Robert Penn Waren Center Category
White Supremacy at the Border: Haitians, History, and A Fight for Dignity
Sep. 27, 2021—Jesús G. Ruiz is a National Academy of Sciences Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow in Caribbean History in the Department of History at Vanderbilt. He is one of several speakers scheduled for this Friday’s Circum-Atlantic Studies Seminar conference, “Other African Diasporas,” to be held at Vanderbilt’s Digital Commons from 3-6 p.m. Click here for a complete list of...
RPW Center Sponsors “Environments” Track at 2021 Southern Festival of Books
Sep. 20, 2021— Serenity Gerbman, Director of Literature and Language Programs at Humanities Tennessee. As I write this, our neighbors in Humphrey County are grieving and just beginning to rebuild after horrific flash floods, while our friends along the Gulf Coast still lack power and face tremendous damage after Hurricane Ida. It feels as if half the country...
Vereen Bell: In Awe and Remembrance
Sep. 13, 2021—Jon Parrish Peede, B.S. ’91, served as the eleventh chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities in Washington, DC. Thirty years ago, I had two mentors as a Vanderbilt undergraduate. Vereen Bell was not one of them. To call him such would be like calling Virgil a close friend. I was—and remain—unreservedly fond of...
Meet a Fellow: Hannah Katherine Hicks
Sep. 7, 2021—Hannah Katherine Hicks is the 2021-2022 American Studies Fellow from the Department of History. Her research focuses on legal history, gender, and race in the nineteenth-century American South. What is your research about and why does it matter? My research focuses on women’s experiences as defendants and complainants in South Carolina’s criminal courts between the...
Meet a Fellow: Carwil Bjork-James
Aug. 30, 2021—Meet Carwil Bjork-James, a 2021-2022 RPW Center Faculty Fellow. This year’s group is exploring the theme of “Environments.” What was your first job and what did you learn from it? My first academic job was a summer internship at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, working in the Global (Climate) Change Research division in the 1990s. The climate models being...
Meet a Fellow: Daniel Romero Suárez
Apr. 27, 2021—Daniel Romero Suárez is the 2020-2021 Joe and Mary Harper Graduate Student Fellow from the Department of Spanish and Portuguese. His doctoral research seeks to demonstrate that contemporary poetry of sickness in Latin America resorts to communal imagery that includes a long and painful history of loss, political violence, and socioeconomic precariousness, in order to challenge...
Meet a Fellow: Sebastian Ramirez
Apr. 13, 2021—Sebastian Ramirez is the 2020-2021 American Studies Graduate Student Fellow from the Department of Philosophy. He will be giving a public lecture on Friday, April 23 at 12:30 PM entitled “Racism’s Revenge: Towards A Du Boisian Theory of Racist Ideology.” What is your research about and why does it matter? Scholars and activists often conceptualize racism as a set of affects, attitudes, beliefs, practices, and/or...
Meet a Fellow: Betsey Robinson
Apr. 6, 2021—Meet Betsey Robinson, a 2020-2021 RPW Center Faculty Fellow. This year’s group is exploring the theme of “Imagining Cities.” What does the phrase “Imagining Cities” mean to you? I am an archaeologist and historian of architecture and landscapes in the ancient Mediterranean world, so it could be said that “my life is in ruins.” But really, my...
Meet a Fellow: Danielle Stubbe
Mar. 30, 2021—Danielle Stubbe is the 2020-2021 Mona C. Frederick Graduate Student Fellow from the Department of History studying the modern intellectual and cultural history of the United States. She will be giving a public lecture on Thursday, April 1 at 2 PM entitled “Cultural Credibility: U.S. Anthropology from the Field to the Archives, 1930-1980.” What is your research about...
Digital Humanities Interest Leads to Local Women’s History Tours
Mar. 23, 2021—Dr. Mary Ellen Pethel is an author, historian, archivist, and digital humanist. She is an Assistant Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies and Global Education at Belmont University. Digital humanist. That’s a descriptor I’ve not only learned to embrace but come to love. Almost a decade after completing my Ph.D. in history, I finally tackled the dissertation-to-book...