Current Fellows
Obert C. & Grace A. Tanner Humanities Center Visiting Research Fellowship | The Virgil C. Aldrich Faculty Fellows | The Annie Clark Tanner Teaching & Research Fellow in Environmental Humanities | Graduate Research Fellows | Mormon Studies Graduate Research Fellow
research presentation schedule
Obert C. and Grace A. Tanner Humanities Center Visiting Research Fellowship
C.J. Alvarez
Associate Professor, Mexican American and Latina-o Studies, University of Texas at Austin
Research: "Desert Time"
The Virgil C. Aldrich Faculty Fellows
Jenny Andrus
Professor, Department of Writing and Rhetoric Studies
Research: "'Under His Thumb:' Storytelling about Staying in Violent Intimate Relationships"
Nadja Durbach
Professor, Department of History
Research: "From Slaves to Enslaved People: Slave Registration and the Emergence of Identity
Documentation in the British World, 1812-34"
About Nadja
Eric Herschthal
Assistant Professor, Department of History
Research: "Carbon Conscripts: Slavery and the Origins of Climate Change"
Thi Nguyen
Associate Professor, Department of Philosophy
Research: "The Social Function of Scoring Systems"
Hua Zhu
Assistant Professor, Department of Writing and Rhetoric Studies
Research: "From Resistance to Interconnectivity: Enacting the Rhetoric of Yin"
The Annie Clark Tanner Teaching & Research Fellow in Environmental Humanities
Darcie DeAngelo
Assistant Professor, Department of Sociocultural Anthropology, University of Oklahoma
Research: "For the Love of Rats"
Nicole Clawson
PhD Candidate, Department of Writing and Rhetoric Studies
Research: "'We’re just people. We’re not these crazy guys with guns:' Rhetorical Narratives and Officer Identity Performance"
Matthew Glasgow
PhD Candidate, Department of English
Research: "They, or Restoration: An Essay"
Mormon Studies Graduate Research Fellow
Charlotte Hansen Terry
PhD Candidate, Department of History, University of California Davis
Research: "To Make Saints: Mormon Adoptions and Familial Belonging in the Pacific"
C.J. Alvarez
Associate Professor, Mexican American and Latina-o Studies, University of Texas at Austin
Research: "Desert Time"
There is a vast desert in the heart of North America, the biggest of its kind on the continent. This dryland is called the Chihuahuan Desert, at least by some. Most people though, in either the United States or Mexico, do not call it by any name and would be hard put to find it on a map. It is an ancient place in the midst of time-illiterate societies, a highly specialized ecosystem populated largely by people stricken with environmental amnesia. This talk is about the history of the desert which is, depending on how you measure, over 8,000 years old. There is no academic discipline, calendrical system, or common vocabulary available to describe this length of time, the lifespan of the desert. This talk proposes, with trepidation and humility, several ways of organizing desert time in the absence of any intrinsically meaningful schema and in the face of a human-centered worldview that too often dominates our imaginations and impoverishes our feel for the world outside our species.
C.J. Alvarez is an environmental historian. His first book, "Border Land, Border Water: A History of Construction on the U.S.-Mexico Divide" (University of Texas Press, 2019) won two book awards for its contribution to our understanding of the built environment of the border. Based on dozens of rare and never-before-seen historic maps, photographs, and blueprints, as well as archival documents and oral histories, he explains how and why the history of survey markers, surveillance infrastructure, and fencing is connected to the history of river engineering, damming, and other hydraulic projects. At the Tanner Humanities Center he will focus on his second book project, "The Arid Heart" which is about the history of the Chihuahuan Desert, the largest and least-known expanse of dryland in North America. He begins the story at the end of the last Ice Age and, drawing on a combination of Native American oral histories, archaeological records, radiocarbon-based paleoenvironmental reconstructions, and historical archives he pieces together a multi-millennial story of the place we now know as the “Chihuahuan Desert.” Much more than a regional story, this book is meant to be a meditation on the discipline of history itself, an examination of the fragmentary nature of the past, and an attempt at ecocentric history writing. Alvarez’s other work has appeared in academic history journals, an exhibition catalog accompanying the photography of Zoe Leonard, and the Brooklyn Rail. He is an associate professor in the department of Mexican American and Latina/o Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. He was born and raised in the desert of southern New Mexico.
