7 faculty, 6 graduate students receive fellowships at Humanities Inst.




Updated 1:00 PM April 21, 2003
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7 faculty, 6 graduate students receive fellowships at Humanities Inst.

By Eliza Woodford
Institute for the Humanities

The Institute for the Humanities has awarded fellowships to seven faculty and six graduate students to support research projects they will pursue in 2003-04.

"Choosing fellows from a field of applicants as distinguished as Michigan's is something of an impossibility," says institute Director Daniel Herwitz, who chaired the selection meetings. "We believe, however, that next year's group reflects something of the diversity of the humanities while also allowing for potentially exciting lines of intersection between fellows."

The outside evaluators for the faculty fellowship selection process were Ellen Driscoll (sculpture, Rhode Island School of Design), Richard Lim (history, Smith College), and Marjorie Perloff (emerita, English, Stanford University). Helping to select the graduate student fellows were Catherine Brown (Romance languages) and Michael Bonner (Near Eastern studies).

The fellowship recipients, beginning with faculty members and followed by graduate students, are:

Behar

Ruth Behar, professor, anthropology

"The Cuba Boom: New American Desires for the Forbidden Island"

This project looks at the resurgence of a North American fascination with Cuba that has exploded since the 1990s. The "Cuba boom" can be observed in a nexus of American desires to connect with Cuba through art, music, photography and film, religion, and various people-to-people exchanges. The American market is flooded with CDs of Cuban music, new films and novels about Cuba, ethnographies of Cuban Santeria, photography books, exhibits of Cuban art, and architectural studies of the island.

A Cuban revolution is happening in the United States, and it has created an insatiable yearning for all things Cuban. Behar will reflect on this yearning, both as a Cuban-American and as a cultural anthropologist participating ambivalently in the "Cuba boom," in order to shed light on the complexities, ironies and mutual longings of the new relationship unfolding between Cubans and North Americans. Behar will hold the Hunting Family Faculty Fellowship.

Cook

James Cook, assistant professor, American culture and history

"Cracks in the White Republic: Forging Culture Across the Color Line in Nineteenth-Century America"

Cook is studying U.S. interracial cultures from the beginnings of northern emancipation (1780s-1820s) through the Plessy v. Ferguson Supreme Court decision (1896), which legalized segregation. These cultures took root in such areas as vice, philanthropy, performance, education and tourism.

Why and how did certain interracial spaces manage to survive even within the post-emancipation caste system, he asks, and what particular forms of sociability did they foster? In answering these questions, Cook says, he is writing a cultural history of people, institutions and spaces that violated the emerging racial caste system. Cook will hold the John Rich Professorship.

Goodman

Dena Goodman, professor, history, women's studies

"Women and Letter Writing in Eighteenth-Century France"

Goodman's project focuses on letter writing as an ordinary, everyday practice in the lives of literate French women in the decades before the French Revolution. She is fascinated by letter writing because increasing numbers of women engaged in it in the century and a half before the French Revolution, while few women had before that time. Moreover, the shift in letter writing from a male- to a female-associated practice corresponds to a moment when writing itself was shaping a new, modern sense of selfhood.

How, Goodman is asking, did women's use of a form of writing that is at once expressive, reflexive and oriented toward another, shape a sense of self that was modern, gendered and gender-conscious? Goodman will by the A. Bartlett Giamatti Faculty Fellow.

Sandra Gunning, associate professor, American culture, Afroamerican and African studies, English

Gunning

"Locating Blackness: Place, Mobility, and Identity in the Early Literature of the African Diaspora"

Gunning's project explores black Anglophone writing and the shaping of community and individual identity in the late 18th and 19th centuries, within the context of international debates over slavery, abolition, the rapid rise of American and European imperialism, and a number of transatlantic migratory movements.

Her sources include memoirs, travel accounts, missionary narratives, and novels produced by people born in the United States, Africa and the Caribbean. Gunning will hold the Steelcase Research Professorship.

Martha Jones, assistant professor, history and Afroamerican and African studies

Jones

"'All Bound Up Together': The 'Woman Question' in African-American Public Culture, 1830-1900"

Jones's book examines the emergence of African American women into public culture in 19th-century America. It is a history of ideas that asks how views of what women could be and could do changed over the course of the century: How, if Black women were considered only marginal to public life in the 1830s, did they come to be recognized as visible and authoritative community leaders by 1900?

It also is a social history that investigates the relationship of such ideas to the allocation of authority within institutions: How did ideas about women shape the structures and practices of Black churches, political organizations, benevolent societies, fraternal orders and schools?

Andrew Kirshner, assistant professor, music/art and design

Kirschner

"The Museum of Life and Death"

Andy Kirshner will create a new music-theater project, "The Museum of Life and Death."

Based on the classic medieval morality play "Everyman," his new piece will explore the imaginative and moral relationship to emerging life sciences technologies (cloning, transgenic organisms, eugenics, etc.) and the evolving meaning of life, death and nature in the context of contemporary American culture.

