A Year in Review 2020-21 - WashU Center for the Humanities

Annual Report

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02/LETTER FROM THE DIRECTOR 04/HUMAN TIES 04/All cooped up: Caste in The White Tiger

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The White Tiger tells the story of an Indian servant’s rise from a subsistence existence to entrepreneurial excess — a man who wrote his own ending, thanks to the fortunes of the global city. Yet, even in this tale of individual triumph, writes historian Shefali Chandra, the film powerfully demonstrates the resiliency of the caste structures that precipitated his abject origins as well as his opportunistic ascent.

06/Making sense of the racial divergence of AIDS and COVID-19 The number of COVID-19 diagnoses grows day by day, but the unequal rate of infection among Black and Latinx people and white people remains constant.

Looking back at the AIDS epidemic, René Esparza, scholar of women, gender and sexuality studies, finds a striking similarity in the U.S.’s historical treatment of viruses that disproportionally affect minority communities.

ON THE COVER

In April 2021, the Divided City Initiative and the Washington University Prison Education Project hosted Nicole R. Fleetwood, now the James Weldon Johnson Professor at New York University, to speak about her recent book, Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration. The book and accompanying exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art explore the work of artists within U.S. prisons and the centrality of incarceration to contemporary art and culture. Dean Gillispie, who was incarcerated for 20 years before his exoneration in 2017 with the help of the Ohio Innocence Project, crafted this miniature camper with found materials. He later renovated a 1963 Airstream, which he christened “Soulshine” after a favorite Allman Brothers song, and hit the open road. Dean Gillispie, Spiz’s Dinette, 1998. Tablet backs, stick pins, popsicle sticks, cigarette foil, 8 H x 16 W x 5 D inches.

10 08/Toward a populist environmentalism

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“Can you save more energy by buying one Prius and driving it 15 miles or by buying three Priuses and driving them 5 miles each?” In Michael R. Allen’s review of Stop Saving the Planet by historian and Sam Fox Research Fellow Jenny Price, he finds compelling evidence that this kind of picayune debate in today’s popular environmental movement allows bad actors to escape responsibility and action.

16/REDEFINING DOCTORAL EDUCATION IN THE HUMANITIES (RDE)

10/When retirement disappears There are few professional actors in the film Nomadland. Instead, the film centers the real-life stories of people who have resettled in campers, RVs and vans to spend their golden years on the road, cycling through an assortment of seasonal jobs. Are they modern-day pioneers, as one character declares, or are they “geriatric migrant labor”? Labor sociologist Jake Rosenfeld shares his reflections on the film’s portrayal of the economic circumstances that govern this workforce.

18/EVENTS + OUTREACH 18/James E. McLeod Memorial Lecture on Higher Education Cultural memory and the peri-pandemic library McLeod lecturer Bethany Nowviskie, dean of Libraries, senior academic technology officer and professor of English at James Madison University, questions how decisions being made by scholars, archivists, librarians and community organizers, acting as individuals and as representatives of their institutions and collectives, will shape our cultural memory of the pandemic — and our capacity for speculative thinking beyond it.

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Annual Report Table of Contents

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18 20/Faculty Book Celebration

28/Cosponsored Events

This year, there were so many ways to celebrate the new scholarship of Washington University’s humanities faculty.

An online book display and peek into the book-making process preceded a panel discussion on community and university engagement, spotlight talks from two new faculty authors and a keynote address from the author of The Broken Heart of America: St. Louis and the Violent History of the United States, Harvard historian (and native Missourian) Walter Johnson.

How to handle a pandemic: A cinematic guide What can film teach us about our current pandemic moment? That question propelled the Screening Contagion Film Series, organized by historian Corinna Treitel and artist-scholar Patricia Olynyk.

They offer an overview of the series and the conversations they hoped it ignited.

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

Uniting behind a common prompt, nearly 400 of them wrote almost a thousand short poems and read one another’s contributions during the socially distanced spring.

30/FELLOWS 31/Norwegian encounters with the world’s music makers Patrick Burke, Associate Professor of Music 32/Licensed thrills: The art of the James Bond franchise Colin Burnett, Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies

33/An anthropologist takes on academia’s attraction to complexity Talia Dan-Cohen, Assistant Professor of Anthropology 34/Get real: On the risks of authenticity Allan Hazlett, Associate Professor of Philosophy 35/Rule long and prosper: Advice for the ages, from the Sages Zoe Stamatopoulou, Associate Professor of Classics 40/FACULTY RESEARCH SUPPORT 44/MINORS 46/GIVING OPPORTUNITIES

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Letter From the Director Just over a year ago, as the scale of the global pandemic became ever more apparent, exposing at each turn enduring inequalities locally and globally, the humanities chairs and directors at Washington University issued a collective statement on the “Value of the Humanities in Times of Crisis.”

I have revisited that statement many times over this academic year and reflected on the case it makes for the “profound ways the humanities can both inform and shape our individual and collective responses to this unique moment, and lead us forward with a new self-awareness, a shared sense of purpose, and a sharper recognition of our vital connections to our multiple communities.”

To be sure, the challenges we faced in the past year and continue to confront have sometimes made it difficult to think about awareness, purpose and connection. We are all tired; many of us are depleted by grief, by caregiving, by isolation, by flying daily by the seat of our pants. We are exhausted by an academic year that seemed to have no beginning … and still has no end.

I am in awe of the creativity, the dedication and the resilience of humanities faculty, staff and students.

It is because of them that there is, indeed, a year to review!

And yet when I look back over this year, I am also struck by the ways in which the humanities, with determination and tenacity, continue to fulfill the mission collectively articulated a year ago in response to this “unique moment.” I am in awe of the creativity, the dedication and the resilience of humanities faculty, staff and students. It is because of them that there is, indeed, a year to review! It has been a year bursting with discovery, innovation and invention, but also one anchored in continuity and tradition.

It is no small accomplishment that we had fellows in (virtual) residence — faculty, graduate and Kling undergraduate — the entire year, managed to host all of our signature annual events and made continued progress on our two Mellon-funded initiatives: the Divided City 2022 and Rethinking Doctoral Education.

As we close out this year, I am exceedingly grateful to Ignacio Infante, who as interim director last year and associate director this year provided the leadership and vision that brought the center through

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those first difficult months of spring 2020. I certainly would not have gotten through this academic year without his good humor, wise counsel and passion for the humanities.

We both extend boundless gratitude to the extraordinary staff at the center: Kathleen Fields, Barbara Liebmann, Tila Neguse, Wendy Love Anderson and Trisha Sutton. This “staff thank you” has become an annual refrain, I know. But it can’t be said enough! Without their ingenuity, their diligence and their incredibly hard work, most of the pages of this 2020–21 Year in Review would be blank.

Before closing, let me acknowledge two significant transitions.

In January 2021, Tila Neguse, who served as project coordinator for the Divided City for six years, took up the post of assistant director at the new Center for the Study of Race, Ethnicity and Equity (CRE2). Gratefully, Tila is continuing her leadership role with us (though in a reduced capacity) for the coming year, as she works to facilitate the sustainability of Divided City initiatives, post-Mellon funding, through CRE2. We congratulate her on this wonderful new opportunity.

Finally, Barb Liebmann, who has been with the center since 2006, is retiring. Barb has been the welcoming face of the center and the behind-the-scenes coordinator of pretty much everything we do for 15 years. She has been the institutional memory-keeper, the one who has kept the train on the tracks. It is hard to imagine the center without her. I want to thank Barb on behalf of all humanities faculty, staff and students who have had the privilege of working with her.

Barb, we wish you the very best as you move into this exciting new phase of your life!

Jean Allman Director, Center for the Humanities J.H. Hexter Professor in the Humanities Department of African and African American Studies

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The film begins and ends with Balram as the global capitalist hero of his own story. Image courtesy Netflix.

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All cooped up: Caste in The White Tiger Shefali Chandra is associate professor in the Departments of Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies and History, currently completing a monograph titled “Penetrating America: Colonial Replay and the Making of a Supercaste.”

In the old days, there were over 1,000 castes in India, so we learn from the narrator of Ramin Bahrani’s 2021 film The White Tiger. But today, there are only two: men with big bellies and men with small ones; those born to be masters and those to be servants; those who eat and those who are eaten. Worded by Balram Halwai, the abused, perceptive and vitally entrepreneurial servant for a rich landlord’s family, the film interweaves the young man’s story with his observations of the entitlement and cruelty of India’s global elite.

Ultimately, however, it is when Balram overcomes the mentality of the perpetual servant that he becomes the author of his own story.

Once he was a rooster who, like millions of Indians, was cooped up by the caste system. But as he learns to see and then see through the bars of brahmanical reasoning and greed, he discovers “what it means not to be a servant.” Transformed by his insights, Balram prophesizes that the time of the “white man” is over; instead, the new century will be led by brown and yellow, by Asians. Intriguingly it is Pinky, the “low” caste, Indo-American daughter of a Brooklyn bodega owner and wife of Balram’s master Ashok, who enlightens him: The door was open all along, yet the rooster searches for the key. Caste is a relic that can now be overcome, by an individual’s initiative, over one lifetime. For Pinky it’s as easy as announcing

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that she’s “done.” Embodying the allure and wisdom of American-centered globalization, she propels Balram’s metamorphosis.

The primary conceit of the film is that Balram embodies caste, and therefore it is a hurdle for him to surmount, which he can, because Pinky already has. Both the “low” caste characters are fictive. The film is based on a novel written by the Indo-Australian Arvind Adiga, and the film’s director is Iranian-American (Bahrani). Together, they promise that globalization will secure the gritty individual’s success — the story closes with the former chauffeur Balram running a profitable taxi service for the global city’s call centers. Class success will repair caste history and bring India up to global speed.

Creativity, consciousness and consumption can mend the past, and repair the infinite progression of stratification, violence, theft.

The film satiates the neoliberal hunger for a tale of rags to riches, tradition to modernity, custom to freedom, caste to class. This while the caste divide has actually grown wider and bloodier with each passing day, and while a democratically elected Hindu

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government openly sanctions lynching, pogroms and rape to draw more and greater groups into the murderous logic of caste. The White Tiger diverts attention away from Hindu neofascism while propounding that caste can be overcome by personal initiative and a little (planned) rage. Within that message, however, we also learn the reverse: Caste will never be displaced and that’s because its actual beneficiaries are now eating from two plates at once: Indian and global.

Balram’s unstated observations powerfully undermine the film’s own fantasies of emancipation. We watch through Balram’s rearview mirror as the bicultural global elite, embodied by Ashok and Pinky, eat the flesh of “their” lower-caste villagers — taxing, killing, blackmailing, bribing and exploiting the boundless creativity and labor — at will. Within seconds they can activate a structure that converts blood into diamonds, cash and Pajeros; yet they cajole Balram to choose and design his own future.

Balram studies them, and a thick description reflects back: of the ruthless and ceaseless appetite of the Indian global elite; how they speak of the deprivations of “the real India” to magnify their own power on a transnational scale; of those who have inherited the colonial territory as their personal patrimony; how they recycle the claim to represent India into land grabs and the evasion of taxation; how they identify as Indian to terrorize and diminish every “other” Indian; how they monetize and bribe their way through each capillary of the “democratic” machine; how easily they kill and steal and secure and spread their inheritances from New Delhi to

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New York; how they parody caste as spiritual and biological and chosen so as to prevent its annihilation. How they exchange caste, cash it in, for global access.

The structure has not been overthrown.

It has received a paint job while from within. It has been steeled and fortified anew. As the century of the brown man and the yellow man opens before us, Global India catapults into existence a new caste formation, a supercaste: bicultural, bilingual, transnational, diasporic and so very concerned about “India.” And Balram?

Once a driver, always a driver. His father rode cycle rickshaws to his death; Balram now runs a taxi service. Caste endures and repackages for global time. As he realizes his potential as the white (not yellow and not brown) tiger, Balram elects to walk away from the future and from his eager viewer.

Having fortified the structure, he leaves the scene. Another generation of workers looks toward us for our assessment.

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Balram fulfills his ambition of becoming driver to Ashok (right), younger son of the landlord, before his story takes another turn. Images courtesy Netflix

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“COVIDGATE,” by ACT UP member Ivy Pachamama, is a revised and updated version of the famous “AIDSGATE” poster featuring Ronald Reagan.

Making sense of the racial divergence of AIDS and COVID-19 René Esparza is assistant professor in the Department of Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies.

Since the onset of the pandemic, COVID-19 has both exposed and exploited the country’s long-festering racial inequities.

That the United States has only 4% of the world’s population yet about 20% of all COVID-19 cases and deaths [as of November 2020] is the result of poor leadership compounded by the disparities that have systematically compromised the immune system of the biopolitically devalued among us. SARS-CoV-2 may be a new virus but, like HIV, it has proliferated unabated due to the sociobiological conditions sustained by state racism and neoliberal governance.

The U.S. AIDS epidemic, which continues to impact thousands of poor Black and Latinx people each year, offers a pre-history of COVID-19.

When HIV first struck American central cities in 1981, medical authorities understood

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the disease as a behaviorally acquired condition afflicting “homosexuals.” It soon became apparent that intravenous drug users presented similar immune suppression symptoms. Societal disdain against gay/bisexual men and people who injected drugs shaped the sluggish response by the government in these early years, enabling the virus to gain a foothold in these populations. By 1982, 853 people had died of AIDS-related complications. Yet at a White House press conference that October, when a reporter asked Press Secretary Larry Speakes about the “gay plague,” Speakes and the press pool burst into laughter, mocking the reporter as a “fairy.”

