Each week this fall, we’ll introduce new �ֲ���ý professors who have tenure-track positions on the faculty.

This year’s nine tenure appointments are in the disciplines of art and visual culture, classical and medieval studies, economics, English, environmental studies, dance, politics (two appointments), and psychology.

This week we introduce the ninth of our nine new faculty members, Michael Boyd Roman.

Name:

Title: Lecturer in Art and Visual Culture and Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow

Degrees from: California State University, Northridge, M.F.A. in drawing; Maryland Institute College of Art, M.A. in community arts; Syracuse University, B.F.A. in painting

His work: Through drawing, installation, and digital media, Roman seeks to “portray the ordinary grace of contemporary Black men.” His works blend elements from hip-hop and urban culture with references to art history and religious iconography, especially from the Renaissance and Baroque periods.

His inspiration: “My work is inspired mostly by my experience as a Black man growing up in this country,” says Roman. Specifically, inspiration comes from what he didn’t see: images that capture the divine beauty of Black men.

“Rarely are Black men depicted as manifestations of divine beauty,” he notes. Instead, contemporary images of Black men “almost always embody political or social propaganda.”

When explaining the concept of divine beauty, Roman says it bears repeating that “our existence is not that of a human being having a spiritual experience, but a spiritual being having a human experience.” The concept of divine beauty, then, speaks to the idea of “the unseen spirit” in all of us that observes what we experience.

But in America, the evil forces of racism and white supremacy thwart the expression of divine Black beauty, giving rise to dehumanizing stereotypes “like the coon and the buck and Stepin Fetchit and Sleep ’n’ Eat — historical racial tropes that completely ignore the divinity that we all hold.”

Madrid, Missouri, Morehouse: Prior to master’s work at California State University, Northridge, Roman directed the visual arts program at Morehouse College in Atlanta.

Roman was at Morehouse in August 2014, when police shot and killed an unarmed Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo. As protests erupted in response, “it was hitting home for all my classes,” he recalls.

In an art history course, he helped his students “walk through those waters, even though that was not necessarily in the course’s wheelhouse, just to give students a chance to feel heard.”

By chance, or perhaps something else, Roman was just about to teach his students about , which depicts the massacre of Spanish civilians by French soldiers. In Goya’s painting, the viewers’ eye is drawn to one man, clearly unarmed, his arms outstretched in submission.

“They were like, ‘So for a least 200 years we’ve known that hands up means ‘don’t shoot.’”

“He has his hands raised and he’s in this crucifixion pose facing down these faceless soldiers with their guns pointed at him.”

His students saw the painting, learned its history, and immediately drew connections to the current moment, especially the  “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot” gesture. “They were like, ‘So for a least 200 years we’ve known that hands up means ‘don’t shoot.’”

For Roman, helping to make “the typical Western art canon” relevant to a group of young Black men “who otherwise literally can’t see themselves in the world,” drove where he went with his next body of work, in which he began to use elements of the Western art canon as a bridge between the idea of divinity and its presence in Black men.

“If these young men could begin to see this art and history as relevant to their contemporary lives, then others could potentially see aspects of these Black young men in themselves through artwork.”

It is black and white: Roman’s work is almost entirely in black and white, working with charcoal and graphite.

When he worked with color, Roman found that when he presented his work, “the conversation would often shift to how I was using color and away from the concepts and content and conversations that I was trying to have through the work.”

He thinks he knows why: “The colors that we see — the color of clothing, or the color of skin tone — all point to historical and socioeconomic indicators.” (Pigments, some very expensive, were themselves economic indicators in Renaissance painting.) Colors were distracting viewers, so Roman eliminated them from his work.

Besides an intentional absence of color, the figures in Roman’s work also avoid suggestions of wealth, status, or station in life. Clothing fades to the background; contemporary jewelry becomes rosaries or beads.

Here, the goal is again to remove “historical racial tropes that completely ignore that divinity that we all hold,” he says. “I try to eliminate socioeconomic distinctions — unless they’re absolutely necessary to the conversation around the piece.”

In the end, he hopes to force the viewer to sit with, and to recognize, “their own implicit biases — as any conclusions drawn by the viewer are a result of the viewer’s own inherent beliefs.”

City and nature: Urban themes in Roman’s work “speak to the collective experience.” The natural world, he says, serves an “internal experience.” In Maine, Roman wants to explore nature, “just get out, do some hiking, find some pathways. I want to go for a walk and take my own photographs — rather than going on Google and trying to find ‘walking through the forest.’”

The art of teaching: In many instances, Roman has given students their first introduction to the arts.

“And I’ve had many students from every grade level come into my classroom thinking that art is just simply not for them or people like them. And so making work that is relevant to their experience, by pulling on my experience and at the same time simply trying to communicate the idea of being seen, of your experience being seen and your experience being valid — that’s a big deal.”

Without a trace: In his classroom, Roman will sometimes sit down next to a student and place a sheet of tracing paper over the student’s drawing.

“I’ll draw on top of it, so that they can see the difference between what I’m doing and what they’re doing, but without altering their drawing,” he explains. “A big pet peeve of mine was when a professor would just fix something on my drawing. I’m supposed to be learning how to do that. How am I learning how to do it if you just did it for me?”

Community engagement: While at Cal State Northridge, Roman joined a community-action event sponsored by Schools Not Prisons, which was working to repurpose a youth detention center in the Los Angeles area.

