2024-2025
Michela Ardizzoni, French & Italian - College of Arts and Sciences
Black Italian Imaginaries
Black Italian writers, performers, and media makers have been contributing to a new understanding of identity and belonging in contemporary Italy, a country that for decades has described itself as white and Catholic. The creative work of the children of immigrant parents reveals a hybrid mix of cultures, languages, religions, and customs—all held together by their common identification as Italians. But the narratives of these new generations of Italians have thus far been marginalized or outright silenced in mainstream records. In a public landscape that stifles diverse voices, the narratives of Black Italian performers, writers, and filmmakers have become an urgent call for a need to redress the space of Blackness in the Italian imaginary. Far from being a mere reaction to this marginalizing rhetoric, my book project Black Italian Imaginaries probes the politics and aesthetics of the multivocality of Italian identity, a way of being Italian that is not dictated by the nationalistic fervor of current mainstream discourse. Black Italian Imaginaries brings together postcolonial studies, decolonial theory, and Black aesthetics in analyzing the history and poetics of Blackness in Italy to show and analyze the existence of a specific cultural production of Black Italianness embedded in the narratives (written, oral, sung, filmed) of contemporary media makers and practitioners.
Thora Brylowe, English - College of Arts and Sciences
Rag Paper and its Transatlantic Ecologies, 1770-1860
Rag Paper and its Transatlantic Ecologies, 1770-1860 is an interdisciplinary book that invites its readers to rethink the physical medium on which culture was (and is) transmitted and stored. It brings theories of media together with attention to paper’s impact on papermill workers and ecosystems, contributing to a growing body of environmental studies in the humanities. This book produces a fuller picture of media ecology as a dynamic system of mobility, use and reuse.
Marjorie Burge, Asian Languages and Civilizations - College of Arts and Sciences
Unearthing Written Cultures of Early Korea and Japan
My book project, Unearthing Written Cultures of Early Korea and Japan explores the adoption of the Chinese script in Korea and Japan in the sixth through eighth centuries. Through focusing on caches of inscribed wooden strips known as mokkan recovered in archaeological excavations throughout Korea and Japan, I explore multiple local script communities operating to varying degrees as part of a larger written network that mirrored prestige good distribution networks of earlier eras. Further, because it was through the immigration of Korean scribes that writing first took hold in Japan, my work underscores the connections between specific regional written cultures across the peninsula and in the archipelago.
J Calder, Linguistics - College of Arts and Sciences
Handsome Women
Handsome Women is a scholarly monograph exploring the linguistic and embodied practices of a group of radical drag queens in the South of Market (SoMa) neighborhood in San Francisco, California. This ethnography employs a multi-modal analysis to explore the relationship between the visual gendered body on the one hand, and the medium of language as a means to articulate gender on the other. Many of the SoMa queens identify as transgender and nonbinary in their daily lives, and their visual gender presentation varies between one that is often read by normative society as “male” when they are out of drag, and one that is more likely to be read as “female” when they are in drag. Many of the queens recount how their feminine voices and mannerisms are stigmatized when they visually appear “male”, but these same voices and mannerisms allow them to receive social capital when in feminine drag. In navigating a gendered landscape that expects voices and bodies to ideologically “match” in normative ways, the SoMa queens leverage visual materials and vocal techniques to create ideological space for themselves as gender-expansive individuals within a wider cisgender society.
Arne Höcker, Germanic & Slavic Languages & Literatures - College of Arts and Sciences
Paranoia and the Totalitarian Drift of Modernity
My book analyzes the history of paranoia and how it can help us understand the re-emergence and rise of sovereign forms of authority in Weimar Germany. Clinically characterized as mental delusion of persecution, jealousy, and grandeur, paranoia became popular in modern psychiatry around 1900 and took on special importance in Freud’s psychoanalysis. Against this historical-epistemological background and informed by philosophical explanations of paranoia as “an illness of power” (Elias Canetti), my study develops an understanding of paranoia as a theoretical figure offering a critical response to two of the central crises of modernity: the crisis of reality and truth; and the crisis of authority. Based on empirically rich case studies from psychiatric, journalistic, literary, and sociological contexts during the Weimar era, my book analyzes the shifting of the forces of modernity towards totalitarian forms of power and control.
