College of Arts and Humanities

INTERDISCIPLINARY STUDIES – Professor David Blakesley chaired the 12^th Triennial Conference of the Kenneth Burke Society on the theme, “Kenneth Burke, the Humanities, and Agency in the Era of AI.” This virtual conference was hosted by Clemson’s Department of Interdisciplinary Studies from May 22–25, 2025, and included a film festival, at which Blakesley presented “The Making of The Wordman Film.” Twenty-two Clemson faculty members and graduate students in the Rhetorics, Communication, and Information Design program presented at the conference, which was attended virtually by over 100 scholars from as far away as South Africa, China, and Belgium. Assistant Professor Eddie Lohmeyer created and hosted an art exhibit, the “Virtual Burkeian Parlor,” in New Art City featuring creative projects by Clemson students, faculty and others.

HISTORY & GEOGRAPHY – On April 25, Professor Vernon Burton keynoted the Liberty Fellowship 20^th anniversary meeting in Greenville, where he spoke on the significance of Lincoln and liberty today, and also participated in a panel on arts and society.  On April 30, the New York Times published an analysis of 35 presidential historians, including Burton, surveyed to assess the questions, “Are Trumps’s Actions Truly Unprecedented?” On May 1, Burton and his coauthor of Justice Deferred published an op-ed, “If there is no birthright citizenship, are you a citizen – and can you prove it?” in the Post and Courier. On May 6, Burton was quoted in the Associated Press story, “Marco Rubio Now Holds 2 Top Jobs.  Just one other politician has done the same,” which was published in the Miami Herald. On Thursday, May 8, Burton spoke at SCETV at the annual meeting of the South Caroliniana Library, which this year paid tribute to South Carolina historian Walter Edgar. On May 12, at the Forum Club meeting of the Clemson University Emeritus College, he spoke on his discipline, History, in the academy today.

LANGUAGES – Associate Professor Jody Cripps published a chapter titled “Signed Music and the Deaf Community” in Ana Cruz’s book, “Culture, Deafness & Music: Critical Pedagogy and a Path to Social Justice.” It talked about how music in signed language is integrated in the deaf community. He also led the study abroad program, “Life as a Signer: The Deaf’s Perspective.” He and seven Clemson students, along with three from other colleges, went to New Zealand and Australia for three weeks. While in Wellington and then in Auckland, he gave presentations titled “What does ‘Sign Language Community’ mean to us?” to the deaf community in both areas. Moreover, in Australia, he and the deaf tour guide from Deaf Adventures, Rachel Soudakoff, gave a presentation about their deaf-led study abroad experiences to a deaf agency in Melbourne.

HISTORY & GEOGRAPHY – Associate Professor Caroline Dunn, with co-author Mikkaela Bailey ’19 (M.A. History), published “Visualizing Elizabeth of York’s Ladies-in-Waiting” in Volume 51 (2) of the journal Historical Reflections/Réflexions Historiques. The article illuminates the experiences of female attendants in both ritual occasions and daily life at the queen’s court and explores ways to visualize their roles and networks, using Net.Create software. The authors demonstrate the monarchs’ reliance upon courtiers, and proves that rather than being isolated in gendered, female quarters, women engaged with men at court daily; their interconnectivity within the network of governance reveals the multiple spokes – male and female – that comprised the wheels of medieval royal governance.

ENGLISH – Assistant Professor Stevie Edwards’ fourth book, The Weather Inside, was a finalist for the Miller Williams Prize and has been offered publication from University of Arkansas Press; the book will be released in spring 2026. Stevie’s poem “My Dear Felicity” appeared in Asterales Journal. She also had two poems, “Rogue” and “Dream After Watching Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?,” published in Crab Orchard Review. Edwards is looking forward to two writing residencies this summer: the Sundress Academy for the Arts’ Firefly Farms in Knoxville, Tennessee, and the Buinho Creative Hub in Messejana, Portugal.

PHILOSOPHY – Assistant Professor Quinn Hiroshi Gibson published a paper in Neuroethics entitled ‘Depression, Intelligibility, and Non-Rational Causation‘. It argues for the use of an updated version of an old clinical distinction between endogenous and exogenous depression, one based on whether depressive symptoms are intelligibly related to their causes.

PERFORMING ARTS – Lillian Utsey Harder, Brooks Center director emerita and artistic director of the Utsey Chamber Music Series, secured two broadcasts on American Public Media’s Performance Today: WindSync’s performance of Nadia Boulanger’s Prelude from 3 Pieces for Organ, (arr. By Lara Lamoure) on April 25 from their concert on October 29, 2024; and clarinetist Anthony McGill and the Pacifica Quartet’s performance of James Lee III’s Quintet for Clarinet and String Quartet on May 12 from their concert on September 9, 2023.

HISTORY & GEOGRAPHY – Assistant Professor Stephanie Hassell presented a paper, “African Experiences of Slavery in Portuguese India, 16th – 18th Centuries,” at Yale University’s Virtual International Conference on the Black Indian Ocean: Slavery, Religion, and Expressive Cultures (1400-1700), on April 2-3, 2025. Also, her first book, Slavery and Religious Conversion in Portugal’s Indian Empire, 1500-1700, will be released in April 2025 as part of Ohio University Press’s Indian Ocean Studies Series.

LANGUAGES – Assistant Professor Magdaléna Matušková recently published an article Allegro Moderato: Music, Memory, and Self-Reflection in Santiago by João Moreira Salles in the Annals edition of The Latin Americanist, Volume 69, Number 1, March 2025. It is also accessible through Project MUSE. The article is about the role of music in the Brazilian documentary, Santiago, directed by João Moreira Salles.

ENGLISH – Senior Lecturer Kathleen Nalley had a series of sonnets published in the May 1 issue of South Florida Poetry Journal, as well as in the spring issue of Brillig: a micro lit mag. Additionally, her second full-length poetry collection, a collaborative manuscript with poet Gabrielle Freeman, titled DISSENT, was accepted for publication by Harbor Editions and is forthcoming in November. Nalley was also named interim director of the Converse University MFA program.

ENGLISH – On April 22, 2025, Professor Rhondda Robinson Thomas gave a talk about her work on the Cemetery Hill Project to a group in Spartanburg, SC, who are seeking to identify all graves and establish a preservation plan for the Old City Cemetery, established in 1900 when graves were reinterred from the first cemetery established for Black residents in 1849. The meeting took place at the Mount Moriah Baptist Church in Spartanburg.

ENGLISH – Professor Susanna Ashton was the keynote speaker for the Celebration of Writing: Publication and Public Action, April 24^th, a conference held at Coastal Carolina University.

HISTORY & GEOGRAPHY – Assistant Professor Camden Burd’s essay, “Green as a Shade of Blue: Political Rhetoric, the Democratic Party, and the Early Environmental Movement in the Upper Midwest,” was recently published an edited collection from the University of Kansas Press in The Liberal Heartland: A Political History of the Postwar American Midwest. The essay explores how democratic politicians harnessed a language that criticized industrial malpractice, advocated for resource preservation, and demonstrated a commitment to the working class to pass a series of environmental legislation in the 1960s and 1970s.  On April 22, 2025, Burd presented research from his first book, The Roots of Flower City: Horticulture, Empire, and the Remaking of Rochester, New York (Cornell University Press, 2024), as part of the Neilly Author Series and the Dr. Matthew E & Ruth Harmon Fairbank Alumni Lecture presented by the River Campus Libraries and the School of Arts and Sciences in partnership with the Local History & Genealogy Division of the Rochester Public Library.

HISTORY & GEOGRAPHY – On April 2-3, Professor Vernon Burton keynoted the premiere of a documentary film on Benjamin E. Mays (in which he was a commentator) and served on a panel to discuss the documentary at Howard University.  On April 10, he spoke on emancipation at the Charleston Library Society and discussed the meaning of emancipation with former Clemson M.A. student Ben Parten of Georgia Southern University.  On April 22, he participated in a Rutgers History and Literature Departments’ panel discussing “The haunting stereotype of ‘The Old Time Negro’ and Black Storytelling in the Plantation’s Shadow.”  On April 24-25, he was the keynote speaker at the 20^th anniversary meeting of the SC Liberty Fellowship, speaking on liberty and participating in a panel on arts and society.  

