PARTICIPANTS

AGATHA BEINS is an associate professor in the multicultural women’s and gender studies program at Texas Woman’s University. Her teaching and research span a range of topics and fields, including social movement activism, art and aesthetics, feminist pedagogies, critical university studies, and food justice. She also serves as Editor of the online open-access journal Films for the Feminist Classroom.

TARFIA FAIZULLAH is the author of Registers of Illuminated Villages (Graywolf 2018) and Seam (SIU 2014). This is her first year at UNT as an assistant professor in creative writing!

JACQUELINE FOERTSCH is a professor of English at the University of North Texas and the author of seven books in postwar-contemporary American literature and culture. She is at work on Chariots of Doom: Getting Around to True Crime in Postwar America.

JENNIFER CAROLINA GÓMEZ MENJÍVAR is an associate professor of Media Arts at the University of North Texas, where she is also affiliated with the Latino and Mexican American Studies program. She has published numerous articles, and her books and edited volumes include Black in Print (2023), Hemispheric Blackness (2022), Améfrica in Letters (2022), Indigenous Interfaces (2019), and Tropical Tongues (2018). Her next book, Indigenous Media Sovereignty, is under contract with The Ohio State University Press.

JANICE A. HAUGE is a professor in the Department of Economics at the University of North Texas. She received her doctorate from the University of Florida. Prior to attending the University of Florida, she earned a BA at Hamilton College in NY, and MSc degree from the London School of Economics. Dr. Hauge’s research focuses on industrial organization, information and incentives, policy, and regulation in the telecommunications and broadband industry. Currently her work centers on empirical analyses of the effectiveness of broadband policies and initiatives both within the US and internationally. Related research focuses on government policy in regulated industries and analyses of regulatory independence in the US.

ANNA HINTON is an assistant professor of Disability Studies and Black Literature & Culture in the English Department at the University of North Texas. She is currently writing her monograph, Refusing to Be Made Whole: Disability in Contemporary Black Women's Writing, which approaches conversations about aesthetics, spirituality, representation, community, sexuality, motherhood, and futurity through a Black feminist disability studies perspective. Her work is published or forthcoming in Toni Morrison: On Mothers and Motherhood, CLA Journal (CLAJ), Anthurium: A Caribbean Studies Journal, the Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies (JLCDS), and The Cambridge Companion to American Literature and the Body.

MARK HLAVACIK is an associate professor of Communication Studies at the University of North Texas where he studies controversies over education and education over controversies. He is the author of Assigning Blame: The Rhetoric of Education Reform (Harvard Education Press, 2016) and articles in academic journals in the disciplines of communication and education. His current work on controversies over education includes a book about controversial social studies curricula from the 1970s to the present, which is under contract with the University of Chicago Press. His current work on education over controversies includes a research conference funded by the American Education Research Association to develop critical approaches to inquiry-based social studies instruction.

WESLEY PHELPS is an associate professor of history and director of undergraduate studies at the University of North Texas in Denton, where he teaches courses on recent United States history and queer history. He received his Ph.D. in history from Rice University in 2010. His research focuses on how democracy operates at the grassroots level and how marginalized groups of people have struggled to participate in the democratic experiment. His book, A People’s War on Poverty: Urban Politics and Grassroots Activists in Houston, was published by the University of Georgia Press in 2014. Phelps’ new book, titled Before Lawrence v. Texas: The Making of a Queer Social Movement, was published by the University of Texas Press in February 2023. In 2024, the Texas State Historical Association awarded Before Lawrence v. Texas its Coral Horton Tullis Memorial Prize for the Best Book on Texas History. Phelps is also the creator of “Queering the Lone Star State,” a 10-episode podcast series chronicling landmark legal cases in the struggle for queer equality in Texas. He is currently researching a book project on Ron Woodroof and the Dallas Buyers Club as well as a project on the cultural history of bisexuality in the US during the 20th century.

RONALD SCHUMANN is an associate professor in the Department of Emergency Management and Disaster Science. A human geographer by training, his research interests include community recovery, social vulnerability, cultural memory, risk perception, and mitigation. Dr. Schumann’s post-disaster fieldwork has taken him across the US to study housing recovery, gathering places, and risk reduction after numerous hurricanes and wildfires. His publications have appeared in scholarly journals such as Risk Analysis, Applied Geography, Environmental Hazards, and Weather, Climate and Society. Dr. Schumann’s current research includes three collaborative projects with interdisciplinary teams. One study, funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), uses photovoice to understand how place attachment has affected housing recovery after recent California wildfires. Also in California, a related study funded by the Joint Fire Science Program (JFSP) examines the efficacy of community-level wildfire risk reduction efforts. Finally, a study in the southeastern U.S., funded by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), investigates mobile and manufactured homeowners’ perceptions of anchoring systems for tornadoes and high wind events.

WILLIAM SALMON is a professor of Linguistics at the University of North Texas. Dr. Salmon does research in the semantics-pragmatics interface and sociolinguistics, and he has published widely on Southern US vernacular Englishes and Belizean Creole English. He has published two books and numerous articles on these topics, which have appeared, e.g., in De Gruyter Mouton, University of North Carolina Press, Journal of Pragmatics, English World-Wide, Linguistics, Applied Linguistics, Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages, Lingua, and more. His faculty website can be viewed at the following link: https://linguistics.unt.edu/william-salmon