Humanities Associates

Dr. Jeff Stilley is an instructor in the Department of Sociology at Virginia Tech. His current research explores the organizing work and political context behind a 1918 general strike in Kansas City. The event had a number of historically unusual features – occurring during war mobilization, its level of support from well-connected upper class women, and that it emerged in support of low-wage white and Black women workers. Based on archival research, the analysis identifies the formation of a “solidarity infrastructure,” which came together partly through unique characteristics of the Kansas City scene, and partly through organizing work that holds lessons for today.

Kevin Cheng, Ph.D., AFC® is a collegiate assistant professor of consumer studies in the Department of Apparel, Housing, and Resource Management at Virginia Tech. His research interests focus on retirement planning, consumer education, and financial literacy. He has presented his research at a number of national and international conferences. Kevin is an Accredited Financial Counselor (AFC®) from the Association for Financial Counseling and Planning Education (AFCPE). He teaches Consumer and Family Finances, Financial Counseling, and Debtor-Creditor Relationships at Virginia Tech. He has been awarded Virginia Tech’s Outstanding Remote Teaching and has received recognition in Virginia Tech’s “Thank a Teacher” program multiple times.

Patrick Thomas Ridge is associate professor of Spanish in the Department of Modern & Classical Languages & Literatures. He earned his Ph.D. in Spanish from Arizona State University and MA from the University of Louisville. While his research focuses broadly on literature, culture, film, and gender in Latin America, he specializes in the study of soccer.

He has published articles on the topic in Oxford Bibliographies, Soccer & Society, Revista Iberoamericana, Chasqui, Studies in Latin American Popular Culture, and Romance Notes. His current book project, Fulboy: The Masculinist Myths of Soccer in Argentina and Brazil, argues that soccer and associated cultural production have historically embedded masculinist ideology. In other words, he demonstrates that men’s soccer has played a key role not only in imagining national and social identity, but also reaffirming conventional notions of gender. Although he examines how soccer-themed cultural production has often perpetuated the idea of soccer as a “man’s game,” he shows how feminist and queer perspectives in more recent years have effectively questioned the sport’s masculinist myths.  

Dr. Geovani Ramírez is an assistant professor of Latinx studies and literature in the Department of English, where he researches and teaches courses on health and environmental humanities. With a special focus on Latinx cultural productions and lived experiences surrounding labor, environments, illness, and healing, his transdisciplinary work engages with medical anthropological, historical, and sociological scholarship to explore the intersections between Latinx labor, legislation, and health. As an ecocritic, Geovani looks to literature to investigate Latinx people’s relationships to and narratives about environments to consider the eco-material realities of their lives as well as their responses to environmental justice concerns and sustainability.

Employing ecocritical and disability studies lenses as well as ecofeminist theory, Geovani’s first book (in progress), The Burning Question of Labor, reveals the essential role Chicanas have played in offering conceptual frameworks for understanding Mexican-heritage people’s relationships to labor and laboring spaces, environments, and health.

Geovani’s work has appeared in such venues as Berkeley Press' Ethnic Studies Review, Latinx Talk, and Intersectionality: Understanding Women’s Lives and Resistance in the Past and Present. Geovani’s public-facing, transdisciplinary approach toward the study of Latinx populations is manifested in “Chicken Doctors and the Trials of Transcendence: Unveiling Gallinera/o Illness Narratives.” “Chicken Doctors” is a multi-genre, autoethnographic piece.

Geovani is a faculty affiliate for Alliance for Social, Political, Ethical, and Cultural Thought (ASPECT) and Virginia Tech’s Women’s and Gender Studies program. He is a 2023 Juneteenth scholar.

Megan A. Duncan, Ph.D., is an assistant professor in the Journalism and Mass Communication Division in the School of Communication. My time as a newspaper reporter fueled my curiosity about how audiences perceive news credibility and adjust to emerging forms of news like social media or online platforms. I now research how news audiences — especially political partisan audiences — make choices about what news to read, believe, comment on, or share. My current project asks how audiences participate in crowdsourcing political misinformation online. I teach courses in social media, data journalism, public opinion, and mass communication theory. In 2023, the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication named me one of two Emerging Scholars in mass communication. I serve as the chair of the Political Communication Division of AEJMC. I have a bachelor’s in journalism from Point Park University, a master’s in mass communication from the University of Florida, and a Ph.D. in mass communication from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.  

John K. Aggrey is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Science, Technology, and Society at Virginia Tech. He studies how social, cultural, and political contexts shape the occurrence and management of infectious diseases. With a focus on Africa's rural and urban populations, he has researched Ebola and COVID-19, particularly exploring the dynamics of risk perception and communication during outbreaks. His work aims to understand how communities construct a sense of risk and how social and political structures influence this process.

John also investigates the vital role of human relationships in epidemic preparedness, challenging conventional models that overly rely on technological and logistical solutions. His current project treats human relationships as a fundamental infrastructure for preparing for and responding to epidemics. This innovative perspective reimagines preventive measures by incorporating the complexities of human interaction and social hierarchies. His publications appear in Social Studies of Science, Politics, and the Life Sciences.

