Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere

This book examines the experiences of Caribbean individuals who joined British and French colonial administrations in Africa during the early twentieth century. Although raised in colonial societies and identifying with European imperial powers, these administrators found themselves marginalized in Africa—excluded by both European colonizers and local communities. Confronting racism and cultural dislocation, many began to engage with African intellectuals and languages, ultimately challenging their imperial identities. Through these encounters, they forged new forms of belonging and solidarity that crossed the traditional boundaries of empire and geography.

Dude Lit explores how male authors have come to dominate the Mexican literary and intellectual scene, examining the cultural dynamics and networks that help shape perceptions of literary authority. Through an analysis of key figures like Juan Rulfo, José Emilio Pacheco, and Guillermo Fadanelli, the book reveals how certain aesthetic choices, professional trajectories, and social connections contribute to the construction of the “great writer.” Drawing on interviews, archives, and literary analysis, Dude Lit investigates how elements such as gendered writing styles, insider networks, and public personas influence critical success. It argues that what is often considered originality or rebellion in men’s writing is frequently supported by established privileges and social conventions. By reassessing the intersections of literature, reputation, and gender, this study offers a new perspective on how cultural authority is performed and recognized in Mexican literary culture.

This award-winning study traces the ways in which female bodies were viewed, imagined, and subordinated in the 15th to 17th centuries through historical, literary, and artistic representations. Drawing on Derrida’s concept of “invagination,” the book examines how anatomical and medical explorations of women’s bodies were tied to broader colonial projects—including population growth, wealth production, and the regulation of difference. By analyzing these intertwined discourses of gender, power, and empire, the work offers a critical lens on early modern strategies of control and classification.

Kreyòl pale (Creole is Spoken) is a comprehensive 29-chapter textbook designed for beginners learning Haitian Creole. Developed using a communicative approach, the textbook focuses on real-life language use, guiding learners through speaking, reading, writing, and listening skills. It presents practical topics essential for everyday interactions in Haiti and among the Haitian Diaspora—such as greetings, travel, food, housing, shopping, and workplace conversations. Aimed at a wide audience—including college students, self-learners, professionals, and volunteers—the textbook features dialogues with English glosses, vocabulary and grammar explanations, pronunciation tips, and culture-based lessons. Full-color images and step-by-step skill-building activities reinforce understanding and make learning more engaging. Each chapter also includes cultural notes that introduce learners to Haitian music, art, literature, and daily life. Designed to support effective, practical language acquisition, Kreyòl pale offers a strong foundation in both Haitian Creole and the cultural contexts in which it is spoken.

Miraculous Celebrity by Derek Burdette tells the remarkable story of the Señor de Ixmiquilpan, a 16th-century crucifix that rose to prominence in colonial Mexico City. Originally created by Indigenous artists and forgotten for decades, the statue was believed to have miraculously renewed itself in 1621. It was then moved to the capital, where it became a major religious and cultural landmark over the next 250 years. Venerated by people across social classes, the crucifix was eventually enshrined in the Convento de Santa Teresa la Antigua and came to symbolize both spiritual devotion and social influence. Burdette traces the statue’s biography across five chapters, examining how it was promoted, reproduced in artworks, carried in public processions, and ultimately housed in a neoclassical chapel. Drawing from archival research and visual analysis, the book highlights how sacred images shaped faith, politics, and community identity in colonial Mexico. As the first monograph dedicated entirely to a colonial crucifix, Miraculous Celebrity fills a gap in art historical scholarship and offers a compelling study for readers interested in Latin American history, religious art, and cultural heritage.

Professor Max Deardorff was awarded a publication subvention for his book A Tale of Two Granadas: Custom, Community, and Citizenship in the Spanish Empire, 1568-1668, which examines the vast, trans-Atlantic transformation of political ideas about subjecthood that ultimately allowed some indigenous colonial subjects and their progeny at the end of the sixteenth century to establish urban citizenship alongside Spaniards in the colonial settlements of what is now Colombia. Responding a generation of colonial history characterized by “blood purity” exclusivism, activists of the period insisted on a more inclusive regime of rights and privileges that opened the door to colonial subjects who assimilated as Christians.

Professor Rachel Carrico received a publication subvention for her book Footwork! Dancing the Politics of Pleasure at the New Orleans Second Line. Since the late nineteenth century, Black New Orleanians have danced through the streets in processions known as “second lines.” The first line consists of the brass band and hosting organization, one of many Social Aid and Pleasure Clubs. The second line is the community that follows. Footwork! Dancing the Politics of Pleasure at the New Orleans Second Line blends ethnographic research with analysis and history to provide the first in-depth study of dance in New Orleans’s African diaspora parading traditions. With a close attention to bodies in motion, the book theorizes pleasure as a form of negotiating and understanding power.

