Celebrate the Fellows Posters

BEYOND THE DIVINE COMMAND: A

HISTORY OF THE SECULAR IN PREMODERN

ISLAM

RUSHAIN ABBASI

MELLON POSTDOCTORAL FELLOW

DEPARTMENT OF RELIGIOUS STUDIES, STANFORD UNIVERSITY

Abbasi’s current book project is an intellectual history of the development of the idea of the secular in the premodern Islamic world. The study is aimed at undermining the current academic orthodoxy which maintains that the distinction between the "religious" and the "secular" is a modern European invention, and thus wholly at odds with an Islamic worldview. It attempts to intervene in contemporary debates surrounding the relationship between Islam and modernity, but through a historically grounded investigation of a single concept (or rather, dialectic) in premodern Islamic thought.

LUMINESCENCE: INSECT KNOWLEDGE, POWER, AND THE

LITERARY: 1700-1814

MONIQUE ALLEWAERT

EXTERNAL FACULTY FELLOW DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH, UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN-MADISON

Luminescence follows insect avatars through eighteenth-century Caribbean natural history, story, riddles, song, and poetry to elaborate counterplantation knowledges and aesthetics. By exploring a constellation of problems and powers associated with West Indian bugs, the book shows that the constant, often insensible touch of insects as well as the tropical climate that they amplified informed a situated knowledge inspired by insects’ navigation of their environments.

WORKING LANGUAGES: METALINGUISTIC

DISCOURSE AND THE SHAPING OF LATIN LITERATURE

BRANDON BARK

SHC DISSERTATION PRIZE FELLOW

DEPARTMENT OF CLASSICS, STANFORD UNIVERSITY

Bark’s dissertation project investigates metalinguistic discourse in ancient Greek and Latin literature. How did Greek and Latin authors write about language? How did generic expectations and literary precedent shape the form linguistic descriptions assume in Classical literature? Conversely, how did changing attitudes about language manifest in literature?

FROM THE BACK OF THE CHURCH:

A HISTORY OF IRREVERENT RELIGION IN AFRICAN AMERICAN LIFE

VAUGHN A. BOOKER

DISTINGUISHED JUNIOR EXTERNAL FELLOW

DEPARTMENT OF AFRICAN AND AFRICAN AMERICAN STUDIES AND THE DEPARTMENT OF RELIGION, DARTMOUTH COLLEGE

Booker’s second book project explores how African American Christians have created and sustained cultural traditions of religious humor that parallel traditions critical of belief. His project centers the ways that African Americans have embraced irreverence, from Emancipation to the present, to understand the persistence of African American religious life and the persistence of comedy about this important facet of Black culture.

ETHEREAL ROMANTICISM:

DYNAMIC MATERIALITY IN GERMAN THOUGHT IN THE LATE

EIGHTEENTH AND EARLY NINETEENTH CENTURIES

MERYEM DENIZ

SHC DISSERTATION PRIZE FELLOW

DEPARTMENT OF GERMAN STUDIES, STANFORD UNIVERSITY

In her dissertation, Deniz explores how new scientific discussions around the conception of “ether” changed the way German Romantic writers conceived of humans’ interactions with nature and their environment and how literature and poetic forms are in turn transformed through such changes.

ANAESTHETICS: POPULAR MUSIC AND THE FLIGHT FROM FEELING

GABRIEL ELLIS

SHC DISSERTATION PRIZE FELLOW

DEPARTMENT OF MUSIC, STANFORD UNIVERSITY

Popular music is often understood as an art form devoted to exploring and evoking strong feelings. How can we make sense of music that does precisely the opposite? In Anaesthetics: Popular Music and the Flight from Feeling, Ellis explores how experiences of nonfeeling are depicted in contemporary genres from shoegaze and dreampop to trap music and cloud rap.

