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Grant program: Summer Stipends
Date range: 2018-2020

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Page size:
 253 items in 6 pages
Award Number Grant ProgramAward RecipientProject TitleAward PeriodApproved Award Total
Page size:
 253 items in 6 pages
FT-259422-18Research Programs: Summer StipendsOlivia Alton WeisserA Cultural History of Venereal Disease and its Treatment in Early Modern England7/1/2019 - 8/31/2019$6,000.00OliviaAltonWeisser   University of Massachusetts, BostonBostonMA02125-3300USA2018History and Philosophy of Science, Technology, and MedicineSummer StipendsResearch Programs6000060000

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

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

FT-259448-18Research Programs: Summer StipendsMargaret Elizabeth ClintonPower and Petroleum in China and the Western Pacific, 1870-Present7/1/2018 - 8/31/2018$6,000.00MargaretElizabethClinton   President and Fellows of Middlebury CollegeMiddleburyVT05753-6004USA2018East Asian HistorySummer StipendsResearch Programs6000060000

Research and writing leading to publication of a book on the history of petroleum in China and the Western Pacific from 1870.

China’s petroleum history has yet to be written, despite its protracted duration and vast geographical reach. China and the Western Pacific region stretching from Russia’s Far East and Japan through Singapore, the Malacca Straits, and Indonesia, have been no less vital to the global history of oil than the better-known entanglements of Euro-America and the Middle East. My book-length environmental history project analyzes China’s long participation in shifting global networks of oil production alongside the changing meanings of oil consumption in daily life. A Summer Stipend will allow me to research and write the book’s third chapter, addressing the years 1949-1976. This chapter focuses on the everyday life of oil production under Maoism, particularly as lived and debated in the Daqing oil fields discovered in the northeastern region of Manchuria in 1959, and what this now-eclipsed period tells us about the possibilities and limits of fossil fuel-based energy sovereignty.

FT-259487-18Research Programs: Summer StipendsBenjamin Lee WhiteThe Authorship of the Pauline Epistles: The Promise and Limitations of Computational Methods6/1/2018 - 7/31/2018$6,000.00BenjaminLeeWhite   Clemson UniversityClemsonSC29634-0001USA2018Computational LinguisticsSummer StipendsResearch Programs6000060000

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

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

FT-259489-18Research Programs: Summer StipendsEmily Suzanne ClarkJesuit Missions and Native Communities in the Northwest, 1840–19406/1/2018 - 7/31/2018$6,000.00EmilySuzanneClark   Corporation of Gonzaga UniversitySpokaneWA99258-1774USA2018History of ReligionSummer StipendsResearch Programs6000060000

Research and writing of a chapter in a history of Jesuit missions to Native Americans in the American Northwest and Alaska, 1840-1940.

Using the rich and understudied archive of the Jesuits of the Oregon Province, this book project focuses on the interactions between Jesuit priests and Native communities in the Northwest region of the United States. While many scholars of American religion have studied Christian missions to Native communities in early America and the eastern states, this project shifts the focus westward and later in American history. It also expands our understanding of conversion and colonialism. Even as the Jesuit priests emphasized their dedication to serving native communities, their actions aided the expansion of the U. S. nation-state through processes of Christianizing and "civilizing." Thus, the book continues a turn in the scholarship on missions and Native Christians to think of conversion as a complicated process with no universal definition. The native communities who hosted them accepted, resisted, and adapted the Catholicism and culture brought by the Jesuits.

FT-259499-18Research Programs: Summer StipendsCecile WhitingGlobal War and the New American Landscape, 1939–487/1/2018 - 8/31/2018$6,000.00Cecile Whiting   Regents of the University of California, IrvineIrvineCA92617-3066USA2018Art History and CriticismSummer StipendsResearch Programs6000060000

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

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

FT-259521-18Research Programs: Summer StipendsWilleke Sandler, PhDUnofficial Empire: Germans Between Germany and Tanganyika, 1925–19456/1/2018 - 7/31/2018$6,000.00Willeke Sandler   Loyola University MarylandBaltimoreMD21210-2601USA2018European HistorySummer StipendsResearch Programs6000060000

Research and writing leading to publication of a book on Germany's former African colony Tanganyika (1925-1945).

Although Germany was stripped of its overseas empire in 1919, from the mid-1920s through the mid-1940s hundreds of Germans immigrated to the former colony of German East Africa (now the British Mandate of Tanganyika). They established tightly-knit communities in the Mandate that received support from the German Foreign Office as well as Nazi organizations. I use the case study of Tanganyika to explore the (re)creation of an expatriate community within the context of a territory that had once been German. This obstinate form of “colonialism without colonies” ignored the reality of Germany’s official position in Africa and helped to establish an unofficial German colony in Tanganyika. A space of overlapping imperial claims, of German pasts and hoped-for futures, and of individual Germans’ economic goals, Tanganyika in the interwar period demonstrates the continued importance of the African continent to the German nation and state after the end of formal empire.

