FA-251018-17 | Research Programs: Fellowships for University Teachers | Zachary Thomas Wallmark | Timbre and Musical Meaning | 7/1/2017 - 12/31/2017 | $25,200.00 | Zachary | Thomas | Wallmark | | | | Southern Methodist University | Dallas | TX | 75205-1902 | USA | 2016 | History, Criticism, and Theory of the Arts | Fellowships for University Teachers | Research Programs | 25200 | 0 | 25200 | 0 | Preparation of a book-length study about timbre (or tone color), music perception, and musical meaning.
Timbre (or “tone color”) is the most poorly understood attribute of music, despite its importance in the generation of musical affect and meaning. Combining methods from musicology and the cognitive sciences, this project explores how timbre shapes emotional responses to music by focusing on situations of listening that complicate the perceptual boundary between “musical” timbre and “noise.” My book-in-progress contributes three novel perspectives to music scholarship and the public humanities: it (1) advances a dynamic, transdisciplinary model for understanding the material and affective dimensions of sound; (2) investigates issues of timbre interpretation in three historical-cultural case studies (free jazz, Japanese music, and heavy metal); and (3) examines the social and ethical stakes of music listening and performance. The book will add to debates about musical meaning, embodiment, and emotion. An NEH Fellowship will support six months of full-time research and writing. |
FA-251067-17 | Research Programs: Fellowships for University Teachers | Valerie A. Kivelson | Icons of Eurasian Empire: Early Modern Russian Visions of Encounter, Conquest, and Rule | 1/1/2018 - 12/31/2018 | $50,400.00 | Valerie | A. | Kivelson | | | | Regents of the University of Michigan | Ann Arbor | MI | 48109-1382 | USA | 2016 | Russian History | Fellowships for University Teachers | Research Programs | 50400 | 0 | 50400 | 0 | Preparation of a book employing the study of
visual culture to investigate early empire building in Russia during the
16th and 17th centuries.
In the 16th and 17th centuries, the tsardom of Muscovy grew explosively. With state agents following hard on the heels of freelance trappers and profiteers, the empire rapidly extended its reach across the hostile terrain of Siberia, reaching the Pacific by 1637. Along the way, they subjugated indigenous populations, welcomed Bukharan merchants as trading partners and settlers, and attempted to open trade with China. My research examines Muscovy’s version of imperial combat, conquest, and rule, primarily through analysis of visual depictions produced by Russians and their proximate others. On the basis of a wide array of visual sources, I plan to write a scholarly monograph on Russia’s early modern imperial encounters. |
FA-251098-17 | Research Programs: Fellowships for University Teachers | Daniel Wallace Maze | Painters in Renaissance Venice: A History of the Workshop of the Bellini Family | 2/1/2017 - 1/31/2018 | $50,400.00 | Daniel | Wallace | Maze | | | | Unaffiliated Independent Scholar | Los Angeles | CA | 90035-2603 | USA | 2016 | Art History and Criticism | Fellowships for University Teachers | Research Programs | 50400 | 0 | 50400 | 0 | A book-length study on the workshop of the Bellini, the foremost
family of painters in Renaissance Venice.
This book provides the first comprehensive history
of the Bellini workshop. It employs cross-disciplinary methods and novel
approaches, and draws upon a wide range of primary sources that include civil
laws, acts of magistracies, tax registers, home inventories, Scuole records,
legal documents, and, of course, paintings and drawings by the Bellini and
their contemporaries. It builds upon twenty-five years of research and academic
articles that have appeared since the last published monographs on Jacopo
Bellini (1989) and Gentile Bellini (1985). And it relies on discoveries that I
made during more than four years of research in the Venetian archives. This
study answers numerous longstanding questions about the Bellini and their
workshop, lays foundational work upon which other Renaissance scholars will
rely, and presents new questions that will frame future research on fifteenth-century
Venetian painting. |
FA-251123-17 | Research Programs: Fellowships for University Teachers | Sean Armel Kelsey | Aristotle's Soul: Essays on the Classical Scientific Treatise, De Anima | 7/1/2017 - 6/30/2018 | $50,400.00 | Sean | Armel | Kelsey | | | | University of Notre Dame | Notre Dame | IN | 46556-4635 | USA | 2016 | History of Philosophy | Fellowships for University Teachers | Research Programs | 50400 | 0 | 50400 | 0 | Four scholarly articles on Aristotle’s classical scientific treatise De
Anima (On the Soul).
My project will focus on Aristotle's De Anima and will take the form of a series of free-standing articles and eventually a monograph. The topic of the De Anima is what we would call 'life'; the primary object of the book is to get clear about what life is. Aristotle's treatment of this topic does not occur in a vacuum; he is aware that he had predecessors, and though he thinks their views are absurd, he regards this absurdity as an index of the difficulties in this area. Thus I propose to examine Aristotle's conception of life by way of *his* problems, as these are revealed by his critique of his predecessors. I will focus on problems connected with perception and reason in particular. I will argue that, for Aristotle, the main difficulty is to develop a conception of life that respects the fact that perception and reason are sources of objective knowledge, without making this an inscrutable mystery. |
FA-251189-17 | Research Programs: Fellowships for University Teachers | Leslie Elin Anderson | Democratic Enclaves in Times of Trouble: The Politics of Resistance in Nicaragua | 8/1/2017 - 7/31/2018 | $50,400.00 | Leslie | Elin | Anderson | | | | University of Florida | Gainesville | FL | 32611-0001 | USA | 2016 | Comparative Politics | Fellowships for University Teachers | Research Programs | 50400 | 0 | 50400 | 0 | A
book-length study of the survival of democratic enclaves in Nicaragua.
A major concern about democratic consolidation is the presence of authoritarian enclaves that continue nondemocratic practices at the subnational level. Yet subnational politics is not always less democratic than national politics. In Nicaragua municipal government is more democratic than national government. This project shows how democratic enclaves can protect pluralism and help re-democratize a nation. Extensive research finds competitive elections and a subaltern politics of resistance in municipalities. These local dynamics constrain President Ortega’s oppression. We know that democratization comes gradually, requiring years to seep downward into society. This book demonstrates that the coming of authoritarianism is also gradual, allowing time for defiance. A politics of local resistance in Nicaragua is impeding Ortega’s authoritarianism and may outlast him entirely. The book uncovers a new challenge to authoritarianism: a subnational citizen politics of resistance. |
FA-251326-17 | Research Programs: Fellowships for University Teachers | Quinn Slobodian | The Rise of International Economic Law | 1/1/2017 - 7/31/2017 | $29,400.00 | Quinn | | Slobodian | | | | Wellesley College | Wellesley | MA | 02481-8203 | USA | 2016 | Intellectual History | Fellowships for University Teachers | Research Programs | 29400 | 0 | 29400 | 0 | A book-length history of the rise of modern international economic law.
The era since the end of the Cold War is often described as the triumph of neoliberalism. Global capitalism, we are told, is governed by market fundamentalism and a faith in self-regulating markets. Yet often overlooked is a development that shadowed the age of globalization: the rise of international economic law. My book project is the first intellectual history of the field of international economic law. It describes the invention of the field since the 1970s as a transformative and world-making political project, modeled on the competition policy of the European Community and culminating in creation of the World Trade Organization in 1995. My book narrates the deregulation of the last four decades as a simultaneous era of re-regulation under systems of international economic law and reveals the political imagination at work in the apparently apolitical domains of legal expertise. |
FA-251362-17 | Research Programs: Fellowships for University Teachers | Travis David Stimeling | Country Music and Record Production in Nashville, 1955-1973 | 8/1/2017 - 7/31/2018 | $50,400.00 | Travis | David | Stimeling | | | | West Virginia University Research Corporation | Morgantown | WV | 26506-6201 | USA | 2016 | Music History and Criticism | Fellowships for University Teachers | Research Programs | 50400 | 0 | 50400 | 0 | A book-length study of country music and record
production in Nashville, Tennessee, 1955-1973.
