CAS Visiting Scholars


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Current Fellows
		A specialist in American material culture, Shirley Teresa Wajda received a Ph.D. in American Civilization from the University of Pennsylvania. Her scholarly research explores generally the relationship between commerce and art in American society, resulting in publications on nineteenth-century portrait photography and children’s cabinets of curiosities, house building and homemaking in the Great Depression, contemporary secondhand material culture, Martha Stewart, and Michael Graves’ designs for Target. Her research has benefited from fellowships awarded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Smithsonian Institution, and the Winterthur Museum. Most recently, Shirley co-edited Material Culture in America: Understanding Everyday Life, the first-ever encyclopedia dedicated to American material culture and its study. Shirley currently teaches in the Department of History at Kent State University. As a fellow in the Center for the Arts in Society, Shirley will continue research and complete the script for ““Modernism and the Kokoon Arts Club of Cleveland, Ohio” an exhibition to open in March 2009 at the Kent State University Museum. (A book will follow.) The Kokoon Arts Club of Cleveland, Ohio, was founded in 1911 by a small group of commercial artists employed at the Otis Lithograph Company. Meeting first at night in the studio of interior designer Louis Rorimer, Club members combined forces and finances to study and make art apart from (but indebted to) their commercial work, seek venues to display their artworks, and simply, to be modern. The Club would become a fixture of the Cleveland art and social scene throughout the 1920s and 1930s, only to lose members and vitality during World War II and dissolve finally in 1953. During its heyday, however, the Kokoon Arts Club served as an important arbiter of Modernist artistic expression in Cleveland.
Past Fellows and Distinguished Faculty
		Matthew Reynolds joined the Center for the 2007-08 academic year. He has a Ph.D. in Visual and Cultural Studies from the University of Rochester, and M.A.s in Visual and Cultural Studies (University of Rochester) and Cinema Studies (San Francisco State University). Before joining the Center, he had been teaching at the University of California, Riverside, and the Otis College of Art and Design. He has curated film series and exhibitions for the Echo Park Film Center, the Getty Research Institute, the George Eastman House Museum of Photography and Film and other venues. Dr. Reynolds has written a number of articles in journals and chapters in books. During his fellowship, he will be working on a manuscript which expands on his doctoral thesis “Soft Focus: Glamour and the Hollywood Redevelopment Project,” which is an academic history of Hollywood, California as urban space and community, from the moment of the city’s inception in 1886 to the present day. Matthew recently joined the faculty in Art History and Visual Culture at Whitman College in a tenure-track position.
		Soyang Park finished a B.A. in Science of Art at Hongik University in Seoul in 1995, and completed a Masters degree in History of Art (20th Century) in 1999, and a Doctoral degree in the History of Art/Visual (20th Century) in 2004, at Goldsmiths College, University of London. Recently she submitted Haunting: Forgetting and Remembering in the Politics and Art of Postcolonial South Korea to Duke University Press for consideration. This book is based in her doctoral thesis on the Korean minjung (people's or grassroots) movement and art of 1980s and early 1990s. Her publications include “Silence, Subaltern Speech, and The Intellectual: The politics of emergent speech in the case of former sexual slaves,” Journal for Cultural Research, Routledge (vol 9. no. 2 April 2005); “Xen: Migration, Labor and Identity: Yongsoon Min,” with Allan DeSouza, Third Text (vol 19. Issue 4, July 2005); and many articles on contemporary artists and criticism for Korean Art Magazine. Soyang was a joint fellow with the Humanities Center. She is currently an assistant professor at the Ontario College of Art and Design.
		Both a writer and a scholar of verse, Susan B.A. Somers-Willett received a Ph.D. in Literature and an M.A. in Creative Writing from The University of Texas at Austin. Her research, which focuses on the social functions of contemporary American verse, lies at the nexus of literary studies, African American studies, and performance studies. Her most recent scholarly project, The Cultural Politics of Slam Poetry, investigates the popularity of poetry slams across the nation and the race-based sense of authenticity engendered in many of these performances. As a CAS fellow, Susan pursued new research addressing how public poetry projects edit, publicize, and otherwise re-negotiate the relationship verse has with mass audiences. Susan is also the author of a book of poetry, Roam (SIU Press, 2006), published as part of the Crab Orchard Award Series. She joined the Center from the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana, where she was an Andrew W. Mellon Fellow in the Humanities. She is currently a Lecturer in the English Department at the University of Texas at Austin.
