2022-23 Bingham Faculty Fellows: Trauma, Precarity, and Resilience
Commonwealth Center for the Humanities and Society (CCHS)
For the Call for Applications for this theme follow this link.
Ariadne J. Calvano, Theatre ArtsProject: "Healing to create Resilience - Undoing White Body Supremacy" Ari (Ariadne if you’re feeling sassy) Calvano is first and foremost an artist. Before joining the UofL faculty as an Assistant Professor of Acting and Movement in the department of Theatre Arts, they studied and taught movement in Misawa, Japan, explored circus arts and swing dance in Boulder, Colorado, and experimented with design and technical theatre in Abilene, Texas. Ari’s artistry and research centers in movement-based performance, stage and intimacy direction, and engaged research. At heart Ari is a clown, putting a spotlight on areas of human frailty, vulnerability, and intentionally embracing the awkward. Within each of their artistic experiences, from crafting a movement-based dissertation in Colorado, to their current work unpacking gender identity in Seneca’s Phaedra, they weave together aspects of history, the present socio-political moment, and pieces of their many contexts to engage with visceral physical expression – power beyond words. They explore perspectives that have been lost, forgotten, or ignored. They research and learn through an embodiment of experiences that speak both to and beyond their own. Ari is proud of their accomplishments as a first-generation college student, who went on to pursue their doctorate to deepen their expertise with practice-as-research and discover ways to produce art and knowledge that engages and serves the community. Their most recent creative and research activities include Intimacy Coaching Look What the Fires Did with Bunbury Theatre, Voice Directing the nationally streamed Louisville Ballet production The Movement, and an upcoming publication in the Journal for Interdisciplinary Voice Studies. They are honored to be included with this group of distinguished colleagues as a 22-23 Bingham Faculty Fellows. Reading List:
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Elise Franklin, HistoryProject: "Disintegrating Empire: Algerian Family Migration and the Limits of the Welfare State in France" Elise Franklin is a historian of France with an interest in the history of gender, colonialism, and decolonization. Before joining the University of Louisville as an assistant professor of European history in 2019, she was an assistant professor and Jamie & Thelma Guilbeau/BORSF Endowed Professor in History at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. She received her doctorate in History from Boston College in 2017. As a Bingham Fellow, Dr. Franklin will be completing her first monograph, Disintegrating Empire: Algerian Family Migration, Welfare, and Decolonization, 1954-1981. The manuscript explores the social aftershocks of the end of French empire in Algeria as they reverberated through the former colony and metropole long after independence in 1962. Diplomatic narratives of Algerian decolonization downplay the continuities connecting the late colonial and postcolonial eras. Her research instead uncovers the slow unraveling of the Franco-Algerian relationship though the lens of French social aid associations and the Algerian migrant families they sought to help. Dr. Franklin has published a stand-alone article, “A Bridge Across the Mediterranean: Nafissa Sid Cara and the Politics of Emancipation during the Algerian War, 1954-1962,” in French Politics, Culture and Society. A new article drawn from her book manuscript, “Defining Family, Delimiting Belonging: Algerian Migration after the End of Empire” appeared in a special issue of Gender & History in fall 2019. Her work has been supported by the University of Louisiana’s Guilbeau Charitable Trust, the Social Science Research Council, the American Historical Association, and the Society for French Historical Studies. Reading List:
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Kathryn Marklein, AnthropologyProject: "Grave abuses: Exposing systemic trauma, generational precarity, and paths of resilience in historic Louisville cemeteries" Dr. Kathryn E. Marklein (she/her) is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology and Faculty Researcher at the Center for Archaeology and Cultural Heritage. As a biological anthropologist and bioarchaeologist, Dr. Marklein applies a biocultural approach to understanding local and peripheral responses to and impacts of imperialism, namely through the analysis of embodied (skeletal) lifetime identities. In addition to research projects at Roman and Byzantine period sites in Turkiye, Dr. Marklein is involved in ongoing ethics initiatives with other UofL faculty and U.S. bioanthropology collaborators pertaining to the research, curation, and repatriation of human remains. It is from this work that the current CCHS project, engaging with the interred residents and descendants of Eastern Cemetery, is based. Dr. Marklein will use this year as a CCHS Fellow to consider the intersections of precarity and trauma in a local cemetery and spotlight the historic marginalization, racial discrimination, and inequity practiced and perpetuated in the (mal)treatment of cemetery residents. Reading List:
