Research and writing leading to publication of a book on the history of parliamentary opposition in the Irish Free State (1922-1937).

This project studies the development of parliamentary opposition in the Irish Free State. The normalizing of such opposition is a crucial aspect of the success of any democracy and Ireland had no traditions or notions of a loyal parliamentary opposition when the Free State was created. The major Irish pre-revolutionary party sought to leave the Westminster parliament via Home Rule and often used obstructionist tactics to achieve that end. The revolution had placed a premium on unity and the post-revolutionary division of Irish politics into parties was often depicted as a deplorable fall—motivated by base desires such as greed or ambition—from the previous state of revolutionary unity. In addition, those hostile to the revolutionary settlement took up arms against the new Irish parliament and initially abstained from it. The development of notions of opposition in the face of these many obstacles proved a key factor in explaining the ultimate perseverance of democracy in Ireland.

Research and writing leading to publication of a book on social and political relations on the frontier of the Chinese Qing empire, based on analysis of an archive in two languages: Nasu and bureaucratic Chinese.

This book project explores a unique archive retained by a lineage of native hereditary chiefs during the Qing dynasty (1644-1912) in southwest China. The archive is in two languages: bureaucratic Chinese and Nasu, one of four closely related Ne (or Yi) written languages. Its documents afford an unparalleled opportunity to work out a description of local relations and forms of subjugation in this periphery of the Qing empire. My inquiry begins with basic questions. What systems of ideas, conventions and practices surrounded each class of administrative, legal, personal, and ritual document in this archive? How did different practices of writing, copying, reading and reciting mediate the subjugation of ancestors, chiefs, wives, concubines, heirs, ministers, bonded tenants, and domestic slaves? Methodologically, how might attention to discrepancies and resonances across forms of writing usually kept separate illuminate social relations otherwise obscured?

Research and writing leading to publication of a book on the role of numbers and numerical thinking in colonial America.

What new possibilities arise if we embrace mathematics as a form of humanist inquiry? How would we tell stories differently if we came to see data as a means of personal expression? My project, New World Calculation: The Making of Numbers in Colonial America, investigates these questions in the context of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century colonialism. When enslaved, indigenous, and colonizing peoples interacted, they staged an encounter between groups who were each highly technically skilled mathematicians and held distinctive beliefs about what numbers are and what work they did in the world. At the same time, the tremendous accounting work required to support the economies of Atlantic slavery and settler colonialism, cultivated new forms of bookkeeping and ideas about the reliability of numerical facts. All of these developments led to shifting relationships to numbers and turned colonial spaces into testing grounds for forging novel forms of numerical thinking.

A book-length study about the migration of Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, and Central Americans to Hawaii between 1832 and 2010, and the Latino-Hawaiian culture that has developed over time.

Aloha Compadre: Latinxs in Hawai’i, 1832-2010, will be the first study to document the collective history and contemporary experiences of Latinxs in Hawai’i. I focus on Mexicans, Puerto Ricans and Central Americans, which make up the majority of the Spanish speaking Latinx population in the state. Historically speaking Latinxs have been voyaging to the Hawaiian Islands for over 180 years. Currently they comprise almost ten percent of the state’s population. Aloha Compadre explores how Latinx migrations to Hawai’i are expanding the borderlands region beyond the western hemisphere and into the Pacific region. Their enduring presence in Hawai’i is also transforming the social, economic and cultural landscape of the state. Documenting their community narratives enables us to understand how the Latinx population seeks to build their communities, form interracial relationships, and find a sense of belonging in Hawai’i.

Research and writing leading to publication of a book on the role of tourism and decolonization after World War II.

"Traveling to the End of Empire" will be the first global history of tourism and decolonization in the twentieth century. It will explore the way that former colonies and former colonizers have used tourist infrastructure—such as museums, exhibitions, monuments, and guided tours—to come to terms with, or to erase, their colonial past. This book will define decolonization as both the formal end of empire and an ongoing process that aims to dismantle hierarchies of race and civilization. It will look critically at the ways in which sites for tourists support or ignore the broader goals of the post-1945 global anti-racism movement, with a particular emphasis on the role that UNESCO played in shaping the global landscape of tourism in the second half of the twentieth century. This fellowship would support two months of research in the United Kingdom. [Edited by staff]

Research and writing leading to publication of a book on the history of trafficking between France and the Americas in the early 20^th century.

This project investigates early 20th-century debates on trafficking through the lens of migration history, and how women’s mobility raised key questions about the distinction between free movement and unauthorized migrations. The “traffic in women” generated copious documentation on such themes as border policing, passport controls, immigration law, deportation, and repatriation. In addition, letters written by ostensibly trafficked women, their families, and members of criminal networks reveal the lived experience of these migrations. Focusing primarily on the transatlantic route between France and the Americas, the project situates both the discourse and experience of trafficking within a longer history of free and unfree labor, sex work, mobility, and globalization.

A book-length study of George Romney's tenure as Secretary of Housing and Urban Development and the legacy of public housing initiatives started during the Richard Nixon administration.

The lack of equal opportunity housing was widely regarded as a major factor in the uprising and protests that took place in many US cities between 1962 and 1968. In May 1969 George Romney, US President Richard M. Nixon's Secretary Housing and Urban Development, launched Operation Breakthrough (OB) to help the US dramatically increase housing production. Romney was unable to shatter or "break through" barriers preventing or inhibiting the industrialization of house production including building codes and zoning laws that sought to restrict low-income housing development and union work rules that discouraged the use of mass-assembly methods and new materials in housing. The nine prototype communities built in eight states did, however, offer among the first, publicly funded, privately built integrated, mixed income planned residential communities in the US (edited by staff).

Writing a book about Chinese approaches to the “foreign other” in domestic and foreign policy in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

To stoke fear and hatred of foreigners for internal needs is a recurring pattern in modern Chinese nationalism. Anchored in interpretive analysis of elites’ political rhetoric, party documents, and propaganda materials, the book is a macro-historical study of Chinese national identity discourse from the 1890s till the 2010s. Rather than being constantly antagonistic toward foreign imperialism, China has undergone cycles of seeking cooperation with foreigners and demonizing them. When facing severe political challenges, Chinese elites often tried to exclude domestic enemies in national identity mobilization. However, if targeting domestic others alone was politically inconvenient or unappealing, they would promote antiforeign identity to reinforce internal battles. By linking China’s domestic politics with attitudes toward perceived foreign adversaries, this study revises dominant views that emphasize historical grievances or external threat in explaining modern China’s antiforeignism.

Research leading to two articles on the geometrical foundations of pre-modern Islamic calligraphy.

In the pre-modern Islamic world, calligraphy was commonly considered to be the most revered branch of art. Despite the art form’s centuries-old history, distinctive idiom, and its popularity from China to Spain, there exists no scholarship that explores the structural principles of Islamic calligraphic compositions. I am requesting a grant to continue research on two articles that I am preparing on a corpus of hitherto unstudied inscriptions designed according to the principles of symmetry identified in geometry, specifically, friezes and medallions. My initial analyses of these textual compositions led me to believe that pre-modern calligraphers were knowledgeable of, and incorporated into their art, contemporary discourses and practices in mathematics. This significant finding, in turn, points to an intersection between art and science, a nuanced understanding of which is essential for a study of the history and meaning of Islamic ornament and its reiterations in non-Islamic art. [Edited by staff]

Writing two chapters of a history of homeopathy and the regulation of the medical profession in Mexico, 1895-1942.

A Revolution in Small Doses examines the integration of homeopathic institutions into the Mexican medical profession after the revolution of 1910. It analyzes how Mexicans shaped the boundary between professional and popular medicine in the process of national reconstruction in the 1920s and 30s. The book demonstrates that the boundary was more flexible than regularly assumed for Mexican medicine and that even during a period when science dominated public health and medical education projects, homeopaths negotiated a place within state institutions as very few other countries did in the 20th century. Homeopaths’ case in Mexico constitutes an experiment on medical pluralism in a time of biomedical hegemony. Homeopathy’s success reflects the continuous presence of plural medical beliefs in a stratified society, a society that struggled to reconcile elitist medical science with popular demands for health, its Porfirian past with its revolutionary present.

