A Year in Review 2016-17 - WashU Center for the Humanities by WashUHumanities

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A YEAR IN REVIEW

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COVER IMAGE: Bill T. Jones, a world-renowned choreographer and dancer, received the 2016 Washington University International Humanities Prize from the Center for the Humanities (page 18).

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TABLE OF CONTENTS 02

Literary scholar Melanie Micir was shocked by the treasure she found while examining the papers of modernist writer Hope Mirrlees and her other archival research. Micir’s study of forgotten writings and forgotten writers recovers a lost history of queer women’s contributions to the genre of literary biography.

Director’s Letter Human Ties: Stories in the Humanities What Does the Humanities Have to Do With It? Associate Director Rebecca Wanzo addresses the oft-repeated argument that university faculty should stick to their books when it comes to popular political conversation. But should journalists and political surrogates do all the talking? Wanzo discusses the “trouble” at the heart of the humanities that perfectly suits its scholars for the job.

Reviving James Baldwin and Repeopling the Civil Rights Movement: Raoul Peck’s I Am Not Your Negro In his review of the documentary I Am Not Your Negro, scholar of African-American literature William J. Maxwell reflects on the relevance of civil-rights-era writer James Baldwin in the age of Black Lives Matter.

Musical Fakery in La La Land: Ryan Gosling, Fred Astaire and Why Performance Still Matters Is Ryan Gosling Hollywood’s new Fred Astaire? Todd Decker, a scholar of music and film, is unconvinced that the La La Land star has earned a spot among the greats of the musical genre.

Notes From Moscow: Remembering (and Forgetting) the February Revolution After 100 Years One hundred years ago, a protest in Petrograd (now St. Petersburg) sparked the Russian Revolution, which toppled a monarchy and eventually ushered in Russia’s Soviet era. WashU undergraduate and Merle Kling Honors Fellow Hilah Kohen reports from Moscow on the nation’s observance of the centennial.

The Divided City Initiative Events & Outreach Faculty Fellows

Live From the Pampa! Nationalism and Narrative at the Creole Circus For the late 19th-century denizens of Argentina and Uruguay, the greatest show on earth was the Creole circus. William Acree, a scholar of Latin American literature and culture, describes the phenomenon that still resonates today in the area’s vibrant theater culture — a mainstay of cultural life and a central place to socialize for Argentines and Uruguayans.

Progress and Pitfalls in Bolivia’s Natural Gas Bonanza Bolivia’s billion-dollar natural gas industry has expanded rapidly since the 1990s, with global investors and national political leaders vying for influence over its development. Anthropologist Bret Gustafson looks beyond the capitalist triumph to examine the energy sector’s impact on the area’s people and environment.

‘A Poetic Processing of New Media Phenomena’: A Look at the 20th-Century German Avant-Gardes If Dadaist Raoul Hausmann’s 1918 poster poem “fmsbw” has you feeling a little befuddled, that’s the point. The arrangement of letters and punctuation must be read within its mediahistorical context, says German literature scholar Kurt Beals.

The Secret Scribes of Modernist Lives

Revolution in the Reels: Filming Japan’s Interwar Struggle Between the two world wars, a new left-wing political movement took hold in Japan, driven partly by the Proletarian Film League, or Prokino. Film scholar Diane Lewis’ book-in-progress, a social history of Prokino, maps its place in interwar Japan.

An Unknown Architect of the Black Aesthetics Movement Scholar Jonathan Fenderson uncovers the life story of the activist-editor of the most important monthly print platform for African-American intellectual culture in the 1960s–70s, Hoyt Fuller.

Close Enough? Reasoning Mistakes Great and Small When a person makes a mistake in logical reasoning, does it matter how close they come to the mark, or is wrong just wrong? Philosopher Julia Staffel investigates the differences between slightly and highly irrational thinkers.

Faculty Research

Student Education

Giving Opportunities

Center for the Humanities 1

A LETTER FROM THE DIRECTOR I suppose if I had to come up with one

But on the other hand, and along with humanities scholars, students and supporters

word to describe this year, I might

across the country, we have been overwhelmed with trepidation and uncertainty as the

choose “discordant.”

new administration in Washington, D.C., releases plans to eliminate what have been

On the one hand and as these pages document, it was a frenetically busy and rewarding year, one animated by the scholarly energy and rigor of workshops and seminars, lectures and debates. The Center for the Humanities could not have kicked it off with a bigger splash than the 2016 International Humanities

the core sources of federal funding for the humanities: the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Institute of Museum and Library Services, and the National Historical Records and Publications Commission, as well as the many international education programs funded by Title VI and FulbrightHays. These cuts threaten the humanities on multiple scales: from the research agendas of individual faculty members, to the education and public outreach work of state humanities councils, to the capacities of libraries and museums to document and archive our pasts and our present.

Prize, which was awarded to scholar,

Indeed, as the humanities center’s associate director, Rebecca Wanzo, argues in these

writer, artist and choreographer Bill

pages, if there were ever a time that required humanistic analysis, surely this is it! Art,

T. Jones. The prize ceremony was

music, history, literature, philosophy, dance, the classics, religion — these are the fields

the highlight of weeks of activities on

that grapple on a daily basis with our ever-changing human condition. It is impossible

and off campus, including wonderful

to imagine any discussion, any analysis of the concepts foundational to how we make

collaborations with Dance St. Louis, the

sense of our world today — power, identity, citizenship, the global, compassion,

Center of Creative Arts, the Missouri

beauty, inequality, gender, empathy, race, truth, ethics, the past — that is not firmly

History Museum and University City

grounded in the humanities.

Public Schools.

But in this discordant year — of vibrancy and of trepidation — it is more important

Our halls were kept abuzz over the

than ever that we continue to imagine and to build and to grow. Defending the

course of the year by the energy of

humanities must not be all that we do; assuming a defensive posture for too long can

fellows — faculty, graduate students

be stultifying. Indeed, as this academic year drew to a close, I have been much inspired

and undergraduates — and by exciting

by the words of Earl Lewis, president of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, in his 2016

new partnerships with a range of

report about our shared future. It will be “neither utopic nor dystopic,” he writes, “but

community institutions, including

rather reveal a complex set of choices that cleave at the social fabric, threatening to

the Contemporary Art Museum

fracture the body politic. Perhaps now is the time to ponder future work so that we can

St. Louis, the Griot Museum of Black

be the architects of the world we seek to inhabit rather than the victims of the future

History, the Pulitzer Arts Foundation,

we casually create.”

the new George B. Vashon African American Museum and the Frederick Douglass Museum of African American Vernacular Images. We also forged new ties nationally through the National Endowment for the Humanities’ Next

Visionary words for uncertain times …

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

Generation PhD project and the Global Humanities Institutes of the Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes. A Year in Review 2

HUMAN TIES

Center for the Humanities administrative staff and faculty leaders.

Paige McGinley, associate professor of performing arts, introduced 2016 International Humanities Prize winner Bill T. Jones.

The annual James E. McLeod Memorial Lecture focuses on an important topic in higher education.

Events sponsored by the humanities center draw wide audiences, including undergraduate and graduate students, faculty and community members.

Center for the Humanities 3

A Year in Review 4

HUMAN TIES

What Does the Humanities Have to Do With It?

I do not know what motivated Fish’s peculiar argument, but it certainly speaks to people who are concerned that college and university professors are too far to the left and are indoctrinating students with political correctness.

Rebecca Wanzo

But the PC accusation often seems to apply to anyone who brings up identity at all. I recognize

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

that many people find the struggles on college campuses over sexual violence, trigger warnings,

In 2016, erstwhile English professor Stanley Fish wrote an op-ed piece for the New York Times attacking history professors for arguing that their discipline gave them some expertise in thinking about the Donald Trump campaign and nomination. Their job, Fish opined, is only to “teach students

histories of racial discrimination, commencement speakers and other issues to be troublesome. But “trouble” is perhaps the place where many humanists do their best teaching and writing.

how to handle archival materials, how to distinguish between reliable and

Humanists often reference Matthew Arnold’s

unreliable evidence, how to build a persuasive account of a disputed event,

Culture and Anarchy (1869) when defending the

in short, how to perform as historians, not as seers or political gurus.” What

humanities, which describes it as the study

is astounding about this claim is that all the things he lists are essential

of “the best which has been thought and said

in vetting political candidates. Is it not important for people to look at a

in the world.” In this logic, writing about the

variety of source materials in evaluating the qualifications and record of a

ideal society, beauty and the sublime are at

candidate — in short, the archive? Are we not constantly seeing conflicting

the center of humanistic inquiry, providing

accounts of events and statements when we watch pundits on the news? And

the foundation for Western civilization. While

yet despite the need for these skills, Fish seems to leave these things to some

undoubtedly foundational, the humanities is also

other kinds of experts — journalists or professional political surrogates —

very good at exploring the worst that has been

who should be more effectively using the very skills that historians and other

thought and said. The humanities can provoke,

humanists should have taught them in college.

speak to grief, make people uncomfortable,

In fact, the 2016 election provided countless opportunities for many humanists to show the real-world application of the content and skills they teach in class. Scholars of Islam and the Middle East have been incredibly important since 9/11, providing needed context to public debates that at best lack nuance and at worst are factually inaccurate. A number of people have referenced the 1935 Sinclair Lewis novel It Can’t Happen Here when discussing the Trump campaign — a novel rarely read anymore but that some people think could be useful in discussing the present moment. When I teach about discourses of masculinity in the public sphere, the discussions of a “muscular” presidency and the gendered language used frequently in Trump’s campaign will be very useful for my students. I suppose some people might suggest that calling attention to this language is evidence of “political correctness” and that

and decenter and trouble ideas like the “west,” “civilization” and “America.” Part of the conflict on college campuses is between those who think destabilizing those ideas is bad for our students and the nation, and those who think it is useful. But regardless of where one is on the political spectrum, the fact that the battle is happening means that we need the knowledge and skills to have productive conversations around the issues that are so essential for our time. Refusing to have the conversations will not make the issues go away.

it gets in the way of more important discussions, but if people did not find

Seeing the university as a place of trouble, as

gendered language important in describing the role of the president, they

opposed to a place of agreement or peace, may be

would not use it.

essential for our democracy.

Center for the Humanities 5

Reviving James Baldwin and Repeopling the Civil Rights Movement:

Raoul Peck’s I Am Not Your Negro William J. Maxwell Professor of English and African and African-American Studies

AS PECK KNOWS, IT’S BALDWIN’S GOOD NAME AND IMPASSIONED QUEER FATHERHOOD THAT YOUNG BLM INTELLECTUALS INVOKE IN TWITTER HANDLES SUCH AS @SONOFBALDWIN AND @FLAMES_BALDWIN.

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HUMAN TIES

espite his burial on December 8, 1987,

As Peck’s film also knows, however,

in 1965; and of Martin Luther King Jr.,

James Baldwin often looks like today’s

Baldwin is back in style because the

his life stripped by a Missouri drifter

most vital new African-American author.

grain and scope of his voice is strange

in Memphis in 1968 after his evolution

Raoul Peck’s Oscar-nominated 2016

as well as familiar. On the one hand,

toward a Baldwin-like democratic

film I Am Not Your Negro explains why

Baldwin’s expression is made to order

socialism.

Baldwin’s almost impossible eloquence,

for the age of Facebook, Instagram

a product of the 20th century, has

and Twitter: The blend of political

returned, unbowed and unwrinkled,

prophecy and actorly self-exposure in

in the 21st.

nearly all of his essays anticipates the

The most obvious reason for Baldwin’s rebirth is the renewed timeliness of his political vision, illustrated in Peck’s documentary by quick cutting between iconic images of brutalized civil rights protesters and rough footage of Ferguson’s gas guns and riot shields. With these uncomfortable visual rhymes linking black struggle in the 1960s and

very 21st-century job description of the selfless freedom fighter/self-promoting social media star. On the other hand, the best of Baldwin’s prose is essentially un-tweetable. His long and gracefully overstuffed sentences, studded with semicolons and immersed in the knotty syntax of two royal Jameses, King and Henry, can’t help but confirm his share

Employing the rescued Remember This House as his foundation allows Peck to re-member Baldwin’s body of work by adding an effectively new limb. Relying on Remember This House also allows Peck to recast the bitterest losses of Baldwin’s time in light of BLM’s new politics of mourning. BLM says and resays the names of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Natasha McKenna and far too many others to individuate the victims of state violence and to insist

of historical remoteness.

on the pricelessness of each and every

Baldwin’s status as the resurrected muse

Peck’s script for I Am Not Your Negro relies

cites and recites the famous names of

of Black Lives Matter (or BLM).

on the outline of a late and unfinished

Medgar Evers, Malcolm X and Martin

Baldwin book, Remember This House,

Luther King, revivifying their individual

discovered after the Harlem author’s

quirks through Baldwin’s intimate

death in voluntary exile in the south

memories and making their premature,

of France. The long, gripping minutes

violent deaths hurt again, separately and

of restored Baldwin speeches in Peck’s

humanly.

the 2010s, I Am Not Your Negro underlines

As Peck knows, it’s Baldwin’s good name and impassioned queer fatherhood that young BLM intellectuals invoke in Twitter handles such as @SonofBaldwin and @Flames_Baldwin. It’s Baldwin’s distilled social wisdom, often mined from his heated Black Power–era interviews, that fortifies

film thus alternate with passages from an obscure Baldwin manuscript read offscreen by an atypically restrained

black body. I Am Not Your Negro likewise

Armed with Baldwin’s words and inspiration, Peck cuts the writer’s

Samuel L. Jackson.

comrades and heroes free from

(See, for instance, the viral social-media

Remember This House retells the story

martyrdom, and breathes the life of our

resharing of Baldwin’s correction of an

of Baldwin’s delayed but intense

time into three again-distinct losses (of

Esquire magazine reporter back in 1968:

involvement in the civil rights

Medgar, Malcolm and Martin rather

“I object to the term ‘looters’ because

movement, focused through the lens of

than Evers and X and King). In the end,

I wonder who is looting whom, baby.”)

three tragic assassinations: namely, the

I Am Not Your Negro both supplies the

And it’s Baldwin’s longer, formal prose

killings of Medgar Evers, the Mississippi

present with a brilliantly exceptional

that’s recommended by BLM readers for

NAACP official shot down by a white

BLM Baldwin and repeoples, beyond

its uncanny relevance, its tight fit with

racist in his own driveway in 1963;

the blur of group history, the costly

present-day emergencies that, according

of Malcolm X, Baldwin’s ideological

collective struggle to which he testified.

to rapper-activist Ryan Dalton, “says a

adversary and surprisingly sympathetic

lot about [Baldwin’s] writing, but also

friend, murdered by Nation of Islam

about how little progress we’ve made.”

members while speaking in Harlem

these intellectuals’ posts and tweets.