The organization took items from the center, like beds and nightstands, and gave them to artists, who in turn created artwork to reframe the items’ purpose and meaning. “One artist melted down a bed to mold into something else,” Roman says.

For his installation The Pipeline, Roman used several nightstands and a single bed, and covered the walls with examples of historical materials, such as newspaper headlines and wanted posters that “link the institution of slavery to our current prison industrial complex,” adding his own charcoal-on-paper portraits of Black male faces to the installation.

Creating that installation was atypical for Roman. Usually, “my community work doesn’t focus on my own artistic creation but instead work as a facilitator for a group that wants to say or speak or address something through their work.”

At Morehouse, Roman taught a mural development class. “I took a class of about a dozen students around Atlanta to look at different murals and how they were engaging the community that they were in. Then we worked with them on developing their own mural for the Morehouse campus.”

Each week this fall, we’ll introduce new �ֲ���ý professors who have tenure-track positions on the faculty.

This year’s nine tenure appointments are in the disciplines of art and visual culture, classical and medieval studies, economics, English, environmental studies, dance, politics (two appointments), and psychology.

This week we introduce the eighth of our nine new faculty members, Brian J. Evans.

Name: Brian J. Evans

Title: Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow and Lecturer in Dance

Degrees from: University of Washington, M.F.A. in dance; Gustavus Adolphus College, B.A. in dance.

His work: Evans describes himself as a “citizen artist,” a term with a few definitions, . While comprising two powerful words, it’s about connecting the two identities, citizen and artist, to empower artists like Evans “to literally dance through life,” he says.

Why dance? When asked how he’s been able to make dance his life’s work, Evans offers a short answer and a longer one.

The short answer: “Male privilege, luck, support from family, and my work ethic.”

The longer answer tells a story that begins at his undergraduate college, Gustavus Adolphus, in St. Peter, Minn., where he took a dance class to fulfill a general education requirement. “Between the choice of drawing and dance, I picked the latter,” he says.

Evans’ hometown is Gaylord, a small town of about 2,300, located about an hour southwest of the Twin Cities, where the top employers are the county and a food-processing plant. While not exactly a Footloose type of place in its conservatism, Evans says that “dancing was not something encouraged for boys in my town.”

But that nearly random choice to take a dance class opened the door to a career that Evans didn’t know existed. “When my professor mentioned in passing that I could do this for a living, I had no idea what that entailed.” 

The dance class led to a dance major and then to an adjunct professor’s invitation to audition for Stuart Pimsler Dance and Theater. It was the best kind of audition because Evans didn’t know it was one. “I just thought it was supposed to be a fun experience. So with all the confidence of someone just trying something new and having a blast, I wasn’t nervous.”

He got the job — a four-month, $5-per-hour apprenticeship — that turned into an $8-per-hour company appointment. In 2018, by that time musical director and a principal dancer, Evans left to pursue a master’s in fine arts at the University of Washington that “allowed and empowered me to come to �ֲ���ý and teach.”

Ease the pain: Evans has found a tried and true medicine to ease those sad moments of self-doubt and isolation: turn your focus to people.

For example, he says, joy comes from “watching once-strangers dance together in community, or seeing the magic that occurs when disparate elements of an art experience come together.”

When the brain asks the body to create what we call “dance,” the result is more than just a body in motion: It’s the creation of meaning.

Or seeing student artists “taking their first steps back into themselves after being away from their bodies for such a long time, or the awesome power of people deciding that things can be better.”

“People astound me in their capacity for extraordinary accomplishment in the face of systemic oppression and their resilience to continue to get up every day to continue the work.”

Embodied in the body: Evans’ work is driven by the notion of “embodied arts,” a term that describes artistic endeavors where the human body is key to how we make sense of the world. 

In other words, while the brain is typically ceded prime authority when it comes to cognition, let’s not forget the body’s role, says Evans. When the brain asks the body to create what we call “dance,” the result is more than just a body in motion: It’s the creation of meaning.

In this sense, the body, as it experiences the world, serves our brain’s need to do complex thinking. Or, as Evans says, the need “to hold more than one story” at a time. 

Children approach the world as embodied artists, says Evans. “They tend to take on everything with everything they have, body and mind,” he says. “As we grow up, some of that embodiment gets stripped away.”

That’s where an arts-focused liberal arts education comes in handy, he says. “An embodied liberal arts education can give us the crucial ability to, in real-time, literally, dance through life — and the power to be unabashedly human.”

Why teach dance? Dance and the embodied arts speak a beautifully complex language that, unfortunately, “most people don’t know,” says Evans. “Worse, they are made or taught to be afraid of this embodied language.”

Teaching students this language “gives me a sense of purpose,” Evans says. “It excites me thinking of the impact I may have on a future senator, teacher, mechanic, philosopher, astrophysicist, etc. who found something in my class made them more empowered to embody their work and life. 

“The hope with any teaching I do is that students find something useful in what I teach, and then attach that to their drive of curiosity and their belief that learning is never finished. As an extension of an academic setting, the expectation is not to ever finish the process of learning.”

The good twin: After more than a decade living and working in Minneapolis–St. Paul, Evans says he would “pit any art scene in the nation” against the Twin Cities’ when it comes to artists’ “ability to find a diverse array of work to tap into.”

