A book-length study on French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Reveries of the Solitary Walker (1782).

Since antiquity a number of Western philosophers have articulated the view that good and bad deeds are the products of knowledge and ignorance, respectively, or that virtue is knowledge and vice ignorance. This cognitivist view of morality (as I call it) is very high-minded. But it also challenges the presuppositions of what one might call the ordinary moral consciousness or the self-understanding of morality as such. Thus the implications of the cognitivist view are momentous, not only theoretically but also practically, at least to the extent that the view gains currency. And it is my observation that the cognitivist view has been gaining currency in the postmodern world. I propose to investigate this view of morality—both its meaning and its potential consequences—through a book-length study of one its richest articulations: the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s final work, the Reveries of the Solitary Walker.

A book and digital project about Russian émigré settlements in western Europe and their impact on western European and Russian political movements (1860-1917).

Between 1860 and 1917, hundreds of thousands of tsarist subjects left the Russian empire for Europe’s large urban centers and university towns. The travelers came from every corner of the empire and from many walks of life, yet they gravitated toward one another in exile, creating close-knit and intellectually vibrant communities that they referred to as “Russian colonies.” This project provides the first synthetic treatment of pre-1917 traffic between Russia and the west, reconstructing the unique cultures that coalesced in émigré settlements. In addition, it traces how the colonies informed the world that lay beyond their borders. Treating these spaces as laboratories of liberation, it shows how the ideologies and practices forged in the colonies traveled back to Russia, catalyzing revolutionary movements. It also argues that the colonies had a profound effect on European understandings of freedom, shaping political movements on both the left and right.

A book on Hegel’s aesthetics based on his unpublished German lectures on art and aesthetics gives between 1820 and 1829.

Hegel’s notorious claim that art “ends” means that, despite its potential for explaining art’s role in human experience and its ability to interpret particular artworks, Hegel’s aesthetic theory is often neglected. My interpretation of this theory in my book manuscript, "Hegel's Aesthetics: The Art of Idealism," restores its potential by embedding it in Hegel’s philosophical idealism, analyzing particular artworks he discusses, and connecting his thought to the vibrant aesthetic debates of his time. These factors reveal that although Hegel claims art can end in several ways—within a historical period, by exhausting conceptual possibilities, or by disintegrating into the agreeable—his belief in its centrality to human life never wavered. His theory clarifies art’s value in general and offers a foundation for interpreting contemporary art in particular. I am applying for this grant in order to do necessary research for chapter 10 in Berlin and to bring the entire manuscript to completion.

Research and writing leading to publication of a book on the political and environmental history of South Asia from 1500 to 1900.

My effort is to build an integrated picture of the "political ecology" (Morrison, 2013) of a diverse region. Eurasia has long known kingdoms and empires. Inequalities of power structured these complex societies and allowed them to modify their environments. I also deliberately span the transition from indigenous kingship to colonial empire. I focus on how environmental processes functioned as a consequence of the struggle for control of the land, water, people and animals on which kingdoms and empires depended. The exertion of power is always met by contest and resistance. Resource access was contested with the weapons of the weak and the weapons of the strong. I will show how these contests shaped the agrarian environment over four centuries. I will especially look at the ecological and political role of human domesticates – from the many humble oxen that tilled the fields to few but lordly horses that trampled over them. This will be an ecology of empire.

Completion of a book-length study on the role of Central Europe in the Investiture Contest, the 11th- and 12th-century debate on the dual authorities of German rulers and Papal Rome.

Henry and Vratislav: Medieval Central Europe Transformed reframes one of the most divisive religious conflicts of the Middle Ages—the so-called “Investiture Contest”—around issues of politics and civil war by analyzing its causes and consequences on a wider Central European scale. Recentering the story around the alliance between the embattled King Henry IV of Germany and his powerful Czech neighbor Vratislav of Bohemia, it reaffirms Slavic agency vis-à-vis long-presumed German hegemony by focusing on the long Elbe River border across which Germans and Slavs engaged for centuries, while also reconstructing the complexity of civil war and its remembrance. Eschewing arid institutionalism for the analysis of human actions and motivations, it widens the lens beyond older historiographical concerns to offer a new vision of medieval political history in the eleventh and twelfth centuries.