This project revisits long-held assumptions about the dynamics of Jewish life in the medieval Islamic world. In my book project, tentatively titled From the Rising of the Sun...To Where It Sets, I intend to challenge the received wisdom that the mostly-agrarian Jewish community urbanized under early Islamic regimes, and subsequently migrated to the communities of the southern Mediterranean in the wake of Islamic conquest. In its place, I propose an alternative narrative of historical contingency, suggesting a Jewish population in the East which atrophies amidst local unrest and the decay of irrigational infrastructure and a corresponding flowering of the autochthonous Jewish population as opportunities for long-distance trade came on the rise as the southern Mediterranean fell under a single (Islamic) legal regime.

Ethnographic research on women in rural West Africa to document and analyze the public songs of married women leading to a monograph on marriage and gendered behavior in a non-Western context.

Something is happening to marriage around the world, and although scholars have long been preoccupied with marital institutions and dynamics we are now scrambling to catch up to a plethora of new trends. My project adds novel insights to this flourishing field by focusing on the perplexing unspeakability of Jola widows in West Africa alongside the din of wives who collectively sing about their marital woes. These phenomena provide fertile ethnographic ground for re-thinking enduring humanistic concerns with the relationship between economy and affect, materiality and emotion, and instrumentality and intimacy

A book-length study about the complexities of slavery, freedom, and identity in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic worlds through the life of slave Antonio Ximenes. 

This project tells the story of Antonio Ximenes, a young man enslaved in Asia who fought for his freedom in the courts of Mexico City. His life was a microcosm of colonial relationships and a kind of urban servitude that differed markedly from later plantation societies in the Americas. Ximenes lived at a pivotal time for seventeenth-century European empires seeking the wealth of trade in Asia. Before he was thirty, Ximenes had traveled in captivity across the Indian Ocean and the Pacific, visiting the cosmopolitan ports of the Philippines, Peru, and Mexico. Calling himself “a black man from India,” Ximenes claimed that his master had granted him freedom in exchange for his bravery and years of service. The records Ximenes and his associates left help us understand the changing and multifaceted meanings of slavery and freedom, race, gender, and self in the global early modern world.

Research and writing leading to a book on Julia Ward Howe, Helene Deutsch, and Sophia Kleegman, 20^th-century doctors of reproductive and fertility medicine.

This rhetorical history project analyzes the scientific, public, and interpersonal communication of three women who were central to the development and implementation of fertility science as it is known today. Reformer Julia Ward Howe, psychoanalyst Helene Deutsch, and gynecologist Sophia Kleegman communicated from different social locations and time periods to push back against—and contribute to—scientific orthodoxy. I contend that the fissures they created in scholarly and mainstream discourses about reproductive health functioned to expand the scope of infertility diagnosis and treatment regimens, and to loosen long-held clinical beliefs about women as the central players in fertility related ills. This analysis identifies the discursive strategies that these actors employed to intervene in fertility studies and demonstrates how interventions in science often unfold not in terms of revolutions but in terms of multimodal, nonlinear, and longitudinal communicative negotiations.

Research and writing two chapters of a book on interactions between Shakers and Native Americans on the Ohio frontier before the War of 1812.

I seek NEH funding to research and draft the two central chapters of my current book project, Shakers and the Shawnee Prophet. This braided microhistory chronicles the fascinating, but troubled relationship between the Shakers—the religious sectarians infamous for their ecstatic worship practices, communal social organization, celibacy, and pacifism—and the militant followers of Tenskwatawa, the so-called Shawnee Prophet and brother of the famed war captain Tecumseh. Written for a broad audience of students, scholars, and general readers and drawing upon understudied Shaker manuscript letters and journals, Shakers and the Shawnee Prophet examines the local sources of religious violence on the early American frontier during the years leading up to the War of 1812. I anticipate that the book will resonate with readers attuned to the politics of religious difference and the troubling connections between religion and violence in our own times.

