News

Fellow’s Talk: Geoffrey Hedges-Knyrim on Iron Age Politics and Agriculture

Posted on October 3, 2023October 11, 2023 by Della Zazzera, Elizabeth

Political Power during the Iron Age of the Southern Levant Through the Lens of Agricultural Production

Geoffrey Hedges-Knyrim (Anthropology, UConn)

with a response by Xu Peng (LCL, UConn)

Wednesday, October 11, 2023, 12:15pm, Humanities Institute Conference Room (HBL 4-209)

The event will also be livestreamed with automated captioning.

The mundane agricultural practices of the Iron Age (c.1200—c.600 BCE) southern Levant (modern Jordan, Palestine, and Israel) are less understood and appreciated relative to larger historical narratives. Understanding the mundane through the archaeological record can exemplify the daily lives of people often ignored or marginalized in the historical record. Using a political ecology framework and plant data, we can determine how state-level societies controlled their agricultural base within their specific environmental and social constraints. This presentation will discuss the current understanding of Iron Age southern Levantine agriculture from an integrated and regional archaeological perspective, focusing on the contribution of archaeological plant remains. This will show how integrating mundane data within a regional perspective using political ecology is preferable to a subregional, siloed perspective.

Geoffrey Hedges-Knyrim is an archaeologist and doctoral candidate in the Anthropology Department. He received his BS in Anthropology from The College at Brockport, SUNY in 2013 and his MA in Anthropology from the University at Buffalo, SUNY in 2015. His research interests include archaeobotany, Bronze and Iron Age archaeology of Southwest Asia, and ancient subsistence practices.

Xu Peng is a PhD candidate in Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies at the University of Connecticut. His research focuses on the articulation of Asianness, and Chineseness in particular, in Latin America and the Caribbean. He will work on his dissertation, “From History to the Future: Chineseness in Contemporary Cuban, Puerto Rican, and Dominican Literatures and Cultures,” as a dissertation fellow at UCHI. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in College Literature, Hispanic American Historical Review, Caribbean Quarterly, and Journal of Asian American Studies.

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If you require accommodation to attend this event, please contact us at uchi@uconn.edu or by phone (860) 486-9057. We can request ASL interpretation, computer-assisted real time transcription, and other accommodations offered by the Center for Students with Disabilities.

Fellow’s Talk: David Evans on the Human Right to Food

Posted on September 20, 2023September 20, 2023 by Della Zazzera, Elizabeth

Rediscovering Hunger: The Human Right to Food and US Politics in the 1970s

David Evans (History, UConn)

with a response by Kathryn Angelica (History, UConn)

Wednesday, October 4, 2023, 12:15pm, Humanities Institute Conference Room (HBL 4-209)

The event will also be livestreamed with automated captioning.

“Rediscovering Hunger” examines the political struggle surrounding the effort to embed the human right to food into US foreign and domestic policy in the mid-1970s. Following a disastrous world food crisis that lasted from 1973-1974, US citizens and political leaders re-awoke to the ethical problem that hunger presented. The promise of the modernization projects of the 1960s gave way to a reality in which wealthy countries remained well-fed, the global poor starved and suffered. Therefore in 1976, various US Congressional leaders, supported by a broad coalition of religious and secular activists, sought to establish the human right to food in US policy. The effort represented one of the earliest efforts in a wider human rights project that came to dominate US politics by the end of the decade. The episode also illustrated the constraints of effectively achieving human rights, as food producers and market fundamentalists contested the meaning and viability of the human right to food despite its moral universality.

David Evans is a doctoral candidate at the University of Connecticut where he studies the history of human rights, US foreign relations, and agricultural diplomacy. His dissertation “Hunger for Rights: Establishing the Human Right to Food, 1933–1988” explores how politicians, internationalists, and activists envisioned the human right to food, first within the discourse of international economic development, and then as a point of contention between advocates for social justice and supporters of deregulatory market policies. David is a husband and father to two children. He received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the University of North Carolina Wilmington. Before pursuing his academic career, David served eight years in the United States Marine Corps.

Kathryn Angelica is Ph.D. candidate in the History Department. Her research interests include gender & sexuality, women’s activism, and African American history in the nineteenth-century United States. While at UCHI, Kathryn will complete her dissertation “An Uneasy Alliance: Cooperation and Conflict in Nineteenth-Century Black and White Women’s Activism.”

