The Institute for the Humanities has awarded fellowships to nine faculty and nine graduate students to support research projects they will pursue during 2014-15.
Faculty Fellows
Sara Ahbel-Rappe, professor, classical studies; John Rich Professor
“The Charioteer’s Circuit: Plato’s Self-Moving Myth. Tracking the Migration of Plato’s Myth in Late Antique Text Networks”
This book investigates the reception of Plato’s Phaedrus, and especially the famous myth of the soul (Phaedrus 246-249) from the first to sixth centuries CE. The phenomenon of this text’s migration into exegetical or speculative traditions or even languages far removed from the original site of Plato’s dialogue in terms of the theory of textual networking is analyzed. Classicist Daniel Selden has used the term “text network” to describe texts whose very composition facilitates migration into a series of narratives at ever further remove from their site of origin (e.g. The Alexander Romance). Scholars of other periods have used the term more broadly in an effort to think about the circulation of texts while keeping to Selden’s original insight, that text networks “explicitly thematize their own dissemination.” Ahbel-Rappe will extend this work in a consideration of how this particular myth, essentially an icon of [trans] migration, helped insinuate Platonism itself into so many disparate regions and religions.
Maria Cotera, associate professor, American culture, women’s studies; Helmut F. Stern Fellow
“The Shock of the Old”
Since 2009, Maria Cotera has been developing a digital archive of oral histories and documents related to the development of Chicana feminist praxis in the civil rights era. The archive includes more than 70 oral histories and thousands of letters, posters, photographs, and ephemera, as well as digital copies of dozens of out-of-print books, articles, and unpublished essays, all of which collectively trace the ways in which Chicanas, Latinas, and their allies developed both a method and a theory of localized (and yet still broadly networked) change-making that shaped contemporary conceptualizations of intersectionality. For her project at the institute, Cotera will work on a book, “The Shock of the Old,” which focuses on the content of the archive, and also the meanings of archives more generally. Cotera is particularly interested in how collaboratively produced digital archives reimagine the archive, not as a “place” or a “source” (to paraphrase Derrida), but as a practice of engaged, interconnected scholarly inquiry.
Alison Cornish, professor, Romance language and literature; Hunting Family Fellow
“Medieval Remediation”
Dante was writing the “Divine Comedy” in a time when medieval Europeans were expanding their communications by means of new writing materials, new languages, and new agents and modes of manuscript production. The poet’s choice to write in his local and contingent vernacular (as opposed to the learned literary idiom of Latin) made him acutely aware of the ephemeral nature of all these media and their consequent need for continuous remediation — through repetition, recopying, memorizing, and translating. This project examines the connections between moments of explicit self-consciousness about the material media of expression and philosophical notions of the relation of the physical to the metaphysical, body to soul, ideas to things.
Holly Hughes, professor, art and design, theatre and drama, women’s studies; Norman and Jane Katz Fellow
“Preaching to the Perverted”
The project is a multiplatform memoir that will explore Hughes’ experiences as one of the four performance artists denied funding during the height of the culture wars. The project involves traditional print media and audio book, with video and web components.
Rachel Neis, associate professor, Judaic studies, history; Richard & Lillian Ives Professor
“Mapping Jews in Late Antiquity: Minority Spatial Practices across Roman and Sassanian Empires”
Jews are figured ambivalently with respect to space. Claims about Jews as quintessentially Diasporic on the one hand, and as associated with land and territory on the other, are often backdated to antiquity. This project critically examines the spatial and mapping practices of Jews, including rabbis, who lived in the first several centuries CE in both Roman-Byzantine Palestine and in Persian-Sassanian Mesopotamia. These practices, which cross the religious, material, and every day, also overlaid the constraints of contemporaneous imperial geographies. Working with a variety of materials, the project will consider such things as prayer rules, toilet practices, pilgrimage itineraries, and Jerusalem Temple iconography as means by which Jews sought to shape and signify their space. The aim is also to compare ancient Jewish practices with those of other minorities in order to consider how ancient minority spatial practices can illumine our understandings of religion, identity, empire, and geography.
Christian Sandvig, associate professor, communication studies, School of Information; Steelcase Research Professor
“Knowing Algorithms”
The algorithm is now a central problem among scholars of culture. In computer science, algorithm refers to a step-by-step procedure for accomplishing a given task. Yet as human experience is digitally mediated, the experience of texts, other media and even reality itself is now produced by a step-by-step procedure executed by a computer. This proposal imagines hybrid research involving scholarship, programming and art that will attempt to reveal algorithms at work. Sandvig will conduct a series of programming and ethnographic projects with open access websites as the output that will address the problem of knowing algorithms.
