20 Years of UCHI

Fellow’s Talk: Prakash Kashwan on Rethinking Academic Hierarchies

UCHI Fellow's Talk: Liberal vs Useful Arts? Rethinking Academic Hierarchies in a (Mal)Connected World. Associate Professor of Political Science, UConn, Prakash Kashwan with a response by Drew Johnson. March 2, 2022, 4:00pm, HBL 4-209.

“Liberal” vs “Useful” Arts? Rethinking Academic Hierarchies in a (Mal)Connected World

Prakash Kashwan (Associate Professor, Political Science, UConn)

with a response by Drew Johnson (Philosophy, UConn)

Wednesday, March 2, 2022, 4:00pm, HBL 4-209

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Contemporary calls for the fusion of ‘humanities’ and ‘sciences’ stand atop a long history of a hierarchical world view that separated the intellectual pursuits of liberal arts from the less prestigious fields of mechanical or ‘useful’ arts. While liberal arts were believed to be the domain of ‘free men,’ useful arts were meant for ‘slaves and serfs.’ Prakash Kashwan asks how living legacies of such a hierarchal view of academia might haunt the pursuit of ‘interdisciplinary’ research, which itself has been come under heavy criticism from radical social thinkers and philosophers. Kashwan asks what such a-priori characterization of any intellectual pursuit means for our collective ability to contribute to realizing justice outcomes in a mal-connected world. He engages the audience in centering human agency and ingenuity in diverse intellectual pursuits aimed at smashing the status quo toward a liberating and transformative world making.

Prakash Kashwan is an Associate Professor of Political Science and Co-Director of the Research Program on Economic and Social Rights, Human Rights Institute, University of Connecticut, Storrs. He is the author of the widely reviewed book Democracy in the Woods: Environmental Conservation and Social Justice in India, Tanzania, and Mexico (Oxford University Press, 2017), editor of Climate Justice in India (Cambridge University Press, July 2022), co-editor of the journal Environmental Politics, and the co-founder of Climate Justice Network. Dr. Kashwan is also the vice-chair of the Environmental Studies Section of the International Studies Association (ISA), and serves on the editorial advisory boards of Earth Systems Governance, Progress in Development Studies, Sage Open, and Humanities & Social Sciences Communications. His public-facing writings have appeared in popular venues, such as The Conversation, the Guardian, Al-Jazeera and the Washington Post.

Drew Johnson is a Philosophy PhD candidate at the University of Connecticut. His dissertation project, “A Hybrid Theory of Ethical Thought and Discourse,” examines the nature and function of ethical thought and discourse. Drew has published on skepticism, deep disagreement and intellectual humility, and on self-knowledge (including co-authored work with Dorit Bar-On). During the Summer of 2019, he was the recipient of the Ruth Millikan Graduate Research Fellowship, awarded by the UConn Philosophy Department. Drew is currently a Dissertation Scholar at the University of Connecticut Humanities Institute.

Access note

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.

Let’s Talk about the 1619 Project

Let's talk about the 1619 project with Prof Dexter Gabriel. For UConn undergraduates, March 23, 2022, 2:00pm, HBL 4-209.

Let’s Talk about…

The 1619 Project

with Prof. Dexter Gabriel (Assistant Professor, History & Africana Studies, UConn)

March 23, 2022, 2:00pm. Homer Babbidge Library, 4-209.

This is an honors event.

The CLAS Dean’s office and UCHI invite UConn undergraduates to participate in a discussion group about the 1619 Project—an initiative to rethink the history of the United States led by Pulitzer-prize winning journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones and the New York Times Magazine. Professor Dexter Gabriel will lead the discussion and help guide students in this important dialogue about reframing national history, the legacies of American slavery, and the controversies surrounding the 1619 Project. The first 40 students to register will receive a free ebook of The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story, and all participants are invited to attend Nikole Hannah-Jones’ talk at the Student Union Theater on March 30th.

REGISTER

Fellow’s Talk: Kathryn Moore on the Fractal Tree of Life

2021–22 UCHI fellow's talk. Leonardo da Vinci and the Fractal Tree of Life. Assistant Professor, Art and Art History, Kathryn Moore. With a response by Meina Cai. February 23, 2022, 4:00pm. Homer Babbidge library, 4-209.