President Ronald Reagan himself first mentioned “AIDS” in public in 1985, after more than 5,000 Americans had died of AIDS-related complications.

This same willful negligence likewise shaped President Donald J. Trump’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Even as the number of cases spiraled out of control, Trump reaffirmed the virus would simply “go away” with warmer weather. Alongside this brush-off, another disturbing fact came to light: the racial chasm of the pandemic.

According to data on 640,000 infections through May 28, 2020, that The New York Times first obtained after suing the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Black and Latinx people were three times more likely to become infected than their white neighbors and twice as likely to die from the virus. When asked about these disparities during a White House briefing of the coronavirus task force, Surgeon General Jerome Adams responded that Black and Latinx people had to “step up” and “avoid alcohol, drugs and tobacco.” The surgeon

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general’s behavioral explanation for unequal health outcomes reflects how diseases of oppression are often individualized as the manifestation of a lack of personal responsibility. Because our profitdriven health-care system posits health as a private matter rather than a collective good, Americans tend to blame weak life choices — not overlapping structural vulnerabilities — for illness.

If we instead employ the social determinants of health in our analysis, we come to understand that Black and Latinx people, who already possess a lower baseline of health, tend to live in poor, segregated neighborhoods without access to sound medical care.

They are more likely to live in cramped, multigenerational homes.

Black and Latinx people are also more likely to work low-wage “essential” jobs that do not offer paid sick leave. In addition to being unable to work from home, they are more likely to travel via public transportation. Although there is no biological predisposition to COVID-19, Black and Latinx people experience higher rates of comorbidities like diabetes and heart disease that elevate their risk for fatal cases of the disease. Thus, the cumulative effects of deeply rooted inequities in housing, employment and health care — not personal “risk behaviors” — better account for the racial profile of COVID-19 in the much the same way such inequities have done so for AIDS. With the CDC reporting in 2018 that Black and Latinx people accounted for 42% and 27% of new HIV diagnoses although they only comprised 13% and 18% of the U.S. population and its dependent areas, respectively, it is clear that AIDS is not over. The racial schism behind COVID-19 also belies the notion that the novel coronavirus is the “great equalizer.” In the United States, SARS-Cov-2 found the perfect host in a nation (newly) unwilling to contend with its lethal legacies of white supremacist violence — a reluctance that fed this deadly pathogen into its monstrous final state. As Ortez Alderson and members of ACT UP we anxiously awaited a viable vaccine against SARS-Cov-2 (a key in Washington, D.C., difference compared with the government’s early inaction toward a October 11, 1988. vaccine against HIV), we were reminded that unless we address the Alderson was a founding member of ACT UP/ underlying sickness that is white supremacy, we may very well find Chicago and the Majority a cure against the virus without truly healing those biopolitically Action Committee, an devalued communities made most at risk.

ACT UP subgroup focused on people of color living with HIV/AIDS. Photo by Donna Binder.

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Image by Hello I’m Nik via Unsplash

As the book unwinds its critique of environmentalism, it begins revealing its real aim: to join struggles for climate, racial and economic justice by demonstrating that our climate crisis is not one of “environment” but one of economy.

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Toward a populist environmentalism Michael R. Allen, a lecturer in the American Culture Studies program and senior lecturer in architecture, landscape architecture and urban design at the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts, reviews the latest book by Jenny Price, a public writer, artist and environmental historian, and current research fellow at the Sam Fox School.

Jenny Price’s Stop Saving the Planet: An Environmentalist Manifesto posits that we need to replace “out there” environmentalism — which dichotomizes the human and natural realms — with an “in here” theory posing environment, society and economy as connected parts of the world in which we live, 24/7.

The book walks the reader through the realms of rah-rah environmentalism that seem hard to believe anyone believes.

Exxon’s commitment to alternative energy. Ecologically sustainable seven-bedroom mansions. Cap-and-trade credits that create a new financialization around finance.

She locates within this “out there” environmentalism an escape hatch that allows for extraction, pollution, consumerism, racism, classism and financialization to mask themselves behind the shields of phony solutions. There is “Green Virtue,” which allows people to moralize their choices without locating them within any social or economic context. There is the insidious “Whole Planetude,” which promotes the idea that any action, anywhere, by anybody will help dig us out of the ecological crises of our time. It’s the planet — not specific locations like Southeast Los Angeles or the West Lake Landfill in St. Louis — that’s at stake. And all actions are somehow equal, so if Union Carbide eliminated bottled water in the workplace, it has done something good for the planet.

As the book unwinds its critique of environmentalism, it begins revealing its real aim: to join struggles for climate, racial and economic justice by demonstrating that our climate crisis is not one of “environment” but one of economy. Capitalism’s promotion of growth through profit drives ecological devastation, and to find out how that has happened, there are specific people who have done specific things to specific places. To liberate Earth, the specific victims of this economy must be set free, not just “the planet.” The specific perpetrators must be brought to justice, not just “people.”

Price’s steadfast commitment to the joining of struggles overturns what political theorist Ernesto Laclau termed “the denigration of the masses.” In the face of unruly, contradictory popular opposition to power, political figures right and left attempt to reassert the supremacy of state and capitalist institutions. After the January 6

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siege of the U.S. Capitol, there is especially a left tendency to double down on rejecting any “populist” outrage expressed in jarring forms.

Price dares readers to recognize their own elitist bearings in making such a denunciation — an unwillingness to accept that environmentalists (in this case) have crafted a discourse far more palatable to Exxon executives than workers on offshore oil rigs. The core of that discourse is that too much environmentalist rhetoric relies on a false equivalence between the oil rigger’s pursuit of a living wage and the Prius-driving, LEED-certified-office-occupying CEO whose pursuit of profit over all other values is the fundamental problem. In the wake of the litany of corporations and universities hawking diversity, equity and inclusion policies and offices without actually addressing the systemic ways in which white supremacy and male power permeate these institutions, Price’s arguments might inspire critique in other areas.

Price critiques this equivalence with concrete examples of ways in which similar judgments mislead. There are some edgy observations, such as that only 3% of plastic is recycled and that municipal waste is only about 3% of the planet’s waste stream. The point is not to discourage recycling — the sort of false populism of ecological denialism in vogue on the right today — but to make it clear that the neighbor who tosses yogurt containers in the garbage is a minor pest compared to Apple, whose products generate so much plastic waste but whose greenwashing schemes inure the corporation to the same kind of scorn.

Price concludes with 39 actions that draw the big arguments down to steps (not always small), such as paying one’s full share of taxes, promoting public space, learning about the needs of neighborhood birds to become a better advocate, learning where your money comes from (as important as knowing where it goes) and so forth.

All of these planks develop a revolutionary and refreshing platform that takes the environmentalist emphasis on individual actions and raises them to individual actions that have collective benefit.

Price returns to the dream of a “Government Is Us Economy,” where we are not timid to ask our government to set human and ecological health as a higher aim than monetary wealth, and she means it. Her compact binds us together by binding our spheres of living together into “the environment,” where we can see that not all inputs are created equal, and not all actions really cause that much change.

We need to replace popular environmentalism, in which we follow ineffective fads that allow certain powers to recuperate our power, with populist environmentalism, in which when we think of the planet, we also think of its people. All of them.

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Romantic ideas about American wanderlust crash against the devastating economic realities of today’s “geriatric migrant laborers” in Nomadland.

Photo courtesy Fox Searchlight Pictures.

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When retirement disappears Jake Rosenfeld is professor of sociology in the Department of Sociology.

Nomadland is a beautiful film. It is also deeply flawed.

Set in the vastness of the U.S. West, the film centers on Fern, played

by Frances McDormand, the rare fictional character in a movie that integrates dozens of real people as they navigate their 60s and 70s holding down a series of seasonal jobs. The film swept core categories in this year’s Golden Globes and won the coveted Best Picture Award at the Academy Awards.

The movie is based on Jessica Bruder’s book by the same name, which in turn expanded on a brilliant 2014 essay Bruder published in Harper’s, “The End of Retirement: When You Can’t Afford to Stop Working.” Key interviewees of Bruder appear as themselves in the movie, a feature of the director Chloé Zhao’s unique approach to honoring the reality of her characters’ lives in her storytelling.

We learn early on that Fern’s husband worked for U.S. Gypsum in the company town of Empire, Nevada, before he succumbed to cancer. Fern may be fictional, but Empire was anything but. This was a company town, where your employer owned not only your time as soon as you entered the mine, it also owned the house that you retired to at the end of your working day. Bear in mind Nomadland is a contemporary story. Empire wasn’t a company town of some bygone era. U.S. Gypsum shut the mine in early 2011, instantly transforming Empire into a ghost town — the zip code erased and all

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— and the workers lost more than a job. They lost their homes.

In a 2011 story in the Las Vegas ReviewJournal, the engineering manager for the mine summed up the tragedy: “It was business. … There was nothing personal.”

Fern’s fictional account is based on true tragedy. Fern thus finds herself without a spouse or a house. From there she joins a massive traveling caravan of “workampers”: nomads who live out of their vehicles, picking up seasonal jobs such as picking beets, staffing campsites and organizing all the packages we order at giant Amazon warehouses. Much of this work is grueling.

None of it is well-paid.

Yet the film doesn’t dwell on the circumstances leading to Fern’s homelessness (or “houselessness,” to use the preferred parlance of many workampers). We do get hints of the backstories leading many to the workamper sites. In the film, Linda May recounts how on Thanksgiving Day of 2010 she planned her suicide after a fruitless search for work. But in the film we don’t get her full accounting: how her own daughter’s family no longer

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had room for her after they were forced into a small apartment; how a few years after that near-tragedy she once again found herself close to despair working for Home Depot and earning just barely enough to afford her trailer. This was a woman who worked her entire adult life, yet still wondered, as Bruder tells us, “how anybody could afford to grow old.” None of the many jobs she worked so hard at for so long offered a pension.

That’s the real story for so many workampers: the cruelty of an economic system that forces grandparents into seasonal, backbreaking labor. And while the first half of the film provides glimpses of how the characters end up in RV and van camps in Arizona, Nevada and other popular destinations for our 21st-century nomads, by the second the director shifts her focus onto the themes of grief, wanderlust and the beautiful communities created by these restless souls.

That’s fine, and if the film had no social commentary, it would remain a remarkable visual achievement. Plus, rare is the moviegoer that wants to spend two hours being preached to about the country’s woefully inadequate social safety net. But Zhao is dexterous enough to interweave a number of themes more seamlessly than displayed here. By referencing the wrenching economic dislocations early in the film, and largely abandoning them midway through, the film does a disservice to the characters whose lived experiences it is so focused on capturing. Telling their stories accurately means presenting them as they really are. To quote Bruder, “they are geriatric migrant labor.” Yes, they grieve lost loved ones, and form bonds with one another as they travel from

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job to job. But workampers’ very existence isn’t evidence of Americans’ wandering spirits, or a deep-seated cultural need to leave everything behind to start over. Many of these people had nothing to start with, and all deserve to spend their golden years without worrying about where the next job will be.

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Photo courtesy Fox Searchlight Pictures.

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DIVIDED CITY

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.

City Seminar The City Seminar was founded in 2007 as a forum through which scholars across disciplines and from colleges and universities throughout the St. Louis area share ideas, research methods, theories and topics on urban issues in the United States and abroad. Co-sponsored by the Divided City since 2014, the seminar has been especially effective in bringing architecture, urban design and humanities scholars into regular dialogue. In spring 2021, the City Seminar partnered with the Washington University Prison Education Project, which was recently awarded $1 million in funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, to bring in speakers whose research focuses on incarceration in the United States.

November 20, 2020 “Global Displacement and Local In-Placement: Transnational Stories of Rustbelt Revitalization” Faranak Miraftab Drawing on insights from her research among meatpackers in central Illinois with transnational families in Mexico and Togo, Miraftab, professor of urban and regional planning at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, took a close look at the contradictory dynamics that fuel the globally displaced labor force we call “immigrant workers” and the role they play in revitalizing the U.S. rustbelt.

February 22, 2021 “Building Educational Justice in Alabama Prisons: What’s Love Got to Do with It? The Alabama Prison Arts + Education Project and Grassroots Program Design” Kyes Stevens With over 20 years of experience in prison arts and education innovation and administration, Stevens is a national leader in the field. Stevens is founding director of the Alabama Prison Arts + Education Project, one of the most esteemed and longest-running arts and education programs in the country offering equal access to sustained and quality educational experiences to those incarcerated in state prisons.

April 13, 2021 “Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration” Nicole Fleetwood This talk examined the impact of the carceral state on contemporary art and culture. Focusing on art made in U.S. prisons and in collaboration with artists and activists across the nation, Fleetwood, professor of American studies and art history at Rutgers University, explored various aesthetic practices and media of incarcerated artists who use penal space, penal matter and penal time to produce art about carcerality.

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Faculty Collaborative Grants These grants support collaborative research, field institutes and community engagement on urban segregation broadly conceived.

The Land on Which We Dance: Reclaiming Spaces of Black Dance in St. Louis

Denise Ward-Brown, Professor of Art, Sam Fox School, Washington University Joanna Dee Das, Assistant Professor of Performing Arts, Washington University

Mass Housing in the United States and Yugoslavia: Crossing the Transatlantic Divide

Michael Allen, Lecturer in American Culture Studies; Senior Lecturer in Architecture, Landscape Architecture and Urban Design, Sam Fox School, Washington University Vladana Putnik Prica, Research Associate in Department of Art History, Faculty of Philosophy, University of Belgrade

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Judith Carlisle

Philosophy-Neuroscience-Psychology, Washington University

Carlisle is a doctoral student in the Philosophy-Neuroscience-Psychology program. Her summer research project explores the concepts of community-level trauma as well as vicarious (or indirect) trauma by focusing on case studies from the history of St. Louis.

Eva Hoffman

Anthropology, Washington University

Hoffman is a doctoral candidate in sociocultural anthropology. She studies reproductive health care in Appalachia and works with pregnant women in rural West Virginia, clinicians and other health-care personnel.

Bridget Kelly

History, Washington University

Mobilizing the Middle: A Radical Atlas of Ferguson

Kelly is a doctoral student in international urban history. Her summer research project examines the material and spiritual effects experienced

by Black residents of Meacham Park in the annexation into Kirkwood.

Urban Palisades: Technology in the Making of Santa Fe, Mexico City

Gicela Medina

Patty Heyda, Associate Professor of Urban Design and Architecture, Sam Fox School, Washington University

Diana Montaño, Assistant Professor of History, Washington University David Pretel, Beatriu de Pinós Fellow and Lecturer of History, Pompeu Fabra University

Graduate Summer Research Fellowship These fellowships support two months of full-time research by graduate students (MUD, MArch, MLA, DrSU or PhD) at Washington University, University of Missouri–St. Louis and Saint Louis University on urban segregation broadly conceived. The fellowships forge sustainable interdisciplinary connections among graduate students in the humanities, architecture and urban design.

Karla Aguilar Velásquez

Romance Languages and Literatures, Washington University

Aguilar Velásquez is a fourth-year doctoral student in Hispanic studies and is also completing a graduate certificate in women, gender and sexuality studies. Her summer project traces the cultural circuits that allow actors in political locations such as underground markets in Cuba or el Barrio in New York to challenge hierarchies of art production and reception.

Erin Barry

History, Washington University

Barry is a doctoral candidate in history with a graduate certificate in women, gender and sexuality studies. She is currently working on her dissertation, which explores the history of adult theaters through three Supreme Court cases in the 1970s.

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Romance Languages and Literatures, Washington University

Medina is a first-year student in the Hispanic studies doctoral program.

Her interests and research are broadly based on Afro-Hispanic literature and the diaspora. This summer she and colleague Rodrigo Viqueira (below) will develop a podcast, “Street Politics Across the Americas.”

Santiago Rozo Sánchez

Romance Languages and Literatures, Washington University

Rozo Sánchez is a doctoral candidate in Hispanic studies. His summer research project will take place in Bogotá and will focus on the role street art has/had during Colombia’s recent “Paro Nacional.”

Nate Stanfield

Architecture, Sam Fox School, Washington University

Stanfield is entering his final year in the master of architecture program.

His research focuses on the histories and futures of water-based crises experienced by Native communities in the Twin Cities, St. Louis and New Orleans regions.

Zeles Vargas

Anthropology, Washington University

Vargas is a third-year anthropology student. His research investigates how the combination of Argentina’s pro-LGBT investments and everyday antigay violence affect gay men’s quotidian world-building and their struggle to survive.

Rodrigo Viqueira

Romance Languages and Literatures, Washington University

Viqueira is a third-year doctoral student in Hispanic studies and is also completing a graduate certificate in Latin American studies. Alongside Gicela Medina (above), he is developing a podcast.

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Seed money for the grassroots: The Divided City initiative’s community-led projects Two critical conditions of the year 2020 — the major funding cuts to local nonprofits due to the economic fallout of the COVID-19 pandemic and the major groundswell of support for social justice activism following the killing of George Floyd — provided the impetus for an innovative community outreach effort by the Divided City initiative over the summer.

Thanks to this new funding program, six St. Louis area projects that address urban segregation and social justice got the support they needed just as the projects were needed most.

In past years, the Divided City’s funding opportunities have centered on Faculty Collaborative Grants. “Community organizations were a part of many of our projects, but they had to have a Washington University faculty partner,” says Jean Allman, co-primary investigator and the J.H. Hexter Professor in the Humanities, as well as director of the Center for the Humanities. “We would hold these informational sessions and there would often be more community people than faculty, and the community people were looking for faculty partners. The energy has always been there, but this year more than ever. So, we started thinking, what if community organizations and representatives don’t need a partner?”

Encouraged by the Mellon Foundation’s own bold and imaginative changes to its funding opportunities and parameters, Allman and co-PI Bruce Lindsey, the E. Desmond Lee Professor for Community Collaboration, modified the 2020 funding program to meet the current moment.

Project coordinator Tila Neguse, now the assistant director of Washington University’s Center for the Study of Race, Ethnicity and Equity, further elaborates: “Jean, Bruce and I were having conversations about how to respond to the global movement for Black Lives. … It was important to me that we were able to position the Divided City initiative as an accessible resource for the community during this time.”

DIVIDED CITY

With that in mind, they launched a new funding scheme to provide seed grants of up to $10,000 directly to local artists and community organizations in the St. Louis metro region engaged in community work or creative practice related to urban segregation.

Word quickly spread, and the effort garnered 82 funding applications. “I was overwhelmed by the quantity and quality of the applications,” Neguse says. “It was so incredible to see the amount of creative energy — especially among young black folks — pulsing through St. Louis metro area.

There were organizations, artists, activists doing work in every field and discipline. It made me very proud of the work being done in St. Louis.

“It also made me realize there is a real need for these type of creative funding opportunities — particularly for young creatives and activists — in this city,” she says. “I think this was a great way for the Divided City to open ourselves up to all the vast resources available outside of the university, in the community. I met so many different individuals and organizations through this process and my hope is that we can continue to foster those connections.”

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Six projects were ultimately selected for funding, for a total of $57,500. Below are featured projects from the cycle, with a spotlight on a couple that have already gotten underway.

BlackTea | Alisha Sonnier and Jami Cox

BlackTea

An audio/visual podcast series that pairs engaging informational programming with hot social topics (see sidebar).

“Our show covers a variety of topics that all fall under political, social, and cultural empowerment and critical thinking. In just two episodes we’ve covered a variety of topics including the Electoral College, the Supreme Court nomination process, Lebron James’ political partnership with Lyft, community and real estate development, the need to normalize therapy and mental health, the 2020 presidential election, St. Louis local elections, the tragic and sudden murder of rapper King Von and more. … ‘Community’ is an intersection of a variety of topics and individuals, and our show is reflective of that. Our ideal impact is for people to literally leave us with their cup spilling over — hence the name BlackTea.”

From St. Louis to Louisville Healing Walls Collaboration | Elizabeth Vega, Artivists STL, Ashley Cathey, Jelani Brown, Kris Mosby A collaborative mural project that joins together Artivists STL and the Louisville Healing Wall initiative to use mural art as a way to build deeper relationships in regional movements and to showcase Black and Brown artists (see sidebar).

— Alisha Sonnier and Jami Cox

Marquette Pool Fence ReCreated | Dutchtown South Community Corporation A public design competition aimed at transforming Marquette Park’s current barbed-wire fence from a piece of low-quality infrastructure into a high-quality piece of functional public art that welcomes residents to the pool and park.

Rivers of Women | Lyah B. Leflore-Ituen A documentary film centering on the life and works of the late St. Louis Poet Laureate Emeritus Shirley Bradley Price LeFlore.

LeFlore, an activist and artist, worked arduously as a change agent in the St. Louis community.

StitchCast Studio Special Edition: The Divided City | Saint Louis Story Stitchers Artists Collective Four one-hour podcast episodes featuring African American youth, ages 16 to 24 years old, who live in neighborhoods with high crime and poverty rates in St. Louis, and covering topics such as the culture of trauma caused by poverty and repeated exposure to violence among families of color in St. Louis, stories of disorientation and dislocation of Black families, and the power of story as healer in Black cultures through time.

Healing Walls “Our collaboration [between Artivists STL and the Louisville Healing Wall initiative] came directly out of both the Ferguson uprising and the Breonna Taylor uprising. Some St. Louis artivists who cut our teeth in Ferguson went to help folks in Louisville, Kentucky, to formulate some art resistance. ... And very quickly, deep relationships formed, which got me thinking, artists are the folks who — by virtue of their manner of collaborations and thinking — are the ones who are going to shape the processes that are going to help us create the world that we serve. … When we talk about social justice, when we talk about racial equity and access — this is directly addressing that in the art community in a way that I think is grassroots and meaningful and led by people who are most impacted.”

— Elizabeth Vega

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RDE

Redefining Doctoral Education in the Humanities (RDE) With a $1.5 million grant 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. This faculty-first approach consists of four components, detailed and with updates for 2020–21 below.

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

William Acree | Romance Languages and Literatures This funding supported Acree in developing vocabulary, ways of seeing and collaborative work models that designers and architects manage in conversations about public space. Moreover, he strengthened his project management skills and expanded his use of digital tools as he moves to focus on how design influences public life. These practices and skills will be incorporated as pillars of his graduate courses going forward.

Stephanie Kirk | Romance Languages and Literatures Kirk was awarded funding for literary translation workshops to develop pedagogical skills in order to offer a course for graduate students in this topic. Students will emerge with defined, marketable and transferable skills in literary translation, an understanding of career paths in the translation/language services industry and a portfolio of materials.

Uluğ Kuzuoğlu | History With his grant, Kuzuoğlu began training in augmented reality (AR) technologies. AR provides a digital interface with the real world by layering, manipulating and/or enhancing the spatial dimensions of our physical reality. The implications of AR for historical research and teaching are transformative, yet they have only recently begun to be explored. After a year of training, he plans to incorporate AR training into the department’s doctoral program and teach graduate students transferable skills that they may use in both academic and nonacademic industries.

Curriculum Innovation Grants Supports individual faculty members or small groups of faculty and community partners proposing innovative and transformative graduate-level course work.

No awards made this year Studiolabs Supports innovative living-learning communities convened to pursue humanities research and collaboration around a theme or problem that strategically develops new capacities. See spotlight feature on studiolabs on next page.

No competition held this year RDE Retreat Together with faculty from neighboring institutions, the retreats feature focused, hands-on training and presentations. This year’s workshop, held February 5, 2021, was “Writing for the Public: How to Share Your Scholarly Work With Ordinary People.”

Designed for humanities faculty who seek to write and publish for broad audiences and to share that knowledge and those skills in their graduate teaching, the workshop was led by Ian Bogost and Christopher Schaberg, founding editors of the Object Lessons essay and book series published by The Atlantic and Bloomsbury. Bogost — who in May 2021 accepted an appointment as director and professor of Washington University’s Film and Media Studies program with a joint appointment in the McKelvey School of Engineering — was the Ivan Allen College Distinguished Chair in Media Studies and professor of interactive computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Schaberg is the Dorothy Harrell Brown Distinguished Professor of English at Loyola University New Orleans.

As part of the day’s full agenda, participants learned why writing for the public might benefit scholars in the humanities, how to define and pursue an audience (or multiple audiences) for their work, and how to identify and work with different publication venues, as well as how public writing differs from academic writing. Several faculty members continued to workshop pieces they began during the retreat with Bogost and Schaberg, with the goal of pitching them to mainstream outlets for publication.

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architecture studio practice. She conceived the studiolabs as both a physical and curricular space, in which interdisciplinary cohorts of scholars and students could examine contemporary issues.

“The idea was to come up with a different model for graduate education,” Allman said.

“We wanted a space that combined humanist inquiry with the best of studios and labs, but was also outward-facing and engaging to the public.”

SPOTLIGHT: Studiolabs at the Lewis Collaborative The charge was ambitious. Conditions were complicated.

The results have been transformative.

Photo by Joe Angeles/ Washington University.

The Lewis Collaborative, located less than a mile north of Washington University’s Danforth Campus, represents a new chapter for one of University City’s oldest and most storied sites.

A new use for an old site Over the last century, the sprawling, three-building complex — originally built as an art school for women — has housed a junior high, a high school, district offices and, most recently, studio and classroom space for the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts.

Now, following a multimillion-dollar renovation, the 3.75-acre property encompasses 93 residential units; offices and co-working spaces; a coffee shop and communal kitchen; and flexible classroom space, known as the studiolabs, for the Center for the Humanities.

The inaugural studiolab, which will launch in fall 2021, is titled “Freedom | Information | Act.” Led by Joseph Loewenstein, professor of English and director of the Humanities Digital Workshop, it will explore legal, practical, ethical and technical dimensions of working with multimedia archives — from the civil rights era to the Ferguson protests.

In fall 2022, Anika Walke, associate professor of history, and Geoff Ward, professor of African and African American studies, will lead “Memory for the Future,” a studiolab examining the interlinked histories and public memorialization of colonialism, slavery and genocide. Additional studiolabs will launch in 2023 and 2024.

“Not every end-product of humanities graduate training needs to be a 30-page Approaching the 96,000-square-foot complex from Kingsland critical essay or a 300-page dissertation,” Avenue, on the western edge of the U. City Loop, bicyclists and Allman said. The studiolabs space, located pedestrians are greeted by a new entrance and updated hardscaping, around the corner from the coffee shop, which lead into the coffee shop, studiolabs and other public-facing can host classes and seminars but also amenities. “The idea of the project is to get residents out of their screenings and exhibitions. Concerts or unit, down on the ground floor, and interacting with people not only performances could be staged on the of other disciplines, but also in the broader community,” said Mary old loading dock that now serves as the Campbell, associate vice chancellor for real estate, who oversaw complex’s north entrance. the renovation.

At the Lewis Collaborative, “all those A new approach to graduate study boundaries that separate student from non“Graduate students in the humanities generally attend weekly student, public from university, just sort of seminars,” said Jean Allman, director of the Center for the wither away,” Allman concluded.

Humanities. “You read the book, you think about the book.

Excerpted from “Inside the Lewis Sometimes, you tear the book apart. At the dissertation-writing Collaborative: Reinventing a century-old U. stage, students are typically working solo, 24/7.”

City landmark” by Liam Otten/Washington But Allman was struck by the collaborative ethos she often found in University Marketing & Communications. scientific, medical and engineering laboratories, as well as in art and

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EVENTS & OUTREACH

McLeod Memorial Lecture on Higher Education The Center for the Humanities invited Bethany Nowviskie — dean of Libraries, senior academic technology officer and professor of English at James Madison University — 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 April 23, Nowviskie gave the lecture “Cultural Memory and the Peri-Pandemic Library.”

In her talk, Nowviskie noted that decisions being made by scholars, archivists, librarians and community organizers, acting as individuals and as representatives of their institutions and collectives, will shape our cultural memory of the pandemic — and our capacity for speculative thinking, beyond it.

She questioned the roles libraries and archives — community-based, federal and academic — play in times of national trauma and transition. How can they partner more effectively with scholars and publics in the middle of a mess? And how do they square the project of cultural memory — the job of liberal arts and memory institutions now — with the challenges that face it: inevitable losses, misinterpretations and gaps; politically and personally motivated refusals to remember; and their own embeddedness in the contested commemorative landscapes of our campuses and towns?

Here, we excerpt a portion of Nowviskie’s lecture, which is available in its entirety on her blog at nowviskie.org.

Cultural memory and the peri-pandemic library

By Bethany Nowviskie We have a job to do with grief. A role to play in narrativizing. And a task before us in organizing — both our archives and our collectives to honor the past and support better futures. In … understanding how and why we teach well enough to structure a collection accordingly. In immediate COVID response (or response to the next pandemic, the next humanitarian disaster), that means understanding how we live well enough to organize information flow in crisis.

Kim Gallon, creator of the COVID Black collective, extends the white feminist notion of an ethic of care to “a Black feminist data analytics [that] begins with care.” To her, care “lacks meaning without the response from the community which appraises its value and rewrites its significance within Black life.” In Gallon’s assessment, “data is relational … it requires human attention, consideration and protection — care — to transform it into meaningful information.”

This is fundamentally archival work. This is data curation and information science. This is the building of humane infrastructure.

And this is the task of our peri-pandemic libraries — pushing through.

Gallon finds inspiration in Patricia Hill Collins’ application of the Black cultural practice of call-and-response to the ethics of care, a theory articulated in Black Feminist Thought: “What does it mean,” Gallon asks, “to analyze health data, particularly on race, through data analytics that are grounded in a Black feminist approach to care? This is where call-and-response is key. Like ethics of caring in Black feminism, care for data in Black feminist data analytics not only occurs within a context of communal life, it also requires a response and input from the community.”

Maybe this is how we connect the organizational with the personal; structure with intimacy. Jacque Wernimont writes of the breakdown of COVID vaccine sign-up systems seemingly unaware of the lived reality they need to interpenetrate — a lived reality so evident in our archives and library datasets, if only we only knew how to

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We have a job to do with grief. A role to play in narrativizing. And a task before us in organizing — both our archives and our collectives to honor the past and support better futures.

make it more actionable, if we only worked better across spectra and boundaries of many kinds. As Wernimont puts it, “media infrastructure is and always has been a matter of life and death.”

While I wrote this talk in my library office last weekend, we held our first real football game of the year. It was a delayed season, initially played to empty stands and a few parents of student-athletes. Now we had a home game open, by governor’s order, to a large — if capped — number of eager student spectators. The JMU Marching Royal Dukes, somewhat socially distanced on the sunny Quad outside my window, warmed up for the college fight song with a big, majestic sound. Graduating seniors, whose caps and gowns had recently arrived, took off their masks to smile for pictures by the fountain in front of the library. I watched some of them angle their cameras to catch the Black Lives Matter signs our Special Collections team had posted in upstairs windows. I was so happy to feel the campus coming back

to life. I wished my staff could see it — both those whose in-person interactions had devolved into a stressful year of COVID policy-policing and reference questions answered behind plexiglass — and those who have not set foot in the library since March of 2020. I breathed a deep sigh of relief that both they and our students might begin to feel some normality at the end of a rough patch here.

There’s a lot behind those Special Collections windows. There was a lot behind my sigh. “The pandemic [as we’ve been told] will end … with a long, protracted exhalation.” Ed Yong warns us that “grief will turn into trauma. And a nation that has begun to return to normal will have to decide whether to remember that normal led to this.”

Invited McLeod lecturer Bethany Nowviskie questioned the roles libraries and archives — community-based, federal and academic — play in times of national trauma and transition.

Photo courtesy the author.

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EVENTS & OUTREACH

Faculty Book Celebration Since its release in 2020, The Broken Heart of America: St. Louis and the Violent History of the United States has been essential reading during a year of widespread conversation about the nation’s historical and systemic racism. Its author, Walter Johnson, a Missouri native and the Winthrop Professor of History and Professor of African and African American Studies at Harvard University, has spoken across the country to share his research and analysis on how the city exemplifies the imperialism, racism and capitalism that have persistently entwined to corrupt the nation’s past.

Missouri native and historian Walter Johnson delivered the keynote address at the Faculty Book Celebration.

Every year, the Faculty Book Celebration honors the recent publications by faculty in the humanities and humanistic social sciences with a display of their work and public lectures by two new Washington University authors and a nationally recognized scholar-author. While an in-person event was not possible this year, the humanities center created an online display of new books and hosted the speakers virtually. The center was honored to present an original talk by Johnson, whose scholarly work has enriched discourse about St. Louis’ origin story and its continuing effects on its present-day residents.

The event began with brief book talks by Douglas Flowe, assistant professor of history, and Rebecca Wanzo, professor and chair of the Department of Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies (see p. 22). A related panel discussion, “Connections: Power and the Politics of Community/University Engagement,” was held virtually earlier in the day (see next page).

Johnson’s keynote address, “What Becomes of the Broken-Hearted?” spanned four decades as he described his early years in midMissouri, his outside-the-classroom education during graduate school, and his eventual scholarly career, all culminating with his writing of The Broken Heart of America.

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Another lesson from the Griot: How community-university partnerships can grow and evolve In advance of the Faculty Book Celebration’s panel discussion on “Connections: Power and the Politics of Community/University Engagement,” CRE2’s Tila Neguse sat down with Lois Conley, director of the Griot Museum of Black History and Culture, to talk about the museum, the pandemic, reciprocity and the relationships the museum has built with the Washington University community. An edited and condensed version of their conversation follows.

Tila Neguse met Conley in the summer of 2016 while planning a Divided City workshop, “Memorializing Displacement.”

Over two days, the Center for the Humanities, the Museum Studies Program at the University of Missouri–St. Louis (UMSL) and the Missouri History Museum instigated conversations among activists, scholars, curators and other museum professionals about how to recover and preserve stories of displaced communities and involuntary urban relocations in St. Louis. Since then, the partnership between the Griot Museum and the Divided City has grown. They’ve worked together on multiple projects, and Conley now serves as a member of the Divided City Advisory Committee. Below, Conley elaborates on how the Griot partners with the WashU community and beyond.

The Griot Museum’s pandemic year We were closed for a year, but the shutdown gave us some time to plan some programmatic things and to nurture certain relationships. In February 2021, we had a multimedia exhibit that centered the work of Black artists in St. Louis. It was an opportunity for us to give a practicum experience to a WashU student. The show

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was called Listen, Look: A Reconciliatory Journey Through Black Grief and Joy, curated

by Precious Musa, a student in the MFA program in creative writing. We had a great turnout in a virtual setting.

A growing Griot community Because of our work with Divided City, we have been getting exposure to other WashU departments. Departments at the university reach out to us or if we reach out to them, they’re receptive. I think being a part of the Divided City has been significant in building those relationships. I feel like we have real partners with different departments at WashU, and there is a mutual benefit to being partners. I’ve been really encouraged by the way these relationships are growing.

We also recently spent a whole semester with students in a class with Professor Penny Acayo [in the Sam Fox School’s Communication Design program]. Her class worked on refashioning our website. It’s particularly fulfilling when we can provide opportunities for students. I’m always looking for other relationships we can develop throughout the campus. I feel it was because of the support from the Divided City that positioned us to develop a partnership with Harvard. We [had] the exhibit opening [in April] through a partnership with Harvard University Commonwealth Project that’s curated by [artist-activist] De Nichols.

The Griot’s next steps I think there are many more opportunities to partner with other universities and other organizations. The goal is to help get our stories out there, incorporating the history in a way that makes it our story not just Black his-story, because that is what it really is — ours. I think if we continue to miss that, we will continue to struggle with the things that divide us.

Lois Conley, Director, Griot Museum of Black History, St. Louis

PANEL DISCUSSION Connections: Power and the Politics of Community/University Engagement Moderated by Ignacio Infante, associate professor of comparative literature and Spanish; and associate director, Center for the Humanities

Panelists Lois Conley, Director, Griot Museum of Black History Walter Johnson, Keynote Speaker, Faculty Book Celebration Tila Neguse, Assistant Director, Center for the Study of Race, Ethnicity and Equity (CRE2) Samuel Shearer, Assistant Professor, African and African American Studies Geoff Ward, Professor, African and African American Studies Aaron Williams, Committee Chair, Young Friends of The Ville and 4theVille Team Member, recipient of the Community Builders Network of Metro St. Louis 2019 Rising Star in Community Building Award

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EVENTS & OUTREACH

Faculty Speakers Douglas J. Flowe Assistant Professor of History Uncontrollable Blackness: African American Men and Criminality in Jim Crow New York (University of North Carolina Press, 2020) Early 20th-century African American men in northern urban centers like New York faced economic isolation, segregation, a biased criminal justice system, and overt racial attacks by police and citizens. In this book, Douglas J. Flowe interrogates the meaning of crime and violence in the lives of these men, whose lawful conduct itself was often surveilled and criminalized, by focusing on what their actions and behaviors represented to them. He narrates the stories of men who sought profits in underground markets, protected themselves when law enforcement failed to do so, and exerted control over public, commercial and domestic spaces through force in a city that denied their claims to citizenship and manhood. Flowe furthermore traces how the features of urban Jim Crow and the efforts of civic and progressive leaders to restrict their autonomy ultimately produced the circumstances under which illegality became a form of resistance.

Rebecca A. Wanzo Professor and Chair of the Department of Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies The Content of Our Caricature: African American Comic Art and Political Belonging (New York University Press, 2020) Revealing the long aesthetic tradition of African American cartoonists who have made use of racist caricature as a Black diasporic art practice, Rebecca Wanzo demonstrates how these artists have resisted histories of visual imperialism and their legacies. Moving beyond binaries of positive and negative representation, many Black cartoonists have used caricatures to criticize constructions of ideal citizenship in the United States, as well as the alienation of African Americans from such imaginaries.

The Content of Our Caricature urges readers to recognize how the wide circulation of comic and cartoon art contributes to a common language of both national belonging and exclusion in the United States.

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New books by faculty in the humanities and humanistic social sciences, 2019–21 William Acree* Associate Professor of Spanish, Department of Romance Languages and Literatures Staging Frontiers: The Making of Modern Popular Culture in Argentina and Uruguay (University of New Mexico Press, 2019) Pamela Barmash Associate Professor of Hebrew Bible and Biblical Hebrew, Department of Jewish, Islamic, and Middle Eastern Studies The Laws of Hammurabi: At the Confluence of Royal and Scribal Traditions (Oxford University Press, 2020) Nancy Berg Professor of Modern Hebrew Language and Literature, Department of Jewish, Islamic, and Middle Eastern Studies Since 1948: Israeli Literature in the Making (State University of New York Press, 2020) (edited with Naomi B. Sokoloff) Lingchei Letty Chen Associate Professor of Chinese, Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures The Great Leap Backward: Forgetting and Representing the Mao Years (Cambria Press, 2020) Tili Boon Cuillé* Associate Professor of French, Department of Romance Languages and Literatures Divining Nature: Aesthetics of Enchantment in Enlightenment France (Stanford University Press, 2020) Jonathan Fenderson* Associate Professor of African and AfricanAmerican Studies, Department of African and African American Studies Building the Black Arts Movement: Hoyt Fuller and the Cultural Politics of the 1960s (University of Illinois Press, 2019) Douglas Flowe* Assistant Professor of History, Department of History Uncontrollable Blackness: African American Men and Criminality in Jim Crow New York (University of North Carolina Press, 2020) Matthias Göritz Professor of the Practice, Program in Comparative Literature A Brief History of the Heart (Vydaviectva Halijafy, 2019) (translated from German by Olga Gapeeva) It Rains in Heaven (Maribor, 2021) (translation into Slovenian by Ales Steger)

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Bret Gustafson* Associate Professor, Department of Anthropology Bolivia in the Age of Gas (Duke University Press, 2020) Ignacio Infante Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Spanish, Department of Romance Languages and Literatures and Program in Comparative Literature Sky-Quake: Tremor of Heaven (by Vicente Huidobro; translated by Ignacio Infante and Michael Leong) (Coimpress, 2020) Rebecca Lester Professor of Anthropology, Department of Anthropology Famished: Eating Disorders and Failed Care in America (University of California Press, 2019) Erin McGlothlin* Professor of German, Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures The Construction of Testimony Claude Lanzmann’s ‘Shoah’ and Its Outtakes (editor with Brad Prager, and Markus Zisselsberger) (Wayne State University Press, 2020) Steven Miles* Professor of History, Department of History Chinese Diasporas: A Social History of Global Migration (Cambridge University Press, 2020) Opportunity in Crisis: Cantonese Migrants and the State in Late Qing China (Harvard University Press, 2021) Casey O’Callaghan Professor of Philosophy, Department of Philosophy A Multisensory Philosophy of Perception (Oxford University Press, 2020) Carl Phillips Professor of English, Department of English Jake Rosenfeld Professor of Sociology, Department of Sociology You’re Paid What You’re Worth and Other Myths of the Modern Economy (Belknap Press, 2021) Luis Alejandro Salas* Assistant Professor of Classics, Department of Classics Cutting Words: Polemical Dimensions of Galen’s Anatomical Experiments (Brill, 2021) Matthew Shipe Senior Lecturer, Department of English Updike & Politics: New Considerations (Rowman & Littlefield, 2019) (edited with Scott Dill)

Claudia Swan Inaugural Mark Steinberg Weil Professor in Art History, Department of Art History and Archaeology Rarities of These Lands: Art, Trade, and Diplomacy in the Dutch Republic (Princeton University Press, 2021) Akiko Tsuchiya* Professor of Spanish, Department of Romance Languages and Literatures Unsettling Colonialism: Gender and Race in the Nineteenth-Century Global Hispanic World (State University of New York Press, 2019) (edited with N. Michelle Murray) Abram Van Engen Associate Professor in English, Department of English City on a Hill: A History of American Exceptionalism (Yale University Press, 2020) A History of American Puritan Literature (Cambridge University Press, (2020) (edited with Kristina Bross) William E. Wallace Barbara Murphy Bryant Distinguished Professor, Department of Art History and Archaeology Michelangelo, God’s Architect (Princeton University Press, 2019) Rebecca Wanzo Professor of Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies, and Chair, Department of Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies The Content of Our Caricature: African American Art and Political Belonging (New York University Press, 2020) Adia Harvey Wingfield Mary Tileston Hemenway Professor in Arts & Sciences, Department of Sociology Flatlining: Race, Work, and Health Care in the New Economy (University of California Press, 2019) Rafia Zafar Professor of English, Department of English and Department of African and African American Studies Recipes for Respect: African American Meals and Meaning (University of Georgia Press, 2019) * Former Faculty Fellow in the Center for the Humanities

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How I Made This Book Writing a book can change your dietary habits, so says one of our new authors! Read on for a look at their journeys to publication.

Responses are condensed for space.

Adia Harvey Wingfield, Mary Tileston Hemenway Professor, Department of Sociology

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Turkey and the U.S. I received major support from the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study (NIAS), the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (MPIWG) in Berlin. I feel very fortunate to have spent a year in residence at NIAS and at MPIWG, respectively.

In addition to their research facilities and libraries, I consulted museum collections, archives and libraries in Amsterdam, Berlin, Chicago, Istanbul, London, Paris and less familiar sites such as Harderwijk, NL, and Petworth, England. I feel especially fortunate to have had the time and support to allow my initial plans for the book to grow and shift in response to what I discovered in archives, observed in museums and read in libraries.

Funding: Weidenbaum Center, WashU sabbatical leave Research sites: A university hospital, a public hospital and a private medical practice Years to publication: Four, including data collection and writing The process of writing this book spanned the birth of a child, a move halfway across the country, preschool admissions delays, co-chairing a search committee and a presidential election with a very unexpected outcome!

Claudia Swan, Mark Steinberg Weil Professor in Art History, Department of Art History and Archaeology Rarities of These Lands grew out of a decade of research that I conducted in The Netherlands, Germany, France, the U.K.,

EVENTS & OUTREACH

Jake Rosenfeld, Professor of Sociology, Department of Sociology Funding: Weidenbaum Center on the Economy, Government, and Public Policy; National Science Foundation; Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development grant to the Center for Studies in Demography and Ecology at the University of Washington Years to publication: Seven, off and on In the time I finished the research for one part of one chapter, my brilliant sister-in-law wrote an entire book. And if my little brother hadn’t begun work on his second one, there’s no telling how many more decades I’d have spent mulling this book over. Nice try, Sam.

Luis Alejandro Salas, Assistant Professor of Classics, Department of Classics Fellowships: Faculty Fellow, Center for the Humanities, Loeb Classical Library Foundation Faculty Fellowship Years to publication: Seven years, all told. About 30% of the book comes from my doctoral dissertation. The majority of the material in the book, however, is the product of further thought and research after I began my position at Washington University. I benefited tremendously from discussions with my colleagues in classics and philosophy, as well as with historians of early modern science and medicine. Many of the parts of the book came together as a whole during my year of leave, and especially during my stay at the Center for the Humanities.

I became a vegetarian as a result of my work on this book!

Carl Phillips, Professor of English, Department of English The only real research required for a book of poems — for a poet like myself, anyway — is living deeply, paying attention, engaging with risk both in terms of how to write and what to write about. In that sense, each of my books is the result of a lifetime of meditating on what it means to be a living human being.

But to be more precise, the poems here were written over the course of two years.

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Rebecca Lester, Professor of Anthropology, Department of Anthropology • • • • •

Seven+ years of ethnographic research 5,000+ hours of participant observation 2,000 practicum hours for MSW 3,000 supervised clinical hours for LCSW 80 formal interviews with clients, clinicians and staff • Hundreds of informal interviews In some ways, I have been working on Famished most of my life, though the more concentrated research and writing process took about 15 years from start to finish.

Tili Boon Cuillé, Associate Professor of French, Department of Romance Languages and Literatures Fellowship: Center for the Humanities Funding: National Endowment for the Humanities: Exploring the human endeavor Workshops: The Bloomington 18th-Century Studies Workshop and the Folger Workshop Research sites: Bibliothèque Nationale de France (Tolbiac), Bibliothèque-Musée de l’Opéra, Bibliothèque Centrale du Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle, Special Collections at Olin Library, the Gaylord Music Library, the Wilson Library (UNC-Chapel Hill) and Edinburgh University Library Years to publication: The better part of 12 years

Pamela Barmash, Associate Professor of Hebrew Bible and Biblical Hebrew, Department of Jewish, Islamic, and Middle Eastern Studies Fellowships: Member of the School of Historical Studies, Institute for Advanced Study Funding: Summer Faculty Research Grant, WashU research leave and research account Research site: Louvre Museum Years to publication: Ten years, off and on

William Acree, Associate Professor of Spanish, Department of Romance Languages and Literatures

Bret Gustafson, Associate Professor, Department of Anthropology Fellowships: Center for the Humanities Funding: Summer Faculty Research Grant Research site: Bolivia Years to publication: The book is historical and ethnographic, based on fieldwork between 2007 and 2019. Written in stints interspersed with teaching work, committee work and family work, it offers reflections and analysis based on my long-term relationship with Bolivian Indigenous movements as well as contemporary concerns around the planetary problem of fossil fuels.

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Lingchei Letty Chen, Associate Professor of Chinese, Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures I joined the humanities center’s Post/ Memory Studies Reading Group when I was working on the manuscript. Many of the readings the group did and discussed had greatly inspired the critical methodology I adopted for this book.

Fellowships: Center for the Humanities; National Endowment for the Humanities; J. William Fulbright Scholar in Uruguay, Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs of the U.S. Department of State Funding: Maxwell C. Weiner Humanities Research Grant, Graduate School Faculty Research Grant Research sites: Public archives in Argentina and Uruguay, private collections in Buenos Aires and Montevideo, and the U.S. Library of Congress Years to publication: Around nine

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EVENTS & OUTREACH

April 6: write, beat, nerve, sound, cry Words contributed by guest curator Olivia Lott, translator of Lucía Estrada’s Katabasis and finalist for the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation. Lott is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at Washington University and was a Graduate Student Fellow in the Center for the Humanities.

To write is to have courage To cry on a page To expose our last nerve To beat our chests and shout That we have something to say That can’t be contained By the mere sound of our voices.

—Chad Savage

Life/Lines 2021 The Center for the Humanities celebrated National Poetry Month with a new installment of Life/Lines, the daily poetry practice.

Novice and published poets alike were invited to create short poems in response to an email prompt sent weekdays throughout the month. All poems — in any language, no judging, no editing — were published on the center’s website.

Life/Lines began last year as a way to keep people connected to each other during very frightening and precarious days. Participants also created a kind of archive — an archive of creative practice — that captured the emotional world of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The selection of poems reprinted here illustrates how poets — from their own unique places, experiences, imaginations, life stories — responded to their daily prompt: Write a short poem (rhyming not necessary) that includes a list of five words, anywhere and in any order.

Men in slouch hats, flasks jammed in a trenchcoat pocket, race through the city all cocked up about their “beat,” their Hemingway prose, their secret sources, their scoops.

They aim to strike a nerve, expose some muck, tear down the muckety muck in charge of it— or maybe just make somebody cry.

Sometimes they lie, but nobody cries fake.

What they write turns into sound, fury, contradiction— but it is read.

—Jeannette Cooperman Zebras each nerve quivers, delivers lions’ cry! the sound astounds, launches their flight; they bound, they write in dizzying lines of black and white on necks and backs and haunches, they stream across the plain and out of sight. only the beat of hooves and dust remain —J. Kiefer

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April 9: spirit, galaxy, blue, fire, moon

April 30: edifice, blue, glassy, tender, flow

Words contributed by guest curator Jane Ellen Ibur, Poet Laureate for the City of St. Louis.

Words contributed by the Life/Lines project team: Jean Allman, the J.H. Hexter Professor in the Humanities and director of the Center for the Humanities at Washington University; Ignacio Infante, associate professor of comparative literature and the center’s associate director; and Kathleen Fields, the center’s publications and communications editor.

Virgo pauses to consider The mysteries of September Her skirts swirl around the sky The dance of her spirit billowing From galaxy to galaxy this night.

She leaps over the fire in the forest Whippoorwills echo over blue water The moon shimmers as bullfrogs call— She is mistress of it all.

—Jo Schaper I’m 5 and Emmie holds me, mom’s mom, teaching me to tangle with the spirit of the word from the futon I dictate a fictive encyclopedia entry on the “blue fire snake” meanest under the forest moon redacting galaxy from this early foray in publishing my eyelashes flag taxonomical dreaming —Jay Buchanan A measure of moon is lost in blue midnight.

Cold fire memories shine Like the Perseids on August nights.

Across the galaxy, a dusty trail of comets enflame the sky.

Meteors fall in the blurred horizon of night and deep water.

The sea swells rise and fall. Time. Time. Time. Time.

Sometimes, the waves reflect the ephemeral light of beauty.

Always returning. Almost here. But, distant. And long since passed.

—jkf

The house’s worth I thought I knew Its stucco tinged a glassy blue.

Made giddy by the edifice I bid upon the premises.

Going with the flow Of a market on a bender I offered up all my legal tender Only for the bid to bounce back: Return to sender.

—John Randall Behind that noble edifice I kept the secret of my discontent.

In those days the street was always busy with a constant flow of bodies, the hawking of the street vendors, the pigeons murmuring like ancient ghosts. I liked to join in occasionally, pressing my shoulders to those of strangers, imagining these empty touches as something tender.

Above, the sky was blue, almost violet. I recited street names like an incantation against evil, and if my eyes were ever glassy, no one said a word.

—Gwyneth Henke Brightness that is tender and warm The windows of the edifice are blue and glassy even the brightest light is cut to shadow trying to enter.

But if you stand outside where the concrete and rebar flow to the earth, flowers bask in brightness that is tender and warm.

Like this poem that celebrates the end of April; also, all the words freed from the dark during poetry month.

—M.E. Hope

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Co-Sponsored Event Screening Contagion Film Series February 11: Steven Soderbergh, Contagion (2011) March 11: Ingmar Bergman, The Seventh Seal (1957) April 8: Edgar Wright, Shaun of the Dead (2004) April 29: Ai Weiwei, Coronation (2020)

A rotating cast of interdisciplinary scholars examined several pandemicrelated films in the Screening Contagion Film Series. Photo courtesy Warner Bros.

How to handle a pandemic: A cinematic guide Freshly returned from a trip to the East, a young mother dies with terrifying speed from an unknown illness. As similar reported cases jump exponentially, a field researcher from the CDC starts her investigation of Patient Zero.

“What we need to determine is this,” epidemiologist Dr. Erin Mears (Kate Winslet) patiently explains at the whiteboard. “For every person who gets sick, how many other people are they likely to infect?” She scrawls the following figures on the board: FLU-1, SMALLPOX-3, POLIO-4/6. “We call that number the R-naught.” A state public health official offers a huffy rebuke: “So far, that appears to be everyone with hands, a mouth and a nose.”

Steven Soderberg’s 2011 eerily prescient thriller Contagion, about an unfolding global pandemic, has garnered intense attention in the last year, like many others in the genre of “outbreak narratives.” This inclination to look to film to make sense of the current pandemic moment inspired Washington University faculty members Corinna Treitel, professor of history and director of the medical humanities minor, and Patricia Olynyk, the Florence and Frank Bush Professor of Art, to create a space to watch and discuss these films together.

Their collaboration, the Screening Contagion Film Series, assembled a rotating panel of scholars with specializations in art, English literature, film and media, history and medical ethics to offer insights on each of the series’ four films. All panel discussions were free and open to the public.

How can something as clinical as an infection rate frame a compelling story? In the first discussion, panelist Peter Lunenfeld, media theorist and vice chair and professor of design media arts at UCLA put it this way: “Happy epidemic films have low R-naughts.

Zombie films have high R-naughts.”

Below, organizers Treitel and Olynyk fill in the film series’ background, how they selected the films and what they hoped people took away from the discussions.

What sparked the idea for the film series?

The spark came out of the alchemy of medical humanities! As an artist and a historian, each with a strong drive to bridge disciplines, we frequently brainstorm on ways in which to engage the community over contemporaneous issues that relate to the interdisciplinary field of medical humanities. During the COVID-19 lockdown and a socially distanced walk in Forest Park last summer, we pondered how we could create a meaningful event around the pandemic. This film series was the result.

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How did you choose the films in the series?

The release of Ai Weiwei’s Coronation was the starting point for the series. We were intrigued by how this documentary represented the crisis in Wuhan, which raised for us the question of how various film genres address the topic of modern day plagues. That led us to Steven Soderbergh’s Contagion and then Bergman’s Seventh Seal. At that point, we realized we had a very heavy set of films and wanted to invoke humor to address this complex and difficult topic. After considering our options, we selected Shaun of the Dead for its comedic perspective.

We also engaged the medical humanities faculty in the curation of this series in order to produce a well-balanced program as well as film and media arts faculty at UCLA as part of their Medicine + Media Arts Initiative.

Collaborating across institutions broadened our audience and critical analysis of these films. It also allowed us to showcase the medical humanities at Washington University to the UCLA community.

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What do you hope that folks watching the panel discussions get out of the experience?

We hope that panel attendees acquire a deep and broad set of perspectives on how film as a cultural practice processes contagion and its related traumas. We also hope this platform attracts an audience with broad differences in background and orientation, who can coalesce around the theme of contagion and engage in serendipitous conversations about the topic.

Since watching/rewatching the films, are there any moments that strike you as particularly resonant with our current moment, or that you see in an entirely different way because of where we are in this pandemic?

Several issues and themes resonated for us as we rewatched Contagion: R-naughts, global connectivity, how race and class are emphasized during times of crisis, humankind’s encroachment on wild habitats, and the interweaving of biological and moral categories in our quest to understand how this crisis began.

Additional Co-sponsored Events, 2020–21 Legacies of Violence and Genocide: Can Memorials and Museums Help Us Build a Better Future? November 5, 2020. Organized by the Holocaust Memorial Lecture Series.

2020 St. Louis International Film Festival, Divided City Film Series, November 5–22, 2020. Organized by Cinema St. Louis.

Leaving Academia: A Practical Guide, November 11, 2020. Organized by the Department of Classics.

Multidirectional Memories, Implicated Subjects, and the Possibilities of Art, November 14, 2020. Organized by the Kemper Art Museum.

30th Annual American Indian Pow Wow, March 27–28, 2021. Organized by the Kathryn M. Buder Center for American Indian Studies in the Brown School.

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Center for the Humanities: A Community of Scholars Faculty Fellows Graduate Student Fellows Kling Undergraduate Honors Fellows

Patrick Burke

Colin Burnett

Talia Dan-Cohen

Allan Hazlett

Zoe Stamatopoulou

faculty fellow

faculty fellow

faculty fellow

faculty fellow

faculty fellow

Nan Hu

Bradley Jones

Olivia Lot

Emma Merrigan

Katja Perat

graduate student fellow

graduate student fellow

graduate student fellow

graduate student fellow

graduate student fellow

Ana Quiring

Lauren Bush

Malcolm Douglass

Kiara Mallory

Christian Monzon

graduate student fellow

kling fellow

kling fellow

kling fellow

kling fellow

Nicci Mowszowski

Efua Osei

Elizabeth Schwartz

Kaysie Wachs

Hannah Ward

kling fellow

kling fellow

kling fellow

kling fellow

kling fellow

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How were Norwegian maritime interests different from other European countries? What was Norway’s relationship to colonialism?

Although Norway, both during and after its union (1814–1905) with Sweden, was not itself a colonial power, its ships played a key role in sustaining colonial networks of trade and migration, and its entrepreneurs benefited from extractive and exploitative colonial practices. In short, Norwegians weren’t precisely colonialists, but their labor and capital was essential to the colonial powers.

Conventional accounts of Norway’s history have tended to ignore or downplay Norway’s connections to colonialism, an oversight that my project will help to correct.

What sources are you looking at?

Patrick Burke is associate professor of music in the Department of Music. Gambang (xylophone) ensemble in Java, sometime between 1916 and 1934.

This is a page from an album created by Johanne Beck (1890– 1934), a Norwegian who served as a Salvation Army officer in Java.

Photo courtesy National Library of Norway.

Norwegian encounters with the world’s music makers During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Norwegian sailors, businesspeople and missionaries moved and settled throughout Asia, Africa and Oceania, thanks in part to their home country’s massive shipping force. In his book-in-progress, “Sounding the Seven Seas: Norwegian Ships and ‘World Music’ at the Margins of Empire, 1850–1950,” ethnomusicologist Patrick Burke investigates their encounters with a wide variety of unfamiliar musical traditions, which helped to create Europeans’ understandings (and misperceptions) of the music of the Global South.

What will this project add to your field or what gap does it fill?

What insights does the lens of ethnomusicology provide?

Recently, many ethnomusicologists have begun to consider music through the lens of world history, thinking beyond genres and neatly bounded “cultures.” By studying a network of colonies and ports rather than a single musical tradition or geographic area, I hope to demonstrate how music and ideas about it were created through a process of constant flux and exchange across borders.

Norwegians wrote firsthand accounts of colonial musical encounters.

Whalers kept diaries while consular employees maintained official records. Sailors wrote letters about their experiences to their families in Norway. “Adventuring” journalists provided sensational profiles of unfamiliar lands and people for a fascinated Norwegian public. While I will draw directly on the accounts of non-Norwegians whenever possible, I intend also to read Norwegian texts both “across and against the grain” to try to access indigenous perspectives unavailable in more conventional records of imperialism. Although the pandemic led me to cancel a planned research trip to Norway this year, I’ve been able to conduct significant research this semester thanks to the digitization of newspapers and photographs by Norwegian archives and museums.

Can you share an example of Norwegian sailors interacting with this “world music”?

Colonial authorities sometimes enlisted groups of African musicians to greet emigrants as their ships arrived in port. For example, in 1882, a shipload of Norwegians arriving in Durban, South Africa, was greeted by an enormous ensemble of 400 musicians and dancers who performed what observers described as a frightening “war dance.” This label probably says more about Norwegians’ stereotypes of Africans than it does about the music and dance that they actually observed. Although music had the potential to demonstrate a common humanity shared by Norwegians and others, at the same time the music of colonized people could serve as an emblem of fear and exoticism, as in the frightening but titillating sounds of this purported war dance. I hope to uncover the real music and musicians behind such stereotypes while at the same time acknowledging the unfortunate power of the stereotypes in shaping Norwegians’ views of non-European societies.

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Licensed thrills: The art of the James Bond franchise That suave spy who prefers his martinis shaken, not stirred sits atop an empire of licensing deals and competing storylines, playing out in a vast James Bond universe.

Film scholar Colin Burnett’s book project, “Serial Bonds: How 007 Storytelling Modernized the Media Franchise,” reveals the storytelling and business strategy that revolutionized media franchising.

Briefly, what is your project about?

My project is about the art of storytelling in the James Bond franchise. Beginning in the 1950s, a new business practice started to radically alter the art of popular storytelling across the globe: media franchising — spreading stories across multiple media at once.

Bond innovated a lean, efficient cross-media approach I call threaded storytelling. Author Ian Fleming licensed partners in film, TV, comics and gaming to reinforce his Bond novels in the marketplace. But writers didn’t create a single Bond continuity stretched out in all these forms. They produced a multitude of distinct continuities — a multitude of medium-specific “James Bonds” for consumers to follow. Fleming and crew were thus able to move serial fiction into the cross-media franchising age.

How has the Bond franchise managed to cross so many different media, cultures and eras?

Bond has circulated so widely, in so many forms and eras, because we are drawn to long-form storytelling, and Bond storytellers have exploited this expertly. We like stories that reliably hold our attention, not just from beat to beat or chapter to chapter within a single installment, but from installment to installment, and even from medium to medium.

To be sure, its formula of sex, violence, globetrotting, and spydriven fantasy and intrigue is part of what explains the franchise’s longevity. But plenty of fictional properties have used the very same attractions with much less success. Ultimately, it is how this formula is used — in long-form stories, varied across media — that explains Bond’s widespread success.

What does this project add to the history of material and visual culture, and to the study of serialized storytelling?

I would boil this project down to an insight into modern aesthetic sensibility. In our passion for serial stories, whether it’s Sherlock Holmes novels or the Fast and Furious movies, we relish the opportunity to discover shapes in time. This pleasure is not unlike listening to a piece of music or reading poetry, where patterns emerge as the minutes tick by, organizing our thoughts and sensations. Long-form popular stories like Bond rely on a different time scale, placing greater pressure on our attention and memory, and use narrative cues, not musical ones. But the effect — playing to our desire to perceive patterns across sequences of moments and forms — is fundamentally the same.

Do you have a favorite work in the Bond franchise?

Part of what makes Bond so fascinating is the variability of the storyworld. I would highly recommend Samantha Weinberg’s trilogy of novels, The Moneypenny Diaries (2005–08), an alternate version of the Fleming continuity, one that feminizes it, retelling events from the perspective of MI6’s iconic secretary. For anyone who thinks that Bond and Moneypenny never … Well, I shouldn’t spoil things!

Colin Burnett is associate professor of film and media studies in the Film and Media Studies program. Sean Connery as James Bond in Dr. No (1962), the film that started the successful cinematic franchise.

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How did complexity become such a central problem?

I think one commonsense answer is that the world has gotten really complex, but there are other ways of answering it that focus more on how different groups of experts came to see different phenomena as complex through various (often conflicting) logics. If we follow this latter approach, then we can trace lots of different paths to complexity’s importance today.

What are the drawbacks of complexity?

Talia Dan-Cohen is assistant professor of anthropology in the Department of Anthropology. Photo: “Wired” by Tom DucatWhite / Flickr / CC-BYNC-ND 2.0.

An anthropologist takes on academia’s attraction to complexity With her current project, “Questioning Complexity,” sociocultural anthropologist Talia Dan-Cohen says that academia’s embrace of complexity can tell us as much about the social and political conditions in which knowledge is produced as it does about the kinds of phenomena experts seek to know.

What is your book about?

The last few decades have seen many studies of the damages wrought by approaches to knowledge that reduce and simplify. In response, many scholars from different corners of the humanities and humanistic social sciences have adopted complexity both as a description of what the world is like and as an aim for knowledge, or what is often termed an “epistemic virtue.”

My book project examines complexity’s meanings and uses in light of this tendency to frame complexity as a good thing. I show that what gets to count as complex changes over time, that complexity has a long and winding history in different disciplinary traditions, and that the term has been associated with different epistemological, political and moral projects.

I think that the notion that complexity is a self-evident feature of the phenomena many experts study hides some interesting tensions that are embedded in the term. For example, taking my own discipline as a starting point, the distinction between the “simple” and the “complex” has a long history in cultural anthropology owing to the once prominent place in the discipline of evolutionary arguments that posit that societies evolve from the “simple” to the “complex.” This kind of evolutionary logic was vociferously criticized in the subfield some decades ago. But some of the meanings and uses of complexity in cultural anthropology today can still be understood in relation to these old distinctions that have been largely discarded, but that nevertheless cast a long shadow.

Another drawback I examine in this project is that many forms of scholarship that claim to be complex or honor complexity are so focused on complexity that they can sometimes be blind to their own reductive moves. If there’s a normative aim to this project, then, it’s to make a case for more situated evaluations of the usefulness of complexity in different contexts, and for different purposes.

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Authenticity is generally understood as a prized characteristic, but you’re skeptical of that. Why? There are two main arguments here. The first is that inauthenticity is sometimes a good thing. One of the examples I talk about in the book is discretion. Being discreet always, or at least usually, involves being inauthentic — it involves saying something you don’t believe or not saying something you do believe (even though it’s relevant).

Allan Hazlett is associate professor of philosophy in the Department of Philosophy. Photo: Authenticity (2009), Necklace District, Detroit, Michigan, photo

by Axel Drainville / Flickr / CC BY-NC 2.0.

Get real: On the risks of authenticity “Be your ‘authentic’ self”: This counsel is earnestly repeated to those seeking jobs, relationships, leadership roles, political office. Is it really that simple? Philosopher Allan Hazlett pushes back on this conventional wisdom in his current book project, “The Wages of Authenticity.” Are there times when being inauthentic is a kindness?

