2021–2022

Year in Review: 2021–2022

A twentieth-anniversary year in review. 2021–2022. A look back at our year celebrating twenty years of fellowship, scholarship, and innovation.

It has been a celebratory year here at UCHI. The year began with our return to in-person work after our completely virtual 2020–2021 academic year. For the first time since March 2020 fellows could use their offices, share thoughts around the coffee machine, and attend each other’s talks in our conference room. Visitors to the Institute could once again browse the fruits of fellowships past on our bookshelves, peruse past winners of the Sharon Harris Book Award, and attend post-event receptions in our collaborative space. And while that would be more than enough cause for celebration, this year we also commemorated the Institute’s 20th anniversary. Since its founding in 2001 UCHI has served as a hub for all things humanities at UConn. Over the years, we’ve embarked on projects like the Digital Humanities and Media Studies Initiative, invited brilliant speakers like Toni Morrison to campus, and offered time and space for work to over 250 fellows. We are incredibly proud of how the Institute has flourished over these twenty years. Here’s a look back at some of what we did as we celebrated twenty years of UCHI. (Click any image to see it full-size.)

Welcome Reception

The year began with our welcome reception, held outside Homer Babbidge Library. We were fortunate to have good weather as we gathered under the portico, seeing colleagues in person for the first time in a year and half. Director Michael Lynch addressed the gathered crowd, thanking UCHI’s founding director, Richard Brown, as well as administrators, fellows, and staff past and present for their support of the Institute, noting that, “We’ve come a long way in twenty years thanks to the work of so many—from a small suite of rooms in Austin to our expansive home here in the library, the intellectual center of campus.”

A crowd gathered outside the UConn library for the UCHI welcome reception.
UCHI director Michael Lynch stands at a podium giving a speech
The 2021–2022 UCHI fellows stand in a group at the welcome reception.

Humanities Undergraduate Research Symposium

In November, we welcomed a group of talented undergraduate humanities researchers to our conference room for the first student-run humanities research symposium at UConn. Students presented on topics from human rights to Shakespeare to Afrofuturism, attended a workshop about humanities-related careers, and listened to a keynote address by UCHI’s own Alexis Boylan. The student organizers, Madelon Morin-Viall, Aarushi Nohria, and Rylee Thomas deserve all the credit for spearheading what we hope will become an annual tradition.

The three organizers of the Humanities Undergraduate Research Symposium, Madelon Morin-Viall, Aarushi Nohria, and Rylee Thomas stand in front of a white wall.
A group of students sit at a conference table

Events

We hosted both hybrid and Zoom-only events this year, inviting members of the UConn community and beyond to learn about publishing for the public, Black digital humanities, the artist Camille Billops, and more. We also co-sponsored more than a dozen events across campus and funded working groups that explored topics from political theory to the history of science.

UCHI fellows seated in the conference room.
UCHI fellow Sherie Randolph stands at a podium giving a talk
A group of people listen to a man speaking from a podium at a cosponsored event, “ Misinformation: Creating a Misfire for American Gun Policy“

Celebrating Twenty Years of Fellows

Throughout the year, we published interviews with past fellows about their experience at UCHI, their fellowship projects, and what they are working on now.

A quote from former fellow Allison Horrocks, "I spent many hours in a chair against one of the walls or bookcases in the UCHI conference room. I loved learning from the visiting fellows and seeing new and compelling work presented to a group of peers."
A quote from former fellow Kornel Chang: “A quote from former fellow Allison Horrocks, "I spent many hours in a chair against one of the walls or bookcases in the UCHI conference room. I loved learning from the visiting fellows and seeing new and compelling work presented to a group of peers."”
A quote from former fellow Joseph McAlhany: “The opportunity to present nascent ideas to a warm, encouraging, and diverse group of intellects was a true gift—their feedback opened up alternative paths of thought which would otherwise have remained hidden.”

Nikole Hannah-Jones

Nikole Hannah-Jones and Manisha Sinha talked history, race, journalism, and the nature of patriotism at our capstone event, attended (in person and online) by over 650 people. Hannah-Jones also met with UConn’s Faculty of Color Working Group, directed by Melina Pappademos.

Nikole Hannah-Jones and Melina Pappademos at a meeting of UConn's Faculty of Color Working Group.
Attendees arrive at the Student Union Theater for the Nikole Hannah-Jones event.
Nikole Hannah-Jones and Manisha Sinha sit facing each other on stage.
Nikole Hannah-Jones and Manisha SInha sit on stage in front of a large audience.

The 2022 Sharon Harris Book Award

UCHI is honored to announce the winner of the Sharon Harris Book Award for 2022:

Robert A Gross headshot

Robert A. Gross

Draper Professor of Early American History, Emeritus, UConn

for his book

The Transcendentalists and Their World (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021)

The Sharon Harris Book Award Committee notesTranscendatalists and their World book cover, “A monumental work of scholarship, this book allows us to view one of the central movements in American literature and philosophy through the magnifying lens of the community of Concord, MA.”

Honorable mention:

Peter Zarrow headshot

Peter Zarrow

Professor of History, UConn

for his book

Abolishing Boundaries: Global Utopias in the Formation of Modern Chinese Political Thought, 1880–1940 (SUNY Press, 2021)

Book cover for Abolishing Boundaries by Peter Zarrow“A thorough exploration of the writings of four important figures of 20th century Chinese political philosophy, Abolishing Boundaries makes a case for the importance of utopianism in shaping Chinese modernity.”

We thank the award committee for their service. The Sharon Harris Book Award recognizes scholarly depth and intellectual acuity and highlights the importance of humanities scholarship. The 2022 award was open to UConn tenured, tenure-track, emeritus, or in-residence faculty who published a monograph between January 2019 and December 31, 2021.

The Political Theory Workshop Presents Luis Beltrán-Álvarez

THE POLITICAL THEORY WORKSHOP PRESENTS

“From Creolization of Theory to Praxis: Feminist and Community Organization’s Decolonial Empowerment in Puerto Rico”

Luis Beltrán-Álvarez, Political Science, UConn
with commentary by Dr. Gregory Doukas, Political Science, UConn
April 18, 2022 from 12:15–1:30pm, Oak 438 and Zoom

Luis J. Beltrán-Álvarez is from Aguadilla, Puerto Rico. He earned his bachelor’s degrees in Political Science and Sociology from the University of Puerto Rico Río Piedras and then earned a Master’s degree in Philosophy from the same institution. He is now a Ph.D. Candidate in Political Science in Political Theory and Comparative Politics at the University of Connecticut. His main research interests are political subjectivities, social movements, decolonial feminism, anticolonialism and decoloniality, anarchism, populism, philosophy of race/racism, and discourse theory.

With generous support from the UConn Humanities Institute, Africana Studies, Anthropology, El Instituto, OVPR, Philosophy, POLS, and Sociology.

Questions? Email jane.gordon@uconn.edu

Fellow’s Talk: Fiona Vernal on Race and Identity in Hartford

Hartford Bound: How African Became and African American and Caribbean City. Associates Professor of History and Africana Studies Fiona Vernal, with a response by Carol Gray. April 27, 2022, 4:00pm. Humanities Institute Conference Room.

Hartford Bound: How Hartford became an African American and Caribbean City

Fiona Vernal (Associate Professor of History and Africana Studies, UConn)

with a response by Carol Gray

Wednesday, April 27, 2022, 4:00pm, Humanities Institute Conference Room, HBL 4-209

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This talk explores Fiona Vernal’s current book and digital humanities project, Housing Hartford: Mobility, Race, and Identity in Post-World War II Hartford, which examines the convergence of three great migrations of African Americans, Puerto Ricans, and West Indians in the Greater Hartford region. The book project integrates oral history, archival research, and GIS methodologies to reframe the history of how Hartford became an African American and a Caribbean city. This narrative of community formation told through the lens of housing, migration, and mobility, offers counter narratives to hardened scripts of slum clearance, white suburban flight, redlining, urban renewal, and gentrification. By exploring the intersections of space, place, mobility, and identity, Hartford Bound offers new visual and spatial histories of race, ethnic belonging, and community succession.

Fiona Vernal is the director of Engaged, Public, Oral, and Community Histories (EPOCH) and Associate Professor of History and Africana Studies at the University of Connecticut. The project she will present today is part of a suite public humanities projects recently awarded the University of Connecticut’s Provost’s Awards for Excellence in Community Engaged Scholarship, a UConn Humanities Institute fellowship, and the Sustainable Global Cities Initiative (SCGI) Faculty Research Grant.

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.

Fellow’s Talk: Sherie Randolph on Camille Billops

"I See it as a Feminist Statement": Camille Billops and the Art of Liberation. Associate Professor of History, Georgia Institute of Technology. Sherie Randolph. With a response by Laura Mauldin. April 20, 2022, 4:00pm. Humanities Institute Conference Room

“I See it as a Feminist Statement”: Camille Billops and the Art of Liberation

Sherie Randolph (Associate Professor of History, Georgia Institute of Technology)

with a response by Laura Mauldin

Wednesday, April 20, 2022, 4:00pm, Humanities Institute Conference Room, HBL 4-209

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Photo of Camille Billops sitting in a chair, wearing a wide-brimmed hat, under a sculpture of a woman with wings.
Photo of Camille Billops by Coreen Simpson, 1984.

Given the socioeconomic structures and cultural constraints that limited Black women’s options both within and outside of the Black community, Black mothers had little space to determine their own lives, protect their bodily autonomy, and pursue their individual passions. How do we understand “bad” Black mothers who rejected contemporary forms of mothering and placed a greater value on their own creative and political work during the long 1960s? Sherie Randolph’s talk looks specifically at the Black feminist artist Camille Billops (1933–2019) and explores how she understood her contribution to Black arts as more valuable than her role as a Black mother. She learned to view her own happiness as freedom from parenting. In short, Billops’s life choices are in line with current research that suggests that if a woman wants to be content, it is best to remain childless. This talk places Billops’s artwork alongside interviews, her personal papers, and other archival sources to examine how she defied the boundaries of heteronormative motherhood in the postwar United States and went on to become an award-winning artist, filmmaker and archivist. In doing so, Billops enlarged Black feminist understandings of the possibility of Black liberation.

Sherie M. Randolph is an associate professor of history at the Georgia Institute of Technology and the founder of the Black Feminist Think Tank. Formerly an associate professor of history and African American Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Randolph’s book Florynce “Flo” Kennedy: The Life of a Black Feminist Radical, published by the University of North Carolina Press (October 2015), examines the connections between the Black Power, civil rights, New Left, and feminist movements. The former Associate Director of the Women’s Research & Resource Center at Spelman College, she has received several grants and fellowships for her work, most recently being awarded fellowships from the University of Connecticut’s Humanities Institute and Brown University’s Howard Foundation. Randolph is currently writing her second book “Bad” Black Mothers: A History of Transgression.

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.

The Political Theory Workshop Presents Natasha Behl

THE POLITICAL THEORY WORKSHOP PRESENTS

India’s Farmers’ Protest: An Inclusive Vision of Indian Democracy

Natasha Behl, Arizona State University
with commentary by San Lee, Political Science, UConn
March 21, 2022 from 12:15–1:30pm, Oak 408 and Zoom

India, the world’s largest democracy, has been experiencing a democratic decline. Since coming to power in 2014 and winning reelection in 2019, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the Bharatiya Janata Party have become increasingly illiberal and authoritarian. The rule of law has deteriorated, rights and liberties have been curtailed, and scholars and the media have been silenced. If electoral constraint, constitutional design, judicial independence, and a free press haven’t slowed India’s march toward illiberalism, what can? In November 2020, India’s farmers began a highly organized protest against the government. How has this protest protected Indian democracy from further degradation? Has it radically altered India’s political future? The farmers’ protest provides an alternative vision of democracy, one rooted in radical egalitarianism. Protesting farmers have actualized the spirit of dissent enshrined in the Indian constitution by holding the current government accountable to it.

Natasha Behl is associate professor in the School of Social and Behavioral Sciences at Arizona State University (ASU). Her book, Gendered Citizenship: Understanding Gendered Violence in Democratic India, was published with Oxford University Press and received the American Political Science Association’s 2021 Lee Ann Fujii Award for Innovation in the Interpretive Study of Political Violence. Her research has been published in the American Political Science Review, PS: Political Science and Politics, Feminist Formations, and Politics, Groups, and Identities. At ASU, she was awarded the Outstanding Teaching Award, the Outstanding Faculty Mentor Award, ASU’s Excellence in Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Award and Social Impact Award. She has written for The Washington Post and Economic & Political Weekly and given a TEDx Talk

With generous support from the UConn Humanities Institute, Africana Studies, Anthropology, El Instituto, OVPR, Philosophy, POLS, and Sociology.

