UNH Today

Brigitte Bailey (professor of English) will work on a book project examining periodical depictions of New York in 1830-1860. These writings show a culture grappling with a new environmental reality, with what the geographer David Harvey calls the “restless formation and reformation of geographical landscapes” of urban capitalism. Professor Bailey will bring perspectives from urban geography and the environmental humanities to literary, visual and periodical studies approaches to read texts by known writers — Lydia Maria Child, Margaret Fuller, Catharine Maria Sedgwick, George Foster, Walt Whitman, William J. Wilson, James McCune Smith, Herman Melville, Fanny Fern — and unknown ones, who describe the upheavals of modernity, the bodies circulating in and organized by this new metropolis, and the oppressive and emancipatory possibilities of the national city.

Daniel Chávez Landeros (associate professor of Spanish) will work on a book project, “Drawing for Justice,” studying six documentary graphic novels released between 2011 and 2019. The fundamental premise is that these illustrated works by journalists and artists from Mexico, Spain and the United States have become a form of visual activism that is redefining the place of graphic narratives in current public discourse. From a humanities perspective, Proessor Chávez will analyze their visual and narrative strategies, the civic values and concepts represented, and their impact on current debates and social demands related to civil society mobilization, race and gender equality, and the fight against human trafficking and organized crime.

Funded by the Center for the Humanities' general endowment and the Ben and Zelma Dorson Endowment in the Humanities, faculty research fellowships provide a semester-long opportunity for junior and tenured faculty to pursue humanities research with no teaching obligations. Awardees participate in the Faculty Fellows Lecture Series in the year following their fellowship.