My central and ongoing project, across three poetry collections and two books of creative nonfiction, has been to challenge and break down many existing categories of knowledge and replace the isolation of specialization with a fretwork of understanding drawn from multiple perspectives. During this fellowship I intend to work on “The Doctrine of Signatures,” an essay collection of biographical portraits of people accused of witchcraft in trials that occurred across 800 years and multiple continents. Each essay considers the unique socio-political circumstances surrounding the accusations.

This first book project draws on Nahua perspectives as the theoretical framework for my analysis of contemporary Nahua cultural production in Mexico. Nahuas, more popularly known as Aztecs or Mexicas, constitute the largest Indigenous nation in that country. This study analyzes texts written from the 1980s to the present. I argue that Nahua artists use unique perspectives (namely, ixtlamatilistli, yoltlajlamikilistli, and tlaixpaj) to disarticulate the narrative frame of vanquished “Indians” that is exemplified in Mexican national discourse.

This project brings ongoing fieldwork to the Institute for Advanced Studies to prototype a mixed-methods toolkit that intersects food access and transportation planning. Over the past six months I have collaborated with the Accessibility Observatory at UMN’s Center for Transportation Studies to investigate the challenges that Latinx residents in South Eastern Minnesota face to get healthy and culturally relevant food.

“William Edmondson: Life and Work” offers the first single-author monograph on its subject. Active in Nashville during the 1930s and 40s, Edmondson (1874-1951) was a self-taught African-American sculptor. His oeuvre consists of angels, women, animals, birds, and tombstones, carved from limestone scrap. Edmondson’s work was collected by both black and white patrons; he was photographed by Louise Dahl-Wolfe and Edward Weston; and he anchored a solo show at the Museum of Modern Art, its first for an artist of color.

I plan to spend my semester in residence at the IAS writing an article on American Indian racialization and the sociological study of race. I argue, here, that American Indian racialization should move from the extreme margins of sociological understandings of race in the U.S. to the very center. In the first section of the article, I address and critique the invisibility of AI people in the sociological scholarship on race. In the remainder of the piece, I offer a historical timeline and theoretical framework for understanding AI racialization through the lens of sociology.

This project extends my research program on the relationship between violence and communication in organizations. My existing work forwards an intersectional analysis of communication about U.S. campus sexual violence, and the project I am working on during my fellowship—a new book—begins to articulate more completely how communication, campus sexual violence, and campus racial violence are connected.

Movement tracks the political evolution of its narrator, Sashi, who works in northern Sri Lanka as a “helper” with the separatist Tamil Tigers. In 1987, when she begins medical school, the Tigers charge her with caring for one of her childhood friends, a medical student-turned-Tiger, while he fasts on a stage they have built at the country’s most famous Hindu temple. With the Tigers’ encouragement, thousands come to keep vigil with him. The group’s goal is to protest the presence of Indian troops in Sashi's hometown, Jaffna.

In light of mounting resistance to regional human rights courts, the question of how these judicial institutions can and do build trust among their various constituents acquires vital importance. In contrast to existing research, which tends to focus on the role of judges and their rulings, this project turns the limelight on the legal bureaucrats of these organizations. While scholars hint at their critical role in passing, it has rarely been the explicit focus of systematic research.

The challenge for modern feminism is to explain how women fit into a new era of inequality. Since the early nineties, winner-take-all practices in the top executive and professional ranks, finance, and Silicon Valley have increased the gender gap for college graduates as a group and entrenched male power in society as a whole. The new system reserves the greatest rewards for those who can “break the rules”—the laws, norms and social conventions that constrain self-interested behavior—and get away with it.