FT-259563-18Research Programs: Summer StipendsEmily CallaciPlanning the African Family in the 1960s and 1970s7/1/2018 - 8/31/2018$6,000.00Emily Callaci   University of Wisconsin, MadisonMadisonWI53715-1218USA2018African HistorySummer StipendsResearch Programs6000060000

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

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

FT-259564-18Research Programs: Summer StipendsNicole EtchesonSuffrage in the Post-Civil War United States7/1/2018 - 8/31/2018$6,000.00Nicole Etcheson   Ball State UniversityMuncieIN47306-1022USA2018U.S. HistorySummer StipendsResearch Programs6000060000

A book on disputes over suffrage for women, African Americans, and ex-Confederates in the post-Civil War era.

Before the Civil War, there was no right to vote. Voting was a privilege with each state deciding whether to set racial, gender, education, property, or naturalization requirements for its electorate. The Civil War destabilized this norm. Native-born white men lost the vote in some states because of service or aid to the Confederacy. African American men claimed suffrage based on loyalty, military service, and the need to protect their newly acquired freedom. Woman suffrage advocates hoped to advance their rights by exploiting the re-opened debate over suffrage. In ways previously unrecognized, these movements intersected and played off each other even as the federal government supplanted the states as arbiter of qualifications for what was increasingly defined not as a "privilege" but a "right." Moreover the effects of these Civil War suffrage disputes would linger well into the twentieth century, having ramifications for African American voting rights and women's rights.

FT-259565-18Research Programs: Summer StipendsStephen Hong SohnThe Korean War (1950–53) in Poetry by Korean Americans7/1/2018 - 8/31/2018$6,000.00StephenHongSohn   Regents of the University of California, RiversideRiversideCA92521-0001USA2018American LiteratureSummer StipendsResearch Programs6000060000

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

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

FT-259568-18Research Programs: Summer StipendsElizabeth BondThe Writing Public: Participatory Knowledge Production in Enlightenment and Revolutionary France6/1/2018 - 7/31/2018$6,000.00Elizabeth Bond   Ohio State UniversityColumbusOH43210-1349USA2018European HistorySummer StipendsResearch Programs6000060000

Preparation for publication of a book-length study of the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, and French newspapers from 1770 to 1791.

My book project, 'Experiencing the Enlightenment: an Eighteenth-Century Information Network,' offers new insight into the cardinal question in my field: the link between the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. Drawing upon letters to the editor written by men and women throughout France between 1770 and 1791, I explore how thousands of readers consumed and interpreted the intellectual movements of their day. Representing a wide range of readers, such letters articulated solutions to everyday problems, honing habits of mind focused on knowing the world and changing society. Bringing previously unexamined sources and digital humanities approaches to bear on an enduring question, my work renders a more nuanced understanding of popular cultural responses to intellectual movements.

FT-259578-18Research Programs: Summer StipendsSarah E. GardnerReading During the American Civil War, 1861–18656/1/2018 - 7/31/2018$6,000.00SarahE.Gardner   Corporation Of Mercer UniversityMaconGA31207-1515USA2018U.S. HistorySummer StipendsResearch Programs6000060000

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

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

FT-259602-18Research Programs: Summer StipendsKathleen Elizabeth NewmanArgentine Early Sound Film (1933–1935)6/1/2018 - 7/31/2018$6,000.00KathleenElizabethNewman   University of IowaIowa CityIA52242-1320USA2018Film History and CriticismSummer StipendsResearch Programs6000060000

Research and writing leading to publication of a book about Argentinian film (1910-1935).

"Argentine Early Sound Film (1933-1935)" is part of the book project, Transnational Modernity: Argentine Cinema and Society, 1910-1935, a study of the relation between silent and early sound film, early feminist movements, and democratization in Argentina. The book examines the competitive roles of (a) Argentine fiction feature films and newsreels and (b) imported, international cinema, mainly from the United States, in shaping a new political imaginary in Argentina in the early twentieth century, first, from the centenary of national independence in 1910 through 1930, the year of the nation's first military coup of the twentieth century, and, second, the dictatorship (1930-1932) and its aftermath (1932-1935). The central research question of this historical and theoretical book project concerns the role of cinema in social transformations of modernity in Argentina, which included a transformation of gender roles and a redefinition of citizenship.