Admitting to a “privileged vantage point,” Evans says he was able to build an arts career through dance performance and commissions; teaching stints and residencies, including as an adjunct at Macalester College; and other creative gigs that used what he calls “auxiliary skills” like music and video editing, Qlab multimedia programming, and musical direction and accompanying — not to mention welding, carpentry, and three days of being a LYFT driver.  

Each week this fall, we’ll introduce new �ֲ���ý professors who have tenure-track positions on the faculty.

This year’s nine tenure appointments are in the disciplines of art and visual culture, classical and medieval studies, economics, English, environmental studies, dance, politics (two appointments), and psychology.

This week we introduce the seventh of our nine new faculty members, Katie Adkison.

Name: Katie Adkison

Title: Assistant Professor of English

Degrees from: University of California, Santa Barbara, Ph.D. in English; Colorado State University, M.A. in English literature, B.A. in English education

Her work: Adkison studies the role of an individual’s spoken voice in early modern English literature — what the actual feeling of speaking means and conveys, especially in terms of power structures.

In Adkison’s scholarship, voice becomes a “kind of embodied sensation. Not literally a sixth sense, but something more akin to sensing knowledge than to just a tool of communication.”

Her dissertation: “The Sense of Speech: Voice and Sovereignty in Early Modern Tragedy,” describes the relationship between early modern theories of sovereignty and the phenomenology of the voice in Elizabethan and Jacobean tragedy.

For example: In the opening scene of King Lear, the titular monarch decides to divide his kingdom based on how much his three daughters say they love him. His first two daughters make elaborate but insincere declarations of love.

Lear then turns to his third daughter, Cordelia, and asks, “What can you say to draw a third more opulent than your sisters?” Cordelia, who does truly love the king, responds, “Nothing, my Lord.” She continues:

Unhappy that I am, I cannot heave
My heart into my mouth: I love your majesty
According to my bond; nor more nor less…. (1.1.91-93)

In referring to her own voice, Cordelia is trying to tell her father “something about politics and about love that his love test is failing to understand,” says Adkison. She’s saying that “love and politics are not mathematical equations. You can’t give more love through your voice the way that you can give more money or more of something tangible.”

The opening scene is a kernel in the larger lesson of the play. Cordelia, in effect, is vocalizing the fact that her vocalization can’t do what her father wants it to do — it can’t be reduced to words. “She’s saying, ‘There’s more to love here, just as there’s more to language in the very voice I’m speaking through.’”

The scene sets the stage for the tragedy. “Lear wants words to equal inheritance, a kingdom, power.” Cordelia wants no part of it. “And so it ends, with death, tears, and so much pain,” says Adkison.

Iambic sortameter: In King Lear’s opening scene, Shakespeare uses a jarring version of iambic pentameter for some of Cordelia’s lines. “The rhythm is off,” says Adkison, noting that the Bard sometimes “uses an extra syllable, 11 instead of the usual 10 — or even a whole extra two-syllable iamb — in some lines.”

Shakespeare did that often, she explains, usually to draw attention to something. “If the rhythm is off, you are supposed to feel it as an audience member.”

We can’t know the intentions of the author now or 500 years later. But the meaning is there, regardless. That’s magic to me.

Adkison recalls the moment that “something felt off in one of the lines. And so I started counting syllables, the way you’re supposed to when something feels off.” The extra syllable “had to be purposeful. It’s too perfect not to be.”

In Cordelia’s 11-syllable lines, there is “something that literally can’t be divided up. The rhythm of the lines is as out of step with her father’s demands as her inability to speak her love is. She’s really talking about vocal rhythm and the experience of voice to explain what’s going on.”

A beautiful thing: “The beautiful thing about how literature thinks about language is that we can’t know the intentions of the author now or 500 years later,” Adkison says. “But the meaning is there, regardless. There’s always something new to be parsed and to be found. That’s magic to me.”

Classroom magic: Sometimes, magical classroom moments happen when a teacher allows a discussion to go off the straight rails.

Last winter, at the University of California, Santa Barbara, Adkison was teaching Thomas More’s Utopia. A student asked, “Is anyone watching The Good Place?” referring to the NBC fantasy comedy about a utopian, but problematic, afterlife.

Rather than guide the discussion back to the 16th century, Adkison took a moment to connect the dots. She noted the etymology of the word “utopia” and how it “can mean ‘the good place’ or ‘no place’ or ‘the good place that cannot exist’ or something along those lines.”

Eager for wordplay, Adkison’s students jumped at the chance to connect More’s Utopia to The Good Place, which led to a “conversation about the way that the show uses and problematizes the notion of a utopia in such interesting ways.”

Then she guided the students back to how More imagined what a good life looked like in his Utopia. “The text is infamously sticky about how one constructs a good life, what it means to live the good life, and all the problems that are wrapped up in that text.”

And a course is born: All of that left Adkison “wanting so badly to teach a class on utopia.” And if you look at utopia, “you have to teach the second half of the class on dystopias because it seems to be true that a good place for some frequently comes to mean a bad place for others.”

“College students are special because they will think with you — taking on the agency of research and thinking of their learning as their own.”

And, voilà! This spring, Adkison will teach such a course on utopian and dystopian fiction, from More’s Utopia and Margaret Cavendish’s The Blazing World to George Orwell’s 1984 and the first of N.K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy. “I’m hoping we’ll end with the first season of The Good Place and try and end on a funny note — even if it’s not necessarily optimistic in all of the ways one wants it to be.”

