Humanities

Jason Ashe, PhD

ASSISTANT PROFESSOR, EMORY COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES, RELIGION

Iniquity and Inequity: A Theology for Black Health Disparities

Iniquity and Inequity will be the first monograph to critically engage traditional Christian theology of illness alongside racial health disparities and population health sciences, with a specific focus on the Black Church and Black people’s health in the United States (US). Theological discourse on health often ascribes positive connotations to suffering, suggesting it as a necessary experience for strengthening one’s relationship with God. Even though faithfulness does not always yield good health or longevity, the sick person’s prayers might influence God to heal them. However, these conversations seldom consider how human health is shaped by the social conditions in which we live. As a health disparities researcher, I argue that racism presents a grave theological dilemma. Without naming systemic racism as a driver of poorer health, we inevitably portray God, “the Great Physician,” as biased against Black people. This book is a dialogue between public health and Black Church studies, tracing points of contention and divergence across chapters organized by personal experiences with untimely loss, historical episodes of medical racism, and Christian teachings that (in)directly reinforce suffering as good, without attending to Black health inequalities. Then, using Black theology and womanism as interlocutors with theological bioethics, I argue that, in light of the racist medical landscape in the US, the Black Church has developed a language that reimagines God as their Healer. Still, we need to resist claims that reuniting with the dead in the afterlife is also a sufficient response to premature deaths, especially those resulting from racist forces.

Laura Emmery, PhD

ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR, EMORY COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES, MUSIC

Cold War Cultural Diplomacy: Music Festivals in Yugoslavia

Taking advantage of the Cold War political divisions and the country's distinctive non-aligned position, Yugoslav artists created cultural exchange programs that bridged the East-West divide. Music festivals, in particular, served a special role in enabling the exchange of ideas from both ideological worlds, making the Iron Curtain less impermeable. This project examines the emergence of postwar Yugoslav cultural programs that made the new communist state one of the most significant centers for experimental musicians and artists from both Blocs through the sudden and violent dissolution of that program in 1991, with the collapse of the political state.

Irving Goh, PhD

PROFESSOR, EMORY COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES, COMPARATIVE LITERATURE

(No) End of Work: "Postwork Imaginaries" in Contemporary Literature

Despite the “Great Resignation” and “Lying Flat” movements at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, and despite “postwork imaginaries” scholarship since the early 2010s in the fields of cultural studies, Marxist feminism, and organizational studies that has underscored for us everything that is wrong with work and how the ideology of work is consuming our lives, we still cannot give up on work. Just two years after the pandemic, we either seem desperate or are made to return to work with pre-COVID fervor. While economic or subsistence reasons might explain our supposed necessity to work, this project believes that there are also other deeper personal and larger social forces that make existence inextricable from work. As this project sees it too, this inextricability is perhaps one of humankind’s greatest, or even last, philosophical problem, which, insofar as it is not addressed and/or solved, constitutes an impasse of contemporary life. To explicate the forces that are entrenching this problem and/or impasse, this project will look at contemporary “postwork” novels that include Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation, Hilary Leichter’s Temporary, Ling Ma’s Severance, Raven Leilani’s Luster, and Adelle Waldman’s Help Wanted. Taking a leaf out of the moments of rest in these novels, and to offer a way out of the impasse, this project also proposes a general break taken by all at the same time, one that avoids the “meantime” (Sarah Sharma) where the privileged rest while poorer and racialized others work.

Kali Gross, PhD

PROFESSOR, EMORY COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES, AFRICAN AMERICAN STUDIES

First to Burn: Black Women and the Long History of American Execution

Beginning with the 1681 trial of Mariah, an enslaved Black woman burned at the stake in the Massachusetts Bay Colony for arson, _First to Burn: Black Women and the Long History of American Execution_ will chart how capital punishment evolved and disproportionately impacted Black women in America. Mariah was not simply the first Black woman burned at the stake; she was the first woman to be burned in what would become the continental United States. In fact, Black women account for several “historic firsts” in the administration of capital punishment from the 1600s to the present, and they unwillingly played a central role in the evolution of death penalty practices. With the support of a URC, First to Burn will be the first book to focus on this overlooked history.

