People

Deborah Keene is an archaeological scientist who specializes in Southeastern U.S. prehistory. She started excavating with the Schiele Museum when she was 15 and went on to work for various private archaeological firms while an undergraduate and then graduate student. She worked as a principal investigator at the South Carolina Institute of Archaeology and Anthropology after earning her Ph.D. She specialized in ceramic analysis, shallow geophysics, households, and subsistence strategies. After moving to Alabama, her focus changed from fieldwork to education. She uses her anthropological and scientific backgrounds to teach liberal arts courses for the Blount Scholars Program.

Kendra is a professional nature photographer, educator and outdoor enthusiast. She is an ecologist and has focused on endangered species and conservation issues much of her career.

Seth Bordner joined the University in 2011 after finishing his doctorate at UNC Chapel Hill. Originally from central Pennsylvania, he is a first-generation college student who never took the sensible advice to get a real job. He teached the History of Philosophy sequence (PHL 211 & 212) in the philosophy department, along with regular sections of Intro to Ethics and Philosophy of Sport. His research is an eclectic mix of history of philosophy and contemporary applied issues in science and sports. Fall 2017 is his first semester teaching in Blount.

Jennifer Caputo began teaching at UA in 2008 as an instructor in New College and currently teaches a range of on-campus and distance arts and humanities courses. She is originally from New York and holds degrees in percussion performance/music education and ethnomusicology. She was introduced to the music and culture of Ghana in 1998 while taking a weekly class that met regularly in Riverside Park in NYC. She has been studying and performing Ghanaian and West African music ever since. Fun fact: while attending the Ghanaian music class in 1999 in Riverside Park, the Dalai Lama (who was scheduled to appear in Central Park in August) walked by with his entourage and stopped to listen to our rehearsal.

“But I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world, and a desire to enjoy the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.” (E.B. White 1969).

Toni Copeland is a biocultural medical anthropologist interested in how biological, cultural, and social factors interact to influence health and illness. Her research as primarily been in Kenya and the American Deep South.

Andrew Raffo Dewar is a composer, musician, ethnomusicologist, and arts organizer.

As a composer and performer of experimental acoustic and electronic music, his work has been presented throughout North America, Europe, and Southeast Asia, and he appears on nearly two dozen commercially released recordings.

As a scholar, Dr. Dewar’s research interests include experimentalism in the arts, jazz and improvisation, music technologies, intercultural music, and 1960s intermedia arts. His writing has been published in the Journal of the Society for American Music, Leonardo Music Journal, Jazz Perspectives, the New Grove Dictionary of American Music (2nd Edition), Musicians and Composers of the 20th Century, and the Jazz Research Journal. He also has chapters published in Negotiated Moments: Improvisation, Representation and Subjectivity, edited by Gillian Siddall & Ellen Waterman (Duke University Press, 2016), and Experimental Music in Practice: Perspectives from Latin America, edited by Alejandro Madrid, Ana Minutti, Eduardo Herrera (Oxford University Press, 2017).

Dr. Dewar is an Associate Professor in New College and the School of Music.

Matt Feminella is an Assistant Professor of German in the Department of Modern Languages and Classics and the Fulbright Program Advisor for UA. He received his PhD from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill in 2016. When he isn’t teaching undergraduate and graduate German courses, Dr. Feminella spends his time researching eighteenth-century intellectual history and theater cultures.

