Our Current Fellows

Internal Fellows

Andrew Cashner (spring 2020)

Assistant Professor of Music

Andrew Cashner is an assistant professor of music in College Music Department of the University of Rochester. He received the PhD in the history and theory of music from the University of Chicago in 2015. He studied piano performance at Lawrence University and New England Conservatory, and organ and sacred music at the University of Notre Dame.

The American Musicological Society selected his article in the Journal of Early Modern History, "Playing Cards at the Eucharistic Table" for its 2015 Alfred Einstein Award. A critical edition of music, Villancicos about Music in Seventeenth-Century Spain and New Spain, was published by the Society for Seventeenth-Century Music in 2017.

His first book, Hearing Faith: Music as Theology in the Spanish Empire, asks what role music played, for early modern Catholics, in the relationship between hearing and faith. It interprets examples of "music about music" in the genre of devotional music known as villancicos, to understand how Spanish Catholics embodied their beliefs about music through the medium of music itself. He will use his Humanities Center Fellowship to complete this book and begin research for a second. This next book will explore how the singing of biblical psalms shaped the relationship between individual and community identities in seventeenth-century Europe and its American colonies.

Thomas Fleischman (spring 2020)

Assistant Professor of History

Thomas Fleischman is a historian of German and environmental history. His first book: Communist Pigs: An Animal History of East Germany’s Rise and Fall is scheduled for publication in the summer of 2020 with Weyerhaeuser Environmental Books, a series at the University of Washington Press. Communist Pigs is an environmental history of the factory farm in the German Democratic Republic, with pigs—the industrial pig, the garden pig, and the wild boar—as the main actors. Since pigs refract changing human relationships to the environment, the book interprets the multiple, malleable bodies of East German hogs to reveal a history of state socialism in flesh and bone.

Beyond agriculture, Dr. Fleischman is interested in the variety of roles animals play in human history, and how “thinking” with living creatures reshapes our understanding of history. To that end, he has begun a new research project about whales, whaling, and German history from approximately 1870 to 1960, tentatively called The Petrel and the Viking: German Whaling in the First Age of Globalization.

David Holloway (fall 2019)

Assistant Professor of Japanese

David Holloway’s current research concerns Japanese fiction from the late 1990s and early 2000s. In particular, he looks closely at the ways in which authors – particularly female authors - grapple with the social and cultural fallout from Japan’s long recession. His book project, The End of Transgression: Gender, Body, Nation, asserts that young Japanese today face crises of affective homelessness, ambivalence, and loss as a result of the collapse of postwar affluence. The book explores the ways in which literary characters respond to this sense of generational dithering. Professor Holloway, who did his PhD work at Washington University in St. Louis, is also working on a second book project related to representations of HIV/AIDS in Japanese popular culture. His recent publications have appeared in U.S.-Japan Women’s Journal, Japanese Language and Literature, Electronic Journal of Contemporary Japanese Studies, and Sungkyun Journal of East Asian Studies.

Brianna Theobald (fall 2019)

Assistant Professor of History

Brianna Theobald is a U.S. women's historian and a historian of Native America. Her forthcoming book, Reproduction on the Reservation: Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Colonialism in the Long Twentieth Century (University of North Carolina Press), documents the transformation of reproductive practices and politics on Indian reservations from the late nineteenth century to the present. The book demonstrates the extent to which colonial politics have been--and remain--reproductive politics while exploring how Native women have negotiated as well as challenged evolving federal policies. Theobald's interest in women's activism has inspired a second book project, tentatively titled Safe Haven: Feminisms and the Domestic Violence Movement.

External Fellows

Eduardo Herrera

Associate Professor of Musicology, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey

This year, Herrera is working on a book that studies soccer chanting in Argentine stadiums. Mixing ethnography and semiotics, Herrera pays attention to the way that moving- and sounding-in-synchrony frames the interpretation of symbolic and physical violence. Drawing on the performative theories of public assemblies, and informed by research on affect and emotion this work argues that chanting brings together sounds and bodies in a public affective practice that, through repetition, contributes to the construction of masculinities that are heteronormative, homophobic, and aggressive, often generating a cognitive dissonance with the individual beliefs of many of the fans.

Herrera first book, Elite Art Worlds: Philanthropy, Latin Americanism, and Avant-Garde Music is forthcoming from Oxford University Press. This book explores the history of the Centro Latinoamericano de Altos Estudios Musicales (1962–1971) as a meeting point for local and transnational philanthropy, the framing of pan-regional discourses of Latin Americanism, and the local embrace of avant-garde aesthetics. Herrera’s co-edited volume Experimentalisms in Practice: Music Perspectives from Latin America (Oxford University Press, 2018) discusses a wide variety of artistic and musical traditions from Latin America, the Caribbean, and Latinx people in the United States, conceived and/or perceived as experimental.

Alexandra Lindgren-Gibson

Associate Professor of History, University of Mississippi

Alex’s work centers on the intersection between the histories of British colonialism, class formation, and the family. At the Humanities Center she will be completing her book project, Working-Class Raj: Colonialism and the Making of Class in British India. This project draws on a rich collection of letters, diaries, and memoirs written by British working-class men and women to explore what happened when they left Britain behind and traveled to India. Once there, they found their worlds upended by new social and racial hierarchies. Alex’s work seeks to understand what British working-class lives, communities, and experiences looked like in an imperial and global context. Her work has appeared in the Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History and has been supported by, among others, the Charlotte W. Newcombe Foundation and the Chabraja Center for Historical Research.