Completion of a book on the literary production in Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean under the influence of Cold War politics.

During the Cold War, both the US and the Soviet Union jockeyed for geopolitical influence in what was then called the Third World. The superpowers also competed for intellectual influence by sponsoring literary activities in Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean. The Congress for Cultural Freedom (organized clandestinely by the CIA), the US State Department, and the Soviet Writers' Union funded outreach programs in the decolonizing world, hosting international conferences, establishing publishing houses and magazines, and sponsoring cultural exchange programs. Surprisingly, writers from decolonizing areas did not line up neatly into Cold War camps. As archival research demonstrates, writers were willing to accept patronage from both US and Soviet agencies. This includes some of the leading intellectuals the day, such as Chinua Achebe, Alex La Guma, Wole Soyinka, and Ngugi wa Thiong'o. 

Research and writing leading to a book on the Prestes Column, a rebellion of military personnel that shook Brazilian politics and ignited the public imagination during the 1920s.

This project offers the first critical reinterpretation of one of the most mythologized events in Brazilian history: the Prestes Column rebellion, when from 1924 to 1927, a group of junior army officers marched nearly 25,000 kilometers through Brazil's vast interior. While existing scholarship has treated the passage through the interior as a backdrop to the rebellion, I focus on the interior regions themselves, exploring how the country's so-called “backlands" served as both a place and a concept in the formation of modern Brazil. By analyzing the rebel passage through the interior and also the meanings attached to that experience afterwards, I will chart the Column's political, conceptual, and geographic significance throughout the twentieth century.My study of the Prestes Column will also serve to develop an entirely new subfield: interior history, an innovative approach for studying Brazil and also Latin America as a whole.

Research and writing leading to a cultural biography of Norman Holmes Pearson (1909-1975), a proponent of literary modernism, a U.S. intelligence operative, and a founding father of American Studies.

As a scholar, teacher, networker, and spy, Norman Holmes Pearson's influence in 20th century American culture was profound, although barely known. With this NEH fellowship, I will complete my biography of Pearson. But this is a cultural biography, using Pearson’s life, experiences, and accomplishments to illustrate the evolution of American society from the 1920s to the 1970s, with a particular focus on how elite culture came together in the 1940s and 1950s to advance a political, cultural, and aesthetic vision of America, and how that consensus fell apart with Vietnam.

Research and writing a history of four utopian communities, established by Mohandas Gandhi in South Africa and India between 1904 and 1936, which provided a model for his social thought and politics.

Gandhi is known worldwide for his nonviolent fight for India’s independence from colonial rule. Lesser known are his utopian residential experiments conducted at the intentional communities, or ashrams, that he founded in South Africa and India: Phoenix Settlement (est. 1904), Tolstoy Farm (est. 1910), Sabarmati Ashram (est. 1915), and Sevagram Ashram (est. 1936). Residents engaged in small-scale experiments with ideals and methods for living a just life that Gandhi would apply to larger-scale social, religious, and political problems. This book focuses on the communal observances undertaken by Gandhi and his co-residents to illuminate the evolution of Gandhi’s concept of sarvodaya, universal wellbeing. It argues: First, that voluntary self-control, which at times bled into self-sacrifice, was central to Gandhi’s utopian philosophy of sarvodaya; and second, that Gandhi’s intentional communities were the necessary conditions for his experiments with and articulation of that philosophy.

Completion of a book on the relationship between banking and slavery in the antebellum South.

This project focuses on the conscious choices made by bankers to directly, knowingly, and explicitly interact with the slave system. My research reveals that southern commercial banks accepted slaves as collateral for loans, helped underwrite the sale of slaves, and sold slave property as part of foreclosure proceedings. Commercial bank involvement with slavery occurred throughout the antebellum period and across the South, placing southern banks at the heart of the domestic slave trade. This project will result in the first major monograph on the relationship between banking and slavery, as well as serving as a corrective to the conclusions of several scholars collectively called the “new historians of capitalism.” Most banks limited their direct involvement with slavery, demonstrating that capitalism did not need slavery to develop. Slavery was intricately, but not inevitably, tied up with the capitalist system.