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Debbie Potter, SociologyProject: "Community Caregivers and Experiences of Risk, Collective Trauma, and Resilience" Debbie Potter is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Louisville. With a joint PhD in Sociology and Social Policy from Brandeis University, Dr. Potter’s work spans substantive, theoretical, and policy issues in the sociology of health and sociology of mental health. Before joining the faculty at U of L, she had two decades of applied research experience, at the masters’ and then doctoral level, in various venues including health policy and mental health evaluation research. At U of L, Dr. Potter teaches undergraduate courses in medical sociology; sociology of mental health; sociology of disability; social policy; and research methods. At the graduate level she teaches courses/independent studies in research methods, social policy, and the sociology of health and illness. Her primary ongoing research areas are in a) lay/public involvement in health/mental health policy and service delivery; b) medicalization of social behaviors among marginalized populations; and, most recently, c) illness pathways/junctures of people diagnosed with both chronic somatic and psychiatric conditions. During her tenure as a CCHS Fellow, Dr. Potter is looking forward to expanding her research on comorbidities to encompass multiple collective traumas. Collective trauma refers to responses to socio-structurally-shaped threats that community members synchronously experience. Previous research on collective trauma has largely been limited to singular traumatic events with relatively few studies examining the cascading effects of multiple collective traumas. This project, however, will assess experiences from two of the multiple synchronous collective traumas from the past couple of years: the COVID-19 pandemic and struggles for racial justice and police reform. In-depth qualitative interviews will be conducted with approximately two dozen community members in Louisville KY, who have taken on culturally-sanctioned and precarious roles as caregivers (nurses, mental health providers, and teachers) while simultaneously supporting efforts for racial justice, to understand their varied experiences of risk, collective trauma, and community resilience. Reading List:
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Shelby Pumphrey, Women's, Gender, and Sexuality StudiesProject: “To Confine and Control: African American Women and the Politics of Commitment in Virginia, 1890 - 1930” Shelby Pumphrey (Ph.D., Michigan State University) is an assistant professor in the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Department and the Pan-African Studies Department. She teaches courses focused on African American Women and reproductive justice as well as African American Women and the carceral state from a historical perspective. Her research focuses on the lives and experiences of Africana women committed to state mental hospitals in the southern United States during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In comparison to the treatment Africana women received while institutionalized, she also focuses on how Africana women have employed ancestral practices to address mental and spiritual concerns across time and space. Reading List:
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Jennifer Sichel, Art HistoryProject: "How to Survive an Endemic: Queer Theory, Mourning, and Lessons on Living in Ongoing Precarity" Jennifer Sichel is Assistant Professor of Contemporary Art and Theory. Her research focuses on 20th-century art, criticism, and visual culture of the United States, with an emphasis on how art manifests queer forms of attachment and belonging. Dr. Sichel is finishing work on her first book, Criticism without Authority: Gene Swenson and Jill Johnston's Queer Practices (under contract, University of Chicago Press). As a careful archival project, the book traces how Swenson and Johnston reimagined sexuality and selfhood in the 1960s, and posited ways of being unmanageable and disintegrated in response to a world that demands clarity and punishes difference. As a Bingham Fellow, Dr. Sichel will begin work on a second project that investigates how queer theory developed in a "blaze of mourning" (as Eve Sedgwick writes) in the late '80s and early '90s during the ravages of the AIDS crisis. The project will focus on artists, activists, and scholars who address how it’s possible to keep living amid ongoing conditions of precarity, illness, and state violence—as such conditions become the norm, rather than the exception. This project takes on particular urgency now, as we’re waiting (perhaps hoping) for Covid-19 to progress from epidemic to endemic, though without any clarity on what that might mean for how we should go on living our lives. The project will scour AIDS archives and queer theory for lessons on how to survive an endemic. Reading List:
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