Gould Sponsored Faculty Research

Summer 2026

Professor Nicholas Buccola, RA Asia Best, and RA Evelyn Montoya

Make America What America Must Become: Loving this Country Like James Baldwin

Make America What America Must Become: Loving this Country Like James Baldwin will be the first book-length treatment of James Baldwin’s philosophy of love and patriotism. In the book, I consider Baldwin’s views on these matters by way of his writings and activism. I argue that Baldwin’s philosophy of love consists of radical empathy – we must try to appreciate the “impossibilities” each of us confront as human beings – and radical confrontation – we must be willing to confront each other in order to make one another conscious of what we could not see before.

Professor Gastón Espinosa, and RA emma Liedke

juan Lugo and the Origins of Puerto Rican Pentecostalism:A Biography and Critical Translation, eds., Gastón Espinosa & Eliezer Oyola

Professor Espinosa’s Gould Summer research project will explore U.S. Latino and Puerto Rican history and religion by analyzing the life, work, and autobiography Juan Leon Lugo (1890-1987), one of the most important Protestant Pentecostal leaders in Puerto Rico and the U.S. in the early 20th-century. He pioneered the Pentecostal work in Puerto Rico and Spanish Harlem from 1916 to the 1950s, served as president of the two largest Pentecostal denominations, contributed to the birth of four denominations and two theological schools, and converted thousands to the movement, which helps to explain why it has since blossomed into over 25 percent of the Island of Puerto Rico and the Puerto Rican Diaspora today. Professor Espinosa will collaborate with Professor Eliezer Oyola to generate the first draft of their co-edited book, Juan Lugo and the Origins of Puerto Rican Pentecostalism: A Short Biography and Translation. This book will provide the first academic biography about Lugo and Spanish to English translation of Lugo’s autobiography, Pentecostés en Puerto Rico o La Vida de Misionero (1951). The project has two parts: First, Professor Espinosa will write a 15,000-word biography about Lugo, focusing especially on the period covered in his autobiography (1916-1951). Second, Professor Oyola (a specialist in Puerto Rican literature) will take the lead in generating the first critical translation of Lugo’s autobiography from Spanish to English. The translation is complete and Professor Espinosa will now write the biography and collaborate with his research assistant to create a timeline, bibliography, and index by September 2026.

Professor Paul Hurley and RA Gabriel Goldstein

What does it mean to act for the right reasons? This project investigates the foundations of consequentialist moral theory by examining whether it asks the right question. Professor Paul Hurley argues that while Aristotelian and Kantian moral theories track the commonsense reasoner in asking “whether to perform an action,” consequentialism asks something different: “whether performing an action produces the best overall outcome.”

The project explores whether consequentialism rests on a fundamentally defective form of practical reasoning that treats an agent's intentions and actions as outcomes-to- be-produced rather than conclusions genuinely reached by the agent.

It then brings this framework to bear on one of the most contested debates in contemporary ethics: the status of deontic constraints, moral prohibitions that hold even when violating them would produce better outcomes. If consequentialism is asking the wrong question altogether, the apparent paradox of such constraints—why morality would ever require us to avoid producing more good—may dissolve entirely. This shift in framing, the project suggests, establishes a powerful presumption against such theories, with profound implications for understanding moral agency.

Professor Lynn Itagaki and RA Kryster Carmela Labarda

the Futures of Comparative Racialization, edited volume Summer 2026

Comparative racialization examines how groups are racialized in relation to one another and how this interchange manages and prioritizes claims on the state. Comparative racialization analyzes the conflicts and connections between and among different racial groups. During Summer 2026, Professor Lynn Mie Itagaki is co-editing a volume of original essays from the Gould-sponsored“ The Futures of Comparative Racialization” multi-day conference held in October 2025 at CMC, with 13+ emerging and senior scholars across the nation. Co-editors Professor Itagaki and Professor Rafael Pérez-Torres (UCLA) will draft a book proposal for the conference edited volume, finalize its co-written introduction, and co-editing the 13+ book chapters through the next round of revision. As a humanistic inquiry, conference participants identify how artists and writers imagine interracial community-building and belonging. Through their visual art and writings, these creatives and cultural workers posit answers to what constitutes democratic belonging and inclusion in the changing interracial US political landscape.

This edited volume aims to identify and evaluate the most recent theories, tools, methods, and concepts used to study, represent, and reimagine interracial relations. As the field has become more established through the increasing recognition of intersectionality and multiracial peoples, communities and histories, racial categories are better analyzed as dynamic interracial formations. Historically, one’s racial identity has been a significant predictor of one’s life chances, opportunities, and quality of life. Ms. Labarda ‘28, the research assistant for this edited volume will help connect past ways of understanding racial identity and interracial relations to emerging ones in the contemporary moment.

Professor Radhika Koul and RA Arundhati Sathish

mapping Colonial Knowledge Networks: Educational Administration and Philological Exploration in 19th-Century British India

This project examines the intersection of colonial educational policy and philological exploration in 19th-century British India through two complementary archival collections. Drawing on recently gathered materials from the British Library's India Office Records and Sir Aurel Stein's papers at the Bodleian Library, this research investigates how colonial administrators and scholar-explorers collaborated to construct knowledge about Indian languages, cultures, and educational systems.

The India Office education department files reveal the bureaucratic mechanisms through which British officials sought to understand, categorize, and control educational practices in India. These documents illuminate the tensions between preserving traditional learning systems and implementing Western educational models, showing how colonial administrators navigated competing pressures from missionaries, local communities, and imperial authorities.

Complementing this administrative perspective, Stein's handwritten correspondence and field notes provide insight into how philological exploration informed educational policy. As a Hungarian-British archaeologist and explorer known for his discoveries in Central Asia, Stein's work exemplified the broader colonial project of mapping linguistic and cultural diversity across the empire.

