Funded Projects Query Form
176 matches

Research and writing to complete a book on the literary function of hell in early medieval translations of apocryphal texts in the British Isles and Scandinavia.

In the Middle Ages, hell was a useful literary space because it was only vaguely defined in scripture, leaving space for imagination and room to establish the boundaries of Christian belonging. This book tells the story of how hell was used in the medieval North Sea to experiment with theology and identity. Examining vernacular translations of two key apocryphal hell texts, the book argues that they were popular experimental sites because of their liminal textual authority. Since apocrypha are noncanonical scriptures, the genre allowed medieval writers flexibility to revise their hells, while also inviting later readers to revere those experiments as valid since they seemed like scripture. The book compares vernacular theologies of the North Sea, highlighting Northern European contributions to hell's evolution.

Research and writing to complete an anthology and study of autobiographical writings by Spanish-American female mystics in colonial Latin America. 

My book project deals with a chronologically structured anthology and study of the writings of Spanish American Creole-Mulatto female mystics in colonial times, still a huge gap in available scholarship, to be completed over the course of twelve months of full-time work. This will be a full reworking of my 600 page doctoral dissertation, although I have been revising it for the past three years. Devoted to the spiritual autobiographies only of Creole mystics from the first three viceroyalties of Spanish America, the study took as its point of departure the earliest authors whose extant works constitute the beginnings of this mostly conventual tradition: María Magdalena de Lorravaquio Muñoz (New Spain); Saint Rosa de Lima (Peru), and Jerónima del Espíritu Santo (New Grenade). This book will be the first comprehensive study on the development of this discourse as a genre and its most significant continuators in each of the viceroyalties, adding the viceroyalty of Río de la Plata.

Research and writing leading to a book about Ethiopic manuscripts from the 15th through 19th centuries that shed new light on early Christianity.

“Hidden in Plain Sight: Ethiopic Manuscripts and Early Christianity” argues that Ethiopic manuscripts (15th–19th century CE) tucked away in US collections open an unexplored path for studying the New Testament and early Christianity. By specifically naming and locating Ethiopia in the ancient world and focusing on four of the largest Ethiopic archival collections in the US, this study introduces Ethiopic manuscripts and discusses how these manuscripts have the potential to broaden Western understanding of the literary, geographical, and cultural milieu of the ancient world. By delving into the language and religious literature of Ethiopia, this book invites readers into a more expansive understanding of early Christianity and into an interdisciplinary engagement of Ethiopic sources as living witnesses, showcasing the dynamic and fluid interactions of Ethiopians in the ancient world and the perduring value of their texts and traditions today.

Research and writing leading to a book about the political and legal institutions that have governed migrant labor in the US from the end of the nineteenth century until today.

My book project, Lineages of the Deportable Labor State: Migrant Workers and the Law in American History, examines the political and legal institutions that have governed migrant labor in the US since the end of the nineteenth century until today. By following migrants from the Caribbean, Mexico, India, and China as they use American legal protections "from below," Lineages also focuses upon how migrants have surprisingly and continuously sought redress from workplace violations and abuse through the law across time and sectors. We know very little about the longstanding, yet changing, relationship between migrant labor and the American political and legal system because scholars of US immigration have previously focused on immigrant admissions and exclusions from the polity rather than the deportation power and rights in the workplace. Lineages will thus be a considerable contribution to the study of migration in the US and in the humanities and social sciences.

Research and writing leading to a book about the branding practices of mother-influencers on digital media in South Korea from 2008-2021.

The project examines the branding practices of mom influencers on digital media in South Korea. Analyzing four cases of a cooking celebrity with online business from the 2000s, blog influencers from 2008 to 2012, Instagram influencers and their shaming accounts from 2019 to 2021, the project aims to tease out how digital media influenced the ideal motherhood, which has been based on a neo-Confucian patriarchal tradition of sacrifice. Upon the influences of neoliberalism and postfeminism that encourage individuals to become economically competitive and pursue their choices and desires, I contend that the focus of ideal motherhood changes from a selfless, enduring mother to an economically skilled expert and then to a morally right figure. It reflects the stark pressures on mothers increasingly bearing both an economic burden and childrearing responsibilities and how mothers’ online economy illustrates their precarious status, further marginalizing them with cultural sanctioning.

