Heath Fogg Davis (PhD in Politics, Princeton University, B.A. Harvard University) is the Director of Temple’s Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies Program. His most recent book, Beyond Trans: Does Gender Matter? (New York University Press 2017) questions our need for gender policies, and offers practical strategies to help organizations of all kinds design and implement policies that are both trans-inclusive and institutionally smart. 

Project Statement: In the wake of the 2020 racial protests that erupted following George Floyd’s murder, several U.S. companies, firms and non-profits hired chief diversity and inclusion officers. My time as a CHAT fellow will be spent working on a book that explores the history and current proliferation of this executive role. When and why were these job titles created in the first place? What do diversity professionals do, and how have their roles changed over time? And to what extent has the professionalization of diversity work been helpful to businesses and non-profits in achieving their diversity and inclusion goals?

Alex Gottesmans' work ranges widely from Solon and Homer to myth and ritual, from Plato to Athenian political history. The thread that connects these disparate topics is a continuing fascination with the forms and modes of ancient Greek political thought and practice, broadly conceived. The overarching agenda of Alex’s research is to widen the scope of what constitutes the study of Greek politics, in order to better understand ancient behavior and mentalities.

Project Statement: Project Statement: While at CHAT, I will be working on a new project, The Curse of Cylon: Civil Violence, Memory and the Dawn of Democracy in Archaic Athens. It seeks to understand the historical and political conditions that gave rise to democracy in ancient Athens at the turn of the 6th century BCE. Previous accounts have stressed the developing consciousness of the demos, or people, over and against that of the elites. My project instead seeks to put civil violence at the front and center of the story. I argue that civil violence was much more endemic and pervasive than previously recognized, and that responding to it was the urgent problem that early democratic reforms sought to address. An important step the Athenians took in this effort was to cast a “veil" of euphemism and silence over the events and responses to them. This veil, while effective in fostering communal healing, has also served to obscure the conditions from historians’ gaze. 

Kate Brelje is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Philosophy at Temple University. Her current research engages feminist philosophy, normative ethics, aesthetics and environmental philosophy.

Project Statement: As a CHAT fellow, I will be finishing my dissertation on ethics of care and plant life. The first half of the dissertation argues for an ethic of care that extends beyond human persons. The second half approaches care ethics in three distinct case studies of human-plant relationships: bonsai plants, tomato plants, and sequoia trees. Each of these three provide distinct relational contexts: artistry and kinship, domestication and use, and wilderness and awe, respectively. During the course of the fellowship, the case studies will be my primary focus. I aim to evaluate the strength of the plant-inclusive care ethic by examining the testimony of plant caretakers (particularly bonsai artists, horticulturalists, farmers, gardeners, foresters, park rangers, and seed savers) and interrogating historical, cultural, and scientific plant paradigms.

Project Statement: My dissertation, “The Historical Romance of Czechoslovak Communism,” seeks to understand the political dynamics of the immediate postwar period in Czechoslovakia through researching the uses of history by the Czechoslovak Communist Party as a political tool and as a site of political engagement and mobilization. In its efforts to increase its popular support, the Communist Party made frequent and specific references to Czech and Slovak history, situating itself and its politics within broad and deep seated political understandings and narratives among the population. Communists effectively deployed history to play on the emotions, self-conception, and recent experience of Czechs and Slovaks, making claims about periodization, meaning in history, the progressive and inevitable nature of development and socialism, tropes of Slavic character, and the glorious heroes of the Czechoslovak past. Other scholars have studied how the Communist Party used historical and cultural tropes to appear to the population. However, what is not clear within the scholarship as of now is how the people who flocked to the Communist Party in the immediate post-war period understood the subjective and semantic content of these historical and cultural tropes, particularly how they reconciled Czechoslovak nationalism with the stated internationalism of communism. My research asks how did Czechoslovak communists reinterpret and use the past, what forms did this take, how did everyday people respond to and engage with this historical usage, and what institutions and social practices reflected this “historical romance” of communism?

Tania Islam is a sixth-year Ph.D. candidate in the Department of English, College of Liberal Arts at Temple University. Her research focuses on 20th and 21st centuries American fiction, consumerist fiction, trauma studies, Transnational studies, global cultural studies, and anthropology. She also holds a graduate certificate in Teaching in Higher Education. 

Project Statement: As a 2021-22 CHAT graduate student fellow, I will be completing my dissertation tentatively titled “Things Left Unsaid: Historical Silences and Multiethnic Women’s Fiction”. My dissertation employs a comparative and interdisciplinary approach to analyze the connection between historical elisions, trauma, and narrative. By analyzing the works of Dina Nayeri, Edwidge Danticat, Julia Alvarez, and Amy Tan, I map out the individual trauma suffered by the women protagonists in their novels, and how at a deeper level this trauma is interlinked with larger political and historical events. At its core, my dissertation holds up the contrarian view that history is not unidimensional and often effaces individual experiences by prioritizing the collective, and much of this process is dependent on which party produces said history. My dissertation also examines the problematic relationship that these women authors envision for their female protagonists in the United States, and how their status as an “outsider” sets them up for cultural and social pushbacks that complicate the process of bidimensional acculturation. I use theoretical frameworks across disciplines, such as those of Cathy Caruth, Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Michel-Rolph Trouillot, and others to set up this comparative approach. Ultimately, my aim is to investigate the ways in which fiction works as a counternarrative to officially produced “history”, plugs historical elisions and amnesia, and sets in motion trauma remediation.

Joseph Kopta is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Art History at Temple University. He is a specialist in the art and architecture of the medieval Mediterranean, with intellectual interests informed by materiality, cross-cultural interaction, and networks between Venice, Byzantium, and caliphal courts.

Project Statement: As a 2021-22 CHAT Fellow, I will be completing my dissertation, “Chromatic Networks: Materiality and Materialism of Middle Byzantine Gospel Lectionaries (ca. 850–1204 CE).” My dissertation as a whole examines the materiality of Byzantine manuscripts in terms of genesis, modes of production, physical materials, and liturgical and monastic settings. In this study, I consider deluxe, Byzantine, Greek-language Gospel Lectionaries produced in the Eastern Mediterranean from the ninth to thirteenth centuries CE, used during a sacred Christian mass according to the centralized liturgical Rite of Constantinople. My study expands the traditional methodological framework of textual and pictorial analysis of these sacred objects, taking advantage of a cross-disciplinary approach that employs codicological analysis with new scientific technologies that identify precise materials and techniques. During my time as a CHAT Fellow, I will complete the final chapter of my dissertation, which investigates Medieval philosophies of chemistry, alchemy, and the understanding of matter, with the aim of reconciling Byzantine, pre-Newtonian physics in its intellectual sense with actual data on manuscript materials (especially pigments) that I address in an earlier chapter.