In Visible Archives: Queer and Feminist Visual Culture in the 1980s explores a number of feminist and cultural touchstones—the feminist sex wars, the HIV/AIDS crisis, the women in print movement, and countercultural grassroots periodical networks—and examines how visual culture interacts with these pivotal moments. The book goes deep into the records to bring together a decade’s worth of research in grassroots and university archives that include comics, collages, photographs, drawings, and other image-text media produced by women, including Hannah Alderfer, Beth Jaker, Marybeth Nelson, Roberta Gregory, Lee Marrs, Alison Bechdel, Gloria Anzaldúa, and Nan Goldin.

Professor Benjamin Hebblethwaite and Professor Silke Jansen were awarded a Publication Subvention Grant for their edited volume, Indigenous and African Diaspora Religions in the Americas , that collects ten chapters that explore Indigenous and African Diaspora spirit-based religious traditions in Canada, the United States, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Cuba, Trinidad and Tobago, Mexico, Brazil, Chile, and Nigeria. The goal of the book is to profile the investigated religions using interdisciplinary research methods. The book includes several maps by UF’s geospatial consultant, Joe Aufmuth.

Professor Laura Gonzales was awarded a Publication Subvention grant for her monograph, Designing Multilingual Experiences in Technical Communication, published by Utah State University Press in 2022. This book highlights the role that language diversity plays in global research collaboration. Through three case studies in various contexts, including El Paso, Texas, Oaxaca de Juarez, Mexico, and Kathmandu, Nepal, this book encourages technical communication researchers to recognize language diversity in their work, and to collaborate with multilingual communities when designing research protocols.

Futures of Cartoon Past: The Cultural Politics of X-Men: The Animated Series, a co-edited volume on X-Men: The Animated Series (1992-1997), provides scholars and fans with an overdue assessment of the popular cartoon series. While the 90s have often been viewed as a “regressive” era for comics, this collection examines the complicated cultural politics of X-Men: The Animated Series where the X-Men continued to advocate for social justice while also encapsulating the failures of earlier movements. This collection will not only serve as a foundation for future scholarship on the animated series, but also on the transmedial landscapes of X-Men narratives specifically and “Saturday cartoons” more broadly. Forthcoming from University Press of Mississippi in 2023.

Professor Trevor Mowchun was awarded a Publication Subvention grant for his book, Metaphysics and the Moving Image: Paradise Exposed, published by Edinburgh University Press in 2023. This work is an investigation into the medium of film’s inheritance of metaphysics—Western philosophy’s oldest and most ambitious form of “truth-seeking.” Why does film take up this ancient quest at the very moment when philosophy sought to abandon it once and for all? The book examines the philosophical implications of a cinematic return of metaphysics in what is often described as a post-metaphysical age, and demonstrates how film radically transform the metaphysical paradigm from rational speculation through concepts to mechanical revelation through images and sounds, a revelation at the heart of the medium’s capacity to enlighten and enthrall. Film theorists and philosophers such as Martin Heidegger, Stanley Cavell, Robert Bresson, and Heinrich von Kleist are put in dialogue with films possessing a “metaphysical film style,” including The Thin Red Line and The Turin Horse. Painting and photography are also considered as precursors to the moving image, but it’s a specifically cinematic metaphysics which promises to lead us out of the traps of abstraction and alienation inadvertently set by old metaphysics. Mowchun demonstrates that in a post-metaphysical world, questions about being, value, truth, life and death return with renewed force, finding concrete yet open-ended responses in cinema.

Political Black Girl Magic: The Elections and Governance of Black Female Mayors examines the experiences of black female mayors from two perspectives – the acquisition of power (their campaigns) and the actual exercise of power (their governance). The main research questions are, “What is the influence of race, gender, or the combination of both on the mayoral campaigns and governance of black women?” and “What are the most significant obstacles for black women when running for mayoral offices and governing as mayors?”

Professor Seth Bernstein received a Publication Subvention grant for his book, Return to the Motherland: Soviet Displaced Persons in World War II and the Cold War, published with Cornell University Press. The book covers the situation of the end of World War II, when more than five million people returned to the Soviet Union from wartime displacement. Most had been forced laborers and prisoners of war, deported to the Third Reich to work in a crushing environment, and they returned to accusations of treason in the USSR. Using declassified Soviet police archives, the book explores their brutal but transnational experience from 1941 into the 1950s. Their story is a window onto the paradoxes of freedom and violence during war, Soviet conceptions of belonging, and debates over migration as a human right in the Cold War.