Nashville Cats: Record Production in Nashville, 1955-1973 will be the first history of record production during country music’s so-called “Nashville Sound” era. This period of country music history produced some of the genre’s most celebrated recording artists, including Country Music Hall of Fame inductees Patsy Cline, Jim Reeves, and Floyd Cramer, and marked the establishment of a recording industry that has come to define Nashville in the national and international consciousness. Yet, despite country music’s overwhelming popularity during this period and the continued legacy of the studios that were built in Nashville during the 1950s and 1960s, little attention has been given to the ways in which recording engineers, session musicians, and record producers shaped the sounds of country music during the time. Drawing upon a rich array of previously unexplored primary sources, this book will be the first to take a global view of record production in Nashville during this key time. |
FA-251381-17 | Research Programs: Fellowships for University Teachers | Henry Barrett Lovejoy | The Liberated Africans Project: A Digital Publication Documenting Emancipation Courts in Sierra Leone, 1808-1896 | 7/1/2017 - 6/30/2018 | $50,400.00 | Henry | Barrett | Lovejoy | | | | Regents of the University of Colorado, Boulder | Boulder | CO | 80303-1058 | USA | 2016 | History, General | Fellowships for University Teachers | Research Programs | 50400 | 0 | 50400 | 0 | The digital publication of an open-source archive relating to emancipation courts in Freetown, Sierra Leone.
Between 1808 and 1896, a network of British courts and international mixed commissions emancipated over 200,000 enslaved Africans in a global effort to abolish the slave trade. The website www.liberatedafricans.org will make accessible open-source archival materials from five courts located in Freetown, Sierra Leone, which was Britain’s main base of operation to suppress the Atlantic trade. This project will mobilize knowledge about Liberated Africans with case-by-case summaries of their emancipation trials conducted by the world’s earliest international human rights courts. The digital publication will include primary documents, synopses, maps, images, databases, tables, graphs, videos as well as query-based search engines. The long-term outcome will challenge and transform how we understand, analyze, and teach African and African Diaspora History, post-1807 intercontinental slave trades, the abolition movement, human rights law, and meanings associated with "slavery" and "freedom." |
FA-251382-17 | Research Programs: Fellowships for University Teachers | Frank Charles Costigliola | The Contingent Cold War and the Integrated Thought of George F. Kennan | 8/1/2017 - 7/31/2018 | $50,400.00 | Frank | Charles | Costigliola | | | | University of Connecticut | Storrs | CT | 06269-9000 | USA | 2016 | Diplomatic History | Fellowships for University Teachers | Research Programs | 50400 | 0 | 50400 | 0 | A
book-length study on George F. Kennan’s (1904-2005) diplomacy and Cold War
policy recommendations.
George F. Kennan, the author of America’s Cold War containment policy, felt that his “Russian self” was more genuine than his American one. Examining the emotional dynamics of Kennan’s thinking affords new insights into 1) the personal roots of his policy recommendations and 2) the possibility that the Cold War could have ended sooner. Kennan’s longing for contact with the Russian people conditioned both his recommendations for containment and his subsequent arguments for dismantling that policy. Passion for Russia impelled and enabled Kennan to discern potential turning points in the Cold War. My approach employs concepts about emotion borrowed from psychology, philosophy, political science, and neuroscience. I do a close reading of texts looking for signs of emotion. I also venture beyond the emotional turn by investigating evidence of integrated thought, that is, the brain-wide processing of information that characterizes how the mind actually operates. |
FA-251391-17 | Research Programs: Fellowships for University Teachers | Allison Stedman, PhD | The Mind-Body Connection in French Literature, 1600-1735 | 1/1/2017 - 12/31/2017 | $50,400.00 | Allison | | Stedman | | | | University of North Carolina, Charlotte | Charlotte | NC | 28223-0001 | USA | 2016 | French Literature | Fellowships for University Teachers | Research Programs | 50400 | 0 | 50400 | 0 | A book-length study of the relationship between
body and mind in French literary, religious, philosophical, and medical texts, from
1600 to 1735.
The book reveals an alternative trajectory for the evolution of beliefs about the relationship between body and mind--one in which ancient theories about the ability of emotions to generate physical symptoms are not abandoned with the rise of Cartesian dualism, but rather reoriented to give preference to the agency of the mind as opposed to the dynamic of forms, spirits and bodily humors in influencing the physical manifestations of illness and health. Although the Cartesian view of the body as a machine whose functioning takes place independent of conscious thought gained support from mainstream medical and theological communities during the 1600s, my book provides evidence that many people took the medieval, scholastic view of the mind-body connection in a different direction, creating texts that anticipate the modern notion of "holism"--the idea that the mind is part of the body and that thoughts could thus be direct causes of disease and other physical symptoms. |
FA-251394-17 | Research Programs: Fellowships for University Teachers | Stephen Vincent Bittner | Wine Production and Culture in Tsarist Russia | 9/1/2017 - 8/31/2018 | $50,400.00 | Stephen | Vincent | Bittner | | | | California State University | Rohnert Park | CA | 94928-3609 | USA | 2016 | Russian History | Fellowships for University Teachers | Research Programs | 50400 | 0 | 50400 | 0 | A book-length study on the wine economies and cultures of the Black Sea during Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union.
"Whites and Reds: Wine in the Lands of Tsar and Commissar" examines the two centuries of interaction between Russia and the wine economies and cultures of the Black Sea--Bessarabia (Moldova), Crimea, and Georgia. After the Russian Empire annexed these territories in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, wine became an increasingly important part of Russian and Soviet culture--as a luxury item, a mark of refinement, and an object of connoisseurship. Consequently, by the mid-1980s the Soviet Union was the world's fourth largest producer of wine, trailing only Spain, France, and Italy. "Whites and Reds" contributes to two of the most active arenas of debate in the historiography of Russia and the Soviet Union: studies of imperialism and consumption. I intend to use an NEH Fellowship to complete the research and writing of this untold and significant history. |
FA-251411-17 | Research Programs: Fellowships for University Teachers | Erin Elizabeth Benay | Early Modern Religious Connections Between Italy and India | 7/1/2017 - 6/30/2018 | $50,400.00 | Erin | Elizabeth | Benay | | | | Case Western Reserve University | Cleveland | OH | 44106-1712 | USA | 2016 | Art History and Criticism | Fellowships for University Teachers | Research Programs | 50400 | 0 | 50400 | 0 | Preparation of a book-length study on the cult of St. Thomas Apostle and his pilgrimage sites in medieval and early modern India.
The return of a saint’s body to its rightful resting place was an event of civic and spiritual significance. Legends of St. Thomas Apostle, for instance, claimed that the martyred saint had been miraculously transported from India to Italy during the thirteenth century. However, St. Thomas’s purported resting place in Ortona, Italy did not become a major stopping point on pilgrimage routes, nor did this event punctuate frescoed life cycles or become a subject for Renaissance altarpieces. Instead, the site of the apostle’s burial in Chennai, India has flourished as a terminus of religious pilgrimage. An unlikely destination on the edge of the ‘known’ world became a surprising source of early modern Christian piety. By disrupting assumptions about how knowledge of Asia took shape during the Renaissance, this project challenges art historical paradigms in which art was crafted by locals to be exported, collected, and consumed by European patrons. |
FA-251432-17 | Research Programs: Fellowships for University Teachers | Jerma A. Jackson | Born in Slavery, Aging in Modern America, 1900-1940 | 7/1/2017 - 6/30/2018 | $50,400.00 | Jerma | A. | Jackson | | | | University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill | Chapel Hill | NC | 27599-1350 | USA | 2016 | U.S. History | Fellowships for University Teachers | Research Programs | 50400 | 0 | 50400 | 0 | A book examining how former slaves and their freeborn contemporaries adjusted to the changes of a modernizing and industrializing America.