Questions? Email jane.gordon@uconn.edu

Born on the Water, Raised on the Word

Born on the Water, Raised on the Word: Invoking, Learning, and Remembering Silenced Histories Through Literature, with Grace Player, Sian Charles-Harris, and Dominique Battle-Lawson. March 23, 2022, 4:30pm, Austin Building Room 217

The Humanities Institute and the Neag School of Education present

Born on the Water, Raised on the Word

Invoking, Learning, and Remembering Silenced Histories Through Literature

A panel presentation with
Grace Player, Sian Charles-Harris, and Dominique Battle-Lawson

and responses by
Julianna Iacovelli, Aarushi Nohria, Erica Popoca, and Samantha vanValkenburg

March 23, 2022, 4:30–6:00, Stern Lounge (Austin Building, Room 217)

Registration required.

The first forty students to register will receive a free copy of The 1619 Project: Born on the Water, by Nikole Hannah-Jones and Renée Watson, with illustrations by Nikkolas Smith. All registrants are invited to attend Nikole Hannah-Jones in conversation with Manisha Sinha, March 30, 2022 at 2:00pm in the Student Union Theater.

Publishing NOW: How to Work with an Academic Press

Publishing NOW: How to Work with an Academic Press, with Leah Pennywark, Humanities Editor at University of Minnesota Press. March 21, 2022, 1:00pm. Live. Online. Registration required.

Publishing NOW

How to Work with an Academic Press

Leah Pennywark (Humanities Editor, University of Minnesota Press)

March 21, 2022, 1:00pm

Live • Online • Registration required.

Leah Pennywark, Humanities Editor at the University of Minnesota Press, will offer tips and insights for working with an academic press. She is also offering virtual half-hour-long one-on-one meetings for prospective authors on March 22. These appointments are for UConn-afiliated faculty only. Interested parties should sign up for an appointment via Calendly.

Leah Pennywark is Humanities Editor at the University of Minnesota Press where she acquires in a wide range of disciplines, including American studies, cultural studies, literary criticism, and cinema and media studies. Her interests include gender and sexuality, race and ethnicity, and emerging cultural formations. She is passionate about argument-driven work that is politically and culturally engaged. Before joining the University of Minnesota Press, Pennywark served as assistant editor at Stanford University Press, where she focused on political science, international relations, security studies, and Middle East studies. Prior to that, she served as acquisitions assistant at Purdue University Press, where she completed a PhD in American literature. She has an MA in literature from the University of Rochester and a BA in English from Rice University.

ACCESS NOTE

This event will offer 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.

Nikole Hannah-Jones

Celebrating 20 Years of the UConn Humanities Institute with Pulitzer-prize-winning journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones in conversation with Manisha Sinha. March 30, 2022, 2:00pm, Student Union Theater.

Celebrating twenty years of the UConn Humanities Institute with Pulitzer-Prize-winning journalist

Nikole Hannah-Jones

in conversation with Manisha Sinha (History, UConn)

March 30, 2022, 2:00pm. Student Union Theater

REGISTER

On March 30th at 2:00pm in the Student Union Theater, Pulitzer-prize winning journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones, most famous for her work on the New York Times Magazine’s 1619 Project, will be in conversation with UConn history professor Manisha Sinha. They will discuss Hannah-Jones’ work as an advocate for people of color in journalism and as a writer working to change the way we think about race in the United States.

This event is restricted to the UConn community. Please register with a UConn email address. All registrations without UConn email addresses will be canceled. If you are part of the UConn community but do not have a UConn email address, write to us at uchi@uconn.edu.

You must show your ticket to enter the venue.

This is a UConn Honors event.

Members of the UConn community may submit questions in advance of the event via online form. Please submit your questions by March 28, 2022. Members of the UConn community will also be able to access a livestream of the event. There will be no recording.

Cosponsored by the Office of the Provost, the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences, the UConn Foundation, the Neag School of Education, the Africana Studies Institute, the Human Rights Institute, the History Department, and the Journalism Department.

ACCESS NOTE

If you require accommodations to attend this event, please notify uchi@uconn.edu by Wednesday, March 23. An ASL interpreter will be present for the duration of the event. The event will also be available via livestream.

NIKOLE HANNAH-JONES is the Pulitzer Prize-winning creator of the 1619 Project and a staff writer at The New York Times Magazine. She has spent her career investigating racial inequality and injustice, and her reporting has earned her the MacArthur Fellowship, known as the Genius grant, a Peabody Award, two George Polk Awards and the National Magazine Award three times. Hannah-Jones also earned the John Chancellor Award for Distinguished Journalism and was named Journalist of the Year by the National Association of Black Journalists and the Newswomen’s Club of New York. In 2020 she was inducted into the Society of American Historians and in 2021 she was named a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. She also serves as the Knight Chair of Race and Journalism at Howard University, where she is founding the Center for Journalism & Democracy.

