Jason is a cultural anthropologist whose work focuses on the situated histories, places, institutions, narratives, practices and aesthetics of American social life.  His most recent research has examined the everyday politics of aging, looking at the elderpublics, aging lifeworlds and welfarist futures coming into being in San Francisco, California.  Approaching ethnography as a mode of research and a genre of writing, he aims to get students to understand the tradeoffs embedded in fieldwork alongside the representational moves made by ethnographers.  Jason also brings ongoing interests in film and media, racial formations, care, health and queer forms of critique to his teaching, research and writing.  He is presently at work on a book exploring the precarities and possibilities around aging in queer and non-queer America.

I have been on the faculty of Beloit College since 2002 teaching all levels of drawing and printmaking. I teach foundations, drawing, and printmaking, which includes media like etching, relief printing, and screen printing. I am also a practicing artist, and I exhibit my work regularly in national and international venues. I earned an MFA in printmaking from the University of Wisconsin-Madison where I worked with storied print artists such as Frances Myers and Warrington Colescott.

My work has since evolved to focus mainly on drawing, usually with commonplace media such as graphite pencils and ballpoint pen. I make drawings and works on paper that evoke the eeriness of everyday experiences and have been described as “clairvoyant,” often depicting familiar spaces charged with a sense of dark presence, or other instances where planes of existence clash: the future sending messages to the past, memory intruding upon the present, or the subconscious bleeding into consciousness.

I have exhibited nationally, including solo exhibitions at the James Watrous Gallery of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters, at the Alcove Gallery in New York, and in numerous national and international group shows.

www.scottespeseth.com

My research and teachings are rooted in racial identity, racial perception, and their relationship with racial inequality.

I earned a master’s degree and a doctorate in sociology at Rice University, and a bachelor’s degree in sociology and political science from Gonzaga University.

My research focuses on the the intersection of history and popular culture in Japan. My first book The Afterlife of Toyotomi Hideyoshi was published in 2022 and looks at how and why the biography of the 16th-century samurai, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, was reinterpreted during and immediately after World War II. My current project looks at the ways women writers of historical fiction use the genre to dismantle patriarchal narratives of Japan’s past. 

I teach in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures, but my courses are often cross-listed with Critical Identity Studies, Media Studies, and Environmental Studies. In my classes, we look at how the narratives people create are subject to cultural, historical, and sociopolitical influences and examine the ways in which language and stories are often used to curate our understanding of the environment and the world.

On Teaching…

As a teacher, I guide students through the challenging yet liberating practices of constantly and persistently pressing into the edges of our understanding with empathy. We do this to harness the power of connecting our humanity to others’ experiences. I believe that becoming an effective professional begins in the classroom, so I organize each class to coach students on how to prioritize respectful interactions to practice being an effective communicator and professionally agile. I encourage students to use curiosity as a tool for lifelong learning so that every day serves as a lab of ideas in which to refine our individual and collective practices to build mutually supportive, brave spaces.

I set up each classroom as a workroom for students to process ideas that call into question how knowledge is constructed and by whom, and importantly, to see themselves as active agents in that process. I find it humbling and enlivening to witness students’ unflinching courage in confronting issues and experiences of social inequities, engaging with the pain of living, and seeking to thrive within global racialized systems that marginalize and dehumanize a large variety of communities.

On Advising & Mentoring…

As an advisor, I ensure that students have access to information and resources that enable them to advance successfully through their training for a particular career stage. Mentoring I see as supporting individuals in the process of translating the significance of their training—how it might impact their life circumstances and how it relates to their overall vocational life journey. As a mentor, I frame students’ time at Beloit College as that of young professionals developing the skills of critical listening, written, and verbal communication, effective collaboration, and fluid navigation of ideas in multiple settings. This approach interlocks seamlessly with the college’s integrated learning outcomes. From the beginning of their time on campus, I mentor students to be confident and ready to meet personal and professional challenges with care, focus, and courage. My objective is to provide a safe space for individuals to experiment with ideas and practices to nurture different aspects of their humanity in service to their chosen vocation. My overarching goal is to help others see and center their holistic wellness in their enduring learning process.

On Research…

My current research reflects on how the religious tradition of Palo Monte/Mayombe, a fusion of AmerIndian Taíno and Kongolese ideas and rituals, within eastern Cuba offers conceptual insight into how the traumatic historical reality of enslavement provides directives on living ethically within diasporal communities. I offer alternative framings for utilizing enslavement and other social maligning practices as part of a diasporal community’s origin story for social transformation through healing. This work comes from how I’ve been teaching about the powerful ways marginal communities reclaim aspects of their social exclusion to transform their circumstances of diaspora. I explore what these epistemic shifts might offer us regarding viewing humanity beyond a binary and racialized framing.

I teach medieval history and a variety of courses that use digital tools to interpret the past. While my scholarly interests focus on religious history in the European Middle Ages, I’ve had the opportunity to develop courses on the history of medieval manuscripts, medieval maps,and the multicultural history of the Mediterranean from the fall of the Roman Empire through the time of Napoleon. I teach the department’s historical methods course in collaboration with the College Archivist so that students can do research using original documents from as early as the mid-nineteenth century (when the College was founded) and write papers about the history of women at the College, for example, or how Beloit participated in the Civil Rights era.

In the last few years I’ve begun to explore the potential of using digital technology to enhance my teaching. I served as a member of the advisory council for vHMML, an online resource for the study of medieval paleography and manuscripts (www.vhmml.org). I also received Beloit’s Phee Boon Kang prize for innovations in technology in 2014 in order to create a website that would allow students to transcribe nineteenth-century materials in the College Archives. More recently, I’ve added courses that use digital tools to build online exhibits of historic materials and to make interactive maps.

