Rock Ethics Institute

Eliana Hadjiandreou, Ph.D. candidate in Psychology (Forrest S. Crawford Fellow in Ethical Inquiry) 

Bio: Eliana Hadjiandreou is a Ph.D. candidate in Social Psychology, conducting research as part of the Empathy and Moral Psychology Lab, with affiliations to the McCourtney Institute for Democracy at Penn State, the Center for the Science of Moral Understanding at UNC Chapel Hill, as well as the University of Cyprus. Her work broadly studies perceptions and norms around empathy, compassion, and selfishness, with a particular interest on how such perceptions can affect our willingness to include others in our moral circles and engage in dialogue across different group divides.  

Dissertation: The Stringent Moral Circle: the Effect of Self-Other Discrepancies in the Expansion of Moral Concern 

Project Description: People continually grapple with the question of who is worthy of our moral regard. Whom should I protest for, wear a mask for, sign a petition for? In other words, who should I include in my moral circle? To answer these questions, people sometimes look to others’ moral decisions. At the same time, people assume that others are more self-interested than they really are (Miller, 1999) which can reduce one’s own prosociality. My dissertation aims to assess whether this paradox is reflected in people’s circles of moral expansiveness, and the effects of assuming that others are less morally expansive than the self on prosocial attitudes towards suffering targets. In some preliminary data I have collected (Hadjiandreou & Cameron, 2020) using the Moral Expansiveness Scale (MES; Crimston et al., 2016) from three perspectives (self, others, others for self), there was support for the hypothesis that people think their own moral expansiveness is higher than that of others, reflecting undue cynicism. This, in turn, has complicated relationships to how much compassion people report for suffering entities, which I will investigate further as part of my dissertation. 

Ashley Lamarre, Ph.D. candidate in Philosophy and African American and Diaspora Studies (Center and Institute Fellow) 

Bio: Ashley Lamarre (she/her) is a dual-title Ph.D. candidate in the departments of Philosophy and African American and Diaspora Studies at Penn State. Her research interests include Critical Philosophy of Race, Feminist Philosophy, and Ethics. Her dissertation project explores the role of hegemonic representations in oppressive systems across Frantz Fanon’s account of cultural racism and Black Feminist accounts of stereotypical representations from thinkers such as Elise Johnson McDougald, Claudia Jones, bell hooks, and Patricia Hill Collins. Additionally, Ashley is also a Program Assistant for the Cultivating Underrepresented Students in Philosophy (CUSP) program at Penn State which hosts both a Fall Graduate Application Workshop and a Summer Institute every year.  

Dissertation: Cultural Racism and Controlling Images: Hesitations, Hierarchy, and the Role of Hegemonic Representations in Oppressive Systems

Project Description: The central question I am concerned with in this dissertation is: what is the role of hegemonic representations in an oppressive system? In this dissertation, I argue that Frantz Fanon’s account of cultural racism can illuminate the mechanism of certain oppressive practices, like hegemonic representations, but lacks in its verdict that cultural racism should be considered a comparably minor form of oppression. Instead, cultural racism should be understood as a co-constitutive element of other forms of exploitation due to its ability to impair the affected group’s capacity for self-definition and its ability to reduce a group’s capacity to resist their oppression. While some contemporary work in critical phenomenology recognizes the power of forms of representational violence, this co-constitutive relationship is thoroughly theorized within Black Feminist Thought by thinkers such as Elise Johnson McDougald, Claudia Jones, bell hooks, and Patricia Hill Collins. Turning to Black Feminist Thought provides an intersectional account of cultural oppression, which we do not get with Fanon, and a rich resource for analyzing attempts to dismantle hegemonic representations. Bringing together Fanon’s decolonial thought and Black Feminist Thought will also allow me to elucidate the woes of liberatory urgency that lead to hierarchies of oppression and political hesitancy in the face of issues of representation. 

Ben Randolph, Ph.D. candidate in Philosophy (Center and Institute Fellow) 

Bio: Ben Randolph is defending his dissertation in April 2023. His dissertation is on the concept of hope in Frankfurt School critical theory and in its philosophical forebears. He has published, presented, and taught on topics in the history of philosophy, continental philosophy, social and political philosophy, and modernist literature. In addition, since 2021, he has advised undergraduates seeking to conduct research or to apply to fellowships and scholarships at Penn State’s Undergraduate Research and Fellowships Mentoring Office (URFM). 

