People

Sari Altschuler is associate professor of English, associate director of the Humanities Center, and founding director of the Health, Humanities, and Society minor at Northeastern University. She is the author of The Medical Imagination: Literature and Health in the Early United States (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018), and her work is forthcoming and has appeared in leading journals, including Early American Literature, Nineteenth-Century Literature, American Literature, American Literary History, PMLA, and the medical journal the Lancet. At the Newhouse Center she will be working on her next book, Able: Disability and the Cultures of Citizenship in the Early United States, which investigates how cultural understandings of ability and disability fundamentally shaped ideas about US citizenship between the Revolution and the Civil War.

Hélène Bilis specializes in the literature and culture of early modern France, with a particular focus in the theater of this period. Her first book, Passing Judgment: The Politics and Poetics of Sovereignty in French Tragedy from Hardy to Racine (University of Toronto Press, 2016) examined how an overlooked character-type—the royal judge—remained a constant of the tragic genre, although the specifics of his role and position fluctuated as playwrights experimented with changing models of sovereignty onstage. She is currently co-editing a volume with Ellen McClure on new approaches to teaching neoclassical tragedy in the twenty-first-century classroom (MLA series, under contract). She is also developing a digital pedagogical edition and translation of Lafayette’s La Princesse de Clèves (under contract, Lever Press) with a trio of colleagues from liberal arts colleges. She serves as the editor for the H-France Forum for medieval to 17th-century literary studies and as the Campus Director for the longstanding Wellesley-in-Aix study abroad program.

While at the Newhouse Center, she will be working on a new book project tentatively entitled, The Anxiety of Competition: How Rivalry Spurred Innovation Among Seventeenth-Century Playwrights. The study focuses on the phenomenon of doublons, dueling plays on the same subject, presented on different Parisian stages, on about the same dates. She aims to understand how these confrontations spurred theatrical innovations, but also how they shaped the legacy of both the “winning” play and playwright, a legacy that has often downplayed or even erased the initial context of the rivalry.

Carol Dougherty is working on an article on Sophocles’ Antigone as part of a larger study of the figure of the metic (metoikos) in Greek tragedy. The word refers to those non-native Athenians who took up permanent residence in Athens, and embedded in the very etymology of the word (oikos means “home” but meta can mean both “to move or change” and “to belong to”) are the very terms in which important debates about Athenian attitudes about citizenship and mobility are formulated. Metics, neither outright foreigners (xenoi) nor actual citizens (politai), modulate the tension between two competing paradigms of Athenian civic identity, namely the willingness of Athens to welcome strangers, suppliants, and refugees into its city on the one hand, and the boast that Athenians were continuous occupants of their territory, autochthonous, born from the Athenian soil itself. Over and over, especially on the tragic stage, Athenian citizens watch their mythic leaders welcome figures like Oedipus, Medea, and the Heraclidae into their city. At the same time, the political construction of autochthony celebrates the Athenians themselves as rooted in their own soil, born the from the earth. What emerges from these conflicting impulses is a politics of place–pitting literal insiders (authochthonous citizens) against those who have moved to Athens and taken up temporary residence–and Dougherty will argue that the figure of the metoikos, the stranger who lives among us, embodies the complicated interplay of the strange and the familiar within Athens’ political climate toward the middle of the fifth century BCE.

Dougherty's research focuses on the intersection of history, literature, and culture of archaic and classical Greece (8–6th centuries BCE). Her first two books explored the transformative and tumultuous period of the eighth century–a time when Greeks settled new lands, engaged in far-reaching trade networks, and embarked upon radical new experiments in politics, economics, and communication. In The Poetics of Colonization, she read the kinds of stories the Greeks told themselves about founding new colonies abroad, and in The Raft of Odysseus, she looked at ways in which Homer’s Odyssey represents a culture engaged in negotiating a new place for itself in a rapidly changing world. Her most recent book, Travel and Home in Homer and Contemporary Literature, brings the Odyssey together with readings of contemporary novels (e.g. M. Robinson, Housekeeping, M. Ondaatje, The English Patient, C. McCarthy, The Road) that are equally interested in questions of travel and homecoming. Her current research project explores the way that Athenian tragedy confronts and elaborates the challenges that mobility places upon issues of civic belonging and identity in Athens of the fifth century BCE.

Nikki A. Greene is Assistant Professor of the Arts of Africa and the African Diaspora in the Art Department. Greene examines African American and African diaspora identities, the body, feminism, abstraction, and music in modern and contemporary art. She is the recipient of the Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship in Art and Africana Studies at Wellesley College, the Woodrow Wilson Career Advancement Fellowship, and the Richard D. Cohen Fellowship at the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University. She was an artist-in-residence at the Ucross Foundation in Wyoming in spring 2019. Greene serves as the Visual Arts Editor of Transition, published by the Hutchins Center at Harvard University.

