Four Faculty Fellows Chart New Ground in Humanities Book Projects

(left-to-right) C. Hanson, M. Innes, D. Jashari, M. Robinson

Studying the Humanities can lead to different journeys across history and culture. The Humanities Center’s Spring 2026 Faculty Fellows — Christopher Hanson (English), Margaret Innes (Art and Music Histories), Denisa Jashari (History), and Marcia Robinson (Religion) —demonstrate how “looking back” can yield fresh perspectives that offer insight into current times.

Each fellow is developing a book that extends interests they have cultivated throughout their academic pursuits, that underlines the power of scholarship, and showcases the Humanities' capacity to shed light on longstanding issues with new frameworks and ideas.

Chris Hanson on Colossal Cave Adventure and accessibility in gaming

Years before his project took shape, Chris Hanson’s interest in gaming flickered to life on a computer screen. Hanson first came across the game Colossal Cave Adventure (hereafter Adventure) at his mother’s workplace. Wrapped in this text-based interactive fiction, his “mind was blown.”

In its time, Adventure did more than inspire him, alone: the game ignited a wave of “text adventure” games, it led to Warren Robinette's vastly celebrated Atari adaptation, and even influenced Roberta Williams, a leading game designer in the 1980s and ‘90s.

Hanson’s book, Changing the (Video) Game: Adventure’s History and Legacy, tells the story of this landmark game and its influence, looking at Adventure as an “entry point” into game history, game evolution, and present-day game practices — specifically, those involving accessibility.

“I'm interested in thinking about [Adventure] from the perspective of a game, but also as something that is intentionally designed to be approachable by people who have never picked up a game controller,” said Hanson.

With Adventure — a text-only game with no visual graphics, required no monitor, and no prior understanding of programming language — there was a level of “congruency” among players’ experiences. Hanson notes this aspect of Adventure can be linked “to the ways in which contemporary games try to make themselves more inclusive and more accessible for differently-abled players.” Anybody, whether differently-abled or not, could experience Adventure in similar ways.

Tied to his exploration of Adventure, Hanson also engages the New Games Movement, a countercultural effort that challenged competitive play and questioned whether childhood games (specifically, those rooted in winning and losing) rehearsed and reinforced the logic of war. He draws on figures like Bernie DeKoven, who argued that the rules of games should not be rigid and instead evolve to accommodate different interests and abilities rather than pit players against one another.

This community-building aspect is intrinsic to Adventure’s origin, as Hanson points out; Will Crowther, the mind behind Adventure, initially created it for the sole purpose of entertaining his daughters.

Though the gaming industry has since been swept away by corporate interests, there has been a recent emergence and prioritization of accessibility — from subtitles to adjustable contrast and brightness settings — making Hanson’s research on Adventure even more relevant.

“Obviously, there’s this push and pull about what's going to make a company money for its shareholders, right? But there's also this ability and interest to make games playable by more players,” said Hanson.

Margaret Innes on communist photojournalism and collectivism in the early 20th century

While working in a photo agency studio following her undergraduate career, Margaret Innes arrived at two realizations: first, she was not going to pursue a career as a photographer; and second, she had a sharpened interest in the historical production and circulation of images.

Innes had a firsthand look at the major economic disruption of 2008, which raised further curiosity in the longer history of photojournalism. After exploring interwar photography in her master’s dissertation, Innes developed a deeper interest in the way photography might have intersected with movements in U.S. history.

These experiences became the underpinnings for Innes’s book project, Collective Forms: Photography in the Era of American Communism, where she looks at photography’s role and relationship in party media through the 1920s and ’30s. Acknowledging long-time critiques of photography as a “tool of capitalism” and “surveillance,” Innes looks to photography’s alternative social application: collectivism.

Grounded in a detailed analysis of communist photographic print media, Innes examines communist press, tabloid magazines and the overall visual culture. She also explores how the Communist Party used an unconventional “theory of agitation."

“I found that in the 1920s, the Communist Party developed this very specific theory of agitation that used upsetting photographic material in a way that was closely connected to their organizational infrastructure. This is a way of thinking about photography that has become unfamiliar to us,” said Innes. “What I'm trying to do is tie these historical uses of photography back to a very particular set of theories and ways of understanding the potential of technology.”

Innes also investigates how communist photography was used to build solidarity and cultivate relationships among the working class. She draws on the Worker Photography Movement, a communist initiative to organize workers as press photographers, and how they filled the press with authentic imagery that narrated working-class experiences.

