The Institute for the Humanities has awarded fellowships to eight faculty and six graduate students to support research projects they will pursue during 2009-10.
Institute Director Daniel Herwitz, who chaired the selection meetings, says, “It will be an exciting year with these lucid and imaginative scholars, essayists, writers and visual artists.”
The outside evaluators for the faculty fellowship selection process were Katherine Bergeron (music, Brown University), Charles Stewart (anthropology, University College, London) and Haiping Yan (theatre, film and dance, Cornell University). Helping to select the graduate student fellows were Piotr Michalowski (Near Eastern studies) and Elizabeth Sears (history of art).
Faculty fellows
• Y. David Chung, associate professor, art and design; director, Center for Korean Studies; Helmut F. Stern Professor — “Pyongyang — a drawing and video installation”
Portrayed as a nation of uncompromising dictatorship, a land of famine, and a people ruled by an ideology whose hatred for the United States is matched in fervor only by the adoration of their deified leaders, North Korea is a country that remains a monstrous enigma to the world. Working from video and photographs from a recent trip to North Korea, the birthplace of his parents, Chung plans to create a drawing and video installation which seeks to capture this place that lives in our minds and in our dreams.
• Peter Ho Davies, professor, English, John Rich Professor — “The Great Race: A Novel”
“The Great Race” is a novel about the building of the transcontinental railroad, focusing on the experiences of the Chinese laborers of the Central Pacific.
Of Celtic and Chinese decent, Davies was first drawn to the material by the competition between the Chinese and the largely Irish laborers of the Union Pacific to see who could lay track faster across the country. The book will consider themes of identity, and representation and explore the early years of the Chinese-American community.
• Angela Dillard, associate professor, Afroamerican and African studies; Residential College; John Rich Professor — “James H. Meredith and the Boundaries of the American Historical Imagination”
This political biography of James Meredith, the civil rights icon turned conservative Republican, attempts to situate our understanding of Meredith’s “conservative turn” within broad shifts in American political culture and American historical memory from the 1960s to the present.
• Valerie Kivelson, professor, history; Steelcase Research Professorship — “Desperate Magic: Witchcraft and the Lineaments of Power in Early Modern Russia”
A study of witchcraft trials and belief in Russia in the 17th and 18th centuries, “Desperate Magic” demonstrates that witchcraft anxieties expressed particularly Russian concerns about serfdom and social hierarchy. This study upends traditional top-down models by revealing how power was contested, manipulated, and reproduced by people scrambling to survive in a fiercely inequitable world.
• Keith Mitnick, associate professor, architecture; Hunting Family Faculty Fellowship — “The Architecture of Unseen Things”
This project will use different forms of written and visual narratives to examine the role of architecture in defining accepted notions of the “normal” and the “everyday.” By overlaying a series of conflicting accounts and representations of a single contested locale, Mitnick will consider ways in which seemingly blank and banal buildings infer a false sense of neutrality upon the institutions they accommodate.
• Ryan Szpiech, assistant professor, Romance languages and Judaic studies; Hunting Family Professor — “Authorizing Apostasy: Conversion and Narrative in Medieval Polemic”
A study of narratives of religious conversion that appeared between the 12th-14th centuries among Christians, Muslims and Jews of the western Mediterranean, this study considers the autobiographical form of these mini-narratives as part of a reaction to the increasing role of logic and reason in religious apologetics after the 12th century. By comparing surviving texts from different religious groups, it analyses the connection between contrasting notions of religious conversion and identity and a common forum of inter-religious polemical writing.
• Magdalena Zaborowska, associate professor, American culture, and Afroamerican and African studies; Hunting Family Professor — “Racing Borderlands: Displacement, Difference, Dialogue, and American Cultural Traffic in the Second World”
Zaborowska’s book explores the new meanings of race and ethnicity in the cultural traffic between the First and Second Worlds post-1989-91. It brings into dialogue the life stories and visual archives documenting interactions among Jewish and Slavic immigrants and black migrants from the South in the Chene Street area in Detroit with the cultural work of domesticating difference and re-visioning East European multiculturalism in theatrical, musical, publishing, and academic activities of Fundacja Pogranicz in Sejny, Poland.
