People
Director
Heather Brook Adams is an assistant 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
Coming soon!
Steering Committee
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.
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.
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.
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 »
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.
Read more about Dr. Levenstein »
Graduate Assistants
Coming soon!
