Faculty Advisory Board
The board of faculty members and two graduate students reflects the wide range of colleges, schools, and departments across Texas A&M in which our faculty and students engage in research related to the humanities.
Membership
COLLEGE OF PERFORMANCE, VISUALIZATION & FINE ARTS
Visual, Material, and Performance Cultures
Leonardo Cardoso, Associate Professor
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Cardoso’s work focuses on sound as a way to understand how governments operate. His first book, “Sound-Politics in São Paulo” (Oxford University Press, 2019), considers how noise has become a persistent problem in urban centers. The book shows that noise is not just a matter of acoustical engineering and public health but permeates a broad range of issues. In São Paulo, noise emerges in controversies about crime control, religious freedom, spatial segregation, youth leisure, civic engagement, and state accountability. Noise has encroached on São Paulo’s powerful construction, transportation, and entertainment industries.
Cardoso intends to analyze the numerous entanglements between sound and modern statecraft in his current book project. Each chapter in the book analyzes contemporary Brazil from a specific acoustic arrangement, including wiretaps, grenades, sirens, radio, and gunshot detection technology.
PHILOSOPHY
Rachel Cicoria, Graduate Student Representative
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Originally from the barrier islands of Southwest Florida, Rachel Cicoria is a 7th year graduate student in the department of Philosophy at Texas A&M University. She completed her undergraduate degree at Florida Gulf Coast University and is finishing her dissertation, which focuses on the relationship between soul and body, and the entanglement of medicine and ethics, in the history and development of the colonial-modern concept and visible social identity of 'race.' This project also analyses the influence of colonial-modern epistemic and social formations on contemporary philosophy, especially phenomenology, or the study of embodied experience. Rachel's areas of specialization include phenomenology, decolonial feminism and material feminisms, and disability studies. Some of her publications include “The Ability System and Decolonial Resistance: The Case of the Victorian Invalid,” Journal of World Philosophies, vol. 6, no. 2 (2021): 45-60, “From ‘Whither’ to ‘Whence’: A Decolonial Reading of Malabou,” Philosophies 8, no. 5 (2023): 93-111, and a forthcoming article "Remembering Without Having Memorized: Technologies of Embodied Resistance," in the SPEP Issue of the Journal of Speculative Philosophy. Most recently, she has served as a graduate student member on the 2023-2024 Committee on the Status of Women, Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy and on the 2024-2025 Accessibility Committee and Local Organizing Team, philoSOPHIA.
GEOGRAPHY
John Patrick Casellas-Connors, Assistant Professor
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Dr. Casellas Connors is broadly trained as a human-environment geographer. His research addresses the social and political dimensions of environmental management programs and food systems. Utilizing an array of qualitative and quantitative methods, his research explores the ways that humans understand and transform their environments and ultimately are affected by these changes. His current research is particularly focused on how changes in the composition of agricultural productions systems across scales may affect the resilience of food systems and influence outcomes in food security. In addition, he is involved with a project examining wildlife management programs in suburban landscapes, where many species now thrive, but institutions and patterns of land use present distinct challenges for management.
ENGLISH
Michael Collins, Professor
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Dr. Michael Colin's published scholarship explores the relationship between risk, altruism, sibling rivalry and sovereignty as that relationship emerges in works by a range of writers (including Etheridge Knight, Yusef Komunyakaa, Norman Mailer, Ayn Rand, Jacques Derrida, and Dante) and in institutions such as the Group of 77 developing nations. He is currently working on several scholarly and creative projects that extend his exploration of the nexus between risk, altruism, sibling rivalry and sovereignty.
PSYCHOLOGY AND BRAIN SCIENCES
Sara Dowd, Lecturer
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Sara Dowd received her PhD in Social Psychology from Texas A&M University after studying at Baruch College in New York City. Sara is most passionate about teaching and uses her research as a tool to encourage critical and independent thinking, as well as a method of deriving and communicating insight. Deeply interdisciplinary, she believes that the arts and sciences are two sides of the same coin and continuously integrates both into her pedagogical practices.
BUSH SCHOOL OF GOVERNMENT & PUBLIC SERVICE
International Affairs
Carmela Garritano, Associate Professor
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Dr. Carmela Garritano is an associate professor in the Department of International Affairs and an affiliated faculty in the Africana Studies program. Her areas of specialization include African cinema and screen media (with a research focus on Ghana); African cultural and literary studies; and energy humanities.