Dissertation: A Secular Hope? An Interpretation and Defense of Adorno’s Critical Theory  

Project Description: Theodor W. Adorno’s critical theory has been accused both of debilitating pessimism and impractical utopianism. This dissertation reconstructs Adorno’s conception of hope and shows that it is neither pessimistic nor unrealistic, but in fact fits the requirements of modern, secular societies. Adorno’s secular hope, like the Judeo-Christian doctrines of hope it inherits and transforms, turns on a rational and an extra-rational component. Its rationality derives from demonstrating that (a) political progress, (b) an ethical life, and (c) a transfigured cognitive experience are not impossible. Hope’s extra-rational sources are “promissory experiences” that give us fallible indications that (a), (b), and (c) are, more strongly, possible, because they are sedimented in existing practices in disruptive and fragmentary forms. This account is elucidated in conversation with alternative attempts at secularizing hope, particularly Kant’s, Marx’s, Honneth’s, and Habermas’s. 

Emily Sterk, Ph.D. candidate in Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese (Center and Institute Fellow) 

Bio: Emily Sterk is a Ph.D. candidate in Penn State’s Department of Spanish, Italian and Portuguese. Her research focuses on contemporary cultural and literary representations of sex tourism and sex workers’ role in the coastal tourism economies of the American tropics. She argues that sex workers serve as reproductive laborers that sustain these coastal economies, while also playing a key role in the intellectual imagination of their respective nations and their positions in the global marketplace. The keywords that organize her publications and course are: feminism, sex and sexuality, anti-colonialism, critical race studies, and trans studies. Emily’s work has appeared in Translation Review, Cincinnati Romance Reviewand Voces del Caribe.  

Dissertation: (S)extractivism in the American Tropics: Sex Workers as Reproductive Laborers of National Identities, Sex Tourism, and the Global Marketplace

Project Description: Emily’s dissertation studies a series of cultural and literary representations of sex tourism and sex workers’ role in the coastal tourism economies of Brazil, Colombia, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Puerto Rico. Interdisciplinary in nature, her project examines the intersections between sex work and sociopolitical issues such as gender equality, LGBTQIA+ rights, racism, and (neo)colonialism within the context of the American tropics. Through an analysis of literature, films, and performances that center around sex workers and sex clients, Emily argues that the sex worker not only serves as a reproductive laborer that sustains the national economy, but also plays a key role in the intellectual imagination of the nation and its position in the global marketplace. In her archive, she pays special attention to the particularities of each context and their cultural productions to examine how depictions of the everyday lived experiences of sex workers intersect with the ways in which their bodies are sexualized and commodified within their national identities and economies, as well as the global sphere’s perceptions of the American tropics. 

Lyana Sun Han Chang, Ph.D. candidate in applied linguistics (Center and Institute Fellow)

Dissertation: Narrativizing Undocumented Status: How immigrants Position Themselves and Negotiate Identities and Discourses in their Reclaimant Narratives

Bio: Lyana Sun Han Chang is a fourth year Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Applied Linguistics at Penn State. Her research interests include discourse analysis, narrative analysis, identity, and raciolinguistics. Her research examines the negotiation and construction of identity and agency against the backdrop of dichotomous mainstream discourses. Her dissertation research focuses on the relationships between immigrant identities, immigrant reclaimant narratives, and immigration discourses within the context of undocumented status. Specifically, Lyana is interested in stance-taking and positioning in narratives to understand how immigrants negotiate identities and public discourses which are often tied to the criminalization and racialization of certain immigrant groups. Her research has implications for the inclusion of narratives which bring to the forefront voices which are often silenced and constrained by dominant discourses, and for immigration reform and social integration. In the past she has presented her research at the TESOL International Convention and Language Expo and the Conference on College Composition and Communication.  

Project Description: Dominant discourses on immigration and legality promote narrow and harmful portrayals of immigrants with an undocumented status. These discourses dehumanize immigrants and have a significant impact on how they are treated. One way to combat these portrayals has been through reclaimant narratives in which immigrants “assert their right to speak and reframe audience understanding” (Bishop, 2018, p. 160). Research on reclaimant narratives, however, has focused on interview data without a detailed analysis of the narratives themselves or contextual research on how narrators contend with the dominant and everyday discourses they’re exposed to—discourses which may differ depending on demographics like race and gender. Therefore, this dissertation aims to understand: 1) how immigrants position themselves in their reclaimant narratives, 2) what discourses immigrants are exposed to, and 3) how immigrants navigate these discourses to position themselves in their narratives. I will use a concurrent exploratory sequential mixed methods design, utilizing data from narratives, surveys, and interviews. Furthermore, a narrative as practice approach (De Fina, 2018a, 2018b) will guide the integration and analysis of this research. I will analyze positioning in reclaimant narratives (Bamberg, 1997), run statistical analyses for survey data, and use thematic analysis (Braun & Clark, 2006) to identify common themes in interviews. Finally, I will use data from the narratives, surveys, and interviews to formulate matrices for conducting a cluster analysis (Bazeley, 2018) to analyze the relationships between narrative positioning, narrators, and discourses. This research can offer insights into how marginalized individuals negotiate discourses and identities to represent their voices against harmful portrayals and has implications for policy change, social integration, and for adding complexity and humanity to discourse on immigration. 

