People
Director
Elizabeth Perrill is a Full Professor in the School of Art. Her primary research interests include histories of Zulu cultural expression, South African contemporary art, museum studies, ceramic arts, and the economics of art. Perrill’s second book, Burnished: Zulu Ceramics between Urban and Rural South Africa (2022), analyzes the aesthetic and economic transformations impacting Zulu ceramics during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Perrill earned her M.A. (2004) and Ph.D. (2008) in Art History from Indiana University at Bloomington.
Associate Director
Asa Eger is an Associate Professor in the Department of History. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 2008 in Islamic Archaeology. His primary research focuses on the formation of frontiers and borders between Muslims and Christians using archaeological and textual evidence. He has led excavations and surveys in southeastern Turkey and Israel. He joined the History Department at UNCG in 2009.
Steering Committee
Ana Paula Höfling (she/her/hers) holds a PhD in Culture and Performance from the University of California, Los Angeles, and she was an Andrew Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for the Americas at Wesleyan University in Connecticut. Her book, Staging Brazil: Choreographies of Capoeira (Wesleyan University Press, 2019), analyzes the role of capoeira and capoeiristas in the process of staging Brazilian national culture, focusing on issues of race, class, and authorship. Her research is published in Dance Research Journal and Revista Brasileira de Estudos da Presença, and she has contributed to several essay volumes on the Brazilian art, culture, and identity. She is Associate Editor of the Revista Brasileira de Estudos da Presença (Brazilian Journal on Presence Studies) and she is Associate Professor and Graduate Program Director in the School of Dance at UNCG. She is currently on research assignment.
Jeremy A. Rinker is an Associate Professor at the University of North Carolina Greensboro’s Department of Peace and Conflict Studies, where he is currently engaged in research that explores the intersections between peacebuilding, collective trauma, and systems of oppression. Of particular interest to Jeremy currently are the ways in which emotions and trauma have been elided in the rational interest-based models of conflict management and resolution practice. Jeremy graduated with a Ph.D. from George Mason University’s Institute for Conflict Analysis and Resolution (now the Jimmy and Rosalyn Carter School for Peace and Conflict Resolution) in 2009. His Masters is in Asian Religion from the University of Hawaii (2001) and his dissertation research focused on a Dalit Buddhist movement based in Western India.
Derek Skillings joined the Philosophy department in 2019. He received his Ph.D. in philosophy from The Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY) in 2017. He received his Ph.D. in zoology and his M.A. in philosophy from The University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa in 2012. He also spent time at the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Bordeaux. He works primarily on biological individuality, explanation, and causal reasoning in biology and medicine. He is particularly interested in the problem of how to approach the complex and hierarchical nature of living systems when investigating biological phenomena and constructing explanations. He has ongoing projects on biological individuality, holobionts, the nature of health, robustness, causal explanation, speciation and lineage concepts, and biological organization. He also has side projects in the history of biology, on marine population connectivity, and on a Buddhist approach to the ontology of living systems. His biology research has focused on conservation biology, evolutionary ecology, and phylogeography. He did the majority of this research at The Hawaiʻi Institute of Marine Biology working on coral reefs and organisms within the incomparable Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument. For an introduction to some of the topics he works on, check out his Aeon Magazine articles on biological individuality and on holobionts and medicine.
Read more about Dr. Skillings »
Co-Founders
Lisa Levenstein is an assistant professor in the History Department. She earned her Ph.D. in History from the University of Wisconsin in 2002. Lisa latest book project is titled When Feminism Went Viral: The US Women’s Movement in the 1990s and Beyond. She joined the History Department at UNCG in 2002.
Read more about Dr. Levenstein »
Jennifer Feather is an associate professor and head of the English Department. She earned her Ph.D. in English Literature from Brown in 2006. She specializes in Renaissance literature and joined the UNCG Department of English in 2008. (Dr. Feather is also a Humanities Network and Consortium Steering Committee member.)
Graduate Assistants
Elizabeth Gardner (she/her), (Graduate) Assistant Director of HNAC, is a Ph.D. student in English Literature. Her broad research interests focus on the intersection between cultural history, narrative literary theory, and visual rhetoric, especially during the 19th century following the advent of photography.
Lisa Hines is a School of Dance Graduate Thesis Candidate. She is a Graduate Teaching Assistant in the Dance Department and Graduate Assistant for the Humanities Network and Consortium at UNCG. Lisa’s research focuses on revisiting spiral curriculum and the use of circles within dance and dance pedagogy as a way of unlocking the embedded vs. embodied movement of dancers. She is currently working on her thesis and a project called “Encroachment,” which will explore culture and race theories through immersive print and dance movement.
Caitlin Smith (she/her/hers) is a first-year MA student in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. She earned a Bachelor’s in Gender Women and Sexuality Studies with a minor in Global Studies from Appalachian State University in 2021. Additionally, her senior capstone focused on the masculinization and animalization of Black women throughout history. Her research interests include Queer Animalia, Black Matriarchy, Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome, the Womanist Movement, and teaching social justice.
Katie Worden (she/her/hers) is a first-year fiction writer in the MFA program. She holds a B.A. and a B.S. from the University of Maryland, College Park. A Fred Chappell Fellow, she also serves as an assistant for the Humanities Network and Consortium. Her research interests include fabulism, myth, and fairy tale in contemporary literature. Find her on Twitter @kmworden.