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Fellow’s Talk: Kathryn Angelica on Black Women’s Activism

Posted on September 13, 2023 by Della Zazzera, Elizabeth

Public Patriotism: The United States Sanitary Commission and Black Women’s Interregional Grassroots Activism During the Civil War

Kathryn Angelica (History, UConn)

with a response by Geoffrey Hedges-Knyrim (Anthropology, UConn)

Wednesday, September 27, 2023, 12:15pm, Humanities Institute Conference Room (HBL 4-209)

The event will also be livestreamed with automated captioning.

This talk examines how histories of the Civil War have neglected the contributions of African American women within and beyond the United States Sanitary Commission during the Civil War. Exploring African American laborers as janitors, clerks, waiters, and cooks, Black women’s contributions to the Sanitary Commission, and African American women’s independent patriotic organizations this talk considers the many ways women of color claimed their rightful place under the banner of patriotic Northern womanhood. Importantly, it also demonstrates how African American women’s organizations diverged from the centralized goals of the Sanitary Commission to encompass Black community support, aid for refugees, and medical relief for disabled soldiers.

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Fellow’s Talk: Xu Peng on Caribbean Chineseness

Posted on September 12, 2023September 13, 2023 by Della Zazzera, Elizabeth

Reading Caribbean Chineseness: A Literary Migration

Xu Peng (LCL, UConn)

with a response by David Evans (History, UConn)

Wednesday, September 20, 2023, 12:15pm, Humanities Institute Conference Room (HBL 4-209)

The event will also be livestreamed with automated captioning.

Since the first wave of indentured Chinese laborers arrived in the Caribbean in the mid- nineteenth century amid the abolition of slavery, Chinese migrants have appeared repeatedly in Caribbean histories and literatures. While historians of the Caribbean have unearthed the Chinese presence from government decrees, census records, local newspapers and magazines, nuanced articulations of Chineseness have also been rehearsed yet remained understudied in Caribbean literature and culture. Drawing on fictional and artistic representations of Sino-Caribbean experiences, this talk proposes a framework that Peng terms “literary migration” to study Caribbean Chineseness. Attentive to the fact that the Chinese not just physically crossed national borders in the past, they have also metaphorically “migrated” into contemporary Caribbean narratives of nation-building and people-making, Peng illuminates the literary functionality of Sino-Caribbean relationality. Using Cuban writer Lourdes Casal’s 1972 short story “Los Fundadores: Alfonso” as an example, this talk demonstrates how Chineseness is narrativized and repurposed in Caribbean literature to reconsider national histories, reconstruct national identities, and envision national futures.

David Evans is a doctoral candidate in the history department whose research focuses on the history of the human right to food and United States foreign relations. Prior to entering academia, he served eight years in the United States Marine Corps as an infantry, reconnaissance, and special operations leader and deployed to Southeast Asia, Iraq and Afghanistan. David went on to earn his B.A. and M.A. degrees at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. Since starting his studies at University of Connecticut he has presented his work at several conferences, most recently the 2022 Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations Annual Conference. In 2020, David received the UConn Human Rights Institute Dissertation Research Fellowship, and the Gerald R. Ford Scholar Dissertation Award from the Ford Presidential Library.

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The Popular Culture Initiative Presents: Danielle Lindemann on What Reality TV Says about Us

Posted on September 5, 2023September 8, 2023 by Della Zazzera, Elizabeth

If you require accommodation to attend this event, please contact us at uchi@uconn.edu or by phone (860) 486-9057. We can request ASL interpreting, computer-assisted real time transcription, and other accommodations offered by the Center for Students with Disabilities.

The Popular Culture Initiative presents:

What Reality TV Says about Us

A Live Podcast Recording

September 13, 2023, 12:00pm
Homer Babbidge Library, Humanities Institute Conference Room

LIVE PODCAST RECORDING: Join us for a live recording of the UConnPopCast featuring Prof. Danielle Lindemann, author of True Story: What Reality TV Says About Us. How do The Bachelor, Survivor, RuPaul’s Drag Race, Project Runway, and other reality shows reinforce and challenge our views of class, race, family, couples, sexuality, and gender?

