stanley is researching a project, tentatively titled “Capital Reconciliation,” that explores the political economy of Civil War veterans’ reunions.