Program

Research Programs: Fellowship Programs at Independent Research Institutions

Period of Performance

1/1/2019 - 6/30/2022

Funding Totals (outright + matching)

$301,454.00 (approved)
$301,454.00 (awarded)


Long-term Research Fellowships at the National Humanities Center

FAIN: RA-259260-18

National Humanities Center (Research Triangle Park, NC 27709-0152)
Tania Munz (Project Director: August 2017 to March 2020)
Robert D. Newman (Project Director: March 2020 to present)

30 months of stipend support (3-5 fellowships) per year for three years and a contribution to defray costs associated with the selection of fellows.

The National Humanities Center, an independent center exclusively devoted to advanced humanities research, seeks five nine-month fellowships for the next three-year cycle (grant period Jan. 1, 2019-June 30, 2022). Since 1978, NEH has generously supported five NHC fellowships during each granting cycle, excepting the last cycle when it supported three. Designated “NEH Fellows,” recipients of these awards are chosen through a rigorous vetting process and join a vibrant intellectual community of 35-40 total Fellows. Each works on a major research project throughout the academic year with significant support from our library staff and fellowship office. End-of-year evaluations from the roughly 1,400 Fellows who have been in residence generally describe their year at the NHC as the most inspiring and productive of their careers. The NHC focuses attention to diversity in all of its dimensions so that Fellows represent a broad range of disciplines, institutions, backgrounds and perspectives.



Media Coverage

Review: Alain Locke and ‘The New Negro’ (Review)
Author(s): Thompson, Clifford
Publication: The Wall Street Journal
Date: 1/26/2018
URL: https://www.wsj.com/articles/review-alain-locke-and-the-new-negro-1517004241

A True Southern Story Of Bravery And Betrayal (Media Coverage)
Author(s): Brokland, Jennifer, Stasio, Frank
Publication: WUNC 91.5
Date: 5/21/2019
Abstract: Growing up in turn-of-the-century Georgia, the Lumpkin children were steeped in a culture of white supremacy. The older girls performed in rallies for “The Lost Cause,” while their father took a direct role in the Ku Klux Klan. But the two youngest Lumpkin sisters, Grace and Katharine, veered well off the path their family had set for them. They became activists and authors who railed against racial and economic oppression... The stories of three of the Lumpkin sisters are chronicled in “Sisters and Rebels: A Struggle for the Soul of America” (W. W. Norton and Co./2019). Host Frank Stasio talks with author Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, a professor emerita at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, about how the two youngest Lumpkin sisters sought to transform both themselves and the troubled region they eventually both returned to.
URL: https://www.wunc.org/arts-culture/2019-05-21/a-true-southern-story-of-bravery-and-betrayal

Trio completes their friend's book, with love and respect (Media Coverage)
Author(s): Ducibella, Jim
Publication: Williams & Mary News
Date: 2/21/2019
Abstract: Calling it an homage to the late Paula Blank doesn’t begin to tell the story of the three William & Mary English faculty members who took up her work on a book titled Shakesplish: How We Read Shakespeare’s Language, after her sudden death in August 2016.
URL: https://www.wm.edu/news/stories/2019/trio-completes-their-friends-book-of-love.php



Associated Products

Shakesplish: How We Read Shakespeare’s Language (Book)
Title: Shakesplish: How We Read Shakespeare’s Language
Author: Blank, Paula
Abstract: For all that we love and admire Shakespeare, he is not that easy to grasp. He may have written in Elizabethan English, but when we read him, we can't help but understand his words, metaphors, and syntax in relation to our own. Until now, explaining the powers and pleasures of the Bard's language has always meant returning it to its original linguistic and rhetorical contexts. Countless excellent studies situate his unusual gift for words in relation to the resources of the English of his day. They may mention the presumptions of modern readers, but their goal is to correct and invalidate any false impressions. Shakesplish is the first book devoted to our experience as modern readers of Early Modern English. Drawing on translation theory and linguistics, Paula Blank argues that for us, Shakespeare's language is a hybrid English composed of errors in comprehension—and that such errors enable, rather than hinder, some of the pleasures we take in his language. Investigating how and why it strikes us, by turns, as beautiful, funny, sexy, or smart, she shows how, far from being the fossilized remains of an older idiom, Shakespeare's English is also our own.
Year: 2018
Primary URL: https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=24267
Primary URL Description: publisher's website
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 9780804791939

Ethnicity and Race in African Thought (Book Section)
Title: Ethnicity and Race in African Thought
Author: Glassman, Jonathon
Editor: Worger, William
Editor: Ambler, Charles
Editor: Achebe, Nwando
Abstract: A Companion to African History embraces the diverse regions, subject matter, and disciplines of the African continent, while also providing chronological and geographical coverage of basic historical developments. Two dozen essays by leading international scholars explore the challenges facing this relatively new field of historical enquiry and present the dynamic ways in which historians and scholars from other fields such as archaeology, anthropology, political science, and economics are forging new directions in thinking and research.
Year: 2018
Primary URL: https://www.wiley.com/en-us/A+Companion+to+African+History-p-9781119063506
Primary URL Description: book publisher's website
Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
Book Title: A Companion to African History
ISBN: 978-1-119-0635

Salerno’s Lombard Prince: Johannes ‘Abbas de Curte’ as Medical Practitioner (Article)
Title: Salerno’s Lombard Prince: Johannes ‘Abbas de Curte’ as Medical Practitioner
Author: Glaze, Florence E.
Abstract: This paper examines the state of medical learning and practitioner identity at the time Constantine the African arrived in Salerno, Italy. The author utilizes surviving early manuscripts of medical texts, documentary evidence, regional chronicles, and early Salernitan antidotaria to frame the identity and activity of a renowned practitioner, a member of the Lombard princely family, who continued after the Norman conquest to work as a practitioner and health administrator, and to serve both the region and the Norman-Lombard leadership. The author concludes that pharmacy, particularly interests in exotic substances from the East, was one of the driving forces behind the transformation of medicine in the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries.
Year: 2018
Primary URL: https://brill.com/abstract/journals/esm/23/3/article-p177_1.xml
Primary URL Description: Article on journal's website
Access Model: Subscription only
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Early Science and Medicine
Publisher: Brill