Marina Magloire, PhD

ASSISTANT PROFESSOR, EMORY COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES, ENGLISH

Memory Work

Memory Work is a public humanities book project commissioned by W.W. Norton. This book seeks to familiarize students and general audiences with the different methods and practices of "memory work;" that is, the work of preserving and interpreting personal, cultural, or intellectual artifacts. Using a mix of archival case studies and oral history interviews with memory workers (e.g. librarians, genealogists, archaeologists, and museum workers), I demonstrate the ethical concerns around documenting historically under-documented groups of people. The voices of Black people in particular have often been left out of archives that have historically recorded them only as property, so establishing a people-centered method for preserving modern day Black voices is particularly important. To do so, the book offers different perspectives on the following questions: Should archives be housed in well-resourced collecting institutions like universities and museums, or should they remain within the communities they stem from? What is the balance between allowing visitors to use archival materials, and keeping the materials safe for future generations? Why is it important to preserve historical documents at all, and how can these documents be useful for the living people in marginalized communities? I am requesting URC funds in order to conduct the necessary archival research and interviews in Atlanta; Hilton Head, SC; New Orleans, and Miami.

Mehtap Ozdemir, PhD

ASSISTANT PROFESSOR, EMORY COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES, COMPARATIVE LITERATURE

The Relevant Subject: Ottoman Cosmopolitics and The Ends of World Literature

In recent decades, world literature has significantly expanded. After its resurgence at the turn of the century, when it reawakened the cosmopolitan horizon of comparative studies, world literary space has become no longer commensurate with (post)colonial European geographies. It now includes other literary cosmopolises across a Eurasian span and no longer privileges the modern era alone. These efforts have enriched world literature by foregrounding diverse genealogies across geographical and temporal registers. Yet if world literature is understood more as a modern knowledge system than an international system of circulation, the metric of inclusion, adding previously excluded languages, locales, and histories, remains insufficient to address its colonial architecture, which valorizes certain modes of knowing and being as relevant while rendering others irrelevant. Taking Ottoman/Turkish literary modernity (1860s-1940s) as a critical site to interrogate world literature as a technology of subject formation, this book argues that the subject of world literature operates within a double economy of relevance in the modern era. On the one hand, the book identifies an economic logic of translation that sustains modern world literature by producing relevant measures for universal comparability alongside residual forms that exceed comparison. On the other hand, it conceptualizes modern subjectivity as an inherently tensile formation, structured by this logic of relevance yet disclosed through linguistic, aesthetic, and fictional residues. By foregrounding translation as a constitutive condition of modern subjectivity, the book shows how modern forms of knowing and being come into existence, while also suggesting that the ethical task of the world literary subject lies in living responsibly in the interval between relevance and irrelevance.

Gregory Palermo, PhD

ASSISTANT PROFESSOR, EMORY COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES, EMORY WRITING PROGRAM

Mapping the Hidden Metric Spaces of Interdisciplinary Scholarship: A Topographical Approach to Citation Analysis

The dominance of “black-boxed” search algorithms and generative artificial intelligence increasingly obscures scholarly provenance. While citation analytics can support source discovery for research and pedagogy, current methods for visualizing citation networks often prioritize aesthetic connectivity over metric accuracy. These “hairball” diagrams require subtracting data to remain legible and mask the spatial relationships between research clusters. My proposed project intervenes by approaching computational bibliometrics from a rhetorical perspective. This project recovers the “hill model,” a technique that treats citation density as elevation to create topographical maps of scholarly terrain. Unlike network graphs, these maps would use nonlinear metric Multi-Dimensional Scaling (MDS) to ensure spatial distance represents co-citation probability, combined with a projection and clustering workflow (UMAP and HDBSCAN) to maintain information about local citation relationships. Using existing computing resources, the project establishes a reproducible pipeline to visualize these research landscapes, identifying the “valleys” where interdisciplinary work bridges disciplinary “peaks.” This approach advances citational justice by prioritizing intellectual commonplaces and underrepresented scholarship. URC funding would support me in refining my dissertation work, which visualizes citation networks across Digital Humanities and writing studies, to author two articles for submission to the Journal of Cultural Analytics and College Composition and Communication. The support would advance my trajectory as an Assistant Teaching Professor and Co-director of the Center for the Future of Trust, as I develop methods to integrate into my teaching and mentorship on the recursive processes of navigating, evaluating, and synthesizing sources.