PERFORMING ARTS – Assistant Professor of Music Lauren Crosby published a peer-reviewed article, “The Sound of Boba Fett: Star Wars Leitmotifs in Streaming Television,” in a special issue of the French academic journal Emergences: Son, Musique et médias audiovisuels that focuses on new perspectives on the music of John Williams.

ENGLISH – Assistant Professor Stevie Edwards’s poem “My Dear Felicity” was featured in the second issue of the journal Asterales. This poem is from the manuscript-in-progress for her fourth book, Childless Dog Lady.

PHILOSOPHY & RELIGION – Associate Professor Quinn Hiroshi Gibson, together with former Clemson Visiting Assistant Professor Sarah Arnaud, published ‘Neurodiversity, Identity, and Hypostatic Abstraction’ in Philosophical Studies.

PERFORMING ARTS – Lillian Utsey Harder, Brooks Center director emerita and artistic director of the Utsey Chamber Music Series, secured five broadcasts on American Public Media’s Performance Today: WindSync’s performance of Mozart’s Serenade for Winds in C Minor, K. 388 (Movt. 2: Andante) on April 2 from their concert on October 29, 2024; Verona Quartet and pianist David Fung’s performance of Grazyna Bacewicz’s Piano Quintet No. l (Movt. 1) on April 3 from their performance on November 1, 2022, and the Verona Quartet’s performance of Duke Ellington’s Cotton Club Stop from their performance on November 1, 2022; violinist Geneva Lewis and pianist Evren Ozel’s performance of Stravinsky’s Divertimento, “The Fairy’s Kiss” (arr. by Samuel Dushkin) on April 10 from their concert on March 28, 2024; and Sphinx Virtuosi’s performance of Michael Dudley’s “Prayer for our Times” on April 16 from their performance on March 30, 2023.

PHILOSOPHY & RELIGION – Professor Charlie Kurth organized the visit of Sara Protasi from the University of Puget Sound on April 10-11. While at Clemson, Protasi gave a public lecture titled “Cultivating Courage in an Age of Fear,” which was attended by over 40 faculty and students. Funding for the events was generously provided by the Department of Philosophy and Religion and the Humanities Hub. Protasi also met with undergraduate philosophy majors and minors for a separate conversation about her work on envy. The visit concluded with a research meeting where Protasi and Kurth talked with Associate Professor Charlie Starkey and Professor Cindy Pury (Psychology) about potential collaborations that would bring together their work on emotion and courage.

PERFORMING ARTS – Professor Linda Li-Bleuel received the 2025 Outstanding Service Award for dedicated service to the Clemson University commissions. This was the result of voluntarily assuming the role of Chair for the Asian Pacific Islander Desi American (APIDA) Committee, an advisory group devoted to promoting appreciation, understanding, and safety for Clemson’s APIDA community. This committee gained recognition for its work and was elevated to the status of the APIDA Commission in 2022, and Li-Bleuel continued as Chair.

ENGLISH – Postdoctoral Writing Fellow Jagadish Paudel presented his paper, “Introducing ‘Image Events’ in the FYC Classroom: Teaching Composition by Combating Racial and Social (In)justice,” at the 2025 Conference on College Composition and Communication, held in Baltimore from April 9–12. In recognition of his conference paper, Paudel also received the prestigious 2025 Chairs’ Memorial Scholarship at the conference.

ENGLISH – Assistant Professor Jon Correa Reyes co-authored the article, “From Chile to Camelot: Reception of the Arthurian Arc of Mampato and Ogú“ in Arthuriana: the Journal of Arthurian Studies. The essay analyzes how the Arthurian arc of the Chilean comic Mampato and Ogú challenges the neocolonial rhetorics that cast Chile as a stagnant country, and how it afforded Chileans an opportunity to participate in a global cultural current of Arthurian adaptations. He also served as the guest editor for this issue of Arthuriana, authoring the introductory essay, “Medieval Studies as a Public Good.” 

LANGUAGES – Together with co-editor Rainer Godel, Professor Johannes Schmidt published the Herder Yearbook 17, now for the first time with Mohr Siebeck publishers, one of the oldest in Germany. This is the sixth time Johannes co-edited this academic journal for the International Johnn Gottfried Herder Society. This new venue allows for eBook and Open Access, while continuing the series in print.

PERFORMING ARTS – Associate Professor Kerrie Seymour wrote and acted in the new short film PURPLE, which was screened at both the Maryland International Film Festival and Greenville’s Reedy Reels Film Festival. The film won the Best Film Made in Upstate SC at Reedy Reels. Additionally, she was featured in a commercial for Tekmetric, based out of Texas.

PHILOSOPHY & RELIGION – Associate Professor Charles Starkey co-authored “Memorialization of Courage,” which was presented by author Cynthia Pury (Psychology) at the Memorialization: Theory, Methods, Goals, and Ethics conference at the University of Mississippi.

LANGUAGES – Professor Eric Touya had published an article, “Developing Humanities Perspectives across Disciplines”, in “Public Humanities: Theories and Methods”, Publications of the Modern Language Association, Vol. 140, Issue 1, 2025. Drawing on his experience teaching women in business in the francophone world, Toya considers the value of the humanities in cultivating civic- and community-mindedness in students and preparing them to take humanistic inquiry into their future careers. He seeks to demystify and deconstruct the discourses of the economists most often studied in university courses, whose models are often purportedly grounded in mathematical reasoning. From a public humanities perspective, his critical intervention reexamines the dichotomies of campuses/communities and academy/public and demonstrates how the work within our classrooms is integral to preparing students for engaging with other communities in the ways they bring humanistic inquiry into the world beyond college. Exploring connections between the classroom and the community, in conjunction with humanities-based reflection on issues of race, gender, and class, helps students to understand the complexity and diversity of socioeconomic realities from a non-Western perspective. 

PHILOSOPHY & RELIGION – Associate Professor and Chair Ben White’s new book, Counting Paul: Scientificity, Fuzzy Math, and Ideology in Pauline Studies, was released this month with Oxford University Press.

ENGLISH – Professor Susanna Ashton authored an article in Publishing History issue 36 entitled “William Stanley Braithwaite and Poetic Stereotypes,” which examines the life and work of African American printer, publisher, critic and poet William Stanley Braithwaite.

ENGLISH – Associate Professor Nic Brown authored the cover story for issue No. 10 of The Bitter Southerner, published March 28. The story is a profile of actor Michael Shannon, focusing on a recent project recreating the music of the pioneering alt-rock band R.E.M.

HISTORY – Professor Vernon Burton presented a paper, “What is Victory Day to the Black Man?” on March 1, at the South Carolina Historical Association annual meeting held this year at Francis Marion University. From March 19 to 21, he gave a public lecture on his book, Justice Deferred: Race and the Supreme Court, to the University of Georgia School of Law and Department of History, in addition to directing two seminars for history graduate students. On March 27, at the Captain Kimberly Hampton Memorial Library in Easley, SC, he presented a lecture, “Lincoln, Liberty, Reconstruction, and the Supreme Court.” On March 22, he presented a guest lecture on “Reconstruction in South Carolina” at the Modjeska Simkins School. He also secured grants from the 1772 Foundation and the South Carolina African American Heritage Commission to support the University of South Carolina’s publication of Georganne Burton and his graphic history of Penn Center.

PERFORMING ARTS – Lillian Utsey Harder, Brooks Center director emerita and artistic director of the Utsey Chamber Music Series, secured six broadcasts on American Public Media’s Performance Today: Goldstein-Peled-Fiterstein Trio’s broadcast of Joachim Stutschewsky’ s Hassidic Fantasy on December 26 and March 25 from their concert on February 9, 2023; guitarist Jason Vieaux’s broadcast on December 27 of Agustin Barrios’ Waltz in G Major, Op. 8, No. 3 from his concert on September 14, 2024; Sphinx Virtuosi’s broadcast on January 1 of Michael Dudley’s Prayer for our Times from their concert on March 30, 2023; pianist Maxim Lando’s broadcast on January 9 of Nikolai Kapustin’s Variations, Op. 41 from his concert on September 15, 2022; and Lincoln Center Chamber Music Society’s broadcast on January 14 of Howard Ferguson’s Octet for Winds and Strings, Op. 4 from their concert on October 18, 2021.

