Staff

Dr. Samantha Pinto, Director 

samantha.pinto@utexas.edu

Samantha Pinto is Professor of English, Core Faculty of WGS, and affiliate faculty of AADS and the Warfield Center at UT Austin. She is a proud former student of Rutgers University and former grad student at UCLA, as well as a former Associate Professor of English and African American Studies at Georgetown University.  Her greatest professional joy is collaboration, and she sees her role as Director of the Humanities Institute at UT Austin as a way to foster as many collaborations as possible across ranks, disciplines, schools, and communities.  

Pinto’s first book, Difficult Diasporas: The Transnational Feminist Aesthetic of the Black Atlantic (NYU Press, 2013), was the winner of the 2013 William Sanders Scarborough Prize from the MLA. work has been published in journals including Meridians, Signs, Palimpsest, Small Axe, Public Culture, Early American Literature, and MELUS, and she has received fellowships from the NEH, the NHC, and from UT’s own Harry Ransom Center. Her second book, Infamous Bodies (Duke UP, 2020) explores the relationship between 18th and 19th-century black women celebrities and discourses of race, gender, & human rights.  Pinto is the co-editor with Alexandra S. Moore of Writing Beyond the State (Palgrave, 2020); the co-editor with Jennifer C. Nash of a 2020 Feminist Formations special issue on “Teaching the Feminist Classics Now,” the Routledge Companion to Intersectionalities (2023), an SAQ special issue on “Feminism’s Bad Objects” (2023), and the Duke University Press book series “Black Feminism on the Edge”; and the special issue co-editor with Shoniqua Roach of a 2021 The Black Scholar special issue on “Black Privacy”. Currently, she is at work on a third book, Metaphor & Material: Inside the Body of Black Feminism, on race, embodiment, and scientific discourse in African American and African Diaspora culture. She is also developing book-length projects on feminist ambivalence and divorce.  Pinto has served as Director of Undergraduate Studies in English at Georgetown, Director of Honors in English at Georgetown and UT, the chair of the American Studies Association’s Standing Committee on Gender & Sexuality, as well as in a host of  other leadership and team roles in her academic service life. She is also the current North American editor of the journal Feminist Theory, and a former editorial board member of PMLA and current editorial board member of African American Review.  Pinto mentors many undergraduate students, graduate students, and junior faculty members inside and outside of UT, and she teaches large general education courses that try to get students excited about the humanities no matter what their major may be. 

Dr. Tanya Clement, Associate Director for Digital Humanities

tclement@utexas.edu

Tanya E. Clement is an Associate Professor in the Department of English and the Director of the Initiative for Digital Humanities at the University of Texas at Austin. Her primary areas of research are textual studies, sound studies, and infrastructure studies as these concerns impact academic research, research libraries, and the creation of research tools and resources in Digital Humanities (DH). She leads High Performance Sound Technologies for Access and Scholarship (HiPSTAS) for the development and interrogation of socio-technical infrastructures to increase access and scholarship with audiovisual cultural heritage collections.

Jeff Meserve, Assistant Director of Research Development

meserve@austin.utexas.edu

Jeff Meserve serves as the Humanities Institute’s Assistant Director of Research Development. He has over a decade of experience in research oversight and management at UT Austin. Some of the most rewarding projects he has been involved with are those focused on collaborative research; community engagement; equity and environmental justice; and public service. He believes his work at HI will provide an opportunity to bring together faculty, researchers, and students to conduct interdisciplinary projects incorporating unique viewpoints and perspectives. He holds an MA degree in African Studies from Yale University and served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Mozambique, teaching biology to high school students in Portuguese.

Dr. Phillip Barrish, Associate Director for Health, Humanities & Medicine (on leave)

512-471-7840 | pbarrish@austin.utexas.edu

Phillip Barrish is the Tony Hilfer Professor of American and British literature in the Department of English and Professor of Medical Education at Dell Medical School, as well as a faculty affiliate with the Department of American Studies and the Center for Women’s and Gender Studies. His current book project is titled Beyond the Bedside: American Literature, Social Justice, and the Health Care System. His previously published books include The Cambridge Introduction to American Literary Realism (2011); White Liberal Identity, Literary Pedagogy, and Classic American Realism (2005); and American Literary Realism, Critical Theory, and Intellectual Prestige, 1880-1995 (2001). Barrish oversees Health Humanities programming at the Humanities Institute and teaches Health Humanities courses to undergraduate, graduate, and medical students. He also directs the MA program in Humanities, Health, and Medicine.