Center for the Humanities 7

the common cloth of civil rights

It’s supposed to be a magic moment when Seb, played by Ryan Gosling, and Mia, played by Emma Stone, rise into the air, buoyed by their blooming love, about halfway through Damien Chazelle’s La La Land. Gravity, the film insists, is no match for romance when music and dance are present. The idea turns out to be an old one: A smitten Fred Astaire dances on the walls and ceiling in Royal Wedding, a 1951 film that, like all Astaire’s 30 studio-era musicals, includes great musical numbers worth waiting for in their host films and, today, savoring as music videos via YouTube. The problem with La La Land’s defiance of gravity stems from its stars: They cannot sing and dance. When Astaire charges up the wall, it’s the fantastic spectacle of a singular talent dancing that matters. Shortly after Gosling and Stone go skyward, Chazelle cuts to a long shot of some other, more accomplished couple twirling in silhouette in space. Gosling and Stone might as well be watching from below with the film’s audience. Cinematic fakery foreign to the musical sits at the heart of La La Land. And that fakery fatally undermines Chazelle’s ideas about jazz and whiteness. The links between Seb and Fred are many. Consider Seb as piano player. Gosling has described his preparation for the role: “I had always wanted to play piano well — so I got to learn a lot, and made strides toward that goal. It took three hours a day of practicing for three months. It was a lot of practicing, but it was well worth it.” Gosling’s efforts yielded seconds of screen time, much of it spent copying a jazz recording. And there’s no way to know if we ever hear his actual playing on the soundtrack. Astaire regularly created opportunities to play piano in his films. And whenever he did, it was

Musical Fakery in La La Land:

Ryan Gosling, Fred Astaire and Why Performance Still Matters Todd Decker Professor and Chair of Music

more than empty motion. He played on the soundtrack too. Just as his voice is his own, his piano playing is his own. Astaire was, in short, a real musician. This used to be a basic qualification for starring in a musical film. The genre was a A Year in Review 8

HUMAN TIES

ASTAIRE WAS, IN SHORT, A REAL MUSICIAN. THIS USED TO BE A BASIC QUALIFICATION FOR STARRING IN A MUSICAL FILM. THE GENRE WAS A PLACE FOR PROFESSIONALS.

place for professionals, not amateurs willing to spend a few weeks practicing. Gosling and Astaire’s different skills matter because La La Land builds Seb’s character on endless spoken riffs about jazz. Gosling’s Seb wants to “defend” and “save” jazz, a tired argument reaching back to ’30s films like Blues in the Night, also about a white musician wanting to rescue the music. Astaire, too, loved jazz. And his films and television shows, spanning almost 40 years, unfold in constant dialogue with the music. In the ’30s, he hired Benny Goodman’s arranger for his film solos. In the ’40s, he repeatedly danced to the boogie woogie blues. In the ’60s, on television, he danced and chatted with trumpeter Jonah Jones, soul jazz organist Jimmy Smith and the legendary Count Basie. Granted, for most of Astaire’s career, jazz was popular music. His claim to the music didn’t require Seb’s depressing hipster nostalgia. Still, Astaire forged his connection to jazz without talking about it. He cut lines from scripts that had him pontificate about the music. And when he could — outside the “Hollywood so white” ethos of the studios — he brought AfricanAmerican musicians onto his civil-rights-era television shows to play the music that made him dance at a time when blacks and whites doing anything together on television was potentially controversial. It matters that Astaire and Gosling are white men, privileged figures in Hollywood whatever the era. Astaire’s career as a dancing leading man begins with his whiteness. No black dancer stood a similar chance. And Fred’s and Seb’s relation to jazz will always be historically complicated. Astaire knew this. Gosling as Seb, going through the motions of Chazelle’s jazz fantasy, doesn’t get it. La La Land’s adoring audiences are settling for less than the musical genre has to offer, both as a genre that celebrates real song-and-dance talent and as a place where whiteness and jazz could meet, as in Astaire’s films, in the real performance of a musical star who was fully invested in the music.

Center for the Humanities 9

Notes From Moscow:

Remembering (and Forgetting) the February Revolution After 100 Years

IT’S JUST ANOTHER INTERNATIONAL WOMAN’S DAY IN THE RUSSIAN FEDERATION.

Hilah Kohen Merle Kling Fellow, Center for the Humanities, Class of 2018

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HUMAN TIES

t is hard to imagine the 20th century

significant anniversaries (the Decembrist

the sovereign is on a trip out of town.

without February 23, 1917, in Petrograd.

Revolt of 1825) are still marked in

Rodzyanko writes that the situation

On that day, tens of thousands took

annual ceremonies, it is unusual that the

in Petrograd is becoming existentially

to the streets of the Russian imperial

February Revolution’s centenary brings

dangerous for the Russian Empire

capital to demand an end to the

almost no public notice beyond a couple

and begs him to comply with some

European war and to the widely

of museum exhibits and a roundtable

of the protesters’ demands (the tsar,

unpopular reign of Tsar Nicholas II.

discussion that takes place, in fact,

meanwhile, has been posting photos

The revolution they triggered not only

in Paris.

of his stylish accommodations). One

achieved those goals, it opened the door to the Bolshevik Revolution just a few months later and the founding of the

Underneath the near-absence of the February Revolution in the physical

commenter, Marion, parodies the ruler’s mindset (“Don’t interrupt the sovereign’s game of dominoes. How are you not

Soviet Union in five years more.

space of Russia’s capital, however, lies

Precisely 100 years from that day, there

Alongside a mass of short paragraphs of

is a new calendar system in Russia (it

the “today in history” sort, many news

is March 8), the entire history of the

sites and cultural organizations have

world’s first communist state has come

constructed in-depth “special projects”

and gone, and the February Revolution

designed to give their users a firsthand

has been known throughout that history

look at the revolution’s events through

as the “February Bourgeois-Democratic

head-spinning infographics, century-old

Revolution,” significant only as a

news stories, and then-and-now photos

predecessor to October. Nonetheless,

of revolutionary landmarks. In my view,

one might expect that incredibly

the most compelling of these projects

significant event to make an appearance

have a common theme: They are

Their conversation reflects wider

in public life upon its centenary, at least

designed to meld with social media.

divisions in contemporary Russian

in the bustling political, cultural and

a quiet but fascinating online presence.

economic center that is Moscow.

Perhaps most remarkable is “1917: Free

By March 8, I have been living

letters, diaries, art and gatherings of

here for about a month. Today, the

1917 on a social media feed day by day

metro is packed with people holding

and even allows users to add their own

enormous bouquets of flowers. Feminist

comments to the events of 100 years

protesters are hanging banners from

ago. The relative anonymity of this

the Kremlin walls. Work days and

space weakens social barriers to sensitive

classes are canceled. In other words, it

political conversation; it allows current

is just another International Woman’s

opinions about the February Revolution

Day in the Russian Federation, and

to emerge on a personal level along with

the February Revolution is hardly on

all their rifts and complications.

anyone’s lips. In a country whose most significant historical commemorations (World War II) draw tens of millions to memorial parades and whose less

History,” a project that replicates the

On March 11, 1917, Mikhail Rodzyanko, the head of the Russian Duma, writes an urgent post on the tsar’s “wall” while

Center for the Humanities 11

ashamed?”). Sergey chides the emperor and empress for “failing to learn how to compromise with the opposition from their English and Danish relatives.” Nina, frustrated with everyone else’s lack of sympathy for the royal family, points to their rhetoric’s Soviet roots and laments, “People just don’t get that the Russian Empire was at war and the revolution was organized in secret by the enemy. People just don’t get it.”

society. Devotion to Russian Orthodoxy (and reverence for its tsars) is increasingly trendy, for example, but so is nostalgia for the atheist Soviet Union. On an institutional level, such complexities make the February Revolution too sensitive a subject to discuss as anything more than a distant historical fact, and the long shadow of the October Revolution makes that distance appear all the greater. However, in new forums enabled by new media, it is obvious that the spring of 1917 is both remembered and deeply felt.

GRADUATE SUMMER RESEARCH FELLOWSHIP Ten graduate students — from the humanities, humanistic social sciences, architecture, urban design and landscape architecture — were selected to conduct research on urban segregation during the summer of 2017. With the goal of forging sustainable

THE DIVIDED CITY: AN URBAN HUMANITIES INITIATIVE The Divided City, launched in fall 2014, is an urban humanities initiative in partnership with the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and Washington University’s Center for the Humanities and Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts. This four-year multipronged research, education and community project combines the disciplinary strengths of scholars and professionals in the humanities, architecture and urban design. 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. Learn more at thedividedcity.com. The Divided City Initiative supports faculty research, curriculum development, and school and community outreach projects. An update on the third year of the project follows, with a special emphasis on new program developments.

interdisciplinary connections among graduate students in these fields, the research fellows conducted their own research at Washington University or abroad and participated in the Summer City Seminar in May 2017 (see next page for details). They will also participate in the academic-year City Seminar program during 2017–18, when they present and workshop their research findings.

WASEEM-AHMED BIN-KASIM, History, Arts & Sciences — Bin-Kasim’s research focuses on a comparative history of urbanism, public health and development in colonial Accra and Nairobi, exploring sanitation and segregation. CHELSEY CARTER, Anthropology, Arts & Sciences — Carter’s project examines how black people with neuromuscular diseases (like ALS) navigate health care spaces and experience care by health care institutions in St. Louis. FRANCESCA DENNSTEDT, Spanish, Arts & Sciences — Dennstedt’s research focuses on how urban spaces in Mexico City are related to issues of sexuality and citizenship by creating spatial divisions (segregation) and other disjunctures among queer subjects. CHRISTINE DOHERTY, Architecture and Urban Design, Sam Fox Graduate School of Architecture & Urban Design — Doherty analyzes different types of school desegregation programs across the United States in terms of student diversity, class and achievement in comparison to neighborhood class and diversity. ANDREA GODSHALK, Sustainable Urbanism, Sam Fox Graduate School of Architecture & Urban Design — Godshalk’s research and design work investigates urban resilience through socialecological system dynamics. WEI LIU, Architecture and Urban Design, Sam Fox Graduate School of Architecture & Urban Design — Liu’s research studies the existing condition of public spaces in corridor spatial design perspective and proposes a framework to improve human capital as a result. CÉSAR D. RODARTE, Architecture and Urban Design, Sam Fox Graduate School of Architecture & Urban Design — Rodarte’s research analyzes the border’s impact on two dependent cross-international cities, paying close attention to the El Paso–Juarez and San Diego– Tijuana borders. SARAH SIEGEL, History, Arts & Sciences — Siegel studies U.S. urban history, with a focus on community activism, particularly how resident groups work to influence local and federal city policies. JOSÉ SULLIVAN, Spanish, Arts & Sciences — Sullivan’s research investigates how literature, film and art have portrayed the segregations in Chile’s largest city, Santiago. HSI-CHUAN WANG, Sustainable Urbanism, Sam Fox Graduate School of Architecture & Urban Design — Wang’s research interest looks at the metabolism of cities, with a special focus on the production and consumption of energy flows that are closely related to urban sustainability.

A Year in Review 12

DIVIDED CITY

NOVEMBER 10 FEBRUARY 16 MAY 5–6 During the academic year, the faculty from the Sam Fox School and Arts & Sciences organize the City Seminar lecture series, with funding and support from the Divided City Initiative. The lecture series, which is open to the public, brings to campus scholars and practitioners whose research and/or work focuses on issues related to urban spaces and the people who inhabit them. During the years of the Divided City grant period, the intensive Summer City Seminar brings together

SUMMER CITY SEMINAR

a diverse group of academics and professionals in the humanities,

In May, the Summer City Seminar hosted Critical Spatial

architecture, urban design and community advocacy for a multiday

Practices St. Louis (CSPSTL), a multiplatform convening that

skill-building workshop.

took on the spatial politics of the city. The events of CSPSTL constellated around a series of citywide exhibitions addressing the entanglements between (sub)urbanism, landscape and race.

CITY SEMINAR

As the second gathering of the Divided City’s Summer City

The seminar’s highlight this year was the celebration of its

creative practitioners working at the intersection of spatial

10th anniversary. Historian Margaret Garb and architectural

and political concerns, with a particular eye to the ways that

historian Eric Mumford founded the forum to get to know

creative practice and historical research mingle in the fields of

other scholars who were doing work on urban topics and to

exhibition and institution building. Across a range of disciplines

begin a broader conversation among urbanists in all fields

— art, architecture, geography, history and urbanism — the

working in the St. Louis region. To mark the occasion, the City

participants all brought to the table a particular way of seeing,

Seminar hosted a roundtable discussion, “Politics and the City,”

of responding to and of communicating the imbrications of

which took place November 10 and featured the following

politics and space.

Seminar, the conference brought together scholars and

panelists: Sarah Coffin, associate professor of urban planning and development at the Center for Sustainability, Saint Louis University; Douglas Flowe, assistant professor of history, Washington University; Clarissa Hayward, associate professor of political sciences, Washington University; and Jesse Vogler, assistant professor of landscape architecture, Washington University. Panelists discussed the status of the city in the new millennium: citizenship, policy, markets, and the roles, scales and potentials of the public sector, urban spaces and built environments. On February 16, the seminar welcomed Liz Ogbu, an expert on sustainable design and spatial innovation in challenged urban environments globally, for her talk, “Beyond the Binary.”

Central to the orientation of the seminar was building relationships among institutions, practitioners and activists in St. Louis and beyond, and providing a platform for collaborative projects across the city. Over a long May weekend, participants reflected upon and put into practice a range of methodologies — historical, creative, architectural, geographic, etc. — that reorient their received ways of approaching the Divided City. Collaborating organizations in this year’s Summer City Seminar include the following: Contemporary Art Museum of St. Louis, George B. Vashon Research Center Museum, the Griot Museum of Black History, Missouri History Museum, Pulitzer Arts Foundation, PXSTL, The Sheldon and Washington University.

Center for the Humanities 13

FACULTY COLLABORATIVE GRANTS

THE AUTUMNAL CITY: A MIDWESTERN FESTIVAL FOR URBAN FUTURISM

INFRASTRUCTURAL OPPORTUNISM: MOBILITY FOR ALL BY ALL

Washington University

Design, Washington University

MATTHEW BERNSTINE, Senior Urban Designer and

several faculty collaborative grants of up to

REBECCA WANZO, Associate Professor of Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies; Associate Director, Center for the Humanities, Washington University

$20,000 each.

