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.
