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Faculty Fellows

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  • Katherine Brewer Ball is Assistant Professor of Performance Studies in the Theater Department & affiliated Faculty in African American Studies at Wesleyan University where she previously held the Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship at Wesleyan's Center for the Humanities. Brewer Ball earned her PhD in Performance Studies at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts. Her research focuses on performance, visual culture, Black and Indigenous aesthetics, feminist theory, queer studies, and psychoanalysis. Brewer Ball is currently working on her first book project, The Only Way Out: The Racial & Sexual Performance of Escape, and conducting research for a new project on contemporary Alaska Native art and performance. In addition to teaching, Brewer Ball curates art events and publishes creative non-fiction.

    

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  • I am a theorist and historian of music and culture with particular interests in affect theory, the history of music theory, Enlightenment aesthetics, early modern science, and eighteenth-century music. Currently I am Associate Professor and the Director of Graduate Studies in the music department at Wesleyan.  My journal articles have appeared in Critical Inquiry, Music Theory Spectrum, Eighteenth-Century Music, and the Journal of Music Theory. My first book, Beating Time and Measuring Music in the Early Modern Era, was published in the Oxford Studies in Music Theory series at Oxford University Press (2014) and won the Emerging Scholar Award from the Society for Music Theory. Last year I was a Visiting Assistant Professor in the music department at Harvard.  You can find my CV here.

    

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  • Tushar Irani's research focuses on Ancient Greek and Roman philosophy.  His recent book, Plato on the Value of Philosophy: The Art of Argument in the Gorgias and Phaedrus (Cambridge University Press, 2017), explores Plato’s views on the role and purpose of argument in civic life.  He holds a joint appointment at Wesleyan in the Department of Philosophy and the College of Letters.  In addition to his work on Plato, he has interests in questions of philosophical method, the history and practice of rhetoric, Ancient Greek and Roman literature, and the history of ethics (especially virtue ethics).

    

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  • History of modern psychological sciences with focus on the scientific practices accompanying claims about the nature of subjectivity and the moral commitments of scientific psychology.

     

Andrew W. Mellon Fellows

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  • Catherine Damman is an art historian who specializes in modern and contemporary art, with a particular focus on the entwined histories of experimental dance, theater, film, music, and the visual arts over the long twentieth century. She received her Ph.D. from Columbia University in 2018, and her doctoral work was supported by a Chester Dale Fellowship at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Visual Arts (CASVA), at the National Gallery of Art. Currently, she is at work on a manuscript that reexamines the formation of “performance” in American discourses, both artistic and academic, in the 1970s. Informed by feminist, queer, and critical race perspectives, the book project conceptualizes the stakes of disciplinary taxonomies in relation to artistic reevaluations of labor—at precisely the same moment that, increasingly, subjectivity itself was conscripted into the demands of a service-based economy. Her writing can be found in Artforum, Bookforum, Art in America, Art Journal, The Germanic Review, and Women & Performance, and in commissioned texts for exhibitions and performances at the Walker Art Center, the ICA London, LACMA, and MoMA PS1. 

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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