As a Newhouse Center Summer Fellow, Greene is finalizing her book manuscript, Grime, Glitter, and Glass: The Body and the Sonic in Contemporary Black Art (Duke University Press). With the undercurrent of music pulsing throughout in both subject matter and style, Grime, Glitter and Glass treats artists Renée Stout (b. 1959), Radcliffe Bailey (b. 1968), and María Magdalena Campos-Pons (b. 1959), who ultimately come together through her own hand, providing a flow between them that produces a new visual-sonic model on the aesthetics of black art, particularly within the United States and the Caribbean, from the jazz composer Duke Ellington to the funk singer-songwriter Betty Davis to the Afro-Cuban icon Celia Cruz. Her manuscript was shortlisted for a Creative Capital Warhol Art Writers Grant in 2018. Greene is also finalizing a forthcoming exhibition catalog essay for the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum: “Thomas McKellar sous rature: John Singer Sargent’s Erasure of a Black Model” (Rizzoli, 2020).

Koichi Hagimoto is specialized in 19th and 20th century Latin American literary and cultural studies. His research revolves around transpacific studies, through which he explores diverse intersections between Latin America and Asia. His first book, Between Empires: Martí, Rizal and the Intercolonial Alliance (2013), compares the anti-imperial literature and history of Cuba and the Philippines in the late nineteenth century. This study focuses on the writings of José Martí and José Rizal, the most prominent nationalist authors of the two contexts. His edited volume, Trans-Pacific Encounters: Asia and the Hispanic World (2016), includes essays that examine the multidimensional nature of the historical and cultural connections between various Asian countries and the Hispanic world. He has also co-edited a special number for Revista de Crítica Literaria Latinoamericana (2018) on the influence of Asia in Latin American literature. In addition, his articles have appeared in such journals as Revista de Crítica Literaria Latinoamericana, Revista Asia América Latina, Chasqui, Transmodernity, Hispania, and Latin American Literary Review, among others.

As a Newhouse Faculty Fellow for 2019-2020, he will be working on a project, entitled “Samurai in the Land of the Gaucho: The Nikkei Experience and the Culture of Modernity in Argentina,” which is part of my current book manuscript. In this project, he will explore the history of Japanese immigration in Argentina through its literary and cultural manifestations.

Kellie Carter Jackson is the Knafel Assistant Professor of the Humanities in the Department of Africana Studies at Wellesley College. Her book, Force & Freedom: Black Abolitionists and the Politics of Violence (University of Pennsylvania Press) provides the first historical analysis focused on the tactical use of violence among antebellum black activists. Carter Jackson is also co-editor of Reconsidering Roots: Race, Politics, & Memory (Athens: University of Georgia Press). Together, Erica Ball and Carter Jackson have curated the largest collection of essays dedicated to understanding the history and impact of Alex Haley’s Roots. Carter Jackson was also featured in the History Channel's documentary, Roots: A History Revealed which was nominated for a NAACP Image Award in 2016. Carter Jackson's research focuses on slavery and the abolitionists, violence as a political discourse, historical film, and black women’s history. Follow her on twitter @kcarterjackson

Newhouse Project/Plans: Carter Jackson is beginning a new book project titled, Losing Laroche: The Story of the Titanic's Only Passenger. The story of the Haitian Joseph Laroche, his French wife, and their descendants is largely unknown and demonstrates how we have imagined Atlantic travel on the Titanic as a set of white privileges. While much has been researched on the Titanic regarding its construction, crew, and passengers, Carter Jackson examines the unexplored aspect of race.She plans to trace how Laroche allows us to better understand the possibilities and limitations of black travel in the Titanic moment.

Hiromu Nagahara is a historian of modern Japan, with a focus on the politics of art and culture since the nineteenth century. As a Newhouse Fellow, he will be working on his current book project, After the Masquerade Balls: The Birth of Japan’s Cosmopolitan Elite, which explores the cultural history of modern Japanese diplomacy by looking at how artistic and other pursuits of 'play' enabled members of Japan's ruling elite to join larger networks of global elites in cities like London, Paris, and Shanghai during the decades preceding World War II. Nagahara is also the author of Tokyo Boogie-Woogie: Japan's Pop Era and Its Discontents (Harvard University Press, 2017), which highlights the public controversies that engulfed the popular songs that were produced by Japan's music industry since the late 1920s and their connections to Japan's emergence as a mass-consumer, middle-class society.