A book-length study of the science fiction genre in Latin America between 1945 and 1969.

This book project will examine the history of the science fiction genre in Latin America during the period 1945-1969, including the relationship of genre development to international and local scientific and political events: from Hiroshima to Sputnik to the Cuban Missile Crisis to the Moon landing. Latin American writers have adapted science fiction to reflect their own realities: expanding the science fiction megatext to include postcolonial perspectives from the margins of world power, calling into question the assumptions and interpretations of the Northern tradition, increasing the permeability of the genre’s limits, and engaging in national and global discourses on identity, history, politics, culture, and modernity. My research aims to increase our understanding of science fiction in Latin America during this crucial time in twentieth-century history, thereby revealing a more complete and complex picture of the genre and of the region.

Preparation of a book-length study on the history and reception of an image by Karl Bodmer from 1834, Mandan Buffalo Dancer, that influenced American and Native American art.

This project follows Swiss expedition artist Karl Bodmer’s Mandan Buffalo Dancer (1834) across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Originally created in Indian Territory in 1834, Bodmer’s portrait of a Numak'aki [Mandan] benók óhate [buffalo bull society] leader subsequently traveled in and out of various historical and cultural contexts, forms, and genres. Treating this image’s journey as a biography, I track “Mandan Buffalo Dancer” across both Native American and non-Native settings to develop the first book-length study that bridges American and Native American art histories and Native studies. Detailing how this story’s various agents used print, I argue that: 1) 19-century systems of racial oppression emerged in part through the very mechanics by which print operates; and 2) Native communities simultaneously formed an alternative history of print that eventually fed Native political activism in the 1960s and 1970s.

Completion of a book-length study of the personal and professional relationship of Willa Cather and Edith Lewis.

I am applying for support to complete a a biographical study of the relationship between American novelist Willa Cather and Edith Lewis, a magazine editor and advertising copywriter with whom Cather shared a home in New York City for 38 years. Lewis's professional expertise allowed her to act behind the scenes as Cather's editor, making significant changes to her prose in typescript, and to advise Cather on the management of her public persona. Their relationship was also social, familial, and domestic--they shared a home, networks of friends, and social relationships with each other's biological families. I argue that this "creative partnership," which combined the personal and the professional, enabled Cather's emergence as a major novelist.

Preparation of a book about women’s global political activism and the Paris Peace Conference, a convening of World War I's allied victors who sought to establish the terms of peace in 1919.

More Than Half of Humanity will offer the first comprehensive account of women’s global political activism in the watershed year of 1919, when world leaders convened in Paris to deliver justice to a war-torn world. Largely excluded from the negotiating table by virtue of their sex, women nonetheless insisted that neither peace nor democracy could be secured if men persisted in excluding “more than half of humanity” from the halls of political power. From Paris to Zürich, and from Cairo to Shanghai to Washington, D.C., women organized conferences, stepped to the rostrum, and took to the streets, demanding a new political order that was democratic in fact as well as in name. Women’s achievements and disappointments in 1919 helped shape the political order that has existed in diverse corners of the globe ever since: one that largely celebrates women’s citizenship in theory even as it limits women’s participation in practice, particularly in matters of foreign affairs.

A book-length study on Aristotle's ethics.

Aristotle’s discussion of the motivation of the good person is both complicated and cryptic. Depending on which passages are emphasized, Aristotle may seem to be presenting a Kantian style view according to which the good person is and ought to be motivated primarily by reason, or a Humean style view according to which desires and feelings are or ought to be in charge. I argue that Aristotle thinks that the thought, desires and feelings of the good person are integrated in a way that is sui generis, and I explain what that is, discussing Aristotle’s view of the psyche, feelings, moral education, prohairesis (choice) and the obscure motivator, the fine, which I take to involve a musical metaphor. I also discuss how disintegration is possible for those who are not good, and how akrasia, acting voluntarily against one’s better judgment, is an ethical phenomenon, not just a problem in the philosophy of action, contrary to the views of modern philosophers.

