Check out these updates from our current cohort of research fellows:
Elana Levine is professor of media, cinema, and digital studies in the Department of English. During the 2024-25 fellowship year, she has been working on a new book, Soap Opera: Romance, Politics, and Scandal in the Lives of Daytime Drama Writers Frank and Doris Hursley, which is a combination biography and cultural history written for a general readership.
Elana was recently quoted in a New York Times story about a new daytime soap opera that launched on Monday, February 24. She will also be presenting a paper about this program at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies conference in Chicago this coming April.
Peter Sands, who is an associate professor of English, researches racial representation in 19th-century literature, utopian/dystopian responses to societal divides, and slow movements as alternatives to global inequities, empowering non-dominant communities to envision new possibilities.
He will be presenting part of his project at the 15th International Conference on The Future of Education in Florence, Italy, June 26-27, 2025. He is also currently reading for and drafting a book proposal.
Marcus Allen, a historian of African American History and Business History, researches Nineteenth Century American History, the History of American Capitalism, North American Slavery, Labor History, and the American Presidents. His current book project, under contract with the University of Georgia Press, is an examination of African-American savings accounts before and after the Civil War.
Recently, he has begun to use a new search engine called FamilySearch.org. This website has made scanned-in documents searchable for the first time, which is important for his work and has allowed him to find new research materials that he can then incorporate into his current book project.
Furthermore, Allen has been working on a chapter related to antebellum America, and was able to get access to a site that uses Google Maps to map all the slave pens in antebellum Baltimore.
Leslie Bow is Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor and Sally Mead-Hands-Bascom Professor of English and Asian American Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her research for C21 follows from her most recent book, Racist Love: Asian Abstraction and the Pleasures of Fantasy (Duke 2022).
She was recently cited in an article for UW-Madison’s student newspaper, Badger Herald. The article, written by Ava McNarney and titled “‘Speak up, take action’: UW community navigates DEI breakdown”, discusses the state, federal pushback against diversity initiatives, and how students and professors are working to maintain inclusive campus environment.
Upcoming, Leslie will be doing a virtual talk on Techno-Orientalism at Wellesley College for the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies.