–What is your academic background and what is your current position in UCHI/at UConn/Your Home Institution?

I have a B.A. in Comparative Literature from the University of Wisconsin and a Ph.D. in American Studies from Yale.  I probably gravitate towards interdisciplinary programs because I’ve never been sure what I wanted to be when I grew up.  Still don’t.

In non-Humanities Institute civilian life I am an Assistant Professor in Residence in the Urban and Community Studies Program and am based at UConn’s Waterbury campus, where I’ve been since 2002.  Between Yale and UConn I worked as a freelance public historian on a variety of books, curriculum projects, exhibits, documentaries, and other more community-based history projects mostly focusing on Puerto Rican and Latino history.   At UConn, the community engagement has continued with service learning projects for students in the history and urban studies courses I teach.

-What is the project you’re currently working on?

The working title for my book project is “Brass City/Grass Roots: The Persistence of Agriculture in Industrial Waterbury, 1870-1980.”  I’ve been working in a variety of archives around the state and conducting oral history interviews as well as reading massive piles of secondary literature on topics ranging from gardening to garbage, thanks to the Humanities Institute.

-How did you arrive at this topic?

It’s an odd story since it has nothing to do with my usual Puerto Rican/Latino research.  Really the project emerged organically [pardon the pun] from my students’ and my involvement with a Waterbury organization called Brass City Harvest, that has been working since 2007 to create new sources of fresh food and jobs for the city through community gardens, greenhouses, a mobile produce van and more recently, a soon-to-be-completed food hub where area farmers can process their produce for sale.  I was teaching an intro course in which we considered food deserts and food justice as contemporary urban issues.  My students began to do service learning projects with Brass City Harvest and I joined the board for a while.  The executive director asked me to do some research for a little exhibit on farming in Waterbury’s relatively recent past.  I had had no idea about the local farming sector, and when I started talking to people and uncovering sources the project seemed worthy of something more lasting than the original exhibit, so that’s how the book came about.

-What impact might your work have on a larger public understanding of your topic?

As Sue Pronovost, the executive director of Brass City Harvest said when she asked me to do the exhibit, it’s hard to convince people that it’s possible to grow things in a city like Waterbury when they don’t realize that it’s happened before.  This project will hopefully reknit together past and present and future by showing that people did raise, process, and market food in Waterbury not too long ago so it is entirely possible for it to happen again.  The food sector could be an important part of Waterbury’s revitalization as well as a way to improve its public health and sense of community,

In a more general way, I hope to historicize the topic of urban agriculture, which is mostly talked about in academic and popular literature as an entirely contemporary phenomenon.  But the story of Waterbury’s agricultural past is not unique, and there are many more such stories to be told about cities and towns which supposedly were 100 percent industrial until industry left.  I hope to be part of an ongoing academic and popular conversation about how and why cities used to support their food sector, when, how and why they withdrew that support, and how they can support it again.  In our era of deindustrialization, we need to look at ways to economically and socially revitalize our cities and there are many lessons to be learned from the past.

-What is your academic background and what is your current position in UCHI/at UConn/Your Home Institution?

I am a Professor of English with an appointment also in our Program in Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies, housed in the Department of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages. I have also been involved for many years with the Human Rights Institute and much of my teaching and research is around human rights. My education was in Comparative Literature and I specialize in the novel, in particular on how novelists engage problems of historical narration. Most of the primary texts I engage with are from postcolonial literatures, especially Anglophone and Francophone African literatures.

-What is the project you’re currently working on?

My current project has a tentative title of “The Hospital and the State.” It brings together a number of interpretative essays on contemporary works that focus on the hospital as a setting and use this setting as way to explore state failure. The project asks questions about the nature of political action and responsibility and where these rest in countries that have suffered significant brain drain, including the departure of many writers and intellectuals. The topic of the hospital seems to engage expatriate writers and this is intriguing to me. In this project, I also return to questions that have engaged me in earlier work concerning the writing of history. How do diasporic writers engage political and historical questions about their countries of origin? What does this distance mean to them and why do they repeatedly create characters who take on leadership roles in those countries?

-How did you arrive at this topic?

This is a hard question to answer because I feel that I am still arriving at my topic… Book projects take some time to become fully coherent. Indeed, by the time that happens, the book is finished! However, the easy answer to this question is in part through teaching courses in contemporary Anglophone fiction where this convergence of texts that focused on hospitals became apparent to me. I was also invited to participate on a panel on “Literature and the State in Africa” and first developed my ideas around this convergence for that occasion. However, the project now includes works by writers outside Africa, most notably Amitav Ghosh and Michael Ondaatje. My interests in human rights, and humanitarianism more particularly, have kept me engaged with scholarship on global health and the history of hospitals in Africa. The project is also an extension of my thinking on the narration of war, which was the topic of my previous book. Many of these novels take place during or after war.

