As USM School of Humanities’ newest Assistant Professor of Philosophy, Ian Dunkle has hit the ground running offering interdisciplinary content. He was awarded a fellowship with colleagues in English, Sociology, and Communications to host events and offer a course on the ethics of medicine in the age of COVID-19. He has already been teaching at USM on the good life and on the skills of critical argument analysis. He will be team teaching in the Spring on pandemic bioethics. Ian is dedicated to open access in scholarship and teaching, recently being awarded an open pedagogy grant from the University of Mississippi. And across all his teaching endeavors, his focus is always on engaging students with thoughtful discussion to enable a growth mindset and enhance critical self-reflection.

Ian’s current research focuses on two main topics: First, he is writing a book on the 19th-century philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. It will be the first book on the role that evaluations of health play in Nietzsche’s innovative ethics. Ian argues that Nietzsche rejected an account of health in terms of good functioning in favor of a view that to be healthy is to be able to realize one’s basic motivations. Nietzsche’s reasons for doing so resonate with rejections of functionalist concepts of health today in the context of the disability rights movement; Nietzsche, Ian argues, was himself a sort of disabled philosopher.

Ian’s second research program is about difficult actions. Achieving something great, like Kahlo’s painting of Two Fridas, seems to make your life go better independently of the products or rewards of the achievement. But what determines this “achievement-value”? Its difficulty, and its difficulty alone, is the answer he defends in “The Competition Account of Achievement-Value.” On his view, what makes the painting difficult for Kahlo is not how hard she exerted herself in creating it, but rather a comparable artist would have to work especially hard to create the same work.

Brooke Swann graduated from USM in 2017 with majors in International Studies, French, and Religion. Following her graduation, she got married (to a man, a history licensure major, she actually met in a USM history class), and she moved to Charlottesville, VA to attend law school at the University of Virginia. While at UVA Law, she interned in Johannesburg, South Africa, in human rights, and in two different prosecution offices. She graduated from law school in May 2020 and started work as a trial attorney in Philadelphia, PA, at the city's district attorney's office. Brooke began her tenure as an assistant district attorney in the office's juvenile unit where her caseload consisted primarily of cases involving child victims. She is now working in the Family Violence and Sexual Assault unit, and she is in a courtroom almost every day.

Brooke’s programs at Southern Miss certainly set her up for success at law school, and even though her career focuses primarily on issues of criminal law, she finds that her humanities background supports her day-to-day in her job. Beyond learning how to think critically, write, and speak, her USM degree gave her a broader understanding of the world and its cultures. She is constantly interacting with people from all over the world, and she places great value in being able to connect with them and understand them on a deeper level.

In her free time, she enjoys continuing to learn other languages, reading constantly, and exploring everything that city life in Philadelphia has to offer. There is never a shortage of concerts, plays, sporting events, or food in this city. She also spends an enormous amount of time spoiling her dog Lucy and cat Loki.

John Constantine Tobin is a second-year poet in the PhD Program at the University of Southern Mississippi’s Center for Writers. He’s originally from Maryland and grew up surrounded by his Greek family in Baltimore and Irish family in the countryside. He received his BA with a dual major in Biopsychology, Cognition & Neuroscience, and Creative Writing & Literature from the University of Michigan. He received his MFA from the University of Baltimore, where he studied Creative Writing & Publishing Arts.

At USM, John is the Co-President of C4W (the Creative Writing Graduate Organization) and the President of the Game Studies Group. He also serves on the Graduate Senate, where he represents the School of the Humanities and recently helped implement LGBTQ inclusion intake forms at Moffitt Health Center.

When it comes to creative endeavors, John’s work focuses on lineage, family dynamics, habitable spaces, inheritable objects, and the undercurrents of queerness that infuse these. His poetry has been published in Alluvium - the Journal of Literary Shanghai, Product Online Magazine, Welter, and Cafe Shapiro Anthology. He was recently a guest speaker for high school students in the Wisconsin Public School District, where he gave a lecture on poetry. He also plans to run a community poetry workshop this spring in Hattiesburg.

When it comes to literary specializations, John’s focus is contemporary queer poetry, queer Modernist literature, and the intersections of queer theory and ecocriticism. He aims to become an authority on these topics and a critical reader of nonnormative behaviors and deviance. Before coming to USM, John wrote a poetry thesis at the University of Baltimore titled The Order in Which They Went and spent two years working as the Narrative Designer and Co-Founder of Merfolk Games - a video game company based in Shanghai.



John deeply appreciates studying at USM because of its supportive community. He feels that USM offers a unique doctoral program that consists of creative writers who are also scholars. Creative writing is a focus, not an afterthought, and this program is unique in the way it welcomes writers whose creative work is augmented by their scholarly pursuits.

Emma Smith is a senior History with Licensure major at Southern Miss. Emma was born in Tarpon Springs, Florida. Her dad was in the Coast Guard, so she grew up around the country: Florida, Alaska, Arizona, Virginia, California, Alabama, and Oregon. She spent her childhood traveling the country with family and learning all about our country’s unique history. She wants to be a history teacher because she thinks that history is what provides us with an opportunity to learn empathy and compassion. To study history is to study humanity.

This passion carries over into Emma’s chosen area of academic study. Emma’s senior Honors thesis is called, “Lost Memories, Lost Colonies.” It is about the cultural impact of the Roanoke Colony’s forgotten history. She has researched the different myths and legends that have derived from the Roanoke Colony and analyzed what the stories say about the authors. Emma will be presenting her thesis at the Research Showcase for Honors Day, an event organized to recruit incoming high school seniors to the Honors College.

