A book-length study of Homer and the history of political philosophy.

I seek support for a book on Homer and the history of political philosophy, a book for which I have received an advanced contract from Cambridge University Press. This book provides something that does not exist in the scholarly literature on Homer or on the history of political philosophy: a compact, focused, and accessible study of Homer as a philosophic thinker in conjunction with Plato, Machiavelli, Nietzsche, and the Bible and an account of the history of political philosophy that begins, not with Plato, but with Homer. My book seeks to demonstrate Homer's crucial importance as a philosophic thinker by explaining the critical role he plays in the thought of Plato, the founder of classical political philosophy; Machiavelli, the founder of modern political philosophy; and Nietzsche, the principal philosophic source of postmodernism. This book will also shed important light on the relation between rationalism and religion in the history of political philosophy by comparing and contrasting Homer and the Bible with respect to their presentations of the divine and their understanding of human excellence.
 

A book-length history of the development, use, and marketing of drugs for children.

This historical study traces the development, use, and marketing of drugs for children. This project’s central argument is that a history of children and drugs is an important lens through which to study children’s place in American life. It spotlights the ways in which evolving constructions of health and disease, shifting child-rearing notions, and changing beliefs about children, have helped medicalize childhood. It is the first book length history of this topic, joining a body of scholarship that attends to age as a historical variable. It is especially important to study this issue historically because almost every twentieth century drug law was enacted because of a pediatric disaster. But drug safety improved for adults, not children, and remains a vexing problem. Most research into this phenomenon is ahistorical. This project is also significant because it shows the novel insights that can be gained by the use of a humanities framework to study scientific and ethical issues.

Research and writing leading to publication of a book on the role of debate among Buddhist monks in shaping medieval Japanese culture.

This project examines the role of Buddhist monastic debate (rongi) in shaping the intellectual, religious, and cultural contours of medieval Japan from the eleventh to the sixteenth centuries. Since participating in debates was an official requirement for monks’ promotion, both medieval critics and modern scholars have dismissed them as a tool of self-aggrandizement. However, by examining the lives of the intellectual giants, their famous debates, and the largely unnoticed “behind-the-stage” moments of regular scholar monks (e.g., daily training in debate skills and doctrinal learning), my book argues that the debate skills that these monks developed were not only a means of social advancement, but also a dynamic mode of internalizing and producing doctrinal knowledge and contesting its established interpretation. Thus my project challenges a popular conception of Buddhism as more experientially rooted and reveals the largely neglected, scholastic dimension of Japanese Buddhism.

A book-length study of the history of Chinese Americans who migrated back to China in the first half of the 20th century, and of their contributions to the Republic of China.

Before World War II, people of Chinese ancestry born in the United States enjoyed few opportunities in America because of racial discrimination there. After the 1911 collapse of China's last imperial dynasty, many Chinese American citizens began to see the young republic that replaced it as a land of opportunity. Almost twenty percent of Chinese American citizens between 1912 and 1937 eventually left the United States and moved to China for careers, education, and to build the new nation. This project is the first study of these people, who helped shape Republican China's early institutions, organizations, companies, schools, cities, and politics. Through examining the lives and experiences of these forgotten Chinese Americans, the project will offer new perspectives on nation-building and economic development in China, the evolution of US citizenship and expatriation policies, and the fraught Sino-American relationship during the first half of the twentieth century.

A book-length study on the logician Saul Kripke and his concepts of identity and necessity.

I propose to re-examine currently orthodox philosophical views concerning the logic, metaphysics and semantics of identity and necessity. The resulting alternative theory dispenses with the notion of a two-place relation that every object bears to itself, and to itself only, and proposes a more sophisticated conception of logical form for necessity statements that accounts, by way of explicit notation, for the distinction between indicative and non-indicative verb moods. It will be shown that a number of prominent philosophical theses, many of which were first articulated by Saul Kripke in the 1970s, require substantial revision or become outright untenable when the background logical framework is modified in the manner proposed. These include the necessity of identity, the existence of contingent a priori truths, and the principled non-synonymy of proper names with definite descriptions. The results will be of interest to philosophers, logicians and linguists.