Angelica Lawson, Ethnic Studies and Cinema & Moving Image Studies - College of Arts and Sciences
Inaugural Reparative Faculty Fellowship to Address Settler Colonialism
Enacting Our Futures: Resistance and Resilience in Indigenous Women’s Resurgence Media
“Enacting Our Futures: Resistance and Resilience in Indigenous Women’s Resurgence Media,” explores the intersections of Indigenous digital studies, literature, and ecocinema through Native American women’s creative works using resurgence theory—an Indigenous feminist framework most notably developed in the work of Anishinaabe scholar Leanne Betasamosake Simpson. Indigenous resurgence specifically refers to political strategies and cultural practices aimed at strengthening Indigenous peoplehood in ways that elevate our epistemologies and ontologies while interrogating legacies of colonialism in our societies, especially inequities along lines of gender and sexuality. Historically, art served both practical and ceremonial purposes, richly layered with symbolic meaning and deeply rooted in Indigenous thought systems. Today’s writers and filmmakers are doing similar work, invoking new modes for insuring continuance, and while the last three decades have seen a proliferation of Indigenous women’s literature, film, and digital media using Indigenous languages created by women who are heavily invested in community engagement—both of which are elements central to Indigenous resurgence, these works have received scant attention in literary and film scholarship. My project seeks to reverse this trend, and to contribute to Indigenous feminist resurgence theory by engaging the work of four lesser-known Native women writers and filmmakers. I demonstrate how, through their community engagement and creative cultural productions, they assert Indigenous presence and futurity in the face of ongoing settler-colonial forces of erasure.
Natalie Mendoza, History - College of Arts and Sciences
Good Neighbor at Home: Mexican American Politics in the World War II Era
My book, Good Neighbor at Home: Mexican American Politics in the World War II Era, shows how Mexican Americans used geopolitics to demand the U.S. government take an active role in ending anti-Mexican racism in the Southwest (1930s-1940s). During World War II, the nation’s hypocrisy became clear: claiming to be a beacon of democracy, the U.S. failed to address its own racism. U.S.-Latin American foreign policy amplified this paradox. The Good Neighbor policy (est. 1936) aimed to repair relations in Latin America by emphasizing a common American heritage, regardless of race, in the hemisphere. Mexican Americans used this moment to call out the government’s reluctance to address racism at home as an affront to its egalitarian ideals. My book makes a case for possibilities in advancing racial equity in the present through grassroots activism and federal action.
Omedi Ochieng, Communication - College of Media, Communication and Information
Keywords for a Black Ecology
What would be the form and contours of the ecological imagination if one started from practices that unfold from fugitive and insurgent Black populations and movements? This is the central question animating this book project. My study seeks to contribute to the invention of a theory, language, and praxis of Black radical ecology. Drawing mainly on visual and print media produced by insurgents, activists and organizers in the numerous protests, riots, and civil unrests that have unfolded across the United States—most notably, the George Floyd, Atlanta, Kenosha, and Ferguson rebellions—this research study asks: how does our conception of ecology change when we attend to the lives, theories, and practices of people whose struggles have focused on the abolition of policing, prisons, and empires writ large? How are keywords of ecology—such as “sustainability,” “resilience,” “adaptation”—transfigured when seen through the eyes of those who are fighting for survival in food deserts, halfway houses, and in sacrifice zones such as the inner city, the prison, the coal camp, and the hollow?
