Undergraduate Research Mentorship

Paige Zalman

PROGRAM COORDINATOR, RESEARCH APPRENTICESHIP PROGRAM, OFFICE OF UNDERGRADUATE RESEARCH

Paige Zalman grew up in North Carolina, where she earned a Bachelor of Music degree in Music Performance from the University of North Carolina Wilmington. As an undergraduate student, she had the privilege of conducting music history research on musical theater, opera, and musical borrowing with an amazing faculty mentor. This experience ultimately inspired her to pursue graduate studies at West Virginia University, where she later received a Master of Arts degree in Musicology. As a graduate student at WVU, Paige expanded her research interests to include popular music, the intersection of music and contemporary politics, and musical exoticism. She also worked in the Research Services department of the Downtown Campus Library, where she helped undergraduate and graduate students with their library research and also taught a ULIB course, College Research Skills. She currently works as the Program Coordinator for the Research Apprenticeship Program.

Travis Stimeling

Associate Professor - Musicology

Travis Stimeling (PhD, musicology, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) is associate professor of musicology and director of the WVU Bluegrass and Old-Time Bands. A scholar of commercial country and Appalachian traditional music, he is the author or editor of several books, including Songwriting in Contemporary West Virginia: Profiles and Reflections (West Virginia University Press, 2018), Fifty Cents and a Box Top: The Creative Life of Nashville Session Musician Charlie McCoy (West Virginia University Press, 2017), The Oxford Handbook of Country Music (Oxford University Press, 2017), The Country Music Reader (Oxford University Press, 2015), and Cosmic Cowboys and New Hicks: The Countercultural Sounds of Austin's Progressive Country Music Scene (Oxford University Press, 2011). He is currently working on two books: Nashville Cats: Record Production in Nashville, 1945-1975 (supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the WVU Faculty Senate, the West Virginia Humanities Council, and the Case Western Reserve University Center for Popular Music Studies) and Opioid Aesthetics: Expressive Culture in an Age of Addiction.

In addition to his work as a scholar, Stimeling has also been quite active in service to the profession and the state of West Virginia. He served as a Senior Editor for The Grove Dictionary of American Music, 2nd ed. (Oxford University Press, 2013), and he current serves as the book review editor for the Journal of the Society for American Music and as series editor for West Virginia University Press’s “Sounding Appalachia” series. He also serves on the board of the West Virginia Music Hall of Fame.

Prior to joining the faculty of WVU, he served on the faculty of Millikin University.

Nancy Caronia

TEACHING ASSISTANT PROFESSOR

My current research project, “The Criminal Body: Italian Racialization and Erasure in the Dime Novel,” is an interdisciplinary study that explores how the American dime novel genre helped enforce discriminatory practices against and eroticized the Italian (im)migrant body in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Encouraged by political and juridical discourses that focused on southern Italian immigrants as violent criminals, dime novel characterizations portrayed southern Italians as monstrous beings who had no loyalty to the United States or American ideals. Dime novel detectives like Nick Carter took on the mask of the Italian immigrant and Mafioso in a minstrelsy overtly designed to marginalize Italian immigrants, but unwittingly also revealed an attraction white nativist Americans had with fictionalized Italian and Italian American criminality. This examination contributes not only to American and Italian Diaspora Studies, but also to current national and local discourses regarding immigrants and immigration policies and laws. In 2017, I received an NEH Summer Institute fellowship to the Bard Graduate Center’s American Material Culture: Nineteenth-Century New York in support of this project. And in 2020, I received the WVU Library in the Arts Faculty/Staff Exhibit Award to mount the exhibit “Dime Novels: Racialization and Erasure.”

David Hoinski

TEACHING ASSISTANT PROFESSOR

Specializations

Ancient Philosophy

Modern German Philosophy

Ethics Social/Political Philosophy

Research Interests

Dr. Hoinski's current work addresses the role of autobiography within philosophy and aims at the articulation of a theory of philosophical autobiography. Dealing with this subject matter, his dissertation included studies of the autobiographical writings of Augustine, Descartes, Vico, Nietzsche, and (perhaps surprisingly) Plato. He is currently working on turning his dissertation into a monograph that will also include chapters on Rousseau and John Stuart Mill. The primary argument of this work is that philosophers write autobiographies in order to present and give some account of philosophical first principles. Dr. Hoinski has also been invited to contribute a chapter on the role of autobiography in Plato and Nietzsche to a forthcoming book (edited by Mark Anderson) that addresses the complex relation between Nietzsche and Plato.