Tobin Siebers, professor, English language and literature; John Rich Professor
“Disability and the Photograph”
Siebers will be writing a book designed to make readers ponder what happens when someone photographs a person with a disability. Can there be a photograph of a disabled person who will not be seen as “ugly”? What does it mean to recognize the subject of a photograph as disabled and to judge at the same time that the photograph is a work of art — that the dominant response is the sensation of beauty? The book interrogates the position of women both before and behind the camera, claiming that no serious theory about disability and the photograph exists without considering the artistry of women. The book also provides the first analysis of disability in Cindy Sherman, and asks whether Diane Arbus mints the defining feature of her work by turning ugliness into the beautiful.
Melanie Yergeau, assistant professor, English language and literature; Charles P. Brauer Fellow
“Authoring Autism: On Rhetoric and Neurological Queerness”
If rhetoric is what makes us human, then what does it mean to deny the autistic’s capacity for rhetoric? This project examines the ways in which the autistic culture movement provides opportunities to rethink long-held ideas about rhetoric and its relation to affect, intent, and human audiences. Textual sites include clinical scholarship, autism conference booklets, and autistic life writing, primarily that which is digital and/or self-published.
Wang Zheng, associate professor, women’s studies, history, Institute for Research on Women and Gender; Helmut F. Stern Fellow
“Experiencing Socialist Transformation: Shanghai Residents in the 1950s”
This research project is a social and cultural history that employs archival research, ethnographic study, and discourse analysis in the investigation of socialist reorganization of Shanghai. It is intended to examine many areas vital to our understanding of human experiences during socialist transformation, a recent past that has been rapidly erased in China’s merge with global capitalism. How did residents of a semi-colonial metropolis respond to the Communist Party’s grand scheme of socialist state building? How was the Maoist reorganization of urban life accomplished, accommodated, resisted, or subverted? How and what were new subjectivities formed in the interplay and contestation of multiple discourses in a socialist revolution? Departing from the Cold War assumption of an all-encompassing “communist totalitarian régime,” the project seeks to bring to light the dynamics and tensions in the relations between the Maoist state and urban society as they played out in the daily life of ordinary people.
Graduate student fellows
David Green, Jr., American culture; James Winn Graduate Student Fellow
“‘Out of this Confusion I Bring My Heart’: Love, Liberation, and the Rise of Black LGBT Cultural Politics in Late-Twentieth-Century America”
This project situates black LGBT cultural and political activism within the history of the black freedom movements in late-20th-century America. Principally, it takes as its objects of analysis literary cultures — political speeches, critical essays, novels, plays, poems, autobiographies — as well as archival sources and oral histories, and examines very closely how these sources reveal the ways that black queer artist-activists discoursed about “freedom” and “liberation” across the civil rights, black women’s, and gay liberation movements. Love, this project argues, functions as a vital intellectual, political, and organizing tool to (re) capture and widen the essence of the “beloved community” as it enables black queer folks to forge new paths on the ever winding, and never ending, long road to freedom.
Alison Joersz, anthropology; Mary I. & David D. Hunting Graduate Student Fellow
“Talking Our Way Towards Development: The Political and Ethical Entanglements of Grassroots Organizing in Haiti”
The discursive practices of two local development organizations in Haiti are compared by this dissertation. Through debates about organizational strategies and social issues (including political scandals), members at each organization act out different visions of ethics and responsibility in political engagement, differences that can be partially attributed to how each is positioned in relation to the development industry and formal politics. This analysis goes beyond the dichotomy of “corrupt” versus “transparent” organizational behavior, highlighting the role of discourse in shaping social action and the entangled nature of politics, development, and ethics in Haiti.
Elizabeth Keslacy, architecture; A. Bartlett Giamatti Graduate Student Fellow
“The Curatorial Impulse: Reading Postmodern Historicism on Exhibit, 1968-1989”
Architectural exhibition as a key site of the formation of architectural postmodernism is examined by this dissertation. Complementing textually based “linguistic turn” that emerged in architectural theory, exhibitions manifested the visual “historical turn” through two primary exhibition types: those that explored historical subjects and those that presented contemporary works that drew upon historical styles. Architects and historians, working as curators, used the medium of exhibition to represent historical periods, such as the neoclassical and the Beaux-Arts, through interpretations that framed history as model and sourcebook for practitioners, and they assembled contemporaneous projects to identify and validate trends as a way of encouraging their adoption more widely. This project explores the ways that the experience choreographed by the exhibition is reflected in the aesthetic experience proffered by postmodern architecture itself. Further, it considers the demonstrative nature of the exhibition and its implications for practitioners, engendered in the curator’s interpretive agency and in the evolving conception of architecture as museum subject.
