2016 Fall - Annual Newsletter

2 0 1 6 R o b e r t P e n n W a rr e n Center for the Humanities

va n d e r b i lt U n i v e r s i t y

Executive Director Report

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he Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities at Vanderbilt University, housed in the beautifully restored Vaughn Home, is a hub of intellectual activity on our campus. As you read through our new annual publication, you will see the remarkable number of programs and projects we hosted during the past year and learn about some of the events that we are looking forward to in 2016/17. The energy that radiates from the Warren Center is a reflection of the strength and centrality of the humanities at Vanderbilt; we are grateful to our many outstanding colleagues who are responsible for the great success of the Warren Center.

The Warren Center’s annual programming includes a theme-based faculty fellows program; a dissertation completion fellows program for advanced graduate students; the Harry C. Howard Jr. Lecture; several conferences and public programs; dozens of visiting speakers; and 16 regularly-meeting seminars and reading groups representing an extraordinary range of topics involving faculty and graduate students. The center has organized many programs related to the digital humanities over the years, and we now look forward with great excitement to working closely with the College of Arts and Science’s new Center for Digital Humanities. The Warren Center is also deeply committed to public humanities; our programming includes a partnership with Humanities Tennessee to create a theme-based tract at the annual Southern Festival of Books held in downtown Nashville. The Warren Center is also a leader in Vanderbilt’s international partnership with Queen’s University Belfast.

The 2015/16 year was another vibrant year of programming at the Warren Center. Our faculty fellows, supported by a prestigious grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation’s John E. Sawyer Seminar Program, explored the theme “When the Fringe Dwarfs the Center: Vernacular Islam beyond the Arab World.” Co-directed by Samira Sheikh RO B E R T P ENN WAR R EN CE NTE R FOR THE HUMANITIE S

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Executive Director Report

(Associate Professor of History), Tony K. Stewart (Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Chair in Humanities and Professor of Religious Studies), and David Wasserstein (Eugene Greener Jr. Chair in Jewish Studies and Professor of History), the seminar hosted eight visiting speakers over the course of the year, many of whom not only met with the seminar but also presented well-attended public lectures. Plans are currently underway for a concluding symposium.

All of our graduate student fellows completed and successfully defended their dissertations—kudos to these outstanding young scholars! Our sixteen seminar groups sponsored 34 visiting speakers who greatly enriched the work of the Warren Center. It was a significant honor to have the chairman of the National Endowment of the Humanities, William Adams, present our Harry C. Howard Jr. Lecture during the year that marked the 50th anniversary of the founding of the national agency. Furthermore, we hosted two large public programs, “Recovering Lost Voices: Robert Penn Warren and the U.S. Civil Rights Movement” on February 10 and “At the Forefront of Freedom: The Women of Selma” on March 24.

Special thanks are due to the members of the 2015/16 Warren Center Executive Committee. This group provides leadership for the Warren Center and engages in the challenging work of assessing applications for our various competitive fellow-

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ships. The 2015/16 Executive Committee included Laura Carpenter (Associate Professor of Sociology), Edward H. Friedman (Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of Spanish; Professor of Comparative Literature and European Studies; Director, Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities), James Hudnut-Beumler (Anne Potter Wilson Distinguished Professor of American Religious History and Professor of History), Jane Landers (Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of History), Thomas Schwartz (Professor of History), Mark Schoenfield (Professor of English), Tracy Sharpley-Whiting (Distinguished Professor of African American and Diaspora Studies and French), and Jeffrey Tlumak (Associate Professor of Philosophy). Our extraordinary staff members, Terry Tripp (Activities Coordinator) and Joy Ramirez (Seminar Coordinator), are central to the life of the Warren Center and deserve tremendous credit for the Warren Center’s many successes.

We are proud of the work the Warren Center accomplished with our colleagues across the campus in the 2015/16 academic year, and look forward to another robust year of intellectual activity ahead.

Mona Frederick Executive Director Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities

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2015/16 Andrew W. Mellon Foundation John E. Sawyer Seminar When the Fringe Dwarfs the Center: Vernacular Islam beyond the Arab World

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From left to right: (front row) Dianna Bell (religious studies); Julia Phillips Cohen (Jewish studies); William Murrell (history); Ashish Koul (history); Tony K. Stewart (religious studies); Samira Sheikh (history), David Wasserstein (Jewish studies and history); (back row) Daniel A. Birchok (anthropology); Moses Ochonu (history); Anand Taneja (religious studies); Riyaz Latif (history of art); and Richard McGregor (religious studies).

Joe Howell

his year’s faculty fellows, under the leadership of Professors Samira Sheikh, Tony K. Stewart, and David Wasserstein, met weekly throughout the year to trace the historical processes that have led to the proliferation of local or vernacular Islams. The myriad forms of vernacular Islam often develop in uneasy relationship to the projected authority of the Arab center, and to those who propose that Islam is singular, exceptional, and inherently transnational. How and why these tensions develop has been the focus of this interdisciplinary group of accomplished scholars.

Plans are underway for a symposium on this topic to be held in 2017.

RO B E RT PENN WARREN CE NT E R FOR THE HU MANITIE S

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When the Fringe Dwarfs the Center: Vernacular Islam beyond the Arab World

• Sufi Religion and Historical Imagination in Mughal Chishti Texts

THE ROBERT PENN WARREN CENTER 2015/2016 JOHN E. SAWYER SEMINAR

Iran in Syria: Ideology or Pragmatism?

IRAN IN SYRIA

September 23, 2015

Ideology or Pragmatism?

Muzaffar Alam, George V. Bobrinskoy Professor in South Asian Languages and Civilizations, University of Chicago

• Writing the Past, Inscribing the Future October 7, 2015

JUAN COLE

THE ROBERT PENN WARREN CENTER 2015/2016 ANDREW W. MELLON JOHN E. SAWYER SEMINAR

Nancy K. Florida, Professor of Javanese and Islamic Studies, University of Michigan

Richard P. Mitchell Collegiate Professor of History, University of Michigan

• Modern Islamic Thought in a Radical Age

Wednesday, 27 January 4:10 pm, Kissam Center C216

November 4, 2015

Sponsored by the Andrew W. Mellon John E. Sawyer Seminar (2015-16) and the Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities Coordinators: Tony K Stewart, Samira Sheikh, and David J Wasserstein

Living Paradox in Riverine Bangladesh Whiteheadian Perspectives on Ganga Devi and Khwaja Khijir

NAVEEDA KHAN Johns Hopkins University Wednesday, 3 February 4:10 pm, Buttrick Hall 123 Sponsored by the Andrew W. Mellon John E. Sawyer Seminar (2015-16) and the Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities

Coordinators: Tony K Stewart Samira Sheikh David J Wasserstein

Image: Tony K. Stewart, “Fishing nets on the Meghna River,” Bangladesh, July 2006

Muhammad Qasim Zaman, Robert H. Niehaus ’77 Professor of Near Eastern Studies and Religion, Department of Near Eastern Studies, Princeton University

• The Aga Khan Case: Religion and Identity in Colonial India November 11, 2015

Teena Purohit, Associate Professor of Religion, Boston University

• Iran in Syria: Ideology or Pragmatism?

January 27, 2016

Juan Cole, Richard P. Mitchell Collegiate Professor of History, University of Michigan

• Living Paradox in Riverine Bangladesh: Whiteheadian Perspectives on Ganga Devi and Khwaja Khijir

February 3, 2016

Naveeda Khan, Associate Professor of Anthropology, Johns Hopkins University

• Boko Haram and Radical Islamism in the West African Sahel: A Biography T h e Ro b e r t P e n n Wa r r e n C e n t e r 2 0 1 5 /2 0 1 6

A n d r e w W. M e l l o n J o h n E . S a w y e r S e m i n a r

BRIAN LARKIN

March 2, 2016

Loudspeakers, Urban Space, and Religious Form in Nigeria

Departments of Anthropology and Africana Studies, Barnard College

Wednesday, 16 March 2016

at the Bishop Joseph Johnson Black Cultural Center Auditorium

Coordinators: Tony K. Stewart, Samira Sheikh, David J. Wasserstein Sponsored by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation’s John E. Sawyer Seminar (2015-16) and the Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities

Moses Ochonu, Professor of History, Vanderbilt University

• Loudspeakers, Urban Space, and Religious Form in Nigeria March 16, 2016

Brian Larkin, Associate Professor of Anthropology, Barnard College

• Isis: Sincerity & Slaughter April 13, 2016

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Faisal Devji, University Reader in Modern South Asian History, University of Oxford

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2015/16 Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities Seminars

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he Warren Center hosted 16 seminars, four of them led by graduate students and the remainder led by faculty. The seminars facilitated interdisciplinary exchange on a wide array of topics. Below is a list of the seminars, coordinators, and visiting speakers invited by the groups.

The 18th-/19th-Century Colloquium

The Contemporary in Theory Seminar

Seminar coordinators: Rachel Teukolsky (English) and Scott Juengel (English)

Seminar coordinators: Ben Tran (Asian studies) and Haerin Shin (English)

• Carolyn Williams, Professor of English, Rutgers University • Andrew Miller, Professor of English, Johns Hopkins University • Sandra Macpherson, Associate Professor of English, Ohio State University

• Lydia Liu, Professor of Chinese and Comparative Literature, Columbia University

The Brazilian Studies Reading Group

Seminar coordinators: Fernanda Bretones Lane (history), Laura Sellers (political science), and Steve Wenz (Spanish and Portuguese) • Cynthia Pace, Ph.D. Candidate in Anthropology, University of South Florida • Paula Pastore, Postdoctoral Fellow in Spanish, Sao Paulo State University (UNESP), Brazil • Courtney Campbell, Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Political Science/History, Tougaloo College • Rafael Marquese, Professor of History, Universidade de Sao Paulo

Derrida’s The Beast and the Sovereign Volumes I & II

Seminar coordinators: Shelby Johnson (English), Paulo Martinez (philosophy), and Stephanie Straub (English) Digital Humanities Seminar

Seminar coordinators: Mona Frederick (Warren Center) and Todd Hughes (Center for Second Language Studies) • Brian Croxall, Digital Humanities Librarian, Center for Digital Scholarship, Brown University • Alyssa Jones Nelson, Acquisitions Editor, De Gruyter Publishers • Franco Moretti, Danily C. and Laura Louise Bell Professor in the Humanities, Stanford University

The Circum-Atlantic Studies Seminar

Environmental Humanities Seminar

Seminar coordinators: Celso Castilho (history) and Jane Landers (history)

Seminar coordinators: Teresa Goddu (English)

• Selena Sanderfer, Assistant Professor of History, Western Kentucky University • Kristin Mann, Professor of History, Emory University • Jason A. Gillmer, Professor of Law, Gonzaga University School of Law • Emma Christopher, Filmmaker and Research Fellow in History, University of Technology, Sydney RO B E R T P ENN WAR R EN CE NTE R FOR THE HUMANITIE S

• Nathaniel Rich, Author • Jason W. Moore, Professor of Sociology, Binghamton University • Joyce Chaplin, Professor of History, Harvard University

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A program of the Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities presents

JASON A. GILLMER Associate Dean for Faculty Research and Development; John J. Hemmingson Chair in Civil Liberties and Professor of Law; Gonzaga University School of Law

SLAVERY AND FREEDOM IN TEXAS

WHO OWNS GREAT IDEAS? Th e Un to l d S to r y o f Hu m a n R i g ht s

LY D I A L I U

THURSDAY, JANUARY 21, 2016

Seminar Coordinators:

Jane Landers and Celso Castilho design: The Fortlander Agency

With support from the Vanderbilt University Law School and Department of History The seminar will be based on a pre-circulated paper.

In its fourteenth year, CASS meets monthly to discuss works-in-progress by seminar participants and invited guests. The scholarship is interdisciplinary and centers on themes related to Atlantic Slavery, colonialism, and/or postcolonialism. Broadly conceived, the works link Africa, Europe, the Americas, and the Caribbean.

Friday, January 29, 2016

A program of the Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities presents

KRISTIN MANN Department of History, Emory University

W. T. Tam P rofessor in the Humanities and P rofessor of Ch i n ese and Comparative Literature, Col umbia Univer sity ROBERT PENN WARREN CENTER, 4:10 PM

CIRCUM-ATLANTIC STUDIES SEMINAR

3–5 pm, Buttrick 123

H o s te d by T h e C o n te m p o ra r y i n T h e o r y G ro up S p o n s o re d by th e R o b e r t Pe n n War re n C e n te r fo r t h e H u m an i ti e s

Biographical Connections linking Benin and Brazil Thursday, October 15, 2015 12 pm

Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities

With support from the Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanties, Center for Latin American Studies, and Department of History. The seminar will be based on a precirculated paper. Lunch will be provided.

Seminar Coordinators:

Jane Landers and Celso Castilho

Im age: Bandu ng Conference, 195 5

In its fourteenth year, CASS meets monthly to discuss works-in-progress by seminar participants and invited guests. The scholarship is interdisciplinary and centers on themes related to Atlantic Slavery, colonialism, and/or postcolonialism. Broadly conceived, the works link Africa, Europe, the Americas, and the Caribbean. image: Professor Raul Barreto, “Salvador Antiga em Imagens,” Ganhadores de Bahia, segunda metade do séc. XIX?

The Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities Digital Humanities Seminar presents

FRANCO MORETTI Danily C. and Laura Louise Bell Professor in the Humanities, founder of the Center for the Study of the Novel and the Literary Lab, Stanford University

ABSTRACTION, PATTERNS, FORM, AND NOISE. A ZIG-ZAG

Thursday, April 14, 2016 4:10 pm in Wilson 126

Poster image adapted from the cover of Odds Against Tomorrow.

Co-sponsored by the Mellon Partners for Humanities Education and the Center for Second Language Studies p ost er d es i gn by T he Fort land er Agency

Image: “An examp le of G li t ch A r t, ” Rosa M e n k m a n ( 20 1 1 ) , l i c e n se d un de r th e C r e ati v e Co m m o n s Attr i b uti o n 2.0 G e n e r i c l i c e n se

The 2016 Black Atlantic History Lecture

EMMA CHRISTOPHER

The Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities Digital Humanities Seminar presents

FA L L 2 0 1 5

Department of History, University of Sydney

Monday, February 8 4:00–6:00 pm at the Bishop Joseph Johnson Black Cultural Center Auditorium with a screening of her critically acclaimed documentary film They Are We

Film screening and reception free and open to the public

Sponsored by the Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities’ Circum-Atlantic Studies Seminar, the Center for Latin America Studies, the Bishop Joseph Johnson Black Cultural Center, and the Department of History http://theyarewe.com/ photo courtesy of Icarus Films poster design by The Fortlander Agency

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October 5 Brian Croxall Digital Humanities Librarian, Center for Digital Scholarship, Brown University Library

October 15–17 Digital Humanities Workshop All events held in the Jean and Alexander Heard Library Community Room

“Literary History and Literary Data: On Networking the Belfast Group” 12:00 noon @ the Warren Center

November 6–7 ThatCamp Vanderbilt

October 19–25 Open Access Week

Curb Center, Vanderbilt University

Jean and Alexander Heard Library library.vanderbilt.edu/scholarly November 18 GIS DAY Jean and Alexander Heard Library library.vanderbilt.edu/scholarly

December 8 Gabriela Oré Menéndez Department of Anthropology, Vanderbilt University 12:00 noon @ the Warren Center

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Film Theory and Visual Culture Seminar

Literature, Medicine, and Science Seminar

Seminar coordinators: Jennifer Fay (English, cinema & media arts), Lutz Koepnick (German, cinema & media arts), and James McFarland (German, cinema & media arts)

Seminar coordinators: Lauren Mitchell (English) and Wietske Smeele (English)

• Akira Lippit, Professor of Cinematic Arts, University of Southern California • Karla Oeler, Professor of Film and Media Studies, Emory University • Nick Sousanis, Assistant Professor of English, University of Calgary • J.D. Connor, Assistant Professor of History of Art, Yale University

Seminar coordinators: Mireille Lee (history of art and classical studies) and Richard McGregor (religion)

Gender and Sexualities Seminar

Seminar coordinator: Katherine Crawford (history) and Melanie Adley (women’s and gender studies) • Nevline Nnaji, Filmmaker Group for Pre-Modern Cultural Studies

Seminar coordinators: Bill Caferro (history), Samira Sheikh (history), and Jesse Hock (English) • Francesca Trivellato, Frederick W. Hilles Professor of History, Yale University • Ellen MacKay, Associate Professor of English, Indiana University • Richard Strier, Professor of English (Emeritus), University of Chicago Literature and Law Seminar

Seminar coordinators: Robert Barsky (French and Italian) and Daniel Gervais (law) • Marie-Pierre Bouchard, Postdoctoral Fellow, French, University of Toronto • François Crépeau, Professor of Law, McGill University

RO B E R T P ENN WAR R EN CE NTE R FOR THE HUMANITIE S

Material Cultures Seminar

• Adam Bursi, Jimmy and Dee Haslam Postdoctoral Fellow, University of Tennessee • Erica Kelly, Exhibition Developer, San Diego Natural History Museum Mexican Studies Seminar

Seminar coordinator: Edward Wright-Rios (history) • Eric Van Young, Professor of History, University of California, San Diego • Isaac Campos-Costero, Associate Professor of History, University of Cincinnati • Christopher Conway, Associate Professor of Spanish, University of Texas-Arlington Music and Justice Seminar

Seminar coordinators: Rachel Skaggs (sociology) and Anthony C. Siracusa (history) • Charles Hughes, Assistant Professor of History, Rhodes College Science Studies Seminar

Seminar coordinators: Ole Molvig (history) and Alistair Sponsel (history) • Shellen Wu, Assistant Professor of History, University of Tennessee • Thomas Andrews, Associate Professor of History, University of Colorado at Boulder

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Warren Center Special Events 2015/16

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he Warren Center partnered with Humanities Tennessee to present a panel at the 27th annual Southern Festival of Books on “Understanding Islam” in conjunction with the 2015/16 Faculty Fellows topic “When the Fringe Dwarfs the Center: Vernacular Islam beyond the Arab World.”

William Adams, chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, presented the 2015/16 Harry C. Howard Jr. Lecture, “The Common Good and NEH at 50,” on October 27, 2015, at the Jean

and Alexander Heard Library. Adams, president of Colby College in Waterville, Maine, from 2000 until his retirement on June 30, 2014, is a committed advocate for liberal arts education and brings to the NEH a long record of leadership in higher education and the humanities. A reprint of his speech is available in the newsletter on page 23, or view the video: vanderbilt.edu/rpw_center/audio_video.php This year’s THATCamp (The Humanities and Technology Camp) featured keynote speaker Elonka Dunin, former COO and studio director of Black Gate Games. She discussed “Wikipedia

Photo credit: Virginia Blaisdell

Photo credit: Diana Davies

At the Forefront of Freedom: The Women of Selma Thursday, March 24, 2016 3:30 p.m. at the Bishop Joseph Johnson Black Cultural Center

“A feminist film MASTERPIECE. Offers an INSPIRING account of the women’s liberation movement of the late 1960s.” – Kitty Lindsay, Ms. Magazine

Film screening and discussion with the director

MARY DORE

FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC

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Monday, October 19 4 p.m. • Buttrick 101

This panel will discuss the central role women played in the U.S. Civil Rights Movement. Panelists include: civil rights activists Jennifer Lawson, Joann Mants and Judy Richardson as well as historians Emilye Crosby (SUNY-Geneseo) and Hasan Kwame Jeffries (Ohio State University).

The film Selma will be shown March 23 at 7:30 p.m. in Sarratt Cinema.

Co-sponsored by the Bishop Joseph Johnson Black Cultural Center, the Ingram Commons, and the Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities with funding from a University Central Research Scholar Grant Award

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Tips and Tricks for Communicating with the Hive Mind.” THATCamp is an “unconference” designed to promote interest in and to develop skills related to digital humanities. This event, held November 6–7, 2015, was hosted by the Warren Center; the Center for Second Language Studies; the Center for Teaching; the Vanderbilt Institute for Digital Learning; the Curb Center for Art, Enterprise, and Public Policy; and the Jean and Alexander Heard Library.

The 2014/15 Warren Center Faculty Fellows group presented three programs during the fall of 2015. “Public Scholarship at Vanderbilt,” on September 15, included Marshall Eakin (history), Joel Harrington (history), Ifeoma Nwankwo (English), Daniel Sharfstein (law), Paul Stob (communication studies), and Holly Tucker (French and Italian, biomedical ethics and society). “Publishing Scholarly Books for a General Audience,” on October 20, featured panelists Harrington, Wendy Strothman (literary agent, The Strothman Agency), and Virginia Smith Younce (senior editor, Penguin Press). It was moderated by Sharfstein. “Public Scholarship, Community Engagement, and Co-creating Knowledge,” on November 10, was moderated by Stob with panelists John Ayers (earth and environmental sciences), Joe Bandy (Center for Teaching), Marshall Eakin (history), Leah Lowe (theater), and Douglas Perkins (human and organizational development).

She’s Beautiful When She’s Angry premiered in Nashville on October 19, 2015. Sponsored by the Margaret Cuninggim Women’s Center, the Women’s and Gender Studies Program, and the Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities, the film is a documentary about the women’s liberation move-

From top: Warren Center Executive Director Mona Frederick, NEH Chair William Adams, and Chancellor Nicholas Zeppos at the 2015 Harry C. Howard Jr. Lecture; Dean of the College of Arts and Science Lauren Benton, Adams, and Provost and Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs Susan R. Wente; “Recovering Lost Voices” panelists Ruth Turner Perot and Rev. Kelly Miller Smith, Jr.; Robert Moses and Rev. Kelly Miller Smith, Jr. (Top two photos by Anne Rayner, bottom two photos by Joe Howell.)

RO B E RT R T PENN P ENN WARREN WAR R EN CE NTE NT E R FOR THE HUMANITIE HU MANITIE S

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ment of the late 1960s. Director Mary Dore led a discussion after the film.

“Recovering Lost Voices: Robert Penn Warren and the U.S. Civil Rights Movement” featured a panel discussion on February 10, 2016, in honor of Vanderbilt alumnus Robert Penn Warren’s 1965 publication Who Speaks for the Negro? Speakers included two civil rights activists who were interviewed by Warren for the volume, Ruth Turner Perot and Robert Moses, as well as Reverend Kelly Miller Smith, Jr., whose father was interviewed by Warren. The event was co-sponsored by the Bishop Joseph Johnson Black Cultural Center, the Office of Inclusion Initiatives and Cultural Competence, the Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities, and Warren College residence hall.

As part of the program “At the Forefront of Freedom: The Women of Selma,” the film Selma was shown on March 23, 2016. The following day, a panel discussed the central role women played in the U.S. civil rights movement. Panelists included civil rights activists Jennifer Lawson, Joann Mants, and Judy Richardson, as well as historians Emilye Crosby (SUNY-Geneseo) and Hasan Kwame Jeffries (Ohio State University). It was co-sponsored by the Bishop Joseph Johnson Black Cultural Center, The Martha Rivers Ingram Commons, and the Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities.

From top: “At the Forefront of Freedom: The Women of Selma” panelists Hasan Kwame Jeffries, Joann Mants, Jennifer Lawson, Emilye Crosby, and Judy Richardson; panelists are introduced

by Mona Frederick; Joann Mants; Judy Richardson. (Photos by Steve Green)

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2016 | LETTERS

Graduate Student Fellows Present 2016 Public Lectures

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THE ROBERT PENN WARREN

ow in its tenth year, the CENTER FOR Warren Center’s annual presents the THE HUMANITIES 2015–2016 Warren Center Graduate Student Fellows Program currently sponsors LECTURE SERIES seven outstanding Vanderbilt graduate students in the humanities and qualitative social sciences in a year-long fellowship program. These awards are designed to support innovation and excellence in graduate student research and allow the students a service-free year of support to enable fulltime work on the dissertation. It is expected that students who receive this award will complete the dissertation during the fellowship term. Additionally, one graduate student from Queen’s University Belfast is For more information, call 343-6060 or visit vanderbilt.edu/rpw_center. selected to participate in the program.

Each spring, the Graduate Student Fellows present a public lecture related to their work. This serves as a capstone to their year, and it’s also a chance to share their research, not just with their peers, but with other students, faculty, staff, and the public.

Graduate Student Fellows “National Identity in Contemporary Argentine Culture”

Steven Wenz,

Joe and Mary Harper Fellow, Department of Spanish and Portuguese

Monday, March 21, 2016

“A Cognitive Approach to Audio Description”

Michelle O’Loughlin,

School of Modern Languages, Queen’s University Belfast

Monday, March 28, 2016

“The American Counter-Enlightenment”

Alexander Jacobs,

George J. Graham Jr. Fellow, Department of History

Friday, April 1, 2016

“Human Rites: Deciphering Legal and Literary Personhood, 1830–1860”

Faith Barter, American Studies Fellow, Department of English

Tuesday, April 5, 2016

“‘Hearing Other Frequencies’: Erna Brodber’s Louisiana, the Colonial Ear, and Low Fidelity Aesthetics”

Petal Samuel, Elizabeth E. Fleming Fellow, Department of English Monday, April 11, 2016

“Problem and Promise: Scientific Experts and the ‘Mixed-Blood’ in the Modern U.S., 1870–1970”

Michell Chresfield,

Department of History

Monday, April 18, 2016

“Varieties of Activism: Pathways of Participation among LGBT Religious Activists”

Jonathan Coley,

Department of Sociology

Tuesday, April 26, 2016

“Transatlantic Narratives on Overcoming Epistemic Injustice: On the Roles of Imagination and Remembrance in Forming Epistemic Agency”

Sandra Skene,

Department of Philosophy

Thursday, April 28

Each lecture will take place at the

Warren Center at 4:10 p.m. and will be followed by a reception.

Vanderbilt University is committed to principles of equal opportunity and affirmative action. ©2016 Vanderbilt University. All rights reserved. “Vanderbilt” and the Vanderbilt logo are registered trademarks and service marks of Vanderbilt University. Produced by Vanderbilt University Creative Services and Vanderbilt Printing Services. Printed on paper with10% post-

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Lectures presented this year:

• “National Identity in Contemporary Argentine Culture” by Steven Wenz, Joe and Mary Harper Fellow, Department of Spanish and Portuguese

• “Problem and Promise: Scientific Experts and the ‘Mixed-Blood’ in the Modern U.S., 1870-1970”

by Michell Chresfield, Department of History

• “A Cognitive Approach to Audio Description”

by Michelle O’Loughlin, School of Modern Languages, Queen’s University Belfast

• “Varieties of Activism: Pathways of Participation among LGBT Religious Activists” by Jonathan Coley, Department of Sociology

• “The American Counter-Enlightenment” by Alexander Jacobs, George J. Graham Jr. Fellow, Department of History

• “Transatlantic Narratives on Overcoming Epistemic Injustice: On the Roles of Imagination and Remembrance in Forming Epistemic Agency” by Sandra Skene, Department of Philosophy

• “Human Rites: Deciphering Legal and Literary Personhood, 1830-1860” by Faith Barter, American Studies Fellow, Department of English • “‘Hearing Other Frequencies’: Erna Brodber’s Louisiana, the Colonial Ear, and Low Fidelity Aesthetics” by Petal Samuel, Elizabeth E. Fleming Fellow, Department of English RO B E R T P ENN WAR R EN CE NTE R FOR THE HUMANITIE S

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Centers of Gravity

Edward H. Friedman

“I have always sought to stir minds, and, at most, to suggest rather than to instruct. If I sell bread, I am really selling yeast.”

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his is a reflection piece, with no great pretensions, but written to share what I hope are useful ideas. I will stick to what I know, which is not a lot but which has taken me a long while to learn. As I write this brief essay, I am about to begin my seventeenth year at Vanderbilt University, and I have completed my fourth decade in the profession. I believe that, while both the profession and I have changed considerably over that time, our “deep structures,” as it were, have remained much the same. I would like to think that adaptability and adherence to core principles have crafted a sound balance, and that the movement would be perceived as a progression. I will mention from the start that the high point of my career— which always has been rewarding and whose common denominator is dedicated, challenging, bright, and genuinely gracious students—has been the opportunity to serve as a member of the Vanderbilt faculty. My teaching duties center on Spanish litera-

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—Miguel de Unamuno, “My Religion” (1907)

ture, specifically early modern texts, and on comparative literature, and I currently hold the position of director of the Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities. Three interrelated elements inspired me to offer these comments: study abroad, teaching (which, naturally, presupposes learning), and the continuing presence of the past in everyone’s life.

As I reflect on events, I realize that my curriculum vitae may be short on adventures, because I have spent a good amount of my time and energy on academic pursuits and because I am constantly caught in the act of reading, writing, grading papers, editing, and mentoring, whereas a number of my contemporaries have thrust themselves into the world and do not list their accomplishments as books, essays, reviews, conference papers, and committee assignments. I am, arguably, an Alonso Quijano who becomes obsessed with books but who remains in the library and contemplates literature in multiple contexts. That is, I do not sally forth, like Quijano’s alter ego Don Quixote, to defend damsels

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in distress and to confront all manner of enemies.

Nonetheless, meetings of the mind do not lack an excitement of their own.

I grew up and attended public schools in Richmond, Virginia. The studious sort, I was excited about going to college. I remember that one of the application forms requested an essay on what candidates for admission considered to be the key influences on their lives. I wrote that I had been affected by being Jewish, living in the segregated South, and having an identical twin brother. My

RO B E R T P ENN WAR R EN CE NTE R FOR THE HUMANITIE S

father was a World War II veteran who had been raised in the Bronx, New York, and my mother was from Richmond, and they were firm in teaching my brother and me the importance of education and of tolerance and respect for difference. One of my earliest memories is being instructed not to use the “N-word� under any circumstances and to see everyone as equal in worth and worthy of consideration. Looking back, I feel fortunate to have received Sunday school-type lessons at home and in Sunday school. I know that this push to bear in mind the

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circumstances and feelings of others has affected how I try to handle myself in the classroom and beyond. I want my students to be able to concentrate on learning in an open and user-friendly environment, and I want my classes to be about discovering the richness of literature, not about questions of my power or authority.

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iving in an Old South, with its protocols of segregation, that reluctantly was moving toward a New South—as the city of Richmond resisted integration—made me aware of civil rights issues that would define U.S. politics for the next decades.

I knew, intuitively at first, that literature provided a forum for the discussion of ideas, ideologies, public policy, nationalism, social problems, and aesthetics, and that insightful teachers could train their students to think without telling them what to think.

Civil liberties are associated with broadening the mind, as are the study of literature and the exploration of angles of vision, often in conflict. The image of separate facilities—schools, restrooms, water fountains, movie houses, restaurants, soda fountains, fronts and backs of buses—has stayed with me, and that is good. Lessons on the Holocaust, religious persecution, and suffering in other forms likewise cannot and should not be forgotten. And inequities hardly have disappeared.

At the University of Virginia, I planned to study literature, and I elected to major in Spanish.

That decision was a turning point in my life, for it brought me into new territories, including Spain in a junior-year abroad program. This was 19681969, still the Francisco Franco years. I lived with a wonderful family and immersed myself into Spanish culture. That academic year in Madrid was unlike anything that I had experienced. I was in a different place, and I had known no one in Spain or in my group before the trip. I had taken many classes given in Spanish, but the professors had not spoken as rapidly as the madrileños in “real-life” situations, and there had been minimal background noises. I was a

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bit lost, but I was extremely happy, because absolutely everything—classes, meals and conversations in my new home, excursions on the street, meeting people, riding public transportation, running errands, sightseeing around the city, visiting bookstores, asking questions, and so forth—was educational and usually fun. The program’s professors were first-rate; many were Socialists, out of favor with the government and not employed in the university system. I also was able to enroll in two courses at the Universidad Complutense, the University of Madrid.

I made several close Spanish male friends, thanks, in almost every instance, to an introduction by a female colleague from my group. Over forty-five years later, I am still in touch with Spanish friends from that time, and this gives me a special satisfaction. One is an economics professor, one a lawyer and businessman, and one a retired draftsman for Iberia Airlines.

When I see them on visits to Spain, it is as if time had stood still. That academic year remains vivid in my mind. What came afterward for me has a direct link to that first time abroad, now part of a dialectics or learning curve. What I have come to understand about the Franco years is a product of encounters, reflection, and knowledge acquired after the fact.

I left Madrid in the summer of 1969 with a new worldview, a new appreciation for education, and strong desire to expand my knowledge. My goal was to do graduate work in Spanish or comparative literature, but first I needed to complete my last undergraduate year and to write an Honors thesis on the influence of European dramatic realism, as fostered by Henrik Ibsen and August Strindberg, on Spanish theater. As graduation approached, I could not avoid thinking back to my year in Spain and forward to graduate school and a future career. My mind was moving in many directions, and conditions in the real world had an impact on me. There were many lessons from observing and living in Spain during a late period in the Franco regime. What I had learned earlier gave me a modified perspective and aided me in thinking about U.S. society and

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customs in light of the civil rights movement. The Vietnam War was on everyone’s mind, and in a short span came the assassinations of Dr. Martin Luther King and Senator Robert Kennedy, and the shooting of students at Kent State University. It was hard not to be politically committed or concerned about the plight of one’s fellow citizens. In the midst of all that was occurring—to me and around me—I received a phone call from Professor Elias L. Rivers, chair of the Department of Romance Languages at Johns Hopkins University, inviting me to enter the doctoral program, and I gladly accepted. This was exactly what I wanted, but, once again, I was not quite sure of what I was getting into, only that I knew that my heart would be in it.

The four years of graduate school passed quickly, with lots of work, superb colleagues and long-term friends, impressive teachers, and the chance to spend a semester (fall 1971) in Madrid. I chose to work in early modern Spanish literature, with an emphasis on theater. I wrote my doctoral thesis, on Miguel de Cervantes’s plays, as a dissertation fellow at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C., in the 1973–1974 academic year, the time of Watergate. The choice of Cervantes was fortuitous, because, although he was a frustrated dramatist, the plays are complex and engaging, and, of course, if one examines Cervantes, Don Quixote is always on the table. I defended the dissertation in April of 1974 and married Susan Krug in May of that year.

My jobs have taken us to Kalamazoo College (three years), Arizona State University (twelve years), Indiana University (eleven years), and Vanderbilt (sixteen years).

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xceptional students have been a staple of my career. At Vanderbilt, I have taught undergraduate and graduate students in Spanish, honors seminars in comparative literature, courses in the Master of Liberal Arts and Science program, a Commons seminar, and four courses in the Programs for Talented Youth. I have had the chance

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to spend semesters in Lisbon and Madrid teaching graduate students in comparative literature (University of Lisbon) and English literature (University of Madrid), and I have directed two summer seminars for school teachers and one institute for college teachers. In Bloomington, Indiana, I taught regularly at a retirement community, so, all in all, my students have ranged in age from eleven to over ninety. With only minor exceptions, I have left each course thinking that I should be paying the students rather than getting paid (but keeping that thought to myself ). My colleagues at Vanderbilt, and elsewhere, have been exemplars, supporters, and friends.

My teaching stints in Lisbon and Madrid—with outstanding students and new sets of colleagues in the academic and theatrical realms—have enhanced my knowledge and my contentment. To bring things full circle, in a way, the current director of the IES Abroad program in Madrid (in which I had studied), invited me, in June of 2010, to speak to a group of students who had recently arrived from the U.S. for the summer program. I stressed the differences in being a student in Madrid now and forty years earlier. The discussion dealt with Franco, the rise of English in Spain, the wonders of technology, and some things that never change.

In my years in the profession, I have witnessed the growth of theory, the growth of interdisciplinary studies, and, notably, the growth of Spanish in the United States. I could underscore, as well, my personal growth as influenced by my teachers, by professional colleagues and those whose works I read with diligence, and by my students. While focusing on early modern studies, I have been able to teach and do research in nineteenth- and twentieth-century narrative and drama in a comparative context. I feel like a secular counterpart to those scholars who spend their days poring over the Torah, the Talmud, and other sacred texts, and who engage in discussions regarding interpretation and analysis. As the song lyric goes, “nice work if you can get it.” What follows is a list of lessons that I have learned and 15

can be intrusive, distracting, and harmful. Some people function on negative energy. One needs to work toward minimizing the ability of these individuals to hurt others and toward protecting, to the extent possible, young scholars and students from their abuse of authority. It may be quixotic, but a belief in poetic justice can be an asset.

advice to those who are teaching or are training to be teachers: 1. Make a determination to be continually on the move, intellectually speaking. Never be complacent. Never be satisfied with prior achievements.

Never be satisfied at having achieved the goals of the past. Never stop creating new courses or new research topics. Never think that you have mastered your field.

2. Texts are stable; criticism and theory are unstable, in the best sense. That keeps us on our toes and in business.

3. Teaching should be interactive. Dialogue should never be missing from the classroom or from engagement with texts and colleagues.

4. Students are, in the overwhelming majority, smart, kind, and generous. They also are vulnerable, so one should try to be understanding of them, should treat them with tolerance and an open mind, and should give them the benefit of the doubt. Especially as the generation gap grows wider, students will know many things about which their teachers are ignorant. Give them the chance to make the acquisition of knowledge a two-way street.

5. Teaching is a venerable and venerated profession.

We should take our disciplines and our students most seriously, but we should not take ourselves too seriously. Our task challenges us to be models of excellence, and we should try as hard as possible to reach that objective, which generally will mean casting the spotlight away from ourselves and onto our texts, our pedagogical methods, and our students.

6. An indisputable way to learn is keep up with what students are reading for their research.

7. The profession is, like life, a dialectics of good and bad. The good far outweighs the bad, but the bad

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8. What do I want students to learn from taking classes and/or working with me on their projects?

To read carefully, analytically, and creatively.

To seek points to praise before seeking points to criticize, and to be respectful (rather than dismissive) in their criticism. To find impetus and subjects for future work. To work tirelessly, but with enjoyment. To develop a spirit of collaboration. To be sympathetic toward others, in narrow and broad terms. To become advocates for the humanities and, needless to say, for humanity.

9. On the fairly rare occasions in which I may be inclined to tout my self-sufficiency, I think of all the people who have watched over me at home and abroad, and I strive to emulate those mentors, guides, and good citizens. Remember that it takes—evoking Thomas Jefferson and Hillary Clinton—an “academical village” to prepare a teacher.

10. Having grown up in a period of “massive resistance” to integration and having observed the strides made by women and minorities—and the impact of these civil rights movements on the academy—I feel that the humanities are more important than ever, because the struggles have not ended. High technology and core principles can, and should, coexist.

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n many ways, and for better or worse, my early instincts about approaching literary and dramatic texts have not wavered, although I hope to have learned to “talk the talk” in a more cultivated and nuanced fashion. Correspondingly, I might add that my political allegiances, which I do not bring

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directly into the classroom, have not shifted radically. Emphasis on tolerance, respect, sensitivity, and consciousness of differences marked my early lessons, and I want to pass the lessons on, so that I truly am educating my students and continuing to educate myself. I am grateful to my family, teachers, and people whose lives have crossed with mine. I am grateful for the splendid Golden Age scholars who have instructed and befriended me. I am grateful that Spain is a part of my personal history. I am grateful that students have responded beautifully to the materials that I have assigned to them and that they have chosen to work with on their own.

In certain ways, I now am more enthusiastic about teaching than ever. Vanderbilt has had much to do with that. My wife Susan has been along for the ride since 1974. Her curriculum vitae reflects our stops along the way: two more degrees and a variety of positions in business and academia, leading to the program in Human and Organizational Development at Peabody. I am tremendously grateful for her understanding and flexibility.

One of the most rewarding features of my position at the Warren Center is that I can play a small role in supporting and promoting the humanities and interdisciplinary studies, and I can interact with a broad range of students and faculty members.

Championing the humanities requires perseverance and resourcefulness. A case can—and should—be made for aligning the humanities with the STEM areas rather than presupposing disconnectedness or mutual exclusion, and rather than resigning oneself to defeat. Intelligent and caring people along the STEM-humanities spectrum can establish significant and reciprocally valuable contacts. At the present moment, teaching self-contained courses, no matter how effective, is not enough. The big picture looms “out there,” and it should not be discounted.

The statistics are not reassuring, but history—longevity, resilience, essentiality—is on our side. I have no platform per se to endorse the humanities and the Humanities Center, but if I did, it would

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encourage (1) high- and low-tech enterprises, and, accordingly, a recognition of the past as one moves forward; (2) an exaltation of books, even as we depend on other media; (3) in-depth study of other cultures along with our own, and as a means of comprehending our own; (4) diversity as the norm, not as a complement to the norm; and (5) a definition of education that would encompass scientific, technological, and practical considerations, and that would involve every conceivable realm of the imagination.

The Warren Center is a safe haven for humanities scholars and for scholars across the campus. It is a jumping-off place for debate, action, inclusiveness, and honorable intentions.

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umanists should not be depressed. The political scene, domestic and international, cries out for hearts working in conjunction with minds.

What we teach and how we teach should have positive consequences, because each of us brings something distinctive to the game. As a Hispanist not born in Spain or Latin America or to Spanish-speaking parents, I have missed being a native speaker, but I have drawn on my particular circumstances to guide me, and I have relied on theory and comparative approaches to enrich my research and teaching. This is what is known as the Ginger Rogers paradigm: dancing backwards and in high heels. I have never quite been a Fred Astaire, but I have tried to stay close to the masters and to let them lead me in good directions, and I am, on the whole, satisfied with that.

Author’s note: Within the last several years, I have been invited to contribute to two volumes, published in Spain and in Spanish, on Hispanic studies in the U.S. and on how “Hispanists” chose and prepared for the profession. This essay is based on ideas that occurred to me in writing those longer and more personal essays.

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What We Are Writing

he following is a list of books published in 2015 by our colleagues in the humanities and social science departments:

Dale P. Andrews, Black Practical Theology, Baylor University Press.

Dan Cornfield, Beyond the Beat: Musicians Building Community in Nashville, Princeton University Press.

Beth Bachmann, Do Not Rise, University of Pittsburgh Press.

Colin Dayan, With Dogs at the Edge of Life, Columbia University Press.

Houston Baker, co-editor, The Trouble with PostBlackness, Columbia University Press.

Idit Dobbs-Weinstein, Spinoza’s Critique of Religion and Its Heirs, Cambridge University Press.

Robert Barsky, Undocumented Immigrants in an Era of Arbitrary Law: The Flight and the Plight of People Deemed Illegal,Taylor and Francis.

Katharine Donato, co-editor, Gender and International Migration, Russell Sage Foundation.

Michael Bess, Our Grandchildren Redesigned: Life in the Bioengineered Society of the Near Future, Beacon Press.

Gabriel Briggs, The New Negro in the Old South, Rutgers University Press.

Celso Castilho, co-editor, Tornando-se Livre: Agentes Históricos E Lutas Sociais No Processo De Abolição, EDUSP.

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Elsa Filosa, co-editor, Boccaccio 1313-2013, Longo.

William Franke, The Revelation of Imagination: From the Bible and Homer through Virgil and Augustine to Dante, Northwestern University Press.

William Franke, Secular Scriptures: Modern Theological Poetics in the Wake of Dante, Ohio State University Press.

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Edward Friedman, Trading Up: A Comedy of Manners. An Adaptation of Juan Ruiz de Alarcón’s Mudarse por mejorarse, Juan de la Cuesta.

Peter Guralnick, Sam Phillips: The Man Who Invented Rock ’n Roll, Little, Brown and Company.

Ari Joskowicz, co-editor, Secularism in Question: Jews and Judaism in Modern Times, University of Pennsylvania Press.

Peter Lake, Scandal and Religious Identity in Early Stuart England: A Northamptonshire Maid’s Tragedy, Boydell Press.

Mireille Lee, Body, Dress, and Identity in Ancient Greece, Cambridge University Press.

Lorraine Lopez, The Darling: A Novel, University of Arizona Press.

Peter Lorge, co-editor, Chinese and Indian Warfare— From the Classical Age to 1870, Routledge.

Peter Lorge, The Reunification of China: Peace through War under the Song Dynasty, Cambridge University Press.

Larry May, Contingent Pacifism, Cambridge University Press.

Kevin D. Murphy, The Tudor Home, Rizzoli.

Dana Nelson, Commons Democracy: Reading the Politics of Participation in the Early United States, Fordham University Press.

Michael Newton, co-editor, Prosecuting Maritime Piracy: Domestic Solutions to International Crimes, Cambridge University Press.

Kelly Oliver, Earth and World: Philosophy After the Apollo Missions, Columbia University Press.

Nancy Reisman, Trompe l’Oeil: A Novel, Tin House Books.

Cecelia Tichi, Jack London: A Writer’s Fight for a Better America, University of North Carolina Press.

Daniel H. Usner, Weaving Alliances with Other Women: Chitimacha Indian Work in the New South, University of Georgia Press.

Herbert R. Marbury, Pillars of Cloud and Fire: The Politics of Exodus in African American Biblical Interpretation, New York University Press.

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HASTAC at Vanderbilt

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ASTAC (Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Alliance and Collaboratory) is a global network of individuals and institutions that come together to share, collaborate, and learn through online forums, blogs, conferences, social media, and other channels of communication.

The HASTAC Scholars program, founded in 2008, is designed for graduate students who are engaged with innovative projects and research at the intersection of digital media and learning, 21st-century education, the digital humanities, and technology in the arts, humanities, and sciences.

HASTAC Scholars blog about digital activities on their home campus, host forums, organize events, and discuss new ideas, projects, experiments, and technologies that reconceive teaching, learning, research, writing, and structuring knowledge.

The Warren Center established the inaugural HASTAC Scholar at Vanderbilt University in 2011/12. Over the years, our HASTAC Scholars program at Vanderbilt has grown as we have added institutional sponsors and mentors. For the upcoming academic year, we have eight graduate student scholars affiliated with various programs on and off campus. These programs include the

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Vanderbilt Institute for Digital Learning; the Curb Center for Art, Enterprise, and Public Policy; Humanities Tennessee (a public sector program funded by the NEH); the Jean and Alexander Heard Libraries; the Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities; the American Studies Program; the Center for Second Language Studies; and the Center for Teaching. Our program not only provides sustained opportunities for graduate students to become proficient in the digital humanities, it also exposes them to various centers and programs outside of their home departments with which they might otherwise not be familiar.

This year, two conference panels resulted from our HASTAC program and related collaboration with Queen’s University Belfast. Both were organized by Todd Hughes (director of instructional technology, Center for Second Language Studies) and Federico Pagello (postdoctoral fellow, Queen’s University Belfast). The presentation at the 2016 HASTAC Conference at Arizona State University featured panelists Vivian Finch (assistant director, Center for Teaching); Laura Hagele (graduate student, German), and Portia Ellis-Woods (graduate student, Media Studies at Queen’s University Belfast). The second panel was part of a program related to digital humanities hosted by the Institute for Collaborative Research in the Humanities at Queen’s University Belfast and featured Hughes, Pagello, Hagele, and EllisWoods along with Mona Frederick (executive director, Warren Center) and Terry Tripp (activities coordinator, Warren Center).

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Mellon Institute in Digital and Public Humanities

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he 2016 Mellon Institute in Digital and Public Humanities for EarlyCareer Scholars, co-directed by the Warren Center, the Center for Second Language Studies, and the Curb Center for Art, Enterprise, and Public Policy, featured guest lectures by speakers from both on and off campus related to digital and public humanities as well as a two-and-a-half day workshop on digital storytelling led by facilitators from the national nonprofit organization StoryCenter. Held May 2–6, institute participants included Vanderbilt graduate students and recent Vanderbilt Ph.D.’s. Also taking part in the seminar was a visiting HASTAC scholar from Queen’s University Belfast and two public humanities representatives from Nashville.

Teresa Mangum, director of the Obermann Center for Advanced Studies and professor in Gender, Women and Sexuality Studies at the University of Iowa, gave a presentation on humanities in the public sphere. Institute participants explored the Nashville Public Library’s Civil Rights Room and the Fort Negley Visitors Center and Park to learn more about vibrant examples of ongoing humanistic inquiry in the public sphere. Derek Bruff, director of the Center for Teaching, and Todd Hughes, director of Instructional Technologies at the Center for Second Language Studies, led workshops on various

aspects of digital humanities.

Each participant in the seminar created a short digital video. One participant noted, “As a result of the digital storytelling workshop, I learned to reconnect my personal and scholarly lives (no small feat). We found ourselves saying that the process of telling these stories ‘humanized’ the humanities for us.

As scholars who work hard to tell the human stories of others, it was refreshing to have the opportunity to reconnect with the personal stories that motivated us to pursue this career in the first place.”

Participants in the program included:

Alejandro Arango, Department of Philosophy (Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow, Tennessee State University)

Lauren Kohut, Department of Anthropology (Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow, Tougaloo College)

Deann Armstrong, Department of English

Kylie Korsnack, Department of English

Krista Castillo, Museum Coordinator, Fort Negley Visitors Center and Park

Juliet Larkin-Gilmore, Department of History

Portia Ellis-Woods, Media Studies, Queen’s University Belfast Tim Foster, Department of Spanish and Portuguese

Yudy Rodríguez, Department of Spanish and Portuguese Angela Sutton, Department of History, (Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow, Digital Humanities Center)

Zoe LeBlanc, Department of History

Brendan Weaver, Department of Anthropology (Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow, Berea College)

Tatiana McInnis, Department of English

Langston Wilkins, Program Officer, Humanities Tennessee

Don Rodrigues, Department of English

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Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities Mona Frederick named UNC Distinguished Alumna

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ona Frederick, a passionate advocate for humanistic research and teaching, was named a 2015 Distinguished Alumna of the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

Mona Frederick receives a Distinguished Alumna Award from Chancellor Carol L. Folt on 2015 University Day at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. (courtesy of The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)

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Frederick has played a pivotal role at the Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities, where she is executive director, since its founding in 1988. Frederick’s Distinguished Alumna award reads, in part, “At a time when humanities students and faculty worry about the fate of their disciplines, Frederick stands as a beacon of hope and energy for the challenges that lie ahead.”

The award was established to recognize alumni who have made outstanding contributions to humanity. Frederick was honored by her alma mater during its University Day ceremonies on October 12, 2015.

Among other accomplishments, Frederick spearheaded Vanderbilt’s successful efforts to build a state-of-the-art digital archive of writer Robert Penn Warren’s audio recordings with 1960s U.S. civil rights leaders and others who participated in the movement. Warren was a 1925 summa cum laude graduate of Vanderbilt. Warren’s recordings were made in conjunction with research for his 1965 book Who Speaks for the Negro? During Frederick’s extensive research, she discovered Warren’s recordings in the Yale University and University of Kentucky Libraries. The Who Speaks for the Negro? digital archive, which is housed at Vanderbilt, includes not only the audiotaped conversations, but also some 4,000 pages of searchable interview transcripts, photographs, letters, and other written materials. Yale University Press recently reissued Who Speaks for the Negro? based on the world-wide interest in the digital recordings.

Edward Friedman, Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of Spanish and director of the Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities, said that it is a tremendous honor to work with Frederick. “Mona’s positive spirit, her dedication to the humanities and to humanitarian causes, her range of knowledge, and her powerful memory are always on display,” he said. “Thanks in great part to Mona’s efforts, the center has become a place for intellectual exchange and goodwill. Her contributions to Vanderbilt are, in a word, enormous.” ­ Ann Marie Deer Owens, senior public affairs officer —

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NEH Chairman William Adams’ Speech at the 2015/16 Harry C. Howard Jr. Lecture

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NEH Chair William Adams delivers the 2015 Harry C. Howard Jr. Lecture (Photo by Anne Rayner)

October 27, 2015 hank you and good evening.

I want to begin by thanking Mona Frederick and the Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities for inviting me to speak tonight. I’m especially honored to take part in the distinguished Harry C. Howard Jr. Lecture series, which over the years has featured so many important voices in the humanities.

I hope it won’t seem too boastful if I begin by noting the fact that one of the very first major gifts the Warren Center received was an NEH Challenge Grant endowing certain aspects of the center’s activities. I can’t take personal credit for this grant, of course, but as we celebrate our 50th anniversary and take stock of our achievements, I’m honored to be able to observe the impressive results of this investment at Vanderbilt.

As I started thinking about this lecture in earnest several weeks ago, I found myself thinking about

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the Vanderbilt alumnus for whom the center is named. I first encountered Robert Penn Warren’s work at Actors Theatre in Louisville, Kentucky, in the winter of 1967 in a performance of All the King’s Men. I was a very young Second Lieutenant in the Army stationed at nearby Fort Knox, and when I had the time and opportunity I’d head for Louisville.

I attended plays at Actors Theatre several times during the year I spent at Fort Knox. I also took a philosophy course in aesthetics, of all things, in the night school program at the University of Louisville.

So what was I doing at Actors Theatre and at the university? It was in part a form of compensation.

I’d left college abruptly after a very unhappy and confusing first year. My decision to join the Army in June of 1966 was impulsive, to say the least, and it didn’t take long for me to wish that I was back in college. So I invented a substitute universe for myself, almost as if the rest hadn’t happened.

But I know now that there was more to it than

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that. Being an executive officer in a basic training company at Fort Knox in 1967, as the Vietnam War and the draft escalated, was a searing experience for a young man who had grown up in a comfortable middle class suburb of Detroit. I encountered people from every imaginable background during my time at Fort Knox. Their lives in the Army were hard, unforgiving, and unpromising. Many of the soldiers I encountered that year were on their way to Vietnam, as I was, only months after leaving Fort Knox.

And I was desperately trying to put all of this together, to shape it into some kind of meaningful whole, and I knew in a vague, inchoate way that the things I saw and heard at Actors Theatre and at the university were relevant in some way to that process.

I was in some ways a very young and unsophisticated version of Warren’s character Jack Burden, who

I was in some ways a very young and unsophisticated version of Warren’s character Jack Burden, who struggles throughout the novel, and the play, to put the fragments of his experience into some kind of meaningful order. struggles throughout the novel, and the play, to put the fragments of his experience into some kind of meaningful order.

What I’d like to share with you tonight is a view of the purposes and power of the humanities that’s rooted in the proposition that in some form or another, the humanities almost always come back to the centrality of meaning in our individual and collective lives. I hope it won’t seem too acrobatic if I attempt, in addition, to connect this proposition to the evolution of NEH over the last 50 years and to fundamental changes in the ways in which we understand the humanities and indeed culture itself.

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On February 26, 1965, Frederick Burkhardt, the president of the American Council of Learned Societies, appeared before the House and Senate subcommittees charged with hearing testimony on the recently drafted National Foundation on the Arts and Humanities Act, which President Lyndon Johnson signed into law several months later. A portion of Burkhardt’s testimony reads as follows: Carthage was a culture that devoted its creative talents to war and trade. It came close to defeating Rome. When, finally, the Romans wiped out Carthage there was nothing left but a pile of rubble on the plains of what we now call Tunisia. But when the Huns sacked Rome, Virgil and Cicero, Terence, Ovid, Catullus and Horace and a host of other poets and statesmen remained a living force and have lived with us to this day.

So too any civilization will be a living force in the world of the future to the extent that it values and nurtures the creative forces of the arts and humanities. . . .1

The legislation creating NEH and NEA was an important element of the progressive legislative agenda enacted by Congress and the Johnson administration in the mid-1960s, an agenda launched at the very moment the country was entering one of the most tumultuous periods in its modern history, perhaps in its entire history. But even as the idea of creating a federal cultural agency dedicated to advancing the humanities was unprecedented and, in at least one way that I will discuss, very progressive, it was also deeply rooted in traditional cultural and intellectual norms, as Burkhardt’s words suggest.

His references to the classics are telling. And so, too, is the apparent anxiety that for all its power and wealth, post-World War II American society still lacked the cultural solidity of older, more mature civilizations: we might still wind up like Carthage.

How we will look to future societies, as they look back on us? Will they find anything interesting and worthwhile to think about?

This is a view of culture and of the humanities that has distinct echoes of the high Victorian sensibilities of Matthew Arnold. In Arnold’s

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rendering, culture is a collection of great works of mind and spirit that are bequeathed to the future, and that the future will receive and contemplate with admiration and appreciation. In this framework, the humanities are essentially about the excavation and exploration of the great cultural tradition. The result of that exploration is the improvement of our own minds and sensibilities through exposure to great works of thought and artistic expression.

This understanding of the humanities is clearly

In this framework, the humanities are essentially about the excavation and exploration of the great cultural tradition. The result of that exploration is the improvement of our own minds and sensibilities through exposure to great works of thought and artistic expression.

on display in the “Report of the Commission on the Humanities” published in 1964, which Frederick Burkhardt helped write. The Commission was formed through the efforts of the American Council of Learned Societies, Phi Beta Kappa and the Council on Graduate Schools in 1963, and its report led to the drafting of the legislation creating NEH and the NEA. The preface to the report begins with the famous remark attributed to John Adams: “I must study politics and war that my sons may have the liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy,” Adams continues, “geography, natural history, and naval architecture, navigation, commerce, and agriculture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture. . . .”2 There is a closely related reference to this view

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of culture in one of the principal arguments the Commission advanced for the creation of federal agencies devoted to cultural concerns. As a revealing artifact of the times and of a certain understanding of culture, the passage is worth sharing: A novel and serious challenge to Americans is posed by the remarkable increase in their leisure time.

The forty-hour week and the likelihood of a shorter one, the greater life expectancy and the earlier age of retirements, have combined to make the blessing of leisure a source of personal and community concern.

“What shall I do with my spare time” all too quickly becomes the question “Who am I? What shall I make of my life?” When men and women find nothing within themselves but emptiness they turn to trivial and narcotic amusements, and the society of which they are a part becomes socially delinquent and potentially unstable. The humanities are the immemorial answer to man’s questioning and to his need for self-expression; they are uniquely equipped to fill the “abyss of leisure.”3

One can’t help but wonder what the report’s authors would think about the ways in which Americans currently fill “the abyss of leisure.” And in light of what has happened in the United States economy and the culture of work over the past five decades, I’m also struck by how surprising, nearly unfathomable to us is the notion that the world of material necessity and work would soon give way to a world of universal leisure. But it was in the air in 1965, in both conservative and progressive circles of social thought.

But what’s more interesting in this passage is the fundamental assumption that culture and its understanding and appreciation lie outside the everyday worlds of work and politics and commerce.

Recalling Aristotle’s view that the life of the mind succeeds the household and political realms, while in every sense depending upon them, culture is here conceived as the creature of leisure, becoming possible only once the realm of material necessity and all that it entails is left behind.

In light of this traditional understanding of culture and of the humanities, it’s not terribly

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surprising, I think, that the earliest priorities of the NEH were focused on research and on the elite higher education institutions, public and private, where fundamental humanities research was being conducted. There were other pressures leading in this same direction, including considerable envy of the National Science Foundation, founded a decade or so before. And there were certainly other impulses operating in the broad humanities community, which I’ll come back to shortly. But the classical paradigm was certainly a force in the early period of NEH’s work. And it was associated with a number of other important assumptions and positions regarding higher education and the cultural realities of the United States, including a highly professionalized, principally academic and increasingly specialized view of humanities work; distance from the public and public concerns; a strongly hierarchical view of American higher education; and the pervasive and fundamental belief in the distinction between high culture and mass culture, between the highbrow and the lowbrow.

The irony of this moment, of course, is that the traditional humanities paradigm was about to crash into the wall of history. In 1965 the civil rights movement was well under way, of course, to be followed shortly by the swelling of the anti-war movement, the counter culture, and the early stirrings of the women’s movement. I don’t want to draw an overly simplistic picture of the relationship between social movements and ideas of culture, but it’s very clear that the eruptions of the 1960s put considerable pressure on the ways in which universities and the disciplines concerned with culture, history, and social life thought about themselves and their ultimate purposes and responsibilities.

Meanwhile, early practices at NEH were being influenced by the mostly unwelcome interventions of Congress, led by the relentless Senator from Rhode Island, Claiborne Pell. For Pell and likeminded politicians, the expenditure of public 26

funds in the service of the humanities had to have demonstrable public impact, beyond the remote and (to some) indecipherable work of humanities scholars closeted away in universities. Pell pushed for and ultimately realized a system of state humanities councils that created public programs and re-granted federal funds to local organizations. The theory and practice of the so-called “public humanities” were generated in part by the leaders and work of these state councils, though the cause was also taken up eventually by academic humanists and, more recently, by the humanities center movement.

By the late 1970s, NEH was beginning to make significant investments in a much more public conception of its work. The agency established a Division of Public Programs and began experimenting with programming in the public arena, primarily in the museum field and in public television. These early efforts were, at first, halting and uncertain, and clearly regarded as less important than the research agenda. But they led to bolder and more confident initiatives in the fields of documentary filmmaking, radio production, and support for humanities programs in public and private libraries, historic sites, and cultural organizations of all shapes and sizes. The first decade of NEH’s work also saw the creation of a program of seminars and institutes for college teachers, which were expanded in the 1980s to include high school teachers. More recently, NEH has led the way in the evolution of the “digital humanities,” which have extraordinary significance for public engagement with the humanities.

What began as an enterprise devoted to research became an engine for a complex and diverse array of humanities activities and practices around the country.

As NEH was making its public turn, a different construction of the humanities was emerging in the academy. I want to call this construction “pragmatic,” in the specific philosophical sense intended by William James, John Dewey, and

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Richard Rorty, among others. In this understanding of the humanities, the concept of experience replaces tradition as the foundation and touchstone of humanities practices. This reorientation toward the realm of experience was also influenced by the phenomenology flowing from France and Germany in the works of philosophers like Martin Heidegger and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. In both phenomenology and pragmatism, the lived experience of the world is the anchoring focus and preoccupation.

The attention to lived experience and the related understanding of the humanities as means of illuminating our experience was given additional energy by the view of culture that was emerging from anthropology. The most important

The pragmatic and ethnographic turn in the humanities led to the erosion of distinctions that were part of the classical paradigm, and most notably the distinction between high and low culture, between elite culture and mass culture.

proponent of this view in the American context was undoubtedly Clifford Geertz. Geertz’s manifesto, The Interpretation of Cultures, was first published in 1973, just as NEH was taking its first steps toward a more public engagement with the humanities. In that work, Geertz developed an understanding of culture as a network of symbols that give meaning to every level and dimension of individual and collective experience. The task of the ethnographer, Geertz argued, is to describe or interpret the meaning of culture by way of what he called “thick description,” an interpretive process relying as much on literary and artistic imagination

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and methods as on scientific observation and analysis. In this world of symbolic systems and the meanings they generate, culture is comprehensive of every part of life, including the political, the commercial, and the mundane. Culture is everywhere, in other words, and it gives meaning to everything we do. The paradigm bequeathed to us by Aristotle and John Adams is now turned on its head. Or as Geertz and William James both suggested in reference to a jocular expression in Hindu cosmology, “it’s culture all the way down.”

The pragmatic and ethnographic turn in the humanities led to the erosion of distinctions that were part of the classical paradigm, and most notably the distinction between high and low culture, between elite culture and mass culture.

As this distinction weakened, vast new tracts of human experience have come under the gaze of humanists hungry to extend the boundaries of their endeavors. Today, the humanities in the United States are broadly arrayed across a vast landscape of cultural material and study. In principle, everything is open to investigation and interpretation. And that investigation is going on in many places outside the academy—in museum and library communities, especially, but also in historic sites and in documentary film and radio. The contemporary humanities are not just concerned with public things. They are being practiced out in public spaces and institutions, informed by and simultaneously informing academic research.

I started these remarks with the assertion that in some form or another, the humanities almost always come back to the centrality of meaning in our individual and collective lives. What I want to suggest by way of conclusion is that a broadly public and pragmatic understanding and practice of the humanities is one of the most promising and, indeed, essential platforms for their future evolution in the United States, both within and outside the academy.

My conviction in this regard has a great deal to 27

do with your immediate circumstances. Within the academy, and I would also say within almost every other part of our educational system, the humanities and the arts are under significant pressure. Just how much pressure, and with what effects, varies enormously, I’m discovering, from place to place and from institution to institution. But over the past decade, at least, there has been a steady and general narrowing of public discussion about the purposes of education at all levels. Most of us would

Most of the great issues of the day—think of race relations, or immigration, the legacies of recent wars, the vexing questions being raised by genetic engineering, and our relations with the natural world—are not, in the end, technical or scientific in nature, though technology and science certainly raise their fair share of thorny issues. attribute that narrowing to at least three factors: the recent economic recession and related vocational anxieties; the ascent of the STEM disciplines and the general fascination with technology; and the implementation of testing regimes that have overwhelmed primary and secondary teachers and administrators.

The implications of this narrowing have rightly generated considerable alarm among those who are inclined toward a more generous understanding of educational purpose. And close to the top of the list of the most worrisome implications is what this narrowing might mean for our civic life. As John Dewey understood, the theory and practice of American democracy have always been closely tied

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to educational practices that support the elemental requirements of citizenship. Those requirements include a reasonably broad acquaintance with American history, a grasp of the fundamental principles of liberal democracy, and acquaintance with the cultural landscape that we currently inhabit.

It’s hard to imagine how we sustain a vibrant democratic political culture in this country without a sustained commitment at all levels of education to the forms of humanistic learning that support democratic institutions and practices.

While the humanities are critical to the integrity of our democratic institutions, I’m also quite sure they’re critical to our collective capacity to address our most difficult and vexing contemporary social challenges. Most of the great issues of the day— think of race relations, or immigration, the legacies of recent wars, the vexing questions being raised by genetic engineering, and our relations with the natural world—are not, in the end, technical or scientific in nature, though technology and science certainly raise their fair share of thorny issues.

Rather, the grand challenges of our times almost always appear at the intersections of our history, our culture, our ideas and our values. These are the domains in which the humanities have their proper and distinctive place, and these are the domains in which we need much more of the imaginative, moral and intellectual capacities embedded in the humanities.

Last but not least, we need to be concerned that the current narrowing of educational purpose will negatively affect the culture of innovation that has been such a critical element of the American economy. Since I previously associated him with a traditional and backward looking view of the humanities, I want to resurrect Frederick Burkhardt by sharing his extraordinarily prescient comment on the relationship between scientific progress and humanistic learning, also delivered in his testimony before Congress:

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. . . there is now a widespread concern that the emphasis on science, important as it is, has produced an imbalance in our civilization and specifically in our educational system where much of the vast amount provided for the support of science and scientific research has been invested. There has been no comparable investment in the humanities and the arts and in consequence the education of our young, including our young scientists, runs the risk of becoming narrowly technical and short-sighted. . . .

A lopsided, half-starved educational system is something this country simply cannot afford, however strong in technology, however strong in defense and wealth. Science itself will suffer in such an environment.4

The path to a renewed understanding of education goes by way of the rediscovery of the fundamental importance of the education of the whole person. We need to reconnect to the educational ideal that has until now distinguished the American educational system, and particularly its system of higher education—the ideal of liberal learning. And we must recapture that commitment in every kind of institution, from the rural high school to the major urban research university.

The humanities must be front and center in this reimagining of liberal learning. For it is the humanities that put us back in touch with our experience. Not our experience as rendered by the natural sciences and the highly quantitative social sciences, though those renderings are important, but our experience as it is lived, out in the world, by

real people. It’s the humanities that give us access to and help us comprehend our experience in its raw, unmediated, and ultimately inescapable and irreducible form.

Robert Penn Warren certainly understood this. In 1964, he travelled across the country interviewing leaders and participants in the civil rights movement. As I know you’re all aware, these interviews were published in book form in 1965 under the title Who Speaks for the Negro? Warren answered his own question by gathering firsthand accounts of this extraordinary social movement. A decade later, in 1974, Warren delivered the Jefferson Lecture, the highest honor bestowed by the National Endowment for the Humanities. In that lecture, he argued for the central importance of literature and poetry in the life of a democracy. “I suppose that I do think of poetry as a passion of the soul,” he said, “though that lingo is high-falutin. Even a nourishment of the soul, and indeed of society to boot, in that it keeps alive the sense of self and the sense of a community. It even, in the same act and same moment, helps one to grasp reality and to grasp his own life. Not that it will give definitions and certainties. But it can help us to ponder what Saint Augustine meant when he said that he was a question to himself.”5 Thank you very much.

Statement of Frederick Burkhardt, President of the American Council of Learned Societies, before the Special Subcommittee on the Arts and Humanities of the Senate and the Special Subcommittee on Labor of the House of Representatives, February 26, 1965.

2 “Report of the Commission on the Humanities,” The American Council of Learned Societies, New York, 1964.

3 Ibid, p. 5.

4 Burkhardt, Statement before the Special Subcommittee on the Arts and Humanities of the Senate and the Special Subcommittee on Labor of the House of Representatives, February 26, 1965.

5 Democracy and Poetry. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975.

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2016/17 Warren Center Faculty Fellows Program Working for Equality and Justice: Theorizing from and with Lived Resistance to Economic Inequality and Injustice

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ne of the key challenges to the moral and political legitimacy of nationstates, international orders, corporations, organizations, families, and communities is economic inequality and injustice. Economic inequality is a timeless topic recently invigorated by social scientific scholarly work such as Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century and Emmanuel Saez’s and Gabriel Zucman’s analysis of U.S. tax records.

Qualitative and quantitative social sciences continually bring new data to bear on the problems of economic inequality, spawn myriad discussions on the nature and dynamics of varied political economies, and raise pressing issues for ethics and politics.

The 2016/17 Warren Center Faculty Fellows Program will turn to the humanities for the study of inequality and injustice. The group will consider how scholarship in the humanities can be informed by the experiences of those people who are actually living with the inequalities and injustices. They will also look to humanistic scholarship to discover how to do this work well.

This year’s Faculty Fellows:

Brooke A. Ackerly, Spence and Rebecca Webb Wilson Fellow, is associate professor of political science. Her research interests include democratic theory, feminist methodologies, human rights, and social and environmental justice. She integrates into her theoretical work empirical research on activism. Her publications include Political Theory and Feminist Social Criticism (Cambridge, 2000), Universal Human Rights in a World of Difference (Cambridge, 2008), and Doing Feminist Research in Political and Social Science with Jacqui True (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010, second edition forthcoming). “Just Responsibility: A Human Rights Theory of Global Justice” is forthcoming from Oxford University Press. She is currently working on responsibility and climate change. Ackerly is codirecting this year’s Fellows Program.

Carwil Bjork-James is assistant professor of anthropology. He is a cultural anthropologist who researches grassroots autonomy, disruptive protest, and indigenous collective rights.

He is currently revising “The 30

Sovereign Street,” a book on the takeover and use of urban space by grassroots social movements in Bolivia. Using both anthropological and historical methods, this work explores how pivotal public events generate political legitimacy, contribute to major (sometimes revolutionary) transformations in the balance of power, and provide models for future political action. His broader research interests include conflicts over extractive projects on indigenous territories, strategic and tactical questions in collective mass action, and the role of urban space in reproducing and challenging racial and state power.

Heath W. Carter, the 2016/17 William S. Vaughn Visiting Fellow, is assistant professor of history at Valparaiso University.

He teaches a variety of courses on the modern United States and is the author of Union Made: Working People and the Rise of Social Christianity in Chicago (Oxford, 2015) and the co-editor of both The Pew and the Picket Line: Christianity and the American Working Class (University of Illinois Press, 2016) and the forthcoming “Turning Points in the History of 2016 | LETTERS

American Evangelicalism” (Eerdmans, 2017). He is an editor for the Eerdmans’ Library of Religious Biography series. Carter is also an active member of the Valparaiso community. He is the chair of the city’s Human Relations Council, which advises the mayor and city council on matters related to diversity and inclusion. He also serves on the board of two other civic organizations, Project Neighbors and the Northwest Indiana African American Alliance.

James C. Fraser is associate professor of human and organizational development.

His work focuses on urban restructuring and governance, housing and neighborhood redevelopment, human dimensions of environmental change, and social justice. His current book project, “A People’s Guide to Nashville,” is under contract with the University of California Press. Fraser has testified before the U.S. Congress on urban redevelopment and housing, and his research for FEMA was used in legislative sessions around floodplain policymaking. Among other journals, his work can be found in Urban Studies, Urban Affairs Review, Journal of Urban Affairs, Urban Geography, Environment and Planning A, Landscape and Urban Planning, City and Community, Community Development Journal, Disasters, Eos (American Geophysical Union), Journal of Disaster Studies, Management and Policy Studies, and the Journal of World Systems Theory Research.

Juan Floyd-Thomas is associate professor of African American religious history.

His research and teaching focus on the intersections of racial/ethnic identity, religious thought, popular culture, and sociopolitical activism in modern U.S. society. FloydThomas is author of The Origins of Black Humanism: Reverend Ethelred Brown and the Unitarian Church

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(Palgrave Macmillan, 2008) and Liberating Black Church History: Making It Plain (Abingdon Press, 2014) as well as co-author of Black Church Studies: An Introduction (Abingdon Press, 2007) and The Altars Where We Worship: The Religious Significance of Popular Culture (Westminster John Knox, 2016). He is currently working on his next book-length project focused on the intellectual, cultural, and political impact of various African American religious movements in Harlem during the twentieth century.

Kathy L. Gaca is associate professor of classical studies.

Her research explores the ancient Mediterranean roots of modern sexual and social violence, repression, and injustice that remain problematic today and need clearer ethical and historical understanding in order to comprehend and challenge them. The recipient of a University of Toronto classics Ph.D. and a Princeton University Postdoctoral Fellowship in Hellenic Studies, she is the author of The Making of Fornication: Eros, Ethics, and Political Reform in Greek Philosophy and Early Christianity (University of California Press, 2003), which won the 2006 CAMWS Outstanding Publication Award, and of numerous groundbreaking articles on her current book project, “Rape as Sexual Warfare against Girls and Women: Ancient Society and Religion, Modern Witness.”

N. Michelle Murray is assistant professor of Spanish. Her research and teaching focus on contemporary Spanish literature and film, gender studies, and migration studies. She is currently completing a book project entitled “A Home Away from Home.” In this study, she examines culture in democratic Spain through a critical engagement with conceptualizations of the domestic sphere.

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Like the rest of Spain, domestic relations have shifted because of the social, political, and economic changes emergent from the transition to democracy (which began in 1975) and the unprecedented immigration that Spain has experienced since the late 1980s. She has published, and has forthcoming, articles about migration, mobility, transnational feminist theory, and crises of space in Spain since 2008.

C. Melissa Snarr, Jacque Voegeli Fellow, is associate professor of ethics and society. Her research focuses on the intersection of religion, social change, and political ethics. As a Christian social ethicist, she draws on a variety of methodologies, with special concentration in sociological and political theory as well as comparative religious ethics, to understand how religion transforms the world.

Her current book project, “Interfaith Poverty in the United States,” builds from fieldwork that examines how the interfaith movement attends to class issues, particularly the vulnerabilities of low-wage workers who are non-Christian. Her previous book, All You That Labor: Religion and Ethics in the Living Wage Movement (New York University Press, 2011), drew on extensive participant observation to analyze and evaluate the contributions of religious activists in the living wage movement. Snarr is co-directing this year’s Fellows Program.

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Warren Center Graduate Student Fellows Program

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ach year, the Warren Center sponsors an interdisciplinary Graduate Student Fellows Program. Vanderbilt University graduate students in the traditional humanities departments or those whose work is of a humanistic nature are invited to apply for the seven dissertation-completion fellowships. The fellowship provides a stipend as well as a modest research fund. Students are not allowed to hold any other form of employment during the term of the fellowship and are expected to complete and defend their dissertations before the start of the next academic year. They meet weekly at the Warren Center, giving presentations from their work to the seminar and discussing texts of common interest.

The Warren Center also arranges for speakers to meet with the group during the year to provide opportunities for discussion of issues pertinent to scholarly life, such as the art of writing, successful strategies for publication, funding opportunities, grant writing, and workshops on delivering academic presentations. Each Warren Center Graduate Student Fellow will give a public lecture in the spring term. Fellows will also be expected to be active participants in the life of the Warren Center during their fellowship year.

The application deadline for 2017/18 graduate student fellowships is January 30, 2017. Further information is available on the Warren Center’s website.

2016/2017 Warren Center Graduate Student Fellows

Timothy M. Foster, the 2016/17 Joe and Mary Harper Fellow, is a doctoral candidate in Spanish and Portuguese. His dissertation, “Dissonant Conquests: Literature, Music, and Empire in Early Modern Spain,” examines the connection between music and power in early modern Spanish culture. He links the literary depiction of music with Renaissance music theory, showing how authors conceived of music in terms of its power to move human emotions. In texts as diverse as humanistic guitar books, chronicles of European-American contact, and crown-sponsored opera, this connection of music and power represents a new way of thinking about early modern perception of musical and other cultural projects of the church and the monarchy.

Lance R. Ingwersen, the 2016/17 George J. Graham Jr. Fellow, is a doctoral candidate in history. His dissertation, “Mexico City in the Age of Theater, 1830–1901,” traces the history of theater from the capital’s emergence as a hub in global operatic and theatrical networks to the demolition of the National Theater and widespread conversion of playhouses RO B E R T P ENN WAR R EN CE NTE R FOR THE HUMANITIE S

into cinematic salons. In chapters that examine the recruitment of the first Italian opera company, map out theater construction booms, analyze the politicization of a popular play, trace the evolution of business practices and consumer tastes, and probe theater’s democratization and commercialization, his work shows theater’s centrality to the city’s cultural, political, economic, and social life.

Shelby L. Johnson, the 2016/17 American Studies Fellow, is a doctoral candidate in English. Her dissertation, “An Earthly Archive: Race, History, and Early Atlantic Political Theologies, 1770–1840,” traces iterations of the scriptural tenet “The earth was given to the children of men” through influential texts in eighteenth-century political theory and less well-known African American, Caribbean, and indigenous writing. Her project contends that the published works of Mary Prince, William Apess, Robert Wedderburn and others entrench the brutal realities of colonial displacement and finitude within evangelical liturgical registers recalling the earth as a divine gift. She argues that these writers 33

render material, or “earthly,” archives that contest colonial practices and policies of displacement and dispossession bolstered by theories of the social contract and possessive individualism. In doing so, they offer an alternative genealogy for arranging human belonging and attempt to project such alternatives into anticolonial and antiracist futures.

Allison R. McGrath is a doctoral candidate in sociology. Her dissertation, “Redefining a Rape Culture: The Influence of Anti-Violence-AgainstWomen Organizations on Mass Media Discourse,” examines the role that social movement organizations play in influencing the content and framing of mass media as a means of achieving cultural change.

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Drawing on media coverage of ten anti-violenceagainst-women organizations (AVAWOs) from 2011 to 2015, she investigates the social movements’ organizational and environmental factors that shape mass media coverage. Employing qualitative and quantitative methods, she demonstrates direct and indirect effects that various organizational and environmental factors have on the media coverage that each AVAWO receives. Her dissertation focuses on the intersection of social movements, violence against women, and mass media and speaks to the dearth of literature that examines the cultural outcomes of social movement organizations more broadly.

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Tatiana McInnis, the Elizabeth E. Fleming Fellow, is a doctoral candidate in English. Her dissertation, “Missing Miami: Rethinking Region, Nation, and Diversity,” examines the confluence of diversity and anti-blackness in representations of Miami, Florida.

Through a concurrent analysis of representations of Miami and immigration policy, urban renewal ordinances, and demographic data, she argues that celebratory monikers of Miami as a global, diverse city obfuscate and maintain anti-black practices including residential segregation, biased detention of émigrés, and inequitable distribution of resources. She suggests that focusing on the understudied archive of “Miami literature” demonstrates how the socio-political regulation of cultural difference informs processes of self-fashioning and representation in a diverse, hierarchal society. She situates Miami as a harbinger for the rest of the increasingly diverse nation and suggests that further examination of Miami will help scholars interpret cultural transformations on a national scale.

Scotti M. Norman is a doctoral candidate in anthropology. Her dissertation, “Cultural Transformation Through Revitalization: Taki Onqoy and Early Spanish Rule (Chicha-Soras Valley, Peru),” investigates the sixteenth-century Taki Onqoy revitalization movement in highland Peru, which preached rejection of Spanish culture and religion in favor of a return to worship of local landscape deities. Her project investigates the politicization and contestation of “religion” in early Spanish colonial context (1532–1581). Combining analysis of primary sources and documents from the 1500s with intensive scientific archaeological investigation, she argues that Taki Onqoy was adopted selectively by Andean people. Her research investigates religious resistance and indigenous revitalization from a local perspective, providing insights into how local peoples actively reinterpreted colonialist ideologies and incorporated colonial actors and institutions into local politics.

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Michael W. Purvis is the Warren Center’s Visiting Graduate Student Fellow from Queen’s University Belfast. His dissertation, “Moving Images: Contemporary Trajectories of Latin American Cinema,” draws from cultural studies scholars Pierre Bourdieu and Pascale Casanova to understand how films from Latin America are distributed, received, and ultimately canonized. It analyzes how films accumulate prestige and reach audiences through the global film festival circuit, but also acknowledges that films travel and acquire recognition through alternative infrastructures, including nationally funded festivals and cinema chains within Latin America, and through formal and informal platforms online. By looking at the globally differentiated consumption of national urban audiences, and changing consumption patterns occasioned by algorithm culture online, he argues that contemporary approaches towards historicisation and canon formation cannot reflect the multitude of ways in which films reach audiences and consolidate reputations, and that the concept of the regional cinematic canon itself may be under threat.

Kanetha B. Wilson is a doctoral candidate in sociology. Her dissertation, “Survivorship in Women of Color: An Examination of Psychosocial Resources in the Experience of Black Women with Breast Cancer,” takes an intersectional approach to understand the significance of different social contexts after women are diagnosed with a gendered illness.

She is exploring ways that social support and personal identity affect decisions and coping strategies for black women with breast cancer. Black women die at much higher rates from breast cancer than white women. This racial gap has persisted for decades, yet public discourse on this subject is sparse and academic research is underdeveloped. Her research will help provide better understanding of the mechanisms behind racial health disparities, especially those that cannot be explained in terms of sociodemographic and biological variations such as income, education, tumor type, and stage of diagnosis.

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Coming Events 2016/17

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elow is a list of some of our currently scheduled public programs. Additional details, as well as a complete list of seminars and activities, are posted on our website. For the most up-to-date information regarding Warren Center programs, sign up for our weekly email newsletter at vanderbilt.edu/rpw_ center/mailinglist.php.

2016 Southern Festival of Books presented by Humanities Tennessee

Fort Negley: A Symbol of the Struggle for Civil Rights in Nashville

October 14–16, 2016

November 5, 2016

This year marks the one-hundredth anniversary of the Pulitzer Prize. We are cosponsoring a series of speakers at the book festival who will either be discussing topics related to the Pulitzer Prize or who are former Pulitzer Prize winners themselves.

Annette Gordon-Reed, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family and 2015 winners in Breaking News Photography, Robert Cohen and David Carson, will be among the speakers.

The Tennessee Historical Society, the Fort Negley Visitors Center and Park, and the Warren Center will host a one-day program at Fort Negley Visitors Center drawing attention to the role that the fort has played in the lives of African Americans in our city as both a very tangible site for freedom during the U.S. Civil War, and now, as an enduring emblem for the fight for justice and equality over many generations.

Harry C. Howard Jr. Lecture

THATCamp

February 2, 2017, 4:00 p.m.

October 28–29, 2016

Speaker: Quiara Alegría Hudes, noted playwright and Shapiro Distinguished Professor of Writing and Theater at Wesleyan University

Speaker: Amanda Visconti, assistant professor (Libraries) and digital humanities specialist at Purdue University The Warren Center, in conjunction with the Center for Digital Humanities, the Center for Second Language Studies, and the Curb Center for Art, Enterprise, and Public Policy, will be hosting Vanderbilt’s fifth annual THATCamp (The Humanities and Technology).

Noah Warren Wallace Stegner Fellow, Stanford University, and 2015 Yale Younger Poets Winner

Hailed for her work’s exuberance, intellectual rigor, and rich imagination, her plays and musicals have been performed around the world. They are Water by the Spoonful, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Drama; In the Heights, winner of the Tony Award for Best Musical and Pulitzer finalist; Elliot, A Soldier’s Fugue, another Pulitzer finalist; Daphne’s Dive; The Good Peaches; Miss You Like Hell; and The Happiest Song Plays Last.

November 1, 2016, 7:00 p.m.

Reading from his most recent book of poetry entitled The Destroyer in the Glass. Co-sponsored with the Creative Writing Program’s Gertrude and Harold Vanderbilt Visiting Writers Series.

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2017/18 Warren Center Faculty Fellowship Opportunities

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he 2017/18 Faculty Fellows Program, co-directed by Laura Carpenter (associate professor of sociology) and Catherine Molineux (associate professor of history), is entitled “Telling Stories: Modes, Media, and Meanings.” The seminar will explore innovative scholarly and popular approaches to telling stories emerging from the various humanistic disciplines and consider how these new approaches reframe the politics and ethics of storytelling.

Taking a humanistic, interdisciplinary approach to pressing empirical, theoretical, and methodological issues associated with storytelling has the potential to deepen understanding of what makes some stories “tell” or compel. Members of the seminar may explore questions such as the following: • How do different modes of telling stories— e.g. literary, scholarly, journalistic, dramatic, oratorical, artistic, or cartographic—work and what do they accomplish?

• What is the relationship between these traditional storytelling modes and emerging modes, such as computer-generated worlds or digital storytelling?

• In what ways do media matter? In addition to oral, aural, print, and visual media of many kinds, Warren Center Fellows may consider the stories told by mixed forms (e.g., museum exhibitions, statistics, material culture, the natural world, graphic novels, narrative medicine, or big data).

The Warren Center will sponsor a Visiting Fellow with expertise in the area of study, in addition to selected members of the Vanderbilt faculty. Information regarding the internal and external application process can be obtained from the Warren Center or its website, vanderbilt.edu/rpw_center.

Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities VU Station B 351534 2301 Vanderbilt Place Nashville, TN 37235-1534

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The Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities Warren Center Staff Edward H. Friedman, director Mona C. Frederick, executive director Terry Tripp, activities coordinator, Letters editor Joy Ramirez, seminar coordinator Letters is the newsletter of the Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities at Vanderbilt University, VU Station B #351534, 2301 Vanderbilt Place, Nashville, Tennessee 37235-1534, (615) 343-6060, Fax (615) 343-2248.

Statement of Purpose Established under the sponsorship of the College of Arts and Science in 1987 and named the Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities in 1989 in honor of Robert Penn Warren, Vanderbilt alumnus class of 1925, the center promotes interdisciplinary research and study in the humanities, social sciences, and, when appropriate, natural sciences. Members of the Vanderbilt community representing a wide variety of specializations take part in the Warren Center’s programs, which are designed to intensify and increase interdisciplinary discussion of academic, social, and cultural issues.

In compliance with federal law, including the provisions of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Title IX of the Education Amendment of 1972, Sections 503 and 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) of 1990, the ADA Amendments Act of 2008, Executive Order 11246, the Vietnam Era Veterans Readjustment Assistance Act of 1974 as amended by the Jobs for Veterans Act, and the Uniformed Services Employment and Reemployment Rights Act, as amended, and the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act of 2008, Vanderbilt University does not discriminate against individuals on the basis of their race, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, religion, color, national or ethnic origin, age, disability, military service, covered veteran status, or genetic information in its administration of educational policies, programs, or activities; admissions policies; scholarship and loan programs; athletic or other university-administered programs; or employment. In addition, the university does not discriminate against individuals on the basis of their gender expression, consistent with the university’s nondiscrimination policy. Inquiries or complaints should be directed to the Equal Opportunity, Affirmative Action, and Disability Services Department, Baker Building, PMB 401809, 2301 Vanderbilt Place, Nashville, TN 37240-1809. Telephone (615) 322-4705 (V/TDD); Fax (615) 343-4969.

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