Eric Disbro, Ph.D. candidate in French and Francophone Studies and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies (Center and Institute Fellow)

Dissertation: Terraqueous Encounters: Queer and Trans Embodiment and Care in Francophone Literatures of the Indian Ocean and Oceania 

Bio: Eric Disbro is a dual-title Ph.D. candidate in French and Francophone Studies and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. His research focuses on contemporary francophone island literatures of the Indian Ocean and Oceania, their innovative representations of queer and trans embodiment, and networks of care. Moving through the world as queer or trans often necessitates constant negotiations with the idea of inhabiting a gendered body, combating cisgender and heteronormative forms of medical, emotional, and social policing that attempt to shock bodies into normative trajectories and curb feelings of dis-ease from within the gender binary. Resistance against these modes of normative thinking and policing often takes the form of innovative care work, where individuals choose to have a radical stake in the happiness of those around them. He maintains that knowledges about queer and trans communities and experiences are constructed communally, and by looking to the Indian Ocean and Oceanian regions, one can find writers whose conceptions of care are inspired by the symbiotic relationships in coastal ecosystems. His work is forthcoming in Women in French Studies and Verge: Studies in Global Asias.  

Dissertation: Terraqueous Encounters: Queer and Trans Embodiment and Care in Francophone Literatures of the Indian Ocean and Oceania

Project Description: Eric Disbro’s dissertation project, “Terraqueous Encounters: Queer and Trans Embodiment and Care in Francophone Literatures of the Indian Ocean and Oceania,” argues that Indian Ocean and Oceanian literary representations of queer and trans embodiment and care practices decenter European and North American systems of medically-assisted gender transition and privatized industrial forms of care. He examines these textual interventions in tandem with maritime knowledges of convergence that take the shape of terraqueous allegories of encounter (i.e., coral reefs, tributaries, sandbars, tidepools, and undertow). This comparative approach allows for a humanities-based intervention in ecocriticism and studies of the Anthropocene that valorizes the imaginaries of island writers that have continuously engaged with issues of normative genders, sexualities, and ecological devastation born of empire. He demonstrates how queer and trans characters actively synthesize on one hand the colonial models of normative gendered embodiment and family care, and on the other hand local, autochthonous, and creolized knowledges of socially constructed gender expression and webs of communal, interethnic, intergenerational, and interfaith care. His conclusions offer new insights into constructing more livable futures for those most at stake during the present moment of planetary crisis. ​   

Mercer Gary, Ph.D. candidate in Philosophy and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies (Forrest S. Crawford Fellow in Ethical Inquiry)

Dissertation: The Normative Limits of Relationality: Technoscientific Challenges to Feminist Ethics

Bio: Mercer Gary is a dual-title PhD Candidate in Philosophy and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Penn State. Her research addresses conceptual questions in feminist ethics surrounding the normative significance of relationships in order to strengthen applied interventions in bioethics and the ethics of technology. You can find recent samples of her work in The Hastings Center Report and IJFAB: International Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics. She recently served as Graduate Assistant in Health Humanities at the Penn State College of Medicine, University Park. Her dog, Teff, is a beloved co-conspirator in all these efforts. 

Project Description: It is increasingly clear that personal relationships are mediated and shaped by technological artifacts. And yet, feminist ethicists focused on the significance of relationality have yet to articulate the impact of such technological mediation for their normative ethical frameworks. My dissertation takes up three case studies that highlight the impact of emerging technologies on feminist ethical claims and reconstructs a relational framework that can accommodate them. First, through an analysis of social robots in aged care contexts, I interrogate the affective requirements of care to develop a critical understanding of care ethics that responds to critiques of existing humanistic accounts. Next, I consider telemedicine practices used to paper over care deficits in rural areas, arguing that ethical care cannot take place across great geographical and social difference. I conclude that another feminist approach is therefore necessary to attend to the forms of non-caring relation illuminated by this technology, prompting me to distinguish care ethics from relational ethics. I further explore the normative significance of these non-caring relationships through direct-to-consumer genetic testing, which exposes genetic relationships with varying levels of social significance. I argue that clarifying the scope and source of relational obligations is key to the advancement of feminist ethics.  