Buying Gay: How Physique Entrepreneurs Sparked a Movement (Book)
Title: Buying Gay: How Physique Entrepreneurs Sparked a Movement
Author: Johnson, David K.
Abstract: In 1951, a new type of publication appeared on newsstands—the physique magazine produced by and for gay men. For many men growing up in the 1950s and 1960s, these magazines and their images and illustrations of nearly naked men, as well as articles, letters from readers, and advertisements, served as an initiation into gay culture. The publishers behind them were part of a wider world of “physique entrepreneurs”: men as well as women who ran photography studios, mail-order catalogs, pen-pal services, book clubs, and niche advertising for gay audiences. Such businesses have often been seen as peripheral to the gay political movement. In this book, David K. Johnson shows how gay commerce was not a byproduct but rather an important catalyst for the gay rights movement. Offering a vivid look into the lives of physique entrepreneurs and their customers, and presenting a wealth of illustrations, Buying Gay explores the connections—and tensions—between the market and the movement. With circulation rates many times higher than the openly political “homophile” magazines, physique magazines were the largest gay media outlets of their time. This network of producers and consumers helped foster a gay community and upend censorship laws, paving the way for open expression. Physique entrepreneurs were at the center of legal struggles, especially against the U.S. Post Office, including the court victory that allowed full-frontal male nudity and open homoeroticism. Buying Gay reconceives the history of the gay rights movement and shows how consumer culture helped create community and a site for resistance.
Year: 2019
Primary URL: https://cup.columbia.edu/book/buying-gay/9780231189101
Primary URL Description: Publisher's website
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 9780231189101

Nostalgia for the Future: Modernism and Heterogeneity in the Visual Arts of Nazi Germany (Book)
Title: Nostalgia for the Future: Modernism and Heterogeneity in the Visual Arts of Nazi Germany
Author: Maertz, Gregory
Abstract: From the early years of the Weimar Republic until the collapse of Hitler’s regime, demonizing modernist art as a symptom of the corruption of German culture was a standard trope in National Socialist propaganda. But how consistent and thorough was Nazi censorship of modernist artists? Maertz’s pioneering research unearths the persistence of recognizable modernist styles in painting and sculpture produced under the patronage of the Nazi Party and German government institutions, even after the infamous 1937 purge of “degenerate art” from state-funded museums. In the first chapter on Hitler’s advocacy for “eugenic” figurative representation embodying Nazi nostalgia for lost Aryan racial perfection and the aspiration for the future perfection of the German Volk, and in the second chapter on the appropriation of Christian iconography in constructing symbols of a Nazi racial utopia, Maertz conclusively proves that the Nazi attack on modernism was inconsistent. In further chapters, demonstrating Baldur von Schirach’s heretical patronage of modernist art as the supreme Nazi Party authority in Vienna and the German military’s unlikely function as an incubator of modernist art, Maertz reveals that the sponsorship of modernist artists continued until the collapse of the regime. Also based on previously unexamined evidence, including 10,000 works of art confiscated by the U.S. Army, Maertz’s final chapter reconstructs the anarchic denazification and rehabilitation of German artists during the Allied occupation, which had unforeseen consequences for the postwar art world.
Year: 2019
Primary URL: https://cup.columbia.edu/book/nostalgia-for-the-future/9783838212814
Primary URL Description: Publisher's website
Publisher: Ibidem Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 9783838212814

A Poetic Record of the Rajput Rebellion, c. 1680 (Article)
Title: A Poetic Record of the Rajput Rebellion, c. 1680
Author: Talbot, Cyntha
Abstract: Through comparison of three poetic texts describing the career of Rana Raj Singh of Mewar (r. 1652–1680), this paper demonstrates how representations of Aurangzeb could vary dramatically even when they were produced for the same Rajput court. Much of the paper focuses on Raj-vilas, a vernacular-language work with a lengthy account of conflict between Aurangzeb and the Rajput lords of Marwar and Mewar. Raj-vilas is also noteworthy for its negative portrayal of the Mughal emperor, whom it castigates as a wicked killer of kin who was duplicitous and vengeful. Sometimes thought to be modern constructions, the criticisms of Aurangzeb found in Raj-vilas reveal that certain ideas about Indian historical figures have continued to be deployed and repurposed over the centuries. Yet Rajput views during Aurangzeb's lifetime were not uniformly unfavourable, as the Sanskrit texts Raja-ratnakara and Raja-prasasti attest. Although these two works resembled Raj-vilas in covering the reign of Rana Raj Singh and were written at roughly the same time, they cast Aurangzeb in a considerably more positive light. This difference can be attributed to the fluctuating political relationship between the Mughal empire and the Mewar kingdom in the decade between 1677 and 1687, underscoring the need to carefully identify the historical contexts within which representations of Aurangzeb were produced and circulated.
Year: 2018
Primary URL: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-the-royal-asiatic-society/article/poetic-record-of-the-rajput-rebellion-c-1680/36EE4BDBCF53E09D5E5D75D18EE98BB8
Primary URL Description: Article on journal website
Access Model: Subscription
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society
Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Posthuman Policies for Creative, Smart, Eco-Cities? Case Studies from China (Article)
Title: Posthuman Policies for Creative, Smart, Eco-Cities? Case Studies from China
Author: Visser, Robin
Abstract: Policies promoting creative, smart, sustainable cities continue to dominate global urban policy scripts. This article explores how posthuman assumptions embedded in such scripts render the socially embodied human invisible and analyzes cases of their rationalization and enactment within China. The article concludes that understandings of creativity in Chinese urban aesthetics expose premises of globally promoted urban policy scripts more transparently than those informed by European aesthetic traditions. The Chinese city is understood to manifest the creative obsessions of humans rather than to actualize a transcendent, idealized vision separate from that of its human creators. This resembles Guy Debord’s idea that what we see in the world—how the world is architected—is a materialization of triumphant ideologies. The contemporary Chinese city, incentivized by the entrepreneurial state, makes visible Debord’s globally dominant “integrated spectacular.” Once creativity and intelligence are rationalized, the autonomous “creative,” “smart,” “eco” city is branded in a global supply chain of city production. Consequently, the posthuman city need not account for the conditions under which embodied humans are actually inspired to create and adequately compensated for their creations. Rather than attributing the failure of posthuman policies in Chinese cities to Chinese exceptionalism, these cases expose universal fault lines in the policies themselves.
Year: 2019
Primary URL: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0308518X18765481
Primary URL Description: Article on journal's website
Access Model: Subscription
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space
Publisher: Sage