LANGUAGES – Under the guidance of Assistant Professor Magdaléna Matušková, Clemson students Cassie Hunt and Hayden Roof participated at the UGA Conference on the Americas on February 21, 2025, in Athens, GA. Roof, writing and presenting entirely in Spanish, won the award for best undergraduate student essay with his writing on the film, También la lluvia (Icíar Bollaín, 2010).

ENGLISH – Assistant Professor Jonathan F. Correa Reyes pulished “Conjuring Ethiopia: Blackness as Dignity in Juan Latino’s Poetry,” in Viator 55, no. 1 (2025). Reyes’ study revisits the sixteenth-century author’s references to Ethiopia and the Ethiopians in his first published volume of poetry, examining recent questions regarding Latino’s birthplace in light of the power of his writing.

ENGLISH – Associate Professor Elizabeth Rivlin presented a paper titled “Hull House: A Historical Case Study in Public Shakespeare,” in the Public Shakespeare / Public Humanities Seminar, at the Shakespeare Association of America Annual Meeting March 20-22 in Boston.

PERFORMING ARTS – Professor Shannon Robert was inducted into the Southeastern Theatre Conference Hall of Fame in Baltimore. This recognition honors the dedicated contributions of theatre artists to the SETC organization and its mission to develop theatre education, promote opportunities, and support live theatre regionally and nationally.

INTERDISCIPLINARY STUDIES – Associate Professor Aga Skrodzka has published her new monograph, The Sex Slave in Cinema: An Inegalitarian Spectacle, with Edinburgh University Press. This book examines the visual politics of the cinematic figure of the ‘sex slave’ from its origins in silent film to its iterations in blaxploitation cinema, European art cinema, Nollywood, and, in its most concentrated form, the Hollywood blockbuster thriller.

PHILOSOPHY & RELIGION – Associate Professor Charles Starkey presented “Perception, Value, and Virtue: Huff and Fuchert’s Taking Moral Action” as part of a symposium on moral psychology at the annual meeting of the Association for Practical and Professional Ethics in Norfolk, Virginia.

PHILOSOPHY & RELIGION – Associate Professor and Chair Ben White gave the annual George Howard Lecture in the Department of Religion at the University of Georgia on March 24.  The lecture was entitled: “Fuzzy Math: the Challenge of Counting Paul’s Authentic Letters,” based on White’s forthcoming book, Counting Paul: Scientificy, Fuzzy Math, and Ideology in Pauline Studies.

HISTORY – Professor and Humanities Hub Director James Burns presented on the Humanities Hub’s Mellon Foundation Teacher Scholar Grant at two national conferences in Washington D.C.  The first was the Annual Conference of the Assocation of Undergraduate Educating Research Universities. The second presentation, with a different cohort of Teacher-Scholars, was at the Meeting of the Association of American Colleges and Universities.

HISTORY – Professor Vernon Burton appeared with Andrew Sullivan on NPR’s The Middle with Jeremy Hobson to discuss the topic “Is democracy really at risk?” in January. On Feb. 4, Burton was the lead historian for an amicus brief filed with the U.S. Supreme Court on maintaining the integrity of the Georgia election system (Case S25A0490 Brief of AmiciCuiae History Professors in Support of Appellees External Vigilance Action, inc., et al.).  Burton has also been appointed to the South Carolina Sesquicentennial Commission (SC250) Advisory Council for Scholars to assist the Commission in helping shape educational programming, public history initiatives, and commemorations that highlight South Carolina’s essential contributions to the Southern Campaigns of the American Revolution.  On Feb. 3, he spoke at Wofford College on the Civil Rights Movement in South Carolina.  On Feb. 13-14,  he participated in a radio program in Chicago on Abraham Lincoln’s legacy and a conference at the University of Illinois on Lincoln and Liberty.  Lastly, on Feb. 25, he chaired a panel as a commissioner at the annual conference of the South Carolina African American Heritage Commission at the State Archives.  

LANGUAGES – Jody Cripps, Associate Professor of American Sign Language, and his colleague, Dr. Anita Small had published a chapter titled “Exploring the Creation of Lyrics, Composition, and Performance in Signed Music” in “Lights: The Real Us Behind the Scenes & Activity Guide.” 

ENGLISH – Assistant Professor Stevie Edwards’ poem “Father’s Day” was featured as The Best American Poetry’s “Pick of the Week.” Additionally, their poems “Heat Wave,” “After Watching Thelma & Louise,” and “With Wings” were published in The Screen Door, a journal for literary voices of the queer south.

PHILOSOPHY – Assistant Professor Quinn Hiroshi Gibson published a chapter in the Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Delusion, edited by Ema Sullivan-Bissett. It was published early in the year, though I don’t know exactly when. His chapter, ‘Delusion and Rationality’, (Chapter 14, pp. 214–227) discusses the philosophical positions on the relation between delusions and rationality and argues that delusions are best understood as irrational beliefs, as opposed to non-beliefs, or rational beliefs. He further argues that, given this interpretation, delusions should be modeled in terms of where the irrationality enters, at the stage of entertainment, the stage of formation, or the stage of maintenance.  

Hiroshi Gibson also published a post on the American Philosophical Association’s blog entitled ‘Reconciling the Manifest and Scientific Images of Addiction‘ in which he argues that by appealing to a leading neuroscientific theory of addiction, we can make progress understanding addiction in ordinary interpersonal, psychological, and moral terms.

RELIGIOUS STUDIES – Associate Professor Elizabeth Jemison has joined the Steering Committee of the Afro-American Religious History Group of the American Academy of Religion, where she will serve a three-year term.

PHILOSOPHY – Professor Charlie Kurth’s paper, “Shames and Selves: On the Origins and Cognitive Foundations of a Moral Emotion” was accepted at the British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, the premier venue for philosophical research on the sciences.  In the paper, Kurth draws on work from a range of disciplines—philosophy, anthropology, psychology, primatology, cognitive science and history—to argue that evolutionary forces equipped humans with a distinctly moral form of shame.

ENGLISH – The Writing Program Administrators (WPA) team composed of Associate Professor Michelle Smith, Senior Lecturer Mary Nestor, and Post-Doctoral Fellows Kelly Sauskojus, Matthew Burchanoski, and Jagadish Paudel participated in and presented at the Carolinas Writing Program Administrators Meeting on February 7 at Furman University in Greenville, SC. The presentation, “Questions From a WPA Team,” was a roundtable discussion featuring Smith’s reflections on a plan for transitioning and changing Clemson’s first-year writing (FYW) program. Smith highlighted the introduction of a new WPA postdoctoral fellows’ program and topics for revising the first-year curriculum, which incorporates inquiry-based research and reflective writing.

PERFORMING ARTS – Visiting Assistant Professor Kimbery Souther has been appointed to the Executive Board of the College Orchestra Directors Association (CODA) as Chair of Development. In this role, she will help CODA activate their strategic plan, increase enrollment, develop methods for financial contributions, and improve the quality and impact of publications, policies, advertising, and fund-raising. The chair of development also implements new policies and aids the organization in increasing accessibility and effectiveness for all collegiate orchestra directors and graduate students.

HISTORY – On February 1, 2025, D’Ondre Swails, Assistant Professor of History and Global Black Studies, delivered the keynote address at the 44th annual King’s Feast hosted by the University of Michigan School of Dentistry. The event celebrates the life and legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. 

LANGUAGES – Éric Touya published the new book Penser la ruralité en Aquitaine : Saubusse (1930-2020). Héritage, Territoire, Transmission (Bordeaux: Presses Universitaires de Bordeaux)  The book explores France’s past and present from a rural perspective, a topic not often studied or understood. It examines the transformations of rural France over the past century (including the collapse of agriculture and the rise of technology and globalization) and what these changes mean for our perception of what constitutes a community, the common good, civic engagements, democratic values, and the future of France. The book has been reviewed by Damien Bouhours in Le Petit Journal.com, Philippe Miquel: “Landes: l’histoire du village de Saubusse sous la loupe d’un universitaire américain”, in Sud-Ouest, and Nathalie Benoy in Radio France Bleu Gascogne  on January 12, 2025 ; Histoire et Sociétés Rurales, Vol. 63, 2025, and Dalhousie French Studies: Revues d’études littéraires du Canada, Vol. 127, 2025.

