Funded Projects Query Form
235 matches

Research and writing of a book on ochre, a natural clay pigment, and how humans have used it in art and technologies for millennia.

I am applying for an NEH Public Scholars program fellowship to complete my current book project, The First Color: The Story of Ochre, a deep time biography of the world’s most enigmatic mineral. For 300,000 years, our species has used ochre to reflect our own evolutionary and cultural histories. Ochre – a combination of clay and iron oxide that forms over billions of years – is particularly synonymous with humankind’s early art and cave paintings. Anthropologists have long used ochre as a proxy for marking when Homo sapiens “became human” in our symbolic thinking; ochre is vibrant cultural spiritual knowledge for many Indigenous, Native, and Aboriginal peoples. Today, ochre still surprises us as we unpack its contemporary uses and meanings. The First Color is a work of humanities scholarship aimed at trade book audiences. By emphasizing ochre’s deep history, The First Color: The Story of Ochre, offers a new way of thinking about ochre and writing object biography.

 Research and writing leading to a book on antisemitism in America from the founding of New Amsterdam in the 17th century to the present day.

When, in 1654, New Amsterdam’s Governor Peter Stuyvesant, furious that Jews had landed in the colony, tried to eject this “deceitful race” of “usurers,” and “blasphemers” of “Christ,” he, to his chagrin, failed. But his words and subsequent attempts to make their lives so difficult that they would leave on their own launched antisemitism as an American tradition. Across American history antisemitism has taken myriad forms. Colonial cemeteries were desecrated. Civil War General Ulysses S. Grant expelled Jews from his military district. Universities set Jewish quotas. Henry Ford disseminated the conspiracy theories of "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion." In the late 1950s, Jewish sites were bombed. In 2018 a gunman murdered eleven worshippers at a Pittsburgh synagogue. "Antisemitism, an American Tradition: A New History," under contract with W. W. Norton, recounts this enduring tradition and shows how living with this hate has forged Jewish identity. 

Research and writing of a book on the ancient Greek philosopher Plato (c. 428-348 BCE) and his relations with the notorious autocrat Dionysus II, based on letters by Plato previously dismissed as inauthentic. 

A narrative of Plato's intrusion into in the politics of the Greek city of Syracuse and an investigation of his complex relations with the city's notorious autocrat, Dionysius II. Evidence from four Platonic epistles, documents often wrongly dismissed as fakes, will allow a detailed account of Plato's daring and disastrous attempt to reform a despotic regime and put his political theories into practice. His experience in Syracuse helped shape his magnum opus, Republic, as well as his later work, Laws, in ways that will be explored as part of this narrative.

Writing of a book on the Dutch East India Company from its sixteenth-century origins through its end in 1799, focusing on the factors that enabled it to become the dominant maritime power in Asia: its financing, its military strength, and its use of trade and information networks.

The Dutch East India Company was one of the wealthiest and most powerful corporations of history. It’s been called the “first great modern corporation” and the “flagman of the modern economy.” My project is to write an accessible, scholarly history of the company that shows how it became dominant throughout maritime Asia not just because of its unprecedented structure, its links to the first capitalistic economy (the Netherlands), and its powerful military capabilities, but also – and most importantly – because it inserted itself into a long-standing set of Asian and Luso-Asian trading networks. Drawing on new perspectives in global history, Asian history, and the history of imperialism, it focuses on the company’s competition and cooperation with Asian organizations such as the Japanese shogunate, the Zheng family empire of China, the maritime state of Makassar, and the Sultanate of Banten, among others. I would write a complete rough draft during the grant year. Knopf will publish.

Research and writing of a book on the history of the comfort sound industry in the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries.