Donald Lopez, professor, Asian languages and cultures

"The Madman's Middle Way"

Lopez

Lopez will complete a book-length study of a text widely regarded as the most important and controversial Buddhist work to be produced in Tibet during the 20th century.

It was the final work of the renegade monk Gendun Chopel (1903-1951), who traveled widely in British India and who, upon his return to Tibet, was imprisoned by the government of the young Dalai Lama. Chopel was a brilliant philosopher, trained at the highest levels of the Tibetan Buddhist academy, who saw himself first as an artist and poet. Lopez will be the Helmut F. Stern Professor.

Julia Carlson, English

Carlson

"Romantic Emphasis: Poetry and the Marks of Culture, 1750-1850"

Carlson's dissertation examines 18th- and 19th-century ways of calling attention to locations in space and time. She traces debates over what to emphasize—andhow to emphasize—in such disparate fields as cartography, grammar, elocution, acting, portraiture and poetry.

Performing close readings of lines, points and curves, she explores the relations between such phenomena as the 18th-century invention of the contour line for showing relief and the simultaneous promotion of the exclamation point for showing feeling. In this way, she is able to tease out the symbolic "logics" that support Romantic systems of emphasis and consider the involvement of these systems of emphasis in British aesthetics and ideologies. Carlson will be a Hunting Family Graduate Student Fellow.

Jennie Malika Evenson, English

Evenson

"Reformation England in the Age of Discovery"

Evenson is tracing the ways that travel and trade influenced the English Reformation. By paying particular attention to interaction with Muslims and Jews who operated extensive trade routes through the Ottoman Empire in the Mediterranean, Evenson has derived some important new geo-political and economic contexts for studying the Reformation.

Her research into the dynamic interactions among Protestants, Catholics, Muslims and Jews challenges many traditional studies and directs attention to the influence of Judaism and Islam on the conceptualization of Protestantism in 16th-century English literature and culture.

Jennifer Goltz, music theory

Goltz

"The Unsingable Note: The Roots of 'Pierrot lunaire' in Cabaret"

Goltz's study draws on original archival research, musical analysis and her own performance experience to explore cabaret culture and the great 20th century composer Arnold Schoenberg's involvement in cabaret as a conductor, composer and arranger of cabaret songs.

Her aim is to shed new light on "Pierrot lunaire," one of the most significant musical compositions of the 20th century. In these 1901 cabaret songs, Schoenberg demonstrated compositional sophistication by engaging gender identity issues and homosexuality through drag performance and double entendre, along with stylistic vocal gestures that defy notation. Goltz says, "His foreshadowing of sinister elements, present in later cabaret style of Weimar, Germany, reaches full bloom in 'Pierrot lunaire'." Goltz will hold the James A. Winn Graduate Student Fellowship.

Stefan Henning, anthropology and history

Henning

"Nowhere Beyond Good and Evil: Chinese Muslim Activism as Ethical Critique, 1929 to 2001"

Henning is concerned with Muslim activism in China from the 1920s to the present. He is asking how Muslim activism in the domains of translation, magazine publication and religious education inspired visions of personhood and polity alternative to secularization and nation-building.

His project draws on archival research and fieldwork in Beijing and in Lanzhou City on the upper reaches of the Yellow River.

Suzanne Spring, English and education

"The 'Voice' of Form: Re-reading Dickinson, Re-reading Writing"

Spring

Epistolary form, Spring argues, is a productive entry point in theorizing acts of reading and writing in English studies. Her socio-historical examination will engage the letter-form in two areas: composition and rhetoric, and Emily Dickinson studies.

After establishing mid-19th century New England as a culture of the letter, Spring turns her attention to the Mount Holyoke Female Seminary as a site where a rhetoric of the letter can serve as a central context for understanding women's writing practices. Finally, she narrows her focus to Emily Dickinson's poetic corpus, understanding Dickinson's "lyric letters" within a tradition of poetic and rhetorical production. Spring will hold the Mary Fair Croushore Graduate Student Fellowship.

Yofi Tirosh, law

Tirosh

"Signifying the Self: Law, Culture, and the Regulation of Identity"

Tirosh's dissertation explores contemporary legal theories of how identity is constituted and maintained. Such theories are essential to determining what elements of identity should be protected by the law. Her research focuses on cases involving dress style, body size, names and accent—traits that are located at the literal and conceptual margins of identity.

Is it, for example, an infringement of religious freedom to require that an orthodox Jewish Air Force captain remove his yarmulke while wearing his uniform? Should an African American flight attendant fired for wearing cornrows have a race discrimination claim? Such cases provide a rich account of law's understanding of the relations between the "core" and "penumbra" of the self, between being and doing, or—to invoke legal language—between status and conduct. Tirosh will be a Hunting Family Graduate Student Fellow.

7 faculty, 6 graduate students receive fellowships at Humanities Inst.

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