Research

Arts and Humanities Faculty Research
History and Society Faculty Research
Arts and Humanities Recent Publications
History and Society Recent Publications

Excerpts from BFRF August 2009 Newsletter

BFRF Final Products Accepted

Elizabeth Goldberg, Arts and Humanities
Plotting the Human: Unsettling the Manichean Allegory in Caryl Phillips' Cambridge and A Distant Shore

This paper examines representations in the work of British writer Caryl Phillips of the lynching of African men as a punishment for their perceived connections to white European women. I argue that what makes Phillips' work so compelling in terms of human rights is its attention to the human particularity of subjects historically fixed and made unrecognizable by their "types" and the conventional plots containing their association. Specifically, both novels juxtapose the narratives of a white woman and a black man--perhaps the most historically fraught convergence of subject positions in the context of race and human rights--in their historical contexts. The narratives mirror one another, reflecting and refracting the deep similarities between these subject positions which have been historically construed as irrevocably different and constructed as the stage for violently dramatic tableaux of misrepresentations comprising miscegenation. This paper explores the potential of such narrative innovations to unsettle the Manichean allegory articulated by Frantz Fanon in Black Skins White Mask, while also considering how Phillips' work intervenes in later debates about the force of the Manichean allegory among postcolonial literary critics. Finally, I show how Phillips' literary work contributes to recent theoretical work about cosmopolitanism as a philosophical underpinning to the contemporary human rights regime.

Mary O'Donoghue, Arts and Humanities
The Strange Arrangement of Dreams

The Strange Arrangement of Dreams is a piece of fiction, specifically a long short story. This fiction locates itself in the legend of Marie Taglioni, an Italian ballet dancer who was said to keep a plastic ice cube in her jewel box as a reminder of the time in 1835 when she was forced to dance in the snow for a Russian highwayman. This fiction also draws on a 1940 piece of art made by Joseph Cornell that commemorates the tale, Tagioni's Jewel Casket, held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The project intercuts fictionalized episodes from life of Taglioni with an imagined account of Cornell's making of the piece of art. Alternating sections ask questions about the making of art and pursue nuanced connections between the box artist Cornell and the dancer Tagioni.

Faculty News

Mary O'Donoghue, Arts and Humanities, has an impressive list of new publications to her credit. Her poems "Letters to Emily: Finding your Voice," "Thanksgiving in Florida" and "Petition," as well as a literary essay "On disgrace and the need for a newfangled envoy" appeared this spring in The Watchful Heart: A New Generation of Irish Poets. Ed. Joan McBreen, Cliffs of Mother: Salmon Press, 2009. This anthology presents the work of twenty-four Irish poets. The poem "Petition" was written as part of the BFRF-supported Aquitania project, 2007.

Her poem "Late Cycle" appeared in a special feature 'Writing Home,' edited by Nessa O'Mahony under the auspices of the John Hume Institute for Global Irish Studies at University College Dublin and published in Stinging Fly magazine, summer 2009. A novel chapter entitled "L. casei immunitas" is forthcoming in fall 2009 in the literary journal Agni.

Excerpts from BFRF May 2009 Newsletter

2009 Summer Stipend Awards

Mary Pinard, Arts and Humanities, Fragile Giants: The Loess Hills, Vanishing Prairie Landscape
The focus of Pinard's research and poetry is the ecosystem of North American tallgrass prairie in the Loess Hills of western Iowa.

Brian Seitz, Arts and Humanities, "Philosophy and the Double"
This essay will introduce the problem of the double by addressing its role and play in philosophy, focusing on two exemplary figures, Plato and Kant, whose metaphysical bifurcations secure philosophical necessity but at the cost of this world.

Elizabeth Goldberg, Arts and Humanities, Limit Cases: Literature, Economic Development and the Achievement of Global Human Rights
This book has two objectives: to examine the consequences of the split between civil/political and economic/social/cultural rights in the two UN Conventions and to consider the role of economic approaches to literature in the global, postmodern age through the lens of economic rights as human rights.

Mary O'Donoghue, Arts and Humanities, Upper Rooms: Two Fictions
This story will examine how performers and practitioners in arts and sports experience the demands of their fields and how those same demands influence, and often contort, their personal relationships and engagements with the world.