Are there times when being authentic is cruel?

Briefly, what is your book about?

The book is about the idea that you have to be authentic to be a good person. I define an “authentic” person as someone who is sincere and candid, but what this boils down to is that an authentic person is an honest person, a person who tells the truth and nothing but the truth. So, the book is about the idea that all good people are authentic. I give two arguments that this is a bad idea. The first one is that there are a bunch of ways in which it is good to be inauthentic and the second is that democratic politics goes badly when we treat authenticity as a requirement for political support.

What is the meaning of authenticity in your project?

I use authenticity to refer to sincerity, which is expressing only thoughts you have, and candor, which is expressing the thoughts you have (when it’s relevant). The inauthentic person, on this conception, is a poseur, someone who is fake or phony. The relationship between authenticity, in this sense, and other kinds of authenticity, or other things we use authentic to refer to, is interesting and not obvious.

The second argument is that thinking that authenticity is required for being a good person is bad for democratic politics. What happens when we think this is that we become so concerned with the possibility that politicians are saying something they don’t really think or not saying something they do really think that we ignore what they’re saying.

How might people see the drawbacks of authenticity in their own lives or the world around them?

I keep coming back to how we often hear people say that they don’t agree with what Donald Trump says, but they admire him for saying it. What they are admiring is Trump’s authenticity — they admire Trump for saying what he believes, even if it is rude, unpopular, extreme, norm-violating, “politically incorrect,” etc. Indeed, the fact that he says rude things is seen as evidence of his authenticity, by contrast with other politicians, who are seen as evasive and secretive. And I should say: The drawback here isn’t that the politics of authenticity is good for Trump, and therefore the politics of authenticity must be bad. It’s that the politics of authenticity leads us to ignore whether what politicians say is true or false, or right or wrong, and instead ask only whether they really believe it.

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Rule long and prosper: Advice for the ages, from the Sages From Imperial Rome to the modern day, the writings of the philosopher Plutarch have offered lessons on leadership. A new project by Zoe Stamatopoulou, associate professor of classics, singles out one of his lesser known works for closer analysis. Read on for more of Stamatopoulou’s “Plutarch’s Symposium of the Seven Sages: A Commentary and a Translation.”

Briefly, what is your project about?

I am currently working on a translation of and a commentary on Plutarch’s Symposium of the Seven Sages. This work is rich in content as the banqueters discuss various topics, yet the conversation keeps coming back to the theme of governance, i.e., the proper management of the state, the household and the self. These two projects complement each other and aim at making this neglected work more accessible and widely known among specialists as well as nonspecialists. The commentary includes an exegesis of the text with notes on the language and the content; in addition, it offers an introduction to the author’s life and style, and an overview of the various traditions informing this particular dialogue. The translation is intended to appeal to a broader readership, offering essential notes and a basic introduction.

Who was Plutarch? How does he figure into the Greek tradition of dialogues?

Plutarch was an intellectual powerhouse of the late 1st and early 2nd century CE. Today he is best known for his biographies, but he also produced a rich corpus of diverse nonbiographical works, including philosophical essays, works that explore Greek and Roman cultural practices, and treatises offering political advice. Some of these nonbiographical works are dialogues, a literary form that allows Plutarch to present different opinions in a vivid and engaging manner. Some of Plutarch’s dialogues, including the Symposium of the Seven Sages, dramatize the discussion of philosophical and other questions in a convivial setting. In the prologue to the first book of his Table Talk, a collection of convivial scenes, Plutarch situates this work explicitly within a long tradition that he traces back to Plato, Xenophon and Aristotle.

You’ve noted that Plutarch’s inclusion of women in the work is unusual. How so, and why is that important?

The Symposium of the Seven Sages features two female figures: Melissa, the host’s wife, and Eumetis (aka Cleobulina), the young daughter of one of Sages. These two female characters eat alongside

the male banqueters but retire from the convivial space soon after the meal is over. Their presence is remarkable for several reasons. To begin with, Plutarch is projecting onto the past a practice that was acceptable in his own era but, as far as we know, not in the 6th century BCE, when this fictional dialogue is set.

The archaic and classical symposion was reserved for male members of the elite and excluded “respectable” women; the only females allowed were enslaved stewards, performers and prostitutes. Plutarch lets freeborn elite women into his fictional banquet, but still circumscribes the extent of their attendance. Furthermore, both female characters embody what Plutarch considered exemplary behavior for women, thus contributing to the education of his readership, both male and female. Both women are portrayed as beneficial to the male head of their household (Melissa’s husband; Eumetis’ father), and both remain silent within the male-dominated space.

The fact that the Symposium pays attention to Melissa and Eumetis at all is exceptional when one compares this dialogue with Plutarch’s other sympotic work, the Table Talk, a collection of convivial vignettes in nine books which features a rich cast of banqueters, none of them female.

Zoe Stamatopoulou is associate professor of classics in the Department of Classics. Image: “The Symposium (The Seven Sages of Greece)”

by Pietro Testa, date unknown, courtesy the National Galleries of Scotland / CC BY-NC 2.0.

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SNAPSHOT A year in the life of the Kling Fellowship

Kling Undergraduate Honors 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.

To capture the everyday tumult of being a researcher, each Kling Fellow created an image that captured their project in motion.

By documenting the messiness of process rather than pristine product, these images archive each fellow’s past year and their ever-evolving project.

Materializing the Hyperreal

By Lauren Bush, Class of 2022 This collage includes a collection of brainstorming sessions, texts and scholars relevant to my Kling research this semester.

Majors: Philosophy-NeurosciencePsychology; Germanic Languages and Literature Project: “Boredom, Indifference and the Social Ontology of ‘Real Virtuality’”

Imagining a Conspiratorial Mind

By Malcolm Douglass, Class of 2022 Major: History Minor: Religion and Politics Project: “The Kennedy Assassination and the Growth of American Conspiracy Culture”

Emmett and Latasha’s Memory

By Kiara Mallory, Class of 2022 Following the cultural reductions constructed in honor of Latasha Harlins and Emmett Till, I trace the impact of Black child deaths on American history and memory through memorials.

Major: English Literature Minor: African and African-American Studies Project: “A Love Song for Latasha and Emmett”

Gentrified Tacos

By Christian Monzon, Class of 2022 Majors: Political Science; Latin American Studies Project: “Gentrification and Cherokee Street: Border Construction in St. Louis”

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Around the World

By Nicci Mowszoski, Class of 2021 How did a project on Holocaust memorials that began in St. Louis lead me to Ukraine, Germany, Russia and beyond? Through memorials, books, museums and research, my Kling project has led me around the world, both physically and virtually.

Majors: International and Area Studies (International Affairs); Germanic Languages and Literatures Mentor: Erin McGlothlin, Professor of German Project: “Commemorating Collaborators at Victims’ Graves: The Martyrization of Ukrainian Nationalists at Holocaust Memorial Sites”

Book as Space

By Elizabeth Schwartz, Class of 2021 A book is a spatial palimpsest of present, past and future places — real and imaginary.

Major: English Literature Mentor: Melanie Micir, Associate Professor of English Project: “The Book and the Bathhouse: Coffee House Press, HIV/AIDS and Gentrification”

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The Real Kings of Hip Hop

By Efua Osei, Class of 2021 From magazine clippings to album covers to small Post-it notes I kept around my desk, this collage displays the multimedia focus and iterative process of my research project.

Major: African and American-American Studies Minors: Political Science; Design Mentor: Lerone Martin, Associate Professor, Danforth Center on Religion and Politics; Director, American Culture Studies Project: “‘Big D Stands for Big Demeanor’: How Black Women Queer Masculinity in Hip Hop”

Colorful Squares

By Kaysie Wachs, Class of 2021 Colorful squares full of notes, quotes and anecdotes gathered over a year of pandemonium.

Majors: Religious Studies; Classics Mentor: Lance Jenott, Lecturer in Classics Project: “Prescriptive Memories of Female Monks in the Greek Lives of Pachomius”

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The Art of Kling

By Hannah Ward, Class of 2021 Since I study art history, I often view the world through visual images. This collage is a visual amalgamation of documents and photos I have become quite familiar with throughout the Kling process.

Majors: Art History and Archaeology; History Mentors: Anika Walke, Associate Professor of History Project: “Art in War: A Study of Matisse’s Bathers with a Turtle During World War II”

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COMMUNITY OF SCHOLARS

Graduate Student Fellows 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.

FALL 2020 Bradley Jones Department of Anthropology

Ana Quiring Department of English

“Cultivating Life: Skill, Environment and the Nature of Knowledge” Interested in the vital transition toward more sustainable forms of food production, Jones’ dissertation explores the knowledge landscapes of U.S. alternative agriculture. Drawing on ethnographic research in New York and Central Appalachia with small-scale sustainable farmers and the knowledge communities they foster, the project examines the cultivation of agricultural skill across agrarian landscapes. Offering insights into the dynamics of agricultural knowledge, social relations of expertise, and transformations of human/environmental relations, the dissertation explores emerging efforts to cultivate more livable human and more-than-human worlds.

“At the Kitchen Table: Feminist Modernism, Recovery and the Trouble with Conventional Women” Quiring’s dissertation traces the feminist preoccupation with conventionality in Anglophone literatures across the long 20th century. The project makes the argument that the rise and canonization of modernism encouraged feminists to distinguish themselves from more traditional, oldfashioned women in order to embody modernity, freedom and stylishness. This practice has persisted into feminist and queer academic discourses in the present.

Quiring’s project demonstrates the harmfulness of such a binary distinction, especially for the way it sidelines already marginalized women. Through readings of many transnational texts in English, “At the Kitchen Table” seeks to rehistoricize the presence, value and politics of conventional women.

Emma Merrigan Department of Romance Languages and Literatures “Cripping Utopia: Revolutionary Corporealities in Cuba and the Diaspora” Merrigan’s project charts how Cuban authors, artists and filmmakers render disability as conducive to and/or inharmonious with the country’s anti-imperialist and collectively driven Revolutionary process, catalyzed in 1959. Cross-pollinating critical disability studies with queer, feminist and critical race theory, Merrigan queries the (in)accessibility of the Cuban Revolution’s pathways to a decolonized Utopia. Radical disability thought and action, she contends, can reorient understandings of social reform to encompass a broader range of bodily and intellectual practices as integral to world (re)making projects intent upon socioeconomic, racial and gender liberation.

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SPRING 2021 Nan Hu Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures “In Other Voices: Dubbing Foreign Films in Maoist China (1949–1976)” This study theorizes the medium of dubbing as mediating the image and meaning of the foreign to the Chinese in the Maoist period (1949–76). After 1949, dubbed foreign films rose to be an outstanding cultural phenomenon in China and became a most important tool for socialist pedagogy. Rather than understanding these films as transparent vehicles of meanings and examining their circulation and reception, this dissertation looks into the specific translating and dubbing processes, analyzing not only the content of the dialogue, but also the techniques, aesthetics and politics of voicing.

Highlighting dubbing as simultaneously a way of audiovisual translation and a genre of performance, Hu argues that this medium not only furnished the state with new techniques to educate its people and promote its Cold War policy, but also became the vehicle for Chinese film workers and the audience to imagine the foreign, the world order and themselves alternatively.

Olivia Lott Department of Romance Languages and Literatures “Radical Re/Turns: Translation and Revolution in Latin American Neo-Avant-Garde Poetics, 1959–1973” Lott’s dissertation examines translational poetic practices of leftist neo-avant-gardes during the long 1960s in Latin America. In theorizing neo-avant-garde return as re/turn — that is, repetition with a generative difference — this project uncovers a series of poetic-political dialogues with global and local predecessors and contemporaries. The neo-avant-gardes do not merely repeat or re-stage the avant-gardes, rather they re-articulate, re-route and re-verse their energies to make them of use for the 1960s antiimperialist struggle. Weaving together a diverse textual archive including poems, literary magazines, manifestos and personal correspondence, Radical Re/Turns chronicles a previously untold narrative of the modes through which neo-avant-garde poets sought to make the revolution.

Katja Perat Program in Comparative Literature “Victimhood and Its Perversion: Masochistic Narratives and Cultural Identity in Cold War Central Europe” Perat’s dissertation focuses on the discursive correlations between sexual and political power in Cold War Central Europe and its postmodernist literary projects. Engaging four of the most widely read Central European postmodern novels — Milan Kundera’s Unbearable Lightness of Being, Elfriede Jelinek’s The Piano Teacher, Peter Handke’s Repetition and Stanisłav Lem’s Solaris — it seeks to address how their deployment of masochistic imagery serves to articulate the conditions of inhabiting the Iron Curtain while simultaneously remapping Central European fiction of the final decades of the 20th century in order to dismantle the naturalized Cold War dichotomy between Eastern and Western literatures.

In spring 2021, two of our Graduate Student Fellows reflected on their work for the humanities center’s Human Ties: Stories in the Humanities blog.

Find their short pieces on our website, humanities.wustl.edu: Katja Perat, “Inhabiting the Iron Curtain: What Sexuality Can Teach Us About Cultural Belonging”; and “Graduate Fellow Olivia Lott Lauded With PEN Translation Honor.”

