Humanities

Katherine Crassons, associate professor of English, has been named the recipient of the 2025 Bonnie Wheeler Fellowship, one of the most prestigious grants for medievalists. The fellowship, which includes a $25,000 stipend and mentorship from a distinguished scholar, will support Crassons as she completes her book, Signs of Wonder: Faith, Ethics, and Epistemology in Medieval and Early Modern England.

Poetry scholar Victoria Bergstrom explores how a group of 1980s French poets rejected metaphor and symbolism to critique media culture, reshaping poetic tradition in an era of image saturation.

Through the lenses of race, gender, and religion, Noh reveals the complex impacts of colonialism and evangelical missions linking Korea, the U.S., and Haiti.

How a vision for Jewish studies transformed a community and inspired generations.

As Ben Wright approaches retirement, the renowned scholar celebrates a career unraveling the mysteries of the Second Temple period and advancing fresh perspectives in early Judaism studies.

If you wanted to create impactful art challenging the status quo in a repressive country, you’d think you would have to go “underground.” Indeed, that’s exactly where a new, alternative art form called Moscow Conceptualism arose in the late Soviet era – operating in secrecy, away from viewers, critics, and especially those in power. But Russian professor Mary Nicholas says that a subset of Moscow artists of the time – who she considers among the most influential -- challenged the idea they should be hidden -- and with great impact. For Nicholas, Exhibit A is a street procession in 1978, where a small group of conceptual artists called The Nest carried a red banner down a Moscow street.

Mark Bickhard, Henry R. Luce Professor of Cognitive Robotics and the Philosophy of Knowledge, challenges traditional metaphysical frameworks in his latest book, The Whole Person: Toward a Naturalism of Minds and Persons. Bickhard critiques the historical divide between the material world and mental phenomena, rooted in ancient Greek philosophy, and argues for a shift from substance-based metaphysics to process metaphysics. His model, called interactivism, emphasizes the evolutionary and developmental emergence of normative phenomena—such as representation, cognition, and language—through dynamic interactions, rather than static structures or substances.

Meet the new director of the Africana Studies program and new faculty member of the English Department Simone A. James Alexander.

Suzanne Edwards' edited volume with Matthew X. Vernon highlights women's medievalism which has often been silenced.

Xavier Piccone ’24 studies an energy infrastructure and its impact on political and economic systems.