Faculty Fellows 2021-2022

 

Raja Adal
Associate Professor, History

Raja Adal is an associate professor of history at the University of Pittsburgh specializing in the comparative global history of Japan and the Middle East, with an interest in technology, aesthetics, visual culture, the material history of writing, and the computational humanities. He received his Ph.D. from Harvard University and his recent publications include Beauty in the Age of Empire: Japan, Egypt, and the Global History of Aesthetic Education (Columbia University Press, 2019) and “Aesthetics and the End of the Mimetic Moment: The Introduction of Art Education in Japanese and Egyptian Schools” (Comparative Studies in Society and History). He is spending 2021 as an NEH fellow writing his second book on the relationship between the mechanization of writing and the world’s writing systems.

Calum Matheson
Associate Professor, Communication 

Calum Lister Matheson is Associate Professor of Communication, Director of Debate, and a member of the Pittsburgh Psychoanalytic Center. Calum’s research interests include the means by which identity and desire are mediated in language, how people communicate about “unspeakable” experiences, and how shared fantasies coalesce radical groups, especially in digital communities. His book, Desiring the Bomb: Communication, Psychoanalysis, and the Atomic Age explored the affective and symbolic aspects of nuclear weapons and apocalyptic fantasy. He has also written on survivalists, Sovereign Citizens, and conspiracy theorists. Before working towards his PhD from UNC-Chapel Hill, Calum studied environmental and military history.

Khirsten L. Scott
Assistant Professor, English

Daughter of the US South, Dr. Khirsten L. Scott is a community-driven educator who centers and embodies liberatory Black feminist and womanist practice. She works across the disciplines of rhetorical theory and writing studies, digital and Black studies, as well as critical pedagogy. Khirsten is currently working on her first book which explores HBCUs and their survival within US Higher Education. Within the city of Pittsburgh, she is lead organizer and facilitator of HYPE Media (Homewood Youth-Powered and Engaged Media), a critical literacies program focused on youth-led story-making possibilities that respond to stigmatized narratives of Black girls, Black women, and Black communities. Khirsten is cofounder of DBLAC, Digital Black Lit and Composition, a virtual and in-person community offering writing support for Black scholars. Her work can be found in Kairos, Prose Studies, the Routledge Reader of African American Rhetoric, Mobility in Work in Composition, Bridging the Gap: Multimodality in Theory and Practice and Kentucky Teacher Education Journal.