Research for a book-length history of venereal disease in 18th-century England.

I aim to write a lively, accessible history of venereal disease at the turn of the eighteenth century. The project takes an innovative approach by situating the disease within the texture of pre-modern London life. Rather than focus on institutional records or writing by elite men, the book grounds disease in the gardens, streets, and taverns where patients and healers discussed the disease, swapped remedies, and negotiated cures. In focusing on the words and lives of sufferers, as well as a particularly vocal group of clap-curers who lived and worked in the crowded streets of London, the book is intended to appeal to a broad audience. I use accessible prose and human stories, but without sacrificing the rigor of thoughtful scholarship. More broadly, the project aims to create an interdisciplinary model for studying the history of disease by drawing on the methods of cultural history, as well as the history of the book, gender history, and literary studies.

Research and preparation of two scholarly articles on the forensic stylometry and authorship of the Epistles of Saint Paul.

This project explores the limitations of forensic stylometry – the detection of an author’s literary fingerprint in the service of exposing forgery. The development of tests, tools, and protocols within computational stylistics has increased confidence in conclusions about authorship, yet tests on the Pauline Epistles in the New Testament over the past 50 years have resulted in divergent findings about which of the 13 texts are authentic. This project seeks to discern why some ancient corpora like the Pauline Epistles have been resistant to consistent authorial categorization. The results will not only help scholars of Christian origins to reassess the relative value of forensic stylometry for their work, but will also serve as a caution for scholars of antiquity more generally who work with short texts in small corpora. Moreover, the project will help forensic stylometrists identify the limitations of their tools in relation to some corpora of great historical interest.

Research and preparation of a book on U.S. landscape painting during and after World War II.

During World War II, photographs and newsreels documenting death and destruction in theaters of war around the world prompted a change in painted representations of landscape in the United States. As a well-established genre in American art, landscape painting had a long tradition of celebrating the local, both bucolic settings and topographical wonders. The wider geographic scope of World War II challenged the regional focus of American landscape painting, especially as it had been practiced in the 1930s. My book examines the ways in which artists struggled to acknowledge an environment now understood to be global and interconnected, and also felt compelled to address the sheer scale of carnage caused by the war. Together these artists recast the terms of landscape painting, broadening its scope from the local to the international, and from the pastoral to the anti-pastoral.

Research and writing leading to publication of a book on family planning in Africa during the 1960s and 1970s.

The history of contraception, population control and family planning is a story of global unevenness. Historians have characterized this global history as a story of extremes: of reproductive freedom, upward mobility and empowerment in some parts of the world, and of racism, vulnerability, population control or coercive sterilization in others. Yet neither narrative of feminist liberation nor of coercive population control captures the history of Africa’s encounter with the global family planning movement. My book, Planning the African Family, tells the story of how African doctors, nurses, social workers, politicians, and patients in the 1960s and 1970s used the resources of family planning in creative and often unintended ways, improvising in the context of scarcity to deliver health and to build health systems.

Research leading to an article and book on the impact of the Korean War on the literature of Korean-American poets such as Myung Mi Kim, Don Mee Choi, and Sun Young Shin.

Though publications by American writers of Korean descent now number easily in the hundreds, no monograph exists that considers this extensive and critical body of work. My aim is to address this oversight at least in part by engaging in the production of a chapter length work over the NEH Summer Stipend period. The chapter will explore discourses of technology and militarism, as they arise in Korean American war poetry, especially focusing on the work of Myung Mi Kim and how her collections—including Under Flag, The Bounty, Dura, and Commons—can be placed in comparison to others such as Don Mee Choi’s Hardly War and Sun Yung Shin’s Rough, and Savage. Juxtaposing these poetry collections reveals an intriguing connection between the Korean civilian and American serviceman in the terrain of war: the desire to find legibility and recognition beyond the weapons, bombs, and gunfire that mark their lives as expendable.

Research and writing of a book on reading practices and literary interpretation during the American Civil War, 1861-1865.

