A Year in Review 2015-16 - WashU Center for the Humanities

// A YEAR IN REVIEW // 15–16

COVER IMAGE: The Mi’raj, or The Night Flight of Muhammad on his Steed Buraq, folio from a Bustan of Sa`di, illustrated by Sultan Muhammad Nur (c. 1525). Christiane Gruber, keynote speaker for the Faculty Book Celebration and an associate professor of the history of art at the University of Michigan, discussed a number of paintings of the Prophet Muhammad produced in Persian and Turkish lands from the 14th century to the modern day (see p. 22).

(Photo courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, metmuseum.org)

TABLE OF CONTENTS

06 02

A Letter from the Director

04

Human Ties: Stories in the Humanities

04

Saving Astronaut Damon (with Disco): The Martian as War Movie Music scholar Todd Decker finds the thread that ties Matt Damon’s The Martian (2015) to the “leave no man behind” genre of war movies, much like Damon’s Saving Private Ryan (1998). This time, however, music directs the audience away from the military resonances. Indeed, he says, disco saves the day.

06

Happy Birthday, Frankenstein!

With more than 40 big-screen appearances and the ubiquity of terms such as “Frankenfoods,” Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus clearly hits a cultural nerve. Historian Corinna Treitel weighs in on the newest cinematic representation, Victor Frankenstein, and describes the lasting legacy of Frankenstein’s monster.

8

A Merciless Macbeth Director Justin Kurzel’s 2015 adaptation of Macbeth hews closely to the original Shakespearean script but for a few brutal twists, writes Jami Ake, senior lecturer in the Interdisciplinary Project in the Humanities. The film, she says, is at once more human and more inhumane.

12 10

Beasts of No Nation and the Politics of Ambiguity Netflix’s Beasts of No Nation portrays the horrific civil wars that took place in Liberia and Sierra Leone — but it was filmed in Ghana, a country that doesn’t even border those war-torn lands.

A scholar of Ghana, historian Jean Allman wonders, Does place matter? And what are the consequences of perpetuating ambiguity about the African continent?

12

The Divided City Initiative

31 31

Melancholy and the Musician: An Ethnographic Study of Classical Turkish Performers Classical musicians of the golden age of the Ottoman Empire continue to influence modernday musical artists. Ethnomusicologist Denise Gill foregrounds the performers themselves in her study of melancholy in Turkish classical music.

32

Seasons in the City: Tracing the Pace of 19th-Century China

28

Seasonal flooding in China’s urban areas along its waterways is an ancient expectation. China scholar Steven Miles tracks the impact of cyclical events such as wet-season floods and dry-season fires on urban dwellers of the 19th century.

29

33

Meet the Nuns of the 17th-Century Spanish New World (Or, Dark Drama in the Nunnery)

What Makes a Democrat? Staging Political Transformation in 1950s West German Film

Only the church of the convent of Jesús María in Mexico City remains, but tales of the former inhabitants within drew Spanish literature scholar Stephanie Kirk to Sigüenza y Góngora’s 1684 Western Paradise. When complete, her translation will give the nuns a new audience.

German film scholar Jennifer Kapczynski finds a reflection of West Germany’s postwar project of democratization in the films of the era. Her bookin-progress, The Subject of Democracy: 1950s West Germany and the Politics of Film, explores the state’s evolving ideologies.

30

34

18

Events & Outreach Faculty Fellowships

The Cunning of Brahmanism: Invisibility Has Its Privileges

Faculty Research

Historian and scholar of India Shefali Chandra tracks the past 100 years of India’s history to unravel the intertwined nature of privileged racial regimes. Matrimonial advertisements play an unexpected role in revealing new and shifting relations between caste and race.

Student Education

Center for the Humanities 1

40 46

Giving Opportunities

A LETTER FROM THE DIRECTOR

As I browse through the back pages of my calendar, I’m overwhelmed by what a busy and rewarding year the center has had. Many of the highlights of that year you will find in these pages.

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation– funded Divided City Initiative had a

Jean Allman

Director, Center for the Humanities 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

particularly robust second year. At the core of the initiative is the partnership between the Center for the Humanities and the College of Architecture and Graduate School of Architecture & Urban Design, which is exploring — via research, curriculum development and community engagement — urban segregation and inequality, locally and globally.

In October, we were honored to host the leadership of the Mellon Foundation, along with representatives from all of the institutions currently supported by its Architecture, Urbanism and the Humanities (AUH) initiative. This second AUH Omnium provided an opportunity for us to showcase the interdisciplinary work of faculty involved in the Divided City, as well as to introduce colleagues from across the globe to the many challenges a racially and economically divided city like St. Louis faces.

In many ways, the omnium launched us into a year of activity focused on the Divided City: several outstanding presentations in the City Seminar series; our faculty’s central role in the Voices & Visions of St. Louis: Past, Present, Future conference hosted by the Graduate School of Design at Harvard; and our very first Summer City Seminar in late May. The rich collaborations between humanities scholars, architects and urban designers continued right through the summer with the Alberti Program: Architecture for Young People and with the study tour of 12 master’s students

A Year in Review 2

HUMAN TIES

We continue to support the very important humanities work flourishing at Washington University. In the coming year and in partnership with our Office of Public Affairs, we hope to develop new ways of foregrounding that innovative work locally, nationally and globally. in urban design, led by Professor

the annual Faculty Book Celebration,

John Hoal, to Accra, Ghana. Thanks to

we continue to support the very

the participation of history graduate

important humanities work flourishing

students Taylor Desloge and Waseem-

at Washington University. In the coming

Ahmed Bin-Kasim, both summer

year and in partnership with our Office

activities foregrounded the humanities

of Public Affairs, we hope to develop new

in understanding architecture and

ways of foregrounding that innovative

urbanism.

work locally, nationally and globally.

In many ways, the themes of segregation

Stay tuned!

obtaining funding for their research, including two ACLS Fellowships and one Guggenheim Fellowship. We closed out the academic year with a First Book Proposal Workshop, modeled on the grant-proposal-writing workshop. We will be eager, in the coming months, to learn what impact these new efforts have had.

The humanities center’s undergraduate programs had a particularly lively year. The medical humanities minor was rolled out, with its first intake of students, and the children’s studies minor continued to move from strength to strength, expanding its numbers and its activities. Meanwhile, the Kling Undergraduate Honors Fellows have become increasingly involved with the intellectual and social life of the center, and we are all the richer for their energy and engagement. In the coming year, we will have 13 Kling Fellows in

and inequality that we have been

Meanwhile, a new development on the

residence, one of our largest cohorts

exploring through the Divided

fellowship front was the hosting of our

in recent years.

City animated other aspects of our

inaugural First Book Fellow. Through

programming throughout 2015–16. Of

this program, Assistant Professor Denise

particular note was this year’s James E.

Gill (Music) was able to invite two

McLeod Memorial Lecture on Higher

national experts and two local experts

Education, given by Rebecca Ginsburg

to the humanities center to workshop

(University of Illinois, Education Justice

her book manuscript over the course of

Project), “Why Universities Should Be

a full day of open seminars and private

in Prisons,” and our contribution to the

meetings. It was an intense and, we

Missouri Humanities Festival, “Arts in

hope, productive set of engagements

Struggle,” which featured the work and

that will enhance Professor Gill’s first

reflections of artist-activists who have

monograph. The center will host four

been at the center of struggles for racial

First Book Fellows in 2016–17.

justice in our community.

As we close out the academic year, I want to extend my thanks to Dean Barbara Schaal and Provost Holden Thorp for their support of the center’s many activities, including the Divided City Initiative. Most importantly, I owe a debt of personal gratitude to the center’s A-Team — Barbara Liebmann, Kathy Daniel, Kathleen Fields, Rebecca Wanzo, Tila Neguse and Wendy Love Anderson.

Any successes the center has enjoyed this year were possible only because of

This academic year we bookended our

their hard work, good humor, patience,

Alongside our work with the Divided

programming with two workshops —

diplomacy and expertise.

City, we have, of course, had a calendar

one at the start of the fall semester and

full of events, which focused more

one at the close of the spring semester.

broadly on the humanities and on

I am delighted to report that our fall

faculty, post-docs, graduate students and

grant-proposal workshop attracted

undergraduates. Through our fellowship

an enthusiastic and engaged group of

programs, reading groups, research

faculty and that an impressive number

grants and sponsored events, including

of our participants were successful in Center for the Humanities 3

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

SAVING ASTRONAUT DAMON (WITH DISCO): THE MARTIAN AS WAR MOVIE Todd Decker

Chair, Department of Music Professor of Musicology

Bring Him Home.

Leave No Man Behind.

This Time the Mission Is a Man. Three movie taglines, each promising the same plot.

The first belongs to the hit film The Martian, the tale of an American astronaut stranded on Mars, his heroic effort to survive and NASA’s no-costspared effort to rescue him. The Martian stars Matt Damon and was directed by Ridley Scott.

The tagline “Leave No Man Behind” comes from the 2001 film Black Hawk Down, also directed by Ridley Scott.

Black Hawk Down tells the true story of the 1993 U.S. military presence in Somalia, which came to grief on the streets of Mogadishu in a mission gone wrong that left 18 elite American soldiers dead. The film’s plot turns on getting all the American soldiers — living and dead — back to base.

A Year in Review 4

HUMAN TIES

HOW DOES THE MARTIAN FINESSE THIS FANTASY OF THE U.S. AND — INDEED — MARS?

T

The poster tagline “This Time the

is lodged deeply in American military

up a radioactive fuel source — and

Mission Is a Man” hails from the 1998

culture and easily capitalized on by

to point the audience away from the

film Saving Private Ryan. Director Steven

blockbuster Hollywood filmmakers —

military resonances of the story. In the

Spielberg’s combat film follows a small

the dictum that no soldier will be left

process, The Martian hijacks the utopian

group of soldiers sent to find and

behind on the battlefield. In the military

energy of disco to reimagine the nation

remove from danger the last surviving

studies journal Armed Forces and Society,

as a place where scientific problems —

brother of an Iowa farm family. As in

scholar Leonard Wong locates the

standing in for political and military

The Martian, the man who needs to be

origins of the U.S. policy “leave no one

problems — are solved by tireless

brought home is played by Matt Damon.

behind” in the Vietnam War, when, as a

hard work, brilliant improvisation and

helicopter pilot Wong interviews notes,

amazing technology.

Put in this context, The Martian can be seen as a war movie, set in the (frigid Martian) desert where the enemy — the absence of breathable atmosphere — is all around. Elite, supremely competent scientists working for a nonmilitary government agency — many in uniform — play the role of soldiers.

The Martian presents the projection of benign American scientific power into a genuinely empty space, a realm with no human history, just waiting to be subdued by American ingenuity and technology. The ostensibly realistic The Martian is a case of non-realitybased movie-making offered to the

if a man was lost, the official attitude was, “Okay, we’re going to stop the war and get this guy back, and then we’ll resume.” These words nicely sum up The Martian. Wong rightly questions the “rational sense” of a military ethic that demands soldiers’ bodies always be recovered. But Hollywood loves this story — see, as well, the 2013 film Lone Survivor — which allows for the easy sidestepping of the “what are we doing here in the first place?” question: a question as easily applied to space exploration as to military adventures overseas on this planet.

Hollywood audience at a moment

How does The Martian finesse this fantasy

of national exhaustion with overseas

of the U.S. and — indeed — Mars?

adventure, when actual wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, both supposedly concluded, linger on as intractable

In part, disco saves the day. Damon finds himself alone on Mars with nothing to

messes.

listen to but a playlist of 1970s dance

The fundamental story values of The

means of misdirection, to keep the

Martian rely on a notion that by now

overall tone of the film light — Damon

tunes. The Martian needs disco as a

dances a bit to “Hot Stuff” after digging

Center for the Humanities 5

In its time, disco was a music of liberation — specifically, gay liberation as acted out in a newly open public sphere for gay men, who through the end of the 1960s could be arrested for dancing together in public.

The Martian

borrows disco’s liberating, optimistic beat to imagine the U.S. beyond the present general quagmire, finding an all-too-easy renewal of a shared national project to reach for the stars (or just bring home a stranded soldier of science) in the voice of Gloria Gaynor, whose “I Will Survive” plays — hopefully if nonsensically — over the end titles.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, FRANKENSTEIN! Corinna Treitel

Associate Professor of History Cofounder, Medical Humanities Minor

Frankenstein will soon turn 200. Mary

for racial otherness. In the 20th century,

No surprise, then, that 20th Century

Shelley’s novel, first published in 1818,

the novel inspired movies such as

Fox has brought us Victor Frankenstein,

tells the story of Victor Frankenstein

Frankenstein (1931), which gave the

featuring Frankenstein as a medical

and his dream of using science to help

scientist an assistant and turned the

student in London and Igor as a circus

humanity. A student of chemistry,

creature into a monster, and Blackenstein

hunchback he rescues and cures.

Frankenstein withdraws from family and

(1973), which refashioned the story for

Together, they build and then kill a

friends to uncover the secrets of life and

African-American audiences.

short-lived creature made of animal

death and eventually succeeds in making a creature from dismembered corpses.

After Frankenstein flees in horror, the creature is left to make its own way in the world. The novel’s drama lies less with the act of reanimating dead bodies and more with the creature’s attempts

Today, new technologies of life often provoke Frankenstein talk. The 1990s brought us “Frankenfoods” and “Frankenfarms.” In May 2015, when Chinese scientists used CRISPR-Cas9 technology to alter human embryos,

parts. Even when Igor refuses to go further, Frankenstein vows to make a creature of human parts. I will not tell you the ending, except to say that love and friendship carry the day. It’s Hollywood, after all.

the ensuing debate contained generous

But the film contributes little to the

emotional bond with its creator.

doses of Frankenstein, with scientists

party Frankenstein’s bicentennial

using CRISPR-Cas9 unwittingly

deserves. Most important, the movie

As both metaphor and myth,

echoing Frankenstein’s justification

has gutted the novel of its dark and

Frankenstein burst the bounds of the

to help humanity and critics invoking

dynamic soul. Shelley accomplished

novel long ago. In the 19th century,

Frankenstein to call for a research

the making of the creature in just four

the creature figured widely in coded

moratorium. Clearly, Frankenstein

chapters, then devoted the rest of

discussions about slavery and abolition,

still matters.

the book (24 chapters plus ancillary

to join human society and forge an

and it has remained a potent metaphor

A Year in Review 6

HUMAN TIES

WANT TO CELEBRATE FRANKENSTEIN’S BIRTHDAY? SKIP THE MOVIE. READ THE NOVEL. IT WILL MAKE YOU THINK. AND THINK AGAIN.

material) to exploring what happened

just like Victor Frankenstein, and the

confrontations. “You purpose to kill

after the creature came to life. The

questions it made me ask concerned

me. How dare you sport thus with life?

movie, in contrast, ignores the crucial

the vexed relations of science and

Do your duty towards me, and I will

after-story and instead spends two

society. Should scientists dare to alter

do mine towards you and the rest of

hours reimagining the creation story in

living matter? I knew, of course, that the

mankind.” I was and remain riveted by

terms of toxic psychodynamics in the

question was moot: They dare; they do.

the voice and pathos that Mary Shelley

Frankenstein family, an unconvincing

But more questions followed. How do

gave a living being who was created

face-off between religion and science,

we do such research ethically? What are

by and from humans yet whose every

and the saving power of male friendship.

our responsibilities to the organisms

effort to join the human community was

Victor Frankenstein may entertain, but it

produced? Who should be involved in

foiled by humans themselves.

does not make you think.

asking and answering such questions?