The Teahouse Under Socialism: The Decline and Renewal of Public Life in Chengdu, 1950-2000 (Book)
Title: The Teahouse Under Socialism: The Decline and Renewal of Public Life in Chengdu, 1950-2000
Author: Wang, Di
Abstract: To understand a city fully, writes Di Wang, we must observe its most basic units of social life. In The Teahouse under Socialism, Wang does just that, arguing that the teahouses of Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan Province, are some of the most important public spaces—perfect sites for examining the social and economic activities of everyday Chinese. Wang looks at the transformation of these teahouses from private businesses to collective ownership and how state policy and the proprietors’ response to it changed the overall economic and social structure of the city. He uses this transformation to illuminate broader trends in China’s urban public life from 1950 through the end of the Cultural Revolution and into the post-Mao reform era. In doing so, The Teahouse under Socialism charts the fluctuations in fortune of this ancient cultural institution and analyzes how it survived, and even thrived, under bleak conditions. Throughout, Wang asks such questions as: Why and how did state power intervene in the operation of small businesses? How was "socialist entertainment" established in a local society? How did the well-known waves of political contestation and struggle in China change Chengdu’s teahouses and public life? In the end, Wang argues, the answers to such questions enhance our understanding of public life and political culture in the Communist state.
Year: 2018
Primary URL: http://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/?GCOI=80140104437250
Primary URL Description: Publisher's website
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 1501715488

The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke (Book)
Title: The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke
Author: Stewart, Jeffrey C.
Abstract: A tiny, fastidiously dressed man emerged from Black Philadelphia around the turn of the century to mentor a generation of young artists including Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and Jacob Lawrence and call them the New Negro -- the creative African Americans whose art, literature, music, and drama would inspire Black people to greatness. In The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke, Jeffrey C. Stewart offers the definitive biography of the father of the Harlem Renaissance, based on the extant primary sources of his life and on interviews with those who knew him personally. He narrates the education of Locke, including his becoming the first African American Rhodes Scholar and earning a PhD in philosophy at Harvard University, and his long career as a professor at Howard University. Locke also received a cosmopolitan, aesthetic education through his travels in continental Europe, where he came to appreciate the beauty of art and experienced a freedom unknown to him in the United States. And yet he became most closely associated with the flowering of Black culture in Jazz Age America and his promotion of the literary and artistic work of African Americans as the quintessential creations of American modernism. In the process he looked to Africa to find the proud and beautiful roots of the race. Shifting the discussion of race from politics and economics to the arts, he helped establish the idea that Black urban communities could be crucibles of creativity. Stewart explores both Locke's professional and private life, including his relationships with his mother, his friends, and his white patrons, as well as his lifelong search for love as a gay man.
Year: 2018
Primary URL: https://global.oup.com/academic
Primary URL Description: Publisher's website
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 9780195089578

Prizes

Pulitzer Prize for Biography
Date: 4/15/2019
Organization: Columbia University
Abstract: Biography category. Pulitzer Prize is an award for achievements in newspaper, magazine and online journalism, literature, and musical composition.

National Book Award for Nonfiction
Date: 11/14/2018
Organization: National Book Foundation
Abstract: Nonfiction category. The National Book awards recognize outstanding literary works by US citizens.

Prose Award for Biography and Autobiography
Date: 1/30/2019
Organization: Association of American Publishers
Abstract: Category: Biography and Autobiography. The PROSE Awards annually recognize the very best in professional and scholarly publishing by bringing attention to distinguished books, journals, and electronic content in 58 categories.

Mark Lynton History Prize
Date: 3/20/2019
Organization: Columbia Journalism School and the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard
Abstract: The Mark Lynton History Prize is awarded to the book-length work of narrative history, on any subject, that best combines intellectual distinction with felicity of expression.

Black Caucus of the American Library Association Award for Nonfiction
Date: 1/26/2019
Organization: Black Caucus of the American Library Association
Abstract: Nonfiction category. The awards recognize excellence in adult fiction and nonfiction by African American authors published in 2018, including an award for Best Poetry and a citation for Outstanding Contribution to Publishing.

