Faculty Research

Erik Loomis (History) “The Making of the Modern Pacific Northwest, 1960 to the Present” is an exploration of the rapidly transforming Pacific Northwest over the past half-century. This book documents this transformation by exploring key points of conflict in the Northwest’s recent history. It starts by looking at the politics of natural resource development and rising environmentalismin the 1960s and closes with an epilogue that juxtaposes the hit television show Portlandia on one hand with the rural anger that led to the recent Malheur National Wildlife Refuge occupation on the other hand.

Marcus Nevius (History) “‘city of refuge’: Petit Marronage and Slave Economy in the Great Dismal Swamp, 1790-1860” is a history of whites and blacks in Southside Virginia and northeastern North Carolina. It is designed for an audience interested in the latest knowledge of American slavery generally, and for an audience interested in the histories of African Americans, or abolitionism, and of slave labor specifically.

Subvention

Lars Erikson, (French) French for Engineering is a textbook under contract with Routledge to be published in April 2018. The aim of the textbook is to develop students’ abilities to communicate in French their STEM knowledge. The textbook teaches no engineering, but rather teaches students how to write effectively, communicate effectively, and think critically about engineering and issues related to this field.

Graduate Research

Molly Hall (English) “Writing Home from World War I: The Dark Pastorals of the British Modernist Novel” aims to address connections between warfare and ecology from 1890 to 1939— a period of simultaneous increase in ecological awareness and unrestrained resource depletion, discussing what literature — a dominant cultural object in the modernist period — can tell us about this mutual acceleration.

Catherine Winters (English) “Giving Voice” is a public humanities project which will combine physical place at the University of Rhode Island with the 2013 novel The Lowland by Jhumpa Lahiri in order to show the perspective of an émigrée from India joining her graduate-student husband at URI. This combination will encourage empathy with the diverse experiences across our campus, a reconsideration of the comfort of the familiar, and a physical connection with the work of a Pulitzer Prize-winning author.