INSTITUTE FOR THE HUMANITIES Annual Report
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20 19
David Opdyke, Paved with Good Intentions
TABLE OF CONTENTS Letter from the Director
4-5
Stopping Traffic 6-8 Visiting Fellow Mabel O. Wilson
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Fellows 10-20 Graduate Student Fellowship
14
Summer Fellowship Program
18
Events
21-23
Undergraduate Programs
24-25
A Dose of Humanities
26-28
Tweeting for the Humanities
29
Gallery
30-33
Remembering James Winn
34-35
Support 37 Affiliates and Staff
38
About the Institute
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LETTER
dear friends of the humanities institute,
from the director
We’ve just completed a very busy year! We had a full slate of 2018-19 events and exhibitions organized around the theme of Humanities and Environments. Faculty panels explored topics such as sacred spaces and ritual environments, water as a contested resource, the environmental impact of development, neighborhoods and suburbs, and animals and capture. We heard lectures on what Islam teaches about the environment, on spatial histories of migration in the Caribbean, on animal mummies and funeral rituals in ancient Egypt, on climate change and land-use change in India, and on the music of glaciers. We had a particularly lively and collegial set of faculty and graduate students in residence, along with Norman Freehling Visiting Fellows Sam White from Ohio State University and Mabel O. Wilson from Columbia University.
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Many of our year’s events are described in this report, and I want in particular to note how important our gallery was to our Year of Humanities and Environments. Our institute is rather unique in having a dedicated gallery space, and it allows us to feature contemporary artists whose work relates to our annual themes. This year the gallery’s exhibitions broadened our approach to environments, pushing us to visualize environments in new ways—as natural, constructed, social, and sometimes scary. The highlight had to be the wildly successful installation by Luzinterruptus, Literature vs. Traffic, which you can read more about on page 6. People are still talking about that event. Our exhibitions challenged our understanding of how we see our surroundings and how we see each other in those surroundings. And in fact, how we see was an explicit focus for some of the programming around exhibitions. Curator Amanda Krugliak created a series of instructive gallery walks for undergraduate
students called “Look 101: Seeing Art in an Instagram World.” These sessions invited participants to think and learn about how to look at art, particularly contemporary art.
an alternative way of imagining economic thinking outside modern capitalist assumptions. We are very proud to host such innovative undergraduate research and pleased to report that Noah has accepted a visiting professor position at Lake Forest College in Illinois.
New to the institute this year was a postdoctoral fellowship for a recent University of Michigan PhD working in an area related to our annual theme. The 2018-19 fellowship was awarded to Noah Blan, from the Department of History, who studies environment and empire in early medieval Europe. (For more on his work, see page 27.) In addition to conducting his own research, Noah directed an undergraduate research group on “Domesticated Animals in Early Medieval Europe” as part of the university’s Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program. A diverse group of students pursued a range of projects, from scrutinizing medieval European records of extant animal remains to interpreting the various animal and hybrid-animal figures that appear in the margins of medieval books of hours and examining animals and gift exchange in medieval Europe as
This year’s collection of faculty and graduate students formed a vibrant interdisciplinary community, and our weekly Fellows’ Seminar was always full of productive and supportive intellectual exchange. As one fellow put it, “There were always sparks of generative connectivity firing up across our work. I felt like I learned a lot, not just about a roomful of interesting projects, but also about literature I hadn’t read and research sensibilities I hadn’t seen close up.” I think it’s fair to say that we all gained unexpected insights and pleasures from our seminar this year, and I already look forward to conversations with the coming year’s fellows cohort. This year’s collection of faculty and graduate students formed a vibrant interdisciplinary
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community, and our weekly Fellows’ Seminar was always full of productive and supportive intellectual exchange. As one fellow put it, “There were always sparks of generative connectivity firing up across our work. I felt like I learned a lot, not just about a roomful of interesting projects, but also about literature I hadn’t read and research sensibilities I hadn’t seen close up.” I think it’s fair to say that we all gained unexpected insights and pleasures from our seminar this year, and I already look forward to conversations with the coming year’s fellows cohort. I am always eager to hear from you—please stop by, take in our gallery show, and say hello. with very best wishes… –Peggy McCracken, Director, Mary Fair Croushore Professor of the Humanities
STOPPING TRAFFIC How a campus art installation brought a community together.
Each of the Institute for the Humanities gallery projects accomplishes something unique with community and outreach. Some bring new audiences and perspectives to campus. Others represent marginalized groups and points of view, extending our reach and relevance. This year, with Literature vs. Traffic, we brought together international artists, diverse units from across campus, over 70 volunteers, 10,000 books, and thousands of community members to celebrate the power of art, education, the written word, free thought, and environmentalism. As part of our Year of Humanities and Environments, we invited anonymous art collective Luzinterruptus to launch their project Literature vs. Traffic. In early October, a short walk out of our building and just around the corner from the institute, Literature vs. Traffic shut down Liberty Street in front of the Michigan Theater, “paving” the street with over 10,000 used books illuminated by 20,000 LEDs. Planning began over the summer when we began collecting books earmarked for recycling from departments all across campus: chemistry, math, American culture, art history, and Afroamerican and African studies, to name a few. Aunt Agatha’s Mystery Bookshop donated their remaining inventory upon closing after many years in business, grade school teachers donated used children’s books, and we even made local house calls to pick up books. 6
Luzinterruptus, Literature vs. Traffic
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and businesses along the route. Public organizations like the Neutral Zone teen center and literacy advocates 826 Michigan shared information about volunteer opportunities with their constituents. The Ann Arbor District Library hosted a post-project, public talkback. Kiwanis of Ann Arbor also supported the effort, donating thousands of surplus used books they were unable to sell.
Books prepped for Literature vs. Traffic at the recently closed Ruthven Museums Building. Photo: Robyn Han
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THE NUMBER OF
BOOKS, OUT OF OVER 10,000, LEFT OVER AFTER
LITERATURE VS. TRAFFIC The extensive preparation of the books took place in the recently closed Ruthven Museums Building amidst the empty laboratories and shelves that once housed the Museum of Natural History and the university’s natural history collections. The building’s rich
At sunrise on October 23, U-M Moving and Trucking delivered the pallets of prepared books along the Liberty Street site. Our enthusiastic team of volunteers worked with Luzinterruptus throughout the day, laying out the books to the artists’ specifications. Over two thousand people from campus, Ann Arbor, and surrounding communities attended, documenting the install into the evening and sharing the images and their excitement on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
history provided the perfect setting for the students, faculty, staff, families with school-age children, alumni, and even retirees who volunteered to, one by one, install two miniLED lights in each book.
By sunset the installation was surrounded by people. An hour later, the normally car-filled street alight with thousands of books, they were invited to walk amidst the books and take them home for free. It was a remarkable occasion to witness the ensuing excitement and camaraderie. By midnight, most of the books were gone.
The project also prompted new connections and collaborative thinking beyond our own borders as we worked with U-M Plant and Operations, Ann Arbor City Council, the U-M International Center, the Downtown Development Authority/State Street District, 8
Literature vs.Traffic had been previously installed in Madrid, Toronto, Melbourne and New York, but Ann Arbor was the first college town to host the installation. Our iteration was also unique in that it was curated to illustrate grassroots movement, whereby each person’s contribution and personal investment is integral to the overall effort and result. Creative thinking, collaboration, and public engagement can aid in empowering us to meet the challenges of our complex world. One book, one story becomes a hundred, and then a thousand, and ten thousand points of light. Institutionally, Literature vs. Traffic serves as a reminder of the indelible imprint of the humanities in our everyday lives and the importance of outreach and inclusion rather than insularity. By extending our reach, creating multiple points of engagement and participation for diverse audiences, we can more fully realize the potential for the arts and humanities to be impactful within our communities. Together, we can stop traffic. –Amanda Krugliak Arts Curator
VISITING FELLOW
MABEL O. WILSON
uniting the humanities & architecture Mabel O. Wilson, professor of architecture at Columbia University, unites the disciplines of the humanities and architecture to investigate the social and historical identities of our built environments. She joined us winter term while working on her latest project, “Building Race and Nation: Slavery, Dispossession and Early American Civic Architecture.” It was a timely topic for the current discourse surrounding monuments and public space as well as the conversations we hoped to activate as part of our Year of Humanities and Environments. During her five-month fellowship, Wilson presented her work to other fellows, attended weekly fellows seminars where she enriched the cross-disciplinary exchange, and also gave a FellowSpeak talk on the “Building Race” project. Taubman College
of Architecture and Urban Planning invited Wilson to give their 2019 Martin Luther King Jr. lecture. During the lecture, Wilson explored the contentious history of monuments in Charlottesville and the University of Virginia (UVA), her undergraduate alma mater, including the “Unite the Right” rally and UVA’s Thomas Jefferson memorial. Considering the inherent inequalities of public space, she asked, how can we more accurately represent Charlottesville’s racialized past through civic architecture?
