Funded Projects Query Form
478 matches

Writing a book on the Highlander Folk School’s role in the Civil Rights Movement and other social movements.

I propose to write a new history of the civil rights movement focused on the Highlander Folk School and on the relationship between education and social change. A small racially-integrated institution in the hills of Tennessee, Highlander was founded in 1932. In the 1950s and 1960s, Highlander hosted hundreds of civil rights activists, including Rosa Parks, Ella Baker, John Lewis, and Martin Luther King. At the core of my research are one hundred hours of audio recordings made of civil rights meetings at Highlander, audio recordings that have been largely overlooked by scholars and that offer a unique opportunity to listen in as civil rights activists debate goals and tactics, use role-play to practice nonviolent protest strategies, and learn from each other and from a range of guest speakers from across the country and abroad. By examining the history of Highlander, I will contribute to the scholarship on civil rights struggles and on the role of education within social movements.

Research and writing leading to a book on the scientific, literary, and philosophical discourse on sexual violence during the French Enlightenment.

This study demonstrates that the Enlightenment promotion of human sexuality as natural and desirable produced a novel, secularized narrative for how sexual violence against women functioned. This new account represented female desire as fundamentally contradictory, with women said to want and need sex as much as men, but to possess an innate resistance to the act itself. By first attracting only to then refuse men, it was argued, women ensured the survival of the species by heightening male desire, thus fulfilling nature’s hidden agenda. This reimagining of female modesty as an instinctual response is documented in medical treatises, socio-political essays on human development over deep time, travel narratives, paintings, and the era’s most popular novels. My analysis intervenes in a far-ranging assortment of disciplines, brought together by a focus on how new assumptions about the “natural” sex act effaced the possibility of “real” rape, with lasting consequences down to our own time.

Research and writing leading to a book on criminal procedure in 18th-century China, based on archival records of 5000 court cases.

I propose a book about criminal procedure in 18th-century China based on 5000 court cases already collected from historical archives. My goal is basic, yet vital: to use concrete case studies--of torture, confession, autopsy, review, appeals, imprisonment, and punishment--to show how the judiciary worked in practice, and from the standpoint of practice to reflect back on its normative claims. No book like the one I propose exists in any language: past scholarship largely depends on normative texts that do not reflect actual practice. I have two foils: an old Orientalist stereotype of China as “a realm of cruelty,” and a Chinese Communist stereotype of the imperial era as “the cannibalistic old society.” In fact, the criminal justice system of the 18th century compares favorably both to its contemporaries and to that of China today. One goal is to suggest how China’s own legal tradition might be the basis for reform, especially with regard to torture, review, and capital punishment.

Research and writing leading to a book on Cornell Capa (1918-2008), a photographer and curator, and the International Photography Center (ICP), which he founded in 1974.

This project offers a new account of photography’s institutional development in the late 20th century. It focuses on Cornell Capa – the Jewish-Hungarian born, naturalized American, brother of the famed photojournalist Robert Capa, who dedicated himself to preserving the work of news photographers whose massive archives were in danger of being discarded and forgotten. In 1974, Capa founded the International Center of Photography (ICP), New York’s first museum, archive, and educational forum devoted exclusively to photography. Based in exclusive access to Capa’s papers and ICP’s institutional records, I offer the first critical analysis of ICP’s origins and Cornell Capa’s 60-year career as a photojournalist, curator, publisher, and institution-builder. By looking at Capa and ICP, I demonstrate not only how major historical events became equated with a few iconic news photographs, but also how the history of press photography became entangled with the language of the art world.

Research and writing leading to a book on the rights of victims to epistemic justice by being known and heard by the parties who wronged them.

This project will provide the first discussion and application of what I call epistemic reparations, which are intentionally reparative actions in the form of epistemic goods given to those epistemically wronged by parties who acknowledge these wrongs and whose reparative actions are intended to redress them. Drawing on and crucially expanding a framework provided by the United Nations of the “right to know,” this project shows that victims of gross violations and injustices also have the right to be known—to be givers of knowledge to others about their own experiences. This project will result in (1) a single-authored book that develops the framework of epistemic reparations, and (2) the creation of a website that provides epistemic reparations by publishing first-person accounts from victims of gross violations, focusing largely on injustices in the criminal legal system.

