Willson Center Faculty Fellows

Willson Center Fellows are selected by an interdisciplinary UGA committee of distinguished artists and scholars. Fellowships support excellence in the humanities and arts by providing faculty with time to engage in research and creative activity.

2023 – 2024

Shira Chess (Entertainment & Media Studies)

Shira Chess is an associate professor in the department of Entertainment & Media Studies. Her research interests are in digital culture, internet studies, and discourse analysis.

Project Title: The Occultic Internet: Shifting Realities in 21st Century Discourse

Project Details

As we move deeper into the 21st century, the internet is a grimoire for conjuring our bubbled versions of reality. In my book The Occultic Internet: Shifting Realities in 21st Century Discourse, I analyze how recent trends in social media and other digital spaces demonstrate our increasingly tenuous relationship with reality through analyzing trends such as reality shifting, the Mandela Effect, and digital conjuring. I explore these topics through the lens of what I identify as “digital occultic rhetoric,” arguing that they speak to broader cultural anxieties about reality and information bubbles in politics and culture.

Shira Chess

Alexander Fyfe (Comparative Literature)

Alexander Fyfe is an assistant professor of Comparative Literature and Intercultural Studies. His research interests are in African literatures, postcolonial literatures, Swahili studies, Francophone literatures, decolonial theory, literary theory, queer theory, gender studies, and African studies.

Project Title: Literary Decoloniality: Modern African Writing and the Politics of Subjectivity

Project Details

Literary Decoloniality is a scholarly book project. It argues that African writers, working from the 1940s to the present day, have consistently used literature to imagine new forms of subjectivity beyond the constraints of coloniality. This means that African writing is situated as a specific kind of decolonial practice, one that takes its unique features from writers’ use of literary aesthetics. As the first book-length work to apply an explicitly decolonial lens to modern African writing, the project shows the limitations of established postcolonialist approaches to the politics of African literatures in order to broaden and enrich understandings of the highly specific political work that African writing does. The book will comprise six chapters and will study a wide range of African literary materials written in English, French, and Swahili. It will constitute a major intervention in the fields of African literary studies and decolonial theory.

Alexander Fyfe

Tracey Johnson (History)

Tracey Johnson is an assistant professor in the Department of History. Her research interests are in history, African American history, art history, women’s history, and activism.

Project Title: Building a Black Arts Democracy: Black Arts Education and Institution Building in New York City, 1929-1993

Project Details

“Building a Black Arts Democracy: Black Arts Education and Institution Building in New York City, 1929- 1993,” examines Black artists’ efforts to provide a community-based arts education in predominantly Black sections of New York City after the Harlem Renaissance. Utilizing archival sources including correspondence, meeting minutes, and journal entries along with newspapers and visual art, the project focuses on the pedagogy of Black artist-educators and their impact on everyday Black New Yorkers. It uncovers how Black artist-educators activated art as a mechanism to explore and cultivate broader claims of representation, selfesteem, political consciousness, joy, and even therapy. The scholarship on Black education in the United States is vast, yet few studies have investigated the importance of Black art education as a tool to dismantle white supremacy.

Tracey Johnson

Joseph Kellner (History)

Joseph Kellner is an assistant professor in the Department of History. His research interests are in Russian and Soviet history, history of science, religious studies, cultural history, and historical anthropology.

Project Title: The Spirit of Socialism: Culture and Belief at the Soviet Collapse

Project Details

This book is the first cultural history of the Soviet collapse and transition, focused on a highly visible flourishing of new spiritual and ideological currents that accompanied the collapse in Russia in particular. By the late 1980s, a seeking milieu, mostly of the educated urban middle class, was looking beyond conventional politics or traditional faiths towards more radical conceptions of the world and the place of humans within it. In four case studies, the book reveals the existential problems facing Russians during the stormy 1990s, and the solutions—esoteric or dogmatic, foreign or homespun, utopian or conspiratorial—that they adopted in response. The revision I propose extends the study forward in time, and considers the relation of this earlier period to the rise of Putinism, with particular emphasis on the origins of contemporary Russian nationalism.

Joseph Kellner

Nate Kreuter (English)

Nate Kreuter is an associate professor in the Department of English. His research interests are in rhetoric, rhetorical theory, composition, rhetorical canon of style, rhetoric related to firearms and violence, and rhetoric in the US intelligence community.

Project Title: Tactical Fantasy Culture: The Rhetorical and Material Politics of Assault Weapons in America

Project Details

In my research project, “Tactical Fantasy Culture: The Rhetorical and Material Politics of Assault Weapons in America,” I seek to produce an academic monograph that examines the rhetorical and political consequences of the 2004 expiration of the 1994 Assault Weapons Ban. The expiration of the ban has allowed powerful, rapid-firing weapons to circulate broadly throughout the country. I will bring my perspective as a rhetorician and apply it to the cultural artifacts that surround a phenomenon that I call “tactical fantasy culture.” This study builds on prior work I have undertaken on rhetoric and guns, which has been wellreceived in my discipline. At the end of this research project I expect to have a manuscript to submit to either the University of Alabama Press, or South Carolina University Press, which are currently the top presses publishing monographs in rhetorical theory. Please see proposal for additional details about the theoretical approach I will bring to the project.

Nate Kreuter

Jordan Pickett (Classics)

Jordan Pickett is an assistant professor in the Department of History. His research interests are in archaeology, environmental history, and Classics (Roman and medieval Mediterranean history).

Project Title: Environment, Disease, and Climate Change in Antiquity

Project Details

Course release support from the Willson Center Fellowship will allow the applicant to advance work on five journal articles related to environmental and climate history in the Eastern Mediterranean, and on two monographs — one related to the evolution of Roman and Late Antique water infrastructure and urban environmental history, the other concerning Roman/medieval fortifications at Sardis in western Turkey.

Jordan Pickett

Cecília Rodrigues (Romance Languages)

Cecília Rodrigues is an associate professor in the Department of Romance Languages. Her research interests are contemporary Brazilian cultural production, historical fiction of the 21st century, ecofeminism, Indigenous literatures, women’s writing, and teaching of Portuguese as a foreign language.

Project Title: Indigenous Women Writers of the Americas: Hemispheric Literature as Act and Action

Project Details

Course release support from the Willson Center Fellowship will allow the applicant to advance work on five journal articles related to environmental and climate history in the Eastern Mediterranean, and on two monographs — one related to the evolution of Roman and Late Antique water infrastructure and urban environmental history, the other concerning Roman/medieval fortifications at Sardis in western Turkey.

Cecília Rodrigues

Logan Sawyer (Law)

Logan Sawyer is a professor in the School of Law. His research interests are in legal and constitutional history, political history, and the history of the legal profession.

Project Title: Partisan Jurisprudence: A Political History of Originalism, 1942-1992

Project Details

Course release support from the Willson Center Fellowship will allow the applicant to advance work on five journal articles related to environmental and climate history in the Eastern Mediterranean, and on two monographs — one related to the evolution of Roman and Late Antique water infrastructure and urban environmental history, the other concerning Roman/medieval fortifications at Sardis in western Turkey.

Logan E. Sawyer III

Roger Stahl (Communication Studies)

Roger Stahl is a professor in the Department of Communication Studies. His research interests are in rhetoric, media theory, political economy of media, cultural studies, and continental philosophy.

Project Title: Drafting the Monograph: Theaters of War

Project Details

Course release support from the Willson Center Fellowship will allow the applicant to advance work on five journal articles related to environmental and climate history in the Eastern Mediterranean, and on two monographs — one related to the evolution of Roman and Late Antique water infrastructure and urban environmental history, the other concerning Roman/medieval fortifications at Sardis in western Turkey.

Roger Stahl

Frans Weiser (Comparative Literature; LACSI)

Frans Weiser is an associate professor in the Department of Comparative Literature and Intercultural Studies. His research interests are in Latin American cultural history, inter-American studies, adaptation studies, historical fiction, and crime fiction.

Project Title: The Violence of Adaptation: Sourcing Nationalism and the State in the Contemporary Brazilian Cinema

Project Details

Combining interviews and archival research, The Violence of Adaptation places Brazil into dialogue with transnational adaptation networks and reevaluates critical characterizations of Brazil’s first wave of blockbusters in the twenty-first century. Sharing the use of crime fiction as a vehicle for critiquing narcotrafficking, inequality, and the failure of the State, many of these movies are adaptations, but their controversial examinations of violence have been treated in isolation. I demonstrate that comparative analysis of the source texts not only complicates reductive evaluations of the films’ politics, but also helps contextualize filmmakers’ political decisions and provides a blueprint for a quantifiable approach to intermedial adaptive strategies.

Frans Weiser

Hyangsoon Yi (Comparative Literature)

Hyangsoon Yi is a professor in the Department of Comparative Literature and Intercultural Studies. Her research interests are in comparative literature, Buddhism in literature and visual arts, and the history of Buddhist nuns.

Project Title: Ŭisang’s Ocean Seal Diagram in the Digital Era

Project Details

Course release support from the Willson Center Fellowship will allow the applicant to advance work on five journal articles related to environmental and climate history in the Eastern Mediterranean, and on two monographs — one related to the evolution of Roman and Late Antique water infrastructure and urban environmental history, the other concerning Roman/medieval fortifications at Sardis in western Turkey.

Hyangsoon Yi

2022 – 2023

Jon Forrest (Linguistics)

Jon Forrest is an assistant professor in the department of Linguistics. His research interests are in sociolinguistics.

Project Title: Redefining Southernness: Accents and Social Evaluation in a Changing South

Project Details

This project will examine how individuals’ perception of the relationship between language and Southern history affects the retention or loss of aspects of the traditional Southern accent. Traditional Southern accents are often negatively evaluated by listeners as uneducated, as well as being associated with negative stereotypes surrounding racial attitudes and beliefs. The project combines acoustic measurement of pronunciation patterns with in-depth analysis of ethnographic interviews conducted with residents of Georgia to illustrate how accent connects to aspects of Southern identity. In combining both modes of analysis, I will address how White speakers’ linguistic systems in particular are a tool to position themselves with relation to an “Old” and “New” South.

Jon Forrest

Berna Gueneli (Germanic and Slavic Studies)

Berna Gueneli is an Associate Professor in the department of Germanic and Slavic studies. Her research interests include German culture, film and media studies, and minority studies.

Project Title: Weimar Orientalisms: Orientalist Film and Visual Culture in the Weimar Republic (1919-1933)

Project Details

Weimar Orientalisms plans to examine Weimar Germany’s complex visualizations of the so-called “Orient.” Edward Said pioneered Orientalism research focusing on colonial texts by British and French Orientalists. While studies on Orientalism, since Said, are expansive and have engaged with literature, fashion, and the fine arts, German film & visual culture have received less attention thus far. To explore Weimar Germany’s fears, fascinations, and creative engagements with the “Orient,” this book combines a reading of Orientalist tendencies in cinema with an analysis of Orientalist visual culture. I intend to analyze Orientalism’s reach into the domains in everyday life and culture, particularly the visual domain, which has been influential (re)creating and engaging with public tastes and ideas. By drawing on 20th-century German language archival films, posters, photographs, and exhibition catalogues, this research will juxtapose and emphasize hitherto underexplored Orientalist material.

Berna Gueneli

David Haas (Hugh Hodgson School of Music)

David Haas is a professor in the Hugh Hodgson School of Music. His research interests include musicology, music theory, and musical applications of literary theory.

Project Title: Russian Reception of Shostakovich’s Symphonies: A Book Project (translation with commentary of 15 essays) and Related Research

Project Details

My research is on the fifteen symphonies of Dmitri Shostakovich, widely recognized as the most significant composer of symphonies after Gustav Mahler. While various writers have explored Shostakovich’s biography and cultural contexts, no scholarly book in English is devoted just to the symphonies themselves.

My goal is to assemble such a book, comprised of fifteen essays translated from the Russian, featuring both Soviet and post-Soviet authors. The wide-ranging opinions, network of rich cultural references, and raising of provocative issues decades earlier than in the West will make this long inaccessible material essential reading for scholars and performers.

The introduction and commentaries will establish the pre-Soviet foundations of Russian scholarship on the symphony and will highlight the strategies by which the authors managed to elude Soviet censors and engage with music that did not neatly and unambiguously align with the Party’s aesthetic directives.

David Haas

Rebecca Hallman-Martini (English)

Rebecca Hallman-Martini is an associate professor in the department of English. Her research interests are in English studies with an emphasis in rhetoric and composition.

Project Title: Centering Student Writers: Exploring a Students as Partners Approach to Linguistic Justice in the Writing Center

Project Details

In this project, I draw on qualitative research with student writers at different universities to develop a collaborative, students as partners (SaP) approach to writing center administration. I concentrate on better understanding the experiences and needs of underrepresented minority writers who engage with their university writing centers. I use what I learn to inform and rethink how writing centers support students, especially across difference and in pursuit of creating more inclusive and linguistically just spaces. I claim that, given writing center studies’ supposedly student-centered lens, our administrative policies, approaches to tutor education, and writing center offerings should be formed intentionally with direct input from student writers themselves.

Rebecca Hallman-Martini

Isiah Lavender III (English)

Isiah Lavender III is Sterling Goodman Professor of English. His research interests include American literature, African American literature, science fiction, and popular culture. He specializes in representations of race and ethnicity in science fiction, afrofuturism, and critical race theory.

Project Title: Critical Race Theory and Science Fiction

Project Details

Investigating science fiction (SF) sub-genres through critical race theory (CRT), this project provides a counter-narrative that reassesses American SF’s involvement in the dialogue on race and racism. It examines the structural, cultural, and political effects of racism inherent in our social institutions, reflected darkly in American SF through imaginary laws shaping possible futures—both good and bad—that promote and prompt change to ensure justice. The riveting stories of future pasts imagined by contemporary writers, largely Black, Indigenous, and other People of Color (BIPOC), confront the devastating consequences of racism and demand that we learn important lessons about: perceptions of criminality and mass incarceration; generational oppressions and systemic poverty; surveillance and race baiting; biopolitics and racial identity configurations (othering); and racial fears and antiracism.

Isiah Lavender III

Kendall Marchman (Religion)

Kendall Marchman is an assistant professor in the department of religion. His research interests include Buddhism and East Asian religions.

Project Title: The Western Pure Land: (Mis)Representations of Pure Land Buddhism

Project Details

This project considers Western accounts and representations of Pure Land Buddhism, from the earliest Jesuit reports of it in the sixteenth century to the way that contemporary scholars discuss it, and why these discussions are often in comparison to Christianity. The guiding questions for this project are: What is the reason for this tendency toward this comparison, and what have been the ramifications of it? The project continues the work of analyzing the history of the study of religion, an effort that originally intended to demonstrate European and Christian superiority. This project is part of the larger effort to acknowledge academia’s past and continue the work to decolonize it. My research will deeply investigate voices from the past to ascertain what, perhaps, has been hidden beneath early Western representations of Pure Land Buddhism.

Kendall Marchman

Richard Menke (English)

Richard Menke is a professor in the department of English. His research interests include Victorian literature and culture, media history, eco-criticism, and environmental humanities.

Project Title: Pages, Cables, Waves: Ecologies of Media and Literature from Wood Pulp to Wireless

Project Details

This book project brings an eco-critical lens to the histories of literature and media as it focuses on the rise of three great late-Victorian media that would become mainstays of twentieth-century modernity: wood pulp paper, cable telegraphy, and radio. In keeping with the broad reach of these media, and with the widely dispersed biomes that were exploited to furnish their physical materials, part of the point of the project is to treat media history and the Victorian literary imagination from a perspective that is not only environmental but also global.

Richard Menke

Karin Myhre (Comparative Literature)

Karin Myhre is an associate professor in the department of comparative literature and intercultural studies. Her research interests include Asian studies; Chinese studies; pre-modern Chinese literature; and Chinese drama, humor, ghosts, and demons.

Project Title: Naive Spectatorship and Comic Play in Chinese Theater

Project Details

The project tracks examples of performed and performance-based humor in middle period Chinese (ca. 960-1368) as strategy for detailed exploration of the ways that theatrical representation and perception were understood. This approach locates moments of theatricality through a broad range of sources and periods, providing alternatives for current literal and epistemic readings.

Karin Myhre

Peter O’Neill (Comparative Literature)

Peter O’Neill is an associate professor in the department of comparative literature and intercultural studies. His research interests include Irish American literature, nineteenth-century American cultural history, comparative racialization, and transnational literature.

Project Title: The American Frontiers of Dillon O’Brien

Project Details

A five-chapter book on the life and times of Dillon O’Brien (1817-1882), Irish-American author and activist.

Peter O'Neill

Jennifer Palmer (History)

Jennifer Palmer is an associate professor in the department of history. Her research interests include history and women’s studies, Latin American and Caribbean studies, and African diaspora studies.

Project Title: Race, Gender, and Property Ownership in the Eighteenth-Century French Atlantic World

Project Details

Where did white male privilege come from? This project traces its legal roots to the early eighteenth-century Atlantic world, which plantation economies made a key site for global capitalism. Simultaneously, the complexity of governing empires prompted a shift to codified law from customary law. Slavery and colonialism triggered these two transformations, which solidified white male privilege while abolishing ownership opportunities open to white women and free women of color.

The experiences of women in five different French Atlantic locales show how ownership existed alongside or outside the legal system. Women constructed ownership socially, through building relationships and consensus. Laws, court cases, and legal rulings gradually closed off these prospects. The emerging paradigm of ownership merged property and privilege, so owning property meant exerting contract-based authority over land and people. Ownership thus became a legal foundation of white patriarchal privilege.

Jennifer Palmer

Adam Parkes (English)

Adam Parkes is a professor in the department of English. His research interests include British, Irish, and American literature from the late nineteenth century to the twenty-first.

Project Title: Questions of Style: Ishiguro in the Archive

Project Details

This project will explore style in the fiction of the Japanese-British novelist Kazuo Ishiguro. Focusing on four novels, I will conduct research in the extensive Ishiguro archive at the University of Texas and start writing a book based on my findings. Ishiguro scholarship typically pursues a thematic focus of one sort or another without giving due consideration to the verbal textures of his prose. By studying the notes, drafts, manuscripts and typescripts in the Texas collection, and scrutinizing Ishiguro’s methods of composition, I will bring much-needed attention to the life (or lives) of the words that Ishiguro uses to build his fictional worlds. By such means, I will elucidate the relations that Ishiguro’s fiction draws between subject-matter and verbal manner, and so breathe new life into the difficult ethical and political issues that his work undeniably raises.

