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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.