University Studies Now, the department’s signature lecture series for the 2025–26 academic year, is funded through the generosity of the Russel B. Nye endowment.
Alexander Manshel
“High School English and the Making of American Readers”
Alexander Manshel is associate professor of American literature at McGill University. His first book, Writing Backwards: Historical Fiction and the Reshaping of the American Canon, was published by Columbia University Press in 2023. His other writing on contemporary fiction and literary institutions has appeared in PMLA, Post45, MELUS, the New Yorker, the Atlantic, the Nation, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and Public Books. He is currently at work on a history of high school English in the United States.
Lindsay Weinberg
"Higher Ed and the Algorithmic Gaze"
Lindsay Weinberg is clinical associate professor in the John Martinson Honors College and founding director of the Tech Justice Lab at Purdue University. Her research and teaching are at the intersection of science and technology studies, media studies, and feminist studies, with an emphasis on the social and ethical implications of digital technology. Her recent book, Smart University: Student Surveillance in the Digital Age (John Hopkins, 2024), examines the proliferation of digital tools for higher education governance and their impacts on marginalized people within and beyond the university’s walls.
Cara Cilano and Pero Dagbovie
“Midcentury Michigan State: A Conversation about Higher Ed and the American Century”
Cara Cilano is professor of English at Michigan State University. She is the author of three books on Pakistani literature and has edited a collection of essays on literary representations of September 11, 2001, from outside the United States. She’s also published 17 journal articles and book chapters. Her current book project is about past MSU president John Hannah and American higher education in the early Cold War. She was a Fulbright Visiting Professor of Cultural Studies at Karl Franzens University, Graz, Austria, in spring 2014 and a Fulbright Lecturer at Yanka Kupala University, Grodno, Belarus, in spring 2007. Cilano served as lead PI on a $1 million US Department of State University Partnerships grant (2014–16) to link her previous institution with the International Islamic University in Islamabad, Pakistan.
Since joining the Department of English at Michigan State as chairperson in 2016, Cilano has joined the Editorial Board of the Michigan State University Press, participated as a fellow in the Big Ten Academic Alliance Academic Leadership Program, and served as secretary of the American Institute of Pakistan Studies.
Pero Dagbovie is university distinguished professor of history, vice provost for graduate and postdoctoral studies, and dean of the Graduate School at the Michigan State University. His scholarship centers on African American history and twentieth-century US history. He has authored seven books, including, most recently, Forever in the Path: The Black Experience at Michigan State University (Michigan State, 2025), as well as numerous articles and essays. He is the former editor of the Journal of African American History, the leading scholarly journal in its field, founded in 1916. He has delivered keynote presentations throughout the nation and abroad and is on the editorial boards of several scholarly journals, including the Michigan Historical Review, Modern American History, the Journal of Black Studies, and the Journal for the Study of Radicalism.
Active in public history, Dagbovie has served as a scholar consultant for the “And Still We Rise” permanent exhibit at the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History in Detroit, the Association for the Study of African American Life and History, the Organization of American Historians, and the National Park Service (US Department of Interior) National Capital Region History Program, National Capital Parks–East. He is currently serving as the lead historian consultant for the restoration of the Carter G. Woodson Home National Historic Site in Washington, DC.
Tristan Ahtone
“Land-Grab Universities”
Tristan Ahtone is a member of the Kiowa Tribe and is editor at large at Grist. He previously served as editor in chief at the Texas Observer and Indigenous affairs editor at High Country News, for which he coauthored the 2020 investigation “Land-Grab Universities.” He has reported for Al Jazeera America, PBS NewsHour, Indian Country Today, and NPR to name a few. Ahtone’s stories have won multiple honors, including a George Polk Award, a National Magazine Award nomination, and investigative awards from the Gannett Foundation and IRE: Investigative Reporters and Editors. A past president of the Native American Journalists Association, Ahtone is a 2017 Nieman fellow.
Amira Rose Davis
“Sporting Revolutions: The 1970s and the Making of Modern College Athletics”
Amira Rose Davis is assistant professor in the Department of African and African Diaspora Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, where she specializes in twentieth-century American history with an emphasis on race, gender, sports, and politics. Recently named a Mellon emerging faculty leader by the Institute for Citizens and Scholars, she is currently finishing her first book, “Can’t Eat a Medal: The Lives and Labors of Black Women Athletes in the Age of Jim Crow” (North Carolina). Her work has appeared in scholarly journals, including the Radical History Review and the Journal of African American History, as well as popular outlets such as the Washington Post and Slate. Davis also provides sports commentary for NPR, ESPN, and the BBC and serves on the advisory board of the Jackie Robinson Museum and the Arthur Ashe Legacy Foundation. Davis was the cohost of the feminist sports podcast Burn it All Down and the host of the third season of American Prodigies.
Kaveh Askari
“Instructional Media, International Programs, and Campus Life: National Iranian Radio and Television at MSU in the 1970s”
Kaveh Askari is professor and director of the Film Studies Program at Michigan State University. He is the author of Relaying Cinema in Midcentury Iran: Material Cultures in Transit (California, 2022), which was longlisted for the Kraszna-Krausz book award and won the 2023 Katherine Singer Kovács Book Award from the Society for Cinema and Media Studies. Before this, he authored Making Movies into Art: Picture Craft from the Magic Lantern to Early Hollywood (Britihs Film Institute, 2014) and coedited several volumes including a recent special issue of Film History titled South by South/West Asia: Transregional Histories of Middle East–South Asia Cinemas (2021). He has collaborated with curators and archives to preserve films made in Iran in the 1950s and 1960s. These preservations have screened at venues including Il Cinema Ritrovato and the Museum of Modern Art.
