Current Fellows

The J. Willard Marriott Library’s Middle East Library holds the complete archival works of Fayez Sayegh (1922-1980), an important twentieth century philosopher. Sayegh’s carefully researched philosophical studies of colonialism, nationalism, imperialism, dialectic methodology, history, and political theory are vitally important to current philosophical debates as well as the humanities as whole. These writings have remained almost entirely inaccessible to the general public for decades. I am applying for a Tanner Visiting Research Fellowship with the goal of publicizing Sayegh’s writings through two related projects.

Dr. Harfouch studies the history of philosophy from 1600 to the present. His 2018 book, Another Mind-Body Problem: A History of Racial Non-Being, presents a counter-history of human subjectivity in the Modern period tracing the development of race and racism through the discourse on minds and bodies. He has also written extensively on imperialism, colonialism, and orientalism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. His current research program focuses on Palestinian philosopher, Fayez Sayegh, who developed a unique philosophical method to advocate for justice in the Middle East. At UAH, Dr. Harfouch often teaches classes in ethics, history, and political philosophy. He is also the director of UAH’s pre-law certificate.

Journalism faces an ongoing—and, in many ways, intensifying—credibility crisis. This project seeks to understand why public trust in journalism fallen so much. I will draw on 150 in-depth interviews with U.S. adults from a variety of political and socioeconomic backgrounds, collected over the past three years, to tell a comprehensive story about people’s relationship with news. My overarching argument: In today’s saturated media environment, where accusations of dishonesty are seemingly everywhere, people feel that distrust is a necessary means to avoid being duped by any individual source of information. Equally important, people see themselves as more than up to the task of “doing their own research” to sift through the inaccurate news to uncover the truth. Contrary to conventional wisdom, which suggests that people trust specific news outlets they perceive as aligned with their own political beliefs (and distrust outlets they perceive as biased in ways that run counter to those beliefs), I conclude that people distrust journalism as a whole because they see the institution as inherently and hopelessly compromised by corporate or political interests. In short, this project seeks to identify the origins and implications of people’s distrust in news. In doing so, it will also chart a path forward for improving journalism’s relationship with the public, and to illustrate larger lessons for addressing what ails American public life.

Dr. Jacob L. Nelson (Ph.D., Northwestern University) is an assistant professor at the University of Utah. His teaching and research focuses on the changing relationship between journalism and the public. He is the author of Imagined Audiences: How Journalists Perceive and Pursue the Public (Oxford University Press, 2021), which draws on case studies of three news organizations in Chicago to understand how journalists' assumptions about their audiences shape their pursuits of those audiences. His work has been published in top journalism studies and communication journals such as Digital Journalism, New Media & Society, and Social Media+Society, as well as in public-facing venues such as Columbia Journalism Review, The Conversation, and Nieman Journalism Law. He is currently working on a book project that examines public trust in journalism, healthcare, and higher education.

In my book I analyze contemporary literary and cinematic representations of beaches in parts of the world that were colonized by France and that remain under her cultural and linguistic influence. Nowadays beaches incarnate–for France and more generally the Western world–vacation sites of regeneration, relaxation, and freedom. The beaches I study take on a different valence in terms of how they are represented and thought of. Often the leisure venue gets overlaid, for instance, with the beaches’ role as a point of departure for hopeful, although undocumented, migrants aiming to find better living conditions overseas. Contemporary post-colonial beaches, I argue in my book, incarnate and perpetuate the asymmetrical North-South, South-North relations of domination and subordination that originated in the historical reality of slavery and colonialism. I consider beaches as contact zones where a wide range of interactions, from hostile to hospitable, occur. To study the literal and metaphorical significance of beaches, I rely on the concept of liminality. I use the natural phenomenon of ebb and flow to show that the beach contains within it—literally and symbolically—the threat of erasure and destruction as much as the promise of growth and regeneration.

In Colorblind University, I trace the intellectual genealogy of racial colorblindness throughout the twentieth century to argue that Black student activism and university policy during the civil rights and Black Power era fundamentally re-shaped interpretations of race in the United States. Ultimately, this particular era not only produced social shifts, but also served as an intellectual movement due to the competing racial ideologies that framed civil rights and Black Power activists and intellectuals’ demands for racial justice. Prior to the Black civil rights movement, institutions used racial classifications to maintain segregation. Following the movement, tensions over racial ideologies grew as civil rights activists wrestled with interpretations of Black Power over the meaning of racial colorblindness. These changes to American society, politics, and culture shaped multiple institutions, most notably higher education. Racial ideologies impacted colleges and universities at many levels, from admissions policies to curriculum and department structures. Beginning with the 1896 Plessy decision that provided constitutional support for segregation, I explore the evolution of colorblind ideology along student activism, university policy, state and federal legislation, and legal decisions. This methodology proves that racial colorblindness did not result from top-down, elitist interpretations of race or bottom-up social influences. Instead, racial colorblindness developed through a feedback loop of social interaction, cultural values, access to political power, and legal decisions. Conflicts over desegregation, affirmative action, and multicultural or multiracial curriculum in a “post-racial society” characterize the debate over race-neutral interpretations. In the end, Colorblind University illuminates how race-neutral ideology became the dominant interpretation of race in the contemporary United States.