My project concentrates on aging former slaves and their freeborn contemporaries in the post-slavery modern era and considers their experiences and knowledge spanning the 19th and 20th centuries. How did these elders perceive and cope with mass education, racial violence and increased incarceration of African Americans, developments that all unfolded in the early twentieth century? I turn to a diverse array of materials—court records, memoirs and material culture--to probe the range of feelings elders had about transformations in their families, their communities and society. These materials contain stories and anecdotes, many quite fragmented. The book brings texture and context to the stories, allowing audiences to enter the households and neighborhoods of aging former slaves where they made sense of the thorny challenges brought on by industrialization. Audiences gain fresh insights about the early twentieth and about a group of African Americans often neglected in scholarship. |
FA-251439-17 | Research Programs: Fellowships for University Teachers | Kate Merkel-Hess | The Warlords: Familial Relationships and Power in Modern China | 9/1/2017 - 8/31/2018 | $50,400.00 | Kate | | Merkel-Hess | | | | Penn State | University Park | PA | 16802-1503 | USA | 2016 | East Asian History | Fellowships for University Teachers | Research Programs | 50400 | 0 | 50400 | 0 | Research and writing leading to publication of a book on the role of regional warlords in 20th-century Chinese politics and society.
The Warlords: Intimacy and Power in Modern China addresses the critical collapse of the Chinese Republic, founded in 1912, into rule by regional warlords. It challenges the typical story of the young republic’s disintegration and failure by examining the personal lives of the warlords and the ways their personal intimacies—of love, marriage, family, friendship, enmity, and patronage—were wrapped up in the politics of the day. It argues that factional warlords and their family members cultivated populist emotion and the intimacy of self and state through new political roles for women, new uses of media and technology, and state policies to foster civil society. Through its examinations of elite political life, The Warlords tells the story of how the political disarray of the warlord period created a space for a new politics of intimacy, shedding light on the ways that private life, intimacy, and sentiment became critical building blocks for modern China. |
FA-251464-17 | Research Programs: Fellowships for University Teachers | Michael T. Bernath | In a Land of Strangers: Northern Teachers in the Old South, 1790-1865 | 8/1/2017 - 7/31/2018 | $50,400.00 | Michael | T. | Bernath | | | | University of Miami | Coral Gables | FL | 33146-2919 | USA | 2016 | U.S. History | Fellowships for University Teachers | Research Programs | 50400 | 0 | 50400 | 0 | A book-length study on northerners who served as
teachers, tutors, and governesses in the antebellum South, their employers, and
the growth of sectional differences.
My book project focuses on the thousands of northerners who worked as teachers, tutors, and governesses in the southern states from 1790 to 1865. It analyzes what their experiences, observations, and reception reveal about life and culture in the Old South, paying particular attention to evidence of emerging northern and southern identities during the antebellum period. The presence of these teachers represents the most widespread, sustained, and intimate contact point between northerners and southerners at a time when sectional tensions emerged and then escalated. Uniquely, if sometimes uncomfortably, positioned within southern society, these northern teachers provide the ideal vantage point from which to explore perceptions of sectional difference and distinctiveness and to chart the emergence and contours of American identity. |
FA-251469-17 | Research Programs: Fellowships for University Teachers | Paulina Laura Alberto | The Story of Raúl Grigera (1886-1955) and the African Diaspora in 20th-Century Argentina | 9/1/2017 - 8/31/2018 | $50,400.00 | Paulina | Laura | Alberto | | | | Regents of the University of Michigan | Ann Arbor | MI | 48109-1382 | USA | 2016 | Latin American History | Fellowships for University Teachers | Research Programs | 50400 | 0 | 50400 | 0 | A book-length study of race in Argentina centered on narrative accounts of the Afro-Argentine cultural figure Raúl Grigera (1886-1955).
I am applying to the NEH to support full-time writing of my second book. Black Legend uses the case of a famous Afro-Argentine man, the dandy-turned-beggar Raúl Grigera, to tell the untold history of blacks and blackness in Argentina’s long twentieth century. I read the hundreds of published stories about “el negro Raúl” alongside archival records of his life to reveal how exaggerated tales of degraded and disappearing blackness sustained national whiteness in the twentieth century, as well as to craft the first counter-narrative of black presence and self-fashioning for that period. More broadly, by exploring Raúl’s case as a striking example of the role of storytelling in disseminating and reinforcing racial ideologies, the book offers a situated contribution from the humanities to scholarship (mostly in social and medical sciences) on narrative’s uniquely compelling powers and on the implications of narrative persuasion for understanding, and combating, racism and its persistence. |
FA-251476-17 | Research Programs: Fellowships for University Teachers | Heather Flynn Roller | Contact Strategies: Independent Indians in the Brazilian Borderlands, 1750-1850 | 7/1/2017 - 6/30/2018 | $50,400.00 | Heather | Flynn | Roller | | | | Colgate University | Hamilton | NY | 13346-1338 | USA | 2016 | Latin American History | Fellowships for University Teachers | Research Programs | 50400 | 0 | 50400 | 0 | A book-length study of indigenous political
life on the Brazilian frontier during the 18th and 19th centuries.
This book project examines the political choices and motivations of independent Indians in the interior of Brazil during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Focusing on their interactions with Brazilian society, the study explores the ways in which Indian nations sought to preserve their autonomy through various forms of contact, and how these strategies changed over the course of Brazil’s transition from colony to republic. The challenges of getting at the perspectives and aims of independent Indians are formidable, because they did not keep their own written records. Despite these limitations, important insights about native political strategies can be reached through a critical reading of the rich documentary record on borderlands conflicts and interactions in Brazil. The project contributes to recent work across the humanities that attempts to reconstruct the perspectives, values, and motivations of illiterate or non-Western peoples. |
FA-251482-17 | Research Programs: Fellowships for University Teachers | Karen B. Graubart | Spaces, Authorities, and Jurisdictions in the Iberian Atlantic, 1400-1650 | 8/1/2017 - 7/31/2018 | $50,400.00 | Karen | B. | Graubart | | | | University of Notre Dame | Notre Dame | IN | 46556-4635 | USA | 2016 | Latin American History | Fellowships for University Teachers | Research Programs | 50400 | 0 | 50400 | 0 | A book-length study of Spanish juridical administration in 15th-century Seville and 16th- and 17th-century Lima.
Neighbors and Others examines governance strategies in 15th century Seville and 16th and 17th century Lima, to show how the laws used to differentiate and administer Muslim, Jewish and sub-Saharan African communities under Christian rule in Iberia were transformed to accommodate the integration of indigenous and African peoples into the new Spanish empire. These systems of governance, which offered limited autonomy to most subject peoples, enabled communities to articulate their own notions of justice and law within the environment of Iberian Christian dominance. By focusing on the local – mapping where urban residents lived and worked, and how they acted through different social and juridical categories – the book demonstrates how Spanish forms of delegated governance created a multi-jurisdictional society that enabled communities to lead themselves via a variety of beliefs and practices. |
FA-251491-17 | Research Programs: Fellowships for University Teachers | Maggie L. Popkin | Object Memory: Souvenirs, Memorabilia, and the Construction of Knowledge in the Roman Empire | 8/1/2017 - 6/30/2018 | $50,400.00 | Maggie | L. | Popkin | | | | Case Western Reserve University | Cleveland | OH | 44106-1712 | USA | 2016 | Art History and Criticism | Fellowships for University Teachers | Research Programs | 50400 | 0 | 46200 | 0 | A book-length study of ancient Roman souvenirs and memorabilia and their
role in constructing knowledge and memory in the Roman Empire.
