Humanities Summer Stipends
Celebrating Faculty Research: Center for Humanitites 2025 Summer Stipend Awardees
The Center for Humanities awards $4000 summer research stipends to five Virginia Tech faculty in support of their work and commitment to advancing the humanities.
With a Center for Humanities Faculty Summer Stipend, I will write a book proposal and two sample chapters for my monograph-in-progress, The Forest Botanicals Region: Seeing Beyond the Coalfields Imaginary in Central Appalachia. By revealing the rich histories and present-day practices that bind a diversity of people to the Appalachian forests, this book will problematize the environmental imaginary of ‘the coalfields’ that has long defined the Central Appalachian region. Drawing on nearly two decades of ethnographic fieldwork, this book will offer an alternative way to view the region, one that moves beyond commodity-focused understandings of place and that is instead centered on the well-being of humans and the more-than-human world.
Title: "Celestia Webster: A Life, with Illness"
Description: "Celestia Webster: A Life, with Illness" is a close examination of one woman’s encounter and relationship with illness in Conesus, a rural town in western New York, in the years just after the American Civil War. Through Webster’s experiences, readers access the world before germ theory and modern medicine--before vaccines, antibiotics, or even ibuprofen--when injuries and illnesses were regular features of daily life. Rather than entering an idyllic world of healthful living or dystopia of constant sickness, readers will encounter the ways that nineteenth-century Americans shared possible cures and healthful advice, cared for one another, and reckoned with their mortality. Readers will also learn how regular sickness affected society, from individuals’ bodies to family caregiving and community bonds, as they follow Webster’s unwilling transformation from someone who lived in a world of illness to someone who was chronically ill.
“Eating with the Eyes” explores a simple question, asking how Early Modern concepts of “taste” as a sensory response became a common way to express aesthetic judgment (in the sense of “good taste”). A wealth of evidence points to new theoretical discourses in the Netherlands, where looking at art was described in terms of consuming food. This gustatory lexicon was frequently used in critical art texts to signal an appreciation for artistic skill and beauty, suggesting a foundation for “taste” in the visual arts.
Brokering with Caliban: The East Indies in Early Modern English Drama of Diplomacy, examines how the ad-hoc diplomacy of East India companies shaped drama from Shakespeare to Dryden. From allusions to Tartars to depictions of siege warfare and the politics of the fort to disputes over treaties, English drama engaged diplomatic concerns about agency, mediation, and representation.
Title: Transformative Organizing: Race, Gender, and the American Labor Movement
“Transformative Organizing: Race, Gender, and the American Labor Movement," examines the innovative ways in which mid-20th century organizers in the American labor movement sought to build solidarity across racial and gender inequity in exclusionary workplaces and unions. The question I take up in this project is: what does it mean to build solidarity in communities and workplaces fractured by oppression, where the idea of a common cause or interests cannot be taken for granted? I contend that the solution to this puzzle requires a reimagining of the core activity through which solidarity is built: organizing. Through archival research, I develop a conception of organizing as activity that transforms persons’ interests, generating novel commonality from which solidarity can be built.