Adam Parkes

Vera Lee-Schoenfeld (Linguistics)

Vera Lee-Schoenfeld is an associate professor in the department of English. Her research interests include linguistic theory, generative syntax, and Germanic languages.

Project Title: A Linguistic Minority in Contact with a National Majority: A Comparative Analysis of Reflexive Objects in Pennsylvania Dutch, German, and English

Project Details

This project will explore style in the fiction of the Japanese-British novelist Kazuo Ishiguro. Focusing on four novels, I will conduct research in the extensive Ishiguro archive at the University of Texas and start writing a book based on my findings. Ishiguro scholarship typically pursues a thematic focus of one sort or another without giving due consideration to the verbal textures of his prose. By studying the notes, drafts, manuscripts and typescripts in the Texas collection, and scrutinizing Ishiguro’s methods of composition, I will bring much-needed attention to the life (or lives) of the words that Ishiguro uses to build his fictional worlds. By such means, I will elucidate the relations that Ishiguro’s fiction draws between subject-matter and verbal manner, and so breathe new life into the difficult ethical and political issues that his work undeniably raises.

Vera Lee-Schoenfeld

Isabelle Wallace (Lamar Dodd School of Art)

Isabelle Wallace is an associate professor in the Lamar Dodd School of Art. Her research interests include contemporary art history, visual culture, art theory, psychoanalysis, semiotics, aesthetics, and philosophy.

Project Title: Subjectivity and Signification: The Art of Jasper Johns

Project Details

Subjectivity and Signification: The Art of Jasper Johns is a book-length study of the American painter, Jasper Johns (b. 1930) with emphasis given to concurrent developments in the fields of psychoanalysis, genetics, and semiotics. Widely characterized as the most significant painter of the postwar period, Johns is also a key theorist of the visual image whose paintings ask incisive questions about art, subjectivity and, as I claim, the relationship between the two. An artist who comes of age in the mid-1950s as Modernism is giving way to Postmodernism, Johns is seen as a key player in art’s mid-century transformation, which is notably contemporaneous with the discovery of DNA’s double helix structure and Lacan’s seminars in Paris. My project brings these (and other) phenomena together for the first time for the purpose of exploring undertheorized links between Western conceptions of the image and individual in the postwar period, when each undergoes a significant and related shift.

Isabelle Wallace

2021 – 2022

Nora Benedict (Romance Languages)

Nora Benedict is Assistant Professor of Romance Languages. Her research interests include Latin American Literature, Bibliography/Book History, and Digital Humanities.

Project Title: Taking a Page from Their Books: Latin American Editors and Global Publishing Trends

Project Details

“Taking a Page from Their Books” provides the first thoroughgoing study of foreign intervention in Latin American publishing and, in the process, sheds light on the literary, political, and economic implications of U.S. and European operations in the book industry in the Global South—for this project, specifically developing countries in Latin America. In particular, I provide a series of case study of different foreign publishers—W. M. Jackson, Albatross, Penguin, McGraw-Hill, and Knopf—who became key figures in Latin American book production during this period. Through a careful analysis of these specific firms, my project reveals the various and nuanced factors (economic, political, literary, and ideological) that shaped the activities and commercial successes of publishers from the Global North in Latin America.

Nora Benedict

James. F. Brooks (History)

James F. Brooks is Professor of History. His research interests include Indigenous and Colonial past in North America, archaeology, public history, the anthropology of philanthropy, and NGO management

Project Title: Picketwire: Life, Death, and Uncertainty across the American Southlands

Project Details

“Picketwire” is at once place and story. Titled after the colloquial version of a watershed name, that of El Rio de las Animas Perdidas en Purgatorio, which originates in the 13,000-foot peaks of the Sangre de Cristo mountains and flows 196 miles across Southwestern Colorado, “Picketwire” the story explores a kaleidoscope of characters toward an understanding of my historical craft as rarely one of firm conviction; rather, for me, a process that requires an elastic suspension of moral certainty. Our most cherished characters, it seems, are often the most disturbing, and not simply for the charge they bring to a story. More often than not they carry forward the deeper work of illuminating the tangled qualities of historical actors, and provide an author the occasional opportunity, in rendering them human, to atone on their behalf, and perhaps, our own.

James Brooks

Suzanne Pilaar Birch (Anthropology and Geography)

Suzanne Pilaar Birch is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Geography. Her research interests include environmental archaeology, zooarchaeology, human paleoecology, stable isotope analysis, paleoclimate, archaeobiology, digital archaeology, public engagement/outreach, women in earth sciences, natural history, climate change adaptation, agricultural transitions, and migration and seasonal mobility.

Project Title: More than Meat: Animal-Human Relationships in Prehistory

Project Details

My proposed book will be a foundational text that centers on a more holistic approach to how we consider the role of animals in our shared past. While the complex and fundamental role that animals play in our conceptualization of ourselves as a species has gained some recognition in human-animal studies more recently, this relationship is often reduced to one of consumption and power in the archaeological record, a paradigm that this book will disrupt. It goes beyond animals as meat and instead applies evidence from the field of zooarchaeology to understand animal agency and their dynamic roles as symbols, co-workers, and companions from the earliest prehistory with relevance for multispecies relationships today and in the future.

Suzanne Pilaar Birch

Rachel Gabara (Romance Languages)

Rachel Gabara is an Associate Professor of Romance Languages. Her research interests include film studies, African studies, and Francophone studies.

Project Title: Reclaiming Realism: From Documentary Film in Africa to African Documentary Film

Project Details

The first book in English to focus on African documentary, “Reclaiming Realism” will explore the aesthetic, sociopolitical, and historical development of nonfiction film in West and Central Africa. For over half a century, French colonial documentary claimed to capture the truth about Africa and Africans. After independence, African filmmakers reclaimed the cinema and their cinematic image by experimenting with documentary content, voice and style. This project will demonstrate the vital importance of documentary first to French colonialism, then to a post-independence reframing of African identities and modes of filmic discourse. A transnational study that highlights the complex interactions between colonial and postcolonial cinemas, “Reclaiming Realism” intervenes in contemporary critical debates about global documentary and the very nature of filmic representations of reality.

Rachel Gabara

Barbara McCaskill (English)

Barbara McCaskill is Professor of English. Her research interests include African American Literature, African American History, History and Culture of African American Freedom Struggle, and Black Feminism

Project Title: The Penn Center’s Influence on the Literature and Culture of the Twentieth-Century African American Freedom Struggle

Project Details

My project will examine the writings and philosophies on racial inequity, war, and poverty that emerged out of the Penn Center before and after Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination. This fifty-acre National Historic Landmark on St. Helena Island, South Carolina, was founded in 1864 by Hastings Gantt, a formerly enslaved person, as Penn School for the freedpeople.  During the twentieth century it was a community center and then destination for civil rights organizations to strategize, organize, train in methods of nonviolence, and run “freedom schools” about civics and citizenship. Dr. King met here with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and a cottage was built for him.  I will research archives to produce a scholarly essay on collaborations between activists and community members; then a university press book on the local, national, and international impact of the literature and speeches incubated at the Center; and updates to the Civil Rights Digital Library.

Barbara McCaskill

Eric Morales-Franceschini (English and Latin American and Caribbean Studies Institute)

Eric Morales-Franceschini is Assistant Professor of English and Latin American and Caribbean Studies. His research interests include aesthetics of liberation, poetics of history, decolonial and subaltern studies, Caribbean and Latinx literature, Cuban cinema, liberation theology, and critical theory.

Project Title: Tenacious Beauty: Theses on Militancy as an Aesthetic

Project Details

A theoretic yet historically and culturally grounded inquiry on militancy as an aesthetic. The project revisits the rhetoric and iconography of the 1960s “Third World militant” in order to elaborate a critical vocabulary with which we can scrutinize and understand militancy as an aesthetic: the begetting body, obediential love, sovereign performativity, and the sacrificial sublime. Drawing on this vocabulary as well as on poststructuralist, decolonial, and Marxist thought, I flesh out four “theses” on what makes militancy a simultaneously erotic and ecstatic force, simultaneously seductive and scandalizing. Lastly, I put them in dialogue with our contemporary context of reemergent and (in)commensurate militancies.

Eric Morales-Franceschini

Mary Hallam Pearse (Lamar Dodd School of Art)

Mary Hallam Pearse is Associate Professor of Art. Her research and creative interests include material culture, object and meaning, jewelry, design, craft, and fashion design.

Project Title: Following the Matter (working title)

Project Details

As an artist working in the field of jewelry and metals, my research often takes the form of wearable objects. My current body of work, entitled Following the Matter, consists of three intricate, handmade objects, whose charged materials and historically resonant forms express the paradoxical links between our senses, desire and death. I will travel to civil war battlefields in Chattanooga, Tennessee, for the purpose of collecting civil-war era lead artifacts which I will melt down and use to construct a “pearl” necklace, which is in fact comprised of lead. This necklace and other, related objects, will form the basis of a one-person exhibition to be held in July 2022 at Stove Works Gallery in Chattanooga, Tennessee.

Mary Hallam Pearse

Emily Sahakian (Theatre & Film Studies and Romance Languages)

Emily Sahakian is Associate Professor of Theatre & Film Studies and Romance Languages. Her research interests include theatre and performance studies, French and Francophone studies, and African diaspora studies

Project Title: Ubu Repertory Theater: Decolonizing Stages and Mindsets through Franco-American Exchange

Project Details

The first full-length scholarly study of Ubu Repertory Theater, an important Franco-American theatre in New York that translated and staged 251 new French-language plays from around the world while addressing racism, colonialism, and heterosexism through Franco-American exchange. The book will contribute to histories of French and American theatre, extending scholarly discussions of French theatre in the U.S. and of Off-Off Broadway. By describing the multiple and nuanced cultural conflicts and encounters that occur under the umbrella of Franco-American exchange, I will contribute to the scholarship on intercultural performance, a major subfield of theatre and performance studies and a nexus of interdisciplinarity. Ubu self-reflexively embraced what it referred to in publicity as its commitment to the “cross-cultural,” challenging artists and audiences to embrace an ethical stance rooted in the experience of exile by engaging in comparative reflection on norms, values, and worldviews.

Emily Sahakian

Esra Santesso (English)

Esra Santesso is Associate Professor of English. Her research interests include Postcolonial Literature and Theory with particular attention to critical race theory, feminism, and human rights narratives.

Project Title: Muslim Comics and Warscapes

Project Details

This project focuses on contemporary comics, primarily from the Middle East, that offer new approaches to representing local Muslim identities while pushing back against existing tropes. Growing impatient with reductionist depictions of this faith group, Muslim artists/authors are responding to the difficulty of defining “Muslim identity” across multiple nations, ethnicities, races, and linguistic groups. Concentrating on warscapes—what I define as areas marked by prolonged disruptions generated by political uncertainty and civil unrest—I engage with a comparative analysis of comics that feature Muslim subjects under duress. My argument is two-fold: first, regardless of their geographical locations and political dispositions, each narrative is concerned with positioning itself as part of a counter-narrative to combat Muslim stereotypes. Second, the notion of “drawing to tell” situates these comics as witness accounts, keen on exposing wrong-doings in their respective societies.

Esra Santesso

Mi-Ryong Shim (Comparative Literature and Intercultural Studies)

Mi-Ryong Shim is Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature and Intercultural Studies). Her research interests include literature, cultural studies, Asian studies, postcolonial studies, mobility studies, cultural geography, translation studies, and globalization studies

Project Title: Asia as Movement: Asian Transnationalism and the Fantasy of Mobility in Late Colonial Korean Literature and Culture

Project Details

My project examines how Korean writers, artists, and filmmakers in the 1930s and 40s depicted the experiences of spatial and geographic movement in a wide range of literary texts and visual materials. I argue that the wartime Japanese empire’s construction of an expansive and fluid transnational space called “Asia” provided colonized Korean subjects with a sense of agency and freedom tied to crossing distances and transgressing boundaries. Being in motion allowed Koreans to imagine themselves, even if temporarily, not as colonized subjects but as empowered participants in the creation of a new Japan-led global order. Yet, Korean representations of mobility also had a subversive effect; they repeatedly destabilized and complicated the spatio-social logic of the empire.

Mi-Ryong Shim

Alexander Spektor (Germanic and Slavic Studies)

Alexander Spektor is Associate Professor of Germanic and Slavic Studies) His research interests include comparative literature, transnational studies, and Slavic literature.

Project Title: Literature Overcoming Itself: Poetics of Language in Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, Andrei Platonov, and Varlam Shalamov

Project Details

In my present project, I turn to 20th-century Russian modernist tradition to investigate how writing participates in the formation of the subject. In particular, I look at three Russian and Soviet writers: Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, Andrei Platonov, and Varlam Shalamov. My goal is to make apparent the deep philosophic and aesthetic affinities between these three very different authors. In their prose, all three pay intense attention to the form-shaping powers of the word, especially as it orchestrates the ethical, social, political, and biological life of a subject. What emerges from their work is the complex function of language in the organization of the subject’s life, especially when measured against the Soviet state’s blunt appropriation of culture as an instrument of subject’s ideological reconstitution.  As such, the prose of Krzhizhanovsky, Platonov, and Shalamov stands as a powerful corrective to the unreflective instrumentalization of language by the Soviet state.

Alexander Spektor

Amy Trauger (Geography)

Amy Trauger is Professor of Geography. Her research interests include political movements, food politics and the human right to food.

Project Title: The biopolitics of Allowable Death in the Food System

Project Details

Since the rise of the organic movement in the 1980’s, ethical eating has intersected with health and fad diets to enter the mainstream. Organic, fair trade, humane certified and other such labeled foods are now commonplace in supermarkets in the United States. Many geographers study the impacts of ecological health and ethical diets, but most are curiously silent on the topic of death in the food system. Of specific concern in this project is what or who is allowed to live and what is let die in the “doing of good” through ethical, ecological or health-driven diets. The original contribution of my project is to show how discourses and practices of ethical eating often (re)produce, at a distance, the socio-ecological harm most ethical consumers set out to avoid. With a Willson Fellowship, I will develop a book proposal, two draft chapters to submit to Duke University Press and a journal article to be submitted to Gastronomica: The Journal of Critical Food Studies.

Amy Trauger

2020 – 2021

Joshua Bousquette (Germanic and Slavic Studies / Linguistics)

Joshua Bousquette is an Associate Professor of Germanic & Slavic Studies and Linguistics. His research interests inldue   linguistics, historical linguistics, sociolinguistics, history of German, dialects of German, and languages in contact / contact varieties of German.

Project Title: Decentering ‘Germans’: The Richness of German from a Variationist Perspective

Project Details

The current book-length manuscript and companion website are entitled “Decentering ‘Germans’: the richness of German from a variationist perspective.” Co-authored with Joshua  Brown, Michael Putnam & Joseph Salmons, the work focuses on the history of non-standard German dialects, serving as an alternative – and also as a supplement – to the traditional historical narrative’s focus on the development of the national standard language. We therefore have two primary goals: first, to address the hierarchy inherent in standard language ideology, which not only creates a retroactive, historical narrative legitimizing the nation state, but also relegates non-standard varieties and their speakers to secondary socio-cultural status; and second, to enrich our understanding of the history of the German language by considering the wealth of dialects spoken not only across Europe, but also in diasporic, post-colonial, immigrant and migrant communities in Africa, Papua New Guinea, and the Americas.

Joshua Bousquette

Ari Levine (History)

Ari Levine is an Associate Professor of History. His research interests include cultural history, Chinese studies, and visual culture.

Project Title: Mirrors of the Mind: Vision, Visuality, and Memory in Song China

Project Details

In Mirrors of the Mind, I attempt to reconstruct the implicit rules that governed the culture of visuality in middle-period China, by examining the metaphors and vocabularies that Song-dynasty literati employed to comprehend the visual perception, cognition, and memory. Moving beyond explicit theories of mind and optics, I seek to extract the implicit categories through which scholars imagined visual experience. Across a wide range of genres, literati recorded impressions of how the eye could see, how the mind envisioned inner and outer worlds, and how visions were encoded in memory. I will interrogate primary sources including painters’ biographies, Buddhist hagiography, travel records, poetic commentaries, antiquarian catalogs, and legal compendia to explain how sight and seeing involved both optical and mentalized processes. I am seeking a Willson Fellowship to research and write two more chapters, and to apply for major grants and fellowships for funding to complete this project

Sharina Maillo-Pozo (Romance Languages)

Sharina Maillo-Pozo is an Assistant Professor of Romance Languages. Her research interests include Latinx Studies, Dominican Studies, Caribbean Studies, Women’s Studies, and Performance Studies.

Project Title: Bridging Borderlands: Popular Music in Contemporary Dominican/ Dominicanyork Literature and Performance Latinx Studies, Dominican Studies, Caribbean Studies, Women’s Studies, Performance Studies

Project Details

Bridging Borderlands: Popular Music in Contemporary Dominican/ Dominicanyork Literature and Performance examines the cultural production of Dominicans in New York City and the Dominican Republic as the result of mass migration of Dominicans to the United States post-1965. The project illustrates how the interdisciplinary dialogue between Dominican, Caribbean, and Afro-diasporic popular music, literature, and performance is a valuable collective archive to examine the cultural borderlands of Dominican identity in a transnational context. The end-goal of the project is to show how the proliferation of what I term “musical texts” in the aftermath of the massive exodus of Dominicans to the United States after the 1960’s signals the ways in which transnational cultural production has an ambivalent value as it either refuses to acquiesce or perpetuates dominant narratives of gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, and nationality in the Dominican Republic and its diaspora in the US

Nicolas Morrissey (Lamar Dodd School of Art)

Nicolas Morrissey is an Associate Professor of Art History in the Lamar Dodd School of Art. History of South Asian Art and Visual Culture, Buddhist Studies, Social and Religious History of South, Southeast and Central Asia, Hindu Studies and Indology, Prakrit, Sanskrit, and Tibetan Studies; History of Religions; the Buddhist, Hindu and Jain History, Archaeology, Epigraphy, Architecture, and Art History of India, Non-literary sources for the study of literary religions, the relationship of textual sources and formal doctrine to actual practice and material culture.