Leonardo Da Vinci and the Fractal Tree of Life

Kathryn Moore (Assistant Professor, Art and Art History, UConn)

with a response by Meina Cai (Political Science, UConn)

Wednesday, February 23, 2022, 4:00pm, HBL 4-209

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This paper will explore the relationship between Leonardo da Vinci’s theories of the geometry of dynamic systems in nature and his artistic output, from c. 1497 until his death in 1519. Working in various media, from his frescoes depicting an artificial garden in the Sala delle Asse and related knot engravings, to his various drawings of geometry and anatomy in his notebooks, Leonardo visualized aspects of complexity beyond verbal description. In these various contexts, the fractal tree of life emerged as a primary model for natural systems that grow over time, from the microcosm of an individual human organ to the macrocosm of the earth.

Kathryn Blair Moore, Assistant Professor of Art History at the University of Connecticut, researches in the medieval and Renaissance periods in Europe and the Mediterranean region. Her book, The Architecture of the Christian Holy Land: Reception from Late Antiquity through the Renaissance (Cambridge University Press, 2017), focused upon the architectural legacy of Jerusalem and the Holy Land more generally. With Hasan-Uddin Khan, she is co-editor of The Religious Architecture of Islam (Brepols, 2021 and 2022). Her second monograph focuses upon arabesques in a European context. She has been a fellow of Harvard University’s Villa I Tatti and the American Academy in Rome.

Meina Cai is an Assistant Professor of Political Science and Asian/Asian American Studies Institute at UConn. Her research focuses on the political economy of development and institutions. She is currently working on land property rights, urbanization, and rural governance in China. She is a UCHI fellow in 2021–2022.

Access note

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.

20 Years of Fellows: Dexter Gabriel

As part of our 20th anniversary celebrations, we've checked in with former fellows to gather reflections on their fellowship years, to get an update on their fellowship projects, and to see what they are working on next. Read them all here.

Headshot of Dexter Gabriel2018–2019 Faculty Fellow Dr. Dexter Gabriel is Assistant Professor of History at UConn. He earned his B.A. in history from Texas State University-San Marcos, an M.A. in history also from Texas State University-San Marcos, and his Ph.D. in history from Stony Brook University-New York. His research interests include the history of bondage, resistance, and freedom in the Black Atlantic, as well as interdisciplinary approaches to slavery within popular culture and media. His current research explores British Emancipation in the Anglo-Caribbean and its impact on abolitionist strategies in nineteenth-century North America. His work has been translated into the social arena through panel discussions, lectures, articles, and interviews as diverse as the Federal Reserve Bank of Virginia to Voice of America, BBC America, and elsewhere


What was your fellowship project about?

I was working on turning my dissertation into a book manuscript for submittal. Titled Jubilee’s Experiment, it explored the impact of British Emancipation on American abolitionism in the 19th century.

Would you give us an update on the project?

The manuscript is currently under contract with Cambridge University Press.

How did your fellowship year shape your project, or shape your scholarship in general?

I was able to use that invaluable time to really think through my project. Dissertations are inherently different from book manuscripts, and I was able to go about the process of trying to imagine what those differences were and how they could coalesce into a working narrative.

Would you share a favorite memory from your time as a UCHI fellow?

Sitting and sharing tea, coffee, and dessert with other fellows—talking about our work, the challenges we were facing, and just talking about academic life in general.

What are you working on now (or next)?

Finishing up for final submission of the book manuscript. Next up, research for a book project on African American emigration to the Caribbean during the 19th century.

Our theme for UCHI’s 20th anniversary year is “The Future of Knowledge.” What would you say are some of the challenges facing the future of knowledge? And what do you think is most exciting or promising about the future of knowledge?

Perhaps one of the greatest challenges we’re facing comes ironically from our success. Thanks to technology today, we can both access knowledge and disperse it in ways before unimagined. We are quite literally in an age of boundless information. At the same time, interpreting that information, discerning fact from fiction, and outright misinformation, has become a serious problem. What gives promise is that despite these challenges, it does show that people are still curious about the world around them, about the past, and their place in the world. I don’t think that quest for knowledge is disappearing from the human experience any time soon.