Research and writing leading to a book on the history of individual privacy and intellectual property from the Renaissance to the present.

The information defense industry is the enterprise that works to uphold information and intellectual property in today’s world. A composite global enterprise involving major corporations, policing institutions, and public agencies, it uses technology, enforcement, litigation, and lobbying to combat counterfeiting and piracy of all kinds. The industry has coalesced in the last 50 years out of disparate forces that had existed for centuries. It now plays a major, but largely unacknowledged, role in shaping the information society itself. I propose writing the first history of this industry. Starting with the guild practices of the European Renaissance, it will reveal the long and contentious process that has led from them to today’s sophisticated enterprise. My book should help us understand how the defining issues of our information politics – those concerning privacy, security, authenticity, and property – attained their current form, and thereby help us devise ways of tackling them.

We are living longer and longer. However, contrary to popular opinion, longevity is not a uniquely modern phenomenon. The Limits of Life explores the cultural and scientific world of advanced old age in early modern Europe (1450-1700). While many in this period were particularly intrigued by the possibility of extending human life, physicians and natural philosophers were also deeply concerned about the political, philosophical, ecological, and social implications of longevity. Expanding beyond the historical demography of Renaissance Italy, my research builds on recent scholarship interested in the cultural and medical history of death and dying. My research probes the ways that ideas about mortality and longevity crossed between elite spaces and popular discourse both in print and through well-documented encounters with the bodies of the aged. Longevity, as both a goal and a lived reality, revealed the religious, social, and embodied limits of early modern life.

Research and writing leading to a book on the rhetorical practices of three American women involved in the study of fertility.

This rhetorical history project analyzes the scientific, public, and interpersonal communication of three women who were central to the development and implementation of fertility science as it is known today. Reformer Julia Ward Howe, psychoanalyst Helene Deutsch, and gynecologist Sophia Kleegman communicated from different social locations and time periods to push back against—and contribute to—scientific orthodoxy. I contend that the fissures they created in scholarly and mainstream discourses about reproductive health functioned to expand the scope of infertility diagnosis and treatment regimens, and to loosen long-held clinical beliefs about women as the central players in fertility related ills. This analysis identifies the discursive strategies that these actors employed to intervene in fertility studies and demonstrates how interventions in science often unfold not in terms of revolutions but in terms of multimodal, nonlinear, and longitudinal communicative negotiations.

Research and writing leading to a book on relations between 11th-century Christian rulers of León and the Islamic states of al-Andalus.

The dangerous perception that medieval Europe was a theater of implacable holy war and that Spain was the arena of religiously-driven Reconquista is widespread. This project questions this perception through a study of the Iberian realms of León, Galicia, and Castile in the eleventh century, under Fernando I (1037-65) and Queen Sancha (d. 1067); it will be the first study of the reign in English. The period is often seen as one in which their Christian kingdom gained the upper hand over the weaker Islamic states of al-Andalus. Historians have generally believed that Fernando aspired to imperial authority in Iberia, developed a close relationship with the French monastic order of Cluny, and exerted dominance over the Islamic states to the south. This project challenges all these presumptions. Through an original analysis of royal charters and narrative sources, it traces the pragmatic nature of power and a geopolitical environment in which religious identity was by no means paramount.

Research and writing of a book on 19th-century poets, novelists, and artist who used the materials of writing and everyday life as inspiration for their work.

This project considers 19th-century British authors who used the materials of writing for inspiration and experimentation: Charlotte Brontë composing poems in the margins of printed books, George Eliot jotting ideas on her blotter, E.B. Browning sewing paper to paper to edit her poems, or Jane Austen using straight pins to “cut and paste.” Albums, journals, and notebooks play central roles, as embodied, haptic spaces where writers created text-and-collage gifts for friends, stored material memories, or collected appropriated words. Paper crafts and needlework served as text composition outside the bounds of ink and pen, and writing’s platforms—desk, slate, wall—mattered. This expanded view of what creativity with textual things meant was common, but the writers discussed here were excessive in their undoing, encrypting, and reusing. Their attention to seemingly insignificant details has been overlooked, primarily because such details have been aligned with the feminine and domestic.