This project examines the reading habits, practices, and choices of various interpretive communities during the American Civil War. It demonstrates that wartime readers did not merely respond to the circumstances of the war, occupation, and Union victory. Rather, reading--how and what they read, the meanings they ascribed to what they had read, and the conditions that influenced their reading--shaped their understanding of the world around them. The war's unprecedented carnage, its contingencies, and its destruction shattered romantic modes of understanding. If America's bloodiest conflict profoundly transformed American literary culture, then it surely changed how readers encountered the printed word. Wartime readers were active participants in the process of coming to terms with the nation's defining event. Ultimately, then, this project explores the relationship between lived experiences and the intellectual and imaginative lives of wartime readers.

Research leading to a book-length study criminal courts in the state of Jalisco, Mexico, 1847-1871.

By examining hundreds of wrongful death investigations and death sentence appeals in nineteenth-century Mexico, Trying Modernity captures how alleged criminals drew from their life experiences, cultural foundations, and legal understandings to defend themselves in the courtroom. Such testimonies give voice to the voiceless and tell us something about how everyday members of civil society understood and asserted their rights. Plotting the trajectory of individual voices across gender, racial, and social lines also reveals the meaning behind the contentious language deployed by judges, investigators, and witnesses. The quiet battle of words in the courtroom, too often overshadowed by the overt violence of military uprisings and civil war playing out at the same time, ultimately shaped a cultural consensus in 1871 that would be foundational for both the authoritarian peace of the Porfirio Díaz dictatorship and notions of citizenship and criminality that extend into the present.

Ethnographic research and completion of a paper on the adaptations to modern social changes in the ritual practices of North Vietnamese rural villages.

This project is an ethnographic study of the gendered dimensions of moral responsibility in northern rural Vietnam, with a focus on lineage ritual. The research examines how village women, who are structural outsiders in their lineages, negotiate what are often overlapping and conflicting moral positions in order to establish themselves as moral persons in the community. In particular, the study considers how this process is affected by changing cultural values and customs. More generally, the study demonstrates how individuals construct moral and social personhood in concert with broader authoritative discourses in times of rapid societal change. It also highlights the diverse ways that local communities address a core humanistic problem: how individuals, each embodying a singular way-of-being in the world, come to live together in a moral community.

A book length study on the development of prisons in Brazil between 1830 and 1890.

My monograph, "Routine Imprisonment, Race, and Citizenship in Nineteenth-Century Brazil, 1830-1890," investigates the birth of the prison in Brazil with a focus on Rio de Janeiro’s Casa de Correção, the city’s penitentiary, and the Casa de Detenção, a remand prison, from 1830 to 1890. This era spans the post-independence period, the termination of the slave trade in 1850, and the protracted emancipation process that culminated in the abolition of slavery in 1888 and the fall of the Empire (1822-1889). The research highlights the seeming paradox that Brazil’s construction of the Casa de Correção represents in the global history of the penitentiary which is associated with industrializing societies and free wage labor whereas slavery was the basis of the Brazilian economy until 1888.

Research and writing for a book on the emerging technology of ballooning in 18^th-century England and its impact on literature and the techniques of omniscient narration.

This book project shows how the advent of flight enabled nothing less than new ways of seeing the world. The first hot air balloons, beginning in 1783, gave the bird’s-eye view to human eyes, and writers in various genres, factual and fictional, adopted the perspective of an observer in a balloon basket. These writers described natural and human-built environments from extraordinary angles and distances, portraying the geographies of Britain and beyond at unprecedented scales. They thus put into practice, more literally than ever before, scientific methods such as detached observation and far-reaching empirical induction, as well as the literary technique of omniscient narration.

Research and preparation of a book on paintings by 20th-century Pueblo artists of the southwestern United States.

My book explores how early 20th-century Pueblo painters navigated the simultaneously generative and perilous confluence of modernity and tradition. I build on while challenging scholarship on American Indian art produced in colonial contexts, which is largely focused on the support and interventions of white patrons and on market forces. Instead, my book foregrounds individual Pueblo artists, highlighting their “aesthetic agency,” or how they creatively adopted, resisted, confronted, transformed, and subverted colonial political, economic, and cultural forces. Each chapter is focused on one Pueblo artist, seeking to understand the aesthetics and politics at play in his or her art. The method for doing so is through careful archival research, through dialogue with the artists’ home communities, and by attending to a rich body of theoretical work produced by indigenous thinkers. As such, the book aims to provide a productive model for writing about transcultural indigenous arts.

Research leading to a book-length study on race and modern dance in Argentina since during the 20th century.

This project examines the role that concert dance forms—classical ballet, modern dance, and contemporary dance—historically have played in the construction and/or critique of Argentine racial exceptionalism. Racial exceptionalism names the pervasive academic and public discourses that have situated Argentina as exceptionally white and European among Latin American nations. Because of its relationship to Euro-American culture, concert dance offers a privileged site for examining the construction of Argentine whiteness. Argentina’s Centennial (1910) and Bicentennial (2010) celebrations, both critical crossroads in the imagination of national identity, bracket this study. My project joins a growing body of scholarship that centers racial politics in Argentina. Within the dance studies field, it aims to bring Argentine concert dance into dialogue with scholarship that documents how dance articulates histories of race and nation.

Research and writing of a scholarly article about the role of eugenics in American classical scholarship prior to World War II.

In this project, I propose to carry out a critical study of the role of eugenic theories in early twentieth-century American classical scholarship. Building on research I conducted for an earlier project, my hypothesis is that the reliance on eugenics was widespread in classical scholarship during the first half of the twentieth century, and I would like to use the NEH Summer Stipend to document and evaluate classicists’ employment of such theories in their interpretations of ancient history, while also weighing the legacy such scholarship continues to have in the field of classics today. The penchant for using Greek and Roman history as a mirror for American life is as old as America itself, and I believe interrogation of the intersections of classical scholarship and eugenics can also provide insight into some of the ways contemporary American debates about race and eugenics were, in turn, bolstered by these interpretations of the ancient world.

Research for a book-length study of a work by 14th-century chronicler, John of Tynemouth, on the lives of saints in medieval England, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland.

I seek funding to support the writing of a formative section of a book project, titled Shaping Monastic Devotional Culture in England. This monograph offers the first sustained investigation of a neglected collection of 156 saints’ lives, some of which constitute the only historical evidence of religious women during the Christian conversion of England. John of Tynemouth's legendary became the definitive register of English holiness, one that was read and recopied from c. 1350-1550. Shaping Monastic Devotional Culture in England investigates the scope of John’s legendary, documents the sources for the saints' lives, examines the collective narrative about localized sanctity, and illustrates the centrality of this register in English monastic reading.

Completion of a book on the use of the Hebrew Bible in Judaism during late antiquity and the early middle ages.

The study of early Jewish religious reading proposed here documents practices in which a cultural elite that is widely acknowledged to sit at the heart of the biblical project seldom opened a Bible and even great religious thinkers maintained an indistinct notion of the contents of the biblical text. This study argues, moreover, that many early rabbinic authorities found that their central canonical text inspired doubts very similar to those expressed by modern skeptics—a form of intellectual dissonance that was tolerable to these late antique thinkers because many early rabbinic authorities cultivated a form of scriptural religiosity that defused doubts regarding the biblical text by embracing the idea of the Bible while simultaneously neglecting the book itself.

Research and writing leading to publication of a book-length study of documentary films in sub-Saharan Africa, from 1905 to the present.