20 Years of Fellows: Joseph Ulatowski

As part of our 20th anniversary celebrations, we've checked in with former fellows to gather reflections on their fellowship years, to get an update on their fellowship projects, and to see what they are working on next. Read them all here.

Headshot of Joseph Ulatowski2019–2020 Visiting Fellow Joseph Ulatowski is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy, and Director of the Experimental Philosophy Research Group at the University of Waikato. His research focus is the nature and value of truth, the problem of action individuation, self-narratives, and practical challenges that arise from these theoretical areas. His approach to these matters is pluralistic, employing both traditional philosophical methods and empirical methods.


What was your fellowship project about?

My fellowship project explored the fundamental question: why do facts matter? The philosophical study of facts has largely focused upon metaphysical questions: What are facts? What is their structure? Do they even have a nature? In the book resulting from the fellowship project, aptly titled Why Facts Matter, I investigate how our answers to these questions are driven by contextual factors and pragmatic considerations. The metaphysics of facts has to be responsive to practical considerations. If this is correct, then what facts are is sensitive to whether and how they are valued.

Would you give us an update on the project?

The book is nearly complete, but then again I imagine any author would say that. Over the course of this project, I have witnessed how our collective relationship to facts has evolved. While I think we have a greater appreciation of facts, some people, what I call “social bandits,” have become more savvy in evading or manipulating them. Gatekeepers, in conjunction with upholding high standards and practices of one’s discipline, have been charged with protecting facts from these bandits. Yet, as I claim in the book, even these gatekeepers are susceptible to psychological biases and colonialist attitudes. Because of this ever-evolving situation, I get stuck into closing and reopening parts of chapters I had thought were complete. So, nearly complete!

How did your fellowship year shape your project, or shape your scholarship in general?

I left the Institute with a much different and, to my mind, far better project than the one I entered with. Before my year at UCHI, I thought of my project as constrained to the philosophical problem of facts. A project on facts, I quickly learned, should be informed not just by what philosophers have said about them but by what others working in the humanities and sciences more generally say about them. The discussions and conversations I had with others at UCHI reshaped the project, allowing me to bring ideas from the history and philosophy of science, literature, sociology, anthropology, and psychology to bear on why facts matter.

Would you share a favorite memory from your time as a UCHI fellow?

The AY 2019–2020 was likely one of the most unusual academic years in modern memory because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite that, if there was a moment that stood out to me, it was Nathan Braccio’s talk on Algonquian and English spatial understandings of New England. Listening to his presentation and speaking with him throughout the year recalibrated my understanding of the purpose of maps. Here was my naïve view: maps represent how things stand in the world. Maps are pictorial facts! Nathan’s presentation brought to light that maps are a means of expressing how one understands and appreciates the space around them. My naïve view of facts was shattered; hearing about Nathan’s project was a watershed moment that began my thinking more perspicuously about a fact’s normative value and how such value plays a much more significant role in the nature of facts than philosophers had acknowledged.

What are you working on now (or next)?

While I am finishing Why Facts Matter, two projects are on my mind. One is a project with my University of Waikato colleague, Jeremy Wyatt. In collaboration with an international team of scholars, we’ve undertaken a University-funded project called Truth without Borders. The main purpose of this project is to better appreciate how truth is used, understood, and valued in different languages. The second project is in a more nascent stage. Tentatively titled, War of the Words: Truth and Virtue in Everyday Communication, I question what it means for truth to win out over falsehood in a marketplace of ideas and attempt to deal with deeply polarized views, whether in politics or elsewhere, by arguing that we should institute rules of conversational conduct to govern our speech acts, much like we institute rules of conduct in war.

Our theme for UCHI’s 20th anniversary year is “The Future of Knowledge.” What would you say are some of the challenges facing the future of knowledge? And what do you think is most exciting or promising about the future of knowledge?