Building upon the conceptual framework outlined in my previous book A Virtue for Courageous Minds: Moderation in French Political Thought, 1748-1830 (Princeton, 2012), this new interdisciplinary project fills a significant gap in the existing literature on French 19tth-century political thought. It explores how post-revolutionary thinkers (A. de Tocqueville, V. Cousin, F. Guizot, C. de Rémusat, liberal Catholics, É. Laboulaye, and J. Ferry) used the legacy of the French Revolution to build new representative institutions and promote key reforms, most notably in the field of education. The project also addresses several important contemporary concerns. I argue that far from being of mere historical interest, moderation is particularly relevant in an eclectic age such as ours, because it can also serve as a powerful normative stance in the fight against new forms of political extremism and religious fundamentalism.

Research and writing leading to a book on how prominent families in late medieval and early modern Rome appropriated Christian saints and hagiography into their own histories to further their moral and political authority.

This project investigates the "domestication" of Christian sanctity in medieval and early modern Rome. In the course of the Middle Ages, there developed a pronounced sense that churches and their saints belonged to specific regions, neighborhoods, and even families. This "emplacement" of medieval families and medieval saints, coupled with a resurgent interest in Rome’s Christian antiquity and a heightened attentiveness to noble lineages, culminated in Roman families weaving themselves, genealogically and materially, into Rome’s Christian past. Saintly lineages blossomed, as did the identification of churches as the former residences of early Christian and late antique saints—cementing presumed links between place, descent and moral worth.

Research and writing the first English translation-edition of the 17th-century Hebrew poem Tofteh ‘Arukh (Hell Arrayed) by rabbi-scholar Moses Zacuto.

Written at the height of the Italian Counter Reformation, Tofteh ‘Arukh (Hell Arrayed) by rabbi-scholar Moses Zacuto (Amsterdam, c. 1620-Mantua, 1697) is a 925-line dramatic poem in Hebrew graphically depicting the hereafter of sinners according to Kabbalah, or Jewish mysticism. Despite its popularity among Jewish readership of the pre-modern era and being generally considered a milestone in the history of Hebrew literary culture, it has never been translated into English, nor has it been the subject of thorough scholarly investigation in English. Sitting at the intersection of textual studies and historical and literary criticism, the project intends to make Tofteh ‘Arukh accessible to the English reader by offering the first-ever complete annotated English translation of the original Hebrew text. The translation will be supplemented by introductory essays framing Zacuto’s work against the cultural ambience of early modern Jewish Italy in which it was produced, read, and circulated.

Research and writing of a book on Frances Ellen Watkins Harper (1825-1911), African American author, orator, abolitionist, suffragist, and civil rights leader.

With the support of an NEH Fellowship, I will complete the first book-length study of the Civil War and Reconstruction-era work of African American writer, speaker, and activist Frances Ellen Watkins Harper (1825-1911). Harper’s career—especially the critical period between 1861 and 1877—remains surprisingly understudied, even though her efforts shaped African American literature, abolitionism, suffrage and civil rights struggles, the temperance movement, the Black press, and American lyceum culture. Beyond either traditional biography or collection of close readings, my book will explore how Harper claimed these nation-shaking moments as her own, both creating and critiquing public assessments of the war and its aftermath. It will argue that she forged a deeply intersectional praxis of public life that engaged the communities around her and that modeled the citizenship she demanded for herself and for other African Americans.

Research and writing leading to a book on the Latino involvement in the Civil Rights Movement between 1968 and 1984.

