The University of Hartford Humanities Center is happy to announce five faculty fellows for 2026–27. All will receive a stipend to support their research and will speak in the Spring 2027 lecture series on “Gender Trouble,” co-organized by Rachel Walker, Associate Professor of History.
Ellen Carey, Associate Professor of Photography, will present on “Women in Color: Anna Atkins, Color Photography and Those Who Struck Light.” Here, she will explore the work of Anna Atkins, a nineteenth-century botanist and photographer who was the first woman to employ this artform as well as the first person to do photography in color. As such, Professor Carey’s talk will shed light on how women practitioners’ historical and contemporary contributions in color photography have gone under-recognized, unacknowledged and, curiously, not seen as located in gender.
KC Comeforo, Associate Professor of Communication, will present on “Daddies, Dandies, and (bull) Daggers: Trans/Queer Performances and the Muddying of the Waters of the Gender Binary.” In this talk/performance, Professor Comeforo will bring the archetypes of “the Daddy,” “the Dandy” and “the Bull Dagger” into conversation with one another as they explore how the existence of queer and trans people in the world creates more equitable ways of thinking about gender.
Jennifer McLeer, Assistant Professor of Psychology, will present on “Status Violations in Workgroups: What Happens When Women ‘Act Like’ Men?” By looking at theoretical and empirical literature, she will examine how self-promoting and successful women are perceived to violate gendered norms of interaction in ways that challenge and disrupt status hierarchies of prestige and power. Along the way, Professor McLeer will consider how such “status violations” affect cohesion, trust and cooperation within workplace groups.
Shreya Malhotra, Assistant Professor of Economics, will speak on “The Measurement Inadequacy of Non-Binary Gender in Public Datasets” in a talk that examines how the public datasets of many countries persistently fail to include adequate gender categories beyond the male/female binary. As such, Professor Malhotra will explore how this inadequacy not only misrepresents population composition but fundamentally undermines research in areas such as labor market dynamics, health outcomes and interpersonal violence in marriage markets in ways that render policy makers and service providers ill-equipped to identify disparities, allocate resources or design inclusive interventions.
Amy Weiss, Associate Professor of Judaic Studies and History, will give the talk “When Conservative Ideas on Gender Meet Progressive Cable TV Viewership,” an exploration of the social, ideological and political power dynamics associated with representation of gender on both the Hallmark and Great American Family channels. Here, Professor Weiss will examine how Hallmark, with its featuring of same-sex couples (with varying interpretations of gender) in their moves in recent years, has influenced how GAF has taken a stand for more “traditional values” regarding both politics and gender. Her talk demonstrates how viewer feedback about gender has now only exposed fault lines in cable television, but has been mapped onto network television as well.
The Humanities Center aims to provide greater visibility for the humanities at the University of Hartford and to furnish venues for interdisciplinary exchanges across the humanities and the arts, sciences, technology, media, music, psychology, film, philosophy, history and literature. For more information, contact Nicholas Ealy, director (ealy@hartford.edu), or visit our webpage.