A Year in Review 2019-20 - WashU Center for the Humanities

CENTER FOR THE HUMANITIES

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Annual Report1

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02/LETTER FROM THE INTERIM DIRECTOR 04/HUMAN TIES 04/Truths and Reckonings: A Pop-up Memorial Museum Citing the city’s geographical and historical setting, Associate Professor of African and African-American Studies Geoff Ward writes that St. Louis is a location particularly suited for telling the story of Truths and Reckonings: The Art of Transformative Racial Justice, an exhibition he curated for the Kemper Art Museum.

06/The Fall of the Berlin Wall and the Political Movement Overlooked by 30th Anniversary Celebrations The fall of the Berlin Wall is remembered as the inevitable triumph over socialism and the inevitable rejoining of East and West Germany. But just days earlier, up to 500,000 East Germans demonstrated to appeal for changes within their government — reunification was not among their demands. In the aftermath of the wall’s fall, writes historian Anika Walke, their vision for the future of the German Democratic Republic is often forgotten.

ON THE COVER

Daily images of lines found in nature and created by people were an important part of the Center for the Humanities’ Life/Lines April 2020 poetrywriting outreach project. As the Washington University and St. Louis community hunkered down under COVID-19 stay-at-home orders, the days blurred and the isolation grew. Every morning in April, a Life/Lines email arrived in participants’ inboxes, with a fresh image and a new poetry prompt. Writers submitted their own poems, then checked the project’s website to see how others responded to the same prompt. By the end of the month, a community of poets — some accomplished and some first-timers — had helped each other through an anxious and uncertain time. See more on pp. 26–28. Photo by Rod Long via Unsplash.

10 08/On Translating Beckett’s Minimalism English and drama scholar Julia Walker writes about Samuel Beckett’s minimalism and the particular challenges — and opportunities — that arise when translating his works.

10/The Career of a Medieval Accusation in an Age of Science What happens when an age-old antiSemitic superstition meets scientific inquiry? That’s the question historian Hillel Kieval kept in mind as he scoured archives in Prague, Budapest, New York, Jerusalem and Berlin to investigate a spate of “ritual murder” accusations leveled against Jews living in turn-of-the-century Central and Eastern Europe.

12/DIVIDED CITY INITIATIVE 16/REDEFINING DOCTORAL EDUCATION IN THE HUMANITIES (RDE) 18/EVENTS + OUTREACH 18/James E. McLeod Memorial Lecture on Higher Education On George Sanchez George Sanchez has helped shape a new generation of academics who have promoted connections with nonacademic organizations, the focus of his talk in 2019 James E. McLeod Memorial Lecture

on Higher Education. Scholar Mary Ann Dzuback writes about Sanchez’s longtime commitment to preserving the multiethnic and multiracial stories of a community in Los Angeles.

20/Faculty Book Celebration Daphne A. Brooks and the History of Black Women’s ‘Radical Musicianship’ Performance studies scholar Paige McGinley interviews Faculty Book Celebration keynote speaker Daphne A. Brooks about her work on Black sonic history and writing for popular and academic audiences.

26/Life/Lines During the month of April (National Poetry Month) in 2020, writers from all corners and walks of life participated in Life/Lines, a daily opportunity for creative expression.

Uniting behind a common prompt, around 350 of them wrote more than 1,200 short poems and in the process made their own community despite the isolation of COVID-19 quarantine.

2019-2020 Annual Report Table of Contents

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34/A War With Words: How Spain’s Women Lobbied Against Slavery in Cuba Akiko Tsuchiya details the social and cultural role that Spanish women writers and intellectuals played in the maledominated antislavery movement of the 19th century, both within and beyond Spain’s national borders, and the space they created for women’s political participation in the public sphere.

36/Home Work: Inside the Lives of Migrant Caregivers in Palestine/Israel As many as 300,000 workers from countries such as the Philippines, Nepal, Sri Lanka and India live and work in the homes of Israeli citizens. In her book project, “Four Years, Three Months: Migrant Caregivers in Palestine/Israel,” scholar of women, gender and sexuality studies Rachel Brown looks into the employer/caregiver relationship as one, paradoxically, of “love, mistrust, trust, exploitation, closeness, racism, familial affection, intimacy, care, dependency, surveillance and alienation.”

30 29/Cosponsored Events On Borders and Unnatural ‘Natural’ Deaths Nature itself — in the form of the Sonoran Desert and the Mediterranean Sea — has been enlisted by nations to carry out enforcement of their borders, writes Tabea Linhard, professor of Spanish, comparative literature, and international and area studies. This strategy allows governments to obscure the role policy plays in deaths of migrants in these hostile terrains.

31/FELLOWS 32/Ovid’s Ibis: Out of Exile When the ancient Roman poet Ovid was banished to the far corner of the empire, he funneled his righteous indignation into the poem Ibis. Classist Thomas Keeline tells the story of the man, the poem and his attempt to bring them both out of the cold.

33/The City Electric: How Mexico City’s People Shaped Its Electrified Future We inhabit electrified spaces. Utility posts and aerial and underground cables surround us. Our horizon is broken down by high-voltage towers, transformers, posts and power lines. Historian of modern Latin America Diana Montaño delves into the making of electrified spaces in Mexico City and how people and power shaped the city’s fate.

35/Bedlam in the New World: A Mexican Madhouse in the Age of Enlightenment Historian Christina Ramos’ project to reconstruct the history of Mexico City’s Hospital de San Hipólito, as well as its most notorious patients — like the rebellious Indian proclaiming noble ancestry and entitlement, a military lieutenant foreshadowing the coming of revolution, a blasphemous Creole embroiderer in possession of a notebook filled with pornographic content — fills in gaps in both the history of medicine and scholarship on the Enlightenment.

37/Is Envy OK? Is Love Laudable? What Medieval Texts Tell Us About Emotions Philosophers, religious scholars and poets alike have long examined human emotions.

Literature scholar Jessica Rosenfeld zeros in on what medieval writers had to say about love and envy, and how their conclusions can help inform our understandings of how they operate.

40/FACULTY RESEARCH SUPPORT 44/MINORS 46/GIVING OPPORTUNITIES

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Letter from the Acting Director

The 2019–20 academic year was as deeply troubling as it was challenging for the communities embodied and represented by the Center for the Humanities at Washington University in St. Louis.

Painfully marked by the COVID-19 pandemic across the world, as well as the horrific deaths of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor and George Floyd, and the many Black lives tragically lost to racism, injustice and inequality in the United States, this year has brought the difficult historical and social conditions that pervade our world to the fore. If ever there was a difficult year to fill in for the center’s director, Jean Allman, there is no doubt that this one would check that box. However, writing this letter in August 2020, I can say that, perhaps more than ever, this year has highlighted the essential purpose and mission of the Center for the Humanities, locally and beyond.

Ignacio Infante Acting Director, Center for the Humanities; Associate Professor, Comparative Literature and Romance Languages and Literatures

Our year was powerfully bookended by our annual signature events, the James E. McLeod Memorial Lecture on Higher Education, delivered by George Sanchez, and the Annual Faculty Book Celebration, which showcased a keynote presentation by Daphne A. Brooks, as well as a roundtable on her scholarship moderated

by Shefali Chandra, interim associate director of the center. While Sanchez’s lecture, “Bridging the Divided City: Preparing Students for a New Los Angeles,” illuminated the challenges and opportunities facing graduate education for Latinx and minority scholars and students in the city of Los Angeles today, Brooks’ keynote, “Blackface Broken Records: On the Eve of the Blues Feminist Experiment,” explored the complex racial and sexual politics of early blues recordings during the 1910s in the United States. While our series of events had to end earlier than usual because of the COVID-19 pandemic, it brought some extremely important lectures, events and conferences to the campus and broader community, from tackling issues as pressing as the tragic politics of migrant life and death along the U.S.–Mexico border to the re-examination of the creative role of translation in the work of the Irish writer Samuel Beckett to a groundbreaking exhibit on the legacies of racial violence.

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Painfully marked by the COVID-19 pandemic across the world, as well as the horrific deaths of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor and George Floyd, and the many Black lives tragically lost to racism, injustice and inequality in the United States, this year has brought the difficult historical and social conditions that pervade our world to the fore.

This year also saw the continued success of the center’s initiatives generously supported by the Mellon Foundation: The Divided City (coordinated by Tila Neguse) and RDE (Redefining Doctoral Education).

Both initiatives included new, exciting developments this year, such as the Making and Breaking the Public working group (coordinated by William Acree and Samuel Shearer and which explores the key intersections between the growing fields of urban and public humanities), as well as the series of RDE Cross-Training and Curricular Innovation grants awarded to colleagues across a wide range of fields. During the spring semester, we also hosted our first Mellon-supported BECHS-Africa Fellowship recipient, Dorothy Pokua Agyepong (University of Ghana), who completed sections on her ongoing research project in the field of linguistics.

As we were forced to move to our remote work locations due to the COVID-19 pandemic after spring break, we remained connected during April through the collaborative Life/Lines poetry project conceived by Jean Allman and brilliantly curated daily by our publications and communications editor, Kathleen Fields. Through a daily prompt shared by a series of guest poets, scholars, translators and public figures, Life/Lines provided a much-needed form of connection across the university, the St. Louis community and around the world, while highlighting the power of poetry to provide such a sustaining mode of expression (virtual human ties indeed) during a most precarious and isolating time.

I would like to conclude by thanking the extraordinary staff at the center — which also includes Wendy Love Anderson, Barbara Liebmann and Trisha Sutton — for all their work, dedication and commitment to the center’s mission. Special thanks to Shefali Chandra, our interim associate director, for her generous collaboration and collegiality. I would also like to express our deepest gratitude to Dean Barbara Schaal for her unwavering support of the humanities and of the center during her entire tenure as dean of the Faculty of Arts & Sciences. Finally, as always, I am grateful to our director, Jean Allman, for the unique opportunity to lead the center this year in her stead as we move forward toward what we hope is a more just and equitable future for all.

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HUMAN TIES

The Art of Transformative Racial Justice Geoff Ward is a professor of African and African-American Studies.

My teaching gallery exhibition Truths & Reckonings: The Art of Transformative Racial Justice grew out of over a decade of research on historical racial violence, its legacies and implications for redress.

We know from this research that area histories of enslavement, lynching and other repression relate to patterns of violence, conflict and inequality today. Our most recent study shows that county histories of lynching are strong predictors of the odds that children — and especially Black children — will be corporally punished in Southern schools today. Similar studies link other contemporary patterns — like white political conservativism and anti-Black sentiment, homicide and incarceration rates, labor market inequality, and heart disease — to area histories of lynching and enslavement. As James Baldwin has stressed, “History is not the past. It is the present. We carry our history with us. We are our history.”

Truths and Reckonings was conceived as a “pop-up memorial museum,” with groupings of artworks from the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum and archival materials from John M. Olin Library and other libraries, building understanding and acknowledgment of these legacies and greater commitment to repair. Exemplified by museums focusing on the Holocaust, genocide and other atrocities, memorial museums aim to translate education and commemoration around past injustices into greater ethical commitments to present and future justice. My exhibit demonstrated both the need for this work and the university resources at our disposal to engage in it, if only we are willing.

Glenn Ligon (American, b.

1960), selection from the portfolio Runaways, 1993.

Lithograph, 30/45, 16 × 12”. Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, Washington University in St. Louis. University purchase, Nathan Cummings Fund and Art Acquisition Fund, 1996. © Glenn Ligon.

Being committed to a public-facing academic practice, I especially appreciated how the exhibit enabled more creative expression and active engagement with diverse groups including staff, students and faculty from our campus and others; area residents; and visitors to St. Louis in a series of conversations and programs that extended over a period of months. WashU students who might not take my classes could still learn about this work by visiting the teaching gallery, and I was able to provide tours to groups, including the Academy for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion; campus residential communities; and teachers from area middle and high schools. Meg Galindo, an Arts & Sciences graduate student, helped me create a

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Glenn Ligon (American, b. 1960), selection from the portfolio Untitled (Two White / Two Black), 1992. Softground etching, aquatint, spit bite, and sugarlift, 25 1/8 × 17 1/2”. Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, Washington University in St. Louis.

University purchase, Charles H. Yalem Art Fund, 1997. © Glenn Ligon.

digital catalog of the teaching gallery so that I could bring it into my Prison Education Project class, virtually.

The Kemper Art Museum has developed a virtual tour of the exhibit, sites.wustl.edu/truthsandreckonings, which enables continued campus and community engagement through this reparative commemorative project.

I came to Washington University in 2018 to deepen this work on legacies and its potential for impact, confident the university, city and region would afford tremendous opportunities to advance basic research, engage students and translate insights into strategies and practices of redress. The exhibit pays close attention to histories and legacies in our region. St. Louis is a deeply wounded city; historian Walter Johnson aptly describes it as the Broken Heart of America.

Yet these distinctions derive from a broader history of Missouri, as freedom’s compromise state, and sociological sedimentation in the wider Mississippi River valley, whereby our river city would become a kind of catchment area, concentrating legacies of national and global atrocity. Missouri statehood was born of an agreement to violate human rights and democratic principles of freedom and equality in furtherance of white racial dominance. The Mississippi River functioned literally as America’s “middle passage,” linking histories and legacies of racist repression in places like Missouri’s

Little Dixie, Bootheel, Jefferson City and St. Louis, to places in the lower river basin, like Memphis; the Arkansas, Mississippi and Louisiana delta regions; New Orleans; and beyond to the global atrocity of the transatlantic slave trade. This exhibit invites reflection on how these legacies become concentrated in a place like St. Louis, through global patterns of racist dislocation, exploitation and dispossession; Black refugee migration; tenuous and contested resettlement; and continued exclusion here in our (gated) gateway city.

The teaching gallery program at the Kemper Art Museum, where faculty guests curate exhibits related to their scholarship — and the relevant university art and library collections my exhibit utilizes — exemplify what attracted me to Washington University. The support from the museum director, curators and other staff, and from Olin librarians has also been tremendous. My hope is that community interest in this exhibit signals that its truth is increasingly felt and shared, and we are growing committed to reckoning with these histories and legacies today.

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HUMAN TIES

Just days before, on November 4, 1989, up to 500,000 East Germans had attended a demonstration in Berlin — the first and only such event that had not been organized by state authorities. The rally, billed as a defense of the GDR constitution and especially the rights to freedom of the press, opinion and assembly, had demonstrated that criticism of the GDR was not necessarily meant to question the existence of the state, but the status quo.

“Imagine there is socialism, and nobody leaves.”

Demonstration in East Berlin, November 4, 1989. Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-1989-1104-437 / Settnik, Bernd / CC-BYSA 3.0.

The Fall of the Berlin Wall and the Political Movement Overlooked by 30th Anniversary Celebrations Anika Walke is an associate professor of history.

“As far as I know — effective immediately, without delay.”