Since the 1960s, an unobtrusive industry has carefully domesticated noise, converting it from an unwanted industrial byproduct to a desirable domestic partner and a first-rate workmate. In my book and a supplementary podcast series, I will explore the “comfort sound” industry: the white noise machines, mechanical “sound conditioners,” smartphone apps, “environmental sound” channels, and noise-cancelling headsets that promote sleep, relaxation, and concentration. The project examines the history of a most unusual industry, the social dynamics fueling the need for noise, and the lessons these comfort sounds can teach us about listening in a media-riven age. [Edited by staff] 

Research and writing of a book about the network of socially- and politically-engaged women artists employed through the New Deal’s Works Progress Administration in the 1930s and 1940s.

"Bohemia on the Breadline" tells a new story about art and activism during an exceptional moment of collective endeavour in the history of the United States. This is a narrative history about a network of women artists who were employed under FDR’s economic recovery program, the New Deal. The book brings to light a history of feminist art that challenged institutional racism and structural inequalities, engaging with civil rights issues including equal pay, healthcare equity, fair housing, and anti-lynching legislation. The women’s work began to disappear when the Works Progress Administration projects were dismantled, and tens of thousands of artworks were destroyed because the government could not afford the storage costs. Their history was further obscured by the ways that major national archives were constructed. Drawing from deep research, this book is the first to show how important these women are to art and social change in U.S. history.

Research and writing a book on early 20th-century Black educators who, having been admitted to Harvard University as “special students,” faced extraordinary barriers there but nonetheless returned to their communities to transform American education. 

While seeking the cause of her great-grandfather George Jordan's mysterious death at Harvard, the author finds an audacious group of nearly 200 Black scholars who attended Harvard around the turn of the century. As teachers, they created a vibrant Black educational system that existed alongside white institutions. But, while many earned degrees at Harvard, some had a curious designation in the catalogs: Special Students. That term was key to unlocking a kind of subtle, insidious red tape Harvard used to make it nearly impossible for Black scholars to attend--to say nothing of receive a degree. 

Research and writing of a book and creation of a multimedia website about music, imperfection and meaning in the songs of American singer and songwriter Bob Dylan (1941- ).

What is it about Bob Dylan’s imperfect sounds that gives them such potency, for so many? This book proposes an answer. It does so not by listening past his sonic imperfections or explaining them away. Rather, it takes imperfection seriously, thinking carefully about its affordances. The book argues that Dylan’s idiosyncratic sounds are not incidental to his art, a troublesome husk we can discard once we have extracted his celebrated words. Rather, Dylan’s music achieves its effects not despite its evident imperfections, but precisely because of them. Dylan’s radical openness to imperfection is an enabling condition of his extraordinarily prolific musical career, and it is at the heart of his music’s political and aesthetic efficacy. Written in clear and engaging prose and drawing on a range of interpretive techniques accessible to a wide readership, Sounding Bob Dylan demonstrates that imperfection is not a bug but a feature of Dylan’s music making.

Research and writing of a book on the history of offshore ‘tax havens’ in the 20th century.

This book will trace the little-known but highly engaging history of offshore financial centers, commonly known as "tax havens." It will convey to a broad non-specialist audience how this global offshore system--which affects any American who has a pension fund or works for a publicly-traded company--emerged from the legal systems and social networks left behind by the British Empire during the wave of de-colonization of the 1960s and 1970s. This history, almost unknown outside of academic circles, is both colorful and compelling, as well as being essential to understanding how the contemporary global economy works. Uniquely, I can tell this story not only as an academic specialist, but as an offshore insider: a trained and credentialed wealth manager with access to some of the still-living founders of the offshore system, and the knowledge to interpret the sometimes-cryptic archival sources that will (along with founder interviews) be the primary data for the book.

Research and writing of a book about William Selig’s silent film Something Good: Negro Kiss (Chicago, 1898).