Shelley’s novel, in contrast, does both.

I read the novel as a cautionary tale

birthday? Skip the movie. Read the

The novel’s longevity turns on its ability

about why the research imperative

novel. It will make you think. And

to ask big questions while refusing to

might go awry — Frankenstein’s willful

think again.

answer them definitively. Add to that its

turn away from the social bonds of

ability to provoke different questions in

family and friendship in the moment

different readers and you have a novel

of creation, the selfish passions driving

that deserves a very big party.

his research, his inability to become

My first experience of the novel came when I was a student of chemistry,

a parent to the creature he has made.

“You, my creator, detest and spurn me,” the creature cries in one of their many Center for the Humanities 7

Want to celebrate Frankenstein’s

A MERCILESS MACBETH Jami Ake

Senior Lecturer, Interdisciplinary Project in the Humanities Assistant Dean, College of Arts & Sciences Even with few deviations from the

mere harbingers or active instigators

Jacobean script, Justin Kurzel’s latest

of Macbeth’s tragic fate, Kurzel locates

film adaptation of Shakespeare’s

the logic of the play’s action firmly

Macbeth features a protagonist even

within the human realm. Whereas

more tyrannical and cruel than does

Shakespeare’s play famously opens

the bloody original, constructing the

with a conspiratorial gathering of

familiar tragic plot with an intensity

witches anticipating (or is it scripting?)

that tests our own cinematically

the action yet to come, Kurzel’s film

muted consciences.

opens with a distinctly human ritual:

In spite of both the appetites of present-day film audiences for all creatures supernatural or magical and the early modern obsession with witchcraft that surrounded the play’s first productions, Kurzel’s film seems much less interested in supernatural sources of evil than with thoroughly human ones. While Shakespearean critics continue to disagree about whether Shakespeare’s witches are

A Year in Review 8

the funeral of the Macbeths’ infant child, a scene nowhere in the original play. The witches, who seem more like itinerant mystics than the strange, bearded women Banquo questions in Shakespeare’s version, walk into the scene through the Scottish mist with their cryptic greetings and equivocal prophecies, but they are neither particularly malevolent nor especially otherworldly.

HUMAN TIES

I

n depicting Macbeth’s relentlessly

Unfortunately, the scene also becomes

As he concludes his film, Kurzel

cruel violations of nature,

a turning point for Macbeth’s tragic

adds an extra layer to Shakespeare’s

generation and time itself, Kurzel

intelligibility in a way that begins

already symmetrical plot structure.

both exposes us to violence

to threaten Kurzel’s larger narrative

Shakespeare’s Macbeth begins as it ends,

Shakespeare never dramatized

purposes. If part of the continuing

with the death of a traitorous Thane

and intensifies the violence we do

appeal of Macbeth as a tragic figure is

of Cawdor, a symmetry that might

witness in the original.

his profound struggle with conscience

suggest an inevitably repeating cycle of

— his keen awareness of the soul-

aspiration and violence. Kurzel’s film

killing consequences of homicide

begins and ends with a child — the

and his ultimate determination to kill

first about to be buried after an all-too-

nonetheless — the extraordinarily

brief life, and the second, Banquo’s son

cruel deaths of the MacDuff family

Fleance, carefully extracting Macbeth’s

make it difficult for the film’s audience

sword from his dead body before

to reinvest in the ongoing drama of

escaping unnoticed into a thick mist

Macbeth wrestling with his own mind,

ominously forming under a blood-red

including his deep concern about losing

sky. It is difficult to tell whether Kurzel

his conscience and the specifically

wanted to offer us a glimpse of hope in

human emotions that accompany it.

Fleance’s furtive exit or whether the boy,

To be sure, Kurzel takes his cue from Shakespeare that we see for ourselves the murder of innocents — and innocence — in the slaying of MacDuff’s wife and children. Shakespeare’s Macbeth sends murderers to perform the slaughter in a pathos-filled scene that features the death of MacDuff’s young son as he futilely attempts to protect his mother. In the moment where the film’s protagonist finally moves beyond all redemption, Macbeth himself lights the

Perhaps because no one in the film

fire that burns MacDuff’s wife and all of

seems to possess the capacity for

his “pretty ones” at the stake. Hardly a

pleasure, let alone joy, Kurzel’s film

cowardly act orchestrated out of public

misses an opportunity to investigate

view, this execution becomes the most

the complexity and depth of the

gruesome of Macbeth’s vicious killings

relationship between Macbeth and Lady

of other people’s children.

Macbeth — a marriage that is arguably one of the best in a Shakespearean canon full of precarious and questionable matches. The film — and many productions eager to showcase the emergence of madness over the loss of intimacy — sidesteps the importance of their emotional and intellectual compatibility. Their relationship seems nothing but perverse for most of the film, as when we witness the couple having sex on the altar of the village church while Lady Macbeth scripts out her regicidal plot.

Center for the Humanities 9

haunted by the murderousness that has orphaned him and bloodied Scotland, will meet the witches on the heath as he grips the sword of the tyrant.

SHAKESPEARE’S MACBETH BEGINS AS IT ENDS, WITH THE DEATH OF A TRAITOROUS THANE OF CAWDOR, A SYMMETRY THAT MIGHT SUGGEST AN INEVITABLY REPEATING CYCLE OF ASPIRATION AND VIOLENCE.

R

ecently, I attended a chocolate tasting at a chichi Chicago chocolatier. For my tastes, there was too much lecturing about the artisanal process and not enough sampling, but it was an OK way to spend an afternoon.

That is, until the owner mentioned that she does not feature any chocolate that is crafted from cocoa grown in West Africa because it is all produced by child slaves.

As I have spent decades in one of the most thriving cocoa-producing areas in West Africa (Ghana’s forest zone), my curiosity was more than piqued.

Rural kids in most parts of the world participate in agricultural labor. And certainly cocoa production has had a huge impact on family farming, but child slavery? Where, exactly?

Everywhere, she said. But, where, exactly? Everywhere in West Africa, except Madagascar, an island off the west coast, she said: “That’s why we feature chocolate that originates in Madagascar

BEASTS OF NO NATION AND THE POLITICS OF AMBIGUITY

but not Congo or Ghana.”

Never mind that Madagascar is off the east, not the west, coast. And never mind that the Democratic Republic of the Congo is around 2,000 miles southeast of Ghana. For this chocolatier, it’s all the same: “terrible.” Yes, it’s terrible … that business decisions can be (mis)informed by such ignorance.

Jean Allman

What does this encounter have to do with the release of Netflix’s first original

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

feature-length film? More than you might think, especially if what you are thinking about is place and audience.

A Year in Review 10

HUMAN TIES

Based on Uzodinma Iweala’s acclaimed

Certainly, the big issues tackled in

first novel, Beasts of No Nation tells the

Beasts of No Nation transcend borders

story of 12-year-old Agu, who lives in an

and cross time: What kinds of violence

unnamed West African nation ravaged

are we each capable of? When and

by civil war. When forces approach

how do humans become beasts? These

Agu’s hometown, women and children

are universal questions, posed by

evacuate, but Agu remains with his older

humanities scholars every day.

brother and his father — both of whom are murdered before his eyes when government troops attack. Agu flees into the forest but is eventually captured by a rebel army, made up mostly of boys, led by the omnipotent “Commandant.” The film follows Agu’s transformation from joking brother, loving son and playful schoolboy into a disciplined child soldier capable of hacking victims to death or shooting them at pointblank range.

I came to Beasts of No Nation skeptical as to how a film might capture the decadelong horror that unfolded in Liberia and Sierra Leone during the 1990s. But writer-director Cary Joji Fukunaga has done an outstanding job, not least in bringing to the screen the internal war waged in the heart and soul of young Agu. Fukunaga keeps the worst of

At the same time, the story is rooted in the real histories of social and political conflict in Liberia and Sierra Leone — conflicts that tore the subregion apart and from which it has yet to recover. We learn nothing of that history, nothing of the devastation left in their wake.

Does it matter that this is a film about Liberia and Sierra Leone, shot in Ghana, with much of the early dialogue in Twi, a language spoken neither in Liberia nor Sierra Leone? Does it matter that it remains logistically difficult, if not impossible, to film in either of those countries, but that Ghana, for a specific set of historical reasons, has the infrastructure in place?

Perhaps in some ways, it doesn’t. But in others, I fear it does.

the violence off screen, although that

By embracing the ambiguity of place

doesn’t make the watching any easier.

that features in Iweala’s novel, Beasts of

Actor Idris Elba’s Commandant is a sadistic abuser, but he is also capable of a disconcerting paternal tenderness toward Agu. First-time actor Abraham Attah, who was discovered on a Ghanaian soccer pitch, gives a stunning performance as Agu. Indeed, most of Beasts of No Nation was shot in Ghana (much of it in and around one of

No Nation does little to challenge the widespread ignorance in this country of Africa’s basic geography and may only reinforce some of the worst stereotypes of the African continent as vast and generalizable, with all of the countries easily interchangeable: the Africa, in other words, of my chocolatier’s haunting fantasy.

Ghana’s oldest cocoa-producing areas), and many of the actors are Ghanaian.

Center for the Humanities 11

BEASTS OF NO NATION DOES LITTLE TO CHALLENGE THE WIDESPREAD IGNORANCE IN THIS COUNTRY OF AFRICA’S BASIC GEOGRAPHY.

AN URBAN HUMANITIES INITIATIVE The Divided City, launched in fall 2014, is an urban humanities initiative in partnership with the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and Washington University’s Center for the Humanities and Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts. Find more at thedividedcity.wustl.edu. Primary investigators: Jean Allman, the J.H. Hexter Professor in the Humanities and humanities center director, and Bruce Lindsey, the E. Desmond Lee Professor for Community Collaboration and dean of the College of Architecture and Graduate School of Architecture & Urban Design.

W

hile a case can be made that segregation has been a

feature of urban life since ancient times, segregation increasingly became a mechanism for dividing and

managing urban space along lines of color and economic privilege

or, better, through the mutually constitutive forces of race and class. The Divided City is stark and unyielding in its contrasts, but how do its inhabitants experience urban life, make meaning, defy their boundaries? How have formal design strategies facilitated, supported, challenged or problematized the Divided City?

These questions are at the foundation of the Divided City: An Urban Humanities Initiative, a four-year multipronged research, education, archival and community project that combines the disciplinary strengths of scholars and professionals in the

A Year in Review 12

DIVIDED CITY

humanities, architecture and urban design.

Over a five-day period, students

Through their collaborative efforts, and

explored the “urban life” of the city

with funding from the Andrew W. Mellon

and investigated the manner in which

Foundation and Washington University,

the City of Rotterdam has made the

the project is developing and expanding

revitalization and programming of

accessible resources for scholarly research

its public spaces a central strategy

series. The City Seminar was founded in

locally (St. Louis) and globally.

The components of the Divided City Initiative include support for 1) faculty and curriculum development, 2) archival projects and 3) school and community outreach. An update on the second year of the project follows, with special emphasis on new program developments.

in its continued prominence as a

across disciplines and from colleges and

students had the opportunity to visit a

universities throughout the St. Louis area

number of architectural, urbanism and

could share ideas, research methods,

landscape firms, and key contemporary

theories and topics on urban issues in the

public spaces, buildings and landscapes.

United States and abroad. The City Seminar

The students were introduced to the structure and working methods of the public space/public life methodology.

“There is great overlap between architecture, urban design and

Program: Architecture for Young People

the humanities when content

is devoting three summers to the core

and purpose are examined.

program is a problem-solving studio and the environment run by the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts.

several talks in the City Seminar lecture

major global city. During the stay, the

Starting in summer 2016, the Alberti

workshop about architecture, community

This year, the Divided City cosponsored

2007 as a forum through which scholars

ALBERTI PROGRAM

themes of the Divided City. The Alberti

CITY SEMINAR

All three fields question how humanity interacts, whether it be through literal space and place, cultural interactions or

has been especially effective in bringing architecture, urban design and humanities scholars into regular dialogue.

“At the Risk of Seeming Ridiculous: Recasting ‘Black Lives Matter’ in the Contemporary Popular Imagination” GARRETT ALBERT DUNCAN Associate Professor, Education and African and African-American Studies, Washington University

invented meetings in imagined

“The Metamorphic City: Eco-urbanism

spaces. A week with architects and

and Quality of Life in Post-industrial

Public School District engage in 2-D and

architecture students provided

Cities”

3-D hands-on problem-solving, use the

me with a fresh and practical

CATALINA FREIXAS Assistant Professor of Architecture, Washington University

Fourth- through 11th-grade students from schools including the St. Louis

libraries and computer labs on campus,

perspective toward architecture

and learn about creative thinking through

and urban design that I will

lectures, discussions and reviews about

now be able to apply to my own

design projects. This summer, program

studies. Public space and urban

leader Gay Lorberbaum, senior lecturer

design are especially relevant to

in architecture, was joined by graduate history student Taylor Desloge to incorporate the humanities perspective into the Alberti curriculum.

PUBLIC LIFE SURVEY

my interests in representations in French literature of government buildings built for marginalized

“Urbanization: Towards a New Conceptual Cartography” NEIL BRENNER Professor of Urban Theory and Director, Urban Theory Lab, Graduate School of Design, Harvard University

and impoverished sectors of French society. Although this

“Creating the Lung Block: Racial

workshop took place in the

Transition and the Making of the

sponsored a humanities graduate student

Netherlands, I gained a more

‘New Public Health’ in a St. Louis

from Romance Languages and Literature,

in-depth understanding of what

Damarias Moore, to participate in the Sam

makes buildings and public space

In March 2016, the Divided City

Fox School’s Masterclass in Urbanism,

functional for residents.”

Architecture and Landscape, “The Lively

Damarias Moore,

City: Behavioral Studies & Public Space

Graduate Student in French

Design” in Rotterdam and Amsterdam in the Netherlands.

Center for the Humanities 13

Neighborhood, 1907–40” TAYLOR DESLOGE Harvey Fellow in American Culture Studies and PhD Candidate in Urban History, Washington University

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.

CITIZEN SPACE

composition, culminating in a best-practice document and an agenda for action that will enable communities to artificially reproduce similar conditions.

MEAN STREETS ROBERT HANSMAN, Associate Professor, Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts, Washington University in St. Louis BRIAN WOODMAN, Film and Media Curator, Special Collections, Washington University Libraries

CLIFF FROEHLICH, Executive Director, Cinema St. Louis MELANIE ADAMS, Managing Director

BRAD SHORT, Associate University Librarian for Collections, Washington University Developing an inventory of archival materials related to the history of music and racial segregation in St. Louis from Washington University and Missouri History Museum collections.

MAPPING LGBTQ ST. LOUIS ANDREA FRIEDMAN, Associate Professor, History and Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies, Washington University

MAKIBA FOSTER, Curator of Oral History and Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies Librarian, Washington University Libraries

for Community Education and Events, Missouri History Museum

SHARON SMITH, Curator of Civic and

Organizing and hosting a film series during the 2016 St. Louis International Film Festival that features both narrative and documentary works addressing racial division and urban space.