Günter Schabowski, newly appointed minister for information of the German Democratic Republic government, made history with this vague answer to a journalist’s question at 6:55 p.m. on November 9, 1989. Effective that day, people heard, East German citizens could receive permission to travel abroad or even emigrate permanently.

Because Schabowski had not paid attention to an embargo on this new regulation, and because he had not even read the law carefully, his statement preempted an orderly cross-border traffic that was supposed to allow for the long-desired freedom to travel for East German citizens. Instead, the Berlin Wall crumbled. Immediately, East and West Germans made their way to the border checkpoints in the city of Berlin and demanded permission to cross. Four hours later, border guards, who had been taken by surprise by the evening’s events, gave in and opened the barriers.

What we now commemorate as the fall of the Berlin Wall, was, while hugely symbolic, the result of a rhetorical fumble and not inevitable.

When writer Christa Wolf, one of 26 speakers at the rally, recited these words from a banner used at many demonstrations that had swept the country for the past two months, people cheered. They, and surely millions glued to the TV where the rally was streamed live (again, something that had never happened before), shared this sentiment. To be sure, there were those who did want to leave. Thousands had applied for permission to emigrate in previous decades, and thousands had forced their way out via the Hungarian-Austrian border or the West German embassy in Prague in the summer and fall of 1989. But for years, political opponents, church activists, punks, artists, writers, musicians and philosophers had called for democratization, for freedom of speech, for a right to privacy and for freedom to travel abroad. They did not want to leave, but they wanted a better country — a better socialism.

There were also many who took to the streets in September and October 1989, exclaiming, “We’re staying here!” The more famous slogan of “We are the people” made it into the history books. Often, it is benevolently placed next to “We are one people,” a slogan calling for the reunification of East and West Germany, which gained popularity in late November once the wall was open. And yet, it was precisely the activism of those who had

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found the courage to speak up before that memorable fumble that laid the foundation for it: Pressure from the street had set in motion changes within the government, including the appointment of a minister for information — Schabowski — and urged the leadership to issue a new law on international travel.

Whether one sees the fall of the Berlin Wall positively or negatively, it is only appropriate to remember that it was rather an end to, not the beginning of, a process that signaled the demise of the GDR as it had existed for four decades. It thwarted the efforts of many who were proposing a so-called Third Way — insisting on the GDR’s sovereignty, which would offer the opportunity to shape a society built on principles of solidarity, social justice, individual freedom, freedom of movement and protection of the environment. Instead, a few days later, West German politicians, economists and lobbyists began to discuss steps toward reunification and conditions for economic support to the East German lands — conditions that, many warned, could only be harmful to large parts of the population. Capitalist restructuring, drastic cuts to welfare and social support systems, and the return of real estate and land to pre-World War II owners spelled not only loss of social status and social security. This massive and often regressive transformation was experienced as a loss of self-worth and sense of belonging by citizens of the former GDR and would produce a new crisis of political representation.

Commemorating and celebrating November 9 covers up the complexity of history. Focusing on the flag-waving men and women who scaled the Berlin Wall on that fall night of 1989 makes it easy to neglect the power relationships that steamrolled the protesters of November 4, and that to this day suggest that the fall of the Berlin Wall marks the inevitable victory of capitalism.

The banner reads: “For article 27 and 28 of the Constitution!

No violence! We’re staying here!” East Berlin demonstration, November 4, 1989.

Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-1989-1104-005 / CC-BY-SA 3.0.

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On Translating Beckett’s Minimalism Julia A. Walker is an associate professor of English and drama.

Samuel Beckett was an elegant writer, mathematically speaking.

Seeking to distinguish himself from the great Irish modernist James Joyce, for whom he served as a research assistant during his early years in Paris, Beckett did not practice an additive style, accreting words in waves of associative thought to represent the complex subjectivities of his characters. Rather, he stripped away words until he arrived at the core elements of speech that merely gestured to an intended meaning. In Waiting for Godot, for example, Act I concludes with Gogo asking, “Well, shall we go?” to which Didi replies, “Yes, let’s go.” Beckett’s stage direction reads “They do not move. Curtain.”

Here, dialogue and gesture exist in a palpable tension that enacts the concept of “waiting” as somewhere between the movement of asserting one’s will and the ontological stasis of Being. Waiting is thus revealed to be an existential condition of life — a theme figured in the circular action of the play. Quite a bit of philosophical heft packed into only seven words!

Beckett’s “minimalist” style extends beyond his characters’ dialogue to include the spare narratives that structure his novels and plays as well as the theatrical elements that bring his dramas to life on stage.

Like a poet (which he also was), he set self-imposed limits on his creative process, stripping the number of characters from his plays over the course of his career: Waiting for Godot features 5; Endgame puts in play 4; Play spotlights 3; Happy Days grounds its action in 2; and Krapp’s Last Tape attests to 1, before the enigmatic mouth in Not I fades to 0.

Samuel Beckett Mural (London, 2006–10) by artist Alex Martinez; photo by Flickr user W10 / CC-BY-2.0.

With geometric precision, Beckett reveals that there is no absolute value of meaning in language, in actions or even in the fact of existence. Like Wittgenstein, he understood meaning to be a function of language use, with the coefficients of vocal inflection, gesture and referential context approaching infinity. This is why he was such a brilliant playwright. Beckett understood how theater

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creates meaning though the various “languages” of the stage, including voice and movement. When Clov pushes Hamm’s wheelchair around the perimeter of the room, returning him to dead center, we see Endgame’s chess metaphor play out in the kinesthetic movement of the actors’ bodies as the pawn enacts the authority of his already vanquished King.

We might assume, then, that Beckett’s plays move easily between languages and culture — vocality and gesture functioning in more or less the same way in each. But Beckett insisted on translating his own work from French into English, from German into English, and from English into French. And he exerted strict control over productions of his plays, trusting directors Alan Schneider and Walter Asmus to interpret them in performance, but famously refusing permission to JoAnne Akalaitis, who set her production of Endgame in a subway tunnel, and to Matin van Veldhuizen, who cast female actors as Godot’s tramps.

Even if his characters and settings remain “universal” (however contested that claim), Beckett’s plays pose interesting problems for translators to solve, as recent performances outside of the Anglo-European context have revealed. In Wu Hsing-kuo’s 2005 production of Godot by the Contemporary

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Beckett’s “minimalist” style extends beyond his characters’ dialogue to include the spare narratives that structure his novels and plays as well as the theatrical elements that bring his dramas to life on stage.

Legend Theatre in Taiwan, for example, theater scholar Wei Feng has noted Beckett’s play was “translated” across languages and cultures in several ways. First, the play’s tragicomic tramps and their vaudeville-esque routines were rendered through the chou, or clown, character in Beijing opera, with the actors performing the expected conventions of their jingju roles badly to suggest the characters’ comic failure. Second, to mitigate against an interpretation that this was merely a poor performance, Wu translated the title of the play as Waiting for Guotuo, or “Waiting for Buddha,” where the homonymic quality of “Guotuo” evoked Beckett’s original, even as it shifted the play’s frame of reference from existentialism to a philosophical register that was more recognizable to the production’s target audience, while remaining faithful to the philosophical scope of the source text. As this suggests, Beckett’s minimalist style is a more — not less — complicated proposition for translators, demanding that they take into account language, tone, gesture, frame of reference and context of performance, all with an eye toward preserving the work’s unity. Not an easy task!

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The Career of a Medieval Accusation in an Age of Science Hillel Kieval is the Goldstein Professor of Jewish History and Thought and the chair of the Department of Jewish, Islamic, and Middle Eastern Studies.

Students of Jewish-Christian relations in the Middle Ages are familiar with what is often called the “blood libel,” the accusation that Jews were in the habit of kidnapping Christian children to torture and kill them (in imitation of the crucifixion of Jesus), and to consume the blood of their victims in the performance of Jewish ritual. Classic instances of the ritual murder accusation took place in the 12th and 13th century in England, France and the Holy Roman Empire and often involved mass arrests, interrogations under torture, public trials and executions.

Stories of Jewish ritual murder performed a variety of cultural functions in traditional Christian societies. They transferred narratives of Christ’s suffering and crucifixion from the distant past to the ongoing present; they enunciated the paradoxical closeness and distance, connection and rivalry, between Judaism and Christianity; and they articulated a message of potential and omnipresent danger that attended the coexistence of Jews and Christians.

This peculiar legend has enjoyed great longevity in European popular culture, but it never went unchallenged. It was denounced in a famous papal bull in the 13th century, lampooned by Protestant theologians in the 16th century and dismissed as superstition in the Enlightenment. Reforms in criminal procedure and, especially, the abolition of the use of torture in criminal investigations by the end of the 18th century, seemed to have put a final stop to state support for public prosecutions of this sort — that is, until the turn of the 20th century.

During the last two decades of the 19th century and the first decade or so of the 20th — following a hiatus of close to 300 years — accusations against Jews for the crime of ritual murder proliferated through much of Central Europe and as far east as the Russian empire. One turn-of-the-century observer, combing mainly through German and Austrian newspapers, detailed no fewer than 128 public accusations during the years 1881 to 1900. This was probably a low estimate.

Not surprisingly, the vast majority of the claims never got beyond rumor mongering or sensational reporting in the mass media. It is conceivable, though, that dozens of accusations were followed up by criminal investigations of varying duration and intensity.

Remarkably, four Central and East European states — Germany, Austria, Hungary and Russia — chose formally to prosecute Jewish defendants at six public trials between 1879 and 1913, thereby breaking with a longstanding tradition of skeptical neutrality on the part of the state. The trials in question took place in Kutaisi (Russian Georgia, 1879), Tiszaeszlár (Hungary, 1882–83), Xanten (Germany, 1891–92), Polná (Austrian Bohemia, 1899–1900), Konitz (Germany/West Prussia, 1900–01) and Kiev (Russian Ukraine, 1911–13).

Of those, three appear to have generated the most discussion in the foreign press.

Tiszaeszlár was the first modern prosecution in Central Europe and elicited widespread questioning of the compatibility of ritual murder discourse and modern culture.

Polná featured a dramatic intervention on the Jewish defendant’s behalf by Tomáš Masaryk, who later became the first president of independent Czechoslovakia.

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At libraries and Kiev seemed to epitomize to the Western archives in Prague, world both the backwardness of Imperial Budapest, New Russia and the hopelessness of its York, Jerusalem and Berlin, Kieval worked oppressed Jewish population. with source material in German, Czech, I have spent a good deal of time over the Hungarian, French past 20 years investigating four of these and Hebrew to “modern” ritual murder trials, hoping to research ritual murder accusations in Central answer several different questions. Why and Eastern Europe. the apparent proliferation and mass View of Kutaisi © dissemination of the accusation at this Mindia Charkseliani/ Shutterstock point in time? Why did modern bureaucratic

states with parliamentary systems decide to invest huge amounts of time and prestige in prosecuting cases that they would have dismissed out of hand a century or two earlier? And, most important, how did multiple state actors — magistrates, prosecutors, forensic scientists and experts of various types — manage to render the implausible plausible?

Over the course of my research, I abandoned my original analytical frame: the ritual

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murder trial as a manifestation of myth and irrationality in an otherwise scientific worldview. It is clear to me now that such a perspective cannot answer very much. In each of the states in question, prosecutors, judges, forensic scientists, criminologists, academic scholars of Judaism and other “expert witnesses” worked to maintain their identity as scientifically trained, bureaucratic rationalists. The modern ritual murder trial could succeed for as long as it did only if it could be disciplined by both the rhetoric and the procedures of modern science. Far from being a throwback to the Middle Ages, the modern ritual murder trial was, in fact, a product of post-Enlightenment politics, fears and conventional wisdoms. It succeeded for as long as it did because it was articulated through the idioms of scientific discourse and rationality.

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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 multipronged research, education and community-engagement project combines the disciplinary strengths of scholars and professionals in the humanities, architecture and urban design.

A second phase of the initiative, the Divided City 2022, kicked off in fall 2018 thanks to an additional $1 million grant from the Mellon Foundation.

Primary investigators: Jean Allman, the J.H. Hexter Professor in the Humanities and director, Center for the Humanities; and Bruce Lindsey, the E. Desmond Lee Professor for Community Collaboration, Sam Fox School, both at Washington University.

Learn more at thedividedcity.com.

DIVIDED CITY

NEW AWARDS Beauty in Enormous Bleakness: The Design Legacy of the Interned Generation of Japanese Americans Kelley Van Dyck Murphy, Assistant Professor, Sam Fox School, Washington University; Heidi Kolk, Assistant Professor, Sam Fox School, and Assistant Vice Provost of Academic Assessment, Washington University; Lynette Widder, Lecturer, Columbia University Beauty in Enormous Bleakness: The Design Legacy of the Interned Generation of Japanese Americans is an interdisciplinary research project between the School of Architecture, the School of Art and American Culture Studies that seeks to explore the connection between American postwar design history and the JapaneseAmerican internment during World War II. Japanese Americans greatly influenced the landscape of postwar American art, architecture and design, from the TWA terminal to the Twin Towers to the Corvette Stingray. Isamu Noguchi, Ruth Asawa, Chiura Obata and Ray Komai are just a few of the design luminaries who made profound contributions to the history of American art and design.

Locally, in St. Louis, architects Gyo Obata and Richard Henmi, both graduates of Washington University, are responsible for much of the mid-century architectural heritage of the city. This research project looks at the role of Japanese-American artists and designers who were affected by the internment of WWII; the lasting effects of their influence on architecture, art and design in the United States; and the impact of the internment experience on their work.

The project unfolds in three mutually informing parts: the research and curation of an exhibition featuring the work of selected Japanese-American architects, artists and designers (including those who escaped internment by attending Washington University); the creation of an archive of materials including but not limited to drawings, models, photographs, correspondence, artwork and other artifacts collected for the exhibition; and the development of an interdisciplinary seminar focused on researching the history of postwar Japanese-American designers’ internment and its impact on their design practices.

Reclaiming Historic Assets to Transform Communities Catalina Freixas, Associate Professor, Sam Fox School, Washington University; Melisa Sanders, Owner/Principal, BlackArc Design; Aaron Williams, Organizer, 4theVille; Cindy Mense, Chief Executive Officer, Trailnet; Nick Hoffman, Managing Director of Education and Visitor Experience, Missouri Historical Society

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The Ville is a historic African-American neighborhood located in north St. Louis City with a rich heritage of Black education, business, entertainment and culture. Prior to the U.S. civil rights movement, the use of de jure and de facto segregation prevented African Americans from finding housing in most areas of the city. As a result, the African-American population of St. Louis heavily concentrated in and around the Ville. Thus, the neighborhood became home to a number of cultural and educational institutions central to the life of the Black community, as well to many notable Black activists, artists and innovators who have contributed significantly to social and civil rights advancements not only at a local level, but globally.