Jenny Andrus
Professor, Department of Writing and Rhetoric Studies
Research: "'Under His Thumb': Storytelling about Staying in Violent Intimate Relationships"
There is a debate in discourse analysis about the proper way to generate narratives for research. There are those who elicit narratives in interviews, producing longer, developed narratives that have likely been practiced in earlier storytelling events (Labov and Waltsky). Then, there are scholars who argue that narrative analysis should focus on narratives occurring in interaction (De Fina and Georgakopoulou). Additionally, narrative analysis must consider the relationship between the local context of storytelling and the macro context of sociocultural mores.
Jennifer Andrus is an assistant professor of Engish and faculty in the University Writing Program at the University of Utah. She directs the first-year writing sequence at the University of Utah and teaches courses on rhetorical theory, discourse analysis, legal rhetoric, and gender & rhetoric. Her current research is on domestic violence and the Anglo-American law of evidence and the ways in which metadiscourses and text production constrain discursive agency. She has publications in Technical Communication Quarterly, Discourse and Society, Language in Society, and College Composition and Communication, and her book manuscript titled "Entextualizing Domestic Violence: Language Ideology and Violence Against Women in the Anglo-American Hearsay Principle" was published by Oxford University Press in 2015.
Nadja Durbach
Professor, Department of History
Research: "From Slaves to Enslaved People: Slave Registration and the Emergence of
Identity Documentation in the British World, 1812-34"
The abolition of the slave trade in 1807 led to an illegal traffic in slaves in Britain’s Caribbean and Indian Ocean colonies. Britain’s government attempted to curb this by mandating the registration of the “lawfully enslaved” in every slave-holding colony. Because copies of these registers were kept in a central office in London, they were one of few ways in which an individual could be vouched for across the British empire. Predating birth certificates, slave registration was thus among the first modern forms of identity documentation. In documenting some combination of name, color, employment, age, stature, country of origin, distinguishing marks, and kinship relations these government records participated in codifying how identity was coming to be understood in the early nineteenth-century British world. Despite government claims that this practice safeguarded their property, however, planters fiercely resisted slave registration. This was not only because they saw this measure as unwarranted interference in colonial society. It was also because the registration process went well beyond a population accounting. The requirement to record each individual on a separate line with discrete data, compelled planters to acknowledge that the enslaved were unique persons even while registering them as chattel.
Nadja Durbach is Professor of Modern British History at the University of Utah and the co-editor of the Journal of British Studies. She received her BA (Honours) from the University of British Columbia and her PhD from the Johns Hopkins University. In 2000 she joined the faculty of the University of Utah. She is the author of three books on the history of the body in modern Britain: "Bodily Matters: The Anti-Vaccination Movement in England, 1853-1907" (Duke, 2005), "Spectacle of Deformity: Freak Shows and Modern British Culture" (California, 2010), and "Many Mouths: The Politics of Food in Britain from the Workhouse to the Welfare State" (Cambridge, 2020). Her current book project is entitled "Registration Nation: Identity, Privacy, and the Recording of Persons in Modern Britain."
Eric Herschthal
Assistant Professor, Department of History
Research: "Carbon Conscripts: Slavery and the Origins of Climate Change"
"Carbon Conscripts" explores the role racial slavery played in the origins of climate change. In recent years, interdisciplinary scholars working across the humanities have suggested that slave plantations may have been an early driver of human-induced climate change. Yet the notion has remained a theoretical conjecture rather than an empirically-tested idea. Drawing on a collaboration with climate scientists, Carbon Conscripts models the carbon emissions of the major slave-grown crops in Anglo-American Atlantic World from the seventeenth through nineteenth century and compares them to emissions from the major non-slave grown commodities of the period. The study ultimately shows that, with some key exceptions, slave-grown commodities dramatically expanded the carbon footprint of the British and American empires long before the transition to fossil fuels, crystalizing a form of racial capitalism that continues to fuel carbon emissions globally today.
Eric Herschthal is an assistant professor of history at the University of Utah who focuses on the early United States, slavery, science, and the environment. As a 2023-2024 Tanner Humanities Center Fellow, he will be working on a new book about slavery’s role in the origins of climate change. His first book, "The Science of Abolition: How Slaveholders Became the Enemies of Progress" (Yale, 2021) explored the ways Black and white abolitionists and scientists used scientific ideas to discredit slaveholders. His academic work has been published in The Journal of the Early Republic, Slavery & Abolition, Early American Studies, and The Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, among other journals. As a former journalist, he continues to write for mainstream outlets such as The New Republic, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The New York Review of Books. He received his doctorate in history from Columbia University.
Thi Nguyen
Associate Professor, Department of Philosophy
Research: "The Social Function of Scoring Systems"
We find scoring systems aplenty in both games and institutional life – in all the rankings and metrics which surround us. Why are scores so common, and what does it mean that we are so often entangled in scoring systems that we don’t entirely control? A score is a quantitative evaluation that renders a singular verdict. Scores have a typical function: they to encourage convergence on a singular evaluation. They are not transparent engines; they transform our values. Scoring can exert systematic pressures on our social processes of evaluations. They work to suppress pluralism about value, and to discourage evaluations in vague terms, and they encourage evaluation in mechanically repeatable terms. In doing so, scores can also serve to settle key choice points in collective reasoning processes – which explains, in part, the centrality of metrics in institutional deliberation.
I’m C. Thi Nguyen. I used to be a food writer, now I’m a philosophy professor at University of Utah. I write about trust, art, games, and communities. I’m interested in the ways that our social structures and technologies shape how we think and what we value. My first book is "Games: Agency as Art." It was awarded the American Philosophical Associations 2021 Book Prize. It’s about how games are the art form that work in the medium of agency. A game designer doesn’t just create a world – they create who we are in that world. Games shape temporary agencies for artistic purposes. And games turn out to be our way of writing down and communicating modes of agency; by playing them, we can try out different forms of agency. Here’s a summary of the book. There have also been some symposia discussing the book.
Hua Zhu
Assistant Professor, Department of Writing and Rhetoric Studies
Research: "From Resistance to Interconnectivity: Enacting the Rhetoric of Yin"
This lecture proposes the rhetoric of yin 因 as a specific way of power subversion. In early Chinese rhetoric, yin means “to go with local circumstances.” It specifically features a paradoxical act of reforming dominant discourses while performing a level of conformity to the discourses. To recover the rhetoric of yin, I recontextualize Guiguzi, a treatise in the Warring States period of China, and further trace ancient traveling consultants’ practice of yin in the situation of advising nobles. Consultants’ practice of yin invites rhetoricians to consider how one might break through the paradigm of speaking against power and speaking outside power, underlying which is an oppositional and ethnocentric logic that sustains the systematic production of the Other. As a shrewd and responsive rhetoric, yin reorients power subversion from antithetic resistance to interconnectivity, or a relating-yet-separating relationship where there is no center to imagine from but subjects and rhetorics of various kinds can co-exist and become interdependent.
Hua Zhu is Assistant Professor of Writing and Rhetoric Studies at the University of Utah. Her research lies at the intersections of comparative rhetoric, non-Eurocentric history of rhetoric, and transnational writing pedagogies. She has published in Rhetoric Society Quarterly, The Routledge Handbook of Comparative World Rhetorics, Rhetorica, and Composition Forum. Her book-in-progress draws upon practices of speaking to the throne in early China to develop a rhetorical theory to rethink power transformation in today’s global contact zones.
Darcie DeAngelo
Assistant Professor, Department of Sociocultural Anthropology, University of Oklahoma
Research: "For the Love of Rats"
We humans don’t love rats, generally speaking. Ten thousand years ago, after modes of production shifted from prehistoric foraging to more settled types of agriculture, pests coevolved with humans. Over a quarter of the world’s human population still derive their livelihoods from farming as a fulltime occupation while the rest of us depend on this agriculture for subsistence. So do the pests. But that might be overly economically deterministic. Consider the rats themselves. Rats look like pests. Their habits and bodies feed into their stereotypes. They hang out in sewers. Their eyes glow in the dark. They have teeth that chitter and… that tail. Imagine my surprise, then, when I met a group of humans who loved rats. These humans loved rats. I have conducted research on rats for half a decade. My research on rats led me to stories from across the world about human encounters with rats as well as why and how they proliferate so well. From vectors to prey, from enemies to models, to finally beloved, in this lecture I discuss some of the surprising encounters between humans and rats across space and time. Being a rat cannot be understood without understanding being a human, just as being a human cannot be understood without understanding being a rat.
Darcie DeAngelo is an assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Oklahoma. As an environmental and medical anthropologist trained in visual methods, her work engages with human-nonhuman relations such as the love between landmine detection rats and their handlers, the excitement of dogs and humans as they hunt for rats in cities, and the kinship of humans and their sourdough starters. As the Annie Clark Tanner Fellow in Environmental Humanities, she will be writing her book, "For the Love of Rats," which explores the surprising relationships between rats and humans across time and space. She also edits the journal, Visual Anthropology Review. Find more of her work here.
