Research and writing leading to publication of a book in the field of philosophy on grief arising from the death of intimates and loved ones.
 

Despite grief at the death of intimates or loved ones being a universal and perennial feature of human experience, contemporary philosophy has contributed very little to our understanding of the diverse ethical questions raised by grief. The proposed project will support the writing of the first ever book-length philosophical treatment of grief. The book will address such issues as whether grief responses are rational, how grief contributes to well-being, whether grief should ever be classified as a psychiatric illness, the place of anger in individual and collective grief, and ethical concerns about the exploitation of the vulnerability experienced during bereavement. This work will appeal to popular audiences curious to know how humanistic methods and knowledge can provide insight and consolation; to academic philosophers interested in death and dying, well-being, and moral psychology; and to scholarly experts in other disciplines seeking an atypical disciplinary perspective.

Research and writing leading to publication of a book on the films of Moroccan director Moumen Smihi (b. 1945) and the history of colonialism in the Arab world.

This project investigates films by Moroccan director Moumen Smihi to better understand the relationship between Arab cinema and the historical experiences of colonialism and modernity. In addressing Smihi's rich images and narratives of colonial encounter, the project analyzes the ways that Euro-American critical discourses have struggled to understand the relationship of Arab cultural production to a modernity that is often conceived as exclusively Euro-American. Using Smihi's films as a lens, my book rethinks those relationships, stressing long histories of mutual influence and exchange that destabilize accounts of Arab modernisms as derivative products of cultural borrowing or colonial imposition. Smihi's cinema offers a compelling vision of the way that cinema, a quintessentially modern technology, has animated relationships between Arab and non-Arab worlds, thus transforming the way we think about the axes of history, colonialism, nationalism, and modernity across the Middle East.

Writing and additonal research for a book about the medical activism of Helen Dickens during the years of 1935 to 1980.

I am applying for a twelve month grant for full funding to complete additional research and revise dissertation chapters into a manuscript. Specifically, my project focuses on obstetrician and gynecologist Helen Dickens, an African American woman and dynamic champion for reproductive rights who worked alongside clubwomen to establish community maternal clinics, as well as desegregate medical schools and hospitals. A groundbreaking study, it pushes the perimeters of the literature on the history of African-American women's claims for citizenship to encompass the emergence of female demands for improved access to health care during the Great Depression and throughout the post-World War II period. African-American women's construction of health care reform in Philadelphia provides a necessary corrective to prior assumptions regarding a perceived dearth of physicians' civil rights efficacy. Based on previously untapped archival sources, my book project demonstrates that women's articulation of health care politics in the urban milieu not only challenges traditional temporal boundaries of civil rights advocacy it reinforces the current shift toward analyzing female agency within the medical field.

Writing and research toward the publication of a book about racial cooperation in Reconstruction-era Perry County, Alabama.

"Civil Wars and Civil Beings" is a scholarly book manuscript about Perry County, Alabama, during the Civil War era. Reconstruction is foremost. Unlike neighboring places in the Black Belt, one of the South’s most violent areas during Reconstruction, Perry County experienced few major economic, political, or racial clashes following Confederate defeat. Nostalgic whites threatened several activist blacks and white Republicans in Perry, but only a handful of individuals were hanged, maimed, shot, whipped, or killed in the county due to prejudice. Instead, whites and blacks in Perry usually developed the types of relationships and institutions that helped African Americans enjoy citizenship. This occurrence was uncharacteristic for Alabama and the remainder of the South from 1865 through 1874, the orthodox years of Alabama Reconstruction.

Completion of a book on Jewish refugees from Poland who fled Nazi forces and the communities in Iran and the Muslim Soviet Union that accepted them.

Of the roughly 350,000 Polish Jews who escaped genocide during WWII, approximately 230,000, two-thirds, survived as refugees in the Muslim Soviet Union--Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Kazakhstan--and (in smaller yet significant numbers) Iran. We do not often think of the story of the Holocaust as one of Jews surviving in Muslim lands, and we do not often think of the networks that were in place in these areas. Tehran Children tells the story of these networks and of the complex web of aid groups, conflicting and converging national interests, diplomatic maneuvers, and local attitudes towards these refugees. It studies the experience of both the refugee and the host nation; of foreign and local aid; of trans-national diplomacy; of hunger--its relief and its use as a weapon; and of memory: how refugees remember and are remembered by the Muslim nations with which they had come in contact. The book has been accepted for publication by W.W. Norton.

