Meet our 2024–2025 Faculty Fellows!
Oliva Bloechl | Music
Olivia Bloechl is Professor of Music at the University of Pittsburgh and author of Native American Song at the Frontiers of Early Modern Music (2008) and Opera and the Political Imaginary in Old Regime France (2017). In 2015, she co-edited Rethinking Difference in Music Scholarship (with Melanie Lowe and Jeffrey Kallberg), and she is currently part of the editorial team of the in-progress Oxford Handbook of Global Music History. Her current book project, Music and Sound in the Struggle for the Ohio Country, 1740-1795, explores the role of intercultural sonic interactions in colonial struggles over the pre-Revolutionary Ohio.
Daniel Heifetz | Religious Studies
Daniel Heifetz is a Teaching Assistant Professor in the Department of Religious Studies. His first book, The Science of Satyug explores the role of neoliberalism in popularizing religion-science syntheses in India. He is currently collaborating on a new project called Queer Desi Religion. This project engages the queer South Asian diaspora community through community-based participatory research. Community members have been consulted about desired outcomes for the project and have been involved in collecting interviews. We aim to contribute to the visibility of this community through academic publishing and local events to combat feelings of alienation and isolation that emerge from being marginalized along multiple axes of identity.
Delanie Jenkins | Studio Arts
Delanie Jenkins is Associate Professor in the Department of Studio Arts. As an artist, she explores the intersection of materials with ideas in a creative process responsive to people, place, and circumstance. Her current work is influenced by geology, consumption, waste, the forces of the planet and our responsibility to it. As a Humanities Center Fellow, she will engage in ongoing creative research that delves into the material resources from her participation in the Arctic Circle Art & Science Expedition, navigating the high Arctic waters of the international territory of Svalbard in late fall 2022.
Rachel Kranson | Religious Studies
Rachel Kranson is Director of Jewish Studies and Associate Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Pittsburgh, specializing in the history of American Jews and the history of gender and sexuality. She is the author of Ambivalent Embrace: Jewish Upward Mobility in Postwar America (University of North Carolina Press, 2017, honorable mention for best first book award from the Immigration and Ethnic History Society) and a co-editor of A Jewish Feminine Mystique?: Jewish Women in Postwar America (Rutgers University Press, 2010, Finalist for a National Jewish Book Award in Women’s Studies). She is working on her current manuscript, tentatively titled “Religious Misconceptions: American Jews and the Politics of Abortion.”
Alex Taylor | History of Art and Architecture
Alex Taylor is an Associate Professor in the Department of History of Art and Architecture. His research concerns the intersecting histories of art and capitalism in the twentieth century. His second book, Forms of Persuasion: Art and Corporate Image in the 1960s (California, 2022), showed how this decade’s declaredly counterculture avant-gardes also engaged the marketing, public relations, and lobbying imperatives of multinational corporate enterprise. At the Humanities Center, he will work on his next book, provisionally titled Possessed Objects, which will explore the mass media forces that turned elite art collecting into a middle-class consumer hobby in midcentury America.
Lidong Xiang | English
Lidong Xiang is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English. She teaches courses in children’s literature and childhood studies. Her research focuses on girlhood studies, global childhoods, environmental injustices and childhood, violence, trauma, and memory studies. Her work during the Humanities Center fellowship will focus on the pivotal role of Chinese bookwomen who have been actively involved in transnational conversations and projects of Chinese children’s literature publishing. This project mainly addresses the question of practicing ethnography to reimagine literary analysis.