Project Title: Ritual and Visual Eclecticism in the Buddhist Art of Medieval South Asia: The Terracotta Sculptures of Nandadirghika Monastery (West Bengal)

Project Details

The primary aim of my project is to create the first comprehensive catalog of over 300 extant terracotta sculpted plaques dating to the ninth century CE from the Nandadirghika Buddhist monastic complex in West Bengal, India and to provide a thorough art historical analysis of this imagery in order to call due attention to its substantial historical importance. Outside of an incomplete report summarizing excavation activity at the site published in 2012, and one scholarly article published in 1999, which contains only a handful of illustrations, the archaeological material from Nandadirghika remains largely unknown by scholars outside of India. When brought to light, the terracotta art from this site will result in a major revision to the current historical reconstruction of Buddhism during the Medieval period, and will provoke a serious reconsideration of the broader orientation of Buddhist ritual practice in medieval India and its relationship to other rival religious traditions.

Nicolas Morrissey

Rielle Navitski  (Theatre and Film Studies)

Rielle Navitski is an Associate Professor of Theatre and Film Studies. Her research interests include film studies and Latin American studies.

Project Title: Transatlantic Cinephilia: Networks of Film Culture Between Latin America and France, 1945-1965

Project Details

With the recent “Pink Tide” of left-wing movements and subsequent turn to the right, Latin America has re-emerged in the US imagination as a region marked by political extremes. In the similarly polarized postwar moment, institutions of film culture in Latin America and France collaborated to manage cinema’s social effects and participated in a mutually beneficial exchange of cultural capital. Fostering viewers’ critical sensibilities as a safeguard against menacing ideologies, film clubs, festivals, archives, magazines and film schools advanced French cultural diplomacy and lent prestige to Latin America’s new middle classes. Drawing on archival research in seven countries, my project charts alternative trajectories of cultural exchange not mediated by the United States—despite its growing global hegemony in the period—challenging the familiar binary of capitalist Hollywood vs. the leftist New Latin American Cinema and shedding new light on film culture’s role in Cold War geopolitics.

Daniel Rood (History)

Daniel Rood is an Associate Professor of History. His research interests include history of African-Americans, ecology, capitalism, and agriculture.

Project Title: Rural Afterlives of Slavery and Emancipation: Landownership, Politics, and Ecological Strategy Among Black Farmers in Clarke County, Georgia, 1865-1980

Project Details

My new book project examines the “rural afterlives” of slavery by looking at the dynamics of race, land ownership, and agricultural transformation in Athens-Clarke County between 1865 and 1980. I focus particular attention on one very interesting, and widely forgotten case. In 1900 a group of black tenant farmers in northern Clarke County, with the help of a local community leader named Judia Jackson Harris, pooled their money and began buying contiguous 40 acre plots of land along Danielsville Road. They ended up controlling a few hundred acres, building a “Rural Model Training School” for their children, and calling their collective homeplace “Settlement.” A fine-grained micro-history of this patch of Clarke County, my project places everyday agricultural practice, ecological strategy, and small-scale investment decisions within the local landscape, while also viewing these factors within the context of government corruption, technological change, and a regime of racial terror.

Daniel Rood

Susan Rosenbaum (English)

Susan Rosenbaum is anAssociate Professor of English. Her research interests include Twentieth-Century American literature, poetry & poetics, modernism in literature and the visual arts, history of the avant-garde, women writers, and digital humanities.

Project Title: Experimental Bishop

Project Details

“Experimental Bishop” explores writer Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979) as a poet dedicated to experiment. Scholars have positioned Bishop as an accessible modernist writer who prized restraint, intimacy, and the perfection of craft, in contrast to the historical avant-garde, literally the “advance guard” of an army, the predominantly white, male-dominated movements that formed in the early twentieth century, whose experimental works opposed art institutions and sought to challenge and shock their audiences. In demonstrating Bishop’s absorption of and contribution to a tradition of experimental writing, this book poses a dual challenge to ways of reading Bishop and ways of reading women poets and the historical avant-garde. I approach Bishop’s writing as a case study in how women writers have often used their position outside or on the margins of avant-garde movements and institutions as an impetus to experiment, necessitating new ways of thinking about literary experimentation.

Susan Rosenbaum

Piers Stephens  (Philosophy)

Piers Stephens is an Associate Professor of Philosophy. His research interests include environmental philosophy, history of ideas, ethics, political philosophy, literature, and philosophy.

Project Title: Nature, Liberty and Dystopia

Project Details

In this book project, I develop an account of the value of nonhuman nature for human freedom. This is construed both politically and psychologically via three theses. Firstly, I outline two pre-modern traditions that may illuminate the relationship between individual liberty and environmental protection. Secondly, I argue that these traditions, though philosophically marginalized, have intellectually survived in a new form, dystopian literature. Thirdly, I use readings of classic dystopian texts that these traditions’ insights can establish nature protection as a stimulus to individual freedom when recast in contemporary form. When completed, the project will integrate results from philosophy, history, political theory and literature.

Piers Stephens

2019 – 2020

Lesley Feracho (Romance Languages / Institute for African American Studies)

Lesley Feracho is an Associate Director of the Institute for African American Studies and Associate Professor of Romance Languages and African American Studies. Her research interests include literature, Latin American studies, diaspora studies, and African American studies.

Project Title: Afro-Diasporic Transnationalism and Black Feminism: Transatlantic Dialogues of Black Women Writers in the United States and Brazil

Project Details

The purpose of this project is twofold:  to analyze African American women writers’ exploration of marginalization, resistance, and citizenship through their narratives and poetic dialogues with Brazilian culture, and to contextualize their works within Black Brazilian women’s theoretical reflections on African American culture. I apply Adelle-Callahan’s concept of literary transnationalism  and Samantha Pinto’s theory of difficult diasporas to study African American women’s literary engagement with Brazil, in poetry and narrative from the 19th century to the 21st century by writers Frances Harper, Paule Marshall, Jayne Cortez, Gayl Jones and Alaya Dawn Johnson, ending with Black Brazilian women’s dialogue with the United States through examples of cultural translation.  In so doing I examine how their works provide a space for Black women to participate in transatlantic conversations that address multiple oppressions while creating empowering alliances and solidarities.

Emily Koh (Hugh Hodgson School of Music)

Emily Koh is an Assistant Professor of Music. Her research interests include music composition, microtonal music, intercultural transfers, Balinese Gamelan, and interdisciplinary collaborations in music. She is also the winner of the Virginia Mary Macagnoni Prize for Innovative Research.

Project Title: New Composition for Two 48-EDO Microtonal Alto Saxophones and Live Electronics, and an Album of Microtonal Saxophone Music

Project Details

My research project comprises of two parts. One, I will be composing a new work for two quarter-tonally offset alto saxophones with live electronics. This will be a development on a current, in-progress work, b(locked.orders)—for soprano saxophone, live electronics and video art—that will be completed and premiered in Spring 2019. Two, I will record an album of all my saxophone works, including the newly composed work outlined above. The works in this album include:

  • homonym (2013) for saxophone quartet — 7 minutes
  • heteronym/ (2016) for saxophone quartet — 7 minutes
  • cryptonym: (2018) for saxophone quartet — 12 minutes
  • [motes] (2013) for alto saxophone and electronics — 6 minutes
  • medi+ation (2017) for baritone saxophone — 7 minutes
  • b(locked.orders) (2019) for soprano saxophone, live electronics and video art —- 14 minutes
  • proposed new work (2020) for two alto saxophones and live electronics — 15 minutes
  • Total running time: 68 minutes
Emily Koh

Jonathan Haddad (Romance Languages)

Jonathan Haddad is an Assistant Professor of Romance Languages. His research interests include French Literature, Mediterranean studies, and early modern cultural studies.

Project Title: The Snake in the Library: Turkish Literature in the French Republic of Letters

Project Details

This fellowship will support the completion of my first book, a microhistory of the French debates about Turkish literature that followed the 1728 expedition to the Ottoman Empire to collect manuscripts for the Royal Library. Moving between Istanbul and France, I draw from the disciplines of cultural history, history of the book, sociology of literature, and literary analysis to contrast the discourses about literature of French travelers to the Ottoman Empire with the demands of an emerging Orientalist French literary market. I present a new facet of Orientalism at the dawn of the Enlightenment and offer a critical analysis of the universalism of the concept of the Republic of Letters. Further, this project contributes to a broader discussion in the field of World Literature about the role of geopolitical imbalances in shaping the object of literature. The course release offered by the fellowship will allow me to complete archival research in France and finalize my manuscript.

Casie LeGette (English)

Casie LeGette is an Associate Professor of English.  Her research interests include nineteenth-century British literature, poetics, and book history.

Project Title: Editing Empire: Anthologies and School Readers in the Nineteenth Century

Project Details

My project tracks the enormous influence of nineteenth-century anthologies and schoolbooks on education, on literary history, and on generations of readers throughout the British empire. Nineteenth-century anthologies and school readers, though designed for British children, spread much more widely, shipped across the empire to be used in Canada and the Caribbean. Many twentieth-century Caribbean authors respond to scenes of colonial instruction in nineteenth-century British poetry; in this project, I seek to explore the textual history of those encounters by examining the textbooks that produced them. Although anthologies and textbooks likely account for most encounters between readers and literature, they have not received sufficient attention: I am thus currently composing a book-length study of anthologies. With this fellowship, I will perform archival research and draft the section of this project dedicated to anthologies and education in the empire, particularly in the Caribbean.

Cody Marrs (English)

Cody Marrs is an Associate Professor of English. His research interests include nineteenth-century American literature, Herman Melville, Civil War literature and culture, poetry and poetics, aesthetic theory, and philosophies of time and periodization.

Project Title: On Melville and Beauty

Project Details

This book examines Melville’s engagements with beauty, as a concept as well as a shared experience. By placing beauty at the center of the field, it provides a revisionary history of American literary studies as well as a new interpretive approach. In short, Melville shows us that (1) beauty is endemic in nature; (2) it is laterally rather than hierarchically distributed; and (3) it tends to dissolve and re-form individual identities. Those insights continue to resonate, and they offer a variety of ways to reframe and reconceptualize literary studies, as well as humanities scholarship more generally.

Peter A. O’Connell (Classics and Communication Studies)

Peter A. O’Connell is an Assistant Professor of Classics and Communication Studies. His research interests include Ancient Greek rhetoric and poetics, Greek literature from the archaic period to late antiquity, and Classical Athens.

Project Title: The Rhetoric of Finance in Classical Athens

Project Details

My project would be the first comprehensive study of finance as a rhetorical strategy in Classical Athens. Two central claims govern my approach. References to financial details in Athenian speeches are meant primarily to persuade, rather than to inform, and speakers expect their audiences to interpret financial details in terms of cultural values. Against the background of these claims, I plan to focus particularly on how orators adopt poses of authority, make their arguments seem transparent and reliable, and add vividness to their descriptions by taking advantage of the visual nature of numbers, property, and money. Grounded in ancient texts, my project would explore the ties between rhetoric and mathematics and between oral or written calculations and public counting displays. I also plan to develop a methodology that, for the first time, takes account of modern studies of the rhetoric of economics and their importance for Athenian oratory.

Cassia Roth (History)

Cassia Roth is an Assistant Professor of History. Her research interests include history, Latin American studies, and gender studies.

Project Title: Birthing Abolition: Reproduction and the Gradual Abolition of Slavery in Brazil 

Project Details

Birthing Abolition analyzes how enslaved women’s reproductive practices shaped the gradual abolition of slavery in 19th-century Brazil. The project contends that the struggle to end slavery was entangled not only with elite understandings of slave demographics but also with enslaved women’s own agency. To do so, it examines demographic trends, elite views of enslaved women’s reproduction, and slave women’s reproductive agency. Like in most Atlantic slave societies, the Brazilian slave population was reproduced through imports and not natural growth. Historians have argued that harsh labor regimes and disease caused negative rates, dismissing the idea of reproductive resistance, or the calculated enslaved practices of abortion and infanticide. While enslaved women’s fertility control may not have affected demographics, I hypothesize that they played an important symbolic role in how elites understood slavery itself, creating the framework for the legal process of gradual abolition.

Alberto Villate-Isaza (Romance Languages)

Alberton Villate-Isaza is an Assistant Professor of Romance Languages. His research interests include Latin-American colonial literature and culture, the Hispanic Baroque, Early-Modern Hispanic world, discourses of Latin-American national identity, and nineteenth- and early twentieth- century Latin-American literature, especially Modernismo.

Project Title: Secular Evangelization: Inner Colonization and The Ambiguities of History in the Baroque New Kingdom of Granada

Project Details

Pedro Simón’s “Noticias historiales,” Rodríguez Freile’s “El carnero,” and Fernández de Piedrahita’s “Historia general” are three 17th-century historical accounts that combine archival documentation, crime, instances of deceit and salacious anecdotes to construct a complex portrait of colonial society of the New Kingdom of Granada (modern-day Colombia). I argue that the use of moral corruption in these texts intends to both deter deviant and define appropriate behaviors for the colonizing elite, through a process of subjectification based on principles of self-control and obedience that are internalized, rather than externally imposed. I also demonstrate that moral corruption is the main factor undermining instruction, as the use of documented examples of crime inevitably shows how to evade the law, instead of what not to do. This ambiguity ultimately exposes the failure of the ideological project of the colonial enterprise, by unveiling the violence and exploitation that supports it.

Michael P. Winship (History)

Michael P. Winship is a Professor and E. Merton Coulter Chair in the Department of History. His research interests include Early Modern history and religion.

Project Title: Visible Saints and Quarreling Churches

Project Details

This project is an intertwined investigation of 17th century New England puritan quarrels over church membership and quarrels over the communal obligations of their individual Congregational churches. There was excellent mid-20th century work on the former topic, but it was pioneering and it painted with a broad bush, which meant that important details and important disagreements among allies, along with important ancillary issues, were left unexamined. The second topic has never been explored systematically. The topics make a natural pair. The church membership debates, because of their intensity and perceived high stakes, were where issues about the nature and powers of Congregational church government were fought out most fiercely and where otherwise mostly hidden assumptions and disagreements about that government revealed themselves. The intended final product of the project is a monograph.

Timothy Yang (History)

Timothy Yang is an Assistant Professor of History. His research interests include history and Asian studies.

Project Title: Drugs and the Business of Empire in Modern Japan

Project Details

This book project examines how private, transnational drug firms promoted Japan as a modern, civilized empire, founded upon middle-class consumerism, technocratic expertise, and the allegedly self-evident value of modern medicine.  Their medicines allowed colonizer and colonized alike to protect their bodies from the dangers of the natural environment and to participate in the spectacle of modern life.  Yet, producing and distributing these medicines often involved extracting resources from the margins of the empire as well as dominating foreign lands and peoples.  At the intersection of global histories of business, medicine, and empire, it demonstrates how the modern pharmaceutical industry (not only within Japan but also across the world) developed as a statist and colonial enterprise, which simultaneously supported—yet also subverted—state regimes of public health.

2018 – 2019

Mark Anderson (Romance Languages)

Mark Anderson is an Associate Professor of Romance Languages. His research interests include Latin American literatures and cultures, ecocriticism, and disaster studies.

Project Title: The Rights of Nature and the Testimony of Things: Environmental Ethics from Latin America

Project Details

This project is a book-length manuscript on how Latin American artists, authors, filmmakers, and legislators have envisioned environmental ethics, both in dialogue with and diverging from Western conceptualizations. Taking as my point of departure the 2008 Ecuadoran Constitution, which grants “nature” legal personhood and specific constitutional rights, I examine three main areas that I argue have converged in the conceptualization of the “rights of nature” in Latin America. The first section deals with animal rights, examining human/animal domestic relations as well as the decolonial trope of “going astray.” The second scrutinizes points of contact between indigenous animistic perspectives and Western object-oriented ontologies. The final section looks more narrowly at the ways in which “things” may be said to have speech in the courtroom, drawing on scientific thought, biosemiotics (non-human communication), phenomenology, and Walter Benjamin’s concept of the aura.

Elizabeth Kraft (English)    

Elizabeth Kraft is a Professor of English. Her research interests include Restoration and Eighteenth-Century British Literature.

Project Title: Literary Jacobitism in the Eighteenth Century

Project Details

My project focuses on a period of time prior to the encoding of Jacobite symbols into a romantic narrative of a past that never existed. British writers during the 1750s were struggling to articulate tolerance and to engage sympathetically with a Catholic sub-culture that had been vilified and denied civil rights since well before the Glorious Revolution. While Walter Scott’s Jacobite (from the Waverley novels) would be appropriated for nefarious nationalistic and racist agendas in the UK and beyond (the Ku Klux Klan is said to have fashioned its iconography based on Scott’s narratives), the Jacobite references prior to Scott chart a different path—one that is neither recidivist nor exclusionary. It is received wisdom in eighteenth-century literary studies that after Culloden Jacobite thought and Jacobites themselves were relegated to a fringe of a British society that had long since moved on. My project will challenge this orthodoxy.

Lisa A. Fusillo (Dance)    

Lisa Fusillo is a Professor of Dance. Her research interests include the scholarly research of dance history, particularly Leonide Massine and the Ballet Russe, and creative research involved in ballet choreography, technique and pedagogy.

Project Title: Nini Theilade’s Journey in Modern Ballet

Project Details

This project is the completion of research and the preparation of a manuscript for publication that will fill a void in the dance literature by bringing to light the contributions of one of the most important innovators in modern ballet in Denmark.  A brilliant star with a remarkable and inspiring career, Nini Theilade made a rich and undisputed impact as a dancer, teacher and choreographer. Examining Nini Theilade’s ballet career through one of the most innovative periods in dance history, this study explores the influences on Theilade’s artistic contributions from her upbringing to her world-wide career that lead to her innovations in modern ballet in Denmark from the 1930s to 1980.

