Short-Term Visiting Fellows 2026-27
Learn about this year's Short-Term Visiting Fellows
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. Esther Cuenca
Fellowship Details:
Dr. Cuenca will be in residence at Texas A&M the week of October 26, 2026.
Contact host Dr. Che Yeun cheyeun@tamu.edu with questions.
Public Lecture:
Ethnographies of Skin: Tattooing in the Medieval World
October 28, 12pm in GLAS 311
Ancient and medieval European, Arab, and Chinese elites have provided ethnographic descriptions of tattooed people in Britain, Africa, and Asia. This talk, on the colonial dimensions of tattoo history, examines the perspective of elite writers on the tattooing practices of indigenous people. These authors conceptualized tattooed bodies as reifying somatic differences. Tattooing also allowed them to highlight “strange” customs they deemed to be uncivilized and helped them internalize their own cultural superiority.
Esther Liberman Cuenca is Associate Professor of History at Texas A&M University–Victoria, where she teaches courses on medieval and world history. She is the author of The Making of Urban Customary Law in Medieval and Reformation England (Oxford University Press, 2025) and co-editor of Law, Justice, and Society in the Medieval World: An Introduction through Film (Fordham University Press, 2025). She has been the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, including ones from the American Philosophical Society, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Medieval Academy of America, and the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, where she first began researching premodern tattooing when completing her first monograph in 2022/23. In 2025, she received a fall fellowship from the Huntington Library in California and a grant from the American Council of Learned Societies to finish her research on premodern tattooing. Her current monograph, Body Art and Tattooing in the Global Middle Ages, is under contract with Cambridge University Press for the Cambridge Element series.
Dr. Maurice Crandall
Fellowship Details:
Dr. Crandall will be in residence at Texas A&M the week of November 9, 2026.
Contact host Dr. Adrian Chavana achavana@tamu.edu with questions.
Public Lecture:
Wolves or Coyotes? Yavapai and Apache U.S. Army Indian Scouts
November 11, 5:00 pm in GLAS 311
During the second half of the nineteenth century, the U.S. Army enlisted thousands of Native American men (and some women) to serve as scouts, soldiers, and spies in its wars of westward expansion. This talk seeks to honestly assess the legacy of Yavapai and Apache U.S. Army Indian Scouts by examining their actions both on the field and as community members in the decades after the wars had ended.
Maurice Crandall is a citizen of the Yavapai-Apache Nation of Camp Verde, Arizona, and an associate professor of history at Arizona State University. His research and teaching focus on the Indigenous peoples of the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands, with a particular focus on Indigenous governance, tribal sovereignty, and community-engaged scholarship. His first book, These People Have Always Been a Republic: Indigenous Electorates in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands, 1598–1912 (University of North Carolina Press, 2019), won several awards, including the 2020 Caughey Western History Prize from the Western History Association for the most distinguished book on the history of the American West. His current book project (under contract with Liveright/W.W. Norton) explores the later lives and legacies of Yavapai and Dilzhe'e Apache former U.S. Army Indian Scouts.
Dr. Stephon Alexander
Fellowship Details:
Dr. Alexander will be in residence at Texas A&M the week of February 1, 2027.
Contact host Dr. Michael Collins mikec@tamu.edu with questions.
Public lecture:
Details forthcoming
Stephon Alexander is the Director of the Center for Theoretical Physics and Innovation at Brown University, and is a leading theoretical physicist, author and jazz musician. His research bridges cosmology, particle physics, quantum gravity and the AI-physics connection. Alexander specializes in the physics of the early universe, notably co-inventing a model that explains the origin of matter over antimatter in the universe and a new unification between Gravity and the Weak Interaction. A past President of the National Society of Black Physicists, he founded SoundPlusScience Inc., connecting music and STEM for high school students. His acclaimed book, The Jazz of Physics, explores parallels between jazz and modern physics. Alexander has held positions at Stanford, Imperial College, Penn State, and Dartmouth, contributing globally to science and education.
Fellowship Details:
Dr. Alemán will be in residence at Texas A&M the week of March 8, 2027.
Contact host Dr. Daniel Runnels runnelsd@tamu.edu with questions.
Public Lecture:
Details forthcoming
Jorge Alemán is Doctor Honoris Causa of the Universidad Nacional de Rosario, Honorary Professor at the Universidad Nacional de Buenos Aires, the Universidad Nacional de San Martín, and the Universidad Nacional de Villa María Córdoba. He has published numerous books and essays on psychoanalysis, philosophy, and political thought.
Fellowship Details:
Dr. Bailey will be in residence at Texas A&M the week of March 29, 2027.
Contact faculty host Gregory Daddis gdaddis@tamu.edu for more information.
Public event:
Details forthcoming
Professor Beth Bailey's scholarly interests fall into two distinct fields: Military, War, and Society in the Recent United States, and the History of Gender and Sexuality in the 20th Century United States. During the 2025-2026 academic year, she served as the Pitt Professor of American History and Institutions at Cambridge University in England. Prior, she completed a decade serving as Foundation Distinguished Professor, director of the Center for Military, War, and Society Studies, and member of the history department at the University of Kansas. Over the past decades, her work has been supported by the Carnegie Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and the American Council of Learned Societies, and she has been a visiting scholar or lectured in Australia, Indonesia, France, Japan, the UK, Lebanon, Germany, the Netherlands, Saudi Arabia, and China. She was elected to the Society of American Historians in 2017; received the Samuel Eliot Morison Prize for lifetime achievement from the Society for Military History in 2022 and the Outstanding Graduate Mentor Award from Kansas University in 2024; and chaired the Department of the Army Historical Advisory Subcommittee. Her most recent book, An Army Afire: The U.S. Army and the Problem of Race in the Vietnam Era (University of North Carolina Press, 2023), won the 2024 Distinguished Book Prize from the Society of Military History.