The Oklahoma Center for the Humanities at the University of Tulsa is pleased to announce its 2021-2022 class of fellows. Throughout the academic year, they will collaborate on research and programming focused on this year’s theme: Renewal and Recovery. This class includes a diverse collection of students, fellows, and members of the community representing different areas of expertise, exploration, and practice.
Kathryn Aung is a junior at the University of Tulsa, studying Political Science, English, and Philosophy. Her current interests include nostalgia and migration, and what they can reveal about and contribute to the themes of renewal and recovery. As an international student from Myanmar (Burma), she is interested in studying Burmese politics for her honors project, specifically the role of media in shaping public opinion, political movements, and conceptions of Burmese national identity.
Elizabeth “Lizy” Bailey is in her last year of undergraduate studies at the University of Tulsa, where she is studying English literature. After TU, she plans to attend graduate school and specialize in Medieval literature and Native American studies. Her current research covers the “missing” women of the Presbyterian School for Indian Girls, the predecessor of the University of Tulsa
Nicole Bauer is an assistant professor of History at the University of Tulsa, specializing in early modern France. Her current book project, explores the changing attitudes towards secrecy in eighteenth-century France, and the development of ideas about government transparency moving into the French Revolution. She is particularly interested in pulling threads from different directions to understand these cultural changes– looking at police practices, religion, ideas about gender and transparency, espionage, legends surrounding the Bastille prison, and ideas about secrecy in Gothic literature.
Ahimsa Timoteo Bodhrán is a multimedia artist, activist/organizer, critic, and educator. His works appear in 23 nations across the globe. A Tulsa Artist Fellow and National Endowment for the Arts Fellow, he is the author of Archipiélagos, Antes y después del Bronx: Lenapehoking, and South Bronx Breathing Lessons. He is editor of the international queer Indigenous issue of Yellow Medicine Review: A Journal of Indigenous Literature, Art, and Thought; and co-editor of the Native dance, movement, and performance issue of Movement Research Performance Journal.
Caroline Cox is a junior at the University of Tulsa. She is a member of Honors and she specializes in studio art and art history. Her current research looks at Renaissance altarpiece fragments and their connection to space and experience.
Don James McLaughlin is an assistant professor of English at the University of Tulsa, specializing in 19th-century American literature. His research focuses especially on the writings of Walt Whitman and Sarah Orne Jewett, the medical humanities, disability theory, LGBTQ literature, and the history of emotions. His scholarship has been published in the peer-reviewed journals American Literature, Literature and Medicine, and J19: The Journal of 19th-Century Americanists.
Michael Mosher is a professor in the TU Political Science department, specializing in the history of Western political thought. Having just worked with Anna Plassart on A Cultural History of Democracy in the Age of Enlightenment, he is exploring the theme of temporalities: how the need to look backward and forward simultaneously throws us off balance and raises the question whether we can recover. He is exploring these ideas with his current teaching which considers our obligation to the past with the Tulsa Race Massacre, and our obligation to the probable future of a disastrously overheated planet.
Jennifer Ragsdale is an associate professor of Psychology at the University of Tulsa. As an industrial/organizational psychologist, she focuses on improving the health and well-being of workers by conducting research on how employees recover from work stress and the impact of technology-mediated work stressors on work-life balance.
Jim Watson is an undergraduate student at the University of Tulsa, studying Philosophy and Economics. His research interests are in early modern philosophy, particularly Thomas Hobbes and Immanuel Kant. His current work focuses on the relationship between materialism, religion, political obligation, and political legitimacy in Hobbes’ Leviathan.