Enslaved Laborers” to honor the thousands of individuals who built and maintained UVA. Her student engagement continued with an interview for the Undergraduate Student Engagement Group’s new Dose of Humanities fellows interview series, where she discussed her work more informally while musing on the ironies of postenlightenment identity—the simultaneous rise of universal equality and racial difference— and the broader implications of a humanities education. Living Writers, a literature and arts show on the student-run radio station WCBN, featured Wilson on an episode, she participated in two courses at Taubman College, taught a mini-course to 18 students on “The Politics of Memorials and
At a gathering with the institute’s Undergraduate Student Engagement Group, Wilson had dinner with students and talked about the UVA student movement—a “shining example of student self-governance”—that would eventually lead to Wilson and a group of architects creating the “Memorial to 9
Monuments” at the institute, and was also interviewed by The Michigan Daily and the student architecture journal Dimensions. “It was a pleasure to share my work with a brilliant and generous group of colleagues who were this year’s fellows cohort,” Wilson reflected after leaving Ann Arbor. “Our weekly meetings were my favorite part because not only did I learn about inspired scholarship in a range of fields, but our shared dialogue about the work was informative and immensely satisfying.” –Megan St. Andrew, student intern. (BA Media Studies 2015; MSI 2020)
MICHAEL LEMPERT
FELLOWS faculty
Noah Blan
Michael Lempert
RICHARD AND LILLIAN IVES FACULTY FELLOW; ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF ANTHROPOLOGY “Small Talk: Therapy, Technology, and the Science of the Face-to-Face”
NOAH BLAN
POSTDOCTORAL RESEARCH FELLOW; HISTORY “Sovereignty and the Environment in Charlemagne’s Empire” At the Institute for the Humanities, Blan revised his dissertation, “Sovereignty and the Environment in Charlemagne’s Empire,” for publication as a book manuscript, and begin work on a separate project, “God’s Footprint: Early Medieval Monasteries and the Making of the European Environment.” This project focuses on monasteries between 500-1000 CE, and their role in the rise of stable, mixed-use farming, in the development of trade and markets, in state formation, and in anthropocentric cosmologies in Europe. Related to “God’s Footprint,” Blan led an Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program project on “Domesticated Animals in Early Medieval Europe,” in which student participants collaborated in a multi-disciplinary study of the cows, pigs, sheep, chickens, and honeybees (among other animals) whose management and exploitation by humans made possible (and sustainable) the colonization of European ecosystems. He also taught a course on “Cities and Sustainability in World History,” a study of how different cities around the world negotiated the needs of urban populations with energy, consumption, and waste from prehistory to the present. 10
This book project is a genealogy of interaction. It traces how a humanistic science of the faceto-face emerged from an intimate dialogue between psychiatry and communication science that began in the mid-twenties and intensified in midcentury America. When face-to-face interaction became an object of epistemological desire in postwar and early Cold War America, many grew convinced that it was small: a microsociological reality unto itself that demanded mechanical recording, faithful transcription, and fine-grained analysis. These technosemiotic practices came together as researchers used recording technologies—from wax-cylinder dictation machines to sound-film— to capture the mercurial flow of therapeutic talk. Talk therapy research helped define the sciences of interaction while leaving us with enduring assumptions about what interaction is and how to know it—including the cardinal assumption that interaction is intrinsically small. Blending linguistic anthropology, history of science, and media archaeology, this book narrates the history of interaction’s scale as it raises questions about the scalar imagination of objects of knowledge across the humanities and social sciences.
KENNETH MILLS
JOHN RICH FACULTY FELLOW, PROFESSOR OF HISTORY “Apostolic Longing and Experience in an Early Modern Spanish World” Mills is studying an enduring conviction in the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spanish world: that the Word of God had been heard in the Americas within a generation of Christ’s
death and resurrection; and that Scripture and patristic authority might be squared with signs of Indigenous foreknowledge of God. This will be the first investigation to explore the investigative method of key proponents of this apostolic hypothesis, a fusing of spiritual yearning, exegetical rigor, and a quest for tangible proof. It will also clarify the complex aftermaths of apostolic narratives, stories which re-scripted as intercultural creations, hybridizing Christianity with dynamic Indigenous traditions. Kenneth Mills
KEITH MITNICK
HELMUT F. STERN FACULTY FELLOW, ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF ARCHITECTURE “Un-Privileged Views”
Keith Mitnick
Ian Moyer
This project uses fiction writing and photography to tell stories about Detroit and to demonstrate how the ways we narrate the built environment in words and images transform our daily experience of it. As is the case with many rapidly changing American cities, the image of Detroit, as conveyed through photographs, is rife with contradictions. Depicted for many years as an abandoned wasteland, it was the poster-child of “ruin-porn” before its status transformed from an abandoned wilderness of dilapidated buildings into an unregulated urban event ripe with economic “opportunities.” Rather than create a single overarching narrative about Detroit’s perceived failures and possibilities, Mitnick will tell stories about the effects of the city’s terrain upon the lives of a fictitious set of inhabitants, organized around a collection of shifting vantage points, to explore how, in the narration of cities, authors perform as agents of its transformation. By relating architecture’s unique areas of focus, namely the representation and shaping of space, to other discursive frameworks, he extends its relevance to other areas of cultural inquiry as well as to challenge certain forms and methods by which the discipline of architecture currently defines itself. 11
IAN MOYER
HELMUT F. STERN FACULTY FELLOW, ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF HISTORY “At the Gates of the Temple: Culture, Politics and Public Space in Ptolemaic Egypt” This project reconstructs a history of public space in Ptolemaic Egypt (305-30 BCE), by examining the gates and forecourt areas of Egyptian temples as places of communication, interaction, and translation that connected indigenous Egyptian élites, the Macedonian Greek dynasty of the Ptolemies, and the wider population of Egypt. These gateway areas became frames for political, judicial and religious practices that mediated relations between a monarchic state and its subjects, and between the royal court in Alexandria and the Egyptian countryside. In some cases, such as the Rosetta Stone and other trilingual decrees, these practices were localizations of widespread Hellenistic genres, and so connected the public side of the temples with a wider, transregional political culture. These phenomena reveal that Egyptian temples were not worlds apart, but a nexus of relations through which it is possible to reconsider the history of Ptolemaic Egypt, and Greek-Egyptian interactions more generally. The goal of these investigations is to bring to light an Egyptian history of politics and public space that has gone misrecognized and neglected in traditional accounts of the Hellenistic period.
“FROM BLACK FITNESS TO SHIPWRECKS TO MEDIEVAL CHEESE, I LEARNED MORE ABOUT MY OWN IDENTITY AS A SCHOLAR BY READING FROM AN ARRAY OF (SEEMINGLY) DISPARATE TOPICS AND FIELDS.” -LAUREN BENJAMIN, 2018-19 RICHARD AND LILLIAN IVES GRADUATE FELLOW
ASWIN PUNATHAMBEKAR
STEELCASE FACULTY FELLOW, ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF COMMUNICATION STUDIES “Sound Clouds: Listening and Citizenship in Indian Public Culture” This project examines the centrality of sound and listening practices in the mediation of politics and citizenship in Indian public culture. Drawing attention to the sonic dimensions of key political events in the past decade, it examines how sonic cues (a popular song, a catchy phrase, or resonant voice) enable new ways of listening and new modes of participation—expressions of sonic citizenship—in a digital era. Tracking the movement of sounds across media platforms—a doctored speech, a song deployed in a political movement, a mobile ringtone that incites violence—Punathambekar shows how sound technologies and practices have become vital cultural and material infrastructures for political participation. In doing so, this project joins a broader scholarly effort across media studies, history, anthropology, and cultural geography to place sound and listening at the center of debates on culture and politics in a digital era.
AVA PURKISS
CHARLES P. BRAUER FACULTY FELLOW, ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF AMERICAN CULTURE AND WOMEN’S STUDIES “Fit Citizens: A History of Black Women’s Exercise, 1900-1960” This project examines the effect of intentional, physical exercise on African American women’s bodies, health, beauty culture, and recreational practices. It argues that African American women used exercise to demonstrate their literal and figurative fitness for citizenship during a time when fit bodies garnered new political significance. As the first historical study on black women’s exercise, the project places black
women squarely within the history of American fitness and decenters labor as the primary mode of black physicality. Because their bodies literally reproduced the race, black women’s physical fitness ostensibly provided the key to black progress during a highly eugenic period in American history. Black women also had the task of implementing physical education, recreation, and public health fitness programs as a form of gendered racial uplift work. At the same time, they faced significant structural limitations to accessing white-only fitness spaces like pools, parks, and gymnasiums. The project chronicles these tensions, explains how they circumvented structural barriers through various forms of public health activism, and reveals the physical and discursive ways in which black women linked black bodily fitness to civic fitness.
Aswin Punathambekar
YOUNGJU RYU
HUNTING FAMILY FACULTY FELLOW, ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF ASIAN LANGUAGES AND CULTURES “How a Podcast Started a Revolution: South Korea’s Protest Culture, 1987-2017” Street protests are a veritable art form in South Korea, perfected through more than sixty years of repeated and bloody confrontations with regimes in power. In 2016-2017, in a chain of events officially dubbed “Candlelight Revolution,” this South Korean art reached its full potential as the main vehicle of a peaceful, rather than bloody, transformation of society. This project locates this moment in a historical context that spans three decades, and focuses on common and divergent technologies of mass protest that were adopted at three key junctures during those decades. The latest of these is related to the rise of the podcast format as an alternative source of political news and commentary. Exploring the role of podcasts in expanding or suppressing mass participation in a tightly controlled media environment, it asks how the rapid proliferation of podcasts in South Korea, which began in 2011 with a single series, 12
Ava Purkiss
Youngju Ryu
Lauren Benjamin
Irene Brisson
Padma Chirumamilla
paved the way for the carnivalesque reanimation and diversification of protest culture. How did this culture innovate political idiom while giving rise to a rich archive of satirical texts that enabled further mobilization of the public? How, in other words, did a podcast start a revolution?
