2018-19
Dimitri Anastasopoulos, Associate Professor of English
“Oia: Perils of American Tourist Children in Greece”
Dimitri is writing a novel titled Oia: Perils of American Tourist Children in Greece, which takes a docufictional approach to the Greek economic crisis of the last decade. He is the author of the novels A Larger Sense of Harvey and Farm for Mutes (both with Mammoth Books), and many stories, reviews, and articles appearing in Notre Dame Review, Williow Springs, Black Warrior Review, Buffalo Noir (Akashic Books Noir), Callaloo, and Journal of Narrative Theory (among other places).
Charles L. Davis, II*, Assistant Professor of Architecture
“The Spatial Allegories of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Prairie Style Architecture”
Charles teaches architectural history and criticism in the School of Architecture. He received his PhD in architecture from the University of Pennsylvania and has an MArch from the University at Buffalo. His academic research examines the integrations of race and style theory in modern architectural debates from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. His current book manuscript, Building Character: The Racial Politics of Modern Architectural Style is forthcoming in the Culture, Politics and the Built Environment series of the University of Pittsburgh Press. This intellectual history traces the historical integrations of race and style theory in paradigms of ‘architectural organicism,’ or movements that modeled design on the generative principles of nature.
Carole Emberton, Associate Professor of History
“Not a Place But an Irrevocable Condition: Emancipation and the Meaning of Home Among Formerly Enslaved Americans”
Carole received her B.A. from the University of Chicago and her PhD from Northwestern University. A member of the faculty at UB since 2007, she teaches courses on the Civil War, historical memory, public history, and a UB Seminar on genealogy and family history. She is the author of Beyond Redemption: Race, Violence, and the American South after the Civil War (Chicago, 2013), which won the Willie Lee Rose Prize for best book in southern history from the Southern Association of Women Historians. She is currently working on a new book about the freedom stories told by ex-slaves in the Federal Writers’ Project. The Emancipation of Priscilla Joyner: An Intimate History of Freedom is under contract with W.W. Norton and is scheduled to be published in 2021.
Chad Lavin, Associate Professor of English
“The Politics of Value (and the Value of Politics)”
Chad was tenured in Political Science before joining UB as Associate Professor of English. He has published two books, The Politics of Responsibility (Illinois 2008) and Eating Anxiety: The Perils of Food Politics (Minnesota 2013), along with essays on a variety of topics in political theory. His current project explores the role of academic disciplines in navigating the interface of ethics, economics, and politics.
Yan Liu, Assistant Professor of History
“Use poison to attack poison: Medicine, illness, and society in early imperial China”
Yan obtained his PhD in History of Science at Harvard University in 2015. He specializes in the history of Chinese medicine, with a particular interest in the history of pharmacology, religious healing, and the exchange of medical knowledge in the global context. He is currently completing a book manuscript that explores the medical use of poisons in classical Chinese pharmacy. His future projects include the history of food in China and the circulation of aromatics (saffron, camphor, etc.) across Eurasia.
Erkin Özay, Assistant Professor of Architecture
“Cities and Schools in America, 1896-2015”
Erkin’s research is concerned with the architecture of institutional settings and their capacity to serve as spaces of collective experience, with a specific concentration on educational environments and resettlement practices. A registered architect, he previously taught at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, University of Toronto, and Northeastern University, and practiced architecture with various international design firms.
Adam Rome, Professor of History
“Partly Green: The Past and Future of Sustainable Business”
Adam is an environmental historian and author of The Bulldozer in the Countryside: Suburban Sprawl and the Rise of American Environmentalism (2001) and The Genius of Earth Day: How a 1970 Teach-In Unexpectedly Made the First Green Generation (2013). He also is co-editor of Green Capitalism? Business and the Environment in the Twentieth Century (2017). In addition to a book about recent efforts by American businesses to become more sustainable, he is working on the environmental-history volume for Oxford’s Very Short Introduction series. From 2002 to 2005, he edited the journal Environmental History.
Mary Nell Trautner*, Associate Professor of Sociology
“Transforming Medical Problems into Legal Problems”
Mary Nell studies intersections of social inequality and social justice. Her current research spans a range of topics, including analyses of young people’s ideologies of gender; physical appearance bias; prosecutors as cause lawyers; living wage campaigns; constructions of masculinity; and sexual aggression in bars. The Humanities Institute fellowship is supporting her main line of research on how families cope and make decisions about their child’s birth injuries.
Joseph Valente, UB Distinguished Professor of English
“Better Now? Recovery Anxiety in the Writing of Autism”
Joseph is the author of James Joyce and the Problem of Justice; Dracula’s Crypt: Bram Stoker, Irishness and the Question of Blood; and The Myth of Manliness in Irish National Culture. He has edited or coedited several collections, including Quare Joyce, Urban Ireland, Yeats and Afterwords, and Ireland in Psychoanalysis. He is now completing Unseeing the Unspeakable: Child Sex Scandal in Irish Literature (with Margot Backus). His current project is entitled “Exceptions to Themselves: Autism and Moral Authority in Modern Literature.”
*OVPRED-sponsored fellows for 2018-2019.
All photos this page by Douglas Levere.