Medhin Paolos is a filmmaker, photographer, musician, and social justice activist. Her first film Asmarina (2015), which she co-directed with Alan Maglio, depicts the presence of the habesha community in the city of Milan through the collective memories of the community recorded in personal archives through photograph, music and stories. For ten years (1999-2009) Paolos was part of the folk-electronic band Fiamma Fumana. Paolos is the co-founder of the Milano chapter of Rete G2 (Second Generation Network), a national organization that promotes the human and civic rights of children of immigrant in Italy. Currently, she is conceptualizing an educational platform for bringing forth a plurality voices, histories, and cultures to the forefront through media artistic interventions.

Jieun Rhee’s Newhouse project, “Deceiving Dragons: Proposing New Narratives of Tradition in Asian Contemporary Art” attempts to explore the works of Asian artists who question and subvert the notion of “Asianness” and its implications of tradition and authenticity. Presenting hybrid positionalities and identities in dealing with issues of gender and national identity, these artists propose queer possibilities interrogating the course of modernization and deprivilege the Western modernist binaries.

Rhee has published on contemporary Asian Arts in various journals such as Art History, Oriental Art, N. Paradoxa and a book chapter in Feminism Art Theory: An Anthology 1968-2014 (Wiley-Blackwell, 2015). She is currently writing a book on the interstitial identities in contemporary Asian arts.

For more information, please visit Jieun Rhee’s faculty profile or her personal homepage.

Rebecca Summerhays specializes in nineteenth-century British literature and science, with a particular focus on how literary genres—including the Bildungsroman, domestic fiction, sensation fiction, and horror—engage new definitions of the human body that emerged in nineteenth-century scientific writing. Before joining the faculty at Wellesley College in 2018, she taught in the writing program at Harvard University, where she received the James E. Conway Excellence in Teaching Award. Her writing has appeared in journals including Novel: A Forum on Fiction and Nineteenth-Century Contexts.  

For her Newhouse project, she will work on two articles: one on Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, and the other on Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. These articles analyze how Shelley and Brontë, among other nineteenth-century authors, represent human feeling in the era that came to understand the body as a conglomeration of independent parts and the brain as just one of many seats of perception. In their novels, both Shelley and Brontë describe feeling as a network of impulse that neither originates nor ends with the boundaries of any single body. If human beings partake of the kind of affinity that draws birds to certain flowers, or unites a swarm of bees, what, if anything, makes us uniquely human?

Sarah L. Townsend is a scholar of modern and contemporary Irish fiction and drama, with particular interests in genre, economic development, race, and migration. Her published and forthcoming scholarship appears in New Literary History, Journal of Commonwealth Literature, Journal of Modern Literature, and a variety of edited collections. She is completing a monograph on the modern Irish Bildungsdrama, and her new research focuses on race and immigration in Ireland and the United States. Dr. Townsend is co-founder of the Irish Studies program at the University of New Mexico and President of the American Conference for Irish Studies-West.

During her fellowship at the Newhouse Center, she will work on a new monograph titled What’s New About the New Irish? Immigration, Whiteness, and Racial Mobility in Ireland and the United States, 1892-2020. Drawing on extensive archival research in Ireland and North America, the book examines the hidden history of transnational white supremacy that undergirds contemporary Irish multiculturalism. Townsend demonstrates how present-day celebrations of the so-called “new Irish” immigrants in Ireland paradoxically derive from a racial vocabulary developed in the 19th- and early 20th-c. U.S. to support Irish immigrants—who were considered only questionably white on arrival—in securing a firm place in the white majority. By tracing the use of the phrase “new Irish” in historical materials and contemporary writing, the project considers how the legacies of this vocabulary continue to shape how race is understood in Ireland today.

Julie Walsh researches and teaches topics in early modern philosophy, with a focus on theories of human freedom and philosophical method. While the majority of her research has heretofore treated the views of the canonical thinkers in both the 17th century rationalist and empiricist traditions, she is beginning to shift her attention to underrepresented thinkers and voices of the period. Her work has appeared in journals including Journal of the History of Philosophy, British Journal for the History of Philosophy, History of Philosophy Quarterly, and the Journal of the American Philosophical Association.

While at the Newhouse Center, I am completing research for an article that looks at the way that one early modern thinker, Nicolas Malebranche, understands Eve's role in the Fall. Women are often described by early modern men as intrinsically morally corrupt; they defend this characterization by pointing to Eve's succumbing to the devil's temptation, which, they say, is the defining moment of such corruption. I argue that, in Malebranche's writings, Eve's actions are not offered as symbols of the essentially weaker character of women. This allows us to read what he says about the  relative moral and intellectual inferiority of early modern women as a commentary on how things are given that women are barred from accessing education, and not how things must be given women's essential weakness.