Research and writing leading to publication of a book on attitudes toward death in ancient Greek tragic drama.

Studies of death in Greek tragedy have a long history in Classical scholarship, complemented by anthropological and archaeological work on ancient Greek views of the afterlife, death rituals, and funerary monuments. Although the idea that Greek tragedy offers readers and viewers insight into how to live with the knowledge that they will die seems obvious, there is no sustained treatment of the ways in which tragedy both exposes and responds to the contingencies of human mortality. Imitating the Dead: Facing Death in Ancient Greek Tragedy will be the first book to make the link between these contingencies and the emergence of tragic drama in Greece. It will also be the first to bring Greek tragedy to bear on questions of prolonging life in contemporary American culture. Positioning Greek tragedy within the long history of confronting death as a "condition of national life," and intended for a broad, educated audience, the book is inspired by the NEH Initiative on the Common Good.

Completion of a book-length study of how promotion of tourism forged and reinforced racial stereotypes in Bahia, Brazil, from the abolition of slavery in 1888 through the 1950s.

My project examines the reinvention of a former sugar zone in Brazil’s Northeast and probes how the promotion of tourism forged and reinforced racial stereotypes in the aftermath of abolition. To do this I turn to sources neglected by historians: illustrated tourist guides for Brazil’s colonial capital of Salvador, Bahia, written from the 1920s through the 1950s. I show how the budding tourism industry of this era developed a distinctive iconography that placed Afro-Bahians as central to the city’s landscape, an apparently inclusive visual culture that worked well with Brazil’s promotion of itself as a racial democracy. Yet I argue that the intersection of tourism and a new visual landscape of the city shaped and consolidated pernicious stereotypes of blackness and exoticized visions of African culture that continue to dominate the visual culture of the city today. I am seeking an NEH grant for a year of full-time work to be able to write three central chapters of my book manuscript.

Research for and writing of a book-length study of British-U.S. relations as viewed through family and emotional ties.

This project examines the history of the “special relationship” between Great Britain and the United States from the perspective of intimate relations. Influenced by the recent cultural and emotional turns of diplomatic history, and drawing on a wide range of historical sources and cultural texts, it examines how matters of the heart have linked – and divided – British and American men and women from the colonial era to the present. It also considers how the language and imagery of intimate affiliation – in particular, of gender, emotion, and sex – have both reflected and shaped political relations between the two English-speaking empires. By turning its focus on the personal sphere of trans-Atlantic relations, The Anglo-American Romance provides a new, critical lens for interrogating the evolution of an alliance that continues to hold tremendous global significance in the twenty-first century, for both good and ill.

Completion of a book on the cultural and intellectual history of war and violence in post-World War II France.

This book is a cultural and intellectual history of political imagination in Cold War France from 1954 to 1967. It analyzes how war, genocide and displacement shaped political ideas and cultural identities in a "postwar" time rife with conflicts in France and abroad. While in the shadow of the Holocaust, the French empire was consumed by violence--especially the bloody and brutal Algerian War of Independence. This interdisciplinary project explores how two groups (Francophone writers and artists who had migrated to France after experiencing war, genocide, or torture as well as French anti-colonial authors) proposed new ways of thinking about political community and belonging. The gendered rhetoric they used anchored their vision of politics and framed how injured and violated bodies were discussed. While most histories of the postwar tend to cast war and displacement as exceptional, this project shows how they are central to political imagination in a post-colonial global society.

Completion of a book on the history of slavery on the Arabian peninsula.