The paramount challenge facing the future of knowledge is the jaded, one-dimensional and westernized view that Enlightenment science is going to solve all the riddles, puzzles, and paradoxes of humanity. Indigenous knowledges and epistemologies, like those found in Māori and Pasifika communities, not only deserve to be a resource for science but they should be a driving force in the sciences. Such epistemologies have been unjustly suppressed and marginalized because of an overly colonialist perspective that science be restricted to one-way of doing it. Providing intellectual space and listening intently to Indigenous knowledges and epistemologies is likely the most promising and exciting prospect for the future of knowledge.

Fellow’s Talk: Laura Mauldin on Our Anti-Body Politic

A poster advertising Laura Mauldin's fellow's talk. A photograph of a tray of pill bottles, papers and post-it notes, along with a printed card that says "Everything will be okay" serves as the background of the poster. The text reads: 2021–22 UCHI Fellow's Talk. "Surfacing (and Countering) Our Anti-Body Politic." Associate Professor, WGSS & HDFS Laura Mauldin, with a response by Sherie Randolph. February 2, 2022, 4:00pm. Live. Online. Registration required.

Surfacing (and Countering) Our Anti-Body Politic

Laura Mauldin (Associate Professor, Women’s Gender & Sexuality Studies & Human Development and Family Sciences, UConn)

with a response by Sherie Randolph (History, Georgia Institute of Technology)

Wednesday, February 2, 2022, 4:00pm.

Live • Online • Registration required

In this talk, I outline what I see as our society’s “anti-body politic.” An anti-body politic means that we all inhabit unreliable bodies, but we don’t want to talk about it or attend to that fact. We shy away from doing so because we live in a culture that worships at the altar of autonomy and independence, where needing care symbolizes everything we don’t want to be. Accordingly, our care infrastructure, an expression of our collective anti-body politic, is woefully insufficient. This means millions of disabled people and caregivers across the United States are left to try to survive without social safety nets, despite rising rates of disability and chronic illness and more complex care needs. After describing these ideas in more detail, I experiment with how we might begin to counter our anti-body politic.

Laura Mauldin is associate professor of Women’s Gender and Sexuality Studies and Human Development and Family Sciences at the University of Connecticut. She is currently writing a book about caregiving in the US that tells the intimate stories of spousal caregivers and their disabled partners’ lives to reveal how ableism shapes the US care crisis, but also how people create and build accessible worlds to survive. You can follow her on Twitter @mauldin_laura.

Sherie M. Randolph is an associate professor of history at the Georgia Institute of Technology and the founder of the Black Feminist Think Tank. Randolph’s first book Florynce “Flo” Kennedy: The Life of a Black Feminist Radical (University of North Carolina Press) examines the connections between the Black Power, civil rights, New Left, and feminist movements. Randolph is currently writing her second book, “Bad” Black Mothers: A History of Transgression. This project explores Black mothers who fashioned lives driven by a commitment to artistic, political, and intellectual work—but mothering their children was not a priority. A history of Black women who rejected culturally acceptable modes of parenting reveals both the constraints of Black mothering and the radical transgressions some Black mothers chose in hopes of creating purposeful lives.

Access note

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

You Should…Listen to Jeffrey O.G. Ogbar’s playlist for the exhibition Facing History: Social Commentary in Contemporary American Art (Amanda Douberley, Benton Museum)

In celebration of 20 years of UCHI and as part of our ongoing You Should… series, we’ve asked former fellows and other friends of the Institute to recommend something related to their work or process. Read them all here.

Four album covers arranged in a 2x2 square: Childish Gambino's This is America, War's Greatest Hits, Pete Rock and CL Smooth's Mecca and the Soul Brother, and Mos Def and Talib Kweli's Black Star.UConn Professor Jeffrey O.G. Ogbar’s playlist for the exhibition Facing History: Social Commentary in Contemporary American Art, on view at the William Benton Museum of Art through March 11, 2022. The show presents work by artists who confront the legacies of past injustices and underscore the enduring impacts of American history on contemporary society. The playlist pairs specific works of art in the exhibition with songs from the 1960s to the present. For example, Ogbar juxtaposes And One (2011) by artist Hank Willis Thomas—a jarring image where the culture of lynching and the commodification around professional sports collide—with Childish Gambino’s “This is America”—a track that provocatively interrogates race and violence in American culture. Or, he asks us to consider how jazz singer and civil rights activist Nina Simone’s “Four Women” informs our experience of A Means to An End… A Shadow Drama in Five Acts (1995) by visual artist Kara Walker, and vice-versa. Listen to the playlist on Spotify or in the exhibition at The Benton.

