Preparation for publication of an annotated translation of the earliest known Christian hymnal, created in Jerusalem in the early 5th century.

I will produce the first English language translation of the earliest known Christian hymnal. This collection of ancient Christian hymns was compiled in Jerusalem during the later 4th or early 5th century. It offers an unmatched resource for understanding the development of early Christian worship and piety, as well as the transmission of Christian doctrine to the unlettered. Nevertheless, this invaluable collection has been almost completely ignored by scholars of early Christianity. Such neglect is almost certainly a consequence of the fact that this collection of theological poetry survives only in an Old Georgian translation, a language known by very few scholars of early Christianity. Compounding this problem is the inaccessibility and complexity of its critical edition. The resulting book will be of interest not only to scholars and students of early Christianity, but to members of the general public interested in sacred music as well.

A book-length study of the collaboration between Willa Cather and Edith Lewis.

I propose to spend summer 2017 working on two chapters of my book “The Creative Partnership of Willa Cather and Edith Lewis,” which reconstructs and analyzes the relationship between Cather, an American novelist, and Lewis, a magazine editor and advertising writer with whom Cather shared a home in New York City for nearly four decades. The book, which will consist of an introduction and seven chapters, is under contract with Oxford University Press with a final delivery date of 1 September 2019. By May 2017, I anticipate having produced complete drafts of the introduction and three chapters. During the fellowship term, I propose to write two more chapters, one on Cather and Lewis’s shared Southwestern travels and Cather’s two novels drawing on those experiences, and another on Lewis’s career as an advertising copywriter and Cather’s engagements with commercial and celebrity culture in the 1920s.

A book-length study about the development of transatlantic religious pluralism in the British colonies between 1660 and 1714.

Researching, in English archives, a book-length study of the growth of religious pluralism in colonial America. Treating toleration as a practice as much as an idea, it sets the creation and growth of colonies like New York and Pennsylvania within the religious and political context of the British Isles and other parts of the empire, from Jamaica to India, to determine just how exceptional or pragmatic the toleration in America was. Emphasizing the role of imperial politics in opening up new possibilities for toleration, the research also shows local efforts in America to restrict pluralism. In this crucial phase of the creation of American pluralism, religious toleration was far from universally accepted. It was contested in some areas, very limited in others, existing in different ways from one colony to another. By examining American developments within the context of the whole empire, this book shows that what we think of as distinctly American was actually an imperial product.

Research and writing of a book on medical understandings of developmental disabilities in the second half of the 20th century. 

After 1950, the understanding and management of developmental disabilities were impacted by two countervailing trends. As public support for the unique needs and experiences of affected individuals increased, physicians began to link developmental disabilities to genetic causes. Genetic associations led to new identities and resources, but also reified disability as a pathological target for medical intervention. Scholars have extensively explored increasing postwar social support for disability. Less has been done to examine how evolving societal views of disability influenced the medical community. This project draws on archives, published literature, and interviews to examine evolving clinical narratives of developmental disabilities. The PI examines how and why new narratives of developmental disabilities entered the medical community, how clinicians responded to alternative viewpoints, positively and negatively, and the role of some professionals in promoting broader adoption.

A book-length project on modern political, religious, and cultural conceptions of medieval Muslim Spain and Spanish national identity.

Inventing modern Spain in the twentieth century meant Europeanizing, but also revising and at times discarding Orientalist images of its southern region, Andalusia, the fabled land of Carmen the Gypsy cigar-maker, the Alhambra Palace, and the Muslim civilization of Al-Andalus. My project, an interdisciplinary analysis of visual art, literary texts, music, and architecture from the late 1800s until the present, will be the first systematic account of how Spanish artists and intellectuals represent Andalusia as a space of encounter between Spain’s modernizing aspirations and its Moorish past. Neither identical nor antithetical to the Arab world, Andalusia challenges ethnocentric notions of Spanish culture while disrupting such oppositions as Oriental vs European and primitive vs modern. In tracing the development of this ambivalent image, the project demonstrates its overlooked yet pivotal role in formulations of national identity in modern Spain.