Years of neglect and disinvestment, products of racial restrictive covenants, redlining, zoning and racist real estate practices, were followed by depopulation and hyper-vacancy as desegregation allowed those who could afford it to move out of the neighborhood. The subsequent deterioration of the physical historical fabric is only one aspect of the damage to a once vibrant and thriving Black community.

Today, the Ville continues to experience erasure. As a result, the community is at risk, as many of the story-keepers of the Ville’s oral history are aging and/or have left the neighborhood.

Using the work conducted by 4theVille as a point of departure, Reclaiming Historic Assets to Transform Communities (RHATC) is a multiphased collaborative community engagement project that aims to empower transient and permanent community members with the neighborhood history to bolster engagement and improve public safety. RHATC seeks to educate, unearth and reclaim sites of historical significance through a series of design exercises, community conversations and urban interventions. Through the project, students work in tandem with neighbors

to design with and to integrate design, museum science, planning and community development practices, engaging multidisciplinary professionals and community members in an effort to activate underutilized public space. Project outcomes will demonstrate how acknowledgment and visualization of complex racialized history can be used to bolster the framework of a disenfranchised community.

Aerial Perspectives: Using Drone Photography to Empower Community-Generated Design Solutions Meghan Kirkwood, Assistant Professor of Photography, Sam Fox School, Washington University; and Wyly Brown, Assistant Professor of Architecture, Sam Fox School, Washington University This project works in collaboration with resident groups in three different St. Louis neighborhoods to integrate the use of drone technologies to support the development of their neighborhood planning efforts. Our workshops will teach residents to fly drones for a variety of purposes, capture aerial views, collect data on lighting footprints, three-dimensionally scan geometry and topography, and create visual narratives about their own neighborhood spaces.

By putting the tools developed for capturing quantitative and qualitative data directly into the hands of local residents in the early planning stages, new neighborhood-led strategies and initiatives will arise to enhance resources that address issues of vacancy and equity. This project offers an important opportunity to test the efficacy of this community-led model for addressing issues of urban segregation, develop new and sustainable connections between Washington University researchers, and create new locally born design solutions to repurpose vacant spaces into beloved places.

“They Call This Town St. Louis” by Thomas Hawk / CC BY-NC 2-0.

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DIVIDED CITY

Highlight: Making and Breaking the Public Making and Breaking the Public is a collaborative faculty grant, organized as a research working group. Working with architects, sociologists, historians, anthropologists, literature and cultural studies scholars and designers, primary investigators William Acree (Romance Languages and Literatures) and Samuel Shearer (African and African-American Studies) attend to the meanings of publics, specifically urban publics. They also collaboratively explore how to model the urban humanities as a mode of public humanities work.

Who makes up the publics in public humanities? Who are included in and excluded from the collectives? And what challenges are there for carrying out public urban humanities in an uncertain but decidedly urban age?

The group organized two project-related events in 2019–20.

October 17–20, they hosted the Insurgent Public Space Making Workshop, featuring Jeffrey Hou, professor of landscape architecture, University of Washington; Bryan Bedwell, head of Kings Highway Vigilante Transitions; and Sheila Rendon, St. Louis resident displaced by the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency’s (NGA) move to North St. Louis.

The workshop focused on insurgent public space making in St. Louis and around the world. Open to the public as well as the campus community, it gathered more than 20 faculty, staff and students (undergraduate and graduate) across the design and humanities disciplines as well as several St. Louis residents unaffiliated with the university. Together, they visited three insurgent public-space-making projects in St. Louis — the Peter Matthews Memorial Skate Garden, Sk8 Liborious and a communityorganized public park made by residents who were evicted from the NGA site in 2017. The workshop ended at Sk8 Liborius Church, with Hou leading an interdisciplinary discussion about the urban humanities and a debate about the meaning of “the public,” who it is for and who is excluded from this loaded term.

Sk8 Liborius is a formerly shuttered Gothic Revival church that was renovated as a private skate park in 2016. The Divided City Graduate Student Research Fellows, above, attended a lecture held at the site organized by the Making and Breaking the Public research working group. Photos courtesy Jean Allman.

On February 14, the Making and Breaking the Public working group brought in guest scholar Brodwyn Fischer, professor of Latin American history and director of the Center for Latin American Studies at the University of Chicago. Fischer’s workshop, Informality as History, focused on the Global South and the role of one of the most contested concepts in urban theory as it relates to publics: informality. Fischer workshopped work in progress from her current book with an interdisciplinary group of 10 faculty and graduate students from across Arts & Sciences. She later engaged in a broader community discussion around her work, attended by 30 people from the Washington University and greater St. Louis communities.

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Graduate Student Research Fellows Michael Brickey

PhD candidate, American Studies, Saint Louis University

Brickey’s research interests fall at the interdisciplinary intersection of urban studies/ history, environmental history, cultural geography, public history and the energy humanities. His summer research project examines how everyday experiences with structural racism, physical infrastructure, social inequity, and local climate zones influence cultural behaviors with regard to energy and inform political attitudes about climate change and climate justice.

Ian Clark

PhD candidate, English Literature Washington University

Clark’s project explores how literature not only archives modes of inhabiting segregated space, but also reinterprets them. His project investigates how literature depicts the individual impact of collective urban divisions and how literature rethinks divided urban spaces and provides strategies to forge connections across the boundaries separating segregated communities. Such issues are particularly relevant now, after the recent completion of Brexit, and during a time when questions regarding Northern Ireland’s partition from Ireland and concerns about renewed sectarian violence in Belfast have become increasingly urgent.

Manuela Engstler

PhD candidate, American Studies, Saint Louis University

Engstler’s summer research project examines the relationship between the White Panther Party, the Black Power and German student movements. It analyzes the flows of exchange between these groups, through translation and adaptation of ideas and ideologies. This project explores the circumstances in which these flows could be considered as merely translation or if these situations should be considered in terms of assimilation and appropriation due to the differences in cultural, regional and racial backgrounds of these groups.

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Zoe Geyman

PhD student, Anthropology, Washington University

Working with digital development NGOs in Delhi, Geyman considers aspects of labor, class performance and consumption, and technology to ask how contemporary development work produces states of “development” and “underdevelopment” in unexpected ways. Her summer research considers how Indian digital development NGOs are responding to the coronavirus pandemic, and the potential for these responses to (re)produce caste, class and global solidarities.

Tashi Ghale

PhD student, Sociocultural Anthropology, Washington University

Ghale’s dissertation fieldwork investigates road-building in Dolpo, Nepal, with a particular emphasis on the Dolpo community and their land tenure practices. Through key informant interviews, focus groups and participant observation, he is investigating how the Dolpo community negotiates a politically charged and socially divided landscape. His research examines the intersections of caste, class and indigeneity in Nepal.

political reform have been made available to and by Cubans with disabilities since the 1960s to ensure their continued existence in a socialist utopia whose governing institutions paradoxically conceived of disability as both conducive to and incompatible with postcolonial liberation. Her summer project engages with contemporary Cuban authors and artists who narrate the post-Cold War era massification of disability on the island as evidence of both the failures and the worldchanging potential of revolutionary action.

Katja Perat

PhD candidate, Comparative Literature, Washington University

Perat researches the discursive correlations between sexual and political power in Cold War Central Europe, currently working toward her dissertation, titled “Victimhood and Its Perversion: Masochistic Narratives and Cultural Identity in Cold War Central Europe.”

Her summer research project explores how segregation in Austrian Carinthia informed Peter Handke’s narrative construction of Yugoslavia that framed his controversial view on the question of its dissolution.

Meredith Kelling PhD candidate, English, Washington University

Grant Stauffer

Kelling’s dissertation project examines women’s work and writing across the 20th century, assessing texts that hide and circulate information essential to the building of everyday gender and antiracist solidarities.

Her summer research centers on memoirs and novels that include recipes and culinary imperatives. In fleshing out the perhaps unsurprising predominance of the recipe format in “passable” women’s writing, Kelling analyzes textual features that model and engender the circulation of information — some culinary, some conspiratorial — between women.

Stauffer’s research focuses on the creation of monuments and use of architectural space within Cahokia, a UNESCO World Heritage site and pre-Columbian Native American ceremonial center located in modern Collinsville, Illinois. As a fellow, Stauffer is examining the timing and extent of spatial segregation within the Ramey Field, a pocket of Cahokia’s Central Precinct that serviced civicceremonial activities on site. He is interested in understanding how segregation contributed to both Cahokia’s development as a ceremonial center and its eventual decline.

Emma Merrigan

PhD candidate, Hispanic Studies, Graduate Certificate in Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies, Washington University

In her research, Merrigan seeks to illuminate what spaces, timelines and practices of

PhD student, Anthropology, Washington University

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Redefining Doctoral Education in the Humanities (RDE) With funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and spearheaded by the Center for the Humanities, Washington University’s Redefining Doctoral Education in the Humanities (RDE, or “Ready”) initiative focuses on developing the best pedagogical practices for instilling capacities essential for success both within academia and in the world beyond.

Next-generation faculty are committed to acquiring new skills, reimagining PhD training for a multiplicity of outcomes, and facilitating and celebrating those outcomes.

To achieve this, faculty trained exclusively for academic, tenure-track careers need the opportunity to develop new capacities, too.

RDE offers a multipronged approach to developing these capacities at Washington University: • Faculty Retreat: Together with faculty from neighboring institutions, the retreats feature focused, hands-on training and presentations.

• Cross-Training Grant: Supports the undertaking of course work to build new capacities as relevant to new, innovative teaching strategies.

• Curricular Innovation Grant: Supports individual faculty members or small groups of faculty and community partners proposing innovative and transformative graduate-level course work.

The 2019 RDE Faculty Retreat featured a workshop on curation and exhibition, led by staff from University Libraries’ Julian Edison Department of Special Collections and Calvin Riley, executive director of the George B. Vashon Museum.

• Studiolab: Supports innovative living-learning communities convened to pursue humanities research and collaboration around a theme or problem that strategically develops new capacities.

RDE

Faculty Retreat The RDE initiative kicked off the 2019–20 academic year with its second annual Faculty Retreat on Friday, September 20 and Friday, September 27.

The first day began with a presentation

by Edward Balleisen, vice provost for interdisciplinary studies and project director of Duke University’s Versatile Humanists — a project aimed at preparing doctoral students in the humanities and humanistic social sciences for a variety of roles in higher education, government, business, the nonprofit sector or wherever their talents and inclinations might lead.

Next, in a presentation on Research, Exhibition and Interdisciplinarity, attendees heard from two leaders of the Colored Conventions Project (CCP): Denise Burgher, chair of community and historic outreach committee and PhD candidate in English; and Anna Lacy, project coordinator and PhD candidate in history, both at the University of Delaware. CCP is an interdisciplinary research hub that uses digital tools to bring the buried history of 19th-century Black organizing to life.

Washington University postdoctoral fellow Sara Ryu then facilitated a panel discussion on Public Interfaces in St. Louis. Speaking on the panel were Kristin Fleischmann Brewer, Pulitzer Arts Foundation; Lisa Çakmak, Saint Louis Art Museum; Shakia Gullette, Missouri History Museum; Robert Moore, National Park Service, Gateway Arch Museum; and Stefani Weeden-Smith, Gephardt Institute, Washington University.

The final session on the first day was a workshop, Curation and Exhibition 101. In collaboration with the George B. Vashon Museum and University Libraries, this workshop provided a hands-on introduction to curatorial practice and exhibition development, including digital exhibits, as elements of interdisciplinary curricular innovation. Staff from the Libraries’ Julian

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Edison Department of Special Collections were joined by Calvin Riley, executive director of the Vashon, to lead a series of exercises featuring a variety of primary source material.

The following week, the retreat participants convened again to meet with George Sanchez, professor of American studies at the University of Southern California.

(Sanchez was the featured speaker for the Center for the Humanities’ James E. McLeod Memorial Lecture on Higher Education; see page 18). Known for his work in combining traditional scholarship with community engagement in a Los Angeles community, Sanchez gave a presentation on “Lessons from the Boyle Heights Museum,” which he developed with artistic director and playwright Josefina López (Real Women Have Curves).

NEW AWARDS Cross-Training Grants Casey O’Callaghan Professor of Philosophy This Cross-Training Grant supports the design, preparation and teaching of a new formal methods in philosophy course sequence, which augments formal logic as part of a revised PhD curriculum in philosophy (including the philosophyneuroscience-psychology concentration).

During the 2020–21 academic year, O’Callaghan will complete two courses in statistics and probability at Washington University and undertake independent study in decision theory. This RDE grant supports teaching replacement in support of two course releases, in order to complete this cross-training course work. A new formal methods-in-philosophy course will situate philosophy at Washington University at the forefront among top PhD programs in its formal methods offerings and will better prepare graduate students and exceptional undergraduates for cuttingedge contemporary research, enable and

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encourage interdisciplinary collaborations and better equip graduates for success in academic and nonacademic career paths.

Tabea Linhard Professor of Spanish and Comparative Literature Linhard’s Cross-Training Grant will assist her in gaining a comprehensive and nuanced understanding of immigration law in the United States and in the European Union.

This training will enable her to develop transdisciplinary courses for doctoral students interested in studying and writing about migration within and beyond the academy and in the intersections between humanistic inquiry and the law. Linhard will dedicate a summer to an in-depth focus on immigration law in the international and the European Union context and the fall semester to the U.S. context. In fall 2020, she will audit the Washington University course W74 LAW 630E, Immigration Law. In addition to learning more about the ways in which immigration laws and policies operate, she is interested in understanding how these affect the lived experiences of migrants and refugees, and how subjects articulate their own stories as they navigate regulations and processes that may range from attaining status to removal proceedings.

Rebecca Wanzo Professor and Chair of Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies This Cross-Training Grant will provide Wanzo the opportunity to learn data visualization software and skills by earning a data analysis certificate at the University of Missouri Computer Education and Training Center. She will explore how the kinds of questions theorists ask can add complexity to what can be understood as data. When students have asked Wanzo the “so what” question about theory, she has always explained that it helps us see differently.

That is, theoretically, also the idea of data

visualization. But what happens when we take the tools of theory — which resist simplification and narrow explanations — to help us understand debates and issues differently? The course she will revise with these new skill sets is From Mammy to the Welfare Queen: African American Women, Representation, and Political Discourse.

Because the course is about the relationship between representation to political discourse, this course is uniquely positioned to incorporate new pedagogies around data.