COVARIATION, CHANGE, AND STYLE

LEWIS ESPOSITO

SHC DISSERTATION PRIZE FELLOW

DEPARTMENT OF LINGUISTICS, STANFORD UNIVERSITY

Esposito’s dissertation explores interspeaker covariation in California, and it aims in part to bridge the gap between theories of sociolectal coherence and bricolage in accounting for patterns of variable clustering.

THE MEETING OF RIVERS: TRANSLATING DEVOTION IN EARLY MODERN INDIA

ELAINE FISHER

INTERNAL FACULTY FELLOW DEPARTMENT OF RELIGIOUS STUDIES, STANFORD UNIVERSITY

Fisher’s current book project reconstructs the prehistory of India’s newest religion, known as Vīraśaivism or Liṅgāyatism, from its own voices, drawing on a novel corpus of unstudied and unpublished archival sources in a plurality of languages. In the process, it brings religious studies and translation studies into dialogue, developing a new conceptual vocabulary for speaking about multilingualism across regions and humanistic disciplines.

SUBJECTED TO FEELING:

SLAVERY AND PERSONHOOD IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY BRAZIL AND CUBA

ISABELA FRAGA

MELLON POSTDOCTORAL FELLOW

DEPARTMENT OF IBERIAN AND LATIN AMERICAN CULTURES, STANFORD UNIVERSITY

Fraga’s research project traces a century-long genealogy of writings concerned with the affective lives of enslaved and free people of African descent in the two most lucrative coffee- and sugar-producing regions of the nineteenth-century Atlantic world. She shows not only how colonial and imperial authorities were deeply invested in imagining the inner lives of those they enslaved, but also how Africans and people of African descent responded to such an investment.

VISIONS OF THE PIANISTIC SELF:

DON SHIRLEY, CIVIL RIGHTS PERFORMANCE, AND THE GREEN BOOK STYLE

PHEAROSS GRAHAM

MELLON POSTDOCTORAL FELLOW

DEPARTMENT OF MUSIC, STANFORD UNIVERSITY

Graham’s project focuses on African American pianist Don Shirley and his musical activity during the civil rights movement. He profiles Shirley’s genreblending, “Green Book Style” pianism, which aimed to stimulate “serious,” idealized, and engaged listening among audiences to approach the category of classical music, navigating through the problematics of racialized entertainment in the U.S. and concert hall anti-Blackness.

ELLIPSIS AND THE IDENTITY RELATION

VERA GRIBANOVA

INTERNAL FACULTY FELLOW

DEPARTMENT OF LINGUISTICS, STANFORD UNIVERSITY

Gribanova’s research focuses on the interaction between the principles that dictate how words and sentences are structured with constituent ellipsis, in which a grammatically salient chunk of linguistic content is left unpronounced and is recoverable from the linguistic context. This approach yields mutually reinforcing insights that bear both on the fundamental nature of recoverability and redundancy in linguistic discourse, and on the unifying principles that underpin grammatical structure across the diverse range of human languages.

DEEP TECH:

LITERATURE, SOUTHERN THOUGHT, AND THE QUESTION CONCERNING TECHNOLOGY

ANA ILIEVSKA

MELLON POSTDOCTORAL FELLOW

DEPARTMENT OF FRENCH AND ITALIAN, STANFORD UNIVERSITY

Ilievska’s project brings to life neglected perspectives on industrialization and technology from within southern European regions (southern Italy, Portugal, the Balkans) dubbed “regressive” or “primitive” by hegemonic thinkers during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Her project challenges the prevailing scholarly consensus that southern European writers exhibited negative, reactionary attitudes towards modernization and technological innovations.

TECHNOLOGIES OF TERRITORIALITY:

INDIGENEITY, SURVEILLANCE, AND THE STATE

ELSPETH IRALU

MELLON POSTDOCTORAL FELLOW

CENTER FOR COMPARATIVE STUDIES IN RACE AND ETHNICITY, STANFORD UNIVERSITY

Iralu’s book project examines the global spatial surveillance of Indigenous peoples, nations, and territories in the twenty-first century through a multisite relational analysis of colonial surveillance and Indigenous resistance in the United States, India, and Palestine. Analyzing Indigenous graphic novels, video games, virtual reality, performance protests, and visual art, Iralu argues that Indigenous experiences of surveillance are not limited by the geographic and legal bounds of nation-states but are rather linked through global histories of militarization and resistance.