A book-length study of the impact of the U.S. presidency on the history of photography and photographic technology.
 
 

The Camera Politic contends that a history of photography told through the lens of its most official subject, the President of the United States, shows us how generations of Americans learned to understand photography's role in public life. The book will analyze images, texts, and archival material to study how presidents participated in and shaped the public experience of photography at four transformative moments: the introduction of the daguerreotype in 1839; the rise of halftone after 1880; the arrival of 35-mm photography in the late 1920s; and the digital revolution of the early twenty-first century. By challenging the narrow characterization of photography as a political tool and extending political communication scholarship back into the pre-television era, my project invites us to think more broadly about how presidential photography participates in the public sphere, and reminds us that every era negotiates the challenges and opportunities of its own "new media."

A book-length study of the material qualities of texts and literary depictions of objects in modern Jewish literature.

My project reads 20th-century Jewish literature through the lens of material culture, analyzing the material qualities of texts, the depiction of things, and discourse about materiality during a period shaped by migration, the Shoah and social, political upheaval. Examining how transition and rupture have refashioned Jewish textuality as material culture will enrich our sense of literature's complex relation to its physical surroundings. Jewish writing emerges from a culture whose theological tradition has an ambivalent relation to embodied forms such as idols. Thus Jewish writing is an ideal forum for exploring how literature deploys objects as emblems of ideas and emotions, and how books may function as things. Treating a wide variety of genres, a material analysis of Jewish writing will sharpen our understanding of how secular culture is indebted to traditional religious forms. Moving beyond language and place, my material reading suggests new, transnational models of identity.

The writing of a book on how a range of media informs understandings of mental illness.

The mentally ill constitute one of the fastest growing underprivileged minorities in advanced societies today, suffering from a range of disabilities that seem to grow even faster than the number of pharmacological “cures” that are developed to treat them. I propose to write a book entitled “Seeing Madness: Insanity, Media, and Visual Culture,” re-framing the question of mental illness in relation to its representations in the arts, media, and visual culture. Madness, I will argue, should not be “seen as” a simple physical or even psychological disability, but as a complex set of intersubjective and social syndromes that range across individual and collective pathologies. My account will accordingly be designed as a counterpoint between a “big picture” of madness in relation to its long history of representations, and the singular case of an artist and filmmaker who suffered from schizophrenia, and whose lifetime project was to make madness visible both from inside and outside.

Preparation of a book on Islam and the performing arts in Indonesia.

Religion and culture are intrinsically linked. As they travel around the world, they create transcultural practices and perspectives manifested in both spiritual and artistic domains. In Indonesia, the performing arts serve as one of the major venues for this blending of beliefs and practices. This study will yield a book-length monograph that examines discourses of transculturalism, the performing arts, and Islam among the Javanese, the largest cultural group in the largest Muslim country in the world. Stemming back to the 15th century, Indonesia’s long process of Islamization has given rise to rich variations in the content and context of the performing arts, such as wayang shadow puppetry and gamelan music. Ultimately, this study aims to address the history and diversity of both traditional and popular Indonesian Muslim expression, while unpacking Indonesia’s modern sociocultural and religious development.

A book-length study of French author Christine de Pizan (1365-ca.1431), including her position as court writer and producer of works in her manuscript workshop.

My study presents Christine de Pizan (1365-ca.1431) as the first nonreligious female public intellectual. If we have acknowledged her importance as a writer, we have not understood the significance of her role as supervisor of her own, eminently prolific scriptorium, which produced an astonishing 54 manuscripts. I approach Christine through the optic of her workshop's tour de force, MS Harley 4431. She authored its 30 texts, transcribed some or all of them in her own hand, and oversaw the execution of its extensive iconographic cycle. I will show how she used her position of authority as a bulwark against the time's rabid antifeminism and as a platform to address matters crucial to the proper functioning of the French body politic. Her genius was to grasp the necessity of controlling the means of production to ensure that her voice be heard as she intended. My project contributes not only to studies of the material book, but speaks to a host of other humanistic issues.

A book-length study of the history of New Year’s observances in the United States.

I seek a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship to support the completion of a book-length manuscript about the history of New Year's observances in the United States titled "Resolutions and Revelry." The book moves from the first years of the republic to the millennial events of 2000, highlighting how the turning point in the calendar promised a fresh beginning, the hopes for which were, in turn, aimed at renewing faith in democracy and individual promise. The three parts of the book focus on the White House New Year’s Day reception hosted annually between 1800 and 1932; watch-night services and other celebrations associated with freedom held since December 31, 1862 when African-Americans and abolitionists waited for the stroke of midnight; and the festivities characterizing Times Square since the first ball drop in 1908. Recovering New Year’s celebrations over time is a dramatic way to study the impact of democracy and modernity on American society and culture.

A book-length study on Plato’s dialogue Theaetetus.

I propose a fresh reading of the "Theaetetus"—one of Plato's most influential and sophisticated dialogues. Despite appearances Plato does not return to an earlier form of dialectic depicted in dialogues like the "Euthyphro", "Laches", "Charmides", and "Protagoras" which conclude with the various interlocutors' recognition of their ignorance—their aporia. Rather, Plato depicts in the "Theaetetus" a form of dialectic which follows upon this aporia and which he has developed in the "Meno", "Phaedo", and "Republic". The "Theaetetus" thus depicts the method by which Plato recommends that we and his interlocutors are to acquire the knowledge we have recognized that we lack. Such a reading enhances our understanding of Plato's method of philosophical inquiry developed in the "Meno", "Phaedo", and "Republic", deepens our understanding of the arguments in the "Theaetetus", and looks forward to the method of inquiry displayed in the "Sophist", for example, in Aristotle, and beyond.

A book-length study on the consequences and impact of the forced mass conversions of Greek Catholics from Belarus and Ukraine to Russian Orthodoxy in 1839.

The year 1839 witnessed the largest mass conversion in the history of the Russian Empire, as 1.5 million Greek Catholics became Eastern Orthodox, with profound long-term implications for the cultural orientation and political loyalties in Eastern Europe. This study delves into multinational archives to assess the day-to-day experience of transforming parish material and liturgical culture, the impact of changes in religious education, and tensions expressed on all sides before, during, and after the conversion in eight Belarusian and Ukrainian provinces. It examines how both imperial officials and Belarusian and Ukrainian subjects adapted to the demands of each other with a variety of local results, challenging our understanding of Belarusian, Ukrainian, and Russian imperial identity development. In doing so, it offers a valuable contribution to European religious history and a deeper understanding of the cultural divisions that continue to shape contemporary events in the region.

An ethnographic study on the experiences of black LGBT Pentecostals who belong to the Fellowship of Affirming Ministries.

The proposed project will cover the final writing up phase of a six-year study of the Fellowship of Affirming Ministries, a coalition of predominantly black, LGBT, Pentecostal churches located across the United States. The group uniquely embraces worshippers otherwise excluded from full participation in black churches, but who ardently seek a collective spiritual experience in an expressive worship setting, as well as a way to reaffirm their connection with the black church, a foundational African American community institution. Filled With the Spirit is an ethnography focused on personal narratives by church leaders and lay members, on analysis of liturgical language, testimonies, and other ritual expression, and on how these spiritual experiences facilitate members’ choices of “ministries” to carry out in their churches and communities. The book focuses on a largely neglected aspect of anthropological studies of religion and LGBT studies in anthropology (and other disciplines).

A book-length study of the interplay between vengeance and mercy in the Qur'an and its roots in Judaism and Christianity.

The Qur'an describes its God as a "possessor of revenge" (dhu l-intiqam) and relates numerous accounts of God's vengeance against those who refuse to believe in God and God's messengers. At the same time the Qur'an insists that God is merciful, indeed that God's mercy "encompasses all things" (Q 7:156). In this book project I will discuss the way in which this interplay between vengeance and mercy in the Qur'an has roots in Jewish and Christian discussions of the "God of vengeance" (Psalm 94:1). In light of this discussion I will examine how later Muslim commentators understand the notion of God's right to avenge himself and in particular the question of when and why God forgoes that right in order to show mercy, even on unbelievers. I will emphasize in the conclusion how certain currents of Islamic theological thought see the mysteriousness of divine mercy as an argument against militant activism.

