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Humanities Names 2024 Departmental and Program Scholars

Published April 2, 2024

A hearty congratulations to our humanities departmental and program scholars! These awards recognize outstanding performance of one undergraduate student in each of our three programs, as well as the department as a whole.

Congratulations to Griffin Six, our English program scholar, Alli Churchwell, our communication, culture, and media program scholar, and Aracely Hernandez-Ramos, our scientific and technical communication program scholar! Each program scholar receives $100 from the department in recognition of their achievements.

Griffin Six has also been named our humanities departmental scholar! Griffin will receive an additional $200 from the department, as well as eligibility for the Provost’s Award for Scholarship, which awards an additional $800 to recipients.

Congratulations and excellent work to all of our amazing humanities scholars!

Van Kooy’s paper for London conference examines ‘the plantationoscene’

Published April 26, 2021

Associate Professor Dana Van Kooy presented her essay, “Assemblages of the Plantationoscene” recently at The London Stage and the Nineteenth-Century World III conference, sponsored by the New College at Oxford University.

Invoking the neologism “plantationoscene,” the paper from Van Kooy, who directs Tech’s English program, examines John Fawcett’s pantomime, “Obi; or Three-Finger’d Jack,” which opened at London’s Haymarket Theatre in 1800. Linking the era (cene) to the performance and visual reproduction of specific theatrical scenes, this neologism offers an alternative framework for interpreting Fawcett’s pantomime, which assembled scenes of plantation life and its corresponding devastation into a formulaic plot.

Focusing on stage descriptions and those scenes advertised on its playbills, “Assemblages of the Plantationoscene” draws attention to the production of a visual ecology that reconfigured the colonial landscape.

In her abstract, Van Kooy established the relevance of the topic: “Throughout The Atlantic World, the plantation system marked a period of human and ecological disaster, one that theaters in Britain and the United States readily transformed into captivating spectacles throughout 18th and 19th centuries. The scale of this devastation continues to impact society in myriad ways, including racialized violence and policies that associate people and labor practices with ‘natural’ and/or geographical spaces.”