Katharine Owens - Fall 2025
Katharine Owens is a professor in the department of Politics, Economics, and International Studies at the University of Hartford. She is an interdisciplinary scholar who investigates plastic pollution through interdisciplinary methods that merge environmental science, policy, and the arts. Her ongoing project “Entangled and Ingested” features life-sized portraits of animals harmed by plastic waste, created from unrecyclable film plastic in public sewing workshops. In addition to the National Geographic Society and the Fulbright Foundation, Katharine’s work has been funded by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the Middletown Commission on the Arts, and the Connecticut Office of the Arts. She has worked on plastic pollution projects in places as varied as Connecticut, USA, Kerala, India, and Svalbard in the Arctic Circle. Katharine seeks to continually push the boundary between art and science, using the arts to explore some of the most pressing environmental problems of our age and advocate for comprehensive policy change.
Cecilia Lim - Fall 2025
Cecilia Lim is a printmaker and community-engaged artist. A first-generation US-born Tagalog (Luzon, Philippines) and Toisan (Guangdong, China) woman, she has lived and worked in Queens, New York for the past 24 years. In community-engaged art projects, Cecilia combines dialogue, short documentary film, printmaking and other 2D artforms to deepen everyday people's sense of connection to themselves and the environment, and inspire them to work together toward a world where everyone has a chance to live well. She is the recipient of grants from Flushing Town Hall, New York Foundation for the Arts, The Puffin Foundation, and Queens Council on the Arts. She was a 2024 Third World Newsreel Social Justice Filmmaker, is part of Korea Art Forum's 2025 Shared Dialogue, Shared Space cohort, and is currently screening her 2025 short film Remember Our Connection: Mending and Repair.
Marie Comuzzo - 2025
Marie Comuzzo is a musicologist, environmental activist, and multimedia artist who is currently pursuing an interdisciplinary dissertation at Brandeis University that explores how sound mediates the relationship between humans and whales. The primary research of this project investigates how the recognition of humpback vocalizations as song in the 1970s transformed human perceptions of whales and the oceans, and how it catalyzed and continues to bring forth environmental action. Marie holds Masters’ degrees in Musicology from Brandeis University and University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and a Master's in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality from Brandeis University. As a professional musician, Marie completed a Graduate Performance Diploma in Violin from Boston Conservatory at Berklee, under the guide of Marcus Placci, and a Violin Diploma from Arrigo Boito Conservatory, Parma, Italy (BM Equivalent). Most recently, Marie was awarded a Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Innovation Fellowship.
Learn more about Marie’s ACLS Fellowship here
Crystal McDonald- Fall 2024
Crystal McDonald is a professional artist, scholar, and PhD candidate in industrial-organization psychology at The Chicago School of Professional Psychology. Her dissertation, "The Influence of Work Environment, Personality, Color, and Preferences on Creativity: A Quantitative Analysis Among BIPOC Employees," explores factors affecting creativity in the workplace. In addition to her research, she serves as Vice Chair of the Blacks in I/O organization, where she builds strategic alliances and career opportunities in creative fields for African Americans. As an artist, Crystal was an artist-in-residence at the Grand Marais Art Colony in Minnesota, has exhibited her work with the NAACP and the Noyes Cultural Center, and was recognized as a finalist in the 92nd National Art League Annual Drawing Competition. She has curated exhibitions at the Evanston Art Center for studio artists from Arts of Life and currently serves on the finance committee for the Intuit Art Museum, where she previously served on their Young Professional Board and Acquisition Committee, with a focus on acquiring works by living Black female artists. As a visiting scholar, she is researching the creation myth and its influence across Biblical texts, early earth science and agricultural manuals, as well as philosophical, architectural, and political treatises. From this research, she will create a series of portraits that explore spirituality, psychological themes, and suppressed emotions by depicting humans as they navigate built spaces influenced by the natural world and the stories we tell about its beginnings.