FT-259619-18Research Programs: Summer StipendsZachary BrittsanMurder and Justice in Mexico’s Age of Conflict, 1847-18716/1/2018 - 7/31/2018$6,000.00Zachary Brittsan   Texas Tech UniversityLubbockTX79409-0006USA2018Latin American HistorySummer StipendsResearch Programs6000060000

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

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

FT-259620-18Research Programs: Summer StipendsJose Luis Bermudez OspinaThe Power of Frames: Rethinking Models of Rational Decision-Making7/1/2018 - 8/31/2018$6,000.00JoseLuisBermudez Ospina   Texas A & M University, College StationCollege StationTX77843-0001USA2018Philosophy, GeneralSummer StipendsResearch Programs6000060000

Research and writing leading to publication of a book on philosophical models of decision-making.

Should values and decisions be influenced by how we frame the outcomes we confront and the choices we have to make? The orthodox view (as found, for example, in psychology and behavioral economics) is that any such influence is fundamentally irrational. The goal of this project is a book, The Power of Frames (under contract to Cambridge University Press) in which I will argue against this orthodox view. Problems with standard ways of thinking about framing emerge when we apply insights from philosophy and related areas of the humanities. The book explores a range of cases illustrating how frame-sensitivity is an integral part of rational decision-making. I draw on examples from Greek and Shakespearean tragedy, ethical dilemmas, group identification, social coordination, and practical psychological problems such as exercising self-control in the face of temptation.

FT-259640-18Research Programs: Summer StipendsLauren MeekerMoral Responsibility, Gender, and Social Change in Lineage Ritual in Northern Vietnam7/1/2018 - 8/31/2018$6,000.00Lauren Meeker   SUNY Research Foundation, College at New PaltzNew PaltzNY12561-2407USA2018Cultural AnthropologySummer StipendsResearch Programs6000060000

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

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

FT-259641-18Research Programs: Summer StipendsWaitman Wade Beorn, PhDBetween the Wires: The Janowska Camp and the Holocaust in Lviv7/1/2019 - 8/31/2019$6,000.00WaitmanWadeBeorn   University of VirginiaCharlottesvilleVA22903-4833USA2018European HistorySummer StipendsResearch Programs6000060000

Research and writing leading to publication of a book on the Janowska camp in Poland during World War II.

This project seeks support to finish research and begin writing a manuscript on the Janowska camp in Lviv, Ukraine. This concentration camp has received little scholarly study despite the fact that the Nazis murdered at least 80,000 Jews in there. Relying on extensive and varied sources including maps, photographs, artwork, perpetrator and survivor testimony, site surveys, and archival documents, I am writing the first comprehensive history of this important place which served as a “hybrid” camp, functioning as a concentration camp, a transit camp to the extermination camp of Belzec, and a dedicated killing site in its own right. In addition, I am applying an interdisciplinary approach to the project that recognizes spatial aspects of the camp’s history that enrich our understanding of it at the micro, local, and regional scale. This includes the microspaces of the camp and its role as the hub of a network of perpetrators in the region.

FT-259642-18Research Programs: Summer StipendsMartine Jean, PhDRoutine Imprisonment, Race, and Citizenship in 19th Century Brazil, 1830–18906/1/2018 - 7/31/2018$6,000.00Martine Jean   University of South CarolinaColumbiaSC29208-0001USA2018Latin American HistorySummer StipendsResearch Programs6000060000

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

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

FT-259659-18Research Programs: Summer StipendsCassio Ferreira de OliveiraCollective and Individual Identity Formation in the Soviet Picaresque Novel, 1921-19387/1/2018 - 8/31/2018$6,000.00CassioFerreirade Oliveira   Portland State UniversityPortlandOR97207-0751USA2018Slavic LiteratureSummer StipendsResearch Programs6000060000

Research and writing leading to a book on the genre of the picaresque novel under the Soviet regime in the years 1921-1938.

Archival research and completion of book chapter on Soviet picaresque narratives. In my book manuscript, I analyze the role of the picaresque as a locus of individual resistance, ambivalence, and apparent reconciliation vis-à-vis the Soviet regime. The picaresque narrates the adventures of a character in the margins of society and his attempts at social ascension and rehabilitation across the territory of a rapidly changing USSR. As a mode of writing and of literary representation of the Soviet Union’s breakneck development, the picaresque suited writers as a means to come to terms with disparate aspects of life in communism. Much as the classical picaresque at once depicted and undermined the Spanish colonial enterprise in the Age of Discoveries, the Soviet picaresque narratives participated in an empire-building project while questioning the basic tenets of the communist experiment.

FT-259686-18Research Programs: Summer StipendsJason H. PearlBalloon Flight and British Literature of the 18th and 19th Centuries7/1/2018 - 8/31/2018$6,000.00JasonH.Pearl   Florida International University Board of TrusteesMiamiFL33199-2516USA2018British LiteratureSummer StipendsResearch Programs6000060000

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

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

FT-259697-18Research Programs: Summer StipendsSarah A. CurtisThe Culture of Childhood in Nineteenth-Century France6/1/2018 - 7/31/2018$6,000.00SarahA.Curtis   San Francisco State UniversitySan FranciscoCA94132-1722USA2018European HistorySummer StipendsResearch Programs6000060000

Research for a book-length study on the history and culture of childhood in 19th-century France.