Curricular Innovation Grants Anika Walke (History) and Geoff Ward (African and African American Studies) Memory for the Future: Theories and Practices of Critical Curation This Curricular Innovation Grant supports the development of a co-taught, interdisciplinary and community-engaged seminar and practicum titled Memory for the Future. The seminar and practicum will combine critical memory studies — with a focus on the interlinked histories of colonialism, slavery and genocide — with collaborative development of curatorial skills and public educational projects facilitating reparative memorial practices in and around St. Louis. The curricular innovation and associated public projects will build partnerships between students and faculty of Washington University and area institutions including the St. Louis Holocaust Museum and Learning Center, Griot Museum of Black History, George B. Vashon Museum and Missouri Historical Society. The interdisciplinary seminar, practicum and public programs will train humanities graduate students in public history as a form of engaged scholarship, imparting new skills (e.g., writing for public audiences, visual design and project management) and scholarly expertise to broaden academic and nonacademic career paths for participants.

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EVENTS & OUTREACH

On George Sanchez Mary Ann Dzuback is chair of the Department of Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies and is associate professor of women, gender and sexuality studies, of education and of history (by courtesy).

McLeod Memorial Lecture The Center for the Humanities invited George J. Sanchez — professor of American studies and ethnicity and of history, and director of the Center for Democracy and Diversity at the University of Southern California — to deliver the James E. McLeod Memorial Lecture on Higher Education. This annual lecture honors the esteemed vice chancellor of students, who died in 2011, and addresses the role of the liberal arts in higher education, a subject especially meaningful to Dean McLeod. On September 27, 2019, Sanchez, known for his longtime commitment to preserving the multiethnic and multiracial stories of a community in Los Angeles, gave the lecture “Bridging the Divided City: Preparing Students for a New Los Angeles.”

WUSTL Photos

For more than 20 years, George Sanchez has been exploring the history of multiethnic/racial communities in the United States. His intellectual curiosity arose out of his experience growing up in a multiracial and multiethnic neighborhood in Los Angeles, observing his father and mother navigate the challenges of becoming citizens of their adopted country, he notes in his groundbreaking study Becoming Mexican American: Ethnicity, Culture, and Identity in Chicano Los Angeles, 1900-1945 (1993). I first read this book when I was teaching History of American Education, a course framed by the question: How do people who have come to the United States “become” Americans — apart from their schooling? What other institutions and experiences are the sources of their education, particularly when they were not born into a white, northern European-American family and community, or were denied full access to equitable schooling in the American colonies or the United States in the 19th and 20th centuries?

Sanchez’s study was a perfect historical text for examining these questions within the singular context of Los Angeles and the Latino/a community. The book is a masterwork for understanding how takenfor-granted migration patterns started before there was a border between the United States and Mexico, and how those patterns were shaped by changes in work opportunities in Southern California, family formation and cultural institutions in Mexico and the United States. Among the most revealing arguments are those articulating the multiple ways immigrants from Mexico influenced American labor union activity, churches, popular culture and the culture of Los Angeles. “Ethnicity,” Sanchez argues, “was not a set of fixed customs surviving from life in Mexico, but ... a collective identity that emerged from daily life in the United States.”

Sanchez has continued exploring these questions, as a historian and as an interdisciplinary scholar and citizen of top universities in the United States. The project he started after moving from UCLA — to the University of Michigan and then to the University of Southern California (USC) — and is now completing (“Bridging Borders, Remaking Community: Racial Interaction in Boyle Heights, California”) is a reflection of that commitment.

This current project also well captures Sanchez’s efforts to link his scholarship to university administrative responsibilities and community engagement activities. He has dedicated his professional life to increasing ethnic, racial and social class diversity in multiple ways. Some examples include his work as director of the Center for

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This current project also well captures Sanchez’s efforts to link his scholarship to university administrative responsibilities and community engagement activities.

American Studies and Ethnicity; vice-dean for college diversity, during which he began USC’s initiatives for first-generation college students and the Student Food Pantry and Trojan Guardian Scholars for Foster Care Youth; and director of the Center for Diversity and Democracy at USC. For 15 years or more, he has shared the knowledge his institutional activism and scholarship have yielded to make a case for increasing ethnic and racial diversity in the historical profession, student enrollments and faculty appointments in higher education, and university cultures to welcome underrepresented minority students and faculty.

His scholarship has been animated by several questions: How do immigrants adapt to and change the larger culture they inhabit here in the U.S.? How is their “new” ethnic identity formed? What can the history of Los Angeles tell us about how different ethnic groups have interacted with one another to shape their city in the 20th century? How does power operate in this context; and how does power shift

across groups around particular historical moments, political, economic and cultural issues; and what roles do institutions play in these processes?

In recent articles and talks, Sanchez continues to examine democratic activism and political power in urban communities shaped by multiracial coalitions. He suggests how those coalitions can be perceived as dangerous for their ability to foster liberal and left political activism in the face of exploitative white majority policies. He has explored how power elites reduced that power by, for example, routing highways through urban neighborhoods in the 1950s and 1960s; deporting undocumented immigrants from the 1930s on; and interning Japanese Americans in the 1940s. Sanchez’s work offers us historically informed means of considering how to create more representative politics, workplaces and educational institutions as we try to bridge geographic, ethnic, racial, social class and cultural divides in the 21st century.

Bridging scholarship and community engagement, Sanchez founded the Boyle Heights Museum with artistic director and playwright Josefina López (Real Women Have Curves).

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Faculty Book Celebration On January 30, the Center for the Humanities presented its annual celebration of faculty books. The publication of a monograph or significant creative work is a milestone in the career of an academic.

The humanities center commemorates this achievement 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.

This year, the center hosted keynote speaker Daphne A. Brooks, the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of African American studies, theater studies, American studies, and women’s, gender and sexuality studies at Yale University. She is the author of two books: Bodies in Dissent: Spectacular Performances of Race and Freedom, 1850–1910 and Jeff Buckley’s Grace. Brooks is currently working on a threevolume study of Black women and popular music culture titled Subterranean Blues: Black Women Sound Modernity. The first volume in the trilogy, Minor Notes for the Revolution: Intellectual Labor and Black Feminist Sounds, is forthcoming from Harvard University Press.

Brooks first participated in a panel discussion, Resistance Acts, coorganized by the center and University Libraries, held at midday. She was joined by Washington University faculty members Patrick Burke, associate professor of music; Miguel Valerio, assistant professor of Spanish; and Rhaisa Williams, assistant professor of performing arts.

Shefali Chandra, associate professor of history and interim associate director of the Center for the Humanities, moderated the discussion.

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In the late afternoon, the Faculty Book Celebration kicked off with brief presentations by two recently published campus authors who both were Faculty Fellows at the humanities center in years past. Jonathan Fenderson, assistant professor of African and African-American studies, spoke on his first book, Building the Black Arts Movement: Hoyt Fuller and the Cultural Politics of the 1960s. William Acree, associate professor of Spanish, American culture studies (affiliate) and performing arts (affiliate) and associate director of the Center for the Study of Race, Ethnicity & Equity, spoke on his second book, Staging Frontiers: The Making of Modern Popular Culture in Argentina and Uruguay. (See page 24 for more on Fenderson, Acree and their books.)

Finally, Brooks delivered the keynote lecture, “Blackface Broken Records: On the Eve of the Blues Feminist Experiment.” Her talk threaded together an exploration of women in blackface minstrelsy, race riots of the Progressive Era, the classic Black women’s blues craze and the origins of one of the world’s most famous musicals. In particular, she questioned the ways that African Americans navigated an early 20th-century popular culture that policed and restricted their sounds. Ultimately, she asserted that the struggle over radicalized sound in the 1910s was a battle waged between women artists — Black and white, in the North and in the South, and on the eve of a blues music revolution.

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Faculty speaker Jonathan Fenderson (center) presented his new book, Building the Black Arts Movement: Hoyt Fuller and the Cultural Politics of the 1960s. / WUSTL Photos

Faculty Book Celebration speaker Daphne Brooks (far right), spoke to a crowd of Washington University students and faculty as well as a sizeable crowd from the St. Louis community. / WUSTL Photos

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Daphne A. Brooks and the History of Black Women’s ‘Radical Musicianship’ Paige McGinley is an associate professor in the Performing Arts Department and author of Staging the Blues: From Tent Shows to Tourism.

In this lecture preview, performance-studies scholar Paige McGinley interviews Faculty Book Celebration keynote speaker Daphne A. Brooks about her work on Black sonic history and writing for popular and academic audiences.

You’ve just completed a new book — the first volume of a trilogy, in fact! Tell me about it.

The trilogy is called Subterranean Blues: Black Women Sound Modernity, and it tells the story of Black women’s radical musicianship across two and half centuries. So, it needed to be divided up! The first volume, which is called Minor Notes for the Revolution: Intellectual Labor and Black Feminist Sounds, should be coming out by the end of this year.

Faculty Book Celebration speaker Daphne A. Brooks.

The whole point of this book is to rethink Black sonic history by starting with the culture workers themselves and how they managed and thought about their own sound. I also try to invite into the circle performers we don’t often think of as having something to do with Black popular music history, such as Zora Neale Hurston. It’s thinking about archives and collectors and the ways a particular kind of standard narrative about Black women’s vocality and Black women’s performance history has been produced and controlled by a very small cadre of thinkers. And it traces a counter-history of the ways that Black women musicians themselves, as well as a heterogeneous cluster of Black feminist thinkers (and collectors and creative writers) have cared for Black women’s musicianship. The last section of the book looks at contemporary performers who are doing their own archival work through their performance repertoires — people like Rhiannon Giddens, Cécile McLorin Salvant and Valerie June.

Your first book, Bodies in Dissent: Spectacular Performances of Race and Freedom, 1850-1910, shows us how 19th- and early 20th-century Black women performers deployed a range of strategies to intervene in representations of Blackness on both sides of the Atlantic. What inspired you to then turn to these questions of music and the sonic?

I grew up thinking I was going to be a rock critic. I wanted to be the first Black feminist rock critic to have a column at Rolling Stone, to try to intervene in the misogyny and the racism of that publication.

And then I took a left turn through Black feminist literary cultural

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WUSTL Photos

criticism and performance studies. That really unfolded during my undergraduate years at Berkeley, when Gabrielle Foreman and Barbara Christian encouraged me to think about graduate school. I knew there was this strong intellectual side of me that was passionate about Black feminist literature, but there was the other side of me that grew up as a post-civil rights baby, loving punk rock and new wave and burgeoning hip-hop. And I wanted to write about it all.

For years now, you’ve been writing both for scholarly audiences and for a broader public, and you’re well known for your popular music criticism in The Guardian, The Nation and other publications. What advice do you have for folks who want to write in different modes and for different audiences?

It’s important for our students to know that there are multiple spaces where we can flex our creative muscles in a variety of different contexts.

In the book I just finished, I’m trying to speak to a reader who hasn’t been served, someone who is conversant in Adorno and who also reads Pitchfork. I think what I’ve always tried to do is to invite a reader into a space of familiarity, but one that also makes you work a little bit. If you’re comfortable enough — and enticed enough by the creative form of the author’s voice — you’re going to be open to exploring avenues of thought that you haven’t before. If you enjoy storytelling as a process in writing, and you can promote that level

of pleasure and create a circle in which your reader is also enjoying the process of being told a story, then you can push your reader to “think otherwise,” as our dear colleague José Muñoz always said.

The talk you’re delivering at WashU is entitled “Blackface Broken Records: On the Eve of the Blues Feminist Experiment.” Could you give us a preview?

In the talk, I’m thinking about the prehistory of the blues as it relates to blackface. More specifically, it’s about the relationship between classic blues women performers, turn-of-the-century blackface culture and anti-Black violence that manifested in East St. Louis in 1917 and in Charleston in 1919.

Perhaps we could call it an ethnography … an ethnography of Black women’s sonic practices as they emerged in relation to white supremacist violence in the Jim Crow era.

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Faculty Speakers William Acree is an associate professor in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, with affiliate appointments in American Culture Studies and Performing Arts at Washington University.

Swashbuckling tales of valiant gauchos roaming Argentina and Uruguay were 19th-century Latin American bestsellers.

But when these stories jumped from the page to the circus stage and beyond, their cultural, economic and political influence revolutionized popular culture and daily life. Staging Frontiers further explores the profound impacts this phenomenon had on the ways people interacted and on the broader culture that influenced the region.

This new, modern popular culture revolved around entertainment and related products, yet it was also central to making sense of social class, ethnic identity and race as demographic and economic transformations were reshaping everyday experiences in this rapidly urbanizing region.

How I Made This Book The publication of a monograph or significant creative work represents a decade’s worth — and sometimes much longer — of research, writing and rewriting.

This work is made possible by fellowships, sabbaticals, research grants and a deep dive into materials in often far-flung locations.

Finally, and amid the competing demands of teaching, service and other research projects at various stages, a book is born. As part of the Faculty Book Celebration, seven recently published faculty authors shed light on the journey from research idea to published manuscript. Their stories, replicated below, were displayed at the event.

RAFIA ZAFAR Professor of English, African and African-American Studies, and American Culture Studies

Jonathan Fenderson is an assistant professor in the Department of African and African-American Studies at Washington University. As both an activist and the dynamic editor of Negro Digest, Hoyt Fuller stood at the nexus of the Black Arts Movement and the broader Black cultural politics of his time. Fenderson uses historical snapshots of Fuller’s life and achievements to rethink the period and establish Fuller’s important role in laying the foundation for the movement.

In telling Fuller’s story, Fenderson provides provocative new insights into the movement’s international dimensions, the ways the movement took shape at the local level, the impact of race and other factors, and the challenges — corporate, political and personal — that Fuller and others faced in trying to build Black institutions.