-What impact might your work have on a larger public understanding of your topic?

In so far as the topic will focus on ideas around leadership and political agency, I hope that it can help spur a conversation about how we conceive these. My work always seeks to complicate our understanding of how historical narratives come to gain currency and takes up the challenge of decentering our perspective. Disseminating the work of writers from the Global South is additionally part of my effort to change a larger public understanding.

What is your academic background and what is your current position in UCHI/at UConn/Your Home Institution?

I am a Professor of History, with concentration in the 20th century U.S., African American. My research spans radical social movements, popular music and urban history. I am a UCHI resident fellow.

What is the project you’re currently working on?

I am writing a book on the rise and expansion of black municipal participation and control in Atlanta, beginning from the late 1960s.

How did you arrive at this topic?

My undergraduate experience at Morehouse College in Atlanta sparked my initial interest in the city. Since my graduation in the early 1990s, the city has attracted more black migrants than any city in the country– by far. Widely perceived as the “Black Mecca,” only the metropolitan area of New York City has more black people than Atlanta metro. In most years, it is the first or second most visited destination for African American tourists It has the highest concentration of black millionaires, black-owned businesses and an over-representation of blacks in municipal and Fulton County government. I’ve been long fascinated how Atlanta, once the headquarters for the Ku Klux Klan, and deeply-entrenched white supremacist control, emerged as this model of black success.

What impact might your work have on a larger public understanding of your topic?

This book will be a useful source for scholars of urban history, African American history, and urban studies. It will make important interventions in both urban history and some facets of political science. There is a subfield of Africana studies, “Black Power Studies,” that will likely find this study an important addition. I hope (as perhaps many of us) that this will also serve as a possible general interest for people interest in the Capital of the South.

-What is your academic background and what is your current position in UCHI/at UConn/Your Home Institution?

I was born and educated in The Netherlands, where I taught at Leiden University after finishing my PhD in 1984. In 1999, I moved to the US, starting my work at UConn in 2000, after having been a visiting fellow for one year at Skidmore College on a project about ‘Creativity in Art and Science. I’m a professor of linguistics who is specialized in the study of the sound structure of languages (‘phonology’). I have worked on different phenomena such as ‘syllable structure’ , ‘word stress’ and ‘vowel harmony’. When I discovered that there are languages that have no sound structure (sign languages), I included those in my research. These languages use visual display instead of sound to express meaning, but other than that they are just like spoken languages in grammatical structure and functionality.

-What is the project you’re currently working on?

The project that earned me a fellowship at the Humanities Institute this year focuses on the relation between the  perceptible form of languages and meaning, specifically looking (!) at visual languages. The question of how words get to have their perceptible form (whether audible or visible) is very old (e.g. discussed in Plato’s dialogue Cratylus). Forms relate to meaning on a continuum from the form being totally arbitrary (as most words in spoken language; why do we refer to a cat with the word ‘cat’?) to being in some sense motivated by the meaning (as in the Chinese word for cat which is ‘mao’). We call this iconicity. Iconicity plays a much larger role in sign languages and I want to investigate the factors that play a role in allowing this to happen and suppressing it in the case of spoken languages (where it actually happens more than most linguists want to admit). In my project, I also include another visual ‘language’, namely the language of drawing, especially in the context of  ‘comics’ or ‘graphic novels’.

-How did you arrive at this topic?

My project combines a number of research lines that have developed gradually over many years. My route from spoken languages to sign languages occurred because realizing that not all languages have sound structure (which was the focus of my attention for many years) came as a shock. Had I spent many years of my life on a side of language that is non-essential? But then I realized that sign languages have a counterpart to phonology because indeed all languages (in fact, all communication systems) need a perceptible side to convey meaning. So this relationship (form/meaning) crystallized as a central issue. From a young age, I’ve liked drawing and graphic novels. I then discovered that there is a blooming academic field that studies this art form. Extending my work into this domain was a natural step (and a perfect excuse to integrate a childhood interest within my academic endeavors).

-What impact might your work have on a larger public understanding of your topic?

Language is something that everyone finds interesting. Yet, many misunderstandings exist among both lay people and academics. This is especially so with respect to sign languages. My work will contribute to erasing ‘language myths’ and allow insights that have been gained in linguistics to be shared with a larger community. By broadening the perspective and including both spoken and signed languages, as well as other, specifically visual, communication systems, my project will highlight the fact that human culture is essentially a web of communication systems and that the relationship between their forms and meanings is a perfect theme to unite the study of these systems.