Research, data analysis, and writing leading to publication of a book on the development of meritocracy in 10th-century China and development of associated open-access online databases.

This project explores the sudden appearance in the tenth century of a meritocratic culture that dramatically transformed Chinese elite society and constituted the ideological foundation of China's famous civil service exams. My first book used GIS, social network analysis, and a huge biographical database to explain the physical demise of China’s aristocracy. I now complement this sociopolitical study with a study that explains the accompanying cultural shift—from an “aristocratic” ethos to a “meritocratic” ethos—which I treat in large measure as a product of the rampant migration of the era. Using new digital tools, I will map out the primary routes of elite migration during the 10th c., and assess how migration correlated with a package of cultural changes (including burial culture, language dialect, as well as articulations in literary texts of new “meritocratic” ideals). By the end of the fellowship period, I plan to have completed a full draft of a new book manuscript.

Research and writing leading to publication of a book on Chinese novelist, industrialist, and entrepreneur Chen Diexan (1879-1940).

By examining the early 20th-century endeavors of Chen Diexian, a novelist, amateur chemist, and manufacturer of toothpowder, this project shows how unlikely actors like Chen pursued industry and science in China in unconventional ways. Before the rise of modern expertise and formal professions, Chen tinkered with cuttlefish to make toothpowder, emulated foreign technologies while pursuing domestic copycats, and published manufacturing formulas as “common knowledge” in newspapers. Even as he drew from global circuits of chemistry and emerging international property rights law, Chen’s pursuits constituted a “vernacular industrialism” that was homegrown and informal and became part of the patriotic National Products Movement and the basis of Chinese success in challenging foreign competitors in pharmaceutical markets in East and Southeast Asia. Chen’s story reveals how Chinese actors were hardly “lagging” behind or mere “copycats,” but were able to navigate, innovate and compete in modern global capitalism.

Preparation of a digital publication that analyzes coins from Aeolia to investigate ancient Greek economy, politics, and society during the Hellenistic period (ca. 350-31 BCE).

My project, Economic, Material, and Social Networks in Antiquity: Aeolian Alexanders, uses social network analysis (SNA) and geographic information systems (GIS) to analyze the understudied region of ancient Aeolis in western Turkey, and reimagines traditional die studies as digital publications which illustrate economic and social networks in geographic space. I am applying to the NEH-Mellon Fellowships for Digital Publication to complete the first born-digital die study using modern techniques, and to publish the results as a publicly accessible web-application. Focusing on coinage in the name of Alexander the Great from the mints of Kyme, Myrina, and Temnos in Hellenistic Turkey, the project expands the traditional bounds of die studies by theorizing die linkages, coin circulation patterns, and hoard data as networks of material and social interaction, which are geographically contextualized through the use of GIS tools.

A book-length study of Paraguayan Guarani, the only indigenous language in the western hemisphere to be spoken by a majority of the nonindigenous population.

The completion of a book on the uses of the Guarani language in different indigenous and non-indigenous communities in Paraguay, with a publicly accessible archive of the language. Paraguayan Guarani is the only indigenous language in the Americas spoken by a non-indigenous majority. About 80% of Paraguayans speak it today, though only 1% of the population is ethnically Guarani . Paraguay’s 1992 Constitution declared Guarani an official language alongside Spanish, and mandated teaching in Guarani to children for whom it is their first language. However, this has not been accompanied by social advances for Guarani-dominant speakers. My project inquires, then, what spaces Guarani inhabits in its different communities of practice and what unique functions Guarani serves for its speakers? My book is intended for scholars of indigeneity, Latin American studies, ethnography, and language contact. I will also create the first publicly accessible archive of any of the Guarani languages.

Research and writing a book-length history of the preservation of antebellum landmarks in Natchez, Mississippi, during the 1930s.

For over eighty years, tourists have come to Natchez in search of the “Old South.” But what they encounter is an invention: the commodification of history constructed during the economic hardship of the Great Depression. My book is the first to tell the surprising story of how Natchez was transformed from a backwater town into a cultural tourism destination by a group of progressive-minded women; and how it continues to shape our shared understanding of the Old South and its complicated legacy, particularly regarding race. Attending to the history of preservation helps us to understand how cultural meaning is assigned to place. This book draws on a rich archive of historic images, architectural documents, and popular culture. In showing how and why the buildings of the “Old South” were first preserved, commercialized, and transformed into a brand, the book aims to make a much-needed contribution to ongoing, often polarizing debates over the meanings attached to cultural patrimony.

A book-length study on the political regime of classical Sparta.

This book investigates the principle that ancient thought presents as the constituting principle of political community: the politeia ("regime" or "constitution"). I analyze the treatment of the politeia by its greatest expositor, Aristotle, especially his examination of the foundational problems of internal faction and external war and the limits of political regimes in resolving them. I then examine Sparta, the city that ancient and modern authors alike represent as the fullest instantiation of a politeia, with the greatest civic unity, lawfulness, and success in war. I acknowledge Sparta's virtues but focus on the critique of the city by thinkers contemporary with it. Against Sparta's primary insistence on unity, obedience to law, and battlefield courage, this critique illuminates the pivotal role of prudence and wisdom in addressing factional conflict, disputes over justice, and the demands of war—insights that remain crucial for our world, still scarred by war and civil conflict.

Completion of a book-length study on literary form in the works of American author Herman Melville.

I analyze what “form” meant to Herman Melville, in concept and in literary practice, with the hope that such an inquiry not only will illuminate his complex career, which in its variety, scope, and duration continues to elude most readers and critics, but also will advance our understanding of this key term in literary studies. Across the chapters, I examine verbal form in terms of the relationships that give it definition: between parts and wholes, structure and duration, inside and outside, word and image, and prose and poetry. Focusing on Melville, whose work has served an exemplary function in the development of American literary criticism, and revising our understanding of the forms and form of his literary career, I provide an alternative to the persistent, resurgent, and misguided choice between “form” and “history,” “text” and “context.” Rather than an alternative to such relations, literary form is located at their tense, vibrant intersection.

A book-length study on the social history of polio in France from 1920 to 1980.

"Polio's Hidden History" is the first scholarly study of polio and its survivors in France. Weaving together histories of epidemic disease, public health, and medicine with the social and cultural history of disability, this book uncovers polio’s critical role in restructuring France’s welfare state and social services, fueling vaccine development and biomedical research, and mediating France’s geopolitical status from the world wars through the era of decolonization. More important, by charting the everyday lives of polio survivors across the tumultuous political landscape of the twentieth century, this book exposes the complex and shifting intersections between disability, able-bodiedness, and citizenship in France, providing a new framework for understanding the history of inclusion and exclusion in one of Europe's oldest democracies.

Preparation of a book-length study on the influential architectural patronage of the Mamluk queen Shajar al-Durr in mid-13th-century Cairo.

“Tree of Pearls” was a slave of obscure origins who rose to become queen-sultan of Egypt in 1250. For architectural history, her patronage was innovative because of the tombs that she added to her husband’s madrasa (college) and her own, thereby making those institutions into commemorative monuments. Thus, for the first time in Cairo, the architectural ensemble was empowered to stand for the founder himself, visibly and unforgettably manifest in the tomb’s high dome rising above the urban skyline. This dramatic transformation--in which architecture embodied human identity--was made possible by a woman whose path-breaking patronage contradicts the prevailing assumption among historians of Islam that Muslim women have historically lacked power and that there was no distinctive female agency in Islamic art and architecture. My book argues that our ability to see their consequence depends entirely on how their story is told.

Preparation of a digital publication on the architectural history and development of the Doric style at the Temple of Hera at Olympia (ca. 600 BCE).

I have recently completed a high-resolution 3D recording of the oldest well-preserved Greek temple in the Doric style, the Heraion at Olympia. The project has revealed significant new insights into the architectural history of the monument. I am now facing a common challenge for researchers working with 3D scans of cultural heritage: how to publish the wealth of digital data. I plan to develop a project website to disseminate the models, reconstructions, and linked texts and images. A lightweight environment built on existing mapping technologies will enable users to navigate visualizations of the remains interactively. The dissemination of the complex 3D models from Olympia through pre-rendered orthographic views will represent a model that might be adapted for many other ancient monuments. The site will allow flexible exploration, but it will also guide visitors through a new argument concerning the architectural history of the temple’s peristyle.