Participate in this live recording as an audience member—and ask Prof. Lindemann your question about reality TV—from 12-1pm on Wednesday, September 13, 2023 in the UCHI Conference Room (Homer Babbage Library, 4^th Floor). FREE FOOD!

Prof. Danielle Lindemann is an associate professor of sociology at Lehigh University. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Economist, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, Rolling Stone, and CNN.com. She recently featured in the Amazon Prime documentary Shiny Happy People: Duggar Family Secrets.

A Welcome to 2023–2024 from Director Anna Mae Duane

Posted on August 29, 2023August 29, 2023 by Della Zazzera, Elizabeth

Dear colleagues,

Love, we have been taught to believe, is a unifying force. Yet we don’t have to look far to see love deployed as a wedge that drives people apart. From local school board meetings to presidential stump speeches, love is too often wielded as a weapon. Adults insist that love for their children means that the outside world should be kept at bay; love for one’s own political community requires viewing opponents as enemies, and love of our own comfort keeps us from taking care of the earth and the generations that will succeed us. The humanities have created the definitions of love that we have inherited, and, we believe, the humanities offer us hope for reaffirming our love for justice, for democracy, and for one another.

Love and its many forms will be a theme this year as our new leadership team welcomes you back for the start of another season of collaboration, creativity, and community here at the Institute. Together we will consider how we can care for one another through works of art, acts of service, and by embracing hope for the future we can create.

We are particularly excited to offer two new initiatives that explore love as it emerges in storytelling and in caretaking. The Popular Culture Initiative (headed by Stephen Dyson) explores the narratives that win the love of wide audiences to ask what these acts of imagination can tell us about our evolving sense of the human. The Medical Humanities and the Arts Initiative (headed by Heather Cassano) insists that we need to consult a humanistic perspective if we are going to determine how we can best care for one another.

In addition to our fellowship opportunities, we are committed to furthering faculty success at every stage as we offer book manuscript workshops, coaching, and other resources designed to help faculty to lean into their strengths as writers and researchers.

Of particular interest in the weeks to come:

9/8, 1:00pm: Virtual Open House. Learn about our current offerings and collaborate with us as we find new ways to support faculty!
10/19, 4:00pm: A Daughter’s Long Goodbye, dir. Steven Smith. Film screening and discussion.
10/20, 1:00pm: Dealing with Resistance, with Jane Elliott. A zoom workshop that offers community as faculty members navigate difficult workloads, as well as concrete options for moving forward.
10/23, 4:00pm: Can you fall in love with ChatGPT? A panel discussion about the movie Her (2013), dir. Spike Jonze.

This year, we welcome a stellar group of fellows to the Institute, working on projects ranging from documentary films on migration, to legal strategies against hate speech, to monographs on early American literature. We are especially excited to welcome our undergraduate fellows. Under the capable leadership of Elizabeth Della Zazzera, we have doubled the size of this program, and look forward to working with this talented group of successful students.

As always, we continue to accept applications for funding for research, collaboration, and invited speakers all across campus, and we remind you that applications for our residential fellowships are due in February.

Keep up with everything we’re doing by following us on social media and subscribing to our newsletter: s.uconn.edu/subscribe. We suspect you will find much to love about what’s going on at UCHI this year!

Wishing everyone an excellent start to this academic year,

Anna Mae Duane and the UCHI Team.

Virtual Open House

Posted on August 16, 2023September 1, 2023 by Della Zazzera, Elizabeth

Please join us for a UCHI Virtual Open House!

September 8, 2023, 1:00 pm

As the new leadership team embarks on our first year at UCHI, we’d like to invite you to a virtual gathering where we can discuss how to build community and enhance the visibility of the remarkable scholarship produced by humanities and social science faculty here at UConn.

We’ll be talking about:

Our faculty fellowships—when and where to apply
Research funding opportunities—where and when to apply
Book Publication Support-—where and when to apply
Graduate and Undergraduate Fellowships—where and when to tell your students to apply!
We’ll also introduce you to our newer initiatives, including:
Book Manuscript Workshops
Faculty Research Forums

And we’ll speak briefly about our guiding programming questions for this coming year:

Love in Public: How Do We Care for One Another?
Great Conversations
Popular Culture and the Human

But we don’t want to do all the talking! We’re eager to hear from you, and to learn about how best to support your research and scholarship.

