Meet Our Fellows
Current Humanities Center Fellows, 2023–24
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 UT Humanities 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
Georgi Gardiner
Associate Professor, Department of Philosophy
Project Title: She Said, He Said
Project Description
Gardiner’s research focuses on when evidence justifies conclusions, especially in high stakes social contexts such as legal convictions, scientific conclusions, and morally loaded beliefs. Gardiner’s current monograph project, She Said, He Said, investigates the epistemology of rape accusations, focusing on formal institutional procedures. ‘She said, he said’ cases are accusations of rape, followed by denials, with no further significant evidence, such as credible alibis or third-party witnesses. In such cases, the accusation is probably true. The project explains why uncorroborated rape accusations are excellent evidence of guilt. The research thus helps reduce undue doubt about rape accusations. But the epistemic force of rape accusations generates a paradox. This paradox—which arises from the contrast between the relatively weak ‘preponderance’ standard and the characteristic epistemic strength of rape accusations—reveals tensions among plausible feminist and liberal commitments. Building on recent insights from philosophy and law, She Said, He Said challenges our understanding of testimony, proof, epistemic justice, and the epistemology of rape.
Hilary Havens
Associate Professor, Department of English
Project Title: The Cambridge Edition of Frances Burney’s Cecilia
Project Description
Frances Burney (1752-1840) was one of the most celebrated authors of the long eighteenth century, and her works influenced later authors such as Jane Austen and Charles Dickens. This project is a critical edition of Burney’s second novel Cecilia (1782) that is part of the Cambridge Edition of the Novels of Frances Burney. Published at the height of Burney’s powers, Cecilia is a bildungsroman focused on the orphan Cecilia Beverley and the various obstacles she must face before she can marry Mortimer Delvile. There are significant variants and deletions within the manuscript draft of Cecilia, and the longest and most strikingly obliterated passage is located within the novel’s famous masquerade scene, which I have recovered using techniques in digital paleography. The newly restored text describes the bizarre satanic rites of Cecilia’s admirer, Mr. Monckton. In my monograph, I have argued that Burney’s suppression and revision of this scene, when read alongside her contemporaneous letters, reveals that she succumbed to familial pressures to remove innovative elements while writing the novel. The fuller range of manuscript evidence that I have begun to recover has already influenced scholarship regarding Burney’s Cecilia, and my further work on the critical edition has the potential to unearth findings that could continue to change our views of Burney and her authorship.
Eleni Palis
Assistant Professor, English & Cinema Studies
Project Title: A Cinema of Reparations: Contemporary American Media and the Reparative Mode
Project Description
A Cinema of Reparations theorizes a “reparative mode” in cinema, uniting several contemporary and concurrent debates regarding reparations and reparative justice underway in mainstream American politics and law, in racial justice organizing and activism, and in film theory and pedagogy at large. While “reparative modes” increasingly refract through film archives, industries, economies, genres, and curricula, as archivists, practitioners, scholars, and franchise executives attempt to decolonize and deconstruct exclusionary film institutions, no work yet exists on how reparative aesthetics emerge onscreen, within contemporary American media. A Cinema of Reparations locates how cinema refracts and reflects the contemporary reparations debate, spanning from Queen Mother Audley Moore in the mid-1960s to the 2019 and 2021 hearings on bill H.R.40: Commission to Study and Develop Reparations Proposals for African Americans (so numbered to invoke William T. Sherman’s 1865 “40 acres and a mule” promise ). A Cinema of Reparations uncovers a reparative mode, especially within films and media that adapt, amend, or un-make a film predecessor. As critically metacinematic engagements with history, the reparative mode helps to point the way forward in the contemporary sociopolitical struggle for reparative justice in American cultural life.
Digital Humanities Fellow
Graduate Fellows
Marco Haslam Dissertation Fellow
Matthew Baker
Doctoral Student, Department of History
Project Title: The World of Lérins: A Late Antique Monastic Ontology
Project Description
At the start of the fifth century, the island monastery of Lérins sat for a few years at the center of Christian discourse in the Latin West. Located several miles off the coast of southern Gaul, near modern Cannes, Lérins educated many of late ancient Gaul’s most well-known clerics: Honoratus of Arles, Eucherius of Lyon, Salvian of Marseille, and Caesarius of Arles, among others. Nevertheless, this important monastery has recently received very little sustained attention in the historiography.
This dissertation project traces these early years at Lérins, from its founding around 410 CE through the end of the fifth century. It follows the development of a distinctly Lerinian brand of monasticism—one among many possible pre-Benedictine “monasticisms”—as a blend of extreme socio-economic privilege, confidence in divinity’s immediate presence on their island, and an “Origenist” insistence on human potential and salvific agency. The dissertation project describes this intersection of belief as a “Lerinian ontology,” or “way of being,” employing language from the anthropologist Philippe Descola. The project will offer new ways of understanding not only Lérins but also the immense variety of Christian monasticisms alive in the late ancient world.
“[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