This book-length project examines the culture of childhood in France from approximately 1850 until the eve of World War I. In mid- to late-19th-century France, changing attitudes towards children as well as the rise of consumer culture both reflected and shaped a new focus on children as economic actors, social beings, and cultural icons. Through an examination of children's literature, material objects, publicity materials, memoirs, and contemporary criticism, this project will show how a new culture of childhood developed in a society undergoing social, economic, and demographic transformation, political democratization, imperial expansion, and Catholic-anticlerical conflict. It argues that both consumerism and anxiety about the future of the nation shaped children’s cultural experiences as well as adult expectations for them during a period when children were critical to the future of the French nation and republic.

FT-259718-18Research Programs: Summer StipendsSascha Thyme ScottInterpreting Early 20th-Century Paintings by Pueblo Artists of the American Southwest7/1/2018 - 8/31/2018$6,000.00SaschaThymeScott   Syracuse UniversitySyracuseNY13244-0001USA2018History, Criticism, and Theory of the ArtsSummer StipendsResearch Programs6000060000

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

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

FT-259722-18Research Programs: Summer StipendsMitra J. SharafiFear of the False: Forensic Science in Colonial India, 1856–19477/1/2018 - 8/31/2018$6,000.00MitraJ.Sharafi   University of Wisconsin, MadisonMadisonWI53715-1218USA2018Legal HistorySummer StipendsResearch Programs6000060000

Research and writing leading to publication of a book on the history of forensic science in colonial India, covering 1856-1947.

Between 1856 and 1947, a web of institutions tailored to the scientific detection of crime in South Asia was created. India’s new experts in toxicology, blood stains, handwriting analysis, and explosives were supposed to cut through the confusion produced by the perjury and forgery of “mendacious natives” to extract objective scientific truth in the service of a neutral vision of justice. In practice, however, the use of the new forensic science in the courtroom invited increasingly complicated and conflicting answers to the questions, "what is truth?" and "what is justice?" This study, which will be the first book-length history of forensic science in colonial India, reveals that a system initially structured along fault lines of racial mistrust expanded into a site for competing conceptions of truth and justice among legal, scientific, and medical professionals, both South Asian and European.

FT-259723-18Research Programs: Summer StipendsVictoria FortunaConcert Dance, Race, and Identity in Argentina10/1/2018 - 11/30/2018$6,000.00Victoria Fortuna   Reed CollegePortlandOR97202-8138USA2018Dance History and CriticismSummer StipendsResearch Programs6000060000

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

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

FT-259726-18Research Programs: Summer StipendsMargarete Myers FeinsteinHolocaust Survivors and Retribution at the End of World War II6/1/2018 - 7/31/2018$6,000.00MargareteMyersFeinstein   Loyola Marymount UniversityLos AngelesCA90045-2623USA2018Jewish StudiesSummer StipendsResearch Programs6000060000

Research and writing leading to publication of a book on Jewish revenge after the Holocaust.

This book chapter on Jewish revenge after the Holocaust shines a new light on the myth of Jewish passivity in response to Nazi persecution. It challenges popular perceptions of Holocaust survivors as spontaneous paragons of reconciliation and tolerance, suggesting instead that attitudes of reconciliation came later and with effort. By acknowledging the role of revenge in survivors' transition to post-genocide life, we can gain insights into their gendered responses to trauma and into the processes by which they sought to reclaim control over their lives. The influence of religious traditions and Zionist politics on survivors' decisions about revenge acts is also explored. This study suggests that Jewish responses may not have been so very different from that of other victims of Nazism. Scholars of other genocides can find it useful for comparison to teach us more about what promotes reconciliation and what fosters the desire for vengeance.

FT-259751-18Research Programs: Summer StipendsDenise Eileen McCoskeyEugenics and Classical Scholarship in Early 20th-Century America6/1/2018 - 7/31/2018$6,000.00DeniseEileenMcCoskey   Miami UniversityOxfordOH45056-1846USA2018ClassicsSummer StipendsResearch Programs6000060000

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

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

FT-259759-18Research Programs: Summer StipendsErin Claire CageThe Science of Proof: Forensic Medicine in Nineteenth-Century France6/1/2018 - 7/31/2018$6,000.00ErinClaireCage   University of South AlabamaMobileAL36688-3053USA2018European HistorySummer StipendsResearch Programs6000060000

Research for a book-length study on the relationship between forensic science and law in 19th-century France.

This book project examines the history of forensics, or legal medicine, in France during the nineteenth century. It analyzes how medical and scientific knowledge was constructed in relation to transformations in the legal and penal systems, shifting political configurations, class, and gender. Drawing upon records of hundreds of legal proceedings, medical reports, and forensic studies, my research reveals how the state, medical authorities, jurists, and lay persons negotiated the boundaries between doubt and certainty as well as innocence and criminality. “The Science of Proof” argues that the practice of forensic medicine was fraught with uncertainty and that the rise of forensic experts both bolstered and undermined the pursuit of justice.

FT-259760-18Research Programs: Summer StipendsVirginia BlantonShaping Monastic Devotional Culture in 14th-Century England7/1/2018 - 8/31/2018$6,000.00Virginia Blanton   University of Missouri, Kansas CityKansas CityMO64110-2235USA2018Medieval StudiesSummer StipendsResearch Programs6000060000

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

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

FT-259830-18Research Programs: Summer StipendsSean Michael FarrellThe Trillick Railway Outrage: Making Sectarianism in Victorian Ireland8/1/2018 - 9/30/2018$6,000.00SeanMichaelFarrell   Northern Illinois UniversityDeKalbIL60115-2828USA2018Cultural HistorySummer StipendsResearch Programs6000060000

Research and writing leading to publication of a book on religious conflict in 19th century Ireland.

This book examines an 1854 assassination attempt in northwestern Ireland. One of the world’s first “train wreckings,” Trillick received widespread newspaper coverage. Commentators assumed this was a sectarian crime, and seven Catholic railway workers were arrested soon after the crash. Despite their best efforts, officials determined there was insufficient evidence to go to trial and released the men, who quickly left the region, disappearing into Ireland’s global diaspora. The first book-length study of this dramatic event, my work highlights the constructed nature of Catholic-Protestant division in nineteenth-century Ireland. I do this by focusing on the ways that Trillick impacted four individuals linked to the crash. This microhistorical approach is designed to detail the ways that sectarian narratives conceal the complexity of human experience. This Irish story has obvious contemporary relevance, given the prevalence of religious violence in divided societies around the world.

FT-259832-18Research Programs: Summer StipendsRebecca Scharbach WollenbergBeyond the Book: Reimagining the Early Reception History of the Bible5/1/2018 - 6/30/2018$6,000.00RebeccaScharbachWollenberg   Regents of the University of MichiganAnn ArborMI48109-1015USA2018History of ReligionSummer StipendsResearch Programs6000060000

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

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

FT-259833-18Research Programs: Summer StipendsElizabeth Rebecca WrightTheater and the Slave Trade in 15th- and 16th-Century Spain and Portugal5/1/2018 - 6/30/2018$6,000.00ElizabethRebeccaWright   University of GeorgiaAthensGA30602-0001USA2018Renaissance StudiesSummer StipendsResearch Programs6000060000

Research for a book-length study of relationships between the Atlantic Slave Trade and the emergence of professional theater in early modern Spain and Portugal.

“Stages of Servitude in Early Modern Iberia” examines an enduring question about the Atlantic slave trade that first comes into view in Portugal and Spain in the late fifteenth century: why did early awareness of its cruelty and illegality not foment abolitionism? I ask how the thriving theater cultures of Spain and Portugal contributed to the naturalization of demeaning images of sub-Saharan Africans and the institutionalization of the Atlantic slave trade. Yet my book also considers a paradox: black Africans and Afro-descendant Iberians found rare chances for artistic validation and economic advancement in the theater business, working as musicians, actors, stagehands, and writers. My study is organized in five chapters (stages), understood in spatial-temporal terms as the cultural contexts where slave-holding was displayed. The completed book will enhance our understanding of Renaissance theater and empire building.

FT-259846-18Research Programs: Summer StipendsRachel GabaraRealism and African Documentary Film, 1905 to the Present6/1/2018 - 7/31/2018$6,000.00Rachel Gabara   University of GeorgiaAthensGA30602-0001USA2018Film History and CriticismSummer StipendsResearch Programs6000060000

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

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

FT-259849-18Research Programs: Summer StipendsPatrick M. ErbenGerman Pietism and American Literature of the Late 18th and 19th Centuries6/1/2018 - 7/31/2018$6,000.00PatrickM.Erben   University of West GeorgiaCarrolltonGA30118-0001USA2018American LiteratureSummer StipendsResearch Programs6000060000

Research leading to an article and book on the influence of German Pietism on late 18th- and 19th-century American literature.

