Residential Faculty Research Fellows

Nicole King
Associate Professor, American Studies
Fall 2024 Residential Faculty Research Fellow

Project: “The Ungentrifiable City: Resisting the Slow Violence of Urban Renewal in Baltimore”

Across Baltimore and cities like it, politicians and developers have weaponized urban renewal projects to destroy Black and poor neighborhoods for private profits. These processes are deeply rooted in the past and yet they continue today. The Ungentrifiable City traces the rise of urban renewal in the neoliberal city and grounds research in the often-overlooked fight for community-led development. The book explains how scholars can work with communities to fight back and reclaim the public’s right to the city from private developers. Using the Baltimore Traces: Communities in Transition public humanities project as a case study, this book culminates with the successful fight to preserve one block of homes in West Baltimore. Universities often function as agents of gentrification in cities; however, scholars can successfully collaborate with residents to fight and repair the damage of urban renewal by employing non-extractive and mutually beneficial methods of community engagement.

Michael Nance
Associate Professor, Philosophy
Fall 2024 Residential Faculty Research Fellow

Project: “Johann Benjamin Erhard’s Writings on Revolution”

With James A. Clarke (University of York), Michael Nance is working on the first English translation of the political writings of the important early left-Kantian philosopher Johann Benjamin Erhard. In his 1795 text On the Right of the People to a Revolution, Erhard develops a Kantian approach to human rights, which, together with his social theory of the structural causes of injustice, allows him to argue for a right to revolution under conditions of structural injustice. Erhard’s work is historically significant as a sophisticated intervention in the intense German-language philosophical debates during the 1790s about the legitimacy of the French Revolution. It is also of continuing philosophical interest, for the issues of the moral legitimacy (or illegitimacy) of revolution and the philosophical foundation of human rights continue to be central to political philosophy. Erhard’s ideas about structural injustice will provide resources for contemporary debates about the role of social, political, and economic structures in theories of oppression and resistance.