In 2017, a short silent film made 120 years earlier reemerged from a forgotten corner of an archive to become a viral sensation across social media and broader popular culture. That film, Something Good: Negro Kiss, depicts an African American couple joyously embracing, holding hands, and kissing. Upon its rediscovery, the film touched millions of people who celebrated its unexpected early depiction of Black love. Something Good is an expression of Black love on screen that is unprecedented in the history of American cinema and challenges how we understand Black representation at the turn of the twentieth century and popular culture’s negotiation of blackness. This book tells the story of the rediscovery of this rare media artifact, the effect it has had on contemporary viewers, its impact on American popular culture history, and the significance of its moving image of Black love from the vaudeville stage to Twitter.

Writing a book about why Americans choose to change their identities, and how such changes are embraced or rejected by others.

“We Don’t Know You Anymore,” a book under contract with William Morrow in the United States and Penguin Books in the UK, is an ambitious exploration of transformation and identity change in 20th and 21st century America. What does it mean to become a “new person,” and who gets to decide whether an identity change is legitimate? What are the limits and ethics of self-identification when identity is increasingly understood to be malleable and self-constructed? And what is the relationship between personal and societal transformation? I build on the scholarship of theorists from diverse fields—including philosophy, history, and gender and sexuality studies—to show that our experience of altering our most personal characteristics is influenced by deeply politicized and often incoherent beliefs about who is changeable, and who has earned or forfeited the right to redemption or reinvention.

Research and writing of a book on how curare, a poison derived from Amazonian plant extracts, was brought to North America and marketed as a muscle relaxant, based on archival research.

In the 1940s E.R. Squibb and Sons transformed Western medicine when it began marketing Intocostrin, the first muscle relaxant. Squibb developed Intocostrin from curare, a plant-based arrow poison from the Amazon. What led to the quick commercialization of an Indigenous arrow poison? My book will answer this question, at once reconstructing a strange history of exploration and medical experimentation, but simultaneously narrating the collision of peoples, cultures, and economic interests surrounding curare. This confluence of historical forces makes curare not just a story of an exotic Amazonian poison turned FDA-approved drug, but also a singular example of twentieth-century globalization, the transnational creation of medical knowledge, and the troubling history of colonialism in the western Amazon.

Writing a biography of Prince Rivers (1824-1887) who was by turns a slave, color sergeant of the First South Carolina Volunteer division of the Union Army, a South Carolina state legislator, and first mayor of Hamburg, SC. 

Prince Rivers may be the most consequential American about whom Americans know almost nothing. An enslaved carriage driver from Beaufort, South Carolina, Rivers escaped to become color sergeant, Company A, First South Carolina Volunteers -- the highest-ranking Black member of the first Black regiment mustered into Union service. After the war, as the "Black Prince," "The Power of Aiken County," and the leader of the 'sanctuary city' of Hamburg, South Carolina, Rivers created one of the boldest and most successful experiments in interracial democracy in the history of the United States. Largely forgotten today, Rivers will join Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, Nat Turner, and Frederick Douglass in the pantheon of the early Black freedom struggle.

Preparation of a book about American rock criticism, from the 1960s to the present, and the overlooked Black, Indigenous, people of color, and women who wrote about rock music for publications such as Rolling Stone and Creem.

When most people envision an American rock music critic—particularly one from the early era: 1964-1980—they imagine someone white and male. And, certainly, the writers at the forefront of the new rock critical establishment were, at least initially, white men. But there’s a different, and much more compelling, story to tell. The Untold History of American Rock Criticism will uncover the hidden histories of the Black, Indigenous, and People of Color and white women writers who helped develop American rock criticism and journalism during the 1960s and 1970s. These writers contributed groundbreaking works to established rock music magazines, such as Rolling Stone and Creem, as well as underground music magazines and zines; Black and brown newspapers; and monthlies, weeklies, and dailies. The Untold History of American Rock Criticism is the book that will let these voices, gathered together for the first time, speak. 

Research and writing of a book on a lawsuit filed in the 1980s against the CIA over its MK-Ultra program, which involved experiments in mind control on unwitting human subjects.