Research and writing leading to a book about how the Andean inhabitants of Huarochirí responded to the Inkas' domination and then to Spanish colonialism in Peru from the 15th to 18th centuries. 

Reimagining Colonialism is a book project based on archaeological, historical, and spatial research that investigates indigenous narratives of successive waves of colonialism by the Inka (1400-1532 CE) and the Spanish Empires (1532-1821 CE) in the Peruvian Andes. Reimagining Colonialism is driven by the question: what if the Inka and Spanish were an addition to local history rather than the filter through which we discuss the diverse and complex communities that inhabited the Andes? In doing so, this book centers on the highland region of Huarochirí (in the Department of Lima, Peru) and their engagements with the Inka and Spanish between the 15th and 18th centuries. At its core, Reimagining Colonialism inverts traditional scholarship that centers on how Andean communities repositioned themselves as part of the Inka and Spanish Empires, and instead shows how this community saw the Inka and the Spanish as parts of their local history.

Research and writing leading to a book about the British financial revolution of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Scholars usually associate Britain’s Financial Revolution with the creation of the national debt, public credit, and sophisticated taxation mechanisms on the part of the British government to help pay for complex and expensive military endeavors at the turn of the eighteenth century. My book, The Financial Revolution and the Politics of Moral Crisis in Early Modern Britain, will consider long-term economic, political, and social changes in Britain and its empire that made a revolution in finance possible and will explore the political and cultural consequences of these changes. Based on original research and a synthesis of existing scholarly literature, the book focuses on moments of political and cultural crisis from the mid-1600s to the mid-1700s to explore how and why a revolution in finance occurred in early modern Britain and how contemporaries understood and responded to it. Its main contribution will be its focus on popular responses to major fiscal and financial changes.

Research and writing for a book arguing that the arts of the Mexican Revolution (1910-1920) influenced Modernist literature in the United States. 

This scholarly monograph argues that the impact of the Mexican Revolution on the development of modernist literature in the United States was primary and definitive. This wide-ranging, transborder study frames U.S. literary modernism within an American, hemispheric context rather than the Eurocentric paradigm that has long dominated the field. A hemispheric approach to modernist studies highlights a distinctive set of formal and thematic elements. These texts emphasize radical (leftist) political ideologies, celebrate indigeneity and the “folk,” employ a mode of “romantic realism,” rely on simple, lyrical poetic expressions, and are oriented toward a wide and diverse general public instead of a coterie of learned sophisticates. This book examines U.S. writers and artists including Katherine Anne Porter, Anita Brenner, Edward Weston, Lynn Riggs (Cherokee), and Langston Hughes alongside Mexican ones including Mariano Azuela, José Clemente Orozco, and Nellie Campobello. 

Research and writing leading to a book on Mexican American educational reform efforts in New Mexico and Texas between 1880 and 1940.

This project explores challenges to the omissions and negative characterizations of Mexican Americans in public school textbooks of New Mexico and Texas between 1880 and 1940. Mexican Americans fought discrimination by voting, asserting their right to jury service, and challenging segregated schools. They sought to revise public school textbooks to be more inclusive, challenge racist notions about Mexican Americans’ educational abilities, and preserve archives related to Mexican American history. Activists and scholars believed textbooks did not reflect Mexican Americans’ cultural legacies, and justified their second-class citizenship because the general public was unaware of their participation in formative events in the region’s and nation’s history. As they engaged in civic action for access to education, Mexican Americans strengthened U.S. democracy, reminded the nation to respect their citizenship rights, and created new historical narratives that included their contributions.

Research and writing leading to a critical biography of Philippa Schuyler (1931-1967), a mixed-race pianist, writer, and Goodwill-Ambassador who was also the daughter of conservative Harlem Renaissance journalist George Schuyler.

Good Women Die is a black feminist critical biography that re-examines the short life of biracial American Philippa Schuyler, a child-prodigy-turned-Goodwill-Ambassador from Harlem. The socially conservative Schuyler traveled the world as a musician, writer and humanitarian. A vast photographic archive documents her social significance during the mid-twentieth century, while numerous choices she made about self-representation reveal how her racial identity shifted across borders. This transnational feminist cultural studies project complicates previous readings of Schuyler's archive and her public personae by centering her voice, her negotiations with whiteness, her interests in dreams and divinations, and her travels across the continent Africa. This biography as an open access digital publication will incorporate many of Schuyler’s audio and visual archives. NEH funding will facilitate the completion of this full manuscript and support its availability to general audiences.