Nancy Linthicum, Near Eastern studies; Marc and Constance Jacobson Graduate Student Fellow
“Writing in Cairo in the Age of Mubarak: Literary Networks and Prose Fiction of the 1990s and 2000s in Egypt”
Beginning in the 1990s, a new body of experimental prose fiction appeared on the Egyptian literary scene as small, independent publishing houses in Cairo were established and began to publish a number of works written primarily by young Egyptian writers. This dissertation investigates formal and thematic trends and linguistic innovation that emerged in this widely overlooked and misunderstood body of Arabic literature over the course of the 1990s and up to the January 25 revolution of 2011. Using diverse methods and disciplines — literary criticism, Arabic dialectology, and original research and interviews with authors, literary critics, and publishers — Linthicum traces interactions among key literary “actors” tied to Cairo and to this body of literature, including writers, literary awards, state ministries, publishers, literary criticism, books as physical commodities, and others.
Sarah Linwick, English language and literature; Early Modern Conversions Graduate Student Fellow
“Ecologies of Kind in Early Modern England”
This project explores how early modern English performances and texts that are often comfortably classified as “literary” today also participate in the period’s sociopolitical and scientific discourse about nature. Specifically, the project focuses on works of drama, poetry, and prose romance that engage systems of “kind” (the kind being variously construed as a category of nature, society, or art). Attending to how early modern performances and texts complicate categorical distinctions between nature, society, and art, the project simultaneously examines how these works negotiate the deconstruction and reconstruction of class, gender, race, sex, and species kinds — and variants of these identity categories. A primary goal of this project, then, is to provide a fresh perspective on how some of the period’s unstable, contingent notions of nature contributed to the transformation of identity categories in the period.
Pascal Massinon, history; Mary Fair Croushore Graduate Student Fellow
“Participant Listeners: Home Taping and the Political Culture of Recording Technologies in the U.S.”
This dissertation investigates the history of magnetic tape recording in relation to debates over aesthetic practice, copyright law and the industrial organization of entertainment in the United States. From the 1950s, when reel-to-reel tape recorders entered the consumer market, to the late 1990s, when digital media began to supplant cassette tapes as the easiest way to reproduce recorded sounds, consumers’ use of magnetic tape provoked social and political conflicts over the value of recorded sounds and influenced changes within the structure of the recording industry. Even as the practice of home taping raised the possibility that the content industry would not be able to maintain control over the reproduction of its products, it also complexly paved the way towards other profitable models of business organization that combined corporate consolidation, low-cost consumer goods, and flexible production of cultural commodities.
Rostom Mesli, comparative literature; Sylvia “Duffy” Engle Graduate Student Fellow
“In Defense of Identity Politics: For a Queer Reassessment of a Vilified Concept”
The processes through which, in the 1970s and early 1980s in France and the U.S., sexual non-normative practices passed from being questions of medical pathology or social deviance to become political positions (and particularly radical political positions) are analyzed by this dissertation. It seeks to understand how deviant sexuality was then articulated normatively, discursively and politically to the Left. With a particular focus on feminism, gay and lesbian liberationism, women of color feminism, and political sadomasochism, it reassesses the role of identity politics in that process. Against the hegemonic views in queer theory and poststructuralist thinking, it excavates the ways that identity politics was used by earlier activists in ways that were radically non-essentialist and non-homogenizing, and it shows that identity politics was not only conducive but indeed necessary to coalition-building.
Asaf Peres, music theory; Richard & Lillian Ives Graduate Student Fellow
“Timbre, Gesture, Space: Towards a Method for Analyzing Studio Produced Popular Music”
In the last five decades, the recording studio has revolutionized how creators of popular music approach the process of producing a song. Innovative musical concepts have resulted from a newfound ability to create sounds that were impossible to generate in a live performance. This sonic revolution has greatly accelerated in the past decade, thanks to recent technological advancements and the popularization of music production software. Peres is developing an analytical methodology which addresses these new technological possibilities in songs by artists such as Britney Spears, Rihanna and Ludacris, with particular focus on musical gestures, sound color, and the formation of imaginary musical space.
Bonnie Washick, political science; Mary I. & David D. Hunting Graduate Student Fellow
“Strange Spaces and ‘Stranger Sensibilities’: Conceptualizing Feminist Counterpublicity on the Web”
Through a situated analysis of digital feminisms, this dissertation develops an account of the Internet as affording spaces of politics wherein distinctive political visions and practices emerge through the interaction of actors who build, imagine, and “inhabit” different Internet sites. The project illustrates how beliefs about the world are given form in the immaterial spaces of the Web and, in turn, have real effects in shaping the lives and experiences of embodied users who navigate these spaces. This relational, world-building approach offers insight into larger questions of democratic politics in “the age of the Internet,” an age characterized by digital, mass publication and concerns about the erosion of community and the commercialization or capture of citizens’ attentions.
