Faculty Research Seminar
The Axinn Center for the Humanities supports a yearly Humanities Faculty Research Seminar focused on a particular theme.
The seminar is designed to support faculty as they pursue their research projects and to create collaboration and community around those projects.
With input from the participants, the seminar leader develops a rough outline of thematic connections to explore in relation to the theme, along with a short bibliography. Seminar participants each work on a piece of scholarship connected to the chosen theme—an article, book chapter, or other defined scholarly product.
The seminar convenes at least monthly, following an agreed-upon schedule of readings and/or short presentations along with discussion. Participants then present their work in a panel presentation or series of talks either in the spring of their seminar year or during the following fall.
'Mellon Migration' Seminar Participants
Rachael Joo
Professor of American Studies
Leader of the Seminar for Fall 2024
Rachael Joo engages in research on transnational Asian/Asian American sporting cultures. Her work has focused on the role of sports nationalisms in shaping a sense of global Koreanness. Her forthcoming book, National Greens: The Natures of Korean Golf, details the impact of the game of golf in shaping a sense of nation, community, and identity in South Korea and its diasporas. She teaches courses on immigration, race, and ethnicity through the American Studies Program.
- Email:
- rjoo@middlebury.edu
Ian Barrow
Director of the Axinn Center for the Humanities, A. Barton Hepburn Professor of History
Leader of the Seminar for Spring 2025
- Email:
- ibarrow@middlebury.edu
Catherine Fitzgerald Boyle
Postdoctoral Fellow for the Axinn Center for the Humanities
Catherine Fitzgerald Boyle (she/they) is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Axinn Center for the Humanities. A historian working at the crossroads of the Middle East and the African continent, Catherine received their Ph.D. in History with a secondary field in Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Harvard University, and their B.A. in History and Middle Eastern Studies at Tufts University. Their book project, tentatively entitled Sites of Servitude, examines comparative slavery, racial formation, and empires in Tunis from 1736 to 1891. Catherine’s research has been supported by the American Institute of Maghrib Studies (AIMS), the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, and the Harvard Center for Middle Eastern Studies - Tunis.
- Email:
- catherineb@middlebury.edu
Yumna Siddiqi
Associate Professor of English
'Power, Represented' Seminar Participants
Therese Banks
Assistant Professor of French & Francophone Studies
James Fitzsimmons
Professor of Anthropology
Jamie McCallum
Associate Professor of Sociology
Linus Owens
Associate Professor of Sociology
Thomas Preston
Visiting Assistant Professor of German
My research project stems from my dissertation and the work towards a book project. My research centers on the resonances between the last 20 years of East Germany and the most recent 20ish years of Neoliberal 21st Century Germany. Specifically, it addresses the breakdown of promises of the good life and how literature and film engages critically with promises of some kind of telos in both systems. Within this seminar, I would develop my third chapter, which accounts for the sense of stasis simultaneously captured towards the end of the 1970s and the beginning of the 00s. I’m interested in the public and political culture around these historical moments, in order to explore in more depth why both periods communicate an absence of individual power in the face of totalizing, static power of the state. On that basis, my project is engaged directly in the topic of how power (and the lack thereof) is represented. At the moment, the chapter addresses the direct representation of these political atmospheres in three filmic works, engaging with scholarship on affect, precarity and the literary genre of horror. In my development of this chapter, I plan to expand my research through comparisons of individual texts that address problems of power and precarity through similar generic conventions, as well as through a deeper exploration of genres themselves. Moreover, I hope to develop a more precise understanding of the historical socioeconomic developments in both East Germany and 21st Century Germany to more fully understand the conditions that produced these aesthetic atmospheres of stasis.
Ryan Sheldon
Assistant Professor of English