		In 2006 Carl DiSalvo received a Ph.D. in Design from Carnegie Mellon University. Carl's work approaches design from a critical and reflective perspective. He uses design to ask questions, provoke debate, and facilitate conversations concerning the social and political aspects of technologies and technological discourses. His work also questions design itself, examining and critiquing contemporary design products, practices, and agendas. Carl's current research focuses on the design and use of emerging technologies for community representation, expression, and action. This includes the development and theorizing of participatory approaches to educational robotics, community-oriented GIS, and environmental imaging and sensing. He is also a member of the collective Carbon Defense League, whose "Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy" at the ZKM in Karlsruhe, Germany. DiSalvo was a joint fellow with the Center for the Arts in Society and the STUDIO for Creative Inquiry. He is currently an assistant professor in the School of Literature, Communication, and Culture at Georgia Institute of Technology.
		A specialist in twentieth century American and American Indian art and culture, Bill Anthes earned a B.F.A. and M.A. in Art History from the University of Colorado and a Ph.D. in American Studies from the University of Minnesota in 2000. He was Assistant Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art History and Theory at the University of Memphis in Memphis, Tennessee, and has been a Scholar in Residence at the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum Research Center in Santa Fe, New Mexico. His book, Native Moderns: American Indian Painting, 1940-1960, was published in 2006 by Duke University Press. As a postdoctoral fellow in the Center for the Arts in Society in 2005-2006, he pursued a new writing project about senses of place and memory in contemporary America, looking at sites including the cities of Memphis and Pittsburgh, and Foxwoods Casino and the Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation in Connecticut. Anthes is currently assistant professor of Art History at Pitzer College in Claremont, California.
		A scholar focusing on European transnational and comparative history, Alexander Vari received his Ph. D. from Brown University in 2004. His fields of teaching and research interest are in French and Eastern European history, 1789 to present; the effects of nation-building, modern urban planning, globalization, communication technologies, arts and urban renewal projects on Europe’s capital cities; and histories of tourism. While in residence as a postdoctoral fellow in 2005-2006 at the Center, he worked on revising his manuscript on “Commercialized Modernities: City Marketing and Urban Tourism Promotion in Paris and Budapest, 1850s to the 1930s.” A former holder of Fulbright and Social Science Research Council fellowships, he also taught modern European history at the University of Tennessee. Alex is currently Assistant Professor of Modern European History in the Department of Social Sciences at Marywood University in Scranton, Pennsylvania.
		Madelaine Hron was the Center's postdoctoral fellow for 2004-2005. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Michigan in Comparative Literature, and studies cross-cultural analyses of pain in immigrant texts. Her other research interests include post-colonialism, globalization, and identity politics. Among her honors, she received a post-doctoral fellowship from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the Våclav Havel Dissertation Award. While at the Center, she investigated the visual representation of suffering and edited her manuscript, "The Translation of Pain." Hron is currently an assistant professor in the department of English at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada.
		Michael Chemers, PhD 2001 University of Washington, MFA 1997 Indiana University. Michael joined the Center as a postdoctoral fellow for the 2003-04 academic year. He has been an Assistant Professor of Dramatic Literature in Carnegie Mellon's School of Drama since 2004. As a result of research done at the Center, Michael was asked to edit a double-size special issue of DISABILITY STUDIES QUARTERLY on freak shows, which included collaborations from former Center fellows Madeleine Hron and Richard Howells. Michael has also made a significant contribution to the new ENCYCLOPEDIA OF DISABILITY, served as a judge for the Irving Zola Scholarship Award for Disability Studies, helped to reprogram the Drama School's history/literature curriculum, worked on a new adaptation of Aristophanes' LYSISTRATA, and significantly improved his fire-juggling skills.
		Richard Howells was the Center's Distinguished Visiting Professor for 2004. He is currently Reader in Cultural and Creative Industries at King's College, University of London. He is the author of Visual Culture and The Myth of the Titanic as well as numerous journal articles and anthology chapters. He received his baccalaureate from Harvard University and his doctorate from Cambridge. In addition, he trained as a journalist and is a cultural critic and regular contributor to the BBC Radio program, “The Message.”