In 2016, Hannah-Jones co-founded the Ida B. Wells Society for Investigative Reporting, which seeks to increase the number of reporters and editors of color. She holds a Master of Arts in Mass Communication from the University of North Carolina and earned her BA in History and African-American studies from the University of Notre Dame.

MANISHA SINHA is the Draper Chair in American History at the University of Connecticut. She received her Ph.D from Columbia University where her dissertation was nominated for the Bancroft prize. She taught at the University of Massachusetts for over twenty years where she was awarded the Chancellor’s Medal, the highest honor bestowed on faculty. She is the author of The Counterrevolution of Slavery: Politics and Ideology in Antebellum South Carolina (University of North Carolina Press, 2000), which was named one of the ten best books on slavery in Politico in 2015 and featured in the New York Times 1619 Project. Her recent book, the multiple-award winning The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition (Yale University Press, 2016) was long listed for the National Book Award for Non Fiction. The Slave’s Cause was widely reviewed in the mainstream press and was featured as the editor’s choice in The New York Times Book Review. Professor Sinha has published and been interviewed in national and international media. She is the author and editor of several other books and articles. She is also the recipient of numerous awards including two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and two from the Mellon Foundation. In 2018, she was a visiting Professor at the University of Paris, Diderot and in 2021, she received the James W.C. Pennington award, from the University of Heidelberg, Germany. She is a member of the Board of the Society of Civil War Historians and of the Council of Advisors of the Lapidus Center for the Historical Analysis of Transatlantic Slavery at the Schomburg, New York Public Library. She is a co-editor of the “Race and the Atlantic World, 1700-1900,” series of the University of Georgia Press and is on the editorial board of Slavery and Abolition. A historian of the long nineteenth century, her research interests lie specifically in the transnational histories of slavery, abolition, and feminism and the history and legacy of the Civil War and Reconstruction. She is currently writing a book on the Reconstruction of American democracy after the Civil War under contract with Liveright (WW Norton).

Fellow’s Talk: Micki McElya on Pageantry and Power in the Black Freedom Movement

2021–22 UCHI Fellow's Talk. Liberating Beauty?: Pageantry and Power in teh Black Freedom Movement. Professor of History Micki McElya. March 9, 2022, 4:00pm. Homer Babbidge Library, 4-209.

Liberating Beauty?: Pageantry and Power in the Black Freedom Movement

Micki McElya (Professor, History, UConn)

Wednesday, March 9, 2022, 4:00pm, HBL 4-209

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This talk examines the centrality of beauty pageants—of the celebratory display and competitive assessment of the appearance and deportment of Black girls and women—to the diverse range of Black politics, activist strategies, and visions for freedom and liberation in the United States from the late 1940s to the 1970s. Common to all was an investment in contesting white supremacist beauty standards, claiming the authority to define Black beauty, and harnessing its liberating possibilities. As both subjects and the objects of these investments, Black girls and women confronted an always fraught, often violent terrain of beauty’s opportunities, limitations, pleasures, and awful degradations. As an ideal, a set of practices, and as daily labor, beauty could be many things, but it was fundamentally always about race, gender, and power.

Micki McElya is professor of History and affiliated faculty with the Africana Studies Institute, American Studies Program, and the Women’s, Gender & Sexuality Studies Program. Her current book project, No More Miss America! How Protesting the 1968 Pageant Changed a Nation will be published by Avid Reader Press (Simon & Schuster) and recently earned a 2022–2023 Public Scholar award from the National Endowment for the Humanities. McElya’s last book, The Politics of Mourning: Death and Honor in Arlington National Cemetery, was a Choice Outstanding Academic Title of 2017 and a finalist for the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction. It was a co-winner of the 2018 John Brinckerhoff Jackson Book Prize from the Foundation for Landscape Studies, winner of the inaugural Sharon Harris Book Prize from UConn’s Humanities Institute, and finalist for the 2016 Jefferson Davis Book Award from the American Civil War Museum. She is also the author of Clinging to Mammy: The Faithful Slave in Twentieth-Century America, which won a 2007 Outstanding Book Award from the Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights.

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.