Meet Our Fellows
Current Denbo Center Fellows, 2024–25
With the support of the UT Chancellor’s Office, the Office of Research and Engagement, our affiliated arts and humanities departments, and the College of Arts and Sciences, the Denbo Center supports the creation of groundbreaking humanities research through our fellowship programs. These individuals—Faculty Fellows, a Digital Humanities Faculty Fellow, Graduate Fellows, and a Marco Haslam Dissertation Fellow—are listed below.
Faculty Fellows
Salvador Bartera
Assistant Professor, Department of Classics
Project Title: Bernardino Stefonio, S.J., Flavia Tragoedia: critical edition, English translation, and commentary
Project Description
In the year 1600, during the celebrations for the Jubilee of Pope Clement VIII, Bernardino Stefonio staged a grandiose play at the Roman Jesuit College, where he was professor of rhetoric. The Flavia, a tragedy centered around the gens Flavia, specifically the principate of Domitian’s last, most tyrannical years, comprises five acts of Latin poetry in the style of Seneca.
Jesuit Colleges were instrumental in promoting the propagandistic message of the Counter-reformation, for their highly centralized mission provided a structured school curriculum that would educate future Catholic leaders and evangelizers. Theatrical performances represented an important component of Jesuit education. Stefonio’s Flavia, therefore, was not just a “school play”, but an elaborate, multilayered, rhetorical tool.
My study’s goal will be to explicate the many interpretative layers that this play offers, through an accurate translation and commentary that will embrace matters of language, history, and literary analysis. I will also provide a wide-ranging introduction, in which I aim to place Stefonio and his works in the Jesuit culture of the second half of the sixteenth century.
About Salvador Bartera
Salvador Bartera is an assistant professor of Classics at UT. His main research interests focus on Roman historiography, particularly Tacitus. He is also interested in the reception of the Classics in the Renaissance. His main publications include articles on the Annals, the concept of fides in the Histories, the history of the commentary tradition of Tacitus, his first Italian translations and Tacitist commentators, and the neo-Latin Jesuit poet Stefonio. He is currently completing a commentary on Annals 16 and preparing an edition of Stefonio’s Flavia Tragoedia.
Kristen Block
Associate Professor, Department of History
Project Title: Desire, Corruption, and Healing in Early Caribbean Transcultural Flows
Project Description
Desire, Corruption, and Healing in Early Caribbean Transcultural Flows explores multilingual archives to investigate a range of early modern beliefs from Africa, Europe, and the indigenous Americas about healing a sufferer’s body, mind, and spirit. In a violent and precarious world, patients and doctors engaged in intercultural dialogues about the origins of uneasily defined ailments like leprosy or sought out potions or remedies for the everyday challenges of relationships. The book project, which Block will complete as a DCHA fellow, argues that the globalized roots of holistic medicine were birthed in the Caribbean, and have yet to be fully comprehended by traditional histories of medicine.
About Kristen Block
Kristen Block is an associate professor of history and a specialist in the societies and cultures of the early modern Caribbean and Atlantic Worlds.
Marcus Harvey
Assistant Professor, Department of Religious Studies
Project Title: “Life is War”: African Epistemology and Black Religious Hermeneutics
Project Description
Dr. Harvey’s monograph, titled “Life is War”: African Epistemology and Black Religious Hermeneutics, is rooted in a growing need to develop new approaches to theorizing the spiritual contours of black experience in the United States. As a transdisciplinary phenomenology informed by this need and by ethnographic fieldwork, his project explores epistemological traditions embedded in the religious cultures of the Akan of southern Ghana and the Yorùbá of southwestern Nigeria. A principal aim of the book involves placing Akan and Yorùbá theories of knowledge in conversation with black spirituality and literature with an eye toward challenging the regnant assumption that black religious experience is most legible within narratives of liberation undergirded by biblical imaginaries and the symbol of American freedom.
About Marcus Harvey
Marcus L. Harvey joined the University of Tennessee’s Department of Religious Studies as an assistant professor in fall 2023. He comes to UT from the University of North Carolina, Asheville, where he served as an assistant and associate professor of religious studies for nine years. Prior to that, he earned his PhD with distinction from Emory University and his bachelor’s from Morehouse College. His research expertise encompasses indigenous African and Africana religious thought, Zora Neale Hurston, black folklore, literature and religion, the phenomenology of religion, and epistemology. Some of his scholarship appears in The Journal of Africana Religions, Estudos de Religião, Religions, and The Palgrave Handbook of African Traditional Religion.
