ANNUAL REPORT
2017–2018
A YEAR IN REVIEW
3 a year in review
The Mellon Sawyer Seminar “Grounding the Ecocritical: Materializing Wastelands and Living On in the Middle East,” organized by Anne-Marie McManus (Jewish, Islamic, and Near Eastern Languages and Cultures) and Nancy Reynolds (History; Jewish, Islamic, and Near Eastern Languages and Cultures; and Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies), presented speakers on topics related to spaces characterized by multiple layers of material and environmental degradation, ruin and decay, as well as the forms of life that inhabit them. In October 2017, guest lecturer Elizabeth DeLoughrey, UCLA, spoke on “Submarine Futures of the Anthropocene,” which tied together ideas about environmental humanities, critical ocean studies, Caribbean poetry and human response to sea-level rise, particularly by focusing on the submarine sculptures of Jason deCaires Taylor. See more on Materializing Wastelands on page 4. The Banker by Jason deCaires Taylor, Underwater Museum of Art, Mexico. Photograph courtesy of the artist
02 LETTER FROM THE DIRECTOR 4 a year in review
04 HUMAN TIES 12 DIVIDED CITY INITIATIVE
A YEAR IN REVIEW
18 REDEFINING DOCTORAL EDUCATION IN THE HUMANITIES
20 EVENTS & OUTREACH 28 FELLOWS
40 FACULTY RESEARCH SUPPORT 44 MINORS 46 GIVING OPPORTUNITIES
34 WEIL EARLY CAREER FELLOWS
29 FACULTY FELLOWS
29 ‘HOW WE LISTEN SHAPES HOW WE VIEW THE WORLD’: THE RADIO DRAMA IN POST-WWII GERMANY In the decades after World War II, the citizens of West Germany and Austria tuned in to narrative radio dramas, or Hörspiel, to reckon with their fascist past and imagine their democratic future, says German studies scholar Caroline Kita.
30 WHAT DO LATINXS AND ASIAN AMERICANS HAVE IN COMMON? LOOK TO THEIR LITERATURE Santo Domingo, May 1965, during the U.S. invasion of the Dominican Republic. Two months earlier, U.S. combat troops officially landed in Vietnam. The graffiti expresses a Latin-Asian solidarity against Cold War intervention: Yankees out of Vietnam. Literature scholar Long Le-Khac writes that Latinx and Asian American literatures reflect shared artistic practices, histories and social challenges.
31 DISOBEDIENT READING: A LONG LOOK OVER BLACK LIFE In his new book, scholar Jeffrey McCune adopts the practice of “reading” — or giving a “long look over” — from queer black culture to newly scrutinize topics such as neo-slave narratives, homophobia in hip-hop, anti-black police and state violence.
32 WRITING A NEW KIND OF WESTERN MUSIC Composer Christopher Stark’s chamber opera “From the Field” is informed by historical literature and images from the American West, including Dorothea Lange’s photographs for the Farm Security Administration.
33 REMEMBERING THE GERMAN ‘HOLOCAUST BY BULLETS’ IN BELARUS During World War II, Belarus lost nearly all of its Jewish population to the Nazis’ favored method of extermination in the Soviet territories: mass shootings near the cities and towns where they lived. Historian Anika Walke studies the effect of war and genocide on its survivors.
35 DO MICROBES HAVE POLITICS? A cholera outbreak in Zambia in 2017 undoes a progressive experiment with urban governance and reverses the ruling party’s comfortable hold on power. Urban humanities scholars Samuel Shearer and Waseem-Ahmed Bin-Kasim highlight the historical and contemporary politics of the urban microbiome.
36 KEEP IT MOVING: TRANSIENCE, DEBILITY AND THE MANAGEMENT OF HOMELESSNESS Public transportation areas have increasingly incorporated principles of “defensive urban architecture.” But such locations have long been part of the infrastructure of homeless services. What is the effect on people who are homeless, inquires Terrance Wooten, when the environment itself is hostile to them?
37 KLING UNDERGRADUATE HONORS FELLOWS 38 GRADUATE STUDENT FELLOWS
TABLE OF CONTENTS
2 a year in review
This year, the rich diversity and kinetic vibrancy of the humanities at Washington University in St. Louis were on full-color display. It began with 1,600 first-year students stepping onto campus in August 2017, having read Frankenstein as part of the Common Reading program. They helped launch us into three semesters of activities — lectures, film screenings, performances and art exhibits — celebrating the 200th anniversary of Mary Shelley’s enduring literary work. And the year closed in late spring as scholars and activists, who have been involved over the past four years with the Divided City initiative, shared the results of their endeavors in a two-day workshop, “A Compendium of the Divided City.” Betwixt and between, and as the pages of this Year in Review detail, there was never a dull moment. A packed calendar of lectures, conferences and exhibits organized by the humanities center and by humanities departments and programs ran from August through May. As the Human Ties essays that begin this report show, each gathering brought to the fore a topic that begs further interrogation: What are the costs of environmental destruction and the erosion of trust (“On Uncertainty: Fake News, Post-Truth and the Question of Judgment in Syria,” April 19)? Will we learn from our past when it comes to urban policy (“Eminent Domain/Displaced,” October 6)? How can a 19th-century novel color our understanding of today’s urgent social,
scientific and technological questions (Frankenstein at 200 Conference, October 13)? How can the hidden consequences of racism shape a society (“‘The Greatest Outrage of the Century’: White Violence and Black Protest in America,” November 8)? By hosting these discussions in a public forum, we are able to draw scholars, students, activists and community members into important exchanges that spark understanding, connections, activism and new questions. Several particularly memorable events galvanized the humanities both on and off campus this year. Sara Ahmed’s McLeod Memorial Lecture on Higher Education, “The Institutional as Usual: Diversity, Utility and the University,” packed the house and contributed in inestimable ways to critical conversations about diversity and inclusion. Anne-Marie McManus and Nancy Reynolds’ Mellon Sawyer Seminar, “Grounding the Ecocritical: Materializing Wastelands and Living On in the Middle East,” brought a range of outstanding scholar-visitors to campus and generated exciting new conversations between the humanities, social sciences and STEM fields about the environment, “wastelands,” and the troubling and troubled past and present of the region we call “the Middle East.” And campus and community came together yet again to participate in a two-day festival of art and ideas in late April. “Dwell in Other Futures,” organized by our
associate director, Rebecca Wanzo, along with independent artist Gavin Kroeber and Tim Portlock, associate professor of art in the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts, explored through fiction, art, performance, music and presentation “alternative visions of the St. Louis to come.” It was a feast of and for the urban humanities. Another highlight of the year for us was having two postdoctoral fellows “in house,” thanks to the generous support of the Mark Steinberg Weil Early Career Fellows program. Samuel Shearer (PhD, Anthropology, Duke University) and Terrance Wooten (PhD, American Studies, University of Maryland) were our top choices in an international, interdisciplinary search in the urban and public humanities. Their contributions to the intellectual life of the humanities center, particularly to our work on the Divided City, have been extraordinary. That both are moving on to tenure-track positions (Wooten to the University of California, Santa Barbara and Shearer to Washington University, after completing the second year of his post-doc) is testament to their academic excellence and, I suppose, to our very good judgment! We look forward to future opportunities to include postdoctoral fellows in our community of humanities fellows. Finally, we were extremely fortunate this year to receive funding from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation in support of two initiatives. The first involves reimagining PhD training in
A LETTER FROM THE DIRECTOR
WE ARE ABLE TO DRAW SCHOLARS, STUDENTS, ACTIVISTS AND COMMUNITY MEMBERS INTO IMPORTANT EXCHANGES.
the humanities and builds from the important foundational work we accomplished with funding from an NEH Next Generation Planning Grant in 2016–17. The five-year, $1.5 million grant from Mellon for Faculty for the Next Generation: Towards New Models of PhD Training in the Humanities will allow us to move toward transformative change in how we prepare our graduate students for the multiplicity of career outcomes they will encounter. The second initiative is the Divided City — the center’s collaborative urban humanities project with the Sam Fox School. We learned in June 2017 that we had been awarded $1 million to extend the Divided City for four additional years, with the goal of ensuring institutional sustainability. We will be providing new opportunities in design pedagogy for humanities graduate students; building stronger curricular bridges between the humanities, architecture and urban design; and supporting humanistic research on the built environment that prioritizes collaboration around innovative knowledge production, community engagement and new training sites (local and global). The center is extremely grateful for the Mellon Foundation’s generous support of these two humanities initiatives and for the unwavering support of Dean Barbara Schaal and Provost Holden Thorp, as we work to grow the humanities across our campus and throughout our community. But mostly, this incredible year of expansion and transformation is a product of the hard work, the good humor and the dedication of the center’s extraordinary staff. I’ll close with my profound gratitude to each and every one of them.
JEAN ALLMAN Director, Center for the Humanities J.H. Hexter Professor in the Humanities Department of African and African-American Studies
↓Photograph by WUSTL Photos
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4 a year in review
↑ “Return To Homs” by Pan Chaoyue/ Flickr CC BY 2.0
News of the civil war in Syria, which entered its seventh year in March, has pierced global awareness unevenly. Overwhelmed by seemingly never-ending waves of violence, authoritarianism and, in popular U.S. depictions, religious strife, the country has become visible through its rubble and images of the lifeless bodies of Syrian children. These sensationalizing flashes may provoke brief cries of outrage. Yet, they merely punctuate stretches of absence and a lack of understanding of the conflict in the global media. In the eyes of Western publics, Syria has become a wasteland. A wasteland in a region of waste — the Middle East.
THE LITTER OF POLITICAL WASTELANDS BY ANNE-MARIE MCMANUS AND NANCY Y. REYNOLDS MCMANUS IS AN ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF MODERN ARABIC LITERATURE AND CULTURE, AND REYNOLDS IS AN ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF HISTORY
HUMAN TIES
How and when do wasteland spaces become legible? Sociopolitical life in such spaces, despite being depicted as barren and homogenized, is nuanced and complex. This can become visible by tracing the waste it leaves behind. The discards of life in wastelands are material: the flows and residues of chemical and organic toxins, and the practices of collection and disposal for ruined domestic property, public infrastructure, garbage and food. Waste can equally be understood as the overlooked stuff that litters lived and imaginative worlds, such as jokes, rumors, sentiments, soap operas and local archives of wartime ephemera. Lastly, the flood of fake news in Syria, as elsewhere, forms another type of waste that fractures the possibility of knowing and judging what is true and thus threatens the formation of political communities. The political and epistemic consequences of the flood of news from Syria formed one case study of the Mellon Sawyer Seminar “Grounding the Ecocritical: Materializing Wastelands and Living On in the Middle East.” The seminar worked over the past year to reorganize common patterns of thought and scholarly production on the Middle East and elsewhere through the lens of wasted stuff and wasteland spaces. The guest speakers, who drew from a wide array of disciplines and case studies, followed networks of waste to expose accretions and sedimentations that are invisible in official histories or popular imaginaries. As Lisa Wedeen, a specialist on contemporary Syrian politics, showed, when we trace the buildup of proliferating junk knowledge online, in the media and in the imagination, Syria today shifts from a wasted, apolitical space to an exemplary site to grapple with the detritus of contemporary politics more broadly.
Paying attention to waste requires us to consider its many temporal lives, from the relatively short life of bread to the perdurance of discarded plastics in the ocean. What archives could such waste create? Literary scholar Elizabeth DeLoughrey took us to oceans to track underwater waste as part of migration and refugee narratives in Caribbean art and literature. As artists and activists repurpose waste into new “archives” of the present, we are invited to ask, to what kinds of community do these unconventional archives belong? What kinds of knowledge do they make possible? The longevity of plastic waste makes visible other time scales in the sea, juxtaposing the disappearance of refugee bodies with traces that remain: a flip-flop, a bottle. The possibilities of archiving waste, moreover, foreground the power of dissensus as a mode of politics, as the historian and anthropologist Ann Laura Stoler demonstrated in her seminar. Other seminars traced the visible and invisible “stuff” that floods and distorts landscapes: crude oil and chemical dispersants from an oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico; the buildup of depleted uranium as U.S. military waste in Iraq; the uncontrolled release of urban sewage into New York City’s creeks; heavy metals and toxins left behind in military target practice; the unequal distribution of radioactive and chemical waste in St. Louis from wartime military production. Disturbed landscapes hinder the lives of some species even as they permit new relationships and growth. Floods dissolve and disperse certain toxins, flushing others to distant surroundings; they displace people, nonhuman creatures, law and even narrative. In a lecture on narratives of the biblical Noah, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, a specialist in medieval English literature, reminded us of the dangers of “ark thinking” (who, and at what cost, decides what and who are preserved in a flood, or under climate change?) and invited us to consider new forms of refuge to be found in the flooded wastelands left behind. The “stuff” under study in the seminar tends to be overlooked because it is defined by what it is not: productive, useful, whole. By honing in on this negation, we set out to reframe geographies of power that connect the Middle East to the rest of the world.
EVENT: “ON UNCERTAINTY: FAKE NEWS, POST-TRUTH AND THE QUESTION OF JUDGMENT IN SYRIA” Lisa Wedeen the Mary R. Morton Professor of Political Science, University of Chicago
APRIL 19, 2018
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NO PLACE LIKE HOME: ST. LOUIS’ EMINENT DOMAIN HISTORY BY MARGARET GARB PROFESSOR OF HISTORY
In summer 2017, the city of St. Louis knocked down several dozen houses in St. Louis Place, a century-old neighborhood just north of downtown. The 99-acre site, once a workingclass black neighborhood, is destined to become the home of the National GeospatialIntelligence Agency, which is moving from its outdated offices south of the city. With $1.6 billion in federal dollars and more than 3,000 jobs at stake, St. Louis fought hard to keep the agency in the city.
