A Year in Review 2018-19 - WashU Center for the Humanities

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A YEAR IN REVIEW

ANNUAL REPORT

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2018–2019 ANNUAL REPORT table of contents 02 / L ETTER FROM THE INTERIM DIRECTOR 04 / H UMAN TIES 04 / 200 YEARS ON, THE VAMPYRE STILL THRILLS

ON THE COVER Asymmetric Chamber by Sir David Adjaye OBE, London, Manchester, 200305; Photo by Lyndon Douglas.

The installation was about “giving people an insight into [Adjaye’s] architectural world of emotion, drama and spirituality,” said curator Graeme Russell. Adjaye, a renowned architect and designer, received the 2019 Washington University International Humanities Prize, awarded by the Center for the Humanities. See more on pp. 20–23.

In The Vampyre (1819), the titular bloodsucker Lord Ruthven leaves a trail of “ruined” women across Europe. That storyline would have hit close to home for its often-misattributed author, Lord Byron, who was well known at the time for his illicit affairs. Was that just the way the true man behind the pen, John Polidori, planned it?

Scholar of 19th-century British literature and culture William McKelvy looks at the enduring legacy of the Byronic vampire.

06 / THREE THINGS YOU SHOULD KNOW ABOUT ISLAM AND MUSLIMS

How is Islam like Hinduism? What is a defensive jihad? How does the concentration of Muslims in the Global South affect their perception worldwide? Aria Nakissa — a scholar of Islamic law and philosophy, contemporary Muslim societies and classical Islamic texts — unpacks a trio of truths about this ancient faith.

08 / ARTISTS, UNITED: THE RADICAL ORIGIN OF A FILM CORPORATION

With film credits like Modern Times (1936), High Noon (1952) and Raging Bull (1980), United Artists has been a major force in Hollywood since its founding in 1919. Film scholar Gaylyn Studlar writes about the company’s creation and the men — and woman — behind it all.

10 / RETHINKING MONSTERS

Literary monster-maker Victor LaValle spins stories that tap into contemporary and age-old fears. Rebecca Wanzo discusses three of these works — The Ballad of Black Tom, The Changeling and Destroyer — in the context of the everyday experience of blackness in America.

12 / D IVIDED CITY INITIATIVE 16 / R EDEFINING DOCTORAL EDUCATION IN THE HUMANITIES (RDE) 18 / E VENTS + OUTREACH 18 / JAMES E. MCLEOD MEMORIAL LECTURE ON HIGHER EDUCATION

A Conversation With Cathy Davidson: On the Digital in the Humanities and Her Journey to Revolutionize Higher Ed Founder, innovator, advocate — Cathy Davidson has been at the forefront of transforming the humanities since she helped launch the first interinstitutional collaboration almost 20 years ago. Graduate Student Fellow Melanie Walsh interviews the one-time math-camp kid about broadening her focus to bring change to the very structure of higher education itself.

20 / INTERNATIONAL HUMANITIES PRIZE

‘Understanding the Relationship Between Things’: Sir David Adjaye and the Social Ramifications of Architecture Geography and form lie at the core of Sir David Adjaye’s conception of architecture as a creative process. Adjaye, one of the leading architects in the world today, is the recipient of the 2018 Washington University International Humanities Prize. Selection committee member and associate director Ignacio Infante delves into the humanism of Adjaye’s work and what compelled the committee’s choice.

24 / FACULTY BOOK CELEBRATION

Routine Maintenance: Caroline Levine on the Forms That Sustain While the disrupters and innovators of the world get a lot of attention, literature and culture scholar Caroline Levine has focused on the oftenoverlooked patterns, repetitions and routines that keep things running.

PhD candidate Deborah Thurman interviews Levine about her analysis of social and artistic forms, defense of repetitive structures and how she found support in sources ranging from Victorian literature to The Wire.

28 / COSPONSORED EVENTS

Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah and Its Archive of Outtakes During a 12-year period, filmmaker Claude Lanzmann filmed interviews with witnesses to the Holocaust — survivors, bystanders and perpetrators alike.

He shot more than 230 hours of footage and included 9.5 hours of it in his magnum opus, Shoah (1985). The remaining archived material (95 percent of the total), writes scholar Erin McGlothlin, has been a boon to scholars of film and history.

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24 34 / TRADITION AND TRANSFORMATION: CLARA SCHUMANN AND THE CREATION OF CLASSICAL MUSIC

08 30 / F ELLOWS 31 / ANTIFASCIST WRITERS ON THE RUN

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In her book-in-progress, literature scholar Tabea Linhard brings to light a network of writers exiled in Mexico while fascist forces overtook parts of Europe. With maps and textual analysis, she examines how Mexico City’s thriving international antifascist community came to be.

32 / ANCIENT THEATER GETS ITS GROOVE BACK

What is Hamilton without its hip-hop? Grease without its doo-wop? Ancient Greek and Roman theater is missing its music, which limits our understanding of those works, says classicist Timothy Moore. Though the melodies are long lost, Moore’s current research recreates the performances’ metrical patterns and considers how they affected their meaning.

33 / OMITTED HISTORY

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In his research, historian Douglas Flowe uncovers the convergence of historical factors that made illegality a form of resistance for African-American men in early 20th-century New York City. Diving deep into their stories — told via intake forms, health and psychological records, and personal letters and correspondence — he removes judgment and instead attempts to understand an understudied history.

Nineteenth-century concert pianist Clara Schumann’s life story is the stuff of movies.

(In Hollywood’s version, Katherine Hepburn played Schumann in 1947’s Song of Love.)

But it’s her status as one of the Romantic age’s preeminent performers and her role in shaping the music and culture of what we now understand as “classical music” that enticed musicologist Alexander Stefaniak to focus on Schumann for his current book project.

35 / BABY TALK: LISTENING TO THE ‘LITTLE GUY’ IN MEDIEVAL FRENCH LITERATURE

Medieval writers viewed children, especially infants, to be the truest representatives of what it means to be human. Scholar Julie Singer is taking a look at what those writers were trying to communicate when they attributed language to their youngest characters. “For these writers,” Singer notes, “there are many truths that only the most marginalized voices can express.”

36 / THE FEUDING PHYSICIAN OF ANCIENT ROME

With no governing body to confirm proficiency, medical practitioners in the 2nd-century CE Greco-Roman world made their cases in the public square. In sophisticated street-corner demonstrations, they aimed to persuade their audiences of their expertise with dramatic experiments and vigorous debates with rivals.

Classicist and scholar of the history of medicine Luis Alejandro Salas introduces us to the paragon of the practice, Galen of Pergamum.

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

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Every week, we are besieged with stories about the “death of the humanities.”

These discussions are typically framed in economic terms — the limited number of jobs for PhDs and debates about whether or not people with humanities degrees have marketable skills. Economic framing of the value of the humanities has impacted enrollment, and many legislators and commentators devalue our fields.

At the same time, a vital crisis in the humanities is produced by such devaluation when we may have never needed our fields more. A couple of years ago, I wrote a piece for the humanities center’s Human Ties blog in which I referenced the Sinclair Lewis novel It Can’t Happen Here, about the rise of fascism in the United States, a novel that has been increasingly discussed in the public sphere over the last few years. Octavia Butler’s 1993 novel Parable of the Sower, which described a president who claimed he wanted to “make America great again,” has been seen as prophetic. We have needed to have serious, historically informed discussions about immigration policy, asylum and concentration camps. Questions of sympathy, empathy and ethical relationships to others are the most profound questions of our time. The need to be increasingly global in terms of language skills and understanding other cultures is omnipresent. Thus the real crisis in the humanities is not that people are studying in these fields and they are not relevant. It is that people are not studying the humanities enough to deal with the most important questions facing us for our future.