Noriko Horiguchi
Associate Professor, Department of World Languages & Cultures
Project Title: Milk and the Making of Modern Japan
Project Description
Milk and the Making of Modern Japan is the first English-language monograph on the cultural history of milk in Japan. Horiguchi’s research uncovers the complex intersectional relations between cow’s milk and human milk. The meanings attached to milk in Japan play a major role in modern Japanese notions of health and healing, imperial strength and postwar democratic reform, and the overlapping medical, material, and spiritual aspects of motherhood. Horiguchi’s innovative approach to the multifaceted interplay between mundane cow’s milk (gyū-nyū) and essentialized “mother’s milk” (bo-nyū) in Japan deepens readers’ understanding of overarching narratives of nation, health, and modernity—and the challenges these narratives face. Drawing on diverse sources, from textbooks and government policy statements to works of literature and visual representations of healthy Japanese bodies—and the national body—this study of cow’s milk as a supplement to and replacement for human milk tells the intricate and self-contradictory story of a seemingly unified, peaceful, and beautiful Japan that safeguards its racial and ethnic exceptionalism, male privilege, and control of female bodies. This project compels readers to think about the remaking of modern Japan both (1) through the lens of cow’s milk as a national drink and symbol in the Cold War era that functioned not only as part of the renewed nationalist discourse on recovery, growth, and strength, but also as “white liquid” that symbolically washed away colonial violence; and (2) through the use of “white ink” (breastmilk) by contemporary Japanese women writers whose works expose Japan’s postcolonial legacy and reclaim women’s agency.
About Noriko Horiguchi
Noriko J. Horiguchi is and associate professor of Japanese literature at the University of Tennessee. Her research centers on the intersection of literature, gender, and politics, and modern and contemporary Japanese cultural history. Her first book, Women Adrift: The Literature of Japan’s Imperial Body (University of Minnesota Press, 2011), reassesses three of modern Japan’s most famous women writers—Yosano Akiko, Tamura Toshiko, and Hayashi Fumiko—with a focus on how kokutai nationalism enfolded the bodies of women as the figurative womb of the nation. Horiguchi argues that while these writers resisted the patriarchal forces of the state domestically and asserted agency by traveling outside of Japan, they often ended up contributing to Japanese nationalism, racism, and imperialistic expansion through their writing abroad. For her current book project, Milk and the Making of Modern Japan, Horiguchi has received a Japan Foundation Research Fellowship, as well as Visiting Scholarships at Kyoto University and the University of Tokyo.
Xuefei Ma
Department of World Languages & Cultures
Project Title: Trans(re)lation of Women’s Scripts: Personal Stories and Nested Feminisms from Rural China to the Sinophone World
Project Description
This project explores the agentic role of women’s writing in articulating both individual life stories and coalitional politics when the neoliberal capitalist forces distribute the norms of self-care and subject individuals into precarious social fields and the conflicting forces of globalization and nationalism sabotage transnational feminist solidarity. It examines the promises and problems of women’s bonding in the culture of nüshu (“女书/女書”, literally women’s writing or scripts, a kind of mosquito-shaped, gendered scripts different from Chinese characters) and nüshu-inspired artistic expressions in cinema, contemporary art, and creative writing in mainland China, Hong Kong, Macau, and Taipei. I argue, to work beyond the constraints of class and regional differences, gendered coalitions have to be turned into multi-focal, decentered fields to articulate women’s singularity, and nüshu-inspired women’s writing in diverse artistic media offers a model of addressing both individual and coalitional articulations. This interdisciplinary project involves translation of nüshu works, analysis of various art forms, and theorization of feminist performance, through which it articulates a world of nested feminisms – from rural China to the Sinophone world – that creatively responds to the intra-acting forces of the male-centered Chinese culture, criticism of Chineseness from Sinophone communities, and women’s everyday struggles with the Chinese-language-based sexual violence.
About Xuefei Ma
Xuefei Ma is an assistant professor of Chinese culture at the Department of World Languages & Cultures at UT. Her research focuses on feminist, queer, and trans cultural production in the global Chinese and Sinophone communities. Adopting interdisciplinary methods to examine contemporary art, cinema, and feminist activism, Xuefei considers the following two key questions: 1) how Chinese feminisms contribute to the global feminist movements, and 2) in what ways mutual transformations between humans and animals in Chinese literary works and digital media production contribute to our understanding of the Anthropocene.