Jean Ngoya Kidula (Hugh Hodgson School of Music)

Jean Kidula is a Professor of Music. Her research interests include ethnomusicology, African musics, African Christianity, religious and ritual musics, the religious music Industry, and the African diaspora (history and recent).

Project Title: The interplay of literacy, commerce and theology in the African Christian music industry

Project Details

In explicating the symbiotic relationship of commodified music and Christianity in Africa, I explore the production of ‘live’ religious music concerts that are now marketed online in auditory and visual formats.  I theorize that these ‘gospel’ concerts effectively subvert the intentions of literacy projects first advanced through European colonialism and Christian musicians, the theological intentions of Western and African Christian endeavors, and the modernization quests of contemporary African governments.  Biblical text and its cultural and experiential application is theologized and explicated orally by musicians.  I posit that the situation has serious implications for education, politics, the economy, social values, and religious readings.   I begin the process by examining the dominance of South Africa’s commercial choral touring outfits of Soweto Gospel choir, Joyful Celebration and Spirit of Praise as pace setters for Eastern, Central and Southern Africa.

Dorothea Link (Hugh Hodgson School of Music)

Dorothea Link is a Professor of Music. Her research interests include late eighteenth-century Viennese music and Mozart.

Project Title: The Italian Singers in Mozart’s Vienna: Their Voices and Roles

Project Details

The Italian Singers in Mozart’s Vienna: Their Voices and Roles examines the types of singers for whom Mozart wrote some of his most beloved operatic roles. While the period-instrument movement has come a long way in uncovering the playing techniques and sound of Mozart’s instruments, the nature of the voices of Mozart’s singers has remained elusive. Since, however, composers at that time still tailored their arias to the voices of their singers, it is possible to construct vocal portraits of some singers. The difficulty then is to construct the historical context in which to understand them. I have done much of this work in earlier books and articles, but in this final book, now in the writing stage, I will present the whole as a single argument, one that will alter how we view and sing Mozart’s operas.

Jan Pendergrass (Romance Languages)

Winner, Virginia Mary Macagnoni Prize for Innovative Research

Jan Pendergrass is a Professor of Romance Languages. His areas of specialization include Renaissance Studies, paleography and Renaissance letter writing, Renaissance diplomatic correspondence and epistolary exchanges between humanists. He is also the winner of Virginia Mary Macagnoni Prize for Innovative Research.

Project Title: A Critical Edition and Commentary of Claude Dodieu’s “Lettres et papiers diplomatiques et administratifs, 1527-1557.”

Project Details

I am preparing for publication a critical edition and commentary of Claude Dodieu’s letters and papers gathered from various European archives, libraries and manuscript collections. Most are unpublished. My collection, transcription and calendaring of primary texts is now near-complete. I intend to use the spring, summer and fall of 2018 to wrap up the final stages of my project. I will travel to collections in order to examine a handful of remaining known documents, along with other anticipated discoveries, which I will then add to my existing corpus. I will focus on my introduction and commentary to some 400 pages of historical text that I now have, in the hope of being able to submit a copy of the work to Librairie Droz, a distinguished academic publisher of Renaissance studies, before the end of the academic year 2018-2019.

Julie Velásquez Runk (Anthropology)           

Julie Velásquez Runk is an Associate Professor of Anthropology. Her research interests include anthropology, ecology, Latin American studies, and geography.

Project Title: Entangled Rosewood: Loss, Being, and Belonging

 

   

Project Details

Entangled Rosewood uses loss as a means to reflect on who we are (being) and how we are in relationship with others and place (belonging). I argue that Panama’s volatile rosewood logging, from an uptick in Chinese demand, challenged indigenous Wounaan to confront marginalization from rocketing economic growth and to come together and act around ways of being and belonging. Assembling years of data—histories, stories, logging permits, port data, video walks, and museum photos— entwines the dead wood of a global commodity with living marker of indigenous identity and ontology.  This project culminates in a collaborative book, illustrating how radical hope addresses ontological precarity and revealing the global processes that engender disparity and shape struggles for equality.  Such work engages a humanistic concern for how humans understand their role in the world and a more recent concern about motivating its care (or sustainability).

Rohan Sikri (Philosophy)            

Rohan Sikri is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy. His research interests include comparative philosophy, Ancient Greek philosophy, Chinese philosophy, and the history of philosophy.

Project Title: The Cut that Cures: Philosophical Therapy in Ancient Greece and Classical China     

Project Details

Is philosophy therapeutic or is it a sickness of the mind? Could it be both–therapeutic in one mode and pathological in another? Using these as guiding questions, my project conducts a comparative study of models of philosophical therapy in ancient Greece and China. I focus on Plato and Zhuangzi, a formative figure in classical Daoism, on account of their compelling insights into this problem. Both thinkers share the idea that philosophy is like the art of medicine. Yet it is an important disjuncture between the two that exposes tensions inherent to models of philosophical therapy. While Zhuangzi associates therapeutic potential with limited philosophical activity, Plato stages his method as an unending quest for truth that he associates with the manic condition of eros. Does the success of philosophical therapy, then, depend on a timely suspension of the method itself? Or do philosophers inevitably risk succumbing to an erotic drive, thereby transforming from therapists into patients?

Julie Spivey (Lamar Dodd School of Art)            

Julie Spivey is an Associate Professor of Art. Her research interests include typography, communication design, data visualization and information design, and design pedagogy.

Project Title: Mapping Deep Blue Habitat: Developing Digital Tools for Visualizing Complex Information  

   

Project Details

This proposal relates to my role as co-PI for “Mapping Deep Blue Habitat in a Changing Climate,” a project that was recently awarded $100,000 from the National Academies Keck Futures Initiative. The project will create a digital platform to visualize the characteristics of ocean habitats so that users may ‘see’ and access information about the impact of climate change on critical species. Among the collaborators, my role and expertise lies in visual communication design, typography and information design. Along with the project’s primary investigator (PI) in Marine Sciences at UGA and partners at the Univ. of Washington, we will design a system to visualize and map the immense dataset related to ocean habitats and affected species, and create the web interface and infrastructure that will allow users to access it. This project is a valuable opportunity for the arts to make contributions to STEM, and for design to have significant early role and impact on a multidisciplinary project.”

Yuanfei Wang (Comparative Literature)

Yuanfei Wang is an Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature. Her research interests include late imperial/early modern Chinese literature and history, transnational maritime history, postcolonial studies, empire studies, gender and feminism, race and ethnicity, cinema, and cross-cultural adaptation and comparison.

Project Title: Writing the Piracy War: Unofficial History, Vernacular Fiction, and the Discourse of Imperial Identity in Late Ming China (1550-1644)

Project Details

The book examines the ways late Ming Chinese scholars wrote about China’s wars against oceanic piracy. In the sixteenth century, a thriving private maritime trade connected East Asia and Southeast Asia with Europe and Americas, resulting in undermining the Ming’s imperial authority in the sinocentric tributary world order. While the Ming waged wars against “Japanese” pirates and Japan, a flourishing publishing industry produced novels and short stories about outlaws and foreign lands, along with a proliferation of unofficial histories and geographical accounts of non-Chinese peoples. The book investigates how authors of these writings, driven by profound uncertainties over Ming’s imperial identity, tapped into the authority of cultural memory, Confucian philosophy, literary tropes, languages, and emperors’ words to legitimize and reconstruct their own narratives of the piracy wars and imagination of the ocean.

Hyangsoon Yi (Comparative Literature)

Hyangsoon Yi is a Professor of Comparative Literature. Her research interests include comparative literature, Korean literature and film, Buddhist aesthetics, and Buddhism and women.

Project Title: James Scarth Gale’s “Life of the Buddha” as a Religious Encounter Narrative

Project Details

This project is concerned with James Scarth Gale’s “Life of the Buddha,” a fictional biography of Siddhārtha. My work is aimed at publishing Gale’s text as a book. To accomplish this goal, I will undertake the following tasks:

(1) Editing Gale’s typescript;

(2) Annotating passages on Buddhist philosophy that are unfamiliar to Anglophone readers;

(3) Writing an introductory essay on “Life of the Buddha” and its original Korean text known as P’alsangnok (Record of the Eight Marks);

(4) Making a glossary of Sanskrit, Chinese, and Korean Buddhist terms.”

2017 – 2018

Antje Ascheid (Theatre and Film Studies)

Antje Asheid is an Associate Professor of Theatre and Film Studies. Her research interests include Film Studies, German Studies, and Women’s Studies.

Project Title: The Symbolic Site — German Identity and the Berlin Film 

Project Details

“The Berlin Film” discusses how cinematic representations of the city address questions of German identity, history and memory, punctuated by case studies of Berlin films that stand out in German film history. Cinematic “narrascapes” depicting city life complement film narratives by supplementing the city as an additional “character” to be read in a historical, political, and national context. The metaphoric geographies offered by the Berlin Film represent the city but also invent it, guiding audiences’ responses to the site by suggesting anxiety or excitement, promise or disillusionment, renewed optimism or political skepticism, social criticism and romantic escapism. The films foregrounded in this volume all highlight an interest in metaphoric identity through “cinematographicity,” the city written as film, illuminating the role of the city as a space both external and internal, as a metaphoric and a symbolic site. (Under contract with Berghahn Books, delivery date June 2018).

Thomas Biggs (Classics)

Thomas Biggs is an Assistant Professor of Classics. His research interests include Latin literature, ancient epic poetry, Roman culture and history, and classical philology

Project Title: A Roman Odyssey: the First Punic War and the Creation of Latin Epic

Project Details

Rome’s first conflict with Carthage (the First Punic War, 264-241 BCE) furnished both the context and content of Latin’s first literature. In this book, I show that the war is not just an important moment in the historical development of the Republic, but that for the Romans it became a reference point in the construction of their own mythology of origins. The project will constitute the only book in English focused significantly on Latin’s first epic, Livius Andronicus’ Odusia (an interpretive translation of Homer’s Odyssey), and on Naevius’ Bellum Punicum (the Punic War), the first Latin epic to depict Roman history and the first to include the figure of Aeneas, the Romans’ Trojan founder. To better understand this pivotal moment in world literary history, this project approaches early Latin epic in the light of new historical reading strategies, intertextuality, memory studies, and innovations in the analysis of Republican Latin fragments.

Benjamin Britton (Lamar Dodd School of Art)

Benjamin Britton is an Assistant Professor in the Lamar Dodd School of Art. His creative and research interests include painting, abstraction, representation, expressionism, romanticism in painting, conceptual painting, and phenomenology of painting.

Project Title: Sub-Present: Landscape as Dislocation

Project Details

Sub-Present is a project consisting of paintings to be made in the spring of 2018, while Britton attends two artist residencies in Ireland. Both the Burren College of Art and the Ballinglen Arts Foundation have accepted Britton’s applications and confirmed the dates of the residencies. The paintings in Sub-Present propose to destabilize the knowledge of where the body is located from the sensation of its position in the landscape. In brief, the paintings use this dislocation to explore the human relationship to ecological conditions. The Sub-Present project will draw upon art historical issues and themes of romanticism in painting such as the representation of the sublime and the use of weather as a symbol of impermanence. The project culminates in a solo exhibition of Britton’s work in late 2018 at Ruth Bachofner Gallery in Santa Monica (one of five galleries in the US where his work is represented), and will comprise an application to Volta 2019 in New York, which is an international art fair.

Naomi Graber (Hugh Hodgson School of Music)

Naomi Graber is an Assistant Professor of Music with research interests in musicology, theatre studies, history, emigre studies, and film studies.

Project Title: Sounding it Out: Kurt Weill’s America

Project Details

This project looks at the transnational career of composer Kurt Weill (1900-1950) by examining his fascination with “America” as a concept. While a young man in the Weimar Republic, he was swept up in the “Amerikanismus” craze, and wrote a series of biting, satirical works that drew on the sounds and images of Hollywood gangsters to criticize the German government. But when Hitler came to power, the German-Jewish composer fled Europe for the United States. There, he found that his imagined “America” was nothing like the real thing, and set to work adapting his acidic style for American audiences. During the Great Depression, he became involved with the Leftist political theatre of the Popular Front, but when World War II began he moved toward the political center with a series of hit Broadway shows. After the war, he returned to writing socially conscious theatre, returning to the issues like racial equality and economic justice that he had championed in the 1920s and 1930s.

Melissa Ann Harshman (Lamar Dodd School of Art)

Melissa Ann Harshman is a Professor of Art in the area of printmaking

Project TitleOverlaps and Intersections: Printmaking, Crochet, and Sewing    

Project Details

Harshman plans to explore the relationship between printmaking, sewing, crochet, and installation. She will research ways to combine these approaches to make wall installations with prints and crocheted flowers, large prints with sewn additions, as well as prints that are constructed with sewn pieces. The imagery is inspired by 17th and 19th century floral painting, mandalas, flower garlands, and chandelier references.

 

Chad Howe (Romance Languages)

Chad Howe is an Associate Professor of Romance Languages. His research interests include linguistics and language history.

Project Title: On the Westernization of Indigenous Grammar

Project Details

This proposal seeks to fill an important gap in our understanding of the continuing impact of European colonization in Latin America, particularly with respect to policies and practices that subjugate, in subtle but ultimately important ways, the linguistic diversity that characterize autochthonous languages, and specifically Quechua, the most widely spoken of the indigenous languages of South America. The primary objective of this project is to move beyond the well-trodden domain of linguistic outcomes of language contact and to address the critical, philosophical, cultural, and moral issues associated with the continued proliferation of Quechua pedagogical materials that have the ostensible goal of promoting and celebrating Quechua as a unique cultural artifact while simultaneously adopting concepts and categories from Western languages, such as Latin, to explain language patterns.

 

Carolyn M. Jones Medine (Religion, Institute for African American Studies)

Carolyn M. Jones Medine is a Professor with a joint appointment in Religion and African American Studies. She specializes in religious studies, particularly African American religions and literatures, with a focus on African American women. Her interest include postmodern and postcolonial theory, and their intersections with Religious Studies and African American cultural production. She also researches African Americans and/in world religions, like Alice Walker and Buddhism; and double consciousness, deploying violence to undo violence to open discursive and ritual spaces of action and potential healing.

Project TitleThe Postmodern Slave Novel: The Middle Passage, Transitivity, and Descent into The Black Atlantic

Project Details

“The Postmodern Slave Novel: The Middle Passage, Transitivity, and Descent into ‘The Black Atlantic'” analyzes novels about slavery, written after 1980, that focus on the Middle Passage, including Toni Morrison’s “Beloved,” Charles Johnson’s “Middle Passage,” and Barry Unsworth’s “Sacred Hunger.” These novels reconstruct the Middle Passage in modes that are inaccessible before the postmodern and postcolonial moment, with their emphasis on the unspoken, on fracture, on the tension and relationship between history and memory for the individual and for the collective community, and on experimental, on “broken,” narrative forms. The transition in the neo-slave narrative genre, to these novels is Octavia Butler’s “Kindred,” the baseline novel of my study.  There is no recovery of identity, individual or collective, these writers suggest, without remembering, in some morally useful way, the Middle Passage and the disruption/relation between memory, history, and identity in that trauma.

 

Jennifer Palmer (History)

Jennifer Palmer is an Assistant Professor of History. Her research interests include history, gender, race, slavery, and colonialism.

Project Title: To Have and to Hold: Women and Property in Global France, 1650-1815            

     

Project Details

In theory, women could not own property in Old Regime France.  Yet family papers, notary records, and court cases manifestly demonstrate that women frequently owned, managed, and passed on property of all sorts, including real estate, personal items, and slaves.  This project is a social and legal history of the relationship between property ownership, race, and gender.  It uses a comparative imperial framework to examine the property-owning practices and experiences of white women, women of color, and indigenous women in Paris, Saint-Domingue, and French Canada.  Focusing on the legal mechanisms that allowed women to circumvent customary property laws limiting their control over property illuminates the connections among property, empire, race, gender, and the law, all categories and institutions that took their modern shape during the eighteenth century.

 

Jennifer Palmer

Ed Pavlic (English)

Ed Pavlic is a Distinguished Research Professor of English. His research interests include African American literature and culture, American poetry, and creative writing.

Project Title: “Outward in Larger Terms”: Adrienne Rich’s Poetic Geography of Expanding Solitudes        

     

Project Details

‘Outward In Larger Terms’ charts the geography created in the poems of Adrienne Rich across her full career, 1951-2012. This work traces the shifting and expanding structure of Rich’s poetry as she moved through the stages of her life engaging contemporary developments in culture, politics, and aesthetics. Known mostly for her work in ways that culminated making her feminist icon in the 70s, Rich’s career continued on for three decades in globally visible and increasingly radical ways which, nonetheless, haven’t been adequately charted for the ethical, political and aesthetic resources it provides. While the perspective spans her entire career, Outward in Larger Terms emphasizes Rich’s later works (1981-2012) as they emanate from (not necessarily well-understand) innovations in her more widely known works. In so doing, she refashioned what we understand as “lyrical solitude” making it a more publicly and politically engaging substance, a practical substance, than was the case.

 

Margaret E. L. Renwick (Linguistics, Romance Languages)

Margaret E. L. Renwick is an Assistant Professor with a joint appointment in Linguistics and Romance Languages. Within Linguistics, her primary areas of specialization are related to speech and language use: phonetics, phonology, speech variation, and language change. Within Romance Languages, her focus is on Italian, Romanian, and Catalan.

Project Title: Mapping Spoken Language in Digital and Social Space: Evidence from Italian

Project Details

Spoken communication is facilitated by shared speech patterns, and complicated by divergence.  Even if speakers share a native language, accents and dialects can differ considerably, depending where a person is from, their socioeconomic status, education level, race, age, gender, etc. My project will study current pronunciation patterns in speech from across Italy, comparing regions to one another and to the prescribed standard, in specific words. Its scope is large: I will analyze ~100 hours of speech from ~150 native speakers in a large corpus of spoken Italian, examining the characteristics of thousands of spoken sounds from monologues and dialogues. The analysis will reveal and map patterns of variability in specific Italian vowels, which vary across dialects, to understand how sounds are represented in the minds of native speakers from different regions, and to evaluate whether the language is undergoing change. I will produce at least three peer-reviewed articles from this work.

