好色先生TV

Seven faculty members have received inaugural research grants from The Humanities Center at 好色先生TV to develop and produce books, documentaries and a digital learning platform.

The Humanities Center, based in the Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences, seeks to serve as an incubator for original, innovative, cutting-edge and interdisciplinary humanistic research. To support this mission, The Humanities Center has established the Faculty Research Grant, designed to provide support to faculty members across all ranks and tracks. This grant aims to empower faculty to study the human condition and human experience, as well as develop human-centered solutions to real-world challenges in our increasingly technology-driven society.

鈥淭he Faculty Research Grants are designed to support humanities faculty in moving from the beginning, middle, and end stages of their research and creative projects and to embolden faculty to take on and bring to fruition bold, ambitious, public-facing work,鈥� said Edda Fields-Black, director of The Humanities Center.

Meet the 2025 Cohort

Marian Aguiar, Associate Professor, Department of English

Project: 鈥淓rrant Mobilities: Decolonial Imaginaries of Mediterranean Migration in Visual and Literary Culture鈥�

Over 31,000 migrants have drowned or gone missing in the Mediterranean since 2014, their journeys leaving only life jackets and drifting boats as evidence. In 鈥淓rrant Mobilities: Decolonial Imaginaries of Mediterranean Migration in Visual and Literary Culture鈥� (forthcoming, Manchester University Press, 2026), Aguiar examines how this crisis is represented and how movement itself becomes a site of regulation and resistance. The book introduces 鈥渆rrant mobility鈥� as a framework for understanding undocumented migrants鈥� precarious and often unauthorized movement 鈥� wandering, unregulated and outside state-sanctioned norms.

Aguiar analyzes cultural works including humanitarian documentaries, art installations using salvaged maritime objects, digital human rights design, and experimental literature and film. Some works reinscribe the hierarchies that leave migrants 鈥渁t sea,鈥� while others imagine alternative politics of movement. These decolonial imaginaries expose and resist the securitization of borders, offering new ways to understand human movement and the ethical demands it places on global citizenship and care.

Uju Anya, Associate Professor, Department of Languages, Cultures & Applied Linguistics

Project: AfroMetaverse Digital Platform

The AfroMetaverse project initiative contributes to the effort to right historical wrongs against Afrodescendants in world language learning by creating a digital platform that centers this community and prioritizes their successful participation in language education. AfroMetaverse has three main components:

1. A VR multilingual educational gaming platform
2. A social networking community
3. A repository of multilingual interaction data for interdisciplinary research

This digital platform will be a space for cultural exchange and global community building for Black youth ages 12-17 in Pittsburgh, Brazil, Colombia and Canada through multilingual game-based educational experiences and social networking, and it will provide a rich source of data for Anya鈥檚 critical discourse research studies in second language acquisition, critical applied linguistics, language education and game-based educational experiences in the metaverse, along with other scholars and collaborators鈥� work in applied linguistics, pedagogy, sociology and more.

Kiyono Fujinaga-Gordon, Assistant Teaching Professor, Department of Languages, Cultures & Applied Linguistics

Project: Documentation of Nanamui

This research involving the Ikema-speaking community in Japan reimagines language and cultural documentation by centering community agency and ethical responsibility.

Traditional linguistic documentation often reflects academic interests more than those of the communities being studied. This interdisciplinary project seeks to transform that model by collaborating directly with speakers of the Ikema dialect of the Miyako language 鈥� identified as severely endangered by UNESCO 鈥� to determine which aspects of their language they wish to share and with whom.

Within this broader effort, the project focuses on documenting Nanamui, religious rituals in Miyakojima, Okinawa, through recording, digitizing, annotating and archiving prayers and practices.

Sarah Idzik, Assistant Professor, Department of English

Project: 鈥淥dd Hospitality: Race, Kinship, and Rhetorics of Transnational Adoption鈥�

Idzik鈥檚 book 鈥淥dd Hospitality: Race, Kinship, and Rhetorics of Transnational Adoption鈥� interrogates how transnational adoption from Asia is discussed in the West and why these narratives matter. It asks: Why do we frame these adoptions as benevolent? What are the consequences for Asian American adoptees and their experiences of race and belonging? In U.S. public discourse, transnational, transracial adoption is rarely controversial and often portrayed as altruistic.

鈥淥dd Hospitality鈥� examines how Asian children are cast as 鈥渙rphans鈥� needing rescue through Western adoption and how this reinforces colonial ideologies. These children are often positioned as proof of postracial harmony, their assimilation taken as evidence that love within white nuclear families can transcend racial and national boundaries. The book argues that such rhetoric commodifies and racializes Asian American adoptees, reinforcing (neo)colonial dynamics and limiting pathways toward racial and decolonial justice. Through the voices and practices of adult adoptees, the book reveals alternative ways of understanding Asian American identity, solidarity and resistance.

Kathy Newman, Associate Professor, Department of English

Project: 鈥淏ackstory: Film, Television and Labor in the Age of the Blacklist鈥�

鈥淏ackstory鈥� offers a revisionist account of 1950s Hollywood, challenging the dominant narrative of total silencing during the anti-Communist blacklist. It argues that, despite 鈥� and sometimes because of 鈥� the blacklist, leftist, liberal and working-class cultural producers found ways to represent labor, class and even unions in surprisingly positive terms.

The book鈥檚 central claim is that labor conditions within the culture industry itself were rapidly changing. The rise of television, and the immense production speed it demanded 鈥� 800 hours of content every 11 days, compared to Hollywood鈥檚 800 hours per year 鈥� radicalized many filmmakers. 鈥淏ackstory鈥� is the first study to offer a redemptive view of film and television culture during the blacklist era. While much of the era鈥檚 history has been told by those who were blacklisted and silenced, this book focuses on those who managed to keep working, revealing the strategies and compromises that allowed them to continue shaping U.S. cultural narratives from within.

Ralph Vituccio, Teaching Professor, Department of English and Reem Alghazzi, Fellow, Artists at Risk, Department of English

Project: IN EXILE

The documentary, 鈥淚N EXILE,鈥� examines the lives of eight artists, writers, political activists and songwriters living in exile, using ethnographic filmmaking to explore complex anthropological themes such as possession, kinship, temporality and displacement.

The project integrates a scholarly approach to visual anthropology, interrogating the boundaries between poetic documentary and sensory ethnography. By drawing from one of the co-director鈥檚 own experiences with migration and dislocation, the film presents a unique perspective on the human experience of exile, fostering deeper engagement with issues of forced migration, conflict and the lingering effects of violence.

Furthermore, it challenges conventional ethnographic methodologies, demonstrating how film can serve as both an academic and artistic medium for capturing lived experiences often inaccessible to traditional research.