2026-2027 Faculty Fellows

Madeline Gangnes
English/Theatre
“Depicting “Foreign” Lands and Cultures in Victorian Children’s Periodicals”

My project builds on research that I have been conducting for the past several years on Our Young Folks Weekly Budget (1871–1897; shortened to Young Folks here): one of the longest-running Victorian children’s periodicals and one of the few late-Victorian penny-weekly illustrated “story papers.” Victorian story papers were short, inexpensive newspaper-styled publications that printed a mix of serialized fiction (novels published in installments), short
stories, poetry, articles, illustrations, humorous anecdotes, and other materials suitable for child audiences. My Slattery project will analyze a selection of short-form works—both text and image—from Young Folks that present locations, cultures, and animals from countries and territories outside of the British Isles. In Young Folks and similar periodicals, we see the Victorian interest in distant peoples and locales presented in a manner designed specifically to educate and entertain children. Ultimately, through my analysis of Young Folks as a case study, I aim to demonstrate that examining short-form works in children’s periodicals can both broaden and deepen scholars’ understandings of the roles that popular media played in forming Victorian children’s perceptions of the world beyond their homeland in the final decades of the British Empire.

Christopher Hauser
Philosophy
“Free Will, Science, and the Bodily Nature of Human Persons”

For my Slattery project, I will write two journal articles that I hope to publish in well-respected, peer-reviewed philosophy journals. The first journal article will examine St. Thomas Aquinas’s ideas about whether it possible for human persons to survive death and experience a disembodied afterlife in heaven as “separated souls.” The second article will defend the idea that we are justified in believing that we have what philosophers call “libertarian free will,” despite those who claim that the behavioral sciences have revealed otherwise.

Megan Heeder
Theology/Religious Studies
“Hungering for Wholeness: Beauty, Moral Theology, and Eating Disorders”

For my Slattery project, I will work on my monograph, which seeks to harness the Catholic aesthetic and moral tradition to respond to eating disorders, particularly as they affect women in our society. Despite the increasing realizations that the feminine thin-ideal is a factor that strongly influences the development of disordered eating and eating disorders, and that women frequently think of their eating, exercise, and weight in moral terms, moral theology has hitherto not explored the connection between them. This quandary is especially pressing and confusing for women of faith, who often disclose that they feel that God loves them better when they do not eat, or associate the suffering of not eating with that of fasting. I will show that considerable riches lie in the Catholic moral tradition, especially when brought into conversation with theological aesthetics, to address the impact of the feminine thin-ideal in a social media age.

Maria Johnson
Theology/Religious Studies
“Darkness as a Bride: Christian Dying in the Contemporary World” 

For my Slattery project, I will work on a book-length theological reflection on the experience of dying in contemporary America. The question that animates my investigation is: Given the current medical and cultural context, how can Christians best approach their own death, and how can they assist others in that approach? The increasing "medicalization" of death in America means that we experience death and dying in a context that is very different from, and increasingly disconnected from, the tradition of Christian reflection on death. My goal is to bring these two aspects of the dying Christian's reality into conversation. I hope that this book will serve to inform and empower individuals and communities in addressing questions of death and dying in a way that is informed and nourished by the rich theological and spiritual resources of the Christian tradition, while at the same time being cognizant of and engaged with contemporary reality, i.e., the situations in which people find themselves and the choices they face.