Excerpts from BFRF April 2009 Newsletter

Recent BFRF Grants
BFRF annouced the following grants to A&H faculty for 2009-2010:

2009 Summer Stipends
Brian Seitz

Research Expense Funds
Janice Yellin

BFRF Final Products Accepted
Mary O’Donoghue, Arts and Humanities, Skelper: Four Chapters of a Novel
This project involved researching and writing four chapters, plus prologue, of a novel provisionally entitled Skelper. The novel is told through the voice of an almost-eighty-year-old Irish former boxer. The completed chapters move backward and forward in time from present-day Paris and L’Hôpital St-Louis to the Irish midlands in the post-WWII period and on into the amateur boxing clubs of 1950s London. The journey is both geographical and retrospective, as the narrator recounts a sequence of events that has brought him to Paris. The completed chapters are later chapters in the novel, to be followed by two or three more.

Excerpts from BFRF January 2009 Newsletter

BFRF Final Products Accepted
Julie Levinson, Arts and Humanities Introduction to Top of the World: The American Success Myth in Film
Top of the World: The American Success Myth in Film is a cultural history of the American idea of success. Although the book focuses on the codification of the success myth in Hollywood movies, its perspective is couched in two centuries of American thought and in a range of disciplinary methodologies. This introductory chapter lays out some of the key frames of reference that will inform the film analyses in the succeeding chapters. It synthesizes the work of historians and theorists of myth in order to establish a scholarly context for the success stories that recur in popular cultural narratives of the twentieth century, focusing particularly on anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss’ notion that myths are comprised of layered pairs of seemingly irreconcilable oppositions.

Excerpts from BFRF November 2008 Newsletter

BFRF Research Awards for 2009-2010

Summer Stipends
Mary Pinard, Arts and Humanities

2009-2010 Course Releases
Jon Dietrick, Arts and Humanities

2009-2010 Major Awards
Elizabeth Goldberg, Arts and Humanities
Mary O’Donoghue, Arts and Humanities
Janice Yellin, Arts and Humanities

BFRF Final Products Accepted
Lisa Colletta, Arts and Humanities, “Intermodern Travel: J.B. Priestley’s English and American Journeys” in Intermodernism: Literary Culture in Interwar and Wartime Britain” After working in the Hollywood studios during the 1930s, writers like J.B. Priestly looked back to England for cultural origins that might resist the modern forces of American capitalism and popular culture. Most, as writers of satires and social comedies, doubted that they would find them, and their comedies often reveal an ambivalence about both American culture and the attempts to reclaim a traditional English one. However, Priestly, who resisted the “astonishing unreality of Hollywood,” felt that post-imperial England might offer a modern national identity able to resist the transnationalism of global capitalism, suggesting an idea of Englishness based on cultural traditions rather than imperial power. This is most evident in his BBC radio broadcasts during the forties that embodied “the voice of the common people,” but his travel narratives: English Journey and Midnight on the Desert, also reveal his understanding of the globalizing power of American popular culture and how this power will reshape traditional ideas of Englishness.
Jon Dietrick, Arts and Humanities, “Blood Money and Bad Pennies: Monstrous Money in Sidney Kingsley’s Dead End”
The article seeks to enlarge our understanding of American attitudes toward money and capitalism during the Great Depression and during our own era by analyzing an extremely popular but critically neglected play from the1930s, Sidney Kingsley’s Dead End. In keeping with the mode of literary and dramatic naturalism that dominates so much thirties drama, money and economic relations are repeatedly implicated in what Dead End wants to encode as the monstrous deformity of a “natural” order. At the same time however, as a late-Depression play that wants to point a way forward, Dead End ultimately cannot find a way to do this that transcends the money economy, and so ultimately attempts to demonstrate a positive result of the very characteristics of money it has critiqued. As a result, Dead End identifies money and the increasing commodification of life as both that which traps characters and that which frees them, the fixer and the dissolver of stable identity, a monstrously distorting force and a force for self-making.
Elizabeth Goldberg, Arts and Humanities, “Of Manifestos and Manifesting: Theorizing and Teaching Literature and Human Rights” “Of Manifestos and Manifesting” explores interdisciplinary work in literature and human rights, with the specific goal of making visible the theoretical implications of a human rights oriented approach to literary study and pedagogy. This approach to literature has garnered serious attention in the past few years as evidenced by conference gatherings, scholarly production, and course offerings, and it is time that scholars and practitioners begin to theorize what it is we are doing; how and why it matters in the current moment in pedagogical, scholarly, and real-world contexts; as well as the potential pitfalls, challenges, and rewards of this disciplinary marriage. The essay pays particular attention to the seeming inconsistency between postmodernism, which has dominated literary studies for the past three decades, and human rights, conceived as a modernist discourse, and argues for the productive exchange made possible by these theoretical tensions.
Elizabeth Goldberg, Arts and Humanities, “Intimations of What Was to Come: Edwidge Danticat’s The Farming of Bones and the Indivisibility of Human Rights”
“Intimations of What Was to Come” situates Edwidge Danticat’s The Farming of Bones as a site for exploring converging strains of intellectual and political work in literary studies, human rights, and historiography. The novel’s reception history identifies it in the genre witness literature for its reclamation of memory of the genocide; however, this essay argues that the novel productively expands the boundaries of the genre by bearing witness not only to civil and political rights violations, but also to violations of social, economic, and cultural rights. In so doing, the novel provides insight into the indivisibility of these rights categories, as well as the consequences of their split in international law from one Universal Declaration of Human Rights into two separate Covenants, one of which—the International Covenant on Social, Economic, and Cultural Rights—remains “aspirational,” rather than legitimated in the way of the Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. The article also examines Danticat’s representations of Haitian history, noting the emphasis in her symbolic structure upon the figure of General Henri Christophe, the third of Haiti’s three “founding fathers.” This emphasis signifies the ambiguous legacy even of Haiti’s triumphant revolution, evoking for readers the long, complex history which produced the world’s first neocolonial nation at the very same moment that its first postcolonial nation was born.
Janice Yellin, Arts and Humanities, “Atlas of Ancient Nubia entries” Six essays about six major ancient Nubian archaeological sites, dating from Neolithic to Early Christian period are part of a definitive, well-illustrated volume presenting the art, history and archaeology of Nubia (American University in Cairo Press) to the general public. Each essay offers a synthesis of published as well as unpublished data from their excavations in an accessible fashion explaining each site’s’ importance in ancient Nubian history. These six sites are published only as excavation reports and so the data have not yet been interpreted or developed into a continuous historical narrative. As a result, important information from them has not been fully considered or made generally available.

