Gould Sponsored Faculty Research
Academic Year 2024-2025
Professor Nicholas buccola and ra Asia best, RA elijah Emory-muhammad
My Brother’s Keeper
Academic Year 2024-2025
My Brother’s Keeper is the proposed third volume in a trilogy in which I am considering the civil rights and conservative movements together. In the first volume, The Fire Is Upon Us, I considered the clashing ideas of James Baldwin and William F. Buckley Jr. – the leading writers associated with the respective movements. In the second volume, One Man’s Freedom, I considered the clashing ideas and actions of Martin Luther King Jr. and Barry Goldwater – the most prominent leaders of the respective movements. In My Brother’s Keeper, I focus leading grassroots activists associated with each movement and consider what motivated these activists and how their stories can help us make sense of our own lives as citizens. My hope is that the trilogy, taken together, will contribute to our understanding of American political history, the American present, and the possibilities for the future.
Professor Esther Chung-Kim and RA Jason Beshai
The History of Medicine
Academic Year 2024-2025
This research project examines the history of medicine by focusing on the intersection between religion and medicine in early modern Europe. In addition to the two main purposes for a university education, namely to prepare for religious or political careers, universities throughout Europe, an increasing numbers of university-trained physicians filled the ranks of their professional guild in order to solidify their authority in matters of public health, accreditation, and even governance of their cities. Hence religious leaders and reform-minded physicians, as well as the institutions they served, influenced the religion and medical reform, education, and public health policies of their cities. The significance of this project is that it fills a gap in the history of medicine by examining the connections between the reform of religion and changes in medicine during the early modern period just before the Scientific Revolution.
Professor Gaston Espinosa and RA Jaden Andrews, RA Sophia Islas, and RA Sophia Prosper
Religion, Race, Gender, and the American Presidency
Academic Year 2024-2025
This Gould Center Projects examines the intersection of Religion, Race, Gender, and the American Presidency. In particular, students focus on how American presidents from 1996 to 2024 have reached out to the 10 largest voting segments of the American electorate: Blacks, Latinos, Asians, Jews, Muslims, Catholics, Evangelicals, Mainline Protestants, Seculars and Women. Students focus particular attention on the candidate's outreach, especially in the 2024 Election and how each of these 10 segments of the electorate in turn voted on Election Day 2024. The RAs also contributed to two Gould Center Events at the Athenaeum, the Religion, Race, Gender, and 2024 Election Conference on October 31, 2024, and the Religion, Race, Gender, and the 2024 Post-Election Results Luncheon on Thursday, November 7th. Their research will contribute to two books: Religion, Race, Gender, and the American Presidency, 2000-2020, which has been accepted for publication by Routledge Press and is due out this Spring 2025 and the Religion, Race, Gender, and the 2024 Election, which will be completed this summer 2025.
Professor Yannis Evrigenis and RA Mea Shelton
The Bodin Project
Academic Year 2024-2025
We will be working on a new edition of Jean Bodin's Six Books on the Commonwealth. This work, which influenced political thinkers from Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau to the American Founders, and gave us the modern definition of sovereignty, is currently not in print in any language and has not been translated into English since 1606! This new edition will be the first to make available in English the last version produced by Bodin himself
Professor Michael Fortner and RA Lucio Vasquez
United We Fall: Race, Place, and Working-Class Politics in New York City
Academic Year 2024-2025
"United We Fall: Race, Place, and Working-Class Politics in New York City" examines the rise and decline of the New Deal Coalition in New York City, focusing on the role of left-leaning organizations and mid-20th-century Democratic Party reforms. The book analyzes the social and political interactions between White ethnics and racial minorities in Harlem, the South Bronx, and Bedford-Stuyvesant from the 1920s to the 1970s. Utilizing a range of primary sources, it explores how multiracial working-class alliances were built and later weakened by anti-Communism and the decline of urban political machines, offering fresh perspectives on the city's postwar political landscape and broader American political development.
Professor Lynn Itagaki and RA Katherine Cheng, RA Jesus Lara, and RA Crystal Widado
The Futures of Comparative Racialization
Academic Year 2024-2025
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 will support foundational research on this project with the end goal being the development of two article- and two book-length projects in the field of comparative racialization.
Fall 2024
Professor Minju kim and RA youngmin oh
Laughter in Solidarity: Korean Mothers’ Complaints about Children
Fall 2024
Utilizing video- and audio-recorded natural conversations, this study examines mothers’ complaints to fellow mothers about their own children and investigates the interactional work that laughter performs in these conversations. Complaining about one’s own child can be face- threatening both to the speaker and to the recipient, similar to self-criticism. Data show that mothers’ complaints are often interspersed with laughter produced by both the speaker and the recipient. Laced with laughter, mothers safely complain about their children and the recipient readily sides with the mother, confirming that the child’s action was indeed complainable; the interactants often co-construct their turns and repeat each other’s utterances, displaying their affiliated stances.