IRENE BRISSON
graduate students
The everyday languages—vernaculars and creoles—that produce the majority of the global built environment continue to be delegitimized as ways of knowing, building, and inhabiting by an architectural discipline centered in the global North. Brisson analyzes quotidian architecture in Haitian Kreyòl through an ethnographic study of the communicative practices in the realm of residential design. Modeling architecture as relational techniques negotiated by diverse actors shows how exclusion contributed to systematic failures to communicate needs and implement reconstruction after the 2010 Haiti earthquake. The linguistic, visual, and material representations of space through which contractors, architects, clients, and non-governmental organizations design Haitian houses vary with class-based hierarchies and elucidate the social meaningmaking that occurs in architecture and construction. This project approaches architecture as a set of negotiations through which social relationships, material and technical systems, environmental conditions, and cultural meanings interact in the production of built environments. Brisson theorizes Kreyòl architecture as a syncretic, dynamic, historical negotiation of global influences that both manifests and disrupts spatial politics.
LAUREN BENJAMIN
RICHARD AND LILLIAN IVES GRADUATE FELLOW; COMPARATIVE LITERATURE AND ENGLISH “Feral Modernisms” Benjamin uses the concept of “the feral” as a guide for understanding the difficulty that modernist texts associate with being at home as they emphasize the fraught ambivalence characterizing home and domestic life. “Feral” names that which has once been part of the domestic sphere and has subsequently either escaped or been banished. Drawing from evolutionary biology, Benjamin invokes it not merely as a synonym for “wild” but rather as an articulation of a ragged and unpredictable relationship with home. She uses this ambivalence to demonstrate the ways in which some modernist texts concern themselves with a fraught relationship to domestication and domestic space that is neither an acquiescence to the confines of the domestic, nor a wild way out of the domestic altogether. The authors considered—H.D., Djuna Barnes, Claude McKay, and Kadya Molodowsky—narrate an existence that is both inside the domestic and outside of it, challenging what it means to belong to any particular place. Benjamin’s analyses shows that home is conceived in terms of domination and entrapment, longing and belonging, precarity and permanence.
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SYLVIA “DUFFY” ENGLE GRADUATE FELLOW; ARCHITECTURE “Speaking, Gesturing, Drawing, Building: Relational Techniques of a Kreyòl Architecture”
PADMA CHIRUMAMILLA
DAVID AND MARY HUNTING GRADUATE FELLOW; INFORMATION “Producing TV(s): The Multitudinous Life of Television in South India” This project looks at the various material and historical forces that shaped television’s early presence in south India in order to gain purchase
rarely, if ever, been exposed to, and this larger picture of what it means to be a humanist has opened up my own work in ways I had not expected. The questions that I received from fellows about my own chapter likewise broadened my understanding about the challenges and affordances of speaking to a wide audience. When I was asked what it means to critique a chapter on a book they had never read—a common occurrence in my discipline—I realized the sorts of disciplinary conventions that I hadn’t even known to address, let alone address adequately. I have found myself more attuned to these potential disciplinary blind spots as I write job materials and grant applications that need to be accessible to a wide variety of scholars.
surprising connections and astonishing creativity GRADUATE STUDENT FELLOWSHIP Without hyperbole, I can say that the year I have spent at the Institute for the Humanities has been the most rewarding intellectual experience I have had at the University of Michigan to date. I have often described the experience to those who ask as profoundly interdisciplinary, but “interdisciplinary” doesn’t seem to capture the breadth of surprising connections, insights, and astonishing creativity found in the work I have had the pleasure to engage here. From Black fitness to shipwrecks to medieval cheese, I learned more about my own identity as a scholar by reading from an array of (seemingly) disparate topics and fields. Though I am a literary scholar by training, I have made notes about VHS tapes and podcasts as well as architecture and anthropology; my own intellectual commitments have become clearer at the same time I surfaced unexpected touchstones in other fields. The weekly readings and biweekly lectures became the cornerstone of my year, and provided a way for me to understand what it means to engage with work as a humanities scholar broadly. While at the institute I completed two article revisions, revised a chapter of my dissertation, and began drafting another. I have also learned how to ask questions about fields that I have 14
In addition to our weekly seminars and FellowSpeak lectures, I have benefited from the vibrant informal community at the institute. Running into staff, students, and faculty in the halls, a book might be recommended, an upcoming talk discussed, or a kind word offered. I got to know my fellow graduate students particularly well, and we created a supportive atmosphere to share, vent, and commiserate as several of us navigated the academic job market and its difficulties. A couple generous faculty fellows extended their lunches after workshop in order to provide tips and advice about interviews, to share their own stories, and offer support. We talked about jobs and parenthood, writing and academic life in general. That is to say, the intellectual benefits of reading and discussing work this year have been great, but so have the personal relationships I have cultivated along the way. In each case, my work is stronger thanks to the people that I have shared this year with, and so am I. –Lauren Benjamin, 2018-19 Richard & Lillian Ives Graduate Fellow
on how television came to acquire its ordinary character within South Indian life and to speculate on what its current transformations reveal about the region’s digital media future. Chirumamilla brings together an ethnography of a small-town South Indian television repair shop with interviews and analysis of trade journals and newspapers in order to understand how the television transformed from a remarkable rarity into a device that sat unnoticed within the background of everyday life. Through close reading of Telugu and English-language newspapers and trade journals from the 1980s through the 2000s, she looks at how regional-language cinema shaped the development of privately owned cable television networks, creating local alternatives to the state-run broadcaster and its mostly Hindilanguage programming. She also examines how contemporary transformations in television technology are reshaping the labor practices and lives of workers, such as television repairmen and local cable operators—workers who were crucial to the early growth of television in the region.
MARY HENNESSY
MARY FAIR CROUSHORE GRADUATE FELLOW; GERMANIC LANGUAGE AND LITERATURES “Handmaidens of Modernity: Gender, Labor, and Media in Wilhelmine and Weimar Germany” This dissertation analyzes the remarkably gendered history of German media during the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries— a period that witnessed the development of new media technologies that would propel women into the workforce as typists, stenographers, telephone operators, film editors, and more. These roles, both invisible and essential, mandated new tasks and generated new forms of labor that would quickly come to be associated with femininity. Focusing on the emergence of new media cultures in Imperial and Weimar Germany, this project argues that women were
essential to the production and maintenance of culture, business, communication, and social life, and that their labor—typing, plugging, cutting, pasting—helped define the material and discursive development of new media technologies. Each chapter explores the gendered logics of a particular media profession in which women were disproportionately represented, reading texts that construct and thereby help to theorize the relationships between gender, labor, and media around 1900. Combining original research with close readings of literary and historical source materials, this project constructs a feminist history of media that considers women’s roles as the handmaidens to modern media cultures.
Mary Hennessy
JALLICIA JOLLY
MARY FAIR CROUSHORE GRADUATE FELLOW; AMERICAN CULTURE “‘I’m Not Sick!’: A Critical Embodiment of Illness, Sexuality, and Self-Making Among HIV-Positive Jamaican Women” The first ethnographic and oral historical study of HIV-positive women in the Anglophone Caribbean, this project explores how gender, sexuality, HIV, and the politics of care and selfmaking meet in young HIV-positive Jamaican women’s everyday lives. Based on sixteen months of fieldwork, the study melds oral history, focus groups, and ethnographic methods of semistructured interviews and participant observation with a theoretical optic that draws from critical race theory, cultural studies, and black and transnational feminist theories. “I’m Not Sick!” foregrounds black female intimacy, desire, and agency to study the self-making strategies that Jamaican women use to refashion themselves as autonomous subjects while navigating entrenched norms of respectability, sexuality, and health. Reflecting the gendered and sexualized dimensions of Jamaica’s class and color codes, these norms structure young women’s access 15
Jallicia Jolly
“BEING ABLE TO PARTICIPATE IN THIS MULTIDISCIPLINARY EXPERIENCE WAS NOT ONLY FRUITFUL FOR MY WORK AS A WRITER AND THINKER, BUT ALSO MADE ME FEEL MORE FULLY INTEGRATED IN THE INTELLECTUAL AND CREATIVE ENTERPRISE OF THIS INSTITUTION.” -JEREMIAH CHAMBERLIN, 2018 SUMMER FACULTY FELLOW
to basic resources, their political possibilities, and how they reconfigure their futures in the wake of a stigmatizing marker such as HIV. It centers Jamaican women’s interior lives as sites of analyses and contributes their life stories, intersectional health experiences, and activism to an emergent body of work on African diasporic women’s social and political lives.
TUGCE KAYAAL
A. BARTLETT GIAMATTI GRADUATE FELLOW; MIDDLE EAST STUDIES “Bodies in War: Politics of Sexuality and War Orphans in Konya (1913-1923)” This project analyzes the disciplining of war orphans’ sexuality by the state and non-state institutions in the city of Konya of the Ottoman Empire during a period marked by continuous military conflicts. It argues that war orphans became associated with notions of sexual “deviancy” and that they became a source of moral panic at the local and national levels since they did not meet the norms and expectations that defined the notion of ideal child. As opposed to pre-modern periods, orphans in the Ottoman Empire of the early-twentieth century were more than a charity case; they were perceived to be the triggers and the targets of “perverse” sexual desires on the part of both their coevals and adults. In addition to surveying the ways in which the regulation of the sexual behaviors and orientations of war orphans, this project brings attention to their experiences and actions.
MIKA KENNEDY
JAMES A. WINN GRADUATE FELLOW; ENGLISH “Crossed Wires: Japanese American Incarceration, Environmental Justice, and the Interethnic ‘Frontier’” This project expands contemporary understandings of the United States’ incarceration of
Japanese Americans by connecting the incarceration to the United States’ enduring histories of frontierism and colonial dispossession. Kennedy effects this expansion by making land ownership and environmental transformation central to the critique of Japanese American incarceration and its literary interpretations. This project draws on the War Relocation Authority’s rhetorical decision to revive nineteenth-century myths of the frontier, which they used to cast incarcerees as “pioneers” being granted the opportunity to tame the West. In response, incarcerees also actively adopted the roles of pioneer and cowboy—though rarely in forms complicit with the WRA’s projects. Ultimately, Kennedy argues that the multiple deployments of these pioneer rhetorics compels deeper focus on the environmental, infrastructural motivations of Japanese American incarceration and its connections to issues of land sovereignty, settlement, and environmental reclamation in the United States.
Tugce Kayaal
AMANDA RESPESS
DAVID AND MARY HUNTING GRADUATE FELLOW; ANTHROPOLOGY AND HISTORY “The Circulation of Medical Goods and Knowledge Between Iran and China Along the Medieval Maritime Silk Road” This dissertation explores the exchange of medical goods and knowledge between China and Iran along the premodern maritime trade routes linking the Persian Gulf with the South China Sea. The Maritime Silk Road, more popularly known as the “spice routes” linking the Far East and Southeast Asia to the Middle East, functioned in the premodern era as a cosmopolitan network of trade arteries across which flowed important commodities and ideas. The long-standing cultural and economic exchange across these thoroughfares dramatically expanded the pharmaceutical ingredients and medicinal recipes available to physicians practicing across ocean littorals, and facilitated the intellectual 16
Mika Kennedy
Amanda Respess
Sam White
engagement of scholars with medical theories, objects, and texts from afar. The project traces the role of Persian travelers and physicians in this exchange from roughly the eleventh through the fourteenth centuries, and the afterlife of Islamic medical objects in contemporary museums and scientific discourse.
member of the design team for the Memorial to Enslaved African American Laborers at the University of Virginia.
visiting fellows
JEREMIAH CHAMBERLIN
SAM WHITE
NORMAN FREEHLING VISITING FELLOW, FALL 2018
Mabel O. Wilson
Sam White is associate professor of history at Ohio State University. He has taught in many areas of environmental history. His research focuses on how we can use both natural and human records to reconstruct past climate variability and extreme weather and how societies coped with them. While at the institute, he began a new book project on historical disasters and migration. He is the author of A Cold Welcome: The Little Ice Age and Europe’s Encounter with North America (2017) and The Climate of Rebellion in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire (2011).
MABEL O. WILSON
NORMAN FREEHLING VISITING FELLOW, WINTER 2019
Jeremiah Chamberlin
Mabel O. Wilson is a professor of architecture, a co-director of Global Africa Lab and the associate director at the Institute for Research in African American Studies at Columbia University. She’s currently writing Building Race and Nation, a book about how slavery influenced early American civic architecture. She is the author of Begin with the Past: Building the National Museum of African American History and Culture (2016) and Negro Building: African Americans in the World of Fairs and Museums (2012) and a 17
summer fellows LECTURER IV; ENGLISH “A History of Events that Never Happened: Memory, Identity, and the Future in the Contemporary Bulgaria” Though Bulgaria is one of the oldest countries in Europe (founded in 681 A.D.), it may be the least known in the West. This work-in-progress, A History of Events that Never Happened, is a book-length narrative nonfiction project. It weaves together Chamberlin’s year-long travels through the country in 2017 with the literary, cultural, and political history of the region, the larger goal of which is to not only better understand this place and its people, but also Chamberlin’s own identity as an American. Specifically, through travels, interviews, and research, he is attempting to explore the ways Bulgarians are processing and interpreting the complex and painful history of their country as it emerged from behind the Iron Curtain and entered the dual experiments of democracy and E.U. membership. In doing so, he examines how the narratives we shape from our past can help us envision and inhabit the future, as well as how uncertainty about the future might compel individuals to seek too much meaning from the past. Bulgaria’s struggles with this latter point feel particularly relevant, offering a microcosm of the experiences of other “small” E.U. countries, many of whom similarly struggle with how to be European without losing a sense of cultural heritage.
illuminating new avenues of inquiry NEW SUMMER FELLOWSHIP PROGRAM Participating in the summer fellowship program at the Institute for the Humanities has been one of the most enriching experiences of my career at this institution—as a thinker, writer, teacher, and member of the university community. The mix of tenured, tenure-track, and lecturer faculty, as well as creative and scholarly projects, produced a marvelously rich working environment. And having the opportunity to receive feedback on my writing from specialists in other disciplines really illuminated new avenues of inquiry for my project. Not only because different fields approach their subjects with different methodologies, but also because different scholars ask different questions and draw from different pools of readings and knowledge. So I left the fellowship with important new ways of seeing my own work and process. I also believe the decision to submit work in progress, work that is still in the generative phase, was crucial to the success of the workshops. My peers and I were allowed an opportunity to test unsure ideas, to explore avenues of production and insight that we might have felt less inclined to do so were we putting up our most polished work. And yet, because of the high standards the fellowship demanded, to do so with rigor and commitment. As such, a spirit of shared endeavor was created, as well as one of mutual trust. 18
As someone who’s taught nearly every summer for the last decade, I’d also never experienced the gift of time that the fellowship provides. My residence at the institute was incredibly productive. I produced more than two and a half chapters toward my current book, totaling nearly one hundred pages of writing, to say nothing of the research and reading I accomplished. More important, I was able to immerse myself in the project for weeks on end, which allowed me to reach sustained depths of insight that are very difficult to achieve when eking out a few hours here and there each week during the normal academic year. As a lecturer, I teach three courses per semester, so the fellowship’s financial support, translated into the time and permission to write, was invaluable. Likewise, though not something that’s easy to quantify, I felt valued by the university community in being offered a summer fellowship at the Institute for the Humanities, both in terms of my own work as a writer and as an interlocutor with my peers. As lecturers, we have few opportunities both within and without this institution to participate in interdisciplinary projects. Similarly, there are few opportunities for research funding available to support our creative and scholarly work. And though our positions are centered on teaching, nearly all the lecturers in my department (I can’t speak for other units) are producing professional work, presenting at conferences, and publishing. So research is an important and enriching aspect of our professional lives. In fact, it’s inextricable from our teaching. As such, being able to participate in this multidisciplinary experience was not only fruitful for my work as a writer and thinker, but also made me feel more fully integrated in the intellectual and creative enterprise of this institution. And valued as a contributor to the university’s mission of research and education. For this, I am truly grateful. –Jeremiah Chamberlin, Lecturer IV, English
PHILIP D’ANIERI
LECTURER IV; ARCHITECTURE AND URBAN PLANNING “The Narrowest National Park: Bureaucrats, ‘Back to Nature,’ and the Federalization of the Appalachian Trail” When Congress passed the National Trails System Act in 1968, the Appalachian Trail began a 20-year-long transformation. What had once been a cobbled-together path over public and private lands, valiantly but not always successfully held together by volunteers, would become a 2000-mile long national park. This federal protection, while welcome to the AT’s supporters, was not a neutral force. It required a wholesale re-imagining of the trail—where exactly it would go, whom it would serve, and what, in the end, it was for. This was not the first time the Appalachian Trail would be re-built, either in the physical construction of its pathway, or in the social construction of its meaning. That larger story—the AT as the built reflection of evolving ideas of environment—is the focus of Anieri’s book, with the working title The Appalachian Trail: A Biography.
VICTOR FANUCCHI
LECTURER IV; FILM, TELEVISION, AND MEDIA “Chatbot” From the beginnings of artificial intelligence, there has been a kind of AI that strives towards the illusion of a mind at work. In 1950, Alan Turing proposed his “imitation game” as an answer to the question of whether machines can think, imagining a test (now called the Turing Test) in which a human judge conversing with a computer is fooled into thinking she is interacting with a human. “Chatbot” will be a mockumentary feature film about the current, sometimes humorously limited state of artificial “intelligence.” The story revolves around a Turing
Test-like competition held by a mysteriously resuscitated ‘90s tech-bubble company with questionable motives.