Excerpts from BFRF September 2008 Newsletter

Faculty News
Mary O’Donoghue, Arts and Humanities, has two recent publications to her credit. A selection of Louis de Paor poems translated as part of the agus rud eile de project was published in The Irish Pages: a Journal of Contemporary Writing. The Irish Pages is a Belfast journal containing Irish, European and international perspectives. In addition, poems from the Transports section of the Aquitania project will appear in a forthcoming anthology entitled 24 Contemporary Irish Poets (Salmon Press, 2009). This anthology profiles Irish poets born after 1959 who have published two or more books. Both of these works were supported by awards from the BFRF.

BFRF Final Product Accepted
Mary Pinard, Arts and Humanities, “Song Net for an Estuary” “Song Net for an Estuary,” is a linked series of fifteen elegiac sonnets on the ecosystem of an estuary: its definition and configuration, as well as its considerable degradation over time through ecological damage and over navigation. As background for these poems, I studied two estuaries in particular: the Thames, for its science and its historical association with the poet John Keats, and a little-known estuary in Grays Harbor, Washington, for its connection to a personal story. Over the course of the summer, I found a suitable form for this project in the sonnet redoublé: a French invention that features fifteen sonnets of any type linked together by the fact that each line of the first sonnet becomes, in its turn, the last line of the following fourteen.

Excerpts from BFRF August 2008 Newsletter

BFRF Final Product Accepted
Lisa Colletta, Arts and Humanities, Voluntary Exiles: British Novelists in Hollywood, 1935-65. This book examines the life and work of British novelists working in Hollywood in the mid-twentieth century through the lens of literary and film history, memoir, and the travel narrative. The British experience in Southern California is an extension of the anxious wandering that followed immediately after World War I and of literary modernism. Hollywood was tantalizing, and rich, blindly confident and seemingly untouched by the devastation of world war that made Europe and England seem tired, resigned, and without possibility. The movies and Hollywood became emblematic of America itself. These writers’ observations of the “industry,” the landscape, and the way of life are almost ethnographic as they try to understand the vastness of America, its bumptious self-assuredness, the blithe belief of its inhabitants in the ability to remake themselves and start afresh, and the impact of all of this on the rest of the world as these qualities are broadcast through the glamorous medium of the movies.BRFR