Research and writing leading to a book about the lives and activities of Japanese doctors in colonial Korea prior to World War II (1910-1945).

This book project examines the lives and activities of Japanese doctors in colonial Korea (1910-1945). Despite their centrality to Japan’s imperial project as researchers, educators, and private practitioners, Japanese physicians have not received much attention from historians of Japan or Korea. My intervention is at once quantitative and qualitative. By creating a database of the entire population of Japanese doctors in Korea (1,194 in 1943) from six different directories, I provide an accurate prosopographical analysis. In turn, using historical documents on and by Japanese doctors, such as autobiographical accounts, medical periodicals, alumni magazines, and popular journals, I discuss Japanese doctors as transnational agents of empire-building. A multilingual project that requires analysis of primary sources in three languages including German, this book will contribute to scholarship on the co-constitutive development of medicine and colonialism in Asia.

Research and writing to complete a book analyzing race and gender hierarchies through representations of dance and movement in the sixteenth and seventeenth century English literature.

Choreographies of Race and Gender: Dance, Travel, and Ritual in Early Modern English Literature 1558-1668 illuminates the formation of racial and gendered hierarchies through patterns of physical movement through space, including dance, geographical travel, and secular and religious rituals. Critical attention to embodied movement in literary texts such as William Shakespeare’s The Tempest and Macbeth, Ben Jonson’s court masques, and Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus as well as travel narratives like John Smith’s account of Pocahontas reveals dynamic paradigms that create and perpetuate ideas of human difference. This book project will contribute to the Humanities a kinesic analysis of early modern English ideologies of colonial encounters, enslavement, witchcraft, upward mobility, liturgical reform, and gendered conduct. Beyond literature, the interpretive focus on motion will interest interdisciplinary scholars and students of dance, colonialism, race, gender, and performance.

Research and writing of a monograph about U.S. Cold War strategy in Africa.

My project, titled The Right Kind of Africans, brings Africa from the historiographic periphery to its center to challenge our understanding of U.S. Cold War strategy. By looking at a full range of U.S. policies in Africa, I demonstrate that the prevailing claim that the overarching aim of the U.S. Cold War strategy was to contain the spread of communism is incomplete and even misleading. Rather, that America’s fundamental objective was to establish global support for liberal norms. By liberal norms, I mean participation in free market capitalism under terms established by the U.S. as well as adherence to the trappings of Western-style democracy. Furthermore, my project evaluates international education as a vital component of the multifaceted U.S. strategy to win the Cold War in Africa. The fundamental purpose of the programs was to locate and nurture American influence over future African leaders. My project revises my dissertation, using new research, to complete a book manuscript.

Research and writing leading to a book about the evolution of economic and political liberalism in Haiti between 1757 and 1815. 

This is a book manuscript revision of a dissertation. Titled “The Vessel of Independence…Must Save Itself: Haitian Nation-State Formation, 1757 - 1815,” it examines Black sovereignty in a hostile Atlantic World reliant on racial slavery. The evolution of economic and political liberalism in Haiti functions as a counterpart to its postcolonial predecessor, the United States. Whereas, the embrace of free trade and individual liberty benefited the U.S., similar efforts disadvantaged the second American post-colony. Haiti’s navigation of Atlantic slavery reveals itself by tracing law and quasi-legal trade treaties made by Haitian statesmen. The book centers Haitian decisions that facilitated the growth of capitalism in the Caribbean and transformed political thought to custom fit a post-emancipation society. To the humanities, “Vessel of Independence” offers a Janus-faced history of American liberalism ruptured against the polemics of race.

Research and writing leading to a narrative history book of Blaxploitation film framed in relation to multiple, contemporaneous politics of Black self-representation.

Blaxploitation: A Narrative History investigates the emergence of a Civil Rights Movement Black cultural discourse that wrestled over cinematic representation throughout the 1970s. Coined in 1972 by activist Junius Griffin, the term highlighted how upon “discovering” Black filmgoing audiences, the (white) film industry exploited Black actors to create and promote cheaply made films for Black people. Rather than overtax the theme of white exploitation of Black labor, my book argues that the term blaxploitation also identifies lesser known, yet ongoing, intraracial conflicts among Black artists, activists, and intellectuals.