Minority: Latinos and the Making of Multiracial America after the 1960s offers a full account of Latinos’ centrality to the struggles over law and policy that reconfigured American society after the 1960s. The book will argue that Latino activism and leadership contributed substantially to the outcome of major domestic conflicts and debates during the long decade of the 1970s: battles over school desegregation and busing, political redistricting, affirmative action in employment, and access to higher education, as well as ongoing protests against police brutality and disagreements over the causes of growing urban poverty. The real impact of the major changes that took shape in American society during the 1970s--the coda to the conventionally-defined civil rights movement--cannot be understood without expanding this national story to incorporate Latinos as central historical actors.

Research and writing a book on the effects of economic pressures on religious principles, specifically how Salafist Islam has adapted to economic growth and globalization.

My book project is about the impact of global economic exchanges on an Islamic movement. Oil deposits and world trade radically changed Saudi Arabia, one of the poorest and most isolated nations in the 1930s, into one of the world’s leading importers of goods and services by the end of the twentieth century. I will analyze the effect of these and other economic changes on Salafism, a religious movement dedicated to reviving the doctrines and practices of the first Muslims. Specifically, I will focus on the codes of conduct that Salafist clerics designed to guide lay Muslims in everyday economic activities not only in Saudi Arabia but throughout the world. Political scientists and historians have studied the spread of Salafism across national borders and the emergence of rival Salafist schools. But they have not examined, as I will in this book, the ways that Salafists have tried to reconcile moral and material pursuits in the context of economic globalization.

Completion of a book on higher education reform movements in the United States during the Progressive Era.

A historical examination of the first iteration of sustained, systemic reform efforts directed at American colleges and universities, based on new archival research. The project identifies a cohort of reformers, the "academic engineers," who derived their power and prominence from the earliest permanently endowed philanthropic foundations. The academic engineers attempted to constrain the ambitions of both institutions and students, but fell short in the face of mounting bottom-up resistance. Still, they left a legacy that includes key infrastructural developments like the community college, as well as a logic of reform that lives on, focused on efficiency, accountability, and utility.

Preparation of a digital critical edition and translation of the 17th-century French novel La Princesse de Clèves by Marie-Madeleine de Lafayette.

Questioning purported “universal theories of digital technologies,” a key aim of this project is to present a model for North American DH [digital humanities] projects, useful to graduate and scholarly audiences, but above all accessible to undergraduates, that focuses on non-Anglophone materials, while furthering scholarly understanding of a classic early modern text. In creating a digital platform for investigating the seventeenth-century novel, La Princesse de Clèves, I offer a liberal arts approach to combining modern language and DH methods by active engagement pedagogies to realize a richer, more global, trans-disciplinary and trans-linguistic DH experience. The approach to the interactive Princesse de Clèves publication will enable viewers to observe how cultural and linguistic differences shape the kinds of questions DH practitioners pose, as well as the methods and materials they draw from.

Research and writing leading to a book on the French Empire’s legal system in the Indian Ocean.

“A World at Court: Nested Legality and French Empire across the Indian Ocean” is about the local litigants and colonial officials who transformed the practice of law in French colonies in the Indian Ocean in the 18th and 19th centuries. It offers an account of French and French-administered “native” courts of law in India, Réunion, and Mauritius. It unearths the permeability of law to novel modes of bringing suits, deciding verdicts, and enacting legal power. Across a geography that integrates South Asia, the Indian Ocean, Africa, and Europe, it charts transformations in colonial legal practice by analyzing judicial interactions that did not quite follow the letter of the law. It argues that French courts in the Indian Ocean relied on local modes of dispute resolution, even in jurisdictions that purportedly relied on European legal codes. They did so by courting local intervention at every stage of the judicial process, thus allowing alternative legal sites “nest” within French courts.

Research and writing leading to a book about the cultural history of violins and violin-playing in Britain, from 1870 to 1930.

