Dr. David Rabban

Fellowship Details:

Dr. Rabban will be in residence at Texas A&M the week of February 16, 2026.

Contact host Dr. Carmela Garritano cgarritano@tamu.edu with questions.

Public Lecture:

Academic Freedom: A Lecture by Dr. David Rabban

Thursday, February 19, 2026
3:45pm in MSC 2406B

Professor David Rabban served as counsel to the American Association of University Professors for several years before joining the University of Texas School of Law faculty in 1983. He served as General Counsel of the AAUP from 1998 to 2006 and Chair of its Committee on Academic Freedom and Tenure from 2006 to 2012. His teaching and research focus on free speech, higher education and the law, and American legal history.  His most recent book, Academic Freedom: From Professional Norm to First Amendment Right, was published in 2024.

Photo: Della Perrone/University of Illinois College of Liberal Arts & Sciences

Dr. Salvatore Callesano

Fellowship Details:

Salvatore Callesano will be in residence at Texas A&M the week of March 2, 2026.

Contact host Dr. Sean McKinnon samckinnon@tamu.edu with questions.

Public Lecture:

Sociolinguistic considerations of severe weather communication for Spanish-speaking communities

Thursday, March 5, 2026
4pm in GLAS 311

Salvatore Callesano, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of Linguistics in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, holding faculty affiliate positions in the Department of Linguistics and the Department of Latina/Latino Studies. His primary areas of research are sociolinguistics and perceptual dialectology within bilingual communities in the United States. His recent work in applied sociolinguistics addresses linguistic variation, dialect contact, and language ideology and attitudes in the contexts of healthcare, severe weather communication, and on social media. His work has been published in venues such as International Journal of Bilingualism, Frontiers in Communication, Language and Communication, and Latino Studies. To support his work, Dr. Callesano has received numerous internal research grants at Illinois, as well as external support through the National Institutes of Health and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Dr. Kerilyn Schewel

Fellowship Details:

Kerilyn Schewel will be in residence at Texas A&M the week of March 16, 2026.

Contact host Dr. Benjamin Davis benjamin.davis@tamu.edu with questions.

Public lecture:

Moved by Modernity: How Development Shapes Migration in Rural Ethiopia

Thursday, March 19, 2026 | 3pm in GLAS 311

Kerilyn Schewel is an assistant professor of sociology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her research explores the causes and consequences of human migration and immobility, with particular attention to issues of gender, generation, education, rural development, and climate change. She combines qualitative and quantitative methods to provide deeper insights into why people move, why others stay, and how societies can respond to the challenges and opportunities of migration. Her first book is Moved by Modernity: How Development Shapes Migration in Rural Ethiopia (2025, Oxford University Press). She regularly collaborates with the Center on Modernity in Transition, where she co-directs a project on Rural Futures.

Fellowship Details:

Chung-An "Steven" Chang will be in residence at Texas A&M the week of April 6, 2026.

Stay tuned for further details on his public lecture.

Contact host Dr. Theodore George t-george@tamu.edu with questions.

Public Lecture:

Beyond the Limits of Interpretation: Translation, Hermeneutics, and East-West Cross-Cultural Understanding

Tuesday, April 7, 2026
3:45pm in GLAS 311

Chung-An, or, Steven, Chang is Associate Professor of English-Chinese Translation and Interpreting at the Department of English Language and Literature at Soochow University in Taipei, Taiwan. His teaching and research interests include translation and interpreting pedagogy, translation theory, East-West cross-cultural studies, and literary hermeneutics. He has published scholarly articles in academic journals both in Taiwan and internationally. His recent monograph is On Qian Zhongshu’s Conceptualization of Translation: Bridging Worlds between the East and the West (Routledge, 2025). Dr. Chang’s research is distinguished by his view that translation is not a mere translingual transfer between languages, but the creation of a transformative realm where meaning can be reconstructed, reinterpreted, refracted, or contested across cultural and disciplinary boundaries.

Fellowship Details:

Dr. Pitman will be in residence at Texas A&M the week of April 13, 2026. The Early Modern Studies Working Group at the Glasscock Center is hosting Pitman.

Contact faculty host Tianna Uchacz thu@tamu.edu for more information.

Public event:

History in the Making: Reconstructing Early Modern Textiles and Clothing

Wednesday, April 15, 2026
12:00pm in GLAS 311

• 12:00–12:45 - Presentation (with light lunch)
• 12:45–13:00 - Q&A
• 13:00–13:30 - textile handling & hands-on experimentation

Sophie Pitman is Pleasant Rowland Textile Specialist and Research Director of the Helen Louise Allen Textile Collection at the Nancy M. Bruce Center for Design and Material Culture at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. A specialist in the Early Modern period, she now researches and teaches widely using the collection of over 13,000 historic global textiles. Pitman was previously a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at UCL (London) where she researched the connection between weather, the environment, and clothing. She has also held postdoctoral research positions on two major early modern reconstruction-based projects: Making and Knowing (Columbia University, New York) and Refashioning the Renaissance (Aalto University, Finland) and has a PhD in History from the University of Cambridge.