My current book project investigates the profound yet neglected role of German Pietism in the development of English-language American literature. A 17th and 18th century religious reform movement, Pietism emphasized a personal and emotional relationship between individuals and the Christian redeemer. The transatlantic spread of Pietism by German immigrants such as the Moravians shaped the occupation with sensibility, feeling, and inwardness in the movement from Enlightenment to Romanticism. My project thus endeavors a major scholarly reassessment of canonical and non-canonical authors of late 18th and 19th-century American literature and upends longstanding origin narratives grounded in what Sacvan Bercovitch called The Puritan Origins of the American Self (1975). During the funding period, I would research and write an article titled “The Cult of Zinzendorf in 19th-Century American Literature and Culture,” examining the American popularity of the founder of the Moravian Church.

FT-259859-18Research Programs: Summer StipendsKevin John AdamsCivil Rights and Anti-Chinese Violence in Seattle During the 1880s7/1/2018 - 8/31/2018$6,000.00KevinJohnAdams   Kent State UniversityKentOH44242-0001USA2018U.S. HistorySummer StipendsResearch Programs6000060000

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

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

FT-259870-18Research Programs: Summer StipendsJulia Quinn Bryan-WilsonThe Works of American Sculptor Louise Nevelson (1899–1988)6/1/2018 - 7/31/2018$6,000.00JuliaQuinnBryan-Wilson   University of California, BerkeleyBerkeleyCA94704-5940USA2018Art History and CriticismSummer StipendsResearch Programs6000060000

Preparation of a book about the American sculptor Louise Nevelson (1899-1988).

Louise Nevelson’s Modernisms will be the first scholarly monograph to closely examine the monochromatic sculptures of a well-known but little studied figure within 20th-century American art. Though Nevelson frequently showed alongside Abstract Expressionist artists in her lifetime (1899-1988), I claim that her scavenged wood wall-based grids, which hover between painting and sculpture, continue to resist easy categorization. The book asserts that Nevelson's work challenges and complicates what modernism looks like, and argues that her color choices (in particular her stated allegiance to blackness) as well as her formal interest in carpentry propose political identifications, ones that offer novel ways of conceiving how sculpture constructs multiple selves in relation to race and gender. I define her modernisms as multiple, related to her art’s aesthetic of embellishment and to her understanding of herself as an atypical modern woman.

FT-259893-18Research Programs: Summer StipendsMelinda Latour O'BrienMoral Song in Late Renaissance France, 1550-16507/1/2018 - 8/31/2018$6,000.00Melinda Latour O'Brien   Tufts UniversitySomervilleMA02144-2401USA2018Music History and CriticismSummer StipendsResearch Programs6000060000

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

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

FT-259916-18Research Programs: Summer StipendsRenata Nicole KellerGround Zero: The Cuban Missile Crisis in Latin America7/1/2018 - 8/31/2018$6,000.00RenataNicoleKeller   University of Nevada, RenoRenoNV89557-0001USA2018Latin American HistorySummer StipendsResearch Programs6000060000

A book-length study of Latin American reactions to the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962.

Ground Zero is a hemispheric history of the Cuban Missile Crisis. It argues that this event was critical to shaping Latin American history and that, in turn, Latin America was critical to the global history of the crisis. Faced with the threat of nuclear war, Latin American politicians, military officers, and citizens seized active roles in the crisis, and their responses had important results. Few histories of the missile crisis look beyond the United States, the Soviet Union, and Cuba, and no histories of Latin America analyze the wider impact of the crisis. This project draws on archival sources from across the Americas, the records of international organizations like the United Nations and the Organization of American States, and the cultural productions of diverse Latin Americans to determine the impact of the Cuban Missile Crisis on Latin America and uncover the ways that Latin American governments and individuals shaped the outcome of the crisis.

FT-259941-18Research Programs: Summer StipendsJ. Cameron MonroeArchaeology at Cana: A West African City of the Atlantic Era, 1600–18947/1/2018 - 8/31/2018$6,000.00J. Cameron Monroe   Regents of the University of California, Santa CruzSanta CruzCA95064-1077USA2018ArchaeologySummer StipendsResearch Programs6000060000

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

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

FT-259950-18Research Programs: Summer StipendsJolene ZigarovichDeath and the Body in the Eighteenth-Century Novel6/1/2018 - 7/31/2018$6,000.00Jolene Zigarovich   University of Northern IowaCedar FallsIA50614-0001USA2018British LiteratureSummer StipendsResearch Programs6000060000

Research leading to a book on the changing attitudes toward death, funeral practices, and mortality as reflected in 18th-century British novels.

Without a book-length study of death in eighteenth-century Britain, historical facts concerning funerary practices and the culture’s overall relationship with mortality are only beginning to be understood. By incorporating a variety of historical discourses–wills, undertaking histories, medical studies, philosophical treatises and religious tracts–my project illuminates a shift in control over death and the body from religious institutions to the individual, which resulted in secular, aesthetic approaches to death and dying. Preserving Clarissa, and other Morbid Curiosities in the Eighteenth-Century Novel reveals that the body itself—its parts, and its preserved, visual representation—functioned as erotic memento, and it suggests that preserved remains became symbols of individuality and subjectivity. This project thereby forces us to reassess the eighteenth-century response to and representation of the dead and dead-like body, and its fetishized purpose and use in fiction.