My project identifies and rehabilitates a vigorous violin culture in Britain, c.1870-1930, through broad historical analysis of the practical and conceptual presence of the violin family there. The surge in musical activity, stimulated by newly affordable instruments, was underscored by changing social and cultural values that broke longstanding barriers of gender and class, and it was advanced by a growing commercial and educational infrastructure. It also endured, impacting the British compositional tradition and multiple performance spheres. Violin culture’s spread and vitality had a systemic and democratizing impact on music-making, its flowering bound up with ideas about the instruments that reflected contemporary concerns. Emphasizing amateur pursuits, mechanisms for learning, and structures that enabled or restricted the realization of professional ambitions, my work explores the meanings string instruments had for newcomer enthusiasts and gives voice to their experiences.

Preparation of an English-language translation and critical edition of the Voronezh Notebooks by the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam (1891-1938).

The project is a critical English-language edition of the Voronezh Notebooks of Osip Mandelstam, one of Russia’s most significant 20th century poets. These poems, written during his exile, in a period between destitution and hope, mark the moment of Mandelstam's crossing from modernist tradition to postmodern poetics, and his negotiation of individuality and collectivity in the precarious political context of Stalin's 1930s. Relying on recently available archival material and manuscript versions, and a wealth of scholarship written in the post-Soviet period, the proposed edition would offer new translations and contextualizing commentary on Mandelstam’s crowning poetic achievement, providing the general reader as well as scholars with pertinent bibliographic information, a timeline of the poet's life, relevant documents from his NKVD files, and comparisons between early publications and contemporary authoritative editions.

Research and writing leading to a biography of John S. Jacobs (1815-1875) and a critical edition of Jacobs’s 1855 autobiographical slave narrative.

This NEH fellowship will support the completion of a project with two components: a book-length biography of John Swanson Jacobs, Harriet Jacobs’s brother and Frederick Douglass’s protégé, and a critical edition of his rediscovered autobiographical slave narrative, The United States Governed by Six Hundred Thousand Despots: A True Story of Slavery. The publication of this 1855 narrative will give scholars the unprecedented opportunity to compare two versions of the same slave narrative in order to understand the impact of white abolitionist editors on the latter version. This will be the first biography of John Jacobs and the most chronologically extensive history of a black family from enslavement to emancipation. It will also serve as an essential companion piece to Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, which now rivals Douglass’s Narrative in importance for the study of the history of slavery. This project is under contract with the University of Chicago Press.

Research and writing leading to a biography of Brazilian folk musician Tom Zé (1936- ).

The personal and artistic trajectory of Tom Zé (b. 1936), one of the great musical innovators of our time, reveals a larger portrait of modern Brazil during the last century. His life and art provide a microhistorical prism through which to examine modernization and underdevelopment, rural to urban migration, authoritarian rule and its legacies, inequality under neo-liberal regimes, insurgent social movements, and cultural globalization. His work also provides an exquisite example of the creative repurposing of cultural tradition, identified with rural northeastern Brazil, in dialogue with experimental music and poetics.

Research and writing leading to a reference work on the Latin transmission and reception of Greek patristic writers in medieval western Europe.

The Lost Patriarchs Project investigates the impact and influence of the Greek Christian patristic tradition in medieval western Europe through a study of the surviving evidence (manuscripts, citations, and monastic library catalogue entries) for the knowledge of Greek works in Latin translation. The goal of the project is the production of an instrument of reference that will further the study of the transmission and reception of Greek patristics in the European Middle Ages.

Research and writing leading to a book on cultural heritage and preservation policies in Colombia.

My project, Excluded: Black Cultural Heritage and the Politics of Diversity in Colombia, examines why in Colombia disparities within Black groups continue to increase despite the heightened public attention for Afro-descendants and creation of public policies intended to combat ethno-racial inequality. I argue that by using visibility as a form of inclusion, state-sponsored multicultural policies have entrenched structural discrimination and preserved systematic inequities. By examining the harmful consequences of the declaration of San Basilio de Palenque's Afro-descendant culture as "Intangible Heritage of Humanity" by UNESCO, I trace how heritage policy ends up perpetuating, against declared intention, the inequalities that multicultural policies intend to resolve. My research advances scholarship on rights, heritage and identity, and establishes the framework for a deeper, more nuanced understanding of the pervasiveness of inequality on a larger scale.