Research and writing leading to a book on Black activism during the 1980s and 1990s. 

"We must take to the streets again" explores the burst of black activism that rose in opposition to the restructuring of the U.S. economy and conservative ascendance in U.S. politics of the late 1970s and 1980s. Focusing on ideas, language, symbols, activists, and organizations, this project presents the black political activism of the 1980s and 90s as a bridge between the mobilizations of the Black Power Movement in the 1960s and Black Lives Matter in the twenty-first century. It will thus help us understand not only a pivotal and understudied period in African American history, but our contentious present.

Research leading to a book on laborers’ use of the Thirteenth Amendment to seek relief from coercive work conditions in the American West (1862-1877). 

The study of abolition in the United States has focused almost exclusively on the South, even though the West also had a long history of coercive labor practices like Indigenous captivity and debt peonage. How, then, was abolition implemented in the West? In the same way that enslaved people in the South escaped to Union lines to claim their freedom during the Civil War, so too did African Americans, Indigenous peoples, Chinese coolies, and Mexican debt peons in the West flee to the nearest federal official to protest their continued bondage. Drawing on territorial records, military correspondence, and judicial case files, this book will tell the story of freedom seekers in the postbellum West. In the process, it will argue that their claims not only helped to implement the abolition of slavery in the United States, but also contributed to contentious debates about what counted as slavery in a postbellum economic system defined by degrees of coercion.

Research and writing leading to a comparative history of Spanish Catholic Saint Teresa de Ávila (d. 1582) and Moroccan Sufi Sidi Ri?wan al-Januwi (d. 1583).

"Between Dung and Blood: Ritual Purity, Sainthood, and Power in the Early Modern Mediterranean" employs sources in Arabic and Spanish to investigate how the stories of two sixteenth-century saints, both from families of converts, reveal the roles played by blood and bodily pollution as substances and symbols in the religious and political fabric of the early modern Western Mediterranean. I argue that, in Morocco and Iberia, ideas about blood and bodily pollution helped shape processes of race-making and social hierarchies based on notions of ritual purity and impurity.

Research and writing leading to a book on legal and philosophical concepts on personhood—from humans to corporations, algorithms, animals, and the environment.

Over the last twenty-five years, the concept of personhood has become essential--to debates about providing corporations human privileges, limiting access to abortion, giving algorithms free speech protections, releasing elephants from zoos, and permitting trees the standing to sue. “The Personhood Problem, From Corporations to Trees: Synthesizing Political and Philosophical Debates on Persons” reveals the unsettling connections between these imagined persons and their sought-after rights, in a bracing and nuanced examination of the versions of personhood proliferating today. Synthesizing the political and philosophical debates on personhood, the book uncovers the unexpected, disturbing, and dangerous alignments between them. Telling the true and engaging story of the oldest version of “fictional” personhood--the corporate one--this book helps us rethink that history and its use, or threat, to us now.

Research and writing for a book examining how early American conceptions of national security are expressed in its literature and other media.  

"American Insecurity" breaks down the concept of security by investigating its American origins and the structures of state as well as the structures of feeling that flow from what philosophers posit as the impetus to form a political community in the first place. The goal is to examine how security provides an organizing principle for collective life in ways that both enhance freedom and limit it. Through critical attention to a range of novels, tracts, pamphlets, and newspapers, including the complete run of the first Black newspaper in the United States, "Freedom’s Journal" (1827-29), in conjunction with contemporary critical theory about media, biopolitics, and affect, I look at how security’s generative capacity to provide a foundation for art and culture is matched only by its capacity to register a sense of vulnerability.  Edited for clarity by staff.

Research and writing leading to a web-based publication that explores how Artificial Intelligence, Geographic Information Systems, and satellite imagery can be deployed to describe land use in the Alas Merta Jati forest of Bali, and how these descriptions interact with local knowledge and sustainability strategies.

The nexus of geographic information systems (GIS) and artificial intelligence (AI) has created a powerful class of analytical visual products that offer new perspectives on planet earth. High resolution satellite imagery – once a rarefied asset reserved for military intelligence operations and geoscience experts - is now hyper-available, and algorithm-derived insights gained from those images percolate into numerous fields. In this project, I will attend to the pathways along which satellite networks, GIS, and AI (S-GIS-AI) create visual artifacts that describe landscapes and land use. I will reflect on the logic of assumptions made and arguments constructed by S-GIS-AI machinery in a specific context: the forests of Alas Merta Jati on Bali, Indonesia. Specifically, I will reflect on how the creation of land-cover categories by these systems can be deployed to support particular needs, ambitions, and opportunities related to sustainability. I seek an NEH-Mellon Fellowship for Digital Publication to complete a multimedia and software-in-action research artifact that tells a story of how this nexus operates in debates over the Alas Merta Jati.

Research and writing leading to a global history of maritime prize law (1498-1916).

Ordering Property charts the global rise and fall of maritime prize law from 1498 through the aftermath of the American Civil War. Prize courts, which had jurisdiction over enemy property seized in wartime, became a principal forum for private property disputes between the subjects of different empires during the early modern era. This made them a key site for creating and enforcing law among polities. Prize courts created trans- and inter-imperial legal orders as a routine part of their work. Empires used prize jurisdiction to extend their authority into regions in which imperial institutions were weak. Prize became a powerful but flawed mode of inter-imperial governance, central to efforts to end the Atlantic slave trade, shape European colonization in Asia, and decide the outcome of the Americas’ independence struggles. The project reveals a largely forgotten history of inter-imperial governance via private property relations in the era before modern international law.

Research and writing leading to a book on the lives and impacts of three Indigenous explorers of the Pacific during the nineteenth century. 

This project analyzes the explorations of three Indigenous individuals—Comekala (a Mowachaht from Nootka Sound), Ranald MacDonald (a Chinook from the Columbia River), and Kekela (a kanaka maoli from the Hawaiian Kingdom)—in the Pacific Ocean from the 1780s to 1900. They illustrate that Native peoples embarked on their own explorations and actively shaped Pacific Worlds in order to craft Indigenous futures. Their explorations and the impacts of them in their home communities demonstrate how Indigenous societies understood and shaped the global in the long nineteenth century. This project complicates the traditional characterization of who counts as an explorer and which societies explore. By analyzing the “routedness” of these three individuals, I reveal how Indigenous individuals and societies engaged with the wider world beyond their homelands while countering the debilitating stereotype of Indigenous peoples who lived static lives marked by narrow horizons and the lack of innovation.

Research and writing leading to a book on the 1918 influenza epidemic in rural Europe, that investigates the social, political, and religious factors shaping responses to the medical crisis.

This book project represents the first transnational cultural history of the 1918 influenza pandemic in Europe. Between 1918 and 1920, the pandemic killed 50+ million people, including 2-3 million Europeans, in the final months of a war that already took 15-20 million lives. The project draws on 978 flu survivors’ testimonies, gathered from 10 European countries, to compare Europeans’ notions of what caused the pandemic, their impressions of healthcare during the crisis, and their perceptions of the flu as a local, national, and global event. I argue that unlike WWI and COVID-19, the 1918 flu did not serve as a mirror for Europeans’ collective aspirations and failures, so they did not remember it as a collective event, despite its extensive and collective effects on society. This thesis explains why the pandemic is undertheorized in the academic record and overlooked in the public memory but is essential for contextualizing COVID-19.

Research and writing leading to a book on the history and cultural influence of the Ghost Dance (1870s – 1970s).

In 1890, Native Americans danced to renew their world. They experienced visions of massive buffalo herds, deceased relatives, supernatural beings, and bright futures. Euro-Americans called it the “Ghost Dance” and focused on the movement’s potential to delay Native people’s transition to “modern” life. Many contemporary historians share this approach, differentiating primitive and hostile dancers from forward-thinking, accommodating ones. In contrast, my book centers Native people by way of four departures from earlier work. I expand the cast of Native actors, push the historical timeline backward and forward, rely primarily on Native sources, and structure the narrative around key themes in Indigenous Studies, including kinship, land, and sovereignty. In sum, I portray a pan-Indian ritual movement to save a beloved and threatened world, an effort that resonates with contemporary Native activism to improve tribal life, defend sovereignty, and protest environmental degradation.

Research and writing leading to a book on the life and works of photojournalist and entrepreneur Thérèse Bonney (1894-1978).

My book on Therese Bonney (1894–1978), a prolific photographer, collector, curator, filmmaker, humanitarian, and American spy, explores how Americans learned about international conflicts through the syndication of her photographs. Concerns over syndication still test democracies today, as they rely on the transmission of accurate news to inform voters and hold leaders to account. She founded the Bonney Service in 1922, the first American illustrated press service in Europe. Through it, she dispersed photographs taken in nineteen countries to a global market of thirty-three nations. Her biography and artistic practice reveal her invention of longlasting cultural categories around gender and social justice. Her photographic and business innovations also permitted the dissemination of Bonney herself as a professional woman artist. Through these photographs and her curatorial work, she contributed to the histories of gender, modernism, journalism, photography, and warfare.

Completion of a book manuscript demonstrating the intersection of science, Big Business, and consumer culture in Victorian England by examining the orchid as a focal point of international trade, print culture, and hybridization practices.  

My new book (under contract with Harvard University Press) follows the hunt for Cattleya Labiata - aka the "Lost Orchid” - as a means of investigating afresh the rise of consumerism and collection culture in the nineteenth century, the shifting meanings of the orchid in Victorian visual and literary texts, the intersection of Big Science and Big Business, and the power of colonial profit-making. Bringing Darwin into fresh focus, too, my project reminds us that the dark side of scientific progress is too often the exploitation of indigenous cultures and the rape of the natural environment. Plant-hunters took what they wanted from the land: we continue to pay for it, while reproducing their mistakes as we grab without considering the fragility of our ecosystems. The Hunt for the Lost Orchid uncovers a story that thrilled and astonished the Victorians, then, but it’s also a warning to us all as we face down environmental cataclysm.

Research and writing leading to a book on the material, political, and environmental history of paper milling in Mexico, from pre-Columbian times to the present.

My book project examines how a cross-section of society made, used, and debated paper to offer a new analysis of political culture and state formation in post-colonial Mexico. It reconstructs practices of production and consumption from independence to the contemporary era to argue that paper became an essential, if unevenly available, political tool used by elites and ordinary Mexicans for negotiating power and status in the new nation. Papermaking generated controversy throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, especially in the newsrooms, forest communities, and mill towns whose fortunes were increasingly bound up with production. By tracing the material, environmental, and discursive contests that swirled around paper, my project demonstrates how government officials, businessmen, journalists, workers, forest communities, development experts, and a range of ordinary Mexicans shaped a political culture in which paper served as an increasingly ubiquitous medium of exchange.

Research and writing leading to a book about representations of the Holocaust in contemporary dance, from 1961 to the present, through consideration of works by Jewish and non-Jewish choreographers working in eight countries.

Moving Memories will examine dance as a critical site for Holocaust representation in over two dozen works created between 1961 and the present by Jewish and non-Jewish choreographers working in the US, as well as in Austria, Belarus, Canada, Germany, Hungary, Israel, and Poland. The Holocaust has been a major focus of film, theater, literature, and visual art; there have been numerous books that address Holocaust representation in these media. Moving Memories will be the first monograph on Holocaust representation in dance. I argue that dance has served as a fertile platform for making an embodied intervention into an immensely complex history of trauma and loss, intolerance and bigotry. The book illustrates how representations of the Holocaust in dance set history and testimony into motion; nudge memorials out of statis; activate individual and collective memories; and generate affective and effective responses in audiences.

Writing and revisions leading to a book that examines the social, political, and technological intersections between natural disaster and civil war in Sri Lanka.

Completion of a book manuscript and two articles examining the intersection of two disasters: the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami and the decades-long civil war in Sri Lanka. The writing provides timely analyses of the experiences and management of disasters and is relevant to broader issues in Environmental Humanities, Critical Disaster Studies, and South Asian Studies.

Research and writing leading to a book about how queer and trans people expand traditional approaches to privacy and counter surveillance by creatively exploiting the features of mainstream technology.

