The Institute for the Humanities has appointed 10 Visiting Fellows for 1993–94, all of whom will work in areas relevant to the Institute’s theme, “The Geography of Identity.”
Visiting fellows share in the interdisciplinary community of the Institute during visits lasting from one week to a full term, joining the seven Michigan faculty and five U-M graduate student fellows announced earlier this year. Most give public lectures or present their work-in-progress at forums with Institute associates. Those who visit for five weeks or more offer courses based on their current work.
The visiting fellows, their interest areas and term of appointment are:
Arjun Appadurai, (anthropology, humanities, and South Asian languages and civilizations) is director of the University of Chicago Humanities Institute. His interests encompass historical anthropology, the anthropology of consumption, transnational cultural studies, and south Asia. With Margaret Mills and Frank Korom, he co-edited Gender, Genre and Power in South Asian Expressive Traditions (1991). His next book is Improvisation and Experience in an Agricultural Society: Essays in the Phenomenology of Commercialization in South Asia. (March 20–April 17)
Maryse Conde is a novelist, playwright, essayist and scholar of Afro-Caribbean literature. Born in the French protectorate of Guadaloupe, she has lived in Africa, France, England and (currently) the United States. Her novels, written in French, probe the issues of racial, social, sexual and “geographic” exploitation. Several of her novels, including A Season in Rihata and The Tree of Life, have been translated into English. Her visit is co-sponsored by the Office of the Vice Provost for Academic and Multicultural Affairs. (Sept. 19–25)
Stanley Crouch began writing for The Village Voice and The SoHo Weekly News in 1975, and was a staff writer for the Voice in 1979–88. His essays have appeared in Harper’s, The New York Times, Vogue, Downbeat, The Amsterdam News and The New Republic, where he is a contributing editor. Notes of a Hanging Judge, a collection of essays and reviews, was nominated for an award in criticism by the National Book Critics’ Circle and was selected by the Encyclopedia Britannica Yearbook as the best book of essays published in 1990. This year, Crouch was one of the winners of the prestigious MacArthur Fellowships. His visit will be co-sponsored by the American Musicological Society with a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. (Feb. 28–March 19)
Edmund Keeley, the Charles Barnwell Straut Professor of English and director, Program in Hellenic Studies, Princeton University, will deliver this year’s Else Lecture: “Nostos and the Modern Greek Sensibility.” Keeley, who will become emeritus in January, will discuss the use of Homeric mythology in the poetry of Cavafy, Seferis, and Ritsos, three central figures in 20th-century Greek poetry. In addition to delivering this important lecture under the sponsorship of the Department of Classical Studies, Keeley will spend a week in residence at the Institute. (March 6–12)
Rashid Khalidi, modern Middle East history, is director of the University of Chicago’s Center for Near Eastern Studies. His visit, co-sponsored by the Center for Middle Eastern and North African Studies, will include a lecture in the Center’s fall term series, “Palestine and Israel in History.” Khalidi’s current research focuses on urban elites in Palestine, Syria and Lebanon during the past two centuries and the growth of nation-state nationalism in the Middle East. Among his publications are Under Siege: P.L.O. Decision-Making During the 1982 War (1986) and a book he co-edited, The Origins of Arab Nationalism (1991). (Dec. 1–15)
Amelie Kuhrt, ancient history, University of London, focuses on the historical analysis of the ancient Near East and on the history and functioning of the Achaemenid Persian Empire, which dominated the whole of the Near East (c. 550–330 B.C.) She currently is working on an Introduction to the History of the Ancient Near East. During her visit, she will participate in a symposium on “The Limits of Hellenization: Issues of Influence, Acculturation and Ethnicity in the Hellenistic World.” (March 20–April 9)
Billie Melman, history, Tel Aviv University, is author of Women and the Popular Imagination in the Twenties, Flappers and Nymphs (1988) and Women’s Orients, English Women and the Middle East 1718–1918: Sexuality, Religion, and Work (1992). During her stay at the Institute, she will complete a comparative study on the female historical imagination from the 18th century to the present. Melman also will offer a minicourse on the effects of World War I on culture, society, and gender. (Oct. 17–Nov. 20)
Richard Sennett, history and sociology, New York University, is director of the Committee on Theory and Culture in the Graduate School at NYU. He has written extensively about the relation of the family and of the middle and working classes to American urban life. His latest published book, The Conscience of the Eye (1991), examines the relation between urban design and the social life of modern cities. He has written three novels, and received the 1983 Ingram-Merrill Award for fiction. During his visit, co-sponsored by the College of Architecture and Urban Planning, he will lecture in the College’s series, and invite interested Michigan colleagues to join him in a close reading of his next book, a study of the first ghetto (in Venice). (Jan. 10–14)
Anne Stevenson has published 10 volumes of poetry and two biographies: Elizabeth Bishop (1966) and Bitter Fame (1989), a critical study of Sylvia Plath. Born in and long-time resident of England, she spent her early school years in the United States, graduating from the
U-M in 1954, where she won the Major Hopwood Award for Poetry. During her residency, Stevenson will offer a minicourse that examines how language creates its own environment, focusing on the poetry of Wallace Stevens, Elizabeth Bishop and her own work. (Sept. 26–Oct. 30)
Bernard Williams is the White’s Professor of Moral Philosophy at Oxford University. His visit will be co-sponsored by the Department of Philosophy. For the past 30 years, Williams has been a central figure in a number of areas of philosophy, including philosophy of mind and moral philosophy. His writings include Ethics and Limits of Philosophy, Moral Luck, and a highly praised study of Descartes. (March 13–19)
The Global Partnership Program, sponsored by the University Council on International Academic Affairs, pairs a U-M faculty member with an international counterpart. The team of scholars engages in collaborative teaching and research in the humanities during a term of residence at the Institute.
During winter term 1994, Patricia A. Simpson, assistant professor of Germanic languages and literatures, and Adjai Paulin Oloukpona-Yinnon, maitre-assistant in the Department of German, Universite de Benin in Lomo, Togo, will combine historical and literary approaches to the culture of German colonialism in their joint project, “Literature, Colonialism, and Identity.” Simpson and Oloukpona-Yinnon hope to formulate an aesthetics of German colonial literature and “Auslenderliteratur” (literature written in German by foreigners) with a focus on the construction of “double cultural identity” in Europe, Africa and North America. The winter term course taught by this team, “Writing Home: Geographies of German Cultural Identity,” is designed for graduate students specializing in German, comparative literature or history, but open to qualified undergraduates who read German.
Guthrie P. Ramsey, Jr., has accepted the Thurgood Marshall Dissertation Fellowship at Dartmouth for 1993–94, and has consequently relinquished his graduate fellowship at the Institute for the Humanities. Victoria Wolcott (history), chosen as an alternate, will join the Institute. Her dissertation subject is “Resistance and Respectability: African-American Working-Class Women in Detroit, 1915–45.”