CHRIS GORDON, Director, Library and Collections, Missouri History Museum

MEMORIALIZING DISPLACEMENT JEAN ALLMAN, the J.H. Hexter Professor in the Humanities, and Director, Center for the Humanities, Washington University

ANDREW HURLEY, Professor of History,

Personal Identity, Missouri History Museum

AARON ADDISON, Director of Scholarly Services, Washington University Libraries JENNIFER MOORE, GIS and Data Projects Manager and Anthropology Librarian, Washington University Libraries STEVEN BRAWLEY, St. Louis LGBT History

EVE BLAU, Adjunct Professor of the History

University of Missouri–St. Louis

Project

and Theory of Urban Form and Design, Graduate School of Design, Harvard University

MELANIE ADAMS, Managing Director

IAN DARNELL, PhD Candidate, University of Illinois, Chicago, and St. Louis LGBT History Project

HEATHER WOOFTER, Professor of Architecture, Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts, Washington University in St. Louis

for Community Education and Events, Missouri History Museum

KATHERINE VAN ALLEN, Managing Director

ROBERT HANSMAN, Associate Professor, Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts, Washington University in St. Louis

MICHAEL ALLEN, Lecturer, American Culture Studies, Washington University, and Director and Architectural Historian, Preservation Research Office Examining the role of government influence on the formation and division of public spaces in St. Louis’ north side, including a seminar at Washington University followed by a publication analyzing contemporary and historical perspectives.

INCLUSION AND NEIGHBORHOOD RESILIENCE

for Museum Services, Missouri History Museum

MARIS GILETTE, the Des Lee Professor of Museum and Community History Studies, and Director, Museum Studies Graduate Program, University of Missouri–St. Louis Organizing and hosting a two-day transnational workshop on “Memorializing Displacement” in fall 2016. Museum professionals and scholars from the United States and South Africa will consider interpretive strategies that can be applied to the story of forced African-American displacement in St. Louis.

MUSIC AND SEGREGATION

CATALINA FREIXAS, Assistant Professor, Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts, Washington University in St. Louis

PATRICK BURKE, Associate Professor of Music, Washington University

MARK ABBOTT, Professor of History,

Missouri History Museum

ANGELA DIETZ, Director of Digital Initiatives,

Director of Center for Neighborhood Development, Harris-Stowe State University

EMILY JAYCOX, Librarian, Missouri History

Evaluating the long-term sustainability of stable neighborhoods in post-industrial cities from the vantage point of design, policy, economics and social

Humanities Digital Workshop, Washington University

Museum

DOUGLAS KNOX, Assistant Director,

A Year in Review 14

Using GIS mapping to visually document historically queer spaces in St. Louis. The final product will be an interactive map available to the public via a digital portal on the Washington University Library website, allowing broad audience access to this information.

TALE OF TWO CITIES, PT. 2 DENISE WARD-BROWN, Associate Professor of Art, Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts, Washington University in St. Louis

HELEN HEADRICK, Educational Opportunities Coordinator, Associate Producer, Higher Education Channel Television (HEC-TV) Bringing together multidisciplinary students enrolled in the Washington University course “Tale of Two Cities: Documenting Our Divides” (fall 2016) to engage with local community organizations and create videos that use street events, meetings and interviews to capture the immediacy of the current historical moment.

DIVIDED CITY

YOU’RE PARTICULARLY FOCUSED ON COLLECTING ORAL HISTORIES FROM SELF-IDENTIFIED ACTIVISTS. WHY EMPHASIZE THAT PERSPECTIVE? Part of what we’re doing is trying to account for voices on the edges. One mantra of Black Lives Matter is that it’s all about the issues, not about whoever the media determines is “the voice

UPDATE: ORAL HISTORIES OF FERGUSON (AWARDED APRIL 2015)

Collaborators: Jeffrey McCune, associate professor of women, gender and sexuality studies and of performing arts; Clarissa Hayward, associate professor of political science; and Meredith Evans, former associate university librarian (now director, Jimmy Carter Presidential Library and Museum)

of the movement.” We want to carve out space to explore how activists — who might not be among the known players — go about doing what they do.

HOW DOES THIS PROJECT BRIDGE THE DIVIDE BETWEEN PURSUING ACADEMIC VS. ACTIVIST WORK? I see this project as an opportunity for the community to teach us and for us to collaborate with the community. These histories provide tremendous opportunities to explore the intersection of history, culture, gender, sexuality, race,

Collaborators McCune and Hayward have been a regular presence in Ferguson, Mo., collecting oral histories from the protesters, activists and community members who spilled into the public square following the shooting death of Michael Brown. Below, we excerpt an interview McCune gave last fall on Ferguson protesters and their Divided City project.

anthropology, sociology and American studies. We want to

WHAT WERE THOSE EARLY DAYS LIKE?

reinvigorate their passions.

In some ways, the clergy vigil on the day after was emblematic of the movement. You had old-school civil-rights prayer warriors joining together to talk about peace and reconciliation.

And you had young people in the middle of the street

make sure they’re not just contained within our individual silos.

Much of this material will be freely available to the public.

Years from now, these archives will help people look back and make sense of their experiences, to regenerate themselves and

IN BROAD STROKES, WHAT SORTS OF QUESTIONS ARE YOU ASKING? First, we want folks to narrate their beginnings in the movement. How did you get started? What was the impetus?

saying, “[expletive] the police, justice for Michael Brown.”

It was a different energy. I see the Ferguson movement as a conversation between those two perspectives.

How did you come to understand yourself as an activist?

The second layer is thinking through experiences. Many

HOW DOES THIS GENERATION OF ACTIVISTS DIFFER FROM EARLIER GENERATIONS? Partly, it’s technology. Folks get revved up because they have more access to more details more quickly than we did historically. There’s a sense of immediacy to what’s going on

folks have participated in multiple — if not hundreds — of demonstrations. Many have been incarcerated or subjected, like myself, to tear gas and other things. So, what was that experience like? What did you see? What did you feel? Who was there with you?

and an immediacy to the reaction.

FINALLY, WHERE DO YOU SEE THE MOVEMENT GOING?

Ferguson is interesting because, at base, we had a very

The Ferguson movement is one of the most efficient, efficacious

multicultural coalition. The history of anti-blackness within this country was taken up by white, brown and black, Asian and Latino, gay and lesbian.… It’s a heterogeneous movement that announces itself as such.

and powerful America has seen. But it’s messy and complicated.

Everybody is committed, but everybody doesn’t always get along. I’m hopeful that as we gather more narratives, we’ll be able to see the movement in all its heterogeneous complexity.

Center for the Humanities 15

MELLON FOUNDATION ARCHITECTURE, URBANISM AND THE HUMANITIES OMNIUM OCTOBER 28–30 The Divided City Initiative team hosted the Mellon Foundation’s Architecture, Urbanism and the Humanities Omnium. The omnium focused on segregation in the city as a growing and complex problem.

O

ver the course of three days,

Ferguson. They visited a number of

scholars from institutions

significant areas in the region whose

participating in the Andrew W. Mellon

complementary histories illustrate the

Foundation’s Architecture, Urbanism

divisions and racial injustice that the

• Canadian Centre for Architecture

and the Humanities funding program

region still struggles with.

• Columbia University

presented a series of lectures and engaged in interactive discussions about their work in architecture, urbanism and the humanities. The Mellon Foundation has made more than $25 million in grants to institutions engaging in multidisciplinary research programs that can generate new insights into changing urban conditions, as well as curricula that will prepare students to tackle the urban problems of the future.

The initiative supports projects that bring together humanists, architects and

Washington University’s Divided City Initiative grantees participated in a panel discussion, moderated by primary investigators Jean Allman and Bruce Lindsey, about their projects.

Later, Mellon investigators who also explore urban divisions introduced

PARTICIPATING INSTITUTIONS

• Cornell University • Harvard University • London School of Economics • Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity (Göttingen, Germany) • New York Botanical Garden

their projects, including Matthew Biro,

• New York University

University of Michigan (Detroit); Dana

• Princeton University

Cuff, UCLA (Los Angeles); Bruno M.

• University of California, Berkeley

Carvalho, Princeton (Rio de Janeiro,

• University of California,

Brazil); and Noëleen Murray, University

Los Angeles

social scientists around urban questions.

of the Witwatersrand ( Johannesburg,

• University of California, San Diego

South Africa). Roundtable discussions

Highlights of the gathering included

focused on new pedagogies, new

• University of Michigan

a bus tour — led by Robert Hansman,

research and public outreach.

associate professor of architecture — that told the story of the complexities of St. Louis, uncovering the racial, sociocultural and political context of St. Louis city and county, including

Both Chancellor Mark S. Wrighton of Washington University and Earl Lewis, president of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, addressed the omnium.

A Year in Review 16

• University of Pennsylvania • University of Washington • University of the Witwatersrand (Johannesburg, South Africa) • Washington University in St. Louis

DIVIDED CITY

SUMMER CITY SEMINAR

AFFILIATIONS OF THE 30 PARTICIPANTS:

MAY 24–26 In partnership with the City Seminar faculty organizers, the Divided City team hosted an intensive three-day, skill-sharing workshop for scholars and professionals in the humanities, architecture, urban design and community advocacy.

L

ate spring 2016 saw the inaugural

Pittsburgh and associate fellow with the

Summer City Seminar, an expanded

Yale Ethnography Project, led an Urban

version of the yearlong City Seminar

Ethnography Workshop. Geospatial

lecture series, with an emphasis on

Resources Librarian Andy Rutkowski,

skill-building. This year’s theme,

from the University of California,

Understanding the Divided City, Urban

Los Angeles, offered a workshop on

Methods, focused on methodologies to

geographical information systems (GIS),

approach the issue of urban segregation.

mapping and communities. And Dan

In interactive, method-focused

Kerr, associate professor and director

workshops led by experts, participants

of American University’s public history

examined the Divided City through

program, led an Oral History Workshop.

urban ethnography, oral history and public records (real estate, census, legal documents).

On the final day of the seminar, Kevin McGruder, assistant professor in the Department of History at Antioch

The seminar began with an optional

College and an expert in community

tour of the Greater St. Louis area led by

development, joined Thomas

Robert Hansman, associate professor of

Harvey, executive director of Arch

architecture, that highlighted significant

City Defenders, a nonprofit provider

locations in the history of the region’s

of holistic legal advocacy, to lead a

struggle with racial division and

workshop titled “Using Real Estate

injustice. Rev. Starsky Wilson, president

Records to Track Segregation Practices.”

and CEO of Deaconess Foundation and

They provided an overview of public

co-chair of the Ferguson Commission,

real estate records, which can provide

gave the opening-night keynote address.

a wealth of information on residential

On the second day of the seminar, three workshops were offered. Waverly Duck, assistant professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of

segregation practices, and sometimes even the intent of the buyers and sellers, when used in conjunction with census, local newspaper and other records.

Center for the Humanities 17

• African and African-American Studies program, Arts & Sciences, Washington University • ArchCity Defenders • Archives Department, St. Louis City Recorder of Deeds Office • American Culture Studies program, Arts & Sciences, Washington University • Brown School, Washington University • Department of History, Arts & Sciences, Washington University • Department of Political Science, Arts & Sciences, Washington University • Department of Sociology, Arts & Sciences, Washington University • Department of Surgery, Division of Public Health Sciences, Washington University • Department of Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies, Arts & Sciences, Washington University • Department of History, College of Arts & Sciences, Harris-Stowe State University • Film and Media Archive, Special Collections, Washington University Libraries • Graduate School of Arts & Sciences, Washington University • Landscape Architecture Program, School of Architecture, Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts • Missouri Wonk • School of Architecture, Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts, Washington University • Urban Design Program, School of Architecture, Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts, Washington University • Washington University Libraries

INSTRUCTORS, STUDENTS FIND PURPOSE IN THE PRISON CLASSROOM SEPTEMBER 24 Rebecca Ginsburg, director of the Education Justice Project (EJP), a college-in-prison program based at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, gave the annual James E. McLeod Memorial Lecture on Higher Education, “Why Universities Should be in Prisons.” EJP offers for-credit courses and other educational activities to men incarcerated in a medium-security state prison. Below, Maggie Garb, a professor of history at Washington University and an instructor in its Prison Education Program at Missouri Eastern Correctional Center in Pacific, Mo., interviews her longtime colleague.

ON HOW REBECCA GINSBURG GOT INVOLVED IN PRISON EDUCATION I started teaching in prison while a graduate student (in architectural history) at UC–Berkeley. I became part

Events & Outreach A Year in Review 18

of the San Quentin program — now known as the Prison University Program — around 1997. I’d thought I’d do it for a semester but found it more meaningful and fun than I had expected. So, I stuck with it. When I moved to Illinois in 2004 (after a two-year post-doc at Washington University), I came with the intention of starting a program here. [In summer 2008, Ginsburg, along with several colleagues from University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign launched the Education and Justice Project at Danville prison. Since then, more than 190 incarcerated men have earned college credits through EJP courses.]

EVENTS & OUTREACH

ON THE RESTORATIVE IMPACT OF EDUCATION FOR INCARCERATED INDIVIDUALS One of the conditions of incarceration is being told, in effect, that you are not needed. “Society doesn’t want you.

You’re not of use to us.” How painful.

Through these programs, EJP students are able to recover the sense of joy and purpose that comes from working with others in pursuit of meaningful action.

That’s something that humans need to be their best selves — the opportunity to know that they’re making a difference in the world. It’s one reason our students will fight so hard to be able to participate.

ON EJP’S APPROACH AND PROGRAMS

tutoring several nights a week; a

places] college doesn’t count as a job.

computer lab; all-student meetings;

We have students who study in the

and each semester the students host

middle of the night because that’s when

a convocation at which they welcome

they have the time or who have to skip

incoming students and instructors.

showers or phone calls to attend college.

On the outside, we run several programs under our Family and Community Engagement (FACE) initiative. They include monthly meetings for alumni in Chicago and open houses in Chicago for family members of incarcerated and formerly incarcerated men, which have become a resource fair and networking opportunity. We’re also developing a reentry manual [with alumni help] for the state, with special focus on Chicago.

We’ve also developed workshops by EJP members, alumni and family

EJP aims to create a college at the

for (primarily) family members on

prison. Why? Because research seems

topics such as writing to your loved

to demonstrate — and our own

one in prison, preparing for re-entry

experiences tell us — that it’s not simply

and advocating for your loved one in

acquisition of “book knowledge” that’s

prison. We also want to provide public-

responsible for a successful college

speaking training to the alumni and

experience. It’s also the ability to spend

family members, who are also invited

time with people who, like you, are

to speak about the collateral costs of

interested in ideas, books, inquiry and

incarceration.

scholarship. Participating in a cohort of dreams is one thing that gives people

ON THE DRAWBACKS OF COLLEGE-INPRISON PROGRAMS

who attend advantages over those who

I don’t think there are drawbacks to

are unable to do that. We’re at the prison

college education for incarcerated

Monday through Friday, morning

individuals, but there are costs. The

through evening.

costs include being singled out by

individuals supportive of you and your

We offer writing, math, science and business courses; a mindfulness discussion group; an ESL program (we train our students as peer ESL instructors, and they teach men in the general population); Chicago Anti-Violence Education (we train our students as peer facilitators, and

correctional officers (COs) who may resent that they’re getting a free quality education. And the COs have a point: Everyone in our country who’s eligible for college should have access. But the costs for our students might be being hassled and made the focus of unwanted attention.