My project investigates ancient Roman souvenirs and memorabilia and their profound role in generating and mediating memory and knowledge in the Roman Empire. In Rome, where literacy was limited and visual communication was essential, souvenirs were a critical means for conveying complex ideas. The Roman Empire produced a rich range of souvenirs and memorabilia commemorating cities, sporting events, monumental statues, and religious pilgrimages. I examine how such objects constructed knowledge in an era before mechanical reproduction. Without access to print or digital media, many Romans learned about various sites, monuments, and events through images on souvenirs. Souvenirs and memorabilia are thus critical to understanding how ancient Romans conceptualized their world. Their study has broad implications for understanding the social functions of images in antiquity and beyond and is relevant to scholars concerned with visual culture’s impact on memory, perception, and knowledge. |
FA-251511-17 | Research Programs: Fellowships for University Teachers | Stephanie Elizabeth Jones-Rogers | Women, American Slavery, and the Law | 1/1/2018 - 12/31/2018 | $50,400.00 | Stephanie | Elizabeth | Jones-Rogers | | | | University of California, Berkeley | Berkeley | CA | 94704-5940 | USA | 2016 | U.S. History | Fellowships for University Teachers | Research Programs | 50400 | 0 | 50400 | 0 | A book-length study of the role that slave-owning women played in shaping changes to American
property law in antebellum North and the South.
Women, American Slavery, and the Law is a book-length manuscript which examines the relationship between gender and the evolution of American slave/property law in the North and the South from the colonial period to American slavery’s legal end. It is deeply concerned with the ways that slavery and slave-ownership shaped the operation of marital property law, and the ways that married women understood the relationship between them. More profoundly, the book elucidates the roles that slave-owning women played in shaping the contours of slave/property laws as the nation, and the institution of slavery, expanded into the West and Deep South. By doing all of this, it will offer a much-needed corrective, which intervenes in three subfields—the history of American law, women’s history, and the history of slavery. |
FA-251516-17 | Research Programs: Fellowships for University Teachers | Benjamin A. Saltzman | Secrecy and Divinity in Early English Literature | 9/1/2017 - 8/31/2018 | $50,400.00 | Benjamin | A. | Saltzman | | | | California Institute of Technology | Pasadena | CA | 91125-0001 | USA | 2016 | Medieval Studies | Fellowships for University Teachers | Research Programs | 50400 | 0 | 50400 | 0 | A cultural and intellectual history of secrecy and concealment in early medieval England (600-1100).
For medieval Christians, the experience of secrecy was inextricably tied to the belief that God knows all human secrets and that God’s secrets remain fundamentally unknowable to human beings. This double-edged conception of secrecy and divinity profoundly affected the ways in which believers acted and thought as subjects under the law, as religious within monasteries, and as readers before books. In Bonds of Secrecy--a cultural and intellectual history of secrecy and concealment in England between the years 600 and 1100--I argue that two of the period’s major institutions (secular law and monastic life) produced a culture of scrutiny that relied heavily upon and sometimes came into tension with this belief in God’s omniscience, shaping the ethics of literary interpretation in the process. |
FA-251528-17 | Research Programs: Fellowships for University Teachers | Lauren Hutchinson Derby | Sorcery Narratives in the History of Haiti and the Dominican Republic | 7/1/2017 - 6/30/2018 | $50,400.00 | Lauren | Hutchinson | Derby | | | | UCLA; Regents of the University of California, Los Angeles | Los Angeles | CA | 90024-4201 | USA | 2016 | Latin American History | Fellowships for University Teachers | Research Programs | 50400 | 0 | 50400 | 0 | A book-length study of Hispaniola focusing on the shared folklore, historical memory, and environment of the borderlands between Haiti and the Dominican Republic.
This proposal seeks twelve months of support for completion of a book manuscript on sorcery narratives as a form of historical memory in Haiti and the Dominican Republic, a project that brings the cultural meanings of animals into the social and environmental history of Latin America and the Caribbean. The final product will be a book with supplemental oral history video clips that I plan to submit to Duke University Press. |
FA-251549-17 | Research Programs: Fellowships for University Teachers | David Robinson | The Mongol Empire's Long Shadow: An Early Modern Chinese Court in Eurasian History | 7/1/2017 - 6/30/2018 | $50,400.00 | David | | Robinson | | | | Colgate University | Hamilton | NY | 13346-1338 | USA | 2016 | East Asian History | Fellowships for University Teachers | Research Programs | 50400 | 0 | 50400 | 0 | Research and writing leading to publication of a book on the political and cultural connections between the Chinese Ming Dynasty (1368-1644) and the Mongol Empire.
My project considers the court of China’s Ming dynasty (1368-1644) in the broader context of Eurasian history, focusing on a moment when much of Eurasia shared a common reference point, the Mongol empire. During the thirteenth century, the Mongols created the greatest land empire in history. Their courts in China, Persia, and southern Russia were centers of wealth, learning, power, religion, and lavish spectacle. When the Mongols lost power in the fourteenth century, ambitious men throughout Eurasia wrestled with how best to exploit the memory, institutions, and personnel networks of the fallen empire. This project explores how the Ming court came to terms with the Mongol empire's legacy, variously denouncing the Mongols' "corruption" of China, insisting that the Ming was the exclusive legitimate successor to the Mongols, and inserting the Ming into the story of the rise and fall of the Mongol empire in communications with other Eurasian courts. |
FA-251595-17 | Research Programs: Fellowships for University Teachers | Mary Lindemann | Fractured Lands: Northern Germany in An Age of Unending War, 1627-1721 | 8/1/2017 - 5/31/2018 | $46,200.00 | Mary | | Lindemann | | | | University of Miami | Coral Gables | FL | 33146-2919 | USA | 2016 | European History | Fellowships for University Teachers | Research Programs | 46200 | 0 | 42000 | 0 | A book-length study comparing government efforts
at rebuilding in two northern German principalities, Brandenburg and
Mecklenburg, during the war-torn years between 1627 and 1721.
The project explores a range of topics relative to the process of rebuilding and recovery in a period of unending war between1627-1721. Life in northern Germany was characterized by prolonged crises that were social, political/administrative, and economic, but also environmental in nature. It is based on a rich archival documentation from villages, cities, and districts in Brandenburg and Mecklenburg and includes less frequently exploited records on forests, dams, mills, waterways, epidemics, and epizootics. I argue that the extended period of war and crisis formed a crucible in which were forged new ways of dealing with structural, infrastructural, and exogenous realities. Thus, what may anachronistically be called a study in "crisis management" reveals a decentralization of authority and an acceleration of activity rather than the frequently accepted story of an increasing centralization of initiatives frustrated by local intransigence. |
FA-251628-17 | Research Programs: Fellowships for University Teachers | Evelyn M. Cohen | Illuminated Hebrew Manuscripts from Renaissance Italy: A Means to Acculturation without Assimilation | 1/1/2017 - 12/31/2017 | $50,400.00 | Evelyn | M. | Cohen | | | | Unaffiliated Independent Scholar | New York | NY | 10025-1968 | USA | 2016 | Art History and Criticism | Fellowships for University Teachers | Research Programs | 50400 | 0 | 50400 | 0 | The preparation of a catalog and interpretive
study of Hebrew illuminated manuscripts from Renaissance Italy during the late
14th to the early 16th centuries.
My book deals with the ways in which members of a religious minority used the patronage of illuminated codices as a means of acculturation within their host country. In emulation of the cultural elite of Italian society, wealthy Jews in Italy commissioned professionally copied and decorated manuscripts. They employed celebrated Christian illuminators to create luxurious books that consciously rivaled those of renowned Christian patrons. My analysis of these codices demonstrates how they reflect an adaptation of Italian practices in the choice of texts that were decorated, as well as a preservation of religious identity through their distinctive illustrations. My study will show how without resorting to assimilation, a unique minority used fine arts as a way to become part of the culture in which they lived. Along the way, some of the most magnificent illuminated manuscripts from the greatest period of book illumination in Italy were produced. |
FA-251630-17 | Research Programs: Fellowships for University Teachers | Richard Jankowsky | The Role of Devotional Music in Modern Tunisia | 7/1/2017 - 6/30/2018 | $50,400.00 | Richard | | Jankowsky | | | | Tufts University | Somerville | MA | 02144-2401 | USA | 2016 | Ethnomusicology | Fellowships for University Teachers | Research Programs | 50400 | 0 | 50400 | 0 | A book-length study
of Sufi music in Tunisia, examining its proliferation among both Sufis and
non-Sufis.
In Tunisia, musics involving praise songs to Sufi saints are not exclusive to members of Sufi orders. Rather, a number of distinct healing and devotional musical traditions co-exist, each associated with particular social and devotional communities. In this project, I show how four such traditions, those of women, Tunisians of sub-Saharan descent, the Jewish community, and even hard-drinking laborers, contribute to a larger ecology of Tunisian Sufi music that also includes a variety of Sufi rituals as well as staged concerts. “Ambient Sufism” draws attention to the connections among these different musics and emphasizes their public audibility, which is now at risk in the new socio-religious climate of post-revolutionary Tunisia. Based on fieldwork between 2009 and 2015, this book highlights the voices of participants and analyzes their musical practices to account for the under-acknowledged role of music and pleasure, as well as the importance of minorities, in Islamic practice. |
FA-251663-17 | Research Programs: Fellowships for University Teachers | Marcia Chatelain | Restaurant Ownership and Civil Rights History in Chicago | 9/1/2017 - 8/31/2018 | $50,400.00 | Marcia | | Chatelain | | | | University of Pennsylvania | Washington | DC | 20057-0001 | USA | 2016 | African American History | Fellowships for University Teachers | Research Programs | 50400 | 0 | 50400 | 0 | A book about the complicated history of McDonald's, the National Black McDonald’s Operators Association, and inner-city African Americans.
Burgers in the Age of Black Capitalism: How Civil Rights and Fast Food Changed America uncovers the precise moment in which McDonald’s transformed itself from a suburban oasis for white families to enjoy offerings from a three-item menu, to a ubiquitous presence on the busiest corners of urban America. Essentially, this is the story of the racial turn in fast food. While health warriors fight an army of trans fats, value meals, and splashy advertisements, few have considered how fast food planted its flag so firmly into the racially segregated battlefields of this conflict. The stakes are high for this story, told by a historian and of broad relevance to a variety of scholars in American history, food studies, urban studies, and civil rights. |
FA-251716-17 | Research Programs: Fellowships for University Teachers | Mark Hussey | Clive Bell and the Making of Modernism | 2/1/2017 - 8/31/2017 | $29,400.00 | Mark | | Hussey | | | | Pace University | New York | NY | 10038-1502 | USA | 2016 | Western Civilization | Fellowships for University Teachers | Research Programs | 29400 | 0 | 29400 | 0 | The
first intellectual biography of British writer Clive Bell (1881-1964), member of the Bloomsbury Group and a pivotal
figure in the artistic, social, and political movements of early 20th-century
modernism.
An intellectual biography that follows Clive Bell’s life and critical thought from his early pacifist writing and essays on aesthetics, through publication in 1914 of his widely influential book Art, to friendships in the first half of the twentieth century with Picasso, Segonzac, Derain, Vlaminck, Diaghilev, Cocteau and other major figures of European modernism including T. S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf. Bell’s theory of “significant form” continues to be an important part of the history of aesthetics, and has received attention recently even from neuroscientists as providing insight into brain function in the encounter with visual art. In addition to lecturing internationally and writing many articles and books on modern art, Bell became an outspoken champion of liberty in his post-First World War cultural criticism, continuing to emphasize the vital role of the arts in a free society. |
FA-251744-17 | Research Programs: Fellowships for University Teachers | Kelly M. Greenhill | Extra-Factual Sources of Threat Conception and Proliferation in International Politics | 1/1/2017 - 8/31/2017 | $33,600.00 | Kelly | M. | Greenhill | | | | Tufts University | Somerville | MA | 02144-2401 | USA | 2016 | International Relations | Fellowships for University Teachers | Research Programs | 33600 | 0 | 33600 | 0 | A
book-length study of extra-factual information in international
politics.
When uncertainty is high, and verifiable facts are inconvenient or few, how do individuals learn about what to fear and how to respond to the threats they have identified? This book focuses on the key role played by threat narratives. I argue that across time and space some distinct and oft replicated patterns have emerged, whereby invented, embellished or simply unverified sources of security-related information materially, despite being unproven, inform and influence foreign and defense policy discourse and formulation. Marrying insights from cognitive, behavioral and political science, I hypothesize that by exploiting individuals’ cognitive, psychological and biological predispositions, enterprising actors can transform vague and inchoate objective sources of anxiety into proximate, and even existentially menacing, albeit unverifiable, security threats. To test my theory, I employ a combination of survey data and cross-national historical case studies, from the 19th-21st centuries. |
FA-251761-17 | Research Programs: Fellowships for University Teachers | Anne Monahan | Horace Pippin (1888-1946): Art, Race, and the Construction of American Modernism | 1/1/2017 - 12/31/2017 | $50,400.00 | Anne | | Monahan | | | | | New York | NY | 10025-5390 | USA | 2016 | American Studies | Fellowships for University Teachers | Research Programs | 50400 | 0 | 50400 | 0 | Preparation of a book-length study on the American painter Horace Pippin (1888-1946).
Horace Pippin (1888–1946), a self-taught painter and disabled World War I veteran, was arguably the most prominent African American artist of the 1940s. My book, When Does a Primitive Cease to Be a Primitive: Horace Pippin’s Challenge to Art Criticism, examines his complicated position at the intersection of contemporary, African American, and self-taught art of his day, revealing unrecognized aspects of his criticality, agency, authorship, and patronage, and the dynamics of canon and racial formation operative in his success. Organized as a set of microhistorical case studies, the project sheds new light on a transitional moment in American modernism and the diverse constituencies involved in its construction and engages the fields of critical race studies, memory studies, literary criticism, sociology, and non-representational theory. |
FA-251789-17 | Research Programs: Fellowships for University Teachers | Katina T. Lillios | Prehistoric Archaeology of the Iberian Peninsula: The Making of a Cultural Mosaic | 7/1/2017 - 6/30/2018 | $50,400.00 | Katina | T. | Lillios | | | | University of Iowa | Iowa City | IA | 52242-1320 | USA | 2016 | Archaeology | Fellowships for University Teachers | Research Programs | 50400 | 0 | 50400 | 0 | The completion of a book-length survey of the archaeology of the prehistoric Iberian peninsula.
For my NEH project I will complete a book entitled Archaeology of the Iberian Peninsula: From the Paleolithic through the Bronze Age (currently under contract with Cambridge University Press, scheduled for completion in July 2018). The book will document the rich and diverse histories of the peoples who lived on the Peninsula between 1,000,000 and 3000 years ago (the Bronze Age), through their art, burials, tools, and monuments. Despite recent dramatic discoveries at archaeological sites in Portugal and Spain, which have revolutionized our thinking about human history, the rich archaeological heritage of prehistoric Iberia remains largely unknown outside the Peninsula. My book will be the only up-to-date synthesis of Iberian archaeology, in English, accessible to students, scholars, and the interested public. |
FA-251796-17 | Research Programs: Fellowships for University Teachers | Daniela Flesler | The Memory Work of Sepharad: New Inheritances for 21st-Century Spain | 8/1/2017 - 7/31/2018 | $50,400.00 | Daniela | | Flesler | | | | SUNY Research Foundation, Stony Brook | Stony Brook | NY | 11794-0001 | USA | 2016 | Spanish Literature | Fellowships for University Teachers | Research Programs | 50400 | 0 | 50400 | 0 | Completion of a book-length study of how modern Spain is addressing and developing its Jewish history.
My book project studies the long-ranging implications of the current “re-discovery” of Spain’s Jewish past. Since the mid 1980s, many cultural and political initiatives have engaged with the memory of Jewish Spain and attempted to officially reconnect Spain with the Jewish world. Today, all things Sepharad are widely marketed throughout Spain, from cultural festivals, museums, former synagogues and Jewish quarters, to historical novels, travel guides, music and cookbooks. The 2015 Law granting Spanish nationality to the descendants of Jews expelled in 1492 is the latest example of this phenomenon. The broad public circulation of new narratives that are putting Spanish Jews at their center has the potential to produce profound social transformations. The book explores the ways in which the memory of Sepharad has allowed Spaniards to rethink long-established notions of cultural identity within the recent debates over Spain's historical memory. |
FA-251802-17 | Research Programs: Fellowships for University Teachers | Ayala Fader | The Internet and the New York Ultra-Orthodox Jewish Community | 8/1/2017 - 7/31/2018 | $50,400.00 | Ayala | | Fader | | | | Fordham University | Bronx | NY | 10458-9993 | USA | 2016 | Linguistic Anthropology | Fellowships for University Teachers | Research Programs | 50400 | 0 | 50400 | 0 | Research for and writing of a study of a community of ultra-Orthodox Jews who use the Internet anonymously to critique their religious community and share their doubts.
How do nonliberal religious communities morally struggle with doubt and faith in the digital age? The book project analyzes the lives of ultra-Orthodox Jews living “double lives,” those who doubted the truth of divine revelation at Mount Sinai but made the moral choice to live in their communities as practicing Jews. The Internet made it possible for those living double lives to anonymously critique their communities online (in Yiddish and English) and secretly explore secular knowledge, sensibilities, and sociality offline. In response, ultra-Orthodox Jewish communal leaders called the current period “a crisis of faith.” There has been a community-wide acknowledgement that embodied signs no longer assured the cultivation of shared interior faith; this required new forms of attention to interiority through talk. As a study of a struggle by doubters and the faithful to define authentic ultra-Orthodoxy, the book speaks to humanities scholars of religion, ethics, language and media. |
FA-251814-17 | Research Programs: Fellowships for University Teachers | Jarod Roll | American Metal Miners and the Lure of Capitalism, 1850-1950 | 8/1/2018 - 7/31/2019 | $50,400.00 | Jarod | | Roll | | | | University of Mississippi | University | MS | 38677-1848 | USA | 2016 | U.S. History | Fellowships for University Teachers | Research Programs | 50400 | 0 | 50400 | 0 | A book-length study of American miners in
Kansas, Missouri, and Oklahoma and their opposition to labor unions, occupational safety regulations, and environmental reforms.
Poor Man’s Fortune is the history of how some white American workers, in this case, lead and zinc miners in Kansas, Missouri, and Oklahoma, rejected the security of labor unions, government reforms, and environmental safeguards from the 1850s to the 1950s. Rather than seek negative explanations for this pattern, as other labor historians might, I instead show how the pattern emerged as these communities embraced, over several decades, the physical, financial, and environmental risks of industrial capitalism in order to seek its rewards. This study, which is based on research in archives across the U.S., offers a grassroots study of anti-union, anti-government white workers that, unlike dominant trends in American labor and political history, takes their perspective seriously. More broadly, Poor Man’s Fortune speaks to issues of sustainability in industrial society by interrogating the dilemmas of people whose labor undermined the viability of their livelihoods and communities. |
FA-251827-17 | Research Programs: Fellowships for University Teachers | Febe Dalipe Pamonag | Patients’ Activism in the Culion Leper Colony, Philippines, 1905-1930s | 1/1/2017 - 12/31/2017 | $50,400.00 | Febe | Dalipe | Pamonag | | | | Western Illinois University | Macomb | IL | 61455-1390 | USA | 2016 | History, Other | Fellowships for University Teachers | Research Programs | 50400 | 0 | 50400 | 0 | A book about patient activism at a U.S.-managed leper colony in the Phillipines (1905-1930s).
This project will advance our understanding of Filipino leprosy patients’ engagement with American colonial officials; this is an understudied theme in the literature on empire and public health policy and U.S. occupation of the Philippines. In 1905, American health authorities established a leper colony in Culion, an isolated island in Palawan. Suspected lepers were forcibly removed from their homes and relocated to Culion. Most scholarship on Culion highlights its role as a laboratory for civic experimentation and how it was embroiled in major political issues of the day. In this project, I consider the views and practices of leprosy patients to show their resistance, as well as adaptation and accommodation of certain regulations in order to improve their lives on the island. This project also addresses such issues as the criminalization of disease and the degree to which individual rights may be compromised in the name of public health, all of which have contemporary resonance. |
FA-251848-17 | Research Programs: Fellowships for University Teachers | Aisha Khan | Obeah and Hosay: Two Religions of the Caribbean Region | 1/1/2018 - 12/31/2018 | $50,400.00 | Aisha | | Khan | | | | New York University | New York | NY | 10012-1019 | USA | 2016 | Cultural Anthropology | Fellowships for University Teachers | Research Programs | 50400 | 0 | 50400 | 0 | A book-length comparative study of two of the Caribbean's most understudied religions--Obeah and Hosay.
My project is a study of the intersections of religious and racial identities through comparative analysis of Obeah and Hosay, two of the Caribbean region’s defining yet understudied religions. My approach is an ethnographic one that draws on the phenomenological tradition. Although Obeah and Hosay are diverse in their beliefs and in their practitioners, they are often treated more categorically, based on their respective African and Indian origins. My project probes assumptions about the inevitable tensions of religious and racial difference in the Caribbean by exploring lived experience filtered through western Enlightenment conceptualizations of religion and race across Caribbean-Atlantic space and colonial and postcolonial time. Inquiring into the relationship between interpretive categories of religion and race, their modes of practice, and the power relations that form their contexts allows better understanding of identities, conflict and governance, and heritage in the Americas. |
FA-251875-17 | Research Programs: Fellowships for University Teachers | John P. McCormick | The People’s Princes: Machiavelli, Leadership and Liberty | 7/1/2017 - 6/30/2018 | $50,400.00 | John | P. | McCormick | | | | University of Chicago | Chicago | IL | 60637-5418 | USA | 2016 | Political Theory | Fellowships for University Teachers | Research Programs | 50400 | 0 | 50400 | 0 | A
book-length study of Machiavelli’s concept of political leadership.
"The People’s Princes: Machiavelli, Leadership and Liberty" argues that Machiavelli, commonly considered a cynical adviser of tyrants, formulated a conception of leadership uniquely facilitating of democracy and the “free way of life.” My project draws on Machiavelli’s cases from Roman and Florentine history, and delineates his literary-rhetorical method of “political exemplarity” to accentuate the interactions between leaders and citizens that he considered indispensible for healthy democratic politics. Moreover, I highlight the relevance of Machiavelli’s thoughts on leadership for our age when democracy is challenged by economic inequality, oligarchic encroachment, failures of political representation and accountability and the rise of populism. Unlike previous interpreters, I show that Machiavelli advises democratic leaders and citizens to diligently pursue policies aimed at thwarting the efforts of socio-economic elites to oppress the people and violate the common good. |
FA-251898-17 | Research Programs: Fellowships for University Teachers | Anne Elizabeth MacNeil | Italian Songs from the Time of Christopher Columbus: A Critical Edition | 7/1/2017 - 6/30/2018 | $50,400.00 | Anne | Elizabeth | MacNeil | | | | University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill | Chapel Hill | NC | 27599-1350 | USA | 2016 | Music History and Criticism | Fellowships for University Teachers | Research Programs | 50400 | 0 | 50400 | 0 | Completion
of a digital edition of Italian frottole,
popular songs of love, war, and politics from the 15th and 16th
centuries.
