Current Fellows Fall 2022
Faculty Fellows
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Courtney Weiss Smith
Associate Professor of English & Science in Society, Faculty Director of Continuing Studies Curriculum
Show BioCourtney Weiss Smith is an Associate Professor in the Department of English and an Associate Editor at History & Theory. Her first book, Empiricist Devotions: Science, Religion, and Poetry in Early Eighteenth-Century England (University of Virginia Press, 2016), won the Walker Cowen Memorial Prize for outstanding scholarship in eighteenth-century studies. She is also a newly appointed editor of the Norton Anthology of English Literature, vol. C, The Restoration and Eighteenth Century, working with volume co-editor James Noggle and the rest of the editorial team on a substantively revised 11th edition. She is also writing Sound Stuff: Words in Enlightenment Philosophy and Poetics, a history of ideas about poetic sound (including rhyme, onomatopoeia, pun, and polyptoton). The project explores how poets but also philosophers and natural philosophers understood the material forms that words took. Selected publications include:
"The Matter of Language: or, What Does 'The Sound must seem an Eccho to the Sense' Mean?" ELH 87.1 (2020): 39-64.
“Rhyme and Reason in John Wilkins’s Philosophical Language Scheme” Modern Philology 115.2 (2017): 183-212.
“Anne Finch’s Descriptive Turn,” in “Bruno Latour and Eighteenth-Century Literary Studies,” ed. Christina Lupton and Sean Silver, with Adam Sneed, special issue of The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 57.2 (2016): 251-65.
Eighteenth-Century Poetry and the Rise of the Novel Reconsidered, ed. Kate Parker and Courtney Weiss Smith (Bucknell University Press, 2014; paperback, 2015).
See also other recent writing: “The Science of Prosody, circa 1677” and “Where Does Language Come From?”
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Martin Baeumel
Assistant Professor of German Studies
Show BioMartin Baeumel is interested in seventeenth through nineteenth-century literature, aesthetics, and history. He is investigating the evolution of certain social functions that art, especially literature, was intended to fulfill. His main focus is on German-speaking poetry, a genre that not only flourished during the eighteenth century, but also had tremendous influence on notions of subjectivity, experience, and literary form in modernity. He has published articles on eighteenth century nature poetry, travel writing, and aesthetic philosophy, and is finalizing a book-length study of the emergence of lyric poetry, tentatively titled Poesie an der Grenze. Emergenz der Lyrik 1680-1750.
Martin studied German and History at the Ludwig Maximilian Universität in Munich, at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, and at the Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen. He received his Ph.D. in German Studies from the University of Chicago. He taught at the University of Texas in Austin before joining Wesleyan University.
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Roberto Saba
Assistant Professor of American Studies & History
Show BioRoberto Saba is a historian of the nineteenth-century United States and its engagement with other parts of the world. He approaches his subjects from transnational and comparative perspectives. His research and teaching focus on capitalism, imperialism, and slavery. He is also interested in the histories of migration, popular culture, world's fairs, and exploration.
His book—American Mirror: The United States and Brazil in the Age of Emancipation (Princeton University Press, 2021)—investigates how American and Brazilian reformers worked together to ensure that slave emancipation would advance the interests of capital. He has also published a chapter titled "The Sun Rises in the North: Brazilian Periodicals Published in the United States in the 1870s" in the edited volume
Press, Power, and Culture in Imperial Brazil (New Mexico University Press, 2021).
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Elise Springer
Associate Professor of Philosophy & Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
Show BioI am broadly engaged with moral theory, and more specifically with the relationship between moral ideals and the activity of criticism. Bringing a broadly pragmatist account of judgment and communication to bear on moral discourse, I show how the challenges of moral criticism require us to rethink some standard assumptions in moral theory. I am also interested in moral responsibility, the consequences of human social embodiment, and interpretive questions about how to understand actions that we oppose.
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Garry Bertholf
Assistant Professor of African American Studies
Show BioBefore joining the faculty at Wesleyan, Professor Bertholf was an Andrew W. Mellon Visiting Faculty Fellow in the Humanities Unbounded Initiative at Duke University. From 2017 to 2019, he was an assistant professor of English and Africana Studies at Davidson College, where he was elected to honorary membership in the Omicron Delta Kappa Honor Society by the Delta Circle’s graduating class of 2019; and from 2014 to 2017, he was an assistant professor of Digital Rhetorics, Comparative Media, and Civic Culture in the Department of English at Clemson University, where he received both the Award of Distinction from the National Scholars Program’s graduating class of 2017 and the 2015-2016 Faculty Member of the Year Award from the College of Architecture, Arts and Humanities. Professor Bertholf was trained at the University of Pennsylvania, where he was the first recipient of the Ph.D. in Africana Studies, the inaugural postdoctoral fellow of the Program on Race, Science, and Society, an associate scholar of the Penn Humanities (now Wolf Humanities Center) Forum on “Violence,” and a lecturer of cultural studies and criticism in the Critical Writing Program of the Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing. In addition, he has held previous appointments as a visiting assistant professor of Africana Studies in the Department of History and Politics at Drexel University and as a preceptor for Cornel West in the Center for African American Studies at Princeton University. He has organized a number of academic symposia and colloquia, ranging in theme from “The Future of Hip-Hop” (2010) and “The Future of Race and Science” (2014) to “Slavery, Violence, and the Archive” (2019) and “Black Feminist Ecologies” (2021). Together with the students in his “Black Literary Theory” course, he recently organzied a hybrid salon on “The Future of Black Studies” (2022). His research and teaching focus on Africana literature and literary criticism, as well as black cultural production and intellectual history. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Anthurium: A Caribbean Studies Journal, the Journal of Popular Music Studies, south: a scholarly journal (formerly the Southern Literary Journal), Viewpoint Magazine, Diacritik, The Martyr’s Shuffle, the Philosophical Quarterly, the Nation Divided series at the University of Virginia Press, and the Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha series at the University Press of Mississippi. He is also the author of Black Sophists: A Critique of Demagoguery (Ph.D. Diss., University of Pennsylvania, 2013) and paired transcriptions of John Coltrane’s 1957 Carnegie Hall performances of Thelonious Monk’s “Epistrophy.” During the 2022-2023 academic year, Professor Bertholf’s current book project (tentatively titled “The Black Charismatic: Demagoguery and the Politics of Affect”) will be supported by a residential faculty fellowship at Wesleyan’s Center for the Humanities and by the Provost’s Equity Fellowship (also at Wesleyan).
Andrew W. Mellon Fellows
Student Fellows
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Anna Hauser
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Nick Bowman
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Oliver Egger
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Emily Hollander