A Year in Review 2014-15 - WashU Center for the Humanities

// A YEAR IN REVIEW 14-15

Is That a Fingerprint?

We at the Center for the Humanities hope you notice our new logo throughout this Year in Review. Formed of neatly swirled lines and shaded green, this oval is hard to miss. To the left, thick letters proudly declare our name: CENTER FOR THE HUMANiTIES. (The lower-case “i” is purposeful.)

Yes, it’s a fingerprint, but no crimes have been committed, and no biometric security devices have been installed in Umrath Hall! At the most basic level, a fingerprint is a common human marker. It represents individuality, but it’s a common individuality. No two are alike, yet they are a feature we all share.

Fingerprints also represent the traces humans leave behind. Long after their creators are gone, fingerprints can tell us how people have interacted with the world. They are a simple affirmation that our work as humanities scholars is to explore the impact of humans in the world. Their leftbehind prints, their traces, are the humanities’ primary data. There are no subjects, no ideas, no areas of study that aren’t shaped by human interaction.

You may also have noticed the lettering in our logo. It isn’t a mistake, a slipped toggling of the caps lock. In subordinating the “i” in CENTER FOR THE HUMANiTIES, we want to emphasize the two words that constitute the humanities: human ties. And, perhaps not so subtly, we hope you will check out our online publication “Human Ties: Stories in the Humanities” — a excellent site where our faculty and students are leaving their own marks!

TABLE OF CONTENTS 02

Director’s Letter

04

Human Ties: Stories in the Humanities

12

The Divided City

17

Events & Outreach

28

Faculty Research & Support

40

Student Education & Support

46

Giving Opportunities

// A YEAR IN REVIEW A Year in Review 1

A LETTER FROM THE DIRECTOR When I first stepped into the directorship of the Center for the Humanities at the beginning of 2014, one of the many urgent tasks on my to-do list was to engage debates about the “crisis in the humanities” and refute the weekly headlines that confidently predicted our inevitable demise. Eight months into the job, I tossed the list. Michael Brown, an unarmed 18-year-old African-American man, was shot dead by a white police officer in suburban Ferguson, Mo., just 10 miles north of campus, in broad daylight.

His body lay in the street for more than four and a half hours. In the tumult that followed, our city joined West Africa’s Ebola epidemic and the Middle East’s ISIS at the top of every international news bulletin. And then Ferguson became New York, became Baltimore, became Cincinnati. . . . It was clear that our urgent and immediate mission had to be to contribute, in whatever ways we could, to expanding scholarly and community understanding of what was unfolding in our own backyard.

How might we serve as a resource in ongoing quests for justice? What could we, as scholars of the human condition, bring to the long and difficult struggle to build a just and sustainable peace in our community? And how might that local work translate to other contexts,

nationally and globally? These are the

Jian Leng and the center’s outstanding

kinds of questions that came to propel

staff (Barb Liebmann, Kathy Pierson and

my first year as director.

Wendy Love Anderson) made sure not only that my transition was a smooth

The Center for the Humanities opened

one, but that we would be poised to hit

its doors exactly a quarter-century ago

the ground running. I am grateful to

as the International Writers Center

all of them for their patience, fortitude

under the directorship of William Gass.

and good humor! Many of the signature

In 2003, with an expanded mission

events and programs Professor Early

encompassing humanistic research

and his staff developed remain core

broadly conceived, the writers’ center

to our mission: the Faculty Book

was transformed into the Center for the

Celebration, the James E. McLeod

Humanities, with Gerald Early at the

Memorial Lecture on Higher Education,

helm. Professor Early directed the center

the biennial International Humanities

for a decade, and thanks to his initiative

Medal, and the Faculty and Graduate

and foresight, the center into which I

Fellows Program.

stepped stood on a secure foundation, with strong connections to communities

Much of our energy in our first year has

on and off campus. Interim Director Erin

been devoted to developing a blueprint

McGlothin, former associate director

for the center’s next stage of evolution.

Center for the Humanities 2

Jean Allman Director, Center for the Humanities Professor, Department of History J.H. Hexter Professor in the Humanities,

With the generous support of Barbara

Our second major new initiative is in

Schaal, dean of the Faculty of Arts &

the urban humanities. In winter 2014,

Sciences, and Provost Holden Thorp,

months before events in Ferguson

we have been able to move quickly on

unfolded, the Mellon Foundation invited

a number of fronts. We have expanded

us to submit an institutional proposal

our internal Faculty Fellowship

under its program on Architecture,

Program from four to six per year and

Urbanism and the Humanities. In

have earmarked two fellowships for

partnership with Dean Bruce Lindsey

particularly critical stages in a humanities

and his colleagues in the College of

career: one for assistant professors

Architecture and Graduate School of

completing their first book and one

Architecture and Urban Design, we

for midcareer associate professors on

developed a four-year interdisciplinary

the verge of completing their second.

project called The Divided City. Our

We also have increased our Graduate

goal was to bring humanities scholars

Fellows Program to six per year and are

into productive interdisciplinary

integrating more fully the Merle Kling

dialogue with architects, urban designers,

Undergraduate Honors Fellows into the

landscape architects, legal scholars,

intellectual life of the center.

sociologists and others around one of

Expanding the center’s capacity

the most persistent and vexing issues in

for incubating and nurturing new

urban studies: segregation.

interdisciplinary initiatives in the humanities has become a top

The Mellon Foundation agreed to fund

priority. We are especially excited by

The Divided City project in July 2014.

developments in the medical humanities

One month later, Ferguson exploded

and the urban humanities. Professors

and, with it, my new director’s to-do

Rebecca Messbarger (Romance

list. Since August 2014, we have devoted

Languages and Literature) and Corinna

much of our energy to responding to the

In that effort, the addition of new

Treitel (History) have spearheaded the

urgency of the crisis around us and to

staff has been critical. Rebecca Wanzo

former, with the support of the center

finding concrete and sustainable ways,

(associate professor in Women, Gender

and its academic coordinator, Wendy

especially through The Divided City

and Sexuality Studies) joined the center

Love Anderson. The first goal of the

initiative, of deepening understanding

as associate director in spring 2014. Her

medical humanities initiative was to

of racial injustice across our community,

leadership, energy and interdisciplinary

create an undergraduate interdisciplinary

including on our campus. Many of us in

agility, especially as events unfolded in

minor and house it in the center. The

the humanities have invaluable expertise

the wake of Ferguson, has, among other

minor and its core courses are launching

to bring to the table: on race and

things, assured that the center’s planning

this academic year, and we already have

inequality, on poverty and social justice,

is responsive and timely. Kathleen Fields

ample evidence that they are being

on urban and social history, on media

also joined us in spring 2014 as our new

enthusiastically embraced — and not just

and visual culture. We also have the tools

publications and communications editor.

by pre-med majors! Though the medical

to connect our local story to global

She is transforming the print, web and

humanities initiative found its impetus

(hi)stories — of racialized violence and

social media face of the center. Tila

in undergraduate education, it is already

struggles for social justice and equality.

Neguse, our most recent staff addition

moving quickly into faculty research

No, the humanities is not only about

in summer 2015, is coordinating the

and collaboration across the disciplines,

racial justice. But this year, in this place,

many moving parts of our Mellon

including with the Washington University

it is exactly where we need to begin.

Foundation–funded initiative in the

School of Medicine.

with appointments in African and AfricanAmerican Studies and Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies

urban humanities, The Divided City.

A Year in Review 3

REMEMBERING THE UNCIVIL O

ne of the more famous

capacity of African Americans to be full

photographs of the conflicts

citizens. But the dominant images from

between protesters and

the movement also “imprison — frame

members of the local police forces

and ‘iconize’ — images of legitimate

and the Missouri National Guard

leadership, appropriate forms of

depicts a young African-American man

political action, and the proper place of

wearing an American flag shirt, his long

African Americans within the national

dreadlocks flowing over his face and

imaginary.”

By Rebecca Wanzo Associate Professor of Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies and Associate Director, Center for the Humanities, both in Arts & Sciences

behind him as he is lit by the tear gas canister that he hurls back at the police.

“Visibility” is necessary if any social

Some initial reports stated that he was

movement wants to gain attention,

throwing a Molotov cocktail, and while

but circulation of images risks

this has now been corrected by a variety

those representations narrowly

of sources, the afterlife of this image and

framing a group or political project.

the role it will play in national memory

More dangerously, activists often

and international perceptions of the

craft representations that can be

event is still undetermined. How will the

easily assimilated into narratives of

conflict be narrated? What aspects will

respectability or normativity. In this

be remembered, misrepresented

logic, people can gain attention because

or forgotten?

activists claim they deserve to be heard because they are the [respectable/white]

The Civil Rights Movement has taught

people in power. But what about people

us that some representations will be

who are not?

misrepresented, ubiquitous or absent from history books and national

And once these images are enshrined,

discourse about the movement’s heroes

the complexities of the moment in

and meanings. A spring symposium,

which the representations are produced

“(Un)Civil Mediations: A Symposium

are often lost. Few people model this

on Civil Rights and Visual Culture”

like Martin Luther King Jr. By the time

(April 23–25), explored the role images

of his death, he was frequently accused

play in the movement and its afterlife,

of being ineffectual and out of touch.

exploring battles waged in the past

After his assassination, the Martin

and the present. As keynote speaker

Luther King who was enmeshed in

Leigh Raiford argues in Imprisoned by

anti-war, anti-poverty and pro-labor

a Luminous Glare: Photography and the

projects was lost to almost everyone but

African American Freedom Struggle, Martin

scholars and activists who remember

Luther King Jr. believed deeply in the

his commitments. His “proper” place

power of images to shame people into

was as a black civil rights figure, and yet

acting, and also to demonstrate the

the afterlife of King means he is also Center for the Humanities 4

Robert Cohen/St. Louis Post Dispatch/Polaris

appropriated as a national hero for a number of causes.

The troubling, oft-heard refrain, “we need a Martin Luther King,” suggests that we need someone who can unite and lead people to victory. But what if the King we enshrined in political memory was one who symbolized not only victory, but ongoing struggle and occasional failure and illegibility?

The “civil” aspect of the Civil Rights Movement is possibly too prominent in the populist discourse that appears on news programs and in textbooks.

Despite the widespread violence during the period familiar to us all, representations of the movement are often of respectable people in pristine white shirts who came together after reasoned debate and marched in an ordered way to justice that could not be denied once people saw the lack of civility they faced. And then victory was won, or so the story goes. But the historical record — including the visual archive — reveals more messiness, and much more incivility as a mechanism for change. Since people are reading the present in relationship to our social movement past, they would do well to foreground an archive that was, perhaps, expedient to forget.

A Year in Review 5

WORKPLACE COFFEE AND THE SUBVERSIVE UNCONSCIOUS

By John Doris Professor of Philosophy and PhilosophyNeuroscience-Psychology in Arts & Sciences

Illustration by Monica Duwel

Center for the Humanities 6

I

f you’ve worked in an office, you’re

On the standard interpretation, the

The watching eyes effect is part of

probably familiar with “honor box”

eyes remind people that they may

a large family of studies identifying

coffee service. Everyone helps

be watched and pay a reputational

influences on behavior that are both

themselves to brewed coffee, adds to

cost for free riding. Since human

unconscious and unexpected. In

the lounge’s growing filth and deposits

beings are social organisms sensitive

sum: You may not know what you’re

a nominal sum in the honor box, with

to reputational considerations, they

doing or why you’re doing it, and if

the accumulated proceeds being used

may thereby be moved to donate. This

you did know, you might not like it.

to replenish supplies. Notoriously, this

“watching eyes effect” is supposed

Evidently, the subversive unconscious

system often devolves into a tragedy of

to involve an unconscious, effortless

is everywhere at work (though these

the commons, where too many people

processing, rather than conscious,

workings may be more absurd than

drink without paying. Unless some

concerted calculation; the eyes are

Oedipal). Should you take this prospect

philanthropic soul goes out of pocket

hypothesized to influence behavior

seriously, you ought to begin to worry

to cover free riders, the enterprise

without those influenced

about who — or what — is running

goes in the red, and everyone’s back to

being aware.

your show. You should worry, if I may

extortionate prices at the café.

be excused a bit of philosophy-speak, If people aren’t typically aware of the

about the extent to which you exert

Fortunately, the tragedy of the honor

watching eyes effect when they’re being

rational control over your behavior:

box may be readily ameliorated; if

affected by it, what might they think if

Maybe the “rational animal” isn’t

images of eyes are placed prominently

they found out afterward? A cheapskate

rational at all.

near the coffee service, deposits

with a policy of free riding might feel

increase. Or so Melissa Bateson and

a little resentful; he’s been made to

I don’t expect you to sign up for this

her colleagues found: The take in a

do something he doesn’t judge to be

anxiety after only a few paragraphs. I

psychology department’s honor box

sensible. A more upright sort might

do expect you’ll contract some unease

(computed by amount contributed

think she’s done the right thing but not

after reading a few chapters of my new

per liter of milk consumed) was nearly

for the right reasons; doing it because

book, Talking to Our Selves. But don’t be

three times as large when the posted

you’re watched is not the same thing

scared off: In the end, I argue that we

payment instructions were augmented

as doing it because it’s decent, honest

do exert rational control over our lives,

with an image of eyes as when they were

or fair. Those who favor fair play only

the multitude of disturbing scientific

augmented with an image of flowers.

when it burnishes their reputation

findings suggesting the contrary

might also have qualms, since

notwithstanding. Human beings live as

“watching eyes” may influence people

rational animals, after all, but in ways

in conditions conducive to anonymity.

weirdly — and wonderfully — different

In none of these cases does “I did it

than is traditionally supposed.

because of the eye spots” sound like a compelling rationale.

A Year in Review 7

Jan Steven van Calcar, Portrait of Andreas Vesalius at age 28, from On the Fabric of the Human Body, 1543.

Center for the Humanities 8

KNOW YOURSELF:

VESALIUS AND THE INVENTION OF THE MODERN BODY

By Marisa Bass Assistant Professor of Art History in Arts & Sciences

T

he great Renaissance anatomist

his illustrations would give “particular

workshops inspired by the material

Andreas Vesalius was born

pleasure” to those who either had no

covered in my Washington University

just over 500 years ago on

opportunity to perform dissection

course Renaissance Bodies: Art, Magic,

December 31, 1514. He hailed from the

themselves or who were “too squeamish”

Science, which culminates each semester

city of Brussels, then part of the thriving

to do so.

in an exploration of Vesalius’ Fabrica and

artistic and intellectual world of the early

its afterlife into the 17th century.

modern Netherlands, but he went on to a

Peering out with a discerning eye

career in Italy as court physician to none

from his own portrait, Vesalius (who

The other workshop was led by Suzanne

other than the Holy Roman Emperor

was hardly squeamish!) shows that it is

Karr Schmidt, curator of prints and

Charles V. In 1543, he published his

as much through looking as through

drawings at the Art Institute of Chicago.

seminal treatise On the Fabric of the

reading that a true understanding of

Schmidt is a specialist in an exceptional

Human Body, a book that forever altered

anatomy is achieved.

genre of Renaissance image known as

the landscape of anatomical study.

“flap prints,” so named because they To celebrate the 500th anniversary of

were works designed to be cut out and

A portrait that appears among the

Vesalius’ birth, Washington University

then pasted back together as tactile

opening pages of the treatise shows

and Saint Louis University co-organized

three-dimensional objects, with flaps and

Vesalius confidently displaying the

a conference, “Vesalius and the Invention

apparatuses manipulated at the hands

dissected arm and hand of a cadaver.

of the Modern Body,” this past February.

of their owners. Vesalius realized the

On the table before him, an inkwell and

The conference germinated from the

applicability of flap prints for his own

a pen remind his readers that Vesalius

collection of rare books at the Becker

knowledge production and included

had the dexterous ability not only to

Library on Washington University’s

them in his works. Schmidt says these

dissect the human body but also to set

Medical Campus, which houses two

flap anatomy prints allowed viewers

his own hand to the task of writing such

copies of Vesalius’ first edition and a

to “dissect themselves in order to learn

a monumental text. The portrait itself,

wealth of other early modern medical

more about the mysteries of their bodies.”

one of more than 200 illustrations to

treatises. To celebrate these local

appear among the pages of Vesalius’

holdings, the conference included

Both through his use of flap prints and

work, shows his investment in the

workshops with the Becker’s rare books

his emphasis on the power of images

efficacy of the printed image alongside

themselves that allowed participants

as tools of medical learning, Vesalius

the printed word. In his dedicatory

to study their wonderful illustrations

created a legacy that challenges us, even

preface to Charles V, Vesalius wrote that

firsthand. I conducted one of these

today, in the quest to know ourselves.

A Year in Review 9

SERIAL BONDS:

WHAT THE SPECTRE TEASER REVEALS ABOUT THE JAMES BOND FRANCHISE Colin Burnett Assistant Professor of Film and Media Studies

Center for the Humanities 10

I

n this era of serialized franchising,

novels and two short-story collections

But when Kevin McClory, who co-owned

where plot developments in the

featuring the iconic English spy. After

the rights to the Thunderball story and to

latest Marvel release refer back

his lover Vesper commits suicide to save

SPECTRE, decided to compete with Eon

to other Marvel movies and TV

him from SMERSH, he vows to decimate

and began planning his own Bond film,

shows, where the animated series

the group — an enemy with no known

Never Say Never Again (1983), a remake

Star Wars Rebels picks up on narrative

leader and tens of thousands of skilled

of Thunderball, Eon producers killed off

threads from the film continuity and

agents who live in the shadows. He

Blofeld in a comical scene in For Your

another show, Star Wars: The Clone Wars,

embarks upon a slow path of retribution,

Eyes Only (1981), bringing a pitiful end to

the James Bond franchise is moving

and suffering.

a storyline they had cultivated in six of

with the times. The March 27 teaser

the first seven films.

for SPECTRE, the latest installment in

The 1953 novel launched but the first in

the long-running series, suggests that

a long line of “serial moments” in the

In November 2013, Eon acquired all

producers are planning a film that

franchise’s history. When sales for the

rights from McClory, and the recent

ties together more than 60 years

dark 1950s SMERSH angle of suicide and

teaser raises expectations that SPECTRE,

of storytelling.

vengeance proved to be modest, Fleming

due out in November 2015, will write the

phased it out and used three novels

closing chapter of Fleming’s SMERSH

For many casual admirers, the “true”

— Thunderball (1961), On Her Majesty’s

continuity — by tying it to a rebooted

Bond is an irreverent superhero who

Secret Service (1963) and You Only Live

SPECTRE plotline.

effortlessly defeats an endless string

Twice (1964) — to insert Bond into a new

of colorful, megalomaniacal villains,

long-term confrontation, this time with

Introduced in 2006’s Casino Royale,

each one unrelated to the next. Bond

a more colorful Thaw-era international

Daniel Craig’s Bond has a past. He

remains surgical, witty, detached — the

terrorist organization called SPECTRE,

endures trauma. Like a SMERSH-era

ageless spy we know and love. He pulls

headed by the mysterious master villain

Fleming spy, painful memories, like

the trigger and moves on — to the next

Ernst Stavro Blofeld. Sales skyrocketed.

Vesper’s betrayal and death, continue

chilled bottle of Bollinger, the next

Unlike the SMERSH plot, this arc came

to force their way back into his life,

hokey pun, the next sexual conquest,

to a resolution. In the final novel of the

coloring his outlook, his missions. The

the next evil plot. James Bond merely

“Blofeld Trilogy,” Bond confronted his

March 27 teaser ends with a scene where

“returns.” He never picks up where he

archnemesis in an exotic sword fight in a

a mysterious figure is shown seated at

left off.

medieval Japanese castle.

a table, the octopus ring of SPECTRE

But one of the pleasures in Ian

Alongside this strategic reboot, Fleming

— concealed from view like the Blofeld

Fleming’s original version of Bond

licensed the novels to the film company

of the 1960s films. This archnemesis

is that of long-form storytelling that

Eon Productions, which adapted the

seems to be from Bond’s past — perhaps

postpones narrative closure, enlarges

SPECTRE/Blofeld plotline, beginning

the source of a repressed trauma. The

our understanding of the character and

with Dr. No (1962) and continuing on

leader of SPECTRE speaks: “Welcome,

holds emotional payoffs in abeyance.

until Diamonds Are Forever (1971). The

James. It’s been a long time. And, finally,

audience for the franchise grew even

here we are.”

adorning his right hand and silhouetted

“Here was a target for him, right to hand.

more. The third film, 1965’s Thunderball,

He would take on SMERSH and hunt it

was the franchise’s first blockbuster,

Eon producers seem prepared

down.” These lines appear near the end

grossing over a billion dollars (adjusted

to cash out on over half a century of

of Casino Royale (1953), the first of 12

for inflation).

serial Bonds.

A Year in Review 11

‘THE DIVIDED CITY’ “Segregation in this broad sense continues to play out in housing, in environmental risk, in access to food, transit, health care, education and other basic services.”

— Jean Allman, director of the Center for the Humanities in Arts & Sciences

By Liam Otten The scars of segregation are deep and continue to divide along racial, cultural and economic lines.s.

In fall 2014, Washington University in St. Louis launched The Divided City: An Urban Humanities Initiative. The $1.6 million project — funded in part by a four-year, $650,000 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation — examines both the history and present-day reality of segregation from a variety of perspectives, pairing humanists with experts and scholars in architecture, anthropology, business, economics, landscape architecture, law, public health, social work and urban design.

“St. Louis is a particularly resonant place from which to pose these questions,” says Jean Allman, director of the Center for the Humanities in Arts & Sciences — and, with Bruce Lindsey, dean of architecture in the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts, principal investigator on the grant.

Center for the Humanities 12

“It sits on the border between north

issues related to spatial and cultural

College of Architecture and Graduate

and south,” says Allman, the J.H. Hexter

isolation and fragmentation.”

School of Architecture & Urban Design,

Professor in the Humanities and

“Segregation in this broad sense

both in the Sam Fox School of Design &

professor of history. “It has profound

continues to play out in housing, in

Visual Arts.

legacies of racism and segregation, of

environmental risk, in access to food,

expansion and decline.”

transit, health care, education and other

Major initiatives include a series of

basic services,” Allman says.

collaborative faculty grants; a summer

The city also has seen many important

seminar in the urban humanities; an

— and several infamous — milestones

Today, for the first time in history, the

oral history research project; a public

in U.S. race relations. These include the

majority of humanity lives in cities and

life survey; the development of new

Dred Scott case (1857); Shelley v. Kraemer

urban areas. The Divided City takes

curricula; a Divided City digital archive;

(1948), which outlawed racially restrictive

St. Louis as a base, but it also looks at a

and, eventually, a multimedia exhibition

real estate covenants); and the continuing

range of global cities such as Shanghai,

curated by faculty and students.

unrest sparked by the August 2014 death

Johannesburg, Nairobi and Rio de Janeiro.

of teenager Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri.

Organizers also plan two new faculty “These are global issues,” Allman

hires — one in the urban humanities

says. “Our aim is to create a model

and one in urban design — as well as

“Segregation remains one of the most

for the urban humanities that will

a postdoctoral fellowship. The latter

vexing problems in urban studies,” says

shape scholarship, teaching and policy

will take primary responsibility for the

Lindsey, the E. Desmond Lee Professor

initiatives across the globe.”

digitizing and archiving of St. Louis-

for Community Collaboration. “By

based African-American newspapers,

segregation, we mean not only racial

In addition to the Mellon grant, The

including The St. Louis American, The

separation in the United States or South

Divided City is supported by the Office

Argus, The Evening Whirl, The Limelight

Africa, but persistent and widespread

of the Provost; Arts & Sciences; and the

and The East St. Louis Monitor.

A Year in Review 13

Faculty Collaborative Grants For each year of the project, The Divided City: An Urban Humanities Initiative awards several collaborative faculty grants of up to $20,000 each.

Projects are interdisciplinary in nature, involving the humanities and at least one other discipline, with particular consideration going to projects that engage architecture or urban design. Grants may be used to support research relating to urban segregation/separation; to develop interdisciplinary curricula; or to build connections between the university and the St. Louis community, especially K–12 schools and cultural institutions.

All recipients, as part of their collaborative work, produce a community-based public humanities project or contribute material to The Divided City online project, which is currently in development.

January 2015 Charting the American Bottom: St. Louis and Its Divided Periphery Collaborative Research Project Jesse Vogler Visiting Assistant Professor of Landscape Architecture, Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts Washington University Director, Institute of Marking and Measuring

Angela Miller Professor of Art History and Archaeology, Arts & Sciences Washington University

Matthew Fluharty Postdoctoral Research Fellow, American Culture Studies Program, Arts & Sciences Washington University Director, Art of the Rural

Michael Allen University College Coordinator, American Culture Studies Program, Arts & Sciences Washington University

T

his project tells a story of a city divided from itself, a story of St. Louis through

the lens of its periphery: East St. Louis and the American Bottom. Few regions in the United States exhibit a social and spatial fragmentation as extreme as that of the vast floodplains of the East St. Louis region. As a coherent geographic interval stretching from the confluence of the Missouri and Mississippi rivers down to the confluence with the Kaskaskia River, this floodplain — known to geographers and anthropologists as the American Bottom — is site to the social and spatial aspirations of precontact Native Americans, 19th-century industrial expansion, 20th-century infrastructural consolidation and 21st-century ecological precarity. Yet this is a region defined less by its inherent ecological and geological continuities and more by the industrial patterns that have effectively fractured it into closed parcels of extraction, production and displacement. It is a territory where UNESCO heritage sites abut Superfund sites, and where the first African-American incorporated town in the United States abuts

Director, Preservation Research

the site of the country’s most notorious race

Office

riot. Through this rather compact region, then, an entire history of North American

Andrew Theising

settlement and aspirations can be told. This

Associate Professor of Political

project will attempt to develop a synthetic

Science

language — both visual and written —

Southern Illinois University in Edwardsville Founding Director, Institute for Urban Research

Center for the Humanities 14

through which we can begin to interpret this episodic landscape.

DIVIDED CITY

Segregation by Design: A Historical Analysis of the Impact of Planning and Policy in St. Louis

Tale of Two Cities: Documenting Our Divides Community Engagement Project

Interdisciplinary Curriculum Development

Denise Ward-Brown

Catalina Freixas Assistant Professor of Architecture, Sam Fox

Associate Professor of Art, Sam Fox

School of Design & Visual Arts

School of Design & Visual Arts

Washington University

Washington University

Helen Headrick

Mark Abbott

Educational Opportunities Coordinator

Professor of History

Associate Producer

Director of Center for Neighborhood

Higher Education Channel Television

Development

(HEC-TV)

Harris-Stowe State University Adjunct Instructor, University College, Arts & Sciences Washington University

T

T

line”) sustainability. This collaboration between Washington

protests and the subsequent efforts for reform. Creating art gives

University and Harris-Stowe State University will not only bridge

students the opportunity to enter into conversations that often

humanities and architecture through interdisciplinary course

polarize and marginalize — not just because of skin color, but because

work, but will also activate both universities’ roles within the

of differences in religion, economic status, ancestral origin, sexual

community, building on the service-learning methodology traditional

preference and/or political ideology. Working together toward a

of historically black colleges and universities. Segregation as a

positive and achievable goal ensures we are not complicit with the

consequence of design has been debated by scholars in fields as

assumptions we have about one another. Thus, the transformative

varied as architecture and urban studies and environmental policy

work that leads to true social change necessarily is internalized within

and planning. However, this debate has rarely been placed in a

the actors. Taking a cue from our country’s response to grassroots

historical context where segregation is seen as a product of urban

movements in our history (e.g., women’s suffrage and the Civil Rights

policy through time, and policy is analyzed due to an imbalance

Movement), we have the ability to witness and document local groups

between social, economic and environmental segregation. Yet, this

as they strive for short-/long-term goals and local/national reform to

omission perpetuates ill-informed policy decisions, which entrench

create strong, sustainable communities. The intersection of education,

racial, cultural, physical and socioeconomic segregation. This course

social justice, art and technology can bring into focus a powerful

will address this gap in research by examining policy through the

dialogue about social and spatial segregation. When artists, designers,

triple bottom line to understand the physical manifestation of

architects, planners and communicators engage in this critique, they

segregation during growth and decline. The intent is to shape debates

help reframe the debate and shift momentum toward positive change.

his transdisciplinary seminar studies the role of planning and design in promoting segregation from a historical perspective,

considering social, economic and environmental (the “triple bottom

ale of Two Cities: Documenting Our Divides brings together students working in transdisciplinary teams to create

documentary videos of the civil unrest that sparked nationwide

on planning, policy and sustainability to address segregation in the coming years.

A Year in Review 15

April 2015

Oral Histories of the Ferguson Movement

Visualizing Urban History: Segregation, Social Transformation and the Built Environment in 150 Years of St. Louis History

Community Engagement Project

Community Engagement Project, Collaborative Research Project

Clarissa Hayward Associate Professor of Political Science, Arts & Sciences

Eric Mumford

Washington University

Rebecca and John Voyles Professor of

Jeffrey Q. McCune

Architecture, Sam Fox School of Design &

Associate Professor of Performing Arts,

Visual Arts

Arts & Sciences

Washington University

Washington University

Margaret Garb Meredith Evans

Associate Professor of History, Arts & Sciences Washington University

Associate University Librarian, Olin Library

Jody Sowell

Washington University

Director of Exhibitions and Research Missouri History Museum

S

ince August 2014, “Ferguson” has come to signify racial segregation in the very broad sense in which The Divided City Initiative uses that

term. A majority-black community, the town of Ferguson is governed by a nearly all-white power structure. Like neighboring suburbs in North St. Louis County, its poverty and unemployment rates are high relative to

F

or scholars of urban history, Visualizing Urban History highlights a multidisciplinary approach to tracing the history of a place and

analyzing the history of the existing built environment. A museum

other municipalities in the region, while its tax base is weak. Like many

exhibit of our research will, in many ways, showcase the powerful

nearby suburbs, Ferguson relies on what has been denounced as predatory

use of humanities methods in urban scholarship, calling attention

policing to help fund local public services. But even still, local services,

to both the evidence used by historians and the analytic stance of

including, crucially, local public schools, perform exceptionally poorly.

humanists. Most important, the exhibit and accompanying catalog

Normandy High, the school from which Michael Brown graduated, lost

will offer St. Louis residents a history of their neighborhoods

state accreditation in 2012 and was taken over by the Missouri Board of

and a way to think through the dramatic changes in the city’s

Education in 2014.

demographics and built environment. The exhibit will urge viewers to take seriously the power of policy makers, politicians, business

Much attention has been focused on these problems, and rightly so. Our

leaders and local activists in shaping urban space and struggling

project expands the focus of much work on segregation and structural

over the meanings of the city’s history.

racism to consider grassroots political activism aimed at challenging and changing it. Specifically, we aim to learn how the activists associated with the Ferguson movement became involved initially; what their goals, strategies and political identities were at the start, and how they evolved over the course of the year; what events, activities, and resources enabled and encouraged them to make progress toward their goals; what obstacles they faced; and how they dealt with these challenges. Understanding the experiences and perspectives of these activists who have drawn national and international attention to the problem of segregation, broadly understood, is central to the concerns that drive The Divided City Initiative.

Center for the Humanities 16

DIVIDED CITY

Noon in the City: The Odunde Festival and the Shaping of South Philadelphia Collaborative Research Project Gerald Early Merle Kling Professor of Modern Letters in Arts & Sciences Washington University

Rosalind Early Associate Editor for Periodicals, Public Affairs Washington University

Naomi Richardson Documentarian and Adjunct Professor Scribe Video Center

N

oon in the City: The Odunde Festival and the Shaping of South Philadelphia focuses on the gentrification of south

Philadelphia’s historical 7th and 30th wards. These wards were where blacks settled during the Great Migration, and it was in this part of the city that sociologist W.E.B. DuBois conducted his famous study that resulted in The Philadelphia Negro, published in 1899.

The area is no longer black, having been through more than five decades of gentrification. The Odunde Festival — a Yoruba New Year festival that was founded by African-American south Philadelphia resident Lois Fernandez — is Fernandez’s attempt to establish the Odunde Festival as a cultural marker in black identity in Philadelphia and stake a claim in the changing neighborhood. Through film and book, this project examines this grassroots response to gentrification.

A Year in Review 17

T

he Center for the Humanities welcomed Roderick A. Ferguson, professor of AfricanAmerican studies and

gender and women’s studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago, to deliver the annual James E. McLeod Memorial Lecture on Higher Education on September 29, 2014. His talk, “The University and the Combinations of Heart and Mind,” excerpted here, pays tribute to the late Dean McLeod and explores the historic transformations of the American university past and the possibilities yet to come.

On Dean James McLeod as an exemplar of the possibilities and potentials of the university I did not have the pleasure of knowing Dean McLeod, but in reading about him, I find his story profoundly inspiring and useful for thinking about what the university can be. Interestingly enough, this occasion, and indeed Dean McLeod’s life as a scholar and an academic citizen, underline for me not only the historic transformations that occasioned what are in my estimation the best of the American university — the entrance of women, people of color and other minorities into the mainstream academy in the ’60s and ’70s but also the intellectual transformations that this entrance brought about —

‘IT’S IN OUR HANDS’

Roderick Ferguson

on the University’s Democratic Future

Center for the Humanities 18

the studies of race, gender, sexuality, disability, ethnicity as not only legitimate but necessary forms of study, necessary for understanding the makeup of this country and the world.

These were intellectual movements that caused revolutions of the mind that would significantly transform institutions like this one. But that

EVENTS & OUTREACH

one — known only through the changes

On the broadening constituency of the university

in how we understand and conduct

Historically black colleges and

historical, literary or social scientific

universities, like Morehouse and

research. There was a revolution of the

Howard, and the formation of women’s

heart. And so in the time that I have, I’d

colleges in the 19th century, represent

like to think about Dean McLeod as an

perhaps the first attempts to push against

exemplar of that unheralded experiment

the limits of what a university could

that has dotted the history of the

be and which people it might claim as

American university — an experiment

part of its imaginative horizon. The

that was not only about the transformation

student movements of the ’60s and ’70s

of our intellectual horizons but also the

represent the other time the university

revaluing of social life.

was challenged in this way. Students

revolution was not simply an intellectual

on the West Coast, the East Coast and In other words, what I hope to suggest

all parts in between demanded that

to you — using Dean McLeod’s life

women and people of color be seen as

here as my primary example — is

constituencies within the academy, not

that an unappreciated history of the

just bodies but bodies and minds that

modern academy is the deployment

could help reorganize knowledge in ways

of institutional imaginations to further

that people never imagined. Similar to

a vision of colleges and universities as

the Freedmen’s Bureau, this was a vision

locations to expand intellectual and

for a democratic education in which

ethical possibilities. What interests me

people within and outside the academy

is the question of how he was part of

could participate in the life of the mind

an effort to institute a contemplative

and the well-being of our world.

practice, an inquiry into the meaning and value of life, within an institution — the modern Western university, that is — that has — for the most part — turned away from that question. Hence, his efforts were part of historic endeavors to make this contemplation part of our intellectual and educational mission.

Dean McLeod provided a model for the enlightened administrator — that is, an administrator who insisted on preserving and developing the university as a location from which we might truly value the human being. [His] was a model of the administrator as a facilitator of redistribution rather than the enforcer of the status quo, the paragon of the academic steward who demonstrates how we can work and struggle in ways that access and exercise the best parts of our personal and collective humanity.

On the university’s future as a site of innovation, inspiration, democratic community In Toni Morrison’s Nobel lecture, she tells the story of an old AfricanAmerican woman, blind and wise, who is confronted by a group of children who are determined to disprove her powers for comprehension. “Old woman,” one of them says, “I hold in my hand a bird. Tell me whether it is living or dead.” There is much silence afterwards, Morrison writes, for the children have asked a question whose answer depends on the one ability that the old woman cannot claim. As Morrison says, “Finally, she speaks, and her voice is soft but stern. ‘I don’t know ... I don’t know whether the bird you are holding is dead or alive, but what I do know is that it is in your hands. It is in your hands.’ ” Throughout A Year in Review 19

Whether the university — troubled by racism, sexism, homophobia, classism and ableism — is to stay alive as a site of innovation, inspiration and democratic community, it is our decision, and it is in our hands. the lecture, Morrison reads the bird as language and the old woman as a practiced writer, and so the old woman’s answer can be taken to mean: If [the bird] is dead, you have either found it that way or you have killed it. If it is alive, you can still kill it. Whether it is to stay alive, it is your decision. Whatever the case, it is your responsibility.

For our purposes here today, as we are inspired by the life of Dean McLeod and as we ponder the future of higher education, we might imagine the bird as the American academy. We can also imagine the old woman as Dean McLeod or those people who told us by word or example to assume the powers of the mind and the heart in whatever institutional settings we find ourselves, those people — a parent, a grandparent, a neighbor or a teacher — who nudged us to change the given order of things to benefit the greatest number of persons.

Whether the university — troubled by racism, sexism, homophobia, classism and ableism — is to stay alive as a site of innovation, inspiration and democratic community, it is our decision, and it is in our hands. It is in our hands.

FACULTY BOOK CELEBRATION Each year the Center for Humanities recognizes and celebrates the books published by Washington University faculty members from all across the Danforth Campus. The event features displays of all books published within the last three years, a reception and book signing, and lectures from a keynote speaker and two faculty members who have published within the last year. Below, we highlight the 2014 celebration, which took place on Nov. 4, 2014.

FACULTY SPEAKERS Ignacio Sánchez Prado, Associate Professor, Romance Languages & Literatures Screening Neoliberalism: Transforming Mexican Cinema, 1988–2012 (Vanderbilt University Press, 2014) Cavernous, often cold, always dark, with the lingering smell of popcorn in the air: The experience of moviegoing is universal.

The cinematic experience in Mexico is no less profound and has evolved in complex ways in recent years. Films like Y Tu Mamá También, El Mariachi, Amores Perros and the work of icons like Guillermo del Toro and Salma Hayek represent much more than resurgent interest in the cinema of Mexico. In Screening Neoliberalism, Ignacio Sánchez Prado explores precisely what happened to Mexico’s film industry in recent decades. Far from just a history of the period, Screening Neoliberalism explores four deep transformations in the Mexican film industry: the decline of nationalism, the new focus on middle-class audiences, the redefinition of political cinema and the impact of globalization. This analysis considers the directors and films that have found international notoriety as well as those that have been instrumental in building a domestic market. Screening Neoliberalism exposes the consequences of a film industry forced to find new audiences in Mexico’s middle-class in order to achieve economic and cultural viability.

Center for the Humanities 20

EVENTS & OUTREACH

Paige McGinley, Assistant Professor, Performing Arts Staging the Blues: From Tent Shows to Tourism (Duke University Press, 2014) Singing was just one element of blues performance in the early 20th century. Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith and other classic blues singers also tapped, joked and flaunted extravagant costumes in tent shows and black on vaudeville stages. The press even described these women as “actresses” long before they achieved worldwide fame for their musical recordings. In Staging the Blues, Paige A. McGinley shows that even though folklorists, record producers and festival promoters set the theatricality of early blues aside in favor of notions of authenticity, it remained creatively vibrant throughout the 20th century. Highlighting performances by Rainey, Smith, Lead Belly, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee in small Mississippi towns, Harlem theaters and the industrial British North, this pioneering study foregrounds virtuoso blues artists who used the conventions of the theater — including dance, comedy and costume — to stage black mobility, to challenge narratives of racial authenticity and to fight for racial and economic justice.

Keynote Speaker “From Plessy to Ferguson: Why the Humanities Matter Now” George Lipsitz, Professor, Department of Black Studies and Department of Sociology, University of California, Santa Barbara

George Lipsitz studies social movements, urban culture and inequality. He is the author of 11 books, including The Fierce Urgency of Now (coauthored with Daniel Fischlin and Ajay Heble), How Racism Takes Place, Time Passages and Footsteps in the Dark.

Lipsitz is chair of the board of directors of the African American Policy Forum and chair of the advisory board for the Center for Black Studies Research. He is editor of the Critical American Studies series at the University of Minnesota Press and coeditor of the American Crossroads series at the University of California Press.

A Year in Review 21

Q&A WITH

GEORGE LIPSITZ

By Peter Benson

Associate Professor of Anthropology in Arts & Sciences

The Center for the Humanities welcomed Washington University alumnus George Lipsitz, AB ’68, now a professor in the Department of Black Studies and Department of Sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, as the keynote speaker at the 2014 Faculty Book Celebration on Tuesday, November 4. (Washington University faculty members Paige McGinley and Ignacio Sánchez Prado also gave brief presentations.) In advance of the event, Associate Professor of Anthropology Peter Benson interviewed Lipsitz about St. Louis, race relations and his upcoming talk, “From Plessy to Ferguson: Why the Humanities Matter Now.”

Center for the Humanities 22

EVENTS & OUTREACH

I know you have connections to St. Louis and to Washington University.

What does it mean to you to be coming back to the area for this event?

on the line in hundreds of nonviolent direct-action protests, and transformed

To me, St. Louis is the most important

the alienations and indignities that

place in the world. My whole way of

people face into constructive and

looking at the world stems from the

collective mobilization for change. He

things I learned there, from classroom

taught me that relations between races

teachers at Washington University

are relations between places, that we

and the University of Missouri–

will never have peace with justice in our

St. Louis, but also from people

communities unless we end residential

mobilizing for justice in the black

segregation and its attendant social

freedom movement, struggling for

stratification.

democracy in the Teamsters Union, and

The subtitle of your lecture is “Why the Humanities Matter Now.” What are pressing issues facing the humanities in light of recent events in Ferguson and St. Louis? How can the humanities specifically contribute to ongoing debates and struggles?

The humanities can play a central role in reframing our understanding of racial justice. As Doris Sommer explains in her great book The Work of Art in the World, aesthetic experience can rekindle “love for a world gone gray with habit”; it can show us how and why we have become

always recall the lessons I learned there

Tell us briefly about the title of your lecture (“From Plessy to Ferguson”) and what you plan to cover.

in school, in social movements, but also

In 1896, the Supreme Court made

for judgment, discernment, empathy

in cultural spaces listening to ragtime

racial segregation the law of the land

and imagination. In projects around the

musicians on a Mississippi riverboat,

in the case of Plessy v. Ferguson, ruling

nation and around the world, a new kind

savoring the performances of the Black

that people of different races could be

of public humanities is generating new

Artists Group at the Sheldon Auditorium,

separate but still equal. In 1954, the Brown

ways of knowing and new ways of being.

hearing Oliver Nelson conduct original

v. Board decision supposedly overruled

compositions from the bandstand on

Plessy. Fifty years ago, the adoption of the

the campus quad, going to country

Civil Rights Act promised a new era of

music nightclubs on South Broadway,

racial justice in the United States. Just six

attending polka dances in south

years ago, the election of Barack Obama

St. Louis and sitting in rapt amazement

led many commentators to argue that

in front of Billy Peek whenever he

we now live in a post-racial society. Yet

played. The imagination and artistry

the killing of Michael Brown and the

of St. Louis musicians created an

practices and beliefs attendant to it in a

alternative academy where different

place called Ferguson reveal how little

ways of life could be envisioned

progress our society has made over the

and enacted.

years in making racial justice a reality.

opposing militarism in the nation and the world. When I return to the city, I

We live under a regime that is worse

Given these connections, how do events in Ferguson and St. Louis resonate with you personally and in terms of the scholarship and advocacy work that you do?

The single most important thing that ever happened to me in St. Louis was meeting Ivory Perry, accompanying him as he mobilized his community for change and learning from the wisdom he dispensed to me in our many long conversations. For more than 30 years, he diagnosed and analyzed the racialized class structure of St. Louis, put his body

than Plessy, because both law and social practice today produce a society that is unapologetically both separate and unequal. Part of the reason for this lies in a logic that remains uninterrogated and unchallenged in frames that seem to disagree with each other, in Plessy, Brown, the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the Obama presidency and killing of Michael Brown alike. To respond honorably, ethically, democratically and decently to our present moment, we need to develop a new frame for understanding racial justice.

A Year in Review 23

inured to suffering and afraid of love.

Through the humanities we can cultivate our individual and collective capacity

A key topic in your work that has always resonated for me is “whiteness.”

What can this concept tell us about how to make sense of and engage with events in Ferguson?

From my perspective, “whiteness” is a condition, not a color. It is a structured advantage, not an embodied identity. It is not synonymous with “white people,” although those of us who are white are usually the beneficiaries of its unfair gains and unjust enrichments. Our problem is not our whiteness, however, but our possessive investment in it.

We do not choose our parents or our pigment, but we do choose our principles and our politics. The protest movement in Ferguson today is asking all of us to stand up, step up and speak up. When white people participate in social justice movements that emanate from the situated knowledge of communities of color, we move everyone closer to a more decent and democratic existence.

CONTEMPORARY POETRY’S CHIEF CHAMPION

MARJORIE PERLOFF RECIPIENT OF THE 2014 INTERNATIONAL HUMANITIES MEDAL & PRIZE

By Vincent Sherry

Howard Nemerov Professor in the Humanities in Arts & Sciences

Center for the Humanities 24

EVENTS & OUTREACH

M

arjorie Perloff, the

In this talk, as in all of the ground-

Along these lines, the lecture

Sadie Dernham

breaking work of her career, she has

demonstrated the special relevance

Patek Professor

unlocked “the times” as the most

of Celan to the concerns of our own

of Humanities

powerful resource of creative activity

critical present. There is a wonderful

Emerita at Stanford

for poetry as well as for our critical

capaciousness in Perloff’s work at large,

University, is the recipient of the 2014

understanding of it. In The Futurist

which is matched with an extraordinary

Washington University International

Moment: Avant-Garde, Avant Guerre, and

generosity of intellectual spirit, so

Humanities Prize, awarded by the

the Language of Rupture, published in

that her intelligence has become,

Center for the Humanities and

1986, for example, she reclaims the

for poets and critics alike, nothing

supported by Dr. David and Phyllis

specificity of a micro-period in the

less than an environment, a whole

Wilson Grossman. Professor Perloff

European avant-garde just before the

climate of inquiry and exchange, a

delivered the lecture “The Last

First World War. Or, in Radical Artifice:

place where poetry matters, without

Hapsburg Poet: The Love Poetry of Paul

Writing Poetry in the Age of Media, where,

a question — or, through questions

Celan and the Limits of Language,” on

already in 1991, she discerns our new

that only intensify its claims. This has

Wednesday, Oct. 22, 2014.

electronic time as the basis of a new

been Perloff’s great gift to the culture

line, a new tempo; in verse, she shows

of the contemporary study of poetry,

The material of the lecture was drawn

the special synergy between the art

which the Center for the Humanities is

from Perloff’s current work, which

of poetry and the wavelength of the

honored to recognize.

focuses on the literature of Austria in

present, the tone of the times.

the period between the two world wars of the previous century. As with all of

She takes time so seriously indeed

her distinguished work, the lecture

that she can illuminate not only the

showed the extraordinary capacity of

radical particularity of this or that

analysis, explanation and appreciation

moment but, in other books, the

that Perloff has brought to the

profounder continuities between the

discipline of literary study. Here, and

phases of the 20th and, now, the 21st

in the body of work the International

century. In one of her more recent

Humanities Prize recognizes, Perloff

books, then, 21st Century Modernism:

not only reads poetry closely and

The “New” Poetics, she connects some

revealingly, she provides a historically

of the most significant initiatives of

informed understanding that allows the

20th-century modernism to the most

verse to resonate with the full import of

ambitiously experimental verse of the

its historical provocations.

current century. Bringing her historical memory to the contemporary scene and offering a precedent for the most contemporary of poetries, Perloff has served in a way to restore the future of poetry.

A Year in Review 25

Q&A WITH

PRISCILLA WALD

By Benjamin Meiners

Graduate Student, Department of English in Arts & Sciences

or to ask children from Rwanda, who have not traveled anywhere near an Ebola outbreak, to observe quarantine before attending a school in New Jersey.

There is no way to disaggregate scientific and medical questions from social and geopolitical ones. What interests me is to understand the exact nature and consequences of the connections.

In your recent book Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative, you use narrative as a means to reframe what many might perceive to be the “scientific” problem of disease. Can you talk about the relation between narrative and disease in that book?

I am interested in how information travels from specialist publications (e.g., science journals) to the mainstream media and popular fiction and film, both for what that circulation tells us about collective beliefs and for some sense of how those beliefs are shaped. We know the world through language, images and stories, and in my work I use my training

Priscilla Wald

R. Florence Brinkley Professor of English and Professor and Chair of Women’s Studies, Duke University

as a literary critic to pay attention to how the circulation of information starts to become conventional: how, that is, broad acceptance of particular aspects of disease take hold and become increasingly difficult to challenge.

At the event “Contagion and Culture,” on Wednesday, March 4, 2015, panelists asked how discourses of race, nation and culture affect our understandings of and responses to contagious disease — in this particular case, the Ebola virus. Can you tell us a little bit about how you conceptualize the relationship between these discourses and Ebola?

This is a very difficult question to answer briefly. It is too simple (although true) to say that disease is one way to stigmatize particular populations that become associated with it for a

variety of reasons or that, conversely, particular populations and places are

Since we are always learning new

pathologized by associations with

things about the world, and since it is

specific diseases. The processes through

important always to be considering new

which those associations emerge are

ways to solve a problem, I think it is

really complicated; science, medicine

important to pay attention to how we are

and geopolitics are always intertwined

telling particular stories — for example,

in ways that are both material and

about the emergence and circulation of

ideological. It is reasonable, for example,

communicable diseases — to consider

to keep a close watch on someone

whether those are the most accurate

who has come from an area where

stories, by which I mean whether or

there is an Ebola outbreak during the

not they produce the most convincing

incubation period; it is not reasonable

explanation of the problem or the best

to fear catching Ebola by going to eat

(most effective and most just) solution to

at an African restaurant in Minnesota

the problem.

Center for the Humanities 26

Cosponsored Events, 2014–15 African Students Association, Africa Week

Center for the Humanities; Comparative

October 28–31, 2014

Literature; and St. Louis Hillel

A.I.R. Refreshed: Women Artists in Perspective 1970–Now

Charif Kiwan, Syria: Snapshots of History in the Making Screening and Discussion

March 31, 2015

February 26, 2015

Cosponsored by the Women, Gender

Cosponsored by the Department of

and Sexuality Studies Program;

Jewish, Islamic and Near Eastern

the Department of Art History and

Languages and Cultures; the Center for the

Archaeology; the Kemper Museum;

Humanities; the Film and Media Studies

the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual

Program; and the International and Area

Screening the Great War: A Centenary Film Series

Arts; the Law, Culture and Identity

Studies Program

October 24–25, 2014

Initiative; and the Center for

Midwest Study Group of the North American Kant Society

Cosponsored by the Center for the

the Humanities

Joshua Takano Chambers-Letson, Materialist Mourning: Danh Võ and the Object’s Extension of Life February 4, 2015 Cosponsored by the Center for the Humanities; Performing Arts Department; and Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies

October 25–26, 2014

Jocelyn Olcott, What Woman? The Challenge of Transnational Feminisms October 14, 2014 Cosponsored by the Center for the Humanities; History; International and Area Studies; Latin American Studies; and

Formal Epistemology Workshop

Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies

May 20–22, 2015

Sumathi Ramaswamy, Laughing at Empire Properly

Graduate History Association, History of the Future Conference

Steven Seidman, Boundary Struggles in Intimate Life: A Psychoanalytic Perspective October 31, 2014 Cosponsored by American Culture Studies; Center for the Humanities; Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies; and the Law, Culture and Identity Initiative

Humanities, Film and Media Studies, Germanic Languages and Literatures, African and African-American Studies, History, and Film and Media Archives

(Un)Civil Mediations: A Civil Rights & Visual Culture Symposium April 23–25, 2015 A Law, Identity and Culture Initiative in the School of Law event, cosponsored by the American Cultural Studies and African and African-American Studies programs, the Department of Art History

April 13, 2015

and Archaeology, and the Center for the

October 10–11, 2014

Cosponsored by Art History and

Humanities in Arts & Sciences; the Office

Cosponsored by American Culture Studies;

Archaeology, Center for the Humanities,

of the Provost Diversity and Inclusion

Center for the Humanities; Department

Digital Humanities Workshop, History,

Grant; Washington University Libraries;

of Anthropology; Department of Art

and International and Area Studies

and the Missouri History Museum.

History and Archaeology; Department

Gloria Rolando, Reembarque/Reshipment Screening and Discussion

Washington University 2015 Powwow

of East Asian Languages and Cultures; Department of English; Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures; Department of History; International and Area Studies; Jewish, Islamic and Near Eastern Languages and Cultures; Legal Studies Program; Law, Identity, and Culture Initiative; and Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies

Sayed Kashua, Humor, Identity, and Other Secrets

October 13, 2014 Cosponsored by African and AfricanAmerican Studies; Center for the Humanities; Comparative Literature; Dean of Arts & Sciences; Dean of the College of Arts & Sciences; Film and Media Studies; Latin American Studies; Romance Languages and Literatures; Vice Provost Adrienne Davis; and Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies

December 4, 2014 Cosponsored by Jewish, Islamic and Near Eastern Languages and Cultures; A Year in Review 27

April 4, 2015

Patricia Williams, Love in the Time of Identity Wars September 30–October 2, 2014 Cosponsored by the Interdisciplinary Project in the Humanities; Assembly Series; Law, Identity and Culture Initiative; Office of the Provost; Center for the Humanities; and the School of Law Public Interest Law & Policy Speakers Series

FACULTY FELLOWS 2014–15 Zhao Ma Assistant Professor of Modern Chinese History & Culture in Arts & Sciences Seditious Talk in Revolutionary China during the Korean War Era: Beijing, 1950–53

What will your new book project cover?

I’m hoping to see how ordinary urban residents come to terms with a new political order [Communists had been in rule for barely two years] and a new foreign war [the Resist America Aid Korea Movement, aka, the Korean War]. Research in this area has been dominated by political and diplomatic history. I hope to bring a human voice to the larger narrative about the Korean War in China.

Who were these “rumormongers”?

They are from many different segments of society: factory workers, students and faculty, street peddlers, housewives in tenement neighborhoods, lower-level government employees.

What did they say?

They talk about the war from their own understanding and interest. There were complaints about the government fighting a war on foreign land that drained China of crucial resources and slowed the recovery at home; worries that the regional conflict could possibly spill over into a “Third World War”; fears that a military setback could instantly and irrevocably throw the country back into chaos; speculations on government censoring of the news; reluctance to embrace North Korea as an ally; and palpable pro-America sentiments, despite the consistent antiAmerican propaganda campaigns.

I have found myself learning to cope with new user policies and viewing restrictions. Some archival holdings, such as the entire records of the anti-rightist campaign, are closed to researchers.

My impression is that the whole history of 1950s China has become increasingly sensitive in Chinese academia. This period of time used to be celebrated as the golden age of the PRC [People’s Republic of China] — a time when the revolutionary state was able to mobilize popular support and rebuild China.

Why was this information collected? What are your sources?

The government sent out an army of propagandists into neighborhoods to solidify the home front. They were also there to watch and listen and report on their conversations. Back in their offices, they wrote detailed notes to the authorities about what was going on in their area — rumors, discussions, opinions.

The hope with these reports [for party officials’ eyes only] was to help government agencies come up with effective propaganda and mobilization strategies.

Tell us about researching these reports in the Beijing Municipal Archives.

But in recent years, with increased access to documents, we’ve begun to find the political witchhunt impulses and the whole system of political manipulation taking shape in this early period.

Given this sensitivity and political baggage, do you ever feel the need to censor yourself in your research and writing?

Quite the opposite. When people in China become nervous or silent about my topic, or any components of it, that triggers my interest. That’s when I know it’s something I should pay attention to.

Center for the Humanities 28

FACULTY RESEARCH

They were also an economic cooperative that pooled their resources. They were very conscious of hardworking American musicians who didn’t have anything to show for it. When the group moved to Paris in 1969, they became minor celebrities, but they did everything cooperatively. When they made money, they invested in new instruments or saved it, which allowed them to be more selective about their gigs. They subordinated their egos for the greater good.

Tell us about your research for the book.

I conducted archival research at Paris’ Bibliotèque nationale;

Paul Steinbeck

New York’s Institute of Jazz Studies at Rutgers and the New York

Assistant Professor of Music in Arts & Sciences

the Chicago History Museum, the Chicago Jazz Archive, and the

Public Library; and Chicago’s Center for Black Music Research, Art Ensemble’s own collection. It was sometimes challenging

Message to Our Folks: The Art Ensemble of Chicago,

to get interviews with group members, but I did get them. I

Improvisation and Great Black Music

went to Chicago, Paris, New York City to interview members, family, business contacts. Talking with them directly had a big

Briefly, what is the topic of the book you’re writing?

impact. When I’m listening to their performances or watching

It’s a history of the Art Ensemble of Chicago, one of the most

them on YouTube, I’m trying to figure out what’s going on —

significant African-American musical groups to emerge in

the improvising, the decision-making, the contingencies. But

the 1960s. There are a lot of ways to write a history; this one

hearing is always subjective. I don’t want to privilege mine.

combines historical inquiry with detailed analyses of the group’s

Having a conversation with them, listening to them muse on

performances, an interdisciplinary approach rarely employed in

what happened before or after the performance — I wouldn’t be

jazz studies and improvisation studies.

able to write a book like this without their insights.

What is the Art Ensemble? from Chicago’s Association for the Advancement of Creative

As a professional musician [Steinbeck plays acoustic bass], how do you think you might hear the group’s performances differently from others who may be examining them?

Musicians [AACM] in the late 1960s. They were an international

I have technical insight; I can identify technique and understand

phenomenon, an innovative, experimental jazz group that

the physical aspects of performing. It also helps that I improvise,

played hundreds of instruments from around the world,

and I know this particular scene after studying music with close

wore symbolic costumes and face paint, recited poetry and

colleagues of the Art Ensemble.

It’s a group of African-American musicians who emerged

performed theatrical sketches during their shows. You might call them an experimental music group or a performance art group.

Their motto was “Great Black Music — Ancient to the Future.”

A Year in Review 29

FACULTY FELLOWS 2014–15 Erin McGlothlin

How do you approach these representations differently as a literary scholar rather than a historian?

Associate Professor of German in Arts & Sciences Constructing the Mind of the Holocaust Perpetrator in Fictional and Documentary Discourse

Historians are interested in figuring out, for example, who Adolph Eichmann was and pinning down the precise reasons why he so zealously participated and even led the Nazis’ genocidal project. I’m more interested in what sorts of

Why do we need to look closely at Holocaust perpetrators?

When literary research has turned to depictions of

representations of him have circulated and how they function, especially for today’s readers and viewers. So, I’m not asking “Is this image of Eichmann accurate?” but rather “What does this

Nazi perpetrators, it has tended to view them as evil, incomprehensible Others. If we call them monsters and sadists, if we say they have no morals or ethical framework, then we can say that none of us would ever do that. That’s problematic.

After all, the Holocaust was a human event. Humans, with their complicated and ambivalent psychologies and moral beliefs, perpetrated it.

image of Eichmann say about our ideas of evil, of perpetrators, of the Holocaust, and how does it function in our contemporary memory of the Holocaust?”

Is it possible to portray perpetrators as human without seeming sympathetic?

In Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah, he interviewed several perpetrators, mostly with a hidden camera. In one of my

What are your sources?

chapters, I look at the interview of a man named Grassler, who

I’m looking at a number of texts and films [such as Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem, Edgar Hilsenrath’s The Nazi and the Barber and Gitta Sereny’s Into That Darkness] that look either at the consciousness of real-life perpetrators or create fictional perpetrators through which they explore these questions of consciousness.

was an administrator of the Warsaw Ghetto. You see him admit the Holocaust in the interview, but he claims that, at the time, he thought his mission was to keep people alive in the Warsaw Ghetto. But Nazi policy allowed and even encouraged a situation in which tens of thousands of the Jewish inhabitants died of disease and starvation; then, in 1942, most of the Warsaw Ghetto was shipped to the Treblinka death camp. You can see him struggling to try to integrate these incontrovertible facts into his life story and self-image. I’m interested in how this scene and others are played out. It’s agonizing. It’s not sympathy, but there are moments of recognition of that human dilemma.

What do you hope readers take away from your book?

When The Nazi and the Barber came out in English translation, 65 German publishers had turned it down. [The fictional firstperson narrative of a Nazi perpetrator was published in 1971.]

When some of these perpetrator representations have come out, the reaction has been, “We don’t want to deal with that.” I want readers to be able to delay their impulse to immediately reject these representations and have some tools with which to evaluate them. Some depictions of perpetrators are really reprehensible, but others teach us something. I want the reader to be able to make that distinction.

Center for the Humanities 30

FACULTY RESEARCH

Ignacio Sánchez Prado Associate Professor of Spanish and Latin American Studies in Arts & Sciences Networks of Strategic Cosmopolitanism: Mexican Anglophilia in the Transnational Literary Field

Please briefly summarize your project.

It’s part of a larger book I’m completing called Strategic Occidentalism, focused on the ways in which Mexican writers relate to Western literary tradition. Most global approaches to literature tend to speak with a very Eurocentric understanding of influence. Because of the inequalities in access to readers, depending on where you are located in the world, it is more likely that a Mexican writer will read a British writer than the other way around. However, this inequality tends to be hidden by the idea of having European writers as completely central to world tradition and Latin American writers as people who receive the influence. My book is trying to make a reading as to how Mexican writers read world literature. They do not consider the same things as canonical in British literature that, for example, a British person would. They do not replicate the types of literature that are being promoted from the center. They do not necessarily relate to the stuff that British or U.S. critics would like the world to read about their own traditions.

there is no such thing as world literature in general, applicable to every writer. In the work of each cosmopolitan writer, there

What makes this idea different, or what is the new contribution to your field?

is a notion of the world that is constructed in very traceable,

Mexican writers are usually understood in the way they write about “Mexican-ness.” But one of the points is to describe the ways in which the most influential fiction in Mexico works, which is not by talking about Mexico. Many major Mexican writers avoid writing about Mexican national identity — and this has been the case for decades. Many writers that become popular in the U.S. — think Isabel Allende, Roberto Bolaño or García Márquez — elicit exoticist interests in American readers, but they do not represent the full spectrum of Latin American fiction.

concrete, material ways. I’m looking at three Mexican writers and a literary movement to explain how it actually works.

What inspired this idea?

It’s something that you notice when you’re a foreign-born literature scholar in the U.S. You know what your Englishlanguage colleagues read and like and are interested in, and [in contrast] you know what your own country is interested in. The same thing happens with cinema: The movies that people are watching there are not the same ones that circulate in international festivals. Whenever you see Latin American cinema in those festivals, you see a story about an immigrant

I want to do something practical: Talk about how cosmopolitanism happens. I study things like translations that make certain authors available to certain writers — how do they circulate, where do they get published, what are they translating,

crossing the border or an indigenous person, someone usually conforming to stereotypes. But what Mexicans like to watch is romantic comedies about the upper class.

where have the writers actually been? I want to suggest that A Year in Review 31

FACULTY FELLOWS 2014–15 Corinna Treitel Associate Professor of History in Arts & Sciences Eating Nature: Food, Agriculture and Environment in Modern Germany

What does your book cover?

The book is an investigation of the many food and farming practices that have grown under the umbrella of “natural eating” since the early 19th century. Germans invested in eating a natural diet — for example, they pioneered early organic agriculture. Many German practices associated with eating naturally have now gone global.

What are some of the rules for “natural eating”?

“Natural” and “unnatural” are culturally constructed categories, and their meanings change over time. In the 1860s, Eduard Baltzer, a radical Protestant minister and German liberal,

One of the things that seems odd about German organic

invented this idea of natural eating. He lived in Nordhausen,

farming is its appeal to Nazi leaders. We associate organics with

a little town at the epicenter of Germany’s agricultural

promoting social justice, ending world hunger and so on. But

modernization. He worked with the city’s poor and saw the

it was the Nazis who first elevated organics to the level of state

effect this kind of food production was having on them: They

action. Several top Nazis ate almost exclusively organic food,

drank too much schnapps, ate too much meat and sugar. It was

and several, like Hitler, were mostly vegetarian. These eating

causing all kinds of social distress. People were spending over

practices have been very politically promiscuous, belonging to

half their income on food, leaving little for adequate housing or

both the left and the right.

medicine. Baltzer saw this kind of consumption as unnatural. He advocated for people to eat more naturally, by which he meant

What happens with this movement after World War II?

more frugally, mainly fruits and vegetables.

In communist East Germany, the remaining believers managed to incorporate some ideas into the state medical bureaucracy, making the natural diet the “health diet” of East Germany. In

How did their ideas spread?

One answer is that Germany had two terrible experiences

West Germany, former Nazis who had co-opted Life Reform

with hunger in the 20th century: in the First World War and in

regrouped, incubating and developing ideas about eating and

the Second World War. During those times, the German state

farming naturally until the environmental movement emerged

co-opted natural eating practices and used them to try to get

in the ’70s and changed the political orientation of eating

Germans to eat more efficiently.

naturally once again.

Another answer has to do with the epidemiological transition

Who have been the adherents to this diet?

from infectious to chronic diseases, from diseases like cholera

From the late 19th to mid 20th century, they tended to be

and smallpox to ones like diabetes, cancers and heart disorders.

laypeople: bourgeois and all over the map politically. During

As Germans developed these “diseases of modernity” in

the 1920s and afterward, people with medical degrees and PhDs

increasing numbers from 1900 onward, state and non-state

began to co-opt these ideas, especially in the Third Reich. But

actors began to think that eating more naturally might make

Life Reform had many other trajectories. For instance, there

sense as a national strategy for public health.

are organic farms in Israel that descend from some of these German groups.

Center for the Humanities 32

FACULTY RESEARCH

Robert Henke Professor of Drama and Comparative Literature in Arts & Sciences Transnational Networks in the Production of Early Modern Theater

In a few sentences, please describe your project.

The project, which I’m just beginning, is a systematic look at international connections between different national and regional theaters in the Renaissance. I’m looking at the ways in which actors, scripts, scenarios, plots, character types, gags and other things crossed geo-linguistic boundaries. It’s amazing how many books professedly devoted to “early modern theater” don’t get beyond England. But, in fact, as much as we love it now, the theater of Shakespeare was not well known outside of England, especially in the Romance-language-speaking countries. People in Italy and France didn’t know much about Shakespeare until the very end of the 17th century.

It’s fascinating to think about the Italian players getting around.

They had to understand about international travel from the

Who else was performing at the time?

There were several great Italian commedia dell’arte companies

beginning because Italy wasn’t a nation until the late 19th century.

who toured England, Spain, France, the German-speaking regions,

They had to go from, for example, the Republic of Venice to

the Netherlands and elsewhere and were known all over Europe.

the Duchy of Florence, where they would have been considered

Politically, Italy was suffering from foreign occupation in the late

foreigners, and they needed early versions of the passport to get

16th century, but culturally it was still very vital. In England, they

from one area to another. They could be stopped, questioned

looked to Italian Renaissance models as they constructed new

and even arrested. They were very canny artists of mobility. Very

forms of theater. A lot of things radiated from Italy.

quickly they went east and started traveling to German- and Czech-speaking regions. Then, they begin to travel a lot to France.

What was the commedia dell’arte and where did they perform?

The commedia dell’arte was the Italian professional theater of

I’m also interested in looking at court networks — how the players

the Renaissance period. They normally didn’t perform from

were invited all around Europe. There’s a wedding celebration, in

fixed scripts but improvised from a structured but flexible system

Paris in 1571, between the French king, Charles IX (a Valois) and

of plots, gags, situations and character types. They didn’t own a

his Austrian bride (a Hapsburg). It reflects the dynastic alliance

permanent building, like the Globe theater in London, but traveled

between those two families. The entertainments are hosted by an

between cities, both inside and outside of Italy.

Italian, Luigi Gonzaga, who happens to be living in France and serving as the Duke of Nevers. His brother is the Duke of Mantua in Italy. At this entertainment, there’s an English ambassador

What about their travels interests you?

I’m interested in where they went and how their voyages from

who sees the commedia dell’arte players. So, it’s a pretty dazzling

one place to another were facilitated materially: what roads and

international phenomenon. I don’t think it’s an accident that

waterways they took and what kinds of transport they used, such

immediately after that you start seeing commedia dell’arte players

as horses, mules or coaches. In northern Italy, for example, they

in England. These are the kinds of international networks that

took advantage of an intricate system of waterways in the Po

I’m examining.

Valley. Venice is at the origin of the commedia dell’arte, and the towns along the Po River in northern Italy were important places of performance.

A Year in Review 33

INTERNAL GRANTS Faculty Seminar Grants

Catherine Adcock | History

One- to three-year grants to tenured or tenure-track faculty to

“Cattle Wealth and Cow Protection: Dharma, Development

support seminars on a particular subject or theme. Groups meet

and the Secular State in India”

at least twice per semester, when participants and guests present and discuss informally their own work as it relates to the theme.

Marisa Bass | Art History and Archaeology “Encrypted Knowledge: The Art of Joris Hoefnagel in the

Eighteenth-Century Interdisciplinary Salon (2 years, renewal)

Wake of Dutch Revolt”

Memory and Violence (1 year, new)

Ann Margaret Baxley | Philosophy “Happiness and Its Value in Kant’s Ethics”

Wastelands (3 years, renewal)

Venus Bivar | History

Reading and Writing Group Grants

“Growth: A Promise for the 20th Century”

Grants to tenured or tenure-track faculty and to humanities

Pannill Camp | Performing Arts

graduate students to support reading and writing groups on a particular subject or theme.

“Arts of Brotherhood: 18th-Century French Freemasonry in Performance” Jennifer Kapczynski | Germanic Languages and Literatures

Reading Groups

“Armchair Warriors/Men of Action: Violence and the

Feminist Philosophy Reading Group (renewal)

Reconstruction of Masculinity in Postwar West

Religion and Literature (renewal)

German Cinema”

Medical Humanities (renewal)

Peter Kastor | History

Placing Space (new)

“Creating a Federal Government, 1789–1829”

Current Trends in Narrative Theory (renewal)

Diane Wei Lewis | Film and Media Studies “Beyond the Screen: Film, Theater and Intermediality in

Digital Approaches (new)

Prewar Japan”

Writing Groups

Paige McGinley | Performing Arts

The Ancient Mediterranean World (new)

“Rehearsing Civil Rights: Practicing the Law, 1934–1965”

Medieval Colloquium (new)

Erin McGlothlin | Germanic Languages and Literatures “Testifying to Treblinka in Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah”

“This group brings together early-career scholars from a range of disciplines with a shared interest in ancient Mediterranean cultures. By reading and responding to one another’s articles and book proposals in progress, we enhance our understanding of our colleagues’ approaches, enrich our perspectives on our own material and collectively improve our work as we prepare it for publication.”

— Karen Acton, Assistant Professor of Classics, on her new writing group, The Ancient Mediterranean World

Steven Miles | History “City Seasons: The Pulse of Urban Life in 19th-Century China” Amber Musser | Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies “Beyond the Feminine Mystique: Femininity and Its Objects” Ignacio Infante | Romance Language and Literatures “A Planetary Avant-Garde: Experimental Poetics and Transnational Literature Networks (1910–1936)” Paul Steinbeck | Music “Message for Our Folks: the Art Ensemble of Chicago,

Summer Faculty Research Grants Open to all assistant professors, associate professors and

Improvisation and Great Black Music”

professors; funded projects are intended to advance the field

Akiko Tsuchiya | Romance Languages and Literatures

of study in which it is proposed and make an original and

“Gender and Cultural Transfer in Carolina Coronado’s

significant contribution to knowledge.

Antislavery Writings” Center for the Humanities 34

FACULTY RESEARCH

Summer Research Seed Grants

Faculty Fellowships

Open to all tenured or tenure-track faculty in the humanities or

Faculty Fellowships provide support for research by junior

humanistic social sciences who will undertake the preparation

and senior Washington University humanities faculty, who

of a competitive, peer-reviewed, prestigious grant application

typically have fewer external opportunities for such support

during the summer with the goal of submitting an application

than their colleagues in non-humanities fields. Fellows spend

the following fall or spring.

a semester in residence at the Center for the Humanities, free from teaching and service obligations, working on their projects

Geoff Childs | Anthropology

and contributing to the intellectual life of the center. Please see

Alexandre Dubé | History

the preceding pages for an overview of this year’s fellows and their projects.