DAVID GOLD
ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR; ENGLISH, WOMEN’S STUDIES, EDUCATION “‘Votes for Women’: African American Suffrage Arguments in the Crisis” Though there is extensive research treating the racial dynamics of the larger suffrage movement, there is less work considering how African American rhetors framed suffrage, particularly for African American audiences. To address this gap, Gold examines a 1915 symposium published in the NAACP’s magazine The Crisis, featuring 24 prominent African American rhetors. He analyzes the rhetorical strategies of the contributors to this symposium, set against the history of the treatment of suffrage in The Crisis as well as the context of wider suffrage discourse, particularly as it intersected with tropes of race. Examining this symposium reveals the deliberative arguments African American rhetors constructed for a largely black public. It also allows us to consider the frequently underappreciated epideictic effects of public arguments; given the overwhelming support for suffrage from a broad swath of community leaders, this symposium also served as a powerful ceremonial assertion of communal values at a crucial moment in history, when the passage of a national suffrage amendment was still uncertain and African American civil rights were still in the “nadir.” Through this examination, Gold aims to contribute to the further reconstruction of an African American suffrage rhetoric that is seen as not merely reactive to dominant suffrage rhetorics but constitutive of its own.
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Philip D’Anieri
Victor Fanucchi
David Gold
ASHLEY LUCAS
ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR; THEATRE AND DRAMA, RESIDENTIAL COLLEGE, ENGLISH, ART AND DESIGN “Prison Theatre: Performance and Incarceration”
Ashley Lucas
Scott Spector
Obscured behind concrete and razor wire, the lives of the incarcerated remain hidden from public view while inspiring, partly as a result of their obscurity, often lurid and fevered representations that try to imagine or rationalize practices of imprisonment. Inside the walls, incarcerated men and women stage their own theatrical productions, articulating their identities and experiences for audiences using Shakespeare, original devised work, and improvisation, all while carefully monitored by gatekeepers. Prison Theatre: Performance and Incarceration, is the first monograph to compare prison theatre around the world. Analyzing prison performances from the United States, Canada, Brazil, Uruguay, the United Kingdom, Ireland, South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand, it looks at the ways in which incarcerated people, professional artists, activists, and even prison staff use theatre as a means to identify, reify, and critique national discourses on criminal justice.
SCOTT SPECTOR
Greta Uehling
PROFESSOR; HISTORY AND GERMAN “Invisible Empire: Layers of Memory in Post-Habsburg Central Europe” While much of East Central Europe belonged for centuries to the Habsburg Empire (from 1867 until its demise in 1918 known as AustriaHungary), the various agendas of this vast realm’s successor states were chiefly opposed to preserving its memory. And yet, traces of this history are not merely extant—they are more integral to the present in these cities and regions than they at first appear. Attending to factors as diverse as architecture, urban design, Jewish cemeteries, railroad lines and other 20
infrastructure, memorials, museums, culinary traditions, language, individual biographies and personal memory, this project aims to expose the palimpsest of historical experience in these places. The goal is decidedly not to claim a unitary, common past to displace the nationalist narratives that have overwritten it, but rather to put all such narratives in critical perspective, even to reveal multiple pasts that continually, if quietly, impact present consciousness and current events.
GRETA UEHLING
LECTURER II; INTERNATIONAL AND COMPARATIVE STUDIES “PTSD Land: The Emotional Geography of Ukraine’s Displaced” In 2014, the Russian Federation claimed Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula. This incursion was followed by a second territorial dispute over eastern Ukraine that, five years on, continues to claim lives on a daily basis. What exactly goes through the mind of a parent forced to send a child to school across a minefield? In this region, confronting choices of this kind constitutes part of the daily calculus of life. Understanding how ordinary people are able to tolerate and function in the face of protracted conflict requires engaging the question of how politically motivated violence reconfigures interpersonal relationships. This project therefore draws upon three years of ethnographic fieldwork between 2015 and 2017 when Uehling interviewed respondents from Ukraine’s tense Crimean border in the south to the capital city of Kyiv in the north, and from the war-torn east to the cultural capital of Lviv in the west. Using narratives about life in and around the war zone as a way of understanding the war itself, the project explores the role of sustained encounters with violence in shaping subjectivity and war’s impact on friendship and family ties.
“Darlings, Delicacies, Deities & Donations: Ancient Egyptian Animal Mummies as Cultural and Environmental Markers,” Salima Ikram, American University, Cairo “Celebrating the Poromboke Commons: Climate Change, Land-Use Change and Cultural Activism,” Marc and Constance Jacobson Lecture by Nityanand Jayaraman
EVENTS MAJOR LECTURES Presenting distinguished visitors to enhance the humanities at Michigan.
AUTHOR’S FORUM A series on books & ideas presented in collaboration with LSA and the University Library.
“From Domination to Regeneration: Cultivating a New World View in Perilous Times,” Jill S. Harris Memorial Lecture by Ibrahim Abdul-Matin
A Rich Brew: How Cafes Created Modern Jewish Culture, Shachar Pinsker (Judaic studies and Middle East studies) and Samer Ali (Arabic language and literature)
“The Secret Music of Glaciers,” Matthew Burtner, University of Virginia
Transformations of Ovid in Late Antiquity, Ian Fielding (Classical studies) and Peggy McCracken (French, Women’s studies, comparative literature)
“Colonialism and Spatial Histories of Migration: the Caribbean Diaspora,” Jean Yokes Woodhead Lecture by Itohan Osayimwese, Brown University
Salima Ikram, American University, Cairo
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Let Me Sing and I’m Happy, Joan Morris (music, emeritus) and Daniel Herwitz (art history, comparative literature, philosophy, art and design)
Left: High Stakes Culture: How Did We Become a Troll Nation and What Can Humanists Do About It?
“Sacred Spaces; Ritual Environments” Nachiket Chanchani (art history, Asian languages & cultures) Jason Young (history) Catherine Sanok (English) “Water” EJ Westlake (English, theater & drama) Leela Fernandes (women’s studies, political science) Brendan Haug (classical studies) “Neighborhoods, Suburbs, Environments” Alexandra Murphy (sociology), Matthew Lassiter (history, American culture), Harley Etienne (architecture)
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MEDIA OUTLETS THAT THE DAVID OPDYKE FEATURED INSTALLATION PAVED
WITH 6000 INTENTIONS
HUMANITIES AND ENVIRONMENTS PANELS Conversations with faculty around our theme year.
Afro-Dog: Blackness and the Animal Question, Bénédicte Boisseron (Afroamerican and African studies) and Aliyah Khan (English, Afroamerican and African studies)
“Concepts for the Environmental Humanities” Miranda Brown (Asian languages & cultures) Gregg Crane (English) Sarah Ensor (English, environment) Ingrid Diran (Afroamerican and African studies, environment) Sam White (history, Ohio State University) Paolo Squatriti (history, Italian, PITE)
The Praiseworthy One: The Prophet Muhammad in Islamic Texts and Images, Christiane Gruber (art history) and Juan Cole (history) Technologies for Intuition: Cold War Circles and Telepathic Rays Alaina Lemon (anthropology) and Karla Mallette (Italian, Middle East studies) 22
“Development” Susan Najita (English, American culture) William Glover (history) Perrin Selcer (history, environment) “Animals and Capture” Antoine Traisnel (comparative literature, English) Bénédicte Boisseron (Afroamerican and African studies) “Criminal Justice and the Built Environment” Claire Zimmerman (architecture, history of art), Heather Thompson (history, Residential College), David Thatcher (architecture, public policy)
FELLOWSPEAK Scholarly presentation of on-going work by current fellows. “Eating Cheese in the Carolingian Empire” Noah Blan “Spatial Narratives in Architecture and Fiction” Keith Mitnick ‘Tempest-tost’?: Climate, Disaster, and Migration to America in the Age of Sail” Sam White
“How a Podcast Started a Revolution in South Korea” Youngju Ryu
“Apostolic Longing in the Early Modern Spanish World” Kenneth Mills
“At the Gates of the Temple: Culture, Politics and Public Space in Ptolemaic Egypt” Ian Moyer
“The Digital Popular: Media, Culture and Politics in Networked India” Aswin Punathambekar
“Building Race and Nation: Slavery, Dispossession and Early American Civic Architecture” Mabel Wilson
“How did you get fat anyway?: Black Women’s Diet and Exercise in the Mid-Twentieth Century” Ava Purkiss
“Small Talk: Talk Therapy and the Microscopic Science of Face-to-Face Interaction” Michael Lempert
HIGH STAKES CULTURE A series that brings humanities perspectives to bear on current debates, in collaboration with the U-M Humanities Collaboratory. “‘This is America’: Who are We and What Can We Learn from Childish Gambino in the Twittersphere?” Megan Ankerson (communication studies), Anita Gonzalez (theater), Robin Wilson (dance), Stephen Berrey (American culture & history), and Angela Dillard (Afroamerican and African studies and Residential College) “How Did We Become a Troll Nation and What Can Humanists Do About It?” Kamilah Taylor and Daniel Burke (co-founders of Swaay), Rachel Rohr (Knight-Wallace Fellow), Megan Ankerson (communication studies), and Angela Dillard (Afroamerican and African studies and Residential College)
Ibrahim Abdul-Matin, Jill S. Harris Memorial Lecture. Photo: Lisa Powers
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“The Politics of Blackface Then and Now: What’s in Your Yearbook?” Stephen Berrey (American culture and history), Bethany Hughes (American culture and Native American studies), Peter Ho Davies (English), Angela Dillard (Afroamerican and African studies and Residential College), and Matthew Countryman (Afroamerican and African studies and Residential College)
undergraduate
PROGRAMS
Our undergraduate programs continued to thrive this year with more events, more students, and more interactions between undergraduates and our fellows. As the program grows, we aim to engage more undergraduate students with creative and critical thinking about the humanities, asking more questions about our world and better understanding other cultures through their arts, histories and languages. DOSE OF HUMANITIES A new series run by the Institute for the Humanities Undergraduate Engagement Group featuring interviews with our faculty and graduate student fellows. (See article page 26) MINI-COURSES • “The ‘Year without a Summer’ 1816: Climate, History, and Humanities,” taught by Sam White • “The Politics of Memorials and Monuments,” taught by Mabel O. Wilson • “Cities and Sustainability in World History,” taught by Noah Blan JILL S. HARRIS MEMORIAL LECTURE The Jill S. Harris Memorial Fund brings a distinguished visitor to campus each year who will appeal to undergraduates interested in the humanities and the arts. Ibrahim Abdul-Matin gave this year’s lecture, “From Domination to Regeneration: Cultivating a New World View in Perilous Times.”