• Claire Zimmerman, assistant professor, architecture and history of art; Helmut F. Stern Professor — “‘Photographic Architecture’ from Weimar to Cold War: The Case of Mies van der Rohe”
Zimmerman is writing a book about architectural representation in the 20th century, focusing on the translation of information about space, material and form into two-dimensional images. The book emphasizes the significant role played by photography in the historiography of modern architecture; it also studies the recursive effects of images, which began to alter building form in subtle but far-reaching ways in the post-World War II period.
Graduate student fellows
• Yanina Arnold, Slavic languages and literatures; Sylvia “Duffy” Engle Graduate Student Fellow — “Law and Literature in Late Imperial Russia, 1864-1917”
Arnold’s dissertation examines the interaction between legal culture and literature in late imperial Russia and its lasting impact on Russian attitudes toward legal practices. She will explore the representation of legal culture by Russian writers, journalists and legal professionals. Among other things, she will investigate how the literary activities of Russia’s “literary lawyers” contributed to their professional self-fashioning. Her dissertation project will include the translation from the memoir “The Book of Death” by Sergei Andreevsky (1847-1918).
• Christopher Coltrin, history of art; Mary Fair Croushore Graduate Student Fellow — “Destruction or Deliverance? The Politics of Catastrophe in the Art of John Martin”
Coltrin’s dissertation analyzes the political associations of a series of apocalyptic-themed paintings produced in England during the 1820s by the painters John Martin, Francis Danby, and David Roberts. Specifically, he will investigate how these paintings may have encouraged progressive political reforms — including universal suffrage, a progressive structure of taxation, and land redistribution — as a means of obtaining deliverance from impending divine destruction.
• Christopher Davis, comparative literature; James A. Winn Graduate Student Fellow — “Performing the Text: Troubadour Manuscripts and Vernacular Poetic Identity”
For his study of the 12th- and 13th-century troubadours of southern France, Davis uses 13th-century manuscript anthologies of troubadour song, or chansonniers, to explore the tensions between oral and textual models of poetic authority during this period. In particular, he is focusing on the influence of the Latin commentary tradition on representations of vernacular authorship and on the status of Occitan as a prestige vernacular for poetic composition.
• Ari Friedlander, English language and literature; A. Bartlett Giamatti Graduate Student Fellow — “Sex, Crimes, and Sex Crimes: Private Sins and Communal Concerns in Early Modern England”
Early-modern English popular pamphlets and court records consistently equated sexual criminals, such as prostitutes and adulterers, with non-sexual criminals, such as vagrants and thieves. In later dramatic literature and sermons depicting England’s burgeoning middle class and incipient nationalism, crime and incontinent sexuality came to function as mutually reaffirming markers of social unsuitability and helped to define how early-modern England understood itself both on a local level, and as a growing national and economic power.
• Daniel Hershenzon, history; Mary Ives Hunting and David D. Hunting Sr. Graduate Student Fellow — “Moving People, Moving Goods: Captivity and Ransom in the Early-Modern Western Mediterranean”
This project examines the captivity, enslavement, and ransom of Habsburg and Ottoman subjects in the early-modern western Mediterranean and the ways in which the movements of these enslaved captives across the sea were negotiated and defined in royal and religious bureaucracies.
• Guillermo Salas, anthropology; Mary Ives Hunting and David D. Hunting Sr. Graduate Student Fellow — “Religious Change and Ideologies of Social Distinction in the Southern Peruvian Andes”
At the heart of this project is the diversity of the ideologies of social differentiation in the regional society of Cuzco, in the southern Peruvian Andes. Paying attention to everyday life as well as evangelical conversions in Quechua communities, Salas aims to explain how different ideologies of social differentiation coexist, legitimizing and reproducing social hierarchies across cultural differences.
— All photos by Peter Smith Photography, except Ari Friedlander, Danile Hershenzon and Guillermo Salas, which were provided courtesy of the respective fellows.