Adam Lambert | Psychology

Roland Grimm Travel Awards Open to all assistant professors, associate professors and professors; awards will fund research in Asia.

Diane Wei Lewis | Film and Media Studies “Beyond the Screen: Film, Theater and Intermediality in Prewar Japan” Steven Miles | History “City Seasons: The Pulse of Urban Life in 19th-Century China”

Maxwell C. Weiner Humanities Research Grants Funded by a bequest from Maxwell C. Weiner, the grants support tenured, full-time faculty in the humanities who do not currently receive an annual research fund in order to facilitate the pursuit of new research directions.

Andrew Brown | Romance Languages and Literature J. Dillon Brown | English Catherine Boon Cuillé | Romance Languages and Literature Ji-Eun Lee | East Asian Languages and Literature Stamos Metzidakis | Romance Languages and Literature Angela Miller | Art History and Archaeology Joseph Schraibman | Romance Languages and Literature Akiko Tsuchiya | Romance Languages and Literature Colette H. Winn | Romance Languages and Literature

A Year in Review 35

EXTERNAL GRANT SUPPORT September 5 & 12, 2014

The Center for the Humanities hosted programming in September 2014 for faculty interested in pursuing competitive external funding such as fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH).

Informational session

Participant survey responses

On Friday, September 5, the humanities center hosted an information session for more than 30 attendees. The morning

Information session

began with a presentation by Jean Allman, the J.H. Hexter Professor in the Humanities in the Department of History and

“Jean Allman’s comments on the sections and contents of a

director of the Center for the Humanities. With many years of

good proposal were very illuminating and even inspiring. They

experience as a reviewer for nationally competitive grant and

gave me an idea of the structure that I needed to implement,

fellowship programs — and as a recipient, including a 2015

and made me think of including things I would otherwise have

ACLS fellowship — Allman guided the group section by section

missed or forgotten.”

through a proposal’s structure and content.

“It was helpful hearing about the experience of applying as an Later, a multidisciplinary panel fielded questions from attendees

applicant and as a juror, about grants won and grants denied.

about their proposals. The panel featured Billy Acree (Romance

Knowing what’s within an applicant’s control and what isn’t

Languages and Literatures), who received a 2014 NEH

helps to focus energies in the most productive way.”

fellowship; Peter Kastor (History and American Culture Studies), who received a 2014 ACLS Digital Innovation fellowship; and Nancy Reynolds (History; Women, Gender and Sexuality

Proposal workshop

Studies; and Jewish, Islamic, and Near Eastern Languages

“I benefited from the very close scrutiny and productive

and Cultures), who received a 2014 Mellon New Directions

criticism directed at each proposal, as well as the chance to have

Fellowship.

the proposal read and critiqued by people outside my field. The criticism was tough and helpful but delivered in a supportive

Proposal workshop

way. The second round was really critical as well, and I would

Faculty who were preparing to submit an application to a major

not cut that. The two-part process was very effective.”

competitive program in fall 2014 or spring 2015 were invited to participate in a proposal workshop.

“I like the groupings, which at least in my case, seemed to draw together like theoretical approaches — it was a nice way to test

Split into three groups — led by Jean Allman (History, Center

the legibility of the project with like-minded colleagues not in

for the Humanities), Rebecca Copeland (East Asian Languages

my own field. I liked the attention to common problem areas

& Cultures) and Steve Miles (History) — the workshop

in proposals — weak phrases, for example, or undefined work

participants circulated their draft proposal in advance of their

plans — which I felt helped me think more generally about the

first meeting. On September 5, they met to give a critical

structure and content of any convincing proposal.”

reading of one another’s proposals and offer observations. On their second meeting, September 12, participants shared their revised proposals.

Center for the Humanities 36

GRANT-WRITING FAILURE, FEEDBACK AND SUCCESS Professor of Spanish Tabea Linhard, who spent her ACLS fellowship in Berlin and Mexico City, writes on her winding road to grant-writing success.

By Tabea Linhard

Associate Professor of Spanish in Arts & Sciences The idea that one should fail often and well has become a truism

in that version of my proposal was not an option. But when the

popular with commencement speakers, life coaches, and designers

ACLS deadline rolled around in the fall, I was able to prepare a

of bumper stickers and kitchen magnets. Like all clichés, the phrase

version that addressed all that I learned from my colleagues at the

is a bit overused and tired, yet it still resonates with my experience

workshop.

winning an ACLS fellowship in 2014.

By then, the 2013–14 academic year was underway, and in By spring 2013, I had submitted applications to both semester-

December I learned that, just like in previous years, I had failed

and year-long fellowship competitions about a dozen times, with

again to receive an NEH fellowship. Yet, the fact that the feedback

nothing to show for it but a solid 100 percent failure rate.

from the NEH panelists echoed the critiques I had received from colleagues in the grant-writing workshop was encouraging. I may

That same summer, I was fortunate enough to receive a Summer

have been unsuccessful in securing yet another grant, but at least

Research Seed Grant from the Center for the Humanities, which

now I was unsuccessful with a purpose. I finally received word

allowed me to cover the costs of a research trip and to spend

in March 2014 that my proposal had been selected for an ACLS

part of the summer preparing a research narrative. The work

Fellowship.

I conducted abroad and my writing process revealed two key aspects of the current state of my proposal: First, that one of its

I realize that I write this with the benefit of hindsight — I am not

parts simply did not fit well with the rest of it, and, second, that I

saying that the fellowship I eventually did receive was meant

had underestimated the richness of some of the materials I would

to be, much less that all my paths led to a successful proposal,

find. It became clear that my book project would require more

straightforwardly and without obstacles. When we submit a grant

substantial archival research.

application, we automatically accept that chance and luck (both good and bad) will be part of that process. Availing oneself of the

Participating in a grant-writing workshop at the Center for the

opportunities offered by the Center for the Humanities will not nullify

Humanities in August 2013 required me to complete a revised

those elements, though in my case I am certain that these steps

version of my research narrative. Unfortunately, the May NEH

improved my chances of eventually landing a grant. But that may not

fellowship deadline meant that incorporating workshop feedback

be a catchy phrase for a kitchen magnet.

A Year in Review 37

SCHOLARLY WRITING RETREAT May 19–29, 2015

F

or two weeks in late spring, the Center for the Humanities hosted Washington University’s second

annual scholarly writing retreat for faculty in the humanities. Modeled after the highly successful program at Lewis and Clark College in Portland, Ore., the retreat was designed by Erin McGlothlin, associate professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures, to help scholars get a jump-start on a productive, prolific summer break.

The first few weeks after Commencement can set the tone for the entire summer, McGlothlin says.

“During the semester, you’re so busy that you can lose track of your project. Then, summer comes and you’re hit with a double whammy: You’re exhausted and you’re staring at a blank page. It can be really easy to fall into a hole instead of stepping up to the research.”

Drawing on her experience in summer 2013 at the Lewis and Clark writing retreat, McGlothlin put together a workshop that could foster the kind of success she had there. (She revised a proposal for a book that was accepted

by Northwestern University Press.) “I left the retreat with the sense that I need to be conscious of my writing practice,”

Running mid through late May, the

Getting away from the home and work

retreat’s 36 attendees — from graduate

offices — places with a lot of potential

students to tenured faculty — met

distractions — is part of the draw of

in one of three designated rooms

open writing hours, McGlothlin says.

for companionship, inspiration and

“The humanities center offers neutral

productive writing. The daily schedule

space, away from temptations,” she says.

included solitary writing time, a short

“It also offers camaraderie: It’s social,

discussion on writing and planning, and

even if you’re not socializing.”

scheduled breaks.

“During the semester, you’re so

she says. “It doesn’t happen magically.

busy that you can lose track of your

Treating it like an exercise allows me to

project. Then, summer comes and

see the control I have over it. It doesn’t

you’re hit with a double whammy:

control me.”

You’re exhausted and you’re staring at a blank page. It can be really easy to fall into a hole instead of stepping up to the research.”

Center for the Humanities 38

Importantly, the retreat provided a rhythm to the summer, McGlothlin says. “I’ve been through this myself every year. … Leisure and work time get so mixed together, especially during summer. I figured that if I was feeling this way, maybe others were, too.”

Socializing with a community of writers

FACULTY RESEARCHStructured time Writing in the same room with others

15 15

Organization of retreat Work spaces in Umrath and in the Graduate Center

14

Discussions about writing

POST-RETREAT SURVEY RESPONSES

12

Snacks

Dates of retreat

0

What did you hope to accomplish?

What did you hope to accomplish?

Put in place productive writing Put in place productive writing habits for the summer habits for the summer Learn about useful and sustainable Learn about usefulwriting and sustainable strategies writing strategies Work on a dissertation chapter Work on a dissertation chapter Book chapter Book chapter Article Article Begin or continue a new project Begin or continue a new project Finish a project Finish a project

3 3

0 0

5 5 5 5

13 13

8 8

5 5

10

Did the retreat meet your expectations?

10 10 7 7

5

11

Yes No

10 10

15 15

What were the strongest or most helpful aspects of the retreat?

What were the strongest or most helpful aspects of the retreat?

Socializing with a community of writers Socializing with a community of writers Structured time Structured time Writing in the same room with others Writing in the same room with others Organization of retreat Organization of retreat Work spaces in Umrath and in the Graduate Center Work spaces in Umrath and in the Graduate Center Discussions about writing Discussions about writing Snacks Snacks Dates of retreat Dates of retreat

11 11 0 0

Why participate?

5 5

12 12

10 10

14 14

15 15 15 15

17 17

15 15

19 19 19 19

20 20

Did the retreat meet your expectations?

Did the retreat meet your expectations?

“I wanted to get into a good writing routine for the summer. Yes

“The most unexpected element was getting to meet and

Have been struggling with writing and was looking for

talk to other faculty in other humanistic disciplines. I wish

Yes No No

we could have more opportunities to meet and work with

support and advice from colleagues.”

other departments.”

“I had a very positive experience last summer, and so I came back this summer. I hope the retreat continues! It provides

“I’m so happy to have participated this year — I got so much

such a productive and supportive environment! I love it!”

writing done with so little pain and drama!”

A Year in Review 39

15

MERLE KLING FELLOWSHIPS T

he Merle Kling Undergraduate Honors Fellowship Program, which began in 2003 as a

collaboration between the Center for the Humanities and the College of Arts & Sciences, moved fully into the Center for the Humanities in 2014. Kling Fellows work with faculty mentors on individual research projects in the humanities or humanistic social sciences, and they sponsor an annual lecture series. They meet at the Center for the Humanities in a weekly three-credit seminar where they present their research, workshop drafts and get insights into the academic life from the center’s faculty and graduate student fellows. Once per semester, they take a short field trip off campus to one (or more) of St. Louis’ many great public humanities sites.

Our first fully humanities centerbased Kling Fellowship senior cohort graduated in May 2015 with an impressively interdisciplinary series of majors and minors: anthropology; comparative literature; economics; French; German; history; Japanese; philosophy-neuroscience-psychology; physics; political science; Spanish; and women, gender and sexuality studies.

Their research projects were equally varied. Chelsea Bhajan analyzed widespread ambivalence about the Trinidadian leisure activity of liming, or “doing nothing well,” and the difficulties it raises for Trinidadians seeking to fit into a faster-paced Western cultural norm. Marie Draper explored the

ways in which language and gender expectations reinforce each other in the undergraduate physics classroom.

Lily Jacobi shared stories from Nigerian women trafficked into prostitution in Copenhagen and discussed how their narratives problematize the binary of agency and victimhood. Gyoonho Kong examined the ways in which theories of translation are challenged by the experimental work of an early 20th-century Korean poet, Yi Sang. Áine O’Connor argued that the ritualized violence of Northern Ireland’s “marching season” reinforces ethnoreligious identity claims in ways that its government is unable or unwilling to recognize. Last but not least, Sonya Schoenberger looked back at the bitter end of the Philippine-American War, with accusations of brutality, torture and “savagery” on both sides that reveal the ways in which legal frameworks were (and are) used to justify extralegal acts.

