Funded Projects Query Form
279 matches

Research and writing of a book examining Afro-Latino memoirists’ use of African American aesthetics across the 20th century. 

Under contract with the University of North Carolina Press, Afroethnic Renewal: Afro-Latino Memoirs and their African American Influences, examines understudied African American narrative strategies, cultural tropes, and political genealogies in contemporary Afro-Latino coming-of-age memoirs. Using literary and historical analysis, I argue that Afro-Latino memoir writers use their affiliation with the African American condition to authenticate and assert their sense of national and diasporic belonging. The coherence of Afro-Latinidad, I contend, can be better understood by analyzing the depth and scope of its influence by Black nationalism and cosmopolitanism. The book finds that Afro-Latinos are shaping US culture in ways that open and extend the conventional definitions of African American literature and identity. I am applying for an NEH Summer Stipend to research and write the chapter on Marta Moreno Vega’s memoir When the Spirits Dance Mambo: Growing Up Nuyorican in El Barrio.

Research and writing of a book on the rhetorical strategies used in the autobiographies of American women activists. 

This book-length project explores the rhetorical strategies within the autobiographies of six diverse women at the forefront of social and political change in the United States over the last 100 years: Jane Addams (1910), Emma Goldman (1934), Dorothy Day (1952), Angela Davis (1974), Mary Crow Dog (1990), and Betty Friedan (2000). The study looks at the ways each woman activist used gender as well as the conversion narrative and other conventions as rhetorical strategies for the advancement of their individual visions for a new, transformed world.

Revision leading to a book on federal house-building and adult education initiatives on the Crow Reservation during the Assimilation Era.

My in-progress monograph, Reframing the Crows, examines three under-researched aspects of Native American history during the Assimilation Era: housing, adult education, and photography. My book argues that the Office of Indian Affairs (OIA) fetishized the house as a conduit of education and catalyst for cultural change for tribal adults. Rooted in settler colonialism and misguided Progressive Era philanthropy, the OIA constructed frame houses around Indigenous peoples in an effort to instill American family structures, land use, and moral authority. The government used architectural determinism (the belief that the physical structure of the house could restructure the behavior of the residents within) to erase tribal cultures. On the Crow Reservation in Montana, the OIA meticulously documented employees’ efforts through photography, wittingly or not also documenting the Crows’ resistance. This proposal seeks funding to support revisions of the final two chapters over June/July of 2021.

Research for a biography of civil rights leader and politician John Lewis (1940-2020). 

John Lewis: A Life in Politics will be the first cradle-to-grave biography of the late Georgia congressman. Lewis was central to America’s fight for racial justice since 1960, when he and fellow Nashville students applied Gandhian ideas to integrate Jim Crow lunch counters. A founder and chair of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, Lewis led major campaigns from the Freedom Rides to the March on Washington to the Selma voting rights march. Ousted as SNCC chairman in 1966, Lewis entered politics, joining Robert Kennedy’s 1968 presidential bid, registering Blacks to vote in the 1970s, and in 1986 winning a seat in Congress, where he rose to be a deputy to the Speaker. Legislatively, he helped extend the Voting Rights Act, established a Black history museum in Washington, and served as “the conscience of Congress.” Lewis’s life story thus shows how the energies of the 1960s civil rights movement, in his person, carried on the drive for racial equality in the following decades.

Research and writing leading to a book about Aztec music, dance and indigenous cultural heritage in contemporary Los Angeles.

Across Los Angeles, Mexican-American men, women, and children of all ages participate in Aztec dancing, a communal dance performed to the beat of an Aztec log drum. Many Aztec dance communities have recently tried to remove European elements from their repertoires, restructuring their music to align with interpretations of a pre-Hispanic Aztec aesthetic. Ongoing disagreements in the community pit dancers who view transmission as historically accurate––regardless of European influences––against those who prefer “recovered” traditions that originate from contemporary Indigenous communities. In this project, I consider this gap in perceptions of history and tradition, and the ways it informs participant’s understandings of Indigenous identity and cultural heritage.

Research and writing leading to a book about the music and hagiography of St. Nicholas in Western Europe, from 1100 to 1500.