“I​​t was a kind of counter-surveillance to capitalist media. I'm really interested in how these worker photographers were mobilized, and also how their groups worked internally,” Innes commented.

This project contributes to the history of photographic technology, but beyond that, a scope of thinking about technological advancement — beyond merely deeming it “good” or “bad.”

“I think it is helpful to look back at a moment when people were also trying to think through the kind of impasse posed by technological forms of the day and think about it in a way that was a little more nuanced.”

Denisa Jashari on 20th-century Chile, pobladores, and urban infrastructure

Denisa Jashari was originally a biochemistry and Spanish major with plans to attend medical school, but after studying abroad in Chile as an undergraduate, a different academic pursuit began to take root.

“I was struck by the ways in which the differences in which class differences were inscribed in urban space and the perceptions that existed, both about the dictatorship, but also about the urban poor, known as the ‘pobladores,’” [VMM1] said Jashari.

Years of archival research and one Ph.D. in history later, Jashari is working on a book, Spatial Conflicts: Producing the Urban Poor in Santiago, Chile, 1872-1994, that contextualizes the pobladores across transformative periods in Chilean sociopolitical history. She analyzes how the urban poor shaped, and continue to shape, Chile’s urban infrastructure and wider society.

Jashari’s book primarily analyzes the 20th century, a time when a majority of Chile’s population resided in its capital, creating both political and infrastructure-related repercussions. In response, the urban poor became much more active in demanding change. Jashari explores how this activity — the petitioning and social organizing driving the grassroots movement of the urban poor — had a direct impact on the formation of the state.

Jashari presents three main arguments, the first calling for a “bottom-up” analysis of state formation rather than a “top-down” approach. Rather than centering her understanding around those in power, she foregrounds the groups who were struggling and contesting political authority.

Her second argument examines "continuity”: Jashari traces unwavering public perceptions of the pobladores, specifically as they relate to space. Even amid drastic administration shifts — from reformists to Salvador Allende, the self-proclaimed Marxist, to the Pinochet dictatorship — Jashari notices an “endurance” in stereotypes about the urban poor and the spaces they inhabit. Both geographically and symbolically, the “place” of the pobladores remained largely consistent.

Her final argument outlines how one cannot understand the category of pobaldores without understanding its intimate ties to urban transformations and restructuring.

“We should not study these things in isolation. We don't have to deal with poverty or social movements as one thing and then the histories of urban infrastructure or urban space as another. In fact, both make a lot more sense if they're intertwined,” explained Jashari. “By doing so, you start to see that all the policies dealing with housing or poverty would fail unless, in my opinion, they think about these people and the spaces they inhabit simultaneously.”

Jashari points out how her argument of "continuity" is important in that it resonates with current events in Chile. Even as urban space is still affected by social factors, Jashari observes how stereotypes about the urban poor tend to persist.

“These perceptions endure, and they can be reused and recycled.”

Marcia Robinson on Kierkegaard, religion and the “aesthetic”

In her new book, Marcia Robinson, an intellectual historian who works on the history of Christian thought and culture, explores how 19th-century Danish religious thinker Søren Kierkegaard makes abstract philosophical and theological ideas like God and “the aesthetic” “hit the ground” for ordinary cultured people in his day. According to Robinson, “if you want to know what religion is for Kierkegaard, it’s the aesthetic. If you want to know how Kierkegaard approaches religion, it’s the aesthetic.”

Robinson maintains that Kierkegaard used the interdisciplinary storytelling tactics of romantic poets and writers appreciated by his cultured audience to present religion as a matter of consciousness—or “awareness” of the otherness of God—and self-consciousness—or “awareness” of self in relation to this Other, which goes to the root meaning of the word “aesthetic.”

During a time when philosophies of individual human freedom were becoming dominant in the West, and calling into question orthodox Christianity and its God, Kierkegaard joined other artistic-minded thinkers in creating an aesthetic approach to religion that addressed the questions that thinking people, believers and non-believers alike, were asking. He did so, though, by showcasing the struggle between humans and God over power and empowerment at the heart of the issue of freedom and its capacity to effect meaningful and fulfilling existence—an issue that continues to illuminate ongoing power negotiations today.

Currently in dialog with several press editors, Robinson expects a 2028 release for her book, ‘Out over 70,000 Fathoms’ with the Lilies and the Birds: Kierkegaard on Religion.

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Meet and learn more from the fellows at the Humanities Center’s Meet the Scholars Coffee Hour at noon on Friday, March 20 in 304 Tolley Humanities Building (with virtual option).