In my current book project, “Reclaiming Realism: From Documentary Film in Africa to African Documentary Film,” I analyze postcolonial African documentary film in its aesthetic, social, and historical contexts. For over half a century, French colonial documentary claimed to capture the truth about Africa and Africans. In the postcolonial era, African filmmakers have reclaimed the cinema and their cinematic image by experimenting with documentary content, voice, and style. I argue that documentary was of vital importance to French colonialism as well as to a postcolonial reframing of African identities and modes of filmic discourse. My study of documentary, moreover, demonstrates how the inclusion of African films enriches our understanding of global cinema. The NEH Summer Stipend will support a final trip to Paris, France, to update the research for the postcolonial portion of my manuscript.

Work on a book-length examination of anti-Chinese violence in late-nineteenth-century Seattle and its implications for post-Reconstruction federal civil rights policy.

“American Pogrom: Anti-Chinese Violence and the Challenges of the Long Reconstruction” uses the assertive federal response to 1880’s mob violence against Chinese in the Pacific Northwest to understand federal power after Reconstruction. Two discrete questions guide my inquiry: what tools did the federal government have at its disposal to protect the civil rights of marginalized groups and how effectively did it do so? Relying on both the architecture of civil rights protections enshrined during Reconstruction and the U.S. Army, which effectively projected federal power, the Cleveland administration illustrated the federal government’s continuing ability to protect civil rights, even after Reconstruction, but also the structural impediments to complete success in that endeavor. In the end, fervid support for Chinese exclusion by locals trumped the federal prerogative, but events there set a precedent for civil rights enforcement that would later be expanded upon in the 1950s and 60s.

Preparation for publication of a book-length study of moral songs and ethics during the Wars of Religion in late sixteenth-century France.

The Voice of Virtue offers the first book-length study of moral song, a fascinating domain of musical activity that gained traction during the Wars of Religion in late sixteenth-century France. Setting pithy and sometimes profound morsels of vernacular wisdom to simple tunes or elaborate polyphonic compositions, moral song offered a multi-sensory engagement with contemporary ethical thought. Whereas Medieval ethics developed within the boundaries of professional philosophy, the Renaissance saw an explosion of informal expressions of moral philosophy created by and for non-specialists. This will be the first book to illuminate song as one such expression of informal ethics, animating diverse moral principles drawn from ancient sources for a broad community of amateur musicians. Positioned at a rich intersection between cultural and intellectual history, The Voice of Virtue stands to make a significant contribution to music scholarship, ethics, and the reparative turn in the humanities.

Completion of an archaeological study and publication of a two-volume monograph on the West African kingdom of Dahomey (1600-1894).

Western perspectives on African cities have long privileged external factors in the rise of cities across the continent. In recent decades, however, archaeologists have revealed the local origins of cities, countering such arguments for the exogenous origins of African civilizations. Yet the global trading networks that engulfed Africa in the second millennium AD had wide-reaching impacts on African urban systems, and we are only beginning to explore how local and global forces articulated. Since 2000, I have explored this question in reference to the kingdom of Dahomey in West Africa, which thrived in the era of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. In the coming year I plan to complete a two-volume monograph summarizing archaeological, documentary, and oral evidence from this research. The monograph will represent one of only a few detailed archaeological studies of a West Africa urban community in this period, providing comparative data for scholars working across the region.

Preparation for publication of a book-length study of the relationship between postindustrial cities and film in the United States, from the 1970s to the present.

Since the term entered popular usage in the early 1980s, the “Rust Belt” has gained considerable cultural and political pull in the United States. Not merely a descriptor for a geographical region surrounding the Great Lakes and Ohio River Valley, “the Rust Belt” serves as a potent symbol for America’s past, present, and impending future. Much of the social construction of the idea of the Rust Belt—both then and now–has occurred in popular film. Filmic representations of shuttered auto plants, unemployed laborers, and decaying downtowns have all contributed to narratives of American decline. At the same time, cities like Buffalo, Cleveland, Detroit and Pittsburgh have actively attempted to court film and television production in an effort to craft their own stories of American renewal. In my manuscript Tinsel and Rust: Hollywood Film and Postindustrial America, I examine the complicated relationship between postindustrial cities and the creative industries in the United States.

