The School of Liberal Arts has been awarded a $225,000 grant from the Mellon Foundation to host a year-long seminar beginning next fall on the Tulane campus.  

The highly regarded Sawyer Seminars were established by the Mellon Foundation in 1994 to provide support for comparative research on the historical and cultural sources of contemporary developments. The grant will fund a new postdoctoral fellowship and two fellowships for advanced PhD students, as well as costs associated with the year-long seminar. Tulane was also awarded a Sawyer Seminar in 2020.

The seminar series, which will launch in fall 2024, will pair established and emerging scholars alongside local New Orleans community partners to explore one of the most polarizing issues of our time: reproductive rights. The laws and policies in the U.S., both at the national and state level, continue to be the subject of heated debates and revisions, as is true of many nations around the globe.  This seminar will use the lens of the humanities to help make sense of the current historical moment.

The seminar series is being co-organized by Professor of English and Gender and Sexuality Studies Kate Baldwin, Associate Professor of History Karissa Haugeberg, and Newcomb Institute Administrative Associate Professor Clare Daniel. It will bring local community leaders in New Orleans into conversation with international scholars researching reproductive health across a variety of fields in the humanities and the arts.

Participants will consider how we prepare the next generation of humanities scholars, policymakers, and activists for a world in which issues around reproductive rights will require new, collaborative ways of thinking.

“In centering Louisiana and the perspectives of those who have been historically marginalized, we look forward to conversations that fuse the dynamism of the arts with the intellectual rigor of the humanities,” Baldwin said. “We appreciate the Mellon Foundation’s support for this vital work.”

According to Daniel, who also serves as the assistant director of community engagement at the Newcomb Institute, the seminar presents an exciting and much-needed opportunity to bring together people working on reproductive self-determination in drastically differing contexts. “New Orleans is already a nucleus of incredible thinking and advocacy around reproductive rights, health, and justice,” she said, “and this series will bolster that work through a transnational dialogue.”

Haugeberg added, “By engaging in thoughtful, respectful, and evidence-based discussions about one of the most hot-button issues of our time, Tulane will do what it does best: showcase why the humanities matter now more than ever.”

"The brilliance of the proposal by professors Baldwin, Haugeberg, and Daniel is the way in which it puts the challenges we are facing in Louisiana and the Gulf South region in dialogue with global analogs,” said Brian Edwards, dean of the School of Liberal Arts. “By examining other national contexts where women’s reproductive rights had previously been criminalized but are now expanding, this project breathes new life and insight into one of the most vexing questions of our time.”

New Orleans native Sarah Reynolds grew up with an interest in Voodoo and how the religion was portrayed in Louisiana and beyond. A PhD candidate in anthropology in the School of Liberal Arts, Reynolds has parlayed this interest into the subject of her dissertation, which explores the intersection of religion and race in Benin, West Africa, with a specific focus on the Vodun religion. Reynolds aims to shed light on how Vodun practitioners, known as Vodunsi, and the Beninese state collaborate to redefine, reshape, rename, and recontextualize the Vodun religion.

Reynolds was recently awarded an American Dissertation Fellowship from the American Association of University Women (AAUW) and $25,000 in funding to support her research. The fellowship, initiated in 1888, stands as the oldest non-institutional source of graduate funding for women in the United States. It is awarded based on rigorous evaluation criteria, including scholarly excellence, the quality and originality of the project design, and the candidate's active commitment to advancing the status of women and girls through service in their communities, professions, or fields of research.

Reynolds expressed her excitement upon receiving the fellowship, stating, "I was thrilled to get the call from AAUW. This award allows me to wrap up my research and focus solely on writing full-time this academic year with the goal of graduating in spring 2024."

As she approaches the final year of her doctoral research, Reynolds has ambitious plans for her future career. She aspires to enter academia and teach courses in the anthropology of religion, anthropology of race, and medical anthropology. This fellowship serves as a pivotal stepping stone in realizing her goals.

Professor of Anthropology Adeline Masquelier, Reynolds' advisor, applauded her dedication and hard work. Masquelier noted, "Sarah is probably the hardest working student I have ever mentored in my thirty years at Tulane. I don't think she's missed a single class; this is how committed she is to her work. I’m incredibly proud that she was selected for this fellowship — it is well deserved."

Despite facing challenges, including delays due to the pandemic, Reynolds remained focused. She conducted archival research and taught while waiting for the opportunity to travel to Benin for her fieldwork. Masquelier commended her resilience, saying, "I have never heard her complain once about things that didn't go her way. She is a real trooper."

On the impact she hopes her research will have, Reynolds shared, “While other scholars have looked at the global nature of Vodun or the experiences of white foreigners in Benin, my research is new in that I examine intra-racial dynamics between Beninese and Afro-diasporic individuals like myself. I want to expand the literature on African and Afro-diasporic religions and make information on them more accessible to those outside academia.”

Reynolds' research promises to meaningfully contribute to our understanding of the intricate relationship between religion and race, particularly in the context of Vodun. With the support of the American Dissertation Fellowship, her work will undoubtedly make a lasting impact in the field of anthropology and beyond.

It’s no secret that corporations have an outsized influence on American politics, but the ways in which they wield power can be difficult to untangle. In his research on climate and clean energy policymaking at the state level, School of Liberal Arts Assistant Professor Joshua Basseches seeks to understand the hand that businesses, specifically investor-owned utilities (IOUs), have in shaping the laws that affect the future of our planet. His recent findings, published in the peer-reviewed journal Politics & Society, are key to understanding business power and the challenges to equitable climate policymaking going forward.

The research article, titled “Who Pays for Environmental Policy? Business Power and the Design of State-Level Climate Policies,” focuses on three state climate leaders — California, Massachusetts, and Oregon — and policies that cap greenhouse gasses and transition a percentage of electricity usage to renewable energy sources. Through examination and analysis of policy texts, archival documents, and over a hundred policy-focused interviews, Basseches found that while design and implementation varied, the power of IOUs in influencing these policies was indisputable. IOUs, for example, successfully lobbied for provisions that shifted the costs and risks associated with clean energy onto electricity consumers — and away from the utilities themselves.

“In thinking about climate policy particularly,” Basseches writes, “it is important not only to assess policy design in terms of environmental strength but also in terms of who pays; that is, how are the short-term costs of the transition to a clean energy economy distributed among stakeholders?”

Basseches is the David and Jane Flowerree Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies and Public Policy, a professorship created within the School of Liberal Arts to address the climate crisis, and a joint appointment designed to reinforce the environmental studies program through its connection with social sciences. Research for the Politics & Society article is a piece of a longer book Basseches is writing, one that involves research in seven states in total. The additional states are Republican-led, and all seven vary in energy production levels, particularly the production of fossil fuels. With this diverse range of states, Basseches explains, “the book will be able to tease apart the importance of utilities’ preferences relative to other factors, like political partisanship and energy economy.”

“I’ve always been interested in how public policy is made — who gets a seat at the table and who doesn’t, and how seats at the table are used.” Central to the future of climate policy design is understanding who influences those decisions, and why. “When it comes to shaping electricity policy, investor-owned utilities are the single most influential type of interest group,” Basseches explains. “My research lends important insights into what is important to them politically and economically, and how they might be re-approached to be better partners in the clean energy transition.”