HISTORY – Professor Vernon Burton  had two articles published: “Confronting the Lost Cause Memorialization in South Carolina” in Grappling with Monuments of Oppression: Moving from Analysis to Activism, part of the Restorative Justice in Heritage Studies and Archaeology book series (Routledge Press, 2025) and “Jimmy Carter’s Day-to-Day Life as President: The White House Diary,” in The Literary Legacy of Jimmy Carter:  Essays on the President’s Books (Rowman & Littlefield, 2025).  On Jan. 5, at the annual meeting of the American Historical Association Burton presented a paper at a session on “Historians and the Courts.”  On Jan 13, he spoke on “Lincoln, Liberty, Reconstruction, and the Constitution” to a group at the Clemson University Emeritus College; on Jan. 23, at the Charleston Library Society, he moderated a discussion on Professor Ben Parten’s new book, Somewhere Toward Freedom; and on Jan. 15 he spoke at the 10^th anniversary celebration of the Modjeska Simkins School in Columbia.

ENGLISH – Assistant Professor Su Cho was one of 35 writers selected to receive a 2025 Creative Writing Fellowship of $25,000 from the National Endowment for the Arts. This year’s fellowships are in poetry and enable the recipients to set aside time for writing, research, travel, and general career development. Fellows are selected through an anonymous review process and are judged on the basis of artistic excellence of the work sample they provided. These fellowships are highly competitive, with more than 2,000 eligible applications received for FY 2025.

ENGLISH – Assistant Professor of English and World Cinema Maziyar Faridi presented an article at the “Thinking Out of the Box” symposium in Paris in December 2024. Commemorating the 35^th anniversary of the Paris Program in Critical Theory, the symposium gathered a group of affiliated theorists and philosophers to reflect on the future of critical theory. Maziyar presented parts of his film-essay on “Khora” and memory. 

PHILOSOPHY – On Jan. 15 Assistant Professor Quinn Hiroshi Gibson gave a talk entitled “Foundation and Conceptual Issues in Medicine and Mind Science” in the Clemson University School of Health Research (CUSHR) Clemson Health Advancement Talk (CHAT) series. In the talk, he outlined three major strands in my research program: foundational questions in philosophy of medicine, the modelling of disordered psychological conditions, and the bioethics and political philosophy of medicalized conditions. 

PERFORMING ARTS – Lillian Utsey Harder, Brooks Center director emerita and artistic director of the Utsey Chamber Music Series, secured five broadcasts on American Public Media’s Performance Today: Goldstein-Peled-Fiterstein Trio’s broadcast of Joachim Stutschewsky’ s Hassidic Fantasy on December 26 from their concert on February 9, 2023; guitarist Jason Vieaux’s broadcast on December 27 of Agustin Barrios’ Waltz in G Major, Op. 8, No. 3 from his concert on September 14, 2024; Sphinx Virtuosi’s broadcast on January 1 of Michael Dudley’s Prayer for our Times from their concert on March 30, 2023; pianist Maxim Lando’s broadcast on January 9 of Nikolai Kapustin’s Variations, Op. 41 from his concert on September 15, 2022; and Lincoln Center Chamber Music Society’s broadcast on January 14 of Howard Ferguson’s Octet for Winds and Strings, Op. 4 from their concert on October 18, 2021.

PHILOSOPHY – Professor Charlie Kurth published a review of Debra Hawhee’s, A Sense of Urgency: How the Climate Crisis is Changing Rhetoric, in the journal Metascience. Drawing on his experiences living in Asheville, NC through Hurricane Helene and its aftermath, he argues that Hawhee’s book projects a misplaced optimism.

LANGUAGES –  Three faculty members of the Department of Languages  presented in panels related to American Sign Language (ASL) and Deaf Studies at the 2025 Modern Languages Association conference in New Orleans. Professor Joseph Mai and Associate Professor Stephen Fitzmaurice co-presented on a discussion panel related to Disability and Hiring: Access, Accommodation, Belonging, and Retention titled “Moving (Slowly) Forward: Reshaping Campus Accessibility for the ASL Community.” Associate Professor Jody Cripps co-presented with Pamela Witcher, Vancouver Community College, and JB Begue, Towson University, on a discussion panel related to Deaf Performance, Language, and Art addressing “Signed Music and its Applications.”

ENGLISH – Professor Lee Morrissey was invited to publish a blog post for the Cambridge University Press about his new book, Milton’s Ireland, which the press published in December 2024. 

ENGLISH – Professor Susanna Ashton held over 20 talks and public events during the past two months at universities, bookstores, libraries, and historic sites promoting A Plausible Man: The True Story of the Escaped Slave who Inspired Uncle Tom’s Cabin (NY: The New Press 2024). This Fall, her title made the Wall Street Journal’s annual holiday gift guide and received a glowing review from The New Republic. This past month has also seen her publish a scholarly book review in Criticism and a short essay about a young fugitive on Freedom-seekers.org website. But the most exciting achiement of the fall, as she reports, was appearing in the Merriam Webster Dictionary with her recent writing from The Hartford Courant cited to indicate contemporary usage of the term “working-class.” 

HISTORY – Professor Vernon Burton published an article in Slavery & Abolition, “Contested Pasts and Mythic History: Formerly Enslaved Women, Francis Pickens, and the Federal Writer’s Project.”  He also co-authored “Can the Constitution and Democracy Survive the Roberts Court?” with Rhetoric, Communication and Information Design Ph.D. student Frances Chapman in Logos: A Journal of Modern Society and Culture. On October 16 at Clemson, Burton participated in the panel, “Briggs Before and Beyond” sponsored by the Cecil Williams South Carolina Civil Rights Museum. At the Southern Historical Society annual meeting in Kansas City, he chaired a session on slavery, and on October 25 at the graduate student luncheon, he spoke on Digital Humanities and Artificial Intelligence in history. On November 7, Burton keynoted the 32^nd annual meeting of the Society of Nineteenth-Century Historians at Augusta University, delivering the inaugural Dicken-Garcia Lecture.  He appeared on the “Research Report from Augusta University” podcast on November 12 discussing research on Abraham Lincoln. On November 13, he spoke on his book, Justice Deferred: Race and the Supreme Court as part of Wofford College’s “Defining or Dividing? Contemporary Issues in American Culture and History” lecture series. On November 15 in Columbia, he spoke as part of two panels for the South Carolina Bar Association’s symposium, “The Civil Rights Act of 1964 Turns 60.” He was interviewed and quoted in the Miami Herald on “Who Can the President Pardon?” Also on November 15,  at the groundbreaking of the addition to the Benjamin E. Mays Historical Site, which now serves as a museum, the director announced that the addition will be used for the “Orville Vernon Burton Research Library.”

PERFORMING ARTS – Professor of Music Paul Buyer will publish the 2^nd edition of his book, Working Toward Excellence, in 2025 with Morgan James Publishing. He is also writing a book chapter on World Percussion as a contributor to The Handbook of Percussion Pedagogy, to be published by Oxford University Press in 2026. Buyer was recently interviewed by Bold Journey magazine, a community that features people’s experiences on leadership, productivity, resilience, confidence, relationships, and mental health, and he was recognized as Professor of the Game at the Clemson-USC game on November 30, 2024.

