2021-2022 Faculty Fellows

 

The Humanities Center congratulates Aaron Hegert, Assistant Professor of Photography, and Lesley Wolff, Assistant Professor of Art History, on being named our Spring 2022 Faculty Fellows.

These fellowships will allow Professors Hegert and Wolff time away from scheduled teaching to focus on major projects.  Please see the descriptions of these fellows' projects below.

Aaron Hegert, Visible Landscapes
The American West is a duplicitous landscape. Its abundant natural beauty is a sight to be seen, and to see it can be transcendent, reverential, exhilarating, or even redemptive. Visuality is at the center of the American conception of nature, and the way the landscape appears shapes our attitudes and beliefs about the natural world. A great deal of the West looks vast, pristine, and uninterrupted, but this image is often a facade, a smokescreen concealing the underlying truth of material conditions in a landscape that is rich in natural resources and capitalist potential. This creative research project, which will be realized as an experimental documentary video, an academic paper, and multiple exhibitions, aims to start a conversation about visual epistemologies, colonial histories, and imperial aesthetics in the popular image of the American West. Much is at stake, as these images and epistemologies affect not only prevalent attitudes about nature and environmental issues in the US, but also substantive land-management and conservation policy decisions.

Lesley Wolff, Hungry Eyes: Picturing Foodways and Indigeneity in Postrevolutionary Mexico City
In today's media landscape, richly saturated with images and stories of and about food, this book stands as a distinctive intervention at the burgeoning intersections of food history and visual studies. Hungry Eyes uniquely tackles pervasive questions about the relationships we perceive between food and art—Is food art? Why or why not?—through the historical lens of modern Mexico. At present, the interdisciplinary field of foodways in the modern arts of the Americas is understudied, but emerging.  This book provides the first scholarly analysis dedicated to the visual culture of food in the arts of Mexico's volatile postrevolutionary era (1920–1960).