Current Fellows

The following researchers comprise the Humanities Research Group for the current academic year. Read about their exciting projects below!

A new addition to the program this fall was a residency at the Neltje Center. Check out this podcast episode to hear four of the fellows reflect on their experience.

Zoe Pearson

Geography & International Studies; School of Politics, Public Affairs, and International Studies

Haaf Netting on the Solway Firth: The Politics of Resource Conservation and Preserving Traditional Knowledge and Practice in the England-Scotland Borderlands

Traditional resource use and management practices are being lost around the world, and with them, ecological and cultural knowledges that have accumulated over generations and even centuries. Haaf net fishing is one such practice—said to have been brought to the Solway Firth between Scotland and England over one thousand years ago by Vikings. This project asks: What are the specific reasons that the practice of haaf net fishing is declining? How do broader structures and debates of the last fifty years around political economic conditions, regional geopolitics, local politics, environmental change, and conservation practice impact upon haaf net fishing and its decline? What is and has been historically the importance of haaf net fishing to local peoples, communities, economies, and cultures and what can haaf net fishing teach us about traditional ecological knowledge, the local environment, cultural traditions, and the ecosystem of the Solway Firth?

Hannah Phalen

Psychology and Law

Guilty of Pregnancy Loss: How Dehumanizing Language Contributes to Pregnancy Criminalization

When the decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization reversed Roe’s almost 50-year-old precedent guaranteeing abortion access, state legislatures rushed to either ban or protect abortion access. And while many statutes that criminalize abortion carve out exceptions for the person receiving the abortion, in practice, these laws can create an environment where people fear that they will be charged with a crime if they seek out care related to their pregnancies. This project explores how the language used in coverage of the abortion debate shapes perceptions of reproductive care, the laws surrounding reproduction, and the people who seek reproductive care. In two parts, I investigate (a) the use of dehumanizing language in media coverage of the criminalization of pregnancy and (b) the impact of dehumanizing language on lay perceptions of the criminalization of pregnancy.

Shelby Shadwell

Visual Arts

Carbon Creative Research

My work consists of large-scale charcoal and pastel drawings of non-traditional imagery such as gut piles left over from big game hunts, space blankets used in emergency situations to stay warm, and pieces of black anthracite coal. For my research group project, I plan to compose new drawings with diamonds as the manifest subject. An undeniable link between viscera, coal, diamonds, and the charcoal implements I use to create the work is that they are all manifestations of carbon through time. The drawings may illicit feelings of disgust or revulsion and awe or ecstasy simultaneously due to the contrast between the vulgarity or ephemerality of the imagery juxtaposed with its meticulous, hyper-realistic, rendering. Among other things, my work allows viewers space to ask questions about low and high status in artistic subject matter and romantic tropes in historical and contemporary western art. 

Amanda Sikirica

Sociology

Abundant Contradictions: An Environmental History of Wyoming

As the second largest energy producing state in the country, Wyoming's economy is defined by the extraction and transport of energy commodities. Using  historical methods and archival data, this project uses stories of development paths not taken to trace what has been described as Wyoming's 'colonial' relationships with the (inter)national energy economy. This project reassembles histories of Wyoming with energy at their center and aims to provide a useful articulation of the complex economic hierarchies of extractive peripheries which influence our projections of energy transitions and the climate-changed future. 

Seth Swanner

English

“Protracting Time, Delicious Benefits”: Colonialism and Unseasonal Ripeness in Thomas Middleton’s A Game at Chess

Thomas Middleton’s 1624 play A Game at Chess was the largest commercial success in the history of early modern theater, in large part because it critiqued King James’s appeasement policy toward Spanish colonialism. Middleton’s polemic centers on the agricultural temporalities of globalization; Spanish colonial holdings in equatorial locales and the global south meant that growing seasons were extended or (from a Global North perspective) “inverted” and could be exploited all the year round. Middleton’s play sees this as a temporal shortcut that alienates the Spanish colonialist (and their royal English apologists) from a “natural” relationship with local food and the seasons in which they grow, advocating for a diet that recognizes both seasons of plenty and of scarcity. Even today, the Global North widely takes the year-round availability of ripe food for granted when, for Middleton, colonialism represented a radical redefinition of what food was, what it could be, and when it could be. His play thus reveals the colonialist roots of our own globalized foodways and anticipates how climate change must augment our understanding of seasonality and ripeness.

Ryan Williamson

School of Politics, Public Affairs, and International Studies

Is Gerrymandering Poisoning the Well of Democracy? Evaluating the Relationship between Redistricting and Citizens’ Attitudes

The process of redistricting holds significant importance as it can directly influence the balance of political power at not only the state level, but the national level as well. When an individual observes that the party in power manipulates this process for electoral gain, injecting partisanship into redistricting, it can foster cynicism and dissatisfaction towards the government. Although previous studies have examined the direct impact of redistricting practices on election outcomes, it is crucial to also consider how these practices affect individual attitudes towards democracy as the longevity of democratic institutions in dependent on citizens having faith in them. Therefore, by conducting an original survey with a unique experiment, I assess how different redistricting methods relate to citizen satisfaction with democracy in the United States. The findings indicate that simply perceiving redistricting as partisan can diminish citizens’ support for the system. However, relying on independent redistricting commissions appears to mitigate concerns of gerrymandering and enhance evaluations of the democratic process. This underscores the need for transparency and fairness in redistricting to maintain trust and confidence in democratic institutions.