Recipes for Respect: African American Meals and Meaning (University of Georgia Press, 2019) Fellowships National Endowment for the Humanities Scholarin-Residence, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture (2014–15); Kate B. and Hall J. Peterson Fellowship at the American Antiquarian Society (summer 1999) Other funding Sabbatical leave(s); Faculty Research Grant (Washington University, 2001); Walt Whitman Distinguished Fulbright Chair, the Netherlands (although this was a lecturing grant, one of the book’s chapters began in Utrecht as an invited lecture) Research sites American Antiquarian Society (Worcester, Mass.), Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture at the New York Public Library (NYC), New York Public Library Research Collections (NYC) Years spent working on the book: On and off for nearly 20 years (no kidding)

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CAROLINE KITA Associate Professor, Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures Jewish Difference and the Arts in Vienna: Composing Compassion in Music and Biblical Theater (University of Indiana Press, 2019) Fellowships Austrian Exchange Service (OeAD): Ernst Mach Grant (summer 2012); Franz Werfel Grant (fall 2015, fall 2017) Research sites Vienna, Austria (Austrian National Library, Austrian Theater Museum, Arnold Schoenberg Center, Wienbibliothek am Rathaus); Salzburg, Austria (Stefan Zweig Centre Salzburg); Marburg, Germany (University of Marburg Library Archive); Cambridge, Mass. (Harvard University Houghton Library); Paris, France (Médiathèque Musicale Mahler) Years spent working on the book: 7 WILLIAM WALLACE Barbara Murphy Bryant Distinguished Professor of Art History Michelangelo, God’s Architect: The Story of His Final Years and Greatest Masterpiece (Princeton University Press, 2019) Fellowships An invitation from Villa I Tatti, Harvard University Center’s for Renaissance Studies in Florence, Italy, to be a Senior Visiting Scholar, fall semester 2014 Other funding Washington University Faculty Research account, and release to spend a sabbatical year abroad in Italy, January–December 2014 Research sites Primarily Italy — Rome and Florence — but also the “third- and fourth-tier” places such as Monteluco and the marble quarries Years spent working on the book: 60 KURT BEALS Assistant Professor, Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures Wireless Dada: Telegraphic Poetics in the Avant-Garde (Northwestern University Press, 2019) Fellowships Faculty Fellow, Center for the Humanities (2016); Arts & Sciences Summer Faculty Research Grant

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(2016); Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowship (2012–13); German Book Office Translation Prize (2012); Translation Residency at the Übersetzeratelier Raron, Switzerland (2012); DAAD Research Grant, Humboldt-Universität, Berlin (2011–12)

Other funding Phyllis Rackin Prize in Feminist Scholarship (University of Pennsylvania); Pew Presidential Research Fellowship (University of Pennsylvania); Andrew W. Mellon Graduate Research Fellowship (University of Pennsylvania)

Research sites Berlin (Berlinische Galerie, Staatsbibliothek; Zurich (Kunsthaus); Paris (Centre Pompidou, Bibliothèque littéraire Jacques Doucet); Iowa City (International Dada Archive at the University of Iowa)

Research sites Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library (Yale University); Harry Ransom Center (University of Texas at Austin); Hornbake Library Special Collections (University of Maryland); Firestone Library Special Collections (Princeton University); Sylvia Townsend Warner Archive (Dorset County Museum, Dorchester, England); William Ready Division of Archives and Research Collections (McMaster University, Hamilton, ON, Canada)

Years spent working on the book: 6 (not including my original dissertation!)

ELIZABETH CHILDS Etta and Mark Steinberg Professor of Art History and Chair, Department of Art History and Archaeology Gauguin: Portraits (Yale University Press, 2019) Gauguin: Portraits, a collaborative effort, is an exhibition catalogue. The funding came primarily from the National Gallery of Canada and the National Gallery, London. Our team had three preparatory meetings in which we planned the book, the show and the essays. My role was as a consultant and as a catalogue contributor (the project’s curators were based at these two museums).

I conducted research in these sites: Ottawa, London, Paris, Honolulu and Tahiti. Most of that travel was funded by the organizing museums; some was funded by my Washington U research account, or by travel to those sites as part of my other conference travel.

Research and writing for the project began three years before the opening of the show.

MELANIE MICIR Assistant Professor of English The Passion Projects: Modernist Women, Intimate Archives, Unfinished Lives (Princeton University Press, 2019) Fellowships First Book Fellowship (Center for the Humanities); Faculty Research Grant (Center for the Humanities); Harry Ransom Research Fellowship in the Humanities (Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin)

Years spent working on the book: I’m not sure how to count this! Three years in grad school and six or seven years after that.

DIANE LEWIS Assistant Professor of Film and Media Studies Powers of the Real: Cinema, Gender, and Emotion in Interwar Japan (Harvard University Press, 2019) Fellowships Japan Foundation Japanese-Language Institute, Kansai, Research Funding; Fulbright-Hays Dissertation Research Abroad Grant; Center for East Asian Studies, University of Chicago, Japanese Studies Dissertation Writing Grant; Postdoctoral Fellowship, Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies, Harvard University; Postdoctoral Fellowship, Japan Society for the Promotion of Science Research sites Waseda University Tsubouchi Memorial Theatre Museum; National Film Archive of Japan; National Diet Library, Japan; Shōchiku Ōtani Library; Kawakita Memorial Film Institute; Harvard University Yenching Library; Makino Collection, C. V. Starr East Asian Library, Columbia University; University of Chicago Library; Waseda University, Meiji Gakuin University, Ritsumeikan University Years spent working on the book: Beginning with preliminary research and dissertation prospectus, 12

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Life/Lines in Challenging Times The Washington University campus and St. Louis community began following stay-at-home orders in March 2020, and we were all abruptly, completely and necessarily isolated from in-person contact. As the real-time meanings of what the COVID-19 pandemic meant for people’s lives and work began to emerge, humanities center director Jean Allman was struck by how, in the midst of such a monumental health crisis, humanities-focused or -inflected work was what was sustaining people in their daily lives, connecting them to others —favorite novels, histories of pandemics, museums and art, poetry, performance, music. This was especially evident on social media. These conditions provided the jumping-off point for the humanities center’s new project, aimed at facilitating real-time connections among its communities through the humanities. After consulting with several WashU poets, Allman decided that poetry would be the way to bring us together.

In April, National Poetry Month, the center launched Life/Lines, a daily poetry project. Every morning, the center sent an email to people who had signed up with a five-word prompt, most often created by a “guest curator” from the campus or the St. Louis community, and a new lines- or network-themed image that helped distinguish one day from the next. Participants wrote a short poem that included these words and sent it back in through the center’s website. All were published — no judging, no editing — on the website and then shared in the next day’s email.

EVENTS & OUTREACH

As the month went by, the project gained media attention and more and more followers. Several campus and local media outlets interviewed Allman about the project, providing access to new prospective audiences. Guest curators shared the project within their circles, creating an everincreasing pool of potential new writers.

Sign-ups increased daily, and poem submissions skyrocketed. At a certain point, the poems became a kind of “countercontagion,” with participants tracking the spread of poetry instead of the virus. At the project’s conclusion, more than 350 people from the campus and St. Louis community were participating, and they had written more than 1,200 poems. When asked to share their experiences at the close of the month, they confirmed that the project had indeed provided a strong and steady lifeline during a spring of isolation, fear and uncertainty.

The pages that follow illustrate how Life/ Lines poets responded to several days’ prompts: Write a short poem (rhyming not necessary) that includes each of the following five words (anywhere and in any order). Poems should not exceed seven or eight lines.

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April 10: Blue, Waves, Sky, Talk, Whale

April 14: Gift, Fall, Brief, Still, See

Words contributed by Jane Ellen Ibur, an arts educator and the poet laureate for the city of St. Louis. She is most recently the author of The Little Mrs./Misses.

Words contributed by undergraduate students in German 4105: Creative Writing? In German? Geht klar!,” co-taught by writer and Professor of the Practice Matthias Goeritz (Comparative Literature) and Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow Claire Ross (Germanic Languages and Literatures).

Jonah’s Quarantine Diary, Day Whatever you know the whale’s belly is actually quite spacious in terms of texture, it feels like being in one of those bouncy castles at a rich kid’s birthday party talk about fun no cake here but it’s cushiony and warm floods on occasion, but you can ride the waves and sometimes catch a glimpse of blue sky too —Gabriella Martin How can a blue mood last When there is a whale, Older than any of us and thoroughly At ease in their own skin, Creating the waves in a perfect arc?

The sadness rises, melts into the sky, And the whale and I talk Of more important things.

—Jeannette Cooperman Moi et la mer — c’est tout un monde Quand je surveille les ondes.

Soit mon désir petite ficelle, qui me relie au bleu ciel.

Je rêve d’avoir des entretiens Avec cette magnifique baleine Avec cette magnifique baleine.

The sea and I: a world unto itself, as I look out upon the waves.

Let my desire be a small string binding me again to the blue sky.

I dream of having talks with this stupendous whale with this stupendous whale.

—Robert Henke

In a brief, still, half-life of a moment standing on the brink of a grand, deep, red and orange canyon I could see the beauty in the depth was not afraid I might fall headlong into it but held out my hands, as if I could somehow hold it and call it what I knew, after all, it must be: Gift.

—Steve Givens

Isolation Haiku Brief lull to be still Perhaps in the fall we’ll see This break as a gift —Dianna Graveman Einem geschenkten Gaul schaut man nicht ins Maul, especially in Gaul, or in the fall. In diesem Fall jedoch dürfte der Gaul ein Gift sein for old Paris, no, not France, the other one, who’s hiding Helen, still, behind the wall.

Jawohl, die Rede ist vom Fall of Troy! This horse is not a toy, no thank-you note required, nor desired, just a brief confirmation of receipt, and then we’ll beat — a dead horse? — a retreat across the old wine-dark Aegean. See, beware of Greeks, and of polysemy.

—K.B.

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EVENTS & OUTREACH

April 20: Breath, Last, Rage, Close, Fortune

April 28: Murmur, Meadow, Leaf, Leave, Least

Words contributed by Rebecca Wanzo, professor and chair of the Department of Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Washington University. Her new book, The Content of Our Caricature: African American Comic Art and Political Belonging, was released in April 2020.

Words contributed by Wayne Fields, the Lynne Cooper Harvey Chair Emeritus in the Department of English at Washington University and author of What the River Knows: An Angler in Midstream, The Past Leads a Life of Its Own and A Union of Words: A History of Presidential Eloquence.

with your last breath say thank you. forget your rage boiling close to gentle and ring fortune’s bell for all to hear.

—Sabrina Spence

This Pandemic Write a poem today. Use these 5 words.

Last, Breath, Close, Rage, Fortune But it is late. Near the end of my day.

I have no energy. The news has worn me out.

And worn me down. I cannot write a poem tonight.

All I can think of is this virus and the distance. I am sad.

I am angry.

The terrible cost. To our lungs, to our livelihood, to our liberty.

Last. Breath. Close. Rage. Fortune —Kevin Farrell just because there is no last breath to mark the close of the life of a thing don’t mean things don’t live and die but do we ever celebrate the life of stuff? where’s the grief and rage and eulogies? the fortune of the disposable is a short ride to a mass grave —Jay Buchanan

To My Fellow Poets As We Contemplate Coming To The End Of April April’s been a meadow in which we gladly wandered.

There are tangles of words in the grasses words sparkle on every leaf a murmur of words swings down from the sky here we sing and shout and moan and cry or just be still as the words go by.

I’m not ready to leave this meadow; it’s brought such sweet relief.

Couldn’t we stay a bit longer one more month, at least?

—January Kiefer

Everlasting Love The bucolic meadow brims with urgency.

A frenzied fire fly hides beneath a leaf.

Birds, bees, and other winged creatures cease their murmur, take cover as rain pelts thirsty earth.

An eruption of pansies coincides with the desire to leave a legacy of love.

I plant three saplings for my great grandsons.

Name them juniors, after each. The least I can do.

—Linda O’Connell

The Last Canoe Trip For Ron C. The news crashed loud as April thunder, A brown oak leaf, who felt spring’s push He floated to the river’s surface; lingered, then Swirled in an eddy, made the final rounds — Shoved off, sole occupant of the aluminum canoe; Barely steering, paddled with the least of strokes Murmuring water edged death’s meadow Then slung around a sawyer to leave the V — Spirit rising like fog above the Meramec.

—Jo Schaper

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Co-sponsored Events, 2019–20 Fronteras Líquidas/Liquid Borders (South

by Midwest V International Conference on Latin American Cultural Studies), October 2–4, 2019. Organized by the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures and the Latin American Studies program.

Lying and Deception: A Happy Marriage, keynote lecture of the Central States Philosophical Association 2019 Meeting, October 18, 2019. Organized by the Department of Philosophy.

Mean Streets, 28th St. Louis International Film Festival, Nov. 5–15, 2019.

“What Is the Word”: Celebrating Samuel Beckett, colloquium, November 7–8, 2019.

Organized by the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, Department of English and University Libraries.

The Bridge #2.2, November 14, 2019.

Organized by the Department of Music.

Sexual Citizens: A Landmark Study of Sex, Power, and Assault on Campus, February 10, 2020. Organized by the Department of African and AfricanAmerican Studies.

The Great Chernobyl Acceleration, February 25, 2020. Organized by the Department of History.

Global Reception of the Classic Zhuangzi: Song to Ming, March 27–29, 2020.

Organized by the Religious Studies program.

Postponed due to COVID-19 campus closure.

Manipulate My Fear: How New Forms of (Mis)Information and Processes of Political and Religious Subjection Contribute to the Erosion of Democracy in Brazil, April 9, 2020. Organized by the Department of Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies. Canceled due to COVID-19 campus closure.

Debilitation in Palestine: Notes Towards Southern Disability Studies, April 16, 2020.

Organized by the Department of Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies. Canceled due to COVID-19 campus closure.

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EVENTS & OUTREACH

On Borders and Unnatural ‘Natural’ Deaths Tabea Linhard is a professor of Spanish, comparative literature, and international and area studies.

While 11 countries had border fences and walls in 1989, now they exist in 70 nations — and counting. The question of how we understand and talk about borders and those who cross them is as timely as it is complex. Jason De León, the speaker for the annual Holocaust Memorial Lecture in fall 2019, provides a compelling perspective on this, as his work shifts our attention from man-made barriers to geographical ones. De León uses ethnographic analysis, forensic science and archaeological research to study the lives and deaths of migrants in the Sonoran Desert, a region where temperatures routinely reach the triple digits. Even though migrants may die from dehydration or exposure to the elements, deaths in the borderlands are not acts of nature but the consequence of specific strategies like “Prevention through Deterrence.” Stated differently, fortifying borders does not stop the movements of migrants, but instead leads them to undertake far riskier journeys.

The current crisis in the Mediterranean, with its unfathomable tolls and (mostly nameless) dead children, also comes to mind here. The term “crisis,” however, is somewhat of a misnomer. “Crisis” is etymologically linked to “decision” and also to “turning point.” In that sense, there may be no such thing as a crisis in the Mediterranean. The current situation along the central, eastern and western Mediterranean routes is uncertain, and

even though specific states, institutions, NGOs and individuals are constantly making decisions that sometimes can and sometimes cannot prevent deaths at sea, no turning point is evident. Instead, we are witnessing a senseless repetition, perhaps best depicted in Ai Weiwei’s most “Mediterranean” work: his Odyssey (2016).

While it is often made to look that way, neither the Mediterranean Sea nor the Sonoran Desert are swallowing up lives and spitting out corpses. Instead, these deaths result from specific border policies or, as the story of the 2012 “Left-to-Die Boat” attests to, from a lack of coherent regulations and from an utter disregard for human life.

In the fall of 2019 Washington University’s Holocaust Memorial Lecture was in its 30th year. Since 1989, talks have customarily alternated between lectures on the Holocaust, specifically, and on other histories of genocide, violence and mass trauma more generally. Many of the talks have addressed how to publicly mourn the lost. The traveling exhibit and participatory art project Hostile Terrain, sponsored and organized by the Undocumented Migration Project (founded by De León) represents one way to publicly grieve deaths in the borderlands. The project includes an installation that consists of handwritten toe tags that map deaths at border crossing. Moreover, across the world, other projects (a cemetery in Tunisia, an underwater museum off the coast of Lanzarote in the Canary Islands) are envisioned to mourn those who died in the Mediterranean. There may be no turning point in sight, yet there are myriad ways to grieve in public those who died on land and sea.