Research and writing leading to publication of a book on conservationism and forest management in colonial Korea, 1910-1945.

This project examines Japanese efforts to rehabilitate, exploit, and showcase Korea’s forests during the period of colonial rule (1910-1945). Building on previous studies of the tangled roots of empire and conservationism, I argue that the forestry enterprise in colonial Korea was as concerned with the seed as it was with the saw: it placed reforestation at the very heart of its efforts to modernize the Korean landscape and the ecological sensibilities of its inhabitants. But forest reclamation in Korea was far from benevolent: it siphoned off forests to Japanese corporations, cut off communities from resources that had long sustained them, and placed vast stands of timber under state control. Afforestation, in other words, was a process rife with conflict and fraught with contradiction. By chronicling this intensive, contested, and largely forgotten forestry project, this book offers a path-breaking case study in the promise and perils of natural resource management in Japan’s empire.

Completion of a book on the history of writing and language teaching at the Syrian Protestant College in Beirut, Lebanon, from 1866 to 1920. 

This project examines the history of writing policies and practices at Syrian Protestant College (SPC), located in Beirut, Lebanon, in order to reveal how rhetorical negotiations among faculty, students, administrators, and the local community around the turn of the twentieth century produced an unsettled, and sometimes unsettling, vision of “America.” The example of SPC demonstrates how “America” was imagined rhetorically through educational practices and policies prior to the nation’s direct political involvement in the Middle East-North Africa region. As American models of schooling traveled across national borders, so too did the ideology of an “ideal American identity” travel through the promotion of literacy abroad. Rhetorical negotiations at SPC illuminate the high stakes and implicit promises of the global spread of American-style institutions of higher education, particularly in relation to questions of American identity, culture, and citizenship.

Analysis and digital preservation of 54 skeletons from the Roman town, Oplontis, destroyed by Mt. Vesuvius in 79 A.D., leading to the creation of digital models, datasets, a project website, and an interpretive article.

Numerous urban centers in the Bay of Naples were completely destroyed by the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in 79 AD. Pompeii and Herculaneum are the most famous of these, primarily because of the extent of excavation and the creation of plaster casts of dozens of dead bodies. Other areas were equally affected but are less understood, even today, because of their location underneath modern development. The villa complex of Oplontis is one of these. The 54 skeletons from Oplontis have been partially excavated, but they have never been conserved or analyzed. This project therefore has two goals: 1) to digitally preserve this cultural heritage through 3D scanning and photogrammetry; and 2) to create and publish a comparative database of key information from the skeletons themselves. This proposed research connects the dots between archaeological context, historical records, and physical bodies and invites the public to interact with this little-known Vesuvian site.

Writing two papers to present at academic conferences in preparation for writing a book on moral responsibility.

Virtually all normative ethical theories hold that whether an action is morally right depends upon the alternative acts available to the agent. But what exactly are the relevant alternative acts available to an agent? The answer to this question is far from obvious once we consider facts about how an agent would freely act in various situations. Actualists say that the relevant acts are determined by how agents would act in any situation. Possibilists deny this. Hybridists posit an actualist and a possibilist ought. The actualism/possibilism debate has important, heretofore, overlooked implications for the philosophical debate about the nature of moral responsibility. I will write two papers which collectively demonstrate that (a) actualism cannot accommodate an essential desideratum for any plausible account of blameworthiness, yet which (b) hybridism can easily be developed to accommodate. Consequently, I will identify another reason to accept hybridism and reject actualism.

Preparation of a monograph about the American public school library and its history.

As of this writing, more than 94,000 school library/media centers exist in the United States, 80,000 of which are public school libraries. For the 20th century alone the American public school library can boast a rich history of service to tens of thousands of schoolteachers and administrators and millions of K-12 users of both sexes, all creeds, races, sexual orientations, ethnicities, and social classes. Despite the fact that the American public school library is ubiquitous, however, no one from the education or the library and information science (LIS) research communities has yet written a comprehensive history of the institution to help identify and deepen understanding of its multiple roles, and to provide perspective to leaders now creating policy, planning its future, and fighting for its funding. I intend to write a 300-page history of the American public school library.