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The real crisis in the humanities is ... that people are not studying the humanities enough to deal with the most important questions facing us for our future.

I am stepping down now after five years at the Center for the Humanities. As I end my time here, I am proud of the fact that demonstrating the relevance of the humanities has been our constant goal. Moreover, our humanities faculty has been incredibly generous in sharing their knowledge and time to write for us and participate in events. We have constantly discussed the history, culture and challenges facing St. Louis. We have brought in scholars of art, history, literary studies and culture who have been able to speak to the past and the present in ways that have been illuminating and transformative.

Just this year, Caroline Levine brought the humanities to bear on questions of infrastructure in ways that transformed how I thought about the issue conceptually and in specific, local ways. And as always, I find the work produced by scholars and community partners in the Divided City Initiative inspiring.

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In addition to receiving more funding for Divided City, the center’s director, Jean Allman, has been successful in securing two other grants from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation — Redefining Doctoral Education in the Humanities (RDE) and the Mellon Early Career Initiative, which creates faculty exchanges between Washington University and the University of Ghana, Stellenbosch and the University of Cairo. These three projects continue the work of building community partnerships and transnational relationships and creating an infrastructure for humanities work in the 21st century. It has been a tremendous learning experience to work with someone who is so engaged and good about thinking about how to secure a future for humanities work in our everchanging university climate.

In this Year in Review, you’ll discover that we had a banner year. We honored Sir David Adjaye with the International Humanities Prize, continued to receive support from Mellon for important initiatives and facilitated the work of our brilliant colleagues. The best part of my time at the humanities center has undoubtedly been the opportunity to learn about the work of my peers. I’ve quite often been dazzled by the breadth and innovation of their scholarship and pedagogy. And they demonstrate every day that despite what some people say about the diminished importance of our fields, we would not want to inhabit a university or a world without the knowledge and contributions made by humanities scholars.

Rebecca Wanzo Interim Director, Center for the Humanities Associate Director, 2014–2019 Associate Professor, Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies

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HUMAN TIES

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From left: Lord Byron, dressed in garb from his travels east, and his onetime personal physician John William Polidori.

200 Years On, The Vampyre Still Thrills WILLIAM MCKELVY IS AN ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH AND SCHOLAR OF 19TH-CENTURY BRITISH LITERATURE AND CULTURE. Two hundred years ago, in April 1819, the New Monthly Magazine in London would first publish “The Vampyre: a tale by Lord Byron,” what many now consider the inaugural text of modern vampire fiction. Almost simultaneously it appeared in book form, with six different London editions dated to 1819. In the same year, it began to circulate on the Continent in an English edition printed in Paris, followed by translations into French and German. A dramatic adaptation would reach the London stage in 1820, the first of some 35 different versions to be staged throughout Europe and America over the course of the 19th century. Goethe, the great German poet and polymath, would declare The Vampyre to be Byron’s masterpiece.

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But the much reprinted and repurposed tale The Vampyre was not written by Byron. It was written

by John William Polidori, the young physician who accompanied Byron on his exile from England following the poet’s highly publicized and sexually scandalous separation from his newly wed wife in 1816. I begin here by recalling the false and persistent attributions of The Vampyre to Byron’s pen because Polidori’s story, if not by Byron, is clearly about him, and Polidori’s innovative vision of the vampire as a Byronic figure — a seductive aristocrat exercising unhallowed powers over both women and men — largely explains why his blood-sucking monster, Lord Ruthven, became the primary template for the modern vampire.