My book will tell the story of two attorneys and their daunting attempt to hold the CIA accountable for its programs of human experimentation. Throughout the 1980s, famed civil rights attorney Joseph Rauh and his young law partner James Turner represented the victims of these programs in a lawsuit against the CIA. Rauh and Turner eventually secured a lucrative settlement for the victims, but not before the CIA frustrated them at every turn. Most importantly, their efforts laid the groundwork for understanding the failures of the CIA’s system of oversight and how to avoid them in the future.

Research and writing leading to a book about nineteenth-century American culture and Mary Ann Patten (1837-1861), who in 1856 averted a maritime disaster by successfully sailing a clipper ship around Cape Horn to San Francisco during the California Gold Rush.

Biography of Mary Ann Patten, celebrated nineteenth-century American heroine, acclaimed for her role in averting one of the most infamous maritime near-disasters of the Californian Gold Rush period.

Research and writing of a book about American Indians and economic enterprise in Montana from the late nineteenth century to the present, with a focus on the interaction of traditional and contemporary ways of life and the relationships between white, Black, and Native individuals.

Biscuits and Buffalo is about American Indians, including ranchers, farmers, biscuit makers, and entrepreneurs, who sustained their families and built viable economic enterprises on the Crow reservation in Montana from the late nineteenth century to the present. The book challenges persistent myths that Indians did not, or could not, adapt or succeed in the reservation era. It features Indian people who defy these myths, people who sought a viable way forward under difficult circumstances, and who did so with a strong sense of their Native heritage. They include Pretty Shield, who worked alongside white and Black women in the women’s club movement, and buffalo hunter Medicine Crow, who became one of many successful wheat farmers. Their stories revise the too simple histories that equate Indian change with defeat and Indian-white relations with antagonism. The book dismantles stark dichotomies between traditional and contemporary ways of life. It moves toward a more nuanced and inclusive view.

Research and writing a book on the cultural history and representations of the Russian forest in literature and art from medieval times to the present.

“Green Russia: A Forest History” draws on literature, art, music, and original reportage to explore the cultural significance of the Russian forest from medieval times to the present, from pre-Christian forest spirits to the canonical figures of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Turgenev to modern tree-worshipping eco cults, showing the philosophical, creative, political, and economic power of Russia’s vast wilderness.

Research and writing of a biography of the musician-educator Ella Jenkins (b. 1924).

"This Is Rhythm" will be the first biography of the musician-educator Ella Jenkins (b. 1924), a pioneer of “multicultural” children’s music. Beginning with her 1957 Folkways debut "Call-and-Response Rhythmic Group Singing," Jenkins, a self-taught artist, reimagined American children’s music by grounding it in the sonic traditions of the African American diaspora. Before Jenkins, music for young audiences was geared either toward diversion or cultural uplift, with European art music as a pinnacle. In contrast, by taking Black music—from the playground chants of Black girls to the gospel music of Black churches—as a paradigm, Jenkins envisioned music-making as a practice of community and cooperation. "This Is Rhythm" traces Jenkins’ life from her South Side childhood to her receipt of a lifetime Grammy Award (2004), positioning her not only as a recording artist and performer, but as a grassroots African American female educator who advanced civil rights through rhythm and song.

Research and writing of a book of cultural and intellectual history exploring the relationship between cybernetic and structuralist theory, avant-garde art, and global cyberculture.

My book offers a narrative history of the relationship between philosophy, technology, and art as it shaped the postwar Western political imagination. I focus on three key moments: the emergence of cybernetics, structuralism, and the American avant-garde in wartime New York City; the popularization of post-structuralism and the proliferation of a popular “underground” aesthetic amidst cultural and economic crisis in 1970s-80s New York; and the emergence of global cyberculture in the 1990s, at a time when commentators were declaring the end of competing ideologies and “the end of history.” By tracing the reciprocal influence of subculture, art, and philosophy, and showing how these movements in turn influenced broader social, cultural, and economic shifts, I show how ideas about a “virtual” realm—long confined to discourses of art or philosophical speculation—came increasingly to structure the lived environment of the late-20th and early-21st century Western world.