LANGUAGES –Associate Professor of ASL Jody Cripps, as the editor of the peer-reviewed Society for American Sign Language Journal, worked with Clemson University undergraduates Brooke Turell, Jaylin Dillard, Danielle LaVigne, and Alejandro Mejia-Tejada in publishing three articles related to ASL and Deaf Studies: “Bringing Sign Language Back to Martha’s Vineyard”, “Hereditary Deafness and Society: The Quest of Ethnical Awareness”, and “Inclusion of American Sign Language in Science and Engineering.” Also, in October, Cripps taught deaf professionals about signed music and promoted their creativity in musicality at the second session of the Canadian Cultural Society of the Deaf’s Deaf Arts Academy in Winnipeg, Canada. He and his colleague, Pamela Witcher, also presented “Signed Music” to deaf high school-aged students and staff at the Manitoba School for the Deaf. In November, Cripps and his Creative Inquiry students Aislinn Horrell, Alina Romero, Reagan Moore, Brianna Motko, Elizabeth Sabol, and Carolina Strinsky went to Hartford, CT, to explore more about the first deaf school in America and its founding members and the school’s relationship with Martha’s Vineyard. They also went to the 2024 National Humanities Conference in Providence, RI, and provided a presentation titled “Hands Waving: Creating a Signed Language-Friendly Society” with two Clemson alumni, Brooke Turell and Allison Rambo, along with Doreen Simons, who is a deaf community partner. He also published two articles in peer-reviewed journals in November. The first article, titled, “Examining the Audience’s Reaction to The Black Drum—Signed Musical Production,” was published in Participants: Journal of Audience & Reception Studies. The second article he wrote with his colleagues, Elizabeth Austin and Leyla Craig, was “A Case Study of University Mass Casualty Simulation with High-School Deaf Students Who Sign” in the Journal of Emergency Management. 

ENGLISH – Assistant Professor Stevie Edwards has been invited to join the editorial board for Sundress Publications, based in Knoxville, TN. As a member of the board, Edwards will help make decisions about winners of book contests, winners of poetry broadside contests, as well as other literary contests. 

LANGUAGES – The Clemson German Program, in an effort led by BMW Principal Lecturer of German Lee Ferrell, joined four other Upstate universities and two chambers of Commerce to host the first Upstate Forum for European and American Business (UFEA) on October 22 at Furman University. This conference combined the efforts of USC-Upstate, Furman University, Clemson University, Spartanburg Community College and Greenville Technical College in cooperation with the European American Chamber of Commerce and the Greenville Chamber of Commerce. The event brought together speakers from industry to speak with students and businesses from the Upstate region on the role of Germany in the state of South Carolina.  In addition to a keynote presentation by Max Stewart of the Greenville Area Development Corporation, there was also a panel discussion on Germany and the Battery Boom in South Carolina followed by a roundtable session for students hosted by numerous German companies from the region. 

ENGLISH – Pearce Professor of Professional Communication Jordan Frith, in collaboration with Sarah Read at Portland State University, was awarded the “Best Paper” award at the annual meeting of the Association of Computing Machinery’s (ACM) Design of Communication Special Interest Group. Their paper, titled “Holistic methodologies for fusing material and discursive infrastructures: Tracing the sociotechnical imaginaries that enable the world’s fastest supercomputer” details the development of the two-year project plan they developed for their National Science Foundation-funded project studying the global dynamics of supercomputing infrastructure.

PERFORMING ARTS – Lillian Utsey Harder, Brooks Center director emerita and artistic director of the Utsey Chamber Music Series, secured four broadcasts on American Public Media’s Performance Today: violinist Geneva Lewis and pianist Evren Ozel’s broadcast on October 23 of Stravinsky’s Divertimento from “The Fairy’s Kiss” Suite for violin and piano (arranged by Samuel Dushkin), and Bartok’s Romanian Folk Dances broadcast on November 29 from their concert on March 28, 2024; and Sphinx Virtuosi’s broadcast on November 4 of Carlos Simon’s Between Worlds and broadcast on December 9 of Ricardo Herz’s Sisifo na Cidade Grande from their concert on March 30, 2023.

ENGLISH – Senior Lecturer of English Kathleen Nalley recently participated in the November 9 opening reception of “Turtle Tales,” a multi-artist exhibit that featured the turtle at No. 3 Pottery Gallery in downtown Simpsonville. Alongside seven other poets from across South Carolina, she read two poems created for the event.

LANGUAGES – Professor Johannes Schmidt published an article in the conference volume Johann Gottfried Herder und Bückeburg—»Was habe ich hier ausgerichtet? Wessen kann ich mich rühmen?«, edited by Martin Kessler. The title of Schmidt’s talk and contribution is “Becoming Maverick, Dissenter, and Individualist.Herder’s Orientation during the Bückeburg Years 1771–1776”. The conference took place in Fall 2023 in Bückeburg, Germany, and was organized by the President of the International Herder Society, Martin Keßler.

PERFORMING ARTS – Associate Professor of Theater Kerrie Seymour performed the role of Heidi in What the Constitution Means to Me by Heidi Schreck in a co-production with LEAN Ensemble Theatre and Furman University Theatre. Through December 29, she is performing the role of Annie Wilkes in an adaptation of Stephen King’s Misery at the Warehouse Theatre.

ENGLISH – Professor Rhondda Robinson Thomas moderated the “Public Histories” panel at the Georgetown and Legacies of Slavery Forum: Honoring Stories, Embracing Communities on Friday, December 6, 2024, at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., in collaboration with Dumbarton Oaks, Tudor Place, and The Black Georgetown Foundation. Thomas is researching and documenting the lives of enslaved persons who labored at Dumbarton Oaks for US statesman John C. Calhoun and his family in the early to mid-1820s for her Call My Name project and the Cemetery Hill project.

LANGUAGES – Professor Eric Touya read the paper, “Baudelaire’s Expression of Life: Poetics and Politics of Production in Modernity” at the Semicentennial Colloquium of Nineteenth-Century French Studies at Duke University. He also read “AI’s Ethical Challenges in Literary Studies: Postcolonialism, Feminism, and Democratic Responsibility, Nurturing Democratic Responsibility in the Age of Artificial Intelligence” at the 25^th Annual Conference on Ethics Across the Curriculum at Clemson University. He also published the article entitled “’Plus jamais la guerre !’ Claudel diplomate: 1927-1947. Prolongements dans les Suppléments aux Œuvres complètes” in Bulletin de la Société Paul Claudel, Vol. 242. Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2024, p. 15-25. 

PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION – Professor and Chair Ben White gave a paper entitled “Acts and the Historical Paul: a Response” at the annual meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature in San Diego, CA on November 23^rd.  

INTERDISCIPLINARY STUDIES – Associate Professor Todd Anderson’s printed artwork “Swiftcurrent Glacier, The Last Glacier” and the original woodblock he carved in its making were both recently acquired by the Hockaday Museum of Art in Kalispell, Montana, for their permanent collection. “It is an honor to have my artwork placed in context and conversation with historic art luminaries, including Russell Chatham and Lucille Van Slick and contemporary peers like Ian van Coller and Bruce Crownover,” Anderson said.

HISTORY – Assistant Professor Camden Burd published his first book, The Roots of Flower City: Horticulture, Empire, and the Remaking of Rochester, New York (Cornell University Press). The book historicizes how a small group of entrepreneurs adapted their businesses to the nineteenth-century American imperial project by distributing plant material to settler-colonists across North America. Furthermore, Burd discusses how the capital from that enterprise flowed back to Rochester, New York transforming the antebellum boomtown into a horticultural wonderland by the late nineteenth century.

HISTORY – On Sept. 20, Professor Vernon Burton participated in a question and answer session with Bob Elder of Baylor University, who delivered a lecture at Clemson on the life of John C. Calhoun. Introducing Burton, Clemson University Historian Otis Pickett announced that this would become an annual lecture series officially named the “Dr. Orville Vernon Burton Annual Lecture Series on The U.S. South.”  On Sept 25, Burton and Professor J. Brent Morris spoke to the Confederation of South Carolina Local Historical Societies at the state archives in Columbia.  On Oct. 12, Burton chaired a session on Presbyterians at the Faith and History Conference in Birmingham and that evening gave a keynote on South Carolina’s Political History in Laurens, SC.

ENGLISH – Assistant Professor Stevie Edwards’s poem, “On Gluttony” was published last month in Glass: A Journal of Poetry. It is a love poem that features cannibalism. 

LANGUAGES – Associate Professor Stephen Fitzmaurice published an Open Education Resource (OER) chapter, titled “Importance of Fingerspelling in Educational Settings”in the co-edited A Survey of American Sign Language/English Interpreting Settings.  Along with Jessica Bentley-Sassaman of Bloomsburg University, Fitzmaurice also published an article in the International Journal of Interpreter Education, 15(1) titled “Perceptions of non-deaf parties in a student interpreted transaction.”