Since the mid-18th century, scholars have been accustomed to thinking of music as embodied in its notation. The restrictions of print culture on the publication of critical editions has entrenched this line of thinking. But with the resources afforded by digital humanities, I am creating a multi-media critical edition of the repertory of Italian songs from the time of Christopher Columbus (known as frottole) that displaces this notion and relocates the object of study in music as a sounding work of art. These songs offer insight into human expression in an era of intense cultural change--a time of war, a time of scientific discovery and the exploration of the New World. Many frottole speak to these cultural anxieties, and the repertory as a whole represents a rejection of French domination over the Italian peninsula in favor of the Italian language, its ancient poetic forms, and traditional practices of singing and reciting to the lyre. These songs give expression to Italian humanism. |
FA-251900-17 | Research Programs: Fellowships for University Teachers | Matt Cohen | Thinking across Cultures in Early America | 1/1/2017 - 12/31/2017 | $50,400.00 | Matt | | Cohen | | | | University of Texas, Austin | Austin | TX | 78712-0100 | USA | 2016 | American Literature | Fellowships for University Teachers | Research Programs | 50400 | 0 | 50400 | 0 | A book-length study of the language of early American cross-cultural interactions.
This book's goal is to revitalize the discussion of inter-cultural relations in early American studies. Much of the most influential scholarship in interdisciplinary colonial studies tries not just to illuminate the past but to provide a new imagination of a shared future among all the descendants of the colonial world. Yet an outdated vocabulary of cultural interchange hinders the field, which has struggled to attract Native American and African American scholars in significant numbers. This lexicon has also kept its work from being taken up in other fields. In five short chapters drawing on both major texts and archival sources, this book traces where terms like "reciprocity," "understanding," "piety," and others came from and how they have evolved from the ways they were used in early colonial contexts. It also looks forward, showing how re-assessing such terms can help students of early America speak to broader questions and bring more diverse voices into the field. |
FA-251961-17 | Research Programs: Fellowships for University Teachers | Gregory Steirer | Intellectual Property Law and the History of the Narrative-Based Franchise | 7/1/2017 - 6/30/2018 | $50,400.00 | Gregory | | Steirer | | | | Dickinson College | Carlisle | PA | 17013-2896 | USA | 2016 | Media Studies | Fellowships for University Teachers | Research Programs | 50400 | 0 | 50400 | 0 | Completion of a book-length study of the impact of intellectual property law on narrative-based franchises in film, television, and other media.
Over the last decade, the narrative-based franchise has come to be seen as one of the twentieth-first century’s paradigmatic storytelling forms. Narrative Inc. argues that in order to understand the significance of this form, we must situate it within the practice of intellectual property law. This project thus offers a dual history of narrative-based franchise production and intellectual property law in the United States, beginning in the early twentieth century and ending in the present-day. Arguing that changes in the franchise and the law have been mutually constitutive, each simultaneously the product and cause of the other, I trace how the logic of the franchise as a narrative form has changed in tandem with that of copyright, trademark, and unfair competition law. Narrative Inc. focuses on a series of specific franchises, demonstrating how their production was bound up—often quite literally through lawsuits—with the discourse and practice of intellectual property law. |
FA-251972-17 | Research Programs: Fellowships for University Teachers | Whitney Schwab | The Philosophical Origin of the Concept of Knowledge | 8/1/2017 - 7/31/2018 | $50,400.00 | Whitney | | Schwab | | | | UMBC | Baltimore | MD | 21250-0001 | USA | 2016 | History of Philosophy | Fellowships for University Teachers | Research Programs | 50400 | 0 | 50400 | 0 | A book-length study on the concept of knowledge
in Stoic philosophy.
Interpreters of ancient Greek philosophy and contemporary theorists typically agree that Plato and Aristotle were both concerned to analyze knowledge. I think that this is a mistake. To be sure, Plato and Aristotle were interested in epistemology, and gave accounts of an important epistemic concept, which they called epistêmê. But, in laying out their accounts of epistêmê they were concerned to describe the optimal or ideal cognitive state human beings can achieve, which is a project that differs in important respects from that pursued by most modern-day epistemologists. Although the idea that Plato and Aristotle were not principally interested in knowledge in the modern sense has experienced some growth in popularity, little work has been done to determine when and how knowledge became a focus of philosophical concern. The central claim of "The Origin of the Concept of Knowledge" is that this occurred in the work of the Stoics and, in particular, in their discussions of katalêpsis. |
FA-251991-17 | Research Programs: Fellowships for University Teachers | Anna M. Shields | Construction of the Tang Dynasty Literary Legacy by Scholars in the Five Dynasties and Northern Song | 1/1/2017 - 8/31/2017 | $33,600.00 | Anna | M. | Shields | | | | Princeton University | Princeton | NJ | 08540-5228 | USA | 2016 | East Asian Literature | Fellowships for University Teachers | Research Programs | 33600 | 0 | 33600 | 0 | Research and writing leading to publication of a book on how Chinese poetry of the Tang Period (618-907) was read and understood by Chinese scholars of the 10th to 12th centuries.
My project investigates the critical works that Chinese scholars of the Five Dynasties (907-976) and Northern Song (976-1127) used to define the literary legacy of their predecessor dynasty, the Tang (618-907). Writing the Tang will explore the multiple, overlapping interpretations of Tang writers and texts found in printed works that circulated widely for centuries. I analyze some of the most interventionist and influential works from the period: biographies of writers in the two Tang dynastic histories; anthologies of Tang prose and poetry; and popular anecdote collections about Tang writers and texts. Together, these works created an enduring portrait of the Tang as Chinese literature's "golden age," a view that idealized Tang literary aesthetics yet increasingly downplayed the political and social role of literary writing in Tang culture. My book will challenge this perspective on the Tang by exposing the interpretative practices that created it. |
FA-252032-17 | Research Programs: Fellowships for University Teachers | Casey O'Callaghan | A Multisensory Philosophy of Perception | 7/1/2017 - 6/30/2018 | $50,400.00 | Casey | | O'Callaghan | | | | Washington University | St. Louis | MO | 63130-4862 | USA | 2016 | Philosophy, Other | Fellowships for University Teachers | Research Programs | 50400 | 0 | 50400 | 0 | A book-length argument for a theory of multisensory perception of human consciousness.
Seeing What You
Hear: A Multisensory Philosophy of Perception argues that human perceptual consciousness
is richly multisensory. This project’s thesis is that the coordinated use of
multiple senses enhances and extends human perceptual capacities in three
critical ways: (1) Crossmodal perceptual illusions reveal hidden multisensory
interactions that typically make each sense more reliable as a source of
evidence about the environment; (2) The joint use of multiple senses discloses
more of the world, including novel features and qualities; (3) Through
perceptual learning, each sense is reshaped by the influence of others. The
implication is that no sense—not even vision itself—can be understood entirely
in isolation from the others. This undermines the prevailing approach to
perception, which proceeds sense by sense, and sets the stage for a revisionist
multisensory methodology that illuminates the nature, scope, and character of
perceptual consciousness. |
FA-252070-17 | Research Programs: Fellowships for University Teachers | Chet Adam Van Duzer | Annotation for Education in the Princeton/Brussels Copy of the 1525 Edition of Ptolemy’s Geography
| 2/1/2017 - 11/30/2017 | $42,000.00 | Chet | Adam | Van Duzer | | | | | Providence | RI | 02906-4255 | USA | 2016 | Renaissance Studies | Fellowships for University Teachers | Research Programs | 42000 | 0 | 42000 | 0 | Preparation of a digital edition of the annotations on a 1527 copy of Ptolemy's Geography that illuminate the understanding and teaching of geography in the early 16th century.