To attend please register at this link.

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A Farewell Message from Director Michael P. Lynch

Posted on May 10, 2023 by Della Zazzera, Elizabeth

Over the last decade, it has been my distinct honor to be part of the collective spirit of inquiry here at UCHI. That is a spirit that UCHI embodies by its very nature, and this year manifested it more than any other. Our inaugural undergraduate fellows, Rylee Thomas and Karen Lau, capped off a year of collaborative fellowship by giving two spectacular talks illustrating the value of humanities scholarship and advocacy. We launched two exhibits about the social emergence of knowledge led by Alexis Boylan: Picturing the Pandemic (with Sarah Willen) and Seeing Truth (in partnership with the American Museum of Natural History). And this year saw the launch of a new global initiative in partnership with Rutgers, Design Justice AI, as well as (in partnership with the New England Humanities Consortium or NEHC), the fourth Symposium of the Faculty of Color Working Group.

It has been tremendous to watch UCHI grow in both ambition and in substance. We have gone from a plucky institute housed in a few cozy rooms in the Austin building to an internationally known research center occupying the top floor of the library. Over the years, we’ve hosted dozens of creative minds, our fellowship program has become one of the most competitive anywhere, we founded and led the NEHC, and we’ve been awarded over $8 million in grants for projects on topics such as restoring public discourse, supporting faculty of color, and the future of truth.

None of this could have been possible without the collective work of the best team at the university, which for this year was Nasya Al-Saidy, Mary Volpe, Eric Berg, Nimra Asif, Katrina Kish, Elizabeth Zavodony, Elizabeth Della Zazzera, Yohei Igarashi, and the ever-amazing Alexis Boylan. My deepest thanks to them, and to everyone who has contributed to running this institute for the past nine years, for their hard work, creative insight, and good humor.

As I step away from the director’s seat, I know that UCHI’s spirit of collective inquiry will only grow. I very much look forward to watching the Institute develop under Professor Duane’s dynamic leadership and I’m confident it will remain a focus of creative humanistic inquiry well into the future.

Michael P. Lynch
Provost Professor of the Humanities
Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor of Philosophy

The 2023 Sharon Harris Book Award

Posted on April 13, 2023August 16, 2023 by Della Zazzera, Elizabeth

Melanie D. Newport

Assistant Professor, History, UConn

for her book

This is My Jail: Local Politics and the Rise of Mass Incarceration (Penn Press, 2022)

The Sharon Harris Book Award Committee notes, “An incisive and timely political history, Melanie Newport’s This is My Jail: Local Politics and the Rise of Mass Incarceration (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2023) features previously under-engaged stories of resistance by jailed people and their allies to challenge conventional accounts of the inevitable or recent emergence of mass incarceration in the U.S. Long predating the rise of conservatism and neo-conservatism, Newport persuasively shows how, in experimental and contingent ways, local governments relied on jails to manage the freedom of people of color from the founding of the nation and its cities. An indispensable player in ongoing negotiations over what local government could and should do, the functions of jails evolved with their role as urban regulatory institutions. As Black and Latinx urban residents resisted them as criminalizing the poor and perpetrating purposeful racialization, the response, through the twentieth century, was jail expansion. Drawing from these lessons, Newport states unequivocally that jails are barriers to collective freedom that cannot deliver a solution to violence in Chicago or beyond. We are delighted that this important, must-read study was authored by a UConn colleague!”

Dimitris Xygalatas

Associate Professor, Anthropology, UConn

for his book

Ritual: How Seemingly Pointless Acts Make Life Worth Living (Little, Brown Spark, 2022)

The Sharon Harris Book Award Committee notes, “Dimitris Xygalatas’ Ritual: How Seemingly Pointless Acts Make Life Worth Living, is an exceptional combination of meticulous research and vivid prose, a first-rate scholarly book which has garnered attention well beyond the academy. Xygalatas combines scientific methodology with a deeply humanistic perspective to argue that rituals which seem initially without purpose constitute deep wells of comfort, connection, and meaning in societies across the world. Ritual, a book which enlightens and entertains, is the focus of multiple special issues in academic journals and has been covered by NPR, the BBC, Nature, and others.”