I will spend a year writing full-time to produce a manuscript on slavery on the Arabian Peninsula. I am asking for support for the last 7 months. In four chapters and an epilogue I will describe and analyze the lives of African and Baloch slaves including a short history of Africans’ presence in Arabia and the Makran Coast (Balochistan), an examination of slaves' specific ethnic and national origins, a description of the “seasoning” process for Arabian Peninsula slaves, an analysis of slave naming and exchanging practices, and detail of slaves’ work lives, families, and networks. This research contends that the power dynamics of slave holder-enslaved coupled with abolitionist and global economic pressures resulted in Arabian slaveholder practices and patterns that were in some ways similar to those of Atlantic slavery. This research will be disseminated as a published monograph intended for students and scholars of slavery and Middle East and South Asian Studies.

Preparation of a book-length study about ancient Greek philosophy and economics.

This award will support completion of research started five years ago on ancient Greek philosophers on economics, producing a scholarly book on this understudied but decisive topic. My claim is that the ancient Greek approach to economic issues is not a prescientific or immature one as it has been unduly viewed up so far, but a philosophical one, based on specific methods, problems and concepts. The purpose of the Greek philosophers on economics was to understand not only economic issues but also their significance for human life, raising questions rather than providing us with explanatory scientific tools. Ancient Greek economics was not a mere profit-oriented skill but an art and a thought dealing with the management of our needs, with all their ethical and political implications. This book will benefit both anthropological studies on ancient Greece and contemporary reflections on what economy is and means.

Preparation of a book-length study of the musical genre reggae en español and national and black identity in Panama, 1970s to the present.

Research on Panama has primarily focused on the Canal and the United States’ relationship to the construction of the “eighth wonder of the modern world.” The Canal brought to Panama not only international recognition but also thousands of black English-speaking laborers from Jamaica and Barbados. West Indian workers labored on the Canal, made Panama their permanent home, and in turn transformed the ethnic, racial, and linguistic composition of the nation. This project inserts black West Indian heritage into the Panamanian nation-state by analyzing the emergence and continuing influence of a black musical genre (reggae en español) as emblematic of national identity in Panama. Specifically, it interrogates Panamanian reggae en español artists’ engagement with the Panamanian nation-state and their articulation of national and black identity in a nation with a long history of exclusion of blacks.

A book about the first journal of science of the 17th- and 18th-century Habsburg Empire.

“Domesticating Curiosities” is a book project that examines the first journal of science, in the Habsburg Empire, The Miscellany of Curiosities, produced by the understudied Academy of Curiosi. The project explains how this journal transformed the human interest in natural curiosities into standardized experimental science. While much literature on French and English luminaries of early science exists, this project will support the first long-term study on the Academy of Curiosi. It proposes to show how this vast Continental network of local, regional and court physicians, who claimed alchemical and medical expertise, played a crucial role in establishing the sciences of chemistry and chemical medicine in the German territories. In exploring the historical roots of emerging experimental fields of chemical sciences the project offers an illuminating case study about how the transformative potential of this new literary genre shaped the relationship between humans and the natural world.

A book-length study of the history of winemaking in California from 1769 to 1920 with emphasis on labor relations during the Spanish colonial, Mexican national, and U.S. eras.

The Grapes of Conquest: Race, Labor, and the Industrialization of California Wine 1769-1920 examines the evolution of winegrowing across Spanish, Mexican, and American California and argues that the wine industry operated as a nexus of conquest, racialization, and citizenship formation throughout the 19th century. This study examines the interactions between the diverse groups who built the industry to demonstrate how wine served as an exemplar of racial exclusion, land ownership, and power. Franciscan missionaries, Californios, Indians, Mexicans, Germans, and Chinese came together in vineyards and wineries to reshape racial and class hierarchies. I contend that wine served as the economic engine for trade and agribusiness. Previous scholarship identifies the citrus industry as the birth of modern agribusiness in California; I argue that the labor and environmental needs of the wine industry laid the foundation for specialized industrial agriculture in twentieth-century California.

Research and writing leading to publication of a book on the dissemination and consumption of English literature in and beyond England during the 16th to 18th centuries.