Brandon James Render is an Assistant Professor in the History Department. His teaching and research examines twentieth century U.S. history, post-1945 social and intellectual movements, and the Black intellectual tradition. His current book project, Colorblind University: A History of Racial Inequity in Higher Education, explores the fundamental shift in Americans' collective interpretation of race during the civil rights and Black Power era.

The Secrecy Trap: American Covert Action’s Legacy at Home and Abroad is a history of American covert action since the 1940s that focuses on how the secrecy surrounding covert action affected policymakers and the public. Covert action has long ranked among the most seductive tools in the policymaker’s toolkit, supplying the mechanism for everything from election meddling to nuclear sabotage. Covert action’s allure has also made it the subject of countless books, articles, films, and television shows that together have fostered the impression that we know a lot about this important foreign policy tool’s record. But a destabilizing question lurks beneath this illusion of familiarity: how do we know what we think we know? With few exceptions, knowledge of covert action comes from selective disclosures made by the policymakers and intelligence officers who controlled the secrets. The Secrecy Trap grapples with this epistemological problem for the first time, revealing covert action’s profound effects on Americans at home. Covert action secrecy tampered with Americans’ ability to make sense of world events, eroded trust in government, and fueled conspiracy theorizing. Covert action secrecy also increased policymakers’ risk tolerance and narrowed the circle of input, leading them to overestimate what they could accomplish with covert action in the near term and to underestimate longer term costs—errors of judgment that had dire repercussions at home and abroad. By accounting for secrecy’s effects, this monograph will provide new insight into covert action’s hidden costs and enable reassessments of American foreign policy since the 1940s.

Peter Roady is a historian of the 20th and 21st century United States with interests that cut across disciplines and historical subfields. His research focuses on the history of the American national security state and the ways that different conceptions of national security have shaped the United States and its relationship with the world. At the University of Utah, he offers courses on U.S. foreign relations, intelligence, and military history, as well as U.S. political history. He received his Ph.D. in history from Columbia University, a master’s degree in public policy from Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, and a B.A. in history from Davidson College. Before attending history graduate school, he worked for five years in national security and foreign policy positions in the U.S. government, focusing on South Asia and cyber issues. He remains committed to public service and welcomes opportunities to help students launch government careers. 

The Standing Rock Sioux’s 2016 fight against the Dakota Access pipeline garnered a torrent of mass media and scholarly attention and situated oil and gas development (OGD) as an environmental justice (EJ) issue impeding Indigenous sovereignty (Estes 2019). Yet, multiple tribal nations currently rely on OGD for revenue and their perspectives remain largely unexamined by scholarly research. The Ute Tribe has been leasing land on their 1.2-million-acre Reservation in northeastern Utah for OGD since 1949 (“Notice of Lease Sale” 1949). Revenue from leasing has lifted the Tribe out of poverty and positioned OGD as its primary expression of sovereignty. However, the permitting process for a well on the Reservation involves a tangled web of environmental approvals from multiple federal agencies whose decision-making processes do not include the Tribe. As a result, environmental management has become a deeply contested political space, undergirded by issues of Ute sovereignty and EJ. In recent years production has moved from the remote periphery to close proximity with Tribal communities and is increasingly affecting life on the Reservation (UDOGM 2019). Tribal members have seen wells creep closer to waterways and ceremonial sites and air quality monitors on the Reservation have recorded unhealthy levels of ozone (Lyman and Tran 2015), a pollutant known to aggravate heart and lung conditions and cause premature death (EPA 2019). My research examines how Tribal members make sense of our1 complicated dependence on oil and gas in light of its EJ repercussions and asks how Tribal entanglement with oil and gas has shaped who we are as Nuchew2 (Ute people), our relationships to land, and our conceptions of sovereignty.