Stefan Zaric – 2023-2024
Stefan Zaric is a Fashion Historian and Fashion Curator from Serbia, and a PhD candidate at the University of Novi Sad where he is developing his doctoral dissertation under the title Iconography and Semiotics of Dramatic Heroines’ Clothing and Fashion in William Shakespeare’s Great Tragedies. In his thesis, Stefan is analyzing how visual and material culture elements of fashion histories from the times King Lear, Macbeth, Hamlet, and Othello are set in rather than their stage representations can help us understand fashioning and, as the fashion studies scholar Susan Kaiser stated, unframing of Shakespeare’s tragic women, parting from established iconographic conventions. As a Visiting Fulbright Scholar, the Center’s first in the field of Fashion History, Stefan is researching fashion and clothing related library and museum materials under the mentorship of Professor Robert Lublin PhD in order to complete his thesis set for defence upon his return to Serbia.
Kristen Abbott Bennett — 2021-2022
Kristen Abbott Bennett is an Assistant Professor of English at Framingham State University and the Project Founder and Director of the Kit Marlowe Project, as well as Assistant Director of Pedagogy for the Map of Early Modern London. Kristen recently signed on with Cambridge UP to contribute an Element entitled Teaching Shakespeare’s Theatre of the World. In Shakespeare’s day the “theatre of the world” commonplace figured a complex mode of thinking about one’s place on earth, in the cosmos, and in the afterlife. In 1599, the Globe Theatre reportedly boasted the motto “totus mundus agit histrionem,” or as Jaques says in As You Like It, “all the world’s a stage,” and architecturally figured the metaphor: the boards the mundane world, the actors humanity, and the audience, in seats rising to the sky, the celestial audience judging the performance. This Element will invite teachers and their students to realize how Shakespeare’s complex invocations of this trope generate kaleidoscopic contexts from which to think about representations of justice in his day and ours. During her time at the Kinney Center, Kristen hopes to set forth the philosophical underpinnings of the “theatre of the world” metaphor from which she will design complementary classroom pedagogies.
Nathaniel C. Leonard — Fall 2021
Nathaniel C. Leonard is an Associate Professor of English at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, where he is the current holder of the A. P. Green Fellowship in Literature and is a 2021 recipient of the Buschman Faculty Award. He primarily teaches early British literature, Shakespeare, and dramatic literature across periods while also coordinating Westminster College’s theatre program. Nate’s academic work is deeply invested in trying to interrogate the function and effect of metatheatrical moments – like soliloquy, chorus, dumb show, inset performance, prologue, and epilogue – on the early modern stage. Given the incredible popularity of these dramaturgical strategies in the period, his work develops a more nuanced discussion of the different types of metatheatre and the unique impacts they have on audiences as well as how they interact with the Renaissance exploration of dramatic form. Nate’s research currently focusses on the similarities between how sixteenth and seventeenth-century English playwrights utilize the-play-within-the-play and restaged cultural performances as tools for generating dramatic efficacy based on the genres (including comedy, revenge tragedy, tragicomedy, and morality play) of the plays in which those strategies appear. He hopes to complete his current book project, tentatively titled Anatomizing Metatheatre: the-Play-within-the-Play, Restaged Cultural Performance, and Genre in English Renaissance Drama, during his time at the Kinney Center for Interdisciplinary Renaissance Studies.
Sean Moore — 2021-2022
Sean Moore is Professor of English at the University of New Hampshire where he has served as Editor of Eighteenth-Century Studies. He has also served as Director (Dean) of the UNH Honors Program. He received the Murphy Prize from the American Conference for Irish Studies (ACIS) for Swift, the Book, and the Irish Financial Revolution: Satire and Sovereignty in Colonial Ireland (Johns Hopkins UP, 2010), which was researched with a Fulbright Scholarship to the Republic of Ireland hosted in 2001-2002 by the Keough-Notre Dame Center in Dublin. He has recently published Slavery and the Making of Early American Libraries: British Literature, Political Thought, and the Transatlantic Book Trade, 1931-1814 (Oxford UP, 2019), the research for which was sponsored by an NEH Fellowship, an American Antiquarian Society/NEH Fellowship, a Library Company of Philadelphia Fellowship, a Newport Mansions Fellowship. His current project is “The British Secret Service and the Scottish and Irish Book Trades, 1660-1829.”