People

Michelle D. Brock is Associate Professor of History at Washington and Lee University. A scholar or religion, gender, and the supernatural in early modern Scotland, she is the author of Satan and the Scots: The Devil in Post-Reformation Scotland (2016). She is also co-editor of Knowing Demons, Knowing Spirits in the Early Modern Period (2018) and the forthcoming Routledge History of the Devil in the Western Tradition. Additionally, she is co-director of Mapping the Scottish Reformation, a digital prosopography of the Scottish clergy between 1560 and 1689. Her second monograph, Plagues of the heart: Crisis and covenanting in a seventeenth-century Scottish town, will be published in fall 2024 with Manchester University Press.

During her time as a Newhouse fellow, Brock will work on her newest book project, tentatively titled "'An Unnatural Woman': Crime, Gender, and Spectacle in Eighteenth-Century Scotland." This project centers on the sensational case of Margaret Dickson, an ordinary fishwife who survived hanging for infanticide in Edinburgh in 1724 and became the subject of an intense national debate about sin and culpability. Using court records and printed news sources, "An Unnatural Woman" investigates how changing ideologies and media cultures on the eve of the Enlightenment produced a moral panic about female crime, sexuality, and choice. This eighteenth-century story of one woman's tragedy turned public spectacle speaks directly to the regulation of pregnant bodies and criminalization of reproductive decisions in our current moment. 

Heng Du (杜恆) is Andrew W. Mellon Assistant Professor of Chinese in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at Wellesley College. Her research focuses on the history of the book in early China (before 220 CE). In her existing publications, she explored topics such as authorship and information management as well as comparative study of ancient book cultures. Du received her Ph.D. in Chinese History from Harvard University, M.A. in Chinese Literature from the University of Colorado at Boulder, and B.A. in Classics and Comparative Literature from Cornell University. Prior to Wellesley, she taught at the University of Arizona and Tufts University. Du offers a range of courses on premodern Chinese literature, history, and philosophy, where she explores with students the deep relevance of the past to contemporary life.

As a Newhouse fellow, she will be completing her monograph project, “Paratext and the Transformation of Early Chinese Writings.” This work expands the concept of “paratext” to locate the intentions and agency of the nameless thinkers and compilers involved in early manuscript production. In doing so, it retraces transformations in the conceptions and practices of elite writing between the 4th c. BCE and 1st c. CE, when territorial states ballooned into the early Chinese empires, the Qin and the Han. It argues that the addition of paratextual elements facilitated a transformation in the enclosed texts’ social ontology: from an everyday object to an art object, from a thing-like entity to a human-like entity.

Scott Gunther is a specialist of contemporary French culture and society. His research
interests include contemporary queer political movements in France, gender-inclusive and
gender-neutral language in French, sexual education in France, comparative
(French/American) law, Franco-German relations, the French social category of "bobos"
(i.e., bourgeois bohemians), and the cultural tastes of bourgeois Parisian children. His first
book, The Elastic Closet: A History of Homosexuality in France, 1942-Present, examines
LGBTQ politics in contemporary France with a focus on the complex relationship between
French republican values and the possibilities they offer for social change.
At the Newhouse Center, his project will involve two comparisons: first, a comparison of the
anti-mask/anti-social distancing/anti-COVID-vaccine rhetoric in France and the United
States, and second, a comparison of the media campaigns from the two countries’ health
agencies aimed at encouraging people to get vaccinated and
to practice sanitary measures such as wearing masks.

Jovonna Jones is an Assistant Professor of African American Literature and Culture at Boston College. Her research and courses cover visual studies, Black feminisms, Black cultural criticism, and the built environment. Her writing has been published in Aperture, Boston Art Review, Callaloo, Souls, Southern Cultures, and the Museum of Contemporary Art-Chicago. She has held fellowships from Dartmouth College, the Edmond and Lily Safra Center for Ethics, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. While in residence at the Newhouse Center, Jovonna will be working on her book The Last Thanksgiving at West Rutland Square. This project centers a legal battle between twelve elderly Black women and a real estate developer in 1980s Boston. The battle was waged over twin brownstones in the historic South End neighborhood, and ended with the residents displaced, even though they won their settlement in court. In a statement to a local newspaper following the case, one resident who had been living at West Rutland Square for 43 years told reporters, “I would still be there if the boom wasn’t lowered on me.” This book investigates the problem space of urban development in and through the scale of the intimate: the collective action of a group of women who labored to save their homes. One of those women was the author's grandmother, and her prescient record keeping preserved the memory of this event through newspaper articles, ephemera, bureaucratic documents, and photographs. Following the archival traces of the West Rutland Square case, the book surfaces the interior protocols of displacement that upended the lives of residents and fractured the landscape of Black Boston. In addition to Newhouse support, this project is also funded through a 2024-2025 ACLS Fellowship. Jovonna holds her PhD and MA from Harvard University and BA from Emory University.

Allison Puglisi is a historian of Black social movements, with an emphasis on gender, ecology,
and urban space. At the Newhouse Center she will revise her book manuscript, Redefining
Residency: Black Environmental Thought in New Orleans. This work in progress explores how
housing activists—particularly Black women—laid the early groundwork for Black
environmental organizing. It was through housing issues that a variety of political groups—the
Black Panthers, tenants’ organizations, and Black-led hurricane survivor groups—came to
critique modern environmental degradation. They found housing inequities inextricable from the
land on which their homes sat, and they understood home both as one’s house and the broader
ecology in which they lived. Redefining Residency is based on Allison’s dissertation, which
received honorable mention for the American Studies Association’s Ralph Henry Gabriel Prize.
Allison is originally from Phoenix, Arizona. She received a BA in History from Dartmouth
College and a PhD in American Studies from Harvard University, with a certificate in Gender
and Sexuality Studies. She was previously the Carol G. Lederer Postdoctoral Fellow at Brown
University’s Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women. Her research has been
supported by the Social Science Research Council, the Ash Center for Democratic Governance
and Innovation, and the Institute for Citizens and Scholars.

Sarah Wall-Randell is the author of The Immaterial Book: Reading and Romance in Early Modern England (University of Michigan Press, 2013). She has also published several essays and book chapters on early modern editing practices, books as stage-props, Sibylline prophecy, Christopher Marlowe, and gender in Shakespearean performance, including “‘The proper false’: ‘Original Practices’ and Transmisogyny,” in Twelfth Night: The State of Play, ed. Emma Smith (Arden Shakespeare, Bloomsbury Press, forthcoming 2025). She is the editor of Marlowe’s translation of Lucan’s Civil War for the forthcoming Oxford Collected Marlowe.

While at the Newhouse Center she will work on a new book project, Shakespeare’s Seven Sisters, about the history of Shakespeare performance at historically women’s colleges in America. Within a decade of their foundations in the late nineteenth century, prominent American women’s colleges organized dramatic societies in which Shakespeare was frequently performed, such as Radcliffe’s Idler Club, Vassar’s Philaletheis Society, and Smith’s Dramatics Association, or dedicated Shakespeare clubs, like the ones at Wellesley and Bryn Mawr. Still other colleges, including historically Black women’s colleges like Bennett (in Greensboro, NC) and Spelman, centered Shakespeare performance early in their histories, not only among student activities but also at important community events like convocations and commencements. Recent years have found women’s colleges embroiled in controversy about their inclusion or exclusion of trans and nonbinary students. Wall-Randell’s book will argue that gender nonconformity, among other performative queer energies, has thrived at women’s colleges since the beginning, under the cloak of Shakespeare’s prestige.

Practicing the unlikely but not unprecedented mix of needle arts and Black liberation, Lisa Woolfork sewing and quilting practice operates alongside her scholarly work as an Associate Professor of English at the University of Virginia. Woolfork is an academic, sewist, community organizer, and podcaster. She is the founder of Black Women Stitch, the sewing group where Black Lives Matter. She is also the host/producer of Stitch Please, a weekly audio podcast that centers Black women, girls, and femmes in sewing. In the summer of 2017, she organized in community to protest the white supremacist insurgency in her city Charlottesville, VA. She resisted in a variety of ways including nonviolent direct action, working with a bail fund for activists, sewing for a creative arts team, and participating in, and later co-founding, CARML, an antiracist media collective.  Her essay “‘This Class of Persons:’ When UVA’s White Supremacist Past Meets Its Future” was published in a collection of essays about the terror events in Charlottesville.  She has spoken about the connections between Black liberation and craft for the Smithsonian’s African American Craft Summit, the Modern Quilt Guild, the Center for Craft, and more. She is currently writing Black Women Stitch Liberation, a book that addresses the connections between Black women’s creativity, autonomy, and community.