PERFORMING ARTS –  Lillian Utsey Harder, Brooks Center director emerita and artistic director of the Utsey Chamber Music Series, secured six broadcasts on American Public Media’s Performance Today: pianist Maxim Lando’s broadcast on September 17 of Improvisation on Duke Ellington from his concert on September 15, 2022, and an additional broadcast on September 30 of Nikolai Kapustin’s Variations, Op. 4; guitarist Jason Vieaux’s broadcast on September 20 of his arrangement of Agustin Barrios’ Waltz in G Major, Op. 8, No. 3 from his concert on September 14, 2021; Verona Quartet and pianist David Fung’s broadcast on September 24 of their performance of Grazyna Bacewicz’s Piano Quintet No. 1 (movt. 1) and Duke Ellington’s Cotton Club Stomp from their concert on November 1, 2022; Sphinx Virtuosi’s broadcast on September 27 of Jessie Montgomery’s Strum from their concert on March 30, 2023; broadcast on October 11, 2024 of Howard Ferguson’s Octet for Winds and Strings by the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center from their concert on October 18, 2021.

PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION – Professor Charlie Kurth traveled to Helsinki, Finland to launch the Negative Emotion Research Group (NERG), an international group of emotion researchers. Participants spanned six disciplines across the humanities and social sciences—Philosophy, History, Anthropology, Theology, Literature, and Psychology. The launch events included a two-day manuscript workshop, a roundtable discussion on the future of interdisciplinary emotion research, and a series of networking events that allowed junior researchers to engage with more senior scholars. The events were funded through a 14,500€ Catalyst Grant from the Helsinki Institute for the Social Sciences and Humanities at the University of Helsinki for which Kurth was the PI.

INTERDISCIPLINARY – Professor and Chair Lisa Melançon co-authored “Creating assignments that put programmatic inclusion and diversity work into practice” in Inclusive STEM: Transforming Disciplinary Writing Instruction for a Socially Just Future (pp. 123-145). The chapter asked the question: what happens in a large technical and professional communication writing program when it creates a programmatic inclusion vision and then sets out to enact it within an assignment? The chapter describes an evaluation of an assignment and the student work produced in relation to both student learning outcomes and the connection to programmatic inclusion. The chapter offers a discussion of what worked well for this assignment and what could be improved to facilitate better implementation of student learning and programmatic inclusion.

LANGUAGES – Professor Salvador Oropesa published the book chapter. “María Oruña’s El bosque de los cuatro vientos: The Architecture of Literary Genres.”  Edited by Inmaculada Pertusa-Seva and Melissa A. Stewart in New Directions in Spanish Female Detective Fiction, Cambridge Scholars, 2024. (pp. 115-30).

LANGUAGES – Together with co-editor Liisa Steinby of the University of Turku, Professor Johannes Schmidt published “Forms of Temporality and Historical Time in the Work of Johann Gottfried Herder.”  He co-authored the Introduction and the Afterword and single-authored the chapter “Herder: Time, Temporality, and (Christian) Telos.” The edited volume was published by Routledge/Taylor & Francis. 

PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION – Associate Professor Charles Starkey and Professor Cynthia Pury (Psychology) presented “The Disunity of Courage” at the  Annual Meeting of the Society for Ethics Across the Curriculum in October at Clemson.

LANGUAGES – Professor Eric Touya read his paper, “Baudelaire’s Expression of Life: Poetics and Politics of Production in Modernity” at the Semicentennial Colloquium of Nineteenth-Century French Studies, “Producing and Receiving the Nineteenth Century” at Duke University. He also read “AI’s Ethical Challenges in Literary Studies: Postcolonialism, Feminism, and Democratic Responsibility”, Nurturing Democratic Responsibility in the Age of Artificial Intelligence (AI) at the 25^th Annual Conference on Ethics Across the Curriculum at Clemson University. He also published article, “’Plus jamais la guerre !’ Claudel diplomate: 1927-1947. Prolongements dans les Suppléments aux Œuvres complètes” in Bulletin de la Société Paul Claudel, Vol. 242. Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2024, (pp. 15-25).

PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION – On September 21^st, Associate Professor and Chair Ben White gave a talk entitled “Fuzzy Math: The Challenge of Counting Paul’s Authentic Letters” for the New Insights into the New Testament Conference, organized by Bart Ehrman at the University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill.  One of 10 international speakers for the weekend conference, which had nearly 2,000 attendees, White discussed the thesis and arguments of his forthcoming book with Oxford University Press, entitled Counting Paul: Scientificity, Fuzzy Math, and Ideology in Pauline Studies. 

INTERDISCIPLINARY STUDIES – The U.S. Library of Congress (USLOC) recently acquired a hand-carved woodblock created by Associate Professor Todd Anderson. The woodblock, which is approximately 2’x3′ in size, was used to create the print “Grinnell Glacier—The Last Glacier”, which is already a part of the USLOC’s collection. “It is an honor to have this woodblock housed and preserved in perpetuity by the USLOC,” Anderson said.

ENGLISH – Professor Susanna Ashton’s new book, A Plausible Man, was favorably reviewed by Melanie Kirkpatrick in the Wall Street Journal. The review lauds the book as “a remarkable piece of historical sleuthing and often a riveting read.”

HISTORY – At Clemson University’s August graduation ceremonies, Dr. Roy Jones and Professor Vernon Burton sponsored posthumous degrees for two extraordinary educators and leaders: Rev. Joseph A. De Laine, Sr. and Mattie Belton De Laine. Rev. De Laine led the brave plaintiffs from Clarendon County to the successful lawsuit Briggs v. Elliot which ended de jure segregation.

On August 23, Burton was one of four historians to file with the Brennan Center an amicus brief before Supreme Court supporting the right of a private cause of action to support section 2 of the Voting Rights Act (No. 24-30115). In September, he was one of five historians to file with the Citizens for Responsibility & Ethics in Washington an amicus brief before the Supreme Court on election certification in Georgia. Also this month, he was part of a panel discussing the 1934 textile strike in the South and the murder of seven strikers in  Honea Path. Following the second presidential debate on September 10, Burton was on a panel “Historians Weigh In: 2024 US Second Presidential Debate” assessing the candidates’ performances.” On September 13, he keynoted the SC Humanities Festival in North Augusta and spoke on Reconstruction and the Lost Cause mythology in South Carolina.

LANGUAGES – Associate Professor of ASL Jody Cripps and his Creative Inquiry course were cited in an article in the travel magazine AFAR by well-known deaf novelist Sara Nović, who visited Martha’s Vineyard to learn more about deaf ancestors and the history of shared-signed community. Cripps was also featured in a recent Clemson University video on accessibility. He talked about how important it is for all humans to learn signed language regardless of their degree of hearing loss in terms of Universal Design or Accessibility.

HISTORY – Associate Professor Caroline Dunn hosted the Fall, 2024 meeting of South Carolina Medievalists on September 14, where she also presented “Visualizing Elizabeth of York’s Ladies-in-Waiting.”

ENGLISH – Assistant Professor Stevie Edwards’s first poetry book, Good Grief, was recently re-released by Write Bloody Publishing. Originally published in 2012, Good Grief features a redesigned cover and is once again available for purchase from booksellers, including Amazon. 

ENGLISH – Associate Professor Jonathan Beecher Field shared one of the highlights of his 2023 research fellowship at the University of Michigan’s William L. Clements Library in the Clements Library Chronicles. Titled “Panting After History,” the brief essay explores the illogic of a late 19th century advertisement for Plymouth Rock Pants, which is an illustration that portrays Pilgrims disembarking from the Mayflower, and picking up the stylish new pants they had ordered — from Native Americans. As Field explains, this image is historically inaccurate, but is a classic example of “settler kitsch,” his name for the cartoonish representations of encounters between settlers and Natives that proliferate in 19th and 20th century popular culture. 

PERFORMING ARTS – Lillian Utsey Harder, Brooks Center director emerita and artistic director of the Utsey Chamber Music Series, secured a broadcast on American Public Media’s Performance Today on August 28 of violinist Geneva Lewis and pianist Evren Ozel’s performance of Bela Bartok’s Romanian Dances from their concert on March 28, 2024.

PERFORMING ARTS – Professor Kendra Johnson (Costume Designer) and Lecturer Erin Rodgers (Draper) collaborated to design, pattern, and construct an 18^th-century clothing ensemble representing that of an enslaved woman working on a South Carolina indigo plantation. The resulting work is currently on display in the exhibit “Blue Gold: The Art and Science of Indigo” at the Mingei International Museum. 

ENGLISH – Calhoun Lemon Professor of Literature Rhondda Robinson Thomas made the presentation “The Recovery of Cemetery Hill at Clemson University: the African American Burial Ground, Andrew P. Calhoun Family Plot, and Woodland Cemetery” at the 3rd Annual Preserving Historic Cemeteries Workshop on September 12, 2024 at the South Carolina Archives and History Center in Columbia.

LANGUAGES – Professor Eric Touya and Col. Lance S. Young have led a group of 12 Clemson students on a study abroad program to London, Paris and Normandy. The aim of the program was to revisit the journey of American soldiers during World War II in Europe from a French and American perspective. Through this journey, the students visited major historic sites in London (Churchill war rooms, De Gaulle Free-French headquarters and the Imperial War Museum), Normandy (D-Day landing beaches, museums, and cemeteries) and Paris (WWII Mémorial des Martyrs de la Déportation, Mont Valérien, WWII Musée de la Libération). They analyzed and reflected on the meaning and purpose of the GIs’ actions and experiences, and on current issues in international relations and cross-cultural exchange between France, Europe, and the United States. Throughout the program, student’s studied Touya’s book French-American Relations: Remembering D-Day after September 11.

HISTORY AND GEOGRAPHY — Professor Rod Andrew Jr. served as the guide for a trip to the D-Day battlefields of Normandy, France, in June. His group met a small group of 82nd Airborne soldiers who happened to be there for the 80th anniversary, and Rod explained the Battle of La Fiere Bridge, a famous battle in the unit’s history.

ENGLISH — Professor Susanna Ashton’s “A Plausible Man: The True Story of the Escaped Slave Who Inspired Uncle Tom’s Cabin” was released on August 6. It is an Editors’ pick on Amazon and has received acclaim from The Wall Street Journal. She has also published pieces on the book in The Conversation, The State, Hartford Courant and Smithsonian Magazine.

HISTORY AND GEOGRAPHY — Department of History and Geography Chair, Professor and Carol K. Brown Scholar in the Humanities Stephanie Barczewski has in press her chapter “Country Houses and the Varieties of Englishness,” which will be published in TheBritishAristocracy and the Modern World, eds. Miles Taylor and Christopher Ridgway, to be published by the British Academy.

She conducted research in June in the west of Ireland for her ongoing book project on national parks in the United Kingdom and Ireland. This included a visit to the archives of the Blasket Islands Centre on the tip of the Dingle Peninsula, where she examined papers donated by the family of the former Taoiseach Charles Haughey about his transfer of several indigenous red deer to his private island Inishvickillane in order to protect them from crossbreeding with non-native sika deer.

Barczewski also carried out research in July and August at the British Library and the University of Salford archives for her book chapter, “Park Here: National Parks and Labour’s Vision for Postwar Britain,” which will appear in the volume of the proceedings of a symposium honoring Professor Sir David Cannadine, which was held at St. John’s College, Oxford University, in April and is being published by Boydell and Brewer.

ENGLISH — Campbell Chair in Technical Communication David Blakesley presented “An Anatomy of ‘Permanence and Change’ in Kenneth Burke’s Histories and Theories of Rhetoric” at the International Society for the History of Rhetoric conference in Vancouver, British Columbia, on July 24.

HISTORY AND GEOGRAPHY — Professor of History Vernon Burton’s coauthored “Justice Deferred: Race and the Supreme Court” appeared in a paperback edition with Harvard University Press. Burton and Amanda Derfner published an op-ed that appeared in The (Charleston) Post and Courier. Burton participated in panels of the SC Humanities program “Just Sharing” in Lancaster on May 3, Columbia on June 6 and Laurens on June 17, discussing with communities topics of South Carolina history, including public memory, memorialization in South Carolina, slavery, the Civil War and Reconstruction and the Civil Rights movement.

On June 27, he served as a guest analyst for the presidential debate for “Voice of America,” Africa Division, Africa in Brief and Daybreak Africa. On June 15 in Nashville, he spoke on recent Supreme Court decisions involving race at the 60th reunion of SSOC (the Southern Student Organizing Committee). On July 13, he keynoted a conference in North Augusta commemorating the 1876 Hamburg Massacre. On July 23, Burton introduced authors Joe McGill and Herb Frazier who discussed their book, “Sleeping with the Ancestors,” for the Clemson Historical Properties series, Brick by Brick. On July 23, he spoke at Frances Marion University on emancipation, Black land ownership and Reconstruction at the commemoration of Historic Jamestown. He was interviewed by the local Greenville NBC affiliate WYFF4 and commented on the historical context of President Joe Biden stepping away from his party’s nomination for reelection.

LANGUAGES — Assistant Professor of American Sign Language Jody Cripps and colleagues Pamela Witcher and Jason Begue provided a presentation titled “Signed Music and Its Applications” at the National Deaf Arts and Culture Festival held by the Canadian Cultural Society of the Deaf in Halifax, Nova Scotia. The application section of the presentation talked about analyzing several signed music clips for their musical notes. It also included the pedagogy and training in signed music with professional performers at the Deaf Arts Academy. Cripps was also a researcher and signed music consultant for the signed musical performance called “Lights: The Real Us.”

HISTORY AND GEOGRAPHY — Associate Professor Caroline Dunn’s book “Ladies-in-Waiting in Medieval England” will be published in August by Cambridge University Press.

ENGLISH — Assistant Professor Stevie Edwards had three poems published over the summer. “Self-Portrait as Chrysalis” and “Alcoholism” were published in Diode Poetry Journal, and “Once I Was a Plague of Locusts” was published in Four Way Review.

ENGLISH — Jordan Frith, the Pearce Professor of Professional Communication, has been awarded a $107,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to conduct extensive fieldwork and interviews at Argonne National Laboratory about the launch of the Aurora Exascale Supercomputer, which will be only the second supercomputer in the world able to operate at the exascale level.

ENGLISH — Senior Lecturer Lucian Ghita published an article with Carl Ehrett, Dillon Ranwala and Alison Menezes titled “Shakespeare Machine: New AI-Based Technologies for Textual Analysis” in the journal Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, Volume 39, Issue 2, June 2024. This innovative research is part of a larger project that analyzes the works of Shakespeare and his dramatic contemporaries using tools from the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP). During this past summer, he also served as the faculty leader for the Global Start Program in Rome, where he taught a humanities course on Storytelling and Social Change. In this immersive course combining on-campus learning with a study abroad experience, students undertook a deep exploration of how literature, art and storytelling challenge societal norms and provoke meaningful social change. Students explored various iconic sites around the city, such as the Roman Forum and the Colosseum, the Borghese Gallery, the Jewish Quarter, the EUR neighborhood and the Modern Art Gallery, building a nuanced understanding of how history and culture influence storytelling and shape the narratives that define our world.

PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION — Assistant Professor Quinn Hiroshi Gibson published a paper entitled “The Science and Moral Psychology of Addiction: A Case Study in Integrative Philosophy of Psychiatry” in  Crítica. The paper argues that two leading neuroscientific theories of addiction are complementary and that this leads to a strategy for translating the results of the subpersonal sciences of addiction to the level of moral psychology.

PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION — New Professor of Philosophy Charlie Kurth joined Clemson University after a two-year residential fellowship at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies. In July, Charlie was a keynote speaker at the Affective and Emotional Dimensions of Experience conference held at the Universidade Católica Portuguesa, in Braga, Portugal. There he presented a paper titled, “Emotional Literacy.” He also recently signed a contract with Princeton University Press for, Good Guilt, Bad Guilt, a book he will be writing with Heidi Maibom, a philosopher based at the University of Cincinnati and the University of the Basque Country. His paper, “Centering an Environmental Ethic in Climate Crisis,” (co-authored with Panu Pihkala from the University of Helsinki) was just published in The Cambridge Handbook on Ethics and Education.