Danielle Procope Bell
Department of Africana Studies
Project Title: Dispersed Domesticities: Uncovering Black Feminist/ Feminine Thought (1892-1920)
Project Description
Dispersed Domesticities: Uncovering Black Feminist/ Feminine Thought argues that Black feminist thinkers at the turn-of-the-twentieth century forcefully reclaimed gender through their innovative reinterpretation of femininity and motherhood. They rejected slavery’s legacy of dehumanization and, specifically, the non-woman status that slaveholding ideology prescribed to them. By doing so, they sophisticatedly asserted their right to safety, family, and joy.
About Danielle Procope Bell
Dr. Danielle Procope Bell is an assistant professor of Africana Studies at UT. She is an affiliate faculty in English and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies (WGS). In 2021, Dr. Procope Bell earned her Ph.D. in English from Vanderbilt University. At UT Knoxville, she teaches a wide variety of courses on Black feminist theory, African American literature, and racial health equity. Dr. Procope Bell’s current book project, entitled Dispersed Domesticities: Uncovering Black Feminist/ Feminine Thought, argues that Black feminist thinkers at the turn-of-the-twentieth century forcefully reclaimed gender through their innovative reinterpretation of femininity and motherhood. Dr. Procope Bell is passionate about Black maternal health and is a core team member of the Knox Birth Equity Alliance—a local collective of Black women engaged in reproductive justice advocacy. She is also a board member for the local nonprofit, Gennisi Charitable Birth Services, which provides free and low-cost doula care to expectant parents.
Digital Humanities Fellow
Jamal-Jared Alexander
Assistant Professor, Department of English
Project Title: A Social Action Toolkit
Project Description
Coming soon
About Jamal-Jared Alexander
Jamal-Jared is a social justice researcher and scholar-activist trained in qualitative methodology. His research includes the Rhetoric of Health & Medicine, as well as DEI recruitment and retention. Using Critical Race and Black Feminist Theory as his theoretical lenses, his research aims to create dedicated spaces and equitable opportunities for marginalized communities in professional and academic settings. He has experience developing and implementing scalable programmatic cultural spaces at universities that support the educational achievement and well-being of multiply marginalized or underrepresented (MMU) students by enhancing campus life through political, social, academic, emotional, and cultural support. He teaches courses in document design, research methods in technical communication, and writing about the disciplines with a strong foundation of social justice embedded in the curriculum.
Graduate Fellows
Mehtap Ince
Doctoral Student, Department of World Languages & Cultures
Project Title: A Cross-Textual Event Analysis based on German Short Stories
Project Description
The goal of this dissertation research is to present a theoretical frame that allows the reader to reflect on current real-world events and understand cultural dynamics through a creative, artistic, and still scientific lens. This dissertation builds upon academic research as well as on personal values that are in alignment with the principles of the UTHC. I am “asking about the meaning of life; encountering new languages, cultures, and customs; when seeking for answers about the history behind our present realities”.
About Mehtap Ince
Mehtap Ince holds an MA in German Linguistics and Contemporary History with concentration on psycholinguistics, spatial relations and events narration by mono- and bilingual speakers. After graduating in 2011, she immersed herself in diverse professional experiences and active participation in the arts. Since 2020, she has been a PhD student and teaching assistant in German in the Department of World Languages & Cultures.
Amanda Klug
Doctoral Student, Department of History
Project Title: Memories of the Constitutional Convention, 1787-1861
Project Description
Amanda’s dissertation explores memories of the 1787 Federal Convention and the development of constitutional exegesis from the Founding through the Civil War. Her research addresses questions about the legacy of the American Revolution, nineteenth-century US political culture and intellectual life, and the antislavery movement.
About Amanda Klug
Amanda is a historian of United States politics, particularly the U.S. Constitution and political philosophy. Her research has been supported by the UT Denbo Center and the Center for the Study of Tennesseans and War, as well as the Library Company of Philadelphia, Historical Society of Pennsylvania, and the Massachusetts Historical Society. Amanda has worked for the Department of History as both a research assistant and a teaching assistant, and is an advisee of Dr. Michael Woods.
Linh Mac
Doctoral Student, Department of Philosophy
Project Title: Krinostic Injustice
Project Description
Krinostic Injustice identifies a new type of epistemic injustice in which a hearer does not question a speaker’s account of a sequence of basic events but calls into question that speaker’s characterization of their experience. Krinostic injustice wrongs an agent in their capacity as a competent judge of their experience (in Ancient Greek, the verb κρῑ́νω means “to decide” or “to judge”). I argue that this form of epistemic injustice manifests in sexual assault trials, while keeping in mind its application to other contexts.
