Faculty Fellows

Meet our 2023-2024 Pitt Faculty Fellows!

Michelle Granshaw Theatre Arts

Michelle Granshaw is an Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Theatre Arts. Her book, Irish on the Move: Performing Mobility in American Variety Theatre (University of Iowa Press, 2019) was named a finalist for the George Freedley Memorial Award. She is currently working on her second book project, The Fight for Desegregation: Race, Freedom, and the Theatre after the Civil War, which examines the protests and actions by Black activists to desegregate the theatre after emancipation. The project explores how these actions reimagined public space and their immediate and long-term impact on U.S. theatrical culture. 

Sahar Hosseini History of Art and Architecture

Sahar Hosseini is Assistant Professor in the Department of History of Art and Architecture. Her scholarship focuses on the built environment and material culture of the pre-modern Muslim world, particularly positioning the Persianate societies at the intersection of global flows, local practices, and the natural context of each region. Her current book project, Zayanderud and its City: Reading the Riverine Landscapes of Seventeenth-century Isfahan explores entanglements of the natural and the cultural in the seventeenth-century urban developments that transformed Isfahan after its selection as the capital of Persia in 1598. By foregrounding “natural systems” this project enriches the narrative of city making and the social life of its buildings and spaces.

Bridget Keown Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies

Bridget Keown is a teaching assistant professor in Pitt's Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies Program, where she leads the Gender and Science Initiative. She also serves as the programming director for the Research, Ethics and Society Initiative of Pitt Research. Her own research focuses on the history of trauma diagnoses, specifically the development of “shell shock” and other war-related traumas during the First World War. She is completing her first manuscript, She Was Sure She Was in Hell: Women and War Trauma, 1914-1935, which examines the narratives and experiences of British and Irish women who experienced trauma symptoms as the result of the First World War, and how gendered notions of citizenship, service, and suffering affected their ability to access care. She will also be working on a project funded by Pitt’s Momentum Funds to identify and analyze claims files located in the War Risk Insurance Bureau to understand how social and cultural assumptions around identity influenced the diagnoses, care, and long-term wellbeing of American First World War veterans, and what impact this history has on veterans’ care today. 

Dan Wang Music

Dan Wang is an Assistant Professor of Musicology in the Music Department at Pitt, and affiliated faculty with GSWS and the Film & Media Studies Program. His first book project makes the case that personhood is an aesthetically learned form—and not just a legal, moral, or political category, say—essential to an enculturation in the West, and details the structures, metaforms, textures, and rhythms of this personhood in audiovisual case studies that extend from European opera since the Enlightenment to cinema and DIY video production in the present. Work during the Humanities Center fellowship will focus on the aesthetic form of romantic love.

 Xiqiao Wang English

Xiqiao Wang is an assistant professor in the Composition, Literacy, Pedagogy, and Rhetoric program at Pitt. Xiqiao’s research program is grounded in an interdisciplinary framework informed by socio-cultural theories of literacy, translingualism, and literacy mobility theories. Her research has examined the changing forms and functions of composition in the broader context of global migration, multilingual and multimodal writing processes across formal, informal, and digital contexts, and best practices in designing translingual and multimodal pedagogy to support diverse learners. Using GIS spatial analysis, her project explores the literacy/spatial practices of first-generation college students against the backdrop of urbanization and internal migration in China.

Molly Warsh History

Molly A. Warsh is Associate Professor of History at the University of Pittsburgh, and (since 2021) the Editor of the Journal of Early Modern History. Among other publications, she is the author of American Baroque: Pearls and the Nature of Empire 1492-1700, which was published by the Omohundro Institute with the University of North Carolina Press in 2018. As a Humanities Center Fellow, she will be working on her ongoing book project, titled Servants of the Seasons, a wide-ranging consideration of the history and significance of seasonal labor and itinerancy in the early modern Atlantic world.


See past fellows:

2022-2023 

2021-2022

2020-2021

2019-2020

2018-2019

2017-2018

2016-2017

2015-2016

2014-2015

2013-2014

2012-2013

2011-2012

2010-2011

2009-2010