My monograph is a study of the changing idea of English literature between the late 16th and the late 18th centuries, through the lens of the production and distribution of books and of information about books across Britain, England's colonies, and Europe. The project is based on the recognition that a reading public and its experience are shaped by where and how, through what networks of agents and what mechanisms of transmission they access their books. My aim is therefore to reveal how urban and national, colonial and international geographies impacted the mediation and perception of English literature in the key period when England rose from the cultural periphery of Europe to global significance, when literature separated from other fields of learning, and recreational reading became the repository of aesthetic value and national identity. I am requesting support for researching and drafting the second half of this project.

A book that examines native uprisings and political activism in Mexico and Guatemala from the 16th to the 19th centuries.

This book project takes a new approach to the history of native communities in Mexico and Guatemala during the colonial era (ca. 1519-1821). Foregrounding gender, the analysis uncovers previously unrecognized patterns in native labor, migration, and legal and political activism. It shows that colonial demands and changing demographics transformed migration patterns as well as native family structures across the centuries of Spanish rule. Indigenous individuals confronted these changes with strategies that varied by gender. Yet both men and women often sought to preserve families, ethnic affiliations, and forms of native sovereignty. For scholars and college students, the book will deepen knowledge about the survival of native societies in the Americas and in the larger Atlantic World. The project also speaks to broader current concerns, as it demonstrates colonial-era origins of today’s migrations across cultural and national borders.

A book investigating the social practices and material culture at al-Azhar, an Islamic center of learning in Cairo, from the 14th to the 17th centuries.

Founded in 972 in Cairo, al-Azhar is the leading religious authority for Sunni Islam. My book is a cultural biography of al-Azhar from the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries, a formative 250-year period, which straddles Egypt’s Mamluk and Ottoman eras. It investigates the complex interplay between the social structures and material culture that scaffolded Islamic learning at al-Azhar (from the rise of fraternities to lockers) and the social practices performed by people in day-to-day life that gave structure and meaning to its rich landscape. Scholarly consensus asserts that al-Azhar rose in prominence as an Islamic center of learning in the sixteenth century. The project reformulates the problématique of al-Azhar’s rise into an investigation of the transition of the Arab provinces to Ottoman rule, specifically the effect of the new administration on educational institutions. It combines sources in Arabic and Ottoman Turkish, including untapped Ottoman court records.

Completion of a book-length project on political and literary relationships between British Romanticism, suicide, the transatlantic slave trade.

This monograph traces the racialized antecedents of a well-known figure in British Romantic literature, the melancholy genius who dies by suicide. The project demonstrates how Romantic-era writers also used the idea of suicide to interrogate the roots of racial inequality based in liberal political philosophies. Individual chapters investigate the period's notions of property, personhood, citizenship, and sympathy in works by canonical and lesser-known writers of African and European descent, including Thomas Day and John Bicknell, Olaudah Equiano, Mary and Percy Shelley, William Wordsworth, William Wells Brown, and James Williams. This will be the first monograph focused on the Romantic period within a growing bibliography on the history of suicide and its role in political discourses.

Research and writing a biography of Fabián Garcia (1871-1947), a horticulturalist and instructor at New Mexico State University.

I am writing a book on Fabián García (1871-1947), a horticulturist whose work transformed the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, and, indeed, the world, by introducing new commercial crops to consumers. García was born in Chihuahua, Mexico, but immigrated to New Mexico and became a U.S. citizen just before attending college and beginning his career as a professional horticulturist. He earned fame for hybridizing a relatively mild and easily canned chile pepper that launched a global chile industry. Yet, his life and legacy extends beyond this one plant. By writing this book for a general audience, my aim is to highlight a variety of historical issues that are relevant to the world we live in today. I want to connect foods we eat to their agricultural origins, while also demonstrating the ways that ethnicity, race, and racism frame these stories. In an era of unprecedented global warming, the book will also consider historically how horticulturists help desert-dwellers adapt to aridity.

Preparation for publication of a book about the relationship between four museums in New York City—the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, the Gallery of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art—that shaped debates about modernism from 1959 to 1966.