LOOK 101: SEEING ART IN AN INSTAGRAM WORLD A series of discussions hosted by Curator Amanda Krugliak offering a fresh take on the basics of looking and evaluating art in the gallery. OPEN MIC POETRY READING For the second year we collaborated with U-M poet Laura Kasischke and hosted a standing-room-only open-mic poetry reading for U-M undergraduate students. HIGH STAKES CULTURE Back for the second year, High Stakes Culture is a collaboration with the Humanities Collaboratory that brings humanities perspectives to bear on current debates. Topics included Childish Gambino’s “This is America,” blackface, and on-line trolling. UNDERGRADUATE ENGAGEMENT GROUP Group members participate in institute events and work to increase student awareness and understanding of the humanities on campus. (See articles pages 26 & 29)
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Undergraduate students at the second annual student poetry reading. Photo: Madison Fox
A DOSE OF HUMANITIES
new interview series brings together undergraduate students and institute fellows Clockwise from top left: Ava Purkiss, Irene Brisson, Keith Mitnick, Ian Moyer, Aswin Punathambekar, and Jallicia Jolly.
One Thursday night during fall semester, the Undergraduate Engagement Group met to brainstorm ideas for a project we could do that would feature the institute’s fellows and their work. We bounced ideas back and forth, and ultimately decided on an interview series that would give us a chance to meet the fellows one-on-one and get to know them and their work. Each undergrad group member would choose a fellow (or two), meet them in person, and interview them about their work, their experience at the institute, their undergraduate years, and their thoughts about the humanities. 26
I chose Noah Blan, a medievalist, because I was planning to focus my senior thesis on prisons in medieval Europe. During the interview, he talked about the project he was working on as a fellow, including his research on the contradictions of monasteries as both a place for monks to isolate themselves from society while simultaneously playing an influential role in society. Noah’s work certainly piqued my interest, but his recommendation to read and think across disciplines and chronologies and take advantage of the opportunities available at a place like Michigan proved particularly helpful. I had spent much of the past semester developing my thesis topic, but was running into difficulties. As a result of the conversation with Professor Blan, I reached out to a wide array of faculty, which in turn led to my shift in focus, and I am now researching prisons in twentieth century U.S. In the end, the process of interviewing a fellow, for me, expanded well beyond just featuring their work. It pushed me both to explore interests outside my previous ones, and to utilize the tremendous resources on campus. –Ryan Herrmann, Undergraduate Engagement Group Member. (BA History and Political Science, 2020)
WHAT HAVE YOU DISCOVERED WHILE YOU ARE DOING RESEARCH? WHAT ARE SOME OF THE KEY TAKEAWAYS THAT YOU’VE FOUND? One of the biggest ones is that there used to be this old argument that medieval people’s relationship with the environment, with nature, was always antagonistic, and that this notion that God gave it to us, we can do whatever we want, is the root of modern ecological crisis. There were some people who thought that, but there were many other voices of diverse perspectives of people’s relationship with the environment. That is one of the most important things that has emerged and that I continue working with. medieval people thought about their relationship with
INTERVIEW WITH NOAH BLAN by Ryan Herrmann
TO START, CAN YOU TELL ME A LITTLE ABOUT WHAT YOU’RE WORKING ON THIS YEAR? Sure, so I’m doing a couple of things. I am revising my dissertation for publication as a book. That’s one of my goals this year, and the other is beginning to work on God’s Footprint which is an ongoing project, so I’m kind of getting my first research done, and am specifically this year looking at monasteries in the Île de France region of present-day France. WHY DID YOU CHOOSE THIS TOPIC? WHAT ABOUT IT INTERESTS YOU? I started thinking about this big question about monasteries and the environment because there’s a contradiction between the rhetoric of monks who were “trying to get away from it all” and live in closer relationship with God as they saw it and really shunning the things of the world, and yet they were becoming these materially wealthy and very important places. I started thinking about that and I was reminded of a question that the modern environmentalist William Rees asked famously, which is “how many people
lie awake at night wondering what percentage of the world is dedicated to sustaining their lifestyle?” His answer was, “not many,” and he was highlighting the dislocation of the era we live in, the Anthropocene, between the way that we live and think about our footprint in the world. So that’s where the footprint in God’s Footprint comes from. Because I think for the Middle Ages you could reverse that question and ask how did these monks and how did these religious figures think about the fact that they believed that God created this whole world for their use, and what were they doing with it? That was where I started from. So, there’s that kind of cultural idea of the wondering and imagining why, but there is also the real impact that I mentioned. The development of economies that take off, of resource production, wide-scale transformation of ecosystems: clearing of forests, dredging up new waterways, turning previously uncultivated land into cultivated land, the creation of new towns that were then in economic and spiritual relationships with these monasteries. And so that’s the driving question behind what I’m doing.
nature in as many ways as you can possibly think of, many of which were super anthropocentric, meaning thinking that humans are both the center of everything and also outside of nature, so to speak, which is actually a very modern attitude. There were just as many people who imagined people in real relationship with other members, living and nonliving, within their ecosystem. They were covering those voices and figuring out how early medieval people learned to live sustainably. Learning to live sometimes not sustainably with their resources is something that’s important for me with my interests in the Middle Ages but also presents analogous lessons for people today. continued on next page
Undergraduate student Ryan Herrmann and Noah Blan, 2018-19 postdoctoral fellow. Photo: Robyn Han
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continued from page 27
WHAT ADVICE WOULD YOU GIVE TO UNDERGRADUATES? I remember people telling me when I was an undergrad to take advantage of as many opportunities as you can because never again will you be in a place with so many opportunities and things going on—lectures, presentations, exhibitions of various things, workshops that you can go to, really cool, interesting things that might not be related to your major or what you think your interests are that will push you and provoke you and open up new possibilities for you to imagine. You have nothing else to do right now except go to class and do those things. People work and there are athletics and all that, but I just mean that you’re in a place in your life where you have time and room and space just to explore, and I got that to an extent when I was an undergrad, but looking back now I think of opportunities that I missed to explore things, and I think that would be my advice.
WHAT IS ONE CHOICE YOU WERE GLAD YOU MADE WHEN YOU WERE AN UNDERGRAD? The obvious answer is being a history major, and that was a roundabout process. I went through many permutations. I actually dropped out of college for a while, just to figure out what I wanted to do. I came back later and was a history major, but I think those two things go together: choosing history and also taking time to figure out what I wanted to do were the most important.
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U-M FACULTY WHO PRESENTED AT OUR EVENTS
HOW DOES THE ENVIRONMENT BEING WITH OTHER FELLOWS HELP DRIVE YOUR PROJECT? That’s a great question. Every week one of the big highlights is going to the fellows seminar and it’s because we’re in this environment where everyone is fully committed to reading critically and carefully, to asking questions that not only sharpen the presenter’s analysis or questions, but also opens up new perspectives for us. It’s really cool to see how people from literature, from art, from architecture, anthropology, various disciplines, come together and see things from different perspectives. This is illuminating for my work, but I think also for how I think about collegiality among other academics.
LAST QUESTION. WHY DO YOU THINK UNDERGRADS SHOULD STUDY THE HUMANITIES? I’ve been thinking about this question a lot, actually. So everyone starts by saying that everyone should take 28
math and science because it teaches you practical skills that everyone needs to know. That’s true, but there’s also another side to that. Taking an algebra class teaches you how to think logically. Taking a science class teaches you how the world around you works and your place in connection to objects and speed and motion. The same is true for the humanities. For the humanities we say that if you take a literature or history class, it will teach you to read more critically, to think more deeply, and to express those ideas whether it’s in writing or verbally, and that’s true. But studying the humanities also helps you figure out how to put yourself in someone else’s shoes, to see things from a perspective you might not have considered. You’ll appreciate there’s beauty or horror or both existing at the same time everyday around you. I think that’s something that humanities offers that people can’t necessarily get in other places.