Angela Porcarelli, PhD

TEACHING PROFESSOR, EMORY COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES, FRENCH AND ITALIAN

The Genealogy of Ingenuity and Deception: The Novelle di Beffa (Trickster Stories) from Boccaccio’s Decameron to Manetti’s Novella del Grasso Legnaiuolo

My research project examines how the genre of novelle di beffa (trickster stories) reveals both the power and fragility of human ingenuity. Many scholars have explored Boccaccio’s celebration of the tricksters' ingenuity in the Decameron, I examine the genre from a different perspective, highlighting how mockery tales expose how easily rationality can be unsettled. This tension becomes central in Antonio Manetti’s La novella del Grasso Legnaiuolo (Tale of the Fat Woodworker). Filippo Brunelleschi, the Renaissance architect famous for engineering the dome of Florence Cathedral and for rediscovering linear perspective, devises a sophisticated ruse to convince a man, il Grasso, that he has become someone else. The story explores how engineered illusions can reshape belief and perception and bring a man to the brink of madness. A key lens in my interpretation is linear perspective, the Renaissance’s symbol of rational order. Paradoxically, perspective also demonstrates the limits of perception: a persuasive image can make artifice appear real. Manetti’s tale dramatizes this same paradox. The project is framed by Lodovico Castelvetro’s Poetica d’Aristotele vulgarizzata e sposta, which reinterprets Aristotle by incorporating Platonic ideas on comedy, understood as a mixture of pleasure and pain. Using short stories from the Decameron as evidence, Castelvetro legitimizes a comic mode with tragic undertones and offers a foundational framework for the comic genre of trickster stories in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. This research provides a historical perspective on ingenuity, artifice, and deception. If Renaissance strategies of deception were elaborate, today’s AI mediated illusions have dangerously extended that potential. Just as linear perspective adopted a single “objective” viewpoint while concealing its constructed nature, contemporary technologies shape what

Jennifer Porst, PhD

ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR, EMORY COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES, FILM AND MEDIA

“Regulating Authorship and Creativity: IP Law, AI, and Hollywood”

Throughout Hollywood history, new technologies have prompted legal challenges to existing Intellectual Property (IP) laws and their application to new and legacy media. Now, Artificial Intelligence (AI) has introduced another important inflection point, and IP law has had to confront some of the earliest challenges posed by AI.   In Hollywood, the industrial lifeblood depends on the rights and subsequent profits granted by IP laws, and the evolution of IP law in relation to AI has profound implications for Hollywood production, labor, markets and audiences, and broader industry structures. That is because IP law, at its foundation, relies on clear definitions of concepts at the heart of the humanities and film and television in particular: creativity, authorship, expression, and humanity. In this critical moment when AI endlessly complicates those definitions, this project examines how the industry, the law, and our political leaders respond and what that could mean for the future of the media and the arts more broadly.  This media industry studies project uses interdisciplinary, qualitative methods to take a critical and cultural approach to analyzing the industrial, legal, and policy debates around AI, IP, and film and television, and draws on ethnographic methods to conduct interviews with stakeholders who aim to influence the future of IP and AI in Hollywood. The results of this work will illuminate ways to better advocate for the role of humans in the creative process, protect human labor and artworks, and ensure that there is a viable future for the arts and artists.