Why �ֲ���ý? “I was so excited when I visited �ֲ���ý to see how much collaboration happens between departments and between students and faculty. Collaborative research structures the idea of the undergraduate thesis that all students write here.”

Why college? “College students are special because they will think with you — taking on the agency of research and thinking of their learning as their own.”

Finding her path: “At my core, I have always known I wanted to be a teacher,” Adkison says.

“I thought I would be a high school English teacher for the rest of my life. But my path to graduate work was one I found late in the stages of my own bachelor’s degree, when I was taking education courses alongside literature courses. I realized I had more questions about the literature. I couldn’t be done.”

Each week this fall, we’ll introduce new �ֲ���ý professors who have tenure-track positions on the faculty.

This year’s nine tenure appointments are in the disciplines of art and visual culture, classical and medieval studies, economics, English, environmental studies, dance, politics (two appointments), and psychology.

This week we introduce the sixth of our nine new faculty members, Yunkyoung Garrison.

Name: Yunkyoung Garrison

Title: Assistant Professor of Psychology

Degrees from: University of Iowa, Ph.D. in counseling psychology and M.A. in educational measurement and statistics; Yonsei University, M.A. in psychology and B.B.A. in business administration

Nontraditional path: As her undergraduate degree indicates, Yun Garrison initially worked in business after graduating from Yonsei University, in Seoul, South Korea.

“I wasn’t really in touch with my own life values,” she says. Instead, she was initially motivated to please her parents, “a congruent Asian cultural value,” as well as to seek happiness through financial success.

A stint in business, specifically the energy sector in South Korea, prompted Garrison to rethink what gives her purpose and meaning.

“The energy industry is male-dominated and, because it’s effectively a monopoly, very change-resistant. For me, working toward change is really important. I didn’t feel it was a good fit for me.”

Humans vs. numbers: Her first job outside business was in a university setting, as a staff member working with international programs and international students. “I enjoyed working with the humans more than numbers.”

From there, she pursued graduate work in psychology. “Psychology was a great fit for me because it has the tools to uncover knowledge while promoting values that are important to me: diversity, social justice, compassion, and humanity.”

Core identity: Garrison says that her doctoral work has only further solidified her “core identity” as a counseling psychologist, which embraces being a scientist, practitioner, and advocate — “all of which are core roles as a counseling psychologist. That’s how I got into this field, and it’s still continuing, an ongoing journey.”

Her work: A scholar-activist, Garrison wants her research to be a “catalyst for individual and societal change.”

Working with individuals and groups in the place where she’s living, Garrison studies the impacts of racism and classism on mental health — and develops programs to help mitigate those effects.

Meritocracy myth: As a doctoral student at the University of Iowa, Garrison did research that links student stress to the social concept of meritocracy.

Meritocracy suggests that “if you work harder, you’re going to succeed  — a really hopeful message,” Garrison explains. Some scholars call it a myth because, as evidence shows, achieving upward through merit may not be possible due to the constraints of racism and classism.

The American Meritocracy Myth Stress Scale “assesses psychological stress among Americans struggling with the meritocracy myth,” she says, by showing that students’ belief in meritocracy creates “psychological disequilibrium.”

Based on her findings, “I’m hoping to develop more programming and interventions for communities of color or underserved communities,” she says. Such programming would have two goals, the first being to gain “more insight about how students internalize the meritocracy myth.” The second would be to help students “develop critical consciousness,” that is, the skills needed to “better understand intricate relationships between beliefs about society and their personal hopes for work and future.”

In community: For her dissertation, Garrison wanted to understand how Latinx and white youth differently view their career paths.

She found rural white students who believe that society is just and the system is fair “tend to have higher career hopes about their future.”

Interestingly, she also found that rural immigrant Latinx students who have critical awareness about the status quo tend to have higher hopes for their future careers and work. “A young person’s critical consciousness plays an important role in underserved immigrant youth’s career development. The more they have critical consciousness, they’re more likely to have a more functional and helpful career belief system.”

Her dissertation research went hand-in-hand with , a school-based program that connects rural youth with careers in health sciences by helping students understand both potential career paths and their own interests and skills.

Why community partnerships?  For Garrison, academic research should benefit the communities in which researchers work.

“I’m a newcomer to Maine — I don’t want to assert myself as an expert of the community. I need to learn from the community.”

“There has been a historical divide between academia and community,” Garrison says. “I want to function as a person who feels and creates the connection between academia and communities, who knows what they need and knows how they can help themselves. As an academic, I want to provide resources and add to their existing power.”

In Maine, she adds, she seeks research partnerships with the state’s Somali and Somali Bantu communities.

“I’m a newcomer to Maine — I don’t want to assert myself as an expert of the community,” she says. “I need to learn from the community, and the community will show me and teach me what they need and what their strengths are. I’ll also need to take some time to learn, instead of just starting new projects without their interest and collaboration.”

Why �ֲ���ý: “The job description was so powerful,” Garrison says. “They were looking for someone who can do social justice, community-based psychology, serving immigrant populations, and also keenly aware of the impact of poverty.

“So I was really excited to apply for the job. And during the interview, it just confirmed that, wow, this is an incredibly open-minded, innovative place.” Adding to that, she felt appreciated during the interview.