FT-259957-18Research Programs: Summer StipendsMichael David Dwyer, PhDTinsel and Rust: Hollywood Film and Postindustrial Cities in the United States6/1/2018 - 7/31/2018$6,000.00MichaelDavidDwyer   Arcadia UniversityGlensidePA19038-3215USA2018Media StudiesSummer StipendsResearch Programs6000060000

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

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

FT-259958-18Research Programs: Summer StipendsSuzanne Sutherland DuchacekWar, Diplomacy, and Knowledge in Habsburg Europe (18th and 19th Centuries)6/1/2018 - 7/31/2018$6,000.00SuzanneSutherlandDuchacek   Middle Tennessee State UniversityMurfreesboroTN37132-0001USA2018Military HistorySummer StipendsResearch Programs6000060000

Preparation for publication of a book-length study of 17th-century European military entrepreneurs, warfare, and diplomacy.

This study examines the social, cultural, and political impact of military contracting in the last great age of contracting prior to the modern era. In the seventeenth century, military entrepreneurs used private wealth, credit, and connections to raise and command regiments since war had become pervasive but rulers lacked large-scale standing forces. What forms of power emerge when contractors monopolize violence? How do their activities redefine the state and political allegiances? How did new forms of power influence other dynamic elements of early modern life, including the growth of science? Focusing on Italian military entrepreneurs in Austrian Habsburg service, this book argues that contractors innovated a new kind of expertise, military science. They undermined political allegiances and built new ties across regions. Military men contributed to a dizzying new mobility in Europe that destabilized traditional boundaries and opened up spaces for new ideas and practices.

FT-259974-18Research Programs: Summer StipendsCorinna ZeltsmanPrinters and Liberalism in Nineteenth-Century Mexico6/1/2018 - 7/31/2018$6,000.00Corinna Zeltsman   Princeton UniversityStatesboroGA30458USA2018Latin American HistorySummer StipendsResearch Programs6000060000

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

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

FT-259994-18Research Programs: Summer StipendsPaula C. ParkLatin America in the Philippines: Rethinking Intercoloniality Across the Hispanic Pacific (1898–1964)7/1/2018 - 8/31/2018$6,000.00PaulaC.Park   Wesleyan UniversityMiddletownCT06459-3208USA2018Latin American LiteratureSummer StipendsResearch Programs6000060000

Research and writing of a book-length study on literary and cultural connections between the Philippines and Latin America, 1898-1964.

My book-length project is comprised of five chapters that explore various parallels and concrete points of contact between Latin American and Filipino writers and diplomats from 1898 to 1964, two emblematic years. While 1898 was a turning point for the entangled histories of the Philippines, Cuba, and Puerto Rico, which became subject--albeit in different ways--to US imperialism, 1964 is a symbolic year during which major celebrations were held in the Philippines and Mexico for the fourth centenary of the 1564 expedition that resulted in the discovery of a maritime return route from the Philippines to New Spain (modern day Mexico). With the NEH summer stipend, I plan to complete the final phase of archival research for my project and to draft the last chapter.

FT-260009-18Research Programs: Summer StipendsNathan John MartinThe Philosophers' Rameau: Music Theory in the Encyclopédie6/1/2018 - 7/31/2018$6,000.00NathanJohnMartin   Regents of the University of MichiganAnn ArborMI48109-1015USA2018Music History and CriticismSummer StipendsResearch Programs6000060000

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

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

FT-260035-18Research Programs: Summer StipendsPhillip TroutmanThe Radical Visual Rhetoric of American Abolition in the 1830s6/1/2018 - 7/31/2018$6,000.00Phillip Troutman   George Washington UniversityWashingtonDC20052-0001USA2018U.S. HistorySummer StipendsResearch Programs6000060000

The completion of two chapters of a book on images in abolitionist publications during the 1830s.

My book project, ‘Incendiary Pictures,’ is the first to analyze American abolitionist image-making in the full context of its formative decade, the 1830s, arguing that its visual rhetoric was creative and its ideology radically interracial, with image-makers attending self-consciously to their own motives, methods, messages, and audiences. Scholars focusing on 1840s-1850s images interpret them as patronizing, objectifying, sentimentalizing, and exploitative. By contrast, I show that in the 1830s, abolitionist visual rhetoric asserted African American agency and subjectivity, interracial collaboration and action, and civil rights. By attending closely to each creator’s ideology and by taking cues from W. T. J. Mitchell’s question, “what do pictures want?”—in the double sense of demanding and lacking—I show how abolitionists creatively exploited images’ power to persuade but also self-consciously acknowledged the limits of any image to convey slavery’s full brutality.