EVENT: “WE LIVED HERE: A COMMUNITY PANEL” part of the exhibition Eminent Domain/Displaced
OCTOBER 7, 2017
↑ Photograph courtesy Preservation Research Office Collection
HUMAN TIES
EMINENT DOMAIN HAS PUSHED WHOLE COMMUNITIES OUT OF OUR COLLECTIVE MEMORY.
But many residents were angered and disappointed that city officials determined to replace their community with high-tech office buildings surrounded by parking lots and a high-security fence. Some longtime residents refused to sell their homes and businesses, necessitating the city to use eminent domain to acquire 44 contested properties. Eminent domain gives the government legal right to take private property for public use or to serve a public good. The government is required to compensate property owners at fair market value, which often is disputed. Even more controversial is the definition of the “public good.” Government has taken private property for the construction of schools, post offices and national parks. In the 2005 Kelo v. City of New London case, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that government can seize private property for a private business in an effort to boost tax revenues and economic development. All too often, the public good is equated with enhancing property values and filling government treasuries, while officials downgrade the interests of poor and AfricanAmerican communities. The rapid acquisition of land and housing in a struggling African-American neighborhood like St. Louis Place proved a grim reminder of urban renewal, the federal government’s mid 20th-century slum-clearance program that tore down working-class white and black neighborhoods in many major cities. With urban renewal, whole communities were displaced and erased from local history. Urban renewal’s early advocates believed the program would replace run-down tenements with modern housing and glass-sheathed office buildings. More often, cities got sports stadiums and urban malls, while low-income residents were moved into high-rise public housing. Poverty was shifted from one neighborhood to another. The historian Arnold R. Hirsch called the “renewal” of Chicago’s South Side, the “making of the second ghetto.” James Baldwin called it “Negro removal.”
St. Louis had a particularly rough urban renewal experience. Mill Creek Valley, a neighborhood of 20,000 families stretching through the city’s core, was flattened in the early 1960s. The neighborhood, one of the few open to African Americans under the city’s segregation codes, was home to black teachers, janitors, cooks, laundresses, railroad porters and musicians. There were shops, grocery stores, churches, saloons and a bank owned by African-American investors. The Booker T. Washington Theatre featured performances by Josephine Baker, Eubie Blake and Bessie Smith. But racial segregation crippled the community, pushing up rents and leading to deteriorated housing. A residential survey in 1958 found that more than half of the dwellings lacked indoor plumbing. Rats were a regular menace. On August 7, 1954, Mayor Raymond R. Tucker announced plans to demolish the commercial buildings and 5,600 residential units in Mill Creek Valley. His hope was that after the land was cleared, private investment would build a new modern neighborhood. Newspapers praised Tucker’s “bold vision.” The local NAACP supported the plan. City voters approved a $10 million bond issue to raze the neighborhood. It became one of the nation’s largest urban renewal projects. Tucker’s plan, coming as the city’s population peaked in 1950 at 856,796 people, was based on assumptions of continued population growth. That proved a mistake. Reinvestment was slow or not at all. The clearing left a vast wasteland that St. Louisans called “Hiroshima Flats.” Mill Creek Valley today is ballfields, a college sports stadium, Harris-Stowe State University, highway entrance ramps and an office park owned by an investment bank. It is St. Louis’ most famous forgotten neighborhood. The process through which Mill Creek Valley disappeared from the landscape and from the city’s collective memory was itself complex. That process of forgetting is also part of St. Louis’ history. Eminent domain has pushed whole communities out of our collective memory. Americans commemorate some historic places. But we rarely recognize the urban neighborhoods that were forged under the weight of segregation, molded into vibrant working-class communities and then demolished. As we continue a long American tradition of debating the public good, we could commemorate the neighborhoods erased from the landscape, the places that once were the hearts of American cities.
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THE MONSTER WHO WILL NOT LEAVE US
a year in review
BY HENRY I. SCHVEY
PROFESSOR OF DRAMA AND COMPARATIVE LITERATURE Brought to life by a 19-year-old woman, the myth of Frankenstein has grown in popularity and significance ever since its remarkable birth at a ghost story contest held at the Villa Diodati near Lake Geneva in 1816. Young Mary Shelley was unable to sleep after attending a conversation as a “devout but nearly silent listener” about reanimating life from dead tissue. Lying in bed, she began to conceive her terrifying tale in a drowsy state of half-dream, half-wakefulness: “I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together. I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life, and stir with an uneasy, half vital motion.” Today, the creation from her book Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus has become ubiquitous — the monster is with us in a fruit-flavored breakfast cereal (Frankenberry), in Herman Munster’s smile and Boris Karloff’s neck-bolted leer, in camp musicals like The Rocky Horror Picture Show and in affectionate parodies like Young Frankenstein. It is also visible in fears concerning human cloning and genetically modified foods (“Frankenfoods”); and in discussions of global warming, scientific hubris, Black Lives Matter, atheism and feminist theory. And these are far from all the myriad associations we have with Frankenstein, arguably the central myth of the past two centuries. Now, 200 years after the novel’s publication in 1818, we still employ Mary Shelley’s dream vision to interpret and explain our world today — but why? The world of Frankenstein is a secular world, where Science has seized the levers of existence from the divine hand. The first of many theatrical adaptations of Frankenstein (appearing in 1823, a mere five years after publication) spoke clearly to the fear that man had usurped the sphere once rightly held by God. The adaptation’s title, significantly, was Presumption.
However, despite her scientist’s prowess in creating life, Shelley’s novel also recognizes the very human weakness at Dr. Frankenstein’s core. He has managed to create new life from inanimate material and initially contemplates the perfection of his achievement: “His limbs were in proportion, and I had selected his features as beautiful. Beautiful!” But no sooner has he given birth to his miraculous creation than he flees in terror, unable to “endure the aspect of the being I had created.” Godlike, Dr. Frankenstein has succeeded in creating life, but having done so, he retreats fecklessly back into his humanity. As the novel’s subtitle, The Modern Prometheus, suggests, the character of Victor Frankenstein may be viewed either as heroic (Prometheus valiantly stole fire from the gods and bestowed it on man) or as an overreacher who has gone beyond his human limits and must be punished for it, just as Prometheus was horribly punished by Zeus for his transgression. Perhaps Shelley’s greatest literary coup was her decision to leave the monster nameless; by so doing, she created an enigmatic figure who combines both innocence and monstrosity. At once childlike and demonic, the Creature can be read as both Adam and Satan. The novel’s epigraph, from Milton’s Paradise Lost, reminds us of the Creature’s essential innocence: Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay To mould Me man? Did I solicit thee: From darkness to promote me?— Indeed, 21st-century audiences are far more likely to see the Creature as an innocent naïf who has been irresponsibly abandoned by his father/creator and rejected by society. Despite his heroic efforts to educate himself and act generously, he is mercilessly mocked and mistreated because of his physical appearance. Only after his complete rejection, both by his father/maker and by society, does the Creature turn to violence and retribution. We can readily understand how the Frankenstein myth plays into contemporary notions of Otherness and racial victimization. Today, the myth is familiar even to people who have never heard of Mary Shelley or read her novel. Indeed, the common confusion in calling the Creature “Frankenstein,” the name of his maker, is perhaps the greatest testament to the story’s total immersion in our popular imagination. In our own fantasies, the scientist and his lonely creation are two indistinguishable halves of a single human whole. And that is just the way its author would have wanted us to see her profoundly ambiguous, always evocative creation.
FROM DARKNESS TO PROMOTE ME?
TO MOULD ME MAN? DID I SOLICIT THEE:
DID I REQUEST THEE, MAKER, FROM MY CLAY
HUMAN TIES
EVENT:
FRANKENSTEIN AT 200 CONFERENCE
OCTOBER 13, 2017 9
10 a year in review
‘A TIME TO LIFT ONE’S VOICE’: THE EAST ST. LOUIS RIOT IN A MIGRATION PERSPECTIVE BY DOUGLAS J. FLOWE ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF HISTORY In the summer of 1900, Arthur J. Harris, a recent black migrant to New York City’s Tenderloin neighborhood, confronted plainclothes policeman Robert Thorpe as he attempted to arrest his girlfriend on the street. Unaware Thorpe was a police officer, Harris fatally slashed him with a blade during the confrontation. As news of the incident spread through Manhattan, white residents descended upon black blocks, tenement buildings and establishments seeking revenge. The New York Tribune compared the ensuing riot to similar recent violence in the South: “It was a scene on very much the same order as took place a few days ago in New-Orleans. … The shouting of the men, the shrieking of the women, the lamentations of the children, the shooting of the revolvers and crashing of windows all made a perfect pandemonium.” Raging mobs stopped and assaulted black citizens on sidewalks, dragged them from streetcars and pummeled them on the asphalt. A white bystander later recalled “a squad of police” that “marched up the street and made a demonstration against every negro in sight.” Likewise, a police officer and a mob of more than 50 people clubbed Harry L. Craig unconscious in the street. “The officers led the crowd,” Craig recounted, “and
did not interfere when others were beating me.” Only a sudden rain shower early the next morning stopped the rioting for a day, but fighting returned a number of times over the next couple of years. In the wake of the initial carnage, black and white commentators articulated scathing indictments of police and white rioters and formed the Citizens’ Protective League to “punish their assailants” and follow through on indictments. Some black residents packed up and left the ramshackle housing of central Manhattan and began an exodus to newly built constructions in Harlem, where they would create a more racially exclusive black mecca over the next few decades. And others responded with bricks, bottles and guns to protect their neighborhoods and businesses, defend themselves and launch counter-offensives. Seventeen years later, similar lawlessness erupted in East St. Louis, Illinois, and a correspondingly lopsided exchange took place that forced black migrants to adapt on rocky terrain. Like many industrializing cities, St. Louis and the surrounding area had received thousands of African-American migrants each week in the spring of 1917 seeking better-paying jobs and improved
housing, and fleeing Jim Crow restrictions and violence farther south. Following a long list of labor-related riots across the country, the conflict in East St. Louis flared as striking white laborers blamed black newcomers for threatening their bargaining power against exploitative industrial managers, and they decided to take their anger out on men, women and children. At one point, more than 3,000 white men ravaged black sections of the city by destroying buildings and killing nearly 200 residents by some estimates. Much like black New Yorkers, black East St. Louisans responded to the rioting defensively and offensively when possible, and some began an exodus to other cities of the Midwest and North, hoping to land someplace safer. Nationwide, blacks called for federal actions against racial violence and questioned the meaning of American democracy. Within days, Marcus Garvey declared it was “a time to lift one’s voice against the savagery of a people who claim to be the dispensers of democracy,” while New York City’s NAACP organized a silent protest march in solidarity with East St. Louis’ black residents. Migration from south to north invariably involved black migrants in a process
HUMAN TIES
that included new freedoms to participate in a likely prosperous commercial economy through prospects of industrial and service employment. Yet it also thrust them into the fast-shifting meteorology of urban racial politics, and it compelled the usage of old and new modes of coping, resistance and collective action. Far from isolated, the rioting in East St. Louis represented a peak in instances of such violence. Like the Tenderloin riot did for black New Yorkers, East St. Louis caused a moment of black national simultaneity and had a part in shaping the subsequent New Negro movement and selfdefense ideologies of the 1920s and beyond. Although separated by nearly two decades, when considered together, these two events represent important nodes on a continuum of racial violence and black resistance and adaptation in migration. Both incidents illustrate the circumstances migrants faced in industrializing urban centers in the early 20th century and provide a model for understanding the interplay and exchange that interregional movement enacted.
↑Saint Louis Star. Refugees, East St. Louis, Illinois, ca. 1917. W. E. B. Du Bois Papers (MS 312). Special Collections and University Archives, University of Massachusetts Amherst Libraries.
EVENT: “‘THE GREATEST OUTRAGE OF THE CENTURY’: WHITE VIOLENCE AND BLACK PROTEST IN AMERICA” Crystal N. Feimster Associate Professor, African-American Studies, History, and American Studies, Yale University
NOVEMBER 8, 2017
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THE DIVIDED CITY: AN URBAN HUMANITIES INITIATIVE The Divided City, launched in fall 2014, is an urban humanities initiative in partnership with The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and Washington University’s Center for the Humanities and Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts. This four-year multipronged research, education and community project combines the disciplinary strengths of scholars and professionals in the humanities, architecture and urban design. In 2018, the Divided City initiative made significant strides in forging a vibrant and sustainable community of humanities, architecture, landscape architecture and urban design scholars, who share a deep commitment to public engagement and to research and teaching on urban segregation.
OĞUZ ALYANAK
WEI LIU
SOCIOCULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY
SUSTAINABLE URBANISM WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY
Produced a short ethnographic film on Strasbourg’s public housing courtyards, with a particular emphasis on youth socialization in these spaces.
MARK BEIRN HISTORY WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY Researched material related to airport infrastructure in municipal and colonial archives in London, Paris and Istanbul and visited environmentally significant sites of the First World War.
LAUREN CROSSLANDMARR CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY Studied how ItalianMuslims navigate a politically charged and socially divided foodscape.
2018 SUMMER GRADUATE RESEARCH FELLOWS
ELIZABETH EIKMANN
This competitive research fellowship for graduate students in the humanities, humanistic social sciences, architecture, urban design and landscape architecture supports graduate students in the St. Louis area working on urban segregation. The newest cohort, listed to the right, conducted research during summer 2018 and then joined a community of graduate students and faculty with similar research interests for programming during the academic year.
AMERICAN STUDIES SAINT LOUIS UNIVERSITY Explored the social, cultural and political meanings embedded in images of late 19th-century St. Louis.
Completed research on a project related to the design of cities that are more environmentally integrated with natural systems, healthier, less dependent on scarce natural resources, and more socially just.
SANTIAGO ROZO-SÁNCHEZ SPANISH AND LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY Furthered his research on contemporary Latin American cultural production, cultural theory, neoliberal culture and world literature theory.
CINDY N. REED AMERICAN STUDIES SAINT LOUIS UNIVERSITY Pursued her work on 20th-century AfricanAmerican literature situated in cities.
ENA SELIMOVIC COMPARATIVE LITERATURE WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY Focused on the newly reconfigured discourses on racialized and minority subjectivity emerging through migration, especially in the United States.
SHENG YAN ARCHITECTURE WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY Worked on the morphology of cities as geopolitical phenomena, with specific focus on the impacts of transnational infrastructure building initiatives on local communities in emerging economies.
DIVIDED CITY INITIATIVE
SUMMER CITY SEMINAR
THE SUMMER CITY SEMINAR SHOWCASED THE VAST BODY OF WORK EMERGING FROM THE DIVIDED CITY INITIATIVE.
On May 10 and 11, the Divided City hosted its third and final summertime workshop series, “Summer City Seminar: A Compendium of the Divided City.” Since its inception in 2016, the Divided City’s Summer City Seminar series has provided a forum through which creative practitioners and scholars across disciplines share ideas, research methods and theories on issues of urban segregation in the United States and abroad. The Summer City Seminar showcased the vast body of work emerging from the Divided City initiative. The seminar ran over two days at the Missouri History Museum and Washington University and featured conversations and presentations on the Divided City’s community engagement, curriculum development and research projects. Panelists included representatives from every Divided City faculty collaborative grant project since 2014: Charting the American Bottom, Mapping LGBTQ St. Louis, Music and Segregation, Oral Histories of Ferguson, Dwell in Other Futures, Technologies of Segregation, Memorializing Displacement, A Centennial of a Divided City: East St. Louis and the 1917 Race Riot, Segregation by Design, Inclusion and Neighborhood Resilience, Citizen Space, Inequality and the City, Tale of Two Cities, Mean Streets, Noon in the City, and Mobility for All. On the first day, participants also celebrated the opening of the Divided City’s exhibit, “Visualizing Urban History: St. Louis’ Mill Creek Valley,” at the Missouri History Museum.
^^ Launched at the Missouri History Museum in May 2018 Over the course of two days, panelists shared an overview of their projects and also addressed a series of questions about challenges, boundaries and the future of their work. Noëleen Murray, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Chair in Critical Architecture and Urbanism and director of the City Institute at the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa, joined the group as an outside respondent. Murray helped generate constructive review, conversation and future planning in response to the final panel. The 2018 Summer City Seminar was a chance for faculty, students and community members to reflect on the past four years of the Divided City initiative by looking back on all the work that has been accomplished. From digital archives and maps to exhibits and curriculum, the 2018 Summer City Seminar covered the compendium of work of the Divided City initiative.
during the Summer City Seminar, the “Visualizing Urban History” exhibit traces the history of Mill Creek Valley, a St. Louis neighborhood demolished with federal urban renewal funds in the early 1960s. The exhibit aims to highlight both the history of the neighborhood and the sources used by urban scholars to excavate a vanished place.
The exhibit consists of eight large banners, each featuring images of sources used to track the history of the neighborhood and text describing the sources and the neighborhood. The exhibit is accompanied by a catalog and an interactive digital map. The banners are portable and can be moved to other sites, such as local libraries and schools.
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FACULTY COLLABORATIVE GRANTS Through four competitions we have awarded 19 Faculty Collaborative Grants. They have been foundational to the Divided City’s efforts to build bridges between the humanities and architecture and between Washington University and other institutions. Grant categories include collaborative research, interdisciplinary curriculum development and community engagement. In April 2017, six new grants were awarded.
^^ Group conversation during “The Autumnal City:
Conversations with Samuel R. Delany,” presented as a part of Dwell in Other Futures: Art/Urbanism/ Midwest. .ZACK, St. Louis. April 27, 2018. From left to right: Rebecca Wanzo, Terrance Wooten, Treasure Shields Redmond, Sophia Al- Maria, Samuel R. Delany. Photograph by David Johnson
DIVIDED CITY INITIATIVE
DWELL IN OTHER FUTURES TIM PORTLOCK
ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF ART WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY
REBECCA WANZO
ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF WOMEN, GENDER AND SEXUALITY STUDIES WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY
GAVIN KROEBER
DIRECTOR STUDIO FOR ART & URBANISM (NEW YORK CITY)
This project uses legendary science fiction writer Samuel Delany’s Dhalgren as a prompt for exploring issues of futurity in the Midwest. In April 2018, the collaborators held a symposium with other institutions in order to bring together local and national artists and thinkers to explore the idea of urban futurism in the Midwest.
A CENTENNIAL OF A DIVIDED CITY: EAST ST. LOUIS AND THE 1917 RACE RIOT JESSE VOGLER
ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY
KARLA SCOTT
ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR AND ASSISTANT DEAN FOR DIVERSITY AND INCLUSION SAINT LOUIS UNIVERSITY
The grant supported a two-day symposium on the centennial of the 1917 East St. Louis Race Riots, which attracted international and local scholars, as well as leading community activists and artists. There were more than 100 participants. Local high school student projects on the 1917 riots were featured during the afternoon.
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INEQUALITY AND THE CITY: MAPPING THE ECOLOGY OF URBAN SEGREGATION CAITLYN COLLINS 16
ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF SOCIOLOGY WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY
a year in review
PATTY HEYDA
ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF URBAN DESIGN AND ARCHITECTURE WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY
DAVID CUNNINGHAM PROFESSOR OF SOCIOLOGY WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY
The grant provides support for a unique cross-school initiative to develop a team-taught capstone course for undergraduate students in sociology and architecture/urban design. The course will examine the history, (re)development and lived experience of urban segregation in St. Louis. It also will serve as the springboard for a multi-method, interdisciplinary, longitudinal study of segregation that will be institutionalized as a new research unit between schools (housed in the Department of Sociology) called the Social Inequality Lab. The first iteration of the course will be taught in spring 2019.
INFRASTRUCTURAL OPPORTUNISM: MOBILITY FOR ALL BY ALL LINDA C. SAMUELS
ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF URBAN DESIGN WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY
MATTHEW BERNSTINE LECTURER OF URBAN DESIGN WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY
PENINA ACAYO
ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF COMMUNICATION DESIGN WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY
In the next decade, the St. Louis region could spend over $2.2 billion on an expansion of its MetroLink system. This interdisciplinary team of designers, writers, researchers and activists are partnering with the Bi-State Development Research Institute and Citizens for Modern Transit to experiment with an arts and designbased approach to building communitycentered ownership around this enormous infusion of resources. Infrastructural Opportunism: Mobility for All by All is aimed at leveraging this investment for a “transit ++” system generated by the people of the neighborhoods with the aim of increasing equity and access for all.
DIVIDED CITY INITIATIVE
TECHNOLOGIES OF SEGREGATION IN ITALIAN RENAISSANCE CITIES DANIEL BORNSTEIN PROFESSOR OF HISTORY WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY
SAUNDRA WEDDLE
PROFESSOR OF ARCHITECTURE DRURY UNIVERSITY VISITING PROFESSOR WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY
↓Photograph by Kathleen Fields/Center for the Humanities, Washington University
This project focuses on the cities of Cortona and Venice, whose differences of geography, history and scale offer revealing test cases for how the natural and built environment reflected and shaped social differentiation in pre-modern Italian cities. The project’s end product will be a collection of digital representations that incorporate text and images to document the relationship between the two cities.
TALE OF TWO CITIES: DOCUMENTING OUR DIVIDES I, II, III DENISE WARD-BROWN ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF ART WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY
The Divided City has supported three iterations of this course (fall 2015, fall 2016 and spring 2017). It is the first cross-listed class between the College of Art in the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts and American Culture Studies in Arts & Sciences. Because of the prior success of the course, the selection committee decided to provide partial support for the course for spring 2017. This year, Divided City funds will support a screening and panel discussion of The Interrupters, a film by director Steve James.
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18 a year in review
FACULTY FOR THE NEXT GENERATION $1.5 MILLION MELLON GRANT WILL HELP TO TRANSFORM PHD TRAINING
Each year, roughly one-third of humanities doctoral recipients will graduate to tenure-track positions. But a recent analysis of data from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation’s Graduate Education Survey found that those pursuing nonacademic careers actually report slightly higher levels of job satisfaction. This raises two questions. How are doctoral programs preparing these graduates for careers outside the tenure track? And how can we better support the faculty who lead these efforts? “One of the primary challenges we face, as faculty trying to prepare students for a range of career outcomes, is that most of us have only experienced a single career outcome: the tenure-track career at a research university,” says Jean Allman, director of the Center for the Humanities. “We don’t have the skill set we need to prepare the next generation for the job market they will face or the range of possible outcomes.” Over the past several years, Allman has helped to lead university efforts to explore new models of doctoral education and to transform perceptions of what it means to be a humanities scholar. In fall 2018, the Center for the Humanities began putting some of those ideas into practice, thanks to a $1.5 million Mellon Foundation grant to support Faculty for the Next Generation: Towards New Models of PhD Training in the Humanities. “Through the center, a group of faculty in the humanities have been working on an exciting set of initiatives in collaboration with the Career Center and the Graduate School, and they have had encouraging conversations with humanities department chairs and directors of graduate studies,” says Allman, who serves as principal investigator. “With this generous support, we are now in a position to move from additive or incremental change to transformative change,” Allman added. “We will be able to undertake substantive faculty training, to fund robust curricular innovation and to rethink one of the foundational pillars of humanities graduate education: the three-hour, discipline-specific seminar.”
BUILDING CAPACITY Support from the Mellon Foundation — which has awarded more than $15.4 million to Washington University since 1970 — builds on a series of faculty workshops and discussions that were sponsored as part of a 2016–17 National Endowment for the Humanities Next Generation grant. It also builds on an extensive review of Arts & Sciences doctoral programs that was led by William F. Tate, dean of the Graduate School, and on doctoral training innovations already being implemented through the Humanities Digital Workshop, directed by Joe Loewenstein, and the departments of Art History and Archaeology, Classics, and Comparative Literature, among others. “We now have access to 10 years of data on admissions selectivity and yield, enrollment, attrition, funding, years to completion and employment outcomes,” Allman says. “In other words, we have launched our efforts to reimagine humanities doctoral training with a very clear sense of where we have been, where we are now, and the disciplinary commonalities and differences among us.”
RDE INITIATIVE
← Photograph by WUSTL Photos
THE MELLON GRANT ENABLES THE CENTER FOR THE HUMANITIES TO IMPLEMENT FOUR KEY INITIATIVES: •
Faculty retreats to explore new skills as well as new teaching strategies designed to foster career diversity;
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Curricular innovation grants to support new pedagogical initiatives and to encourage collaboration across schools, departments and disciplines, as well as with neighboring institutions;
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Cross-training for humanities faculty, which will enable faculty to undertake course work in fields outside their own areas of expertise; and
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Studiolab communities for living and learning through a pilot series of yearlong, vertically integrated “studiolabs” organized around a particular theme or problem.
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THE INSTITUTIONAL AS USUAL: DIVERSITY, UTILITY AND THE UNIVERSITY
20 a year in review
BY SARA AHMED
SCHOLAR OF FEMINIST THEORY, QUEER THEORY, CRITICAL RACE THEORY AND POSTCOLONIALISM
OCTOBER 20 Self-identified “Feminist Killjoy” Sara Ahmed gave the 2017 James E. McLeod Memorial Lecture on Higher Education. Her talk drew from three distinct but related projects — her study of diversity, first presented in On Being Included (2012), her book in progress on “the uses of use” and her current research on complaint. Read on for a summary of her lecture.
Attending to the uses of use allows us to catch institutions as they are being built, to show how they work, to make them into building words or construction sites. Once assembled, it can seem that universities are as they are. Diversity work is the effort to transform what has already been assembled. You come to know how “being as they are” is work when your work is to change how things are. My arguments build upon work by Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Gloria Wekker, Jacqui M. Alexander and Heidi Mirza, who have offered powerful critiques of diversity in the academy as a way of building feminist of color and black feminist counter-institutional knowledge. Diversity work requires one to become conscious of use, confronting or bringing to the front what is often reproduced by receding into the background. Diversity workers are often reflective about how they do their work, about what words to use, how to make arguments, how to address different communities, because of the difficulty they have in getting through. One practitioner observes: “I would say that the term diversity is just used now because it’s more popular. You know it’s in the press so why would we have equal opportunities when we can just say it’s diversity.” We can “just say it’s diversity” if diversity is “just used now.” Use becomes a reason for use, the circularity of a logic transformed into a tool. Many practitioners suggested that diversity is “just used now” because of its affective qualities as a lighter, happy or positive term. As another practitioner describes: “Diversity obscures the issues… diversity is like a big shiny red apple, right, and it all looks wonderful, but if you actually cut into that apple there’s a rotten core in there, and you know that it’s actually all rotting away, and it’s not actually being addressed. It all looks wonderful but the inequalities aren’t being addressed.” Diversity might be used because of what it allows organizations not to address. If the word diversity might be used more, the word racism might be used less because it does more. Audre Lorde described so well how racism is heard as getting in the way of smooth communication. Any use of the word racism is heard as overuse. When words evoke histories that create friction, they catch attention, they sound louder. Just from contrasting the uses of words, we learn about institutional worlds. Diversity workers
← Photograph by WUSTL Photos
DIVERSITY WORK REQUIRES ONE TO BECOME CONSCIOUS OF USE, CONFRONTING OR BRINGING TO THE FRONT WHAT IS OFTEN REPRODUCED BY RECEDING INTO THE BACKGROUND.
EVENTS & OUTREACH
have a lot to teach us! Diversity workers are trying to transform institutional habits; they are thus trying to intervene in how things usually happen, to stop the flow of things, to deviate from the well-trodden paths. When diversity workers are employed by institutions, they are being appointed to transform their employers. Even when diversity workers are appointed by institutions, it does not mean that institutions are willing to be transformed. One practitioner describes: “It is a ‘banging your head against a brick wall’ job.” You sense how repetition becomes a sore point: You keep coming up against the same thing. The institution that appoints you can be what blocks your efforts. Perhaps your efforts are blocked not despite but through being an appointment. This is how: A job description is a wall description. Institutions are built from small acts of use, from uses of use, and how building blocks put together, over time, become walls, walls that enable some bodies to enter, stay put, progress — others, not. You come up against how use thickens like cement to form a wall when you enter organizations that are not intended for you, or when you try to transform organizations so they are more accommodating, or when you make a complaint about an abuse of power.
↑ Photograph by WUSTL Photos
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FACULTY BOOK CELEBRATION
a year in review
FEBRUARY 15 The publication of a monograph or significant creative work is a milestone in the career of an academic. The Center for the Humanities commemorates this achievement annually during the Faculty Book Celebration. The event recognizes Washington University faculty from across campus by displaying their recently published works and large-scale creative projects and inviting two campus authors and a guest lecturer to speak at a public gathering. In mid-February, the Center for the Humanities welcomed Nancy MacLean, the William H. Chafe Professor of History and Public Policy at Duke University, as its guest speaker. First, the humanities center partnered with Washington University Libraries to host the panel discussion “Mainstream and Extreme: White Nationalism, Masculinity and Racialized Violence from East St. Louis to Charlottesville.” MacLean, author of Behind the Mask of Chivalry: The Making of the Second Ku Klux Klan, was joined by the following Washington University faculty: Andrea Friedman, professor of history and women, gender and sexuality studies (moderator); David Cunningham, professor of sociology; Denise Ward-Brown, associate professor of art; and Rebecca Wanzo, associate professor of women, gender and sexuality studies. Alumna Keona Ervin, assistant professor of history, University of Missouri– Columbia, also joined the panel. Later in the afternoon, the Faculty Book Celebration kicked off with two brief talks by faculty members related to their new works. (On the following pages, read the excerpted talks by Corinna Treitel, associate professor of history, and Joanna Dee Das, assistant professor of dance.) MacLean gave her keynote lecture, “The Origins of Today’s Billionaire-Funded Radical Right and the Crisis of American Democracy.”
↑ Photograph by WUSTL Photos
EVENTS & OUTREACH
FACULTY SPEAKER CORINNA TREITEL
ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF HISTORY Eating Nature in Modern Germany: Food, Agriculture and Environment, c. 1870 to 2000 Cambridge University Press Eating Nature in Modern Germany explores German attempts to eat and farm naturally over the past 150 years — or to put it more poetically, it’s about German dreams of eating nature. It took me 11 years to research and write the book plus another two to publish it. What kept me going? I love puzzles, and this project had several. Two big ones were promiscuity and persistence. Natural foods and farming have a politically promiscuous history. In the Third Reich, several top Nazis, including Adolf Hitler, were vegetarians, and the state set up an organic herb garden at the Dachau concentration camp. Historically, however, these practices originated on the left. Eduard Baltzer, a radical Protestant minister and liberal, popularized the dream of eating naturally in the 1860s. After World War II, moreover, these practices were repurposed in East Germany, a communist state, to promote a healthy socialist life. Explaining this remarkable political promiscuity with the tools of a historian turned out to be quite a challenge.
Another puzzle involved understanding the persistence of “the natural temptation,” that is, the belief that turning to nature through food or farming could save Germans from the less desirable aspects of modernity, from pollution to cancer. In 1982, the German magazine Der Spiegel ran a cover story on “bio-foods” featuring a portrait of a person constituted entirely of fruits, vegetables and grains and implying that organic plant food (not meat!) builds firm and healthy flesh. Even today, the German Society for Nutrition, which sets nutritional advice for the entire country, still prescribes a diet drawn from the same wellspring. Of course, these are not solely German puzzles. Consider the United States. In 2006, the Organic Trade Association produced Grocery Store Wars, a film in which Cuke Skywalker and Princess Lettuce led an “organic rebellion” against the “dark side of the farm” headed up by Darth Tater, a synthetically fertilized potato. And while we’re all familiar with the stereotype of the left-leaning liberal who shops at Whole Foods, conservatives have also staked a claim. In 2006, Rod Dreher coined the term “crunchy cons” to describe his fellow “Birkenstocked Burkeans, gun-loving organic gardeners, evangelical free-range farmers, [and] right-wing nature lovers.” Find out how I solved these puzzles by reading the book!
← Photograph by WUSTL Photos
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FACULTY SPEAKER 24 a year in review
JOANNA DEE DAS
ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF DANCE Katherine Dunham: Dance and the African Diaspora Oxford University Press I would like to start with a simple question: How do artists affect social change? Anecdote one: In July 1950, the world-famous choreographer Katherine Dunham and her dance company, often considered the first black dance company in the world, arrived in São Paulo, Brazil, for the start of their first tour of Latin America. Upon arrival, she received disturbing news. The elegant Esplanada Hotel had canceled her reservation. When her white husband, John Pratt, went to inquire, the manager told Pratt that they did not accept black patrons. Dunham decided to file a lawsuit. Within 48 hours, the incident made front-page headlines in all of Brazil’s major newspapers, and São Paolo residents protested in the streets. Brazil’s legislature passed Law No. 1390 against racial discrimination within a year. And today, when you go to Brazil, you see signs posted in every elevator announcing that racial discrimination is illegal.
I’ll ask again: How do artists affect social change? Anecdote two: On that same Latin American tour, Dunham’s choreography, based on her ethnographic research in the Caribbean combined with her training in ballet and modern dance, had an important political impact. In Peru, Nicomedes Santa Cruz asserted that Dunham’s 1951 show in Lima was “the first positive publicly staged demonstration of blackness in Peru.” Inspired by Dunham, Nicomedes and his sister Victoria began to research Afro-Peruvian folklore as the basis for a new aesthetic, and, to this day, the Santa Cruzes are widely considered the co-founders of the Afro-Peruvian arts movement. These are only two of several examples in my book, Katherine Dunham: Dance and the African Diaspora, about the myriad ways that Dunham affected social change. I argue that from the 1920s to the 1970s and beyond, Dunham articulated a place for dance in the fight against racial inequality and, crucially, emphasized an international perspective. Dunham was a part of not just an artistic community but also an intellectual community thinking through the idea of diaspora and a political community that built transnational alliances to end racial oppression. Artists not only imagine but also enact a better future. In Dunham’s case, this enactment occurred through her dancers’ embodiment of her choreography onstage, through lessons taught in her classrooms in New York and East St. Louis, and through her own efforts to live as a citizen of the world. To find out more, you’ll have to read the book!
← Photograph by WUSTL Photos
EVENTS & OUTREACH
EVENT COSPONSORSHIPS, 2017–18 October 11, 2017 ETHNOGRAPHY OF AN IDEA: THERE’S A DISCO BALL BETWEEN US Jafari Allen, Associate Professor, Department of Anthropology, University of Miami Organized by the Department of Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies
October 12, 2017 PROSTHETIC ECOLOGIES: (RE)MEMBERING DISABILITY, CURATING CULPABILITY, AND LAOS PDR’S DIRTY WAR Cathy J. Schlund-Vials, Professor of English and Asian/Asian-American Studies, University of Connecticut Organized by International and Area Studies and Asian-American Studies
October 19–21, 2017 THE FUTURE OF FOOD STUDIES GRADUATE CONFERENCE Organized by the Graduate Association for Food Studies
October 20, 2017 FRANKENSTEIN DOUBLE FEATURE, A CINEMATIC CELEBRATION Film screenings of Bride of Frankenstein (1935) and Young Frankenstein (1974) Organized by the Film and Media Studies Program
October 26–28, 2017 NEW CARTOGRAPHIES IN IBERIAN AND LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES, THE MID-AMERICA CONFERENCE ON HISPANIC LITERATURES Organized by the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures
October 30–November 3, 2017 RAJA FEATHER KELLY, CHOREOGRAPHER, RESIDENCY IN DANCE GUEST ARTIST Organized by the Performing Arts Department
November 2–12, 2017 MEAN STREETS: VIEWING THE DIVIDED CITY THROUGH THE LENS OF FILM AND TELEVISION, THEMATIC FILM SCREENINGS AT THE ST. LOUIS INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL Organized by Cinema St. Louis
November 10–11, 2017 PREJUDICE: INTERSECTING METHODS AND PERSPECTIVES WORKSHOP Organized by the Philosophy-Neuroscience-Psychology Program
January 29, 2018 MAIMONIDES AND THE MERCHANTS: JEWISH LAW AND SOCIETY IN THE MEDIEVAL ISLAMIC WORLD Mark R. Cohen, the Khedouri A. Zilkha Professor of Jewish Civilization in the Near East, Emeritus, and Professor of Near Eastern Studies, Emeritus, Princeton University Organized by the Department of Jewish, Islamic and Near Eastern Languages and Cultures
March 1–4, 2018 RELIGION AND POLITICS IN EARLY AMERICAN CONFERENCE Organized by the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics
March 8, 2018 FROM THE WAR ON POVERTY TO THE WAR ON CRIME: THE MAKING OF MASS INCARCERATION IN AMERICA Elizabeth Hinton, Assistant Professor of History and African and African-American Studies, Harvard University Organized by the Missouri Historical Society/Missouri History Museum
April 5–7, 2018 THE ARTS OF DEMOCRATIZATION: STYLIZING POLITICAL SENSIBILITIES IN POSTWAR WEST GERMANY Organized by the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures
April 5–6, 2018 DAVID BORDWELL LECTURE SERIES AND FILM SCREENING David Bordwell, the Jacques Ledoux Professor of Film Studies, Emeritus, Department of Communication Arts, University of Wisconsin–Madison Organized by the Film and Media Studies Program
April 11–13, 2018 BIGGS RESIDENCY REUNION AND SYMPOSIUM Organized by the Department of Classics
April 12–13, 2018 ISRAELI LITERATURE @70 Organized by the Department of Jewish, Islamic and Near Eastern Languages and Cultures
April 21, 2018 28TH ANNUAL POWWOW Organized by the Kathryn M. Buder Center for American Indian Studies
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PAINTING NEW PICTURES 26 a year in review
BY ABRAM VAN ENGEN
ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH In the 1830s, a wave of anti-immigrant and anti-Catholic fervor struck the nation. At roughly the same time, Andrew Jackson began a ruthless campaign of Indian Removal, continuing years of political and cultural attempts to erase Native American presences, while slavery spread its horrors both in the nation and beyond its borders. It was at this moment that four paintings were commissioned for the U.S. Capitol Rotunda. All four paintings — created for the most political of buildings and hanging there still — came shaped by religious themes. Focusing on subjects of “discovery” and “settlement,” the four paintings included two of the Spanish and two of the English. The images of Columbus and De Soto celebrate them for their exploration of the “New World,” while also rebuking them for barbarous conquests in the name of Catholicism. Spears, swords and crosses angle against each other, all mixed in a sea of metal. The two images of English settlement, meanwhile, tell a very different story. The Baptism of Pocahontas celebrates the conversion of a Native American as a sign of the English civilizing process. The Embarkation of the Pilgrims furthers the story of a nation founded by Pilgrims and Puritans in search of civil and religious freedom. In these two images we find pernicious myths of white civilization and stability, the spreading of Anglo-Protestantism and the establishment of English rule as a new sort of revelation. These Capitol images rely on religious imagery for political messaging, but they do not attempt to understand that relationship or its effects in early America. Rather, they create a national self-image out of an imagined past — a past that many in the 1830s considered white, English
and Protestant. Native Americans appear in the Capitol Rotunda only as conquered or converted. African Americans appear not at all. The many peoples of America, the many relations between religion and politics, the stories of community and confrontation, of mixture and creation — all of it gets erased in favor of a myth in which the coming of Protestantism means the birth of liberty. The Puritan “city on a hill” slides into place as the nation of the United States, expunging all kinds of other cultures and experiences in early America. As scholars critique and correct this myth, their goal is not to turn old heroes into new villains, but rather to seek a better understanding by reexamining the familiar subjects while looking past them to the wide varieties of peoples and places, religions and politics, that constituted complex literatures, histories and cultures throughout the early Americas. That work could not be more important. Just as paintings of Pilgrims, Pocahontas, Columbus and De Soto still hang in the Capitol, so do many today still speak of religion and politics in the present by inventing a narrative of religion and politics in the past. We need new, better, more accurate and inclusive paintings — and we must find a way to display them where all can see.
EVENT: RELIGION AND POLITICS IN EARLY AMERICA MARCH 1–4, 2018
← Photograph courtesy Architect of the Capitol
EVENTS & OUTREACH
THE SUPERMARKET OF ISRAELI LITERATURE: A FESTSCHRIFT BY NANCY BERG
PROFESSOR OF MODERN HEBREW LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE; CHAIR, DEPARTMENT OF JEWISH, ISLAMIC AND NEAR EASTERN LANGUAGES AND CULTURE At 70, Israeli literature is having its day in the sun: David Grossman won the Man Booker Prize for A Horse Walks Into a Bar (with his translator Jessica Cohen); Amos Oz won the inaugural Jingdong Literary Prize, and his novel Judas (short-listed for the Booker), along with Ayelet Gundar-Goshen’s Waking Lions, are both up for the 2018 International Dublin Literary Award; and the literature has taken root abroad as well as in Israel. This is a literature we have witnessed developing in real time. A literature of a new nation that consciously constructed its culture, written — mostly, although not exclusively — in a language revived after centuries of dormancy. The literature played a huge role in this unprecedented linguistic feat, anticipating and shaping the spoken language, written by nonnatives and, at times, nonspeakers. For most of the last millennium, Hebrew had fallen into disuse. While it continued to function in the religious realm, it was no one’s mother tongue, and it was not spoken in everyday conversation. The lexicon was limited to approximately 7,000 items (English claims 1 million); the literature — as it was — mostly legal or liturgical. There were no textbooks, teachers or grammars. And there was no precedent. No language that had been as dormant as Hebrew and for as long had ever been fully woken from its deep sleep.
↑ “Supermarket” by Flako/Flickr CC BY 2.0
IN THE SUPERMARKET Through the supermarket alleys I push a cart As if I were the mother of two heads of cauliflower, And navigate according to the verse-list I improvised this morning over coffee. ..................................... Hurry folks, to the coriander, Hurry hurry folks, I’m the supermarket bard, I’ll sing to the rustle of cornflakes,
It was in the literature that the language was forced to stretch and bend.
The curve of the mutinous cucumbers,
It is from the literature that the spoken idiom emerged, an idiom that is now the primary language of several million, a language that has produced an extraordinary literature — with a great deal of ordinary works, too — in a relatively short time. Israeli literature also includes works in other languages, languages of the immigrants and indigenous, transplants and replants.
Until the cash register will hand me
The history and morphology of Hebrew facilitate references to biblical stories, Talmudic discussions and prayers that many writers have exploited to enrich their work. Others have sought to liberate themselves from the tyranny of allusion, attempting to normalize the language.
by Agi Mishol
The best-known Israeli poet, the late Yehudah Amichai, managed to do both, straddling the religious and the profane. A poem that begins with bumping his head simultaneously recalls and cancels the prophecy of the End of Days.
EVENT:
The first recipient of a prize named in Amichai's honor, Agi Mishol, continues the poet's work. Praised for her sly wit, her ability to balance between the literal and poetic, she too combines the everyday with the sublime.
The final printed version Of my poem.
(Translated by Tsipi Keller)
ISRAELI LITERATURE @70 CONFERENCE APRIL 12–13, 2018
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28 a year in review
FACULTY FELLOWS GRADUATE STUDENT FELLOWS KLING UNDERGRADUATE HONORS FELLOWS WEIL EARLY CAREER FELLOWS
CENTER FOR THE HUMANITIES FELLOWS A COMMUNITY OF SCHOLARS
FELLOWS CAROLINE KITA
ASSISTANT PROFESSOR DEPARTMENT OF GERMANIC LANGUAGES AND LITERATURES Border Territories: The Emancipatory Soundscapes of Post-War German Radio
‘HOW WE LISTEN SHAPES HOW WE VIEW THE WORLD’: THE RADIO DRAMA IN POST-WWII GERMANY Almost 100 years ago, radio broadcasts developed as the first electronic mass media. Various state and commercial actors leveraged this intimate listening experience with the audience to spread propaganda, sell soap and entertain. In West Germany’s post-World War II years, says Caroline Kita, radio broadcasts, and specifically radio dramas, offered a unique space to make and critique its new democracy.
WHAT IS YOUR BOOK PROJECT ABOUT? My book examines narrative radio dramas in West Germany and Austria in the two decades following the end of the Second World War, 1945–65. I focus not only on the texts but also on their soundscapes, their acoustic realization through voice, music, noise and silence. I claim that radio drama offered a unique discursive realm for Germans and Austrians to confront the past and imagine the future after fascism.
HOW IMPORTANT WAS RADIO TO DAILY LIFE IN GERMANY? Radio has a particularly complex history in Germany and Austria because it is so intertwined with the history of National Socialism. The Nazis’ mass production of home radios was one of the primary reasons radio was so accessible in the postwar period — through the ’50s, radio continued to be the primary medium of news and entertainment. In the book, I explore how radio dramas reflect the medium’s transition from a tool of propaganda dissemination to a pluralist space of democratic ideas.
WHAT IS A RADIO DRAMA? A radio drama is a dramatic work produced exclusively for the acoustic medium. Because its stage is not visible to the eye, characters, locations and events must all be made evident to the listener through sound. I am interested in the radio dramas that directly reflect the political, economic and social landscape of Germany in years of occupation and division. These works — considered serious literature and written by some of the most prominent intellectuals of the period — were played on prime-time radio and were widely heard and discussed.
IN WHAT WAYS DOES THE RADIO DRAMA LISTENING EXPERIENCE DIFFER FROM VIEWING FILMS AT THE CINEMA? The radio drama is evocative, not representational. While the soundscapes can be naturalistic (doors opening, cars driving by, doorbells ringing) to give the listener a sense of place and time, they also often manipulate familiar sounds to allow for the merging of spaces, time frames or identities. One of my favorite radio plays, Border Crossers by Jan Rys, is about two refugees sitting in a Viennese coffeehouse around 1960, imagining that they are journeying back to their hometown in Czechoslovakia. The entire radio drama is them speaking, and the only other noises that one hears are the clinking of glasses in the coffeehouse. But in their dialogue, they interpret these sounds as those they hear in the borderlands, tin cans that they step on in an open field, for example. The listener really has the sense that they are in both places at once in a way that wouldn’t be possible in film.
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of focusing simply on themes and social concerns, my comparison highlights artistic techniques. I ask, Why do Asian American and Latinx writers gravitate toward strikingly similar shapes for their stories? I suggest that this shared shape can reveal less obvious connections between these communities that we wouldn’t see if we looked only for overt similarities of themes and social concerns.
30 a year in review
TELL US ABOUT THE CONCEPT OF “TRANSNARRATIVE” LITERATURE.
“The literatures of Asian Americans and Latinxs explore a history not recognized by many Americans: Millions of them are here because the U.S. military was in their countries during the Cold War,” Long Le-Khac says. He asserts that reading together works such as Junot Díaz’s Drown and Aimee Phan’s We Should Never Meet — Cold War fictions that leave gaps in the story and jump back and forth in time and place — creates a new method for making visible the links between the two groups.
Transnarrative describes a shape for storytelling that links many separate stories within one book, a form common across contemporary Asian American and Latinx fictions. In transnarrative books, readers encounter many separate stories involving different characters, events and settings. As we read across the different stories, we figure out how they’re linked. The stories in Aimee Phan’s We Should Never Meet, for instance, focus on Vietnamese and Americans during the Vietnam War. As we read, it emerges that these characters are disparate cogs in a massive operation evacuating refugee children. Many of Phan’s characters never meet; their impacts on one another are indirect or left unexplained. But reading them together lets us perceive a more expansive world.
“Seeing this storytelling technique in both Asian American and Latinx literatures helps connect different groups that were scattered by the same international American military machine,” he says. “These groups have a shared interest in changing how the U.S. thinks of its foreign policy and the people it displaces.”
HOW DOES THIS BOOK CONNECT TO YOUR BROADER RESEARCH INTERESTS?
BRIEFLY, WHAT IS YOUR BOOK ABOUT?
This project is part of a broader interest and conviction that the stories we tell and the way we tell them have consequences for social change. Looking ahead, I’m eager to extend my research to how social movements and storytelling intertwine. This is a growing interest among social scientists, and I’m excited to see what a literature and humanities point of view might bring to this question.
LONG LE-KHAC
ASSISTANT PROFESSOR DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH Transnarrative: Giving Form to Asian and Latinx America
WHAT DO LATINXS AND ASIAN AMERICANS HAVE IN COMMON? LOOK TO THEIR LITERATURE
The book compares the literatures of the minority groups most rapidly transforming the U.S.: Latinxs and Asian Americans. When we read their literatures together, they reveal shared artistic practices, histories and social challenges that I hope can help lay the foundations for a Latinx-Asian American solidarity. This solidarity could impact the future of the U.S. and its relationships to the world.
WHAT DO YOU HOPE TO DRAW OUT BY WRITING ABOUT THE LITERATURE OF THESE TWO GROUPS? These minority literatures have been studied separately, but there’s little discussion of their connections. Through comparison, I reveal many of their social challenges as shared — for instance, how America’s immigration system has shaped both communities. But instead
FELLOWS JEFFREY MCCUNE
ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR DEPARTMENT OF WOMEN, GENDER AND SEXUALITY STUDIES AND DEPARTMENT OF AFRICAN AND AFRICAN-AMERICAN STUDIES Read! An Experiment in Seeing Black
DISOBEDIENT READING: A LONG LOOK OVER BLACK LIFE Jeffrey McCune’s latest writing project proposes an alternative lens for interrogating culture created by queer men of color, a perspective that centers blackness as well as sexuality. His book-inprogress continues his work of “unveiling a new world of black vocabularies and realities,” says McCune, targeting “some of my favorite and most problematic institutions.”
WHAT IS THE OVERVIEW OF YOUR BOOK PROJECT? WHY IS THIS PROJECT AN “EXPERIMENT”? This project is my entrée into the space of the intellectual who dares to disobey how (s)he has been taught to read culture, performance and everyday life. Some people simply call this “reading against the grain” or “moving outside the canon”; I call it “performing a disobedient reading.” My emphasis is less on what one reads but rather how one reads. For so long, folks have been told to read the slave experience as a site of only terror and pain. Yet and still, the same folks name all types of pleasure at the scene of prisons around the world. I ponder the significance of pleasure in the U.S. slave economy. And that’s just one example of the type of disobedient moves I make. The goal here is to afford space for intimate readings, which do not give over to how institutions have taught us to produce nice but incomplete refrains about blackness and black things.
WHAT IS THE DEFINITION OF “READ” YOU’RE USING? For this project, I am borrowing from black queer vernacular, where “read” is an intimate engagement with a text, requiring a “long look over” and a strong interest (love even). I draw the method from the practices of black gay communities, where I have seen folks get to know each other so well, and then utilize what they have come to know to tell the individual(s) what they never thought was apparent or available. To “read” blackness, or to “read blackly” if you will, is to be immersed in black stuff, to center black perspectives and politics, and to anchor one’s interpretations in that which is often unavailable to the common (white) eye. But, reading in black queer vernacular goes deep. Thus, the findings may be even beyond the scope of those who are black and who commit themselves to more traditional ways of reading. Reading requires rigor and rebellion; it requires as much of a deep, intentional investment in disobedience as it does in intentional investments in blackness as terrain worthy of attention. With the black queer lens at center, the interrogations and discoveries in this project see sexuality and gender as necessary and not supplemental.
WHAT OTHER PERSPECTIVE DOES THIS FORM OF READING HAVE IN INTERROGATING THE TOPICS OF YOUR INQUIRY? For example, in the chapter titled “Reading the Black Church Sissy,” I suspend the refrain of the church as a homophobic space in order to interrogate queer attraction to the institution. Beyond self-loathing or -hating diagnoses, I pivot toward the pedagogy of the black church specifically, through its sexual teachings vis-à-vis sermonic and social texts, to understand the performative space as sometimes affording “flexible theologies.” In other words, how do the sermons about “going to the dyke club” or the social hours where the boys are critiqued for “too-tight pants” get utilized as repertoire for discovering one’s sexuality.
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← “Ex-tenant farmer on relief grant in the Imperial Valley, California” by Dorothea Lange, Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Photograph Collection
32 a year in review
emotional. It’s still slightly unfathomable to me that the government hired artists to document this pivotal time in American history. Like all great art, the work survives, and it continues to promote important ideas about the perils of unpredictable climates, corporate greed, mass migration, etc.
CHRISTOPHER STARK
ASSISTANT PROFESSOR DEPARTMENT OF MUSIC Music From the Field
WRITING A NEW KIND OF WESTERN MUSIC Growing up in rural western Montana, composer Christopher Stark says, was like growing up “in airplane mode.” His hometown of Polson, located on the Flathead Indian Reservation and nestled at the base of a range of the Rocky Mountains, claims a population of 4,488 people. That sense of isolation allowed him the space to derive his own thoughts and feelings about music and creativity, Stark says. “Isolation can often lead to naïve viewpoints, but it can also nurture interesting and different perspectives,” he says. Now, Stark brings this outlook to bear on a new chamber opera that celebrates the historical American West.
WHAT WERE YOU THINKING ABOUT WHEN YOU NAMED YOUR OPERA FROM THE FIELD? From the Field is a reference to the authors and photographers who traveled the United States during the Great Depression documenting rural poverty. I settled on the title after discovering a digital archive of Dorothea Lange’s handwritten notes, which accompany her iconic photographs. I hope to use these fascinating quotidian journal entries as the backbone of the libretto.
AS YOU’RE WRITING THE LIBRETTO, YOU’RE CONSULTING DEPRESSIONERA PUBLIC ARCHIVES THAT INCLUDE ICONIC IMAGES SUCH AS DOROTHEA LANGE’S MIGRANT MOTHER. HOW HAVE THESE STORIES INSPIRED YOU? The photographs are truly remarkable. Lange’s Migrant Mother was the work that started me down this path, and after digging through more of these fabulous archives, I have also fallen in love with Walker Evans’ photographs. Both artists were bold enough to showcase the intimacy of individual people’s lives, and, because of this, their work is profoundly deep, visceral and
HOW DO YOU TELL THIS STORY THROUGH THE MUSIC? The honest answer is that it’s very difficult, and often impossible, to tell a story through music alone. Music is, fortunately and unfortunately, an abstract medium. With that said, there are many ways of holding someone’s attention with sound. For example, one could juxtapose familiar and unfamiliar patterns or create dramatic changes in volume, but, ultimately, storytelling typically happens through the more concrete art forms, such as poetry or visual art. The music will hopefully add additional layers of complexity and meaning to the narrative, but the libretto will convey the story.
WHAT IS THE BIGGEST CHALLENGE IN CREATING A NEW WORK? For me, it is finding a way into the emotional core of the idea that is inspiring the new work. If I am creating from a place of true authenticity, interest and passion, then I believe the work has a shot of surviving. If I can’t find my way into that core, which happens often, then the work has little chance of resonating. Perhaps the thing I love most about music is the intangibility of its power. Have you ever felt when a piece of music is resonating with an audience? There’s almost a palpable humidity. I am always chasing that feeling.
FELLOWS ANIKA WALKE
ASSISTANT PROFESSOR DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY Bones, Ashes and Dirt: The Long Aftermath of the Nazi Genocide in Belarus, 1941–2008
↓ Photograph courtesy Anika Walke
REMEMBERING THE GERMAN ‘HOLOCAUST BY BULLETS’ IN BELARUS As German troops marched into the Soviet Union in 1941, a terrifying practice of Jewish extermination took hold: “Holocaust by bullets.” Instead of being deported to camps such as Auschwitz, Soviet Jews were gunned down in mass killing actions where they lived. Other Soviet citizens were shot or died of hunger and occupation terror; several hundred thousand were deported for forced labor. Historian Anika Walke focuses her current book project on the remembrance of occupation violence and genocidal killings in Belarus, known at the time as the Belarusian Socialist Soviet Republic (BSSR).
WHAT IS THE JEWISH HISTORY IN BELARUS BEFORE WWII? As part of the so-called Pale of Jewish Settlement, an area within the Russian Empire to which Jewish subjects of the Tsar were confined, the territory of what is now the Republic of Belarus is situated in the historic homeland of Eastern European Jewry. The Soviet Union was one of very few states in interwar Europe where anti-Semitism did not rule law or politics. But by the 1930s, expressions of a collective Jewish identity had been erased.
IN BROAD STROKES, HOW DID THE GERMAN OCCUPATION UNFOLD IN BELARUS? World War II began in the BSSR with the invasion of German troops in June 1941. Beginning in August 1941, German authorities, supported by auxiliary troops and local police that included Ukrainians, Lithuanians or Belarusians, began with the systematic extermination of Soviet Jews, rounding them up and shooting them at pits or trenches just outside their hometown. By early spring 1942, the majority of the Jews of Belarusia had been killed. Other Belarusians had the chance to survive if they did not resist the Germans, and some even benefited when they actively served the German cause. But the civilians were brutalized, too — they were deported for forced labor, villages were burned down, and thousands were killed because they were suspected of helping Soviet partisans or Jews or for being Communists. In response, a large partisan movement developed, eventually mobilizing 380,000 Belarusians to fight the Germans. In the course of the war, between a quarter and a third of the BSSR population died, among them up to 800,000 Jews. The economy and the country were destroyed on a scale that is hard to imagine.
HOW HAS THIS PERIOD OF HISTORY BEEN TAUGHT AND REMEMBERED? Throughout the Soviet period, the history of World War II — which in the region is called the Great Patriotic War — was remembered primarily as the moment in which the Soviet population, the Communist Party and the Soviet government joined forces to defeat the German invaders. The Holocaust was not acknowledged officially and thus was not part of the official memory culture. Some Jewish survivors, however, tried to place small memorials on the killing sites. In the years immediately after the war, Soviet authorities took these down or punished people for establishing these monuments. The logic was that all Soviet citizens suffered equally, and to highlight one nationality’s particular suffering was an expression of chauvinism. Only since the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991 are efforts to mark the killing sites permitted, though rarely does the initiative to do so come from state or municipal authorities. 33
SAMUEL SHEARER
TERRANCE WOOTEN
The Kigali Model: Making a 21st-Century Metropolis Duke University, Durham, North Carolina Washington University departmental affiliations: African and African-American Studies and Anthropology
Lurking in the Shadows of Home: Homelessness, Carcerality and the Figure of the Sex Offender University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland Washington University departmental affiliations: Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies; and African and African-American Studies
PHD IN CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY, MAY 2017
MARK STEINBERG WEIL EARLY CAREER FELLOWS, 2017–18 In July 2017, two new scholars joined the Center for the Humanities as Weil Early Career Fellows after an international search that drew 63 applications from as far away as Australia, India, Jordan and Germany. The Weil postdoctoral fellowship fosters the professional development of gifted scholars and bolsters Washington University’s strengths in urban and public humanities.
Shearer’s dissertation focuses on the markets, neighborhoods and streets where residents of Kigali (the capital city of Rwanda) encounter new architecture and design strategies that are aimed at converting their city into a global metropolis with world-class tourist facilities, high-tech service industries and a “green” urban metabolism. Many city residents, however, experience these processes through mass evictions, market closures and an ongoing utility crisis in the city. In response, they are going kukikoboyi (literally “to cowboy”), creating rogue markets, housing settlements and ad hoc utility networks. His research explores these divergent practices of city-making to show that in the process, a new Kigali is being built: a 21st-century metropolis that, despite being a rogue version of its planned future, is a cosmopolitan urban center that no single interest, process or population fully controls. While in residence at the humanities center, Shearer worked on two projects. First, he edited his dissertation as a book manuscript. Second, he is pursuing a new research project following the lives of Rwandans who have recently left Kigali for other cities in the region: Lusaka, Zambia; Lilongwe, Malawi; and Kampala, Uganda. During the 2018–19 academic year, Shearer will continue as a Weil Fellow in the Center for the Humanities. Starting in July 2019, he will be an assistant professor in the Department of African and African-American Studies at Washington University.
PHD IN AMERICAN STUDIES, MAY 2017
Wooten’s dissertation was a multimethodological and interdisciplinary project that examined how those who have been designated “sex offenders” and are homeless in the Maryland/D.C. area are managed and regulated by various technologies of governance such as social policies, sex offender registries and architectural designs. Drawing on scholarship in African-American studies, carceral studies, and gender and sexuality studies, his dissertation considered how the very construction of home is bound up in processes of sexual regulation and management that produce certain people as homeless by virtue of their proximity to sexual impropriety, deviance and blackness. During his fellowship at Washington University, Wooten built on his dissertation research to develop a better understanding of the social, economic and political implications of homelessness and housing deprivation in both urban and suburban geographies. “I Am Not a Number: On Housing Acuity Scores and the Necropolitical Construction of Vulnerability” offers a humanist critique of contemporary homeless-services delivery models attempting to capture and convert human suffering into discrete, measurable acuity scores. Wooten will be a postdoctoral scholar in the Department of Black Studies at the University of California–Santa Barbara during 2018–19. Beginning July 2019, he will be an assistant professor in the Department of Black Studies.
FELLOWS
↑“Cholera Prevention Sign Board” by Rahul Ingle, Sustainable Sanitation Alliance/ Flickr CC BY 2.0
DO MICROBES HAVE POLITICS?
BY SAMUEL SHEARER AND WASEEM-AHMED BIN-KASIM
SHEARER IS A WEIL EARLY CAREER POSTDOCTORAL FELLOW, AND BIN-KASIM IS A GRADUATE STUDENT FELLOW, BOTH IN THE CENTER FOR THE HUMANITIES Lusaka, Zambia: December 2017 — The business district is a crime scene. Following a presidential decree, soldiers and police set about closing markets, shops, bars and restaurants. They turn stalls upside down and collect water and food samples — the forensics that might help catch a murderer who has been on a killing spree. That murderer is cholera, and more than 2,000 cases resulted in more than 40 deaths. Days after the presidential decree, the government operation to find cholera turns away from the microbe toward the people who are suspected of assisting its spread: street vendors and those who live on the city’s edges. Kanyama, one of the city’s largest so-called slums, is declared ground zero of the outbreak and placed under curfew. The street economy itself is charged with aiding and abetting cholera. The police and soldiers demolish and burn more than 10,000 small street stalls that have colonized Lusaka’s sidewalks. The city council reinstates a previously suspended ban on street vending meant to rally the nation’s low-income urban voters. Street vendors and Zambia’s ruling Patriotic Front (PF) loyalists return to the streets to riot against the very government they put in power. Cholera not only took the city hostage but appeared to have become an effective political actor, undoing a progressive experiment with urban governance and reversing the ruling party’s comfortable hold on power.
We draw attention to these events to raise a more general question about bacteria: Do microbes have politics? Cholera has been a key player in urban politics, technological innovations and the humanities. The most famous examples are the 19th-century outbreaks in London and Paris, which created the conditions for the first geographic information systems (GIS), generated the figure of the serial killer in both public and social science imaginations, and inspired that game-changing pulp literary genre: detective fiction. Microbe-politics have also been stamped onto urban landscapes of postcolonial metropolises through long histories of struggles over diseases and the city. In the name of public health, colonial authorities in Asia and Africa created the very conditions for bacteria to thrive. They segregated towns, demolished areas thought to be bacterial and built infrastructure where microbes would later return. The struggle over the city between microbes, colonial authorities and urban residents was not straightforward. For example, the realization of the potential for guerilla germ warfare during Mau Mau (1952–64) led to Nairobi’s unequally distributed sewage system. Today, a collection of anti-disciplinary urbanists is beginning to ask how to build cities that are designed for, rather than against, bacteria. Microbes are also being recruited to assist with pollution cleanup. In drawing attention to both the historical and contemporary politics of the urban microbiome, we do not wish to simply add another actor to the network. Nor are we suggesting a bacterial determinist perspective for the humanities. Rather, in posing the question — do microbes have politics? — we suggest the urban humanities take a closer look at these invisible actors that work well beyond the areas of epidemiology that they are usually assigned to.
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← Photograph by Saitor/Flickr CC BY 2.0
36 a year in review
KEEP IT MOVING: TRANSIENCE, DEBILITY AND THE MANAGEMENT OF HOMELESSNESS BY TERRANCE WOOTEN
MARK STEINBERG WEIL EARLY CAREER FELLOW CENTER FOR THE HUMANITIES On January 10, I woke up to six unread text messages from six different people, a personal record. All of them were virtually the same: “Have you seen this?!” Attached was a link to a video originally posted on Facebook by a passerby in Baltimore, Maryland. The video, which sparked national controversy, was of a 22-year-old black woman who had just been discharged from a “local hospital” onto the streets, abandoned at a bus stop. Since then, the hospital has come under fire for carrying out yet another example of “patient dumping,” whereby vulnerable patients — usually people who are homeless or transient, often with serious mental illnesses — are discharged to the streets or a shelter. They are “dumped” because they have no other place to go and do not have the financial means to remain in care or pay room and board somewhere else.
During my two years of fieldwork in a suburban county south of Baltimore, I regularly witnessed people being shuffled from hospital or mental health institution to shelter, and then from that shelter to another, big, heavy bags over their shoulders, the cold biting their skin as they walked to and from or waited on buses or trains. Often, they would arrive at one location just to find out they had to go to another due to a lack of room. When they would drop into gas stations or late-night fast-food restaurants to get warm or rest their bodies, they would be rushed out for loitering — or worse, accused of theft, sometimes having the police called on them. Some of them had severe mental illnesses or medical conditions like the woman in the video. Others of them were just down on their luck. All of them were trying to find a place to rest. Mobility is integral to the city and city life. Increasingly, communities have been demanding forms of transportation that make urban (and suburban) spaces more accessible and environmentally friendly. New bike lanes, trolleys, bus routes and walking trails have emerged across various landscapes to help people experience urbanity in exciting and equitable ways. At the same time, we have seen the ever-constant privatization of public spaces and the rise in “defensive urban architecture” used to deter transient populations from lingering in certain areas of cities and suburbs, painting them as a threat to the order and movement of space. As such, they are forced to keep on moving, not staying too long in one place, even when that place is the hospital. As scholars and activists continue to think about how to best serve, support and intervene in the lives of those experiencing homelessness as well as how to make more accessible landscapes, it is critical that we be attentive to how processes of debilitation — the slow wearing, tearing and tiring of the body — shapes the experiences of navigating both the city and homeless services. Transience is exhausting, and that exhaustion is debilitating. It can also be deadly. What this suggests is that homeless-service providers, urban designers and planners, and government authorities all have to be integrated agents in the fight to end homelessness, with an eye toward making movement across urban landscapes less debilitating.
FELLOWS
MERLE KLING UNDERGRADUATE HONORS FELLOWS, 2017–18 Every spring, five to eight of Washington University’s sophomore scholars are admitted into the Merle Kling Undergraduate Honors Fellowship. Kling Fellows are Arts & Sciences undergraduates who engage in serious independent research in the humanities and/ or the humanistic social sciences, with an interest in pursuing further graduate work in one of these areas. The program promotes fellowship in its truest form: a community of motivated intellectuals, brought together to facilitate discovery and collaboration.
Each Kling Fellow identifies a humanitiesoriented research project, which often changes over time, and works with the Center for the Humanities to select a faculty mentor for guidance in his or her discipline and to request research funding. Kling Fellows meet weekly in an interdisciplinary seminar where they present drafts of their work, peer review one another’s writing, read and think about the role of the humanities in university life, and occasionally get off campus to see humanities research in action around the
St. Louis metro area. Over the course of two academic years, each Kling Fellow will write up his or her research findings in either a scholarly article or a long-form piece of creative nonfiction. They are an important part of the Center for the Humanities, where they meet each semester’s cohort of faculty and graduate-student fellows and provide undergraduate representation on the center’s advisory board.
CLASS OF 2018
Sophie Lombardo Major: History Minor: Writing Mentor: Anika Walke, Assistant Professor of History
Helen Li Major: International and Area Studies Minor: Psychological and Brain Sciences
Patrick Goff Major: Germanic Languages and Literatures Minor: Economics Mentor: Caroline Kita, Assistant Professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures Breaking Down the Beer Wagon: Man Is Man (1926) and Bertolt Brecht’s Conception of an “Epic” Radio Drama Hilah Kohen Major: Comparative Literature Minor: Russian Language and Literature Mentors: Vincent Sherry, Professor of English; and Nicole Svobodny, Senior Lecturer in International and Area Studies A Tale of Two Androgynes: Missed Connections in the Anglophone Canon of Russian Literature Allie Liss Major: Anthropology: Global Health and Environment Minor: Art Certificate: Geographic Information Systems (GIS) Mentor: Shanti Parikh, Associate Professor of Anthropology Disrupting Agency Through Transportation: Place and Space in East St. Louis, Illinois
Contested Ownership, Contested Narratives: Robert Kempner and the Nuremberg Archive Noah Weber Majors: Chinese, English Literature Mentor: Letty Chen, Associate Professor of Chinese Language Teacher as Author: Narrative Experimentation in Lao She’s Xiaopo de shengri (小坡的生日, Little Po’s Birthday), 1931 Nathaniel Young Majors: Latin American Studies, Spanish Mentor: Ignacio Sánchez Prado, Professor of Spanish, Latin American Studies, and Film and Media Studies Authenticity in Production: Violeta Parra and the Cultural Project
CLASS OF 2019 Seth Blum Majors: Mathematics, International and Area Studies Minor: Arabic Changing Scales of Jordanian Water
Old Age in the New Age: Examining UrbanRural Inequalities in China Through the Lens of Elder Care Sarah Martin Majors: Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies; African and African-American Studies Black Women’s Re-tooling of Memes as a Digital Resistance Strategy Byron Otis Majors: Art History, Painting The Beaten Husband: Visions of “Manly” Women in the Dutch Golden Age Abigail Rochman Major: International and Area Studies Minor: Writing Symbolism, Trauma and Terror: Political Violence and the Memory of the French Revolution Lexi Slome Majors: Linguistics, Psychological and Brain Sciences Excavating Figurative Language: The Influence of Historical Origins of the Comprehension of Idiom
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38 a year in review
GRADUATE STUDENT FELLOWS, 2017–18 FALL 2017 Andrea Bolivar Department of Anthropology An Ethnography of Transgender Latinas’ Experiences in Sexual Economies of Labor in Chicago Bolivar’s dissertation research, the first long-term qualitative study of its kind, challenges dangerous simplifications by examining the everyday lived experiences of transgender Latina sex workers in Chicago, many of whom are undocumented. Her dissertation deepens understandings of sex work specifically around the concepts of agency, kinship, activism, violence and race. Margaret Tucker Department of English Excessive Realities: Catholicism and the Rise of the English Novel Tucker’s dissertation charts a history of the novel that redefines realism, not only as an epistemological and representational mode, but as a style of writing that draws attention to the limits and possibilities of reality itself in moments of narrative excess. The outcome of this work reveals Catholicism as an unacknowledged yet unmistakable influence on the development of realist fiction in England. Ashley Wilson Department of Anthropology Marriage at the Margins: Come-We-Stay Relationship in Kibera, Kenya Wilson’s dissertation explores how women and men in a Nairobi, Kenya, slum negotiate conjugal status without the financial resources demanded from an increasingly expensive marriage economy. Specifically, she examines the contradictory relationship between 2012 feminist-initiated legislation that seeks to “protect” poor women’s matrimonial rights and the lived realities of marital choice and opportunity within the Kibera slum. At the heart of her dissertation are competing definitions of morality and gendered respectability between state-level actors on one hand and individuals targeted by state legislation on the other.
SPRING 2018 Oğuz Alyanak Department of Anthropology Fear of the Ordinary: Muslim Turks Negotiate Men’s Moral Worth in the Franco-German Borderland Recent scholarship on gender looks at how migrant men, and their Europe-born sons, are an integral part of how Europeans think about Islam. Yet we still know little about who these men are. Alyanak addresses this gap by focusing on Turkish men in Strasbourg, France, as their lives unfold in three domains — work, home and leisure — and exploring how they reflect on Islam as they go about their everyday lives and discuss their daily routines vis-à-vis local conversations that frame moral and masculine behavior. Waseem-Ahmed Bin-Kasim Department of History Sanitary Segregation: Cleansing Accra and Nairobi, 1908–1963 This comparative project cuts across urbanization and public health. The project explores the segregationist plan of William Simpson in Accra and Nairobi, two important capital cities in British colonial Africa. Simpson was one of the British Empire’s foremost sanitary, plague and urban design experts, who advised imperial officials at the Colonial Office in London. Simpson’s recommendations yielded unexpected and varying results because of the very different histories, power dynamics and landscapes of the colonial cities. Joohee Suh Department of History The Afterlife of Corpses: Dead Bodies and the 19th-Century Society of China Suh’s dissertation project investigates a set of controversies that arose over unburied bodies in 19th-century China. This topic originated from an observation that there was a large number of dead bodies left unburied on the outskirts of major imperial cities in the eastern coastal regions of Qing China (1644–1911). These bodies became a major source of anxiety for both commoners and administrators. Consulting judicial documents on grave desecration cases, account books of burial societies, burial manuals, local histories and popular stories on zombies recorded in literature and newspapers, Suh uses these bodies as a key that links several different components of the 19th-century society that contested the meanings of death, dead bodies and afterlife.
FELLOWS
THE FELLOWSHIP ALLOWED ME TO … focus on my writing in an academic atmosphere conducive to collegial collaboration and support. — Ashley Wilson SOMETHING NEW I LEARNED THIS SEMESTER IS … the value of interdisciplinary conversations. I did not have many opportunities to show my [dissertation] draft to the people outside of my field before. … Their comments actually helped me better understand what I was doing and pushed me to think about how to put my work in dialogue with broader scholarship. — Joohee Suh THE MOST UNEXPECTED THING ABOUT MY FELLOWSHIP WAS … the sense of community the center fosters among faculty, postdoctoral and graduate fellows. The environment, the staff, as well as scholars encourage informal conversations along the corridors and in offices. — Waseem-Ahmed Bin-Kasim
MY FAVORITE THING ABOUT MY FELLOWSHIP WAS … the lunch workshops. It was really fun to learn about what other scholars were doing, and I truly enjoyed the comfortable but constructive atmosphere where everybody tried to help each other. — Joohee Suh I WOULD RECOMMEND THIS FELLOWSHIP FOR GRADUATE STUDENTS WHO … like to think creatively about their research and who think they’d benefit by presenting their work to a broader scholarly audience. — Oğuz Alyanak 39
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INTERNAL GRANTS
a year in review
FACULTY SEMINAR GRANTS One- to three-year grants to tenured or tenuretrack faculty to support seminars on a particular subject or theme. Groups meet at least twice per semester, when participants and guests present and discuss informally their own work as it relates to the theme. The Contemporary (renewal, 1-year grant) Eighteenth-Century Interdisciplinary Salon (renewal, 1-year grant) Wastelands (renewal, 1-year grant)
READING AND WRITING GROUP GRANTS Grants to tenured or tenure-track faculty and to humanities graduate students to support reading and writing groups on a particular subject or theme.
Reading Groups Affect Theory Reading Group (new) Approaches to Literary Pedagogy (new) Digital Approaches (renewal) Disability Studies (new) History of the Present (new) Kierkegaard Reading Group (renewal) Medical Humanities (renewal) Queering the Global/Transnational Conversation (renewal) Satire (new) Sports and Society (new) Transpacific From the Global South (new)
Writing Groups American Religions (renewal) Black Urban Humanities (new) Medieval Studies (renewal) Religion and Literature (renewal) WashU Translation Workshop (renewal)
SUMMER FACULTY RESEARCH GRANTS Open to all tenured or tenure-track faculty; funded projects are intended to advance the field of study in which it is proposed and make an original and significant contribution to knowledge.
ROLAND GRIMM TRAVEL AWARDS Open to all tenured or tenure-track faculty; awards fund research in Asia. Shefali Chandra | History The Cunning of India: White Women, Caste and Transnational Sex Talk
Bret Gustafson | Anthropology Guarani Language Histories on Bolivia’s Colonial Frontier
Michael Frachetti | Anthropology Nomadic Urbanism and Silk Road Networks Across High Asia
Ji-Eun Lee | East Asian Languages and Cultures Leaving Home: Gender and Travel in Colonial Korea (1910–1945)
Aria Nakissa | Jewish, Islamic and Near Eastern Languages and Cultures Southeast Asia and the History of Human Rights in the Muslim World
Tabea Linhard | Romance Languages and Literatures Unexpected Routes: Exile, Geography and Memory Akiko Tsuchiya | Romance Languages and Literatures Women’s Networks in the 19th-Century Spanish Antislavery Movement Shefali Chandra | History The Cunning of India: White Women, Caste and Transnational Sex Talk Michael Frachetti | Anthropology Nomadic Urbanism and Silk Road Networks Across High Asia
SUMMER RESEARCH SEED GRANTS Open to all tenured or tenure-track faculty in the humanities or humanistic social sciences who undertake the preparation of a competitive, peerreviewed, prestigious grant application during the summer with the goal of submitting an application the following fall or spring. Monique Bedasse | History Top Threat: A New History of Rastafari Joanna Dee Das | Performing Arts Dancing for God and Country: Performing the Politics of Conservatism in Branson, Missouri Thomas Keeline | Classics Latin Textual Scholarship in the Digital Age: An Open-Access Critical Edition of Ovid’s Ibis
MAXWELL C. WEINER HUMANITIES RESEARCH GRANTS Funded by a bequest from Maxwell C. Weiner, the grants support tenured, full-time faculty in the humanities who do not currently receive an annual research fund in order to facilitate the pursuit of new research directions. Julie Singer | Romance Languages and Literatures Anne Margaret Baxley | Philosophy Joe Barcroft | Romance Languages and Literatures Paige McGinley | Performing Arts
COLLABORATIVE RESEARCH SEED GRANT Open to all tenured and tenure-track faculty in the humanities and humanistic social sciences; encourages the establishment of research partnerships and funds preliminary work that lays the foundation for original, expanded collaborative research projects capable of attracting external funding or the publication of new co-authored research. Billy Acree | Romance Languages and Literatures Mapping Street Culture in Modern Latin America Anca Parvulescu | English and Interdisciplinary Project in the Humanities Comparatizing Transylvania: Rurality, Inter-Imperiality and the Global Modernist Market
FACULTY RESEARCH SUPPORT
PROPOSAL-WRITING WORKSHOP Time devoted exclusively to research and writing is integral to academic productivity. It allows scholars to travel to important sites, pore over far-flung archives, conduct interviews and otherwise become immersed in the pursuit of a research question. Scholars need time to reflect, analyze and make connections and, finally, share their discoveries with the world. While faculty engage in this kind of activity as a matter of course, the fellowship — a period of time free of administrative, service and teaching responsibilities — provides the opportunity to make significant strides. As such, they are greatly valued and highly sought after. A number of national organizations and societies provide fellowship funding, and, expectedly, the competition is fierce. For the past four years, the Center for the Humanities has organized an information session and workshop for faculty in the humanities and humanistic social sciences interested in pursuing external funding. As in previous years, the fall 2017 program included a session on proposal writing from a reviewer’s perspective and a multidisciplinary panel of recent award winners. Faculty who were preparing to submit a proposal during the current academic year were invited to workshop their proposals within small peer groups, which convened twice for review and feedback. Participants highly rate these offerings, according to their survey responses.
APRIL 30 AND MAY 7 Heading into the summer months, faculty often give greater focus to writing projects such as book manuscripts.
SEPTEMBER 8 AND SEPTEMBER 15 Just ahead of a flurry of fall deadlines, the Center for the Humanities continued its tradition of organizing and hosting programming for faculty who are pursuing competitive external funding. Congratulations to our recent participants who succeeded in winning external support:
ANGELA MILLER ART HISTORY AND ARCHAEOLOGY NEH Fellowship
TILI BOON CUILLÉ ROMANCE LANGUAGES AND LITERATURES NEH Fellowship
LERONE MARTIN RELIGION AND POLITICS NEH Fellowship
FIRST-BOOK WORKSHOP Modeled after our successful and well-received Proposal-Writing Workshops, the information session and workshop for first-time authors are designed to provide real-world instruction both from decision-making editors and from colleagues who have recently published their first books. Faculty were also offered the opportunity to workshop their own book proposals. The information session began with “Getting Started: Advice from Series Editors.” Three of Washington University’s own series editors — Jean Allman (African and African-American Studies), Ignacio Sánchez Prado (Romance Languages and Literatures; Latin American Studies; Film and Media Studies) and Kit Wellman (Philosophy) — led the discussion. Next, publishing experts Gillian Berchowitz, director and editor-in-chief at Ohio University Press, and Dawn Durante, senior acquisitions editor, University of Illinois Press, gave a joint talk on “Publishing Your First Book: Perspectives From a University Press.” The session concluded with a panel discussion with four recent authors titled “What Works and What Doesn’t: Lessons Learned From the First Book Experience,” featuring Colin Burnett (Film and Media Studies), Ji-Eun Lee (East Asian Languages and Cultures), Abram Van Engen (English) and Anika Walke (History). Participants in the book proposal workshop first met in small groups on April 30 to give a critical reading of one another’s proposals and to offer observations. At the second meeting, on May 7, participants shared their revised proposals.
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FACULTY SURVEY
DID THE SUPPORT HELP YOU MEET YOUR RESEARCH AND/OR WRITING GOALS? (combines responses from Faculty Fellowship, Summer Faculty Research Grant, Summer Research Seed Grant, Collaborative Research Seed Grant and Grimm Travel Award recipients)
In the spring of 2018, the Center for the Humanities asked former recipients of its Faculty Fellowships and other internal awards to reflect on their experiences with these various types of support. Here’s what they told us!
* Most neutral responses were from faculty who were unable to carry out their projects for nonfunding-related reasons or had not yet entered the grant period.
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“I used my FRG money to do research using archival materials about the Bauhaus that were housed at the Getty Research Institute in L.A. The research allowed me to deepen my understanding of the school and design movement and the participants in it. I used this information to write poems. … The grant experience met and possibly exceeded my expectations. The work I did at the Getty was critical to realizing what at that point was simply an idea. What I learned there allowed me to write a much more informed grant application for the Berlin Fellowship.” — Mary Jo Bang English, Faculty Research Grant, 2014
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“The different grants allowed for travel to collections; provided dedicated time to research and research collaboration; and funds for book purchases. The multiple grants have been instrumental at key points of my research, greatly assisting work in progress, and accelerating that progress.” — Harriet Stone Romance Languages and Literatures, Faculty Research Grant, 2010, 2014, 2017
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FACULTY RESEARCH SUPPORT
COLLABORATIVE RESEARCH SEED GRANT
“Thinking through the CRSG application has been transformative for me, and I don’t say this lightly. Not only does it have me exploring long-term opportunities for collaborative research and writing — in fact, one of our goals is to apply for collaborative research fellowships from the NEH and ACLS — but it also allowed me the chance to delve into new research directions, specifically related to the urban humanities.” —W illiam Acree Romance Languages and Literatures, Collaborative Research Seed Grant, 2018
SUMMER FACULTY RESEARCH GRANT Survey respondents reported the following long- and short-term outcomes of their Summer Faculty Research Grant:
FACULTY SEMINAR
Project still in progress
New course(s)
Other creative work (list below)
Invited lecture(s)
Article(s) (peer-reviewed journal)
Article(s)
Book (edited volume)
Book chapter(s)
Book (monograph)
“The Center for the Humanities is probably the institution on campus that has done the most to foster my intellectual and professional life on campus. The faculty seminar on “Intimate Histories of the Cold War and Decolonization” was easily the most rewarding experience I’ve had at WashU. It brought me into conversation with some of the smartest people I have ever met … and had deep impacts on my writing and thinking.” —A ndrea Friedman History, Faculty Seminar, 2010–11 43
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CHILDREN’S STUDIES The Children’s Studies minor brings together a range of disciplinary and methodological approaches to the study of children and childhood. During the 16 credit hours required for the minor, students are exposed to social science courses that measure and analyze how children mature and how institutions have affected children, as well as courses in the humanities that examine how children are portrayed and constructed in art, literature, history and film. This academic year, 11 students graduated with a Children’s Studies minor, and as of June 2018, an additional 33 have enrolled in the minor. The Children’s Studies minor is directed by Gerald Early, the Merle Kling Professor of Modern Letters in the Department of English and chair of the Department of African and African-American Studies, and Desirée White, professor of psychological and brain sciences.
SELECTED COURSES, 2017–18 This year, the Children’s Studies minor introduced a new one-credit capstone course, Senior Seminar in Children’s Studies, for juniors or seniors who are preparing to graduate with the minor. Students discussed a series of interdisciplinary readings about the past and the future of the field, reflected on their own pasts and futures in the Children’s Studies minor, and created and presented portfolios of their minor experience. Additional Children’s Studies courses offered this year draw from programs and departments across Arts & Sciences, including the following: COURSE HOME
COURSE TITLE
American Culture Studies
ediscovering the Child: R Interdisciplinary Workshops in an Urban Middle School
English The Cultural History of the American Teenager Film and Media Studies
Children’s Television
Germanic Languages and Literature Children in the Shadow of the Swastika International and Area Studies Children of Immigrants: Identity and Acculturation African and African-American Studies Construction and Experience of Black Adolescence English A History of the Golden Age of Children’s Literature Comparative Literature
Narratives of Childhood
Education Neighborhoods, Schools and Social Inequality
MINORS
MEDICAL HUMANITIES The minor in Medical Humanities draws on courses from a variety of departments and programs, including art history, classics, history, languages and literature, music, philosophy, and gender and sexuality studies. The minor graduated its first class of students in 2017–18, with one student graduating in December and eight in May. As of June 2018, 18 additional students are minoring in Medical Humanities. The minor hosted several major events during 2017–18, including the following: November 2: The Return of the Warrior: Ancient Greeks and Modern Combat welcomed Professor Peter Meineck of New York University to lead a group of veterans and Washington University students in readings of four scenes from Greek drama. A discussion followed regarding how these scenes still speak to contemporary concerns surrounding post-traumatic stress and other issues. February 8: Defining Human: An Interdisciplinary Conversation About What It Means to Be Human gathered an interdisciplinary panel to discuss the titular question. Panelists were Wolfram Schmidgen, chair, Department of English; Father Gary Braun; Charlie Kurth, assistant professor, Department of Philosophy; Tobias Zuern, postdoctoral fellow, East Asian Religions, Religious Studies Program; Emily Jungheim, MD, MSCI - OB/GYN; Allan Larson, professor, Department of Biology; Amy Cislo, senior lecturer, Department of Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies; and Rev. Karen Anderson, MDiv, Pastor, Ward Chapel AME Church, President MCU (Metropolitan Congregations United). Rebecca Messbarger, professor of Italian in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, concluded her three-year term as director of the minor in June 2018. Corinna Treitel, associate professor of history, became the director of the Medical Humanities minor on July 1, 2018. Treitel and Messbarger worked together to propose and found the minor.
ANCIENT GREEKS AND MODERN COMBAT Staged reading of scenes from Ancient Greek plays. Directed by Peter Meineck, Professor of Classics in the Modern World at New York University and founder and public program director of Aquila Theatre.
NOVEMBER 2 6:00-7:30PM GRAHAM CHAPEL Sponsored by Missouri Veterans Endeavor, the Program in Medical Humanities, the Department of Classics, the Performing Arts Department, the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, the George Warren Brown School of Social Work, the Institute for Public Health, and the Program in Comparative Literature.
THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 8, 6-8PM DANFORTH UNIVERSITY CENTER 2ND FLOOR, GOLDBERG LOUNGE An interdisciplinary panel discussion addressing the question:
“What does it mean to be human?” FEATURING: •
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Rev. Karen Anderson, MDiv. Pastor, Ward Chapel AME Church President, Metropolitan Congregations United Fr. Gary Braun Pastor, Catholic Student Center Amy Cislo, PhD Senior Lecturer, Women, Gender, & Sexuality Studies Emily Jungheim, MD, MSCI Associate Professor, OB-GYN Charlie Kurth, PhD Assistant Professor, Philosophy Allan Larson, PhD Professor, Biology Wolfram Schmidgen, PhD Chair of the English Department Tobias Zuern, PhD Postdoctoral Fellow, East Asian Religions
SPONSOR: The Program in Medical Humanities ORGANIZER: Tommy Baumel, Class of 2019, Medical Humanities minor Free and open to the public. For additional information, contact Rebecca Messbarger at rmessbar@wustl.edu, or visit http://cenhum.artsci.wustl.edu/.
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AN INTERDISCIPLINARY CONVERSATION ABOUT WHAT IT MEANS TO BE HUMAN
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GIVING OPPORTUNITIES
a year in review
More than ever, the humanistic perspective plays a vital role in working to resolve today’s complex problems. The Center for the Humanities promotes the advancement of the humanistic disciplines by funding new research and facilitating exchanges between scholars, changemakers and the interested public. Please take part in helping us to expand and deepen the reach of the humanities and the important contributions our center achieves. The Center for the Humanities asks for your support in promoting our mission at Washington University as well as our local community and around the world.
GIFTS TO THE ANNUAL FUND Direct your annual Washington University gift to the Center for the Humanities to support ongoing programs such as the James E. McLeod Memorial Lecture on Higher Education; the Faculty Book Celebration, which honors our faculty’s scholarship and inquiry; publication of the Humanities Broadsheet, a monthly publication that highlights humanities-related events on campus and in the St. Louis area; or our faculty workshops, which provide an important forum for faculty development in grant-seeking, academic publishing and public engagement. Century Club membership begins with an Annual Fund gift of $100 or more. Annual Fund gifts of $1,000 or more earn membership into the Eliot Society, a leadership society that benefits from exclusive events and offerings such as the Black Tie Annual Dinner and discounted rates for the Whittemore House.
ENDOWMENT GIFTS Endowment gifts are invaluable resources that bolster the strength, quality and success of Washington University and the Center for the Humanities. Endowed fellowships, endowed academic and research programs, and endowed facility funds provide critical permanent support for faculty teaching and research and for myriad student educational experiences. Fellowships, which may be designated to provide permanent funds for undergraduate, graduate and postdoctoral fellows, or faculty fellows, provide key resources that further the critical import of the humanities today by supporting discovery, innovative research and curriculum development
With an endowed gift of $50,000, you will provide support for lectures and programming, thus helping us to disseminate the knowledge and research of our talented community. With a gift of $100,000, you will be able to endow a fellowship and thus dramatically enhance a new scholar’s ability to dig deep into today’s most pressing questions. To make a gift in support of the Center for the Humanities, please contact Director and Professor Jean Allman (314-935-5576 or jallman@wustl.edu) or Director of Development Mary Druyvesteyn (314-9355219 or druyvesteyn@wustl.edu).
MAKE A GIFT ONLINE To make a secure online gift or to make payment on an existing pledge, go to our giving page at gifts.wustl.edu. To designate your gift, type “Center for the Humanities” in the special designation box.
MAKE A GIFT OR PLEDGE BY MAIL To make a gift by mail, please include an explanation of the purpose for your gift and a check made payable to Washington University. SEND TO: Washington University in St. Louis, Alumni and Development Programs, Attn: Mary Druyvesteyn, One Brookings Drive, Campus Box 1202, St. Louis, MO 63130. 1. James E. McLeod Annual Lecture on Higher Education/ WUSTL Photos 2. Dwell in Other Futures, Divided City/David Johnson 3. “Autumn Knight, The La-a Consortium: Convening #3,” Dwell in Other Futures, Divided City/Michael Thomas 4. James E. McLeod Annual Lecture on Higher Education/ WUSTL Photos 5. Faculty Book Celebration/WUSTL Photos 6. Alberti: Architecture for Young People, Divided City/ WUSTL Photos
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ADMINISTRATIVE STAFF
a year in review
JEAN ALLMAN
Director, Center for the Humanities J.H. Hexter Professor in the Humanities, Department of African and African-American Studies, with appointments in the Departments of History and Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies
REBECCA WANZO
Associate Director, Center for the Humanities Associate Professor, Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies
WENDY LOVE ANDERSON Academic Coordinator
KATHY DANIEL
Grant and Contract Coordinator
KATHLEEN G. FIELDS
Publications and Communications Editor
BARBARA LIEBMANN
Administrative Coordinator
TILA NEGUSE
Coordinator, Divided City Initiative
EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE William Acree Associate Professor of Spanish Monique Bedasse Assistant Professor of History Rebecca Copeland Professor of Japanese Language and Literature Tili Boon Cuillé Associate Professor of French and Comparative Literature Robert Henke Professor of Drama and Comparative Literature Ignacio Infante Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Spanish Charlie Kurth Assistant Professor of Philosophy Laurie Maffly-Kipp Archer Alexander Distinguished Professor, Religion and Politics
CONTACT DETAILS Center for the Humanities Washington University in St. Louis Campus Box 1071 One Brookings Drive, St. Louis, MO 63130-4899 314-935-5576 cenhum@wustl.edu humanities.wustl.edu Umrath Hall, Room 217
Ignacio Sánchez Prado Professor of Spanish, Latin American Studies, and Film and Media Studies
IN MEMORIAM
WILLIAM GASS (1924–2017) When William Gass established the Washington University International Writers Center in 1990, the goal was to bring “writers of every form and flavor” from around the world to St. Louis. He aimed high with his first invitation, to the St. Lucian poet and playwright Derek Walcott. In the years since, the center’s name has changed to the Center for the Humanities and our mission has broadened to include all of the humanistic disciplines. But we strive to remain true to his pioneering spirit and his dedication to “setting in motion what … will one day be seen to have been a good idea,” as he wrote in his invitation to Walcott. We will continue to draw inspiration from his grand vision. — Jean Allman Director, Center for the Humanities
^^ Derek Walcott and William Gass at the International
Writers Center’s “inaugural bash,” where Walcott gave a reading, January 18, 1991. P hoto courtesy International Writers Center Archive, Washington University Libraries.
Center for the Humanities Campus Box 1071 One Brookings Drive St. Louis, MO 63130-4899
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