– Amanda Douberley
Assistant Curator/Academic Liaison
The William Benton Museum of Art

Headshot of Amanda Douberley, a white woman with short dark hair, standing in front of a bookshelf.Who is Amanda Douberley? Amanda Douberley is Assistant Curator/Academic Liaison at the William Benton Museum of Art, where she is responsible for connecting the Benton’s collections and exhibitions with teaching in departments across the university. She has curated numerous exhibitions at the museum, often in collaboration with faculty and other campus partners. Amanda holds a Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin with a focus on 20th-century American sculpture and public art. Before coming to UConn in 2018, she taught in the Department of Art History, Theory, and Criticism at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Fellow’s Talk: Meina Cai on Negotiation and Land Rights in China

2021–22 UCHI Fellow's Talk. The Art of Negotiations: Legal Discrimination, the Contention Pyramid, and Land Rights Development in China. Assistant Professor, Political Science Meina Cai, with a response by Kathryn Moore. January 26, 2022, 4:00pm. Live. Online. Registration required.

The Art of Negotiations: Legal Discrimination, Contention Pyramid, and Land Rights Development in China

Meina Cai (Assistant Professor, Political Science & Asian and Asian American Studies, UConn)

with a response by Kathryn Moore (Art and Art History, UConn)

Wednesday, January 26, 2022, 4:00pm.

Live • Online • Registration required

How and how much do land-dispossessed villagers protect their property rights in a context where the legal framework discriminates against them? Contradictory to the existing research that pays much attention to protests, this research identifies negotiations as a strategy of the dispossessed to engage with local governments and improve their compensation arrangement. Negotiations, together with petitions, protests, and violence, form a pyramid-shaped structure of contention. More importantly, these negotiations focus on local specific considerations that are not specified in formal compensation policy—which I call “non-programmatic compensation” (NPC). NPC negotiations create a fragmented compensation regime that combines low, stagnant, and less locally diversified formal compensation standards with dynamic and locality-specific informal NPC negotiation deals. The arguments are developed using extensive field research, an original dataset of local land compensation policies, and surveys of rural households, rural cadres, and local government officials. It helps explain the puzzle why formal compensation policy standards remain low despite an increasing number of protests against land takings.

Meina Cai is an Assistant Professor of Political Science and Asian/Asian American Studies Institute at UConn. Her research focuses on the political economy of development and institutions. She is currently working on land property rights, urbanization, and rural governance in China. She is a UCHI fellow in 2021–2022.

Kathryn Blair Moore received her PhD in art history from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, and has previously taught at Texas State University, the University of Hong Kong, the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Pittsburgh. Her research and teaching span the medieval and Renaissance periods in Europe and the Mediterranean region, with a particular focus on cross-cultural exchange between Christian and Islamic cultures. Her first book, The Architecture of the Christian Holy Land: Reception from Late Antiquity through the Renaissance (Cambridge University Press, 2017), received a Prose award in art history / criticism and the Medieval Institute’s Otto Gründler Book Prize. She is currently writing a book on the emergence and development of the concept of the arabesque in a European context. Her research has been supported by grants and fellowships from Harvard University’s Villa I Tatti, the American Academy in Rome, the American Philosophical Society, and the American Council of Learned Societies.

Access note

This event will be presented with automated captioning. 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.

20 Years of Fellows: Dimitris Xygalatas

As part of our 20th anniversary celebrations, we've checked in with former fellows to gather reflections on their fellowship years, to get an update on their fellowship projects, and to see what they are working on next. Read them all here.