Geovani Ramirez, PhD

ASSISTANT PROFESSOR, EMORY COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES, ENGLISH

They Bring It Home with Them: Hazardous Habitats & The Burning Question of Labor

The Burning Question of Labor studies late 20th (1970s-1990s) and 21st century narratives that portray Latinx labor and illustrate the permeable boundaries between human bodies and their environments. My book examines a wide range of literary forms, cultural expressions, and materials—novels, plays, poems, short stories, and vignettes—alongside essays, speeches, written/audio/video interviews, (auto)ethnographies, news articles, and comics. As a literary project, my book employs literary methods, particularly close reading, to study the literary techniques and rhetorical devices writers/speakers use to portray worksites, labor conditions, and the embodied knowledge and practices that arise from inhabiting hazardous work environments. Using the frameworks of slow violence, slow observation, and trans-corporeality to hone my close reading of the coalescence of human bodies and their environments, I argue that Latinx labor-informed epistemologies manifest an acute awareness of the ways that laboring spaces and technologies adversely affect human health and environments. Inquiring as to how strenuous labor, toxic exposures, and hostile environments affect the lives of Latinx laborers, The Burning Question considers not simply what exposures or injuries (and processes that cause them) occur at work but contemplates, when appropriate, stories about exploitative and toxic environments (habitats) as also illness narratives. I thus understand writings that link environments and health as what medical humanist Anne Hunsaker Hawkins terms ecopathographies. I use ecopathographies as a framework to understand narratives on Latinx labor, and I expand on the genre.         

Leonardo Velloso-Lyons, PhD

ASSISTANT PROFESSOR, EMORY COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES, SPANISH AND PORTUGUESE

Figural Africa: Race, Historiography and the Global Turn in Early Modernity (1550-1630)

The imperial ventures of Iberians in the early modern period did much to shape the world as we know it today. From establishing the transatlantic slave trade to the colonization of vast swathes of the Americas, Africa, and Asia, the impacts of that time carry through to our present in countless untold ways, not least of which is how we think about Africa and its place in the world. Examining histories written in Peru, Ecuador, Senegambia, and Iberia, my project shows how a group of historians theorized Africa for their readers, in doing so, constructing racialized geographic identities that could rationalize colonial projects around the globe. My findings show that these historians did this in ways that not only contributed to but also transcended the now common colonialist image of the African continent as a provider of human labor and raw materials. While diverse orders of knowledge (cartographic, ethnographic, antiquarian, etc.) shape these historians’ works, as well as their local realities in each place, my project reveals the common thread that underpins these histories: an unmistakably ambivalent rhetorical framework—one that acknowledges the centrality of Africans in the increasingly globalized Ibero-Atlantic world while also striving to limit their actual and symbolic influence by assigning them a racialized geographic identity. Africa and African peoples, as I argue, were an important hinge for early modern historians who sought to reduce the continent to a series of transposable figures of thought that could be used to understand and evaluate non-African peoples and places.

Calvin Warren, PhD

ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR, EMORY COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES, AFRICAN AMERICAN STUDIES

Incalculable Blackness: Mathematics and Existence

Continental Philosophy is currently experiencing a “mathematical turn” in its attempt to formalize Being, avoid the pitfalls of phenomenology and correlationism, and rupture knowledge programs. This “turn”, however, neglects antiblackness and reproduces metaphysical violence—-since mathematical procedures often support oppressive technologies (think of algorithms, for example, used for police surveillance, employment discrimination, redlining etc..). This project examines the “underside” of the mathematical turn; in particular, it argues that black thinkers challenge mathematical reasoning to discredit metaphysics and imagine new cosmologies—ones that remain incalculable by Eurocentric reasoning and mathematical procedures. By examining African fractals, ethnomathematics, African Sacred Sciences (Yoruba mathematics), and contemporary iterations of Black thought, I sketch out the subversive use of black mathematics. Ultimately, this project develops a “Black Philosophy of Mathematics” to advance new knowledge at the intersection of Black Philosophy and ethnomathematics. I am applying for the URC (Fall 2026)) to complete this manuscript and submit it to Duke University Press (Political Theology Undisciplined book series).