Please join us in welcoming five UW-Milwaukee Faculty Fellows and one UW System Fellow to the Center for 21st Century Studies in our 2020-21 cohort.
Ivan Ascher is an associate professor of political science at UW-Milwaukee and is the author of Portfolio Society: On the Capitalist Mode of Prediction (Zone/MIT Press). This year while a C21 Fellow, Ascher will write a graphic novel aimed at undergraduate political theory students titled Corrupting the Youth: Politics and Philosophy on a College Campus and develop a YouTube channel aimed at young adults, providing videos with critical insights and factual knowledge from the humanities and social sciences.
David DiValerio is an associate professor of history and religious studies at UW-Milwaukee, and is the author of The Holy Madmen of Tibet (Oxford University Press). His research project this year will be to complete the book Mountain Dharma: The Culture of Meditation in Tibet, which is devoted to understanding contemplative practice through an examination of the thousand-year history of Buddhism in Tibet.
Douglas Haynes is a nonfiction writer, poet, and professor of English at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh. He is the author of Every Day We Live Is the Future: Surviving in a City of Disasters (University of Texas Press) and a poetry chapbook, Last Word. At C21, he will write a new work of narrative nonfiction that documents international efforts to adapt to the human challenges of the Anthropocene by re-envisioning educational institutions. He’ll also be developing a new podcast entitled “Stories for the New Earth.”
Jenny Kehl is an associate professor of global studies and freshwater sciences at UW-Milwaukee whose work focuses on the political economy of water and water security. She is the recipient of a 2018-19 Fulbright award. As a Faculty Fellow, Kehl’s research project this year is “Water Wars: Deliberate Precarity and Strategic Securitization,” which examines water scarcity as a threat multiplier, and the power structures that reinforce, and often profit from, scarcity by contributing to its insecurity.
Gladys Mitchell-Walthour is an associate professor in the Department of African & African Diaspora Studies at UW-Milwaukee. She is the author of The Politics of Blackness: Racial Identity and Political Behavior in Contemporary Brazil (Cambridge University Press). Her research project this year, “The Revolution will be Digitized: Black Brazilian YouTube Social Justice Activism in A Time of Political Repression,” highlights how Afro-Brazilian YouTubers seek social justice through digital activism.
Sara VanderHaagen is an assistant professor of communication at UW-Milwaukee. She is the author of Children’s Biographies of African American Women: Rhetoric, Public Memory, and Agency (University of South Carolina Press). Her research project during her fellowship year, “Ideals of Womanhood: Exemplars and the Rhetoric of American Women’s Rights,” explores the rhetorical choices of 19th century women rhetoricians, showing how they invoked exemplary figures—from Joan of Arc to Harriet Tubman—to establish women’s right to take up space in public life.