Professor Robert Kawashima was a awarded a Publication Subvention Grant for his monograph The Archaeology of Ancient Israelite Knowledge, published by Indiana University Press in 2022. The book reexamines what is generally, if misleadingly, known as the “monotheistic revolution.” Based on comparative analyses of biblical prose narrative and the myths and epics of ancient Greece and the ancient Near East, Professor Kawashima argues that the biblical writers transformed the concepts of the divine, the human, and the cosmos, which they inherited from the surrounding cultures. Ultimately, what is distinctive about biblical narrative is not the belief in one as opposed to many gods, but the redefinition of the divine as being no longer a part of nature.

Professor Stephen G. Perz was awarded a Publication Subvention grant for his book, The Road to the Land of the Mother of God: A History of the Interoceanic Highway in Peru, co-authored by Jorge Luis Castillo Hurdado, and published by the University of Nebraska Press in 2023. This work discusses the Peruvian region of Madre de Dios, the land of the Mother of God, which for centuries was among the most remote parts of South America. Access to Madre de Dios was a priority for the Incan empire, Spanish conquerors, missionaries, scientists, rubber barons, and colonists, all of whom encountered unexpected perils in finding the way, many paying with their lives. At the dawn of the 21st century, unprecedented circumstances aligned to finally impel construction of an Interoceanic Highway across Madre de Dios. Despite political demand, the highway was not justifiable economically or ecologically, resulting in extraordinary exemptions from oversight. The road thus yielded problematic outcomes and stimulated debate over infrastructure governance. Revelations that systemic corruption was behind its approval made the Interoceanic Highway an emblematic case of the contradictions of infrastructure.

Professor Jeffrey Adler was awarded a Publication Subvention Grant for his monograph Bluecoated Terror: The Roots of Police Brutality in Modern America, forthcoming from the University Press of California in 2024. This book explores the roots of modern police brutality against African Americans by charting the early twentieth-century transformation of racial violence from a series of extra-legal vigilante campaigns into a purposeful, systemic, and purportedly legally justifiable expression of the government mandate to preserve “law and order.” The book focuses on New Orleans and the urban South, where municipal policing intended to safeguard white supremacy also triggered a fierce response from African Americans, launching the early Civil Rights Movement during the years before World War II.

Professor Rori Bloom was awarded a Publication Subvention Grant for her monograph Making the Marvelous: Marie-Catherine d’Aulnoy, Henriette-Julie de Murat and the Literary Representation of the Decorative Arts, which has been published with University of Nebraska Press in 2022. With the publication of Making the Marvelous, Professor Bloom contributes to the fields of fairy tale studies, French literary studies but also studies of the decorative arts in France. The book moves away from thematic concerns often analyzed in women’s writing — love, marriage— to concentrate on the authors’ aesthetic sophistication and formal experimentation. It demonstrates that these authors’ works redefine the marvelous not as magical but as manmade in order to argue that their attitude toward the supernatural is skeptical and surprisingly modern.

Professor Maya Stanfield Mazzi was awarded a Publication Subvention Grant to support her book, Clothing the New World Church: Liturgical Textiles of Spanish America, 1520–1820, to be published by the University of Notre Dame Press. This book takes a hemispheric look at the many forms of textile art fashioned for the adornment of churches, priests and church attendants, and statues of saints. By exploring the connections between important fabrics and the work of Amerindian artists, this book sees cloth as key to establishing and maintaining Catholicism in the New World.

Professor Elizabeth Ginway received a Publication Subvention Grant for her book Cyborgs, Sexuality and the Undead: The Body in Mexican and Brazilian Speculative Fiction published in 2020 by Vanderbilt University Press. The book interprets the literary and cultural representations of the human body as reflected in the speculative fiction of Mexico and Brazil, emphasizing the effects of technology (bodies as cyborgs), the emergence of non-traditional sexualities, and the social implications of a present haunted by an embodied past (bodies as vampires and zombies). The book portrays the effects— and ravages—of modernity in these two nations, addressing its technological, cultural, and social consequences and their implications for the human body.

Professor Ingrid Kleespies was awarded a Publication Subvention Grant to support her co-edited volume, Goncharov in the Twenty-First Century, published by Academic Studies Press in June 2021. This volume offers a close look at the life of Ivan Goncharov (1812-91), a canonical Russian author whose career as a loyal civil servant interplayed with his significant literary output as a creative social critic to play a formative role in the development of Russian literary culture.