Nicole Clawson
PhD Candidate, Department of Writing and Rhetoric Studies
Research: "'We’re just people. We’re not these crazy guys with guns:' Rhetorical Narratives and Officer Identity Performance"
Narratives can create a shared worldview and provide resources that teach members of a society how to behave. As it does elsewhere, storytelling plays an important role in the work of police officers and in forming and maintaining police culture. Quotidian narratives shape police culture and give rise to officer identities. In this talk, I present a concept called “flexible and evolving identity.” I hold that identity not only emerges in-the-moment but evolves over time. The narratives I analyze consider emergent identities that operate outside traditional officer behavior (i.e., racist, machismo, suspicious, etc.), rhetorically positioning officers as “human.” Being “human” is used to create connection and camaraderie with the public. The stories told by these officers are not “just stories”; they do real rhetorical work to reshape and reframe police culture. Using this analysis, I show that officer identity and police discourse are rhetorically flexible and open to evolution. As more idiosyncratic identities and non-traditional policing narratives are shared, police discourse and culture metamorphosizes.
Nicole Clawson is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Writing & Rhetoric Program at the University of Utah. Her research focuses on narrative, identity, and police rhetorics. For the past two years, she served as the Assistant Director/Graduate Student Liaison in the Writing Program Administration and was nominated twice for the Ramona W. Cannon Award for Graduate Student Teaching Excellence in the Humanities.
Matthew Glasgow
PhD Candidate, Department of English
Research: "They, or Restoration: An Essay"
The Bear River is many and multiple: the primary tributary to a drying ancient lake, a site of state-sanctioned genocide, boundless molecules who have known many paths and many ends, a symbol for our ursine kin who once lumbered in great numbers along their shores. A river, too, is kin. Their flow not only maintains life, but is, in themselves, alive. Their memory insists on histories, both social and environmental, which offer truth in the mud and muck of mythologies of the American West and climate change denial. Can the river bear us? Can we bear them? This lyric essay considers the multiplicity and more-than-human agency of the Bear River, the work being done to restore ecosystems along their path, and if whiteness grounded in colonial extraction will ever allow for such restorative kinship. If we ask a river about their own restoration, they might respond: of whom, for whom, to when, and why?
Matty Layne Glasgow is the author of "deciduous qween" (Red Hen Press, 2019), winner of the Benjamin Saltman Award. His work has recently appeared in Copper Nickel, Ecotone, Gulf Coast, Pleiades, Poetry Daily, and the anthology Queer Nature. Matty has served as the Wasatch Writers in the Schools Coordinator and Editor of Quarterly West at the University of Utah where he is a PhD Candidate in Creative Writing and English Literature. As a Black Earth Institute Fellow, he's working on a book-length project on the Great Salt Lake, and his dissertation is a collection of lyric essays on all things bear entitled Bear With Me.
Charlotte Hansen Terry
PhD Candidate, Department of History, University of California Davis
Research: "To Make Saints: Mormon Adoptions and Familial Belonging in the Pacific"
White Mormon missionaries first arrived in Hawai‘i in 1850 and started the practice of adopting or sponsoring Pacific Islanders and bringing them to the North American West within a few years. Mormon participation in English schools is what led to many of these migrations, and some children then went to Utah and the larger Mormon cultural region to attend school. This paper explores these cross-racial adoptions and how adoption was understood across different communities. The adoption of Pacific Islander children complicated Mormon attempts to expand the boundaries of belonging as adoptions exacerbated tensions with the United States and Pacific nations by the 1890s. This talk is part of a larger project that explores Mormon missionization efforts during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and responses to these efforts by Pacific Islanders and their governments, U.S. imperial agents, and other missionary organizations. It traces how white Mormon missionaries and Pacific Islanders considered their affiliations with one another, and also their attempts to define and expand racial, religious, familial, and national belonging.
Charlotte Hansen Terry is a Ph.D. candidate in U.S. History at the University of California, Davis. Her dissertation, titled “Mormons, Pacific Islanders, and the Boundaries of Belonging in the Age of Empire,” explores Mormon missionization efforts during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and responses to these efforts by Pacific Islanders and their governments, U.S. imperial agents, and other missionary organizations. She traces white Mormon and Pacific Islander attempts to define and expand racial, religious, familial, and national belonging. She completed her MA in U.S. History at the University of Utah in 2015, where she focused on women’s history and religious history in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. During her Ph.D. she has worked on various research and writing projects, including working with a team of other graduate students in the History department writing short biographies for the National Park Service, collaborating with the History Project at UC Davis, and helping with the Empire Suffrage Syllabus project.