PUBLIC HUMANITIES IN ACTION
From the early modern past to the environmental future, my public humanities work creates spaces for creative inquiry and collaboration to flourish, bringing historical inquiry into conversation with artistic practice, interdisciplinary scholarship, and the lived experiences of communities.
RENAISSANCE OF THE EARTH
Founding Director
Humanities | Environment | Art |Public Life
How might the early modern past help us imagine more sustainable and equitable futures? Renaissance of the Earth brings students, artists, scholars, and New England communities together to investigate the difficult inheritances of our environmental present: extractive colonialism, racism, forced migration, and global environmental inequality. Through interdisciplinary research, courses, workshops, exhibitions, and arts programming, the project treats the past not as a repository of answers, but as a site for generating new ways of imagining futures.
Formats: Research collaborations · Courses · Hands-on Workshops · Exhibitions · Arts programming
ARTIST IN RESIDENCE PROGRAM
Founding Director
Art | Archive | Earth | Inquiry
Three regional artists each year encounter the collections and diversity of the landscapes of the Kinney Center and develop new work in response. Residencies culminate in performances, exhibitions, masterclasses, conversations, and encounters with students and the public—turning the archive into a living space for creative inquiry. The aim is not simply to bring art into humanities research, but to let artistic practice reshape the questions, methods, and possibilities of humanistic inquiry.
THE ART(E)FACTS PROJECT
Co-Director with Malcolm Sen
Earth | Cultural Commons | Sustainability
The Art(e)facts Project brings humanistic inquiry into conversation with sustainability sciences, Indigenous and premodern epistemologies, art, and technological imaginaries. It asks how cultural histories might help us rethink the earth as common wealth rather than merely a technological or financial object. ❦ Supported by the UMass Amherst College of Humanities and Fine Arts, Humanities Research & Creative Laboratories Grant
OTHER COLLABORATIONS
ARCHIPELAGO - Research Team · UMass Amherst · 2025–26
A transdisciplinary collaboration with the University of the Azores examining climate change and sustainability through environmental science, history, literature, and the arts. With Edie Meidav, Evan MacCarthy, and Lena Fletcher. ❦ SPARC — Strategic Partnerships to Advance Research and Creative Activity Grant
ANTHROPOCENE LAB - Research Team · UMass Amherst · 2023–24
An interdisciplinary laboratory exploring new narratives of the Anthropocene—and the relationships between deep pasts, shared futures, human communities, and more-than-human worlds.❦ Supported by a Provost Interdisciplinary Research Grant.
THINKING EARTH SEMINARS - Co-Organizer · UMass Amherst · 2023–24
A cross-campus seminar bringing faculty and graduate students together around one of the defining intellectual questions of our moment:
How do we imagine the Earth? With Malcolm Sen, Thad Miller, Rob DeConto, Sandy Litchfield, and Regina Spector.
COMMUNITY SHAKESPEARE Principal Investigator · UMass Amherst · 2019–21
Free public Shakespeare seminars expanded into a two-year program of artist residencies, performances, dramaturgical conversations, and public lectures. ❦ Supported by Mass Humanities, Massachusetts Cultural Council, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.
SHAKESPEARE, RACE, AND AMERICA - Organizer · UMass Amherst · 2018
A Five Colleges collaboration with Amy Rodgers built around Keith Hamilton Cobb's American Moor, combining: Performance · Artist Residency · Public Talk with Kim F. Hall · Actor's Studio · Scholarly Roundtable · Exhibition ❦ Coverage included the Los Angeles Review of Books, Massachusetts Daily Collegian, and Daily Hampshire Gazette.
EARLY MODERN CONVERSIONS - Team Member · 2017–19
An international collaboration examining the first great "Age of Conversion" (1400–1700) through scholarship and creative practice—and bringing that history into conversation with contemporary questions of globalization, radicalization, violence, and personal transformation. ❦ Supported by McGill University, the Institute for the Public Life of Arts and Ideas, SSHRC, the Canada Foundation for Innovation, and other partners.
EARLY MODERN MIGRATIONS - Co-Organizer with Nicholas Terpstra · University of Toronto · 2012
An international interdisciplinary conference bringing together 90+ participants from twelve countries to examine early modern migration.
❦ Supported by SSHRC.
EARLY MODERN EXILES - Co-Chair with Nicholas Terpstra · Jackman Humanities Institute Working Group · University of Toronto · 2010–12
A collaborative research group focused on exile, migration, and displacement in the early modern world.
A CHRISTIAN TURN'D TURKE (1612) - Dramaturge · University of Toronto · 2012
A performance-based encounter with Robert Daborne's play, developed with director Noam Lior and the Centre for Performance Studies in Early Theatre / Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies.