Mellon-Morgridge Professors

Professor Edoro-Glines was selected as a Mellon-Morgridge Professor in 2023.  She is a Nigerian academic of Esan descent. She is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, specializing in African literature with a focus on the history and theory of the novel in Africa. She also works on digital culture, particularly social media, as it relates to literary form. Additionally, she holds a joint faculty appointment in the African Cultural Studies Department. Beyond her academic role, she is the founder and editor of Brittle Paper, a prominent online platform dedicated to promoting African writing and literary culture. Her work as the editor of Brittle Paper extends beyond academia and involves active engagement with mainstream literary communities and industries, intersecting with digital culture and the global African literary scene. 

Prof. Edoro-Glines’ Constellations course is titled Social Media Writing and examines social media through the lens of literary imagination and creativity, and will be taught in spring 2024.  

Prof. Ralph Grunewald was introduced as a Mellon-Morgridge Professor in the Fall of 2022. He is a member of the English Department and the Center for Law, Society, and Justice.

Much of Dr. Grunewald’s work addresses fundamental questions of how truth, guilt, and justice are interconnected in different justice systems. His approach is interdisciplinary, combining legal and humanities scholarship. In his new book, Narratives of Guilt and Innocence: The Power of Storytelling in Wrongful Conviction Cases (New York University Press, forthcoming), Dr. Grunewald analyzes how narrativization (the way “facts” and “stories” are told) in the criminal process affects the outcome of a case, potentially leading to wrongful convictions. His fall 2022 Constellation course, Criminal Justice in America, was an introduction into the criminal justice system in the United States, focusing on timely and pertinent questions and inspiring students to think critically about the law as a human-made system.

His 2023 Constellation, Truth and Crime, expands this focus by inviting students to explore and discuss why we are so fascinated by true-crime stories, what legal truth is, and how “evidence” and “facts” are ultimately constructed. Can podcasts and TV shows produce a more accurate picture of a case and achieve a “truer” form of justice by exposing details the law might not have accounted for, or is their purpose just to entertain us?

Prof. Paola S. Hernández was chosen as a Mellon-Morgridge Professor in 2023. She specializes in contemporary Latin American theatre, performance, and Latinx Studies. She is a member of the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, as well as Interdisciplinary Theatre Studies and Chicanx and Latinx programs. Prof. Hernández teaches a variety of courses on visual arts, migration, and border studies, as well as theatre and performance studies of the Americas, and has staged a variety of Latin American plays on campus. This new course on the border introduces topics of the historical, social, and artistic ramifications between the U.S. and Mexico. Her first book, The Theatre of Argentina and Chile: Globalization and Disenchantment (Corregidor 2009) explores the impact of globalization on the social, cultural, and economies of Argentine and Chilean theatre. Her second book, Staging Lives in Latin American Theater: Bodies, Objects, Archives (Northwestern University Press 2021), analyzes how material objects and archives—photographs, videos, and documents such as witness reports, legal briefs, and letters—come to life onstage. Hernández argues that present-day, live performances utilize these material archives to reinterpret recent traumatic histories in Latin America. She has recently published on Latinx American theatre in Fifty Key Figures in Latinx and Latin American Theatre (Routledge 2022). Her current work focuses on how visual artists on and around the U.S.-Mexico border relate to different manifestations of this contact zone as a geographic, historic, and political place of encounters and possibilities.

Prof. Hernández will teach Border & Migration Studies in LatinX America as her Constellations course, beginning in spring 2024.

NEW MMP!

Prof. Joshua Calhoun will join the Constellations team in fall 2024!  Stay tuned for more info on his class, Archival Information & Artificial Intelligence, to be taught spring 2025.

Prof. Giuliana Chamedes was selected as a new Mellon-Morgridge Professor of the Humanities in 2020. In the 2020-21 academic year, she developed a new Constellation on Fascism: Fascism: Then & Now (History 366).

Dr. Chamedes is a member of the Department of History, who specializes in international and global history with a focus on the place of Europe in the wider world. Her first book, A Twentieth-Century Crusade: The Vatican’s Battle to Remake Christian Europe is the first comprehensive history of the Vatican’s agenda to defeat the forces of secular liberalism and communism through international law, cultural diplomacy, and a marriage of convenience with authoritarian and right-wing rulers. She is currently working on her second book project, Failed Globalists: Economic Justice, Decolonization, and the Decline of the European Welfare State, 1973-1993, which examines the emergence of a radically new way of conceptualizing state-economy relations.

Prof. Frédéric Neyrat served as a Mellon-Morgridge Professor from 2018-2023. He is a member of the English Department with expertise in the environmental humanities and contemporary theory. He developed our Planetary Humanities Constellation.

Dr. Neyrat is the author of several books, including The Unconstructable Earth: An Ecology of Separation, and Atopias: Manifesto for a Radical Existentialism. Dr. Neyrat recently launched Alienocene, an electronic journal that gathers texts, sounds, and images seeking to reshape the relationship between the human and the inhuman, the terrestrial and the extraterrestrial, the near and the distant, what is familiar to us and what persists in remaining – despite everything – alien.

Prof. Mario Ortiz-Robles served as a Mellon-Morgridge Professor from  2018-2022. He is a leader in the emerging field of Animal Studies in which he created one of our first Constellations.

Dr. Ortiz-Robles’ home department is English, but his wide-ranging intellectual interests have allowed him to forge strong connections across the UW-Madison campus. His Constellation aspired to build off the success of his Borghesi-Mellon workshop in Animal Studies and created a hub for scholarship and research focused on representation, rights, and animal-human relations. He has an extensive publication record that includes his book Literature and Animal Studies, which asks “Why do animals talk in literature?”

Prof. Jenell Johnson was a Mellon-Morgridge Professor from 2017-2023, establishing our Health & Inequality Constellation.

Dr. Johnson’s work is recognized internationally for reshaping our understanding of science and medicine in the field of Rhetoric and Communications, in Communication Arts as well as in Science and Technology Studies. Much of her work looks closely at issues related to how we understand the meaning of neuroscience, psychiatry, and mental disability. These interests are best illustrated in her first book American Lobotomy, and the edited collection The Neuroscientific Turn, a collection of essays from humanists and scientists reflecting on the growth of the “neuro-disciplines.” Johnson is the director of UW-Madison’s Disability Studies Initiative. She leads a double life as a cartoonist and has recently published a comic anthology entitled Graphic Reproduction.

Prof. Laura McClure is Halls-Bascom Professor of Classical Literature Studies and an internationally recognized scholar of gender and women in the ancient world. She teaches in the department of Classical and Near Eastern Studies, Gender and Women’s Studies, and the Integrated Liberal Studies program. For Constellations, she developed the Bodies & Society Constellation from her signature course, Classics 351: Gender and Sexuality in the Classical World. Taught annually, this course demonstrates the relevance of ancient ideas about gender to modern conceptions as well as the ways ancient women exerted agency and influence within their own traditional societies. Professor McClure is the author of the textbook used for the course, Women in Classical Antiquity: From Birth to Death (2019), and two scholarly monographs, Spoken Like a Woman: Speech and Gender in Athenian Drama (1999), and Courtesans at Table: Gender and Greek Literary Culture in Athenaeus (2003). She is currently working on two books for Oxford University Press, one on women’s receptions of the Greek chorus, and a biography of an Athenian courtesan called Phryne.