Preparation of a book on French music and patronage networks during the late reign of King Louis XIV (ca. 1685-1715).

This is a study of the social, intellectual, and musical implications of a mixed Italo-French musical idiom (the goûts-réunis) that emerged during the late reign of Louis XIV (ca. 1685-1715). This phenomenon brought an end to the dominance of a style established by Jean-Baptiste Lully as a touchstone of French "good taste" defined against Italian "extravagance." I propose a reevaluation of the period’s cultural history--heretofore seen as a product of the rise of a bourgeois public sphere--by documenting the critical role played by experiments with the Italian style among networks of princely patrons, their courtiers, and artistic clientèles. Their writings and scores reveal the goûts-réunis to be a tectonic shift in French musical language emphasizing the expressive effects of Italian harmonic techniques promoted as part of their broader artistic opposition to royal classicism, and an incubator for Enlightenment concepts of the sublime and the irrational in the arts.

Research and writing leading to publication of a book on the historical and literary relationship between British gardens and imperialism during the long 19th century.

"Horticulture and Imperialism: The Garden Spaces of the British Empire, 1789-1914" is an interdisciplinary book manuscript that explores the role of horticulture in shaping the imperial and ecological ambitions of nineteenth-century Britain. Significant for its attention to the collaborative concerns of empire and environmental studies, this project traces the effects of imperialist perspective on garden design and on the discovery and cultivation of non-native plants for British landscapes. At the same time, it shows how plants themselves, especially exotic specimens with aggressive habits of growth, attenuated the cultural confidence in imperial power by challenging the human expectation of dominance and mastery over the environment. By focusing on horticulture, this study addresses the ideas of both empire and environment as humanist paradigms, reconfiguring our knowledge not only of gardens but also of the concepts of nature and culture that gave rise to them.

The completion of a book-length study on German medieval World Chronicle manuscripts and an interpretation of their illustrations.

This study will be the first comprehensive account of illuminated World Chronicle manuscripts and their relationship to the tastes and preoccupations of urban audiences in an era of growing middle class city life, from roughly 1330 to 1430. I investigate sixteen richly decorated manuscripts, filled with texts of a versified world chronicle, written in Middle High German, and adorned with illustrations. My book focuses on texts and images that evince a range of social preoccupations among late medieval city dwellers—commercial and political ambitions, skepticism about Christian religious practices, appreciation of artistic ingenuity, and ultimately the implications of the new technology of print. While most art historical considerations of the late medieval era consider sacred works, my project investigates the secular sphere.

A book-length study on the impact of Phoenician traders and colonists in the Mediterranean region during the late Iron Age, from about 700-500 BCE.

Between the eighth and early sixth centuries BCE, flourishing cultures from Greece, Italy, and Iberia engaged in a process of contact and adaptation of Near Eastern styles and technologies known as the "orientalizing" phase or "orientalizing revolution." These include tangible as well as non-material cultural capital (literacy among them). The Phoenicians in particular, in their mercantile and colonial expansion in this period, were crucial agents in this story of encounters, offering and exploiting the "oriental" models of the urban, sophisticated, complex societies of the Near East. This novel monograph will offer the first systematic, comparative treatment of this transformative period across the Mediterranean, focusing on the process through which Iron Age societies entered the first transnational cultural and economic network. It will also call into question our stark, artificial historical division between "classical" and Semitic cultures and their respective civilizing roles.

A book-length study of the interaction between U.S. and Mexican efforts to modernize agriculture in the 1930s and 1940s, and their influence on the attempt to modernize Third World agriculture during the Cold War.

During the 1930s and 1940s, government and civil society in the United States and Mexico waged unprecedented campaigns to remake their countrysides in the name of agrarian justice and agricultural productivity. This book project examines how those campaigns were intertwined and forged in dialogue with one another. It examines key historical moments – the Mexican Revolution and its push for land reform, the New Deal's agrarian program, and the global "Green Revolution" to promote scientific agriculture – and unshackles them from the separate national frameworks to which they are frequently bound. In doing so, the book reveals that the rural histories of the United States and Mexico share far more than is often imagined.

