Center for the Humanities

Faculty Fellows

• 

  Lori Gruen

  William Griffin Professor of Philosophy

  Read More

  Lori Gruen is a leading scholar in Animal Studies and Feminist Philosophy.  She is the author and editor of 9 books, includingEthics and Animals: An Introduction (Cambridge, 2011), Reflecting on Nature: Readings in Environmental Philosophy and Ethics (Oxford, 2012), Ethics of Captivity (Oxford, 2014), and Entangled Empathy (Lantern, 2015). Her work in practical ethics focuses on issues that impact those often overlooked in traditional ethical investigations, e.g. women, people of color, non-human animals. She is a Fellow of the Hastings Center for Bioethics, a Faculty Fellow at Tufts’ Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine’s Center for Animals and Public Policy, and was the first chair of the Faculty Advisory Committee of the Center for Prison Education at Wesleyan. Gruen has documented the history of The First 100 chimpanzees in research in the US (http://first100chimps.wesleyan.edu) and has an evolving website that documents the journey to sanctuary of the remaining chimpanzees in research labs, The Last 1000 (http://last1000chimps.com).

  My research lies at the intersection of ethical theory and ethical practice. I have written on a range of topics in practical ethics and am currently concentrating human entanglements with non-human animals, both actual and conceptual, with an emphasis on ethical and political questions raised by captivity and carceral logics.

• 

  Joel Pfister

  Olin Professor of English

  Read More

  Joel Pfister, Olin Professor, has written THE PRODUCTION OF PERSONAL LIFE: CLASS, GENDER, AND THE PSYCHOLOGICAL IN HAWTHORNE'S FICTION (Stanford University Press, 1991); STAGING DEPTH: EUGENE O'NEILL AND THE POLITICS OF PSYCHOLOGICAL DISCOURSE (University of North Carolina Press, 1995, CHOICE "Best Academic Books of 1995" award); (co-editor of) INVENTING THE PSYCHOLOGICAL: TOWARD A CULTURAL HISTORY OF EMOTIONAL LIFE IN AMERICA (Yale University Press, 1997); INDIVIDUALITY INCORPORATED: INDIANS AND THE MULTICULTURAL MODERN (Duke University Press, 2004), CRITIQUE FOR WHAT? CULTURAL STUDIES, AMERICAN STUDIES, LEFT STUDIES (Paradigm Publishers, 2006) THE YALE INDIAN: THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ROE CLOUD (Duke University Press, 2009), and SURVEYORS OF CUSTOMS: AMERICAN LITERATURE AS CULTURAL ANALYSIS (Oxford University Press, 2016). He has published articles or reviews in numerous journals, including AMERICAN LITERARY HISTORY, AMERICAN LITERATURE, AMERICAN QUARTERLY, JOURNAL OF AMERICAN STUDIES, COMPARATIVE AMERICAN STUDIES, YALE JOURNAL OF CRITICISM, NOVEL, AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW, and REVIEWS IN AMERICAN HISTORY. He teaches a range of courses in American literature, American culture, and cultural analysis and critique. Professor Pfister has received several fellowships, such as an American Council of Learned Societies fellowship, a Rockefeller fellowship, and a Mellon fellowship, and has lectured in China, Japan, Israel, England, Germany, France, Denmark, Norway, and Italy as well as the United States and Canada. Recently he served as chair of American Studies and after that chair of English. Once again he is chair of the American Studies department. He was a Visiting Professor in the John F. Kennedy Institute of North American Studies in the Graduate School in the Freie Universitat in Berlin for the summer term in 2011. In July, 2012, he served on the faculty of the West-China Faculty Enhancement Program in American Studies, co-sponsored by the Ford Foundation and the China Association for the Study of American Literature, and taught Chinese college and university professors American literature as American Studies in Xi'an, China.

• 

  Lily Saint

  Assistant Professor of English

  Read More

  Lily Saint is Assistant Professor of English at Wesleyan, where her research explores the nexus between ethics and cultural practice in the Global South. She is writing a book that considers how black practices of reading and spectatorship in twentieth century South Africa contributed to the formation of ethical relation during a period of profound ethical crisis. Despite the severity of material and social disadvantages, black readers and spectators encountered a wide variety of textual and visual genres, (including American B movies, genre fiction, radio, photocomics, and popular music). By inserting these genres into ongoing theoretical conversations about the relationship of aesthetics to ethics, the book carves out a place in the study of audience and reader reception in the Global South to recognize the ethical importance of all acts of reading. Professor Saint's writing has been published in several peer-reviewed journals, most recently in Postcolonial Studiesand the Journal of African Cinemas.

  At Wesleyan, she teaches classes on global and postcolonial literature and theory, contemporary and canonical African novels, and ethical theory.

