Pennsylvania State University may soon have one of the most rotund student bodies in the nation. The school’s Department of Graphic Design announced the hiring of a new professor who will focus on emphasizing obesity in the classroom.
Brooke Hull, who identified as a non-binary expert in fat and queer activism, will research “fatness and marginalized identity with the goal of expanding design education for every human body.”
“Brooke’s established research interests and scholarship bring breadth of expertise to the department as a whole,” said Darrin Thornton, interim head of the Dept. of Graphic Design. “Their enthusiasm for teaching and mentoring students will have a positive impact and complement existing faculty in the graphic design department.”
Hull’s most recent projects include:
- “Designing for Intersectional Fat Liberation: Leveraging Co-design & Ethnographic Methods to Document Fat Lived Experiences” — an internationally recognized research and co-designed project that visually represents the intersectional lived experiences of eight fat people to advance fat representation and liberation.
- “Researching through Critical Making: Using Illustrated Letterforms to Represent Fat, Intersectional Bodies within Design” — a public-facing design and illustration project that has evolved alongside their formal research praxis for them to visually communicate the need for fat representation in design through reimagined typography.
- “(The Struggle for) Queer Existence within Design History” — a public-facing research and design project that shares queer designers throughout design history and examines and questions their existence in design archives.
Later this summer the university announced Hull would be presenting a talk on “the challenges and successes of researching with and about fat folks in the project, ‘Designing for Intersectional Fat Liberation.’”
“We are thrilled to welcome Brooke to the Stuckeman School,” said Chingwen Cheng, director of the Stuckeman School. “Their design advocacy work and their dedication in creating a learning environment for diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging aligns with school’s core values and are critical to the Stuckeman School community.”
No doubt Professor Hull’s class will huge.