Tracy Quan, Spanish & Portuguese - College of Arts and Sciences
Being Latinx and Asian in the United States: Ethnolinguistic Identities, Multilingual Practices, and Raciolinguistic Ideologies
Being Latinx and Asian in the United States is a sociocultural linguistic project that explores how individuals who identify as both Latinx/Hispanic and Asian confront and contest racio- and ethnolinguistic assumptions about who they are and who they can be. First, Latin Asians are subject to raciolinguistic ideologies–racialized ideas about the language(s) people speak based on their phenotype, race, and ethnicity–and monoglossic and monoracial ideologies that result in complex forms of inter- and intra-group marginalization based on their perceived linguistic and cultural background. Second, Latin Asians reconcile their intersecting identities in light of these ideologies in multiple ways, ranging from dress and appearance to language use to sociocultural practices to the adoption of exclusionary language ideologies to claim or reject identities that are not automatically ascribed to them. I employ critical discourse analysis to analyze survey and interview data from US-based Latin Asians to study the way power, legitimacy, and belonging are enacted, reproduced, and resisted by text and talk in participants’ narratives in an effort to understand, expose, and ultimately resist discrimination reproduced in discourse. Ultimately, this project uses the case of Latin Asians to problematize monolithic views of who Spanish speakers and Latinxs/Hispanics are in the US context, and in so doing, expose and contest the raciolinguistic discourses that marginalize Latinxs/Hispanics and Spanish speakers who fall outside stereotypical expectations.
Jeanne Quinn, Art & Art History - College of Arts and Sciences
Looking Glasses
Looking Glasses proposes using mirrored surfaces in a sculptural installation that creates a space where we may see ourselves as we are. While mirror-like glazes have been possible for ceramic artists for centuries, the technique of using metallic lusters to create a reflective surface on clay has not been fully exploited by ceramicists in a conceptual register. Mirrors reflect, but also reverse front to back—described by mathematicians as inside-out. Covering the walls in the corner of a room, viewers will be reflected on two sides. Mirrors at a ninety-degree angle to one another form a “true mirror” or non-reversing mirror, creating an uncanny sensation as left and right are inverted from the conventional mirror image, and allowing us to see ourselves as others do.
Charlie Samuelson, French & Italian - College of Arts and Sciences
Sexual Consent in High Medieval French Literature
Sexual Consent in High Medieval French Literature takes to task an entrenched notion: that the history of sexual consent is one of progress forward from a backward Middle Ages. Reading twelfth- and thirteenth-century literary texts associated with a variety of genres (romances, chansons de geste, saints’ lives, lyric poetry) alongside medieval canon law and theology, as well as modern moral philosophy and legal and feminist theory, this monograph seeks to do justice to both the sophistication and the limitations of the engagement with sexual consent in literary works. It emphasizes how texts long read as uninterested in sexual consent can reflect on it in intricate ways that intersect with medieval and modern thought; it also stresses how this pushes us to think in new ways about both the concept’s messy history and its fraught theoretical relation to feminist politics today.
2023-2024
David Boonin, Philosophy
Recent technological advances have transformed government use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in a variety of ways. Police departments depend on crime prediction algorithms to tell them where and when to send officers on patrol. Cities deploy massive networks of closed-circuit television cameras to engage in public surveillance on an unprecedented scale. Courts making decisions about bail, parole, probation, and even sentencing increasingly rely on proprietary recidivism prediction algorithms. And military powers around the world are engaged in an escalating arms race to develop increasingly autonomous AI-based weapon systems capable of selecting and lethally engaging enemy targets on their own. My book project, Artificial Intelligence, Ethics, and the State, critically examines the main ethical objections that have been raised against each of these developments, focusing on four features of the latest form of AI that give rise to the objections: (1) advanced machine learning algorithms can inadvertently replicate, strengthen, and even introduce racial bias, (2) they can interact with each other on a scale so massive that they threaten to invade our privacy, (3) they can be so complex that it’s impossible to explain the basis of the conclusions they reach, and (4) they can operate in increasingly autonomous ways that raise puzzling questions about who, if anyone, can be held responsible for the results of their behavior.
David Glimp, English
Digital Humanities and Arts Fellowship (CHA/CRDDS)
Drama, Romance and Political Life in the English Renaissance: A Computational Approach
This project utilizes computational methods for text analysis to augment our understanding of the politics of Renaissance English literature. Focusing on two important forms of literary production—drama and proto-novelistic romances—this study examines the usefulness of computational approaches for deepening our knowledge about the complex interplay between political controversy and artistic practice in sixteenth and seventeenth-century England. The proposed study will strive to understand: 1) when and how distinct political vocabularies and concepts develop in the available corpora; 2) which kinds of political ideas are most prevalent on stage and in romance; 3) differences between the political dimensions of romance and drama; and 4) to what extent literary works lead, lag, or parallel the development of political discourses. Drawing on new methods for textual inquiry this research aims to augment our understanding of how political discourse—ideas about the nature and scope of sovereign authority, about the nature and responsibility of government, and about identity and community—transform across the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and interact with Renaissance English literature.
Patrick Greaney, Germanic & Slavic Languages & Literatures
My project examines the central role played by the consumer products company Braun in mid-twentieth-century West German culture. Braun has long been considered by historians to be West Germany’s exemplary design-oriented company, and the firm’s canonical style is often credited as an inspiration by contemporary designers. Drawing on extensive archival research, my project is the first critical history of Braun that shows how the company presented itself as a lifestyle brand for a postfascist culture and responded to 1950s conceptions of race, gender, and sexuality. By fully situating Braun in postwar culture, my project transforms the history of a global brand and design style and deepens the understanding of the tensions between past and present that shaped West Germany’s first decades.
Zachary Herz, Classics
The God and the Bureaucrat: A Story of Roman Law considers how the Roman Empire, an autocratic state ruled by leaders of variable competence and governed according to aristocratic etiquette, could generate the documents we now understand as foundational to liberal legal order. In the third century C.E., jurists (legal philosophers) like Ulpian wrote elaborate treatises on the application of abstract legal doctrine, even as most Roman adjudicators lacked the training to understand the texts written for their ostensible benefit. Men like Ulpian—who briefly served as a regent for the child-ruler Severus Alexander before dying in a military coup—and his mentor Papinian, who was put to death in 212 for refusing to endorse imperial fratricide, wrote guides to a law that did not actually exist. The God and the Bureaucrat argues that these texts are properly understood as an archive of political imagination: of smart men, in perilous circumstances, dreaming of a world that was fairer than their own. These men drafted off of a longstanding tendency in Roman discourse that equated law with archaism, formality, and impersonality; from the speeches of Cicero to the poetry of Horace, Romans viewed law as a set of values as much as statutes. This fantastical jurisprudence would combine with the autocratic legalism emerging from the imperial court into a new kind of law that was abstract and suprapolitical, but nevertheless socially powerful: in other words, into the normative order we now understand as “positive law” and treat as Rome’s greatest legacy. My research roots this legal transformation in the literary movements and political chaos of Imperial Rome; by showing the fantastical origins of the documents we now know as Roman Law, The God and the Bureaucrat sheds new light on how Rome—and law—organize our own fantasies.
Marina Kassianidou, Art and Art History
A Partial History of Touch: Volume I is a mixed-media installation that explores the relational character of mark-making as well as the multidimensional characters of language,
embodiment, and knowledge. The installation revolves around a collection of 19th and early 20th-century Greek schoolbooks that belonged to my grandparents and great-grandparents. I trace marks of use and time found on the pages of these books, such as folds, creases, tears, stains, discolorations, and worm holes, and recreate them as artist’s books and large-scale sculptural drawings. The recreated books and drawings act as records of the history of handling of each original book. The “unreadable” marks that these records hold—marks that may be more readable to a non-Greek audience than the Greek characters in the original books—enable an embodied and potentially shared mode of knowing, one that depends on touching, feeling, and handling objects as we move through the world.
A. Marie Ranjbar, Women & Gender Studies
From Persian Empire to Pariah State: Environmental Injustice, Racialization, and Coloniality in Iran aims to untether understandings of empire and colonialism from the West, demonstrating how environmental injustice in Iranian Azerbaijan functions as a form of coloniality that is under-theorized in decolonial and postcolonial scholarship. Bridging historical analysis of Iran’s imperial pasts with ethnographic work on contemporary social movements, this book project examines how the desiccation of Lake Orumiyeh disproportionately impacts ethnic minority communities and reproduces relations of coloniality. Using the example of Lake Orumiyeh as an entry point into the history of imperialism in Iranian Azerbaijan, I analyze how conflicts over this region during the 18th and 19th century by the British, Persian, Russian, and Turkish empires shape current struggles over land, environmental resources, and minority rights in Iranian Azerbaijan. While anticolonial scholars have established how Iran has been deeply impacted by Euro-American imperialism, I posit that Iran’s encounters with non-Western empires have created different forms of coloniality not adequately accounted for in Anglophone theory that are critical for understanding environmental violence. The book demonstrates how the racialization of ethnic minorities in Iranian Azerbaijan reflects forms of coloniality that both replicate European racial logics and the current embodiments of non-Western empires (i.e., Russia, Turkey), thereby broadening current debates on imperialism, ontology, and the environment.
Annika Socolofsky, Composition
Sentinel, Socolofsky's debut full-length opera, intimately captures the internal struggles of an agoraphobic woman battling against the realities of her own trauma and attempting to escape her pain through the construction of her own virtual reality. Created by Danielle Birritella, Sentinel’s creative team consists of librettist Claressinka Anderson, projection designer Hana Soonyeon Kim, and music director Marc Lowenstein. Sentinel is first and foremost about the journey of healing—a rare objective in a medium historically obsessed with the themes of trauma, pain, and sexual violence. This project builds upon Socolofsky's past work with themes of physical and emotional trauma, rage, and neurodivergence as it relates to queerness in her most notable vocal works Don’t say a word and I Tell You Me. A workshop of the initial compositional material is slated for Fall of 2023 at Montclair State University, presented and funded by PEAK Performances.
Nishant Upadhyay, Ethnic Studies
Indians on Indian Lands studies dominant caste Indian diasporic formation within the Canadian settler state. Specifically, it theorizes Indian immigrant labor in resource extraction industries, logging and canneries in unceded lands of British Columbia in the 1960s-90s and the tar sands in Treaty 6 lands of Alberta presently. The book examines these sites as simultaneous spaces of Indigenous dispossession, spaces of racialized-classed-gendered-casted labor formations, and spaces that are further fueling the climate crises. Weaving theory, interviews and conversations, ethnography, cultural and literary analysis, archival research, analysis of recent events, and secondary literature, the book forms the archive of Indigenous and Indian spatial and affective intimacies that exist within and across the afterlives of imperialism. This multi-sited, multi-method, interdisciplinary approach traces the interwoven and simultaneous relationalities, intimacies, and complicities of dominant caste Indian diasporic communities. Indians on Indian Lands adds to the growing scholarship on Indigenous and Asian relationalities within Canadian and U.S. settler states and offers first of its kind multi-sited exploration of contemporary Indigenous-Indian intimacies using mixed-methods interdisciplinary approaches. Overall, the book is an exploration of what it means for brahmin and dominant caste Indians to be on Turtle Island, and what it means to engage in decolonial ways of knowledge production, ethical relationalities, and solidarity praxis.
Terri S Wilson, School of Education
Schools of choice often focus on the needs, interests, and identities of particular communities. These schools raise philosophical questions about justice and recognition. What kinds of identity should be recognized by the state, and how might such identities be supported through public education? My project, How Different Should Schools Be? Justice, Recognition and Choice in Education, explores debates about the purposes and limits of school choice. Drawing on original research in three distinctive schools, my project leverages concrete cases of school choices to build novel, textured arguments about the justifiable limits of choice. I argue that claims of recognition must be considered alongside the broader structural forces that shape identity differently for different students. Certain non-dominant communities do have powerful reasons to establish schools that support their cultural and linguistic identities, but such claims do not apply to more privileged communities that seek to create schools of their own. Identity claims are neither equal nor interchangeable.
Tim Weston, History
My book project, Dying to Speak: The Perilous Life of the Journalist in Modern China, is about freedom of speech in twentieth-century China. It revolves around the careers of four celebrity journalists from the early part of the century, all of whom were brutally killed because their newspaper work threatened the interests of powerful political figures. In addition to examining the four men’s colorful careers, I analyze the process by which, after their deaths, they were transformed into martyrs, idealized representations of the crusading, justice-seeking journalist prepared to speak truth to power. Finally, I assess the ways, over the last forty years, the four men have been remembered in the People’s Republic of China, where journalists are forced to tow the Communist Party line and, along with all Chinese citizens, are denied freedom of speech, despite its being guaranteed in the Chinese constitution.
2022-2023
Maisan Alomar, Women & Gender Studies
Race for the Cure examines the transhumanist movement–which positions itself as a cutting-edge and future-oriented endeavor to eliminate mortality–as part of a long historical arc of medically rehabilitative research and practice that has exploited and exacerbated gendered, race, and class inequality. It analyzes key moments in the post-WWII “rehabilitative turn”– including a new look at the origins of the Tuskegee Study – to situate the contemporary transhumanist movement as part of this history of research ethics, gendered and racial subjectivity, and unequal access to healthcare. Amidst the present global health crisis, which understandably has led to the proliferation of hurried efforts to develop rehabilitative technologies, examining this precedent shows: At every stage from conceptualization to testing to distribution, the development of rehabilitative medical technologies risks exploiting and reproducing historical inequities evident in earlier attempts to define and rehabilitate disability.
Angie Chuang, Journalism
American Otherness examines journalism’s cultural role in producing American identity and navigating racial equity through case studies. The book project focuses on eight distinct news-media narratives that span the first two decades of this century, bracketed by the 9/11 terrorist attacks and the COVID-19 pandemic. These narratives include the news coverage of the undocumented mostly-Latinx youth pursuing residency through the DREAM Act/DACA, the Barack Obama “birther” debate, and the Atlanta spa shootings. My research argues that journalism’s struggle to embody an ideal of racial equity mirrors a broader cultural struggle over Americanness—and that the mainstream news media are very much enmeshed in this process, at once hindering and enabling progress and self-reflection.
David Ciarlo, History
Ciarlo's new book project, Selling War: Advertising, Propaganda, and the Origins of the Fascist Aesthetic in German Visual Culture, 1910-1925 offers a visual history of the First World War, using images that were widely seen at the time, but are now largely ignored or forgotten—namely, those of advertising. My research shows how belligerent, warlike imagery circulated widely in German commercial culture long before the German state begin its (better-known) efforts to disseminate official propaganda. Moreover, my exploration of advertising shows how graphic designers were the first to craft the themes that would be picked up by later official propaganda: advertisers created and circulated visions of hyper-masculine militarism, of smugly-confident technophilia, and of a type of German-ness that was increasingly racialized (as "whiteness") and these widely-circulated visions became an important means by which ordinary Germans at home or at the front actually "saw" the war. Selling War, then, will argue that even the horrors of trench warfare could be re-imagined through the ceaseless repetition of martial themes in mass-produced commercial imagery. Moreover, the imagery of the hyper-masculine, militarized, and racially-pure "German" that emerged in the advertising of the war years formed the core of a "fascist aesthetic" which the National Socialists (Nazis) would first borrow from and then coopt.
Brianne Cohen, Art & Art History
Cohen’s The Empathic Lens: Contemporary Art, Ecology, and Kinship in Southeast Asia is the first study to explore a 21st-century efflorescence of artistic projects in Southeast Asia that urge widescale publics to prevent socio-environmental violence by envisioning ecological empathy through more sustainable, Indigenous cosmologies. This artwork employs the camera lens not only to document destruction of local landscapes, but also to galvanize feeling for inanimate matter, plants, animals, and humans through the imagining of more embodied, interconnected forms of kinship, an understanding of familial, environmental relations central to Indigenous knowledge. Major museums and cultural venues throughout the world widely exhibit the work of these artists from Cambodia, Vietnam, and Singapore, yet publics in the United States and Europe may not recognize their names yet because they remain marginalized and understudied in Euro-American scholarship – names such as Khvay Samnang, Tuan Mami, or Nguyễn Trinh Thi. The Empathic Lens analyzes and introduces English-speaking, arts-and-humanities audiences to this body of environmentally engaged, camera-based artwork, which presents an alternative, more ethical picture for planetary living through the lens of sustainable, Indigenous worldviews.
Celine Dauverd, History
All the Kings of the Mediterranean examines the conquest of North Africa (1450-1620) through the prism of seven Renaissance popes. By investigating on the one hand soft power through rhetoric and authority, and, on the other, raw power through secular jurisdiction and alliance politics, it argues that popes sought leadership over all confessions. By examining 15-17th c. documents in six different languages, I reveal that popes’ ecumenical identity was the signifier of their redefined imperium. Acting as potent ideological fuel whose imperial interests choreographed wars in Africa, popes adroitly consolidated their sovereignty over the Mediterranean world at the expense of Iberian rulers and Muslim warlords. Bridging classical studies, religious history, and international relations, this project brings an alternate history to the Maghreb conquest.