In 1961, Art in America's special issue posed the question "What Should a Museum Be?" As arts administrators grappled with the role of the museum in contemporary life, they increasingly turned to design to make the case that museums were no longer repositories of venerated objects, but sites of cultural discourse. My book project analyzes how four prominent museums in New York City negotiated this increasingly politicized terrain, as they marshaled innovative architecture to forge competing versions of modern art for public consumption between 1959 and 1966. With chapters focusing on the Guggenheim Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, the Gallery of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art, I investigate how museums expanded their visibility in the urban fabric while historicizing recent art – not as esoteric or obscure, but as a tool that had the potential to advance cultural agendas amidst the socio-political turmoil of the 1950 and 60s.

Research and writing leading to publication of a book about the history and culture of Kakaamotobe, a West African carnival, from 1899 to the present.

Kakaamotobe, or Fancy Dress, is a lively carnival that has been performed in southern Ghana, West Africa, for more than a century, yet few scholars have analyzed this vibrant and engaging art form. The purpose of this project is to complete the first book on West African carnival. Fancy Dress is significant as an art form that blends local and foreign performance traditions to express public commentary on pop culture; social and cultural mores; and local, national and international politics and economy. A vital creative expression of the lower classes, the carnival is both comedic entertainment and a necessary regenerative force in Ghanaian culture. I will combine extensive field research gathered over nine years with secondary sources in art history, history, culture and politics in order to situate this artistic practice across Ghana and in comparison with other Black Atlantic carnivalesque traditions.

Preparation for publication of a book about the relationship between U.S. literary modernism and the Romantic Revival (c. 1880-1920), with consideration of works by Edith Wharton, Henry James, and W.E.B. Du Bois.

At the end of the nineteenth century, an unexpected resurgence of widespread interest in supposedly old-fashioned romantic fiction occurred. Historical, sensational, sentimental, and utopian romances suddenly displaced realistic novels in popular magazines and on bestseller lists. Critics have long dismissed this “Romantic Revival,” yet several important authors, including Edith Wharton, Henry James, and W.E.B. Du Bois, embraced it, using the distant settings and fantastic plots of these various genres in innovative ways. My project surveys the Romantic Revival as an important literary movement that enabled particularly skillful writers to push the boundaries of their fiction and move beyond the empiricism of Realism into the uncertainties of Modernism. In short, I argue that the Romantic Revival played a significant role in the emergence of Modernism in the United States.

Research and writing a biography of Fredi Washington (1903-1994), a civil rights activist and a performing artist active in the Harlem Renaissance.

Focusing upon the life and career of performing artist and civil rights activist Fredi Washington, this project places an African American female performing artist at the center of the narrative of the New Negro Renaissance; illuminates the vital influence of performing artists on the movement; and demonstrates the ways in which Washington and the New Negro Renaissance are central components of the long civil rights narrative and our understanding of the African American quest for civil and human rights. The manuscript will consist of six chapters and a prologue and epilogue.

A book-length study of architecture, urban development, and the emerging public sphere in Barcelona between 1350 and 1450 CE.

Treasure of the City is a book-length study that illustrates the transformative role the construction of public works, monuments and urban spaces played in the crystallization of municipal power and an emerging public sphere in late medieval Barcelona. The nascent city council’s quest for the right to tax trade as a form of income to fund public construction required negotiation with aristocratic and religious authorities, a dynamic and contentious conversation that led to the municipal government’s empowerment and to a commercial revolution in the city.

Research and writing leading to a book on women’s role in the development of the Caribbean tourism industry during the 20th century.

I am applying for a 12-month award (full funding for summer 2020 and spring 2021 and three-fourths funding for fall 2020) to complete the final three chapters of a proposed book entitled Imagining the Tropics: Women, the Professionalization of Caribbean Tourism, and the Conjuring of Island Fantasy 1890 – 1980. The book addresses women’s roles in Caribbean tourism development across the twentieth century. The award will facilitate the second stage of the project, including completion of research (3 months) and writing (9 months). While often neglected in the historical narrative, my research reveals that women were crucial to the development of Caribbean tourism. Imagining the Tropics complicates a history that views modern tourism as a predominantly male-constructed fantasy, clarifies the mechanisms that built Caribbean visions of tropical escape, and frames a regional approach that highlights the incredible impact of women – Caribbean and otherwise – on this ever-expanding industry.