Dr. Hoinski's work in ancient philosophy focuses on the interpretation of Plato and Aristotle. He recently finished a paper, to be published in Rhizomata (Fall 2014) and co-authored with Ronald Polansky, offering a new interpretation of the famous palinode in Plato’s Phaedrus. His work on Aristotle concentrates on the intellectual virtues and the philosophy of science. At a conference at Vytautas Magnus University (Kaunas, Lithuania, Fall 2011) on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, Dr. Hoinski presented an early version of his work on Book 6 that raises the question whether there is a science of sciences for Aristotle. He is also working with Ron Polansky on a book chapter addressing the similarities between Aristotle’s philosophy of science and 20th-century philosophy of science, especially as developed by Michael Polanyi in Personal Knowledge and other works. Dr. Hoinski recently (March 2014) presented a paper with another colleague, John Fritz, at the Pennsylvania Circle of Ancient Philosophy on the problem of evil in Plato.

Other research interests include Augustine, Descartes, Vico, Rousseau, Nietzsche, and Hegel, as well as topics in the philosophy of emotion and the philosophy of literature or poetics.

Teaching Interests

At WVU, Dr. Hoinski has taught the history of ancient philosophy, the capstone seminar, ethical theory, current moral problems, and social/political philosophy. His first capstone course focused on the study of philosophical autobiographies, and his second was dedicated to a careful study of Rousseau’s Emile. He recently developed a course on the philosophy of law for the Spring 2016 semester.

Other Interests

Dr. Hoinski likes to read novels, history, and books concerning the natural sciences. He is also an avid student of foreign languages, especially German and ancient Greek. He considers himself to be a bibliophile (or bibliomaniac) and has a library with more than 3000 volumes. He also like to draw and paint and write poems. Whenever he travels, Dr. Hoinski always tries to visit the art museums and (of course) the bookshops. He is also by long habit and perhaps somewhat tragically a fan of Cleveland sports teams.

Rhonda Reymond

Associate Professor | Art History

Dr. Rhonda Reymond received her Ph.D. and MA degrees in Art History, specializing in Art of the United States from the Colonial period to WWII, from the University of Georgia and a BFA with a double major in Historic Preservation and Interior Design from the Savannah College of Art and Design. She teaches courses in Baroque and Nineteenth Century European Art and Architecture, and American and African American Art and Architecture. Her research focuses on art, architecture and visual culture of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries and addresses issues of identity, especially in the art of African American artists and has appeared in Post-Bellum, Pre-Harlem: The Achievement of African American Writers, Artists, and Thinkers, 1880-1914 and American Periodicals and Visual Culture. Her explorations into identity also encompass spatial organization in mapping activities, and pictorial imagery of world’s fairs. Her dissertation examined Richard Morris Hunt’s ecclesiastical architecture and specifically All Souls’ Church (1893) and its integration into Frederick Law Olmsted’s plan for Biltmore Village in Asheville, North Carolina. She has won awards for outstanding teaching and actively publishes on art history pedagogy.

Radhica Ganapathy

Assistant Professor, Theatre History & Criticism

PhD – Texas Tech University

MA – Miami University

BFA – Maharaja Sayajirao University

Dr. Ganapathy’s research engages in critical representations of race, class, gender, and sexuality in twentieth century theatre and performance. She holds a Ph.D. in Theatre from Texas Tech University with a dual focus in History/Theory/Criticism and Acting/Directing. Ganapathy began her career in theatre as a professional actor in New Delhi (India), before relocating to the United States. She has collaborated with various artists, performers, and scholars in India, Sweden and the United States.

Prior to joining the School of Theatre and Dance at WVU, Ganapathy taught at Penn State Berks and Stockholm University (Sweden). Ganapathy's current research examines notions of performance and performativity in art and the everyday life.