Research and writing leading to a book reassessing female solidarity in the Victorian novel.

My monograph project challenges traditional accounts of female solidarity as a driver of narrative and social success for women. By contrast, my project shows that in prominent novels of the late nineteenth century, antagonism and indifference are surprisingly effective tools for women looking to break out of traditionally defined roles. On the one hand, this antagonism disrupts the status quo in unanticipated ways—a patriarchal society that has come to expect solidarity between women finds it difficult to deal with female competition—and it helps open new domestic and professional pathways for women. On the other hand, in the effort to achieve gender equality, the professional New Woman’s rhetoric recycles distinctly sexist, racist, and classist mid-Victorian conventions, thereby bringing middle-class Englishwomen dialectically into the labor pool of the British empire, even as they resist patriarchal institutions.

Completion of a book and two open-access articles about Indigenous hip hop musicians, media professionals and the concept of sonic sovereignty.

What does sovereignty sound like? The book Sonic Sovereignty: G/local Hip Hop and the Shifting Popular Music Mainstream answers this question through ethnographic research and media analysis undertaken with Indigenous hip hop musicians and media professionals. The research is rooted in Winnipeg, an Indigenous music broadcasting center in Canada whose resonance is heard across borders. It reveals the wide and deep impacts of Streetz FM, the first Indigenous hip hop station, and probes the forces that led to the station’s closure, even as its music continued to find popularity with audiences. I extend research that explores the racialization and gendering of urban-format popular music and detail the implications on how Indigenous artists are heard—and silenced—through popular music distribution. Musicians are actively building what I call sonic sovereignty, navigating the expectations of mainstream airplay while pushing aesthetic and political boundaries.

Writing leading to a book on race and the building of the Burma Road, a major infrastructure project in the China-Burma-India theater of World War II.

This study will become the first book on African-American GIs building the Burma Road, including pipelines to transport Lend-Lease Act supplies to China, America’s ally in WWII. Accomplished during wartime in difficult terrain and at the mercy of subtropical elements, the Road was not only an engineering miracle but unique in U.S. military history with Black GIs as the major force, engaging in the most racially and ethnically diverse region in WWII, and resulting in a casualty rate higher than the army’s WWII combat average. The subject spans the histories of WWII, African Americans, and Afro-American-Asian encounters, but has been largely neglected by scholarship in these fields while also remaining absent from public memory. The book’s historical narrative is established within an analytical framework that examines America’s race issues in the context of the global politics of (anti)racism and (de)colonization and reassesses African Americans' contribution to the victory of WWII.

Research and writing leading to a book about women working in the contemporary U.S. and global film industry, with a particular focus on producers, writers, and directors.

How Female-Driven Films Are Valued From Pitch to Premiere explores the realities of women working above-the-line as producers, writers, and directors in the U.S. and global film industry since the emergence of the #metoo and Time’s Up movements. The book examines how industry cultures and business practices “value” female-driven projects (starring, written, produced, and/or directed by women) and the barriers women must face to get their films made. Grounded in five dozen in-depth interviews conducted from 2016 to 2020, this longitudinal study traces individual creatives and their female-driven projects across each filmmaking stage—development, financing, production, film festivals, marketing and distribution. The Award for Faculty at HSIs will support the completion of the first scholarly book length account that highlights the value of contemporary women’s labor, voices, and storytelling from the point of view of filmmakers who are working to change a historically male-dominated system.

Research and writing leading to a book on prisoners of war and their role in imperial competition in 18th century British and Spanish America. 

Captive Exchanges addresses themes of warfare and incarceration as well as empire and cultural contact in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world. Prisoners of war acted as crucial conduits in the development of military and commercial intelligence in the long conflict between the growing British colonies of the southeast and the Caribbean and Spanish Florida. This monograph uncovers the experiences of prisoners of war before the codification of international laws about the taking and holding of captives. People seized by an enemy might be closely confined, subject to interrogation, allowed to wander freely, or quickly returned to their countrymen. British, Spanish, and French agents of empire, enslaved Africans, and Indigenous people from throughout the southeast experienced captivity in culturally specific and shifting ways. Investigating the impact of intelligence-gathering by prisoners reveals networks of information inadvertently created by captives and officials on the edges of empire.