BFRF Fall 2008 Course Releases
Elizabeth Goldberg, Arts and Humanities, "Plotting the Human: Black (African) Man and White (European) Women in Caryl Phillip's Cambridge and A Distant Shore"

HISTORY & SOCIETY FACULTY RESEARCH

Excerpts from BFRF May 2009 Newsletter

2009 Summer Stipend Awards

Marjorie Feld, History and Society, American Jews and Antipartheid: Global Justice and the Activist Tradition in American Jewish Life
Feld will focus on the experiences of American Jewish antiapartheid activists during the late twentieth century

Kandice Hauf, History and Society, Disciples: Followers of Charismatic Leaders
Hauf will establish the comparative and theoretical framework for an inquiry into discipleship in the Chinese Confucian tradition.

Excerpts from BFRF April 2009 Newsletter

BFRF Fall 2009-2010 Course Releases
Jeffrey Melnick, History and Society
Katherine Platt, History and Society

BFRF Summer 2009 Stipend
Marjorie Feld, History and Society

Excerpts from BFRF January 2009 Newsletter

BFRF Final Products Accepted
Stephen Deets, History and Society “The Institutions and Unfulfilled Vision of the Sami” This chapter uses the three Sami Parliaments in Scandinavia to examine the problems and prospects of non-territorial autonomy operating both inside states and across state boundaries. Non-territorial autonomy seeks to allow national groups to create their own representative institutions and to exercise power over culture and education, but these bodies often become enmeshed in debates over their competencies and role vis-à-vis other state institutions. Based on extensive interviews, this chapter argues that, despite significant differences in power, the Sami Parliaments of Finland, Sweden, and Norway do exercise considerable control over their culture, but their powers over education and land rights have been limited by the unwillingness of state institutions to expand their competencies. Still, the international networks between the parliaments and with other international institutions illustrate how governance of trans-boundary nations could operate.

Excerpts from BFRF May 2008 Newsletter

BFRF Final Products Accepted
Kevin Bruyneel, History and Society “Hierarchy and Hybridity: The Internal Postcolonialism of Mid-19th Century American Expansionism” In this essay I argue that in some of the key documents, policies and governing practices of mid-19th century American expansionism we can see the compatible workings of hierarchy and hybridity in the relationship between race and nation in U.S. politics and history. Hierarchy and hybridity are the twinned components that I introduce to better account for the complexity of the interplay between racial inequality and American nation-building in the decades immediately following the US-Mexico War, which ended in 1848. To develop this argument, I begin by explaining what I mean by hierarchy and hybridity, how I put them together, and in what way they can offer a precise analysis of the colonialist dynamics shaping persistent group inequality in a liberal democratic setting such as the United States. For the purposes of this paper, the main focus of my analysis will be the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo and its consequences. With this focus in mind, I see in a few of the Treaty’s key clauses, as well as in subsequent legislation such as the California Land Act of 1851, the internal postcolonial process by which Mexican citizens were drawn into the American polity on hierarchical and hybridic terms, requiring both their subjugation in the politics, culture and economy of the United States and the creation of a new ethnic identity for them that would assume a liminal place within the nation’s racial order.

Completed FRF sponsored research projects
Jeffrey Melnick, History and Society Under Construction: America’s Cultures of 9/11 Under Construction serves as a useful introduction to the complexities of American culture in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. With a broad purview that includes film, music, literary fiction and other popular arts, the volume is designed for anyone interested in quietly probing how American cultural agents and audiences have processed the national trauma of 9/11. Written in an accessible language, and unburdened by academic jargon, 9/11 Culture constructs a number of common-sense approaches for the study of all of the works of popular and literary art. Offering balanced examinations of a catalogue of artifacts culled from across the cultural landscape--film, music, rumors, photos, memorials, comic strips, fiction, telethons, poetry--Melnick probes the multiple ways that 9/11 has exerted a shaping force on a wide range of social formations from the politics of masculinity to the poetics of redemption. This project was supported by a 2002 FRF award.

BFRF 2008 Summer Stipends
Stephen Deets, History and Society, “The Institutions and Unfulfilled Visions of the Saami.” This research will examine efforts by Saami to institutionalize their community in order to consider practical and theoretical implications of trans-sovereign governance.
Lisa DiCarlo, History and Society, “Observations of Ebru.” DiCarlo will analyze the Turkish public’s reactions to and the Turkish media’s coverage of Ebru, an exhibit on Turkey’s ethnic diversity, in an attempt to discover whether the original Republican ideas about ethnicity have been internalized by the general population of Turkey.