Research leading to publication of a scholarly article and book on the role of women and the significance of gender in North Korea during the Cold War.

This project examines the role of women and the significance of gender in North Korea during the Cold War. Rather than duplicating histories of the Cold War as a masculine battle of political acumen, this research emphasizes the affective dimensions of power and dominance of feminine tropes as key to understanding North Korea. Women proved to be the primary cultural icons, and feminine tropes became models for emulation throughout society. If the construction of modern citizenship has always been a gendered process of delineating appropriate masculine and feminine roles in service of the state, this project explores how North Korean women (and men) were mobilized throughout the Cold War as sacrificial mothers. While there are parallel sacrificial women in other contexts, North Korean developments were unprecedented in the ascription of motherhood to men to create a new model of militarized citizenship that was at once masculine and feminine, drawing on transnational Cold War cultures.

The completion of volume 3 of the Loeb Classical Library series of the Greek Anthology, a critical edition and translation of ancient Greek epigrammatic poetry.

My project is a new edition and revised translation of The Greek Anthology for the Loeb Classical Library. The Anthology is a collection of more than four thousand ancient Greek epigrams dating from the 6th century BCE to the 6th century CE. The current edition most in use by English speakers is now a century old, and scholarship has advanced considerably. Greek epigram provides the ancient seeds both of European love elegy and of the species of wit still known as “epigram.” Less known, but equally important, are epigram’s exploration of death and memorialization, and its intense and complex engagement with material culture: epigram began as inscribed poetry, and it continues to reflect on objects even as its own genre becomes exclusively textual. Finally, The Greek Anthology provides an opportunity unique in antiquity to trace minutely the evolution of a genre over a thousand years. An up-to-date edition and accessible translation will be invaluable to scholars and the general reader.

The completion of a book on the Eurasian dimensions of the Russian Empire during the reign of Peter the Great from 1696 to 1725.

Westernization is one of the supposedly settled questions of Russian history. According to the standard interpretation, old Muscovy was isolated and backward until Peter the Great (r.1696-1725) changed everything by turning the country towards Europe, leading in time to a dramatic reordering of Russian society, culture, and governance. My study offers an original reinterpretation of this critical moment of the Russian past. Rather than the turn to Europe, I argue that the great development of Peter's time was a new and wide-ranging engagement with the world, specifically with the societies of Eurasia and the Northern Pacific, all of which was profoundly influenced by the country's complexity as a sprawling, multiethnic empire. My contention is that it was this worldly transformation rather than westernization proper that ultimately had the greatest impact on Russia's modern experience.

A book-length study of the relationship of theater, performance, and the law during the civil rights movement.

Rehearsing Civil Rights explores performances of the law that were ubiquitous in the middle decades of the twentieth century. During this period, activists strategically tested de jure and de facto segregation at sit-ins; black lawyers performed both legal authority and legal subjectivity as they argued cases in the highest courts of the land; and artists such as James Baldwin wrote plays that explored nonviolent resistance and the category of the legal subject. This book brings the work of these activists, lawyers, and artists together under a common umbrella to explore the relationship between performance and the law from the dawn of the Popular Front (1934) to the close of the classical phase of the civil rights movement (1965). In its consideration of performances both on and off stage, this book emphasizes the contestation of legal segregation as a fundamentally embodied act as well as the significance of the law as it was lived, rather than as it was written.

A book-length social history of the Ottoman Empire from the 16th through the 19th century, based on a study of Ottoman Jewish communities.

I am seeking NEH support in writing my second book. It will be a social history of the Ottoman Empire from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century explored through the prism of its Jewish communities and focusing on such issues such as leadership, taxation, literacy, charity, and inter-communal relations. The book will consider key and misunderstood questions in Ottoman Jewish historiography; further our understanding of Jewish-Muslim relations; and explore everyday life in the Ottoman Empire from new angles. It will be based mostly on primary sources from the National Library of Israel in Jerusalem and the Ottoman archives in Istanbul. I have already carried out most of the research and published some preliminary findings. I will complete a first draft of the entire manuscript during the fellowship year. The book will serve historians and students of the Middle East, Ottoman Empire, and Jewish-Muslim relations.