Gould Sponsored Faculty Research

Summer 2025

Professor Nicholas Buccola and RA Alexandra Wofford

Make America What America Must Become

Make America What America Must Become: Loving this Country Like James Baldwin will be the first book-length study of James Baldwin’s philosophy of love and patriotism. In the book, I consider Baldwin’s philosophy of love by way of several key encounters in his life and work. In Part I: Shadows, I consider how Baldwin developed his philosophy of love in the shadows cast by the life and death of his father; the life and death of his best friend; and his early pursuit of romantic love. In Part II: Encounters, I consider what we can learn about Baldwin’s philosophy of love by way of his relationships with other artists and activists, including Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, Medgar Evers, and Lorraine Hansberry, as well as Baldwin’s conflicts with conservatives such as William Faulkner, James Jackson Kilpatrick, William F. Buckley Jr., and Jerry Falwell. In the book, I argue that the two key elements of Baldwin’s philosophy of love are radical empathy and radical confrontation.

Professor Esther Chung-Kim and RA Andrew Rizko

Religious Influences in the History of Medicine

This project examines the long arc of religious influences in the history of medicine. To highlight a pivotal moment, this research examines the development of poor relief institutions alongside the popularization of medical knowledge in early modern Europe. In the efforts to reduce poverty, concerns for health care and healing emerged as important contributors to poverty alleviation. While the word, hospitality, has now taken on another meaning in the business sector, usually referring to the hotel industry, its etymology comes from the Latin word, “hospes” which means guest or stranger, where we get the words, “hospitable” and “hospital.” Hence, poor relief and medical care were closely connected.

Professor Lynn Itagaki, RA Kendall Higgins*, and RA Crystal Widado**

AI, Authenticity, and Authentic Learning*

The humanities classroom and its essay assignments have been upended since the easy, widespread access to large-language models/generative AI programs with a prompt and a click of a button. Students no longer have to struggle with what they uniquely think and how to distinctively communicate it in prose. What authentic learning is possible with LLM/gen- AI programs instantly creating prose essays—the traditional proof of one's individual thinking and humanistic inquiry? These LLM/gen-AI programs appear to thwart this fundamental liberal arts concern of developing innovative thinkers. This essay wrestles with the questions of authenticity and what can be considered authentically and distinctively human in this technological moment. More specifically, abstract concepts such as authenticity, authentic learning, and most importantly, the human, often have racialized impacts that produce material inequalities, and this essay proposes to trace the interplay of these ostensibly race-neutral terms through Asian American studies in the US, an interdisciplinary research area which coalesced around political and cultural debates over what was authentically Asian/American. How might we understand these new concerns of how the widespread use of gen-AI will impede human thinking through these continuing questions of what makes the authentic human.

Multiracial Identities**

This original essay analyzes a significant development in racial theories that shows connections not produced by making different racial formations similar but instead by acknowledging the impossibility of producing sameness—incommensurability. To posit incommensurability as an analytic provokes profound questions central to this field of study: Does comparative racialization happen even when we are trying not to compare? Does comparison always result in hierarchization and violence? Does comparison always produce exploitation, extraction, extinction—and capitalism? How does incommensurability fit into relationality taken up by postcolonial and diasporic critics, especially Black, Indigenous, and women of color feminist and queer of color theorists? How do concepts of intersectionality and assemblage interact with incommensurability or are they in opposition? I posit that how multiracial identities have appeared in mainstream politics and society can trace the process and possibilities of incommensurability for comparative racialization, exposing the historically monoracial demands for choosing one identity above all others, most recently in electoral polling and government surveys.

Professor Minju Kim and RA Annabel Chung

A Corpus-based Study on the Development of the Stance-Marking Functions of Korean Question Words

This study uses diachronic and synchronic corpus data to examine the development of the stance marking functions of three Korean question words, mwe ‘what’, mwe-l ‘what-accusative marker’ and mwusun ‘what kind of’. Mwe-l and mwusun encode the speaker’s challenging and rejecting stance while mwe conveys more diverse meanings. This study examines their development by paying attention, for the first time, to the critical period from the 1900s to the 1930s when western-style novels started to be produced, providing access to a more conversational use of Korean. Textual evidence shows that among the three, mwe-l was first established as a rejection marker before 1900s, followed by mwe around 1920s and then mwusun in 1930s. This study proposes that mwe-l and mwusun developed into rejection markers from their frequent use in similar rhetorical questions which emphatically reject an interlocutor’s earlier utterance. Studies showed that across different languages, interrogative constructions often develop into disaffiliative stance markers such as challenges and rejections (e.g., Chinese shenme ‘what’). This study proposes that this propensity has much to do with the prevalent use of rhetorical questions in challenging interlocutors. This study also tries to account for how mwe can express contradictory meanings by proposing that mwe became a rejection marker due to the influence of mwe-l and subsequently underwent extensive functional shifts from rejection to dismissal, to detachment, and finally to accommodation and resignation, which was facilitated by its frequent collocation with the sentence ender ci ‘you know’.

Professor Briana Toole and RA Samuel Yao

By the Roots: How We Reclaim the Radical Power of Resistance

In his 1971 Theory of Justice, John Rawls articulates the central elements, scope, and limits of civil disobedience. Civil disobedience, a conscientious, public, nonviolent breach of law, is permissible only in cases where there is a major breach of the principles of justice and may only be pursued as a last resort. On Rawls’ account, civil disobedience is reconceived as a primarily communicative act, one that seeks to persuade the majority by appeal to shared principles of justice. Little attended to in discussions of Rawls’s account are the epistemic barriers to communication.

Drawing on work from Maria Lugones, I argue that those engaged in civil resistance speak from resistant worlds-of-sense. But, resistance must speak to “official” or mainstream worlds-of- sense, worlds that reflect the values, assumptions, and commitments of the dominant. From the perspective of this world-of-sense, the claims made by those engaged in resistance may be rendered illogical. Worse, that world may render invisible the injustice that resistant agents seek to remedy. As such, those who occupy the mainstream world-of-sense may downgrade the credibility assessments of those who speak from resistant worlds, and reasonably – from their perspective – dismiss the claims of those engaged in civil resistance.

I argue that civil disobedience, as Rawls conceives it, is thus subject to a paradox. On the one hand, the primary aim of resistance is to communicate to a wider public. On the other hand, this wider public may lack the necessary epistemic background to appropriately engage those communicative attempts. Thus, civil resistance is unlikely to succeed in its communicative aim. My aim, in drawing attention to this paradox, is to motivate reconceiving of resistance as engaged in epistemic disruption, an act which requires confronting directly the world-of-sense of the dominant.