Announcing HWW Consortium Postdoctoral Fellowship Awards 2024-25
The Humanities Without Walls Consortium (HWW) is pleased to announce the selection of two Public Humanities Postdoctoral Fellows. Please join HWW in congratulating the new fellows!
Kimba Stahler (History, Case Western Reserve University) will be in residence at the Humanities Institute at Penn State University.
Jordan Woodward (English, The Ohio State University) will be in residence at the Humanities Research Institute at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
Penn State University
Kimba Stahler is a historian of US women’s and gender history and social justice movements. She specializes in twentieth century antipoverty and feminist movements. Her research interests include participatory democracy, alliance formation among grassroots activists and organizations, and identity politics. She has a PhD from the Department of History at Case Western Reserve University.
For Kimba’s dissertation research, she conducted oral histories to uncover how members of the Students for a Democratic Society living in Cleveland constructed that organization’s most successful interracial grassroots organizing campaign during the 1960s. Using those oral histories, she produced a storytelling podcast, entitled "Visions of Democracy," that encourages listeners to think about the various forms that democratic participation takes. Her current book project, tentatively titled Rats in Common: The Untold History of Cleveland’s Interracial Welfare Rights Movement, explores how white middle-class political organizers and poor white and Black single mothers forged productive political relationships out of their shared commitment to radical forms of American democracy.
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Jordan Woodward is from a small town in Oklahoma within the Muscogee (Creek) Nation, at the point where the Ozark foothills meet the Great Plains. Growing up in a state marked by the boom and bust of extractive industry, Woodward has a particular interest in the relationships between place, community, and industry, as well as between storytelling and technical and professional communication. She has a PhD in English (Rhetoric, Composition, and Literacy) from The Ohio State University.
Recently, Woodward has written about a network of organizations in the Little Cities of Black Diamonds (LCBD) microregion of Appalachian Ohio who are working to transition their economy from extractive industry to eco-heritage tourism. In this project, Woodward argues that technical communication acts as an essential element in crafting shared narratives of place/environment, history, and community that circulate from the underground work of coalitional networks into the public sphere. Her broader research questions include: How do diverse stakeholders negotiate a shared, though sometimes conflicting, interest in place? How do different generations approach place-making? What role do technical and professional communication and storytelling play in place-making efforts? What is at stake in place-making efforts in rural areas that have a history of resource extraction?