Hank Lazer has published thirty-two books of poetry, including field recordings of mind in the morning (2021, BlazeVOX – with 15 music-poetry tracks with Holland Hopson on banjo – available from Bandcamp), COVID 19 SUTRAS (2020, Lavender Ink), Slowly Becoming Awake (N32) (2019, Dos Madres Press), Poems That Look Just Like Poems (2019, PURH – one volume in English, one in French), Evidence of Being Here: Beginning in Havana (N27), (2018, Negative Capability Press), Thinking in Jewish (N20) (2017, Lavender Ink).  Lazer has performed jazz-poetry improvisations in the US and Cuba with musicians Davey Williams, Omar Pérez, Andrew Raffo Dewar, Holland Hopson, and others.  Lazer’s Brush Mind books have been transformed into video installations and performances in several art gallery venues.  In 2015, Lazer received Alabama’s most prestigious literary prize, the Harper Lee Award, for lifetime achievement in literature.  Lazer has been quarantining in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, and at Duncan Farm in Carrollton, Alabama.  To order books, learn about talks, readings, and workshops, and see photos of Duncan Farm see Lazer’s website: https://www.hanklazer.com

Richard Richards, professor and chair of the philosophy department, has been involved with the Blount Scholars program since its first year. His research is in the philosophy of science and philosophy of biology, and he has two books published by Cambridge University Press, The Species Problem: A Philosophical Analysis, and Biological Taxonomy: A Philosophical Introduction.  He is finishing a third book with Cambridge, The Biology of Art.  

Dr. Stephen Schwab, former (and retired) official at the Central Intelligence Agency, is now an adjunct assistant professor of history at The University of Alabama. Since 2009, he has been doing his best to inspire or, if necessary, “spook” young Blount Scholars into doing their best to succeed as undergraduates and later in life.  

Steve Tedeschi is an English professor at UA.

Dr. Claire Thompson is an anthropologist who specializes in Southeastern archaeology. She enjoys bringing a cultural perspective to the Blount Foundations courses that she teaches.

Alexa is a social psychologist who examines scientific, religious, and political beliefs, and the factors that facilitate or impede belief change. Some of her work takes a meta-scientific approach, using psychological methods to study the beliefs and practices of psychological scientists. Inspired by her students, she has recently become interested in how classroom environments can foster the right balance of agency and humility.

Amber Bird is a PhD student in the Hudson Strode Program in Renaissance Studies at the University of Alabama. Her research and teaching interests include sixteenth- and -seventeenth century English devotional poetry, Christian poetics, and the materiality of forms. She has recently presented on limits of representation, tensions between form and content, and the embodiment of devotion at the international Renaissance Society of America and the Conference on John Milton.

Posoh! I am a Bioarchaeology Ph.D. student from the Menominee Tribe of Wisconsin. It is my belief that the most important aspect of any research in North American Archaeology is the relationship between tribes and institutions of learning. My research interests revolve around this relationship and include: the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women Movement, Tribal Archaeology, NAGPRA case studies, and forensic anthropology regarding ancestry. My current research is taking me to South America where I am exploring burial practices, chicha, and purple corn. If any of these topics interest you, feel free to ask me about them!

Camille Morgan is a PhD student in the Anthropology department. Primarily trained as a bioarchaeologist, her dissertation focuses on the different ways in which human remains are displayed in North American contexts, from prehistoric to modern times, what these displays can tell us about the power dynamics between the groups involved, and how these messages are shaped by histories of aggression.

Austin (he/him) is a PhD candidate in the Department of Political Science, and an MA student in the Department of Gender and Race Studies. He is the recipient of the Department of Political Science “Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching” award in 2019, the College of Arts and Sciences “Outstanding Service by a Graduate Student” award in 2019 for his work improving conditions for the queer/trans community at the University of Alabama, and a 2021-2022 “Graduate Council Fellowship” to support his dissertation research.

He studies political representation in global politics in two senses: first, he studies political representation as an institutional relationship between individuals/groups and an individual/group they contract to represent them in governance institutions, and second in a discursive sense, as the ability for nation(s)/people(s) to represent themselves with linguistic/legal categories available to them in international law and institutions. In particular, his work examines military interventions in politics through the Coup Agency and Mechanism dataset for which he is a co-manager (militarycoups.org), and discursive representations by underrepresented nation(s) and people(s) through the Unrepresented Nations and Peoples Organization (UNPO).