TWEETING FOR THE HUMANITIES
undergraduate engagement group
As a member of the institute’s Undergraduate Engagement Group, I have had the privilege for the past two years of collaborating with a diverse group of students to advocate for the unique role of the humanities in contemporary society. In line with the annual theme of Humanities and Environments, our group remains energized by the opportunity to foster dialogue, innovation, and inspiration across campus and beyond. One aspect of our efforts I most enjoy is creating social media content for institute-organized events. From the Author’s Forum and FellowSpeak to High Stakes Culture and artist conversations, the variety of events offered on a weekly basis provides a rich setting for further dialogue and discussion online.
media is the opportunity to creatively increase the visibility of the humanities across a wide variety of interdisciplinary discussions. The Undergraduate Engagement Group has been able to further connections of this nature through a new weekly series, Dose of Humanities, that features interviews of the institute’s current fellows. For me, it was such a pleasure to not only interview Steelcase Faculty Fellow Aswin Punathambekar for Dose of Humanities but also to create an Instagram story for his FellowSpeak discussion, “The Digital Popular: Media, Culture and Politics in Networked India.” Building upon relationships of this nature encompasses a core objective for the Institute for the Humanities, which serves to bring the voices of the humanities to public life. I look forward to participating in events for future semesters.
While I personally use social media regularly, creating an Instagram story or a Facebook post in a limited amount of time and for a campus unit proved to be an exciting challenge. My introduction to this mode of dissemination was an artist conversation with Gideon Mendel for the Deluge exhibition. I was immediately drawn to the process of succinctly conveying my excitement about Deluge to an audience beyond those who could attend the event. I carried the same energy in undertaking social media for the Author’s Forum featuring the book Afro-Dog: Blackness and the Animal Question and the Humanities and Environments faculty panel on “Criminal Justice and the Built Environment.” What continues to draw me back to the institute’s social
2018-19 UNDERGRADUATE ENGAGEMENT GROUP MEMBERS Maitreyi Anantharaman Felix Aubeock Evan Binkely Halley Burnside Ryan Herrmann
Vivian Li Alexis Miettinen Sydney Moore Hui-Yuan Neo Hannah Thoms
See you on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter!
Sarah Uddin Julia Wang Julia Whang
–Evan Binkley, Undergraduae Engagment Group Member. (BA History of Art, 2020)
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Gideon Mendel, Carl Coleman and his stepson Cody Lamb, Longs, South Carolina, September 2018
GALLERY
Innovative exhibitions and arts programming. LITERATURE VS. TRAFFIC Luzinterruptus
THE DRAFT Esmaa Mahamoud ABOUT THE ARTIST: Esmaa Mohamoud (b. 1992), is a Toronto-based African-Canadian artist. She holds a BFA from Western University and an MFA from OCAD University. Recently, Mohamoud has exhibited at the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Royal Ontario Museum and the Museum of Fine Arts Montreal. She is represented by Georgia Scherman Projects. ABOUT THE EXHIBITION: The Draft explores material and popular Black culture through the realm of athletics. With the use of textiles and concrete, The Draft addresses the ways in which Black bodies navigate spaces as both visible, and at times invisible.
Above: A “utopia statement� submitted by a visitor via the interactive component of the Blind House installation.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS: Luzinterruptus is a Spain-based, anonymous art collective that carries out urban interventions in public spaces using light as a raw material and the dark as a canvas. They began in Madrid in 2008, using light (to highlight issues that go unnoticed by the authorities and the community) as well as anonymous places and ordinary objects. ABOUT THE EXHIBITION: In October, the Institute for the Humanities shut down Liberty Street and reused thousands of discarded books, turning them into an illuminated pathway for the large-scale art installation Literature vs. Traffic. See article page 6.
RELATED EVENTS: Opening Reception and Artist Conversation
RELATED EVENTS: Post-event discussion at Ann Arbor District Library
LOOK 101: Seeing Art in an Instagram World, How to Look at the Art of Esmaa Mohamoud
LOOK 101: Seeing Art in an Instagram World, How to Look at the Art of Luzinterruptus
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ABOUT THE ARTIST: Gideon Mendel came of age as a photographer in South Africa in the 1980s and identified strongly as a “struggle photographer.” His career has been notable for his engagement with three of the crucial political and social issues that have faced his generation: apartheid, HIV/AIDS in Africa and climate change. Mendel’s intimate style of image making and long-term commitment to projects has earned him international recognition and many awards. He was shortlisted for the Prix Pictet Prize 2015 and recently has won both the inaugural Jackson Pollock Prize for Creativity and the Greenpeace Photo Award 2016. ABOUT THE EXHIBITION: Deluge is a five-channel video installation and the culmination of Mendel’s ten years of work on the Drowning World project, shooting video and stills in thirteen different countries. It depicts
A glass house with a chair and manual typewriter inside for visitors to type a “utopia statement.” Part of the Blind House exhibition. Photo: Robyn Han
a variety of individual stories, positioned with a synchronous global narrative in a way that is both personally intimate and deeply political. In all his years of responding to floods and making many journeys he has shot a vast archive of video footage, which is fully activated in this presentation for the first time. EVENTS: Opening Reception & Artist Conversation Look101: Seeing Art in an Instagram World, How to Look at the Art of Gideon Mendel PAVED WITH GOOD INTENTIONS David Opdyke, Efroymson Emerging Artist in Residence ABOUT THE ARTIST: David Opdyke is a draughtsman, sculptor, and animator known for his trenchant political sendups of American culture. Born in Schenectady, NY in 1969, he graduated from the University of Cincinnati with a degree in painting and sculpture. His work is informed by the massive industrial and corporate restructuring he witnessed growing up. For 20 years Opdyke worked as a scenic painter and architectural model-maker. Ranging from intricate miniature constructions to room-sized installations, his artwork explores globalization, consumerism, and civilization’s abusive relationship with the environment. ABOUT THE EXHIBITION: This site-specific installation serves as a critique of U.S. culture and politics. In an era of fake news and daily hyperbole, Opdyke literally changes the picture by hand painting on 528 vintage postcards of well-known American landmarks and destinations. The postcards are assembled into a large mural—a vast gridded landscape beset by environmental chaos. Each card is placed to fit into the overall image, and 32
carefully modified with the gouache to show a realistically rendered piece of the overall turmoil. The installation also features animated shorts and script-driven video, which take place within the visual confines of one or more postcards. The animation is inspired, in part, by Terry Gilliam’s animation work on Monty Python’s “Flying Circus” and by the classical music sound effects in the Road Runner cartoons. RELATED EVENTS: Good Intentions: Is Art an Effective Means of Activism?” Panel Discussion with David Opdyke, journalist Lauren Sandler, art historian Tara Ward, and curator Amanda Krugliak & Opening Reception In Conversation: Artist David Opdyke with writer Lawrence Weschler
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WEIGHT OF EACH CONCRETE BASKETBALL IN ESMAA MOHAMOUD’S THE DRAFT
Photo: Robyn Han
DELUGE Gideon Mendel
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Esmaa Mohamoud, The Draft Photo: Robyn Han
BLIND HOUSE: UTOPIA AND DYSTOPIA IN THE AGE OF RADICAL TRANSPARENCY Walter Martin and Paloma Munoz ABOUT THE ARTISTS: Walter Martin and Paloma Muñoz are a collaborative team. They started working together in 1993 and have exhibited worldwide. They are best known for “Travelers,” a series of snow globes depicting unfortunate situations in frozen landscapes. Professional and personal partners since soon after they met in 1993, they live in Milford, Pennsylvania, maintain a studio in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and work summers at a family retreat in Spain.