FT-260081-18Research Programs: Summer StipendsNathan Edward Suhr-SytsmaThe Role of Poetry in Contemporary African Literary Communities6/1/2018 - 7/31/2018$6,000.00NathanEdwardSuhr-Sytsma   Emory UniversityAtlantaGA30322-1018USA2018African LiteratureSummer StipendsResearch Programs6000060000

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

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

FT-260082-18Research Programs: Summer StipendsZena HitzIntellectual Life: What It Is and Why It Matters5/1/2018 - 6/30/2018$6,000.00Zena Hitz   St. John's College, Main CampusAnnapolisMD21401-1687USA2018Philosophy, GeneralSummer StipendsResearch Programs6000060000

Completion of a book on the importance of intellectual life, addressing historical and contemporary examples of social withdrawal, contemplation, and scientific reflection.

Contrary to many current writers, intellectual life is important for more than just profit or politics. Intellectual activity is good for human beings—as an escape, a refuge, a source of insight, a ground for dignity, and as a way of relating to others. These goods justify our institutions for the humanities and the liberal arts, and lay the ground for the future institutions that may replace them. This book-length essay (approximately 50,000 words) is a response to the 'crisis in the humanities' that puts that crisis in a broader perspective.

FT-260113-18Research Programs: Summer StipendsAaron Paul JohnsonPhilosophy and Tradition in the Contra Julianumby Cyril of Alexandria (c. 375–444)5/1/2018 - 7/31/2018$6,000.00AaronPaulJohnson   Lee UniversityClevelandTN37311-4475USA2018Classical LiteratureSummer StipendsResearch Programs6000060000

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

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

FT-260114-18Research Programs: Summer StipendsLaura Moure CecchiniThe Lure of the Baroque in Italian Visual Culture, 1898–19456/1/2018 - 7/31/2018$6,000.00Laura Moure Cecchini   Colgate UniversityHamiltonNY13346-1338USA2018Art History and CriticismSummer StipendsResearch Programs6000060000

Preparation of a study on the revival of the 17th-century Baroque style in Italian art and architecture from 1898-1945.

Against dominant narratives about the chief role of the classical tradition in modern Italy, Baroquemania argues that between the country’s unification and the cataclysmic fall of fascism, Italian cultural conversations mostly revolved around the Baroque and its legacy. The Baroque was seen as a period of decline but also as one of the few experiences common to the entire peninsula. Baroquemania combines archival research and close readings of visual and material culture, with critical analyses of the Italian discourse on Baroque aesthetics. The book explores imaginative responses to the style in a variety of artistic mediums, with an eye to the debates in the academy and another to those outside of it: artists, architects, critics, and political ideologues. Intervening in the study of Italian visual culture and of the Baroque revival, Baroquemania re-appraises Italian modern art and sheds new light on the role of style in the cultural politics of the 19th and 20th centuries.

FT-260120-18Research Programs: Summer StipendsTraci Lynnea ParkerDepartment Stores and the Black Freedom Movement: Workers, Consumers, and Civil Rights from the 1930s to the 1980s7/1/2018 - 8/31/2018$6,000.00TraciLynneaParker   University of Massachusetts, AmherstAmherstMA01003-9242USA2018African American HistorySummer StipendsResearch Programs6000060000

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

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

FT-260121-18Research Programs: Summer StipendsDaniel Bernardo HershenzonJewish Manuscripts in the Early Modern Mediterranean: Between Piracy, Redemption, and the Spanish Inquisition9/1/2018 - 10/31/2018$6,000.00DanielBernardoHershenzon   University of ConnecticutStorrsCT06269-9000USA2018European HistorySummer StipendsResearch Programs6000060000

Research leading to publication of a book-length study of religious artifacts and piracy in the early modern western Mediterranean.

I am requesting the NEH Summer Stipend to conduct two months of research in the Bodleian Library (GB) and in the AHN and AGS (Spain) on the negotiations over the restitution of 3,000 Hebrew manuscripts, sent from Livorno to Algiers in the 1630’s, intercepted by Spanish pirates, and sent to the Inquisition’s dungeons. The story forms the 3rd chapter of a book project on religious artifacts—Korans, Bibles, prayer shawls, pictures of Christ and the Virgin, and relics—that as a byproduct of piracy and human trafficking circulated in the thousands in the early modern western Mediterranean, crossing religious boundaries. The project argues that during the 17th century such objects—captured, humiliated, redeemed—helped shape relations between Christians, Jews, and Muslims in the context of maritime piracy. Reconstructing their trajectories sheds new light on the experience of captivity and the practice of redemption, of people and objects.