These forms of public mourning will continue to be a tragic necessity as long as border enforcement strategies push women, men and children to risk their lives in “hostile terrains.”

Photo by Michael Wells, primary photographer for the Jason De León’s Undocumented Migration Project.

Holocaust Memorial Lecture “The Land of Open Graves: Understanding the Current Politics of Migrant Life and Death Along the U.S.-Mexico Border” Jason De León, Professor of Anthropology and Chicana/o Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles Wednesday, December 4, 2019

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Akiko Tsuchiya

Christina Ramos

Diana Montaño

Jessica Rosenfeld

Rachel Brown

Thomas Keeline

Dorothy Pokua Agyepong

Deborah Thurman

Deniz Gundogan Ibrisim

Gabriella Martin

Mark Beirn

Natalia Guzmán Solano

Samantha Pergadia

Christian Baker

Efua Osei

Elizabeth Schwartz

Erica Williams

Fiona Eckert

Hannah Ward

Jane Yang

Kaysie Wachs

Lopaka O’Connor

Mónica Unzúeta

Nicci Mowszowski

Tanvi Kohli

Center for the Humanities: A Community of Scholars Faculty Fellows BECHS-Africa Fellow Graduate Student Fellows Kling Fellows

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CENTER FOR HUMANITIES: A COMMUNITY OF SCHOLARS

Why hasn’t Ibis received much scholarly attention?

Ovid’s poems from exile in general have been neglected in favor of his earlier love poetry and the Metamorphoses, his mythological masterpiece. In recent decades, much of Ovid’s exile poetry has come in from the cold, but the Ibis is still in exile. I think the biggest reason for this is that it’s an inaccessible poem in every sense: The unrelenting series of curses presupposes knowledge of recondite mythology and obscure ways of alluding to that mythology, and the poem lacks a modern edition and commentary to explain its recherché references. This is of course part of the draw for me: The Ibis’ erudition poses a formidable critical challenge — and that’s fun!

What does your project entail?

Statue of Ovid at the National History Museum at Ovid Square, Constantza, Romania.

“Ovid” by Wisi Greter / CC-BY-2.0.

Ovid’s Ibis: Out of Exile Thomas Keeline is an assistant professor of classics.

In the year 8 CE, Roman Emperor Augustus banished one of the most famous writers of his day, Ovid, to the outskirts of the empire. Full of anger, self-pity and a sense of betrayal, Ovid recorded his suffering in a 644-line poem, Ibis — a caustic catalog of curses and swears cast at an anonymous adversary. Over the millennia, the poem faded from the spotlight of scholarly attention. But with his project “Latin Textual Scholarship in the Digital Age: An OpenAccess Critical Edition of Ovid’s Ibis and Its Scholia,” Thomas Keeline is reexamining the poem, this time employing some thoroughly modern methods.

Why did Augustus banish Ovid?

“A poem and a mistake” (carmen et error) is Ovid’s own explanation. The poem was the Ars amatoria (“The Art of Love”), a sort of ancient seduction manual that fell afoul of the Emperor Augustus. The error remains a mystery: possibly political, possibly sexual, but probably the world will never know.

We don’t have Ovid’s original manuscript — we have only much later medieval copies of copies of copies. These texts were copied by hand, and in each new copy, new errors were inevitably introduced. Over time, these errors compounded, and as a result, no single manuscript preserves what Ovid actually wrote. My project entails reading through the extant manuscripts and figuring out their relationships, ultimately trying to work backward to Ovid’s original text.

I’m also editing the explanatory annotations that accompany the manuscripts. Some of these annotations preserve knowledge from antiquity, and all of them are evidence for how the poem was being read at particular times and places. These annotations have never been systematically edited. I traveled to a number of European libraries and examined (and photographed) some 30 manuscripts of the poem.

How does a digital critical edition benefit readers?

Digital editions have lots of advantages, but I’ll just talk about one.

In traditional print editions, readers have to read the text that the editor has chosen to print. But that “authoritative” text is always an editor’s reconstruction, drawing on different manuscripts and scholarly conjectures to try to fix a fluid tradition. My digital project lets readers play a role in the text’s constitution. I try to give readers all the information they’ll need to make their own informed choices about the text, and they’ll be able to have their choices reflected in what they’re actually reading. They can disagree with me if they want to. “Reading” a classical text becomes, in a way that it never could in the print world, what it always should be: a collaborative process of critical reconstruction.

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The City Electric: How Mexico City’s People Shaped Its Electrified Future Diana Montaño is an assistant professor of history.

We inhabit electrified spaces. Utility posts and aerial and underground cables surround us. Our horizon is broken by high-voltage towers, transformers, posts and power lines. In her current book-in-progress, Electrifying Mexico, Diana Montaño delves into the making of electrified spaces in Mexico City. Her work looks at how ordinary citizens (businessmen, salespersons, inventors, doctors, housewives, maids, and domestic advisers) saw themselves and their city as modern through electricity.

Briefly, what is your book about?

Electrifying Mexico examines the fluid relations Mexico City residents (capitalinos) established with electricity from the 1880s to 1960. The relationship between electricity and society opens a window to understand Mexico’s embrace of technology in its quest for modernity. I argue that electricity played a central role in imagining and crafting the country’s path from the 1880s to the mid 20th century.

Cast as the harbinger of modernity, electricity’s brightness, foreignness and multivalency made it a favorite tool not only for the display of political and national might but also for personal and commercial. Across spatial and temporal stages, government officials, businesspeople, social commentators, inventors, doctors, electrical workers, domestic advisors, housewives and ordinary citizens both sold and consumed electricity. Mexicans became “electrifying agents” who imagined an electrified future and shaped electrical consumption.

They did so in symbolic and concrete ways: constructing a discourse for an electrified future and shaping its application. In doing so, they commandeered technological change, actively negotiating modernity.

Taking technology as an extension of human lives, Electrifying Mexico moves beyond official blueprints to follow individuals on the ground to scrutinize the contested terrain of the city’s electrification. It documents how electrical lighting, power and traction changed ideas of time and space, of body, self, nation and others. In its multiplicity of applications, electricity not only allowed Mexico to imagine itself modern, but also individuals who adopted ideas, behaviors and values associated with it. It shows how ordinary residents unleashed the technology’s transformative energy into public and private spaces, shaping how they worked and traveled, their civic rituals, how they cooked meals and washed their clothes.

How does the focus on everyday life contribute to understanding these fluid relations?

How does your archive reflect your focus on everyday people?

In popular discussions, technologies appear as “black boxes” — closedoff entities that unilaterally change society and culture. Electrification is characteristically portrayed as a universal, progressive and singlestranded narrative. As in the case of big technologies introduced to African, South Asian and Latin American countries, examinations of electricity yield no agency to local societies, which appear as mere “perpetual consumers” of technology, of modernity developed elsewhere. Scholars pushing to decenter the history of technology have demonstrated that far from one-way relations, technologies outside the North Atlantic have interacted deeply with societies and cultures elsewhere, with said interactions entailing at times mutual resistance, accommodation, acceptance and even enthusiasm.

Electricity as a primary engine of a modern society permeated all aspects of life. Aiming to ground the study in the experience of everyday life, I amassed a wealth of primary sources.

Official and commercial plans to electrify public avenues and civic celebrations found in government records are complemented with newspapers, medical and legal journals, novels and popular sources. Satirical verses in newspapers and the penny press, for instance, took a critical stance on the inefficiencies brought about by the city’s electrification.

Cover image, Electra, vol. 4, no. 55 (February– March 1930). Courtesy Diana Montaño.

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What effect did their activism have?

A view over “Trinidad, Cuba” by Flickr user serena_tang / CC-BY-2.0.

A War With Words: How Spain’s Women Lobbied Against Slavery in Cuba Akiko Tsuchiya is a professor of Spanish.

By the mid 19th century, most of the world powers had agreed to ban the importation of enslaved people from Africa. Yet, in the Spanish colony of Cuba, the transatlantic slave trade remained an illegal but lucrative economic activity well into the 1860s, says Akiko Tsuchiya. In the face of such powerful economic interests and despite their own subjugated position in society, Spanish women spoke out against slavery in ways that compelled their audience to face the horrors of bondage taking place thousands of miles away. Tsuchiya details it all in her book in progress, Spanish Women of Letters in the 19th-Century Antislavery Movement: Transnational Networks and Exchanges.

What is your book about?

My book investigates the social and cultural role that Spanish women writers and intellectuals played in the antislavery movement of the 19th century, both within and beyond Spain’s national borders. Although many women actively championed the antislavery cause through their writings and activism, they were often relegated to the shadows of their male counterparts. As most of these women did not give speeches or write political pamphlets, one of my objectives is to recover these women’s voices. Beyond that, there are two major questions that interest me: first, how these women negotiated their place in a male-dominated antislavery movement to achieve their political aims; and, second, how their activism enabled the creation of new arenas of political participation for women in the liberal public sphere. In the second part of the book, I shift my focus to the transnational networks that Spanish women abolitionists formed with those outside of Spain’s national borders, in other parts of Europe, the U.S. and Spanish America.

Some of these women were able to reach a different audience by publishing magazine articles that addressed a mostly female public. For example, the antislavery writer Faustina Sáez de Melgar directed the magazine La Violeta (Madrid, 1862–66).

Among the pages of this presumably conservative magazine were articles that publicly denounced slavery. Other fictional writings — novels, plays and poetry — by these women brought the issue of slavery to the forefront by featuring representations of enslaved Afro-descendants, which was not common in literature of the times in Spain.

Why is this the right time to be writing about this history?

The legacies of slavery have become an important subject of public discourse and humanistic inquiry in recent years, both in the United States and in Europe. In the specific case of Spain, immigration has become a pressing area of concern, particularly in view of the racist treatment to which immigrants from Africa and elsewhere have been subjected by the Spanish government and society. In recent years, anti-racist and immigrant-rights groups have drawn connections between colonialism of the past (the enslavement of Africans) and that of the present (racism against African immigrants).

For example, in 2018, in Barcelona there was a public proposal to rename a square that holds the name of a slave trader after a Guinean immigrant who died at a detention center as an act of reparation. Spain has yet to come to a reckoning with the legacies of its colonial past, but in light of the historical memory movement following the end of the Franco dictatorship, the time is ripe for the nation to also confront its colonial history and to recognize those who fought to end slavery.

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Bedlam in the New World: A Mexican Madhouse in the Age of Enlightenment Christina Ramos is an assistant professor of history.

In her current book-in-progress, Bedlam in the New World, Christina Ramos reconstructs the history of Mexico City’s Hospital de San Hipólito, the first of the Americas to specialize in the care and confinement of the mentally disturbed — as well as the lives of some of its most notorious patients — to write a new history of madness during the Age of Enlightenment.

Since its founding (attributed by legend to a repentant conquistador in 1567), how did the Hospital de San Hipólito’s mission change over time?

Administered by the Order of San Hipólito, it was foremost a charitable establishment that combined religious and medical models of care. It originally surfaced as a convalescent hospital that admitted a multiracial group of unfortunates labeled pobres dementes (mad paupers) and gradually came to concentrate on this marginal group exclusively.

During the late 18th century, the hospital underwent significant transformations. Its once modest facilities were modernized, while its charitable mission was touted in terms of a utilitarian service to the state and wider public. I argue that the hospital became a microcosm and colonial “laboratory” of the Hispanic Enlightenment, as the ideals of order, utility, rationalism and the public good came to shape new ideas of madness and its medical and institutional management.

What were some of the reasons people were confined there?

Most arrived because they were poor and lacked family and resources to provide for them. However, by the late 18th century, the hospital came to house a growing population of allegedly insane criminals transferred from the Inquisition and secular criminal courts for crimes ranging from murder to blasphemy. Colonial magistrates sent suspects to San Hipólito because they insisted that madness was a disease with an underlying physiological basis.

Is there a particular patient who stands out?

The cases are utterly engrossing and one of the main reasons I undertook the project. In 1789, inquisitors sent José “Tebanillo” Ventura Gonzalez to San Hipólito after they determined him to be mad. An embroider by occupation, he kept a notebook in which he would draw designs and related sketches, which the inquisitors uncovered during their investigation and filed as evidence. While some of the images were innocuous illustrations of flowers clearly

intended for stitching, others were of a crude variety with pornographic overtones.

Were Tebanillo’s sketches a testament to his troubled and disordered mind? Or did they simply expose in material form his perverted and morally debased character and conscience? The Inquisition, after all, was in the business of interrogating inward states of reasoning and conscience; because of this, its agents often unwittingly found themselves at the forefront in devising new modes for understanding the complexities of human reasoning and the nuances of intent. By the late 18th century, their concerns could not be answered on the basis of lay testimony alone and required “proof” in the form of medical expertise.

Tell us how this research will fill in gaps in both the history of medicine and scholarship on the Enlightenment.

The project aims to decenter traditional histories of both madness and Enlightenment that have privileged Europe as the epicenter of the medical and intellectual developments that inform the modern world. The case of San Hipólito undoes this narrative, illustrating the centrality of religious personnel, including inquisitors, in propelling madness’s medicalization long before the rise of psychiatry as a hegemonic science.

The Madhouse by Francisco de Goya, 1812–19.

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CENTER FOR HUMANITIES: A COMMUNITY OF SCHOLARS

Home Work: Inside the Lives of Migrant Caregivers in Palestine/Israel Rachel Brown is an assistant professor of women, gender and sexuality studies.

Hundreds of thousands of migrant workers are employed as caregivers in Palestine/Israel, nurturing the bodies of elderly and disabled Jewish-Israelis and sustaining the body politic of the State of Israel. Recruited from South and Southeast Asia and Eastern Europe, these women sacrifice personal freedoms — and take on large employment agency debts — for the opportunity to earn a more lucrative wage. Through ethnographic interviews with migrant caregivers and their employers, Rachel Brown focuses on this oftenoverlooked population in her book project, Four Years, Three Months: Migrant Caregivers in Palestine/Israel.

Who are these caregivers, and why is there a need for them?

Migrant caregivers in Palestine/Israel come from the Philippines, Nepal, Sri Lanka and India, and, in smaller numbers, from Moldova, Bulgaria, Romania and Hungary. Officially, they number roughly 60,000. However, this figure does not include the large number of undocumented workers. I have heard 300,000 as a total number.

The government began granting visas to migrant workers in construction and agriculture following the first intifada — the Palestinian popular uprising — adopting policies of economic separation and securitization of Palestinians. Though migrant caregivers had come in small numbers since 1988, following passage of the Long Term Care Insurance Law, this post-intifada moment paved the way for migrant caregivers in much greater numbers. The Long Term Care Insurance Law was a response to the growing number of elderly and frail adults within the population, and eventually, an effect of neoliberal privatization and the retrenchment of state welfare services. The presence of migrant caregivers is thus a combination of neoliberal spending cuts, as well as shifts in the racialization of labor.