 

Paola De Santo (Romance Languages)

Winner, Virginia Mary Macagnoni Prize for Innovative Research

Paola De Santo is an Assistant Professor of Romance Languages. Her research interests include the literature and culture of Renaissance Italy, early modern Italian literature and culture, and Italian women writers. She is also the winner of Virginia Mary Macagnoni Prize for Innovative Research.

Project Title: (Ne) Habeas corpus:  Bodies Natural and Politic in the Ambassador and Courtesan in Renaissance Italy

Project Details

This book-length project offers a comparative study of two key figures of the Italian Renaissance –the ambassador and the courtesan– and the place of their bodies natural in relation to the body politic. In studying textual spaces constructed for the body within writings by and about these two seemingly opposite figures, I establish that these spaces range from the material to the metaphorical. Material spaces were increasingly allocated to both figures, urban confinement for the prostitute, and the embassy for the ambassador. The prostitute becomes the “body” of the state, while the ambassador personifies its “mind”. Via physical and metaphorical confinement, the early modern structures of government effectively deny them ownership over their own bodies. This ownership, however, is rhetorically reclaimed, I argue, through bodies of their own texts.

2016 – 2017

Yuri Balashov (Philosophy)

Yuri Balashov is Professor of Philosophy. His research interests include metaphysics, philosophy of science, and philosophy of language.

Project Title: Time and the Self

Project Details

I seek teaching release to work on a new book project. In a 2005 article I argued that the highly popular B-theory of time (on which different moments of time – past, present and future – are similar to different places) is inconsistent with our experience of the present unless the theory is supplemented with a highly controversial view of persistence, known as the stage theory. My argument has since come under criticism, which is partly justified. I intend to revisit and strengthen the argument and set it in a broader context taking into account influential work published in 2007–2015.

Yuri Balashov

Amma Ghartey-Tagoe Kootin (Theatre and Film Studies, Institute for African American Studies)

Amma Ghartey-Tagoe Kootin is Assistant Professor with a joint appointment in the Department of Theatre and Film Studies and the Institute for African American Studies. Her research interests include research/creative work that combines academic historical methodologies with performance (e.g. theatre, film, television, etc.), the African diaspora, performance studies, performing history, performative archival research methods, U.S. performance history (late 19th/early 20th centuries), and blackness in popular culture.

Project Title: Laughing after Slavery: The Performances and Times of Laughing Ben Ellington

Project Details

The manuscript, Laughing after Slavery: The Performances and Times of Laughing Ben Ellington, brings to light the unknown but significant story of “Laughing Ben”, an African-American former slave who at the 1901 world’s fair gained national and international fame because of the stories he told about his slave experience and his extraordinary ability to laugh loudly for long periods of time thereafter. Examining the production and impact of Ben’s laughing act using performative enactments and theories from trauma studies, slave narrative, and scientific investigations of laughter, the manuscript considers the connections of laughter and humor to the slave experience and the literal role laughter played in fomenting national acceptance of the trauma of American slavery. During the Willson Fellowship, I expect to devote my full time to completing the manuscript and book proposal in Spring 2017 for submission to a university press by the start of Fall semester 2017.

Amma Ghartey-Tagoe Kootin

LeAnne Howe (English)

LeAnne Howe is Eidson Distinguished Professor in American Literature in the Department of English. Her research interests include creative writing, Native literatures, Native performance, and filmmaking,

Project Title: Searching For Sequoyah

Project Details

Today Americans only vaguely know that Sequoyah was a man. While the film is about Cherokees, the full story reveals deeply held family connections, the creation of kinship, and courage in the face of extinction. The film presents the story of a natural genius, Sequoyah, a Native man who created the only indigenous writing system for a Native language north of Mexico. Sequoyah lived at the most turbulent times for Cherokee people and helped navigate those difficulties. His life is central to the Cherokees, and Native American history and Global Georgia. Searching for Sequoyah, a documentary co-produced and written by LeAnne Howe, with Native filmmaker James M. Fortier is set in three locations, in, Oklahoma, North Carolina, and Mexico. Our intended audience is a national one, Native and non-Native. It’s historical but told through the lineal descendants of Sequoyah. Project completion is set for summer 2017.”

LeAnne Howe

Kevin Jones (History)

Kevin Jones is Assistant Professor of History. His research interests include history, Middle East, Iraq, nationalism, anti-colonialism, social history, cultural history, and poetry.

Project Title: The Poetics of Revolution: Culture, Politics, and Modernity in Iraq, 1914-1963

Project Details

This project is a social history of anti-colonial politics and radical culture in Iraq. The project is structured around the historical argument that Iraqi poets played a central role in the creation and consolidation of national identity and the long political struggle against colonialism. I use Iraqi poetry, memoirs, and newspapers alongside British and American archival documents to analyze the cultural dynamics of popular opposition to foreign hegemony between 1914 and 1963. I argue that the varied instances of political revolution during this period were rooted in a shared commitment to an evolving concept of anti-colonialism that linked political liberation, social reform, and cultural revolution. I illustrate the historical contingency of the ideological and sectarian conflicts that have been used to frame these events as fragmentary expressions of local grievances and instead demonstrate the way in which global dynamics shaped the evolution of these revolutionary currents.

Kevin Jones

Peter Van Zandt Lane (Hugh Hodgson School of Music)

Peter Lane is Assistant Professor of Composition. His research interests include music composition, electronic music, analysis of contemporary music, and music of the Renaissance.

Project Title: Trombone Concerto: Commissioned by American Chamber Winds for trombonist Joseph Alessi

Project Details

Over the course of the 2016-17 academic year, I will be focusing my creative/research efforts towards the composition of a new Trombone Concerto for American Chamber Winds and New York Philharmonic Principal Trombonist, Joseph Alessi. This commission was proposed by David Waybright, music director of American Chamber Winds (a nationally touring and recording wind ensemble made up of professional players –mostly recent graduates– in the United States). This new work is slated for premiere at the World Association for Symphony Bands and Ensembles international conference in June, 2017, to be held in Utrecht, Netherlands.

Peter Lane

John Wharton Lowe (English)

John Wharton Lowe is Barbara Methvin Professor of English. His research interests include Southern, African American, Caribbean, and Multiethnic literatures; American Studies; Comparative Transnational literature and culture; humor; and Louisiana culture.

Project TitleThe Man Who Came Home:  The Life and Fiction of Ernest J. Gaines

Project Details

The Man Who Came Home: The Life and Works of Ernest J. Gaines will be an authorized biography of one of our nation’s most important living writers.  Gaines, born into a poor but culturally rich African American community in rural Louisiana, migrated to California as a teenager, where he acquired a fine education, including an MFA from Stanford.  His novels and stories focus on the complex interplay between Louisiana’s ethnically mixed people, with a special focus on African American struggles for racial and social justice.  His presentations of gender, Southern history, and folk humor are a precious repository of one of our nation’s most unique cultures, while offering a probing examination of enduring questions of human identity.  This critical biography will link Gaines’s fiction with the fascinating details of his life, which offers a compelling example of individual and group fulfillment.

John Lowe

Barbara McCaskill (English)

Barbara McCaskill is Associate Professor of English. Her research interests include African American literature and culture, Civil Rights Movement literature and film, Post-Bellum, Pre Harlem literature (1877-1919), African American women’s literature, autobiographies of slavery and freedom, and black feminism / womanism.

Project Title: Rev. Peter Thomas Stanford (1860-1909) and the Transatlantic Anti-Lynching Campaign

Project Details

My research project focuses on the involvement of Rev. Peter Thomas Stanford (1860-1909), a textbook writer, orator, and newspaper editor, in the development of a transatlantic anti-lynching campaign that connected activists in England, the United States, and Canada. Born into American slavery and raised by Native Americans, Stanford became Birmingham, England’s first black minister. My project will participate in new directions in African American literary studies by pivoting focus on nineteenth-century literature away from Eastern U.S. writers, and by thinking about how productions other than single-authored, bound books, which constitute a preponderance of early African American printed productions, helped determine thematic content and aesthetic practices that influenced future generations. This project reflects my ongoing interest in how early African American writers consciously fashioned transnational communities for artistic inspiration and to enact social change.

barbara mccaskill

Cecilia Rodrigues (Romance Languages)

Cecilia Rodrigues is Assistant Professor of Portuguese. Her research interests include contemporary Brazilian literature; prose fiction of the 21st century; narratives of displacement; urban literature and representations of violence; (re)construction of national identities; new media in foreign language learning and study abroad programs

Project Title: Beyond the Ruins: A Reparative Reading of Milton Hatoum

Project Details

Originally from the Amazon region, contemporary novelist Milton Hatoum is the first Lebanese-Brazilian writer to gain national and international acclaim. Unlike critical studies that situate his work within a paradigm of regional and national collapse following Brazil’s uneven modernization under the military dictatorship, I argue that theses analyses of disintegration limit the importance of Hatoum’s contribution. In contrast, I propose a reparative reading in which the refashioning of personal identity, reconciliation with nature, and the search for continuity through history shape pathways to recovery and healing beyond the ruins of the nation. My book will be the first to examine all of Hatoum’s four novels together and provide a complete picture of this prominent author’s social criticism.

Cecília Rodrigues

Amy Ross (Geography)

Amy Ross is Associate Professor of Geography. Her research interests include human rights and transitional justice. Her work engages with theories of violence, power, and conflict, with specific empirical focus on institutions of truth and justice, and the so-called crimes of international concern (genocide, crimes against humanity). Her epistemological orientation is towards a critical approach of human rights with a regional focus on Central America, and increased interest in US military relations with the region, past and future.

Project Title: Civilian Casualties in Battle: Identifying Innocents in Contemporary Conflicts

Project Details

A century ago, nine out of ten casualties of war were armed combatants. Today, however, 90% of the casualties of war are civilians. The proposed research project investigates how US service personnel are trained to distinguish between civilians and combatants in today’s complex conflicts. The project involves fieldwork with the United States Army Reserve Officers Training Core (US Army ROTC) in Ft. Knox, Kentucky, in order to 1) observe contemporary training of junior officers, and 2) interview senior officers (colonels and generals) involved in developing the ROTC curriculum for the next generation of officers. My long-term research agenda concerning the laws of war and human rights provides a historical and theoretical framework with which to evaluate the data collected in the study of the US Army’s contemporary training. The empirical data from the research portion in ROTC at Ft. Knox will inform my analysis of the epistemological foundations of the laws of war.

Amy Ross

Christopher Sieving (Theatre and Film Studies)

Christopher Sieving is Associate Professor of Theatre and Film Studies. His research interests include film history, American history, African American cinema, the 1960s, and avant-garde cinema.

Project Title: Bill Gunn’s GANJA & HESS

Project Details

This book analyzes and historicizes Bill Gunn’s landmark independent film GANJA & HESS (1973), a film that has across the last four decades attained a sizable cult following among devotees of African American cinema, art house aficionados, and horror fans thanks to its formal complexity and rich allegory. My aim is to explore the ways in which the film accomplishes these effects, and I also examine how the contradictory market pressures placed on black-oriented films in the early seventies, the period of “blaxploitation” and the “Black Movie Boom,” shaped production practices and distribution and exhibition strategies. In broader terms, this project uses GANJA & HESS to open up an inquiry into Bill Gunn’s career and, ultimately, into the horizons of possibility for producing black cinema at a particular (and particularly meaningful) historical moment.

Chris Sieving

Steven Soper (History)

Steven Soper is Assistant Professor of History. His research interests include modern European history, modern Italian history, criminal justice, human rights, and international affairs.

Project Title: The 66: A Story of Revolution, Suffering, and Rescue at Sea on the eve of Italian Unification

Project Details

In 1851, William Gladstone’s published a blistering exposé of squalid prison conditions in southern Italy, triggering what may be the first international human rights campaign aimed at the release of prisoners. For the sake of a few dozen gentleman prisoners, British officials plotted multiple prison breaks, broke diplomatic relations with the government in Naples, and thwarted its ruler’s successive plans to ship the prisoners to Argentina and the United States. The final act took place at sea, in early 1859: sixty-six political prisoners en route from Naples to New York hijacked their ship and forced the captain to land the vessel in Ireland. They received a hero’s welcome in England, before returning to Italy to fight for Italian independence. At a time when real and fictional prison narratives thrilled European and American readers, the men who escaped the “dungeons” of Naples left behind an extraordinary record of their suffering and escape.

Steven Soper

Elizabeth Wright (Romance Languages)

Winner, Virginia Mary Macagnoni Prize for Innovative Research

Elizabeth Wright is Professor of Spanish. Her research interest include early-modern Spanish literature and literature, and culture of the early-modern Atlantic world.

Project Title: Stages of Servitude: Representing the Atlantic Slave Trade in Early Modern Iberia (ca. 1441-1640)

Project Details

“Stages of Servitude: Representing the Atlantic Slave Trade in Early Modern Iberia” is a book that considers how a new mode of slave trafficking became integrated into the fabric of daily life. Portugal and Spain were the primary destinations of the earliest voyages (1441- ca. 1600) and thus the first places where the Atlantic slave trade was debated. While outright abolitionism did not emerge until the eighteenth century, many early observers objected to the obvious cruelty of the emerging slave trade and others worried about how it veered from traditions of “just-war” slavery. My book asks how this notorious sin became banal, scrutinizing the first Iberian representations of slave trafficking. Part I (Chapters 1 and 2) illuminates the historical, legal, and economic background; Part II (Chapters 3 to 5) hones analysis on the places where slave trading and the mistreatment of black Africans were represented, rehearsed, and in time, made commonplace.

Betsy Wright

2015 – 2016

Joshua Barkan (Geography)

Joshua Barkan is Associate Professor of Geography. His research interests include geography (legal, political, and economic), social and political theory, critical legal studies, and the historical geography of capitalism.

Project Title: Corporate Nationality: Legal Politics and the Geography of Capitalism in a Global Age

Project Details

My book project examines the legal politics of “corporate nationality.” Nationality establishes the ability of corporations to legally transact business in a jurisdiction and their location for purposes of regulation and taxation. Yet we know little about the ways corporate nationality is constituted in different municipal legal systems or in the daily practice of global corporations, much less the history of this variegation or its effects on corporate power today. My goal is to formulate a competitive proposal for national fellowships addressing these issues and an article outlining the argument.

Joshua Barkan

Marla Carlson (Theatre & Film Studies)

Marla Carlson is Associate Professor of Theatre & Film Studies. Her research interests include spectator response theory, gender theory, medieval performance, theatre and performance studies, and interspecies performance.

Project Title: Affect, Animals, and Autists: Feeling Around the Edges of the “Human” in Performance

Project Details

This book asks how and to what ends recent performances centering on human-animal relations or with autism spectrum disorders affect their audiences. My aim is to show how theatre and related performing arts both reflect and contribute to a redefinition of the category “human” that is more inclusive of human difference and less hierarchical in relation to other species. Case studies include spectacular puppets playing animals; actual animals present on stage in theatre, performance art, and dance; realist and post-realist representations of autism in the theatre; and collaborations between autistic and neurotypical theatre makers.

Marla Carlson

Oscar Chamosa (History)

Oscar Chamosa is Associate Professor of History. His research interests include history, folklore, Latin American studies, twentieth-century Argentina, cultural history, and romantic nationalism.

Project Title: Neoliberal Folklore: Tourism and the Consumption of Tradition in Northwestern Argentina, 1960 to Present

Project Details

This project seeks to understand how rural communities in Northwestern Argentina have appealed to folk traditions and tourism to promote development amidst deep political and economic changes brought by military dictatorship in the 1970s and structural reforms in the 1980s and 90s. I focus my research on the phenomenon of folk festivals, large happenings that attract thousands of visitors to small rural communities during the summer and winter vacation season. My hypothesis is that, despite resistance from progressive sectors, Argentine folk festivals helped establish and justify neoliberal notions of economic development by bowing to the logic of the market and allowing the commodification of intangible goods such as folk music and local traditions.

Oscar Chamosa

Emily Frey (Music)

Emily Frey is Assistant Professor of Music. Her primary research interests are musicology, opera, and Russian literature.

Project Title: Russian Opera in the Age of Psychological Prose

Project Details

In contrast to previous studies of Russian opera, which have focused overwhelmingly on questions of nationalism, my book project puts the operas of Musorgsky and Tchaikovsky in dialogue with the psychological prose of Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Dostoevsky. I argue that late nineteenth-century Russian opera, drawing on and acting out the debates central to contemporary literature, served as a public staging ground for the exploration of individual subjectivity in Europe’s only autocracy.

Emily Frey

Allan Kulikoff (History)

Allan Kulikoff is Professor of History. His primary research interests are American social and cultural history, history and economics of global capitalism, and slavery in the western world.

Project Title: The Many Masks of Benjamin Franklin

Project Details

Using Franklin’s voluminous writings and his many portraits, and building on theoretical works in the history of capitalism, The Many Masks of Benjamin Franklin examines Franklin’s character, his “moral and mental qualities.” Rubbery, slippery, a master of disguises, a taker of pseudonyms, Franklin metaphorically wore many masks, often at the same time: moralist and satirist, scientist and diplomat, patriot and ward heeler, English gentleman and wild American, slaveholder and abolitionist, leather apron man and exemplar of wealth. Chapters, arranged chronologically, will cover his entire life, from his Silence Dogood character to the meaning of the fur cap he wore in Paris. The book frames its analysis on Defoe’s idea of writing as performance, Habermas’ theory of the public sphere, Anderson’s imagined communities, and Thompson’s vision of class relations under early capitalism.

Allan Kulikoff

Susan Mattern (History)

Susan Mattern is Professor of History. Her research interests include ancient Mediterranean history, world history, transcultural psychiatry, history of medicine, history of disease, and demographic history.

Project Title: Psychotic Disorders and Psychotic Symptoms in Greek and Roman Antiquity

Project Details

This study will use the modern transcultural psychiatry and psychiatric anthropology of schizophrenia, other psychotic disorders, and psychotic phenomena to interpret evidence from ancient sources about hallucinations, delusions, and disorganized speech. When severe and persistent these phenomena are often pathological symptoms of psychotic disorders. This study will address the role of these behaviors in ancient society, their phenomenology, and the circumstances under which ancient observers saw them as dysfunctional. It takes no position on the validity of the schizophrenia diagnosis, but it will investigate ancient diagnostic classifications of psychotic disorders. This study will illuminate the experience of mental illness in the ancient world, and the role of anomalous cognitive and perceptual phenomena in ancient society. It will also contribute to the study of the influence of cultural factors on psychotic disorders and psychotic symptoms.