David LeBlanc, Ph.D. candidate in English (Center and Institute Fellow)

Dissertation: Aesthetic Ecologies and Romantic Poetics in the Anthropocene

Bio: David is a 3rd year Ph.D. candidate in the English department. He is from New Hampshire where he attended Keene State College, majoring in English and minoring in Writing. David went on to attain an MFA in Creative Writing with a concentration in Poetry from the Stonecoast MFA program at the University of Southern Maine. His research investigates intersections of aesthetics and ecocriticism in British Romantic poetics, particularly those that frame and inform contemporary poetic discourse on the environment and the Anthropocene. 

Project Description: My research investigates how conceptualizations of nature and Anthropocenic change developed through the poetry and aesthetics of British Romantics. Specifically, I explore how three concepts—the bower, the fragment, and what I have termed the ‘Dark Other’—changed and informed Romantic aesthetics and, in turn, how these concepts persist and help shape ecocritical and Anthropocenic discourses today. I argue that the conventionally noncontingent space of the bower was largely broken open by Romantic poets and used to expose how natural spaces were always ever intertwined, culturized, and politicized by human intervention. The fragment—a Romantic model that has long been an object of scholarly study—reflected shifts towards more systemic conceptualizations of the world as local units, systems, and spaces mixed with their global iterations. Finally, the ‘Dark Other,’ loosely based on Thomas De Quincey’s own concept of ‘The Dark Interpreter,’ acts as a vehicle for Romantic poetics highlighting human action itself—notably, the act of authorship—as intertwined with both natural and local/global systems. The ‘Dark Other’ also represents the looming pressures of voice and agency during this volatile period in British colonialism. I read these three concepts forward into recent work by poets such as Donika Kelly and Alison Hawthorne Deming to see how the bower, fragment, and ‘Dark Other’ continue to appear in and influence poetic discourses today. I take as a given Anne Mellor’s call to reconfigure the British Romantic canon around the inclusion and re-centralization of women poets. As such, I use the poetry of Charlotte Turner Smith, Anna Laetitia Barbauld, and Joanna Baillie as a springboard for my examination of Romantic poetics. However, my concept-based research model includes analysis of many other Romantic poets, conventionally canonical and otherwise.

Yi-Ting Chang, Ph.D. candidate in English and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies (Center and Institute Fellow)

Dissertation: Independence’s Others: Decolonial Taiwan in the Transpacific 

Bio: Yi-Ting Chang is a Ph.D. candidate in English and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Her research focus includes transpacific inter-Asia studies, Asian American studies, and decolonial feminist theory. Broadly speaking, her research is driven by two major questions: “What does it mean to do decolonial work?” and “How can critics conceptualize a transpacific genealogy and expression of the decolonial beyond deconstructing U.S.-Japan inter-imperialism?” Chang’s academic research is formed by and formative of her interests in pedagogy and public writing in Chinese. During her free time, she writes for Chinese/Taiwanese media outlets on the issues of gender, sexuality, pedagogy, and politics of identity.  

Project Description: “Independence’s Others” critiques independent state-building as the normative ideal of decolonization and theorizes a decolonial understanding of Taiwan by engaging an archive of Taiwanese and Taiwanese American literature. I use the term “others” to index 1) the marginalized bodies disavowed by independent state-building and its developmentalist projects, and 2) alternative decolonial sensibilities inconceivable to the self-naturalizing neoliberal present. The selected archive of Taiwanese and Taiwanese American literature allows me to investigate “independence’s others” by tackling the issues of Han Taiwanese settler colonialism, Austronesian Indigeneity, techno-nationalism, archipelagic ecologies, and queer and trans desires. At the same time, the literary archive situates Taiwan in a transpacific network of relations, conceiving a transpacific genealogy of the decolonial emerging from the politically ambiguous archipelago. “Independence’s Others” refuses to speak to one single field or subject/subjectivity but enacts multiple crossings–those of the categorical, geographical, and disciplinary. Only through these crossings can I begin to understand why/how liberal ideologies and multiple colonial pasts dissect a transpacific Taiwan, and how independent state-building wounds many bodies. And only by doing so can I begin to challenge the neoliberal compartmentalization of knowledge that forestalls interdependence.