IMAGE CREDIT: THUNDERBIRD STRIKE

THE FRUITS OF THEIR LABOR: RELIGION,

RACE, AND RESISTANCE IN CALIFORNIA’S CENTRAL VALLEY, 1870-1960

JEM JEBBIA

SHC DISSERTATION PRIZE FELLOW

DEPARTMENT OF RELIGIOUS STUDIES, STANFORD UNIVERSITY

Jebbia’s dissertation project explores interreligious labor movements in contemporary California’s Central Valley. This research considers why and how, after arriving in this region, immigrants, Indigenous, and Black laborers contested white supremacy while living in racial, religious, and national hierarchies that maintained it.

ANXIETIES OF ABUNDANCE: BOOK AND BODY IN AMERICA’S GILDED AGE

JESSICA JORDAN

SHC DISSERTATION PRIZE FELLOW

DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH, STANFORD UNIVERSITY

In the late nineteenth century, Americans were drowning in books. Since what Americans read was believed to be a cipher for who Americans were, the task of choosing from among these varied offerings was a fraught one, made more complex by an ever-diversifying audience of readers. Jordan’s research explores how the “flood of books” created new possibilities for how people made meaning from them, and what these new possibilities meant for the burgeoning literary culture of the United States.

HEARING BEYOND VOCAL TWILIGHT: AGING

VOCALITY IN CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN OPERA PERFORMANCE

MICHAEL KINNEY

CAREER LAUNCH FELLOW DEPARTMENT OF MUSIC, STANFORD UNIVERSITY

Panic about the aging process has long impacted perceptions of what it means to grow old in the United States. Kinney’s dissertation explores how age ideology has shaped how we listen to and evaluate singing voices in contemporary operatic performance. When older voices are given the opportunity, he argues, the borders of operatic vocal expressivity, storytelling, and even the genre itself are reshaped to become a more powerful medium of the human condition.

FILTERED LIFE: GENDERED

DWELLING AMIDST ENVIRONMENTAL DISTRESS

MATTHEW KOHRMAN

INTERNAL FACULTY FELLOW

DEPARTMENT OF ANTHROPOLOGY, STANFORD UNIVERSITY

Around the world, fraught feelings about filters are on the rise, as people are enticed to sort the unwanted from the desired. Teleologies of purity are longstanding, but how people are being urged to use filters to cleanse their immediate environments has been intensifying in many locales.

RE-COGNITIONS: SPECTATING THEATER, SELF,

AND

WORLD

RADHIKA KOUL

CAREER LAUNCH FELLOW

DEPARTMENT OF COMPARATIVE LITERATURE AND SYMBOLIC SYSTEMS, STANFORD UNIVERSITY

Bringing together fields ranging from comparative literature and cognitive science to philosophy and natural language understanding, Radhika’s work exemplifies her belief in the comparative as a mode of thinking that subsumes the interdisciplinary. Her first book brings Kashmir’s rich tradition of Sanskrit poetics, aesthetics, and philosophy to bear on matters considered unique to European modernity.

HOMER AND THE WORLD OF SONG

RICHARD MARTIN

DONALD ANDREWS WHITTIER INTERNAL FELLOW

DEPARTMENT OF CLASSICS, STANFORD UNIVERSITY

Martin’s project moves the questions surrounding Homeric composition from the realm of philology into sociology. It takes as its guiding principle an observation by the Arabist and folklorist Dwight Reynolds: the “text” of an oral-traditional poem is really only the context for a performative event, whereas what strikes those of us from script-based cultures as “context” is really the text requiring interpretation.

