Project Leads

Farès el-Dahdah, Lead Principal Investigator
Farès el-Dahdah received his undergraduate degrees in fine arts and in architecture from the Rhode Island School of Design and went on to pursue his graduate studies in urbanism and architectural theory at Harvard University's Graduate School of Design. Following a two decade long professorial track at Rice University's School of Architecture, he was appointed director of the Humanities Research Center (HRC) in 2012, Professor of the Humanities in 2014, and Professor of Art History in 2021. El-Dahdah was a visiting fellow at the Canadian Center for Architecture and is currently a Faculty Scholar at the Baker Institute for Public Policy. He has has written extensively on Brazil's modern architecture and has been involved in a number of collaborative projects with Casa de Lucio Costa and Fundação Oscar Niemeyer, two Brazilian cultural foundations on the boards of which he serves. Aside from leading the he Diluvial Houston grant, he is also leading a Digital Art History Grant, titled Situated Views of Rio de Janeiro: 19th and Early 20th-Century Photography and supported by the Getty. His current research interests explore and critique how digital platforms uphold the mission of disseminating knowledge while developing online geospatial platforms that describe cities over time, as they existed and as they have come to be imagined. At Rice, el-Dahdah's activities extend across the university in his capacity as co-chair of the University Committee on Information Technology as well as a member of the Ken Kennedy Institute's Faculty Advisory Committee.

Melissa Bailar, Co-Principal Investigator
Melissa Bailar is Professor in the Practice of Humanities and the Associate Director of the Humanities Research Center at Rice University. Bailar’s background is in French studies, and she has published articles on the actress Sarah Bernhardt, the feminist poet Nicole Brossard, digital archives, and trends in higher education and is the editor of the collection Emerging Disciplines (Rice University Press, 2010). She has served as a co-principal investigator on three grants supported by the Andrew W Mellon Foundation: a John E. Sawyer Seminar on the Comparative Study of Cultures titled “Platforms of Knowledge in a Wide Web of Worlds: Production, Participation, Politics,” a Public Humanities Initiative with a focus on Medical Humanities and Cultural Heritage, and a multi-institutional digital humanities network. She also serves as a co-principal investigator on an American Council of Learned Societies humanities postdoctoral fellowship initiative and a National Endowment for the Humanities award for a workshop in digital textual analysis. She teaches courses on critical humanities of health, French film, and nineteenth-century French literature.

Joseph Campana, Co-Principal Investigator
Joseph Campana is a poet, arts writer and scholar of Renaissance literature, with essays on Spenser, Shakespeare, Nashe, Defoe, Middleton, poetry and poetics, and the history of sexuality in PMLA, Modern Philology, ELH, Shakespeare, and elsewhere. He is the author of The Pain of Reformation: Spenser, Vulnerability, and the Ethics of Masculinity (Fordham UP, 2012), the co-editor of Renaissance Posthumanism (Fordham, 2016), and the author of three collections of poetry, The Book of Faces (Graywolf, 2005), Natural Selections (2012), which received the Iowa Poetry Prize, and The Book of Life (Tupelo, 2019). His poems appear in Slate, Kenyon Review, Poetry, Conjunctions, Colorado Review, and many other venues. Individual poems have garnered prizes from Prairie Schooner and The Southwest Review. He has received the Isabel MacCaffrey Essay Prize, the MLA’s Crompton-Noll Award for LGB studies, and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, The Bread Loaf Writers Conference, and the Houston Arts Alliance. Campana serves as editor of 1500-1659 of Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, for which he has also edited a series of special issues: “Staging Allegory” (Spring 2015), “After Sovereignty” (Winter 2018), and Shakespeare’s Waters” (Spring 2019). Recently published essays treat a range of figurations of creaturely life in early modern England--busy bees, bleeding trees, and crocodile tears. Current projects include a study of children, futurity, and sovereignty in the works of Shakespeare entitled The Child’s Two Bodies, a two-volume edited collection on Renaissance insect life called Lesser Living Creatures, and a collection of poems entitled Live Oak. His reviews of theater, dance, books, television, and the arts appear in The Kenyon Review, The Houston Chronicle, and other venues.

Kathleen Canning, Co-Principal Investigator
Kathleen Canning assumed the position of Dean of the School of Humanities and Andrew W. Mellon Professor of History at Rice University in January 2018. She was previously Sonya O. Rose Collegiate Professor of History and Arthur F. Thurnau Professor of History, Women's Studies and German at the University of Michigan. She chaired the UM History Department from 2013 to 2017 and was founding director of the Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies. She is the author of Languages of Labor and Gender (Cornell 1996) and Gender History in Practice (Cornell 2006) and co-editor of Weimar Publics/Weimar Subjects: Rethinking the Political Culture of Germany in the 1920s (Berghahn 2010). Her current book project is entitled Citizenship Effects: Gender and Sexual Crisis in the Aftermath of War and Revolution in Germany. Since 2011 she has been the editor of the University of Michigan Press series on Social History, Popular Culture and Politics in Germany. At Michigan she received the John D’Arms Award for Distinguished Graduate Mentoring in the Humanities and the Matthews Underclass Teaching Award for her contributions to undergraduate education.

Program Manager

Weston Twardowski, Program Manager

Weston Twardowski is a scholar and artist with an extensive background in non-profit management and community engagement. He holds an Interdisciplinary PhD in Theatre and Drama from Northwestern University. His current research focuses on post-Katrina New Orleans and the role of performance in civic adaptation, racial and environmental justice advocacy, and the creation of networks across disparate organizations and populations. His scholarship examines performance and urbanism, environmental justice, the environmental humanities, especially in a Southern US context, and has been published in TDR: The Drama Review, Theatre Journal, Theatre History Studies, and Ecumenica among other journals. As an artist, he has worked as a professional director, dramaturge, and actor. He co-founded Third Culture Theatre in Los Angeles where he serves as literary manager. He has a passion for developing new works, especially those that address social injustice and issues related to environmentalism and climate justice.