The publishers responsible for Lord Ruthven’s viral circulation deliberately exploited the text’s flagrant indeterminacy — Was it by Byron or about him? — by releasing different editions with a range of attributions. Some directly attributed authorship to Byron, or the prefatory material clearly pointed to him. In only one case did an edition of 1819 get close to the facts with the authorial phrasing amended to a Tale related by Lord Byron to Dr. Polidori. Polidori’s story was, in truth, a response to his hearing or reading of a much shorter tale by Byron that had been composed in June 1816. But the publication in the summer of 1819 of that tale as part of Byron’s attempt to disavow authorship of The Vampyre only assured that it would be traced to Byron in some way.

Before Polidori’s Lord Ruthven rose to fame in 1819, vampires in the English imagination were routinely associated with an exotic Near East composed of lands ruled by the Austrian and Ottoman empires — locales conceived as primitive territories ridden with superstitious beliefs of the past. Polidori changed all that by making his vampire a glamorous figure of London’s high society. Like the charismatically handsome Byron whose physique was marred by a clubfoot, Lord Ruthven possesses a face with a “deadly hue” that is nevertheless “beautiful” in outline and form, an incongruity that seems only to enhance his powers of fascination.

After describing Ruthven’s seductive hold over all women, the tale suddenly shifts to his hold over Aubrey, a wealthy and naive young man. The two set off together on a Grand Tour, where Aubrey learns firsthand of Ruthven’s depravity — but also swears to a dying Ruthven to tell no one of his crimes or death.

On his return to England, Aubrey is horrified to watch his younger sister courted

by Ruthven. As their marriage approaches, Aubrey, bound by his oath of silence, is driven mad by his inability to intervene. At the tale’s end, readers learn that Aubrey’s sister has indeed “glutted the thirst of a VAMPYRE!” As one early review rightly observed, “the natives of England are now first made subject to the horrible attacks of Vampyres,” and the vampire is not a Serbian peasant haunting an obscure village, but “a bustling inhabitant of the world; restless and erratic; a nobleman subject to ... pecuniary embarrassments.” In a decisive stroke, Polidori had humanized the vampire, made him not an exotic primitive but an emblem of the modern soul and its multitudinous maladies. Byron scholars and academic readers continue to keep the brilliant and complicated lord alive, but there can be no doubt that Byron has most frequently left his grave to walk among the living as any number of figures in vampire fictions that have been avidly consumed by lay readers. Many of these revenants, whose numbers are legion, owe their time among us to John William Polidori.

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Three Things You Should Know About Islam and Muslims ARIA NAKISSA IS AN ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF ISLAMIC STUDIES AND ANTHROPOLOGY. FIRST, IN SOME IMPORTANT WAYS, ISLAM RESEMBLES HINDUISM AND JUDAISM MORE THAN BUDDHISM AND CHRISTIANITY. Every major religious tradition, including Islam, admits of significant variation across time and space.

That being said, different religious traditions tend to be patterned in distinctive ways. For instance, some traditions were more concerned with political life during their formative period. Consequently, they developed a significant corpus of teachings pertaining to law and war — two basic aspects of political life. These traditions might be labeled “politically concerned.” Meanwhile, other traditions were less focused on political life during their formative period.

Consequently, their teachings on politics, law and war are less developed. These traditions might be labeled “politically ambiguous.”

Hinduism, Judaism and Islam can be classed as “politically concerned” religions. Thus, all have developed doctrines on law (dharma, halakha, sharia) and war. These doctrines incorporate legal norms and military tactics that were widespread in premodern societies, but which violate modern liberal norms. As such, modern polemics directed against these traditions have often involved citing their legal and military doctrines outside of their historical context.

Buddhism and Christianity can be classed as “politically ambiguous” religions.

All premodern Buddhist and Christian societies habitually utilized laws and military tactics that conflict with modern liberal norms. Nevertheless, it can be argued that such laws and military tactics are not based on doctrines sanctioned by the earliest Buddhist and Christian religious authorities. This provides a strategy for defending Buddhism and Christianity from modern polemics, while depicting them as morally superior to politically concerned religions like Hinduism, Judaism and Islam. At any rate, such polemics offer little in the way of religious understanding. Moreover, it is debatable whether modern liberal norms, generated by modern technologies and social structures, are a useful standard for transhistorical comparison.

