Center for the Humanities
Wesleyan University
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Faculty Fellows

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  • My current work focuses on grief and the work of mourning, especially in relation to disability studies. How might a feminist and queer politics of irreparable loss and incurable injury engage with the past so as to imagine a more capacious and sustaining future. How are lives sustained under conditions of fragility and dependency, and what kinds of labor, including the work of grief and the endless labor of giving care, are required for living on? Who does this work, and how are grief and loss entwined with possibility and desire? In disability studies anomalous bodies and so-called disabilities are rightly considered welcome variants of human potentiality, rather than regrettable incapacities or injuries to be cured – but there are real losses, nonetheless, that must imperatively be addressed so as to enrich our understanding of human possibility.

    

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  • Megan H. Glick is Assistant Professor of American Studies and affiliate faculty in the Science and Society Program. Her research and teaching focus on representations of difference along lines of race, gender, disability, and speciation, from both cultural and scientific perspectives.

    Her first book is forthcoming in November 2018 from Duke University Press’s ANIMA Series and is entitled, Infrahumanisms: Science, Culture, and the Making of Modern Non/personhood. Her writing has appeared in American Quarterly, Social Text, Gender and History, and Hypatia. At Wesleyan, she teaches numerous courses across cultural studies and the medical humanities, including, “Popular Culture and Social Justice,” “Visual Culture Studies and Violence,” “Bioethics and the Animal-Human Boundary,” “Race and Medicine in America,” “Health, Illness, and Power,” “Biopolitics/Animality/Posthumanism,” and “Modern Histories of Gender and Sexuality.”

    

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  • Twagira's areas of expertise include: gender and sexuality in Africa; global gender history; 20th century West Africa; the environment, technology, and development, including women and the environment, gendered cultures of technology, the history of technology in Africa, and development in Africa.

    She is currently working on a book about women living at a large agro-industrial development scheme in Mali called the Office du Niger.  The project examines how women used the resources of the scheme to engineer a highly adaptive local food production system that depended on female labor power and made use of modest technologies (such as metal pots and calabashes) that are generally overlooked in favor of the more impressive irrigation infrastructure of the scheme.  The project highlights the ways in which common narratives about development miss the critical environmental and technological work of women. 

    

Andrew W. Mellon Fellows

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  • Heather V. Vermeulen’s current research relates eighteenth- and nineteenth-century archival documents from British colonial Jamaica to literature and arts of the African Diaspora, with a focus on slavery, ecology, and queer kinship. Her article “Thomas Thistlewood’s Libidinal Linnaean Project: Slavery, Ecology, and Knowledge Production” appeared in the March 2018 issue of Small Axe. “Mortal Coils and Hair-Raising Revolutions: Styling ‘Race’ in the Age of Enlightenment” is forthcoming in A Cultural History of Hair in the Age of Enlightenment, 1650-1800 (Bloomsbury), edited by Joseph Roach and Margaret Powell. She was lead curator and catalog author for the exhibition Prospects of Empire: Slavery and Ecology in Eighteenth-Century Atlantic Britain at the Lewis Walpole Library (Nov. 17, 2014—May 1, 2015). She is currently at work on a book project tentatively titled Queer Kin-aesthetics and the Plantation Grotesque, as well as articles on artists Ellen Gallagher, Wangechi Mutu, and Torkwase Dyson. Vermeulen has received fellowships and awards from Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, MacMillan Center for International & Area Studies, Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, & Abolition, Lewis Walpole Library, and Fund for Lesbian & Gay Studies. She received her Ph.D. in African American Studies and American Studies, with a Certificate in Women’s, Gender, & Sexuality Studies, from Yale University.

    

     

Visiting Fellows