Writing toward a book on the scientific, cultural, and visual history of red hair.

_Strangers Within: A Cultural and Genomic History of Red Hair_ analyzes how redheads have been marginalized and penalized over a wide temporal and geographic swathe. Juxtaposing cultural history with new genomic discoveries, this is an investigation of MC1R gene variant carriers and the gendered and sexualized myths that have been ascribed to this phenotypic group. Grounded in contemporary popular culture and running the gamut from genomic findings (which include medical singularities) to Norse mythology, Celtic folklore, slavery in Ancient Greece and Rome, the Inquisition, anti-Semitism, art historical and literary representations, this book has implications and ambitions beyond red hair as a model for understanding the construction of otherness—and the fear and attraction, adulation and abuse—of the other.

Research and writing of a book on the camps formed by fugitive slaves near Union army positions during the U.S. Civil War, and their role in bringing about the Emancipation Proclamation issued by President Abraham Lincoln in 1862.

An account of the "contraband camps" that sprung up in the early days of the U.S. Civil War and how their presence created the necessary pressure on the Lincoln Administration to declare full emancipation in Southern states.

Research and writing of a biography of Wakara (c. 1815-1855), famed Ute horse thief, Indian slave trader, defender of Native sovereignty, and collaborator in settlement.

In the first half of the 19th century, Wakara (often anglicized as "Walker" (c. 1815-1855)), the famed Ute horse thief, Indian slave trader, collaborator in the settlement of the west and defender of Indian sovereignty, was among the most influential and feared men in the American Southwest. Yet the history books barely mention him. Wakara's America, the first full-length biography of the controversial Ute leader, illuminates why history has forgotten Wakara and explains why it's time that history give Wakara his due. Instead of repeating Manifest Destiny's most pernicious myth—that Native peoples and lifeways were eradicated from the American landscape—telling Wakara's story, and those of his lineal and spiritual descendants, reveals the history of resilience as well as present-day vitality of Wakara's people. Doing so also blurs the long-established lines between "colonizer" and "colonized"; "Native" and "American."

Research and writing of a microhistory of an unsolved 1971 crime, the Philadelphia neighborhood in which it occurred, and the community of activists in Black-Jewish relations.

This microhistory looks at an unsolved 1971 crime, the Philadelphia neighborhood in which it occurred and the unusual community of activists it touched, in order to draw conclusions about twentieth-century Black-Jewish relations. Postwar tensions between Black Americans and Jews of European descent are often narrated with an emphasis on leaders and major organizations. By approaching this issue at the scale of a neighborhood and its private lives, I offer new insights about continuing intimacies between these groups after the Civil Rights period, while opening fresh discussion of the integral role Black Jewish and Judaic communities played in postwar urban space. Despite persistent public interest in stories about Black-Jewish relations, few works exist for general readers. I seek to add to this rich scholarly conversation, while opening the subject to a broad spectrum of U.S. readers.

Research and writing of a book about the life and art of Dutch artist Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890), with a focus on the artist’s lesser-known works and art interpretation.

This book on Vincent van Gogh, one of the most iconic modern artists, is meant to showcase what the humanities do best: to teach us that meaning is often found not in seeking definitive answers but in exploring enduring, difficult-to-answer questions. Rather than grasping for new, ostensibly shocking revelations—one of the most common ways of approaching the artist and his work—this project instead seeks to burrow into areas that prompt still more questions: Where did Van Gogh’s intense engagement with self-portraiture come from? In France, where his work underwent a seismic shift that made him into the artist we now know, what was his experience as an immigrant? And how do we understand his final period of illness without engaging in lurid speculation? Throughout, we engage with lesser-known and overlooked works to come to a broader and richer sense of Van Gogh’s art and its relationship to the times in which it was made.