I hate that we’re asking them to make such choices and respect them so much for choosing their education.

ON THE REWARDS OF TEACHING IN A PRISON EDUCATION PROGRAM One reason that we have so many people offering to work with us is that they recognize that our system of incarceration is a huge blight upon our nation, and it requires that decent people step forward and work for change. I see our work as contributing to meaningful social change, in at least a few ways: •

Equipping our students to communicate their perspectives on incarceration and related matters and providing the forums for them to be heard.

•

Promoting critical discussion of criminal justice and incarceration on campus and in the community.

•

Pushing other state agencies for more humane recognition of incarcerated individuals and the needs of their family members.

ON HIGHER EDUCATION’S POTENTIAL TO CREATE CHANGE I think the power of higher education in prison programs lies in our capacity to contribute to a shift in thinking around our current situation — most especially the outrageous numbers of incarcerated and the outrageous expenses associated with imprisonment. That’s what universities do well, and it’s what brings

they work with the general population

Another cost is that prison isn’t set up

on a trauma-informed anti-violence

for college. Many of our students still

education); a guest lecture series;

have to work during the day — [in most Center for the Humanities 19

so many to EJP.

FACULTY BOOK CELEBRATION

CATHERINE KEANE, ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF CLASSICS JUVENAL AND THE SATIRIC EMOTIONS (OXFORD, 2015) The verse Satires of Juvenal (early 2nd century CE) have been

FEBRUARY 11

admired, discussed and imitated since late antiquity. With their

The publication of a monograph is a milestone in the career of

treasury of moralistic quips (“bread and circuses,” “pray for a

an academic. The Center for the Humanities commemorates this

sound mind in a sound body,” “who will guard the guards?”)

achievement annually during the Faculty Book Celebration. The event

and their portrayal of imperial Rome as a dog-eat-dog world

recognizes Washington University faculty from across the Danforth

exhibiting constant norm-violation and corruption, they

campus by displaying their recently published works and inviting two

have inspired authors and intrigued scholars. In the late 20th

campus authors and a guest lecturer to speak in a public setting.

century, Juvenal became the poster boy for the theory of satire as a kind of rhetorical performance, for this trained declaimer seems to move between the roles of indignant moralist, amused spectator and dry cynic with consistent skill. In this “persona theory,” emotions are viewed as the satirist’s rhetorical tool: He is a performer of emotions, aiming to entertain a likeminded audience.

But emotions also play a dynamic role in the narrative content of Juvenal’s poetry. The programmatic first Satire declares that “whatever people do — their prayers, fears, anger, pleasures, joys, diversions — is fodder for my little book.” This defines satiric subject matter in terms of its noisy and varied affective content and represents the satirist as feeding on it. Juvenal’s subsequent account of the Roman and human experience highlights how emotions are generated, how they function and interact, and how they can be manipulated. The Satires therefore complement the Greco-Roman philosophical, rhetorical and narrative works that show us how those cultures experienced and thought about emotion.

Juvenal may declare that “our tender hearts are Nature’s gift to the human race,” but he recognizes the role of culture, tradition and politics in the origins and valuation of emotions. The topics other ancient writers on the emotions “think with” are also Juvenal’s signature topics: domestic relations, social competition, political life, and incidents in history and myth. Some Satires narrate various conditions for anger, from shifting power dynamics in marriage to the humiliations of the patronage system. Other poems marshal tales of politics and emperors to show how society or the state can forcibly script public emotions. Meanwhile, by claiming the emotions as satire’s territory, Juvenal implicates his own genre in these complex dynamics. Satire offers not emotional relief, but engagement: When it is not testing its audience’s tolerance for indignation, it is provoking discomfort by juxtaposing vignettes of human disaster with carefree laughter (as in the misleadingly jolly 10th Satire). With these experiments, Juvenal did not just change and expand his genre, but helped shape its critical reception.

A Year in Review 20

EVENTS & OUTREACH

ZHAO MA, ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF MODERN CHINESE HISTORY AND CULTURE RUNAWAY WIVES, URBAN CRIMES, AND SURVIVAL TACTICS IN WARTIME BEIJING, 1937–1949 (HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2015) It was the late summer of 1943. China was at war, and Beijing was under Japanese occupation. Twenty-one-year-old Mrs. Li struggled to get by and came to the painful realization that her husband, a street peddler, was unable to support her. To secure her future livelihood, she started working with her neighbor to recycle wastepaper scraps in an open market near her home. The business partnership with her neighbor not only helped Mrs. Li financially, it also grew into a warm and affectionate bond and, ultimately, a sexual relationship.

Mrs. Li’s husband found out about his wife’s extramarital affair later but did not punish her. Perhaps he hoped to win her back, or maybe he was willing to turn a blind eye to his wife’s affair in exchange for financial help from her business partner.

In early 1944, the extramarital affair took a fateful turn. As the city’s economy further deteriorated, Mrs. Li got her sexual and business partner’s word that she would receive “good food and decent clothing” if she married him.

Mrs. Li agreed. On the chilly morning of February 28, she left home, arrived at the train station, purchased tickets, passed the security checkpoints, boarded a train and ran away from Beijing. Police officers on routine neighborhood patrol caught Mrs. Li and her partner at a wayside inn. They were immediately transferred back to Beijing and went on trial, which is the only reason we know her story now.

Yet, Mrs. Li’s story also reveals another set of elements that characterize women’s experiences in wartime Beijing — opportunities in the pervasive informal economy, petty trade, illegal dealing, neighborhood ties, geographic mobility, and a regional tapestry of commerce and crime.

By tracing these fragments of women’s lives, we are able to shift our focus from the “makers” to the “everyday tactics” that lower-class women devised and utilized in their personal efforts to cope with the terrifying forces of war, occupation, poverty and revolutionary politics.

My book reveals two different worlds and world orders

The story brings to light regime changes, massive poverty and the state-building processes through crime fighting.

Through her story, we can study the institutions and individuals who made the urban social structure and moral

in a divided city: One was the official, orderly, civilized, administered and male-centered world. The other was unofficial, flexible, unruly, chaotic, ambiguous and laden with crimes, which is my focus.

order, as well as those who defined the roles and rules for

The survival tactics embedded in and reproduced by

women in wartime Beijing and beyond.

everyday experience, I argue, opened endless possibilities for lower-class women to modify the male-dominated city and, more importantly, to subtly deflect, subvert and “escape without leaving” the powerful masculine forces during and beyond wartime Beijing.

Center for the Humanities 21

FOLLOWING THE PROPHET: A LIFE DEVOTED TO DEVOTIONAL ART FEBRUARY 11 Faculty Book Celebration keynote speaker Christiane Gruber, associate professor, history of art, University of Michigan, gave the lecture “The Praiseworthy One: Devotional Images of the Prophet Muhammad in Islamic Traditions.”

Elizabeth Childs, the Etta and Mark Steinberg Professor of Art History, asked Gruber about the multicultural contexts of Muhammad’s image in art.

YOUR LECTURE TOPIC, ON THE DEVOTIONAL IMAGES OF THE PROPHET MUHAMMAD IN ISLAMIC TRADITIONS, MAY COME AS A SURPRISE TO SOME, AS THERE IS WIDESPREAD MISPERCEPTION THAT VISUAL REPRESENTATIONS OF MUHAMMAD ARE FORBIDDEN

BY THE KORAN. UNDER WHAT CIRCUMSTANCES MAY THE PROPHET BE REPRESENTED? Although there is a tendency to shy away from representing the Prophet Muhammad, especially in Arab lands, there did not exist a single express legal ban or decree (fatwa) prohibiting his figural representation prior to the Charlie Hebdo massacre. In fact, in Persian and Turkish lands, illustrated manuscripts and paintings depict the Prophet in a variety of ways in order to instruct viewers and readers into his biography, early Islamic history, the tenets of the Islamic faith, eschatological thought and devotional behavior.

A Year in Review 22

EVENTS & OUTREACH This corpus of imagery is fascinating because it reveals

through the figural and representational arts, as well as through

fluctuating conceptualizations and visualizations of

calligraphy and architecture. Images have proved particularly

Muhammad in different times and places, thus providing a

powerful within pedagogical and devotional contexts, as they

barometer of sorts for other important issues concerned with

provide the semblance of unmediated access as well as a visual

prophecy, sacrality and piety. At times, especially in medieval

fulcrum for an individual wishing to channel and focalize his

Persian lands, the Prophet was depicted unveiled, with his facial

pious attention upon Muhammad.

features fully visible, while at others, especially in Turco-Persian

imagery, the textual and visual record reveals a much more

WHAT THOUGHTS DO YOU HAVE ABOUT THE TRAGIC EVENTS IN PARIS IN JANUARY 2015, WHEN POLITICAL CARICATURISTS AT THE JOURNAL CHARLIE HEBDO WERE THE VICTIMS OF A FATAL ASSAULT BY TERRORISTS?

complex and nuanced picture, in which iconographic tactics of

The massacre at Charlie Hebdo was devastating in countless

abstraction are linked to more spiritual tendencies to convey

ways. Besides the terrible loss of life, I fear that the historical

the secret and “unseen” mystery of the Prophet’s nature

evidence — that is, Islamic images of Muhammad — has

and origins.

come under grave threat as well. This threat is not only due to

spheres after 1500 CE, artists added a facial veil or a flaming bundle to camouflage his traits. While some may interpret these visual strategies as prompted by an urge to “ban” figural

OVER THE HISTORY OF THE ISLAMIC FAITH, WHICH PERIODS HAVE SEEN THE MOST SEVERE RESTRICTIONS ON THE REPRESENTATION OF THE PROPHET? The most severe restrictions are a remarkably contemporary phenomenon, and they emerged in Saudi Arabia for the first time as a fatwa in response to the Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoon controversy of 2005–06. The fatwa issued in 2006 stated that satirical images — but not images writ large — of the Prophet are prohibited. This fatwa became even more stringent with a decree issued in response to the 2015 Charlie Hebdo massacre in Paris, in which a Saudi cleric declared that all

physically violent terrorism but through reactionary, kneejerk responses that seek to explicate the root reasons for the attack in the first place. To my mind, the offices of Charlie Hebdo provided a soft target, a proxy war ground in which ISIS militants were able to operate and exact damage.

Unfortunately, explaining that the root cause of the attack stems from an ostensible “ban” on Islamic images of the Prophet, especially disrespectful ones, skirts much larger social, cultural, religious and political issues. If we are to pin our explanations on the problematic of imagery, then we not only overlook deeper problems, but we also give credence to flawed,

images of Muhammad are prohibited.

and often neoconservative and reactionary, discourses on

Thus, the harshest and most unyielding restrictions have

are to uncritically propagate the notion of a “ban” and ignore

emerged in the last decade within the Wahhabi (ultra-

historical Islamic images of the Prophet, then we must admit

conservative) setting of Saudi Arabia. In this regard, we must

to our own complicity in censoring or, worse, endangering the

remember that these legal restrictions are in direct response

historical data.

images of the Prophet in Islamic traditions. In addition, if we

to contemporary image (and ideological) conflicts on a global scale. Such decrees have only emerged in Saudi Arabia and are

This problematic holds true not only for images but also

not universally applicable or accepted.

for broader discourses on Islam today, which have become

HOW DID SOME MUSLIM ARTISTS SEEK TO ENHANCE THEIR FAITH AND MYSTICAL UNDERSTANDING IN THE PROCESS OF USING BOTH WORDS AND IMAGES TO DEPICT THE PROPHET?

is important to tackle such narratives with an attention to

increasingly trenchant and divisive at an alarming speed. It

Muslim artists, patrons and other individuals have cultivated

verifiable data and with a moral use of language, as well as to disallow fear-mongering ideology to trump inquiry based on robust and sound evidence.

their faith in many creative ways over the past millennium.

Oftentimes, the Prophet acts as the pivot of their devotions because Muhammad embodies a variety of concepts, including leadership, authority, love and mercy. In oral prayers and textual sources, he is invoked as an intercessor for his community and acclaimed as the most beautiful model of humankind. Over the centuries, artists used their own “praiseworthy” methods of recalling and imagining the Prophet Center for the Humanities 23

ARTS IN STRUGGLE: AN AFTERNOON OF CREATIVITY, COMMUNITY AND DIALOGUE ON THE STRUGGLE FOR RACIAL JUSTICE IN ST. LOUIS OCTOBER 3 Just over a year after the shooting death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., the Center for the Humanities hosted an event featuring four artists with St. Louis roots who explore questions of activism and racial justice in their work.

What is the relationship between art and activism? How should artists engage questions of racial justice? Did the protests in Ferguson change those equations? An event organized and hosted by the Center for the Humanities invited four St. Louis artists representing a range of media to present their work and offer their own responses to those queries.

“Arts in Struggle: An Afternoon of Creativity, Community and Dialogue on the Struggle for Racial Justice in St. Louis” featured an exhibit of works by Damon Davis and Washington University alumna De Andrea Nichols (BFA ’10, MSW ’14); a poetry performance by Cheeraz Gormon; and a screening of the film Ferguson: A Report from Occupied Territory by documentary filmmaker Katina Parker. The afternoon concluded with a roundtable discussion with all four artists, moderated by Jonathan Fenderson, assistant professor of African and African-American Studies.

This event was held as part of the Greater St. Louis Humanities Festival.

A Year in Review 24

DAMON DAVIS, an East St. Louis native, is a multidisciplinary artist who now works and resides in St. Louis. He maneuvers between creative platforms as a member of experimental hip-hop outfit SNS (Scripts N Screwz), as both producer and a vocalist, and as a cofounder of art collective Civil Ape. In 2012, he started FarFetched, an independent music and art imprint. Recently, he won an Emmy for the short documentary A Story to Tell, which was based on Davis’ life and work. His large-scale art projects in Ferguson, Mo., have been covered in the national and international media.

CHEERAZ GORMON is a north St. Louis native, lifelong activist, internationally touring spoken-word artist and poet, and documentary photographer turned award-winning advertising copywriter. Her deep passion for humanity and issues affecting various communities provides the fuel for her dynamic spoken-word performances and her first book of poetry, In the Midst of Loving.

DE ANDREA NICHOLS helps creative change-makers bring their ideas to life. In addition to serving the Contemporary Art Museum in St. Louis, she is the founder and creative director of social-design organization Civic Creatives, through which she equips organizations and leaders to resolve critical social challenges using design thinking. She is also creator of Design Serves (D*Serve), a current Clinton Global Initiative project that teaches design skills and civic engagement to K–12 youth and helps them identify and actualize social change ideas in their neighborhoods. Her initiatives United Story and FoodSpark highlight and address prominent interests of communities using story- and food-based social interventions.

KATINA PARKER is a filmmaker, photographer, writer, graphic designer, cultural curator, social-media expert and communications consultant. Through her work, she speaks to the multi-dynamic possibilities of technology and media to spark social and cultural change for voices who have traditionally been underrepresented in media. She teaches social media and film through the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University.

Center for the Humanities 25

EVENT COSPONSORSHIPS, 2015–16 “QUEEN FOR A DAY: TRANSFORMISTAS, BEAUTY QUEENS AND THE PERFORMANCE OF FEMININITY IN VENEZUELA” Marcia Ochoa, Associate Professor, Departments of Feminist Studies, and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies, University of California, Santa Cruz

September 10, 2015

Speaking about her recent ethnography, Marcia Ochoa considered how femininities are produced, performed and consumed in the mass-media spectacles of international beauty pageants, on the runways of the Miss Venezuela contest, on the well-traveled Caracas avenue where transgender women (transformistas) project themselves into the urban imaginary, and on the bodies of both transformistas and beauty pageant contestants (misses).

Cosponsors: Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies; Anthropology; Latin American Studies; Center for the Humanities

“THE INVENTION OF TESTIMONY: CLAUDE LANZMANN’S SHOAH IN THE 21ST CENTURY” November 13–14, 2015; workshop held at the University of Missouri–Columbia Major Shoah scholars representing a variety of disciplinary angles and hailing from North America, Europe and Australia, along with film archivists from the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, workshopped papers that examine the many legacies of Shoah and Lanzmann’s other associated films, their impact on historical and cinematic standpoints on the Holocaust, and their present and future place in shaping Holocaust memory in the 21st century.

Cosponsors: Research Council of the University of Missouri in partnership with Mizzou Advantage; Based on a True Story; Washington University Center for the Humanities

CRONIES SCREENING AND DISCUSSION November 14, 2015 As part of the St. Louis International Film Festival, the filmmaker, cast and crew members attended the screening of their film and afterward led a discussion.

Cosponsors: Cinema St. Louis; Center for the Humanities

“AMERICAN INTIMACIES: DISABILITY AND INTIMACY ROUNDTABLE” February 5, 2016 This roundtable explored how disability transforms our thinking about intimate relationships. Disability in public often produces “inappropriate” intimacies, including uninvited questions and stares.

Disability in private can heighten the vulnerability of intimate practices, while also expanding the meanings of sexuality, kinship and carework. Psychosocial disorders and environmental illnesses raise new questions about emotional and physical proximity.

Cosponsors: American Culture Studies; Office of the Provost; Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies; Center for the Humanities

“GLOBAL INEQUALITIES: REFLECTIONS ON ECONOMIC CITIZENSHIP” Manuela Boatcă, Professor of Sociology, AlbertLudwigs-University Freiburg, Germany

March 29, 2016

The widening of global economic inequality is paralleled by an increase in the commodification of citizenship, as seen in “citizenship by investment” programs and trade in European Union passports, limiting work opportunity and visa-free travel for those with already challenging economic circumstances.

Cosponsors: Committee on Comparative Literature; Sociology; International and Area Studies; Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies; Center for the Humanities

A Year in Review 26

“ENDURANCE, EPHEMERALITY: ART AND THE PASSAGE OF TIME” April 1–2, 2016 This symposium, organized by the graduate students of Art History and Archaeology, pursued a deeper conceptual engagement with the theme of time and the ways in which its passage has shaped both artistic practice and our understanding of art and material culture.

Cosponsors: Art History and Archaeology, Center for the Humanities

“‘SONIC VISIONS’: JAZZ AND IMPROVISED MUSIC TO AVANT-GARDE FILMS” April 8, 2016 Featuring acclaimed jazz icon Thurman Barker (percussion) with Paul Steinbeck (bass) and Joel Vanderheyden (sax), the trio fave performed an original and unscored performance alongside a short program of avant-garde and experimental films from around the world. The performance was followed by a Q&A on jazz, improvisation, film and music, and experimental film and jazz as modern art forms.

Cosponsors: Music; Film and Media Studies; Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts; Performing Arts Department; Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum; East Asian Languages and Cultures; Center for the Humanities

“MANY VOICES, ONE MESSAGE: HONORING OUR LANGUAGES TO STRENGTHEN OUR FUTURE” April 9, 2016 Washington University 2016 Powwow offered dancing, singing, drumming, arts, crafts and food that celebrated and emphasized the importance of language in preserving cultural identity.

Cosponsors: Buder Center for American Indian Studies; Brown School Student Coordinating Council; Women’s Society of Washington University; Missouri Humanities Council; Center for the Humanities

EVENTS & OUTREACH

A NEW VIEW OF GLOBAL INEQUALITIES MARCH 29 The Center for the Humanities co-sponsors many lectures and events throughout each academic

TELL US ABOUT YOUR LATEST BOOK, GLOBAL INEQUALITIES BEYOND OCCIDENTALISM. My book proposes a theoretical framework for understanding how inequalities are reproduced under global capitalism. It examines what happens if we transfer classical approaches to inequality, such as those elaborated by Marx and Weber, to a 21st-century global context.

In particular, it shows how the Western standpoint informing much theory-building from sociology’s classics up to present-day approaches to inequality has led to a systematic neglect of the dynamics of colonialism and imperialism. Ultimately, the book intends to reveal the extent to which the mainstream analysis of social inequalities relies, first, on an overgeneralization of

year organized by faculty from across

the Western European historical experience and, second, on the erasure of non-Western, non-

the humanities. Co-sponsored

European and non-white experiences from sociological theory-building.

events promise to draw a wide range of campus scholars. Invited

WHAT BROUGHT YOU TO WORK ON THIS TOPIC?

by Anca Parvulescu (English and

For one thing, the fact that, to the mainstream media, global inequality is news. As recently as

Interdisciplinary Project in the

the end of 2012, The Economist was still questioning whether inequality needed to be tackled

Humanities), Manuela Boatcă, professor of sociology at AlbertLudwigs-University Freiburg, gave the talk “Global Inequalities: Reflections on Economic Citizenship.”

Beforehand, comparative literature PhD student Ena Selimovic interviewed Boatcă.

at all, since globalization and technical innovation had allegedly narrowed inequality globally.

On the other hand, to most academics in the global North, global inequalities are new. As an unprecedented rise in income inequalities started to occur in rich countries such as the United States and Great Britain, global inequalities suddenly became a hot topic for sociologists and economists. Yet inequalities have been the result of global and transregional processes for more than five centuries. At least since the European expansion into the Americas, intercontinental migration, the Atlantic slave trade, and the unequal economic exchange between Europe and its colonies have provided global entanglements that decisively shaped the inequality structures of both the former colonizing as well as the former colonized regions. It was, however, only when the rise in income inequality rendered the United States more unequal than much of Latin America that debates on global inequalities became prominent in Western academia.

LOOKING AHEAD TO YOUR TALK, COULD YOU TELL US MORE ABOUT THE CONCEPT OF “ECONOMIC CITIZENSHIP”?

Citizenship by investment, or economic citizenship, is a type of facilitated naturalization procedure with a clear economic rationale. States confer citizenship to very wealthy individuals in exchange for an investment in the countries’ government bonds, real estate or most important branches of industry and use the income as an alternative development strategy or as a means of managing global financial crisis. Economic citizenship was first implemented in Caribbean states seeking sources of economic development after independence. Economic citizenship programs spreading throughout Southern and Eastern Europe after the 2008 financial crisis primarily — and explicitly — target Chinese and Russian investors.

HOW DO YOU SEE YOUR FOCUS ON ECONOMIC CITIZENSHIP CONTRIBUTING TO ONGOING DEBATES ON IMMIGRATION AND THE REFUGEE CRISIS? For labor migrants, inherited citizenship and lengthy naturalization procedures are legally (re) enforced as the only legitimate options. In this context, most European states today refuse non-European, non-Western or non-white migrants’ claims to citizenship, denounce or block illegalized migrant paths to residence, and, increasingly, restrict the rights and the duration of refugees’ presence in their territory. This double standard illustrates the reasons for increasing global inequalities today and testifies to the continuities of colonially charged racial and ethnic exclusions in the history of modernity more generally.

Center for the Humanities 27

Faculty Fellowships

A Year in Review 28

FACULTY RESEARCH

In his 1684 publication Parayso Occidental, Sigüenza y Góngora details the 100-year history of Jesús María, a convent in Mexico City. One section recounts the story of Marina de la Cruz, a widow who enters the convent with her beautiful daughter, whom she dotes on. Sigüenza writes that God punishes Marina for her less-than-full devotion,

STEPHANIE KIRK Associate Professor of Spanish Translation and Critical Edition of Carlos De Sigüenza y Góngora’s Western Paradise [Parayso Occidental] (1684)

striking her daughter with a disfiguring illness that eventually kills her. Freed from all worldly distractions, Marina dedicates herself to a life of sanctity and becomes an exemplar for the other women. Stories such as this one — with their details about life in the Spanish New World, expectations of and options for women, and the Catholic Church’s role in society — convinced Stephanie Kirk that the publication deserved a wider audience, which her first-ever English translation will finally reach.

WHAT’S IMPORTANT TO KNOW ABOUT THE AUTHOR? Together with the cloistered nun and famous writer Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora (1645–1700) was the leading intellectual of his day. He was a polymath and mastered many topics, including engineering, indigenous cultures, cosmography, mathematics, history and astronomy. He corresponded with leading scholars in Europe and possessed a huge library of books and indigenous codices.

A product of his age, he saw no contradiction between science and religion and was deeply devout. He had been expelled from the Jesuits as a novice for unbecoming behavior — the rumors were he would escape from the monastery at night — and spent the rest of his life desperately trying to gain readmission. Seemingly, he was granted his wish on his deathbed and left his library to the Society of Jesus. He left his body, however, to science at a time when cadavers for autopsy were in short supply and when suspicions persisted about the orthodoxy of such anatomical explorations.

TELL US ABOUT TRANSLATING 17TH-CENTURY SPANISH INTO MODERN ENGLISH. The language is a huge challenge! New Spanish baroque prose is insanely convoluted and labyrinthine and long-winded. Sigüenza y Góngora aimed to display his erudition.

In its opaqueness and wordiness, it reminds me sometimes of academic writing at its absolute worst. So, my greatest challenge is to first decode and decipher — at times I find identifying the subject of certain verbs quite difficult as they can appear at several lines’ remove from each other — and then to render it into readable English prose without losing the atmosphere of the original.

WHAT DOES THIS BOOK OFFER YOUR FIELD AND OTHERS? This book primarily tells of women’s lives at a time when men’s stories held more currency and when men decided women’s fates. Sigüenza y Góngora claims he is writing a history of women for women, but scholars have cautioned readers not to take this at face value because he is using women’s stories to further his own intellectual ends as an educated Creole. It also details the central role of religion in New Spanish society. Written at a time when a huge percentage of women were living in convents in various capacities, Western Paradise gives us an unprecedented view of their experiences.

Center for the Humanities 29

BRIEFLY, WHAT IS YOUR PROJECT ABOUT? I’m interested in India’s role in the globalizing of whiteness. Transnational scholars have shown how whiteness transcends skin color and incorporates a number of

SHEFALI CHANDRA Associate Professor of History The Cunning of India

institutionally embedded, sexual and ideological imperatives. However, work on the Indian caste system has only recently begun to expose the transnational and, specifically, the American role in the production of caste. Even those studies that do work on Indo-U.S. histories focus on “lower” caste and African-American histories.

My interest is in the unmarked and dominant racial formations: whiteness and uppercaste cultures. The project tracks the interdependence of racial formations under global capitalism. How has India, and those who traffic in an Indian cultural identity, invigorated and deflected the globalization of U.S. ideas of race?

WHAT DOES YOUR TITLE, THE CUNNING OF INDIA, TELL US ABOUT YOUR PROJECT? As I show, the “cunning of India” is to normalize a particular contract between sexual normativity and racial privilege. This is a sly move: It makes upper-caste sexual strictures stand in for Indian culture, and it is reinforced by racialisms and class formations generally considered extraneous to India. “India” endures as a feminized and world-historical triumph over capitalism, Islam and even whiteness, while enabling the universalization of upper-caste and racial-settler cultures.

IN GENERAL, WESTERNERS DON’T KNOW MUCH ABOUT INDIA’S CASTE SYSTEM EXCEPT THE IMPRESSION THAT IT’S REPRESSIVE AND IS BEING SWEPT AWAY WITH MODERNIZATION. WHERE DOES THIS TYPE OF UNDERSTANDING GO WRONG? Caste is not being swept away; rather, in new and innovative ways, it tightens its grip over more and more people. Like all systems of racialization, caste is volatile, opportunistic and, most interestingly for me, covert and implicit. Certainly, the features that characterized it in the 19th century (features that were clumsily codified by rather clueless British anthropologists!) have changed dramatically. But its basic contours have endured and even deepened. It takes a particular kind of literary, historical and ethnographic commitment to uncover the newer manifestations of caste.

The notion of a caste system diverts our attention away from critically analyzing Brahmanism: the power of the Brahmanical caste to quietly reproduce its power. Just as it is inadequate to study “race” in the United States without probing the specific manifestations of whiteness, so, too, does the academic conception of a caste system or even of “lower caste” histories actually excuse those who benefit most from caste. In the words of the radical scholar and anti-caste leader B.R. Ambedkar, “caste is Brahmanism incarnate.” By focusing on Brahmanism, as he urges us to do, we can appreciate the secular, ritual elasticity that undergirds the continuation of caste today.

WHAT’S THE CONNECTION TO MATRIMONIAL ADVERTISEMENTS? Matrimonial adverts, which millions of people read weekly in Indian and American newspapers, are like megaphones that amplify an elite consensus over the permissible parameters of caste, race and gender. I read them as conversations across time and space that enact the changing contours of caste: skin color, profession, access to education and the most valued aspect of (upper) caste identity: the ability to shed caste itself. For me, they are historical transcripts that reveal new and shifting relations between sex, race and global capitalism.

A Year in Review 30

FACULTY RESEARCH

YOUR BOOK BREAKS NEW GROUND AS THE FIRST BOOK-LENGTH ETHNOGRAPHY OF TURKISH CLASSICAL MUSICIANS. WHAT DOES IT CONTRIBUTE TO THE DEBATE ABOUT MUSIC AND AFFECT? In scholarship on sound, music, emotion and affect, we still tend to focus first and foremost on music itself as some sort of object — a disembodied force that can act on a listener in a particular way. My book disrupts normative questions about the relationship between music and affect asked by music studies scholars who prioritize the music object and assume its capacity to act. Focusing on melancholic musicking as affective practice means that asking the questions “does music elicit affect?” or “does music express affect?” are the wrong questions. Instead, I focus my research on the musicians themselves, locating how they talk about and sound out affect, how they police other musicians’ descriptions and performances, and, importantly, how they learn the correct ways to feel through the intimate, dyadic and long-lasting bond in a master–apprentice relationship.

Turkish classical musicians themselves are quick to explain that melancholy lies in a

DENISE GILL Assistant Professor of Music Melancholic Modalities: Affect and Turkish Classical Musicians

person — not in the uncanny or ethereal sounding of a disembodied music object. The melancholic modalities cultivated by Turkish classical musicians are not necessarily painful: Descriptions of ecstasy, joy, communitas, attunement and elation accompany philosophical articulations of separation and suffering. My aim is to understand the kinds of social politics that enable contemporary Turkish classical musicians to generate particular affective practices, and to explore how ideas and expressions of pain, sadness and loss are experienced by them as deeply pleasurable.

WHO ARE SOME OF THE MUSICIANS INCLUDED IN YOUR STUDY, AND WHY DID YOU SELECT THEM? My book included interviews with professional musicians from multiple state-

There are dozens of terms in Turkish

sponsored ensembles in four main urban centers in Turkey (Istanbul, Ankara, Konya

and Turkish-Ottoman for which the

and Izmir), as well as musicians who are the headline performers for multiple

English translation is simply rendered

municipal performances. I also worked with Turkish classical musicians who have

as “melancholy,” says ethnomusicologist

successful careers as touring performers and recording artists outside of the state-

Denise Gill. In her book, Melancholic

sponsored artistic realm. Finally, as one of my chapters is particularly concerned with

Modalities: Affect and Turkish Classical

issues of pedagogy, I worked with a number of master-teachers who educate students

Musicians (forthcoming in 2017 with

in private studios, as well as examined music lessons in conservatory and university

Oxford University Press), Gill considers

settings. I also interpret the legacies of composer and virtuoso Tanburi Cemil Bey

a wide spectrum of melancholic

(1873–1916), composer and Mevlevi sheikh Ismail Dede Efendi (1778–1846), and the ney

practices that are purposefully cultivated

(reed flute) musician Neyzen Tevfik (1879–1953), among others.

by contemporary Turkish Classical musicians and expressed in their sound and music-making. A musician of classical Turkish music herself, she focuses her study on the people who perform, improvise, compose and teach the music themselves.

Importantly, I shape the book around central issues related to the melancholic modalities these musicians instantiate through transmission, narrative discourse and music-making. Islamic ideologies of separation intertwine with modernist and latecapitalist notions of nostalgia, and central beliefs about the relationship between a master and an apprentice, understandings of the boundaries of the body and health intersect to form musicians’ core philosophies.

Center for the Humanities 31

STEVEN MILES Associate Professor of History City Seasons: The Pulse of Urban Life in 19th-Century China On November 1, 1822, a fire whipped through the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou (Canton), leaving 50,000

BRIEFLY, WHAT ARE YOUR GOALS FOR THIS BOOK?

people homeless. On April 7, 1883,

At the most basic level, I want to understand the experience of daily urban life in

a visitor to the western Chinese city

19th-century China. What were the rhythms of life in late imperial Chinese cities,

of Chongqing observed that rising

before the onset of rapid industrialization and revolution at the turn of the 20th

waters of the Yangzi River were forcing

century? To what extent were these rhythms seasonal, and to what extent were they

residents of “well-built bamboo houses”

characteristically urban?

on the river’s edge to move inland. such as the fires of dry autumns and the

WHAT SEASONAL PATTERNS HAVE YOU SEEN EMERGE IN STUDYING LIFE IN THESE CITIES?

floods of wet springs — on the urban

Whereas previous studies of seasonal patterns have emphasized one particular

dwellers of preindustrial China is

seasonal phenomenon, such as mortality in Berlin or sheep stealing in Wales, I am

the subject of Steven Miles’ latest

interested in understanding how different aspects of seasonality overlapped. For

book project.

Guangzhou, the main seasonal weather pattern was the distinction between the wet

Tracing the impact of the seasons —

“These two events illustrate the seasonality of urban life in 19th-century China,” Miles says. “In particular, they hint at the relationship between seasonality and urban spatial practice,

and dry seasons, which were in turn determined by monsoon winds. As one might expect, catastrophic flooding occurred in the wet season, whereas catastrophic fires tended to occur in the dry season. But I am also interested in seasonal patterns that were less clearly related to weather: fertility and mortality, the state ritual cycle, popular festivals, crime and disputes.

or seasonal circulations of people within

What I have found most striking in my initial research is the way in which urban

and through cities.”

residents of different classes and genders experienced seasonal events in different ways.

He continues, “The Guangzhou fire burned the warehouses of European traders who annually arrived in the city in August or September, indicating that the composition of the urban population changed with the seasons.

In Chongqing, the physical shape of the city changed with the seasonal movement of poorer urban residents toward the river in the fall and away from it in the spring.”

In addition, different segments of urban society assigned different kinds of meanings to seasonal events. Events such as catastrophic fires and popular religious festivals seem to reveal tensions and relationships among urban residents that otherwise remain hidden.

WHAT KINDS OF SOURCES ARE YOU USING IN YOUR RESEARCH? This project has given me a chance to explore new types of sources for understanding urban life in Guangzhou that I did not use in my earlier research. These include government reports on particular kinds of crime (home and shop invasions), stone inscriptions still to be found in Guangzhou today, almanacs printed in Guangzhou and articles from newspapers. After exhausting these and other Chinese-language sources, I will work on archives of Western medical missionaries who lived in Guangzhou.

A Year in Review 32

FACULTY RESEARCH

JENNIFER KAPCZYNSKI

thinkers and artists used metaphors of collective illness to try to explain the nation’s relationship to National Socialism and to try to come up with

Associate Professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures The Subject of Democracy: 1950s West Germany and the Politics of Film

possible cultural “cures.”

HOW WILL YOUR ANALYSIS IN THIS BOOK AFFECT OUR UNDERSTANDING OF WEST GERMANS OF THIS ERA? AND CONTEMPORARY GERMANS? One of the inspirations behind my decision to focus more strongly on how 1950s West German cinema

WHAT IS THE IDEA BEHIND YOUR BOOK PROJECT?

grappled with democratization has been the current migration crisis in

I hope to make clear how popular film

Europe. I’m struck by how, in many

in 1950s West Germany engaged with

ways, Germany finds itself at a parallel

the project of postwar democratization.

political crossroads today. With the

It was a tricky business: Democracy was

massive influx of refugees, Germany

initially more or less imposed on the

has begun the process of trying to

Western zones by the Allied occupiers,

educate newcomers about cultural

and that fueled a lot of resentment in

norms and expectations. While none

the postwar population. And at the same

of the teaching efforts are directly

time, by the 1950s it was more or less

trying to instill principles of democracy

accepted that democracy would have

(and some of the attempts have been

to be West Germany’s way forward,

painfully clumsy), they communicate

particularly if it wanted to forge

a great deal about the contemporary

stronger alliances with Western Europe and differentiate itself from the

German vision of life in a free and open

Communist East.

DOES IT BUILD ON EARLIER WORK, OR IS IT A NEW DIRECTION FOR YOU?

I’m especially fascinated by how thinkers

I’ve wanted to write a longer study of

far-right political movements since the

and filmmakers of the early Federal

1950s West German cinema for a long

end of the Second World War, which

Republic attempted to achieve this

time. Although there has been some

is really straining the limits of political

“domestication” of democracy — and,

excellent research in the area, the

discourse and tolerance. West German

particularly in the case of 1950s film,

topic is still quite underexplored, in

culture of the 1950s was marked by deep

how they sought to render democracy

part because there is a long-standing

fear about whether its new democracy

visible through characters’ words as

academic prejudice about the quality

could withstand threat — whether from

well as through their postures, actions

of the filmmaking from this period

anti-democratic forces within or Soviet

and surroundings. To a great extent,

(which was overwhelmingly profit-

influence from across the border — and

this project was connected to the

oriented and genre-driven rather than

in some ways, it seems to me that the

contemporaneous effort to rethink the

artistically ambitious). My interest in the

current crisis constitutes one of the

terms of masculinity along lines that

cinema’s connection to democratization

country’s biggest tests since that period.

differed from those of the preceding

is relatively new, but in many ways the

fascist era — which emphasized physical

project grows out of work I did for my

and ideological hardness, rigidity

first book, which explored how, in the

and violence.

very first years after the war, postwar Center for the Humanities 33

society. At the same time, Germany has seen the most significant rise in

Internal Grants FACULTY SEMINAR GRANTS

WRITING GROUPS

One- to three-year grants to tenured or

American Religions

tenure-track faculty to support seminars

(new)

on a particular subject or theme. Groups meet at least twice per semester, when

Sonia Lee | History “Subverting the Rehabilitative Ideal: Toward an Intellectual History of Liberatory Psychiatric and Black Power”

Medieval Colloquium

participants and guests present and

(renewal)

discuss informally their own work as it

Ann Marie McManus | Jewish, Islamic and Near Eastern Languages and Cultures

SUMMER FACULTY RESEARCH GRANTS

“Of Other Languages: Arabic Literature

relates to the theme.

Open to all tenured or tenure-track

Eighteenth-Century Interdisciplinary Salon

faculty; funded projects are intended

(renewal, one-year grant)

to advance the field of study in which it

Memory and Violence

is proposed and make an original and

(renewal, one-year grant)

significant contribution to knowledge.

Wastelands

Karen Acton | Classics

(continuation, three-year grant)

“The Emperor as Patron”

READING AND WRITING GROUP GRANTS

Kurt Beals | German “The Birth of Poetry from the Spirit of

Grants to tenured or tenure-track

the Machine: New Media in German

faculty and to humanities graduate

Poetry, 1916–1968”

students to support reading and writing

Shefali Chandra | History

groups on a particular subject or theme.

READING GROUPS Contemporary German Literature

“Empress of Democracy: Indian Gender Production as Twentieth-Century Revolution”

(new)

John Doris | Philosophy

Digital Approaches

“Addiction, Recovery and Transformative

(renewal)

Experience”

Medical Humanities

Denise Gill | Music

(renewal)

“Aurality Beyond the Human: Virtuosic

Placing Space

Listeners of Istanbul”

(renewal)

Musa Gurnis | English

Queering the Global/Transnational Conversation

“A Spy in the House of Actors”

(new)

Religion and Literature (renewal)

St. Louis East Asian Modern (STEAM)

Martin Jacobs | Jewish, Islamic and Near Eastern Languages and Cultures “Constantinople vs. Tenochtitlán: Imperial Expansion through a Cinquecento Sephardic Lens”

(new)

Voice and Sexuality Studies Working Group, 2016–17 (new) A Year in Review 34

and the Politics of Regionalism (1956–2011)”

Angela Miller | Art History and Archaeology “Reason and Magic at Mid-Century: The Circle of Lincoln Kirstein”

Lori Watt | History “The Japanese-American Transition in Immediate Postcolonial Korea and Micronesia, Autumn 1945”

Joe Schraibman | Romance Languages and Literatures “History, Language and Deep Structures in Leonardo Padura’s Heretics”

Hayrettin Yucesoy, | Jewish, Islamic and Near Eastern Languages and Cultures “Topography of Power: Ibn al-Muqaffa and the Abbasid Revolution (750–809 CE)”

FACULTY RESEARCH

SUMMER RESEARCH SEED GRANTS Open to all tenured or tenure-track

MAXWELL C. WEINER HUMANITIES RESEARCH GRANTS

COLLABORATIVE RESEARCH SEED GRANT

faculty in the humanities or humanistic

Funded by a bequest from Maxwell C.

Open to all tenured and tenure-

social sciences who undertake the

Weiner, the grants support tenured, full-

track faculty in the humanities and

preparation of a competitive, peer-

time faculty in the humanities who do

humanistic social sciences; encourages

reviewed, prestigious grant application

not currently receive an annual research

the establishment of research

during the summer with the goal of

fund in order to facilitate the pursuit of

partnerships and funds preliminary

submitting an application the following

new research directions.

work that lays the foundation for

fall or spring.

Clarissa Hayward | Political Science “Political Disruption and Structural Change”

Henry I. Schvey | Performing Arts “Something Wild! An Intermedial Exploration of the Theatre of Tennessee Williams”

Julia Walker | English and Performing Arts “Modernity and Performance: Enacting

Billy Acree | Romance Languages and Literatures Guinn Batten | English Eric Brown | Philosophy Stephanie Kirk | Romance Languages and Literatures Stamos Metzidakis | Romance Languages and Literatures

Change on the Modernizing Stage”

Vivian Pollak | English

ROLAND GRIMM TRAVEL AWARDS

Michael Sherberg | Romance Languages and Literatures

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

Denise Gill | Music

Harriet Stone | Romance Languages and Literatures

“Aurality Beyond the Human: Virtuosic Listeners of Istanbul”

Lori Watt | History “The Japanese-American Transition in Immediate Postcolonial Korea and Micronesia, Autumn 1945”

Hayrettin Yucesoy | Jewish, Islamic and Near Eastern Languages and Cultures “Topography of Power: Ibn al-Muqaffa and the Abbasid Revolution (750–809 CE)”

Center for the Humanities 35

original, expanded collaborative research projects capable of attracting external funding or the publication of new co-authored research.

Nancy Reynolds (History) and Anne-Marie McManus (Jewish, Islamic and Near Eastern Languages and Cultures) “Wasteland Literacies: Towards New Readings of Place and Waste in the Middle East”

PROPOSAL-WRITING WORKSHOP

CONGRATULATIONS TO THIS YEAR’S PARTICIPANTS WHO SUCCEEDED IN WINNING EXTERNAL FUNDING!

AUGUST 28 AND SEPTEMBER 4 As the academic year began in late August 2015, the Center for

LERONE MARTIN (RELIGION AND POLITICS) • Fellowship, American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) • Book subvention, Louisville Institute for the Study of American Religion

the Humanities continued its new tradition of organizing and hosting programming for faculty who are pursuing competitive external funding.

Time devoted exclusively to research and writing is integral to academic productivity. It allows scholars to travel to important sites, pore over far-flung archives, conduct interviews and otherwise become immersed in the pursuit of a research question. Scholars need time to reflect, analyze and make connections and, finally,

GLENN STONE (ANTHROPOLOGY) • Fellowship, John Simon Guggenheim Foundation

share their discoveries with the world. While faculty engage in this kind of activity as a matter of course, the fellowship — a period of

ANNE-MARIE MCMANUS (EAST ASIAN LANGUAGES AND CULTURES) • Humbolt Research Fellowship for Postdoctoral Researchers

time free from administrative, service and teaching responsibilities — provides the opportunity to make significant research strides.

ANNA VALLYE | POSTDOCTORAL RESEARCH ASSOCIATE AND TEACHING FELLOW, ART HISTORY AND ARCHAEOLOGY/SAM FOX SCHOOL OF DESIGN & VISUAL ARTS • Junior Fellowship, Humanities, Urbanism and Design Initiative at the University of Pennsylvania • Post-doctoral Fellowship, Center for Cultural Analysis at Rutgers University (declined)

As such, they are greatly valued and highly sought after. A number of national organizations and societies provide fellowship funding, and, expectedly, the competition is fierce.

For the past three years, the Center for the Humanities has organized an information session and workshop for faculty in the humanities and humanistic social sciences interested in pursuing

PREVIOUS SUCCESSES

external funding. Participants highly rate these offerings, according to their survey responses.

ILA SHEREN | ART HISTORY AND ARCHAEOLOGY • Fellowship, Institute for Advanced Study at the University of Minnesota

This year, Jean Allman opened the information session with a presentation on proposal writing from a reviewer’s perspective. As

MARISA BASS | ART HISTORY AND ARCHAEOLOGY • Fellowship, School of Historical Studies, Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University

a decidedly experienced reviewer for nationally competitive grant and fellowship programs (and several times a recipient), Allman guided the group through what a reviewer looks for in each part

DENISE GILL | MUSIC • Fellowship, American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS)

of a proposal. Later, a multidisciplinary panel of recent award winners fielded questions from attendees about the proposal-

PAIGE MCGINLEY | PERFORMING ARTS DEPARTMENT • Fellowship, National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH)

writing process. The panel included Laurie Maffly-Kipp (Religion and Politics), Jessica Rosenfeld (English), Elizabeth Schechter

TABEA LINHARD | ROMANCE LANGUAGES AND LITERATURES • Fellowship, American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS)

(Philosophy) and Lori Watt (History).

Faculty who were preparing to submit a proposal during the current academic year were invited to workshop their proposals within small peer groups. Convening over two weeks, the participants shared and received feedback on their drafted proposals at their first meeting. At their second meeting, they shared their revised proposals. The small groups were led by Jean Allman (Center for the Humanities, History), Tim Moore (Classics) and Rafia Zafar

JULIA STAFFEL (PHILOSOPHY) • Fellowship, American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) • Fellowship, Washington University Center for the Humanities • Radcliffe Fellowship, Harvard (declined) • National Humanities Center (alternate)

ANGELA MILLER | ART HISTORY AND ARCHAEOLOGY • Fellowship, Center for Advanced Studies in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery in Washington, D.C. REBECCA WANZO | WOMEN, GENDER AND SEXUALITY STUDIES; CENTER FOR THE HUMANITIES • Senior Faculty Fellowship, Cornell University, Society for the Humanities

(English, African and African-American Studies).

A Year in Review 36

FIRST BOOK WORKSHOP

FACULTY RESEARCH

APRIL 29 As the semester wound down, the Center for the Humanities organized and hosted a new workshop aimed at helping humanities faculty navigate the unknowns of academic book publishing.

In academia, professional success hinges on publishing one’s research

Post-workshop survey responses indicate that attendees unanimously

throughout one’s career, and in the humanities, that typically takes

found the workshop to be useful. Several of their survey comments are

the form of the book. It is therefore critical for an assistant professor

excerpted below:

working toward tenure to find a press for his or her first book, and just as important for an associate professor working toward promotion to full professor to publish at least a second monograph. Those books are peer-reviewed before publication (an important vetting process) and often widely reviewed afterward.

“One attends a lot of workshops at my career stage, and this was by far the most helpful. I think of myself as a pretty savvy, strategically minded chap, but much of the content of this day came as a revelation. I’m profoundly grateful to Jean Allman and the Center for the Humanities for organizing this event, which sends me into a

But the journey from manuscript to published work is not always clear. Scholars have widely different experiences, even with the same press. Further, university book publishing has undergone swift and enormous change in the last decade, leaving many presses underfunded and with smaller and smaller book lists. Added to that, the pressure to market books to appeal to ever broader audiences (and potential customers) means that scholars are asked to write much differently than academics even a generation ago.

dedicated writing year with new energy and clarity of purpose.”

“It was a great additional spur to writing. The practical information (e.g., the nature of subvention funds, discussion of advance contracts, and timelines) was especially helpful.”

“I found helpful the perspective on the advantages of publishing in a series, something I hadn’t fully understood previously, and the nitty-gritty economic factors that are rarely discussed like illustrations,

Given these circumstances, it is important to share information with

copyediting and indexing.”

one another in order to understand the range of possibilities. To that end, the Center for the Humanities organized and hosted its firstever First Book Workshop to clear away the unknowns surrounding publication. It was attended by 28 humanities scholars from all stages of the academic career path — graduate student to tenured faculty — and featured the following topics and lineup:

GETTING STARTED: ADVICE FROM SERIES EDITORS Kit Wellman (Philosophy), Linda Nicholson (Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies), Jean Allman (History)

PUBLISHING YOUR FIRST BOOK: PERSPECTIVES FROM A UNIVERSITY PRESS Gillian Berchowitz, Director, University of Ohio Press

WHAT WORKS AND WHAT DOESN’T: LESSONS LEARNED FROM THE FIRST BOOK EXPERIENCE Anika Walke (History), Anca Parvulescu (English and Interdisciplinary Project in the Humanities), Dillon Brown (English), Lerone Martin (Religion and Politics) Center for the Humanities 37

“The model-minority designation suggests that Asian Americans are succeeding by conventional American standards, but it also masks some harassment directed toward them and distances them from other minority groups.”

“THERE’S THIS BELIEF THAT GOD CREATED MAN, and out of man, he created woman. And these are really crystal-clear categories. There’s something very deep and fundamental about that for the Christians who have … a way of thinking about the Bible as the word of God. Anything that challenges that idea, of the clarity of gender, is really suspect.

It’s anxiety-producing, and it makes people angry.”

— R. Marie Griffith Professor of Religion and Politics, in “America’s Profound Gender Anxiety” in The Atlantic

— Adia Harvey Wingfield Professor of Sociology, in her essay “The Professional Burdens of Being a ‘Model Minority’” for The Atlantic

EXPERT ANALYSIS

I think we should assume he did hate [St. Louis], but I think we confuse hatred with lack of connection.… Williams was deeply connected to St. Louis. The fact that he did or did not like it is not

“Even today, 50 years after the height of the KKK’s civil-rightsera violence, communities where the Klan once thrived exhibit higher rates of violent crime than neighboring areas. Such effects demonstrate the power of a movement that flouts established authority and weakens the bonds of respect and order within a community.”

irrelevant, but it is a more complicated picture than like or dislike.… The fabric of St. Louis, even as [Williams] resisted it, was something essential to his writing and to his character.”

— Henry I. Schvey Professor of Drama and Comparative Literature, in “Hey Stella! St. Louis’ first

— David Cunningham

Tennessee Williams Festival pays tribute to him

Professor of Sociology, in his column

in the town he hated” on St. Louis Public Radio

“Five Myths About the Ku Klux Klan” for The Washington Post

“We now have the tools to analyze [Norman] Rockwell’s paintings as mythic constructions that speak to collective ideals, that represent us to ourselves in ways we can all recognize even though they may not reflect the actual conditions of American society. And we should remember that occasionally ROCKWELL ALSO CONFRONTED WHAT WAS WRONG WITH THE NATION AS WELL, SUCH AS HIS MOVING IMAGES OF CIVIL RIGHTS STRUGGLES IN THE 1960s.”

— Angela Miller Professor of Art History, in “Norman Rockwell’s View of Small-Town Missouri Newspaper Brings in Millions” in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch

“I think that women are often subject to greater linguistic scrutiny than men are. My own observation is that [women’s] language is coming under closer scrutiny in professional circumstances.”

— John Baugh the Margaret Bush Wilson Professor in Arts & Sciences, in “Are Linguistics the New Forefront of Diversity Initiatives?” in Fast Company A Year in Review 38

“People think they have an idea of who Kafka is, and this book gives them 99 other versions of who Kafka was.”

— Kurt Beals Assistant Professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures, on St. Louis Public Radio’s “Cut & Paste” podcast on Beals’ new translation of a book about the author’s life

“I SEE THESE MODERN-DAY [SCHOLARSHIP-SUPPORTED ACTIVIST] ATHLETES, AND THEY ARE PART OF A TRADITION OF ATHLETES WHO SAY [TO THE SYSTEM], ‘YEAH, WE’LL PLAY FOR YOU, BUT YOU NEED TO PLAY FOR US.’ ” — GARRETT DUNCAN ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF EDUCATION, IN “WHY STUDENT-ATHLETE ACTIVISM IS RATTLING CAGES” IN THE CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR

FACULTY RESEARCH

EXCERPTED AND CONDENSED FROM REBECCA WANZO’S “MARVEL’S TROUBLE WITH NORMAL” (REVIEW OF THE NEW MUTANTS BY RAMZI FAWAZ), IN THE LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS Embracing normativity has become

As with most forms of popular culture,

we still can’t find agreement on these

something of a mainstay in DC Comics. But

the source material for superhero films

questions.

Marvel often loves the freaks, the suffering

is endlessly more transgressive and

outsiders, and the cheeky social rejects.

adventurous than its adaptations. But it

What animates some of the most interesting

is worth asking in the wake of the playful

superhero stories is not coming to belong

Deadpool’s success whether, as Ramzi Fawaz

because you attain an ideal. It is belonging

suggests, Marvel’s popularization of “figures

precisely because you are perpetually

of monstrous difference” contributed to

struggling and out of place.

an expansion of identificatory potential in

The general public — and at times, scholars

popular culture.

At their best, Marvel Comics have trouble with and trouble the normal. As Marvel’s influence in our entertainment universe continues to expand, it is worth asking how much the pleasures of the company’s products involve embracing the normative and how much is the result of attending to the pains and possibilities of deviance.

— can be quite reductive when they make

This tension in superhero comics between

At the core of what may appear to be the

statements about what superhero comics

representing American nationalism

films’ most politically emaciated version of

are or do. As scholarship about superhero

and white masculinity, on one hand,

complex storytelling, there may be seeds of

comics continues to grow, scholars have

and difference, exceptionality and

the radical imagination that inaugurated the

made clear that what might be most

cosmopolitanism, on the other, is rooted

company’s initial success. Counter to some

interesting about one of the most dominant

in a countercultural quandary that still

leftist accounts, the transnational success

popular genres in the United States is

haunts various political projects. Is it best,

of Marvel’s films may not solely derive from

not what has been consistent within the

as political “Others,” to embrace being

the way they export American nationalism

superhero tradition, but rather what has

Other as a political identity and point of

and masculine violence through big-budget

stood apart. Such outliers include not

pride, or is the task to demonstrate that

special effects. Part of the pleasure they

just individual examples of idiosyncratic

“Others” are normal and that constructions

provide may also be located in the resistance

variance, but broad swaths of storytelling

of normalness erase existing differences?

to normal that offers a path to remaking the

and style that illuminate major cultural and

Is that a false binary? Do we do both? From

world in a more just image.

narrative shifts.

antiracist projects to LGBTIQ rights activism, Center for the Humanities 39

Student Education Merle Kling Undergraduate Honors Fellowship

KLING FELLOWS, CLASS OF 2017 Marie Bissell | Anthropology and Linguistics major, Philosophy minor Mentor, John Baugh, the Margaret Bush Wilson Professor in Arts & Sciences, with appointments in Psychology, Anthropology, English, Education, African and African-American Studies, Urban Studies “Mapping Prejudice: A Perceptual Dialectology Approach to Evaluating Language Attitudes Toward American English Dialects”

THE KLING FELLOWSHIP PROGRAM aims to introduce students to the life of the mind, to show students what it is like to do research and to excite gifted undergraduates about the possibilities of pursuing a graduate degree. Yet, the benefits of the fellowship go beyond an individual’s interests and aspirations. The Kling Fellowship creates a community of scholars who come together and engage with one another’s research across disciplines. The program promotes fellowship in its truest form: a community of motivated intellectuals, brought together to facilitate discovery and collaboration.

Competitively admitted Kling Fellows meet weekly in an interdisciplinary seminar, where they present drafts of their work, review one another’s writing, read and think about the role of the humanities in university life, and occasionally get

Although linguistic acts operate under the guise of strictly communicating verbal content, they are also social occurrences imbued with symbolic characteristics. Certain dialects carry with them connotations of prestige, while others are socially tied to stereotypes of illiteracy and incorrectness.

What kinds of social judgments influence these perceptions within the United States, and how can they be most accurately measured? My project seeks to collect and analyze data pertaining to language attitudes toward English speakers across the United States, with a particular theoretical focus on speakers from the American South. This research is grounded in perceptual dialectology, a subdiscipline of sociolinguistics focused on individual social attitudes about varieties of speech and their geographic origins. My hypothesis is that individuals will attribute negative characteristics to speakers whom they perceive to be from the southern United States, including low education level and economic status. Locating the underlying attitudinal judgments attributed to speakers of the dialect will contribute useful information to understanding how different types of speech come to index certain social and geographic characteristics.

off campus to see humanities research in action around the St. Louis area. During the summers, Kling research continues, with many fellows drawing on their designated research funds for project-advancing activities such as language study, ethnographic interviews and archival discovery.

“Interrogating Interventions: Global Aid for Obstetric Fistula”

Over the course of two academic years, each Kling Fellow writes up his or her research findings in either a scholarly article or a long-form piece of creative nonfiction for publication in the annual Kling journal, Slideshow. At the same time, Kling Fellows are an important part of the Center for the Humanities, where they meet each semester’s cohort of faculty and graduatestudent fellows, select an outside speaker to invite for a public lecture, and provide undergraduate representation on the center’s advisory board.

THE PROGRAM PROMOTES FELLOWSHIP IN ITS TRUEST FORM: A COMMUNITY OF MOTIVATED INTELLECTUALS, BROUGHT TOGETHER TO FACILITATE DISCOVERY AND COLLABORATION.

Shivani Desai | Anthropology (Global Health and Environment) major, minors in Political Science and Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies Mentor, Shanti Parikh, Associate Professor, Anthropology and African and African-American Studies

The emerging issue of obstetric fistula is a relatively new and underresearched women’s health problem, caused by prolonged labor and found primarily in the Global South. While researchers have explored communitybased stigma and women’s daily experiences of suffering and resilience while living with fistula, and while important theoretical frameworks regarding aid exist, there is still much research to be done in the realm of policy and global intervention. Through interviews, focus groups, field observations and document-content analysis both in Geneva and Iganga, I will examine how the emerging women’s health issue of obstetric fistula is perceived both from top policy levels and from grassroots community and individual positions.

Drawing from theoretical and real-world frameworks in Anthropology; Global Health; Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies; Political Science; and International Studies, I will explore the rhetorical and mobilization tactics utilized by international health organizations in order to understand how Western-dominated global discourse surrounding obstetric fistula shapes policy and intervention decisions, and in turn, how these aid initiatives tangibly impact women’s lived experiences and health outcomes.

A Year in Review 40

STUDENT EDUCATION

Shaun Ee | International and Area Studies and Philosophy-NeurosciencePsychology majors Mentor, Timothy Parsons, Professor, History and African and African-American Studies “The Voice of Kenya: Competing Visions of Nationhood in a Post-Colonial State” After Kenya “won” its independence from the British Empire in 1963 with a formal declaration, its struggles for nationhood instead became struggles about nationhood, as different individuals and groups competed for their own visions of the fledgling Kenya to be recognized. As in other nations, broadcasting media was one key site of this battle. To illustrate the ways in which the idea of “Kenya” was contested, I examine declassified documents from Kenya’s Ministry of Information and Broadcasting (MIB) during the leadership of Kenya’s first president, Jomo Kenyatta (1963–1978). MIB in this period had near-total control of radio and television and, hence, serves as a valuable lens through which to examine these struggles for Kenya. As an exemplification of the political dynamics of MIB and Kenya at large, I focus on Wera Ambitho, an MIB employee but also one of Kenya’s first nationalists. By linking Ambitho’s career to more general political events, I aim to illustrate that the content of Kenyan nationalism was never a singular drive but a contested entity that made multiple promises.

Max Hofmeister | Economics major Mentor, Venus Bivar, Assistant Professor, History “The Challenge of Using Subsidies to Promote Industrialization in U.S. Agriculture” Industrial agriculture, the basis of the contemporary American food system, transformed farming in the 20th century. Criticism of industrial agriculture has varied over time: it is accused of being costly, inefficient and complex, but also of creating conflict between large-scale, wealthy farmers and smaller, “traditional” farmers; causing a decline in rural life and society; facilitating capitalist penetration of agrarian life; and recently, damaging the environment.

A century of agricultural policy and corporate support either overcame or absorbed those criticisms in order to institutionalize the industrial system, in part through subsidies. Indeed, the U.S. government has offered agricultural subsidies since the Great Depression in various forms, including research, loans, price controls, crop insurance and direct payments. As this system faces increasing challenges heading into the 21st century, it is vital to understand what worked previously, what did not work and what the effects of these subsidies were. My project will analyze the history of agricultural subsidies, explore how they took their current forms, and discuss ways of making them more effective for the future.

