Residential Faculty Research Fellows

Lisa Pace Vetter
Associate Professor, Political Science
Affiliate Faculty in Gender, Women’s + Sexuality Studies
Spring 2024 Residential Faculty Research Fellow

Project: “American Political Thought: The Basics”

This project seeks to explain the unique nature of American political thought by weaving together the strands of American political thought as a narrative of debates over fundamental ideas. To what extent are the theoretical foundations of the American project rooted in racism, sexism, and imperialism? Are these sources of oppression embedded in the fabric of the nation, or are they tragic by-products of the founding that have been largely overcome? Vetter also seeks to highlight the contributions of important as well as overlooked American political thinkers and examine current controversies in American politics through the perspective of American political thought and reflect on future possibilities.

Emily Yoon
Assistant Professor, English
Spring 2024 Residential Faculty Research Fellow

Project: “Little Intimacies: Ecologies of Race, Migration, and Relation in Minority U.S. Fiction”

This project investigates the possibilities, limitations, and reverberations of intimacies as experienced by minority characters in twentieth- and twenty-first century minority U.S. fiction. Yoon engages a growing body of scholarship that asks what intimacy looks like when forged within and alongside violent processes of racialization, colonialism, and global capitalism. Her term “little intimacies” magnifies the small in scale—compressed and liminal spaces, abbreviated moments in time, personal relationships, and what appears negligible or minute—as a critical optic to understand the relationship between racial formations and migrations. A reading of U.S. authors who represent other countries alongside global writers who represent the U.S. complicates our understandings of U.S. identity and racial formation, even as it clarifies my argument for a much-needed expansion of our definition of minority U.S. literature. In pairing narrations of migration alongside the submerged stories of those who are left behind, Yoon illustrates how racialization necessarily becomes entangled with the intimate for minority subjects in messy and unexpected ways.