Timothy Melley is Professor of English and Geoffrion Family Director of the Miami University Humanities Center. He is the author of Empire of Conspiracy: The Culture of Paranoia in Postwar America (Cornell 2000), The Covert Sphere: Secrecy, Fiction, and the National Security State (Cornell 2012), as well as numerous essays His short stories have appeared in Story Quarterly, Threepenny Review, The Sun, Columbia, Mississippi Review, and Epoch. They have also aired on Public Radio International’s “This American Life” and received mention in The Best American Stories. He is the recipient of the Benjamin Harrison medallion and four teaching awards, including Miami's university-wide teaching prize, the E. Philip Knox Award. He is currently writing about the cultural politics of security.
Pepper Stetler is Associate Professor of Art and Architecture History and Associate Director of the Miami University Humanities Center. She is the author of Stop Reading! Look!: Modern Vision and the Weimar Photographic Book (University of Michigan, 2015). Her essays on early twentieth-century German art and photography have appeared in publications of the Museum of Modern Art and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, as well as numerous journals. In 2016, she received the Crossan Hays Curry Distinguished Educator Award from the College of Creative Arts. Her current research explores the dynamic relationship between photography and architecture.
Stephanie Marlow earned her BA in English Literature and Creative Writing (2016) at Miami University. Since graduating, she has worked as an Administrative Assistant at an in-home care company and as an Eligibility Referral Specialist with Butler County Job and Family Services interviewing people for SNAP and Medicaid. She has two dogs and three cats. She joined the Humanities Center team in October 2022 and couldn’t be happier to be back at Miami again.
Lauren van Atta is a second-year doctoral student in English specializing in early modern drama and queer theory. She earned her B.A. from the University of Dayton and her M.A. from Lehigh University. She is currently writing about bodies, reproduction, and queer identity in the writing of early modern authors.
Cody Norris is a first-year doctoral student in English. His research interests include early modern drama, queer theory and sexuality studies, and cultural studies. He earned his B.A. in English and M.A. in writing at Coastal Carolina University.
Elisabeth Hodges is Associate Professor of French and Chair of French, Italian, and Classics. She is the author of Urban Poetics in the French Renaissance (Ashgate, 2008). Her essays have appeared in publications in France and in numerous journals. Her current scholarship focuses on French and contemporary art film with publications on Godard and the television series The Wire, and work in progress on sound in Isaac Julien’s 10,000 waves. She serves as a docent for the Contemporary Art Center and guest curates film presentations for the CAC and the Mini Microcinema. She is currently writing a book on sensory aesthetics in contemporary art films.
Kaara L. Peterson, Associate Professor of English, studies Renaissance medical history, art history, and literature. Her most current publications are Humorality in Early Modern Art, Material Culture, and Performance, with Amy Kenny (Palgrave Macmillan), and The Afterlife of Ophelia, with Deanne Williams (Palgrave Macmillan). Her essays have appeared in English Literary Renaissance, Renaissance Quarterly, and Studies in Philology, among others, and in collected volumes. She recently held a Plumer visiting fellowship at St. Anne's College, Oxford, and is the recipient of an upcoming Burleigh Visiting Fellowship at the University of Cambridge.
Michele Navakas, Professor of English, is the author of Coral Lives: Literature, Labor, and the Making of America (Princeton, 2023) and Liquid Landscape: Geography and Settlement at the Edge of Early America (U of Pennsylvania Press, 2018). She is currently working on a study of early twentieth-century reading habits and the emergence of ecology as a popular concept in the United States.
Nathan French is an associate professor of comparative religion. He specializes in Islamic law (sharīʿa), Islamic legal theory, Islamic theology, and contemporary Middle East history. His research explores how contemporary Jihadi-Salafi movements, such as al-Qa'ida and ISIS, appropriate and re-interpret Islamic law and theology for their sociopolitical projects. He is presently completing a monograph, "And God Knows the Martyrs: Theodicy, Violence, and Asceticism in Jihadi-Salafism."
P. Renée Baernstein is Professor of History and Associate Dean in the College of Arts and Science. She specializes in the history of Renaissance Italy, particularly gender, religion, and family. She is the author of A Convent Tale: A Century of Sisterhood in Spanish Milan (Routledge 2002) as well as articles in many journals. She has been a Fulbright fellow, fellow of the American Academy in Rome, Visiting Professor at Harvard’s Villa I Tatti Center in Florence, and recipient of the Ohio Academy of History’s Distinguished Teaching Award. Her next book, “Strangers at Home,” is about noble women and family politics in sixteenth-century Italy.
Ryan Gunderson, Associate Professor of Sociology and Social Justice, has published more than 60 articles in journals including Environmental Politics, Journal of Cleaner Production, Organization & Environment. His books include Hothouse Utopia: Dialectics Facing Unsavable Futures (Zero Books, 2021) and Making the Familiar Strange: Sociology Contra Reification (Routledge, 2020) and, as co-author, The Degrowth Alternative (Routledge, 2020) and Climate Change Solutions: Beyond the Capital-Climate Contradiction (Michigan, 2020). In 2019 he won the Early Career Award from the Association for Environmental Studies and Sciences, and in 2020 received the Miami University Junior Faculty Scholar Award.