Spring 2008 Faculty Fellows
Spring Seminar: The Human and its Others
- Lisa Bedore, Communication Sciences and Disorders
- Douglas Biow, French and Italian
- Kelley Crews-Meyer, Geography and the Environment
- Janet Davis, American Studies and History
- Carolyn Eastman, History
- Samuel Gosling, Psychology
- John Hartigan, Anthropology
- LeeAnn Kahlor, Advertising
- Samantha Krukowski, Radio-Television-Film
- Brian Levack, History
- Abigail Lustig, History
Lisa Bedore, Associate Professor of Communication Sciences and Disorders, is interested in language acquisition, bilingualism, and communication disorders. She has published extensively in this area, and is currently working on a book manuscript, "Early Phonetic and Phonological Acquisition." This project explores the unique ways that culture and human interaction patterns influence speech and language learning outcomes for children.
Douglas Biow, Professor of French and Italian, is a specialist on Medieval and Renaissance Italy. His most recent book is The Culture of Cleanliness in Renaissance Italy (2006). In the seminar he will employ "thing theory" to consider the relationship between humans and objects in early modern culture.
Kelley Crews-Meyer, Associate Professor of Geography and the Environment, specializes in landscape change, population-environment interactions, and environmental policy. She has published numerous articles and co-edited two books on these topics. She brings to the seminar an interest in exploring the binaries through which humans are constructed in relationship to the environment, and scientists in relationship to various kinds of nonscientists (advocates, decision-makers, stakeholders).
Janet Davis, Associate Professor of American Studies and History, focuses her research on American popular culture. Her 2002 book, The Circus Age: Culture and Society under the American Big Top, was selected by Choice as an outstanding academic book. Her current book project concerns the role of evangelical Christians in the nineteenth and early twentieth-century animal welfare movement.
Carolyn Eastman, Assistant Professor of History, specializes in the history of early America, with a focus on gender, political culture, and oral, print, and visual media. She is currently completing a book manuscript entitled "A Nation of Speechifiers: Oratory, Print, and the Making of a Gendered American Public, 1780-1830." Her new project explores the role of popular print media in disseminating universal and gendered concepts of the human in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world.
Samuel Gosling, Associate Professor of Psychology, conducts a broad range of research projects on human and animal personality. He has published numerous articles on the relationship between personality and physical, virtual, aural, and social environments. During the seminar he will explore the similarities and differences between human and animals personalities as well as how people make identity claims through altering physical and virtual environments.
John Hartigan, Associate Professor of Anthropology, specializes on whiteness and critical race theory, urban studies, and the anthropology of science. His most recent book is Odd Tribes: Towards a Cultural Analysis of White People (2005). His current research concerns how human similarities and differences are being reconstituted through advances in genetics.
LeeAnn Kahlor, Assistant Professor of Advertising, focuses her research on the public understanding of science and health. Among her publications are two lead articles in the journal Science and Communication. Her current research concerns how humans conceptualize and communicate about the natural environment, environmental resources, and environmental risks and threats.
Samantha Krukowski is an Assistant Professor of Experimental Media in the Radio-Television-Film Department who has exhibited her work locally, nationally, and internationally. Her research and teaching interests center on several areas associated with experimental media, including the movement between digital and analog, virtual and actual forms. During the seminar she will be working on paintings, drawings, and video inspired by magnifications of human bodily substances.
Brian Levack, John Green Regents Professor in History specializes in the history of witchcraft prosecution and demonic possession in early modern Europe. His most recent book is the forthcoming Witch-Hunting in Early Modern Scotland: Law, Politics and Religion. He will bring to the seminar his interest in a variety of processes of dehumanization and exclusion.
Abigail Lustig, Assistant Professor of History, specializes in the history of biology and natural history in the eighteenth through twentieth centuries. She has co-edited a volume entitled Darwinian Heresies (2004), and is currently working on a book manuscript entitled "Calculated Virtues: Biology and the Explanations of Sociality since Darwin." The book focuses in particular on the use of ants as mirrors of and proxies for human beings.