GAVIN KROEBER, Director, Studio for Art &

Washington University

Urbanism (New York City)

The aim of this project is to bring together an interdisciplinary team of designers, GIS experts, writers, researchers and community activists in partnership with the Bi-State Development Research Institute (an arm of Metro) and Citizens for Modern Transit to collaborate with the impacted residents and envision not just a new billion-dollar train, but an investment in uniting this divided city.

For each year of the project, The Divided City: An Urban Humanities Initiative awards

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. Through three competitions, we have awarded 13 faculty collaborative grants, including the most recent awards, announced in May 2017, listed at right. Learn more about all funded projects online at thedividedcity.com.

TIM PORTLOCK, Associate Professor of Art,

This project will host an interdisciplinary festival of art and ideas in the spring of 2018 exploring the intersection of urbanist and futurist practices and applying them to St. Louis.

A CENTENNIAL OF A DIVIDED CITY: EAST ST. LOUIS AND THE 1917 RACE RIOT

JESSE VOGLER, Assistant Professor of Architecture,

LINDA C. SAMUELS, Associate Professor of Urban

Project Manager, Facilities, Washington University

PENINA ACAYO, Assistant Professor of Art,

TALE OF TWO CITIES III

Washington University

DENISE WARD-BROWN, Associate Professor of Art,

KARLA SCOTT, Associate Professor of

Washington University

Communication; Director, African American Studies, Saint Louis University The proposal supported the planning of a two-day symposium on May 26–28, 2017, which featured international and local scholars as well as leading community activists and artists in a suite of events around commemoration of the 1917 Race Riots in East St. Louis.

INEQUALITY AND THE CITY: MAPPING THE ECOLOGY OF URBAN SEGREGATION

CAITLYN COLLINS, Assistant Professor of Sociology, Washington University

PATTY HEYDA, Associate Professor of Urban Design and Architecture, Washington University

DAVID CUNNINGHAM, Professor of Sociology, Washington University Inequality and the City: Mapping the Ecology of Urban Segregation is a research-based capstone course for undergraduate students in sociology, architecture and urban design. Team-taught by professors Caitlyn Collins (sociology), Patty Heyda (urban design and architecture) and David Cunningham (sociology), the seminar will examine the history, (re)development and lived experience of urban segregation in St. Louis.

A Year in Review 14

Tale of Two Cities: Documenting Our Divides is a course that was taught in the fall semester of 2015 and 2016. Its third iteration is being offered in the fall 2017 semester. Over the course of the semester, students work in transdisciplinary teams to create documentary videos of street events, meetings and interviews that capture the immediacy of modern segregation, urban unrest and grassroots revitalization in St. Louis.

TECHNOLOGIES OF SEGREGATION IN ITALIAN RENAISSANCE CITIES DANIEL BORNSTEIN, the Stella Koetter Darrow

Professor of Catholic Studies, Washington University

SAUNDRA WEDDLE, Professor of Architecture, Drury University; Visiting Professor of Architecture, Washington University This project focuses on the cities of Cortona and Venice, where differences in geography, history and scale offer revealing test cases for how the natural and built environment reflected and shaped social differentiation in pre-modern Italian cities. Case studies of both Cortona and Venice will rely on pre-modern urban representations, including Jacopo de’ Barbari’s View of Venice (ca. 1500) and Pietro da Cortona’s 1634 View of Cortona, to map qualitative and quantitative data and to support analysis of architectural and spatial expressions of socioeconomic differentiation and segregation.

DIVIDED CITY

PROJECT UPDATE

SEGREGATION BY DESIGN:

A HISTORICAL ANALYSIS OF THE IMPACT OF PLANNING POLICY IN ST. LOUIS AWARDED JANUARY 2015

In spring 2015, Catalina Freixas and

diverse backgrounds, preparing students to work with community stakeholders,

Mark Abbott were awarded a grant

building student ability to write a cohesive neighborhood plan, and developing a fuller

through the Divided City Initiative

understanding of the role of policy and design in the promotion and alleviation of

to design a course, Segregation by

segregation in America. Students attended lectures by local experts and then worked

Design, that would examine the causes

in teams composed of Washington University architecture students and Harris-Stowe

and consequences of residential

urban studies students, aided by two or three design and policy professionals, to create a

segregation in metropolitan St. Louis,

neighborhood mitigation plan for six different communities in metropolitan St. Louis,

as well as propose potential policy

each representing a unique expression of segregation. The student research boards have

and design mitigation strategies. The

been displayed at Washington University’s Olin Library, Harris-Stowe, the Creative

intent of the collaboration was to

Exchange Lab gallery and the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts. During 2017, the

generate a transdisciplinary approach

Tower Grove South team will present their plan to the area’s neighborhood association.

to segregation from the perspective of

Further, the content of Segregation by Design and some of the work of the student

an architect, Freixas, and a historian,

teams also may be used by Great Rivers Greenway and its work with Beyond Housing’s

Abbott. During spring 2016, Freixas

24:1 Initiative in the Normandy School District.

and Abbott developed the course syllabus, which aimed at achieving the following student outcomes: strengthening analytical skills, testing new research methods and strategies, enhancing student ability to work in teams comprising individuals from

CATALINA FREIXAS is an assistant professor of architecture in the College of Architecture in the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts at Washington University. MARK ABBOTT is a professor of history in the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences at Harris-Stowe State University and director of the Center for Neighborhood Affairs. JOSEPH HEATHCOTT, an associate professor of urbanism at the New School, is a consultant on the project. Center for the Humanities 15

PROJECT UPDATE

MEMORIALIZING DISPLACEMENT AWARDED APRIL 2016

For three days in October 2016, the Center for the Humanities at Washington University, the Museum Studies Program at the University of Missouri–St. Louis

The workshop began on October 26 with a public plenary session at the Missouri

(UMSL) and the Missouri History

History Museum featuring four invited guests from South Africa who have earned

Museum hosted the Memorializing

renown for transforming museum and heritage practices in post-apartheid South

Displacement Workshop. Highlighting

Africa. The remainder of the program, held at Washington University on October 27

innovative practices in South Africa and

and UMSL on October 28, was constructed to encourage interchange among our

major cities in the United States, the

South African guests, invited speakers from other cities in the United States and

event aimed to instigate conversations

local participants. To orient out-of-town guests to the local historical landscape, they

among activists, scholars, curators and

participated in a three-hour narrated bus tour of notable sites of displacement in the

other museum professionals about

St. Louis metropolitan area. Thursday afternoon and Friday programming consisted

how to recover and preserve stories of

of film screenings, panel discussions and a wrap-up session designed to identify local

displaced communities and involuntary

commemoration priorities and brainstorm collaborative projects.

urban relocations in St. Louis. The program was guided by the following

Attendance at each day’s events ranged between 60 and 70 people. Approximately

overarching questions:

30–40 people attended on multiple days. Total attendance was about 100 discrete individuals. These included faculty, students, museum professionals and representatives

•

What interpretive strategies have

from civic and cultural organizations, such as the Griot Museum of Black History,

been employed successfully in

the Pulitzer Arts Foundation, Lewis Place Historic Preservation, Inc., the Scott Joplin

other parts of the United States and

House State Historical Site, Laumeier Sculpture Garden and Greenwood Cemetery

the world to recover the stories of

Organization.

displaced populations? At the concluding session, attendees arrived at a consensus to convene a follow-up •

What obstacles have local

meeting among interested parties to explore collaborative initiatives on interpreting the

groups encountered in keeping

theme of involuntary displacement.

alive memories of dislodged communities in St. Louis? •

How relevant are the interpretive strategies adopted elsewhere to the case of St. Louis?

•

How can the interpretation of

JEAN ALLMAN is the J.H. Hexter Professor in the Humanities and director of the Center for the Humanities at Washington University. ANDREW HURLEY is a professor of history at University of Missouri–St. Louis. KATHERINE VAN ALLEN is the managing director of museum services for the Missouri History Museum.

lost communities address the contemporary legacies of historical injustices and unleash the forces of progressive change? A Year in Review 16

PROJECT UPDATE

DIVIDED CITY

MUSIC AND SEGREGATION IN ST. LOUIS AWARDED APRIL 2016

St. Louis, notorious for its history of racial segregation but also widely celebrated for its vibrant musical heritage, provides a significant test case for questions about the connections between music and segregation in urban life. The archives of both Washington University and the Missouri History Museum hold many materials related to this rich history. However, their catalogs vary in the degree to which they signal content related to music, and no formal means of coordination allows students

PROJECT UPDATE

MAPPING LGBTQ ST. LOUIS AWARDED APRIL 2016

and researchers to view or search these resources as a unit. Such coordination is necessary if researchers are to address the role of music in St. Louis. This project develops an inventory of archival materials related to music and racial segregation in St. Louis in the collections of Washington University and the history museum and creates a publicly accessible website that highlights these resources and enables searches within them.

Mapping LGBTQ St. Louis is an interdisciplinary humanities project that centers on the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer experience within the divided city. It asks how sexuality divides cities and how urban spaces are implicated in the division of LGBTQ communities by race, gender and class. Exploring these questions through a focus on the St. Louis metropolitan region on both sides of the Mississippi River, we seek to identify patterns of sexual segregation; analyze how these reflect, reinforce and reproduce other divisions; and reveal historical strategies of resistance in the urban landscape. The digital map that we are creating brings that history to life. We anticipate that our map will pioneer new ways to represent both LGBTQ community history and broader histories of urban space and segregation.

PATRICK BURKE is associate professor of music at Washington University.

ANDREA FRIEDMAN is an associate professor of women, gender and sexuality studies, and of history at Washington University.

ANGELA DIETZ is director of digital initiatives at Missouri History Museum.

MIRANDA RECTENWALD is the curator of local history for University Libraries at Washington University.

EMILY JAYCOX is a librarian at Missouri History Museum.

JENNIFER MOORE is the GIS and data projects manager and anthropology librarian for University Libraries at Washington University.

MOLLY KODNER is associate archivist at Missouri History Museum.

STEVEN BRAWLEY is the founder for the St. Louis LGBT History Project.

VERNON MITCHELL is curator of popular American arts for University Libraries at Washington University. DOUGLAS KNOX is assistant director for the Humanities Digital Workshop at Washington University. BRAD SHORT is associate university librarian for collections at Washington University.

SHARON SMITH is curator of civic and personal identity at the Missouri History Museum. CHRIS GORDON is the director of Library and Collections at the Missouri History Museum. AARON ADDISON is the director of scholarly services for University Libraries at Washington University. IAN DARNELL is a PhD candidate at the University of Illinois, Chicago. BOB HANSMAN is an associate professor of architecture and urban design at Washington University. Center for the Humanities 17

Events & Outreach

‘A THING CALLED HUMAN HOPE’: BILL T. JONES ON TRAUMA, ENDURANCE AND THE DEMOCRACY OF DANCE BY JOANNA DEE DAS ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF DANCE

SEPTEMBER 29 Joanna Dee Das, a dancer and scholar of the politics of performance in the 20th century, interviewed the choreographer and artistic director Bill T. Jones, recipient of the 2016 Washington University International Humanities Medal. Faculty in English, African and African-American Studies, and Performing Arts incorporated Jones’ writings and performances into their fall-semester curriculum and gave talks on his work on campus and in the community with partners including the Missouri History Museum and the Holocaust Museum and Learning Center. This event inspired a new relationship with Dance St. Louis, which hosted two performances of Jones’ work Analogy/Dora: Tramontane by his dance company in the days following the lecture, and the Center of Contemporary Arts, which held a master class with a professional from Jones’ company that was open to local dance students.

“I’m always asking people to look at artistic form. And while they’re looking at artistic form, I say: ‘Ask yourself, ‘What are you experiencing as you’re looking?’ ”

Bill T. Jones, a world-renowned choreographer and dancer, received the 2016 Washington University International Humanities Prize. Jones was born in 1952 in Bunnell, Fla., and began dancing as an undergraduate student at the State University of New York at Binghamton. There, he met Arnie Zane, who would be his companion and collaborator until Zane’s death

— Bill T. Jones

in 1988. In 1982, Jones and Zane formed the A Year in Review 18

EVENTS & OUTREACH Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company,

“Why don’t you make something a little

this work is ultimately a work about

which has consistently performed

more personal?” And that’s when I began

a kind of hope. It’s saying: Dora lived

work that focuses on social issues about

to think about her oral history, about

through this.

race, gender, sexuality, illness, death

how to take my interest in literature

and dying and historical memory. In

and bring it back to the love for my

addition to serving as artistic director for

dance company. It was a wonderful

WHAT DO YOU THINK THAT DANCE ADDS TO THIS STORY?

New York Live Arts, Jones has received

experiment. It has this kaleidoscopic

Let me tell you a short story about this

Tony Awards for his choreography

sort of immediacy. They’re doing very

question of “why dance.” We were doing

for two Broadway musicals, Spring

complex things sometimes while text is

another program at a minimum-security

Awakening (2007) and FELA! (2010).

being told. And so suddenly Dora has

prison in upstate New York, Fishkill

He also has won a MacArthur “Genius”

become an African-American woman. A

Correctional Facility. At the beginning

Award, the Kennedy Center Honors and

moment ago, she was a Chinese woman;

of the performance, two of the women

the National Medal of the Arts.

she was a young white woman. This is

dancers walk into the audience and each

(This interview is edited for length.)

my whole idea: the democratic nature of

extends her hand and takes the hand of

our performance. I have been practicing

one of the prisoners, walks him out onto

that my whole life.

the floor, and walks around the floor

TELL ME ABOUT THE PIECE YOU ARE BRINGING TO ST. LOUIS, DORA: TRAMONTANE.

with him and chats with him. It was a

I’ve made a lot of different works, and

HOW DO YOU SEE THE CONNECTIONS BETWEEN DORA’S STORY AND TODAY?

sometimes at this point in your career

First and foremost, I am a formalist,

people, but we were not people all in the

as an artist you ask yourself, “Why am I

and I’m always asking people to look at

same circumstance. Some of us were

making another work? Where’s my real

artistic form. And while they’re looking

going to be able to leave that locked-up

interest?”

at artistic form, I say: “Ask yourself,

facility; some of us were not. The dance

‘What are you experiencing as you’re

brought a sense of life and availability

looking?’ ”

and possibility to them.

a Jewish woman who was 19 years

We spend a lot of time now thinking

During a really wonderful question-

old when the Germans marched into

about racial and sexual identity. There’s

and-answer session afterward, one man

Belgium, where her family was living.

something about this older Jewish

said, “I’m going to meet with my parole

woman’s story being told by a Hispanic

officer, and they’re going to ask me why

person, a black person, a white person,

was it important I come and see this

a Chinese person. We are behaving as if

today.” And I said, “I think that figuring

we’re completely blind to the differences

out dance, what dance is, takes some

between her ethnicity and ours, but

thinking about what I’m supposed to

the audience can see. It says something

be feeling as I’m watching it. Tell your

about how we’ve traveled — that I, as

parole officer that this was good for your

a black American, could be telling a

participation in a democracy.”

I had done an oral history with my companion Bjorn Amelan’s mother,

She told me about her life, her mother’s death, her moving with her sisters to the south of France. She was part of an organization called OSE, Organization to Save the Children [Oeuvre de secours aux enfants], which worked in the holding camps of Rivesaltes and Gurs. The Vichy government, in conjunction with the Nazis, put people there who were considered to be against the Hitler regime. She tells these stories with great distance, great discretion. I made this oral history for my companion and his brother, knowing there would be a time when her voice would be quieted. I was reading this W.G. Sebald novel, The Emigrants, and feeling overwhelmed. I said to myself,

Jewish woman’s story in such a free way. But, then, the story is about repression, about anti-Semitism, about running for your life in the face of authority. These issues are with us very much now. What is redeeming is that there’s a stage of young beautiful bodies there that are saying to us, “Yes, there is horror in the world. There is racism. There is sexism. There are all these things. But there’s a thing called beauty, and there’s a thing called human hope.” And I think that Center for the Humanities 19

very powerful moment that heightened everything. We were suddenly all

IN A DEMOCRACY, SO MUCH IS COMING AT YOU THAT YOU DO NOT UNDERSTAND. AS A GOOD CITIZEN, HOWEVER, YOU HAVE TO FIGURE IT OUT. LOOKING AT DANCE, WHICH IS SOMETIMES SO EXOTIC TO PEOPLE, IS UNDERSTANDING HOW TO LIVE WITH OTHER BODIES IN THIS WORLD. IT HAS THAT POWER TO MAKE YOU RETHINK THINKING, RETHINK LOOKING. RETHINK YOUR OWN BODY.

WHY DON’T UNIVERSITIES SUPPORT RACIAL EQUALITY? BY CHRISTOPHER NEWFIELD PROFESSOR OF LITERATURE AND AMERICAN STUDIES, UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SANTA BARBARA

OCTOBER 25 Higher-education change agent Christopher Newfield gave the annual James E. McLeod Memorial Lecture on Higher Education. He brings an interdisciplinary background to the analysis of a range of topics in American studies, innovation theory and “critical university studies,” a field he helped to found. Below is a condensed version of his lecture.

Although universities have materially supported racial inequality in the past, we who work in universities generally believe that we have repented. We assume that universities now side with social and scientific progress — that we represent reason rather than retaliation, debate rather than domination, as well as personal and economic development. These are indeed the general tendencies of universities in the abstract. And yet universities do not produce racial equality. But this is not universities’ fault, is it? Isn’t it solely the fault of the business or political class — the Republican Congress, the prison-industrial complex, the policing system and warfare-not-welfare economics? My answer is no — we academics do contribute

“My answer is no — we academics do contribute to racial inequality. We sustain it in at least two major ways.” — Christopher Newfield

to racial inequality. We sustain it in at least two major ways. First, academics don’t support equality of educational outcomes. Colleges are structured around selectivity and performance ranking, and this permeates the culture of learning. I was reminded of this by a student response to one of my Detective Fiction lectures.

A Year in Review 20

EVENTS & OUTREACH

I SAID THAT CRIME FICTION

The second reason universities generate racial inequality is what my new

CELEBRATES AUTONOMOUS THINKERS

book, The Great Mistake, calls the devolutionary cycle. This cycle begins with

LIKE SHERLOCK HOLMES, BUT THAT MOST OF THE GENRE, INCLUDING THE WORK OF ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE, ALSO

the mistake of treating a public good as a private one. Everyone now focuses on private market goods — higher salary for the graduate, more profitable skills for the firm — which renders invisible the nonmarket, indirect and social benefits. A major nonmarket benefit is racial equality. And yet the “private

TEACHES THE POTENTIAL DEMOCRACY

good” mistake encourages the university system to allocate resources by ability

OF INTELLIGENCE.

to pay. It sends lower-income and/or racially marginalized students to poorer

The world need not be divided between the 1 percent Sherlocks and the 99 percent Doctor Watsons. Watson could deduce if he hadn’t

universities whose lesser resources generate less learning and lower graduation rates. The university system is replicating both economic and racial inequality rather than cutting against it.

adopted the role of the passive, quasi-masochistic

Though the symptom of racial inequality is increasingly well known, the

chronicler of Holmes’ greatness, and Holmes often

deeper cause I describe — privatization — is not well understood. The

chides him for not thinking better. You can all be

symptom was confirmed by a major study from Georgetown a few years ago:

Sherlocks, I say.

“Since 1995, 82 percent of new white enrollments have gone to the 468 most

One of my students replied, “Democratic intelligence is nice feel-good stuff. But when we arrive here as freshman physics majors, we figure out by the end of the first quarter who is smart and who isn’t. There isn’t anything you can do about that.” “Well,” I said, “applying that assumption is the problem I’m talking about. So, physics is a noir discipline producing hierarchy?” The class laughed. “And literary study is an antinoir nurturing democracy?” I asked. The class

selective colleges, while 72 percent of new Hispanic enrollment and 68 percent of new African-American enrollment have gone to the two-year and four-year open-access schools.” These open-access schools have half the money per student of selective universities and often quite a bit less than that. The lowered learning and graduation rates are a logical result. My privatization cycle explains how the current private-good philosophy ensures racial inequality. We try and try and try to reduce racial disparity with all sorts of creative and excellent programs. Fifty years later, we have made only minor progress in the white-black university attainment gap (although the white-Latino gap has narrowed). And we still agonize over the limited numbers of people of color in the professorial pool.

laughed again. Students know perfectly well that

I bring up the privatization cycle because every racial era has its justification

selecting for intellectual hierarchy is the rule of the

that seems racially neutral, and privatization is ours. We used scripture for

university game, and even though many also feel

slavery, and invalid evolutionary theory for Jim Crow, and meritocracy to draw

there’s something wrong with it, they don’t know

a line around the civil rights era (even though meritocracy is grounded in tests

how to think around it. Neither do their professors.

that emerged from invalid evolutionary theory). Under what I think of as the

Rank-order meritocracy is holding back U.S. education. But when rank meritocracy

U.S.’s Fourth Racial Regime, privatization translates anti-egalitarian educational and racial assumptions into an economic logic that seems irreversible.

is suspended, miracles can happen. Some

We can in fact overcome racial inequality. But we who work in universities will

interesting studies are collected in law professor

need to confront both our belief in educational inequality and our investment

Lani Guinier’s recent book, The Tyranny of the

in the privatization cycle. The best way to increase American educational

Meritocracy: Democratizing Higher Education. It

attainment is to improve completion rates for low-income and under-

turns out that when students are not tracked, when

represented students. This requires that we dramatically increase expenditures

they are taught to approach learning as young

at the low-spending colleges, where most of those students go. And that in

intellectuals, when they are taught to teach each

turn requires fixing the great mistake — seeing university education as a public

other in groups, when they discover that learning

good, and leveling up funding so that disadvantaged students no longer go to

is thinking, racial inequalities can be made

financially disadvantaged universities.

to disappear.

Center for the Humanities 21

FACULTY BOOK CELEBRATION FEBRUARY 7

biographies and autobiographies, that focus on identity. Washington

The publication of a monograph is a milestone in the

University panelists were Rebecca Wanzo, associate professor of women,

career of an academic. The Center for the Humanities

gender and sexuality studies; Melanie Micir, assistant professor of English;

commemorates this achievement annually during

Erin McGlothlin, associate professor of German and Jewish studies; and Long

the Faculty Book Celebration. The event recognizes

Le-Khac, assistant professor of English.

Washington University faculty from across campus by displaying their recently published works and largescale creative projects and inviting two campus authors and a guest lecturer to speak at a public gathering.

In the late afternoon, more than 100 university and community members gathered for the Faculty Book Celebration. Tables lining the room displayed the 89 books Washington University faculty have published in the past three years. Sowande’ Mustakeem, assistant professor of history and African and African-American studies, spoke briefly about her book, Slavery at Sea: Terror, Sex, and Sickness in the Middle Passage (University of Illinois Press, 2016). Ron Mallon, associate professor of philosophy, chair of philosophy and director

In early February, the Center for the Humanities welcomed Sidonie Smith, the Mary Fair Croushore Professor of the Humanities, professor of English and women’s studies, and director, Institute for the Humanities, University of Michigan, for a series of events tapping her expertise in literary autobiography and humanities education advocacy. During her visit, Smith spoke with members of the humanities faculty in a town hall meeting to discuss the future of humanities doctoral education.

THE HUMANITIES SCHOLAR WILL BE AT ONCE A MULTI-MEDIATED

of the Philosophy-Neuroscience-Psychology Program, briefly outlined the arguments in his newest book, The Construction of Human Kinds (Oxford University Press, 2016). Finally, Smith gave her keynote lecture, “The Humanities After 2016: What Do We Want to Become?” As the author of Manifesto for the Humanities: Transforming Doctoral Education in Good Enough Times, Smith commented on the increasing need for humanities academics to make their work accessible to the public. She outlined several ways to accomplish this: contributing opinioneditorial pieces, writing for ever-more diverse audiences and creating openaccess versions of one’s work. In line with this expanded view of ways to share research and analysis, Smith challenged the audience to imagine new forms of intellectual exchange beyond the traditional dissertation and scholarly monograph. This new ecology could include projects such as a suite of essays, an ensemble project (e.g., essays, digital component, syllabus), a translation project (e.g., new

SELF-PRESENTER; A SELF-ACHIEVER;

translation of a work, introductory essay, essay on originator of work, public

A BRICOLEUR OF INTELLECTUAL

project on the work), a documentary, a white paper, a performance — and

INQUIRY, INDIVIDUAL AND COLLECTIVE;

forms yet to be imagined. While these types of culminating projects would

AN ANONYMIZED SITE OF DATA; A

require a restructuring of the curriculum, Smith says that these new humanists

NETWORKED NODE OF A KNOWLEDGE COLLABORATORY. On February 7, Smith joined the panel discussion “Identity Narratives in Anti-Identity Times,” a

will belong to a future with multiple possibilities: “The humanities scholar will be at once a multi-mediated self-presenter; a self-archiver; a bricoleur of intellectual inquiry, individual and collective; an anonymized site of data; a networked node of a knowledge collaboratory involving scholars, students, laypeople, smart objects, robots.”

Faculty Book Celebration event co-sponsored by University Libraries that examined the increasing popularity of and backlash to stories, particularly

A Year in Review 22

EVENTS & OUTREACH

Center for the Humanities 23

‘INTERVENTION IS ALL’: SIDONIE SMITH LEAVES BEHIND TALK OF A CRISIS IN THE HUMANITIES TO FOCUS ON THE FUTURE

THE CONVERSATION ABOUT THE “CRISIS” IN THE HUMANITIES AND IN GRADUATE EDUCATION HAS BEEN A HOT TOPIC FOR SEVERAL YEARS — WHAT PROMPTED YOU TO WRITE THIS BOOK RIGHT NOW? Given the realities of a higher-than-desirable average timeto-degree and dismal job prospects for humanities doctorates

BY MERRILL TURNER

and the shifting ecology of the everyday life for academic

PHD CANDIDATE IN ENGLISH

humanists, I wanted to add my voice to those calling for the

Sidonie Smith has written extensively on women’s life narratives,

transformation of doctoral education.

with a focus on autobiography and travel narratives. Her visit to the Center for the Humanities follows the publication of her latest book, A Manifesto for the Humanities: Transforming Doctoral Education in Good Enough Times. In it, Smith lays out her case for prioritizing and revitalizing graduate education in the 21st century.

For me, repetitive talk of crisis obscures a historical perspective on change in the academy and leads too easily to a sense of enervation — and a nostalgic view of “the old” 20th-century academy. Invocation of “the crisis” is not enough now. Intervention is all.

A Year in Review 24

EVENTS & OUTREACH

YOU CALL THIS BOOK A “MANIFESTO.” HOW DO YOU SEE IT REVOLUTIONIZING DOCTORAL HUMANITIES EDUCATION IN THE U.S. AND CANADA? WHAT DO YOU SEE AS THE CHALLENGES FACING BOTH PROSPECTIVE GRADUATE STUDENTS ENTERING PHD PROGRAMS AND THE FACULTY MEMBERS CHARGED WITH MENTORING THEM IN THE 21ST CENTURY?

What I am calling for is radical change. My argument for

Faculty find themselves enervated by the intensity of their

The dissertation monograph remains inflexibly wedded to

multiple obligations. Many find it difficult to take on a new kind

the traditional book-culture format. The habits of inquiry

of course or explore alternatives to the monograph dissertation

and production its conventional demands reinforce may not

with their students. A more challenging situation obtains

train doctoral students in methodologies enabled by, and skills

when faculty are asked or are expected to advise and mentor

necessary to navigate, this emergent environment.

embracing more flexible dissertation options proceeds from recognition that it’s imperative to affirm the intellectual mission of the PhD as a project and redefine its paths to achievement.

students on alternative academic positions and alternative careers outside the academy. The same difficulty pertains when

OPENING OPPORTUNITIES FOR DIVERSE MODELS

programs seek ways to train doctoral students in new skills

OF THE DISSERTATION AND DIVERSE MODES AND

required for digitally environed scholarship. Except for those

MEDIA OF ITS COMMUNICATION WILL SIGNAL THE

identifying as digital humanists, they rarely have the expertise to teach such things. Nonetheless, there are often professionals across the campus to enlist in alternative modes of training, graduate students who come in with considerable skills and tech-savvy undergraduates who can be collaborators in

IMPORTANCE OF PREPARATION FOR NEW CULTURES OF COLLEGIALITY AND NEW ENVIRONMENTS OF SCHOLARLY INQUIRY AND COMMUNICATION. Along with that change, I call for a greater variety of projects

the classroom.

coming out of course work, so that the seminar paper is not the

Though graduate students will have been prepared for careers

only mode of scholarly communication in which students gain

that unfold through diverse trajectories, they are constrained

competency. Seminars might be organized around a double

by the requirements of their programs and the interests, energy

format analytical project, with submission of scholarly objects

and commitment of the faculty with whom they work. But

in traditional print form and in a multimedia environments

they can take charge of their own learning, stewarding their

such as WordPress or Scalar, a visualization or mapping project,

intellectual passions and preparing themselves, with whatever

a curation, a term-long blog edited into a publishable piece.

help and guidance they can find. Because future faculty in humanities disciplines will require flexible and improvisational habits of mind and collaborative skills to bring their scholarship to fruition, they can seek opportunities to mobilize scholarly networks. This is especially critical as programs attract and successfully mentor more diverse cohorts.

Another change would involve the radical move away from the standard three-credit course packaging of doctoral education, the experimentation with ensembles of one-, two-, three-credit courses and/or yearlong courses. More creativity in course design and assignments could serve students well as they gather deepened expertise and new capacities (such as digital literacies for work and teaching, experience in collaboration, project management, grant-writing, etc.) that are going to be increasingly important to humanities scholarship and teaching.

Center for the Humanities 25

EVENT COSPONSORSHIPS, 2016–17 Fall 2016

RESIDENCY IN DANCE GUEST ARTIST Nathan Trice, a graduate of the Alvin Ailey Certificate Program and one of the most soughtafter teaching artists in the academic dance world as well as in the professional dance studios nationally and internationally, is the creator of nathantrice/RITUALS, a Project-by-Project Dance Theater Company. Organized by the Performing Arts Department

September 9, 2016

MOVEMENT, EXCHANGE AND BELONGING IN THE HISPANIC WORLD Conference organized by the Spanish Graduate Student Organization

September 13, 2016

ON AFRICA AND ‘WORLD’ BLACKNESS Jemima Pierre, Associate Professor, Department of African American Studies, University of California, Los Angeles Organized by the Department of African and AfricanAmerican Studies

September 13–15, 2016

HUMANITIES: POST THEORY, POST MODERN, NEO-GLOBAL Lynn Hunt, the Eugen Weber Professor of Modern European History, University of California, Los Angeles Lecture series organized by the Interdisciplinary Project in the Humanities

October 4, 2016

AF-PAK, THE WAR ON TERROR AND SOLIDARITIES: ASIAN-AMERICAN YOUTH/STUDIES Sunaina Maira, Professor of Asian American Studies, and affiliated with the Middle East/South Asia Studies program and with the Cultural Studies Graduate Group, University of California, Davis Organized by the Asian American Studies Minor

October 14, 2016

January 19, 2017

LOOKING FOR LORRAINE: GIFTS OF THE HIDDEN HANSBERRY

REFUSING OPTIMISM: TA-NEHISI COATES, ANTI-BLACKNESS AND THE ETHICS OF ANGUISH

Imani Perry, the Hughes-Rogers Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University and Faculty Associate in Princeton University’s Program in Law and Public Affairs and Gender and Sexuality Studies Organized by the Chancellor’s Graduate Fellowship Program, 25th Anniversary Celebration and Alumni Reunion

October 26, 2016

BUILDING TRANSNATIONAL SOLIDARITY: FILM SCREENING AND TOWN HALL Screening of Pankaj Butalia’s film The Textures of Loss and town hall discussion featuring the following: Christiane Assefa, organizer and writer from Mekelle, Ethiopia, who works on issues related to U.S. militarism, reproductive justice and feminism; Kristian Blackmon, organizer for racialeconomic justice, works with faith-labor coalition Jobs with Justice, curator of black resistance art at Urb Arts St Louis; Naomi Carranza, a student organizer with an interest in immigration reform and interconnectedness of struggle; Krishna Melnattur, Azadi member (Washington University School of Medicine) who is interested in anti-caste uprisings in India in the context of their opposition to Hindu nationalism and neoliberalism; and Pankaj Butalia, a filmmaker who documents Indian occupations. Organized by Azadi: Middle Easterners and South Asians for Solidarity

November 16, 2016

OBEDIENCE AND RESISTANCE: PRINCIPLES FOR ETHICAL LIVING David R. Blumenthal, the Jay and Leslie Cohen Professor of Judaic Studies, Emory University Organized by the Religious Studies Program

A Year in Review 26

Joseph Winters, Assistant Professor of Religious Studies and a secondary position in the Department of African and African-American Studies, Duke University Organized by the Religious Studies Program

February 6, 2017

INDIGENOUS RIGHTS AND ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE SYMPOSIUM: FROM STANDING ROCK TO ST. LOUIS CONFERENCE Organized by the Buder Center for American Indian Studies

February 16, 2017

BETWEEN ISLAMOPHOBIA AND HOMOPHOBIA: GENDER, SEXUALITY AND LIBERAL ENGAGEMENTS WITH ISLAM Joseph Massad, Professor of Modern Arab Politics and Intellectual History, Columbia University Organized by the Department of Jewish Islamic and Near Eastern Languages and Cultures

March 25, 2017

27TH ANNUAL WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY POWWOW March 31, 2017

THE SPATIAL TURN Conference organized by the Graduate History Association

April 25, 2017

AN EVENING WITH NTOZAKE SHANGE Ntozake Shange is a poet, performance artist, playwright and novelist known internationally for her play For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf. Organized by the Missouri History Museum

EVENTS & OUTREACH

The general public tends to associate the term transgender with Caitlyn Jenner. This has advantages and disadvantages. On the one hand, Jenner shows us that even a celebrated athlete who once embodied an ideal form of masculinity could feel disconnected from the gender others had enthusiastically celebrated. She also reminds the world that people can, and do, transition later in life. But for all the ways the spotlight on Jenner has brought some positive attention to transgender issues, there are numerous ways that her own projection of what “transgender” is has been a disservice to the majority of people who identify as transgender.

A ‘TRANSGENDER’ PRIMER

Few people have the resources to undergo the types of cosmetic surgeries Jenner

BY AMY EISEN CISLO

trans women of color.

SENIOR LECTURER, WOMEN, GENDER AND

“Transgender” is an umbrella term that can be used to describe someone whose

used to transform her face and body. Few people can transition without fear of losing their jobs, their friends and their families. The reality for many people who transition after puberty from male to female is fraught with danger, especially for

SEXUALITY STUDIES

identity does not align with the sex assigned at birth. In other words, a parent could

NOVEMBER 4–5

send out birth announcements that declare, “It’s a girl!” usually based on the child’s

The 2016 Transgender Spectrum Conference,

genitalia, only to find out later that the “girl” does not feel like her identity aligns

cosponsored by the Center for the Humanities, explored the complexity of transgender issues. Keynote speakers included Johanna OlsonKennedy, a leading pediatric specialist in the care

with femininity. A person might insist, or declare, that they are not what the happy birth announcement told the world; instead that person might identify as a boy or as non-binary, gender queer or many other words that indicate that one does not fit within the assumed direct relationship of gender and sex.

of transgender children; Bear Bergman, a well-

Further, the term “transgender” includes the sex category “intersex.” Intersex

known author of numerous works that engage

includes androgen-insensitivity syndrome, progestin-induced virilization, adrenal

with his personal life experiences as a trans man;

hyperplasia and Klinefelter’s syndrome. Babies born with any of these conditions

Shannon Price Minter, a lawyer famous for his

are assigned a sex at birth because birth certificates in the United States allow

work in LGBT rights; and the founding members

only two choices: male or female. As a result, people who are intersex sometimes

of the Detroit Sistas Project, an organization that was founded to explore the intersections of race and gender in the Motor City.

confront the same situation as those born male or female when the sex assigned to them at birth does not match their gender. Our legal and medical discourses are structured around the idea that humans should be easily identified with only two sex categories: male and female. For a long time, the sex categories were believed to be the same as gender categories, so that a female was a woman and a male was a man. In the past, sex categories were also assumed to align with a person’s sexuality. In other words, psychologists thought that a healthy female was a woman who was attracted to men. Today, we recognize these categories — sex, gender and sexuality — as different and sometimes independent of one another. It is important to note that even though we often see LGBT grouped together, transgender is not a type of sexuality. People who identify as transgender may be homosexual, heterosexual, asexual, bisexual, pansexual — just about any sexual category you can imagine. Transgender simply describes how a person understands their gender.

Center for the Humanities 27

WI L L I AM AC RE E

BR ET G USTAFSON

KURT BEALS

MELANIE MICIR

DIA NE WEI L EW IS

JONAT HAN FENDERSON

JUL I A STA F F E L

Faculty Research A Year in Review 28

FACULTY RESEARCH

WHAT WAS THE CREOLE CIRCUS, AND WHAT DOES THE TERM “CREOLE” MEAN IN THIS CONTEXT?

LIVE FROM THE PAMPA! NATIONALISM AND NARRATIVE AT THE CREOLE CIRCUS

The Creole circus was an entertainment phenomenon that developed in the region known as the Río de la Plata, comprising Argentina and Uruguay, in the 1880s and 1890s. In the mid-1880s, traveling circus troupes, which had crisscrossed the region for decades, incorporated short plays called Creole dramas into their acts, and these became the namesake of the Creole circus. Creole (criollo) was a colonial term denominating Spaniards born in the Americas and their privileged social status. By the second half of the 1800s, however, and in line with the appropriation of the term across Latin America, “Creole” had come to designate what and who was “authentically” local — in this case, Argentine or Uruguayan and clearly not European.

ONE OF THE RECURRENT CREOLE DRAMAS PERFORMED WAS THAT OF THE STORY OF JUAN MOREIRA, THE TALE OF A GOOD-GAUCHO-GONE-BAD BASED LOOSELY ON A REAL-LIFE OUTLAW WHO BECAME A FOLK HERO. WHY DID THIS STORY RESONATE WITH THE PEOPLE? There are many reasons the story of Juan Moreira became so popular, beginning with its entertainment value. The story first appeared as a serialized narrative in an Argentine newspaper, quickly becoming a best seller. Over the course of a couple of months in 1879–80, readers followed the arc of Moreira’s noble life on the pampa, his persecution by corrupt state officials and his downfall that fed a larger-than-life myth of the man. The daily installments inspired suspense — like telenovelas do so well today. The dramatic representation of Moreira only heightened the entertainment quality, for spectators were treated to horse races, knife fights, music and dance, all of which made for sold-out shows.

WILLIAM ACREE

There were deeper issues at play, too. The transformation of the Argentine

Associate Professor, Romance Languages and Literature,

countryside — from a space devoted to raising livestock (cattle and sheep) to

Arts & Sciences

one centered on cereal cultivation — altered work opportunities as well as

For the late 19th-century denizens of Argentina and Uruguay, the greatest show on earth was the Creole circus. William

ways of life. Tensions surrounding immigration also feature in the Moreira drama. Waves of mass migration to Argentina and Uruguay between 1870 and 1914, primarily from Italy and Spain, led to a demographic transformation

Acree describes the phenomenon that still resonates today

in the region. During these same years, there was a proliferation of Creole

in the area’s vibrant theater culture — a mainstay of cultural

literature as well as the growth of nativism as a powerful ideology that

life and a central place to socialize for Argentines and

overlapped with nationalism. Finally, the shifting economic landscape resulted

Uruguayans.

in rapid urbanization of the port capitals of Buenos Aires and Montevideo, where the majority of both countries’ populations were concentrated. With these changes, people welcomed the chance to celebrate the “simple life” of the past the Creole dramas portrayed, albeit an idealized or imaginary version.

Center for the Humanities 29

WHAT ARGUMENT ARE YOU MAKING WITH ENERGY AND EMPIRE: BOLIVIA IN THE AGE OF GAS? The book documents the ways in which a natural-gas boom in Bolivia is

PROGRESS AND PITFALLS IN BOLIVIA’S NATURAL GAS BONANZA

transforming its politics, culture and the economy. The word “empire” in the title of the book is a reference to the longer historical domination of the United States and of a particular form of fossil-fuel-dependent capitalist growth that underlies the global environmental crisis of global warming — and the skewed and unequal relationship between places like Bolivia and the consuming countries. In many ways, the book is an attempt to critique this relationship — between empire, fossil fuels and a particular form of development — and to imagine how countries like Bolivia are both trapped within yet seeking to move beyond this dependent relationship. The argument I hope to make is that beyond the apparent benefits in economic growth, and the efforts made by the government to redistribute that growth in the near term, the ecological and social impacts of gas development are, in the longer term, environmentally destructive and socially regressive. This mirrors the effects of fossil fuels globally.

WHAT’S AT STAKE FOR THE PEOPLE OF THIS REGION? Their livelihoods are at stake. The energy industry, in many cases, makes payments to communities and organizations that are, for better and for worse, eagerly accepted. These are more or less legal attempts to secure what companies call “social license” — the ability to operate (drilling, exploring) without community protest. Yet these short-term gains are usually paralleled by other negative effects — environmental and social — and the local peoples are rarely, if ever, the recipients of most of the benefits of gas development, which flows, quite literally and figuratively, to the cities. While Bolivia touts itself as a supporter of indigenous rights, gas development will trump self-

BRET GUSTAFSON

determination every time.

Associate Professor, Anthropology, Arts & Sciences

WHAT KINDS OF SOURCES ARE YOU USING IN YOUR RESEARCH?

Bolivia’s billion-dollar natural gas industry has expanded

Well, the anthropologist traffics in a lot of conversations, whether we call

rapidly since the 1990s, with global investors and national

them interviews or not. The kind of work we do is not so simple that we can

political leaders vying for influence over its development. Bret Gustafson looks beyond the capitalist triumph to examine the energy sector’s impact on the area’s people and environment.

simply try to count something and run some statistics to create a bar graph out of it. We are trying to craft a rich and complex social and cultural portrait that seeks to understand things like fossil-fuel development in multiple dimensions, simultaneously. In my case, it runs the gamut: Twitter exchanges, TV commercials, coffee-shop chitchat, taxi drivers, indigenous leaders, political officials, gas field workers. The explosion of possible “data” is both useful, since you learn things you did not know, but also overwhelming, since at some point you have to make a lot more decisions about what matters, how it matters and why it matters.

A Year in Review 30

FACULTY RESEARCH

‘A POETIC PROCESSING OF NEW MEDIA PHENOMENA’: A LOOK AT THE 20THCENTURY GERMAN AVANT-GARDES

CAN YOU GIVE US A BRIEF OVERVIEW OF THE PROJECT? My book argues that the poetics of early 20th-century German avantgardes were profoundly shaped by modern theories and technologies of communication such as the telegraph, and particularly the wireless. These technological and theoretical breakthroughs occasioned a fundamental re-examination of the relationship between language and human subjectivity, and experimental poetry was one key venue in which that re-examination took place. Focusing on Dada, I demonstrate that these literary developments can be properly understood only in their media-historical context, as a poetic processing of new media phenomena.

WHAT DOES THE RESEARCH AND WRITING PROCESS LOOK LIKE FOR A PROJECT LIKE THIS? It’s been a long process. Fortunately, I’ve had the chance to go to Europe several times and work in archives at places like the Berlinische Galerie in Berlin and the Centre Pompidou in Paris, which have significant collections of works by some of the Dada poets. For the media history aspect, I’ve made use of a lot of digital and print archives to read historical publications and trade journals from the telegraph industry, to get a better idea of how people were thinking and writing about these technologies at the time. It’s easy for us to look through an anachronistic lens and see the telegraph as a precursor to the telephone, the internet and so on, but I’ve tried in this project to understand how people were thinking about this medium back when it was a brand-new, cutting-edge technology.

KURT BEALS Assistant Professor, Germanic Languages and Literature, Arts & Sciences

HAS THERE BEEN A PARTICULAR FINDING OR EXPERIENCE DURING YOUR RESEARCH THAT HAS SURPRISED YOU? One thing that’s surprised me is the similarity between some reflections about

Listening to Dadaist Raoul Hausmann recite his 1918

the telegraph in the late 19th century and the sorts of things people say about

poster poem “fmsbw,” you may recognize the staccato

texting or Twitter today. There are editorials in German magazines from that

repetitions of sound, codes and ciphers that first prompted

time arguing that the telegraph is going to fundamentally change linguistic

Kurt Beals to connect Dada poetry to the telegraph. In his

practice, because the sorts of abbreviations that people come up with to save

study of early 20th-century experimental poetry, Wireless

money will end up entering into everyday speech, until at some point people

Dada: Telegraphic Poetics in the Avant-Garde, Beals uncovers

forget where they even came from. Sounds familiar, right? LOL.

new links between these artistic productions and the new forms of communication of the day. “It’s easy to talk about ‘the media’ as an ideological force in contemporary culture,” Beals said, “but there are also less obvious ways that our everyday means of communication influence our lives and our patterns of thought.” Center for the Humanities 31

BRIEFLY, WHAT IS YOUR BOOK ABOUT? This book traces a series of biographical projects undertaken by, for and about modernist women writers in the middle of the 20th century. Although these writers are better known for their work in other genres (particularly, though not exclusively, the novel), their life writing has received less attention. I suggest that this work, some of which was published and some of which remains accessible only in archives, constitutes a queer feminist counter-history of modernist literature over the course of the long 20th century.

THE SECRET SCRIBES OF MODERNIST LIVES

WHAT ARE THE CHALLENGES IN CHOOSING BIOGRAPHY FOR LITERARY STUDY? Most scholars of literature rely on biographical information in both their written work and their classrooms, but there is a long theoretical history of pushing back against the biographical in order to assert the sanctity, or, at the very least, the formal independence of literature. We now see many writers arranging for their personal and professional archives to be preserved in university libraries and special collections, but we are still forced to contend with many who distrust biography and who, like Henry James, want to burn all of their private papers. W.H. Auden called biography “always superfluous” and “usually in bad taste.” James Joyce envisioned biographers as “biografiend[s].” And Vladimir Nabokov accused them of being “psycho-plagiarists.” Biography isn’t a four-letter word, but in some circles, you’d never know it.

GIVEN THAT REPUTATION, WHY IS THIS GENRE VALUABLE? Most of the women writers in my book could not assume that, in the absence of biography, the literary work they produced would speak for itself. Instead, they understood biography as an activist genre that could offer a corrective to the dominant versions of literary history that for too long had privileged the cultural production of male writers. And they were right! The biographical acts and archives produced by these women directly enabled the feminist and

MELANIE MICIR

queer recovery projects undertaken by scholars later in the 20th century.

Assistant Professor, English, Arts & Sciences

HAVE YOU RECOVERED ANY LITTLE-SEEN OR UNPUBLISHED SOURCES THAT HAVE BEEN SURPRISING OR OTHERWISE IMPACTFUL?

With her book-in-progress, The Passion Projects: Modernist Women, Intimate Archives, Melanie Micir surveys the biographical writings — from published texts and established collections to drafts, outlines and annotated letters — of midcentury women writers to revive their contributions to literary history.

A few summers ago, while I was reading through the papers of Hope Mirrlees and Jane Ellen Harrison at Newnham College, Cambridge, I was shocked to discover the complete manuscript of the second half of Mirrlees’s biography of the English antiquarian Sir Robert Bruce Cotton. She had published the first half during her lifetime, but virtually all scholarship on Mirrlees was in agreement that she had never finished the second half. Yet, there it was — in its entirety! Only a few months earlier, the college archivist had had to make the argument that this manuscript was important enough to be held in the Newnham Archives. It is most fortunate for me, and for future scholars interested in either Mirrlees, Harrison or Cotton, that she made an excellent case. Archival research can be tedious, but the occasional stumble into something both surprising and impactful makes it all worth it. A Year in Review 32

FACULTY RESEARCH

CAN YOU DESCRIBE THE RISE OF THE COUNTRY’S PROLETARIAN MOVEMENT? Japan did not fight in WWI, but it manufactured munitions for the Allies. This helped develop heavy industry in Japan and spurred rapid urbanization.

REVOLUTION IN THE REELS: FILMING JAPAN’S INTERWAR STRUGGLE

The contributions that ordinary people made to Japan’s modernization gave rise to interwar social movements that called for sweeping social and political reforms. The proletarian movement came out of these developments, emerging in the 1920s and starting off as a fairly broad, coalition-based movement that comprised mostly middle-class/elite writers, artists and intellectuals who wanted to create a more progressive, pacifist society. The movement gradually became more focused on political organization, recruiting and politicizing factory workers and tenant farmers. It also became more closely linked to the Japanese Communist Party, which was considered seditious and therefore illegal, and was itself guided by policies set by the Communist International, or Comintern.

WHO WAS INVOLVED IN PROKINO, AND HOW DID THEY COMMUNICATE THEIR IDEAS? Just prior to the establishment of Prokino, leftist intellectuals were writing about popular cinema from a political perspective, celebrating progressive artists such as Chaplin, criticizing the links between commercial cinema and capitalist culture, and drawing attention to the ideological messages found in mainstream film. However, in many ways, Prokino was less aligned with this kind of film criticism than with the proletarian theater movement. One of the founding members of Prokino belonged to the Sayoku Gekijō (Leftwing Theater) trunk theater, a mobile theater unit that was dispatched to factories to perform

DIANE WEI LEWIS Assistant Professor, Film and Media Studies, Arts & Sciences

on-site for workers. He decided to use an amateur film camera to shoot May Day festivities and labor strikes. Documentary filmmaking and ad hoc film screenings became central to Prokino’s mission.

In the years after World War I, a new proletarian movement

One interesting example involves a group of tenant farmers in the village of

took hold in Japan. A driving force for the new leftist politics

Shiodome in Saitama Prefecture who formed a union to protect themselves

was Prokino, a collective of artists, creators and thinkers who

from a corrupt landlord. The landlord had been supporting a mistress with

saw the potential to document and spread their message

funds meant for local elections, selling off the topsoil from his fields to a

via film. Diane Wei Lewis shares a preview of her current

brick-making company, redrawing the farmers’ plots and penalizing them

book project, Prokino: The Proletarian Film League of Japan,

when they couldn’t produce enough rent from their meager crops. Prokino

1929–1934, a full-length study of the collective and its place in

was invited to film the union’s first cooperative rice planting. They sent two

Japanese interwar history.

members with a small-gauge film camera and 200 feet of film. The members learned about the union’s history and wrote up an account of the farmers’ struggles and the filming itself in articles for Prokino’s magazine. Films such as these were then used to boost union morale or recruit farmers who had yet to organize.

Center for the Humanities 33

YOUR BOOK EXPLORES ACTIVIST AND ORGANIZER HOYT W. FULLER AND THE BLACK ARTS MOVEMENT OF THE 1960S. WHO WAS FULLER, AND WHY DID YOU FOCUS ON HIM? Hoyt Fuller was an editor, activist and intellectual who profoundly influenced

AN UNKNOWN ARCHITECT OF THE BLACK AESTHETICS MOVEMENT

African-American counterpublic discourse immediately after Jim Crow in the 1960s and 1970s. He edited a widely read journal called Negro Digest (renamed Black World in 1970), which he ran from 1961–76, using it as the most important monthly print platform for the Black Arts Movement and African-American intellectual culture. It was through his work with Negro Digest/Black World that participants in the Black Arts Movement began to understand themselves as a national network of like-minded individuals and organizations. Fuller was also an activist who was obsessed with connecting local struggles with larger global fights for liberation. Situated in Chicago for most of his career, he was part of a triumvirate that founded the Organization for Black American Culture, a community-rooted artistic and intellectual collective that sparked national trends in the area of African-American literature and visual arts. At the same time, Fuller pushed the local group to participate in Pan-African organizing efforts on the African continent. Between 1966 and 1977, Fuller attended and participated in several international cultural festivals on the African continent, including the First World Festival of Negro Arts in Dakar, Senegal, in 1966; the First Pan African Cultural Festival in Algiers, Algeria, in 1969; and the Second World Festival of Black and African Arts and Culture in Lagos, Nigeria, in 1977. In this sense, he was a cosmopolitan black activist, who believed that the fate of black people throughout the diaspora was tied to that of Africa. Fuller was also an intellectual in his own right. He wrote newspaper articles,

JONATHAN FENDERSON Assistant Professor, African and African-American Studies, Arts & Sciences “The black revolt is as palpable in letters as it is in the streets,” begins the seminal 1968 essay “Towards a Black Aesthetic.” Its author, Hoyt Fuller, was a pivotal figure in the AfricanAmerican intellectual culture of the 1960s and ’70s and is the

long-form essays and editorials and published a short Pan-Africanist travelogue, titled Journey to Africa, that chronicled his experiences in Morocco, Senegal, Algeria and Guinea.

WHAT NEW CONTRIBUTION TO YOUR FIELD DOES THIS PROJECT MAKE? This book is an attempt to think through the ways mid 20th-century shifts in America’s (and the broader world’s) economic, racial and cultural terrains influenced African-American life.

subject of Jonathan Fenderson’s current book-in-progress,

How did these shifts make black people think differently about themselves?

Building the Black Arts Movement: Hoyt Fuller and 1960s

How did the shifting terrain destabilize long-held beliefs in the African-

Cultural Politics. The essay, said Fenderson, “has remained

American community? And, more important, how did this shifting terrain

a touchstone for thinking about African-American literature

produce new, innovative ideas that would subsequently emerge as core

(and literary politics) of the 1960s and 1970s.”

pillars in African-American culture? Many scholars have wrestled with these questions; however, my book uses Hoyt Fuller’s life as a prism to interrogate these issues.

A Year in Review 34

FACULTY RESEARCH

CLOSE ENOUGH? REASONING MISTAKES GREAT AND SMALL

HUMAN REASONING INVOLVES DEALING WITH UNCERTAINTIES AND PROBABILITIES. HOW HAS PHILOSOPHY ADDRESSED THIS PROBLEM? In traditional systems of logic, probabilities and uncertainties don’t really have a place, so for a long time, it was more or less ignored. With the somewhat recent development of modern probability theory and statistics, philosophers investigate this question with a focus on what makes such reasoning rational.

WHAT DOES YOUR RESEARCH ADD TO THIS PROBLEM? In my view, rationality is not an all-or-nothing matter. My goal is to better understand to what degree people are irrational in their reasoning. Since philosophical theories of what makes our attitudes rational usually just focus on characterizing the ideal case, they don’t have good resources to capture the extent to which someone’s degree of confidence diverges from the degree of confidence they should ideally have. But this can make a big difference. Suppose you go to the doctor, who has to estimate how likely it is that a particular test result indicates that you have a serious disease. And let’s suppose that the doctor should be about 5 percent confident that you have the disease, if she had reasoned well with her available information. It seems that if the doctor was slightly more or less confident, say 3 percent or 8 percent, then this would be a lot less irrational than if she was 90 percent confident instead. But the standard philosophical views can’t systematically make this distinction. They simply register whether a reasoner has reached a rational conclusion or not. In my work, I use mathematical models of people’s belief systems and

JULIA STAFFEL Assistant Professor, Philosophy, Arts & Sciences Major League Baseball player and manager Frank Robinson once pronounced, “ ‘Close’ only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades,” but philosopher Julia Staffel is more

reasoning strategies to be able to capture differences between slightly and highly irrational thinkers. It is obviously worrisome if we are highly irrational in particular contexts, but small divergences from the rational ideal don’t seem troublesome in many contexts. Many reasoning problems are very difficult, and our minds have to use simplifying shortcuts or heuristics to deal with them. But that seems fine as long as they generate close-to-optimal conclusions.

generous than the barrier-breaking baseball star. Sometimes

WHAT IMPACT COULD YOUR WORK HAVE IN THE PUBLIC SPHERE?

“close” is good enough, she said, and there’s a difference

I hope that my work will make a contribution to the bigger project of helping

between missing by a little and missing by a mile — at least

people be better reasoners. Reasoning well is beneficial for individuals

when it comes to logical reasoning. Staffel’s current project,

because it helps them be more successful in life, but it is also essential for the

Unsettled Thoughts: Reasoning, Uncertainty and Epistemology,

functioning of society. Perhaps right now, this is more obvious than ever.

broadens traditional philosophical thinking about human reasoning to differentiate between conclusions that are slightly and highly irrational.

Center for the Humanities 35

INTERNAL GRANTS FACULTY SEMINAR GRANTS One- to three-year grants to tenured or tenure-track faculty to support seminars on a particular subject or theme. Groups

Thomas Keeline | Classics Latin Textual Scholarship in the Digital Age: An Open-Access Critical Edition of Ovid’s Ibis

MAXWELL C. WEINER HUMANITIES RESEARCH GRANTS Funded by a bequest from Maxwell C. Weiner, the grants support tenured, full-

Caroline Kita | Germanic Languages and Literatures

time faculty in the humanities who do

participants and guests present and discuss informally their own work as it

Border Territories: The Emancipatory

fund in order to facilitate the pursuit of

relates to the theme.