Allison Niebauer, Ph.D. candidate in Communication Arts and Sciences (Crawford Fellow)

Dissertation: The Rhetorical Nature of Harm and Repair: Clergy Perpetrated Sexual Abuse in the Altoona-Johnstown Catholic Diocese 

Bio: Allison is a rhetorical critic who specializes in public memory, rhetorics of religion, and communal harm and repair. She is a fifth year Ph.D student in the Communication Arts and Sciences Department at Penn State, where she also received her Master’s Degree. She received her bachelor’s degree in International Relations from Wheaton College in Illinois. 

Project Description: Her dissertation investigates the impact of a clergy perpetrated sexual abuse scandal on a local Catholic Diocese and how stakeholders within the community have sought repair, redress, and reform. She seeks to advance our understanding of how discursive, material, and social conditions create and limit the resources communities have to reason about tragedy and seek repair.  

Allison’s scholarly goal is to provide a theoretical account of the role of communication in communal harm and repair by bringing together insights from rhetorical studies and moral philosophy. She aims to expand the horizon of reparative options available to this community and others by identifying how current reparative options are produced, mobilized, circulated, and received. 

Curry Kennedy, Ph.D. candidate in English (Center and Institute Fellow)

Dissertation: Rhetorical Education and Religious Practice in Early Modern England

Bio: Curry Kennedy is a Ph.D. candidate at Penn State’s English department, where he studies the long, fraught, and fascinating relationship between rhetoric and religion. At the heart of his work is the question of how texts, rhetorical training, ethical maturation, and religious transformation come together. In the past, these interests have led him to interact with the prayerful rhetoric of Augustine of Hippo, the prophetic rhetoric of Vibia Perpetua, the sermonic rhetoric of John Milton, and the theological stylistics of Ralph Waldo Emerson. In keeping with this trajectory, for his dissertation, he has turned his attention to the minds and movements of the English reformation.

Project Description: Kennedy’s dissertation project asks how humanist educational reforms and reformation religious practices interanimated one another between the opening of John Colet’s grammar school at St. Paul’s in 1509 and the end of the English Civil War in 1660. Adopting a “cradle-to-grave” organizational scheme, he tracks how religious texts, rituals, and ideas permeated and punctuated the lifespan of early modern writers as they progressed through petty school, grammar school, university, and adult education. Each chapter focuses on a different text or species of text—catechisms, the first edition of Erasmus of Rotterdam’s De copia, John Rainolds’s Oxford lectures on rhetoric, and Puritan “arts of listening”—and reconstructs, through archival analysis, how students and auditors got bound up with these teaching technologies, so that their ability to discern what was wise and do what was good came to full bloom—or didn’t. Crucial to these texts’ ability to foster growth in their auditors were their connections to various religious rituals and practices, such as confirmation and Lord’s day liturgies, which were hotly contested in a volatile, reformational milieu. Ultimately, Kennedy shows that religion is an indispensable backdrop to the study of rhetoric in this place and period. 

Kaitlyn Newman, Ph.D. Candidate in Philosophy (Crawford Fellow)

Dissertation: Ethics in the Aftermath: Rethinking Post-Genocide Representations and Remembrance with Lyotard and Levinas

Bio: Kaity is a sixth year Ph.D. student in philosophy. She is originally from Tennessee and completed undergraduate degrees in Philosophy and International Relations at Middle Tennessee State University. Her research interests are in 20th century philosophy, and the intersection of ethics and memory. Her dissertation is on the ethics of memory/memorialization and genocide remembrance through representation. 

Project Description: My dissertation examines the critically important accounts of language and subjectivity in the work of Emmanuel Levinas and Jean-François Lyotard—two philosophers whose ideas were born in the aftermath of the Holocaust—and suggests that our contemporary understandings of these concepts affect the way in which we engage with post-genocide representations. I argue that by transforming our notions of language and subjectivity, in order to acknowledge the inherent excesses involved in both concepts, we can revolutionize the way post-genocide representations are taken up in public memory in order to make spaces of memory more open and inclusive. Both Lyotard and Levinas are committed to the idea that, in language, there is something that exceeds our ability to present it linguistically, and both believe that the Holocaust illustrates this point because it is impossible for us to capture the event in its entirety in language or signification more generally. In addition, with regard to subjectivity, both philosophers maintain that there is something within the self that exceeds the modern category of “the human.” Most importantly, this excess, or what cannot be captured in language or representation, has an ethical significance; we have a duty or responsibility to bear witness to it. With respect to representations of genocide, this means that, though every representation will inevitably fail to capture the entirety of the event, we nevertheless have a responsibility to continue to produce and engage with representations—memorials—of genocide. This reveals that that the activity of genocide remembrance is ongoing and, of necessity, never complete.