One of the most widely-venerated saints in medieval Europe, St. Nicholas was also one of the most popular saintly subjects for composers and musicians. Music for Nicholas across genre, register, and language outpaced that composed for virtually all other non-biblical saints in the Middle Ages. Despite its quantity and diversity, however, Nicholas’s musical hagiography has yet to be examined. This project explores for the first time how the creation of new musical repertoires shaped and responded to the expansion of Nicholas’s cult, ca. 1100-1500. Nicholas presents an exceptional case among medieval saints since hagiographical texts repeatedly draw attention to song and its role in defining and disseminating his cult. I argue that music became a lynchpin in hagiographical and cultural negotiations, powerful enough to intervene in discourses around the saint and rituals of time and place, liturgy and devotion, race, religious identity, language, and nationhood.

Research and writing leading to a book on Asian seafarers in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English literature.

During the height of the African slave trade, British officials initiated the lesser-known forced migration of lascars or Asian sailors, known as “black slaves.” They manned Atlantic-bound ships under conditions that resembled those of enslaved Africans. My book project addresses this gap in critical histories of racial enslavement by examining literary representations of lascars, a workforce that fueled east-west commercial shipping from the late seventeenth century to the end of World War II. Stranded in Britain, they appeared as specters to English writers who imagined a social solution for them different from the one they had devised for black Africans—a moral sympathy wedded to a policy of detention and deportation rather than abolition. My proposed monograph not only bridges hemispheric divisions in humanities scholarship but also creates a new field for studying Indo-Atlantic conceptions of slavery, skin color, migrant labor, and citizenship in English literature and culture.

Research and writing of a book on the destruction of the Quilombo dos Palmares, a large community of runaway slaves in northeastern Brazil, and its legacy.

On November 20, 1695, the Black Brazilian maroon Zumbi died defending Palmares, one of history’s largest fugitive slave settlements. Most histories of Palmares conclude here. My book, however, treats Zumbi’s death and the destruction of Palmares as a starting point for new diasporas and forms of inheritance. By studying African and Afro-Brazilian religious beliefs and practices, place names, and oral traditions alongside previously overlooked colonial documents, I show how memories of Zumbi and Palmares survived in multiple forms in the aftermath of 1695. And I show that a full reckoning with slavery’s legacies and a truly comprehensive system of reparations are impossible without accounting for lineages and histories that derive from other, less commonly recognized forms of inheritance. This book project transforms how we think about fugitive slave communities and diaspora and reshapes conversations about reparations, not just in Brazil but across the Americas.

Research for a book on the history of public debates about gender and military conscription in the United States. 

The United States is on the cusp of making one of the most significant changes to American society in the nation’s history: drafting women. Although women have voluntarily served in the military throughout American history, the government has never required them to risk their lives for their country. That exclusion from compulsory military service has had far-reaching consequences for women’s legal standing, economic opportunities, and citizenship. Requiring women to register for Selective Service will remove the last major legal distinction between the obligations and benefits of citizenship for men and women. Drafting Women will provide the necessary historical background for an informed public discussion about what that decision means. The question of drafting women is, at its heart, a question about what it means to serve in the military. It is a question about the relationship between military service and full citizenship. It is a question about what it means to be an American.

Research and writing of a book about deafness and music in the United States, including the history and analysis of sign language music, from 1800 to the present.

This monograph contextualizes recent musical practices in Deaf culture within the history of deafness and deaf education in America, and proposes a methodology for engaging analytically with the musical products of Deaf culture, in the form of musical works created and performed in sign language. The project’s aim is to bring the long and rich history of sign language music to the attention of music theorists, to engage with it seriously and thoughtfully as a musical art, to understand what elements of music are resilient across modalities, and to grapple with the methodological quandaries that signed music raises for the discipline of music theory. In redefining music as movement, the book argues that sign language music, rather than being marginal or extraneous to histories and theories of music, is in fact central and crucial to our understanding of all musical expression and experience. It argues, above all, for the resilience of music in the face of enormous obstacles.

Research and writing towards a monograph about the influence of the Roman poet Ovid (43 BCE–17/18 CE) on the medieval English poet Geoffrey Chaucer (1340s–1400 CE).

