2022-23 Fellows
Glasscock Internal Faculty Residential Fellows
Recipients of the annually awarded Internal Faculty Fellowships receive a one-course teaching release in the fellowship year, a $1,000 research bursary, and an office in the Glasscock Center for the fellowship year. These fellows, along with the Glasscock Faculty and Graduate Research Fellows, will present and participate in the Colloquium Series during their fellowship year.
Evan Haefeli | Professor, History
An historian of colonial North America and the Atlantic world at Texas A&M University, Evan Haefeli previously taught at Princeton University, where he received his PhD, as well as Tufts, Columbia University, and the London School of Economics, where he was a Visiting Fellow. His research primarily focuses on the religious and political origins of early America. He is the author of several books, including New Netherland and the Dutch Origins of American Religious Liberty (2012), Accidental Pluralism: America and the Religious Politics of English Expansion, 1497-1662 (2020), and editor of Against Popery: Britain, Empire, and Anti-Catholicism (2020). He has also published a number of works on Indigenous North American history.
In his time at the Glasscock Center, Haefeli will work on finishing his next book manuscript, entitled, The Perils of Pluralism: Religious Tolerance and the Rise and Fall of the First British Empire, 1660-1783.
Christopher Menzel | Professor, Philosophy
Christopher Menzel is professor of philosophy at Texas A&M. He received his PhD in philosophy from the University of Notre Dame and has been a research fellow at Stanford University (CSLI), CSIRO Melbourne, Saarland University (IFOMIS), the Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy (LMU), and Notre Dame. He has published widely in the areas of knowledge representation, philosophy of religion, logic, philosophy of logic, and philosophy of mathematics. He is currently writing a book on the logic and metaphysics of the alethic modalities (necessity and possibility). This will be his focus during his residency at the Glasscock Center.
Glasscock Graduate Residential Fellows
The Graduate Residential Fellowships are designed to support outstanding research in the humanities by providing selected graduate students a semester of residence in the Glasscock Center to focus their efforts on writing their doctoral dissertations.
Victoria Green | PhD Candidate, Philosophy
Victoria is a current PhD student in the Department of Philosophy and has received an M.S. in Primate Behavior from Central Washington University. Her area of study is in animal and environmental ethics. Specifically, she focuses her research on scientific methodology and the relationship between scientists and their nonhuman animal subjects in wild, noncaptive settings. She is a student in the Applied Biodiversity Science graduate certificate program and works primarily on cross-disciplinary collaborations for her research projects, including projects that speak to the ethics of conservation practices, ethics of new technologies, and how science and conservation reflect society’s relationship with the natural world.
Janet Cho | PhD Candidate, English
Janet Eunjin Cho is a doctoral candidate in the Department of English at Texas A&M. Her research explores the interplay between history and aesthetics in Asian American literature to recover the materiality of Asian diasporas against the Eurocentric traditions of valorizing aesthetic sensibility as a condition of the universal human subject. Her current dissertation project investigates how embodied foodways of queer and women Asian (im)migrants inform the formalistic and stylistic practices of contemporary Asian American women writers while vibrantly illuminating the histories of colonialism, nationalism at home and abroad, and racism inflicted upon Asian diasporic bodies from the twentieth century to present. Janet’s most recent publication appears in Open Words; her article, “‘How Good to Eat!’: Writing Asia Through Food in Virginia Woolf’s Orlando,” is forthcoming at Modern Fiction Studies.
Glasscock Faculty Research Fellows
These fellowships are designed to address a need for funding for research that could not be accomplished otherwise in order to complete a book project, major article or series of articles, or other research project that makes an impact in the field. Fellows participate in the Colloquium Series, which will function as a working group for these works-in-progress. Projects are chosen on the basis or their intellectual rigor, scholarly creativity, and potential to make a significant impact in the candidate’s career and field.