CLIMATE CRUCIBLE:

AMERICAN CHOICES IN GERMANY, JAPAN, AND THE MAKING OF THE GREAT ACCELERATION, 1939-1953

PAUL NAUERT

CAREER LAUNCH FELLOW

DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY, STANFORD UNIVERSITY

Nauert’s current project presents a new interpretation of American responsibility in shaping trajectories of climate change and the planetary politics of climate (in)justice at a pivotal moment. Combining sources from U.S. military, diplomatic, and intelligence archives with economic and environmental data, Nauert bridges historiography of the U.S. in the twentieth-century world and environmental humanities scholarship while illuminating roots of twenty-first century challenges in the geopolitics of climate justice.

FRAGMENTS OF THE CONCRETE:

ECOLOGY AND TECHNICAL MEDIA IN GERMAN ROMANTICISM

BRYAN NORTON

MELLON POSTDOCTORAL FELLOW

DEPARTMENT OF GERMAN STUDIES, STANFORD UNIVERSITY

Norton’s project explores German romantic speculation regarding the possibility of a perpetuum mobile, uncovering an experimental attitude towards technical media in the making of natural knowledge. A synergistic mode of material reciprocity found in Novalis, Schelling, Goethe, and Hölderlin, he argues, stages a new political ecology of spatial relations rooted in a more ethical approach towards the natural world.

PUPPET POTENTIAL: VISUAL AND KINETIC MIMESIS IN LATE MEDIEVAL SCULPTURE,

1300-1525

MICHELLE K. OING

MELLON POSTDOCTORAL FELLOW DEPARTMENT OF ART AND ART HISTORY, STANFORD UNIVERSITY

Oing’s current book project examines the role of moveable sculpture in Northern Europe through the conceptual framework of puppetry. By tracing the “puppet potential” of sculpture, this monograph places conceptions of representation and mimesis at the center of the turbulent changes in artistic and religious expression in late medieval Northern Europe.

PARTIAL FORM: AN

EXPERIMENTAL HISTORY OF ASIAN AMERICAN FILM AND VIDEO

EVE OISHI

MARTA SUTTON WEEKS EXTERNAL FELLOW

DEPARTMENT OF CULTURAL STUDIES, CLAREMONT GRADUATE UNIVERSITY

Oishi’s book chronicles a particular history of Asian American film and video beginning with the first known film directed by an Asian American in 1914. Tarrying in the eras and spaces left out of comprehensive narratives of Asian American film and video, the project excavates and elevates the female and queer roots of Asian American cinema while simultaneously expanding and revising scholarly histories of U.S. avant-garde cinema.

FROM SLAVERY TO STARDOM:

FAMILY, FREEDOM, AND THE FIRST BLACK CELEBRITY, JOSEPH BOLOGNE, CHEVALIER DE SAINT-GEORGE

CHRISTY PICHICHERO

EXTERNAL FACULTY FELLOW

DEPARTMENT OF MODERN AND CLASSICAL LANGUAGES, GEORGE MASON UNIVERSITY

From Slavery to Stardom is the first in Pichichero’s two-part book series on African diasporic lives of the French empire between the seventeenth and early nineteenth centuries. Shedding new light on figures like the famed composer-violinist-swordsman Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-George and foregrounding understudied figures, such as Saint-George’s free Black mother Nanon and generations of African-descended families connected to the French armed forces, these projects restore the rich diversity of intersectional positionalities that coexisted in France during this era.

WHAT TO MAKE OF ME: THE

TRANSGENDER BODY AS A VALUABLE RESOURCE

ERIC PLEMONS

EXTERNAL FACULTY FELLOW

DEPARTMENT OF ANTHROPOLOGY, UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA

Research is underway that would transform the tissues removed during transgender people’s reconstructive genital surgeries from medical waste into valuable resources. This project investigates the conditions and interrogates the implications of the uses to which researchers hope these tissues might be put. The project asks: What are the implications of identifying a trans person’s value in the utility of their body parts to others?

AGNOTOLOGY IN THE ARCHIVES:

PROBING CIGARETTE INVISIBILITY AND CIGARETTE DECEPTION

ROBERT N. PROCTOR

VIOLET ANDREWS WHITTIER INTERNAL FELLOW

DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY, STANFORD UNIVERSITY

Proctor seeks to explore the production of ignorance inside large corporate entities—for internal consumption. Cigarette makers often used their own employees as a kind of proving ground for denialist campaigns, for example, with the goal also being to police morale and ensure corporate loyalty. Proctor explores how cigarette makers managed health and safety in the cigarette workplace, while perfecting the world’s deadliest consumer product.

IMPOSITIONS: THE AESTHETIC BLACKENING OF PUERTO RICO

AND ITS

DIASPORA

JUDITH RODRÍGUEZ

EXTERNAL FACULTY FELLOW

DEPARTMENT OF AFRICAN AMERICAN AND AFRICAN DIASPORA STUDIES, INDIANA UNIVERSITY-BLOOMINGTON

Rodríguez’s project re-reads and reconceptualizes Puerto Ricanness through the antagonisms, complications, and possibilities that emerge when centering an interrogation of the structural mechanisms of antiblackness within Puerto Rican aesthetic production from the 1930s to the present.

ARCHIVE OF THE FLESH: FUGITIVITY,

KINSHIP, AND BLACK FEMINIST THEORY AND ART IN THE AMERICAS

MARGARITA LILA ROSA

MELLON POSTDOCTORAL FELLOW

DEPARTMENT OF COMPARATIVE LITERATURE, STANFORD UNIVERSITY

This book project weaves the Black Atlantic gendered archives of slavery and rebellion with contemporary visual art to explore how Black femme traces throughout the Spanish Caribbean and Brazil indicate Black Atlantic femme survival. Using historical archives from Cuba, Dominican Republic, and Brazil, it instrumentalizes contemporary art from across the Black Atlantic as a metaphorical lens through which to read the scenes within the historical archive.

GLOBAL REVIEW OF SEX, GENDER, AND INTERSECTIONAL ANALYSIS IN RESEARCH POLICIES OF MAJOR PUBLIC FUNDING AGENCIES

LONDA SCHIEBINGER

ELLEN ANDREWS WRIGHT INTERNAL FELLOW

DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY, STANFORD UNIVERSITY

For decades, Dr. Schiebinger’s work has explored how humanistic methods and approaches can transform how we do science. Now Schiebinger seeks to use these approaches to help achieve greater diversity, equity, and inclusion in current scientific research and outcomes. Her next project is a collaboration with colleagues from the Wellcome Trust, London, and a 14-person international advisory board that includes scholars from the Netherlands, South Africa, Brazil, and India.

CHANGING GENDER

SUSAN STRYKER

MARTA SUTTON WEEKS EXTERNAL FELLOW

DEPARTMENT OF GENDER AND WOMEN’S STUDIES, UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA

Stryker’s project constructs a unified historical narrative of gender-variance in North America from the 17th century to the present. It address the meta-historical problem of the historicity of the categories through which we think about embodiment and identity (such as the term “gender” itself), situates contemporary transgender phenomena in the long historical arc of biocentrism, and argues that trans issues are a key site of social struggle in the late Anthropocene.

COLLECTING INDEPENDENCE:

THE SCIENCE AND POLITICS OF NATURAL HISTORY MUSEUMS IN NEW SPAIN, 1770-1820

ANNA TOLEDANO

JEFF AND SARA SMALL CAREER LAUNCH FELLOW DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY, STANFORD UNIVERSITY

Toledano interrogates why certain plants, animals, and minerals made the journey to Spain from Spanish America—and why most did not—to develop a new, material interpretation of natural history collecting in the late Spanish Empire. Her use of diverse textual and object sources weaves together a holistic story of the history of science in the Viceroyalty of New Spain.

CRISIS OF REPRESENTATION: MEDIA

AND THE POLITICS OF DIFFERENCE IN 1980s AMERICA

FRED TURNER

DONALD ANDREWS WHITTIER INTERNAL FELLOW

DEPARTMENT OF COMMUNICATION, STANFORD UNIVERSITY

Between the end of the Vietnam War in 1975 and the rise of the World Wide Web in the early 1990s, Americans witnessed a now-forgotten explosion in new media technologies and a simultaneous turn toward identity-centered politics on both the left and the right. Turner’s book project explores how these events shaped one another and argues that when they did, they helped set the stage for the polarized, hyperindividuated world we inhabit today.

NO PROMISED LAND: ENVIRONMENTAL INEQUALITY IN THE MAKING OF GLOBALIZED ATLANTA, 1949-1996

VANNESSA VELEZ

SHC DISSERTATION PRIZE FELLOW

DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY, STANFORD UNIVERSITY

Velez’s dissertation traces the environmental and political history of metro-Atlanta’s rapid economic development from the beginning of national urban renewal in 1949 to 1996 when the city cemented its status as a global hub after hosting the Centennial Olympics.

GUERRILLA MEDICINE AND DISABILITY IN COLD WAR CENTRAL AMERICA

HEATHER VRANA

EXTERNAL FACULTY FELLOW DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY, UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA

Guerrilla Medicine and Disability in Cold War

Central America reexamines the Cold War by centering disability in the civil wars of Guatemala, Nicaragua, and El Salvador. To date, these conflicts have been understood mainly in terms of social class, foreign intervention, and death tolls. But disability was a critical outcome of the region’s civil wars and a major motive for combatants to take up arms. This project focuses on the lived experiences of disabled Salvadorans, Guatemalans, and Nicaraguans before, during, and after the wars.

EXPERIENCING THE NOVEL: THE GENRE OF

TENDER

CONSCIENCE

ESTHER YU

INTERNAL FACULTY FELLOW

DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH, STANFORD UNIVERSITY

Experiencing the Novel traces the origins of the early British novel’s hyperconscious narrator to the English Revolution and its invention of the “tender conscience.”

First conceived as a sensitivity to sin, this spiritual ideal became a shared political principle in the 1640s. As it unfolds a vision of the long seventeenth century, the book reveals an enduring culture of dissent whose recalibrations of affective norms shape popular politics, philosophy—and the culture of sensibility itself—from the margins.

DUTIES TO THE COLLECTIVE: JURISTS,

ISLAMIC LAW AND THE SEARCH FOR COHESION, 945 TO 1258 CE

ADNAN A. ZULFIQAR

EXTERNAL FACULTY FELLOW

LAW SCHOOL, RUTGERS UNIVERSITY

Duties to the Collective is the first book written on the overlooked story of collective duties in Islamic law. It explores the dynamic way in which jurists, between the tenth and thirteenth centuries CE, responded to desperate circumstances by expanding legal responsibility to maintain civilizational unity. The book uncovers how they utilized Islamic law to build a theoretical framework for greater cohesion—social and political.

THE PARADOXES OF AESTHETIC INDIVIDUALISM:

FASHIONING SELVES AND COMMUNITIES IN FIN-DE-SIÈCLE FRANCE AND SPANISH AMERICA

VICTORIA ZURITA

SHC DISSERTATION PRIZE FELLOW

DEPARTMENT OF COMPARATIVE LITERATURE, STANFORD UNIVERSITY

Zurita’s dissertation studies a constellation of ethical and aesthetic ideals common to three intersecting literary movements which flourished during the last three decades of the French and Spanish American nineteenth century: Symbolism, Decadence, and Modernismo. She has termed this constellation “aesthetic individualism”— the valorization of an individual’s uniqueness, self-determination, and integrity, and the cultivation of these qualities through art. Her dissertation argues that positive and ambivalent representations of highly aestheticized individuals allowed prominent writers to problematize an array of social, political, and geopolitical issues, and to express their desire and anxieties about communal identities at multiple scales.