People
Director
Heather Brook Adams is an associate professor of English and a 2021-2022 Candace Bernard and Robert Glickman Dean’s Professor in the UNCG College of Arts and Sciences. Her research performs feminist historiography of the recent past and investigates large themes such as health and wellness through a focus on rhetorics of reproduction and pregnancy in relation to affect, gender, race, and class. Her monograph, Enduring Shame: A Recent History of Unwed Pregnancy and Righteous Reproduction (University of South Carolina Press, 2022) explores rhetorical shaming and blaming practices, both private and public, that have shaped—and that continue to shape—discussions of gendered reproduction and sexual wellbeing. Dr. Adams is also currently co-editing a collection with Dr. Nancy Myers on rhetorics of reproduction. Dr. Adams’s scholarly and pedagogical interests also include advocacy, teaching writing at the undergraduate and graduate levels, visual rhetorics, intersectional feminist methodologies, and undergraduate research. She is a cross-appointed faculty member in UNCG’s Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies program.
Associate Director
Michiel Van Veldhuizen specializes in the religious and intellectual history of the ancient world, with a particular interest in disaster and divination. His current book project, Divining Disaster: Signs of Catastrophe in Ancient Greek Culture, analyzes the ways in which the ancient Greeks gave meaning to such disastrous events as plagues, famines, and shipwrecks, and the lessons it may hold for a hermeneutic disaster management today. Among his forthcoming publications are a chapter on the use of abductive reasoning in deciphering oracles, and an article on the reception of Circe’s island as a place of becoming-animal in the journal Ramus. His research draws on such fields as semiotics, ecocriticism, and animal studies to illuminate ancient mentalities and modern receptions. With many years of experience as a writing consultant, Michiel is also passionate about teaching writing at all levels.
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Steering Committee Members
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.
Gwen Hunnicutt is a professor in the Department of Sociology whose research is concerned with gender violence – its varieties, causes, consequences and politicizations. This research is located at the intersections of critical criminology, interdisciplinary violence studies, green criminology, feminist criminology, gender, peace and security studies and ecofeminism. My recent book, Gender Violence in Ecofeminist Perspective: Intersections of Animal Oppression, Patriarchy and Domination of the Earth, aims to begin an eco-centered, eco-feminist, informed discussion about the ways in which gender, patriarchy and violence are bound up with our relationship to the environment. Her articles appear in peer-reviewed journals in the fields of criminology, feminist criminology, gender studies, and violence studies. She teaches a range of core and special topics courses, focused on general criminology, gender violence, collective violence, green criminology and deviance.
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Erin Lawrimore is the University Archivist and Associate Professor at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. In this role, she is responsible for collecting, preserving, and promoting the history of UNCG from its creation as the State Normal and Industrial School in 1891 through today. Her research interests include community-engaged archival practice, course-based undergraduate research, and American archives history and development. Erin is also the co-founder of Well Crafted NC. Well Crafted NC couples archival research with documentation through oral history and collection building to tell the history of beer and brewing in North Carolina. These stories include Moravian settlers who were among the state’s earliest commercial brewers, prohibitionists and those who skirted their restrictive laws, a pioneering Black woman who led operations at one of the largest commercial breweries in the world, and a German immigrant who changed the laws of the state to open the door for today’s craft beer revolution. Erin holds a bachelor’s degree in English from Duke and a masters of science in information studies from the University of Texas at Austin. She previously worked as Assistant Head and Curator of the Special Collections Research Center at North Carolina State University, and as Coordinator for Acquisitions and Processing at the University of Tennessee Special Collections Library. She has been an active member of the Society of American Archivists since 2001 and served on the organization’s Council from 2016-2019.
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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.
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.
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Faye Stewart (she/her/hers) teaches and researches diversity, migration, transnationalism, and gender and sexuality. She teaches all levels of German language, culture, film, and literature, in addition to courses in English on topics such as race and representation, queer cinema, and identity and belonging in contemporary German-speaking Europe. As a speaker of English and French and a lifelong learner of German, she enthusiastically promotes the study of all languages and the development of intercultural proficiencies through travel and study abroad, encounters with literary and filmic texts, and working with diverse collaborators. She is the author of German Feminist Queer Crime Fiction: Politics, Justice and Desire (McFarland, 2014); co-editor of Gender and Sexuality in East German Film: Intimacy and Alienation (Camden House, 2018); co-editor of Framing Islam: Faith, Fascination, and Fear in 21st-Century German Culture, special issue of Colloquia Germanica 47.1-2 (2014/2017); and a member of the authoring team for Grenzenlos Deutsch (German Without Borders), an inclusive, open-access curriculum for beginning German.
Co-Founders
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.)
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.
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Graduate Assistants
Liz Gardner is a PhD 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. Beginning her second year working with HNAC, Liz is excited to assist in furthering the humanities throughout the university and Greensboro communities.
Kathy Goodkin is a doctoral student in English, specializing in American poetry, hybrid-genre, and environmental writing. She has a diverse academic and administrative background and holds an MFA in creative writing from George Mason University. Kathy is the recipient of the 2023 Roskelly Award for Pedagogical Innovation. Her recent or forthcoming publications include an article on Elizabeth Bishop and John Donne (forthcoming in Penn State University Press’ Bishop-Lowell Studies) and several poems in The Laurel Review (Fall 2022).
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 revisits spiral curriculum and involves curating multi-disciplinary art forms. She is working on her thesis and an immersive exhibit project called “Encroachment” that will debut at GPS downtown in the Fall of 2023. The exhibit will explore culture and race theories through print work and dance movements. Lisa is passionate about Latin Social Dance and currently spends any available time developing a community in Greensboro that fosters a safe space for all people to connect with one another through dance.
Pooja Shah is an international PhD student in the English department, specializing in postcolonial theory and literature, gender and sexuality studies. She is the recipient of the Alumni Hayes Excellence Fellowship (2022-2026). Pooja’s academic background also includes work in comics studies, linguistics, and narrative theory.