A book-length study and companion website about visually impaired filmmakers and their use of various technologies, which illuminate the experience of blindness through film.

"Blind Cinema," for which I seek an NEH Summer Stipend, has two key aims: first, to raise critical awareness about the existence of blind filmmakers, and second, to establish the contours of a blind cinematic style through theories of the gaze and haptic film. It is the first book to study how visually impaired filmmakers use digital media both to make visible the experience of disability and to destabilize stereotypes about the blind. My analysis of films by blind and visually impaired directors, as well as of collaborations between blind and sighted filmmakers, shows how the aesthetics and content of these works represent the experience of blindness. I combine film and disability studies approaches to consider how new technologies of vision are giving blind filmmakers access to the tools and techniques of filmmaking and how their innovations are transforming our experience of film.

Research and writing leading to publication of a book about Spanish women writers and the transnational antislavery movement of the nineteenth century.

This project examines the social and cultural place of Spanish women of letters in the transnational antislavery movement of the nineteenth century, showing the ways in which abolitionist women reconciled their activism with their traditional gender roles—as mothers, wives, and religious believers—and negotiated their relationship to (masculine) liberal discourse. Drawing on recent developments in gender and post-colonial theories, this study raises questions about women’s shifting role in the liberal public sphere, the crucial function of their transnational networks in achieving their political objectives, and their often ambivalent relationship to the subaltern communities for which they were presumably advocating. My work elucidates the different ways in which these women engaged, negotiated and, at times, contested existing gender and racial paradigms as they participated in the antislavery debate, both nationally and transnationally.

Research and writing leading to a book publication on Soviet foreign policy with the Arab Middle East (1920-1990).

The Eastern International is a study of how Moscow leaders’ embrace of the flexible and vague concept “East” in political and cultural initiatives created a mutually interacting relationship between the Soviet Union’s supposedly decolonized “domestic East” (the predominantly Muslim Soviet republics in Central Asia and the Caucasus) and the colonized “foreign East” (South and East Asia, Africa, and the Middle East). I argue that from the interwar period through the Cold War, this conceptual linkage created an unusual relational space of interactions and exchange that shaped official Soviet Central Asian histories, literatures, and cinemas, facilitated the spread of Marxist-Leninist ideas in the Middle East, and shaped Russia’s foreign relations.

Research and writing leading to publication of a book about literary and film interpretations of the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial (1963-1965), the first major Holocaust trial in postwar Germany.

Between 1963 and 1965, twenty-two men who participated in mass murder at the Auschwitz concentration camps were prosecuted in what became known as the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial, the first major Holocaust trial in postwar Germany. The proceedings revealed, however, that German criminal law was not equipped to deal adequately with the genocide that occurred at Auschwitz. Instead it treated the Nazi atrocities as ordinary murder and manslaughter cases, which trivialized genocide. The book I will complete with a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Stipend exposes how authors and filmmakers revisit the trial, teaching lessons that it misrepresented with regard to the origins of the Holocaust, the conditions in the camps, the guilt of the perpetrators, and the suffering of the victims. The significance of my work thus reveals how art succeeded where law failed in holding the German public accountable for the Holocaust and in crafting a memory culture of genocide.

Completion of a book on the role of compassion in art and literature from ancient writers, Plato and Aristotle, medieval theologians, Saint Augustine and Saint Thomas Aquinas, and writers of the English Renaissance, Philip Sidney, Edmond Spenser, and Shakespeare.