This book project introduces a concept I entitle “digital enchantment”: a framework that explores how diverse queer and trans users subvert and expand traditional approaches of privacy by creatively exploiting the features of mainstream technologies and creating their own platforms. Prevailing counter-surveillance strategies uncritically celebrate visibility and representation while positioning privacy as an individual right rooted in concealing information. Drawing on San Francisco case studies including drag queens, trans taxi drivers, cruising gay men, and femme witches, I look to LGBTQ+ histories that complicate these assumptions. Digital enchantment describes the hyper-visible glamour, mischievousness, and mystical intuition that many queer/trans subjects employ to playfully dazzle both the human senses and computational sensors.

Research and writing leading to a book offering a pluralistic account of the processes of human thought informed by cognitive science.

Human beings think. We are, as Descartes remarked, “thinking things.” We also talk. Putting these two observations together has led philosophers to a powerful idea: that thoughts are mental sentences. But this linguistic model of mind faces a significant problem. It struggles to accommodate nonhuman animals, which are too sophisticated to be explained without thoughts yet not sophisticated enough to be explained with sentence-like thoughts. Drawing on research from the cognitive sciences, my project develops a detailed, philosophical account of the nonlinguistic mind that explains animal intelligence and reorients our understanding of human uniqueness.

Research and writing leading to a book on the scientific concept of “Opposite Sexes” in 19th-century German scientific and scholarly discourse.

A 12-month NEH fellowship will enable me to complete a book, The Making of the Opposite Sex, that will investigate how sex came to be viewed as opposite rather than merely other. As naturalists shifted focus from anatomy to physiology, this oppositional sexual dynamic emerged in science, medicine, literature, and philosophy, all fields in dialogue. In various thinkers, the polarity came to ground definitions of the organism; the workings of all life; the possibility of empirical knowledge; the existence of the objective world beyond subjective imaginings; human ethical interactions; and even an originary heterogeneity as the condition of possibility for differentiated existence as such. My book will focus on the German-speaking world in which sexual polarity emerged. It will conclude by analyzing the resurgence of the model in the US in the last 30 years. My research will illuminate from a scholarly standpoint why the concept has proven so intertwined with social values for so long.

Preparation of a trilingual (English, Spanish, Kreyol) translation and critical edition of “Unbroken Nostalgia: Haitian Kreyol Poetry in Cuba” by Hilario Batista Félix (1955- ), an important Haitian-Cuban writer.

I will complete a scholarly edition (with introduction, translation, and annotations) of Nostalji san pwen ni vigil: pwezi kreyòl nan peyi Kiba (2015) by Haitian-Cuban writer Hilario Batista Félix, in collaboration with the author. A descendant of Haitian migrant workers to Eastern Cuba during the mid-twentieth century, Batista embodies and expresses Cuba’s cultural and linguistic diversity. His writing affirms Black agency by evoking Haiti’s spiritual traditions and revolutionary legacy of 1804, while also contesting enduring patterns of discrimination towards Haitians in Cuba and issues of internalized racism within the Haitian-Cuban community. The poems also convey a sense of longing for a shared heritage and homeland, a desire for belonging within the present, and a forceful commitment to anti-racist discourse. My project, the first to address Batista’s collection, sheds light on Eastern Cuba's Haitian cultural heritage and helps expand the corpus of diasporic Haitian literature.

Research and writing leading to a book about hip hop history, showing how the record collections and home-DJ practices of Black women and Latinas in the 1970s Bronx shaped the artform’s birth, sound, and development.

This project enacts a paradigm shift in hip hop history, showing how the record collections and home-DJ selecting practices of Black women and Latinas in the 1970s Bronx dramatically shaped the artform’s birth, sound, and development. Through archival evidence, textual analysis, and a new oral history archive co-created with Bronx women, this book performs three interventions: reconceiving gender in hip hop historiography, rethinking the figure of the “mother” in popular music studies and record collecting culture, and documenting the selecting practices of Black women and Latinas. In narrating their lives and relationships to music, Bronx women reveal how they used records to create new forms of identity, motherhood, and family structures, as well as how crucial their collecting and selecting have been to major social, political, and artistic movements in the United States.