Faculty and Staff Notes

On December 2, Associate Professor of Art History Matthew Rarey delivered the Distinguished Alumni Lecture at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Department of Art History, where he earned his PhD in 2014. Rarey's lecture, "Renaming the Fetish in the Eighteenth-Century African Atlantic," was simulcast on Zoom and is publicly available on the Department's YouTube channel.

Associate Professor of Art History Matthew Rarey published his essay, "A Cartographer of the Long Eighteenth Century: Anastácio de Sant’Anna’s Guia de Caminhantes" in a special issue of Arts dedicated to “Black Artists in the Atlantic World." The essay is available open-access and under a Creative Commons license.

Caroline Val of Teen Vogue interviewed Yveline Alexis for an article about the impact of anti-Haitian rhetoric.

Associate Professor of Hispanic Studies Sergio Gutierrez Negron cofounded the small literary press La pequeña, proyecto editorial. The inaugural Fall 2024 catalog includes a memoir about Montserrat’s volcanic explosion in the 1990s written by author Yvonne Weekes; a novel by a 25 year-old Puerto Rican novelist, Daniel Rosa Hunter; and a literary travelogue by Mexican writer, Luis Felipe Lomelí. La pequeña will publish three books a year, spanning Puerto Rican, Caribbean, and Latin American literature.

Visiting Assistant Professor in English and Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Postcolonial World Literature Asif Iqbal’s article, entitled “The East Pakistan-West Pakistan Entanglement: Gender, Politics and Postcolonial Development in Shawkat Ali’s Dhakkhinayoner Din,” has been published in South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies. The article grew out of the British Academy Writing Workshop “Pakistan to Bangladesh, 1947–71.”

Assistant Professor of German Jessica Resvick gave a paper at the Atkins Goethe Conference in San Antonio, Texas. Her talk, "Goethe's Invisible Hands: Art, Craft, Chirognomy," analyzed the role of hand anatomy and manual gesture in Goethe's final novel, Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre, tracing out the religious, aesthetic, and medico-scientific significance of manuality within nineteenth-century thought.

Assistant Professor of Cinema and Media Joshua Sperling published "The Power of a Brand: Paramount, Heartland Narrowcasting, and Taylor Sheridan's Yellowstone" in the Journal of Literary Studies. Sperling was interviewed on the topic by the French cultural magazine Télérama.

Professor of Politics Stephen Crowley's opinion article, "What Explains Trumpism? It's Capitalism, and it's Global," appeared in The Nation.

Associate Professor of Music Theory Andrew Pau presented two research papers on opposite sides of the Atlantic during the first week of November. The first presentation, "Expanded Continuation Phrases in Fauré's Piano Music," was given at the Institut de France in Paris, at a colloquium marking the centenaries of the deaths of French composers Gabriel Fauré (1845–1924) and Théodore Dubois (1837–1924). The second presentation, "Fauréan Influences in Lili Boulanger's Clairières dans le ciel" was given at the annual conference of the Society for Music Theory in Jacksonville, Florida.

Visiting Assistant Professor of Religion Francesca Chubb-Confer recently published an essay, "Poetry on the Periphery: Language, Power, and Islam" as part of a scholarly forum in the journal Afghanistan.