“I am eager to bring my full self to �ֲ���ý and Maine and contribute to these communities in order for all community members to feel truly valued and appreciated.”

Each week this fall, we’ll introduce new �ֲ���ý professors who have tenure-track positions on the faculty.

This year’s nine tenure appointments are in the disciplines of art and visual culture, classical and medieval studies, economics, English, environmental studies, dance, politics (two appointments), and psychology.

This week we introduce the fifth of our nine new faculty members, Lisa Gilson

Name: Lisa Gilson

Title: Assistant Professor of Politics

Degrees from: Yale University, Ph.D and M.A. in political science; Tufts University, B.A. in political science 

Before �ֲ���ý: Postdoctoral fellow in social studies, Harvard University

Her work: Gilson focuses on political reactions expressed outside of mainstream political channels, from abolitionist movements to contemporary far-right groups. 

A political theorist, she is working on a book about the relationship between such social movements and social critics, including artists and writers, and the idea that the various political actors involved in a movement “are each doing particular kinds of things. Each has strengths that are particular to what kind of organizing they’re doing and what kind of protest they are doing.”

Example 1: In one chapter of her book, Gilson looks at Walt Whitman. While his writings were sympathetic to egalitarian and anti-racist ideas, his work didn’t actively call out racists and Southern sympathizers. 

Yet, as Gilson argues, political actors like Whitman must be viewed in context. Whitman was uniquely situated to speak to a particular audience — Southern whites — that otherwise would have been “disgusted by, or not respond well to, a broader anti-racist movement. He spent a lot of time really trying to target that audience and work with that audience.”

Meanwhile, other actors in the movement, including Radical Reconstructionists, “were facing other kinds of demands. They couldn’t speak directly to white Southerners because the white Southerners obviously had no interest in listening to them.”

Example 2: Gilson pointed to recent Twitter comments from U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez responding to critics who said that Black Lives Matter activists’ language around defunding the police doesn’t play well among voters. 

“We shouldn’t be attacking people for playing a role that is adapted to their specific situation.”

AOC’s response, in effect, sums up Gilson’s book project. “Activists who are trying to get people out into the streets will use language that might not poll well with the broader voting public. But it’s not the activists’ job — nor would it play to their strengths — to use language that polls well.”

While elected officials have to think about what language they use to further their goals, activists “use the language that works best for their specific and immediate goals,” she says. “For example, the slogan ‘defund the police’ may appeal more to people who actually show up at protests rather than those who don’t participate. And that’s fine. We shouldn’t be attacking people for playing a role that is adapted to their specific situation.”

Ideas in the classroom: Gilson is teaching “Politics and Literature” this fall, looking at how writers target “different audiences with work that’s outside of what is traditionally considered to be ‘political.’” For example, the class will read, among other works, Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, which raises questions about race, class, and gender through its depiction of a young Black girl who believes that her dark skin makes her ugly.

Working outside traditional political spheres, writers like Morrison seek to “change our broader culture and the broader discourse that people have around certain topics.”

Finding her path: Gilson grew up in a diverse area and says she quickly learned that her experiences as a white person were fundamentally different from those of her Black neighbors. 

In school, “I started connecting my experiences growing up and being in a more racially diverse neighborhood and being treated better, and not having to think about my skin color, and how that related to my interactions with the police” with a broader system of racist oppression — one she wanted to study and fight.  

Sample lesson: Gilson often teaches introductory courses in political theory. In one class, after having her students read the works of theorists like Hobbes, Rousseau, and Marx, she gave them Politics of Piety, by Saba Mahmood, a book that analyzed a women’s piety movement in Cairo. 

“The women who are in this piety movement are choosing these religious precepts which place them in submission to their husbands,” Gilson says. “Mahmood makes a complicated argument that the women are expressing a type of agency. 

“It’s one of my favorite things that I’ve ever taught because it’s challenging to me, and because the students themselves have to take a step back and ask, ‘What does it mean to say that I support a position that [they wouldn’t naturally agree with?]” 

Why �ֲ���ý? Gilson’s undergraduate college was Tufts, where programs such as the Experimental College Tisch College of Civic Life informed her belief that there were “things that you could do as a scholar that also would contribute to the community,” Gilson says.

During her job search, the “importance of community-engaged learning was one of the first things that I noticed about �ֲ���ý,” she says, finding the college’s approach — forging long-term relationships with community partners — preferable to the drop-in model of community work, where students do a few projects, write their papers about it, and then graduate.

“If you’re really interested in your community, shouldn’t you be thinking about the long-term needs of the community? About how the community has already tried to organize around those needs? And how might you be able to support what exists already?”

Each week this fall, we’ll introduce new �ֲ���ý professors who have tenure-track positions on the faculty.

This year’s nine tenure appointments are in the disciplines of art and visual culture, classical and medieval studies, economics, English, environmental studies, dance, politics (two appointments), and psychology.

This week we introduce the fourth of our nine new faculty members, Tyler Harper.

Name: Tyler Harper

Position: Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies

Degrees from: New York University, Ph.D. in comparative literature and M.A. in comparative literature; Haverford College, B.A. in English

His work: Harper researches the evolving ways in which science fiction writers have depicted human extinction, and how the concept of extinction has changed since 1796, when scientist Georges Cuvier proved that species extinction was in fact possible.

