opening windows and imagining other possible worlds 2019-20 DAVID AND MARY HUNTING GRADUATE FELLOW The time I have spent in residence at the Institute for the Humanities is the most enriching experience I have had as a graduate student at the University of Michigan. I do not say this lightly—the university has offered me ample opportunities for intellectual engagement. And yet, across my seven years on campus, those opportunities pale in comparison to the models for creative and generous scholarship that I have encountered in the institute. My colleagues this year included literary scholars, artists, historians, gender theorists, performers, linguists, and cultural critics. Some wear more than one of these hats. They are people who inspire me as they angle purposefully across disciplinary fault lines. In their hands, interdisciplinarity is not an empty buzzword; it is a practice that demands ongoing theoretical and methodological innovation.
NICHOLAS CAVERLY
Our weekly seminars and biweekly FellowSpeak lectures were a comforting regularity, especially in a year that is concluding with most of us sheltering at home. It has been my privilege to engage with works-in-progress from colleagues who are pushing at the cutting edges of their fields. To name only a few, their drafts have examined ancient cognitive processes, transhistorical educational institutions, sonic communities of carillon performance, embodied stakes of postcolonial resistance, and new definitions for language itself. Commenting 18
on my colleagues’ work has challenged me to expand my own modes of analysis and scholarly commitments as an ethnographer of racist (and antiracist) environments. In particular, it has done so by opening windows on the diverse ways that humanistic scholars can make conditions of oppression legible while never foreclosing possibilities for liberatory politics. During my fellowship year I have written and revised an article for publication, completed two chapters of my dissertation, and successfully navigated the academic job market. None of this seemed possible in September. Yet it became so with the support of my colleagues in the institute, all of whom read and commented on an early draft of that article. Outside of our regular seminars, a few graduate student colleagues and I also workshopped chapter drafts, cover letters, and job talks. Their feedback helped me craft work that speaks to a breadth of scholarship rather than a narrow field. I was also buoyed by the care that faculty fellows extended toward graduate students. Without exception, they were reservoirs of encouragement on early career transitions and commiseration about the increasingly precarious state of the academy. Their advice has been invaluable to me, especially on job interview rituals and the need to cultivate life outside of work. From former fellows, I knew that my fellowship at the Institute for the Humanities would help me better orient my scholarship toward matters of interdisciplinary concern. I was, nonetheless, unprepared to find a community of people who go to such lengths to sustain me both intellectually and personally. As individuals and as a collective, they have indelibly shaped the ways that I think, work, and imagine other possible worlds. –Nicholas Caverly, 2019-20 David and Mary Hunting Graduate Fellow, anthropology
