Hauntings

Published September 9, 2024

Kahn Institute Long-Term Project, 2025–26

Meeting time: Wednesdays, 4:30–7:30 p.m.

Project Description

For some, haunting conjures ghost stories and spooky houses. Yet, haunting evokes myriads of social and cultural realities and lived experiences across time and space. What might it mean for someone who neglects their ritual duties to dead ancestors to reckon with hungry ghosts or malevolent spirits in contemporary times? How have the legacies of slavery and colonialism persisted in the bodies and lives of Indigenous, Black, and other racialized people? What facets of scientific, political, and economic systems haunt present-day inequalities?

The concept of haunting serves as a mechanism to draw us into dialog with unresolved pasts, whether personal and familial histories as personified in the haunted house, the ghosts of our disciplines in perpetuating inequalities, or the legacies of spectral forms of governance where loss or violence can haunt our public imaginations. Haunting takes on disparate forms, from popular culture and the folkloric ghost story’s desire for memory to unsettling landscapes, scientific truths, or capitalism’s legacies. Haunting can also inspire care work and community making.

This project focuses on the variety of ways that the past makes itself known in the present across disciplines. We might dive into the more popular convention of ghost stories and haunted houses and then place those manifestations alongside more theoretical conceptions of haunting circulating in cinema studies, critical theory, and Black studies. The ghosts and hauntings of the scientific realm in epigenetics or genomics might engage us to reckon with the biological calculus of natural differences used to justify colonialism, misogyny, and slavery in the past and present. We can also consider the palpability of historic injustices in contemporary built environments. Our work could show that haunting reveals how love continues, how healing happens, or how care work catalyzes.

In our exploration of haunting and its machinations, we hope to balance studying the work of other scholars and artists with engaging with the work of the project’s participants. We plan to invite guest speakers, including scholars, activists, and artists, to our seminar, who can push our conversations in provocative and exciting directions.

This Kahn project provides us with an opportunity to engage across disciplines in grappling with the manifestation of the past in the present, trusting not only what we can prove but also what we can feel as we wrestle with hauntings together.

Organizing Fellows

Alex Callender, Art
Jennifer DeClue, Study of Women, Gender, and Sexuality

Fellows

Hala Anderson ’26

Architecture & Urbanism and Government double major

Anderson will be examining how architectural homogenization haunts contemporary society, erasing cultural specificity and disconnecting communities from their histories. Her primary interest is understanding how people are influenced by the built environment and how governance and policy influence urban development.

Cynthia Arguijo ’27J

Mathematical Sciences major; Environmental Science & Policy minor

The increased frequency of flooding due to global warming has haunted marginalized communities. Incorporating statistical and data science methods, Arguijo will research how water quality, homes/infrastructure, health, and finances are affected by frequent flooding in Harris, Cameron, Galveston, Brazoria, and Jackson Counties in Texas and to determine how resilience varies in communities of different racial and economic demographics.

Cati Bestard Roger

Art

Bestard Rotger’s artistic practice explores the potential of untold narratives and nonviable materialities. Her Hauntings project aims to further investigate the idea of the glitch and the creative possibilities of failure within photographic systems, a theme she began examining in her “Form” series. Whether emerging from analog or digital technologies, a glitch disrupts systems in unexpected ways, finding paths to manifest unannounced. Yet, these ghost-like appearances offer alternatives for new meanings.

Emma Chubb

Smith College Museum of Art

Chubb is advancing research into contemporary artworks that examine Morocco’s transformation since 1999 from a country shaped by postcolonial emigration and forcible disappearance to one remade by immigration from south of the Sahara and western Europe. She is interested in how haunting might provide a theoretical framework to understand these legacies as entangled with both French and Spanish colonialism and the post-independence “Years of Lead.”

Shebez Jamal

Art

Jamal’s research interests and visual art practice are informed by approaches to urban un/planning, Black migrational patterns/methods of wayfinding, as well as the Black vernacular image. They are exploring the formation and decimation of Missouri’s first Black city, Kinloch, MO, and interweaving vernacular materials that include images from the archive of their maternal grandmother alongside recorded oral histories, video installations, and sculptural techniques as a means of fully imaging the once bustling Black city.