Mithi Mukherjee, History
The Asian Dissent examines the dissenting judgment of the Indian jurist Radhabinod Pal in the Tokyo Trials of 1946, held by the victorious powers of the Second World War to try Japanese wartime leaders. In this lone dissent Pal mounted the most significant legal challenge from the colonized world in Asia to the existing discourse of international law and its connections to empire and race in the twentieth century. By exploring the complex and conflicting geopolitical and cultural discourses that undergirded this historic act of defiance, The Asian Dissent seeks to insert anticolonial resistance into the heart of the story of international law, empire, and international relations. As the search for a new post-imperial international law that could meet the challenges of a globalized world becomes ever more urgent, Pal’s anticolonial perspective has become particularly salient.
Yumi Roth, Art & Art History
Filipiniana Americana is a play on words and the associations we have with terms like “Americana” and, to a lesser extent in the US, “Filipiniana.” As categories, “Americana” and “Filipiniana” seem to describe quintessential aspects of each culture, yet, when combined, what can the new, hybrid term suggest? Though Filipinos were present and represented in the American West from the late 19th c. (e.g. the 1899 Greater America Exposition in Omaha, NE and Buffalo Bill's Wild West show), the myth of the American West does not include Filipinos. As an artist, I am interested in the forms that these stories and knowledge can take, from objects to video to site-based installation. Filipiniana Americana describes the larger project of locating the intersection between “Filipinoness” and “Americanness” couched in the American West.
Honor Sachs, History
Sach’s project, “Freedom by a Judgment,” which traces the story of a mixed-race family of slaves named the Colemans as they sued for freedom claiming Indigenous ancestry over multiple generations. The Colemans claimed descent from a maternal Indian ancestor named Judith, an Apalachee woman born in Spanish Florida who was captured by the English and sold into slavery. As Judith’s children and grandchildren were sold, they initiated freedom suits by claiming Indigenous heritage. This project documents their complex personal histories as they worked within the evolving legal system of the early United States to define their own understandings of race, rights, and family.
Emilie Upczak, Cinema Studies & Moving Image Arts
Digital Humanities and Arts Fellowship (CHA/CRDDS)
Feminism and Queer Identity in a 1970’s Commune: The Ann Roy Collection
The Rare and Distinctive Collections was gifted Ann Roy’s collection of work in 2012. The substantial and uniquely diverse materials cover Roy’s life as a young girl in Tulsa, Oklahoma; as the wife of an historian writing about the Ute Indian Territory; as an ex-patriot living in Mexico and raising two sons; as an instructor at Ivan Illich's center in Cuernavaca, and as a feminist working to bridge the cultures of Mexico and the United States. The collection includes Super-8 films that were taken in Tepoztlán, Morelos, Mexico where Roy lived in the 1970’s, a center for international spiritualists seeking answers and exploring identity, often through performance and under the influence of hallucinogens. The Super-8s also point to the emergence of a queer community. The final project will be a Digital Exhibition that will include audio recordings, digitized films, photographs, drawings, clothing designs, writings, lectures from the collection while giving a historical overview of the group of people, location, and movements within the collection, and engage creative projects and ask questions through the making and presentation of, experimental films, scholarly articles and interviews.
Laura Winkiel, English
Modernism and the Middle Passage is a literary history of modernism written from the vantage point of the sea and the legacy of the slave trade. The sea has long been viewed in the West as wasted, empty space and a lawless zone that hides its history and swallows its traumas, especially the mass atrocities on board slave ships. Modernism and the Middle Passage’s attention to the ocean and its role in slavery remaps modernist literary history across centuries, nations, races, and even the nature/culture divide that defines the human. It compares Anglophone writing from Africa, Britain, the Caribbean, and the US within the common frame of Atlantic history and situates newly published works by Zora Neale Hurston and Claude McKay within modernist writers’ focus on the aftereffects of the slave trade. The book presents the sea as a material entity that invites new kinds of planetary connectivity, new histories of slavery and colonization, and new modes of thinking the human to emerge.