Susan Mattern

Akinloye Ojo (Comparative Literature)

Akinloye Ojo is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature. His research interests include Yoruba language, culture and society; and applied linguistics.

Project Title: Yoruba Anthroponomy: A Sociolinguistic and Gendered Analysis of Yoruba Personal Names

Project Details

The proposed multifaceted project will provide a comprehensive sociolinguistic and gendered analysis of the naming system and personal names of the Yoruba people within Nigeria and the Diaspora in West Africa, the Caribbean, the Americas and Europe. The study will be an evocative exploration of Yorùbá personal names, including their importance, types, structure, selection, meaning, application, and the gendered markings. The structural analysis of the names will be dependent on Yoruba grammar while the sociolinguistic and gendered analysis of the names will be focused on the meanings, contents, and applications of the names centering on their semantic and pragmatic fields. The volume produced from this project will become the definitive work on Yoruba anthroponomy and the standard reference for an enduring and mounting aspect of Yoruba culture and society.

Akinloye Ojo

Adam Parkes (English)

Adam Parkes is Professor of English. His research examines modern British and Irish literature in the context of social, political, and cultural developments in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Project Title: Aristocracy Complex

Project Details

I am working on a book about literary modernism and the aristocracy. The project as a whole considers a wide range of examples of a widespread modernist fascination with aristocracy – real or imagined – in the age of modern democracy. The two chapters to be written during the period of the grant will examine two under-read and under-studied modern novelists who were also members of the aristocracy: Elizabeth Bowen and Henry Green. In particular, I will explore how these writers – one Anglo-Irish, the other English – challenged representations of masters and servants found in such precursors as E.M. Forster and D.H. Lawrence in order to imagine alternative democratic futures.

Adam Parkes

Channette Romero (English)

Channette Romero is Associate Professor of English. Her research interests include American Indian literature and film, multiethnic literature and film, gender and feminist theory, and theories of the novel.

Project Title: In-forming Native Film: Genre and American Indian Cinema

Project Details

My book manuscript, “In-forming Native Film,” explores the complex relationship between Native American cinema and Hollywood. It examines the growing body of films produced by Native filmmakers that seek to replace Hollywood’s false stereotypes of Natives with more accurate portrayals. However, my manuscript reveals the complex dynamics that arise when contemporary Native films appropriate familiar Hollywood genres (comedy, horror, animation, science fiction films, etc.) in ways that might appeal to mainstream viewers, but ultimately downplay Native concerns and worldviews.

Channette Romero

Alex Spektor (Germanic and Slavic Studies)

Alex Spektor is Assistant Professor of Germanic and Slavic Studies. His research interests include Russian literature, Polish literature, American literature, comparative literature, philosophy, and literary theory.

Project Title: The Reader as Accomplice: Narrative Ethics in Dostoevsky, Gombrowicz, and Nabokov

Project Details

My project is a book-length study of the complex ways in which literature forms our ethical character. I seek to analyze literature’s humanistic significance without sacrificing its particularities as a specific art form. Both as a student and a professor of literature, I have become increasingly concerned with the value of the humanities in our higher education. Hence, in the project, my task is to show that a serious study of art—and literature in particular—is instrumental in making us responsible and responsive human beings. In the project I investigate the importance of ethics in the prose of three major 19th- and 20th-century authors—Fyodor Dostoevsky, Vladimir Nabokov, and Witold Gombrowicz—in order to show the range of literature’s response to an inquiry in the moral sphere.

Alex Spektor

Piers Stephens (Philosophy)

Piers Stephens is Associate Professor of Philosophy. His research interests include environmental philosophy, ethics, political philosophy, history of ideas, and literature and philosophy.

Project Title: Nature, Liberty and Dystopia: On the Moral Significance of Nature for Human Freedom

Project Details

In this book project, I will develop an account of the value of nonhuman nature for human freedom, construed both psychologically and politically, establishing three theses. Firstly, that two pre-modern traditions exist that can enrich the contemporary debate between liberalism and environmentalism. Secondly, these traditions were philosophically marginalized in modernity, but intellectually survived in a new form, dystopian literature. Thirdly, I demonstrate via readings of dystopian texts that modernized aspects of these traditions’ insights can establish nature protection as a key liberal value. The completed project will integrate results from philosophy, literature, history and political theory.

Piers Stephens

Beth Tobin (English)

Winner, Virginia Mary Macagnoni Prize for Innovative Research

Beth Tobin is Professor of English and Women’s Studies. Her primary research interest include eighteenth-century British literature and art, cultural history of the British Empire, women and material culture, the history of the book, the cultural history of natural history, and science studies.

Project Title: John Abbot’s Art and the Material Practices of Transatlantic Natural History

Project Details

My project is to complete a book on John Abbot (1751-1840), an artist-naturalist, who produced over 5,000 watercolor drawings of Georgia’s birds and insects, which he sent to European and American patrons. He also shipped thousands of Georgia’s insect and bird specimens, many of which found their way into Europe’s great natural history museums. My book will recover the importance of Abbot as an artist and naturalist by placing his artwork in the context of cultures of collecting, the material practices of transatlantic natural history, and the global networks of exchange that undergirded scientific praxis in his era.

Beth Tobin

Frans Weiser (Comparative Literature)

Frans Weiser is Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature. His research interests include hemispheric American studies, twentieth-century Luso-Hispanic narratives, historical fiction and film, and adaptation studies.

Project Title: False Documents: The Politics of Historical Fiction in the Americas

Project Details

My project analyzes contemporary novels in English, Spanish, and Portuguese that imitate the conventions of documents such as diaries and archival texts. In doing so, I explore an alternative to historiographic metafiction, the dominant political model of historical fiction that claims to revise history by distorting the historical record. By reexamining recent developments in historiography, literary studies, and Inter-American studies, this project seeks to reaffirm literature and history as complementary means of exploring the past. I demonstrate that contemporary American authors, despite political and national differences, share important writing strategies that help readers reconceptualize how narrative history is constructed.

Frans Weiser

Magdalena Zurawski (English)

Magdalena Zurawski is Assistant Professor of English. Her research interests include creative writing, American literature 1776-1865, modern and contemporary literature, aesthetics, poetics, and genre theory.

Project Title: The Curse of the Sub-Sub Librarian and Other Stories

Project Details

My project involves completing my fiction collection, “The Curse of the Sub-Sub Librarian and Other Stories.” The narratives in this collection explore the limits of art and literature as tools for navigating contemporary political and social life through fabulist scenarios in which various protagonists refuse to differentiate between imaginary landscapes and “real life.” Drawing on the work of Kleist, Hawthorne, and Melville, as well as contemporary fabulist fiction, this collection furthers my earlier critical and creative investigations of the relationship between being an artist and being a “good” citizen.

Magdalena Zurawski

2014 – 2015

Mark Abbe (Art History)

Mark Abbe is Assistant Professor in the Lamar Dodd School of Art. His primary interests are Art History, Classics, Archaeology, Polychromy, Conservation and Restoration, Scientific Analysis of Artworks.

Project Title: Colorful Materialities: Polychromy on Roman Marble Sculpture, 100 BC-AD 235

Project Details

This project analyzes the ancient painting and gilding that defined the original appearance of Roman marble sculpture. Combining art history, archaeology, and scientific materials analysis, this interdisciplinary study significantly expands our appreciation of the semantic languages of color and materiality in Roman statuary and reveals new insights into the ancient craft of marble polychromy. A Willson Fellowship will allow me (1) to finish the publication the first comprehensive, contextualized study of Roman sculptural polychromy (from Corinth in mainland Greece), and (2) to complete archival research for my forthcoming monographic study on the Venus Lovatelli, the most important painted sculpture to survive from Pompeii.

Mark Abbe

Joshua Bousquette (Germanic and Slavic Studies)

Joshua Bousquette is Assistant Professor in the Department of Germanic and Slavic Studies. His primary interest is linguistics.

Project Title: C-Agreement in Modern Varieties of West Germanic: Unexpected complexity in heritage and non-standard languages

Project Details

This book-length project treats complementizer agreement – a common, non-standard linguistic phenomenon in varieties of German – as evidence of unexpected complexity in heritage language communities. Long relegated to second-class status, non-standard or heritage varieties are often regarded as ‘incompletely acquired’ or lacking in ‘complexity’ relative to codified standard languages. Drawing on data from both isolated ‘language islands’ in Continental Europe as well as heritage communities in North America, my completed manuscript will analyze this complex linguistic phenomenon to counter the ideology that codified standard languages are maximally complex, arguing instead for an ideologically neutral account of language use and language change.

Joshua Bousquette

Valerie Boyd (Journalism)

Valerie Boyd is Associate Professor in the College of Journalism and Mass Communications. Her primary interests are narrative nonfiction, the intersection of literature, journalism and culture, and black women’s biography/autobiography, as well as race and gender issues in media.

Co-winner, Virginia Mary Macagnoni Prize for Innovative Research.

Project Title: Gathering Blossoms Under Fire: The Journals of Alice Walker

Project Details

Across five decades of journal entries—1962 to the present—Alice Walker offers a passionate, intimate record of her development as an artist, human rights activist and intellectual. Gathering Blossoms Under Fire will be an intimate self-portrait of a key literary figure of the 20th century, as well as an extraordinary book of social history, told through the lens of one remarkable life.

Valerie Boyd

Husseina Dinani (History)

Husseina Dinani is Assistant Professor of History. Her primary interests include history of late colonial and early postcolonial Tanzania, citizenship and development, and gender and women.

Project Title: En-gendering the Postcolony: Women, Citizenship and Development in Tanzania, 1945-1985

Project Details

My book project is a history of the early African postcolony driven by the perspectives of rural women in Tanzania. It uses women’s personal narratives collected from Lindi district, (Lindi region, located in the southeast of Tanzania), to examine citizenship and development politics from 1945 to 1985. By paying attention to gender and experience—in particular women’s daily lives—I argue that the complex and different ways in which women organized and imagined their worlds powerfully shaped the making of Tanzania in Lindi District. My research points out that in their ongoing pursuits to achieve security and well-being, women altered the Tanzanian government’s nation-building efforts and shaped processes of citizenship and development.

William Finlay (Sociology)

William Finlay is a Josiah Meigs Distinguished Teaching Professor and serves as Head of the Department of Sociology. His primary research interests are organizations, economic sociology, and networks and markets.

Project Title: Creating Reputations by Managing Networks: South African Wines in the U.S. Market

Project Details

I intend to work on a book that will develop the idea that reputation—in this case the reputation of a wine and a winery—is constructed through a sequence of inter-organizational transactions and that “taste” is the outcome of these transactions. Drawing on interviews with winemakers, importers, distributors, and retailers, I will document in detail how the taste for a particular cultural product—South African wine—is being created and constructed through the networks that link these different organizational actors. My study will show that organizational processes matter far more than price or quality in this market.

Shane Hamilton (History)

Shane Hamilton is Associate Professor of History. His research interests include 20th-century U.S. history, agriculture and rural life, history of technology, and history of capitalism.

Co-winner, Virginia Mary Macagnoni Prize for Innovative Research

Project Title: Supermarket USA: Food and Power in the Cold War Farms Race

Project Details

Recounting for the first time the “Farms Race” that underpinned the economic conflict at the heart of the Cold War, my book examines the American supermarket as a concrete embodiment of efforts to promote American-style industrial agriculture on a global stage. Rather than merely treating supermarkets as a form of consumer-oriented Cold War propaganda exported around the world, my study breaks new ground by exploring the supply chains and production practices that allowed supermarketing to transform global food chains in the mid-twentieth century. The book will fundamentally transform our understanding of the economic impacts of the Cold War, offering a fresh and expansive reinterpretation of the rise of American agribusiness in the twentieth century.

Miriam Jacobson (English)

Miriam Jacobson is Assistant Professor of English. Her primary research interests include English literature, Renaissance studies, history, classics, and material culture.

Project Title: Renaissance Undead: Reanimating the Past in Early Modern England

Project Details

This book argues that for English writers, the rehabilitation of classical antiquity in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was not a rebirth or Renaissance, but rather a raising of the dead. Drawing on classical and contemporary materialist readings of the past, I uncover the vexed relationship that writers of the early modern period had with classical antiquity. The book’s five chapters reveal the circulation and reanimation of corpses in several genres: Ovidian metamorphosis (Medea’s resurrection of Aeson); stage romance and epic (mummies in Pericles and Tamburlaine); Turk plays (eunuchs); lyric poetry (hair bracelets and corporeal resurrection in Donne’s poems); and Complaint poetry (weeping, bleeding, lactating female ghosts).

René Jagnow (Philosophy)

Project Title: Experiencing Pictures: The Philosophy, Psychology, and Aesthetics of Pictorial Experience

Project Details

In this monograph, I will develop an account of pictorial experience that explains how pictures can represent objects and scenes in a way that is able to incite a viewer’s aesthetic interest. My project establishes two main theses. First, I argue that what a picture represents is largely determined by the specific ways in which it engages ordinary perceptual mechanisms; and second, I show how this account of pictorial experience explains the phenomenal characteristics of those aspects of pictorial experiences that are particularly relevant to our aesthetic interest. The completed project will integrate results from phenomenology, philosophy, and psychology of visual perception.

Betina Kaplan (Romance Languages)

Betina Kaplan is Associate Professor of Spanish. Her research interests include contemporary Latin American literature, gender and violence, Argentine film, and memory studies.

Project Title: Imagining the ‘Disappeared:’ Memory, Film, and Photography in Argentina’s Post-Dictatorship

Project Details

This book length project analyzes cultural artifacts, particularly film and photographs but also literature, monuments, and memorials to examine how Argentine victims of state violence during the 70’s are visualized in the present. Drawing on recent work in memory studies which attends to the relationship between individual and collective historical experiences, my study analyzes the technologies through which cultural memory is articulated and the ways in which performative practices and representational media depict the figure of the “disappeared.”

Cody Marrs (English)

Cody Marrs is Assistant Professor of English. His primary research interests are U.S. Literature to 1900, the American Civil War, poetry, and aesthetic theory.

Project Title: Transbellum America: Literature, Time, and the Long Civil War

Project Details

This study remaps American literary history through later writings of Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, Frederick Douglass, and Emily Dickinson. Although these authors are typically read as “antebellum” figures, they are in fact interperiodic writers. After peace was sealed at Appomattox, Melville composed thousands of pages of poetry; Whitman repeatedly revised and reissued Leaves of Grass; Douglass delivered some of his most far-ranging lectures; and Dickinson penned more than 560 new poems. These texts, I argue, reveal a different trajectory not only for these particular authors, but for nineteenth-century American literature itself, which is often divided, both scholastically and curricularly, into “antebellum” and “postbellum” halves.

Diane Batts Morrow (History)

Diane Batts Morrow is Associate Professor of History. Her research interests are history and African American studies.

Project Title: “A Group of Race Women Have Made of Themselves a Living Sacrifice to the Cause of Christianity and Service”: The Oblate Sisters of Providence, 1860-1955

Project Details

My research focuses on the Oblate Sisters of Providence, the first black Roman Catholic sisterhood in the United States. More comprehensive in scope than an institutional study, it remains the only research to utilize the experiences of a community of black women religious as a lens through which to analyze significant issues in United States history from the Civil War through the mid-twentieth century. It also contributes substantively to the burgeoning field of scholarship acknowledging the seminal roles women religious have played historically in the formation of American culture and society. The University of North Carolina Press, which published my first book, has expressed interest in publishing this current book-length project.

Rielle Navitski (Theatre and Film Studies)

Rielle Navitski  is Assistant Professor in the Department of Theatre and Film Studies. Her primary interests are film studies, Latin American studies, and visual culture.

Project Title: Criminal Modernities: Sensational Cinema and Journalism in Mexico and Brazil, 1906-1930

Project Details

My manuscript traces the parallel emergence of public cultures of violence in early-twentieth century Mexico and Brazil, examining how early cinema and the illustrated press capitalized on new visual technologies to stage the social tensions of industrialization and urbanization. In two nations with divergent political trajectories but shared experiences of uneven modernization, sensationalism framed criminal violence, bodily peril, and technological breakdown as ambivalent signs of progress. Even as it registered modernization’s social costs, sensational visual culture traded on the topicality and authenticity attributed to photography and cinema, incorporating local spaces into a uniquely modern temporality marked by eventfulness and chance.

John Short (History)

John Short is Associate Professor of History. His research interests are the social and cultural history of Europe in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and the history of European imperialism.

Project Title: The Limits of Global Consciousness: A Critical Prehistory of Globalization and Its Cultural Effects in Europe, 1870-1930

Project Details

The project explores the idea of global consciousness, a convention of globalization theory and world history, by historicizing it, tracing its development in Europe from 1870 to the First World War. It reframes global consciousness with the techniques of cultural history, visual culture and the history of experience, arguing that global consciousness––the play of scales, proximities, distances and vantage points––was not some automatic effect of the globalizing technologies of communications or production or transportation, epiphenomenal and given, but rather the complex and problematic outcome of certain techniques of seeing, elements of commodification, cultural forms and modes of experience.

Sarah Wright (Philosophy)

Sarah Wright is Associate Professor of Philosophy. Her research interests are philosophy, epistemology, virtue theories, and environmental ethics.

Project Title: A Comprehensive Neo-Stoic Virtue Epistemology

Project Details

The goal of this project is to compose a book proposal, the topic of which will fill a gap the range of approaches to virtue epistemology that are currently being discussed in the literature. The dominant approaches in the field either focus too heavily on the reliability of the virtues or take a historical approach to virtue that focuses only on Aristotle. My own neo-Stoic alternative shifts the focus from reliability and broadens the debate by looking at an approach to the virtues developed in a philosophical school that spanned centuries. In addition to its historical interest, this novel neo-Stoic approach can also be used to address general problems in contemporary epistemology.