I have taught at Beloit since 2004, although before then I managed to live in every continental US time zone (not counting Yukon time!). At Beloit, I work with students to explore how storytelling can transform both our current world and worlds of the future.

I welcome mentoring student projects (critical and creative) on science fiction, climate fiction, the environmental humanities, neo-Victorian/ historical fiction, and narratives about data and modernity. Members of my classes often curate their own art exhibits (such as Green Romanticism and Frankenstein 200).

I published a book on mechanical models of feeling and community in the Victorian period, and enjoy teaching courses on literature, science, technology, environmental studies, media studies, literary adaptation, and evolving forms of human and posthuman identity. My current “passion project” explores fantasies of technological design and spiritual intelligence from Charles Babbage to the present.

My research has been recognized by fellowships and awards from the American Council of Learned Societies, the American Philosophical Society, the Associated Colleges of the Midwest, the British Society for Literature and Science, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the North American Victorian Studies Association. In the spring of 2024, I received the James K. Underkofler Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching Award.

When I’m not teaching or researching, you can find me running very slowly, hanging out with my family and cats, or ESL tutoring for Beloit’s Stateline Literacy Council. My parents came to the US as non-native English speakers from the Middle East (from the Armenian diaspora in Syria and Turkey), so I have a particular soft spot for foreign students and people interested in studying and traveling abroad. 

I teach a wide range of courses in the Economics and Business Department, including Principles of Economics, Quantitative Methods, Econometrics, and Health Economics. I love sharing with students the ways in which economic theories and models impact their everyday lives. I also relish the opportunity to guide students on the various career paths they may take if they choose to major in economics.

My research focuses on Health Economics and Labor Economics, with a secondary focus on Applied Economics, Financial Economics, and Economic History. My most recent research examines how to improve competition in the healthcare industry, particularly between health insurance firms, and how exposure to temperature shocks during pregnancy can affect a child’s labor market outcomes later in life.

I am a bioarchaeologist, physiologist, and molecular biologist with specific interests in human osteology, palaeopathology, and infectious disease. I study the expression of respiratory bacterial infections in skeletal remains and how the marginalization of a community compounds the intensity of disease.

I primarily teach classes on human biology, including anatomy and physiology, biometrics, and histology and pathology. I encourage my students to focus on curiosity and research methods, so that whether or not they’re “right,” they will have the skills that they need to succeed as scientists. I love learning more about my students’ lives and finding ways to connect human biology to the ways that they navigate the world. I am passionate about research and can trace this passion to my own undergraduate experiences in research labs. I love involving students in my research and encouraging them to find their own areas of inquiry.

My research and teaching keeps me busy, but in my downtime I am a voracious reader, an occasional embroiderer, and a lover of giant fluffy dogs. I run a nonprofit that helps Wisconsin families who have faced pregnancy or infant loss called The Marigold Foundation, and I love sharing the joy of science with my children.

I have always been fascinated by languages, as reflected in my teaching and research.

At Beloit, I teach classes in various levels of Modern Standard Chinese. Learning Chinese gives students insights into language’s role in shaping how we think and experience the world. I also offer courses on topics related to Chinese literary and cultural history.

In recent years, my teaching has grown to include courses that introduce students to research in the Digital Humanities (DH). Students in my courses use a variety of quantitative tools and methods to explore texts as data. I’m particularly intrigued by the ways in which we can apply computational tools and methods to the study of literature. I encourage students who want to learn more about DH to pursue advanced DH projects with me.

Additionally, I enjoy mentoring students interested in literary translation, something I pursue in my scholarship. Currently, I am working on a translation of the eighteenth-century Chinese language novel Lüye xianzong (working title: The Worldly Adventures of Master Leng Yubing, Daoist Immortal).

My latest published research can be found in History Retold: Premodern Chinese Texts in Western Translation (Brill, 2022; Leo Tak-hung Chan and Zong-qi Cai, eds). Entitled “The ‘Double Effect’ of Translation in Jean-Pierre Abel-Rémusat’s Iu-Kiao-Li ,” my contribution to this volume describes how a work of narrative fiction from seventeenth-century China came to be translated into French in the early nineteenth century. It also explores what its readers understood themselves to be reading.

In my private life, I am a (very) amateur piano player and an aspiring beekeeper. I also enjoy making jam with the beach plums I gather with my family. I serve on the board of directors of both the Beloit-Janesville Symphony and the Qi Shu Fang Peking Opera Company.

The courses that I teach at Beloit are directly related to my research interests, which means students in my classes get to take lots of field trips. These courses include include Earth’s Climate: Past and Future, Evolution of the Earth, and Paleontology. I incorporate multi-week projects into my courses to provide hands-on, critical-thinking activities that reinforce lecture material. I also strive for an inclusive classroom and I view our differences as strengths and believe that we can all learn from each other.

My research interests include paleoclimatology, paleontology, and environmental science. These interests lead me to study a variety of questions like: How did climate change cause extinctions in Earth’s past? and, What are the potential environmental impacts related to mining? Since these research interests are multi-disciplinary, I spent time in the field collecting fossils and rock samples as well as the lab studying those fossils and conducting geochemical analysis; you can find more info on my lab group at the Beloit Paleo Lab website.

I spend my free time gardening, cooking, and with family. I make pizza from scratch almost every weekend, and have recently started bottling hot sauce with the different peppers that I grow in my garden.