ACM announces 2025-2027 Academic Leadership Fellows

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.