Dr. Garritano works at the intersection of politics and film and media, and her research has been supported by Fulbright IIE, the West African Research Association, and the US Department of Education’s FLAS program. Trained in African area studies, her writing combines theoretically-grounded inquiry with ethnographic and archival research methods. Her first book African Video Movies and Global Desires: A Ghanaian History (Ohio University Press, 2013) was selected as a Choice Outstanding Academic Title and was awarded The First Book Award by the African Literature Association. Additionally, she is co-editor, with Kenneth W. Harrow, of A Companion to African Cinema (Wiley-Blackwell, 2019), a volume that brings together some of the most exciting writing on African film and media today. Under production at Indiana University Press and expected in 2025 is African Energy World in Film and Media, a book that joins the work of energy humanists in analyzing the cultural and social dimensions of energy forms and systems. Its critique functions as a crucial part of the process of undoing our deep dependence on fossil fuels and advancing equitable energy transition, massively complex undertakings mandated by climate crisis. Dr. Garritano also has published writing on African literature, postcolonialism, and Nollywood. Her work has appeared in The Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, Modern Fiction Studies, Black Camera, The Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry, African Studies Review, and Research in African Literatures. She is currently conducting research for a book project on the cultural and political history of plastics—their local production, industrial and commercial uses, as waste, and in contemporary art—in Ghana.
PHILOSOPHY & HUMANITIES
Theodore George, Professor
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Theodore George is Professor of Philosophy and Presidential Impact Fellow at Texas A&M University. His expertise is in hermeneutics, or, the study of interpretation, as well as applied hermeneutics, and, more generally, contemporary continental European philosophy, classical German philosophy, and the philosophy of art and aesthetics. Some of his recent publications include The Responsibility to Understand: Hermeneutical Contours of Ethical Life (Edinburgh University Press, 2020); co-edited with Gert-Jan van der Heiden, The Gadamerian Mind in the Routledge Philosophical Minds series (Routledge, 2021); and the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry, “Hermeneutics” (2021). He has also recently completed his first book of poetry, Motherfisher: a haiku-story of grieving in the age of COVID (Alien Buddha Press, 2021). Dr. George’s research has been supported by the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC); the Fulbright Commission; the Goethe Institute; the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD); and the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies (FRIAS) at the University of Freiburg, Germany; and, at Texas A&M, by the Presidential Impact Fellows Program; the Rothrock Fellows Program; and the Melbern G. Glasscock Center for Humanities Research, and he is a recipient of the Texas A&M Association of Former Students College-level Teaching Award. His current book project concerns the development of a new, globalist theory of interpretation.
COLLEGE OF ARCHITECTURE
Architecture
Kevin Glowacki, Associate Professor
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An archaeologist and architectural historian, Kevin Glowacki has many years of experience excavating and documenting sites in the Mediterranean. His most recent research focuses on vernacular architecture at the Late Bronze Age-Early Iron Age settlement of Kavousi Vronda and the formative stages of the Bronze Age Minoan city of Gournia, both sites located in eastern Crete (Greece). At Texas A&M, Glowacki is Associate Professor in the Department of Architecture, where he teaches courses in architectural history and heritage of the built environment. He also served as Director of the Center for Heritage Conservation in the TAMU School of Architecture from 2016 to 2021. Glowacki is the recipient of the Award of Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching from the Archaeological Institute of America, the ING Professor of Excellence Award, and the Montague-Center for Teaching Excellence Award from Texas A&M University. He has been a Faculty Fellow of the Center for Heritage Conservation since 2006 and served as co-editor of Preservation Education and Research, the journal of the National Council for Preservation Education from 2009 to 2012.
ENGLISH
Joseline González-Ajanel, Graduate Student Representative
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Joseline González-Ajanel is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of English at Texas A&M University. Her dissertation project focuses on U.S. Central American cultural productions that center transnational human rights and counter hegemonic U.S. imaginaries of Central-Americanness. In addition, her dissertation considers “monsters” and speculative fiction as spaces for U.S. Central American autonomy and resistance, where U.S. Central Americans actively imagine a commitment to expanding U.S. Central American futurities. Joseline received her B.A. in English Literature with a minor in Chicana/o/e Studies from California State University, Dominguez Hills (CSUDH). She was a Mellon Crossing Latinidades fellow from 2024-2025.