Soundscapes of Post-War German Radio

new research directions.

meet at least twice per semester, when

The Contemporary (new, 1-year grant) Eighteenth-Century Interdisciplinary Salon (renewal, 1-year grant) Wastelands (continuation, 3-year grant)

Shanti Parikh | Anthropology Global Circuits of HIV Care: Demonized Men, Suffering Women and the Paradoxes of Waiting and Wandering

Harriet Stone | Romance Languages and Literatures

READING AND WRITING GROUP GRANTS

Focusing on the Details: French Still Life

Grants to tenured or tenure-track

Part I: Early Modern France

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

and the Artful Science of Knowledge,

Kedron Thomas | Anthropology The Future of Fashion: Sustainability, Labor and the New Material Culture

not currently receive an annual research

COLLABORATIVE RESEARCH SEED GRANT Open to all tenured and tenuretrack faculty in the humanities and

READING GROUPS

SUMMER RESEARCH SEED GRANTS

Digital Approaches (renewal)

Open to all tenured or tenure-track

Kierkegaard Reading Group (new)

faculty in the humanities or humanistic

partnerships and funds preliminary

social sciences who undertake the

work that lays the foundation for

preparation of a competitive, peer-

original, expanded collaborative

Medical Humanities (renewal)

humanistic social sciences; encourages the establishment of research

Queering the Global/Transnational Conversation (renewal)

reviewed, prestigious grant application

research projects capable of attracting

during the summer with the goal of

external funding or the publication

Religion and Literature (renewal)

submitting an application the following

of new co-authored research.

fall or spring.

None awarded

Voice and Sexuality Studies (renewal)

WRITING GROUPS American Religions (renewal) Medieval Colloquium (renewal) WashU Translation Workshop (new)

SUMMER FACULTY RESEARCH GRANTS

Monique Bedasse | History Mad: Mental Health and Decolonization in Jamaica, 1935–1978

Anca Parvulescu | English Comparatizing Transylvania: Liviu Rebreanu’s Ion as World Literature

Paul Steinbeck | Music

Open to all tenured or tenure-track

Sound Experiments: The Music of

faculty; funded projects are intended

the AACM

to advance the field of study in which it is proposed and make an original and

ROLAND GRIMM TRAVEL AWARDS

significant contribution to knowledge.

Open to all tenured or tenure-track

Clarissa Hayward | Political Science Disrupting Ignorance

faculty; awards fund research in Asia. No applicants this year A Year in Review 36

FACULTY RESEARCH

PROPOSAL-WRITING WORKSHOP SEPTEMBER 2 AND 9 As the academic year began, the Center for the Humanities continued its tradition of organizing and hosting programming for faculty who are pursuing competitive external funding.

Time devoted exclusively to research and writing is integral to

Faculty who were preparing to submit a proposal during the current

academic productivity. It allows scholars to travel to important

academic year were invited to workshop their proposals within small

sites, pore over far-flung archives, conduct interviews and otherwise

peer groups. Convening over two weeks, the participants shared and

become immersed in the pursuit of a research question. Scholars

received feedback on their drafted proposals at their first meeting. At

need time to reflect, analyze and make connections and, finally,

their second meeting, they shared their revised proposals. The small

share their discoveries with the world. While faculty engage in this

groups were led by Jean Allman (Center for the Humanities, History),

kind of activity as a matter of course, the fellowship — a period of

Michael Sherberg (Romance Languages and Literatures) and Joseph

time free of administrative, service and teaching responsibilities —

Loewenstein (International Project in the Humanities and English).

provides the opportunity to make significant research strides. As such, they are greatly valued and highly sought after. A number of national organizations and societies provide fellowship funding, and, expectedly, the competition is fierce. For the past four years, the Center for the Humanities has organized an information session and workshop for faculty in the humanities and humanistic social sciences interested in pursuing external funding. Participants highly rate these offerings, according to their survey responses. THIS YEAR, JEAN ALLMAN OPENED THE INFORMATION SESSION WITH A PRESENTATION ON PROPOSAL WRITING FROM A REVIEWER’S PERSPECTIVE.

CONGRATULATIONS TO THIS YEAR’S PARTICIPANTS WHO SUCCEEDED IN WINNING EXTERNAL SUPPORT: HENRY I. SCHVEY (PERFORING ARTS) • Book proposal: Edinburgh University Press accepted The Might of Color, the Mystery of Design: The Plastic Theatre of Tennessee Williams CLARISSA HAYWARD (POLITICAL SCIENCE) • Fellow-in-Residence, Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics, Harvard University • Sabbatical Fellowship, University Center for Human Values, Princeton (declined) THOMAS KEELINE (CLASSICS) • National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Stipend

As 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 of a proposal. Later, a multidisciplinary panel of recent award winners fielded questions from attendees about the proposal-writing process. The panel included Nancy Reynolds (History), Tabea Linhard (Romance Languages and Literatures), Paige McGinley (Performing Arts Department) and Michael Sherberg (Romance Languages and Literatures).

Center for the Humanities 37

MEDIA-TRAINING WORKSHOP FEBRUARY 3 The Center for the Humanities, in partnership with the Office of Public Affairs, hosted a how-to (and why-to) session on participating in national and local conversations by sharing research and expertise via popular media, blogging and social media.

In response to the need to bring the work of humanities faculty, in

associate professor of political science; and Jeffrey McCune,

particular, into the mainstream, the Center for the Humanities and

associate professor of women, gender and sexuality studies.

the Office of Public Affairs partnered to organize a media-training workshop. As a pilot program, it provided a limited group of scholars in the humanities the opportunity to learn about the myriad ways

Next, a team from the Office of Public Affairs gave a presentation on how to work with its office to promote research, scholarship and expertise on and off campus. The group included Sue Killenberg

faculty can engage as public intellectuals and share their expertise with a wide range of audiences by participating in thoughtful dialogue, debate and discussion on some of the most important issues of

McGinn, executive director of university news; Chuck Finder, executive director of media relations; and Liam Otten, senior news director, arts and humanities.

our time. Through activities such as working with the news media, blogging and social media engagement, presenters explored a

DURING LUNCH, TOD ROBBERSON, EDITORIAL

number of ways to showcase scholarly research and expertise and

PAGE EDITOR OF THE ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH,

how individuals can help tell that story.

SPOKE FROM HIS PERSPECTIVE AS A PERSON

The program began with a panel discussion featuring scholars from

WHO DETERMINES WHETHER TO ACCEPT

the humanities and humanistic social sciences who have experience

A CONTRIBUTED PIECE FOR A NEWSPAPER’S

commenting in the media, contributing content to popular media

EDITORIAL PAGES.

outlets and participating in the broader public square through social media. Rebecca Wanzo, associate director of the Center for the Humanities and associate professor of women, gender and sexuality studies, moderated a discussion between Marie Griffith, director of the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics and the John C. Danforth Distinguished Professor in the Humanities; Clarissa Hayward,

Finally, participants engaged in a writing exercise to test their new media-writing skills by identifying a topic and creating a headline and strong, attention-grabbing opening paragraph. This hands-on experience was intended to get them thinking about how to try the new techniques for communicating their own scholarly work to the public.

A Year in Review 38

FACULTY RESEARCH

“However gripping and sophisticated their writing, the authors who have become canonical figures in early African American literature give only a partial view into the world of early black letters.”

“BEING IN THAT ROOM IS EXCITING. YOU FEEL PRIVILEGED. YOU FEEL CLOSER TO THE WORKING PROCESS OF A MASTER AND HIS PUPILS AND ASSISTANTS.”

— Rafia Zafar Professor of English and of African and African-American studies, in “The Birth of African American Writing” December 14, 2016, The (London) Times Literary Supplement

— William Wallace Professor of Art History and Archaeology, in “Secret Room Holds ‘Lost’ Michelangelo Artwork”

IN THE MEDIA

April 21, 2017, National Geographic

“From the founding of the nation, into the 19th century and to today, this nation’s most formative leaders have agreed wholeheartedly in this: History is fundamentally important. Today it finds its strongest support in the [National Endowment for the Humanities].” — Abram Van Engen

Armed with ideas that resonate with presidential positions, and in a climate that legitimizes ‘alternative facts,’ these groups feel they can gain further influence by adopting personas that mirror those of mainstream policy institutions.” — David Cunningham Professor of Sociology, in “How to Combat the Rise of ‘Intellectual’ Hate Groups in the US”

February 16, 2017, Christian Science

Associate Professor of English in “Reagan Called America a ‘City on a Hill’ Because Taxpayers Funded the Humanities”

Monitor

March 21, 2017, Salon.com

“WHEN WE TALK ABOUT THE CHALLENGES THAT WE FACE TODAY, we can frame undocumented immigrants’ fear

“While ‘gay,’ ‘lesbian’ and ‘transgender’ are English words, same-sex practices and a variety of gender expressions have a long history on the continent…. The

of deportation as a ‘Latino’ issue;

research helps to dispel the myth that Black

Muslim women’s fear of wearing

Africans and African culture are inherently

a hijab as a ‘Muslim’ issue; the struggle against the Dakota pipeline as a ‘Native’ issue; or we can simply view all of these as an attack against humanity.” — Sonia Lee Associate Professor of History, in “Puerto Ricans, African Americans, and the Pursuit of Racial Justice” December 3, 2016, Black Perspectives

homophobic. Black South Africans are no more homophobic than their white compatriots.”

— Julie Moreau

Post-Doctoral Fellow in Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies, on a new survey of South Africans’ attitudes about homosexuality and gender non-conformity in “New Research Seeks to Dispel Myth of ‘African Homophobia’ ” September 14, 2016, NBC News Out

Center for the Humanities 39

“IN TRUMP’S CAMPAIGN, HIS SEXIST LANGUAGE HAS OFTEN BEEN EXCUSED AS PART OF WHAT MEN DO. PERHAPS THIS [ACCESS HOLLYWOOD] TAPE HIT A NERVE BECAUSE IT SUPPORTS WHAT IS STILL A CONTENTIOUS CLAIM TO MANY U.S. CITIZENS BOTHERED BY ‘POLITICAL CORRECTNESS’ — THAT HOW YOU SEE AND TALK ABOUT PEOPLE INEVITABLY HAS A RELATIONSHIP TO WHAT YOU DO TO THEM.” — REBECCA WANZO

ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF WOMEN, GENDER AND SEXUALITY STUDIES, IN “TRUMP VS. CLINTON: THREE KEY MOMENTS FROM THE SECOND DEBATE” OCTOBER 10, 2016, THE CONVERSATION.COM

Student Education ‘NOW IS THE TIME’ JEAN ALLMAN ON RETHINKING THE HUMANITIES DOCTORATE than STEM colleagues to graduate with firm job commitments — both

SO WHAT MIGHT THE HUMANITIES DOCTORATE OF THE FUTURE LOOK LIKE?

inside and outside of academia. Yet most U.S. humanities programs

Well, that’s the question. Do we still need the 300-page

prepare doctoral students primarily for tenure-track positions.

manuscript? Are there ways to incorporate digital or

That could be changing. In summer 2016, Jean Allman, director of

collaborative work? What if you published a series of articles, or

the Center for the Humanities, received a prestigious Next Generation

made a film or documentary? It’s all up for grabs.

Students earning humanities doctorates are somewhat more likely

Humanities PhD Planning Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. The grant is designed to help transform doctoral training while promoting a greater sense of public engagement.

But if you change the nature of the dissertation, you have to recognize that you’re also impacting people who stay in academia. Many institutions still consider the single-author

Allman discusses the humanities, dissertations and the future

monograph to be the proof of tenure worthiness. I think those

of the PhD.

rules will need to change, too. People don’t read monographs the way they used to. I’m an Africanist, and I’m working on a book project right now. If and

WHAT DREW YOU TO THIS TOPIC?

when it’s published, my colleagues in West Africa still won’t be able to access it. A printed book can cost a month’s salary. But

Right now, there’s a real intellectual debate going on. What

imagine that same work published as a series of articles. They

is a doctorate? What is a dissertation? What is an appropriate academic capstone? And how is that related to building a career?

do have digital bandwidth. They do have access to JSTOR.

To me, it’s all fascinating. My interest started several years ago. Rich Smith, then dean

THAT’S AN INTERESTING POINT. THE SHAPE OF THE PHD CAN INFLUENCE WHO IS ABLE TO ACCESS THAT KNOWLEDGE.

of the Graduate School, asked me to lead a committee tasked

Absolutely. If you’re writing a 300-page monograph, then

with defining the dissertation. And I’m thinking, sure, I know

you’re writing for a very particular North American and

what a dissertation is. I wrote one. It’s 300 pages. It has lots of

European audience. At the same time, how we train PhDs

footnotes. [Laughs.]

shapes what people are able to do after graduation. And job prospects influence who decides to enter the field.

Of course, the reality is more complicated. In math, a dissertation might be 30 pages. In chemistry, it might be a

If all we’re doing is training people for tenure-track jobs, and if

series of collaborative articles. Physics, business, social work —

we know those jobs are becoming fewer and farther between,

all have very different ideas about what a dissertation looks like.

then we’re going to have a far less diverse group of people

I realized that we humanists need to step up our game. Other fields have adapted and reshaped the dissertation. Humanities students still do exactly what I did, and what the generation before me did. It hasn’t changed at all.

earning PhDs. But if the training is rigorous and multifaceted — if the skills we offer can inform a wide variety of career options — then we’re going to have a much stronger and more diverse pool of applicants.

A Year in Review 40

STUDENT EDUCATION

TELL US ABOUT THE NEH GRANT. WHAT ISSUES ARE YOU EXAMINING? at each. The first, led by Michael Sherberg, is looking at cohort

THE IDEA THAT ONE MIGHT CHOOSE TO ENTER ACADEMIA OR THE PRIVATE SECTOR SEEMS MORE COMMON IN STEM FIELDS. IN THE HUMANITIES, DOES THAT REPRESENT A CULTURAL SHIFT?

size. Today, even large doctoral programs may have entering

Within departments, you often hear about advisees who’ve

classes of a dozen students — and many have only four or five,

been granted tenure, but you seldom hear about advisees who

often with very different areas of focus. So, how do you build

become CEOs or direct nonprofits. Most programs don’t have

graduate seminars? How do you create a sense of community?

a culture of celebrating that; we’re just too stuck in our silos. I

It’s a real challenge.

think we all need to poke our heads out a little more.

The second group, led by Joe Loewenstein, is looking at

At WashU, we have a graduate dean, Bill Tate, who is

prequalification course work, what we ask students to do, and

encouraging us to think outside the box — and who has spent

time to degree. The third group, led by Liz Childs, is examining

the last several years gathering the data that will allow us to do

the training we offer once course work is complete. How do we

just that. How many candidates, how many graduates, how long

get people out into the world? And what sorts of fellowships,

it takes to earn a degree, what they’re doing now … . We have a

internships or other opportunities might that require? How

solid statistical map, which a lot of universities don’t have.

We’ve identified four main problems, and have groups looking

might we rethink the form and substance of the dissertation?

But the fact is, things are happening at other places too.

