Class of 2020

Professor
Department of Philosophy & Humanities
College of Liberal Arts

José Luis Bermúdez’s research interests include philosophy of mind, philosophy of psychology, rationality and cognitive science.

Bermúdez plans to develop a cross-disciplinary understanding of different conceptualizations of selfhood in the ancient, medieval and early modern periods based on the proceedings of a federally funded workshop and his research into Aristotle’s theory of the soul.

Associate Professor
Department of Performance Studies
College of Liberal Arts

David Donkor engages theatre/performance as a form of public address in Africana cultures. His ethnographies of Ghanaian stand up comedy, popular theatre, and storytelling explain the interplay of a trickster ethos (based on folk figure Ananse) with performance, political liberalization, and economic (neo) liberalization in Ghana.

Donkor will produce a book, Staging Independence, about Ghana’s 1957 independence commemoration and exploring the national, international, and transnational importance of Ghana’s maiden independence.

Associate Professor
Department of History
College of Liberal Arts

Side Emre specializes in late medieval and early modern history of the Ottoman Empire and Egypt.

Emre will apply a combination of visual arts, computer technology, codicology, history, religion, anthropology, and mysticism to generate a multi-lingual, interdisciplinary study of unpublished Arabic and Ottoman manuscripts that feature hand-drawn Sufi diagrams of mystical cosmologies.

Associate Professor
Department of International Studies
College of Liberal Arts

Carmela Garritano’s current project, African Energy Worlds: African Cinema of the Anthropocene, puts energy humanities scholarship in conversation with African film and media to demonstrate the crucial role of humanities-based research in addressing fossil-fuel dependence and anthropogenic climate warming, the worst effects of which are lived by people in the global South. 

Garritano will complete work on a book that combines energy humanities scholarship with African film and media.

Associate Professor
Department of History
College of Liberal Arts

Sonia Hernandez specializes in the intersections of gender and labor in the US-Mexican borderlands, Chicana/o history, and modern Mexico.

Hernandez will use the example of an attempted lynching of a Mexican migrant in the 1900-era Texas to produce a book on how such moments of violence led regional Mexican and Anglo American elites and working-class Mexicans from Texas and northern Mexico to create unlikely cross-border alliances to mitigate violence.

Associate Professor
Department of English
College of Liberal Arts

Britt Mize’s research interests include literature and language of both the Old and Middle English periods. His research program centers on the concept and uses of tradition.

Mize’s work will generate a public scholarly database and a traditional scholarly book to document the influence of the eighth century epic poem Beowulf on the modern world and to analyze its impact on academic and popular culture (scholarly, creative, political, educational, and religious) from the eighteenth century to today.

Assistant Professor
Department of History
College of Liberal Arts

Stephen Badalyan Riegg’s research and teaching interests revolve around the histories of Imperial Russia and the Caucasus.

Riegg will produce a book that explores how and why the Romanov dynasty both encouraged and encumbered European settlement in the Russian empire’s strategically vital periphery between 1800 and 1917 while examining how diverse Westerners benefited or hindered tsarist imperialism.

Assistant Professor
Department of Landscape Architecture & Urban Planning
College of Architecture

Hope Hui Rising will investigate approaches for designing sustainable settlements in places near rivers, lakes, and oceans that can proactively adapt to the effects of climate change — such as rising sea levels or intense flooding — while also engaging in mitigation strategies that are more effective and timely.

Assistant Professor
Department of Landscape Architecture & Urban Planning
College of Architecture

Andrea Roberts’ research interests include community development and revitalization, heritage conservation, community resilience, vernacular and cultural landscapes, preservation policy, grassroots/insurgent planning, participatory planning, action research, ethnographic research, planning history and theory, and public finance.

Roberts will generate a book that examines the struggles of more than 500 Texas freedom colonies, exploring issues of land stewardship, ownership, and cultural production while documenting the ongoing resistance to social forces that may seek to erase heritage, place, and “free” black identity.

Assistant Professor
Religious Studies Program
College of Liberal Arts

Robin Veldman’s research interests and teaching include examining how religious beliefs and cultural identity shape attitudes toward nature. Building on theory and methodologies from religious studies, her teaching and scholarship use the tools of the humanities and social sciences to interpret human-environmental interactions.

Veldman will study a phenomenon she calls ”incivil religion” — religious discourse that embraces incivility as its underlying mode of expression — with a focus on how this discourse portrays the environmental crisis, which may undermine the narrative of progress fundamental to discussions about America’s purpose and destiny.