Humanities Professors Selected for 2025 Faculty Fellows Awards

Five College of Humanities professors have been selected as 2025 Faculty Fellows: David Bresnahan (History), Blake Gutt (World Languages & Cultures), Benjamin Lyons (Communication), Maureen Mathison (Writing & Rhetoric Studies), and Ryan Moran (History). Faculty Fellows receive a semester of full release time from teaching and administrative responsibilities in order to spend time advancing scholarly or creative research projects.

Wanda Pillow, dean of the College of Humanities, says, “The College is thrilled that our Humanities faculty have been recognized for the value and impactful contributions of their scholarship with a 2025 Faculty Fellowship, and looks forward to supporting them during the completion of their projects.”

Read below for more on what each of the Faculty Fellows will be pursuing in the upcoming year!

David Bresnahan, History
David Bresnahan, assistant professor of History, is working on his second book project during the fellowship. “The Bombay Africans and the Exploration of East Africa is a history of Africa’s exploration from the perspective of the liberated Africans who worked as headmen and interpreters on nineteenth century British expeditions. In both scholarly and popular literatures, the history of African exploration focuses on the European men that led expeditions, among them David Livingstone, Richard Francis Burton, and John Hanning Speke. My book, by contrast, looks at these expeditions through the lens of a remarkable group of African intermediaries who were known as the “Bombay Africans.” The Bombay Africans were former slaves from East-Central Africa who were liberated and educated in India. They later returned to Africa to join British geographical expeditions. The Bombay Africans charts new dimensions in the history of Africa’s exploration and shows how liberated Africans shaped imperial knowledge-making processes.”

Blake Gutt, World Languages & Cultures
Blake Gutt, assistant professor of World Languages and Cultures, is working on a book titled The Trans Middle Ages. “The Trans Middle Ages is an innovative, interdisciplinary book project that examines representations of gender transition and transformation in medieval French texts through the lens of modern trans theory. This cross-temporal theoretical engagement catalyzes detailed analysis of both “canonically trans” medieval texts, and texts that are not typically seen as susceptible to trans interpretation. A wide array of medieval texts discuss gender norms, gendered embodiments, and what we now call gender identity in complex and flexible ways. These sources range from hagiographic works describing saints assigned female at birth who lived as monks, and literary representations of pregnant men, to medical, theological, and philosophical treatises. Through analysis of this corpus, the project traces a lineage between the Middle Ages and the contemporary period.”

Benjamin Lyons, Communication
Ben Lyons, assistant professor of Communication, is working on a book titled Shades of Gray: How Older Adults Make Sense of Misinformation. “Concerns about the public's susceptibility to untrustworthy news has motivated an explosion of research on vulnerable groups, especially older adults. Compared to younger users, older Americans share far more links to and visit such sites far more often. These findings fit with stereotypes of senior citizens unable to judge what’s true online. Relying on a wealth of data from nationally representative surveys and experiments, I complicate this notion. Why are older news consumers especially vulnerable to dubious content?”

Maureen Mathison, Writing & Rhetoric Studies
Maureen Mathison, associate professor of Writing and Rhetoric Studies, is working on a book about unruly controversies. “Science is in a precarious position today. Where scientists once were held in high esteem, they now face multiple challenges that jeopardize their status. Allegations of misconduct are increasing, with plagiarism and fraud at the forefront. Breaches of norms are dangerous as they erode confidence in science. Science is experiencing challenges to its image as controversies that threaten its integrity- unruly controversies­ increase. Such controversies have the potential to create havoc in the scientific world. Little is known, though about how such breaches are investigated and adjudicated because their accounting largely remains hidden from view.

Unruly controversies are critical to understanding contemporary science. Science tends to insulate itself from the public while at the same time develop trust with the public, a deft practice to sustain over time, as trust must be taken at its word. The job of truth-telling is more difficult today, complicated by the network of invested partners in the hidden making of science: funding, publishing, and commercialization. Though most scientists adhere to scientific norms, at least in spirit, there are situations where normative behavior is violated because of pressures from network stakeholders, jeopardizing the trust science works hard to maintain.

The purpose of this book is not to vilify individuals who transgress norms but to illuminate the conditions and exigencies that lead to their violation of norms, and to see how they are adjudicated by the community of science. In this way, the larger community under which contemporary science operates can be made more apparent.”

Ryan Moran, History
Ryan is an assistant professor of History working on his second book project. During the fellowship, he will be traveling to collections in the US and Japan to study aptitude testing in modern Japan and how this related to concepts of meritocracy. Knowledge testing is an important subject for educators. “While contemporary Japan is considered a place where one’s score on aptitude tests will determine future prospects, little attention has been paid to the history of this practice. This project examines aptitude testing’s origins in the development of labor science in the 1920s and looks at how this research was co-opted by wartime ideologues in the 1930s.”

Please join us in congratulating our colleagues!