Dancing Queen: Marie de Médicis’ Ballets at the Court of Henri IV (Book)
Title: Dancing Queen: Marie de Médicis’ Ballets at the Court of Henri IV
Author: Gough, Melinda J.
Abstract: Under glittering lights in the Louvre palace, the French court ballets danced by Queen Marie de Médicis prior to Henri IV’s assassination in 1610 attracted thousands of spectators ranging from pickpockets to ambassadors from across Europe. Drawing on newly discovered primary sources as well as theories and methodologies derived from literary studies, political history, musicology, dance studies, and women’s and gender studies, Dancing Queen traces how Marie’s ballets authorized her incipient political authority through innovative verbal and visual imagery, avant-garde musical developments, and ceremonial arrangements of objects and bodies in space. Making use of women’s "semi-official" status as political agents, Marie’s ballets also manipulated the subtle social and cultural codes of international courtly society in order to more deftly navigate rivalries and alliances both at home and abroad. At times the queen’s productions could challenge Henri IV’s immediate interests, contesting the influence enjoyed by his mistresses or giving space to implied critiques of official foreign policy, for example. Such defenses of Marie’s own position, though, took shape as part of a larger governmental program designed to promote the French consort queen’s political authority not in its own right but as a means of maintaining power for the new Bourbon monarchy in the event of Henri IV’s untimely death.
Year: 2019
Primary URL: https://utorontopress.com/us/dancing-queen-2
Primary URL Description: publisher's website
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 9781487503666

Prizes

2020 Bevington Award for Best New Book
Date: 5/1/2020
Organization: Medieval and Renaissance Drama Society

Sisters and Rebels: A Struggle for the Soul of America (Book)
Title: Sisters and Rebels: A Struggle for the Soul of America
Author: Hall, Jacquelyn Dowd
Abstract: Descendants of a prominent slaveholding family, Elizabeth, Grace, and Katharine Lumpkin grew up in a culture of white supremacy. But while Elizabeth remained a lifelong believer, her younger sisters chose vastly different lives. Seeking their fortunes in the North, Grace and Katharine reinvented themselves as radical thinkers whose literary works and organizing efforts brought the nation’s attention to issues of region, race, and labor. In Sisters and Rebels, National Humanities Award–winning historian Jacquelyn Dowd Hall follows the divergent paths of the Lumpkin sisters, who were “estranged and yet forever entangled” by their mutual obsession with the South. Tracing the wounds and unsung victories of the past through to the contemporary moment, Hall revives a buried tradition of Southern expatriation and progressivism; explores the lost, revolutionary zeal of the early twentieth century; and muses on the fraught ties of sisterhood. Grounded in decades of research, the family’s private papers, and interviews with Katharine and Grace, Sisters and Rebels unfolds an epic narrative of American history through the lives and works of three Southern women.
Year: 2019
Primary URL: https://wwnorton.com/books/9780393047998
Primary URL Description: publisher's website
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 97803933585

Prizes

PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Bigraphy
Date: 3/2/2020
Organization: Pen America
Abstract: For a distinguished biography published in 2019.

V. S. Naipaul's Journeys: From Periphery to Center (Book)
Title: V. S. Naipaul's Journeys: From Periphery to Center
Author: Krishnan, Sanjay
Abstract: The author of more than thirty books of fiction and nonfiction and winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, V. S. Naipaul (1932–2018) is one of the most acclaimed authors of the twentieth century. He is also one of the most controversial. Before settling in England, Naipaul grew up in Trinidad in an Indian immigrant community, and his depiction of colonized peoples has often been harshly judged by critics as unsympathetic, misguided, racist, and sexist. Yet other readers praise his work as containing uncommonly perceptive historical and psychological insight. In V. S. Naipaul’s Journeys, Sanjay Krishnan offers new perspectives on the distinctiveness and power of Naipaul’s writing, as well as his shortcomings, trajectory, and complicated legacy. While recognizing the flaws and prejudices that shaped and limited Naipaul’s life and art, this book challenges the binaries that have dominated discussions of his writing. Krishnan reads Naipaul as self-subverting and self-critical, engaged in describing his own implication in what he saw as the malaise of the postcolonial world. Krishnan brings together close readings of major novels with considerations of Naipaul’s work as a united project, as well as nuanced assessments of Naipaul’s political commentary on ethnic nationalism and religious fundamentalism. Krishnan provides a Naipaul for contemporary times, illuminating how his life and work shed light on debates regarding migration, diversity, sectarianism, displacement, and other global challenges.
Year: 2020
Primary URL: https://cup.columbia.edu/book/v-s-naipauls-journeys/9780231193320
Primary URL Description: publisher's website
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 9780231193320

The Nanziatticos and the Violence of the Archive: Land and Native Enslavement in Colonial Virginia (Article)
Title: The Nanziatticos and the Violence of the Archive: Land and Native Enslavement in Colonial Virginia
Author: Goetz, Rebecca Anne
Abstract: Between 1704 and 1706, English Virginians destroyed the Nanziattico nation. First they used an oyer and terminer trial to hang several of its young men, and then they separated Nanziattico children from their parents and bound the children out as indentured servants. Finally, they sold the surviving Nanziattico adults in the English sugar island of Antigua. These events occurred at the brutal intersection of many colonial histories--Native dispossession and land seizure, native enslavement, the Atlantic slave trade, and the creation of archives that minimized colonial violence. In this way the story of the Nanziatticos is not merely a tale of the early eighteenth century; instead, it is rooted in the previous century of English colonialism in Virginia and in a long and dire history for Native people attempting to navigate the dangers of colonialism. The English removed the Nanziatticos in the service of two desires--control of land and the erasure of Native claims to Virginian spaces--thus underscoring that Native enslavement was not always about labor. Though historians generally present the trade in enslaved Native people in the Southeast either as the result of coordinated slave raids made by the English and their Native allies or as the result of diplomatic or trade encounters, in this case the English used their courts and the language of justice to dispossess and to enslave. In how they told (or did not tell) the story of the Nanziatticos, the English quietly eliminated an entire nation, an event seen only with difficulty in the archive.
Year: 2019
Primary URL: https://muse.jhu.edu/article/716196
Primary URL Description: journal's website
Access Model: open access
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Journal of Southern History
Publisher: The Southern Historical Association