William Paris, Ph.D. candidate in Philosophy (Crawford Fellow)

Dissertation: Shadow and Voice: The Ungendering of Black Life in Frantz Fanon, Sylvia Wynter, and Hortense Spillers

Bio: William Paris is in his sixth year of the dual-title program in Philosophy and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. His research areas focus on Africana Philosophy, African-American Philosophy, 20th Century Continental Philosophy, Black Feminism, as well as Gender and Sexuality Studies.  

Project Description: Over the course of Crawford Fellowship I will continue my research and writing for my dissertation “Shadow and Voice: The Ungendering of Black Life in Frantz Fanon, Sylvia Wynter, and Hortense Spillers.” My aim in this project will be to develop a more complex understanding of “Black Life” as understood through the ongoing traumas of Trans-Atlantic Enslavement and European Colonialism. No longer can we be content with conceptualizing the lives of Black women and men, in the past and present, as mere shadows, photo negativities, or analogies to our inherited Euro-U.S. understandings of identity. Black thought—as articulated by Fanon, Wynter, and Spillers—reveals enslavement and colonialism constructed, at best, an uneasy relationship between Black life and the privileges of gender as a fact of humanity and, at worst, made that relationship impossible. It was in this way that violence against the Black body could be justified or tolerated. This recurrent historical violence forced many Black people to understand and articulate their reality in a manner scarcely recognizable. But there was creativity in the development of this voice. This creativity is lost when Black women and men are simply read as mimics of Euro-U.S. thought. The consistent problematic of Black Life in the Western world is to engage with a reality that has made Black people unreal in a language that was not their own, yet to speak all the same. My research into these three figures will participate in that tradition of voice, creativity, and the challenge of a politics of freedom. 

Molly Appel, Ph.D. candidate in Comparative Literature (Crawford Fellow)

Dissertation: That the World May Learn: The Pedagogical Mediations of Human Rights Literature in the Americas

Bio: Molly Dooley Appel is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Comparative Literature with a minor in Latin American Studies. She researches the pedagogical underpinnings of human rights literature and scholarship. Molly was a 2007 Teach For America (TFA) corps member in New York City, teaching English as a Second Language (ESL) in Washington Heights and in the Bronx for 4 years. Later, she provided instructional and curricular support to TFA corps members while teaching ESL at Temple University in Philadelphia. At Penn State she has been a teaching assistant in Comparative Literature, a research assistant and dissertation fellow for Penn State’s Title VI National Resource Center – The Center for Global Studies, an instructor of Rhetoric and Composition, and an officer for the Penn State Americanists and the organization for Graduates in International Languages and Literatures.  

Project Description: Molly’s dissertation, “That The World May Learn: The Pedagogical Mediations of Human Rights Literature in the Americas,” is focused on the ideas we have about the role of literature in teaching people to understand human rights. Scholars, educators, and human rights advocates advance their work through a set of assumptions about the relationships between imagination, language, and personal/community engagement. Literature is said to train, invite, and encourage audiences to feel, consider, or imagine human rights and their subjects; these are verbs that indicate the presence of a complex pedagogical relationship casting audiences as active or passive “students” of a text. She develops this idea through three case studies anchored in the late 1960s and early 70s in the Americas, an era that ushered in paradigm-shifting social movements, new developments in pedagogical practices, and a new wave of human rights literature: the student movements within Argentina, Mexico, and the Chicano-Nuyorican movements in the United States. Molly uses theories of critical pedagogy to examine how literary texts and public discourses mediate student subjectivities during this time. She argues that a recognition of these pedagogical mediations can both contribute to humanistic understandings of the development of human rights discourse and help cultivate empowered studentship through scholarly practice. 

Andres Amerikaner (Crawford Fellow)

Bio: Andrés Amerikaner is a fourth-year ABD student in the Ph.D. program in Comparative Literature at Penn State. His research focus includes post-9/11 narratives of Latin American diaspora; translation, transculturation and translingualism; and Southern Cone film. Andrés holds an M.S. in print journalism from Columbia University and is a former reporter for the Miami Herald.