A book-length historical study of local and regional responses to AIDS in Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, and Missouri in the 1980s and 1990s.

In the early AIDS crisis, the Heartland became a cultural and political battleground over sexuality, morality, and citizenship. The disease inspired the sick, their families, and LGBTQ people to fight AIDS and the homophobia it fueled; without this tragic impetus, many would have stayed closeted, remained apathetic, or left the region. Most LGBTQ historical scholarship depicts the Heartland as inspiring an LGBTQ exodus, a foil to coastal cities, or a backdrop to sexual secrecy. As the first in-depth historical study of AIDS in the Heartland, this work recasts the region as an important site in national AIDS history. An NEH Summer Stipend would fund research and the writing of chapter 2, which unearths local responses to early AIDS and serves as the bedrock for the argument that the respectability politics most resonant and effective in the politically and religiously conservative Heartland deeply shaped the initial AIDS response and the national LGBTQ political agenda for a generation.

A book-length study of the impact of European opera on the American popular stage, 1890-1915.

My proposed book, Opera on the American Popular Stage, 1890–1915, examines the use of opera in vaudeville, early musical comedies, and American comic operas written and performed by African American and white musicians. Opera contributed a rich palette of music, plot lines, and cultural stereotypes that nourished new productions. The genre had a widespread presence on the popular stage and took on a range of meanings that sometimes were contradictory and, depending upon the context, often race-specific. During the era when Jim Crow laws were being passed, blacks and whites viewed opera through the lens of race, class, and gender, coming to different conclusions as to its social and cultural meanings. Each chapter of the book will focus on a particular manifestation of opera drawing upon methodologies from gender, African American, theater, and American studies using examples from all three types of entertainments.

Writing of a book on the surveillance of political and religious opponents by American Christian organizations between the Civil War and the early 21st century.

“God’s Watchers” seeks to rethink the history of religion in the United States by focusing on the problem of surveillance in American culture. Unlike recent works in American religious history that focus on the problems of secularism and the legal boundaries of church and state, this project concentrates on techniques of surveillance to argue that historians have paid far too much attention to problems of belief, theology, and legal precedent while paying far too little attention to the mechanisms of social regulation and policing that have characterized American religious organizations. The resulting narrative offers a complex story of overlapping alliances between religious activists and law enforcement agents, violent conflict between business interests and the forces of organized labor, and the mixing and melding of the agents of church, state, and voluntary associations into a dense tangle of political intrigue and social upheaval.

Writing a book on the role of Native American religious traditions in legal debates over religious freedom.

The category of "religion" as it has come to be defined in the law has had mixed results for Native American communities who have strategically appealed to the legal/political discourse of "religious freedom" to protect sacred places, practices, knowledge, objects, and ancestral remains that are not easily assimilated into modern Western senses of "religion." In turn, those communities have articulated such arguably "religious" claims in other legal and political discourses: cultural property, historic preservation and environmental law, treaty-based federal Indian law, and indigenous rights in international human rights law. The book to be completed under the grant, Native American Religious Freedom Beyond the First Amendment, explores these Native American claims, and the various legal discourses of their articulation, to inform contemporary discussions about religious freedom, the cultural history of the category of religion, and the vitality of indigenous religions in today's world.

A book-length study of U.S.-Iranian relations, 1905-1953.

This book-length project will offer a critical and comprehensive examination of US-Iran relations during the period between Iran’s first revolution and the 1953 US coup against Iran’s prime minister. Based on extensive multi-national, multi-lingual archival research in government, non-government, and cultural sources, this book will provide a deep understanding of the roots and drivers of early US-Iran engagement. By writing a history of the broad array of interactions between Americans and Iranians--official diplomacy, geopolitics, military matters, missionary activities, business and financial relationships, oil, travelers and tourism, women and gender, human rights and humanitarianism, and culture--I will argue that Americans had an indelible impact on Iranian nationalism and understanding of the West, while Iran served as an ally for US attempts to upend the European-dominated global system, a lens for understanding the Islamic world, and a site for the exercise of growing US power.

Writing two chapters toward completion of a book on the nature of concepts.

