GELS names new fellows

Updated 4:00 PM April 1, 2005

GELS names new fellows

By Tobin Siebers
Global Ethnic Literatures Seminar

The Global Ethnic Literatures Seminar (GELS) has awarded 11 fellowships for the fall 2005 semester to four faculty members and seven graduate students chosen in a University-wide competition.

The group will meet for a weekly seminar to discuss questions and topics crucial to international diversity. The seminar will be supplemented during the semester by a slate of distinguished public lectures.

New fellows also will plan a two-day October conference on "The Future of Minority Studies."

Faculty fellows receive a course reduction in the fall and $1,000 in research money. Graduate student fellows are supported by GELS in the fall term and receive $3,000 in the summer prior to their tenure.

The 2005 fellows are:

Rita C-K Chin, assistant professor of history, who is working on the politics of migration in the new Europe. She focuses on London, Paris and Berlin as new homes to extensive immigrant communities of South Asians, North Africans and Turks.

Coleman Jordan, assistant professor of Afroamerican and African studies, and of architecture and urban planning, who is studying the narrative, architectural and cross-cultural legacies of the more than 60 slave-holding castles and forts built on a 300-mile coastline of Ghana, West Africa, between the late 15th and 19th centuries.

Susan Najita, assistant professor of English language and literature, and of American culture. She is examining the culture of decolonization among Pacific Islanders as pictured in both literary and nonliterary texts. Najita argues that the novel plays a central role in decolonizing critical methodologies found in history, anthropology and psychology.

Margaret Somers, associate professor of sociology and history, who is working on a general theory of human rights. She is asking how human rights discourse might address poverty and other human rights violations in a global context.

The graduate students come from a variety of departments and programs.

Mucahit Bilici, Department of Sociology, is tracing the impact of signal world events—changing OPEC oil prices and the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks—on the multi-layered community of Muslims in America.

Susan Frekko, Department of Anthropology, is researching questions of language and national sentiment among the Catalan-speaking population of Barcelona, Spain. Of particular importance to her are the language ideologies that determine people's understanding of what language is and how it is used or should be used in any given situation.

Justine Pas, Program in American Culture, is focusing on the translation of the Holocaust in American immigrant literature as featured in works published in the United States by Holocaust survivors from 1967 to today.

Jinny Prais, Department of History and Women's Studies Program, is writing a cultural history of the identity formation of British-educated West Africans between 1920-50. She is asking how the literate public sphere associated with this colonized and diasporic population fits into the British Empire.

Bhavani Raman, Department of History, is studying the social practices of document culture, tracing how the skill of writing in south India, where very few people could read and write, changed its association from a kin-based craft to a professional skill practiced by scribes during colonial rule.

Ronit Ricci, Program in Comparative Literature, is examining the spread of Islam eastward into South and Southeast Asia via a study of "The Book of One Thousand Questions." It is the story of a Jewish leader's meeting with the prophet Muhammad, his asking of many questions on mystical issues, and his subsequent conversion to Islam.

Jonathan Wipplinger, German Department, is exploring the German reception of American jazz music as the primary site of the construction of the meaning of modernity in German culture.

GELS names new fellows

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