Objects to Think With (Applied Theory Flash Talks)

Join us for an event organized by the Applied Theory Initiative at the ASU Humanities Institute. Objects to Think With brings together faculty from across ASU whose scholarship spans an eclectic range of disciplines and practices. This flash talk event explores theory as a living, material, and situated practice, foregrounding the objects, images, and tools that shape how ideas take form.

Each faculty participant will give a 5–7minute flash talk about an “object to think with,” demonstrating how theory emerges through making, teaching, writing, and artistic practice. Talks will highlight the relational, interdisciplinary, and surprising ways theory takes shape in the world. A roundtable discussion and audience Q&A will follow, opening space for conversation across fields and methods. 

Graduate students interested in the Critical Theory Certificate are especially encouraged to attend.

Matt Bell is the author most recently of the novel Appleseed (a New York Times Notable Book) and the craft book Refuse to Be Done, a guide to novel writing, rewriting, and revision. He is also the author of the novels Scrapper and In the House upon the Dirt Between the Lake and the Woods, as well as the short story collection A Tree or a Person or a Wall, a non-fiction book about the classic video game Baldur's Gate II, and several other titles. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, Esquire, Tin House, Fairy Tale Review, American Short Fiction, Orion, and many other publications. A native of Michigan, he teaches in the Creative Writing Program at Arizona State University.

Cora Fox is Associate Dean of Health Humanities in the School of Medicine and Advanced Medical Engineering and Director of Humanities Integration for ASU Health. She is also Associate Professor in the Department of English. She has led an initiative to develop research capacity in the health humanities at ASU since 2013, and she co-directs the Health Humanities Initiative in the Humanities Institute. She is the author of Ovid and the Politics of Emotion in Elizabethan England (Palgrave, 2009) and co-edited, with Bradley Irish and Cassie Miura, Positive Emotions in Early Modern Literature and Culture (Manchester UP, 2021) and with Barbara Weiden Boyd, the MLA Approaches to Teaching the Works of Ovid and the Ovidian Tradition (2010). Her current work focuses on the cultural histories and politics of positive emotions, as well as the role of narrative in shaping notions of care and community, particularly their exclusions. She is currently working on a book on representations of healthy communities in early modern England.

Bradley J. Irish (bradleyjirish.com) studies the literature and culture of Renaissance England, with a particular focus on both the history of emotion and the emerging field of early modern neurodiversity studies.  

He is the author of Emotion and the Tudor Court: Literature, History, and Early Modern Feeling (2018), Shakespeare and Disgust: The History and Science of Early Modern Revulsion (2023), The Universality of Emotion: Perspectives from the Sciences and Humanities (2024), The Rivalrous Renaissance: Envy and Jealousy in Early Modern English Literature (2025), and Literary Neurodiversity Studies: Current and Future Directions (2025), and is the co-editor of Positive Emotions in Early Modern Literature and Culture (2021), The Routledge Companion to Literature and Emotion (2022), and the forthcoming Neurodiversity in Early Modern English Literature. 

He currently serves as Co-Editor-in-Chief of the interdisciplinary journal Emotion Review.  He is also the creator of literaryneurodiversity.org and earlymodernemotion.net.

Angela Rounsaville is an associate professor in the Department of English’s writing, rhetorics and literacies program. Having previously been at the University of Central Florida, where she served as director of their award-winning writing program, Rounsaville is a literacy researcher who explores writers and writing conditions in the swirl of globalization and transnational movements. She is the co-author of “Writing Knowledge Transfer: Theory, Research, Pedagogy” (Parlor Press, 2023).

Jed Samer is an associate professor in the Department of English’s film and media studies program. Also a remix artist and documentary filmmaker, Samer is a scholar of feminist, queer and trans media. They are the author of Lesbian Potentiality and Feminist Media in the 1970s and co-editor of Su Friedrich: Interviews. Samer's feature documentary, Tip/Alli, is in post-production, and they are writing a book on trans comedy with the support of a Humanities Institute fellowship. 

Sa Whitley is an Assistant Professor of Women & Gender Studies in the School of Social Transformation at Arizona State University. Whitley is also the Co-Director of the Queer X Humanities Initiative at the ASU Humanities Institute. They received a Ph.D. in Gender Studies from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). Whitley’s research projects explore black and LGBTQ housing-justice movements, queer financial subjectivities, and the politics of black urban land reclamation and architectural preservation. Their current book manuscript has been supported by the Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women and the Dartmouth Society of Fellows. Whitley’s recent scholarly writing is available or forthcoming in TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly and Antipode: A Journal of Radical Geography. Whitley is also an award-winning poet and contributor to the literary arts. They are a Cave Canem Fellow and the winner of the 2024 Indiana Review Poetry Prize. Their recent poems appear or are forthcoming in POETRY Magazine, Ninth Letter, Palette Poetry, and Paperbag. Whitley also participated in the 2023-2024 Poetry & the Senses Fellowship with the Arts Research Center at UC Berkeley and the ASU Center for Imagination in the Borderlands.

About the Applied Theory Initiative

The ASU Applied Theory Initiative intervenes in the common understanding of theory as a highly specialized, contemplative practice divorced from material life. Instead, we return to an older meaning of theory as a journey, both sacred and political, and ask how theory might circulate through lived experience. In other words, turning theory on its head, we do not ask how theories can be applied to the world, but rather, explore the various ways that theory shows up in the world. 

For a full listing of all the Humanities Institute events visit https://humanitiesinstitute.asu.edu/events

Image: Pengfei Liu, free downloaded from Unsplash.