Wyoming Institute for Humanities Research Announces Faculty Fellows at UW

The Wyoming Institute for Humanities Research (WIHR) has selected recipients for its 2019-2020 cohort of faculty fellows. Selections are for the Humanities Research Group program at the University of Wyoming.

A competitive process selected 16 faculty members from across disciplines at UW. The fellows come from the College of Arts and Sciences, the College of Agriculture and Natural Resources, and the Ellbogen Center for Teaching and Learning.

“Their projects are richly interdisciplinary and reflect a broad range of cutting-edge research on humanistic, civic, social and technological issues,” says Scott Henkel, WIHR director.

The fellows are researching how to integrate music instruction in the public schools; how to tell more fully the story that links Mexican bracero workers in the 1940s to the rise of Mexican-owned Napa Valley wineries during the 1990s; how virtual reality can provide safe training environments for health care and other public sector workers; and how to tell the experiences of people who are incarcerated in prisons in Wyoming.

“These humanities fellows are on the forefront of engaging with communities across Wyoming and throughout the world,” Henkel says.

By using digital humanities technology, fellows will document Northern Arapaho place names and stories -- hunting stories, in particular -- associated with those place names, and bring the names and stories back to the Wind River Indian Reservation. Fellows also will explore the ways in which Africans manipulated German colonial rule and the degree to which such colonial encounters shaped collective perceptions of national identity.

“The research that our fellows produce will shape the world in which we live,” Henkel says. “They will help us to see more clearly problems that desperately need solutions, such as the legacy of colonial conquest and its impact on our contemporary cultures; the state of race relations in America; and how technology can help us to see our histories in new ways and to tell our stories to new audiences. I am tremendously impressed by these research projects, and I am excited for these fellows to engage the public with their fascinating work.”

The cohort of Humanities Research Group fellows and the titles of their projects are:

-- Ulli Adelt, American Studies Program and African American and Diaspora Studies, “Kraftwerk: The Man Machine.”

-- Adam Blackler, Department of History, “Heathens, Hottentots, and Heimat: The Boundaries of German Identity in Southwest Africa.”

-- Irene Checa-Garcia, Department of Modern and Classical Languages, “Lexical Development in Spanish Heritage Speakers: Differences and Commonalities with L2 Learners and Monolinguals.”

-- Nick Crane, School of Politics, Public Affairs and International Studies, “Banishing Ghosts and Building Solidarities in Central Mexico After the Long Sixties.”

-- Susan Dewey, Gender and Women’s Studies, “Lonesome Cowboy: Dispatches from the Frontiers of Prison America.”

-- Conxita Domènech, Department of Modern and Classical Languages, “Pen to Paper: The Female Protagonists of Early Modern Spanish Literature.”

-- Chelsea Escalante, Department of Modern and Classical Languages, “Decolonizing Dual Language Immersion.”

-- Franz-Peter Griesmaier, Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies, “Rationality Dynamics.”

-- Jennifer Louise Harmon, Department of Family and Consumer Sciences, “Hemp for Victory!: The History of Hemp in America.”

-- Cliff Marks, Department of English, “Art Spiegelman’s Art of Trauma: Writing and Drawing the Inconceivable.”

-- Justin Piccorelli, School of Politics, Public Affairs and International Studies, “Understanding the Human-Human Relationship Through Virtual Reality.”

-- Tiger Robison, Department of Music, “Implementing Music Programs in Early Childhood Centers: A Phenomenological Study.”

-- Caskey Russell, Department of English, and Native American and Indigenous Studies, “Documenting Arapaho Place Names with 3-D Virtual Reality.”

-- Janel Seeley, Ellbogen Center for Teaching and Learning, “What Am I Doing?: Inquiry into Higher Education Instructional Practices.”

-- Lilia Soto, American Studies Program and Latina/o Studies Program, “Napa Valley Uncorked: Mexicans in the Wine Country.”

-- Arielle Zibrak, Department of English, “Writing Against Reform: The Aesthetic Counter-Tradition in the Age of Progress.”

For more information about the WIHR, visit www.uwyo.edu/humanities.