For-profit recruitment and placement agencies charge thousands of dollars in illegal fees to workers who wish to migrate. This debt shapes their bargaining power, their ability to hold abusive employers accountable and their legal status. Overall, the government has taken a very hands-off approach to regulating these agencies.

What is the meaning of the designation “Four Years, Three Months” in your book title?

This is the length (at the time of research) of the visa for migrant caregivers. In the Israeli context, migrant caregivers’ legal status is bound to their employment status, effectively hindering their ability to leave employers.

When a migrant caregiver’s visa expires, they become undocumented. There are two main exceptions to this rule. One is if they are still caring for an elderly or disabled charge at the time of expiration, at which point they can stay until the employer dies. The other exception is if they receive a “special visa” to stay longer, which is increasingly rarely granted. Thus, a worker’s economic situation and legal status is predicated upon the bodily health and approval of the employer. Workers’ ways of strategically navigating the employer/caregiver relationship and their ability to collectively organize are thus deeply shaped by the visa limit, which ties their precarity to the employer’s health and to broader discourses about who is deserving of care under neoliberal capitalism. These neoliberal discourses about who is worthy of care take particular iterations in Palestine/Israel in ways that invoke and are always already in relation to the treatment of Palestinians.

Photo courtesy Activestills.

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we live with (mind versus body, rational versus irrational, human versus animal) became so difficult to traverse. Literature from this period offers some surprising and useful models for imagining and understanding our feelings, then and now.

Why focus on love and envy?

The God of Love locks the Lover’s heart. f. 15r.b, Roman de la Rose MS National Library of Wales 5016D.

Is Envy OK? Is Love Laudable?

What Medieval Texts Tell Us About Emotions Jessica Rosenfeld is an associate professor of English.

Across 13th-century Europe, the proliferation of pastoral, literary and academic texts on topics like ethics and love signaled a hunger for the examination of emotions. Those same texts, says Jessica Rosenfeld, can inform our contemporary understandings of how emotions operate.

Her book in progress, Envious Charity: Theorizing Emotion in the Later Middle Ages, takes on two conflicting but complementary emotions: envy and love.

For this project, I chose emotions that were considered especially significant and were undergoing changes in meaning. Love and envy were designated in medieval writings as “contrary” to each other, one the highest virtue and the other the “worst” vice, though it intrigues me that, even in opposition, they are hard to disentangle — both are forms of desire. Envy is typically distinct from jealousy, though, because jealousy targets something (or someone) that belongs to another person and envy targets that other person directly.

What misconceptions do people have about envy?

The most common misconception I see in contemporary political discourse is that envy is always petty and unbecoming. I’m a fan of the feminist critic Sianne Ngai, who suggests that envy is worth listening to because, alone among the emotions, it draws attention to inequality. I also like political scientist Jeffrey Green’s The Shadow of Unfairness, which argues that “reasonable” envy should be allowed to drive politics and that it makes perfect sense to single out the super-rich for regulatory treatment. Envy is often described (in both medieval and modern contexts) as “irrational” when we desire that others lose something, even when we have nothing directly to gain, but Green argues that such desire can be rational and even ethical.

Briefly, what is your book about?

How do these medieval texts and contexts relate to contemporary debates?

Emotional experience occupies the center of all of our lives and is increasingly central to how academics approach history, literature and other disciplines. There are still many unsettled questions about emotions: Are they universal or culturally specific? Are they reasonable? Do we have any control over them? Do they originate in the mind or the body? The Middle Ages in Europe were not only a period of intense, focused attention to emotional experience, but also a time before many of the distinctions that

Some of the literary texts I look at — for example, the 14th-century English poem Piers Plowman — are deeply concerned with problems we still face: poverty, debates about the “deserving” poor and the role of charity, about what constitutes basic needs and whether society should guarantee them. In terms of emotions, medieval writers talked about justice in terms of individual feeling and in terms of law, and this debate (is justice a feeling or an institution?) still plays out in both academic writings and real-world politics. In a chapter on love and reason, I look at medieval theories of desire and consent, which are very concerned to figure out where free choice fits into the picture, both with respect to one’s own desires and the desires of others (whether a human lover or God).

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Meet Visiting Fellow Dorothy Pokua Agyepong In spring 2020, the Center for the Humanities played host to Dorothy Pokua Agyepong, PhD, a linguist from the University of Ghana and the center’s first BECHS-Africa Fellow. With funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and in partnership with the University of Ghana, American University in Cairo and Stellenbosch University, the three-year transnational fellowship program is aimed at enhancing research capacity for early-career scholars in the humanities. Each year, early-career scholars from the four institutions are invited to apply for a residential fellowship exchange.

You are fluent in or have familiarity with six languages. How does that affect your work as a linguist?

In Ghana, multilingualism is a norm rather an exception, given that almost every Ghanaian speaks more than one language.

For instance, I speak two dialects of Akan (Twi and Mfantse), Ga, Standard Ghanaian English, Ghanaian Pidgin English and French.

Apart from the financial and economic benefits that come along with being multilingual, my ability to interact in more than one language has taught me one crucial thing — to appreciate the fact that every language has its own rules of usage, even if they are structurally similar. I have come to know that language is more than just words, phrases, clauses and sentences. Being multilingual has opened my eyes to the fact that language embodies a people’s culture and belief. As a linguist, I approach every linguistic analysis from this perspective. Thus, rather than approaching an analysis from a preconceived idea of what the language should be or how it should behave, I allow the language to “speak” for itself. I delve into the language, allowing myself to learn not only about the string of words that make up the language, but, more crucially, I learn how the culture of people influences their use of language.

How does the field of linguistics intersect with the humanities?

Linguistics is concerned with the scientific study of the nature and features of human language. It provides the most important components needed to better understand what it means to be human. As a humanities discipline, linguistics investigates how meaning is conveyed via human language, how children acquire language, ways in which language interacts with the society, the cultural norms and practices that govern the use of human language, and the mental processes involved in the production and comprehension of human language. It is described as a scientific study because it adopts a rigorous scientific approach to the study of human language. This involves collecting data and observing the relationships that exist between forms in order to make general statements about language use.

Dorothy Pokua Agyepong (University of Ghana) is the first BECHS-Africa Fellow to reside in the Center for the Humanities.

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Kling Undergraduate Honors Fellows

Graduate Student Fellows

Every spring, five to seven Washington University sophomores are admitted into the Merle Kling Undergraduate Honors Fellowship, where they conduct a humanities-oriented research project under the supervision of a faculty mentor. Kling Fellows meet weekly in an interdisciplinary seminar where they present drafts of their work, review one another’s writing, read and think about the role of the humanities in university life, and occasionally carry out fieldwork and take visits off campus to see humanities research in action around the St. Louis metro area. Senior Kling Fellows publish their research findings as articles in our annual journal, Slideshow.

While working at the Center for the Humanities in their own office, the students awarded the Graduate Student Fellowship actively participate in the center’s intensive, interdisciplinary intellectual environment.

Graduate Student Fellows discuss their research with the Faculty Fellows in residence, other WashU humanities faculty and invited guests.

CLASS OF 2020 CHRISTIAN BAKER Major/minor: Religious Studies/Text and Tradition Mentor: Lerone Martin, Danforth Center on Religion and Politics Enter the Five Percent: How Wu-Tang Clan’s Debut Album Maps the Complex Doctrine of the Five Percent Nation

FIONA ECKERT Major: Environmental Policy and International Development Mentors: Venus Bivar, History “Incorporated to Be a Sewer”: A Historical Analysis of Industrial Pollution in Sauget, Illinois

TANVI KOHL Major/minor: International and Area Studies and South Asian Languages and Civilizations Mentor: Shefali Chandra, History

ERICA WILLIAMS Majors: Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies, and Psychological and Brain Sciences: Cognitive Neuroscience Mentor: Rhaisa Williams, Performing Arts

Gabriella Martin

To (Not) Be on One Accord: The Ivy Leaf, Footwear and Mobility in Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Incorporated

Iberian Babel: Spain’s Translational Literatures, 1939-2018

Department of Romance Languages and Literatures

JANE YANG Major/minor: International and Area Studies/ Anthropology Mentor: Zhao Ma, History, and East Asian Languages and Cultures

rompting the Political: The Emergent Feminist Politics P of Women’s Anti-mining Activism in Cajamarca, Peru

Main Melody Recomposed: Deconstructing the Wolf Warrior Phenomenon

Deborah Thurman

CLASS OF 2021 NICCI MOWSZOWSKI Majors: International Affairs, Germanic Languages and Literatures

Natalia Guzmán Solano Department of Anthropology

Department of English

The Sensitivity Readers: Affective Professionalism and American Literature After 1945

Mark Beirn Department of History

A Diasporic Quest for Power: Jagmeet Singh, Hybrid Whiteness and Genocide

Uniting the Broken Nation: National Discourse in German and Ukrainian Holocaust Memorials

LOPAKA O’CONNOR Majors: History and Economics Mentors: Elizabeth Borgwardt, History; and Steven Hirsch, International and Area Studies

EFUA OSEI Major: African and African American Studies ’Cause I’m Da Baddest B—: Gender and Performativity of Black Femmeness in the 1990’s Hip Hop

“America’s St. Helena”: Filipino Exiles and U.S. Empire on Guam, 1901–03

ELIZABETH SCHWARTZ Major: English Literature

Of Creative Impulses: Tracing Traumatic Survivance, Memory and Subjectivity in Anglophone World Literatures

MONICA UNZUETA Majors/minors: Latin American Studies and Spanish/Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies Mentor: Bret Gustafson, Anthropology

“I am a writer of fiction”: Reading Race as a Literary and Social Form in Contemporary U.S. Metafiction

Samantha Pergadia

Articulaciones Feministas: Contemporary Bolivian Feminisms and the Struggle against Gender Violence

Power Struggles in Pachomian Women’s Monasteries

KAYSIE WACHS Majors: Religious Studies and Classics HANNAH WARD Majors: Art History and Archaeology, History

Art in War: A Study of Matisse’s Bathers with a Turtle During World War II

Grounding Mobility: Infrastructure, Airports, and Urban Space in Berlin, Istanbul and Nairobi, 1923 to 1963

Deniz Gundogan Ibrisim Program in Comparative Literature

Department of English

Taxonomic Harm: Race, Species and the Ontology of Metaphor

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FACULTY RESEARCH SUPPORT

Internal Grants SUMMER FACULTY RESEARCH GRANTS

SUMMER RESEARCH SEED 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.

Open to all tenured or tenure-track faculty in the humanities or humanistic social sciences who undertake the preparation of a competitive, peer-reviewed, prestigious grant application during the summer with the goal of submitting an application the following fall or spring.

Patrick Burke | Music Sounding the Seven Seas: Norwegian Ships and “World Music” at the Margins of Empire, 1850-1950 Steven Miles | History City Seasons: The Pulse of Urban Life in Nineteenth-Century China

Caroline Kita | Germanic Languages and Literatures

Harriet Stone | Romance Languages and Literatures

Lauren Eldridge Stewart | Music

The Documentary Impulse: Questions of Scale Diane Lewis | Film and Media Studies Kitchen Programmers: Women, Work and the Age of Telecommunications in Japan René Esparza | Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies The Great Gay (Return) Migration: AIDS Homecoming Narratives, the Shrinking Welfare State and Middle-America’s Fantasies of Racial Reconciliation Esther Kurtz | Music Movements of Blackness: Racial Politics in Capoeira Angola of Backland Bahia Heather Berg | Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies Porn Work Pascal Ifri | Romance Languages and Literatures Albertine Assassinee: Enquete sur une mort suspecte dans, A la recherche du temps perdu Miguel Valerio | Romance Languages and Literatures Becoming Diaspora: The Global Circulation of African Culture in Early Modernity, 16th–18th Centuries

ROLAND GRIMM TRAVEL AWARDS Open to all tenured or tenure-track faculty; awards fund research in Asia.

No awards made

MAXWELL C. WEINER HUMANITIES RESEARCH GRANTS Funded by a bequest from Maxwell C. Weiner, the grants support tenured, fulltime faculty in the humanities who do not currently receive an annual research fund in order to facilitate the pursuit of new research directions.

Pascal Ifri | Romance Languages and Literatures Rebecca Messbarger | Romance Languages and Literatures Joseph Schraibman | Romance Languages and Literatures Akiko Tsuchiya | Romance Languages and Literatures 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.

No awards made

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FACULTY SEMINARS

RENEWALS

Grants to tenured or tenure-track 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.

Medical Humanities Reading Group Conveners: Carolyn Sargent (Anthropology), Corinna Treitel (History)

C21 STL: A Faculty Seminar on the Contemporary (2020–23) Convener: Melanie Micir (English)

READING AND WRITING GROUPS 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 NEW The Real of Psychoanalysis and Marxism Reading Group Graduate student conveners: Santiago Rozo Sanchez (graduate student in Romance Languages and Literatures), Katja Perat (graduate student in Comparative Literature)

Queering the Transnational Conversation Reading Group Conveners: Jeffrey McCune (Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies and Performing Arts), Zeles Vargas (graduate student in Anthropology) A History of the Present Reading Group Conveners: Shefali Chandra (History), Andrea Friedman (History) Sports and Society Reading Group Conveners: Noah Cohen (American Culture Studies), Sunita Parikh (Political Science) Projecting Latin American Cinema Reading Group Graduate student conveners: Yamile Ferreira (graduate student in Romance Languages and Literatures), Rodrigo Viqueira (graduate student in Romance Languages and Literatures) Poetry and Poetics Reading Group Graduate student conveners: Alex Mouw (graduate student in English), Ann Marie Jakubowsk (graduate student in English)

Transregional East Asia Reading Group Graduate student conveners: Haochen Wang (graduate student in History), Kejian Shi (graduate student in History)

Kierkegaard and Existentialism Reading Group Graduate student convener: Judith Carlisle (graduate student in Philosophy)

The Literature and Performance Reading Group Graduate student conveners: Alexandra Swanson (graduate student in English), Sara Brenes Akerman (graduate student in English)

Here Comes Everybody: The Finnegans Wake Reading Group Graduate student conveners: Ian Clark (graduate student in English), Matthew Thompson (graduate student in English)

The Genre-Bending Reading Group Graduate student conveners: Karla Aguilar Velasquez (graduate student in Romance Languages and Literatures), Maddie HouseTuck (graduate student in Performing Arts), Yuhua Shi (graduate student in East Asian Languages and Cultures)

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Early Modern Reading Group Conveners: Rob Henke (Comparative Literature and Performing Arts), Julie James (graduate student in Art History and Archaeology)

Approaches to Literary Pedagogy Reading Group Graduate student conveners: Charlotte Fressilli (graduate student in English), Ana Quiring (graduate student in English)

WRITING GROUPS NEW Interdisciplinary Dissertation and Publication Writing Group Graduate student conveners: Trent McDonald (graduate student in English), Heesoo Cho (graduate student in History) Interdisciplinary Postdoctoral Writing Group Postdoctoral fellow conveners: Anna Whittington (postdoctoral fellow in Interdisciplinary Program in the Humanities), Rosanne Liebermann (postdoctoral fellow in Jewish, Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies) RENEWALS Literary Translation Workshop Graduate student convener: Olivia Lott (graduate student in Romance Languages and Literatures) Religion and Literature Writing Group Graduate student conveners: Ann Marie Jakubowski (graduate student in English), Shirley Anghel (graduate student in Romance Languages and Literatures

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FACULTY RESEARCH SUPPORT

Scholary Writing Retreat Participants worked intensively on their individual projects, following a schedule of check-ins, focused writing periods and virtual communal breaks.