Preparation of a web-accessible, digital monograph examining the history of data visualization in the United States and Great Britain from the late 18th to early 20th centuries.

Data by Design: An Interactive History of Data Visualization, 1786-1900, challenges the common belief that visualization serves as a neutral method for data’s display. In a series of five “data narratives”—chapter-length web-based texts that employ interactive visualizations in order to advance their claims—I trace the rise of modern data visualization techniques. I connect what I term the “visualizing impulse” to Enlightenment ideas about the primacy of visual knowledge, and to the related concepts of subjectivity, agency, and the human. I show how data visualization carries a set of assumptions and arguments about how knowledge is produced, and who is authorized to produce it. Illustrating how these assumptions were both upheld and contested over the course of the nineteenth century, through both specific visual practices and key political events, I reveal how historical epistemologies, as much as visual form, continue to influence the design and reception of visualization today.

Completion of a book-length study on the folklore of French and Creole Louisiana and its adaptations in France, Africa, and francophone Atlantic traditions.

Louisiana’s French and Creole folklore is formed from the confluence of many diverse elements (e.g. the French and Spanish colonial periods, the slave trade, the Acadian exile, and the Haitian Revolution). Folklore Figures of French and Creole Louisiana will be the first book-length work devoted to analysis of this tradition. Through comparative analyses of a corpus of Louisiana folktales and their analogues from Acadia, France, and West Africa, my research places the region in a larger context of the francophone world, demonstrating how characters and moral values have been adapted over time to the sociocultural context of Louisiana. I suggest that several instances of cultural trauma within Louisiana’s French and Creole communities are reflected in the moral framework of folktales through increased prestige associated with the trickster figure. This monograph also contributes significantly to folklore studies through my transcriptions of previously unavailable tales from the 1940s.

A book-length study of the concept of national security in Roman literature and its political trajectory from the late republican period to the early imperial era.

The politics of national security in the 21st century turn on a fear of dangers perceived as originating mostly from outside. These may come from other people—such as refugees, immigrants, foreign foes, and terrorists—or arise from impersonal forces, like changes in climate or the spread of disease. Such assumptions, however, lie in stark opposition to the term’s conceptual origins in ancient Roman political thought. The Latin word securitas, first attested in Cicero’s philosophical writings from the 1st century BCE, means peace of mind in a strictly psychological sense. The enemy to pacify is not the other but the self. My book traces national security’s emergence as a concept in Roman literature and the politics of its trajectory. Recuperating this story through the analysis of sources outside the political theoretical canon reveals an untold history, and sheds light on ideological blind spots that continue to inform political discourse to this day.

A book length study of Native American writers that examines the reception of European classical education and knowledge in colonial New England.

My book tells the hitherto untold story of how Native American writers have used their knowledge of the languages, literatures, and cultures of ancient Greece and Rome. The centerpiece consists of my translations and interpretations of a small but rich body of texts which have never before been published as a corpus: letters and poems written in Greek and Latin by American Indians in colonial New England. Aiming to make them accessible both to scholars and an interested public, I place these texts in the context of allusions to Greece and Rome found in a variety of Native-authored English-language essays, poems, and novels, allusions which themselves have not yet been studied as a body. My book makes a significant new contribution to the field of classical reception studies, and will enrich our understanding of the complexities of Native American writing over the centuries.

Research culminating in a book-length study of Islamic involvement in the spice trade, in the 13^th through the 16^th centuries.

An NEH Grant will support a year of research and writing for my second book, Profit and Prophecy: Islam and the Spice Trade from Venice to India. The book will illuminate how medieval Islamic religious authorities debated, regulated, and invested in commercial life along a spice route that arguably sparked the birth of modern industry in Europe. In doing so, Profit and Prophecy will re-write our understanding of the role of Islam in the making of global capitalism, and shine a new light on a perennial question for the humanities and the reading public: how do the moral commitments of religious traditions accommodate or constrain economic development?