and safety. The exhibition combines photographs the artists have envisioned of houses without windows as well an actual glass house in the center of the gallery, revisiting the whole notion of a glass house as an example of sophistication, luxury, and modernism. In a darkening era of surveillance and the internet, for Martin and Muñoz, Blind House serves as “a metaphorical solution to the full on campaign against personal privacy.” EVENTS: Opening Reception and Artist Conversation Undergraduate Student Exhibition Tour
ABOUT THE EXHIBITION: Blind House is a razor-sharp work that brings into question our ideals of house and home, privacy, 33
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UTOPIA STORIES WRITTEN BY VISITORS TO THE BLIND HOUSES EXHIBITION
remembering
JAMES WINN
James Winn was director of the Institute for the Humanities from 1988-1996. Photo by: Philip Winn
1947-2019
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James has always inspired both awe and affection, a combination far rarer than either of its component parts. He was a consummate scholar: learned, meticulous, capable at once of large-scale synthesis and exquisite local analysis. He was also (another rare combination) a consummate musician: a highly accomplished flautist, musicologist, and avid fan of music in all its manifestations, both classical and popular. He was a passionate teacher, a tireless and imaginative administrator, a devoted friend and mentor, a dauntingly articulate advocate for liberal-mindedness and the liberal arts. I was still a very junior assistant professor in James’s home department (the English department) when he was appointed director of the Institute for the Humanities and I vividly recall the gusto with which he embarked on his new job. It is no mean task to launch an institute from scratch. James’s distinguished colleague John Knott oversaw the institute during its first year, while the search for a longer-term director was ongoing, but it was James who lay the foundations for the institute’s subsequent intellectual and civic trajectory. It was also he who raised the funds to expand fellowship offerings and establish the endowment that would secure the future of Michigancentered initiatives in the humanities. We take for granted now that “humanities,” as construed by the institute, includes not only scholarly inquiry in the fields of literature, philosophy, languages ancient and modern, history, anthropology, musicology, art history, and cultural studies of many varieties, but also the production of creative work in musical,
verbal, visual, performative, and screen arts. It might easily have been otherwise, however: not all humanities institutes are so broadly welcoming to those who work in the arts. James was perfectly suited, by temperament, training, and philosophy, to insist that analytical, interpretive, and creative work belong in a single conversation, that historians and composers, AfricanAmericanists and poets, philosophers and painters have much to learn from one another and, perhaps more importantly, much to learn from presenting their work to those outside their narrow disciplinary circles. We who make our livings in humanities and the arts do not, as a rule, require the same kind of infrastructure and financial backing as do our colleagues in the research sciences. Those of us who make our livings in universities owe a considerable portion of our energy and passion to the mission of teaching and are sustained, in turn, by the energy, curiosity, and, yes, the intellectual push-back from our students. What we lack is time. And time is the first and foremost gift provided by the institute’s fellowship program: time to write, time to read more deeply than the normal teaching year allows, time to conduct research or generate new paintings, time to experiment with new methodologies and to acquaint ourselves with new developments in our respective fields. But the gift that many of us have found to be even more significant is the gift from which “fellowship” derives its name: the gift of intellectual community. I am not the only former institute fellow who has found herself much altered, and her perspectives much enlarged, by the intellectual
“MY OWN DREAM [ABOUT THE FUTURE OF THE INSTITUTE] SHOWS A SHIFTING AND FLEXIBLE INTELLECTUAL COMMUNITY, WITH SCHOLARS LEARNING TO LISTEN TO ONE ANOTHER AND RESPECT EACH OTHER’S FIELDS MORE FULLY AND DEEPLY THAN THE CURRENT REWARD SYSTEM ENCOURAGES, STRIVING TO ADDRESS A WIDER PUBLIC IN GENERAL TERMS, SEEKING COMMON GROUND AND FINDING COMMON ISSUES AS THEY SHARE THE DEEP AND SERIOUS ENGAGEMENT WITH VALUES THAT LIES AT THE HEART OF THE HUMANITIES.” -JAMES WINN, 1992
exchange the institute so brilliantly affords. Many of my colleagues have had similar experiences. “This isn’t the direction I thought my work was taking,” one might say, “but the example of soand-so’s work, in a field I would have thought quite unrelated to my own, has given me a sense of new possibilities.” Or: “My department is small and, much as I like my colleagues, I’ve felt rather isolated in my [historical period] [theoretical approach] [you name it]. The institute has introduced me to colleagues with whom I can really share my work.” Or: “The feedback I got in the weekly seminar has given me new confidence in a project I feared was inchoate.” Or: “I have a much clearer sense of my own inquiry now that I’ve had 35
the opportunity to present it to colleagues outside my speciality.” For individual scholars and artists, as for the university and the profession as a whole, this cross-fertilization constitutes the most durable legacy of Michigan’s Institute for the Humanities. And, from its inception, by hosting conferences, public lectures, concerts, exhibitions, and other public-facing projects, the institute has served as a resource for the community as a whole. For this legacy and for this vision, we are all much indebted to the wonderful James Winn. –Linda Gregerson,Caroline Walker Bynum Distinguished University Professor, Department of English
SUPPORT Drawing on Michigan’s remarkable resources, we seek to become a national leader in advocating for the humanities in higher education and to serve as a national and international center for scholarly research in the humanities and creative work in the arts. By engaging with the institute through your gifts, you directly support the university and the institute in our mission to: • Engage and address the world as a premier institute that boldly integrates the humanities with the arts. • Stand at the forefront of public outreach and service through the humanities and arts. • Maximize scholarly impact by funding precious time and opportunities for Michigan’s best emerging scholars. • Encourage and promote cutting-edge research across the humanities and the arts. Please support the Institute for the Humanities generously as together we make a profound and continuing difference in our university and the world. The institute is currently focused on raising funds in support of the art gallery and its exhibitions. The institute’s gallery has gained national attention for the high quality of it curated shows mounted annually. An endowment to name the gallery and/or one of its three to five annual shows would ensure the institute is able to continue the tradition of superb exhibitions that showcase the synergies between the work of humanities scholars and creative artists. It will also enable the institute to expand outreach to undergraduate students and the general public. 37
The Institute for the Humanities is a center for innovative, collaborative study in the humanities and arts. HOW TO GIVE One of the easiest ways to support the humanities is through an outright gift to the Institute for the Humanities. The University of Michigan makes giving such gifts very easy through its secure gift website (https://leadersandbest. umich.edu/find/#!/scu/ lsa), search on the term “humanities” and available funds will be listed. To discuss your gift in more detail please contact us at humin@umich.edu or 734.936.3518 or contact the institute’s advancement officer Jeff Jelinski, LSA Advancement, 734.615-6333 or jjelinsk@umich.edu.
AFFILIATES AND STAFF STAFF Lucy Cahill, gallery coordinator (thru Dec 2018) Stephanie Harrell, marketing communications specialist Juliet Hinely, arts production coordinator Laura Koroncey, graphic designer Amanda Krugliak, curator Peggy McCracken, director Gretchen O’Hair, fellows coordinator Sheri Sytsema-Geiger, administrative manager STUDENT INTERNS Robyn Han, gallery Sydney Moore, office Asia Siev, marketing & media Megan St Andrew, marketing & media
INSTITUTE FOR THE HUMANITIES EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE Anne Curzan, ex officio; associate dean, humanities; English, linguistics, education Gaurav Desai, English Lucy Hartley, English Matthew Lassiter, history, urban and regional planning Peggy McCracken, ex officio; Institute for the Humanities Anthony Mora, American culture and history Arthur Verhoogt, papyrology and Greek Claire Zimmerman, architecture and history of art
NONDISCRIMINATION POLICY STATEMENT The University of Michigan, as an equal opportunity/ affirmative action employer, complies with all applicable federal and state laws regarding nondiscrimination and affirmative action. The University of Michigan is committed to a policy of equal opportunity for all persons and does not discriminate on the basis of race, color, national origin, age, marital status, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, disability, religion, height, weight, or veteran status in employment, educational programs and activities, and admissions. Inquiries or complaints may be addressed to the Senior Director for Institutional Equity, and Title IX/Section 504/ADA Coordinator, Office of Institutional Equity, 2072 Administrative Services Building, Ann Arbor, Michigan 48109-1432, 734-763-0235, TTY 734-647-1388. For other University of Michigan information call 734-764-1817. THE REGENTS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN Jordan B. Acker, Southfield Michael J. Behm, Grand Blanc Mark J. Bernstein, Ann Arbor Paul W. Brown, Ann Arbor Shauna Ryder Diggs, Grosse Pointe Denise Ilitch, Bingham Farms Mark S. Schlissel, ex officio Ron Weiser, Ann Arbor Katherine E. White, Ann Arbor
WWW.LSA.UMICH.EDU/HUMANITIES 202 S. Thayer Street, Suite 1111 Ann Arbor, MI 48104-1608 734.936.3518
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ABOUT THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN INSTITUTE FOR THE HUMANITIES
2018-19 YEAR OF HUMANITIES & ENVIRONMENTS
The Institute for the Humanities is a center for innovative, collaborative study in the humanities and arts. Each year we provide fellowships for Michigan faculty, graduate students, and visiting scholars who work on interdisciplinary projects. We also offer a wide array of public and scholarly events, including public lectures, conferences, and art exhibitions.
Environments are at the core of human experience. From organic gardens to protected parklands, from historic buildings to urban revitalization, environments are shaped by our desires, needs, and fears. Environments are also shaped by human inhabitation, and in turn, they shape humans’ ever-changing habits, ideologies, and understandings of the people and world around us.
Our mission is to serve as a national and international centerpiece for scholarly research in the humanities and creative work in the arts at the University of Michigan. We exist to deepen synergies between the humanities, the arts and other regions of the university, to carry forward the heritage of the humanities, and to bring the voices of the humanities to public life. Since 1987 the institute has granted fellowships to over 500 Michigan faculty fellows, Michigan graduate student fellows, and visiting fellows. The Institute for the Humanities: • Encourages fellows to talk and debate, informally and formally— all in an effort to reach beyond the assumptions of a given discipline. • Promotes innovative teaching in the humanities, encouraging fellows to add perspectives from other disciplines to the courses they teach. • Brings nationally known scholars, artists, and performers to Michigan to participate in programs, conferences, and fellowships. • Offers programs reaching out to university and public audiences. Brings together those who create—artists, musicians, actors, writers—with those who analyze these art forms.
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In 2018-19, we explored contributions of humanistic inquiry to understanding this powerful back-and-forth between humans and environments. We considered environmental disasters and ecological thriving, investigated the structures of development and sustainability, interrogated relationships of ideology and architecture, and explored dreams for an ecologically just world. The Institute for the Humanities acknowledges that the University of Michigan, named for Michigami, the world’s largest freshwater system, sits on land stewarded by Niswi Ishkodewan Anishinaabeg—the Three Fires People, who are the Ojibwe, Odawa, and Potawatomi—along with their neighbors the Seneca, Delaware, Shawnee, and Wyandot nations.
202 S. Thayer Street, Suite 1111 Ann Arbor, MI 48104-1608