Scottish Narratives of Sovereignty in the Later Middle Ages: Re-imagining 'Fredome' (Article)
Title: Scottish Narratives of Sovereignty in the Later Middle Ages: Re-imagining 'Fredome'
Author: Manion, Lee
Abstract: This article explores literary discussions of sovereignty in two medieval Scottish romances, John Barbour's The Bruce (c. 1375) and the anonymous Arthurian romance Golagros and Gawane (c. 1475), both of which respond to the Anglo-Scottish conflicts of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and advocate Scottish independence. Premodern European conceptions of sovereignty relied on narratives of recognition to construct and support political claims. This essay argues that these Scottish vernacular texts adapted terms from the larger European discourse to re-imagine the nature of government and freedom through the formal element of a 'sovereign recognition'. While Barbour's The Bruce attempts to distinguish the validity of political claims via the rightful behavior of rulers, ultimately it remains trapped by the prevailing terms of sovereign recognition that require the subjugation of others and the citation of documentary 'proof' to establish authority. By contrast, Golagros and Gawane critiques the use of historical narratives of recognition in determining political relations. This Arthurian romance posits alternative criteria for sovereign recognition that would create a dialogic system of equivalent polities based on personal bonds of mutual acknowledgement. The political thought in both literary texts offers a valuable challenge to current definitions of sovereignty and freedom as located solely within the framework of the territorial nation-state.
Year: 2019
Primary URL: https://muse.jhu.edu/article/741707
Primary URL Description: journal's website
Access Model: open access
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Scottish Literary Review
Publisher: Association for Scottish Literary Studies

Animal Transference and Transformation Among Wounaan (Article)
Title: Animal Transference and Transformation Among Wounaan
Author: Velásquez Runk, Julie
Abstract: Much of the “Amerindian” ontological literature emphasizes metamorphosis and transformation. This article examines animal transference and transformation among indigenous Wounaan in Panama. We use participant observation and analysis of stories to examine the transfer of virtuous animal (and other) properties to newborns via the navel (p′oo nʌm, known in Spanish as ombligado), and the transformation of humans into animals as indicated in traditional stories. We demonstrate how and why these two animal–human interactions reveal human personhood—one augmenting and the other diminishing it. Rather than a ready mutability between human and animal realms of reality, we find transference and transformation intertwined with everyday relationality, morality, and constructional conviviality with animals as well as nonanimal beings. Our results suggest that the Isthmo‐Colombian area may reveal different ontologies than those described for other regions, and that attention to political ontologies may prevent the essentialization of alterity.
Year: 2019
Primary URL: https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/jlca.12389
Primary URL Description: journal's website
Access Model: open access
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology
Publisher: American Anthropological Association

Around the World: Borders and Frames in Two Sixteenth-Century Norman Map Books (Book Section)
Title: Around the World: Borders and Frames in Two Sixteenth-Century Norman Map Books
Author: Serchuk, Camille
Editor: Baumgärtner, Ingrid
Editor: Ben-Aryeh Debby, Nirit
Editor: Kogman-Appel, Katrin
Abstract: The volume discusses the world as it was known in the Medieval and Early Modern periods, focusing on projects concerned with mapping as a conceptual and artistic practice, with visual representations of space, and with destinations of real and fictive travel. Maps were often taken as straightforward, objective configurations. However, they expose deeply subjective frameworks with social, political, and economic significance. Travel narratives, whether illustrated or not, can address similar frameworks. Whereas travelled space is often adventurous, and speaking of hardship, strange encounters and danger, city portraits tell a tale of civilized life and civic pride. The book seeks to address the multiple ways in which maps and travel literature conceive of the world, communicate a 'Weltbild', depict space, and/or define knowledge. The volume challenges academic boundaries in the study of cartography by exploring the links between mapmaking and artistic practices. The contributions discuss individual mapmakers, authors of travelogues, mapmaking as an artistic practice, the relationship between travel literature and mapmaking, illustration in travel literature, and imagination in depictions of newly explored worlds.
Year: 2019
Primary URL: https://www.degruyter.com/view/book/9783110588774/10.1515/9783110588774-008.xml
Primary URL Description: book publisher's website
Publisher: De Gruyter
Book Title: Maps and Travel in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period
ISBN: 9783110587333

Gathering Medicines: Nation and Knowledge in China’s Mountain South (Book)
Title: Gathering Medicines: Nation and Knowledge in China’s Mountain South
Author: Farquhar, Judith
Author: Lai, Lili
Abstract: In the early 2000s, the central government of China encouraged all of the nation’s registered minorities to “salvage, sort, synthesize, and elevate” folk medical knowledges in an effort to create local health care systems comparable to the nationally supported institutions of traditional Chinese medicine. Gathering Medicines bears witness to this remarkable moment of knowledge development while sympathetically introducing the myriad therapeutic traditions of southern China. Over a period of six years, Judith Farquhar and Lili Lai worked with seven minority nationality groups in China’s southern mountains, observing how medicines were gathered and local healing systems codified. Gathering Medicines shares their intimate view of how people understand ethnicity, locality, the body, and nature. This ethnography of knowledge diversities in multiethnic China is a testament to the rural wisdom of mountain healers, one that theorizes, from the ground up, the dynamic encounters between formal statist knowledge and the popular authority of the wild.
Year: 2021
Primary URL: https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/G/bo78678179.html
Primary URL Description: publisher's website
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Type: Multi-author monograph
ISBN: 9780226763651