Eric Malczewski is an Assistant Professor in the Center for Public Administration and Policy at the School of Public and International Affairs at Virginia Tech. He is a social theorist and sociologist working in the areas of social and political theory, sociology of knowledge, philosophy of the human sciences, sociological theory, comparative historical sociology, and culture. He is presently working on a book on the eminent 19th & 20th century philosopher and sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies and his theory of human will. Professor Malczewski has published on the organizing principles of social science, epistemological issues in social and sociological theory, nationalism, culture, and conceptions of nature in American culture and American landscape painting. He is an expert on the thought of Max Weber and Émile Durkheim and has published on their theoretical and methodological contributions. He is a Faculty Fellow at the Center for Cultural Sociology at Yale University. Before joining Virginia Tech, he spent eight years on the faculty of Harvard University teaching social and political theory in the Committee on Degrees in Social Studies and serving on the Board of Advisors.

Candace Buckner is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Religion and Culture. She holds a doctorate from the University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill in religion with a focus on ancient Mediterranean religions. Her work is focused on the writings of early church fathers and documents from the world of Roman Egypt from 300–800 CE. Specifically, she investigates how religious literature and documentary evidence constructs race, ethnicity, foreignity, disability, health/healing, and space. She has been awarded research grants from the North American Patristics Society and the Center for the Humanities.

Recently, her academic scholarship has focused on the topic of race and disability in the biographical accounts of the saints Aphou and Aaron, and public scholarship on maternal risk in Roman Egypt. During 2023–2024, she is also co-leading with David Schones (Austin College) a workshop organized by the Society of Biblical Literature on “Teaching the Bible during and after COVID-19” focused on disability studies and teaching post-COVID-19. Currently, she is working on a monograph centered on the desert as imagined in the biographies of various saints.

Deborah Milly’s research interests include Japanese responses to increased immigration, comparative and global responses to international migration, and comparative patterns of interaction between state and civil society actors.

In addition to publishing New Policies for New Residents: Immigrants, Advocacy, and Governance in Japan and Beyond, she has presented papers on these subjects at numerous conferences and international meetings. During the fall semester of 2014, Milly used a sabbatical to conduct research on the evolving policy discussion of international health care workers in Japan. During the fall of 2015 and the summer of 2016, she continued that research with support from a Fulbright research award.

Ben Katz is an Associate Professor of Human Development and Family Science at Virginia Tech. His research focuses on the developmental of executive function -- the mental processes that support our abilities to learn, reason, think, and decide -- throughout the life course, including how they may be modulated through experience and intervention. As a developmental cognitive neuroscientist, he uses a variety of methodologies in his research, including fMRI and non-invasive brain stimulation, which has been supported via grants from the NIA, NIDDK, and the Advanced Education Research and Development Fund. Prior to entering academia, Ben worked as a game designer in Austin and San Francisco. 

Dr. Edward Polanco is a Kuskatanchanej – a person from Kuskatan (Western and Central El Salvador) – scholar of Mesoamerica. Although he was born in Los Angeles, CA, his ancestors are from Kuskatan and his parents fled their homeland due to political violence and instability. Dr. Polanco is committed to amplifying and centering Indigenous voices and perspectives in his research, his classroom, and on Virginia Tech’s campus. To achieve this, he works closely with the Latinx and Native communities on campus, and more broadly in the US and Latin America. Dr. Polanco is on leave in the Fall of 2023.

His first book, Healing Like Our Ancestors: The Nahua Tiçitl, Gender, and Settler Colonialism in Central Mexico; 1535-1660 (University of Arizona Press; in press, expected August 2024) examines healing ceremonial specialists among 16th and 17th-century Nahua people (Indigenous groups with diverse communities in Mexico and El Salvador) in Central Mexico. Dr. Polanco carefully analyzes the different healing tasks women and men had in their communities, he also unpacks the importance of women as titiçih (healing specialists), and he unearths how Spanish authorities attacked Native healers as they attempted to evangelize and hispanize Indigenous populations in New Spain (today known as Mexico and Central America).

He has published on Indigenous healing knowledge, and gendered understandings of the human body. Various fellowships and institutions have funded Dr. Polanco’s work, including the Fulbright-García Robles research grant, FLAS summer and AY fellowships, and a Newberry Library National Endowment for the Humanities Long-Term Fellowship. For more information and updates, please visit Professor Polanco's personal website.

Dr. Polanco’s teaching interests include Native history, Latin America, Mexico, El Salvador, Mesoamerica, sorcery, race, gender, and class. He has introduced various new courses to Virginia Tech that challenge students to think about the past from Indigenous perspectives.

Rohan Sud works at the intersection of metaphysics and philosophy of language, with a focus on issues related to vagueness, the indeterminacy of meaning, and meta-ontology. He has additional interests in meta-ethics (esp. expressivism), philosophical logic, formal epistemology, and rational choice theory.

He grew up in Flint, Michigan, and attended Columbia University in New York City where he studied economics and philosophy. After a brief stint in investment banking, he returned to my home state to pursue a PhD in Philosophy at the University of Michigan.

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Currently he is an assistant professor at Virginia Tech.