About Linh Mac
Linh Mac is a PhD candidate in the Department of Philosophy. Her current research combines social and political philosophy with ethics, epistemology, and feminist philosophy. Her dissertation examines the philosophical implications of the race- and gender-related oppression experienced by historically marginalized social groups. She has recently published a translation of an article by Jürgen Habermas, reflecting her interest in German thought. Find out more about Mac on her website.
Kyle Vratarich
Doctoral Student, Department of History
Project Title: “Distinguished Scoundrel”: General Orville Babcock, The Whiskey Ring and the Dawn of a New Breed of Political Operative
Project Description
The Reconstruction Era was a time of squandered potential and political turbulence, in part because of the development of a new breed of political operative. These politicos, many of whom were former or active military men who fell back on their training to get things accomplished by whatever means necessary, were deeply embedded in the growing system of “rings” that emerged to fill the hole left by the rapid expansion of centralized power during the Civil War. This project investigates this new wave of political actors through the lens of General Orville Babcock, Ulysses S. Grant’s aide-de-campe during the Civil War who followed him to the White House as his Private Secretary (similar to a modern-day Chief of Staff). Babcock served as Grant’s mouthpiece to the Cabinet and at times to the public while also revitalizing the nation’s capital on its Board of Public Works, yet he was allegedly involved in some of the most significant scandals of the Grant Administration, including the attempted annexation of Santo Domingo and the Whiskey Ring, of which he was allegedly the mastermind. By looking at daily Reconstruction politics through the lens of Orville Babcock, we can better understand how he and other new politicos developed a new method of political action not in single episodes, but throughout their lives while simultaneously understanding how opportunities to engage in corrupt behavior became possible through perpetuated rumors of political corruption.
About Kyle Vratarich
Kyle Vratarich is a PhD candidate at UT in the Department of History. He focuses on the United States during the nineteenth century, specifically during the Civil War and Reconstruction. Kyle is interested in Civil War era political culture, specifically postwar presidential politics, the expansion of powers that occurred during the Civil War, and the political turmoil that resulted from this expansion during Reconstruction. His dissertation concerns the political culture of the Grant Administration, particularly claims of corruption therein, through the lens of President Grant’s Private Secretary, General Orville Babcock. Kyle hails from Eldersburg, Maryland, a suburb of Baltimore. He earned his Associate’s Degree at the Community College of Baltimore County, his Bachelor’s at Towson University, and his Master’s at American University. In his time at UT, he has served as a teaching assistant for a wide array of history classes and has held multiple research assistantships, including one at the Center for the Study of Tennesseans and War. Kyle is extremely excited to join this year’s group of Denbo Center Fellows!
Marco Haslam Dissertation Fellow
Stacie Beach
Doctoral Student, Department of History
Project Title: Arbitration and Conciliation: A Social History of Imperial Petitions and Rescripts, 200-450
Project Description
Stacie’s research focuses on Roman administrative practices in the Eastern provinces, particularly during the period of the Tetrarchy. Her dissertation, titled “Arbitration and Conciliation: A Social History of Imperial Petitions and Rescripts, 200-450” examines how ordinary people perceived their relationship with Roman emperors and how they used the petition system to navigate every-day problems and social anxieties.
About Stacie Beach
Stacie Beach is an historian of Late Antiquity, focusing primarily on the Eastern Roman Empire. As an archaeologist with a continuing interest in material culture, Stacie has had several opportunities to work on excavations in Italy, Israel, and, most recently, Jordan, with UTK’s own “Dig Jordan” program at ‘Ayn Gharandal. She also participated in a 2-week intensive epigraphy and digital humanities program at the American Academy in Rome.
Stacie’s research and travel have been supported by funds from UT’s Marco Institute, the Medieval Academy of America, and Phi Alpha Theta National History Honor Society, among others. She was also the Department of History’s 2023 recipient of the Josh Hodge Award for the Recovery of Lost Voices.
“[As a fellow at the Humanities Center] I had the opportunity to work on my book daily without the distractions that come with the normal responsibilities of being a faculty member. I could come to work at the Humanities Center ready to think, write, reflect, brainstorm, and analyze—truly invest my time and energy in the historical process and everything it entails.”
—Brandon Winford, Assistant Professor, UT Department of History
UTHC Faculty Fellow, Class of 2016–2017