Center for the Humanities 40

“I got feedback from people who really spoke to how their disciplines are organized; getting that angle and that lens are really important, and made my project better in a lot of ways.”

– Marie Draper, Class of 2015 “I feel really thrilled that I was able to participate in this program. It was a really foundational component of my undergraduate experience.”

– Lily Jacobi, Class of 2015 “It was an unparalleled opportunity.

Nobody I know in other schools has had anything like this, and people are always amazed when they hear I had two opportunities for research in undergrad, and one of them was literally self-made.”

– Áine O’Connor, Class of 2015

STUDENT EDUCATION

CHILDREN’S STUDIES I

n May 2007, the humanities center’s minor in children’s studies graduated its first student;

in May 2015, 18 children’s studies

Children’s Studies Minor Graduates

minors graduated with varied majors: American culture studies, psychology,

(including anticipated December 2015)

chemistry and urban studies. During the 2014–15 academic year, our minors

25

also studied abroad for children’s studies credit, performed research in a variety of labs and other programs around campus, volunteered in nearby schools and children’s hospitals, and participated enthusiastically in children’s studies lectures and other campus events such as the Children’s Film Showcase. Enrollment in the gateway

20 15 10 5

Interdisciplinary Introduction to Children’s Studies course continued to rise, topping out at 47 in fall 2014, and as of August 2015, 42 undergraduates have

0 ’07

’08

’09

’10

’11

’12

’13

’14

’15

declared in children’s studies.

Founding children’s studies minor director Gerald Early was joined this year by a new codirector, psychology

The research community in children’s

award-winning historian of the Civil War

professor Desiree White, who also heads

studies sponsored two public lectures

(Civil War America, Sing Not War, Texas

the Human Behavioral Assessment Unit

this past year. Vanessa Sasson of

Divided) and of American childhood

of the Washington University Intellectual

Marianopolis College, who recently

(The Children’s Civil War, Children for the

and Developmental Disabilities Research

edited a volume on Little Buddhas:

Union), reflected on the intersection

Center. Professors Early and White have

Children and Childhood in Buddhist Texts

between his two fields in a talk titled

recruited a faculty advisory board for

and Translations, spoke on “Ascetics Who

“Everything I Know About the Civil War

children’s studies that includes scholars

Love Their Children: Remembering

I Learned from Studying the Histories of

from across Arts & Sciences as well as the

Relationships in Buddhist Studies.” James

Children and Youth.”

schools of medicine, law and social work.

Marten of Marquette University, an

A Year in Review 41

NEW

MEDICAL HUMANITIES MINOR

Illustration by Monica Duwel

Center for the Humanities 42

STUDENT EDUCATION

I

n spring 2015, the curriculum governing body for Arts & Sciences approved a new minor in the medical humanities. Incubated and housed in the Center for the Humanities, the program is designed to explore issues of health, disease and medical care as core human experiences, and to examine those experiences with insights and critical methods drawn from literature, philosophy, history and the

arts. With this approach, the program of study is designed to provide a solid grounding in the textual-historical approach essential to all humanities scholarship.

The cofounders of the minor, Rebecca Messbarger, professor of Italian, and Corinna Treitel, professor of history, both have a substantial research and teaching interest in the medical humanities. Messbarger’s most recent book, The Lady Anatomist: The Life and Work of Anna Morandi Manzolini, is a biography of an acclaimed anatomical sculptor of the Enlightenment. Treitel (also featured as a faculty fellow on page 32) is author of

Medical Humanities at a Glance •

Germany, a scientific powerhouse in the 19th and 20th centuries, also hosted one of the Western world’s most vibrant and influential occult movements. With the new minor,

•

•

after the student’s third semester

with a set of tightly related “big” topics and issues. These include the contested

at Washington University

meanings of health and disease; the ethical dimensions of medicine; illness narratives; building; the relationship between religion and medicine; exchange and friction between biomedicine and other healing traditions; and the burden of disease as it relates to gender, race and class.

Students must apply for admission to the minor, which can take place

The minor combines disciplinary diversity with thematic unity to engage students

debates over health and development; the role of medicine in war, empire and nation

Available to undergraduates beginning with the Class of 2018

they bring together as an academic community faculty who have long been teaching and researching in the medical humanities, from the liberal arts to the medical school.

Housed in the Center for the Humanities

A Science for the Soul: Occultism and the Genesis of the German Modern, which questions why

•

Requires 18 units of study

•

Draws in courses in art history, classics, history, languages and literature, music, philosophy, and

For the minor’s first two years, students must apply to declare the minor; this may take

gender and sexuality studies

place after their third semester of study at Washington University. In this way, faculty directors may create a mix of students with differing intellectual agendas — some headed for a career in practicing some type of health care, others continuing in their

•

Founded by Arts & Sciences professors Rebecca Messbarger

humanities study.

(Italian) and Corinna Treitel (History)

Medical humanities aspires to instill values shared by all humanities disciplines: to appreciate multiple worlds and viewpoints, to communicate clearly and gracefully, and to read and think critically. Students emerge from the minor able to apply the insights and critical methods of literature, philosophy, history and the arts to subjects often left solely to the natural and social sciences. Its goal is to demonstrate the enduring relevance of humanistic inquiry to understanding a basic realm of human experience.

A Year in Review 43

•

Advisory committee members are scholars of the humanities, social sciences, history of medicine and medical humanities

GRADUATE STUDENT FELLOWS FALL 2014

SPRING 2015

Noah Cohan | Department of English and

Courtney Andree | Department of English

American Culture Studies Program

“Disabling Modernity: Disability and Sexuality

“‘We Average Unbeautiful Watchers’: Reflexive Fans

in British Literature, Film and Culture, 1880–1939”

and the Readerly Stakes of American Sports Narratives”

Sara Jay | Department of History Margaret Dobbins | Department of English

“Lyrics and Recipes: The Somatic Experiences of

“Queer Accounts: Stories of Economic Change in the

Algerian Jewish Life in France and Israel after 1967”

Victorian Novel”

Jennifer Westrick | Department of History En Li | Department of History

“In the Blood: Breeding Vice and Virtue in Early

“Betting on Empire: A Socio-Cultural History

Modern Britain”

of Gambling in Late-Qing China” Center for the Humanities 44

STUDENT EDUCATION

The fellowship allowed me to … … complete a draft of the whole dissertation, present a chapter and have a practice conference talk, attend many intriguing events on and off campus, get to know what other graduate student and faculty fellows are working on, obtain advice from excellent mentors on my project and career path in formal and informal settings, and enjoy LOTS of good food.

— En Li

The most unexpected thing about my fellowship … … has been how my thinking about my role in the university has shifted. My fellowship at the center has not only benefited my research but also helped me professionalize as a scholareducator in the humanities.

— Margaret Dobbins

I would recommend this fellowship to graduate students who …

My favorite thing about my fellowship … … was connecting with graduate students and faculty members in other fields. The writing process can be isolating and insular at times, so I welcomed the opportunity to learn from and respond to other fellows’ research.

— Courtney Andree

… are invested in using multidisciplinary methods.

— Noah Cohan

I would recommend this fellowship to graduate students who …

My favorite thing about my fellowship … … has been the mental and physical space in which to think and to write. Focus can be hard to come by, and the center is an ideal place in which to find it. I’ve been calling this the magic office.

— Jennifer Westrick

A Year in Review 45

… want a lively, supportive and educating environment to combat the ennui of dissertation writing and remember what they value about the humanities as they complete their graduate research.

— Margaret Dobbins

GIVING

OPPORTUNITIES Help us continue and expand our work! The Center for the Humanities asks for your support in promoting the humanities at Washington University and beyond. As much as ever, the humanistic perspective is necessary in solving today’s complex problems and in imagining a better tomorrow.

Annual Gifts

To Give to the Center for the Humanities, contact

Direct your annual Washington University gift to the Center for

Director and Professor Jean Allman (314-935-9599 or

the Humanities to support ongoing programs such as the James

jallman@wustl.edu) or Associate Director of Development

E. McLeod Memorial Lecture on Higher Education, the Faculty

Julianne Smutz (314-935-5148 or jsmutz@wustl.edu).

Book Celebration, publication of the Humanities Broadsheet or

Make a Gift Online

our Scholarly Writing Retreat.

To make a secure online gift or to make payment on an existing Annual gifts of $100 or more qualify for the Century Club level,

pledge, go to our giving page at gifts.wustl.edu. To designate

and annual gifts of $1,000 or more earn membership in the

your gift, type “Center for the Humanities” in the special

Eliot Society. Any amount is welcome.

designation box.

Endowment Gifts

Make a Gift by Phone

Endowment gifts are invaluable to the strength, quality and

Call toll-free: (866) 645-6448. Washington University accepts

success of Washington University and the Center for the

Visa®, MasterCard®, Discover® and American Express®.

Humanities. Endowed fellowships — for undergraduate

Please be sure to provide the card number, expiration date and

research fellows, graduate and postdoctoral fellows and faculty

name as it appears on the card.

fellows — endowed academic and research programs, and endowed facility funds together provide critical permanent support for our faculty’s teaching and research and our students’ educational experience.

Make a Gift or Pledge by Mail To mail your gift, include an explanation of the purpose for your gift, your credit card payment or check payable to Washington University. Please mail to Campus Box 1082, One

Endowed gifts begin at the $50,000 level for lectures and

Brookings Drive, St. Louis, MO 63130.

$100,000 for endowed fellowships.

Center for the Humanities 46

GIVING OPPORTUNITIES

A Year in Review 47

CENTER FOR THE HUMANITIES

ADMINISTRATIVE STAFF Jean Allman

Kathleen G. Fields

Director, Center for the Humanities

Publications and Communications Editor

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

Rebecca Wanzo Associate Director, Center for the Humanities Associate Professor, Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies

Wendy Love Anderson Academic Coordinator

Kathy Jessen-Pierson Accounting and Grant Specialist

Barbara Liebmann Administrative and Program Assistant

Tila Neguse Coordinator, The Divided City Initiative

Contact details Center for the Humanities Washington University in St. Louis Campus Box 1071 One Brookings Drive St. Louis, MO 63130-4899 (314) 935-5576 art-sci.cenhum@email.artsci.wustl.edu cenhum.artsci.wustl.edu Umrath Hall, Room 217

Center for the Humanities 48

“Within multilingual societies, maintaining the languages of ethnic and cultural groups is critical for the preservation of cultural heritage and identity.”

— Mohammad Warsi, Senior Lecturer in South Asian Languages, in his essay “Holding on to the Mother Tongue” for The Hindu

“Much of poetry is indirect.

There might be a literal meaning but also, underneath, a secondary meaning. It’s that

— John Bowen, the Dunbar-Van Cleve Professor in Anthropology, in his essay “Three Reasons France Became a Target for Jihad” in Time magazine

ambiguity — Does it mean what it says, or does it mean what it suggests? — that’s how poetry

“But the main impact may be to use the [Charlie Hebdo] attacks as an excuse to blame Islam and immigration for broad anxieties about where things are going in Europe today. Such a confusion can only strengthen the far right.”

“Moral anxiety is something we should learn to feel at the right times and in the right ways … This anxiety reflects something admirable about you: a sensitivity to the complexity of moral life.”

— Charlie Kurth, Assistant Professor of Philosophy, in his essay “Worried Well” in Aeon Magazine

works.”

“Challenging racism requires more than just changing

— Mary Jo Bang, Professor of English, in “Writers Define Poetry’s Role in Today’s Society” on St. Louis on the Air

the actions of individual

“Phonograph preachers saw themselves as competing with the likes of Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith. They saw themselves as ‘descending’ into the marketplace as a way to combat what they saw as an evil influence of the market upon Christians.”

— Lerone Martin, Assistant Professor of Religion and Politics, in

political agents, like those at the center of the events in Ferguson. It requires thinking creatively about institutional redesign and building political coalitions aimed at changing the laws and the policies that play a critical role in sustaining racial inequality.”

— Clarissa Rile Hayward, Associate Professor of Political Science, in

“African-American Clergy Became Celebrities ‘Preaching on Wax’”

her essay “After Ferguson” in the

in Faith & Leadership

Washington Post A Year in Review 49

indicia to come

Center for the Humanities Campus Box 1071 One Brookings Drive St. Louis, MO 63130-4899

Center for the Humanities 50