Martha Cutter

Professor, English, American Studies, & Africana Studies, UConn

for her book

The Many Resurrections of Henry Box Brown (Penn Press, 2022)

The Sharon Harris Award Committee notes, “This book both excavates the radical effects of the performances of Henry Box Brown, both in the nineteenth-century world in which he lived, and in the imaginations and artistry of Black innovators in the twenty-first century. Henry Box Brown self-emancipated in 1849 by having himself mailed in a large postal crate to free soil in Philadelphia. He then created a career in which he built on his own remarkable story as an abolitionist lecturer, magician, actor, singer, and hypnotist. Cutter scrutinized a far-flung archive that included materials in England, the US, and Canada to reveal aspects of Brown’s life and work that had been previously unknown. This book manages the difficult feat of both creating an impeccably-researched engagement with this remarkable man and tracing his legacies in compelling close readings of current literature and artistry. This truly interdisciplinary work offers an important new perspective in how we engage the work of nineteenth-century African American artistry, but how that artistry continues to influence our present moment.”

Nu-Anh Tran

Assistant Professor, History & Asian and Asian American Studies, UConn

for her book

Disunion: Anticommunist Nationalism and the Making of the Republic of Vietnam (University of Hawai‘i Press, 2022)

The Sharon Harris Award Committee notes, “Nu-Anh Tran’s book Disunion: Anticommunist Nationalism and the Making of the Republic of Vietnam, offers a fresh perspective on the Vietnam War and its legacies by engaging and analyzing a largely neglected archive of Vietnamese-language sources. In doing so, Tran makes a persuasive case that overturns the conventional wisdom that the U.S’s hand was forced in propping up up the dictatorial Ngô Đình Diệmin as the only feasible option in the fight against communism. Tran’s research reveals that the U.S. could have chosen any number of Vietnamese allies as it sought to stop the expansion of communism. Rather, the US chose to invest in the most authoritarian option because of colonialist skepticism around the Vietnamese capacity for democracy. This remarkable book adds complexity and nuance to the ever-present American justification of violent intervention as a means of ‘spreading democracy.’”

Fellow’s Talk: Karen Lau and Rylee Thomas

Posted on April 7, 2023April 7, 2023 by Della Zazzera, Elizabeth

Undergraduate Humanities Research Fellows

Karen Lau, “Soup Dumplings for the Soul: Ethnic Studies and Social-Emotional Learning”

and Rylee Thomas, **“The Ghostly Dynasty: Victim-Blaming, the Gothic Novel, and the Modern True-Crime Drama”**

Wednesday, April 19, 2023, 5:00pm, Humanities Institute Conference Room (HBL 4-209)

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The event will also be livestreamed with automated captioning.

“Soup Dumplings for the Soul: Ethnic Studies and Social-Emotional Learning”

Karen’s public humanities project examines the link between ethnic studies and social-emotional learning. She will share conclusions from a series of Asian American history workshops she led at EO Smith High School and their impact on students’ mental health and sense of identity.

Karen Lau, from Norwich, CT, is a Day of Pride Scholar majoring in political science and economics with a minor in Asian American studies. As an inaugural UCHI Undergraduate Research Fellow, her project’s aims are two-fold: 1) pilot a qualitative study that implements a novel Asian American history curriculum at a local high school and 2) investigate how the curriculum affects students’ mental health, social-emotional learning, and sense of identity. With funding from UCHI, the UNH Center for the Humanities, and the Mellon Foundation, her fellowship will produce publicly engaged humanities scholarship, culminating in a student-curated exhibit and a journal publication. Karen’s research interests include ethnic studies, curriculum development, digital humanities, and education policy. She pursues these interests as an intern for Make Us Visible, a member of the Humanities Undergraduate Research Symposium, and the Secretary of the Human Rights Symposium. Karen is also a 2022 Holster Scholar, a UConn@COP27 Fellow, a Campaign Fellow for Joe Courtney for Congress, and a member of the Special Program in Law. She aspires to serve the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund as a public interest attorney. In her free time, Karen enjoys curating Spotify playlists, exploring trails, visiting farmers’ markets, and shopping for corduroy pants.

