Academic Leadership Fellowships

Daniel Michael Youd has always been fascinated by languages, as reflected in his teaching and research. At Beloit, he teaches classes in various levels of Modern Standard Chinese. Learning Chinese gives students insights into language’s role in shaping how we think and experience the world. He also offers courses on topics related to Chinese literary and cultural history. In recent years, his teaching has grown to include courses that introduce students to research in the Digital Humanities (DH). Students in his courses use a variety of quantitative tools and methods to explore texts as data. He is particularly intrigued by the ways in which we can apply computational tools and methods to the study of literature. Additionally, Youd enjoys mentoring students interested in literary translation, something he pursues in his scholarship. Currently, he is working on a translation of the eighteenth-century Chinese language novel Lüye xianzong (working title: The Worldly Adventures of Master Leng Yubing, Daoist Immortal). His latest published research can be found in History Retold: Premodern Chinese Texts in Western Translation (Brill, 2022; Leo Tak-hung Chan and Zong-qi Cai, eds). Entitled “The ‘Double Effect’ of Translation in Jean-Pierre Abel-Rémusat’s Iu-Kiao-Li ,” his contribution to this volume describes how a work of narrative fiction from seventeenth-century China came to be translated into French in the early nineteenth century. It also explores what its readers understood themselves to be reading.

Rebecca Brueckmann’s research and teaching is on African American history and the transnational history of the Black Diaspora, Southern history, the history of white supremacy, and gender history. Her book, Massive Resistance and Southern Womanhood (University of Georgia Press, 2021) offers a gender, cultural and social history that examines the intersectional entanglements of white segregationist women’s activism in Massive Resistance during the 1950s and 1960s. It provides a comparative overview and analysis of women’s involvement in Massive Resistance, developing several typologies of female segregationist activists. By doing so, it takes into account factors such as class, age, religion, gender-specific self-conceptions and regional aspects to trace the differential points of emergence, forms of activism, self-understandings and media representations of segregationist women in Arkansas, Louisiana, and South Carolina. Currently, she is working on a book project on the transatlantic history of 19th and 20th century Black concert dance.

Amber Shaw teaches courses at Coe on early and nineteenth-century American literature, American women writers, travel literature and transnationalism across the long nineteenth century. Her recent essays have appeared in ESQ, Symbiosis, and Women’s Studies. She has held fellowships at Winterthur Museum and Library and the Library Company of Philadelphia/Historical Society of Pennsylvania, and she has served as an ACM Visiting Faculty Director at the Newberry Library. Her current research focuses on mid-nineteenth-century transatlantic literary interest in the Lowell, Massachusetts textile mills. Shaw is also the faculty advisor for students who apply for prestigious national awards such as Fulbright, Goldwater, Truman, Rhodes and Marshall Fellowships.

Nick Phillips received his PhD from Indiana University in 2014. His dissertation, titled “Space and the City: Peripheral Communities of Madrid and Barcelona”, focused on the production and representation of suburban spaces in contemporary Spanish detective fiction. His research and scholarly interests include contemporary Spanish and Latin American detective fiction, Spanish cinema, television and popular music, urban studies, studies of space and everyday life, Spanish ecocriticism, and Catalan language, literature, and film.

Catherine Denial’s new book, A Pedagogy of Kindness, was published in 2024 with the University of Oklahoma Press. She argues that academia needs to get relentlessly kind, a practice that has nothing to do with simply “being nice.” Kindness requires a commitment to justice be front and center in our teaching in order for us to co-create incredible learning opportunities with our students. Her historical research has focused on nineteenth-century marriage, divorce, pregnancy, childbirth, and infancy among Native and non-Native communities in what we currently call Minnesota. By looking at interpersonal relationships, she is able to gain a new perspective on who had what power in the region at any given moment, and offer new ways to think about Native resistance to American colonialism.

Benjamin E. Zeller is a researcher and teacher of religion in America. He focuses on religious currents that are new or alternative, including new religions, the religious engagement with science, and the quasi-religious relationship people have with food. His interests are united by an interest in expanding the conversation about religion by including less commonly studied groups, phenomena, and topics, and looking at more common topics from new angles. He is the author or editor of six books, and co-general editor of Nova Religio: The Journal of Alternative and Emergent Religions. He previously served as Director of the College Honors Program and Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Brevard College, and visiting Fulbright Fellow at Åbo Akademi (Turku, Finland). He has spoken at venues as diverse as the WorldCon science fiction convention, Rooftops Conference on non-profit real estate, National Public Radio, BBC radio, CBS’s 20/20, and documentaries appearing on Netflix, Hulu, and HBO. At Lake Forest College he has served as elected chair of both the Curricular Policies Committee and Faculty Personnel Policies Committee.

