Fellowships at the National Humanities Center

FAIN: RA-50045-06

National Humanities Center (Research Triangle Park, NC 27709-0152)
Kent R. Mullikin (Project Director: September 2005 to November 2012)
Elizabeth C. Mansfield (Project Director: November 2012 to March 2011)

Four fellowships per year for three years.

The National Humanities Center requests support for fellowships for advanced study in the humanities.

Associated Products

The Aesthetics of Anarchy: Art and Ideology in the Early Russian Avant-Garde (Book)
Title: The Aesthetics of Anarchy: Art and Ideology in the Early Russian Avant-Garde
Author: Nina Gurianova
Abstract: Nina Gurianova identifies the early Russian avant-garde (1910-1918) as a distinctive movement in its own right and not a preliminary stage to the Constructivism of the 1920s. Gurianova identifies what she terms an “aesthetics of anarchy”—art-making without rules—that greatly influenced early twentieth-century modernists. Setting the early Russian avant-garde movement firmly within a broader European context, Gurianova draws on primary and archival sources by individual writers and artists, Russian theorists, theorizing artists, and German philosophers. As it explores the aesthetics embraced by the movement, the book shows how artists transformed literary, theatrical, and performance practices, eroding the traditional boundaries of the visual arts and challenging the conventions of their day.
Year: 2012
Primary URL: http://www.ucpress.edu/book.php?isbn=9780520268760
Primary URL Description: Publisher's website
Secondary URL: http://www.worldcat.org/title/aesthetics-of-anarchy-art-and-ideology-in-the-early-russian-avant-garde/oclc/785332887&referer=brief_results
Secondary URL Description: WorldCat
Publisher: University of California Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 9780520268760

The Little Girl who Fought the Great Depression: Shirley Temple and 1930s America (Book)
Title: The Little Girl who Fought the Great Depression: Shirley Temple and 1930s America
Author: John F. Kasson
Abstract: Her image appeared in periodicals and advertisements roughly twenty times daily; she rivaled FDR and Edward VIII as the most photographed person in the world. Her portrait brightened the homes of countless admirers: from a black laborer's cabin in South Carolina to FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover's recreation room in Washington, DC. A few years later her smile cheered the secret bedchamber of Anne Frank in Amsterdam. For four consecutive years Shirley Temple was the world's box-office champion, a record never equaled. Amid the deprivation and despair of the Great Depression, Shirley Temple radiated optimism and plucky good cheer that lifted the spirits of millions and shaped their collective character for generations to come. Cultural historian John F. Kasson shows how the most famous, adored, imitated, and commodified child in the world astonished movie goers, created a new international culture of celebrity, and revolutionized the role of children as consumers. To do so, she worked virtually every day of her childhood, transforming her own family as well as the lives of her fans.
Year: 2013
Primary URL: http://www.worldcat.org/title/little-girl-who-fought-the-great-depression-shirley-temple-and-1930s-america/oclc/869365388&referer=brief_results
Primary URL Description: WorldCat description
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 9780393240795
Copy sent to NEH?: Yes

The Homoerotics of Orientalism (Book)
Title: The Homoerotics of Orientalism
Author: Boone, Joseph Allen
Abstract: This book offers an erudite and timely interpretation of the phenomenon of homoeroticism in orientalism in the Near and Middle East. Treating a broad range of Western representations of the “Orient”, Boone provides an important corrective to Edward Said’s Orientalism by addressing the powerful ways in which Europeans writers’ and artists’ representations of homoeroticism in the “Orient” have covertly enabled the appeal of orientalism as a predominantly male mode of discourse.
Year: 2014
Primary URL: http://cup.columbia.edu/book/978-0-231-15110-8/the-homoerotics-of-orientalism/reviews; http://www.worldcat.org/title/homoerotics-of-orientalism/oclc/842879159&referer=brief_results
Primary URL Description: WorldCat
Access Model: codex available for purchase
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 9780231151108
Copy sent to NEH?: Yes

When Christians First Met Muslims: A Sourcebook of the Earliest Syriac Writings on Islam (Book)
Title: When Christians First Met Muslims: A Sourcebook of the Earliest Syriac Writings on Islam
Author: Michael Philip Penn
Abstract: The first Christians to meet Muslims were not Latin-speaking Christians from the western Mediterranean or Greek-speaking Christians from Constantinople but rather Christians from northern Mesopotamia who spoke the Aramaic dialect of Syriac. Living in what constitutes modern-day Iran, Iraq, Syria, and eastern Turkey, these Syriac Christians were under Muslim rule from the seventh century to the present, wrote the earliest and most extensive accounts of Islam, and described a complicated set of religious and cultural exchanges not reducible to the solely antagonistic. Through its critical introductions and new translations of this material, When Christians First Met Muslims allows scholars, students, and the general public to explore the earliest interactions of what eventually became the world's two largest religions. - Publisher's description.
Year: 2015
Primary URL: http://www.worldcat.org/title/when-christians-first-met-muslims-a-sourcebook-of-the-earliest-syriac-writings-on-islam/oclc/890310380&referer=brief_results
Primary URL Description: WorldCat entry
Publisher: University of California Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 9780520284944
Copy sent to NEH?: Yes

Envisioning Islam: Syriac Christians and the Early Muslim World (Book)
Title: Envisioning Islam: Syriac Christians and the Early Muslim World
Author: Michael Philip Penn
Abstract: The earliest and largest corpus of Christian writings on Islam was written in the Aramaic dialect of Syriac. Envisioning Islam shows how these previously neglected texts problematize modern perceptions of an exclusively hostile Christian reaction to Islam and revolutionize our understanding of the early Islamic world.
Year: 2015
Primary URL: http://www.worldcat.org/title/envisioning-islam-syriac-christianity-and-early-muslim-world/oclc/911211337&referer=brief_results
Primary URL Description: WorldCat entry
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 9780812247220
Copy sent to NEH?: Yes

Volition’s Face: Personification and the Will in Renaissance Literature (Book)
Title: Volition’s Face: Personification and the Will in Renaissance Literature
Author: Andrew Escobedo
Abstract: Modern readers and writers find it natural to contrast the agency of realistic fictional characters to the constrained range of action typical of literary personifications. Yet no commentator before the eighteenth century suggests that prosopopoeia signals a form of reduced agency. Andrew Escobedo argues that premodern writers, including Spenser, Marlowe, and Milton, understood personification as a literary expression of will, an essentially energetic figure that depicted passion or concept transforming into action. As the will emerged as an isolatable faculty in the Christian Middle Ages, it was seen not only as the instrument of human agency but also as perversely independent of other human capacities, for example, intellect and moral character. Renaissance accounts of the will conceived of volition both as the means to self-creation and the faculty by which we lose control of ourselves. After offering a brief history of the will that isolates the distinctive features of the faculty in medieval and Renaissance thought, Escobedo makes his case through an examination of several personified figures in Renaissance literature: Conscience in the Tudor interludes, Despair in Doctor Faustus and book I of The Faerie Queen, Love in books III and IV of The Faerie Queen, and Sin in Paradise Lost. These examples demonstrate that literary personification did not amount to a dim reflection of “realistic” fictional character, but rather that it provided a literary means to explore the numerous conundrums posed by the premodern notion of the human will. This book will be of great interest to faculty and graduate students interested in medieval studies and Renaissance literature.
Year: 2017
Primary URL: http://undpress.nd.edu/books/P03314?keywords=andrew+escobedo
Primary URL Description: publisher's website
Secondary URL: http://www.worldcat.org/title/volitions-face-personification-and-the-will-in-renaissance-literature/oclc/1020708283
Secondary URL Description: Worldcat
Publisher: University of Notre Dame
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 9780268101688
Copy sent to NEH?: No

Literature and the Cult of Personality: Essays on Goethe and His Influence (Book)
Title: Literature and the Cult of Personality: Essays on Goethe and His Influence
Author: Gregory Maertz
Abstract: The construction of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe as an Anglo-American sage and literary icon was the product of a cult of personality that lay at the center of nineteenth-century cultural politics. A reconstruction of the culture wars fought over Goethe's authority, a previously hidden chapter in the intellectual history of the period ranging from the late eighteenth century to the threshold of Modernism, is the focus of Literature and the Cult of Personality. Marginal as well as canonical writers and critics figured prominently in this process, and Literature and the Cult of Personality offers insight into the mediation activities of Mary Wollstonecraft, Henry Crabb Robinson, the canonical Romantic poets, Thomas Carlyle, Margaret Fuller, George Eliot, Matthew Arnold, and others. For women writers and Jacobins, Scots, and Americans, translating Goethe served as an empowering cultural platform that challenges the myth of the self-sufficiency of British literature. Reviewing and translating German authors provided a means of gaining literary enfranchisement and offered a paradigm of literary development according to which 're-writers' become original writers through an apprenticeship of translation and reviewing. In the diverse and fascinating body of critical writing examined in this book, textual exegesis plays an unexpectedly minor role; in its place, a full-blown cult of personality emerges along with a blueprint for the ideology of hero-worship that is more fully mapped out in the cultural and political life of twentieth-century Europe.
Year: 2017
Primary URL: https://cup.columbia.edu/book/literature-and-the-cult-of-personality/9783838210414
Primary URL Description: Publisher's website
Secondary URL: http://www.worldcat.org/title/literature-and-the-cult-of-personality-essays-on-goethe-and-his-influence/oclc/1030280921
Secondary URL Description: Worldcat
Publisher: Ibidem Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 9783838210414
Copy sent to NEH?: No

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: Gregory Maertz
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
Publisher: Ibidem Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 9783838212814
Copy sent to NEH?: Yes

The Names of the Python: Belonging in East Africa, 900 to 1930 (Book)
Title: The Names of the Python: Belonging in East Africa, 900 to 1930
Author: David L. Schoenbrun
Abstract: Systems of belonging, including ethnicity, are not static, automatic, or free of contest. Historical contexts shape the ways which we are included in or excluded from specific classifications. Building on an amazing array of sources, David L. Schoenbrun examines groupwork—the imaginative labor that people do to constitute themselves as communities—in an iconic and influential region in East Africa. His study traces the roots of nationhood in the Ganda state over the course of a millennia, demonstrating that the earliest clans were based not on political identity or language but on shared investments, knowledges, and practices. Grounded in Schoenbrun's skillful mastery of historical linguistics and vernacular texts, The Names of the Python supplements and redirects current debates about ethnicity in ex-colonial Africa and beyond. This timely volume carefully distinguishes past from present and shows the many possibilities that still exist for the creative cultural imagination.
Year: 2021
Primary URL: https://uwpress.wisc.edu/books/5929.htm
Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 9780299332501

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