I seek a ten-month Mellon Fellowship for Digital
Publication to fund the completion of my transcription, English translation,
and study of the annotations in a copy of the 1525 edition of Ptolemy’s Geography that is currently divided
between Princeton and a private collection in Brussels. The annotations,
written in Latin in about 1527, are extremely profuse, were made for a student,
and contain original geographical thought. They are valuable for studies of the
reception of Ptolemy’s Geography, of
sixteenth-century geographical education, and of European intellectual
networks. The only good format in which to publish them is in a digital edition
that shows images of the pages and thus the context of each annotation, with a
full transcription and English translation, all searchable. Princeton has
agreed to host the digital edition on its server in an instantiation of the
open-source Mellon-funded Archaeology of Reading platform for digital editions
of annotated early modern books. |
FA-252088-17 | Research Programs: Fellowships for University Teachers | Claire Gilbert, PhD | The Arabic Voices of the Spanish Monarchy (1492-1700) | 7/1/2017 - 6/30/2018 | $50,400.00 | Claire | | Gilbert | | | | St. Louis University | St. Louis | MO | 63103-2097 | USA | 2016 | Renaissance History | Fellowships for University Teachers | Research Programs | 50400 | 0 | 50400 | 0 | Preparation of a book-length study about the use
of Arabic in Spain and Spanish territories during a period of anti-Arabic
legislation and expulsions of Arabic speakers, 1492-1700.
I seek the support of an NEH Fellowship to complete a monograph on The Arabic Voices of the Spanish Monarchy (1492-1700). During the early modern period, the history of Spain was marked by anti-Arabic legislation and expulsions of Arabic speakers. This monograph explains how Arabic translators in this context found professional opportunities, and shows the continuous use of Arabic across Spanish territories. This project engages with topics including the administration of minorities, politics of language, family and empire, cultural intermediaries, and religious conversion. By combining archival testimony with analysis of discursive and legal tools that created cultural hierarchies, I show how Arabic translators took advantage of the same hierarchies they helped enforce. The continuous use of Arabic by these translators allows me to explore themes of language use and power relations that continue to resonate in contemporary society and across humanities disciplines. |
FA-252104-17 | Research Programs: Fellowships for University Teachers | Paul E. J. Hammer | Queen Elizabeth I, Robert Earl of Essex and the Politics of the English Royal Succession, 1598-1603 | 8/1/2017 - 5/31/2018 | $37,800.00 | Paul | E. J. | Hammer | | | | Regents of the University of Colorado, Boulder | Boulder | CO | 80303-1058 | USA | 2016 | British History | Fellowships for University Teachers | Research Programs | 37800 | 0 | 37800 | 0 | A book-length study on Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, and the politics that led to his trial and execution for treason in 1601 under Queen Elizabeth I.
This project challenges the accepted
understanding of how James VI of Scotland was able to succeed Elizabeth I on
the English throne in 1603, thereby transforming Tudor England into Stuart
Britain. Using an unprecedented range of original sources, it offers a
radically new appraisal of the political significance of Robert Devereux, Earl
of Essex, and of the 'Essex Rising' which resulted in his execution in 1601.
Building on this foundation, it outlines a new political narrative for the
period 1598-1603, setting English events within a broader British context and
revealing a 'secret history' of James's path to the English crown.
Methodologically, this project breaks new ground in early modern British
history by the quantity and richness of its archival sources, its commitment to
reading all key documents in their original manuscript form, and its extensive
use of literary sources. The project's chief outcome will be the completion of
a substantial monograph entitled The
Hunted Hart: Robert Earl of Essex, Queen Elizabeth I, and the Politics of
Treason in Shakespeare’s Britain. |
FA-252126-17 | Research Programs: Fellowships for University Teachers | Anne-Maria Boitumelo Makhulu | The New Financial Elite: Race, Mobility, and Ressentiment After Apartheid | 9/1/2017 - 8/31/2018 | $50,400.00 | Anne-Maria | Boitumelo | Makhulu | | | | Duke University | Durham | NC | 27705-4677 | USA | 2016 | Cultural Anthropology | Fellowships for University Teachers | Research Programs | 50400 | 0 | 50400 | 0 | A book-length study
of black financial elites in post-apartheid South Africa.
“The New Financial Elite: Race, Mobility, and Ressentiment After Apartheid” sets out to look at the rise of a small, if powerful, class of black financial elites in contemporary South Africa. Focusing on the black upper middle class—their educational backgrounds, professional expertise, aspirations, and pathways to affluence—the project looks at one and the same time at the very particular historical circumstances in which this minority within a minority came to benefit from Black Economic Empowerment legislation soon after democratization in 1994. Adopting both ethnographic and archival methods, "The New Financial Elite" explores the trajectories, desires, and obligations of black elites acknowledging the intensity of contrast between rich and poor in South Africa, a contrast that itself motivates this novel research on class diversity. |
FA-252132-17 | Research Programs: Fellowships for University Teachers | John Tresch | Poet Edgar Allan Poe and the Forging of American Science | 6/1/2017 - 5/31/2018 | $50,400.00 | John | | Tresch | | | | University of Pennsylvania | Philadelphia | PA | 19104-6205 | USA | 2016 | History and Philosophy of Science, Technology, and Medicine | Fellowships for University Teachers | Research Programs | 50400 | 0 | 50400 | 0 | A book-length study of the role of science and technology in the life and writings of Edgar Allan Poe.
In Edgar Allan Poe’s famous tales, delusional narrators recount gory scenes of murder, madness, and despair. Yet he also wrote in depth about science, technology, and certainty. Trained as an engineer at West Point, he published a seashell guidebook and wrote on daguerreotypes and cryptography. By the 1830s, the “American experiment” had acquired astonishing equipment powered by electricity and steam; audiences confronted theories of species change, convertible fluids, and the birth and death of stars. Yet the USA's lack of stable scientific institutions opened the way for confusion, controversy, and hoaxes. The proposed book sets Poe's life and work in the tumultuous spaces in which new knowledge was debated, from Richmond and Baltimore to Philadelphia and New York, revealing his unique combination of visionary romanticism, skepticism, and enthusiasm for new sciences and machines. It casts new light on both a fascinating author and a decisive period in American science and culture. |
FA-252136-17 | Research Programs: Fellowships for University Teachers | Jane E. Goodman | Democracy and Cultural Exchange after the Arab Spring | 8/1/2017 - 7/31/2018 | $50,400.00 | Jane | E. | Goodman | | | | Trustees of Indiana University | Bloomington | IN | 47405-7000 | USA | 2016 | Cultural Anthropology | Fellowships for University Teachers | Research Programs | 50400 | 0 | 50400 | 0 | Completion of an enhanced digital edition and book-length study that records
and analyzes the intercultural exchange between an Algerian theater troupe and
audiences in the United States.
In the humanities, intercultural exchange has been understood as a problem of translation not only between languages but also between cultures. I propose to explore problems of cultural translation, or the act of conveying one group’s history and experiences in terms that another group can understand. I do so via a study of an upcoming US government-sponsored tour by an Algerian theater troupe. The book follows the troupe from Algeria to the United States, showing how actors and audiences confront new views of their own and each other’s culture through theatrical performance. The book is envisioned as a multimedia work that will enable readers to experience (via embedded video) the events analyzed in the text as well as to explore links to primary research materials (such as theatrical scripts) that cannot be accessed via a traditional print book. The enhanced e-book is under contract with Indiana University Press. |
FA-252150-17 | Research Programs: Fellowships for University Teachers | Loubna El Amine | The Foundations of Confucian Political Thought: History, Law, and the Political Community | 9/1/2017 - 8/31/2018 | $50,400.00 | Loubna | | El Amine | | | | Georgetown University | Washington | DC | 20057-0001 | USA | 2016 | Political Theory | Fellowships for University Teachers | Research Programs | 50400 | 0 | 50400 | 0 | A
book-length study of the foundations of Confucian political thought.
My proposed book project, provisionally titled 'The Foundations of Confucian Political Thought: History, Law, and the Political Community,' will focus on the intersection of the concepts of time and space in Classical Confucian thought. More specifically, the project aims to delineate the Confucian conception of the political community by asking such questions as: What are the criteria for membership in it? Is territory important, why, and how? What explains the Confucian concern for the past? Can this concern with the past be considered sacred? Can history (as opposed to religion or metaphysics more broadly) be the normative foundation of Confucian political thought? The project aims to contribute to the expansion of the study of political philosophy and the history of political thought beyond the Western tradition. |