Professor Galina Rylkova was awarded a Publication Subvention Grant to support her book Breaking Free from Death: The Art of Being a Successful Russian Writer, published by Academic Studies Press in 2020. This book examines the ways in which Russian writers navigate the burdens of everyday life, politics, and society in pursuit of their literary careers.

Professor Malini Johar Schueller was awarded a Publication Subvention Grant to support her book, Campaigns of Knowledge: Pedagogies of Colonialism and Occupation in the Philippines and Japan published with the Temple University Press in Fall 2019. This book argues that beginning in 1898 the creation of a suitable pedagogical subject through schooling emerged as a central biopolitical technology of U.S. power overseas, one deployed in the colonization of the Philippines and the occupation of Japan.

Professor Lauren Pearlman was awarded a Publication Subvention Grant to support her book, Democracy’s Capital: Black Political Power in Washington, D.C., 1960s-1970s, published by the University of North Carolina Press in Fall 2019. This book captures the transition from black protest to black political power on the municipal level under the Johnson and Nixon administrations, and explains how strict federal oversight and intervention into home rule impeded the democratic potential of the civil rights movement.

Professor Luise White was awarded a Publication Subvention Grant to support her book, Fighting and Writing: the Rhodesian Army at War and Post-War published by Duke University Press in 2021. The book is an episodic history of white soldiers fighting to preserve majority rule in Zimbabwe. Based on archives, interviews and most of all the memoirs these soldiers later wrote, this book addresses the place of race and its meaning for belonging to a colony and a nation.

Professor Emily Hind was awarded a Publication Subvention Grant to support her book, Literatura Infantil y Juvenil Mexicana: Entrevistas, published by Peter Lang Publishing in November 2020. This book offers an introduction to the field, detailed bibliographies, and interviews with writers and other people involved in the burgeoning Mexican publishing market for young readers.

Professor James Essegbey was awarded a Publication Subvention Grant to support his co-edited volume The Grammar of Verbs and their Arguments: a Cross-linguistic Perspective (Papers in honor of Lars Hellan) with Adams Bodomo and Dalina Kallulli, published by Rüdiger Köppe Verlag in 2019. The articles in this volume explore the significance of verb constructions to understanding time, events, history, and the modeling of language structure more broadly.

Professor Jeff Needell was awarded a Publication Subvention Grant to support his book, The Sacred Cause: The Abolitionist Movement, Afro-Brazilian Mobilization, and Imperial Politics in Rio de Janeiro, published in 2020 by Stanford University Press. This book documents the role of political mobilization in Brazil’s late 19th century abolitionist movement to reveal the decisive interactions between social movement building and the parliamentary government of Brazil’s monarchy.

Professor Ying Xiao was awarded a Publication Subvention Grant for her book China in the Mix: Cinema, Sound, and Popular Culture in the Age of Globalization (University Press of Mississippi, 2017). Her book focuses on sound and its role in constructing identity and culture in Chinese film and media.

Professor Emily Hind was awarded a Publication Subvention Grant for her book, Dude Lit: Mexican Men Writing and Performing Competence, 1955-2012 published by the University of Arizona Press in 2019. The subject of Dude Lit answers the question: How did men become the stars of the Mexican intellectual scene? Her book examines the tricks of the trade and reveals that sometimes literary genius rests on privileges that men extend one another and that women permit.

Professor Peter Schmidt was awarded a Publication Subvention Grant for his edited volumes, The History of Kiziba and its Kings (Mkuki Na Nyota Publishers, 2020) and Historia ya Kiziba na wafalme wake (Mkuki Na Nyota Publishers, 2020), both translated by Galasius B. Kamanzi. These projects discuss previously inadequately translated oral traditions from Buhaya, a key region in East Africa.

Professor Biagio Santorelli was awarded a Publication Subvention Grant for his book, [Quintiliano] Ilmuro con le impronte di una mano (Cassino University Press, 2017). His book discusses the first Major Declamation ascribed to Quintilian and the imperial and literary culture of Rome.

Professor Kaira Cabañas was awarded a Publication Subvention Grant for her work with a translation of Jacques Derrida’s Artaud the Moma (Columbia University Press, 2017). She edited and provided the afterward for Peggy Kamuf’s translation of this Derrida’s 1996 lecture at the Museum of Modern Art in New York concerning the exhibition Antonin Artaud: Works on Paper.