Research and writing leading to a history of debt and finance in post-independence Ghana, 1950-1980.  

Financing Africa’s Future will be the first book-length study to situate Africa’s postcolonial past within a broader history of international business, private investment, and financial crime. As the first sub-Saharan African country to gain independence in 1957, Ghana became a hot economic opportunity zone attracting businessmen and investors from around the world. I argue that decolonization and the process of nation-building rested on intricate and intimate negotiations of credit, contracts, and massive loans. Such financial transactions not only funded vital development projects, but were also social affairs connecting networks of people and institutions in and beyond the continent. By fusing financial and business history with social and cultural analysis, Financing Africa’s Future brings human relationships to the center of a dynamic economic history that has all too often been reduced to national narratives of disappointment and decline.

Preparation of a book interpreting the work of German Romantic philosophical poet Novalis (1772-1801) plus a one-volume selected edition of his philosophical and literary writings.

This two-pronged project offers the first comprehensive philosophical account of the German Romantic thinker Novalis that takes into consideration his work as a philosopher, poet, and natural scientist. It promises to shed light on a figure essential to the history of humanistic efforts to understand ourselves and our world and should be of value to specialists and educated laypersons alike. It provides an integrative reading that shows his late lyric poems and novels to be essential in any adequate interpretation of his philosophical achievement. Its publication goals are twofold: (1) a monograph offering the first comprehensive interpretation in English of the totality of Novalis’s oeuvre, including his poetic writings, as a sustained contribution to philosophy, centered on the idea and conditions of a philosophical system in Kant and his earliest successors, and (2) a one-volume translation of a comprehensive, carefully edited selection of Novalis’s philosophical and literary writings.

Writing and revision for an edition of the collected works of Guyanese belletrist, Egbert Martin (c. 1861-1890).

Following emancipation in the 1830s, Guyana (then British Guiana) witnessed a boom in literary output. Technological advancements in printing in the colonies and the rise of a new Black middle class meant that, for the first time, Afro-Guyanese voices were being heard. At the forefront of a growing group of Black literary figures was Egbert Martin, the colony’s “most important nineteenth-century poet,” according to Laurence Breiner’s Introduction to West Indian Poetry (Cambridge UP, 1998) and, in the words of the Harlem Renaissance writer Arthur Schomburg, “one of the greatest Negro poets in history.” The Complete Works of Egbert Martin brings together all of Martin’s known writings, many of which have been remained unpublished since they first appeared in Guyanese periodicals in the 1880s and many of which I have newly discovered.

Research leading to the revision of an undergraduate course and a peer-reviewed article on minority health and urban design in Baltimore since 1900.

My project “The (pathogenic)-CITY” is intended as a significant step towards rectifying a major gap in education about the chronological history of racial disparities by focusing on how urbanization, urbanicity, and residential segregation have transformed minority health and well-being in Baltimore since the early 1900s. My proposed course will be a substantial effort to change viewpoints and contribute to the development of new methodological and theoretical notions for a broader interdisciplinary discourse by discussing the role of urban designers, theorists, and town planners. I will study the historiography of urbanization, racial segregation, and its consequence on health disparities in Baltimore, which is a “living archive” and witness its changing urban landscape. This project will expand knowledge by filling the gaps in the multi-discipline arena that is timely and urgent for broader humanities disciplines and HBCU institutions.

My book project, Migrants or Refugees? Violence and Coerced Migration in Southern Mexico and Guatemala, 1950-2000 investigates the causes and impacts of Guatemalan migration into southern Chiapas. Throughout the first half of the twentieth century, the border between Guatemala and Mexico had little impact on social and economic networks that developed with the regional coffee economy. Lasting economic, social, and cultural ties formed between communities on both sides of the border. By early 1981, violence from the Guatemalan Civil War (1963-1996) and deepening poverty pushed growing numbers of Guatemalan campesinos to migrate for work on Mexican coffee fincas. Simultaneously, intensifying conflict led thousands of indigenous villagers to abandon their homes and seek safety in Mexico. Some Guatemalans were depicted as unwitting ‘victims’ who deserved asylum and assistance. Others were labeled as “too political” or “opportunistic” and received little support.