The fourth group, led by Mark Smith, is looking at career

There are people we can engage, templates we can examine,

advising. Where exactly are people getting jobs? And what sort

foundations who are invested in helping us. We all want to do a

of advising can we offer to those who aren’t interested in the

better job of engaging the public. We all want our graduates to

tenure track? Working for a public institution or a community

be doing interesting and strategic work.

group — anything that engages the best of your skills — can be an equally worthy outcome.

We all want the humanities to thrive. Now is the time.

Center for the Humanities 41

MERLE KLING UNDERGRADUATE HONORS FELLOWSHIP KLING FELLOWS, CLASS OF 2017

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

MARIE BISSELL Linguistics and Anthropology majors, Philosophy minor

possibilities of pursuing a graduate degree. Yet the benefits of the fellowship go beyond an individual’s interests and

SHIVANI DESAI

aspirations. The Kling Fellowship creates a community of

Anthropology: Global Health and Environment major; Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies and Political Science minors

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,

SHAUN EE

brought together to facilitate discovery and collaboration.

International and Area Studies and Philosophy-Neuroscience-Psychology majors

Competitively admitted Kling Fellows meet weekly in an

MAX HOFMEISTER Economics major

interdisciplinary seminar, where they present drafts of their work, review one another’s writing, read and think about the

EMILY MURPHY

role of the humanities in university life, and occasionally get

History major; Sociology and French minors

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. Over the course of two academic years, each Kling Fellow writes

MARY-CLAIRE SARAFIANOS English Literature major (Concentration in Creative Non-Fiction Writing); Text and Tradition and Computer Science minors

JESSICA THEA International and Area Studies major (Concentration in Development); Psychological and Brain Sciences minor

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 graduate-

CLASS OF 2018 PATRICK GOFF Germanic Languages and Literatures major; Economics minor

student fellows, select an outside speaker to invite for a public

HILAH KOHEN

lecture, and provide undergraduate representation on the

Comparative Literature major; Russian Language and Literature minor

center’s advisory board.

ALLIE LISS Anthropology: Global Health and Environment major; Fine Art minor

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

History major; Writing minor

NOAH WEBER Chinese and English Literature majors

NATHANIEL YOUNG Spanish and Latin American Studies majors; Marketing minor

A Year in Review 42

STUDENT EDUCATION Even amid technology’s increasingly expansive grip on the lives of everyday Americans, Oxford Dictionaries recently made a gutsy move that prompted outcries from linguistic purists across the nation: It declared the “Face with Tears of Joy” emoji as its 2015 Word of the Year. Oxford Dictionaries’ controversial christening of this pictograph as the defining character of the year was not without careful consideration and scrutiny, yet major news outlets such as New York Magazine and Business Insider boldly proclaimed that the foremost authority on the English language had made a terrible mistake. Vox reporter Caroline Franke suggested that “no matter how much we communicate with emoji these days, the English language isn’t Wingdings — at least not yet.” This kind of resistance to language change is common among linguistic purists, who insist that it is possible and probable that language will evolve too quickly,

OXFORD DICTIONARIES AND POLICING THE BOUNDARIES OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE

to detrimental ends. Flavorwire reporter Jonathon Sturgeon notes that, ironically, “emoji also represents the wild visage of a person who has lost it. In other words: no other word or pictogram … gives better expression to their [linguistic purists’] complaint.” However, Oxford Dictionaries, which has been publishing dictionaries for more than 150 years, has a solid justification for its widely contested choice. As explained on its website, “The Oxford Dictionaries Word of the Year is a word or expression that we can see has attracted a great deal of interest during the year to date…. This year, instead of choosing a traditional word or expression, Oxford Dictionaries has chosen an example of this type of pictographic script to represent the sharp increase in popularity of emojis across the world in 2015.” Essentially, an emoji functions as a pictorial representation of a word or expression, making it equally eligible for recognition by Oxford Dictionaries. The primary issue with the knee-jerk backlash the selection has spurred is that Oxford Dictionaries is not designed to make normative judgments about the

BY MARIE BISSELL

merits of linguistic change over time. Rather, its primary objective is to describe

MERLE KLING UNDERGRADUATE FELLOW,

linguistic change in real time. Skeptics counter that Oxford Dictionaries’ Word

CLASS OF 2017

of the Year endorsement carries prescriptive weight, even if it is not explicitly intended to do so. As arguably the foremost authority on the English language, Oxford Dictionaries faces the challenge that perhaps its descriptive intents could be misinterpreted by the public in this way. But are the “Face with Tears of Joy” emoji’s critics simply unwilling to believe that technology alters language usage? English is constantly evolving and transforming; in fact, the BBC estimates that a new word is added every 98 minutes (in other words, almost 15 new words daily). The advent of widespread technology usage among English speakers has revolutionized the way the people communicate with one another, and that certainly includes the innovative introduction of the emoji as a new medium for communication. Oxford Dictionaries’ choice of the “Face with Tears of Joy” emoji as 2015’s Word of the Year reflects our culture’s increasing reliance on technology and signals the direction of the linguistic developments that are yet to come. Kling Fellows are encouraged to write commentary for the Kling Public Square blog, which is found on the humanities center website at cenhum.wustl.edu. Center for the Humanities 43

UNDERGRADUATE MINORS

MEDICAL HUMANITIES The minor in Medical Humanities approaches health, disease and medical care as culturally embedded human experiences

Center for the Humanities offers two minors to promote interdisciplinary humanistic thinking at Washington University at the undergraduate level. The minors in Children’s Studies and Medical

that vary across time and place. It draws on courses from a variety of departments and programs, including art history, classics, history, languages and literature, music, philosophy,

Humanities are offered in coordination with departments and

and gender and sexuality studies, which give students the

programs across Arts & Sciences.

training to apply the insights and critical methods of the humanities to subjects often left solely to the natural and social sciences. In addition to exploring health, disease and medical care as core human experiences, the program of study is designed to provide a solid grounding in the textual-historical approach essential to all humanities scholarship. The minor combines disciplinary diversity with thematic unity to engage students with a set of tightly related “big” topics and issues. These include the contested meanings of health and disease; the ethical dimensions of medicine; illness narratives; debates over health and development; the role of medicine in war, empire and nation building; the relationship between religion and medicine; exchange and friction between biomedicine and other healing traditions; and the burden of disease as it relates to gender, race and class.

On November 2, the Children’s Studies minor hosted Paula Connolly, professor of English at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte, for the lecture “Seeing Slavery in American Children’s Literature.” Connolly discussed how visual representations of slavery have been used to educate children on issues of race in America, drawing on illustrations from the past 225 years, including A Birthday Cake for George Washington, published in 2016.

The minor cosponsored several events in 2016–17:

CHILDREN’S STUDIES Students pursuing a minor in Children’s Studies learn about children and childhood while drawing on the expertise of faculty from across Washington University. Minors develop a sophisticated interdisciplinary understanding of childhood and the issues surrounding the treatment and status of children throughout history.

• Frankenstein, the Vital Force and Electricity, featuring speakers Stanley Finger, professor emeritus of psychological and brain sciences, Washington University; and Paola Bertucci, associate professor of history and the history of medicine, Yale University; • Sex in America, Then and Now: The Lasting Legacy of Masters and Johnson, a conversation between Tom Maier, author of Masters of Sex: The Life and Times of William Masters and Virginia Johnson, the Couple Who Taught America How to Love and producer of Showtime series Masters of Sex; and Michelle Ashford, showrunner for Masters of Sex;

A minor in Children’s Studies exposes students to an interconnected set of ideas about children as objects and subjects in a variety of essential disciplines. The minor combines social science courses that measure and analyze how children mature and how institutions have affected children with courses in the humanities that examine how children are portrayed and constructed in art, literature and film. It requires 15 credit hours of academic course work.

• Sexploration at Washington University in St. Louis: The Legacy of Masters and Johnson in Sexuality Research and Clinical Practice, a panel discussion featuring scholars and practitioners from the Washington University School of Medicine Obstetrics and Gynecology Division, the Brown School and the Department of Religious Studies; and • Books and Bodies: 500 Years of Printing Medical Texts, a presentation by Elisabeth Brander, rare book librarian at the Washington University Bernard Becker Medical Library.

A Year in Review 44

STUDENT EDUCATION

GRADUATE STUDENT FELLOWS 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 environment in which the Graduate Student Fellows can discuss their research with

COLLEEN LANG

AMANDA SCOTT

Department of Anthropology

Department of History

Vulnerable Agents: The Social Role of Children Living With HIV Lang’s dissertation explores the experiences of children living with HIV/AIDS in Uganda and the ways in which concepts of responsibility and reintegration shape their daily lives and longterm outcomes. She pays special attention to the ways in which children themselves come to understand and respond to their situation and exercise their agency as they attempt to mobilize others to meet their needs with alternately productive and detrimental consequences.

the Faculty Fellows in residence, other

CHRISTIANE MERRITT

humanities faculty and invited guests. The

Department of Philosophy (PhilosophyNeuroscience-Psychology)

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.

A New (and Psychologically Improved) Model of Gender Research and Contribution Over the past several decades, feminists have pointed to limitations of past and current scientific practice. Feminists have criticized anthropologists, biologists, psychologists and, most recently, neuroscientists. This tradition is part of what Merritt calls feminism’s “negative project.” At the same time, many feminist philosophers have also engaged in a positive project, making recommendations intended to remove or correct for bias.

GOLDA KOSI ONYENEHO Department of Anthropology

Corrupted Modernity: Corruption as National Identity in a Nigerian Petrostate Scholarship on the anthropology of corruption has noted the need for less static models of petty corruption better able to explain why citizens choose to engage in corruption in some contexts of exchange but not others and why, in seeming contradiction, citizens who enact corruption also frequently lament its existence. To date, little work has thoroughly examined widespread petty corruption, and corruption lament, by ordinary citizens as the performance of national identities evoked by postcolonial symbols of the nation.

Center for the Humanities 45

The Basque Seroras: Local Religion, Gender and Power in Northern Iberia, 1550–1800 This is the first systematic study of the Basque seroras, a category of devout laywomen active throughout the early modern period in northern Spain and southern France. Hired competitively at the parish level and licensed by the diocese, seroras were church employees, enjoying social prestige and pay comparable to the male clergy. They took no vows and were free to leave the religious life if they chose, meaning that the vocation afforded them considerably more autonomy than traditional nuns or married wives had.

HANNAH WAKEFIELD Department of English

Writing the Household of God: Institutional Religion in 19th-Century American Literature Despite the relative lack of scholarly attention paid to institutional religion, it appears throughout 19th-century American literature as an organizer of social relations, a site of nostalgia, an agent of cultural change and an object of political critique. Church audiences and denominational practices helped to determine novelistic plots, the texture of dialogue, portrayals of characters’ interiority and the issues under debate for much of the 19th century.

SUSANNA WILLIAMS Department of English

Dying Worlds: Environment, Ecology and Empire in British Literature, 1875–1915 Why do so many texts produced by British authors during the height of British imperialism meditate on environmental catastrophe? By reading the representation of fragile island ecologies in novels, short stories, travelogues and diaries from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, she examines how British writers think about climate change, invasive species, land use, coal production and trash disposal in ways that, suspiciously, seem thoroughly contemporary.

Giving Opportunities More than ever, the humanistic outlook plays a vital role in working to resolve today’s complex problems to create a better tomorrow. Please take part in helping us expand and deepen the reach of the humanities and the important contributions our center achieves. The Center for the Humanities asks for your support in promoting our mission at Washington University and around the world.

ANNUAL GIFTS

MAKE A GIFT ONLINE

Direct your annual Washington University gift to the Center

To make a secure online gift or to make payment on an existing

for the Humanities to support ongoing programs such as the

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

James E. McLeod Memorial Lecture on Higher Education,

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

the Faculty Book Celebration, publication of the Humanities

designation box.

Broadsheet, or our many faculty workshops. Annual gifts of $100 or more qualify for the Century Club level,

MAKE A GIFT BY PHONE

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

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

Eliot Society.

Visa, MasterCard, Discover and American Express. Please be sure to provide the card number, the expiration date and the name as it appears on the card.

ENDOWMENT GIFTS Endowment gifts are invaluable to the strength, quality and success of Washington University and the Center for the

MAKE A GIFT OR PLEDGE BY MAIL

Humanities. Endowed fellowships — for undergraduate

To mail your gift by mail, please include an explanation of the

research fellows, graduate and postdoctoral fellows, and faculty

purpose for your gift, along with your credit card information

fellows — endowed academic and research programs, and

or check made payable to Washington University. Send to

endowed facility funds provide critical permanent support

Washington University in St. Louis, Alumni and Development

for faculty teaching and research and for myriad student

Programs, Attn: Mary Druyvesteyn, One Brookings Drive,

educational experiences.

Campus Box 1202, St. Louis, MO 63130.

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 Director of Development Mary Druyvesteyn (314-935-5219 or druyvesteyn@wustl.edu).

A Year in Review 46

GIVING OPPORTUNITIES

Events hosted by the Center for the Humanities provide the opportunity and impetus for faculty members to engage in conversations on important topics in higher education.

As with the feting of artistic director and choreographer Bill T. Jones, the biennial International Humanities Prize celebration brings together campus and community to acknowledge the honoree’s impact on the world stage.

The annual Faculty Book Celebration celebrates the milestone of publication for Arts & Science’s faculty.

Published during the academic year, the Humanities Broadsheet spotlights events on campus and in the St. Louis region that explore the human condition.

The Center for the Humanities partners with community organizations such as the Missouri History Museum to organize and host events like April 2016’s sold-out “An Evening with Ntozake Shange.”

Center for the Humanities 47

CENTER FOR THE HUMANITIES ADMINISTRATIVE STAFF

EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE

Jean Allman

Associate Professor of English

Dillon Brown

Director, Center for the Humanities

Tili Boon Cuille

Professor, Department of History

Associate Professor of French and Comparative Literature

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

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

Wendy Love Anderson

Robert Henke

Professor of Drama and Comparative Literature

Ignacio Infante

Associate Professor of Comparative Literature

Charlie Kurth

Assistant Professor of Philosophy

Laurie Maffly-Kipp

Academic Coordinator

The Archer Alexander Distinguished Professor, Religion and Politics

Kathy Daniel

Assistant Professor of Performing Arts

Grant and Contract Coordinator

Kathleen G. Fields Publications and Communications Editor

Paige McGinley

Ignacio Sánchez Prado

Associate Professor of Spanish and International and Area Studies

Barbara Liebmann Administrative Coordinator

Tila Neguse Coordinator, Divided City Initiative

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

A Year in Review 48

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

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