In her time at Southern Miss, Emma has found vibrant and supportive communities in Eagle Catholic and Alpha Chi Omega. Over the years in Eagle Catholic, she has served as their Fundraising Chair and Vice President. She learned invaluable lessons about how to organize a large event and gained a strong foundation for public speaking skills that will serve Emma for her entire life. She also served as Vice President of Chapter Relations and Standards for Alpha Chi Omega during the 2020 COVID-19 Pandemic.

During her last semester, she will be student teaching on the coast of Mississippi. She hopes to be placed in Ocean Springs, but she is just excited to move to a new place and start setting down real roots. Emma has traveled to 47 out of 50 states, and the Mississippi Coast has inexplicably captured her heart.

Digital Humanities is a well-established and internationally recognized field within the broader umbrella of humanities research. At USM, humanities faculty and students have been incorporating digital methods in their research in the past 5-7 years, including scholars in English, History, and Philosophy as well as affiliates in Computer Science, Communications, Geography and the Ecospatial Lab, and Cook Library’s Digital Lab and McCain Archives. Currently, there are roughly twenty faculty across campus implementing digital humanities methods in their teaching and research. At the Center for Digital Humanities, we hold weekly Open Hours to chat with faculty and students about their digital research, and organize brownbag talks as well as workshops to serve as a hub for the larger digital scholarship community at USM and in the region. To learn more about DH classes, graduate credentialing through the DH badge, and ongoing DH projects at USM, please visit us online.

We couldn't be prouder to announce funding from the Council of Graduate Schools (CGS) to catalyze innovation in the preparation of humanities PhDs for diverse careers.

Through a competitive sub-award process, a committee selected us to join The Humanities Coalition, which will develop and assess initiatives for better supporting humanities PhD students transitioning from graduate programs into the workforce.

USM will join a network of other grantees as well as universities that submitted competitive proposals to participate, including: Arizona State University; CUNY Graduate Center; Howard University; Indiana University Bloomington; Loyola University Chicago; Michigan State University; Purdue University; Texas A&M University; The University of Texas at El Paso; University of Arizona; University of Arkansas; University of California, Irvine; University of Missouri; University of Rochester; University of Wisconsin-Madison; and Wayne State University.

Angela Ball has a poem in Trampoline Poetry.

Josh Bernstein published a chapbook, Northern Cowboy (Green Rabbit Press, 2021), which won the Wilt Prize in Creative Nonfiction at Lightning Key Review, as well as academic articles in a journal, Otherness: Essays and Studies, and in an edited collection Conrad and Ethics (Columbia UP, 2021). 

Daniel Capper has essays in Astrobiology: Science, Ethics, and Public Policy and Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science.

Abraham Cahan’s "The Rise of David Levinsky in McClure’s Magazine: Race, Capitalism, and Jewish American Identity" was published in Studies in American Jewish Literature.

Craig Carey published essays in Pedagogy and American Literary Realism.

Joseph Peterson has a research article in Journal of Modern History, a public commentary essay in The Washington Post, and a public commentary essay in LARB.

Olivia Clare Friedman won a Pushcart Prize for her short story “The Real Thing,” originally published in McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern. The story is anthologized in The Pushcart Prize XLVI: Best of The Small Presses 2022. In 2021, her short story “Women and Men Made of Them,” originally published in The Paris Review, was named a Distinguished Story in Best American Short Stories 2020. Her short story “Company” is in the current issue of Bennington Review.  Her story “January” was published in the winter 2021 issue of The American Scholar, and her story “Some Agonies Over and Over” is in the spring 2021 issue of The Yale Review. 

Bradley Phillis co-edited a collection entitled The Cursed Carolers in Context.

Jon Riccio's chapbooks Prodigal Cocktail Umbrella (Trainwreck Press) and Eye, Romanov (SurVision Books, a shared 2020 James Tate Prizewinner) were published earlier this year.

Amy Slagle published the article "Forgiveness Seventy-Times-Seven: Reincarnation in Valentin Tomberg's Meditations on the Tarot" in Spiritus: A Journal of Christian Spirituality.

Eric Tribunella's book A de Grummond Primer: Highlights of the Children's Literature Collection, co-edited with Carolyn Brown and Ellen Ruffin was published by U. Press of Mississippi in April 2021.

Alexandra Valint published a book, Narrative Bonds: Multiple Narrators in the Victorian Novel with Ohio State University Press, Theory and Interpretation of Narrative Series, 2021. She also published an essay in Nineteenth-Century Contexts.

Andrew Wiest published two books with Amber Books. One is entitled The Navy and the other is entitled The Army.

Josh Bernstein was the recipient of USM's College of Arts & Sciences Creative Scholarship Research Award.

Douglas Bristol will be the Dale Center's Blount Professor.

Sam Bruton received a Lucas Grant for Research.

Daniel Capper won a University of Southern Mississippi Multidisciplinary Innovation Award for Research, 2021.

Ian Dunkle received an Open Educational Resources & Pedagogy Grant from the University of Mississippi, an Interdisciplinary Investigations: Medical Encounters Fellowship, and Travel Grants from CAS and USM

Rachael Fowler is a USM Innovation Award Winner for 2021 in Graduate Research.

Olivia Clare Friedman is the recipient of a 2021 Creative Research Award at USM. 

Monika Gehlawat is a USM Innovation Award Winner for 2021 in Basic Research.

Nicolle Jordan received an Aubrey Keith Lucas and Ella Ginn Lucas Endowment for Faculty Excellence award for 2021.

Heather Stur will be USM's Moorman Professor (2021-23).

Susannah Ural was the recipient of USM's College of Arts & Sciences Scholarly Research of the Year award.

Andrew Wiest was selected for the Hattiesburg Public Schools Hall of Fame.