Research Projects

_{Bernard Lightman}

Bernard Lightman

I am currently working on two major projects.  First, the John Tyndall Correspondence Project, which focuses on locating, digitalizing, transcribing, and publishing all letters to and from the eminent, 19^th century British physicist John Tyndall.  Director of the Royal Institution of London starting in the late 1860’s, Tyndall played a major role in the debates surrounding the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species, in the secularization of science, and in the area of climate science.  Published by the University of Pittsburgh Press, we are projecting twenty volumes of correspondence.  We are half-way through the project as volume 10 is due out in a few months.  The project involves over thirty scholars from around the world who have been working collaboratively on transcribing and editing the letters.  The second project is a co-edited volume of essays on the global history of evolution and religion.  Drawing on the papers presented during an online workshop that took place in June of 2021, the focus is on how important intellectuals around the world viewed the complicated relationship between science and religion in the long nineteenth century. The authors are experts on science and religion in East Asia, South and Central America, Europe, Africa, the Middle East, Australia and New Zealand.  My paper for this project is on evolution and religion in transnational contexts, specifically in Britain, Japan, and China.  With my two co-authors we discuss how evolution in it many forms played a crucial role in the reconfiguration of cultural traditions in these three national contexts.

Alison Halsall

Alison Halsall is at work on two key research projects. Currently in press with the University Press of Mississippi, The LGBTQ+ Comics Studies Reader, edited by Alison Halsall and Jonathan Warren, explores the exemplary trove of LGBTQ+ comics that coalesced in the underground and alternative comix scenes of the mid-1960s and in the decades after. This heavily illustrated volume engages with the work of preeminent artists across the globe, such as Howard Cruse, Edie Fake, Justin Hall, Jennifer Camper, and Alison Bechdel, whose iconic artwork is reproduced within the volume. Along the way, certain LGBTQ+ touchstones emerge organically and inevitably—pride, coming out, chosen families, sexual health, gender, risk, and liberation. Featuring comics figures across the gamut of the industry, from renowned scholars to emerging creators and webcomics artists, the reader explores a range of approaches to LGBTQ+ comics—queer history, gender and sexuality theory, memory studies, graphic medicine, genre studies, biography, and more—and speaks to the diversity of publishing forms and media that shape queer comics and their reading communities. Forthcoming Fall 2022.

Visualizing Children in Crisis Around the World, Halsall’s solo book project, considers graphic narratives for and about children and youth, from diverse cultural and ethnic backgrounds, varied regions of the world, wide-ranging gender identities and levels of ability. This project has three primary objectives. One, it explores this visual and literary medium that is heavily invested in the representation of children and youth, especially in relation to the depiction of particular experiences and crises (migration; enslavement; internment; cultural displacement; marginalization; oppression, etc.) that young people have undergone and continue to live through the world over. Two, it examines the many circuitous routes that graphic literature for young people takes in and out of discourses of nation, belonging, and identity, moving with and oftentimes against currents of power. Three, it considers the reader as a source tension itself: the reader that is produced by the comics text and the empirical reader (who might be adult, child, etc.). This project is being reviewed by Ohio University Press.

_{Alison Halsall}