Performing Commemoration: Musical Reenactment and the Politics of Trauma (Book)
Title: Performing Commemoration: Musical Reenactment and the Politics of Trauma
Editor: Figueroa, Michael A.
Editor: Fauser, Annegret
Abstract: Public commemorations of various kinds are an important part of how groups large and small acknowledge and process injustices and tragic events. Performing Commemoration: Musical Reenactment and the Politics of Trauma looks at the roles music can play in public commemorations of traumatic events that range from the Armenian genocide and World War I to contemporary violence in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the #sayhername protests. Whose version of a traumatic historical event gets told is always a complicated question, and music adds further layers to this complexity, particularly music without words. The three sections of this collection look at different facets of musical commemorations and reenactments, focusing on how music can mediate, but also intensify responses to social injustice; how reenactments and their use of music are shifting (and not always toward greater social effectiveness); and how claims for musical authenticity are politicized in various ways. By engaging with critical theory around memory studies and performance studies, the contributors to this volume explore social justice, in, and through music.
Year: 2020
Primary URL: https://www.press.umich.edu/11560559/performing_commemoration
Primary URL Description: publisher's website
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Type: Edited Volume
ISBN: 97804720546

Figures and Frameworks (Book Section)
Title: Figures and Frameworks
Author: Fuller, Mia
Editor: Zeier Pilat, Stephanie
Editor: Jones, Kay Bea
Abstract: The Routledge Companion to Italian Fascist Architecture investigates what has become of the architectural and urban projects of Italian fascism, how sites have been transformed or adapted and what constitutes the meaning of these buildings and cities today. The essays include a rich array of new arguments by both senior and early career scholars from Italy and beyond. They examine the reception of fascist architecture through studies of destruction and adaptation, debates over reuse, artistic interventions and even routine daily practices, which may slowly alter collective understandings of such places. Paolo Portoghesi sheds light on the subject from his internal perspective, while Harald Bodenschatz situates Italy among period totalitarian authorities and their symbols across Europe. Section editors frame, synthesize and moderate essays that explore fascism’s afterlife; how the physical legacy of the regime has been altered and preserved and what it means now. This critical history of interpretations of fascist-era architecture and urban projects broadens our understanding of the relationships among politics, identity, memory and place.
Year: 2020
Primary URL: https://www.routledge.com/The-Routledge-Companion-to-Italian-Fascist-Architecture-Reception-and-Legacy/Jones-Pilat/p/book/9780367348519
Primary URL Description: publisher's website
Publisher: Routledge
Book Title: The Routledge Companion to Italian Fascist Architecture: Reception and Legacy
ISBN: 9780367348519

Urban Designs for Rural Settlers: Paradoxical Civic Identity in the Pontine Marshes (Book Section)
Title: Urban Designs for Rural Settlers: Paradoxical Civic Identity in the Pontine Marshes
Author: Fuller, Mia
Editor: Zeier Pilat, Stephanie
Editor: Jones, Kay Bea
Abstract: The Routledge Companion to Italian Fascist Architecture investigates what has become of the architectural and urban projects of Italian fascism, how sites have been transformed or adapted and what constitutes the meaning of these buildings and cities today. The essays include a rich array of new arguments by both senior and early career scholars from Italy and beyond. They examine the reception of fascist architecture through studies of destruction and adaptation, debates over reuse, artistic interventions and even routine daily practices, which may slowly alter collective understandings of such places. Paolo Portoghesi sheds light on the subject from his internal perspective, while Harald Bodenschatz situates Italy among period totalitarian authorities and their symbols across Europe. Section editors frame, synthesize and moderate essays that explore fascism’s afterlife; how the physical legacy of the regime has been altered and preserved and what it means now. This critical history of interpretations of fascist-era architecture and urban projects broadens our understanding of the relationships among politics, identity, memory and place.
Year: 2020
Primary URL: https://www.routledge.com/The-Routledge-Companion-to-Italian-Fascist-Architecture-Reception-and-Legacy/Jones-Pilat/p/book/9780367348519
Primary URL Description: publisher's website
Publisher: Routledge
Book Title: The Routledge Companion to Italian Fascist Architecture: Reception and Legacy
ISBN: 9780367348519

Laying Claim: Mia Fuller on Italy’s Internal and External Colonies (Book Section)
Title: Laying Claim: Mia Fuller on Italy’s Internal and External Colonies
Author: Fuller, Mia
Editor: Ferrari, Marco
Editor: Pasqual, Elisa
Editor: Bagnato, Andrea
Abstract: A Moving Border: Alpine Cartographies of Climate Change builds upon the Italian Limes project by Studio Folder, which was devised in 2014 to survey the fluctuations of the boundary line across the Alps in real time. The book charts the effects of climate change on geopolitical understandings of border and the cartographic methods used to represent them. Locating the Italian condition alongside a longer political history of boundary making, the book brings together critical essays, visualizations, and unpublished documents from state archives. By examining the nexus of nationalism and cartography, A Moving Border details how borders are both material and imagined, and the ways global warming challenges Western conceptions of territory. Even more, it provides a blueprint for spatial intervention in a world where ecological processes are bound to dominate geopolitical affairs.
Year: 2019
Primary URL: https://cup.columbia.edu/book/a-moving-border/9781941332450
Primary URL Description: publisher's website
Publisher: Columbia Books on Architecture and the City
Book Title: A Moving Border: Alpine Cartographies of Climate Change
ISBN: 9781941332450

Levi’s Authority and the Italian South / L’autorità di Levi e l’Italia del sud (Book Section)
Title: Levi’s Authority and the Italian South / L’autorità di Levi e l’Italia del sud
Author: Fuller, Mia
Editor: Siravo, Chiara C.
Editor: Grima, Joseph
Editor: Filipponi, Achille
Abstract: This volume centres around a day in December 1974 in San Costantino Albanese, and the photographic and pictorial traces it left behind. The documents presented here – four photographs of Carlo Levi dining and socialising in the company of local politicians and members of the community, and of a mural by Levi painted that evening – are stored, respectively, in the private collection which is the result of Nicola Scaldaferriʼs research and on a wall in the former Pro Loco of San Costantino Albanese. San Costantino Albanese is a small town in a remote mountainous area of Basilicata called Val Sarmento. It was settled during the sixteenth century by a community of Albanian refugees known as Arbëreshë, as a result of the Ottoman invasion of the Balkans. The community, like that of its neighbour San Paolo Albanese, is part of the Italo-Albanian Byzantine Catholic church and an early-modern form of the Albanian language is spoken in both villages. It becomes clear, through the essays in this volume, that four photographs from a private collection and a mural can generate a multitude of reflections that go beyond the time, place and people depicted in them.
Year: 2019
Primary URL: https://www.humboldtbooks.com/en/book/carlo-levi-a-san-costantino-albanese-archivi-della-basilicata-volume-2
Primary URL Description: publisher's website
Publisher: Humboldt Books
Book Title: Carlo Levi a San Costantino Albanese. Archivi della Basilicata [Volume 2]
ISBN: 9788899385675