Scholarly Writing Retreat The Scholarly Writing Retreat offered Washington University humanities and humanistic social sciences faculty, postdoctoral fellows and graduate students the opportunity to jump-start their summer writing in a motivated, supportive and collaborative atmosphere, even as they were spread out in their own work spaces while the campus was closed in spring and summer 2020. The first session of the retreat was held May 18–29, and a second session was added June 1–12.

In past years, the annual retreat has brought scholars from across campus to designated writing spaces, with the Center for the Humanities conference room serving as home base. Past participants have regularly reported that the retreat’s daily schedule and real-time accountability helped to propel them into productive summer writing, while the in-person interaction helped to stave off summer isolation. While the stay-at-home orders of the COVID-19 pandemic necessitated many changes to the format of the Scholarly Writing Retreat,

Acting Director Ignacio Infante determined that this was a moment that required more structure and support than usual. Together with Shefali Chandra, associate professor of history and interim associate director of the humanities center, and with the help of Caroline Kita, associate professor of German, and Zoe Stamatopoulou, associate professor of classics, the four planned a Scholarly Writing Retreat like none held before.

Writing retreat participants, more than 50 in number, began each day with a daily prompt email — a no-wrong-answer conversation starter on topics from the silly to the sublime. Participants were divided into common-interest writing groups based on the type of writing they were tackling this summer — from dissertations to book chapters — and the groups met via Zoom daily to check in and discuss their writing projects. Most often, they held “quiet Zooms,” during which participants would join a Zoom call and work on their own writing while muted, providing the daily schedule and realtime accountability that made earlier in-person writing retreats so successful. To provide the opportunity for socializing, two daily drop-in coffee breaks gave them the chance to chat about the daily prompt, to catch up or just to hang out with some new faces.

CENTER FOR THE HUMANITIES

Tips for Cultivating a Successful Writing Practice •

Set “soft deadlines” in between your big deadlines — use conferences or exchanging work with colleagues to help you develop ideas for articles or other big projects.

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Create a calendar or schedule for writing.

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Only revise the last paragraph you wrote (to keep yourself from getting caught in the revision trap).

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Set a word count goal per day.

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Do “work sprints” or the Pomodoro method.

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Use browser shutdown software (like Freedom) to keep yourself from getting distracted by other websites, news or social media.

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Share your writing with others and get feedback.

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Prioritize your work — write before you check email or write letters of recommendation or reviews.

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Use old notes as a prompt to start writing.

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Start with short writing goals (5 minutes, no distraction), increase by small increments until you can write for an hour without a break.

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Change your location during the day — try writing in a different space.

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Use an app (like Forest or Lightdogs) to help motivate your writing and keep you from checking your phone too much!

Thanks to the participants in Caroline Kita’s writing group for sharing the list of writing tips they collected during the Scholarly Writing Retreat.

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MINORS

Children’s Studies Amy Pawl, Teaching Professor of English; and Desirée White, Professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences; Co-Directors In the Children’s Studies minor, students learn about children and childhood while drawing on the expertise of faculty from across Washington University. Minors develop a sophisticated interdisciplinary understanding of childhood and the issues surrounding the treatment and status of children throughout history.

(Above) Jan Havickszoon Steen, The Merry Family, 1668, Rijksmuseum, Gallery of Honour, SK-C-229 / public domain.

(Right) Adriaen van Ostade, Child Reaching for a Doll, 1679, National Gallery of Art, Rosenwald Collection 1943.3.8296 / CC0 1.0.

A minor in Children’s Studies exposes students to an interconnected set of ideas about children as objects and subjects in a variety of essential disciplines. It combines social science courses that measure and analyze how children mature and how institutions have affected children with courses in the humanities that examine how children are portrayed and constructed in art, literature and film.

Accordingly, the minor draws students with majors, among others, in education, psychology, English, history and American culture studies, or students whose career plans include child-oriented specialties such as family law or pediatric medicine.

In early March 2020, the interdisciplinary nature of the minor was showcased during an evening event at which students from the Children’s Studies Senior Seminar gave public presentations on their experiences. The audience learned about child-focused research the presenters had conducted on such timely topics as immigration, race, health-care access, disability and literacy.

Presenters also stressed that interests developed from course work for the minor often guided the volunteer and internship choices they made; for instance, a course on investigating the school-toprison pipeline led one student to become a mentor at her local juvenile detention center.

Other students observed that they found themselves putting children at the center of self-designed projects even in seemingly unrelated classes. Senior Liz Murphy, for example, elected to curate an exhibit for an art history class that focused on representations of child-rearing — both positive and negative — in Dutch Golden Age art.

A second evening gathering, planned for late March, required that students display more than the usual amount of adaptability, as campus classes and events went remote. Fortunately, Children’s Studies minors are used to crossing boundaries, and they navigated the shift from actual to virtual with energy and creativity!

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Medical Humanities Corinna Treitel, Director and Professor of History The Medical Humanities minor approaches health, disease and medical care as culturally embedded human experiences that vary across time and place. In addition to exploring health, disease and medical care as core human experiences, the program of study is designed to provide a solid grounding in the textual-historical approach essential to all humanities scholarship.

The minor continued to grow and flourish in 2019–20 academic year, despite the disruption of COVID-19. Twelve seniors — the minor’s biggest class ever — graduated in May. Congratulations to the Class of 2020: Kiegan Baranski, Andy Benckendorff, Courtney Benion, Keaira Clancy, Alexa Gault, Clara Henkes, Lauren Hucko, Brennan Kandalaft, Christy Lindberg, Olivia Murray, Maddie Nelson and Rinat Tal! The year kicked off with a new course, What is Medical Humanities?, that considers medical humanities on a global stage. Students wrote part of the syllabus themselves with the explicit aim of globalizing the Medical Humanities minor and completed proposals for advanced research projects that covered American, European, African and South Asian topics.

The panel discussion “Leveraging the Medical Humanities Minor” was held in the fall semester, featuring former minor Skyler Kessler, Class of 2018, pre-health dean Carolyn Herman and Career Center adviser Amy Heath-Carpentier. Kessler spoke about integrating his medical humanities interests into his applications for medical school and advised students on how to keep those studies alive while becoming a physician (see sidebar). Later, students in the minor gathered to watch the documentary End Game about end-of-life care, followed by discussion with Anya Plutynski, associate professor of philosophy.

ALUMNI SPOTLIGHT: Skyler Kessler Skyler Kessler, who graduated with a minor in Medical Humanities in 2018, just finished his second year of course work at the Washington University School of Medicine. He has long demonstrated interest in a career in the medical profession, first as a young participant in the junior fire department in New York and then as a full member of the rescue squad as a licensed EMT after he turned 18. He says, “From that point on, I really knew that I wanted to go into medicine.”

After his first two years at Washington University, devoted mainly to pre-med curriculum, he began to feel a little burned out and wanted to try something new. He explains that he decided to try the medical humanities because he “was kind of afraid of the humanities and I wanted to challenge myself and kind of get out of the bubble of the basic science courses.” Today, he credits the medical humanities with giving him a unique perspective that he believes will help him to be a better physician. While his biology studies may have helped him understand the individual functions of body parts, he believes doctors need a bit of the humanities to understand the broader picture, arguing, “It is really important not to judge people … and do your best to treat them as a whole patient and not like a conglomeration of organ systems.”

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GIVING OPPORTUNITIES The Center for the Humanities is dedicated to the promotion of humanistic thinking, inquiry and scholarly production as activities essential to this university, the community we serve and the broader world. The center facilitates the work of humanists, both faculty and students, by nurturing innovative research, transformative pedagogy and vibrant community engagement locally and globally.

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$1,000 will provide flexible funding and qualify you for membership in the William Greenleaf Eliot Society.

Gifts of any amount provide vital, ongoing support.

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 in our local community and around the world.

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 Senior Director of Development Deborah Stine (314-935-7377 or deborah_stine@wustl.edu).

How You Can Help

MAKE A GIFT ONLINE

Your support enables vital humanities research and the dissemination of new findings, scholarly exchanges, student research experiences and engagement with the greater public.

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.

$1.25 million endowment will permanently support the entire Faculty Fellowship program; $200,000 will endow one Faculty Fellowship. $1 million will endow one postdoctoral fellow in residence at the humanities center; $90,000 will support a postdoctoral fellow for one year. $600,000 will endow the entire Graduate Student Fellowship program; $30,000 will support the entire program for one year. $300,000 will permanently endow a Visiting Scholar program, allowing for an extended visit each year by a new highprofile scholar. $200,000 will permanently endow the annual James E. McLeod Memorial Lecture on Higher Education. $15,000 provides funding for the Kling Undergraduate Honors Research Fellowship program for one year. $15,000 will fund the publication of the Humanities Broadsheet for a full academic year. $5,000 will fund a First Book Workshop for one of our Faculty Fellows.

GIVING OPPORTUNITIES

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: Deborah Stine, One Brookings Drive, Campus Box 1202, St. Louis, MO 63130.

1, 5, 6 / Honoring the work of Washington University’s humanities scholars at the Faculty Book Celebration.

2 / Connecting audiences and thought leaders at the annual James E. McLeod Lecture on Higher Education.

3 / Developing new capacities among our faculty with Redefining Doctoral Education in the Humanities (RDE).

4 / Spearheading a multidisciplinary and multi-institutional initiative to focus on segregation in St. Louis and beyond via The Divided City.

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Administrative staff

Executive committee

Jean Allman Director, Center for the Humanities Professor, Department of African and African-American Studies J.H. Hexter Professor in the Humanities, with appointments in History and Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies

William Acree | Associate Professor of Spanish

On leave 2019–20

Rebecca Copeland | Professor of Japanese Language and Literature

Ignacio Infante Acting Director, Center for the Humanities Associate Professor, Comparative Literature and Romance Languages and Literatures Shefali Chandra Interim Associate Director, Center for the Humanities Associate Professor, History Wendy Love Anderson Assistant Director of Academic Programs

Monique Bedasse | Associate Professor of History Colin Burnett | Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies

Matt Erlin | Professor of German Kristina Kleutghen | David W. Mesker Associate Professor of Art History Melanie Micir | Assistant Professor of English Zoe Stamatopoulou | Associate Professor of Classics Rafia Zafar | Professor of English

Kathleen G. Fields Publications and Communications Editor Barbara Liebmann Administrative Coordinator Tila Neguse Coordinator, Divided City Initiative Trisha Sutton Administrative Cluster Supervisor We thank Kathy Daniel for her service as the humanities center’s contract and grant coordinator from March 2016 to August 2019.

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 Umrath Hall, Room 217 cenhum@wustl.edu humanities.wustl.edu facebook.com/WashUHumanities twitter.com/WashUHumanities

HUMANITIES ANNUAL REPORT

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02/LETTER FROM THE INTERIM DIRECTOR 04/HUMAN TIES 04/Truths and Reckonings: A Pop-up Memorial Museum Citing the city’s geographical and historical setting, Associate Professor of African and African-American Studies Geoff Ward writes that St. Louis is a location particularly suited for telling the story of Truths and Reckonings: The Art of Transformative Racial Justice, an exhibition he curated for the Kemper Art Museum.

06/The Fall of the Berlin Wall and the Political Movement Overlooked by 30th Anniversary Celebrations The fall of the Berlin Wall is remembered as the inevitable triumph over socialism and the inevitable rejoining of East and West Germany. But just days earlier, up to 500,000 East Germans demonstrated to appeal for changes within their government — reunification was not among their demands. In the aftermath of the wall’s fall, writes historian Anika Walke, their vision for the future of the German Democratic Republic is often forgotten.

ON THE COVER

Daily images of lines found in nature and created by people were an important part of the Center for the Humanities’ Life/Lines April 2020 poetrywriting outreach project. As the Washington University and St. Louis community hunkered down under COVID-19 stay-at-home orders, the days blurred and the isolation grew. Every morning in April, a Life/Lines email arrived in participants’ inboxes, with a fresh image and a new poetry prompt. Writers submitted their own poems, then checked the project’s website to see how others responded to the same prompt. By the end of the month, a community of poets — some accomplished and some first-timers — had helped each other through an anxious and uncertain time. See more on pp. 26–28. Photo by Rod Long via Unsplash.

10 08/On Translating Beckett’s Minimalism English and drama scholar Julia Walker writes about Samuel Beckett’s minimalism and the particular challenges — and opportunities — that arise when translating his works.

10/The Career of a Medieval Accusation in an Age of Science What happens when an age-old antiSemitic superstition meets scientific inquiry? That’s the question historian Hillel Kieval kept in mind as he scoured archives in Prague, Budapest, New York, Jerusalem and Berlin to investigate a spate of “ritual murder” accusations leveled against Jews living in turn-of-the-century Central and Eastern Europe.

12/DIVIDED CITY INITIATIVE 16/REDEFINING DOCTORAL EDUCATION IN THE HUMANITIES (RDE) 18/EVENTS + OUTREACH 18/James E. McLeod Memorial Lecture on Higher Education On George Sanchez George Sanchez has helped shape a new generation of academics who have promoted connections with nonacademic organizations, the focus of his talk in 2019 James E. McLeod Memorial Lecture

on Higher Education. Scholar Mary Ann Dzuback writes about Sanchez’s longtime commitment to preserving the multiethnic and multiracial stories of a community in Los Angeles.

20/Faculty Book Celebration Daphne A. Brooks and the History of Black Women’s ‘Radical Musicianship’ Performance studies scholar Paige McGinley interviews Faculty Book Celebration keynote speaker Daphne A. Brooks about her work on Black sonic history and writing for popular and academic audiences.

26/Life/Lines During the month of April (National Poetry Month) in 2020, writers from all corners and walks of life participated in Life/Lines, a daily opportunity for creative expression.

Uniting behind a common prompt, around 350 of them wrote more than 1,200 short poems and in the process made their own community despite the isolation of COVID-19 quarantine.

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