By analyzing these materials together, this project traces the networks through which colonial knowledge about education was produced, circulated, and implemented. It contributes to scholarship on colonial education, the history of philology, and the administrative culture of the British Raj. The research will result in a research document with transcriptions and attendant analyses in preparation for a scholarly article examining how colonial educational policy was shaped by both bureaucratic imperatives and intellectual curiosity about indigenous knowledge systems, thus revealing the complex negotiations that characterized British rule in India.

professor Aseema Sinha, RA Mia Balonick, and RA Malu Junco

Seeking Hygeia: Time, State Identities, and Pandemic Responses across the World

Seeking Hygeia: Time, State Identities, and Pandemic Responses Across the world” offers a thematically driven book-length treatment of five respiratory pandemics to explore how countries that experienced SARS in 2003, HIN1 in 2009 and MERS in 2015 learnt from and remembered those past crises to respond to COVID-19. This book project examines the role memory, control, and learning played in shaping diverse policy responses across Asia. These responses resonate with underlying state identities and their capacities to remember or forget in the countries under study. Through this examination Aseema Sinha develops a social theory of state wherein policy responses and state control over pandemic is fundamentally tied with narratives of memory-making, learning from the past, which in turn is located in underlying webs of meaning and state identities.

2025-2026 Academic Year

Professor Lynn Itagaki, RA Crystal Widado, and RA Ella Labarda

The Futures of COmparative Racialization

“The Futures of Comparative Racialization” is a multi-stage project in its 2nd year funded by the Gould Center that is comprised of (1) a 4-day conference that will bring 14 junior and senior scholars across the United States to workshop their original research at CMC; (2) an edited volume of the revised and expanded participant chapter contributions; (3) the volume’s co-authored introduction with Professor Rafael Pérez-Torres from UCLA; (4) a short book, co-authored with Rafael Pérez-Torres, to provide an overview of comparative racialization. This project is led by Lynn Itagaki, Associate Professor of Literature and Gender Studies, with two undergraduate research assistants, Crystal Widado ’27 and Kryster Carmela Labarda ’28. Comparative racialization examines how groups are racialized in relation to one another and how this interchange manages and prioritizes claims on the state. These RAs funded by the Gould will support foundational research on this project with the end goal in the development and publication of article- and book-length projects in the field of comparative racialization.

Professor Andrew Schroeder, RA Michelle Lee, and RA Sara McMurtray

Views of Science in the Political Philosophy/Theory Literature

Over the past 15 years, philosophers of science have increasingly agreed that the traditional picture of science, according to which it is ideally a dispassionate, “value-free” endeavor is mistaken. To replace it, they have proposed a picture of science according to which values play a limited but crucial role in the research process, and that these values can enhance (rather than compromise) scientific objectivity. In this project, faculty and students from CMC and Durham University (UK) are seeking to determine whether work in political theory, political philosophy, and political science journals has adopted the new, philosophically-informed picture of science; or whether it continues to employ the traditional, outdated view of science.

Professor Steven Zhou, RA George Chan*, and RA Jordan Nguyen**

The Pursuit of Multiple Callings - A Theory of Vocation, Identity, and Work

“Where Did Callings Start?”*

Historically, research on vocational calling has almost exclusively focused on how calling develops or changes in working adults. In our qualitative research paper, we will investigate how callings form in children prior to their adult working lives — that is, in childhood before the age of 18. Specifically, we will focus on integrating literature on parenting and cultural influences in development. We will test our theory using qualitative interviews of first-year college students who have identified a vocational calling.

“When Callings Collide”**

Historically, research on vocational calling has focused on the positive benefits in job satisfaction and sense of purpose and meaning. More recent studies have highlighted potential downsides of a strong identification of a calling, particularly in burnout and worker exploitation. In this theory paper, we will advance a conceptual model of when individuals might identify two or more callings — and moreover, when these callings might create tension and conflict within individuals. Our paper will review the relevant literature, integrate diverse research streams, and propose future research directions based on our novel theory of multiple callings.

Fall 2025

Professor Esther Chung-Kim and RA Prisha Kejriwal

Medicine and Spirituality in Early Modern Europe

While medicine and spirituality are sometimes considered opposing fields, scholars have recognized these two fields as increasingly interrelated. This research project shows that religious reform and medical reform were more closely related than previously thought. Just as religious reformers used spiritual rationale to support medicine practitioners, physicians also supported shifting religious views in their medical treatises. This year-long project examines the contributions of the Dutch physician, Levinus Lemnius, as a noteworthy example of a popular physician connecting spirituality to physical, mental and social health.

Professor Sarah Sarzynski and RA Georgia Alford

An Environmental History of the Colombian-Peruvian War, 1932-1933

Instead of depicting the Amazonian borderlands as terra nullius, or empty lands ripe for settlement, a borderlands approach renders visible the people who inhabited the region and the significant roles they played in the short border conflict.  I examine the adaptations and collaborations between Colombian and Peruvian soldiers, Amazonian peoples and the Amazon itself during the war.  Soldiers were both unequipped and under-resourced, often lacking appropriate support from the national armies, which meant that they had to adapt to lowlands Amazonia to survive. To do so, they often relied upon local knowledge to learn how to build appropriate structures, navigate the terrain and rivers, communicate, find food and treat wounds and illnesses.  Some Amazonians also interacted with the troops, sometimes conscripted by force and other times volunteering laborers, guides, spies and soldiers. Georgia Alford is creating a historical map of soldiers’ paths by foot and by boat into the Amazon region to the garrisons and battle sites.