“Chaucer’s Ovidian Arts: Poetic Influence and Innovation at the Beginning of English Literature” will investigate the influence of the Roman poet Ovid (43 BCE–17/18 CE) on the medieval English poet Geoffrey Chaucer (1340s–1400 CE). It will consider how Chaucer’s lifelong engagement with Ovidian techniques, modes, questions, and ideas resulted in some of the most remarkable and innovative poetry in the English tradition. It will be a significant resource for Chaucer scholars without intimate knowledge of Ovid, at a time when more Chaucerians than ever are conscious of Ovid’s importance, but few are conversant with that poet’s works. It will make major contributions to the ongoing historicization of literary forms, and to concepts of poetic influence and literary “tradition,” while providing a richer sense of Chaucer’s own understanding of the purpose of poetry and the relationships between art and life.

Research for a book on how American religious organizations intervened in the cultural and political affairs of other countries after World War II.

Culture Warriors Abroad: a Global History of the American Culture Wars will be the first book-length historical study of how Americans exported the culture wars and worked in tandem with allies in Africa, Europe, and Asia to further their visions of democracy. By exploring the history of the culture wars abroad from the 1960s to the present day, and the transnational links that sustained them, it will show that today’s divisions about what a democracy should look like are nothing new. The book will explore historical precedents to today’s debates about the health of democracies, including race, gender, education, birth control, free speech, abortion, and AIDS medication, and the relationship between religion and secular democratic states. In doing so, Culture Warriors Abroad offers a genealogy of today’s political realignments underway in the United States and beyond.

Writing and research for two chapters of a book examining how creative personnel in the television industry found opportunities to engage social issues as a result of a changing network system in the 1960s. 

This project examines how television writers and producers approached controversial subjects and introduced new storytelling formats during the 1960s, the early era of centralized network control. The network era is examined as a time of transition, in which the new dominance of the filmed series substantially altered the craft of television writing. The goal of this project is to reassess an era of television history that has previously been dismissed for its reliance on formulaic, audience-pleasing programming. I use archival records to argue that creative personnel were aware of the constraints represented by a three-network system, and they balanced the medium’s desire for convention with measured techniques of invention as they developed, executed, and promoted television dramas.

Research for a documentary film on a 1969 strike by Black and Puerto Rican students at City College of New York.

This proposal is for a summer stipend to conduct research for a documentary on the 1969 campus strike by Black and Puerto Rican students at the City College of New York. This documentary will tell the dramatic story of this defining moment in the history of student protest, one that literally changed the face of American universities. One of the distinctive aspects of the takeover is that it was led not by white middle class rebels protesting government actions halfway around the world but by Black and Hispanic students in a public institution not serving the public of its surrounding environs. The ensuing policy of Open Admissions remains the longest, most ambitious attempt by any American institution to address inequalities in access to higher education. The challenges this policy presented led to profound changes in thinking about the role and purpose of higher education: what the university is, whom it serves, what is taught—questions that continue to confront us as a nation.

Research and writing towards a biography of English poet and editor Eliza Cook (1812–1898).

I propose to write a biography of Eliza Cook (1812–89), one of the most famous and influential women of letters in Great Britain during the early and mid-Victorian periods. Cook not only was the prolific author of poetry volumes whose work was widely reprinted in the British and American press but also served as the editor of Eliza Cook’s Journal (1849–54), which rivaled Dickens’s Household Words in popularity. Cook was a political radical and iconoclast who dressed in men’s clothing and had a widely publicized romantic relationship with American actress Charlotte Cushman. This book, when complete, will be the first biography dedicated to Cook—long overdue recognition for a writer who was a well-known feminist, celebrity poet, cultural icon, and innovative journalist. I plan to incorporate a wide range of unpublished archival material from libraries in the UK and US, including letters, manuscripts, and author portraits.

Research and writing of a book about American modern dancer Isadora Duncan (1877-1927), her early career in Germany (1902-1905), and pre-World War I German culture and politics.