Sarah McNamara | Assistant Professor, History
Sarah McNamara is Assistant Professor of History and core faculty in the Latina/o, Mexican American Studies Minor at Texas A&M University. Her research focuses on Latinx, women and gender, labor, and immigration histories in the modern United States. Her first book, Ybor City: Crucible of the Latina South is in press (UNC Press, spring 2023). In addition to her monograph, McNamara has published in the Journal of American Ethnic History, Labor: Studies in Working Class History, contributed to the edited volume, 50 Events that Shaped Latino History, and has an essay forthcoming in the Oxford Handbook of U.S. History. Beyond her academic work, McNamara is dedicated to interdisciplinary collaboration and sharing research on labor, Latinx, immigration, and women and gender with a broad audience. She has written for Public Seminar, The Washington Post, The Houston Chronicle and published an ethnopoetic piece about the experience of undocumented activists in the U.S. South with South Writ Large. McNamara is dedicated to student and community activism. McNamara’s work has received support from the American Historical Association, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Institute for Citizens and Scholars, and the American Association of University of Women, among others.
Cinthya Salazar | Assistant Professor, Educational Administration and Human Resource Development
Dr. Cinthya Salazar received her Ph.D. in Higher Education, Student Affairs, and International Education Policy from the University of Maryland in 2020 and joined the Educational Administration and Human Resource Development department at Texas A&M University as an Assistant Professor during the same year. Dr. Salazar's research focuses on the mechanisms used by undocumented students to access, persist, and succeed in higher education. Through her scholarship, she seeks to generate localized retention theories and student success models which can potentially reduce minoritized student's college attrition. Dr. Salazar continues to be an active member of the National Association of Student Personnel Administrators (NASPA), supporting practitioners committed to creating equitable learning environments for minoritized students. She currently serves as the Region III representative for NASPA's Undocumented Immigrants & Allies Knowledge Community.
Cara Wallis | Associate Professor, Communication
Cara Wallis is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication and a faculty affiliate with Women’s and Gender Studies at TAMU. Her research concerns the social and cultural implications of digital media use, in particular how such use intersects with gender, class, and place (rural/urban) in China. She is the author of Technomobility in China: Young Migrant Women and Mobile Phones (NYU Press, 2013) and multiple articles and book chapters. She is wrapping up a book manuscript based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork that examined the affective and ethical underpinnings of social media use in China. Her new project focuses on the impact of China’s “zero Covid” policy on rural migrant workers in Beijing. She has been a Visiting Scholar at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences Institute of Journalism and Communication and the Communication University of China. She received her PhD in Communication from the University of Southern California.
Glasscock Graduate Research Fellows
The Glasscock Center for Humanities Research annually funds Graduate Research Fellowships at $2,000 each. To be eligible, students have to be working on a Doctoral dissertation or Masters thesis but could be at the initial stages of their projects. The outcome should be a dissertation or a thesis, or a significant portion thereof. These students will participate in the Colloquium Series and use the experience as a tool to improve their own writing and projects and help each other to improve the quality of the work being produced as a group.
Victoria Green | PhD candidate, Philosophy
Victoria is a current PhD student in the Department of Philosophy and has received an M.S. in Primate Behavior from Central Washington University. Her area of study is in animal and environmental ethics. Specifically, she focuses her research on scientific methodology and the relationship between scientists and their nonhuman animal subjects in wild, noncaptive settings. She is a student in the Applied Biodiversity Science graduate certificate program and works primarily on cross-disciplinary collaborations for her research projects, including projects that speak to the ethics of conservation practices, ethics of new technologies, and how science and conservation reflect society’s relationship with the natural world.
Brandon Wadlington | PhD candidate, Philosophy
Brandon Wadlington received his BA in Philosophy from California State University, Stanislaus. He is currently a PhD student in the Philosophy Department at Texas A&M. He is also pursuing a Master’s Degree in English as a part of the Philosophy PhD. His research focuses on the ethics of Plato and Aristotle, with special emphasis on their conceptions of practical wisdom and practical judgment. His Master’s Thesis explores the origins of Ancient Greek conceptions of practical wisdom as they are found in Homer, especially the Iliad.