Ataya is an enrolled citizen of the Fort Peck Sioux and Assiniboine Tribes and a descendant of the northern Ute Tribe from the Uintah and Ouray Reservation in northeastern Utah.Prior to starting her PhD at Berkeley, Ataya worked for the Ute Tribe and later the Bureau of Indian Affairs as an environmental protection specialist. In this position she reviewed agency NEPA documents assessing the environmental impacts from proposed oil and gas wells cited on Tribal lands.  During the five years she spent doing this work, she identified tensions between Tribal sovereignty and federal environmental oversight, particularly around air quality regulation. Her research seeks to better understand these dynamics and address the resulting public health concerns. Ataya is passionate about revitalizing the Ute language and is pursuing a designated emphasis in Indigenous Language Revitalization to strengthen her community's language curriculum and anchor her work in Ute epistemologies.

Saccades is a collection of essays exploring the history and present of extraction in the western U.S. through a mix of arts writing, memoir, photography, and archival work. It focuses on the way landscapes are interpreted, especially by extractive industries. From the development of prospecting technologies for “reading” the earth, to a secret abortion in a Depression-era mining camp, to the extraction industry’s surprisingly direct relationship to visual art as patron, subject, and medium, Saccades suggests that the framework one uses to understand a landscape can deeply change one’s material relationship to it.

Lindsey Webb is the author of Plat (Archway Editions, May 2024), which was a finalist for the National Poetry Series, and the chapbooks Perfumer’s Organ (above/ground, 2023) and House (Ghost Proposal, 2020). Her writings have appeared in Chicago Review, Denver Quarterly, jubilat, and Lana Turner, among others. With Kylan Rice, she edits Thirdhand Books.

She earned an MFA in poetry from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and lives in Salt Lake City, where she is a Tanner Graduate Fellow and PhD candidate in Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Utah.  She is working on a project about land use and land art in the American west.

Megan's project is titled "The Daughters of Utah Pioneers: A Study of Utah Heritage, Religion, and Gender." Since 1901, the Daughters of Utah Pioneers (DUP) has been one of Utah’s flagship public history organizations – running a state museum, collecting artifacts, erecting historical markers and monuments, and organizing Days of ‘47 parades and rodeos. This significant women-led organization has produced a variety of community-based histories over the years, but to date historians have neglected its role in shaping public perception of Utah's history. This research project traces the formation and growth of the DUP over the course of the twentieth century and analyzes how its influence on Utah society changed over time, especially as women began to access professionalization opportunities, which then transformed work in the heritage sector. Foregrounding material culture and objects, this project tells a story about women’s work, preservation, the politics of history, and Utah’s spiritual connection to the past.

This book project situates the Bacchanalian Conspiracy episode of 186 BCE described by the Roman historian Livy in his Ab urbe condita (From the Founding of the City) within its larger cultural context in order to make both the narrative and Roman culture accessible to students, instructors, and non-specialist readers. This Conspiracy centered on the new, extraordinary growth of the cult of Bacchus in Rome and Italy due to corruption of its traditional initiation practices and rituals. The young men of the Roman state were being debauched by older women, who ran through the streets of Rome at night with live torches. After an investigation, the Senate passes an extraordinary decree allowing state officials to detain and ultimately execute 7000 individuals, and severely restrict the worship of Bacchus. Livy’s detailed narrative provides an opening for exploring fundamental questions about how the Roman state functioned; state and individual relationships to religious worship; how gender, age, and socio-legal status were viewed; family relationships and obligations; and Roman views of nonRomans. These questions remain relevant today, making Livy’s narrative a useful lens for examining how we address them in our own, modern culture. While focusing on Livy’s text in particular, I contextualize his narrative in an interdisciplinary manner that brings traditional historical and philological approaches together with material culture by considering the physical landscape of the spaces described in the episode, as well as archaeological evidence for the cult of Bacchus in Italy during the early second century BCE.

Public Enemies argues that a genealogy of American lyricists, from Walt Whitman to Gwendolyn Brooks, used the tools of lyric in song and on the page to challenge normative conceptions of democratic culture. The nexus of this challenge was in their diverse experimentation with the figure, speech, and personality of “the transient,” manifest variously as racialized strangers, vagabonds, tramps, hobohemians, or migrant workers. These lyricists understood how central transient persons and communities were and continue to be in popular stories American tell themselves about territorial expansion, urban development, and individual freedoms or rights. Underlying this popularity, however, is a fundamental tension in American culture between the idealization of autonomy or mobility and reckonings with the personal, social, and political costs of marginalization and displacement. It is to this tension that these lyrics address themselves, showing how a truly pluralistic democracy requires an attention to the transitional figures whose speech, presence, or conversation populate the shifting margins of public life.