My book project documents American modern dancer Isadora Duncan’s early career in Germany (1902-1905), where her wildly popular revolt against traditional ballet animated debate across the political spectrum. Coupled with her nearly nude “classical” dancing, Duncan’s writings on Darwinist evolution and her demands for clothing, health, and education reform generated intense interest from the German public. A storm of controversy over Duncan pitted proponents of classical humanism and liberal democracy against neo-conservative nationalist reformers—all struggling for the public’s allegiance at a critical turning point in pre-war German politics. I argue that Duncan’s display of the strong, beautiful, natural body gave inadvertent, yet tangible support to the early architects of German Aryanism and National Socialism. Through critical reaction to Duncan’s hold on a politically disenchanted citizenry, we discover new narratives of public persuasion that facilitated Nazism in Germany.

Complete revisions of five chapters of a book on the religious practices of transgender African-Americans and Latinx people.

NEH’s Summer Stipend would support the completion of my second book, Faces of Faith, Kindred Spirits: Black & Latinx Transgender Religious Lives. The fruit of a decade of ethnographic and archival research, the book reveals that the history of trans liberation is American religious history. Faces of Faith shows that trans people have re-envisioned established religious forms so as to be seen and heard within their chosen traditions. In the U.S., these forms include singing in Gospel choirs; cooking “church food”; quoting Bible verses and preaching; building altars for saints and the Virgin Mary; and paying homage to Afro-Diasporic gods and ancestors. Faces of Faith documents the reclamation of these religious forms through innovative “de-Othering” strategies. The first book to provide a richly textured analysis of Black and Latinx trans religious practitioners, Faces of Faith promises to be a pathbreaking contribution to religious studies, anthropology, and women’s and gender studies.

Writing two chapters for a book on the development and use of algorithms by big technology companies.

Big technology companies like Facebook and Google concentrate power over the world in “algorithmic empires” — the concept this book develops to describe the extraction of vast amounts of personal data to feed digital systems that structure what we know and how we are known. Algorithms convert individual experience into data, the most valuable global commodity, and generate artificially narrow content to capture our attention. Through mass surveillance and information manipulation, algorithmic empires contribute to an erosion of trust in technology and a misinformed citizenry. The book makes sense of algorithmic empires by: 1. Tracing the logic of algorithmic empires for resource extraction and social control and its relationship to “surveillance capitalism”; 2. Cataloguing Facebook scandals in privacy violations and microtargeting along with gaps in its global regulation; 3. Theorizing public responsibility that shifts our relationship to algorithmic empires from consumers to subjects.

Writing and revising a comparison of art, architecture, and urbanism in New York City and São Paulo, 1940-1960.

My book recasts standard narratives of São Paulo and New York through an analysis of art, architecture and urbanism, arguing that North-South elites worked together (though not always agreeably) to create a shared vision of the modern and cultured city in the post-WWII period. Exploring these distinct but interrelated practices from the 1940s to the 1960s from a transnational perspective, I argue that efforts to make São Paulo and New York into regional leaders earned these cities international standing, even as it intensified patterns of uneven development, spatial segregation and racial anxiety. Popular sectors, I show, readily responded to racialized visions of the city, setting-up the stage from which different sectors of society would negotiate the shape that modernity would take.

Research and writing leading to an article and a podcast about how racialized language in African-American literature and film is translated into Spanish and Portuguese.

This project analyzes how racial language from African-American literature and film is translated into Spanish and Portuguese. As I explore this question, I am particularly interested in the translation of racial labels and of racialized linguistic practice. The analysis of the translation of racial language in film and literature is an area of inquiry that has seen substantial growth over the past decade. Significantly, to this point, the translation of racial labels and the representation of racialized linguistic practice have been parallel but ultimately separate lines of research. A review of academic literature on the topic reveals that no existing study examines both translation phenomena. The present study seeks to fill that gap. In addition to the project’s significance as a scholarly endeavor, it is also a significant inquiry for the current social and political moment. Final products will include research talks, an article manuscript, and a podcast episode.

Research for a book on the desegregation of mass transit in New York City before and during the Civil War.