Affiliated Fellows
Affiliated Fellows are those whose fellowships originate outside of the Glasscock Center but are incorporated into our programming and fellows' cohort. They participate in the scholarly community of the Center.
Rachel Lim
Assistant Visiting Professor, History
Rachel Lim is an Accountability, Climate, Equity, and Scholarship (ACES) Fellow and a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of History. Her research and teaching interests include migration, diaspora, globalization, gender, and comparative race and ethnicity at the intersection of Asia and the Américas. Her current book project, Itinerant Belonging: Korean Transnational Migration to and from Mexico, uses interdisciplinary research methods to examine the history of Korean migration to Mexico, from the twentieth century to the present. Rachel received her PhD in Ethnic Studies from the University of California, Berkeley and has written for multiple scholarly and popular venues, including The Journal of Asian American Studies, Verge: Studies in Global Asias, and The Washington Post.
Allegra Midgette
Assistant Visiting Professor, Psychological and Brain Sciences
Dr. Midgette’s research investigates the origins and social processes that support individuals in developing an understanding of justice and learning how to care for others in an inequitable and unjust world. Her work addresses two key questions: How do we come to care about each other and about justice within the family? How do we become just in the face of inequality? To investigate these questions, Dr. Midgette employs a mixed methodology that places the experiential reality of children and their families at the forefront. The long-term goal of her work is to characterize how cultural, societal, and family practices influence individual moral development, with the ultimate aim of supporting the creation of interventions that contribute to individuals’ development into more caring and just individuals.
Glasscock Summer Research Fellows
This fellowship supports faculty and graduate research from within the Texas A&M community. Each fellowship is awarded to a faculty member and allows them to hire a graduate student as a full-time Graduate Research Assistant during the 3 summer months.
Dr. Johanna Dunaway | Associate Professor, Political Science
Johanna L. Dunaway received her Ph.D. from Rice University in 2006. Before joining the faculty of Texas A&M in Fall 2016, Johanna was a Joan Shorenstein Fellow in the Shorenstein Center for Media, Politics, and Public Policy, at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. She teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in media and politics, political communication, political behavior, American politics, and research design. Her areas of research include news media and politics and political communication, with an emphasis on how the changing media environment is shaping news consumption and political knowledge, attitudes, and behavior. Her publications appear in journals such as the American Journal of Political Science, the Journal of Politics, the Journal of Communication, Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, Political Communication, Information, Communication & Society, Public Opinion Quarterly, and PloS One. Johanna’s recent book, Home Style Opinion: How Local Newspapers Can Slow Polarization, co-authored with Joshua Darr and Matthew Hitt, was published as part of the Cambridge University Press Elements in Political Communication series in 2021. Her forthcoming book, News and Democratic Citizens in the Mobile Era, co-authored with Kathleen Searles, will be published with Oxford University Press in October, 2022. Her current book project, The House that Fox Built? Representation, Political Accountability, and the Rise of Cable News, is co-authored with Kevin Arceneaux, Martin Johnson, & Ryan J. Vander Wielen.
Spencer Goidel | PhD candidate, Political Science
Spencer Goidel is a Ph.D. candidate in the department of Political Science at Texas A&M. He received his BA from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette in 2018. His research and teaching interests include public opinion, voter behavior, and political communication. He has published work in Public Opinion Quarterly, Research & Politics, and PS: Political Science & Politics. Spencer received the Rapoport Family Foundation Doctoral Dissertation Survey Research Grant for his research on choice overload in U.S. elections. He is currently working on completing his dissertation by May 2023.
Project Description:
Our research examines the relationship between high speed internet access and election polling error. We demonstrate how digital information inequalities can have important political implications for the accuracy with which polling data reflect voters’ prospective candidate evaluations relative to Election Day outcomes. Specifically, we use data from the 2016, 2018, and 2020 U.S. election cycles to examine whether variation in the quality of internet access—in conjunction with several other factors—helps to explain gaps between polling projections and the actual vote shares candidates earn on Election Day. We show that, while most Americans have internet access, internet quality continues to be a meaningful divide, that these inequalities in quality are negatively affecting sample representativeness, and this is causing an increase in polling error. It is necessary that public opinion scholars accurately gauge public opinion. Yet, the past two presidential elections are suggestive of many shortcomings. Our research points to one reason---poor internet quality---scholars and pollsters are experiencing such difficulty.