Concepts are the building blocks of higher thought, particularly the sorts of thought that are involved in categorization, reasoning and inference, judgment and decision making, planning, and similar processes. This project defends a theory of concepts that portrays them as cognitive tools, biologically and culturally shaped to serve an array of practical and theoretical ends. The crucial fact about concepts is that they display striking adaptive fluidity, which enables human cognition to adjust itself to a wide range of domains, tasks, and contexts. While currently dominant approaches to concepts largely neglect or marginalize this phenomenon, exploring the origin, scope, and limits of this adaptive fluidity leads to a theory that has greater empirical adequacy and theoretical depth. This work will inform research in the philosophy of mind, psychology, and other fields, such as anthropology and the history of science, that study the processes by which humans categorize the world.

Preparation of an online critical edition of Ibis by the Roman poet Ovid for the Digital Latin Library.

I propose to prepare an open-access critical edition of the Ibis, a poem by the Latin poet Ovid. The edition will be submitted to the Digital Latin Library, a new cooperative venture established to provide a home for innovative Latin textual scholarship in digital form and to make that scholarship accessible to the world. The Ibis itself, although written by one of ancient Rome’s best-known poets, has long been neglected, in large part because of the lack of a suitable edition. My research has shown that the standard text, issued some 60 years ago, can be improved in a number of ways. I have laid the groundwork for my project in a lengthy study of the manuscript tradition and text of the poem, which has been published in a leading Classics journal, as well as in publications and conference presentations on textual criticism in the digital age. My project will both make a contribution to scholarship on Ovid and serve as a pilot project for digital critical editions of Latin texts.

Creation of a digital edition of Aiiieeeee! An Anthology of Asian-American Writers (1974), a formative text in the development of Asian American Studies.

“Behind Aiiieeeee!” is a digital humanities project that examines the genesis of Asian American literature and its political and aesthetic role in contemporary America. It undertakes the first comprehensive archival analysis of Aiiieeeee!, a foundational Asian American literary anthology from the 1970s formed in the crucible of national post-civil rights struggles and global “Third World Movements” in Asia. These unpublished materials will be showcased through a series of online interactive learning modules, including an annotated hypertext version of the original edition and a visual map of the inter-ethnic and transnational networks involved. It will provide educators and students with the resources to appreciate a number of unfamiliar but seminal Asian American texts, while contributing to a scholarly understanding of how literary fiction became a powerful vehicle for synthesizing the political and aesthetic aspirations of the first generation of self-proclaimed Asian Americans.

Preparation of a book-length study on the patronage of Cosimo de'Medici in the fifteenth century and the fresco paintings by Beato Angelico in the monastery of San Marco, Florence.

This research project reconstructs the original fifteenth-century audience for Beato Angelico’s frescoes at the monastery of San Marco in Florence to challenge traditional art-historical assumptions regarding both the reception of the artist’s work and the motivations for its patronage by the Renaissance statesman and merchant, Cosimo de’Medici. Based on art-historical and archival evidence of an elite group of humanist scholars who gathered at the site’s library under the auspices of Cosimo, the project takes into account the coexistence of religious and secular viewers during the fifteenth century and thus opens up the analysis of Fra Angelico’s imagery for the first time to a larger social body that had political motivations. The reception of the paintings by these secular viewers extends the political and social significance of Cosimo’s patronage to the larger Florentine public outside the monastery's walls.

Research and writing leading to publication of a book on Palestinian research into Zionism and the role of that research in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

In mid-September 1982, just as they invaded West Beirut, Israeli forces raided a high-rise in the Lebanese capital. Though the building belonged to the Palestine Liberation Organization, the targets inside were neither militants nor weapons. The Israeli soldiers were there to capture a library—a library that was filled with books about Jews, Zionism, and Israel. Reading Herzl in Beirut, the monograph I am writing, is a book about that library, the institution that collected it (the PLO Research Center), the researchers who used it, the scholarship they produced in it, and, ultimately, the impact of the knowledge produced there on the course of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. How did learning about the enemy inform Palestinian politics and the acceptance of a two-state solution? With an NEH Summer Stipend, I will travel to Beirut and Jerusalem to gain access to archives, libraries, and the many scholars of the PLO, Palestinian intellectual history, and the conflict based there.

Writing two chapters in a book on a new theory of justification.

Moral rationalism identifies the norms of morality with norms of practical reasoning, explaining why we have reason to act rightly. Most contemporary rationalists adopt ideal advisor accounts of rationality—you have most reason to do what your ideal all-knowing advisor tells you. This has costs. It prevents reasons from playing certain explanatory and justificatory roles and obscures how we know what reasons and morality require. I work with an example model—an agent has most reason to do what a rational agent would do in her shoes. I build from there to the objective reasons captured in the advisor model by adding in information and more. But I do not need to leave the agent’s perspective to talk about advisors distinct from the agent. The resulting view unifies objective and subjective reasons, and makes sense of what we should do when we lack full information or certain abilities. It captures the idea that reasons motivate rational agents in an ordinary sense.

Research and writing of a book on the professional and social impact of the mobilization of physicians during World War I.

As the U.S. prepared for the First World War, editorials warned that thousands of civilian doctors would be needed to voluntarily enlist in the Army and Navy Medical Corps to support the war effort. These predictions proved accurate; in the nineteen months from declaration of war in April 1917 to Armistice in November 1918, roughly 32,000 American doctors enlisted as medical officers — what amounted to twenty-two percent of all licensed doctors nationwide. In my book project, “Mobilizing Doctors: The American Medical Profession, Militarization, and the State in the First World War,” I argue that this sudden, unprecedented mobilization of doctors transformed American medicine in the short- and long-term. Based in the medical humanities, my research uses archival sources to examine the wartime experiences of doctors, the rhetoric of medical leaders, and the evolution of medical careers and institutions. “Mobilizing Doctors” thereby demonstrates the lasting effects of war on American society.

Research leading to publication of a book on the role of detective novels in social and political debate in twentieth-century Africa.

Unsovereign Bodies: The State and the Individual Subject in African Detective Fiction traces the history of the detective genre as a mode of critique in Anglophone African writing. By playing on narrative codes that promise full disclosure of criminal deception and justice for hardworking, innocent individuals, Anglophone African writers, I argue, have transformed the detective novel’s ideological preoccupation with liberal capitalism and its discontents into a broader critical engagement with the collectivist ideals of decolonization, the valences of vulnerability, and the untenable governmentalities available to the postcolony. For their local readerships, the novels consequently ask how do individuals and communities manage risk and resources given the radical instability of the sovereignty of the state and rights-bearing citizen?

An article-length study about the economic history of Brazil focusing on the introduction of the metric system and the conduct of the first national census in the 1870s.

My research looks at two major events that took place in Brazil in 1872: the first national census and the adoption of the metric system of weights and measures. These events are important to Brazil's history because of their potential to integrate the domestic economy. Prior to the adoption of the metric system Brazilians used regional weights and measures of differing values, making long-distance exchange difficult. Prior to the national census, Brazilian planners lacked much beyond a general understanding of the demographics of the internal market. Both innovations brought Brazilians into closer contact with state officials whose policies had powerful effects on their livelihoods This project opens an investigation into the history of Brazil's domestic economy, where most Brazilians lived and worked and where government initiatives had the greatest potential to affect their quality of life and standard of living.

A book-length study on the architecture of disability accommodations in France, 1750-1975.

This project will explore how architectural and urban developments in France accommodated, and at times failed to accommodate, the disabled subject between 1750 and 1975. It will analyze the evolving design of pedagogical institutions for the deaf and the blind, as well as urban reform measures that gradually made cities more legible and navigable, alongside changing medical and cultural constructions of the different kinds of sensory disabilities. In the era when conceptions of disability were shifting from moral to scientific terms, material and spatial interfaces played increasingly formative roles in programs of education, therapy, and integration. By recovering the ways in which the modern built environment shaped, and was shaped by, non-normative human experiences, this project situates disability studies at the heart of humanistic inquiry into the forces—whether cultural, environmental, or political—mediating the relationship between individuals and society.