Completed in May, Harper’s dissertation was on “The Specter of Extinction: Environmental Nihilism in British Science Fiction (1800–1945).

Why sci-fi? With a literary canon that includes books from L. Ron Hubbard, and with movie titles like Abbott and Costello Meet the Invisible Man, science fiction in America is a “heavily stereotyped genre,” Harper says. “We’re often used to thinking of sci-fi as entertainment or as beach reading.” Plus, it’s a genre that’s frequently “coded as both white and male,” he says. 

For a liberal arts professor, stereotype is a door waiting to be kicked open. “One of the joys of teaching science fiction is getting students to see sci-fi differently — as a genre that not only engages with big ideas but also that includes some great works written by marginalized voices.”

A sample lesson: Harper says that he’s always loved introducing students to the novel Dawn, by Octavia Butler, the first Black female science fiction writer to reach national prominence. 

One of her earlier works, Dawn poses the “big questions that I find tend to excite students. Questions like, is the fear of otherness innate? Or is it learned? Can it be unlearned? And, is the exploitation of nature or other species ever justifiable?”

In class, he’ll lead an exercise in argument mapping to “break down the various worldviews presented by a novel or film and look who is presenting those views, how they clash, and how they’re reconciled.”

The exercise “gets students to slow down, look past the aliens and the spaceships, and really confront the profound and topical questions about the environment and our place in it that a novel like Dawn ���DzԱ�����.”

Why �ֲ���ý? “�ֲ���ý struck me as an institution that really strives to navigate a balance,” Harper says. While “upholding the traditional concept of a liberal arts college as a space in which students are able to think on a campus — free from the distractions of the world around them,” the college also works to bring “the liberal arts model into the 21st century.” 

Imagining Extinction: British science fiction writers of the 1800s and early 1900s, like Mary Shelley, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, and H.G. Wells, imagined that the natural world was the prime threat to human life.

In their works, “nature was re-imagined as not only a threat to the species, but a threat to the very moral vision that informed Western thinking about humanity in general,” Harper says. He calls this ‘environmental nihilism’: the threat of meaninglessness posed by the recognition that nature is completely indifferent to human existence.”

In Britain during the early Romantic era — the late 1700s into the early 1800s — these initial extinction narratives also tended to “imagine threats to the species as arising from absolute catastrophes that could not be avoided or prevented,” he explains. 

Later, particularly in the wake of Darwin’s discoveries in the mid-1800s, the threat of extinction was re-imagined as “something that could be mitigated by human ingenuity and power, something we might be able to prepare for politically, technologically, scientifically and so on. This view still informs contemporary reflection on human extinction.”

The idea that nature was the major threat to humankind changed after the U.S. dropped atomic bombs on Japan: “Human extinction was now recognized as something that humans might bring about,” says Harper.

Now, climate change: A legacy of 19th- and early 20th-century science fiction is today’s belief that “we can confront the threat of climate change with large-scale technological solutions, like geo-engineering,” Harper says. 

However, clinging to a magic-bullet solution, he says, merely “becomes a way to avoid thinking about climate change as a political crisis.” Today’s science fiction can address this avoidance and reinforce the politics of the climate crisis by imagining the “ways different groups of people are more or less implicated by environmental violence.” 

In other words, writers of climate fiction can show us new worlds after climate change and raise the question: Who gets to live in these new worlds? 

Any catastrophe, whether it threatens extinction or not, “impacts different racial groups unequally and acts on different communities in different nations unequally. It’s imperative that we think about a problem that seems fantastical but is in fact quite pressing.”

Do we survive? “I remain an optimist,” Harper says. “But I think one of the reasons I’m drawn to thinking about human extinction is that there are people with tremendous power and wealth who take the question of human extinction very seriously. You have people in Silicon Valley building compounds in New Zealand in preparation for a coming climate catastrophe.”

Harper adds, “We have, especially in academia, a duty to think seriously about this as well and to draw attention to the oversimplifications that we see in a news item, for example, about Elon Musk wanting to establish a human colony on Mars as a backup if Earth were to become uninhabitable.”

Each week this fall, we’ll be introducing new �ֲ���ý professors who have tenure-track positions on the faculty.

This year’s nine tenure appointments are in the disciplines of art and visual culture, classical and medieval studies, economics, English, environmental studies, dance, politics (two appointments), and psychology.

This week we introduce the third of our nine new faculty members, Nivedhitha Subramanian.

Name: Nivedhitha Subramanian

Title: Assistant Professor of Economics 

Degrees from: Duke University, Ph.D. in public policy studies; Northwestern University, M.A. in economics; Massachusetts Institute of Technology, S.B. in economics.

Economics because: Like many U.S. high schools, Subramanian’s did not offer economics. “But I really liked math and I really liked social studies,” she recalls.

“One of my favorite teachers — with whom I’m still in touch — suggested that I would really like economics because it combines the two. And she was right.”

Her work: As a development and labor economist with a focus on gender, Subramanian looks at the economic challenges facing less-developed countries.

Specifically, she uses data to explore how gender, social expectations, and even reputation affect workers’ choices in developing countries, particularly Pakistan — questions like, “How do we hire people? What are the constraints that people, particularly women, might face in the labor market?”

For example: For her dissertation, Subramanian conducted experiments on how gender norms affect women job seekers in Pakistan. To gather data, she used Job Asaan, a Lahore-based platform for female job seekers created by a team of development economists at Duke, including Subramanian.