In her role as Associate Dean of the Faculty, Nora Anderson Lewis oversees faculty development and mentorship, chairs the university’s Mentoring Committee, coordinates programming for new faculty, and serves on the Inclusive Pedagogy Committee. In addition, she is the liaison to the Akademos online bookstore and works with Lawrence’s Wriston and West scholars. As an Associate Professor of Music, she works with an oboe studio of 8-10 students in weekly lessons, studio classes, chamber music, and reed-making workshops.

Monica Rico specializes in the history of early and nineteenth-century America. Her interests include transatlantic history, the American West, gender, and environmental history. She is the author of Nature’s Noblemen: Transatlantic Masculinities and the Nineteenth-Century American West (Yale, 2013) and “‘Don’t Forget This’: Annie Oakley and the ‘New Girl’ in Anglo-American Culture,” in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West and the Frontiers of Transnational Mass Culture, edited by Frank Christensen (University of Oklahoma, 2017). She is the recent recipient of fellowships from the American Philosophical Society, George Washington’s Mount Vernon, and the Bright Institute for American History at Knox College. She serves on the board of the Outagamie County Historical Society and is the recipient of several awards for community service and leadership. Rico’s courses include “Women in Early America,” “American Environmental History,” and “Introduction to Public History” as well as advanced seminars in American history.

Jacqueline Clark is a qualitative sociologist who studies social inequalities, health and illness, as well as visual sociology, Appalachian Studies, and the sociology of jobs and work. In her spare time, she also likes to scout thrift stores, flea markets, and antique stores for quirky collectibles. She has combined these interests in her research, which has focused on how and why some people collect contemptible collectibles or racist objects from the past. She is also beginning a new project which examines how women from different generations experiences everyday sexism. She teaches classes on social inequalities, medical sociology, death and dying, as well as sociology through film and research methods, among others.

Anthony Bateza is a specialist in Martin Luther, moral theology, and Christian ethics. Luther’s political theology is his primary area of research, focusing on the reformer’s understanding of human agency and his relationship with the virtue tradition and Augustinian thought. He is also personally and professionally invested in questions of race, identity, and social justice. He has written on Black liberation theology and connections between Lutheran teaching and confronting racism in the United States. Bateza teaches a variety of courses in the religion department that connect theological and historical questions with contemporary challenges. He has taught in the Enduring Conversations program and currently serves as the program director of the Race and Ethnic Studies program (RACE) and chair of the Race, Ethnic, Gender, and Sexuality Studies department (REGSS). Bateza has earned degrees from Iowa State University (B.S., 2002), the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago (M.Div., 2006), and Princeton Theological Seminary (Ph.D., 2017). He is an ordained pastor in the Lutheran Church (ELCA) and frequently speaks in congregational settings and at church events.

Ron Watson foregrounds the social determinants of health in all of his work and centers key humanistic questions about how individual identities, beliefs, and cultural practices play into people’s lived experiences and possibilities for social mobility. He works closely with students interested in working in public health and other community-based health professions. In addition to political science courses like Comparative Health Systems, he also teaches a sophomore and senior seminar in Health & Society and works closely with many Health & Society majors to plan their next steps after Beloit. Additionally, Watson advises students who run the Beloit Public Health Initiative, a student-led, legally registered nonprofit that does public health work in the community.

After earning a degree in economics at Grinnell College, Ross Elfline worked in museum education and research at various museums in the Chicago area. Elfline earned a master’s degree in Modern Art History, Theory, and Criticism from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, concentrating on critical design strategies of the recent past. Elfline completed their doctoral work at UCLA, working primarily with Miwon Kwon and Sylvia Lavin and completed a dissertation on the Italian Radical Architecture group Superstudio (active 1966-79). Elfline also worked at the Getty Research Institute and taught at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena before joining the Carleton faculty in 2009.

Meira Z. Kensky’s first book, Trying Man, Trying God: The Divine Courtroom in Early Jewish and Christian Literature, was published by Mohr Siebeck in 2010, and was the inspiration for a conference on “The Divine Courtroom in Comparative Perspective” at Cordozo School of Law in New York. Currently, she is working on her second book, Go To Hell: Vicarious Travel with Peter and Paul in Earliest Christianity, under contract with Wm. B. Eerdmans, and a second book for Mohr Siebeck, Isopsychos: The Figure of Timothy in Early Christian Literature. She was the recipient of Coe College’s C. J. Lynch Outstanding Teacher Award, in 2013, and currently serves as Coe College’s Director of Advising. In Fall 2018, she was in residence as a teaching fellow at the Newberry Library in Chicago as the co-director of the Associated College of the Midwest’s Newberry Seminar in the Humanities.