Dr. Sergio Lemus | Assistant Professor, Anthropology
Lemus is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology. Previously, Lemus was part of the inaugural ACES Fellow cohort class of 2019. In his research agenda, Lemus documents the centrality of labor processes in driving cultural transformations among Mexican migrants and the politico-historical changes that give rise to a working-class formation—Los Yarderos. This research is slated to be published as a book at the University of Illinois Press under Latinos in Chicago and the Midwest series titled “Los Yarderos: Mexican Yard Workers in Neoliberal Chicago.” Lemus’ second research project examines the lives of Mexican, working-class immigrants and their cultural experience living with cancer. This research acutely points to the neoliberal, necropolitical, and cultural forms that give rise to the Latino/a cancer patient as a manageable population in the United States. In general, Lemus’ projects emphasize the study of immigration along three lines of investigation: a) Mexican transborder subjectivity, b) cultural production and reproduction, and c) health and disease as these relate to class, gender, and unstable state regimes.
Aigul Seralinova | PhD candidate, Anthropology
Aigul Seralinova has more than ten years of experience working with International Organizations in Kazakhstan in the area of social and economic development and poverty reduction. She led projects/initiatives to improve analytical capacity to measure poverty and develop an inclusive pro-poor policy for the country. She holds a Master’s Degree in Social Work from Washington University in St. Louis. She was awarded the Fulbright Scholarship in 2009. Aigul worked with the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe Programmed Office in Astana, Kazakhstan as a Senior Program Assistant, conducting projects related to gender equality, combating human trafficking and domestic violence before the start of the Ph.D. program in Cultural Anthropology at Texas A&M University.
Project Description:
The project documents how undocumented Mexican men use alternative forms of medicine and navigate between biomedical and non-traditional forms of healing to capture better how Mexican migrants culturally mediate their medical subjectivity in precarious, neoliberal conditions. This ethnographic research project takes place in Brazos County among Latina/o populations. Brazos County is central Texas’ region is an important ethnographic site for three reasons---1) there is a strong presence of migrants from Latin America as well as US-born Latinos or Hispanics, and 2) this population is representative of more significant trends nationally in terms of working-class composition and undocumented status, and 3) Brazos County is home of two major regional hospitals and cancer treatment centers that allow for the contact with patients suffering from this disease.
Dr. Lu Tang | Associate Professor, Communication
Dr. Lu Tang is an Associate Professor of Health Communication. She is also the Director of the Data Justice Lab affiliated with the Texas A&M Institute of Data Science. Dr. Tang conducts research on social media and emerging infectious diseases using computational methods such as natural language processing and social network analysis. She also studies culture, health communication, and minority health using mixed methods such as surveys, interviews and photovoice methods. Her ongoing projects seek to identify biases and other barriers of minority that contributes to health disparity. Her research has been published in journals such as Journal of Health Communication, Health Communication, Journal of Applied Communication Research, Journal of International and Intercultural Communication, Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly, and Journal of Medical Internet Research.
Jinxu Li | PhD candidate, Communication
Jinxu Li is a first-year Ph.D. student in the Department of Communication at Texas A&M University. Her research interests lie at the intersection of health communication, social media, and mixed methods. Her current research includes identifying mental health stigma and reducing AI medical bias in underprivileged populations.
Project Description:
Recent years have witnessed the use of artificial intelligence in decision-making in numerous areas of society, including medical research and health care. While AI research accelerates the scientific community’s understanding of human physiology and medicine, it also has important potential ethical pitfalls. For instance, in medical AI research, the training datasets used in AI research are often predominantly drawn from the Caucasian population and men, which creates biases in the findings as well as the generalizability of such research. In health care, many decisions about the approval of treatment are based on AI-based computer systems, and members of marginalized populations are much less likely to be approved for innovative treatments. In this project, we seek to understand how ethics are constructed and understood in medical AI research.