In the first experiment, some job seekers were given extra, gender-specific information about job postings, such as the gender of the job’s supervisor. Boom: Application rates doubled among job seekers armed with that information; in addition, job seekers with that information were more likely to apply to a job with a female supervisor.

“There’s this discrepancy between what women want for themselves and what they think that their parents or their families want for them.”

In the second experiment, some job seekers were reminded, or “primed,” about family expectations, being asked if they had discussed their job search with their family. (The answer was not surprising: “an overwhelming ‘yes,’ because in a South Asian context, especially for young people, it’s something you discuss with your parents,” says Subramanian.)

However, being reminded of family affected job seekers’ behavior, lowering their applications by 30 percent. “This is consistent with women knowing that their families might not be supportive of their job search,” Subramanian says.

At the same time, women who got the family reminder were more likely to apply to jobs when also given information about the gender of coworkers, which suggests that “they believe their families care whether they will be working with men or women,” explains Subramanian.

“There’s this discrepancy between what women want for themselves and what they think that their parents or their families want for them. And that was really impacting which jobs they apply to.”

In terms of policy, Subramanian has suggested some easy-to-implement strategies to increase job application rates, like providing accurate information in a job posting about the gender of a job’s supervisor, or, for businesses seeking workers particularly, “simply publicizing the fact that they have female supervisors and/or that they have mostly or all female employees.”

Why development economics? Subramanian, who is Indian-American, grew up in the U.S. but traveled to India frequently.

“Just seeing the differences in day-to-day life and the two different contexts sparked a lot of questions for me,” she explains. “In college, I took a class on development economics, and I realized that those were exactly the questions that I wanted to answer, using really interesting methods.”

Context matters: “Part of the joy of this kind of research is learning about other contexts — about what other communities and societies look like — and then understanding sort of the bigger picture of your work.”

“There seems to be a lot of interaction across departments, and I thought that was really exciting.”

To that end, “being able to work in a country, living there for longer periods of time, is just incredibly valuable to understanding the context and doing high-quality social science research,” Subramanian says. “Granted, in the current state of the world, that’s not always possible.”

Why �ֲ���ý? “I am an economist, but I really like talking to other social scientists and learning from broader communities,” she says. At �ֲ���ý, “economics and sociology are literally on the same hallway,” sharing a floor in Pettengill Hall with several other academic programs, including Africana and classical and medieval studies.

“There seems to be a lot of interaction across departments, and I thought that was really exciting,” she says. During her visits, “I really liked talking to everyone I met, including all the students. They were fantastic, and so I was really excited about getting to interact with these faculty and students going forward.

Why teach? “Teaching is exciting,” she says. “There’s almost no parallel feeling to seeing something click for a student.”

This semester, she’s teaching statistics, a rite of passage for econ majors. “Students come in with mixed feelings about how excited they are. Even if they are initially less excited, you can help them see why knowing statistics is useful for interpreting the world around us. That’s just really rewarding.”

Each week for the next nine, we’ll be introducing new �ֲ���ý professors who have tenure-track positions on the faculty.

This year’s nine tenure appointments are in the disciplines of art and visual culture, classical and medieval studies, economics, English, environmental studies, dance, politics (two appointments), and psychology.

This week, we introduce Mark Tizzoni.

Name: Mark Tizzoni

Position: Assistant Professor of Classical and Medieval Studies 

Degrees from: University of Leeds, M.A., Ph.D., in medieval studies and history; University of Scranton, B.A., in history and Latin 

The spark: Classical and medieval studies is “not necessarily something that everyone just naturally goes into,” Tizzoni says. 

Growing up, he had a cousin who was a history buff. “When he would visit, we would talk about history. And he was very interested in the medieval period.” That rubbed off on Tizzoni. By high school he was deep into Beowulf, The Wanderer, and The Seafarer.

From there, he was drawn to both classical studies and medieval studies. “Homer also had that same sort of influence on me that Beowulf did. That’s how I ended up with late antiquity — it’s that middle ground where the two things meet.”

Seeking the unknown: “I’m a first-generation to college student. As a child, academia was this really strange, foreign thing to me, a world I had no knowledge of — whatsoever,” he says.

Still, he had, from an early age, “always wanted to be an educator. I wanted to really deal with material in-depth, in complexity, and in intricacies, and to work with students who want to do that. 

“That’s what set me on this path of the total unknown to become a college professor. And it worked. It doesn’t always!”

His work: “I work on the transformation of the Roman world in the West, how it went from being Rome to the Middle Ages,” Tizzoni says. “I do this through the medium of poetry — how this transformation was affected and experienced by Iberians and North Africans. 

For a poet in the fifth century, North Africa was “one of the best places to be. Carthage had a really vibrant intellectual culture. It was where a considerable portion of people from the Roman world would go for their education.”

And by the late fifth century in North Africa, the Vandals had taken power from the Roman Empire, and the poetry that follows reflects existential questions: “How would they exist in this world where Rome was no longer in charge? Who were they going to be? What does that mean?”

Through their verse, which was performed more than read in an era when fewer people were literate, the poets “were building this essentially new and independent Vandal identity that set them apart from Rome, bringing the rest of the populace into this political project of the Vandals. There was great excitement as they were trying to forge these new identities.” 