Excerpts from BFRF January 2008 Newsletter

BFRF Final Products Accepted
Mary Godwyn, History and Society, “The New Faces of Entrepreneurship: Narratives and Images of Minority Women Entrepreneurs” This book represents an integration of entrepreneurship studies and sociological theory. It is an ethnographic exploration of atypical business owners and an analysis of their businesses. Our objective is to provide visibility to minority women entrepreneurs that reflects their burgeoning numbers and redresses their lack of representation in the literature on entrepreneurship. We apply a multi-dimensional and integrated analysis that addresses the challenges, dilemmas and opportunities experienced by minority women business owners, and also incorporates sociological theory to investigate how race, gender, ethnicity and other minority status pertain to these challenges and their possible solutions. We examine minority women entrepreneurs not merely as generic business owners, but also as individuals with social status characteristics which, under the existing frame of reference, render them non-traditional and atypical – in other words, deviant rather than normative. Our goal is to disseminate the experiences of minority women entrepreneurs in order to challenge, and change, the current archetype of an entrepreneur.

Excerpts from BFRF May 2007 Newsletter

BFRF 2007 Summer Stipend Part of their 2007-2008 BFRF major award package
Mary Godwyn, History and Society, In preparation for next year's work on her book manuscript, Narratives and Images of Minority Women Entrepreneurs, Godwyn will be conducting in-depth phone and/or face-to-face interviews throughtout the summer. the interview data and work-in-progress will be presented at the American Sociological ASsociation conference in August 2007.

BFRF Final Products Accepted
Marjorie, Feld, History and Society, Lillian Wald: Ethnic Progressive
A second-generation German Jewish American, Lillian Wald (1867-1940) won international acclaim for her pivotal role in the creative of a more pluralist society and the American Social welfare state. This study challenges conventional views of Wald and of the Progressive reform movement. Her innovative work on behalf of immigrants and industrial laborers was rooted in Jewish cultural identity, yet it expressed a universal vision at odds with the enthnic particularism with which she is now identified. By recovering Wald's neglected legacy, Ethnic Progressive contributes to historical--and contemporary--understanding of such major issues as feminism, Zionism, immigration, and ethnic identity.

BRFR Awards for 2008-2009

The BFRF announced awards for the 2008-2009 academic year including the following H&S faculty:

2008 Summer Stipends
Rohit Chopra
Stephen Deets
Lisa DiCarlo

2008-2009 Major Awards
Rohit Chopra

ARTS AND HUMANITIES RECENT PUBLICATIONS

Professor Elizabeth Goldberg

"Review: Through Your Eyes." Dir. Eva Urrutia and Guillermina Buzios. The Americas: A Quarterly Review of Inter-American Cultural History. Fall, 2004.

With Danna Greenberg. "What's a Cultural Studies Curriculum Doing at a College Like This?" Liberal Education. Journal of the American Association of Colleges and Universities. September, 2004.

"Who was Afraid of Patrice Lumumba? Terror and the Ethical Imagination in Lumumba: La Mort du Prophet." Terror, Media, and Liberation. Ed. J. David Slocum. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, Depth of Field Series, 2005.

HISTORY AND SOCIETY RECENT PUBLICATIONS

Professor Kevin Bruyneel

The Colonizer Demands its 'Fair Share' and More: Contemporary American Anti-Tribalism from Arnold Schwarzenegger to the Extreme Right.” New Political Science, Vol. 28, #3, September 2006.

Review of Race and Racism in Modern Philosophy edited by Andrew Valls, in Perspectives on Politics. Vol. 4, #3, September 2006.

“Editorial: No on Repealing the 22nd Amendment,” The New York Time Up Front. April 24, 2006.

Review of Politics in Time: History, Institutions and Social Analysis by Paul Pierson, in Canadian Journal of Political Science, Vol. 39, #1, March 2006.

Professor James Hoopes

"Managing a Riot: Chester Barnard, Social Unrest, and the Origins of Business Leadership Theory" in the Journal of Management History.

Professor Blake Pattridge

"The University of San Carlos of Guatemala Under Conservative Rule, 1839-1855" in the Secolas Annals (Journal of the Southeastern Council on Latin American Studies), Volume XXXII, November 2000.