INTERDISCIPLINARY STUDIES — Department of Interdisciplinary Studies Chair Lisa Melonçon published an article on “Rhetoric of Health and Medicine” in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Communication. This article offers a review of relevant books from 2016 to 2024 to illustrate trends in the field of rhetoric of health and medicine (RHM). It first traces the history of RHM from an emerging field to an established field within rhetorical studies. One of the markers of success for the field is that RHM demonstrates the interdisciplinary nature of RHM. The article next describes the relevance of rhetoric to the field and then it synthesizes themes and commonalities within RHM scholarship. It concludes by considering future directions for scholarly inquiry and ways for those new to RHM to learn about and contribute to the field.

ENGLISH — Alumni Distinguished Professor Lee Morrissey presented a paper on Donald Ryan’s novel, “The Spinning Heart” at the University of Galway Conference on Irish Studies 2024: Slow Violence and Irish Studies.

PERFORMING ARTS — Assistant Professor of Music Lisa Sain Odom, along with colleague Seth Killen of Anderson University, co-presented a session titled, “Self-Led Teaching: An IFS Approach to the Private Voice Lesson,” at the 2024 Musical Theatre Educators’ Alliance Conference in London this July. Odom’s full-length cover article, “Why I’m Glad I Got a B.A. in Music,” was published in the print version of Classical Signer magazine, convention issue.

HISTORY AND GEOGRAPHY — Assistant Professor Amanda Regan published the article “Secret Societies and Revolving Doors: Using Mapping the Gay Guides to Study LGBTQ in the United States, 1965-1989” in the innovative and new Journal of Digital History. The article uses computation methods to explore data from Mapping the Gay Guides (MGG). MGG is Regan’s digital history project funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, which digitizes and builds datasets based on LGBTQ travel guides from 1965 to 2005.

Regan also attended DH2024, the annual conference of the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations, at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media, George Mason University, in Arlington, Virginia, in August. She attended to promote the Digital History Ph.D. program. Also present were Associate Professor and Ph.D. Program Director Douglas Seefeldt and two of our Ph.D. students. Ph.D. student Hallie Knipp attended after being awarded a bursary from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Association for Computing in the Humanities. Ph.D. student Luc Avelar presented his digital history seminar project which he developed last fall in Mandy’s class, titled “An Imagined Geography of Empire: Mining Cultural Representations of the American Colonial State During the St. Louis 1904 World’s Fair.”

LANGUAGES — Professor of German Johannes Schmidt accompanied nine National Scholars and Associate Professor Andrew Pyle to Germany. The group visited Berlin, Stuttgart and the medieval city of Regensburg where the students continued 6-week internships with a partner institution. Before the trip, Herr Schmidt introduced students to the history and culture of Germany in general and the three cities.

HISTORY AND GEOGRAPHY — Professor Michael Silvestri was interviewed by RTE Radio (the Irish national broadcaster) for the program “Irish Imperial Lives” on an episode titled “Charles Tegart Police Intelligence Officer.” He also continued work on his manuscript, “A Country That Has Served the World Well With Police: The Irish Policeman in the British Empire and Beyond,” which will be published in 2025 by New York University Press.

HISTORY AND GEOGRAPHY — Associate Professor Christa Smith traveled to Morocco along with 11 other educators in June and July. Smith attended educational lectures and visited important geographic sites to share curriculum and pedagogy when teaching about North Africa.

HISTORY AND GEOGRAPHY — Assistant Professor Rebecca Shimoni Stoil signed a book contract with the University of Nebraska Press for her monograph on the farm crisis and its role in the origins of modern rural anti-federalism. She conducted research over the summer in special collections at the University of Alabama Library as she works to finish the manuscript.

PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION — Department of Philosophy and Religion Chair and Associate Professor of Religion Benjamin White presented a paper entitled “Pauline epispasm in the Second Century” at the 19th International Conference on Patristic Studies in Oxford, England, on August 7.

HISTORY AND GEOGRAPHY — Associate Professor Lee Wilson is working on transcribing documents she recently collected in Barbados and at the Library of Congress.

HISTORY — Humanities Hub director James Burns was an invited presenter at the symposium, “Colorful Threads: Bridging Oceans Through Artistic Narratives of the Indian Ocean Rim,” held at the Africa Institute in the United Arab Emirates in December. His presentation, “Movie-mad Island: Cinema and Public Leisure in Colonial Mauritius, 1897-1968,” featured an ARC-GIS Storymap that was developed with the assistance of Digital History Ph.D. student Addison Horton and staff at the Clemson University Geospatial Institute. All conference papers will be published in the Duke University Press Journal, “Monsoon: Journal of the Indian Ocean Rim.”

HISTORY — Professor Vernon Burton spoke on the “Two South Carolina Reconstructions and how Briggs v. Elliot became Brown v. Board” at the Horry County Museum on December 2 as part of the South Carolina Humanities series, “Just Sharing: Building Community Through Stories of Our Past.” On December 4, Burton’s discussion with David Rubenstein of the New York Historical Society on “Justice Deferred: Race and the Supreme Court” aired on the “For the Ages: A History Podcast.” On December 7, Burton appeared as a guest alongside Maricopa County, Arizona, Supervisor Bill Gates on NPR’s “The Middle with Jeremy Hobson” to discuss how democracy is at stake in the 2024 election. On December 17, Burton lectured on African Americans and the American Revolution for the keynote of the Charleston Victory Day commemoration for Revolutionary Charleston America 250.

ENGLISH — Pearce Professor of Professional Communication Jordan Frith’s newest book, Barcode, has been mentioned on CNN, The Conversation and in The Atlantic. The book is an engaging exploration of the cultural history of the barcode that examines how this taken-for-granted 50-year-old technology significantly shaped the global economy and became maybe the most recognizable icon of contemporary capitalism. The book covers the early history of the barcode. It analyzes how the barcode somehow ended up playing a significant role in sci-fi dystopias, biblical prophecies, consumer protests, labor movements and a presidential election.

PERFORMING ARTS — Brooks Center Director Emerita Lillian Utsey Harder, artistic director of the Utsey Chamber Music Series, secured one broadcast on America Public Media’s “Performance Today” in December with a broadcast on December 11 of Joachim Stutschewsky’s “Hassidic Fantasy” by the Goldstein-Peled-Fiterstein Trio from their concert on February 9, 2023.

LANGUAGES — Department of Languages chair Joseph Mai’s in-depth review of Martin O’Shaughnessy’s recent work, “Looking Beyond Neoliberalism: French and Francophone Belgian Cinema and the Crisis,” in “SubStance.”

GLOBAL BLACK STUDIES — New assistant professor Vincent Ogoti co-authored an article with Reginold A. Royston titled “Voicing Afro-Modernity: How Black Atlantic Audiobooks Speak Back.” The piece published in the “Journal of African Cultural Studies” examines the evolving world of audiobooks and how they breathe new life into critical works of Black Atlantic literature. The authors explore how audiobooks like Zora Neale Hurston’s “Barracoon” and Yaa Gyasi’s “Homegoing” resonate with listeners, offering a fresh perspective on these profound narratives. The article highlights how sound studies scholars and literary critics alike can reconsider the importance of the “talking book” as a critical form of oral literature. Ogoti and Royston offer a method of “close listening,” drawing on the tactics of reading in sonic literary studies and suggest, through engagement with the work of scholars such as Ato Quayson, Tsitsi Jaji and others, an interdiscursive approach toward “binaural” voices in African and Afro-descendant cultural production.

LANGUAGES — Professor Eric Touya published “Liberal Arts Approaches to Teaching Women Entrepreneurship in Senegal: Narratives, Ethics, Empathy” in “The Entrepreneurial Humanities: The Crucial Role of the Humanities in Enterprise and the Economy.” He also published a review of “Gender and the Spatiality of Blackness in Contemporary Afro-French Narratives” by Polo B. Moji in “French Review, 97.2” and of “Misère de l’homme sans Dieu: Michel Houellebecq et la question de la foi” by Caroline Julliot et Agathe Novak-Lechevalier in “French Review, 97.1.”