  Professor Saint has a Ph.D. in English from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, which was awarded the Irving Howe Prize for Best Dissertation Involving Politics and Literature in 2011. She has a B.A. in the History and Sociology of Science from the University of Pennsylvania. Before coming to Wesleyan, she taught in the English department at the University of Pittsburgh.

• Elizabeth G. Traube

  Professor of Anthropology

  Read More

  I received my B.A in Folklore & Mythology from Radcliffe in 1970 and my PhD in Anthropology from Harvard in 1977. One set of current research interests grows out of my dissertation fieldwork in what was then Portuguese Timor and today, after a 24 year occupation by Indonesia, is Timor Leste, East Timor. I first returned to East Timor in 2000 during the UN transitional administration, established after a 1999 referendum in which the East Timorese had voted overwhelmingly for independence. I went back to the same interior town where I had lived in 1973-74 and revisited the two sacred origin villages which had been the focus of my earlier research. Both villages were in ruins; they had been laid waste in 1999 by Indonesian-sponsored militias, as part of a campaign launched in retaliation for popular support of independence. For the custodians of these villages and for the local community, the underlying question was not what had motivated the militias but rather whytwo such sacred centers had proved vulnerable to external force. One possibility was that their spiritual status had been weakened by their long involvement with me in the past. Although this was neither the only nor, I think, the dominant interpretation in play, it has nonetheless obliged me to reflect on the afterlife of ethnographic projects in popular memory and cultural practice. I am presently writing about the diverse ways in which Timorese have made outsiders into insiders, with emphasis on the indigenization of nationalist discourses of popular sovereignty. Over the decades when research on Timor was precluded, I became involved in cultural and media studies. In my book Dreaming Identities: Class, Gender and Generation (Westview Press) I analyzed a number of successful Hollywood movies released during the Reagan era as a contradictory terrain where new possibilities and identities mingled with calls for a return to a represented past. My more recent interests in television studies include the television industry's relations to changing forms of domesticity in the US, new modes of television storytelling, and aesthetic ideology among television producers.

Andrew W. Mellon Fellows

• 

  Larry McGrath

  Andrew Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow

  Read More

  Larry S. McGrath's research and teaching address the history of modern Europe and the Atlantic world. He received his PhD in Intellectual History from the Humanities Center at Johns Hopkins University. His publications explore the cultural resonances of religion, philosophy, nationalism, and the human sciences from the late eighteenth century to the present. Larry is currently transforming his doctoral dissertation into a book, Making Spirit Matter: Neurology, Psychology, and Selfhood in Modern France. When he’s not backpacking or playing ultimate frisbee, Larry also spends his time working on two projects: the first examines intellectual ambassadors in international relations around World War I; the second uncovers the history of brain education in France, Germany, and America. 

• 

  Jeanette Samyn

  Andrew Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow

  Read More

  Jeanette Samyn received her B.A. in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia University and her Ph.D. in English from Indiana University. Her teaching and research investigate the worldviews projected by nineteenth-century literature and science. Currently, she is turning her doctoral dissertation into a book, In Praise of the Parasite: Asymmetrical Relations in the British Empire, which explains how complex asymmetrical relations were embedded into turn-of-the-century notions of "community" and "environment" through the figure of the parasite. She is also interested in contemporary film and politics, and has written on these subjects for publications such as n+1, The New Inquiry, Dossier, and The American Reader.

Visiting Fellows

• Hassan Almohammed

  Read More

  Hassan Almohammed holds a PhD in French contemporary poetry from the Université Blasie Pascal where he wrote his dissertation, La prémonition de la mort chez les "poets météores" français du XXème siècle (1945-1992), on the existential and poetic relationship surrounding the premonition of death. After completing his studies he held a post at the University of Aleppo, Syria. More recently he has been teaching in France. Professor Almohammed has five articles published in academic journals, has attended and presented at numerous conferences in his field in Syria and France, and was invited to give a guest lecture on poetry at the University of Manoubai, Tunisia. Over the last several years, Professor Almohammad has also served as an interpreter for various French journalists and media-related videos and has translated poetry collections into French and Arabic."

  His publications include: "About Tamtam", in Poetologie du témoignage, Éditions Publisud (2014) and "Olivier Larronde ou la marche à la mort," Frontières Vol. 19. p. 41-46, Spring 2007.

  Aside from his expertise in, and passion for, literature, Professor Almohammed holds an MA in the theories and practices of language and fine arts from the EHESS, Paris where he wrote his thesis on the photomontage and the fabrication of analogical and digital photography.

  In addition, Hassan is a poet and skilled oudist who regularly participates in poetry events and readings.

Student Fellows

• Alyssa Domino

• Rachel Earnhardt

• Isabel Farral

• Jeesue Lee