“The Ghostly Dynasty: Victim-Blaming, the Gothic Novel, and the Modern True-Crime Drama”

Throughout history, a disturbing trend in social perceptions of domestic abuse and violence against women is a tendency to blame the victim. While feminist movements have changed this culture for the better, contemporary society continually criticizes women for behaving in ways that bring tragedy upon themselves. To explore this dichotomy, Rylee is writing a contemporary young adult horror novel that plays upon the conventions of both the gothic novel and the modern true-crime drama. Her novel, titled The Ghostly Dynasty, will explore the double standards that society places on women in both literary and criminal justice.

Rylee Thomas is a junior at UConn double majoring in English and communication with a creative writing concentration. After graduation, Rylee plans to get her masters in English and pursue a career in publishing. She’s incredibly grateful to have won the Wallace Stevens Poetry Contest, the Collins Prize in Poetry, and the Aetna Prize for Creative Writing for Children. When not writing, she can be found figure skating, drinking matcha lattes, and rereading Austen novels. For her project, Rylee wants to explore the culture of victim-blaming double standards that contemporary society continues to place on women through tropes of nineteenth-century gothic novels. She hopes to explore this dichotomy by writing a contemporary young adult fantasy novel that plays upon the conventions of both the gothic novel and modern true-crime drama.

Political Power during the Iron Age of the Southern Levant Through the Lens of Agricultural Production

Geoffrey Hedges-Knyrim (Anthropology, UConn)

with a response by Xu Peng (LCL, UConn)

Wednesday, October 11, 2023, 12:15pm, Humanities Institute Conference Room (HBL 4-209)

The event will also be livestreamed with automated captioning.

Access note

Rediscovering Hunger: The Human Right to Food and US Politics in the 1970s

David Evans (History, UConn)

with a response by Kathryn Angelica (History, UConn)

Wednesday, October 4, 2023, 12:15pm, Humanities Institute Conference Room (HBL 4-209)

The event will also be livestreamed with automated captioning.

Access note

Public Patriotism: The United States Sanitary Commission and Black Women’s Interregional Grassroots Activism During the Civil War

Kathryn Angelica (History, UConn)

with a response by Geoffrey Hedges-Knyrim (Anthropology, UConn)

Wednesday, September 27, 2023, 12:15pm, Humanities Institute Conference Room (HBL 4-209)

The event will also be livestreamed with automated captioning.

Access note

Reading Caribbean Chineseness: A Literary Migration

Xu Peng (LCL, UConn)

with a response by David Evans (History, UConn)

Wednesday, September 20, 2023, 12:15pm, Humanities Institute Conference Room (HBL 4-209)

The event will also be livestreamed with automated captioning.

Access note

The Popular Culture Initiative presents:

What Reality TV Says about Us

A Live Podcast Recording

Access note

Melanie D. Newport

Assistant Professor, History, UConn

This is My Jail: Local Politics and the Rise of Mass Incarceration (Penn Press, 2022)

Dimitris Xygalatas

Associate Professor, Anthropology, UConn

Ritual: How Seemingly Pointless Acts Make Life Worth Living (Little, Brown Spark, 2022)

Martha Cutter

Professor, English, American Studies, & Africana Studies, UConn

The Many Resurrections of Henry Box Brown (Penn Press, 2022)

Nu-Anh Tran

Assistant Professor, History & Asian and Asian American Studies, UConn

Disunion: Anticommunist Nationalism and the Making of the Republic of Vietnam (University of Hawai‘i Press, 2022)

Undergraduate Humanities Research Fellows

Karen Lau, “Soup Dumplings for the Soul: Ethnic Studies and Social-Emotional Learning”

and Rylee Thomas, “The Ghostly Dynasty: Victim-Blaming, the Gothic Novel, and the Modern True-Crime Drama”

Wednesday, April 19, 2023, 5:00pm, Humanities Institute Conference Room (HBL 4-209)

The event will also be livestreamed with automated captioning.

“Soup Dumplings for the Soul: Ethnic Studies and Social-Emotional Learning”

“The Ghostly Dynasty: Victim-Blaming, the Gothic Novel, and the Modern True-Crime Drama”

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and Rylee Thomas, **“The Ghostly Dynasty: Victim-Blaming, the Gothic Novel, and the Modern True-Crime Drama”**