A book-length study of political printers in Mexico between 1821 and 1910.

My book project examines the political and social struggles surrounding the making and consuming of print in Mexico to offer a new analysis of the emergence of liberalism across the long nineteenth century. It argues that Mexico City printers galvanized and shaped post-independence political discussion and conflict by giving material form to competing ideas and reform projects. The book also demonstrates how Mexico City printers and collaborators from across the social spectrum ushered in a new political culture in which print served as an incendiary element in rollicking and ruthless struggles over the fledgling nation’s future. The project significantly revises our understanding of the role of print in the formation of Mexico’s public sphere, and offers insight into how imprints functioned as key objects that linked intimate urban communities, larger patronage networks, and spurred political action in a post-colonial society with low literacy rates.

Research and writing of a book-length study of the music theory of Jean-Philippe Rameau (1683-1764) and French Enlightenment debates about human knowledge.

The Philosophers' Rameau investigates how and why the music-theoretical writings of Jean-Philippe Rameau (1683-1764) came to be prominently featured in the main publishing organ of the French Enlightenment: Diderot and d'Alembert's Encyclopédie. The answer is that the philosophes' found in Rameau's theory of harmony a succinct illustration of their own scientific epistemology. For this reason, the structure of the Encyclopédie's exposition of Rameau comes to mirror that of its account of human knowledge as a whole. The initially veiled and the progressively more overt critique of Rameau that Rousseau developed across his articles on music, and which d'Alembert subsequently appropriated, thus redounded on the Encyclopédie itself and in the end threatened its editors' global project. My book's chief methodological novelty lies in its emphasis on the interpenetration between technical questions of music theory and broader issues of scientific method and philosophical psychology.

Research and preparation of an article on the role of poetry in African literary communities.

What is the future of literature? While the Internet revolution is often thought to call into question the future of literary reading in North America, African writing today suggests that the rise of digital media should not be confused with the decline of the literary. This project examines contemporary African poetry in English and the communities through which it circulates in order to ask in what sense this new poetry serves as a paradigm of the literary and its fortunes in the twenty-first century. In pursuit of a better grasp on literature’s cultural, ethical, and subjective work, the project probes the extent to which a writer’s location still matters in an era of digital publication. Drawing on fieldwork as well as theoretical discussions of lyric poetry and original textual interpretation, it foregrounds diverse African actors’ understanding of why the literary still matters for their current situation and possible futures.

Research and preparation of a book on the 5th-century literary attack by Bishop Cyril of Alexandria against the Roman Emperor Julian the Apostate (332-363).

This book project is the first monograph in any language to investigate one of the most significant works of Cyril of Alexandria (5th century) since the very recent publication of its extant ten books in a critical edition. The book will focus upon the ways in which the Contra Julianum (a literary attack against a religious polemical work of the emperor Julian over sixty years following his death) participated in key literary and philosophical discourses. The Contra Julianum not only extended earlier Christian apologetic traditions but also appropriated Greek poetic and philosophical texts in unique ways within a late Roman imperial context. Cyril furthermore crafted unique formulations of epistemological, theological-demonological, and legal-philosophical positions that show a creative and incisive engagement with ongoing philosophical discourses in these areas.

Research and writing of a monograph on the economic consequences of the integration of American department stores, from the 1950s to the 1980s.

I am seeking the assistance of a NEH Summer Stipend, so that I can complete my first book, Workers, Consumers, and Civil Rights (under contract at the University of North Carolina Press). During the summer of 2018, I will conduct archival research at the National Archives and Records Administration in College Park, Maryland. Here, I will review the records of the Sears, Roebuck, and Company affirmative action cases, the subject of my book’s sixth and final chapter. These cases expose the retail industry’s discriminatory practices against African Americans and women, the industry's ongoing transformations, ones that revolutionized, or rather diminished the status of retail work and consumption, and the challenges and limitations of neoliberalism in the 1970s and 1980s.