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Internal Grants SUMMER FACULTY RESEARCH GRANTS Joe Barcroft | Romance Languages and Literatures Effects of Fundamental Frequency Variability on Word Identification Rafia Zafar | English/African and African-American Studies Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture Uluğ Kuzuoğlu | History Cybernetic Socialism: Computers in the Chinese Reform Era ROLAND GRIMM TRAVEL AWARDS Ji-Eun Lee | East Asian Languages and Cultures New World, Old Ways: Kasa Travelogues by Korean Women Writers Lori Watt | History and International and Area Studies From Colonialism to JICA: A History of the Japan International Cooperation Agency SUMMER SEED GRANTS Paul Steinbeck | Music Black Earth: Nicole Mitchell and the Future of Creative Music Diana Montaño | History (Dis) Placing Necaxa: Power Networks and Erased Histories in Mexico (1890s–1914)

FACULTY RESEARCH SUPPORT

Stephanie Kirk | Romance Languages and Literatures Global Martyrs: Jesuit Missionaries in Early Modern England, Ireland and the Hispanic World Melanie Micir | English Disappearing Women: Old Age and Modern Fiction COLLABORATIVE RESEARCH SEED GRANTS Geoff Childs | Anthropology Tibetan Songs of Spiritual Experience (gur): Exploring the Musical Dimensions of a Textual Tradition Akiko Tsuchiya | Romance Languages and Literatures Cultural Legacies of Slavery in Modern Spain (19th–21st centuries) Anika Walke | History Capturing Place-Based Experiences in Holocaust Survivor Testimony FACULTY SEMINARS No awards made

MAXWELL C. WEINER HUMANITIES RESEARCH GRANTS Rebecca Messbarger | Romance Languages and Literatures Ghostly Light: How Criminal Corpses Animated the Italian Enlightenment Michael Sherberg | Romance Languages and Literatures Italian Literature, Middle Ages and Renaissance Ila Sheren | Art History and Archaeology Contemporary Art on the US–Mexico Border; Eco-art Harriet Stone | Romance Languages and Literatures Observing, Interpreting and Inventing the World William Acree | Romance Languages and Literatures Mapping Street Cultures and Writing the Humanities of the Future Javier García-Liendo | Romance Languages and Literatures Schoolteachers and the Making of Popular Modernity in Peru

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Members of the 19th Century in the Americas Reading Group plan to review and discuss works such as America Unbound: Encyclopedic Literature and Hemispheric Studies by Antonio Barrenechea; Hemispheric American Studies by Caroline Levander and Robert Levine; The Fabric of Empire: Material and Literary Cultures of the Global Atlantic 1650–1850 by Danielle C. Skeehan; NineteenthCentury Spanish America: A Cultural History by Christopher Conway; The Inverted Conquest: The Myth of Modernity and the Transatlantic Onset of Modernism by Alejandro López-Mejías; and Transamerican Literary Relations and the Nineteenth-Century Public Sphere by Anna Brickhouse.

READING GROUPS

RENEWALS

WRITING GROUPS

NEW

Poetry and Poetics Reading Group Convener: Alex Mouw, English

NEW

19th Century in the Americas Reading Group Convener: Sara Hernández Angulo, Romance Languages and Literatures Marxism and Literature Reading Group Convener: Marc Blanc, English Ethnicity and Literature Reading Group Convener: Sara Flores, English/American Culture Studies

Approaches to Literary Pedagogy Reading Group Convener: Anwesha Kundu, English Sports and Society Reading Group Convener: Noah Cohan, American Culture Studies Mind and Perception Group Convener: James Gulledge, Philosophy

Comparative Readings of LGBTQ+ Literature in German Convener: Christian Schuetz, German

Medical Humanities Convener: Amy Cislo, Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies

African Diaspora in the Americas Reading Group Convener: Kache Claytor, Romance Languages and Literatures

The Real of Psychoanalysis and Marxism Convener: Santiago Rozo Sánchez, Romance Languages and Literatures

Latin America Social Theory Reading Group Convener: Matthew Abel, Anthropology

Interdisciplinary Experimental Writing Group Convener: Francisco Tijerina, Romance Languages and Literatures RENEWALS American Religions Writing Group Convener: Abram Van Engen, English Religion and Literature Writing Group Convener: Ann Marie Jakubowski, English Washington University Translators Collective (formerly known as Literary Translation Workshop) Convener: Derick Mattern, Comparative Literature Interdisciplinary Dissertation and Publication Writing Group Convener: Trent McDonald, English

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Proposal Writing Information Session and Workshop Time devoted exclusively to research and writing is integral to academic productivity. It allows scholars to travel to important sites, pore over far-flung archives, conduct interviews and otherwise become immersed in the pursuit of a research question. Scholars need time to reflect, analyze and make connections and, finally, share their discoveries with the world. While faculty engage in this kind of activity as a matter of course, the fellowship — a period of time free of administrative, service and teaching responsibilities — provides the opportunity to make significant strides. As such, they are greatly valued and highly sought after. A number of national organizations and societies provide fellowship funding, and, expectedly, the competition is fierce.

Since 2014, the Center for the Humanities has organized an information session and workshop for faculty and post-docs in the humanities and humanistic social sciences interested in pursuing external funding. The August 2020 program included an information session held via Zoom on proposal writing from a reviewer’s perspective, led by humanities center director Jean Allman, and a multidisciplinary panel of recent award winners: Tili Boon Cuillé (Romance Languages and Literatures), Joanna Dee Das (Performing Arts) and Thomas Keeline (Classics).

FACULTY RESEARCH SUPPORT

Faculty who were preparing to submit a proposal in fall 2020 or spring 2021 were invited to workshop their proposals with small peer groups, led by Ignacio Infante (Comparative Literature, Romance Languages and Literatures), Ila Sheren (Art History and Archaeology) and Abram Van Engen (English, Religion and Politics).

Participants gave critical readings of one another’s proposals and offered observations at their first meeting (via Zoom). At the second meeting, they shared their revised proposals.

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Scholarly Writing Retreat The annual Scholarly Writing Retreat offers Washington University humanities and humanistic social sciences faculty, postdocs and graduate students the opportunity to jump-start their summer writing in a motivated, supportive and collaborative atmosphere. Even with the challenges of remote work because of the COVID-19 pandemic, more than 30 participants signed up for this year’s retreat, held June 1–11.

The 2021 retreat continued, like the previous year’s offering, in an online format. Led

by Joanna Dee Das, assistant professor of dance; Caroline Kita, associate professor of German; and Ila Sheren, associate professor of art history and archaeology, three small groups were formed, each determining their meeting frequency, times and formats.

Some groups met intensively, signing on to Zoom twice daily for focused bursts of

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writing using the Pomodoro method. Others checked in by sharing their writing goals and signing on several times per week for accountability. All strategies were designed to facilitate productive summer writing.

Additionally, a trove of material on writing practice was shared with all participants.

As members of this structured and supportive virtual writing community, participants made progress on a range of projects: dissertations, book chapters, proposals, articles, and fiction and memoir.

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

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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.

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 2021, students representing a variety of majors and interests came together for a special Children’s Studies event featuring best-selling author Deborah Underwood. Her lecture, “The Power of Picture Books,” offered attendees a behind-the-scenes look at the process of creating a successful picture book for young readers. She emphasized what she called the “dance between text and illustration” that occurs on the page, providing visual examples from her own works of how illustrators’ independent decisions can enhance, color or even shift the impact of certain words and phrases.

Students were also invited to see the way that picture books are foundational in shaping the emotional and imaginative lives of children. Finding Kindness, a book that shows how caring can ripple through a community; Every Little Letter, in which childlike letters prove how much they can accomplish when there aren’t walls between them; and Reading Beauty, in which a fairy-tale heroine and her books save the day, are all crafted to provoke reflection and growth as well as delight in their readers.

The student takeaways from the event were as varied as the students themselves: One appreciated the author’s forthright discussion of her circuitous post-college career trajectory (“her nonlinear pathway was fascinating and reassuring at the same time”), another felt the insight into the publishing world was especially valuable, while still another was left pondering “how an author can bring a reader to a particular moment or feeling with so few words.”

Best-selling children’s book author Deborah Underwood (above) spoke on the power of picture books, one of the highlights of the year for the Children’s Studies minor.

Despite the significant challenges of the pandemic year, students maintained the quality of their writing and research. In recognition of their exceptional work, it was decided to offer a first-of-its-kind “Children’s Studies Essay Award,” to be judged by a committee of faculty and graduate students.

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COURSE SPOTLIGHT: “Health and Disease in World History” What was life like at Washington University as the 1918 influenza pandemic swept the globe? Surprisingly, no one really knows.

The university’s archives have very little information on the period, and according to Corinna Treitel, professor of history and director of the medical humanities minor, that gap limits what historians can learn.

Student archivists collected material related to Washington University’s experience of the COVID-19 pandemic during the 2020–21 academic year.

Photo by James Byard/ Washington University.

Medical Humanities Corinna Treitel, Director and Professor of History The Medical Humanities minor continued to grow and flourish this year, despite the disruption of COVID-19. Nine seniors graduated with a minor in May; two more graduated with special majors in Medical Humanities. The fall 2021 semester begins with 25 students.

Two student advisers — Lillian Asonganyi, Class of 2021, and Noor Ghanam, Class of 2022 — worked hard to keep community alive during the pandemic. In the spring semester, Noor organized a COVID-19 memorial for students and faculty to talk about losses both big and small during the pandemic.

The MedHum minor also hosted the Screening Contagion Film Series in the spring. Via Zoom, more than 150 attendees joined historians, literary scholars, media theorists and even a surgeon to discuss four films with pandemic themes: Steven Soderbergh, Contagion; Ingmar Bergman, The Seventh Seal; Edgar Wright, Shaun of the Dead; and Ai Weiwei, Coronation (see page 28).

Corinna Treitel (History) stepped down as director of the minor this summer; Rebecca Messbarger (Romance Languages and Literatures) returns as director when the 2021–22 academic year commences.

“In an entry-level class, students come in thinking that history just lives in a file cabinet up in the sky and that your professor has access to the folder,” said Treitel. “But history is built from primary sources. It’s a data-driven discipline, just like the natural sciences. History starts through the collection of evidence.”

This spring, Treitel taught a 100-level course on health and disease in world history.

She invited university archivist Sonya Rooney to talk with the class about the dearth of information related to the 1918 pandemic on campus and what materials could have been preserved from that time.

The conversation quickly shifted from theoretical to practical.

For their final project, the students created their own COVID-19 archive. They recorded video and audio conversations with fellow students, collected official messaging from the university and local government, interviewed scientists researching COVID-19 and creating health guidelines, and documented how peers addressed mental health and social justice. They then compiled these materials into a series of StoryMaps, web-based visual archives often used by museums and libraries to collect archival material into a narrative for the public.

Excerpted from “Building a COVID-19 archive” by John Moore/Arts & Sciences Communications

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GIVING OPPORTUNITIES

GIVING OPPORTUNITIES

HOW YOU CAN HELP

MAKE A GIFT ONLINE

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.

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.

MAKE A GIFT BY MAIL

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.

$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.

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, University Advancement Programs, Attn: Deborah Stine, One Brookings Drive, MSC 1202-414-3100, St. Louis, MO 63130.

$300,000 will permanently endow a Visiting Scholar program, allowing for an extended visit each year by a new high-profile 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. $1,000 will provide flexible funding and qualify you for membership in the William Greenleaf Eliot Society.

Even during the COVID-19 campus closure, the Center for the Humanities never lost a step. Public events were moved online. Fellows workshopped their new writing in group Zooms. New competitive grants and fellowships were awarded. And Life/ Lines, our still-necessary poetry writing community, drew us all back for another round in April. Still, we look forward to holding in-person meetings, workshops and events once again! Here’s a look back at some of our favorite humanities center moments over the past few years.

1 / International Humanities Prize winner Sir David Adjaye, OBE meets with undergraduates before his public lecture, October 2018. Photo: WUSTL Photos.

2 / The James E. McLeod Memorial Lecture on Higher Education provides a forum for the public as well Washington University faculty, staff and students to hear directly from thought leaders in higher education such as British-Australian feminist scholar Sara Ahmed, October 2017.

Gifts of any amount provide vital, ongoing support.

3, 4 / A highlight of the annual Faculty Book Celebration is the display of recent faculty books, January 2020. Photo: WUSTL Photos.

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).

5 / Artist Autumn Knight performs The La–a Consortium as part of the Divided City– sponsored conference on Afrofuturism, “Dwell in Other Futures,” April 2018. Photo: Michael Thomas.

6 / Published during the academic year, the Humanities Broadsheet, a free events calendar, spotlights events on campus and around the St. Louis region that explore the human condition.

Photo: WUSTL Photos.

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CENTER FOR THE HUMANITIES

Administrative staff 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 Ignacio Infante Associate Director, Center for the Humanities Associate Professor, Comparative Literature and Romance Languages and Literatures Wendy Love Anderson Assistant Director of Academic Programs

Executive committee

Kathleen G. Fields Publications and Communications Editor

Colin Burnett | Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies

Barbara Liebmann Administrative Coordinator

Joanna Dee Das | Assistant Professor of Dance

Tila Neguse Coordinator, Divided City Initiative

Danielle Dutton | Associate Professor of Creative Writing

Trisha Sutton Administrative Cluster Supervisor Grants and budgets specialist

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

Contact details Center for the Humanities MSC 1071-153-20 Washington University in St. Louis 1 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

Center for the Humanities MSC 1071-153-20 Washington University in St. Louis 1 Brookings Drive St. Louis, MO 63130-4899

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