2013 – 2014

Rachel Gabara (Romance Languages)

Rachel Gabara is Associate Professor of Romance Languages. She specializes in twentieth and twenty-first century Francophone African and European literature and film, literary theory, film history and theory, autobiography, and postcolonial studies.

Co-winner, Virginia Mary Macagnoni Prize for Innovative Research

Project Title: Reclaiming Realism: From Documentary Film in Africa to African Documentary Film

Project Details

This book-length project analyzes contemporary African documentary film in relation to the history of French colonial cinema in West and Central Africa. After independence, African filmmakers experimented with documentary content and style, challenging the so-called realism of colonial newsreels and ethnographies as they worked to reclaim the cinema and their cinematic image from their former colonizers. My finished manuscript will provide the historical context and filmic analysis necessary for an understanding both of the importance of documentary to the French colonial project and the significance of African documentary to world cinema today.

Rachel Gabara

Simon Gatrell (English)

Simon Gatrell is Professor of English. He conducts research on nineteenth-century British and Irish writing and culture, twentieth-century Irish writing and culture, South African writing and culture, textual criticism, and dress theory.

Project Title: A Scholarly Edition of Thomas Hardy’s novel Under the Greenwood Tree

Project Details

The completion of a scholarly edition of Thomas Hardy’s novel Under the Greenwood Tree that will include every alteration to the work made by Hardy and by others over Hardy’s lifetime, an introduction that will include description and analysis of the composition and publication of the novel and analysis of the alterations made by Hardy at each successive stage in the novel’s progress through time, and illustrative and explanatory annotation.  The edition has been commissioned as part of Cambridge University Press’s complete scholarly edition of Thomas Hardy’s fiction.

Simon Gatrell

Kelly Happe (Communications, Women’s Studies)

Kelly Happe is Assistant Professor of Communication Studies and Women’s Studies. Her current research interests include feminist theories of biocapital and biopower, race and performative theory, and new environmental health movements.

Project TitleOccupy, the Body, and the Possibilities for Economic Radicalism

Project Details

This project examines Occupy Wall Street and other Occupy groups as part of a larger project on the body, capitalism, and social movements. Occupy is important for two reasons. First, it is a social movement for which the goal of direct action is not greater participation in existing political forms, such as political parties, labor unions, legislative assemblies, or the courts. Second, and related to this, Occupy is guided by a utopian impulse to disrupt the workings of capitalism and enact alternatives to it. Occupy’s calls for radical economic alternatives are possible, I argue, because of the bodily experience of occupation as a type of rhetorical representation of global capitalism and of one’s place within it.

Kelly Happe

Jamie Kreiner (History)

Jamie Kreiner is Assistant Professor of History. She researches and teaches the history of Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages.

Project TitleThe Premodern Pig

Project Details

The project is a social and semiotic history of the pig: how it was raised, managed, consumed, and represented throughout Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, and why it was such a recurrent feature of social definition and difference.

Jamie Kreiner

Pablo Lapegna (Sociology, Latin American and Caribbean Studies)

Pablo Lapegna is Assistant Professor of Sociology. He specializes in social movements, Latin American studies, ethnography and qualitative methods, environmental sociology, rural sociology, and political sociology.

Project TitleThe Dark Side of the Boom: Transgenic Crops, Pesticide Drifts, and Popular (De)Mobilization in Contemporary Argentina.

Project Details

I am applying to the Willson Center Research Fellowship to complete a book manuscript during fall 2013. Based on ethnography and discursive analysis and drawing on the Argentine case, my book seeks to understand the adoption and expansion of genetically modified (GM) crops, and the ways in which people think, feel, and act (or fail to act) when affected by environmental problems. The Fellowship will allow me to revise the ethnographic chapters of my PhD dissertation (focused on specific rural communities), and write new chapters on the national context, based on the analysis of recently collected newspaper data.

Pablo Lapegna

Chana Lee (History, African American Studies)

Chana Lee is Associate Professor of History and African American Studies. Her areas of specialization are African‑American history, women’s history, biography, and historical memory.

Project TitleMedical Racism and Political Death: The Case of Juliette Derricotte

Project Details

This project examines a fatal automobile accident and its political consequences. The most well-known victim was Juliette Derricotte, an international reformer and university dean. On November 7, 1931, she died from survivable injuries after local hospitals refused treatment. What happened was not unusual in the Jim Crow South, where facilities routinely denied blacks emergency medical care. However, the public outrage that followed was unprecedented. Activists, educators, artists and journalists turned her death into a national cause, and supporters from afar wrote letters and held memorials across India, China, Japan and England, where she had spent years campaigning against women’s oppression.

Chana Lee

Casie LeGette (English)

Casie Legette is Assistant Professor of English. Her Teaching interests are Romantic poetry and prose, nineteenth-century British literature, Victorian poetry, the Victorian novel, poetics, eighteenth-century British literature, nineteenth-century periodical culture, radical culture, gender studies, and social history.

Project TitleThe Past Jumps Up: British Radicals and the Remaking of Literary History, 1790-1870

Project Details

Throughout the nineteenth century, British radical and working-class papers regularly reprinted the (now) canonical poetry and novels of their recent past. By excerpting, re-contextualizing, and remaking this often elite literature, radical editors and publishers made these texts serve entirely new purposes. I argue that these editors and publishers transformed literary history, hauling the texts of the recent past directly into the present and undoing literary chronology in the service of political change. My project demonstrates the ways in which particularly working-class practices of printing, publishing, and excerpting changed both literary history and the history of reading.

Casie LeGette

Stephen Mihm (History)

Stephen Mihm is Associate Professor of History. His primary research interest is in the economic, business, and cultural history of the United States, with special interests in the history of counterfeiting, money, banking, and financial speculation.

Project TitleThe Measure of Modernity: Standards and Standardization in the United States, 1785-1918

Project Details

In the late eighteenth century, standards did not exist in the United States.  Weights and measures varied widely from place to place, as did monetary units, timekeeping practices, and product specifications governing everything from screw threads to railroad track. Over the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a curious coalition of modernizers launched innumerable campaigns aimed at imposing national standards.   This project traces the history of these campaigns, as well as the resistance they often aroused.  It will focus in particular on the integral relationship between standardization, modernization, and the making of the modern nation state.

Stephen Mihm

Nicolas Morrissey (Lamar Dodd School of Art)

Nicolas Morrissey is Assistant Professor of Asian Art. His fields of interest include the history of Asian art and visual culture, Buddhist studies, and the social and religious history of South, Southeast and Central Asia.

Project TitleThe Buddhist Caves at Pitalkhora, Western India

Project Details

My project provides the first comprehensive documentation and analysis of the art, architecture and epigraphy extant at the Buddhist rock-cut monastic complex of Pitalkhora in Western India. This study, the first of its kind, will extend considerably the current understanding of the artistic and religious milieu of Western India during the first five centuries of the Common Era. This book-length project examines the many unique – and previously unrecognized – architectural features of the Buddhist excavations at Pitalkhora while connecting them to broader processes of patronage and Buddhist ritual and doctrinal changes.

Nicolas Morrissey

Thomas Peterson (Romance Languages)

Thomas Peterson is Professor of Italian. He specializes in Italian lyric and epic poetry, modern and contemporary fiction, women writers, literary theory, film studies, and philosophy of education.

Project TitleItalian Representations of America (1935-1965)

Project Details

This is a study of views of the United States of prominent Italian writers during the period 1935-1965.  The writings include cultural and literary essays, travelogues, letters and memoirs.  As a heterogeneous group of texts representing the American reality–in the arts as well as the cultural and social institutions–the works lend themselves to a study by means of literary anthropology.  The project aligns itself with the work of those cultural historians who focus on the relations between national literatures, identities and traditions, rather than viewing them in isolation.

Thomas Peterson

Charles Platter (Classics)

Charles Platter is Professor of Classics. His research interests include comedy and literary theory, with a specific interest in Plato.

Project TitleTracking Orestes: Aristophanes and the Poetic Past

Project Details

This is a proposal for a book about the comic playwright Aristophanes and his relationship with the Greek literary tradition. In it I argue that Aristophanes creates a strong and antagonistic link with the other authors of the Greek poetic tradition, beginning with Homer, continuing through Lyric Poetry and Tragedy, all the way through to his fellow-writers of comedy.   By so doing Aristophanes uses his comedy as a way of shaping the reputations of his rivals and asserting the superiority of his own work.

Charles Platter

Patricia Richards (Sociology, Women’s Studies)

Patricia Richards is Associate Professor of Sociology and Women’s Studies. Her specialty areas include sociology of gender; global sociology; race, class and gender; social movements; and qualitative methodology.

Project TitleEpistemological Decolonization and the Life Histories of Mapuche Women Elders

Project Details

I propose to collect and analyze life histories with Mapuche women elders in southern Chile and Argentina, shedding light on the unique epistemological position reflected in their knowledge stores and life experiences. An exploration of indigenous women elders’ contributions to collective memory and the meanings they hold for broader efforts to decolonize knowledge and theorize autonomy, this project will center the mutual constitution of gender, race, and coloniality and contribute to feminist interventions on decolonial modernities.

Patricia Richards

Daniel Rood (History)

Daniel Rood is Assistant Professor of History. His research and teaching interests include slavery in the Atlantic world, Antebellum South, Latin America and the Caribbean, science and technology, and capitalism.

Co-winner, Virginia Mary Macagnoni Prize for Innovative Research

Project TitlePlantation Technocrats: Slavery, Science, and Expertise in the Atlantic World, 1830-1860

Project Details

I will use the support provided by the Willson Center to complete my book manuscript, Plantation Technocrats. An interdisciplinary study that renews the history of Atlantic slavery by analyzing it through the lens of science and technology, Plantation Technocrats insists that the slaveholding world be incorporated into the mainstream narrative of the Industrial Revolution.  The book shows how chemists, engineers, machinists, and other experts, working with big-money, global commodities like sugar, cotton, and flour, placed themselves on the cutting edge of the new sciences of capitalist commodity production in the nineteenth century.

Daniel Rood

Susan Rosenbaum (English)

Susan Rosenbaum is Associate Professor of English. She specializes in twentieth-century American poetry, with research and teaching interests in American literature, modern poetry and poetics, literature and the visual arts, autobiography and confession, women writers, and cultural and gender studies.

Project TitleImaginary Museums: Surrealism, American Poetry, and the Visual Arts in New York, 1920-1970

Project Details

The technology of mechanical reproduction profoundly transformed the American public’s relationship to art. Instead of visiting art museums, the public could simply look at photos of art in books or on the internet, and could even make their own virtual collections from reproductions. For modern artists and poets, the invitation to transform the public experience and potential meanings of art by reimagining the museum proved irresistible. My book explores the history of the “imaginary museums” American poets and artists created: these visual, conceptual, and poetic collections reimagined the museum’s scale, materials, and democratic aims, and in doing so, made the role of the imagination central to the museum experience.

Susan Rosenbaum

Emily Sahakian (Theatre and Film Studies, Romance Languages

Emily Sahakian is Assistant Professor of Theatre and French. Her research interests include French Caribbean theatre, literature, and cultures; post-colonial and intercultural theatre; theatre of the African diaspora; and French-language theatre.

Project TitleDramatic Disconnects: Slavery’s Legacy in French Caribbean Theatre by Women

Project Details

My book project examines the legacy of slavery in French Caribbean women’s theatre. I argue that eight key plays juxtapose words with performances to unmask—and imagine an end to—four ongoing practices of subjection stemming from the time of slavery. My research into their production and reception histories in the Caribbean, France, and the U.S. has revealed how the performances sparked dialogue and disagreements over how to define race, gender, and Caribbean culture. My study shows Caribbean theatre as working in disconnects—between past and present, African-derived and Western epistemologies, and text and performance—which are emblematic of slavery’s legacy, and which reflect Caribbean culture at large.

Emily Sahakian

2012 – 2013

Mark Anderson (Romance Languages)

Mark D. Anderson is Associate Professor of Latin American Literature and Culture. His research focuses on the relationships between literature and the environment in Latin America.

Project Title: Writing Nature in Latin America: A Literary History

Project Details

The Willson fellowship has been invaluable for me at this critical juncture in the development of my book project on Writing Nature in Latin America. It allowed me to concentrate fully on my research during the spring semester of 2013. In reality, I am working on two books at once: the Writing Nature book and the Crisis Narrative in Mexico book. I have been researching both book projects intermittently over the last several years as I worked on other projects, and I have completed one chapter and a good chunk of the introduction of each of them. I plan to finish the introductions this summer and fall, and then submit proposals for both books to respected university presses. I also plan to use the progress I have made on these book projects during my tenure as a Willson fellow to apply for additional residential fellowships at the Library of Congress and the Research Triangle, as well as research grants from the NEH and the ACLS.

mark anderson

Cynthia Turner Camp (English)

Cynthia Turner Camp is Assistant Professor of English Literature. She specializes in Middle English literature, particularly fifteenth-century history and hagiography.

Co-winner, Virginia Mary Macagnoni Prize for Innovative Research

Project Title: Imagining the Holy Past in Fifteenth-Century England

Project Details

The support of the Willson Center’s Research Fellowship has been pivotal to my research program, both in the 2012-2013 academic year and into the future. The fellowship permitted me to accept a Non-Stipendiary Visiting Research Fellowship at the University of London, which in turn enabled me to secure the Sarah H. Moss Fellowship that supported three months of archival research in London, Oxford, and Cambridge. Since I write frequently about unpublished medieval manuscripts, significant time in the archives that hold those manuscripts is essential. The Willson Center Fellowship directly contributed to the completion of my first monograph, two conference papers (and counting), three invited talks, and two peer-reviewed articles that I will be writing in the coming months. Without Willson Center support, none of that would have been possible, and I am very grateful.

cynthia turner camp

Adriane Colburn (Lamar Dodd School of Art)

Adriane Colburn is Assistant Professor of Art. She is an installation artist.

Project Title: Hyperspectrics, Exhibition Production

Project Details

The Wilson Center Fellowship proved to be an invaluable contribution to my research. It helped to support several exhibitions and enabled me to participate in projects that I would not have been able to engage in while simultaneously teaching. By providing the course release, I was able to be in New York for several months to install and facilitate my exhibition there, to travel to San Francisco three times for an exhibition and the design of two public artworks, and to travel to Marfa, Texas for an exhibition and symposium. My participation in these events has also led to further opportunities including exhibitions in Munich, China, Los Angeles, several public art opportunities and the inclusion in an upcoming publication. In addition, I was awarded the best exhibition prize at the Dumbo Arts Festival. In all, this fellowship has been remarkably fruitful.

Adriane Colburn

Sujata Iyengar (English)

Sujata Iyengar, Professor of English, studies and teaches the ways in which different historical and cultural settings transform and employ the works of Shakespeare.

Project Title: Artistic and Artisanal Print Appropriations of Shakespeare in a Supposedly Post-print World

Project Details

My Willson Center research fellowship allowed me to explore a hitherto under-investigated archive at the Hargrett Rare Books and Manuscript Library, the Folger Shakespeare Library and the Library of Congress: “artist’s books,” or editions of Shakespeare’s plays and poems made by writers, binders, printers, painters and sculptors who use the book – its covers, typography, page layout, and paper texture as well as, of course, the textual or illustrated content upon its pages – as their preferred aesthetic medium. Shakespearean artist’s books such as Jan Kellett’s miniature herbals, Sue Doggett’s unique, collage, print, and hand-illustrated The Tempest, Leonard Baskin’s enormous lithographic Titus Andronicus and MacArthur-award winning book artist Claire Van Vliet’s monumental woodcut-illustrated King Lear use the form of the book to help readers understand Shakespeare’s words in fresh and sometimes challenging ways. Thanks to my Willson Center fellowship, I was able to consult these books first-hand and to experience their effect as physical, material objects in space, rather than as disembodied objects upon a screen. Turning the heavy, cream-colored pages of Van Vliet’s Lear, or unfolding the accordion fans of Kellett’s tiny masterpieces, helped me to understand that book artists turn Shakespeare’s words into exquisite or provocative mobile sculptures (books!) that make art through a performance – a reading – produced and delivered by reader, artist, and author. Such insights about Book Arts and Book History can help us navigate the rapidly changing terrain of emerging digital publication and performance in our own era.

Ari Daniel Levine (History)

Ari Daniel Levine is Associate Professor of History. He is a cultural historian of early modern China.

Project Title: Dislocated Memories: Urban Space and Diasporic Nostalgia in Song China

Project Details

Receiving the Willson Center Research Fellowship enabled me to pursue full-time writing during the fall semester. In that time, I was able to complete two additional chapters of my book manuscript on cultural memory and urban space in Song-dynasty Kaifeng: one on the city’s gardens and another on the imperial palace. I was invited to present early versions of these chapters at a lecture sponsored by Princeton University’s Tang Center for Asian Art in October 2012, and invited talks at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv University, and National Tsinghua University in Taiwan. I also published a chapter in a Chinese-language edited volume, published by Peking University Press. Two other chapters have been accepted for publication in East Asian Science, Technology, and Medicine and the leading European sinological journal, T’oung Pao.

Ari Daniel Levine

Dorothea Link (Hugh Hodgson School of Music)

Dorothea Link is Professor of Musicology. Her research focuses on late eighteenth-century Vienna.

Project Title: Arias for Stefano Mandini, Mozart’s First Conte Almaviva

Project Details

I am extremely grateful to the Willson Center for providing precious research time, which I applied to writing the book Arias for Stefano Mandini, Mozart’s First Conte Almaviva. As one of four case studies on Mozart’s singers, it constitutes the last big chunk of preparatory work needed to writing the book, The Italian Singers in Mozart’s Vienna: Their Voices and Roles. In gestation since 1991, the book aims to shed light both on the kinds of voices heard on the operatic stage in the late eighteenth century and on casting practices of the time in order to give singers and directors today a better sense of how to perform Mozart’s great operas in an historically aware way. Because of my workload during the academic year, the only chance I have for sustained writing is during the summers, which is not enough to maintain momentum in developing ideas to say nothing of producing a respectable publication record. Consequently the Willson Center Research Fellowship, which I have now received two times, has been critical to my progress as a scholar.