I seek the NEH Summer Stipend to conduct 2 months of archival research for a new book project. The First Freedom Riders is the story of Elizabeth Jennings, the 25-year-old New Yorker who launched the first successful civil disobedience campaign in U.S. history. On Sunday, July 16, 1854, Jennings stepped onto a ‘whites-only’ streetcar on Third Avenue becoming the first among a small army of young black women and men to fight to forcibly desegregate mass transit in New York City. The First Freedom Riders argues that their campaign to stage a civil war in miniature was unprecedented, radical, and highly coordinated. To disrupt and destroy Jim Crow in Gotham City, black activists built a new organization, the Legal Rights Association, that pioneered the art and science of protesting in public and developed strategies of civil disobedience—public set-pieces, boycotts, petitions, defense funds, etc.—that have become the hallmarks of grassroots anti-racism protests ever since.

Research and writing towards a book examining the intertextual links among domestic writing, food culture, and early modern English poetry.

Seasonal Tastes investigates poetic style, culinary flavor, and the construction of diurnal time in early modern English literary works and practical handbooks. In early modern usage, the word “season” was a verb, describing the act and art of flavoring dishes, and a noun, indicating a specific time of the year. Likewise, “taste” referred both to bodily sensation and readerly pleasure; the consumption of food as well as a discerning appetite for literary culture. Seasonal Tastes puts literary works and “how to” literature in dialogue to explore flavor, time, literary form, and climate in the early modern period. This project intervenes in debates about how nature is depicted within literary studies, and within the humanities more broadly, by taking seasons as its central focus.

Research for a book on how economic and environmental forces have affected ecological and human health on the reservation of the Hopi Tribe in northern Arizona.   

Shifting Nature: Agriculture, Environment, and Health on the Hopi Indian Reservation since 1882 is the first book to analyze how economic and environmental forces transformed one of North America’s oldest and most biologically diverse food systems, disrupting human and environmental health in the process. Intertwining archival research with oral histories conducted collaboratively with the Hopi Tribe, the book asks questions at the heart of environmental humanities: How do communities lose or maintain control of the cultural, economic, and environmental resources in which their subsistence is rooted? How does the erosion or resilience of traditional foodways shape human and ecological health? And how can oral history help us understand historic shifts in indigenous food systems, disease, and the environment? The project illuminates these questions by using the Hopi story as a microcosm through which to explore shifting histories of subsistence, ecology, and health in modern America.

Writing of a book on the relationship between fiction and history in a selection of contemporary South Asian and Eastern African novels written in French and English.

This book project confronts the importance of lateral exchanges in the Indian Ocean in shaping the cultures and communities of the region. It takes the Indian Ocean as a transnational framework to explore the relationship between fiction and history in contemporary Anglophone and Francophone novels from South Asia and Eastern Africa. Examining the novels alongside multi-lingual, trans-historical archives, ranging from legal and administrative documents to travel narratives, photographs, and film, I contend that the novels employ a self-conscious mode of rewriting history, which exposes the limits of the various forms of community imagined in the region. This interdisciplinary project formulates a historically and culturally informed reading of the Indian Ocean that is sensitive to the region’s complex history of colonization and decolonization and at the same time responsive to its racial, linguistic, and cultural heterogeneity.

Archival and ethnographic research so that she can finish drafting chapters two and three of her manuscript on "petty" economy in Benin, especially the practice of buying cloths and tailoring them to made-to-order clothes.

This book manuscript project is a history of tailors and clothing in Benin from the era of the precolonial Kingdom of Dahomey (c.1600 – 1894) to the recent past. In this part of West Africa, men and women regularly bring cloth purchased in local markets to artisan tailors to sew made-to-order outfits for ceremonial and everyday wear. By tracing the long history of the objects, craft knowledge, and practices of tailoring, this project shows how the making and wearing of tailored clothing gave form and expression to modernity, urbanization, and political transformations. In doing so, “Tailoring Identities” reveals how international and regional markets in cloth and clothing intersected with colonial, national, and local politics, as well as regimes of taste and shifting notions of identity and affinity. Employing archival, visual, material, and oral sources, this project posits that as tailors made clothes, they also crafted ideas and gendered experiences of self, city, and nation.