Ryan Raul Bañagale is Director of Performing Arts and Associate Professor of Music at Colorado College. He offers classes on a range of American music topics, including musical theatre, jazz, popular music, folk music, and media studies. His first book, Arranging Gershwin: Rhapsody in Blue and the Creation of an American Icon (Oxford University Press, 2014), focuses on the ongoing—and surprising—life of Gershwin’s iconic Rhapsody in Blue over the course of the ninety years since its inception. He is co-editor of “We Didn’t Start the Fire”: Billy Joel and Popular Music Studies (Lexington Books) and editor of the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Arrangement Studies (Oxford University Press). He currently sits on the editorial board of the George Gershwin Critical Edition and will be editing at least three separate arrangements of Rhapsody in Blue. His research also appears in journals such as Jazz Perspectives and the Journal of the Society for American Music.

Marion Hourdequin specializes in environmental philosophy. Her research and teaching interests also include ethics, philosophy of science, and comparative philosophy. Prof. Hourdequin’s current research focuses on climate ethics, climate justice, the social and ethical dimensions of solar geoengineering, and relational approaches to environmental ethics. She is the author of Environmental Ethics: From Theory to Practice (Bloomsbury, 2015) and editor, with David Havlick, of Restoring Layered Landscapes (Oxford, 2016). Hourdequin is Vice President/President Elect of the International Society for Environmental Ethics and serves as an Associate Editor for two journals, Environmental Values and Environmental Ethics.

Constance Kassor teaches courses on Buddhist thought and Asian religious traditions. Her research primarily focuses on Tibetan Buddhist philosophy, and her forthcoming book, Accounting for Awakened Awareness, explores the philosophy of the 15th-century Tibetan scholar Gorampa Sonam Senge. She has spent several years living with Buddhist communities in India and Nepal, and she regularly offers courses at Lawrence University that involve travel to these countries. Kassor is also interested in issues related to women and gender minorities in Buddhist traditions, as well as the intersections of Buddhism, race, and justice. In addition to her scholarly publications, she has written for Lion’s Roar and Tricycle and has recently published an audio course on Asian religious traditions for The Great Courses and Audible.

An interdisciplinary scholar of contemporary African American history and political theory, Duchess Harris’ work has focused on events of Black political importance that have largely been ignored or neglected. She has authored, co-authored, or edited five academic books and numerous peer-reviewed articles and book chapters. Harris is particularly proud of her work on The Duchess Harris Collection, a series of 120 books for students in grades 4-12 that address issues of race, gender, and class in America. Harris was also a founding member of the American Studies department and served as chair for eight years, including as its inaugural chair. Harris is the recipient of the 2021 Thomas Jefferson Award. The award was established in 1961 by the Robert Earll McConnell Foundation to honor members of the Macalester community who exemplify the principles and ideals of the third President of the United States. Harris was selected by a committee of past Jefferson Award winners.

Andrea Kaston Tange has been fascinated with Victorian fiction since, as a ten-year-old, she was duly impressed by Jane Eyre daring to take on her Aunt Reed–and winning. Her research has focused in various ways on questions of identity in the period: from the relationship between domestic architecture and middle-class-ness (Architectural Identities: Literature, Domesticity, and the Victorian Middle Classes, University of Toronto Press, 2010) to explorations of how the consolidation of the British empire required the active participation of children and impacted their lives (Children and Empire series, Routledge Press, 2012). Her current book-length project, Imagined Encounters: Palimpsests of Victorian Travel, examines how illustrating journalists, colonial settlers, and tourists, understood and represented themselves and others as they traveled the globe. Her most recently developed courses have focused on race in the Victorian period and include archival and digital projects that give students experience with many facets of research, writing, and editorial work.

Mary Unger’s research interests include twentieth-century American literature, recovery work, women’s reception practices and reading communities, middlebrow literature, literature of the Midwest, gender and sexuality studies, critical race theory, and pedagogy. Her recent work can be found in Reception, MELUS, and Legacy. In 2020, Unger was honored to receive the David D. Anderson Award for Outstanding Essay in Midwestern Literary Studies from the Society for the Study of Midwestern Literature for her essay, “The Book Circle: Black Women Readers and Middlebrow Taste in Chicago, 1943-1953,” published in the peer-reviewed journal Reception.

Louis Epstein is a historical musicologist whose research ranges from early twentith-century French music to digital mapping to the science of teaching and learning. His book, The Creative Labor of Music Patronage in Interwar France, reveals how collaborations between a variety of patrons and composers informed the distinctive sounds of French classical music between the world wars. Epstein has received fellowships and researching funding from the Fulbright Program, the French Embassy, the Georges Lurcy Foundation, the Whiting Foundation, the Associated Colleges of the Midwest, and the Arts and Humanities Research Council. An experienced teacher, from 2021-24 Epstein is serving as Co-Director of St. Olaf’s Center for Innovation in the Liberal Arts. He is currently a co-founder and associate editor of Open Access Musicology, a collection of freely available scholarly essays intended for use in undergraduate classrooms that is published in a dynamic, digital format by Lever Press. Before coming to St. Olaf, Epstein taught at Harvard University and the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.