Much of the poetry that Tizzoni is looking at was written in the last decade of the Vandal Kingdom. “So we don’t know what would have happened” had Vandal identity in North Africa had more time to develop.

For example? “I work on a collection called the Anthologia Latina, these really feisty, fiery, strange pieces. One poem is four lines, and the central piece is that there’s a monkey riding a dog. So weird stuff, but culturally relevant. That piece actually asserts a new cultural identity, a new ethnic identity, for the people of North Africa. There’s advanced stuff happening in these poems that don’t feel advanced.”

Why it matters right now: “Late antiquity and the Early Middle Ages are very important in discussions of identity, and it’s actually at the forefront of a lot of discussions today. White nationalists have especially grabbed onto these ideas, using it to try to prop up their worldviews. And this needs to be countered.

“One way to fight this is not just to take down the Eurocentric stuff, but also to reassert the role Africans played in the Early Middle Ages. It’s also important, broadly, to understand the ways people make a conscious effort to construct and build identity. That’s happening in late antiquity, and that has wider implications today, as we construct what it means to be an American, or other such identities.

“Identity isn’t something that just exists in the world. We create it, from many different things, including poetry.”

Why teach? “I love bringing primary sources into class, especially things that I work on. It’s always a lot of fun to present the students with these strange little pieces of poetry and have them see how they’re historically significant and how you can actually break down pieces of import out of them, to understand the society that made them.”

Each week for the next nine, we’ll be introducing new �ֲ���ý professors who have tenure-track positions on the faculty.

This year’s nine tenure appointments are in the disciplines of art and visual culture, classical and medieval studies, economics, English, environmental studies, dance, politics (two appointments), and psychology.

This week, we introduce Seulgie (Claire) Lim.

Name: Seulgie Lim

Title: Assistant Professor of Politics 

Degrees from: Boston University, Ph.D. in political science; Seoul National University, M.A. in international cooperation, B.A. in international relations 

Her research: Lim studies efforts at gender equality in West African nations, particularly the effects of a 2010 gender parity law in Senegal that mandates that the country’s National Assembly and other legislative bodies comprise 50 percent women. 

“There are different ways of looking at the concept of gender equality or gender parity,” Lim says. “For Senegalese women, their roles and identities as mothers, wives, and caregivers are very important. Passing this law on gender parity didn’t necessarily mean that they wanted to give up their household work or have men do half the chores, for example.” 

“Law does not exist as a legal tool only. It has to fit within society. My argument is that the gender parity law does face certain social and cultural and religious challenges — but from a theoretical perspective, it contributes to the diversity of feminisms in Africa.” 

Finding her path: Lim was born in South Korea. Her father had a steady job but it “didn’t necessarily allow him to spend that much time with our family.” That’s not what he wanted, she says.

“West Africa definitely holds a special place in my heart.”

So he decided to take “a big adventure, a big risk” by taking a position in Mauritania, a country he’d never heard of until someone he knew went to work there. The family lived there for 15 years before moving back to Korea for Lim’s and her sister’s college education.

“West Africa definitely holds a special place in my heart,” Lim says. She lived there as a young child and teenager, not yet able to grasp its “political, social, or religious aspects.” 

When she arrived at Boston University for doctoral study, “one of the first classes I took was on African politics. It confirmed some of the things I instinctively knew because I had grown up there, but it was a shift in terms of how I can see these things from an academic perspective.” 

Inside out: On a flight to Senegal to do fieldwork, Lim looked out the window as the plane was about to land. “The landscape is just so different from what I was experiencing traveling back and forth between the U.S. and mostly Korea. It was like going back home for me — it’s very similar in many ways to Mauritania.”

Being both an outsider and insider, “thinking about my identity within all of that, was actually a really exciting part of field work and research.”

That aspect of fieldwork was alluring to Lim, the “feeling of going back home — eating the food that I used to eat when I was growing up. It’s not necessarily academic but has to do with how you feel as a researcher. I met childhood friends that I had not seen for more than 15 years.”

Being both an outsider and insider, “thinking about my identity within all of that, was actually a really exciting part of field work and research.” Along the way, Lim learned to interrogate her inside-outside perspective.

During doctoral studies, a professor from Senegal was “really good at making me aware of my own prejudices as I was doing my research — after all, it had been such a long time since I left the country. And so I had some preconceived notions that I wasn’t even aware of, and he pointed those out.”

Why teach: “I really like the fact that students can learn as much from me as I can learn from them. It’s not just a one-way process where I’m regurgitating what they have read. 

“One of the things that impressed me during my visit to �ֲ���ý is that whenever I was talking to a faculty member, there would always be one or two students passing by and waving hands. I really liked that connection, that we get to know students not only as students, but also as individuals who have their own experiences and stories.” 

Sample lesson: “For all the classes I have taught, I show a TED talk by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, ‘,’” Lim says. The well-known talk explores how stereotypes and misunderstanding emerge when we hear and accept just one story about another person or country.

“It’s a continent of energetic women’s movement, positive political and social changes, and promising technological advances.”

“I like to set that as the foundation — we are going to pay attention to all the different stories that are out there,” Lim says.

“I want students to know that Africa is not just a continent with civil conflicts, with diseases, with debts, but there are so many different things we can learn about all the different countries on the continent — it’s a continent of energetic women’s movement, positive political and social changes, and promising technological advances.”