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Tipu Sultan of Mysore’s copy of the Koran, at Bodleian Library, Oxford. Photo by Ben Sutherland CC BY 2.0

SECOND, EXPANSIONIST JIHADS CAME TO AN END AROUND 1700 CE. IN PREMODERN ISLAM, THE TERM “JIHAD” GENERALLY REFERS TO RELIGIOUSLY MOTIVATED WARFARE. Such warfare can be defensive in nature (i.e., protecting Muslim lands from nonMuslim invasions) or offensive in nature (i.e., extending Muslim rule over nonMuslim lands). From the emergence of Islam (in the early 7th century) until the early 18th century, Muslim societies participated in both defensive and offensive jihads against rival political powers. However, offensive jihads came to an end around 1700, following the failed Ottoman Siege of Vienna and the end of Mughal expansion under Aurangzeb (albeit with the partial exception of Usman dan Fodio’s jihads in West Africa).

From 1700 until today, Muslim jihads have been defensive in character, focused either on repelling foreign invasions (usually by Western countries) or establishing borders in disputed territories (e.g., the borders of Turkey, Pakistan and Indonesia).

Accordingly, since the 19th century, virtually all Muslim religious scholars (including the most conservative) have deemed offensive jihad as inapplicable to modern-day circumstances. These points are often overlooked by Western media outlets, which frequently claim that contemporary Muslims are engaged in efforts to conquer the world by jihad.

THIRD, IN MATTERS OF “DEVELOPMENT,” MUSLIM COUNTRIES RESEMBLE OTHER COUNTRIES IN THE GLOBAL SOUTH. It is commonly asserted that Muslim countries are less economically developed and less politically stable than Western countries due to the negative influence of the Islamic religion. Nevertheless, such a view fails to explain why other countries in the Global South face similar difficulties, even when they are not Muslim (e.g., SubSaharan Africa, Latin America). Hence, without denying that religion shapes social life, it is necessary to consider alternative explanations for conditions in the Global South (e.g., historical patterns of colonization, geography).

Similarly, many criticisms directed at Muslim immigrant populations in the West are also directed at other immigrant populations from the Global South (e.g., welfare dependency, crime, ethnically segregated neighborhoods). However, only in the case of Muslims is there a strong tendency to attribute negative behavioral patterns to religion, as opposed to other factors (e.g., poverty, racism). For instance, according to many media outlets, theft or murder committed by Muslim gangs should be interpreted as military attacks in a jihad conquest. Similarly, when impoverished Muslims live together in a ghetto or banlieue, this is often interpreted as an attempt to establish an Islamic caliphal government in that area. Analyses of this type generate a distorted view of Muslim communities living in the West and abroad.

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HUMAN TIES

Artists, United: The Radical Origin of a Film Corporation GAYLYN STUDLAR IS THE DAVID MAY DISTINGUISHED UNIVERSITY PROFESSOR IN THE HUMANITIES AND THE DIRECTOR OF THE PROGRAM IN FILM AND MEDIA STUDIES.

Left to right: Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford, Charles Chaplin and D.W. Griffith Inset: Mary Pickford, “The Girl with the Curls,” maintained an adolescent persona even as she strategized to take more control of her career and the business of filmmaking.

In 2019, United Artists celebrates its 100th anniversary. One hundred years is a lot of history by American standards but even more so by Hollywood’s. Movie studios had existed in Hollywood for less than a decade when, in one of the film industry’s most historically significant events, United Artists was created, not by moguls or bankers but by artists, by movie talent — including a woman.