Dimitris Xygalatas headshot2016–2017 Faculty Fellow Dimitris Xygalatas is Associate Professor of Anthropology at UConn. His interests include ritual, sports, cooperation, the interaction between cognition and culture, and the impact of cultural practices on psychophysiological wellbeing. His research combines laboratory and field methods to study human interaction in real-life settings. He has conducted several years of fieldwork in Southern Europe and Mauritius. Before coming to UConn, he held positions at the universities of Princeton, Aarhus, and Masaryk, where he served as Director of the Laboratory for the Experimental Research of Religion (LEVYNA). At UConn, he directs the Experimental Anthropology Lab, which develops methods and technologies for quantifying behavior in real-life settings. He is affiliated with the Cognitive Science Program, the Connecticut Institute for the Brain and Cognitive Sciences, the Institute for Collaboration on Health, Intervention, and Policy.


What was your fellowship project about?

My fellowship led to the development of a book proposal, a project that summarizes my work on ritual from an interdisciplinary perspective.

Would you give us an update on the project?

It is called Ritual: How Seemingly Senseless Acts Make Life Worth Living. I am happy to say that is has now been completed and is scheduled to come out this spring by Profile Books.

How did your fellowship year shape your project, or shape your scholarship in general?

In a practical sense, having dedicated time to work on a single project is invaluable to any academic. I simply wouldn’t have been able to get this project off the ground without this fellowship. But perhaps more importantly, my work is radically interdisciplinary. I hold the view that anyone who is trying to understand human behavior should not only move between scientific and humanistic perspectives, but in fact be scientific and humanistic at the same time. Unfortunately, the way contemporary academia is set up, there are both practical and ideological obstacles to this consilience. Thankfully, there are structures like UCHI that supersede disciplinary divisions, allowing their members to venture into more holistic perspectives.

Would you share a favorite memory from your time as a UCHI fellow?

All the vibrant conversations we had, often into the late evening, after the weekly talks, some of the best of them with people you’ve never met before.

What are you working on now (or next)?

It is partly a natural extension of my previous work, but one that has become much more salient to me since the pandemic broke out. I’m interested in cultural practices (think of ritual, art, sports, and music) as tools for resilience in the face of adversity.

Our theme for UCHI’s 20th anniversary year is “The Future of Knowledge.” What would you say are some of the challenges facing the future of knowledge? And what do you think is most exciting or promising about the future of knowledge?

Oh, boy! Unfortunately, knowledge is not what it used to be. In recent years, we are seeing that the very things that promised to democratize knowledge (things like the internet and the social media) have become tools for the subversion of knowledge, Truth, facts, and even reality itself. Worst of all, this subversion seems to be an emergent phenomenon rather than being imposed from the top (those in the top often merely ride the wave), which likely makes it far more difficult to deal with as well as more dangerous. The fact that UCHI has been discussing these issues for years is tremendously important for the future of knowledge.

20 Years of Fellows: Katherine Rye Jewell

As part of our 20th anniversary celebrations, we've checked in with former fellows to gather reflections on their fellowship years, to get an update on their fellowship projects, and to see what they are working on next. Read them all here.

Katherine R. Jewell2018–2019 Visiting Fellow Katherine Rye Jewell is Associate Professor of History at Fitchburg State University in Massachusetts. She is the author of Dollars for Dixie: Business and the Transformation of Conservatism in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge University Press, 2017). She is currently writing a history of college radio for University of North Carolina Press.


What was your fellowship project about?

My fellowship project is a history of college radio since the 1960s.

Would you give us an update on the project?

With the work I completed at UCHI, the project is now two books, with one covering the 1960s and 1970s, and the other extending from the 1970s to the present. The latter is almost finished and under contract at UNC Press

How did your fellowship year shape your project, or shape your scholarship in general?

I was able to produce a huge word count that has provided a core foundation for my research. It was absolutely essential time and space to think through a huge amount of research material and to produce narratives from that.

Would you share a favorite memory from your time as a UCHI fellow?

All the people I met! I formed lifelong friendships with other scholars at UCHI, including creating a writing group that continued after the conclusion of the fellowship.

What are you working on now (or next)?

I am finishing up the book project by this December, and next I’ll turn to the second book that emerges from this research.

Our theme for UCHI’s 20th anniversary year is “The Future of Knowledge.” What would you say are some of the challenges facing the future of knowledge? And what do you think is most exciting or promising about the future of knowledge?

My research looks at radio history, which has been difficult to archive and preserve. Going forward, the preservation of born-digital materials presents a significant challenge, as well as opportunity, for future scholars.