From Protestant Supremacy to Christian Supremacy (Article)
Title: From Protestant Supremacy to Christian Supremacy
Author: Goetz, Rebecca Anne
Abstract: Over the last generation, historians have begun to explain Christianity's impact on developing ideas of race and slavery in the early modern Atlantic. Jon Sensbach's A Separate Canaan: The Making of an Afro-Moravian World in North Carolina, 1763–1840 showed how Moravians struggled with both race and slavery, ultimately concluding that Moravians adopted the racist attitudes of their non-Pietist North Carolina neighbors. Travis Glasson's Mastering Christianity: Missionary Anglicanism and Slavery in the Atlantic World showed how the Anglican church accustomed itself to slavery in New York and the Caribbean. Richard Bailey's Race and Redemption in Puritan New England unraveled changing puritan ideas about race and belonging in New England. My own book, The Baptism of Early Virginia: How Christianity Created Race, argued that Protestant ideas about heathenism and conversion were instrumental to how English Virginians thought about the bodies and souls of enslaved Africans and Native people, and to how they developed a nascent idea of race in seventeenth-century Virginia. Heather Kopelson's Faithful Bodies: Performing Religion and Race in the Puritan Atlantic traced puritan ideas about race, the soul, and the body in New England and Bermuda. From a different angle, Christopher Cameron's To Plead Our Own Cause: African Americans in Massachusetts and the Making of the Antislavery Movement outlined the influence of puritan theologies on black abolitionism. Engaging all this scholarly ferment is Katharine Gerbner's new book, Christian Slavery: Conversion and Race in the Protestant Atlantic World. Gerbner's work both synthesizes and transforms this extended scholarly conversation with a broad and inclusive look at Protestants—broadly defined as Anglicans, Moravians, Quakers, Huguenots, and others—and race in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries over a geography stretching from New York to the Caribbean.
Year: 2019
Primary URL: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/church-history/article/from-protestant-supremacy-to-christian-supremacy/8ED1DE5ECF446B12DBA93E5D5FF72632
Access Model: open access
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Church History
Publisher: Cambridge University Press

The Role of the Scribe: Genius and Guide (Book Section)
Title: The Role of the Scribe: Genius and Guide
Author: Rust, Martha
Editor: Conklin Akbari, Suzanne
Editor: Simpson, James
Abstract: This Handbook produces a stereoscopic view of Chaucer’s works. Juxtaposing chapters by Middle English scholars with chapters by specialists in other fields – Latin and vernacular literature, philosophy, theology, and history of science – it offers a new perspective that uses the works of Chaucer to look out upon the wider world. Clusters of essays that place Chaucer’s works in “the Mediterranean Frame” and “the European Frame” are bracketed by groupings on “Biography and Circumstances of Daily Life” and “The Chaucerian Afterlife,” while a cluster on “Christian Doctrine and Religious Heterodoxy” foregrounds the role of confessional identities in the emergence of Middle English literary authority. The Handbook’s scope addresses the claim of universality that is often implicit in the study of Chaucer’s works. Chapters on anti-Judaism in the Canterbury Tales and on Hebrew literature reveal what has been suppressed or elided in the construction of English literary history, while studying the Arabic sources and analogues of the frame tale tradition reveals the patterns of circulation that lie behind the early modern emergence of national literatures. Chapters on French, Italian, and Latin literature address the linguistic context of late fourteenth-century Europe, while chapters on philosophy, history of science, and theology spur on new areas of development within Chaucer studies. Pushing at the disciplinary boundaries of Chaucer Studies, this Handbook maps out how we might develop our field with greater awareness of the interconnected world of the fourteenth century, and the increasingly interconnected – and divided – world we inhabit today.
Year: 2020
Primary URL: https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-oxford-handbook-of-chaucer-9780199582655?cc=us&lang=en&
Primary URL Description: publisher's website
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Book Title: The Oxford Handbook of Chaucer
ISBN: 9780199582655

Voice of Freedom: Turbulent Times Turned an Artist into a Hero (Film/TV/Video Broadcast or Recording)
Title: Voice of Freedom: Turbulent Times Turned an Artist into a Hero
Writer: Adriane Lentz-Smith
Director: Rob Rapley
Producer: Emily Harrold
Producer: Rob Rapley
Abstract: American Experience On Easter Sunday, 1939, contralto Marian Anderson stepped up to a microphone in front of the Lincoln Memorial. Inscribed on the walls of the monument behind her were the words “all men are created equal.” Barred from performing in Constitution Hall because of her race, Anderson would sing for the American people in the open air. Hailed as a voice that “comes around once in a hundred years” by maestros in Europe and widely celebrated by both white and black audiences at home, her fame hadn’t been enough to spare her from the indignities and outright violence of racism and segregation. Voice of Freedom interweaves Anderson’s rich life story with this landmark moment in history, exploring fundamental questions about talent, race, fame, democracy, and the American soul.
Year: 2021
Primary URL: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/voice-freedom
Format: Video
Format: Digital File
Format: Web