Short Term Visiting Fellows
The Glasscock Center Short-Term Visiting Fellowships bring distinguished scholars, artists, and performers to Texas A&M University. Both individuals and groups of the Texas A&M faculty may nominate Visiting Fellows who will contribute to the Glasscock Center’s mission to foster and celebrate the humanities and humanities research at Texas A&M.
Dr. Scott L. Thumma | Professor of Sociology of Religion and director of the Hartford Institute for Religion Research
Scott L. Thumma is Professor of Sociology of Religion and director of the Hartford Institute for Religion Research (www.hartfordinstitute.org) at Hartford Seminary, Hartford, Connecticut. He has published numerous articles, research reports, and chapters on religious life in addition to co-authoring three books, The Other 80 Percent, Beyond Megachurch Myths, and Gay Religion. He has researched and written on megachurches, evangelicalism, gay religious life, congregational studies, the rise of nondenominational churches, the impact of the Internet technology, and the changing religious landscape.
Scott is the Principal Investigator for 5-year Lilly Endowment grant to study the impact of the pandemic on churches (www.covidreligionresearch.org) and a Thriving in Ministry grant. He co-leads the Faith Communities Today (www.faithcommunitiestoday.org) national research project and has also conducted 7 national studies of megachurches and 3 national studies of nondenominational churches. He is a member of the committee that recently conducted the 2020 US Religion Census of US congregations.
Dr. Nicholas De Genova | Professor and Chair of the Department of Comparative Cultural Studies at the University of Houston
Nicholas De Genova (Ph.D., Anthropology, University of Chicago 1999) holds an appointment as Professor and Chair of the Department of Comparative Cultural Studies at the University of Houston.
Beginning in 2020, following the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Professor De Genova was appointed to chair a Special Committee on Race and Social Justice in the College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences at the University of Houston.
Professor De Genova's academic work has contributed to multiple disciplines, including anthropology, sociology, geography, and political science, as well as the interdisciplinary fields of migration studies, border studies, citizenship studies, sociolegal studies, cultural studies, urban studies, postcolonial studies, American studies, European studies, and ethnic studies -- specifically, Latino/a/x studies, African American studies, Asian American studies, Native American studies, and Arab American studies. He is also a social and political theorist and critic.
Dr. Eduardo Cadava | Philip Mayhew Professor of English at Princeton University
Eduardo Cadava is Philip Mayhew Professor of English at Princeton University. He is the author of Words of Light: Theses on the Photography of History (Princeton UP), Emerson and the Climates of History (Stanford UP), and, most recently, Paper Graveyards (MIT). He has co-edited Who Comes After the Subject (Routledge), Cities Without Citizens (Slought Foundation / Rosenbach Museum), and The Itinerant Languages of Photography (Princeton University Art Museum and Yale UP). He also has translated works by Jacques Derrida, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, and Maurice Blanchot, and has co-translated Nadar's memoirs, Quand j'étais photographe, which appeared under the title When I Was a Photographer(MIT). He is the President of the Executive Board of the Slought Foundation in Philadelphia and he has co-curated installations and exhibitions at the Slought Foundation, the MAXXI Museum in Rome, Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York, the Al-Ma’mal Center for Contemporary Art in East Jerusalem, and the Princeton University Art Museum. He is presently co-directing, with Eyal Weizman, a multiyear project on the relation between political conflict and climate change entitled Conflict Shorelines that includes field work in Amazonia, the Negev desert, and the Arctic, and collaborating with Fazal Sheikh on a project entitled Exposure that documents the ruination of the Utah landscape by uranium mining and oil and gas drilling and the consequences of this ruination on native communities. He received the President’s Award for Distinguished Teaching in 2018 and, in 2019, he was awarded honorary Greek citizenship for “promoting Greek culture abroad.”
More information forthcoming.