COLLEGE OF EDUCATION & HUMAN DEVELOPMENT
Teaching, Learning & Culture
ArCasia James-Gallaway, Assistant Professor
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ArCasia D. James-Gallaway is an assistant professor in the Department of Teaching, Learning and Culture at Texas A&M University. As an interdisciplinary historian of education, she examines and illuminates African American struggles for educational justice, and her scholarship follows three interrelated strands of analysis: 1) the history of African American education, 2) Black history education, and 3) gendered (anti)Blackness in education. James-Gallaway’s research engages oral history methodology, critical race theory, Black feminist theory, and critical geographies of race and has been supported by organizations such as the Ford Foundation. She has published her work in more than two dozen book-chapters and peer-reviewed journal articles, including History of Education Quarterly; Race Ethnicity and Education; Paedagogica Historica, Oral History Review, and Journal of Black Studies.
GLOBAL LANGUAGES AND CULTURES
Alain Lawo-Sukam, Associate Professor
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Dr. Alain Lawo-Sukam is an Associate Professor of Hispanic and Africana Studies, and Coordinator of Africana Studies program in the Department of Global Languages and Cultures. He is the author of La poesía de Guinea Ecuatorial en su contexto colonial y (trans)nacional (2019) and Hacia una poética afro-colombiana: el caso del Pacífico (2010), the creative writing books Mange-Mil y sus historias de tierra caliente (2017) and Sueño con África. Dream of Africa. Rêve d’Afrique (2013). He has published numerous articles in national and international peer reviewed journals. He is a member of several editorial boards, and has served as manuscript reviewer for many national and international journals. He is a recipient of numerous grants and awards; among the most recent are the Humanities & Arts Fellows program, College of Liberal Arts’ Achievements in Climate and Inclusion Award (ACI), AFS College-Level Distinguished Achievement Award for Teaching, Glasscock Research Publication, the Hispanic Studies Research Enhancement and High Impact Research Grants.
SOCIOLOGY
Defne Över, Assistant Professor
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Defne Över is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Texas A&M University. As a political sociologist, she examines media and legal institutions, social movements, and the construction of legitimacy in contemporary contexts of autocratization, using a cultural lens. Her research draws on ethnography, interviews, and surveys. Her current book project Boundaries That Divide: How Journalists in Turkey Surrendered Their Power Over Politics investigates how Turkey’s news media became an accomplice in the country’s democratic backsliding process instead of acting as a break against it. Över’s other work has appeared in PLOSOne; Social and Legal Studies; Media, Culture & Society; Current Sociology; Research in Social Movements, Conflicts and Change; Qualitative Sociology, and several edited collections.
COLLEGE OF ARCHITECTURE
Architecture
Zachary Stewart, Associate Professor
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Zachary Stewart is an architectural historian with dual training in the fields of architecture and art history. He specializes in the material culture of medieval Europe. His research focuses on the buildings, cities, and landscapes of medieval Britain.
Stewart’s current book project, Collaborative Gothic: Building the Parish Church in Late Medieval England, investigates the parish church as a vehicle for innovative material production during the two centuries between the Black Death and the Reformation. His research on this and numerous other aspects of medieval building culture has appeared in The Journal of Architectural Education, Speculum, Different Visions, The Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, and The Antiquaries Journal as well as in numerous edited collections.
ANTHROPOLOGY
Shelley Wachsmann, Professor
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Shelley Wachsmann is the Meadows Professor of Biblical Archaeology in the Department of Anthropology at Texas A&M University. His research focuses on ship iconography of the eastern, ancient Mediterranean. Additionally, he is interested in the potential of deep-submergence archaeology. These areas of expertise have allowed Dr. Wachsmann to lead several field projects throughout the Mediterranean Sea. His most recent field work was through the Ioppa Maritima Project, a deep-sea survey of shipwrecks in Israel. Furthermore, he has authored several books and articles, including The Gurob Ship-Cart Model and Its Mediterranean Context (2013), and Understanding the Boat from the Time of Jesus: Galilean Seafaring (2015).
COMMUNICATION & JOURNALISM
Anna Wolfe, Associate Professor
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Dr. Anna Wolfe’s research examines how we connect with others and organize social action across meaningful differences. To this end, she investigates how people negotiate in-group/out-group boundaries, how they craft narratives to organize collective sensemaking and action, and how processes of dialogue and deliberation facilitate deeper shared understandings and more democratic public decisions. She typically utilizes critical-interpretive and ethnographic methods to analyze how people talk with each other in moments of disagreement or tension due to heightened awareness of salient differences. Her co-authored book, Sex and Stigma: Stories of Everyday Life in Nevada’s Legal Brothels (NYU Press) received five major disciplinary book awards for the insights it offered into practices of secrecy and stigma management that shape the lives of sex workers in the legal brothel industry in the US. Much of Dr. Wolfe’s work has been conducted in collaboration with community partners to use communication theory to address everyday problems of living and working in a pluralistic society.