Reception showcases the work of faculty

“Forgive me if I get right to it,” said Nicholas Radel seconds after stepping to the podium.

Radel, a professor of English, had only four minutes to give a summary of an essay that encompassed more than four centuries of literature. Nearby, a large digital clock counted down the seconds before Radel had to yield the podium to another colleague.

Radel was one of six Furman faculty members presenting speed talks at the annual Faculty Scholarship Reception on Feb. 10 in the James B. Duke Library. Sponsored by the Provost’s Office and Furman University Libraries, the reception showcased the university faculty’s achievements over the past year, including scholarship submissions, awarded grants and newly awarded degrees. Tables stretched throughout the library displaying copies of the journals and books in which the faculty members were published.

Radel’s essay, “Citizen Othello: Teaching Claudia Rankine as Shakespeare’s Future,” appeared in the spring 2022 edition of the journal Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Teaching. Examining Shakespeare’s “Othello” and Rankine’s 2014 poetry collection “Citizen,” Radel found that the authors’ insights about race and identity echoed one another’s.

“I wanted to show students that questions about diversity belonged to the past as well as the present,” he said.

Mahan Ellison, an associate professor of Spanish, discussed a generation of young authors in Equatorial Guinea, the only sub-Saharan African nation where Spanish is an official language. Ellison’s essay “Sex, Identity and Narration in the Equatoguinean Diaspora” appeared in “Twenty-First Century Arab and African Diasporas in Spain, Portugal and Latin America.”

Scholarly and creative achievements were on display during the Faculty Scholarship Reception at the James B. Duke Library on Feb. 10.

Although the work of writers like O’sírima Mota Ripeu, Guillermina Mekuy and Trifonia Melibea Obono are sometimes dismissed for their direct approaches to sex, Ellison explained in his speed talk, “they indicate that Equatorial Guinea’s place in Spanish literature will only grow in the future.”

Bronwen Forbay, a visiting associate professor of voice originally from Durban, South Africa, co-authored “An Introduction to Afrikaans Art Song Literature: Origins and Repertoire,” which appeared in the Journal of Singing in 2022. Forbay and her co-author, Christian Bester, will present a lecture recital on March 20.

The little-known genre reflects her homeland’s philosophy of “ubuntu, umuntu, ngumuntu, ngabantu,” said Forbay – a Zulu phrase meaning “A person is a person by, with and through other people.”

James Guth, the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Politics and International Affairs, published “New Frontiers of Religious Freedom? LGBTQ Rights Versus Religious Conscience” last year in the journal Religion, State and Society. The Masterpiece Cakeshop controversy and other recent cases have been framed as conflicts pitting antidiscrimination policies against the free exercise of religion, Guth explained. His essay asked, “What do Americans think about this issue, and what factors influence their decisions?”

Using data from three major national academic studies, Guth found that the opinions fell along culture war lines, “contributing one more brick in the walls of ideological and partisan polarization.”

Alison Roark, an associate professor of biology, discussed her work as program director for a 15-school cohort that received a grant from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute to create a more inclusive environment for their students pursuing STEM fields. Roark discussed the leadership team’s efforts in the areas of faculty development, student agency and engagement, and curricular change.

Judith Williams, an assistant professor of anthropology, examined white racial identity in the multicultural metropolis of Miami. Her case study focused on Geena, a white lesbian with cerebral palsy who moved to Miami from rural Virginia. Geena experienced ridicule from her Spanish-speaking coworkers because she was married to a transgender woman, and she heard troubling comments from her white Latina bosses about her disability.

“Geena said she felt as if she was living in a different country,” said Williams, whose essay “Cooking Up Hope: Minoritized White Women and Their Hope for Equality in Miami’s Latinx Dominated Restaurant Industry” appeared last year in the Journal for the Anthropology of North America. “Geena now had to navigate a new experience of whiteness that didn’t have the same amount of clout within Miami’s white Latinx hegemony.”