Emily Murphy | History major Mentor, Lerone Martin, Assistant Professor, Religion and Politics “The Violin in a World of Violence: Enslaved Violinists and the Racial Politics of Music” My project examines the complicated position of enslaved violinists, whose performances both subverted and supported an internalized system in which oppressors could lie to themselves about the cruelty they inflicted.

Negotiating racial boundaries through performances of both protest and perpetuation, the experiences of enslaved violinists speak to a greater history of African-American culture and the complexity of race in American music. While many works on slave culture and resistance discuss the political

significance of music in enslaved communities, none focus on the peculiar role of the violinist himself and all its dimensions. Contextualizing the enslaved violinist’s struggles and triumphs within West African musical traditions, historical debates on slaveholder paternalism, and intergenerational musical legacies, I will look to WPA narratives, runaway slave advertisements, travelogues, sheet music and the memoirs of individual violinists to illuminate how enslaved violinists, in straddling expectations, performed racial stereotypes yet resisted white control. Their performances unified African Americans by evoking common heritage as well as new traditions, created a unique blend of culture and shaped the evolution of American music.

Mary Claire Sarafianos | English major, minor in Text and Tradition Mentor, Vivian Pollak, Professor, English “Tell It Slant: Form and Function of the Dash in Emily Dickinson” My project explores the ways in which Emily Dickinson uses punctuation, focusing particularly on her use of the dash, as a tool to push back against the constraints of gender and womanhood that she lived within. Historically, most scholarship concerning Dickinson’s poetry has either dismissed her punctuation as irrelevant or rewritten her poetry to ignore it. Instead, I bring attention to her punctuation and its significance, particularly in reference to the issue of gender in her poetry. I will specifically analyze a selection of poems in which Dickinson discusses or makes allusions to “Woman” and womanhood. I hope to compare Dickinson’s original manuscripts to the various editions of her published poetry to note the ways in which interpretations may change based on the differences in syntax and structure.

I will argue that Dickinson uses the dash to create and complicate images of compliant and submissive women and, in doing so, challenges the social demands and restrictions of gender that she would have faced in her lifetime.

Jessica Thea | International and Area Studies major, minor in Psychological and Brain Sciences Mentor, Shefali Chandra, Associate Professor, History “Politics of Plague: The Relationship Between Epidemic and Westernization in 1994 India” My project aims to investigate the ways in which perceptions of the state and ideologies regarding statehood and sovereignty change in the era of globalization. I will accomplish this through the lens of the 1994 plague outbreak in India. Throughout my project, I will be situating myself within the transformationalist perspective of globalization, focusing on the social, political and economic implications of globalization. I seek to identify the ways in which the 1994 Surat plague outbreak reflects the shifting reach of the Indian state under globalization. By analyzing the different actors that participated in suppressing the outbreak, responded to the disease and implemented policy in the aftermath of the epidemic — such as the Indian government, the World Bank and foreign powers such as the United States — I will argue that the entity of the state is becoming more diffused, yet still more controlling over its population. In particular, I want to explore where the line is drawn between international aid/intervention and Westernization or even exploitation.

Center for the Humanities 41

KLING FELLOWS, CLASS OF 2016

CALEB DELORME Major in Comparative Literature Mentors include Emma Kafalenos (Comparative Literature) and Bret Gustafson (Anthropology) “Indigenous Tradition as Literature: The Case of the Wichí Narrative” Centuries after Goethe coined the term, a “world literature” is still in the process of emerging. Its chief hindrance: Eurocentric bias. To overcome this, world literature must include Native peoples.

Yet the impulse to treat indigenous American tradition as literature must also be questioned. This

Every spring, the Kling

paper will explore these tensions, referencing a specific indigenous tradition — the narrative of

seniors publish Slideshow,

the Wichí people, a Native Latin American group. Through collaboration with specific Wichí

the program’s annual

individuals, I found that treating Wichí narrative as literature reveals aspects of it that would

journal. The articles therein

otherwise be inaccessible. Although it may not fit the category of literature exactly, and although

represent a portion of the

it can also be understood through other categories like religion or history, categorizing Wichí

humanities and humanistic

narrative as literature will improve our understanding of both the indigenous tradition and the

social-science research

concept of literature itself.

that the fellows conduct under the supervision of

NIKHIL DHARAN

a Washington University

Majors in Chemistry and History

faculty mentor over the

Mentor: Corinna Treitel (History)

course of their two-year

“From Atmosphere to Empire: Britain, India and the Nitrogen Problem in the Era of the First World War”

fellowship term in the Center for the Humanities.

Here, we reprint the abstracts that introduced their articles in Slideshow.

The First World War (1914–19) placed an unprecedented strain on the munitions and food supplies for the nations of Europe, and indeed the world. In Britain, the exigencies of total war elevated the nitrogen problem — or the dearth of nitrogen resources for fertilizer and explosive uses — from a scientific concern to a national one. In this article, I present the first comprehensive history of the British Nitrogen Products Committee (NPC), a group of experts co-opted by the state to evaluate the country’s nitrogen production capabilities. Despite being unconnected to the colonial administration, the NPC framed solving the nitrogen problem as an imperative for the British Empire at large. I will trace how this objective was received by colonial officials in India and who adapted it to fuel a discourse of development for agricultural industries, particularly sugar.

Ultimately, nitrogen became a key issue of the colonial state, and India was bound closer to Britain in a period that has been characterized as the beginning of the end of colonialism. By bringing the empire to bear on the history of science during the First World War, I aim to broaden our understanding of what the war meant and who it impacted, even after a century.

KATELYN MAE PETRIN Major in Medical Humanities (special major) and minors in Writing and Classics Mentor: Edward McPherson (English) “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Future?”

In Warren Ellis’s 2007 comic, Doktor Sleepless, so-called “grinders” undergo radical body modification, put on masks and beat up the police force. In 2016, real-life grinders are far too busy biohacking — implanting themselves with magnets, putting LED stars under their skin, and working with fellow citizen scientists across the world — to bother with political dissent. They dream of being cyborgs in a world with total morphological freedom — the ability for every person to choose what they look like when, without the limitations of funding or the interference of government. This movement has received both applause and condemnation. In a series of interviews, grinders explore how these dreams take shape and what makes them attractive to so many. Some grinders push at the limitations of their ideals, politically and structurally; others embrace the future with total idealism. Throughout these interviews, I look at how grinders may — or may not — challenge the status quo and how that may relate to the vitriol directed at their work.

And I ask, finally, what are the consequences of locating dreams of the future in the human body?

A Year in Review 42

STUDENT EDUCATION

“WHO’S AFRAID OF THE BIG BAD FUTURE?” Katelyn Mae Petrin on biohackers and the medical humanities

AS A MERLE KLING FELLOW, YOU PROPOSED A SPECIAL MAJOR IN THE MEDICAL HUMANITIES. WHAT DREW YOU TO THAT TOPIC? The medical humanities encourage a holistic, multi- and interdisciplinary look at how work done by doctors and scientists affects people and ideas. They can help future doctors and policymakers to better understand their impact on patients — but there are also important academic questions that are only just starting to be asked. I wanted to learn about health, the body, science, knowledge production, biology, the way history influences the present and the way narratives influence the world around them.

YOUR RESEARCH PROJECT IS TITLED “WHO’S AFRAID OF THE BIG BAD FUTURE?” WHAT’S IT ABOUT, AND WHAT DID YOU FIND INTERESTING ABOUT THE SUBJECT? It’s about a group of people called “grinders” who implant themselves with semi-practical, semi-artistic biotech. They want to become cyborgs. Most grinders have magnets in their fingers.

I’m fascinated by a lot of things about the grinders, but mostly I’m intrigued by their optimism. This is a group that takes its name from an apocalyptic sci-fi comic and who are doing things that, in a thousand stories, herald doom and death. But they’re excited, they’re ecstatic, and they’re almost unfailingly optimistic that the work they do will be fun and, just maybe, will contribute to humanity’s betterment.

I think there’s something admirable about their spirit.

IN ADDITION TO ACADEMIC RESEARCH, YOU’VE WRITTEN FOR THE COMMON READER, THE JOURNAL OF IDEAS LAUNCHED

BY WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY PROFESSOR GERALD EARLY. WHAT’S IT LIKE WRITING FOR THAT AUDIENCE? The Common Reader is interesting because it sits between my two interests — academic writing and journalism. Academic writing accesses complicated ideas and theoretical frameworks but can be reductive about what’s “really” going on with a text, phenomenon or group of people. Journalism presents voices without theoretical commentary — people can just speak for themselves, which is awesome when it comes to stories about communities that don’t often get a voice in society. But that can make it hard to connect what they’re saying to larger trends.

The Common Reader gives me some flexibility to walk the blurry in-between lines.

Center for the Humanities 43

CHILDREN’S STUDIES The Children’s Studies minor celebrates its 10-year anniversary in 2016. It has graduated just under 100 students as of May 2016 and is on track to graduate another 20 by the end of the next academic year. Enrollment in the annual Interdisciplinary

ACADEMIC MINORS

Introduction to Children’s Studies course continued to be extremely strong, rising to 57 for fall 2015. During the 2015–16 academic year, six Children’s Studies minors studied abroad in locations across the globe, including Auckland, Capetown and Copenhagen, while two minors signed up for independent studies supervised by Washington University faculty, one focusing on child psychiatry and one focusing on children’s literature. The undergraduate minor continues to be co-directed by Professor Gerald Early (English, African and African-American Studies) and Professor Desirée White (Psychological and Brain Sciences), with a faculty advisory board including participants from the School of Medicine, School of Law and the Brown School, as well as Arts & Sciences.

MEDICAL HUMANITIES The Medical Humanities minor formally began operations in fall 2015 under the direction of Rebecca Messbarger, professor of Italian. This minor sought to restrict its size for its first two years, and through two rounds of applications, including short essays and interviews, it generated a founding class of 14 students, 11 from the Class of 2018 and 3 from the Class of 2019. Their majors include biochemistry and neuroscience, anthropology and psychology, and Spanish and Latin American studies.

One is even a major in mechanical engineering! All share a compelling interest in the intersection of medical issues with humanistic methods and sources of inquiry. (Two plan to study abroad for Medical Humanities credit in 2016–17.) Forty freshmen took THE CHILDREN’S STUDIES RESEARCH COMMUNITY SPONSORED A PUBLIC LECTURE IN MARCH 2016. WALTON O. SCHALICK OF THE UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN–MADISON SPOKE ON “HEARING IS BELIEVING: CHILDREN, DISABILITY, AMERICAN RADIO AND POPULAR CULTURE, 1910–70.”

the new interdisciplinary Art of Medicine course in fall 2015, and more than 90 are currently enrolled in the minor’s other gateway course, Health and Disease in World History, for the fall 2016 semester, indicating significant student interest in the subject.

Faculty engagement is also strong, with an active advisory board for the minor as well as a Medical Humanities reading group for faculty and graduate students that has won a second consecutive year of funding from the humanities center.

A Year in Review 44

STUDENT EDUCATION

GRADUATE STUDENT FELLOWS

CLAIRE CLASS | ENGLISH AND WOMEN, GENDER AND SEXUALITY STUDIES “Typewriting: Literature, Gender, and Modernist Sociology in America, 1892–1930”

The students awarded the Graduate Student Fellowship actively participate in the Center for the Humanities’ established Faculty Fellowship Program, which offers an intensive, interdisciplinary intellectual

MAX FORRESTER | HISTORY “Competing Destinies: Religious and Political Conflict in the Southwest Borderlands, 1803–1848”

environment in which the Graduate Student Fellows can discuss their research with the Faculty Fellows in residence, other humanities faculty and invited guests. The students work in residence at the center for one semester and workshop a dissertation chapter, article or job talk with an engaged group of scholars.

ROBIN GIRARD | ROMANCE LANGUAGES AND LITERATURES “Courtly Love and Its Counterparts in the Medieval Mediterranean”

KELSEY KLOTZ | MUSIC “‘How Can They Call Us Cool?’ Race, Authenticity, and Embodiment in Cool Jazz Narratives, 1948–1960”

ELISABETH WINDLE | ENGLISH “Queer Nostalgia Across the Gay American Century”

Center for the Humanities 45

Giving Opportunities

A Year in Review 46

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 Direct your annual Washington University gift to the Center for the Humanities to support ongoing programs such as the James E. McLeod Memorial Lecture on Higher Education, the Faculty Book Celebration, publication of the Humanities Broadsheet or our faculty workshops.

Annual gifts of $100 or more qualify for the Century Club level, and annual gifts of $1,000 or more earn membership in the Eliot Society. Any amount is welcome.

ENDOWMENT GIFTS Endowment gifts are invaluable to the strength, quality and success of Washington University and the Center for the Humanities. Endowed fellowships (for undergraduate research fellows, graduate and postdoctoral fellows, and faculty 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 experiences.

Endowed gifts begin at the $50,000 level for lectures and $100,000 for endowed fellowships.

To give to the Center for the Humanities, contact Director and Professor Jean Allman (314-935-5576 or jallman@wustl.edu) or Associate Director of Development Julianne Smutz (314-935-5148 or jsmutz@wustl.edu).

MAKE A GIFT ONLINE To make a secure online gift or to make payment on an existing pledge, go to our giving page at gifts.wustl.edu. To designate your gift, type “Center for the Humanities” in the special designation box.

MAKE A GIFT BY PHONE Call toll-free: (866) 645-6448. Washington University accepts Visa®, MasterCard®, Discover® and American Express®. Please be sure to provide the card number, expiration date and name as it appears on the card.

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 Brookings Drive St. Louis, MO 63130-4899 Center for the Humanities 47

CENTER FOR THE HUMANITIES

Contact details Center for the Humanities

ADMINISTRATIVE STAFF

Washington University in St. Louis

Jean Allman

Campus Box 1071 One Brookings Drive, St. Louis, MO 63130-4899

Director, Center for the Humanities

(314) 935-5576

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

cenhum@wustl.edu cenhum.artsci.wustl.edu Umrath Hall, Room 217

Rebecca Wanzo Associate Director, Center for the Humanities Associate Professor, Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies (on leave 2015–16)

Wendy Love Anderson Academic Coordinator

Kathy Daniel Grant and Contract Coordinator (beginning March 2016)

Kathleen G. Fields Publications and Communications Editor

Kathy Jessen-Pierson Accounting and Grant Specialist (through January 2016)

Barbara Liebmann Administrative Coordinator

Tila Neguse Coordinator, Divided City Initiative

EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE Dillon Brown | Associate Professor of English Tili Boon Cuille | Associate Professor of French and Comparative Literature

Todd Decker | Associate Professor of Music Alexandre Dubé | Assistant Professor of History Robert Henke | Professor of Drama and Comparative Literature Diane Lewis | Assistant Professor of Film and Media Studies Paige McGinley | Assistant Professor of Performing Arts Timothy Moore | John and Penelope Biggs Distinguished Professor of Classics

Ignacio Sanchez Prado | Associate Professor of Spanish and International and Area Studies A Year in Review 48

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

Nonprofit U.S. Postage PAID St. Louis, MO Permit No. 2535