The proposed book project examines the intersection of ethics and aesthetics in early modern England, focusing on how classical and Christian concepts of pity collide in the works of Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, and William Shakespeare, in ways that challenge the ethical claims Renaissance defenders of poetry often made for the value of making and experiencing art. In the course of this exploration, the project also considers how ideas about the relationship between art and ethics on the one hand, and between emotion and ethics on the other, have shifted between Plato’s banishment of the poets in Republic and recent studies in the social sciences that link reading literature to empathy. Early modern England, I argue, was a pivot-point in the intellectual history of debates about the worth of art; understanding this moment in time provides us insight into our own currently embattled position in the humanities, and potentially offers us powerful arguments for the worth of creating and studying art.

Research and writing leading to publication of a book about memory, music, and theatrical performance in seventeenth-century England.

My monograph examines the extant music and descriptions of musical performance contained in forgotten entertainments including rare shows, peep shows, puppet theater or "motion shows," and communal ballad singing in seventeenth century England. Using the early modern ars memoriae, or memory arts, as a framing device, I investigate how music can increase our understanding of alternative performance spaces and their resonances within sanctioned theatrical and musical traditions. The early modern theater functioned as a powerful mnemonic scheme, a real and imagined architectural space, a mirror of the world, a didactic tool, a repository of knowledge, and a communal performative experience. Yet, the spaces I investigate are not necessarily limited to physical venues. Rather, I explore how we can view musical performance as a powerful tool that can uncover marginalized identities, unsanctioned or transient theaters, social classes, political intrigue, and forgotten genres.

Research and writing articles for academic and general audiences on the history of bird-banding and its relationship to environmental science.

I propose to use the NEH Summer Stipend to complete an academic article on the environmental and cultural history of bird-banding and its relationship to 20th-century conservation, as well write a shorter piece on the same subjects targeted toward a broader, popular audience online. The art and science of affixing coded markers to migratory birds (and other animals), banding was at the heart of twentieth-century wildlife management, ecology, ethology, and what could anachronistically be called environmentalism. My primary exemplar will be the biography and work of Margaret Morse Nice. Examining this history sheds light on an understudied part of American scientific, political, and cultural heritage: times in our collective past (stretching into the present) when citizens of all stripes—across divides of gender, class, and education—were an integral part of understanding and protecting nonhuman nature.

A book manuscript looking at the concept of “sovereignty” in a pre-Columbian civilization in northern Peru as a comparative example for discussing non-state sovereignty today.

I seek funding to help complete a book manuscript that examines how the ancient Moche (AD 200 - 800) of northern Peru used the built environment for performative ritual feasts that involved spectacular violence and human sacrifice of captured, foreign elite combatants as a strategy to assert and extend their sovereignty by making political subjects of participant-witnesses of these public spectacles. I will use the stipend to spend time writing and and expanding on relevant social theory as it relates to recent archaeological survey and excavations as well as my own data on biological relatedness among ancient Moche skeletal populations from throughout the north coast region.

A book-length study of the impact of philosophy and psychology on acting and theater in early twentieth-century Russia.

I am applying for NEH funds to complete the archival research and the writing of my book manuscript. The book argues that Russian modernism's radical reinvention of methodologies for theater acting drew on contemporaneous developments in philosophy and psychology to reimagine, via the actor, the broader nature of human consciousness and perception. In turn, I show that the Russian modernist theater directly influenced the development of both philosophy and psychology in the early-Soviet period. Through close study of theoretical writings on the actor, rehearsal notes, plays, and performances from the early-twentieth-century Russian theater, the book demonstrates that Russian modernism treated the theatrical experience as one that is sensory and lived by both actor and spectator, therein anticipating American and European interest in the phenomenology of theater by several decades.

A book-length study of patronage and modernist music in France, from 1918 to 1939.

In my book, I trace the substantial shifts in patronage that transformed the sounds and meanings of French modernist music between the world wars. These shifts motivate my redefinition of patronage: far from the court- and church-centered employment that produced most art music before 1800, I explore the “new patronage” of the twentieth century, exemplified by disparate funding practices stretching from the philanthropic to the entrepreneurial. I show how shifts in patronage affected not only music but the composers, critics, theater owners, audiences, and institutions that shaped how it was made and understood, leaving behind legacies that continue to shape international art music composition and music philanthropy through the present day.