Valerie Joseph

AEMES

Joseph’s research extends explorations done in Brooklyn, New York in the 1980s and Carriacou, Grenada in the 2000s on the affiliation and disaffiliation with Africa among young African descended girls. The girls’ everyday utterances and game-songs expressed profound through seemingly subconscious connections to both African heritage and racist ideology. The gap between the two continues to vitalize questions around identity, internalized racism, and formal and informal ameliorative interventions—historic and ancestral, seen and unseen.

Nikté Lopez-Aleshire ’26

Latin American Studies and Studio Art double major; Museums concentrator

Lopez-Aleshire will explore the impacts of past dictatorships and revolutions on contemporary culture in Latin America and how the brutality of past political repression haunts nations in the present. What role do the arts play in remembering these histories? How do non-Western spiritualities help individuals confront collective trauma?

Colin MacCormack

Classical Studies

MacCormack researches ancient Greek and Latin literature and its reception in modern media, with a special interest in monsters, magic, and folklore. Once a relatively diminished or even rejected aspect of ancient thought, his work argues such “superstitious” beliefs were not only prevalent within ancient Mediterranean cultures, but productive to their ways of thinking. Within ancient accounts of ghosts, hauntings, and supernatural events, we encounter an ever-developing confluence of life and death, present and past.

Jess Pfeffer

Lazarus Center for Career Development

Trained in Early Modern literary studies, Pfeffer brings a trans theoretical lens to questions of embodiment and haunting. Too often, trans bodies are described in relation to lack: surgery or morphological shifts are framed as a supplement for bodies that don’t align with a person’s sense of self. This research interrogates how the mark of a scar might reframe this lack as an “excess.” It gets at the heart of how every body is just as constructed and excessive, constrained to a form it doesn’t quite inhabit.

Lindsay Poirier

Statistical & Data Sciences

Poirier’s scholarship brings cultural analysis to statistics and metrics that guide public health policy in the United States. Specifically, her project examines myths, cultural practices, and socio-political relations that “haunt” the U.S. maternal mortality rate, demonstrating how the reported rate carries cultural meaning beyond the number itself. Her research asks how the accounting of maternal mortality rates animates power and control over reproductive life and death, as well as over conception and the freedom to choose whether to become a parent.

Eva Rueschmann

School of Arts & Media, Hampshire College

Rueschmann is writing a book examining film adaptations of mid-century British Gothic writer Daphne du Maurier. This work explores how the original literary work acts as a spectral presence within the film adaptations, influencing and shaping the new narrative. This dynamic between past and present creates a layered narrative experience where various time periods and cultural contexts intersect, fostering an ongoing dialogue between the original text and its adaptation.

Sarah Stefana Smith

Gender Studies; Critical Race & Political Economy; Art Studio, Mount Holyoke College

Smith’s Grids and Other Provocations examines grids as a hauntological structure—modernist systems of ordering that shape and discipline imagination, relation, and non-relation. Through short form essays exploring nets and networks, longitude and latitude, technologies of printing and photography, and works by artists like Agnes Martin and Jack Whitten, writer-artist Sarah Stefana Smith interrogates how grids connect to empire, technology, and imperialism. Grounding her inquiry in abolitionist practice and material engagement with bird netting, Smith asks: What becomes possible through the trouble of the grid's overdetermined order?

Laura Torraco AC ’27J

Anthropology major

Torraco will explore how the ancient olive trees of Sicily are haunted and what they are haunted by. Rather than being just passive relics of empire and conquest, do they also carry the legacies of the Sicilian people’s resilience? How do these olive trees symbolize the past while actively shaping the ways history continues to haunt the present?

Frazer Ward

Art

Ward’s research weaves together reflections on disappearance as a practice among artists, the disappearances associated with Alzheimer’s disease, and the disappearance of gender binaries suggested by encounters with his transgender child. Artists who disappear deliberately and those who disappear because they can never find purchase in the artworld leave traces. Haunting is about the idea of the trace, but also unexpected survivals and forms of presence.

Frazer Ward speaking and demonstrating with his hands in front of a class

Rebecca Worsham

Classical Studies

Worsham’s research is on the archaeology of houses and households during the Middle Bronze Age in Greece and how the structure acts as a monument to the memory of its inhabitants. Her book project considers how ancestors are or are not evoked within the house. She is also working on a public-facing piece on the emotional connections between houses and their occupants, how they have changed over time, and how that affects ideas about ghosts and hauntings.