		John Leaños was a Center fellow in 2002-2003. John Jota Leaños was born and raised in Los Angeles in a Mexican-Italian-American family. The class, cultural and linguistic differences within his family have informed his artistic work on memory, cultural identity and historical amnesia. His work centers on an investigation of the symbols and politics of memory and forgetting through digital photography, public art and installation. Leaños is the Co-Founder of the San Francisco Historical Circle of the Displaced, a not-for-profit organization dedicated to preserving historical moments of displaced cultures and is a member of the cyber-critical art group, Los Cybrids: la Raza Techno-CrÃtica. He received his Master's of Fine Art in Photography from San Francisco State University in June of 2000. He is a recent recipient of the Creative Capital Fund Award, Creative Work Fund Grant, the Murphy-Caddigan Award for Visual Arts and the Potrero Nuevo Fund. Leaños's work was shown at the Whitney Biennial 2002 and he is presently curator of the Digital Mural Project at the GalerÃa de la Raza in San Francisco.
		Jessica Sternfeld, a Center fellow in 2002-2003 has received a contract for her manuscript "The Megamusical" from Indiana University Press. As a Fellow, Dr. Sternfeld conducted new research during the year and presented her findings and interpretations at a public lecture sponsored by the Center. In keeping with the Center's theme for the year - "arts in times of catastrophe" - she researched Broadway musicals' responses to several world events. She investigated the idea that musicals, despite their reputation for being escapist and frivolous, never fail to address the most serious issues. She focused on three very different works of musical theater which all deal with the unlikely theme of Nazism: Rodgers and Hammerstein's "The Sound of Music", Kander and Ebb's "Cabaret", and Mel Brooks's "The Producers." Her second major realm of investigation involved how Broadway responded to the September 11th attacks. Sternfeld is currently Visiting Assistant Professor in Duke University's Deparment of Music and in the Music Department at the University of Carolina, Chapel Hill.
		Lawrence Bogad, a Center fellow for 2001-2002 and currently Associate Professor of Theatre and Dance at UC Davis, is author of Electoral Guerrilla Theatre: Radical Ridicule and Social Movements (Routledge, 2005). His articles appear in TDR: The Drama Review, Contemporary Theatre Review, Radical Society, the Journal of Aesthetics and Protest, Red Pepper, the International Brecht Society's Communications, and the anthologies A Boal Companion, Performance and Place, and Images of Mental Illness through Text and Performance. He has worked as a writer, performer, and organizer across the US and the UK. His play, Haymarket (1998), was the first full-length drama about the Haymarket Square tragedy. Bogad is a veteran of the Lincoln Center Theatre Directors' Laboratory and the Clandestine Insurgent Rebel Clown Army.
		Melissa Ragona, a Center fellow in 2001-2002, was a visiting assistant professor in the Department of English during the 2002-2003 school year, where she coordinated the University Film Festival. Ragona's critical and creative work focuses on sound design, film theory and new media practice and reception. Her essay, "Hidden Noise: Strategies of Sound Montage in the Films of Hollis Frampton," appeared in the journal, October in 2004. She also participated in the Princeton conference: Gloria! The Legacy of Hollis Frampton (November 2005) in which she addressed the relationship between film and sculpture in the work of structuralist filmmaker Hollis Frampton and sculptor Carl Andre. Her essay, "From Abstract Expressionism to Popism: Marie Menken's Cinematic Study of an Aesthetics of Surface," is forthcoming in the Duke University Press book, Women Experimental Filmmakers this spring. Two other critical essays, one on the use of sound in the work of filmmaker Paul Sharits, the other on experimental film and sculpture will be appearing in books from University of Minnesota Press and Centre for British Film and Televisions Studies in London, respectively. She is currently working on a book manuscript: Readymade Sound: The Recording Aesthetics of Andy Warhol, which examines Warhol's tape recording projects from the mid-sixties until the late 70s in light of the rich history of audio experiments in modern art in which sound and listening became central objects of study. Ragona is currently Assistant Professor of Art in the School of Art at Carnegie Mellon University.
		Howard Bossen, the Distinguished Visiting Professor for 2001-2002, has completed work on an exhibit and a book about Luke Swank, an early modernist photographer. The book has been published by the University of Pittsburgh Press, and the exhibition has shown at the Carnegie Museum of Art. He presented the work he completed concerning Lewis Hine at the joint meeting of the American Journalism Historians Association and the Association for Education in Journalism.
		Mady Schutzman is a writer, scholar, and theatre artist. She is a freelance practitioner of the techniques of Theatre of the Oppressed and is co-editor of "Playing Boal: Theatre, Therapy, Activism." While a Distinguished Faculty for the Center in 2002-03, Schutzman taught workshops based on the work of Augusto Boal, and a course entitled, "Playing Boal: Theatre, Therapy, and Social Change." She researched how concepts of randomness and divination relate to contemporary political habits within power hierarchies.