From St. Paul to Populist Politics: The Evolution of Charismatic Leadership (Radio/Audio Broadcast or Recording)
Title: From St. Paul to Populist Politics: The Evolution of Charismatic Leadership
Writer: Molly Worthen
Abstract: Charisma is a concept we typically use to refer to individuals who fascinate, attract, and captivate us in some way. The word’s modern usage, however, obscures its origins in Christian doctrine. In such contexts, charismatic figures were understood to have a kind of divinely ordained authority and spiritual influence. In this podcast episode, Molly Worthen, associate professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, explores the evolution of charisma in the popular consciousness and its role in various historical epochs and movements. From St. Paul to contemporary populist politicians, analyzing the ineffable allure of charisma can help us to understand how power has been produced and wielded in both religious and secular contexts.
Date: 05/17/2021
Primary URL: https://soundcloud.com/nationalhumanitiescenter/molly-worthen-evolution-of-charismatic-leadership
Primary URL Description: Discovery and Inspiration: National Humanities Center Podcast
Access Model: Open Access
Format: Digital File
Format: Web

Undocumented Activism and Minor Politics: Inside the Cramped Political Spaces of Deportation Defense Campaigns (Article)
Title: Undocumented Activism and Minor Politics: Inside the Cramped Political Spaces of Deportation Defense Campaigns
Author: Austin Kocher
Author: Angela Stuess
Abstract: n/a
Year: 2021
Periodical Title: Antipode 53, no.2

Fighting Jim Crow in a World of Empire (Book Section)
Title: Fighting Jim Crow in a World of Empire
Author: Adriane Lentz-Smith
Editor: Brooke L. Blower
Editor: Andrew Preston
Abstract: n/a
Year: 2022
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Book Title: The Cambridge History of America and the World, vol. 3, 1900-1945

The Suicide of Miss Xi: Democracy and Disenchantment in the Chinese Republic (Book)
Title: The Suicide of Miss Xi: Democracy and Disenchantment in the Chinese Republic
Author: Bryna Goodman
Abstract: A suicide scandal in Shanghai reveals the social fault lines of democratic visions in China’s troubled Republic in the early 1920s. On September 8, 1922, the body of Xi Shangzhen was found hanging in the Shanghai newspaper office where she worked. Although her death occurred outside of Chinese jurisdiction, her U.S.-educated employer, Tang Jiezhi, was kidnapped by Chinese authorities and put on trial. In the unfolding scandal, novelists, filmmakers, suffragists, reformers, and even a founding member of the Chinese Communist Party seized upon the case as emblematic of deep social problems. Xi’s family claimed that Tang had pressured her to be his concubine; his conviction instead for financial fraud only stirred further controversy. The creation of a republic ten years earlier had inspired a vision of popular sovereignty and citizenship premised upon gender equality and legal reform. After the quick suppression of the first Chinese parliament, commercial circles took up the banner of democracy in their pursuit of wealth. But, Bryna Goodman shows, the suicide of an educated “new woman” exposed the emptiness of republican democracy after a flash of speculative finance gripped the city. In the shadow of economic crisis, Tang’s trial also exposed the frailty of legal mechanisms in a political landscape fragmented by warlords and enclaves of foreign colonial rule. The Suicide of Miss Xi opens a window onto how urban Chinese in the early twentieth century navigated China’s early passage through democratic populism, in an ill-fated moment of possibility between empire and party dictatorship. Xi Shangzhen became a symbol of the failures of the Chinese Republic as well as the broken promises of citizen’s rights, gender equality, and financial prosperity betokened by liberal democracy and capitalism.
Year: 2021
Primary URL: https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674248823
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 9780674248823

Prizes

Frances Fuller Victor Award for General Nonfiction, Literary Arts
Date: 4/25/2022
Organization: Oregon Book Awards
Abstract: n/a

A Subversive Bonanza: The Construction of the Panama Canal, the Biomedical and Life Sciences, and the Birth of Tropical Ecology (Book Section)
Title: A Subversive Bonanza: The Construction of the Panama Canal, the Biomedical and Life Sciences, and the Birth of Tropical Ecology
Author: Paul S. Sutter
Editor: Martin Meiske
Editor: Eike-Christian Heine
Abstract: N/A
Year: 2022
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
Book Title: Beyond the Lab and the Field Infrastructures As Places of Knowledge Production since the Late Nineteenth Century

Afterword to Special Issue, Working toward Justice on Difficult Ground (Article)
Title: Afterword to Special Issue, Working toward Justice on Difficult Ground
Author: Stuesse, Angela
Abstract: n/a
Year: 2023
Primary URL: https://tennesseelawreview.org/symposium/
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Tennessee Law Review

Challenges to Addressing Mental Health Repercussions of Large-Scale Immigration Worksite Raids (Article)
Title: Challenges to Addressing Mental Health Repercussions of Large-Scale Immigration Worksite Raids
Author: Stuesse, Angela
Author: Lopez, William D.
Author: Novak, N.
Author: Eidy, N.
Author: Shull, T.
Abstract: Immigration worksite raids–in which dozens to hundreds of individuals are detained–often target food processing plants or other warehouse-based operations, primary sources of employment for immigrants in rural communities. Drawing on interviews with 77 adults who provided support following six worksite raids, we describe three challenges to identifying resultant mental health impacts: (a) amid poverty and family disappearance, mental health is not the priority; (b) untrained practitioners misidentify signs of declining mental health; and (c) mental health care is linguistically limited, expensive, and inaccessible to working families. We end by discussing how practitioners and advocates can address these challenges.
Year: 2023
Primary URL: https://static1.squarespace.com/static/56167617e4b05bb9c3f1bfa1/t/651b15839c63e1604278e19f/1696273844077/Lopez%2C+et.+al+2023
Access Model: Open Access
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Journal of Rural Mental Health