Michael Oliveri (Lamar Dodd School of Art)

Michael Oliveri is Associate Professor of Art in the Lamar Dodd School of Art.

Co-winner, Virginia Mary Macagnoni Prize for Innovative Research

Project Title: Inner and Outer Space Images from the Micro to the Macro

Project Details

This project involves creation of Inner and Outer space images. The Inner-space series are large-scale images using an electron microscope. The Outer-space series are images of the night sky.

Michael Oliveri

Peter O’Neill (Comparative Literature)

Peter D. O’Neill is Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature. His interests include state theory, transnationalism, comparative racialization, cultural studies, and ethnic American literature.

Project Title: The Transatlantic Irish and the Racial State

Project Details

I am delighted to report that the Willson Center Fellowship, awarded to me for Spring Semester 2013, has been a resounding success. The break from teaching allowed me the time to conduct the research necessary to write the introductory chapter to my first book project, provisionally titled The American Racial State and the Transatlantic Famine Irish. I am confident that I will have at least two other chapters completed, and certainly enough to send out to publishers, by this coming July. I could not have achieved this goal in such a timely manner without the Willson Fellowship. Sincere thanks are due to all at the Willson Center for this wonderful opportunity to advance my career.

Peter O'Neill

Jennifer L. Palmer (History)

Jennifer L. Palmer is Assistant Professor of History. She is interested in the social and cultural history of eighteenth-century France and its colonies.

Project Title: An Ocean Between Them: Race, Gender, and the Family in France and its Colonies

Project Details

The Willson Center Faculty Research Fellowship has been instrumental in moving my research and writing forward this semester.  As a junior faculty member, it is so important to have the opportunity to devote myself to writing.  During most semesters this is difficult, and even few fellowships in the humanities allow for full-time writing support.  Because of the Willson Center Fellowship, I have made considerable progress towards fulfilling my department’s expectations for tenure, and I have also made great strides towards completing a manuscript that I think will make an important contribution to scholarship in my field.

The Willson Center Faculty Research Fellowship has proven instrumental in driving my scholarship forward.  Without this fellowship, I likely would have completed my manuscript in time for my tenure review—but the manuscript would not be nearly as strong.  Having the opportunity to really focus on the overall argument of the manuscript—an unglamorous but extremely necessary part of a scholar’s craft—has made my project a much more important contribution to knowledge.

jennifer palmer

Akela Reason (History)

Akela Reason is Assistant Professor of History. She is a cultural historian with interests in American material culture and urban history.

Project Title: Politics and Memory: Civil War Monuments in Gilded Age New York

Project Details

While on research leave funded by the Willson Center for the Humanities in the fall of 2012, I completed research for my book project, Politics and Memory: Civil War Monuments in Gilded Age New York. My research campaign began during the summer in New York City, where I completed work in several archives, including the New-York Historical Society, Columbia University’s Avery Architectural Library, New York Public Library, and the city’s Muncipal Archives. During this trip, I also visited and photographed all of the monuments that will be included in my book. My research continued into the fall as I consulted several nineteenth-century newspapers for additional historical information for my project. I also began writing one chapter based on research from my summer trip to New York archives. I presented a paper titled, “The Disappearance of Iconography from New York’s Civil War Monuments, 1864-1902” at the Southeastern College Art Conference in Durham, NC. This paper addressed one of the overarching themes of the book and will provide the basis for at least two book chapters. Early this spring I gave my Willson Center talk, which summarized the state of my work so far.

A Willson Center Fellowship in the fall of 2012 provided me with the opportunity to move my project forward substantially. The gift of time is perhaps the most important thing for advancing publication of scholarly projects. Without this fellowship I would not have been able to gain traction on my project in order to move towards publication.

Jon Swindler (Lamar Dodd School of Art)

Jon Swindler is Assistant Professor of Art.

Project Title: Pressure-Sensitive Project and Artist Residencies

Project Details

The time off provided through the Willson Center Research Fellowship enabled me to concentrate my efforts two ongoing creative projects. In January, during a three-week residency at Scuola di Grafica International I engaged in a project that employed multiple printmaking processes, including relief, plate lithography and monotype.  My approach to the residency and the work created therein was open-ended.  Upon arriving I immediately looked to the environment surrounding me for ideas.  The result was an abstract accumulation of marks and imagery, which were literally and figuratively drawn from Venice.  I viewed Venice as an accumulation of components – a strange built environment in which the interstitial spaces revealed as much about the city as its colossal landmarks.  My approach to pulling the prints was in many ways analogous to the city itself, in that they were some-what structured, somewhat randomized substrates for the accumulation of information.  I embraced the inherent (natural) tendencies of printmaking processes, i.e. decay.  These monoprints became raw material to be scavenged for the creation of a series of collages.  Once again, the place imparted itself on the work.  The spaces in between, which intersect the various components, provide (like mortar) structure and support.

Upcoming projects and opportunities include a solo exhibition at the University of North Carolina in Charlotte and a two-person exhibition at Washington State University in Pullman.  I will be showing work executed during the residencies in Venice and Canada In both of these exhibitions.  This summer I will be traveling to the University of Minnesota to engage students in a “Pressure Sensitive” workshop similar the one I led in Canada.  I am currently in the process of submitting the work created during my Willson Center Fellowship to multiple exhibition opportunities on the national and international level.

Jon Swindler

Martijn van Wagtendonk (Lamar Dodd School of Art)

Martijn van Wagtendonk is Associate Professor of Art, and Chair of the Art X: Expanded Forms area. Most recently he claims to be a kinetic sculptor, even though the room-filling, interactive environments that he constructs are as much engineering and theater endeavors as they are sculptural installations.

Project Title: Song of Lift

Project Details

The Willson Center Research Fellowship allowed me to finish a large project named “Song of Lift.” This is a room-filling kinetic art installation. It was shown at the Urban Institute for Contemporary Art in the show “Somewhere Else,” during the international art competition “ArtPrize.” It won second place and a lot of publicity and exposure.

This fellowship has allowed me not just the room to successfully finish the above-mentioned artwork, but to experiment and research the next step.  With a university system that does not provide sabbaticals, the Willson Center Fellowship provides a much welcomed opportunity to create a window in which to put the nose on the grinding stone and get some real work done on our mandated research.

Martijn van Wagtendonk

Andrew Zawacki (English)

Andrew Zawacki is Associate Professor of English and director of creative writing. His new poetry book,Videotape, is due in spring, while his translation of Sébastien Smirou, My Lorenzo, has just appeared.

Project title: See About: Translating Sébastien Smirou’s Beau voir

Project Details

Thanks to a 2012-13 Willson Center Research Fellowship, I completed a revised draft of French poet Sébastien Smirou’s second poetry volume, Beau voir, which I’m calling See About. Together he and I will finalize the translation this summer, when I’ll return to Paris for two months. Thereafter I will set about seeking an appropriate publisher in the US. I have had preliminary offers from several American houses, including Counterpath Press and La Presse, to publish the book, but I’d like to wait until the manuscript is finished to my satisfaction before committing anywhere. Ideally, I would place the volume with a slightly more visible house; that, in turn, will involve waiting a few months on two national translation fellowships for which I have applied. Meantime, my translations of two of the book’s eight chapters have appeared in the American literary journals Aufgabe and Paperbag, and I have just sent a third to Conjunctions, which is preparing a feature on “menageries.”

Willson Center Research Fellowships – and this was my second such grant – have been integral, irreplaceable aids to me in finishing translating Smirou’s two books. Even more important, however, is the time, funding, and permission these grants have provided to allow my mind to wander –with  the kind  of extreme  concentration  that’s  only  possible  when unfettered by other obligations – into unpredictable domains. An example. In July 2012, when the five photo-essays on Paris graffiti that The Poetry Foundation had asked me to write over summer concluded, I assumed that was the end of that. The series of photographs accompanied by my reflections on French graff were just a discrete, one-off endeavor. Once school started again,  though, and  the  Willson  grant coaxed  me  back  into  translating Smirou,  I  started becoming aware of how my formal Willson project was calling the graffiti venture back into play.  It  began  dawning  on  me  that  examining  graffiti,  especially  in  French,  implicates  a hermeneutics  less  of  reading  or  critical  interpretation than  of  translation. Following that hunch, I delivered a Willson Center Fellows Lecture titled, “Paris Photo Graff: Reflections on Shooting Graffiti in the City of Light.” Presenting this other project of mine was, for me anyway, a compelling way to articulate my ideas about translating, and “Paris Photo Graff” has since moved into the forefront of my creative research. So I am indebted to this fellowship that supported me as I made significant progress on the project I set out to do. But I am more grateful for how the grant provided me an opening to elaborate one project in light of another obsession I hadn’t realized—and wouldn’t have realized, without the Willson—was so related.

Andrew Zawacki

2011 – 2012

Nell Andrew (Lamar Dodd School of Art)

Project title: The Medium is a Muscle: Dance, Film and the Origins of Modern Art

Project Details

The Willson Center Research Fellowship has allowed real strides in my research. As a junior faculty member completing my first book, the fellowship term has provided precious time and focus for my book project.

I am grateful for this extremely productive term during which I have discovered new material in foreign archives, collaborated or consulted with faculty in my field from around the globe, and completed a large portion of my book manuscript for publication. Along the way, my work in archives also produced the unexpected seeds of a future research project, so that the fellowship will help me to complete my first book and even lead me on toward a second.

nell andrew

Sarah E. Blackwell (Romance Languages)

Project title: Framing, Causality, and Evaluation in Spanish: How Cognitive Structures Shape the Discourse

Project Details

Receiving the Willson Center Research Fellowship is a great honor and has been truly invaluable to me. By removing the constant pressure of preparing and teaching classes this semester, it has enabled me to lay the groundwork for a new book.

It brings together three topics—framing, causality, and evaluation—which have been widely studied in various areas of linguistic inquiry, including semantics, pragmatics, and cognitive linguistics. Through the analysis of naturally occurring Spanish discourse, the study aims to show how expressions of causality (e.g. relations of cause and consequence/effect and of justification and claim/conclusion/inference) are inextricably tied to speakers’ “framing” of the situation, both in terms of Gregory Bateson’s notion of framing, or how a speaker’s statement is intended to be interpreted, and Irving Goffman’s definition as the “activity” the speaker is participating in when speaking. Attributions of causality in the Spanish discourse will also be linked to the cognitive notion of knowledge frames (or schemata), originating from the work of Federick Bartlett, which captures the notion that our understanding and evaluation of experiences, including visual scenes and verbal texts, are “expectation-driven” and derived from previous experiences.

The Willson Center Research Fellowship has allowed me to develop these topics into the initial chapters of my book project, along with a tentative outline for the subsequent four chapters, forming a proposal to send to potential publishers of the book, as well as a more narrowly focused research article that closely examines the expression of semantic versus pragmatic causality in the retelling of a film by native Spanish speakers.

sarah blackwell

Lorgia Garcia-Peña (Romance Languages)

Project title: Reframing the Past: A Re-Vision of the 1937 Haitian Massacre

Project Details

As a junior faculty member I cannot even begin to express what an incredibly positive impact this fellowship has already had on my young career. Having a semester to devote to research and writing allowed me to travel to conduct research overseas, meet with mentors and dedicate time to writing and editing.

I spent several months in Mexico City researching a series of recently declassified documents. My findings enriched my book manuscript and allowed me to produce a new article forthcoming next summer in the Latino Studies Journal. In addition I have been invited to various institutions including Rutgers University, Harvard and Amherst to present my work with faculty and students, given that this research is, thanks to the Willson Center, new and groundbreaking.

This fellowship is extremely important for the advancement of research at UGA and I am just thrilled to have had the honor of receiving one.

Lorgia Garcia Peña

Imi Hwangbo (Lamar Dodd School of Art)

Project title: The Sanctuary Series: New Work in Three-Dimensional Drawing

Project Details

My creative research explores the notion of three-dimensional drawings. My work is constructed with translucent mylar that is printed, hand-cut, and layered in such quantity that sculptural forms are created. In the past, the imagery in my work has been based on the iconography of Korean decorative art traditions.

As a professor in the University of Georgia Studies Abroad Program in Cortona in spring 2011, I had the opportunity to research the decorative patterns of cathedrals in Italy. In the fall of 2011, with the research focus provided by the Willson Center Research Fellowship, I began a series of artworks based on the frescoes of the Cathedral of San Rufino in Assisi.

This new body of work, entitled “The Lens Series,” explores the notion of thresholds onto a transcendent space. A lens, which sharpens or alters vision, can transform the act of perception. The works in this series are scaled to suggest a window onto a private meditative space. The imagery, which is colored by hand on a translucent substrate, has the visual effect of stained glass. Fabricated with numerous layers of lasercut mylar, the artworks create a visual statement that is both pictorial and volumetric.

My work has been enormously enriched by the research focus provided by the fellowship. It was essential to the development of an innovative direction in my creative research in the visual arts. It also allowed me to introduce new technical processes such as rapid prototyping in my work.

Imi Hwangbo

Christopher Pizzino (English)

Project title: Graphic Novels and the History of Censorship

Project Details

Thus far in the term of my fellowship, I’ve appeared at the annual international meeting of the Modern Language Association to give a talk related to my book on contemporary U.S. comics. While at the MLA in Seattle in January, I and a fellow panelist were interviewed live on NPR concerning the status and history of comics in the U.S.

My book, Arrested Development: Comics at the Boundaries of Literature, and several of its key topics were mentioned during the interview. The broadcast generated considerable local interest in Seattle’s comics scene, and some comics publishers based in the area subsequently attended the talk. Also in January, an article related to the book was confirmed for publication in ImageTexT, a peer-reviewed journal of comics studies. The article will be entitled “Autoclastic Icons: Bloodletting and Burning in Gilbert Hernandez’s Palomar,” and will appear later this year.

The Willson Center Research Fellowship has had a powerful impact on my research into U.S. comics. To begin with, it allowed time for substantial revisions to the ImageTexT article, which were requested very suddenly in mid-January. Of course, the main impact has been the benefit to the book project. My project seeks to correct a number of common misconceptions about the development of comics, and to understand how they have been affected by a traumatic history of censorship and suppression.

The Fellowship (in addition to allowing time for assembling the manuscript) will allow me to take two crucial research trips. The first will be to the Comic Art Collection at Michigan State University, one of the largest comics archives in the nation, where I will be examining a number of rare horror comics that were more or less censored out of existence in the 1950s. I’ll also be examining the early cultural history of these comics as told in fanzines. The second trip will be to the Library of Congress, which has recently made available the papers of Dr. Frederic Wertham, one of the key crusaders against comics in the 1950s and the most well-known opponent of horror comics. I will be examining his papers in the hope of better understanding the theories of art that allowed Wertham to appreciate violent, disturbing material when presented in modern print literature while condemning very similar material when presented in comics. Neither of these trips would be possible without the support of the Willson Center, nor would the strong intervention I am attempting to make into the study of U.S. comics.

Christopher Pizzino

Jed Rasula (English)

Project title: Jazzbandism

Project Details

This fellowship has made it possible for me to sustain a high level of productivity going back to last summer. One of the advantages of being notified, last spring, that I was a Fellowship recipient, is that I was able to design the whole year for maximum yield.

I therefore spent the summer working exclusively on my book Oblique Modernism, anticipating (correctly, as it turned out) that I could complete it around the end of the year, freeing me up to launch into a new project once the Fellowship began in spring term. Although I was teaching in the fall, a great boon of a Fellowship is that it permits light to shine through the looming window of a cleared space, as it were.

jed rasula

Julie Velásquez Runk (Anthropology)

Project title: Ethics and Engagement: Reflections on the Process of Collaborative Research on an Indigenous Language of Panama

Project Details

I would like to take this opportunity to express my support for the Willson Center Research Fellowship. The Fellowship provides an uncommon opportunity for UGA professors to be released from teaching, and therefore dedicate time to conducting and writing up research. This is particularly important in the arts, humanities, and related disciplines, in which opportunities for support are limited, even with large grants.

Given that I do research internationally in Panama, I have found my research and writing opportunities are stymied by the relatively little time I have available in the summer (and recently that time has been entirely dominated by grant administration). Given that UGA is a research university that does not support research sabbaticals, the role of the Willson Center is incredibly important for the research potential and retention of faculty.

For me personally, my Willson Center Research Fellowship has allowed me the time to work with colleagues in Panama to carry out and reflect on our collaborative linguistic project. In so doing, it has furthered the collaborative potential of our research and its theoretical contribution to the literature. In addition, the teaching release of the Fellowship has permitted me to take advantage of diverse opportunities. These include writing a supplemental proposal to the National Science Foundation, participation in Willson Fellow Fausto Sarmiento’s upcoming conference, and an invited talk at Columbia University.

Julie Velásquez Runk

Esra Santesso (English)

Project title: Disorientations: Islamic Identity in Anglophone Literature

Project Details

I used this time primarily to work on my manuscript (Disorientation: Islamic Identity in Anglophone Literature. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming). This project explores the literary representation of Muslim immigrants and the challenges they face as they try to negotiate their religious identity in the secular states of the West.

I argue that a number of novels written after September 11 highlight the predicament of the devout Muslim woman living in diasporic communities in England; these works pay particular attention to the identity crisis experienced by the Muslim woman, a process which I term “disorientation,” a temporary disruption of identity that challenges the fixity of one’s allegiances.

Without the support I received from the Willson Center it would not have been possible to finish the full draft of the manuscript. Having some time away from teaching allowed me to focus fully on my research, and to have a quick turnaround with my correspondence with the publisher.

Esra Santesso

Fausto O. Sarmiento (Geography)

Project title: Farmscape Transformation in Neotropical Mountains: The Political Ecology of Andean Grasslands Conservation

Project Details

I was very enthusiastic with the prospect of applying to the Wilson Center Research Fellowship, due to an upcoming emphasis on ecocriticism and the inclusion of environmental tropes in the humanities at large, mainly from landscape onomastics and political ecology of agrobiodiversity conservation.

My Willson Center Fellowship had a very positive outcome, as my research productivity increased, reflected with published books and articles, visits to research institutes, and guest lectures, which solidified my professional stance on mountain studies.

fausto sarmiento