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In 1909, a young Canadian actress named Mary Pickford made her first appearances in one-reel (11-minute) films made at Biograph studio in New York City. In 1911, she received her first on-screen credit. Known to her audience as “Little Mary,” “The Girl with the Curls” and “America’s Sweetheart,” Pickford became the biggest female star in the first quarter century of American film history. Her only rivals in box-office popularity were action hero Douglas Fairbanks, whom she would marry in 1920, and Fairbanks’ good friend, Charles Chaplin, whose “Little Tramp” comedy persona was beloved worldwide. During the 1910s, Pickford moved from studio to studio to acquire more money but also more power to guarantee the quality of her films. In 1916, she became the first Hollywood star to produce her own films under a partnership agreement with Famous Players-Lasky/Paramount. In 1918, she moved to First National, but by 1919, she was fed up.

As Hollywood corporatized with vertical integration linking production to distribution to theatrical exhibition, the studios depended on “block booking,” which forced movie theater exhibitors to take groups of films — sight unseen, titles unknown. Pickford learned that her spectacularly popular films were being used by Famous Players-Lasky and then First National to force theater managers to commit to these large packages of films. She had had enough of letting a major studio profit in the millions from her popularity and even sell inferior films with it. She, Fairbanks, Chaplin and prominent director D.W. Griffith joined together to form a distribution company for independent producers, and on April 17, 1919, United Artists (UA) was incorporated. An

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unprecedented declaration of independence by Hollywood’s top talent, the new enterprise was designed to guarantee the partners both artistic control and improved profits. It was a business venture, but, as scholar Tino Balio has noted, it was one rooted in artistic idealism too.

With an adolescent screen persona to nurture, Pickford had long been careful to give the impression that her mother, Charlotte, financially managed her career.

But many years after the founding of United Artists, she suggested this radical venture focused on distributing the films of independent producers had been her brainchild. Block booking was banned: Each film distributed by UA would sink or swim on its own.

In the early 1920s, UA offered some big, bold box-office hits, like Fairbanks’ The Mark of Zorro and Robin Hood, and quiet, sensitive ones, like D.W. Griffith’s Broken Blossoms. Pickford won over audiences with Pollyanna. Apart from the popularity of individual films, UA would become a bulwark against the overwhelming dominance of vertically integrated studios that sought to eradicate competition by preventing independent productions from reaching movie theater screens.

Ultimately, the U.S. Supreme Court would demand via the “Paramount decrees” of 1948 that studios stop their monopolistic stifling of competition. Block booking, vertical integration and other policies like blind booking would have to end, but this was over 20 years away.

Faced with such daunting competition and internal challenges, UA experienced financial instability for years. The partners often failed to hit target goals for making films. Griffith left. Reorganization was required. Other talent came and went — Gloria Swanson, Buster Keaton, Sam Goldwyn, Walter Wanger, Alexander Korda, David O. Selznick — but with none trusted to become full partners. Pickford and Fairbanks retired from the screen in the early 1930s and divorced. Pickford assumed the role of executive leadership at UA in 1935 but made mistakes, among them the loss of UA’s distribution of Disney films. In 1939, Fairbanks died. In 1951, management was transferred out of Pickford’s hands, and she sold her stock in UA in 1956, a year after the other remaining founder, Charles Chaplin, had sold out.

In the 1950s, United Artists entered a new era of international agreements, television and the rise of independent producers in the wake of the Paramount decrees that broke up the studios. In this new business climate, UA became a model for a successful Hollywood company. Its scope and success eclipsed the vision of its four original founders, but without the radical act of independence and commitment to quality made by Mary Pickford, D.W. Griffith, Charles Chaplin and Douglas Fairbanks, United Artists would never have existed — or ultimately flourished.

“Going to the movies, Jersey City, New Jersey, 1912” by Lewis Hine CC BY 2.0

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HUMAN TIES

Rethinking Monsters REBECCA WANZO IS ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF WOMEN, GENDER AND SEXUALITY STUDIES AND INTERIM DIRECTOR OF THE CENTER FOR THE HUMANITIES. As the success of Jordan Peele’s 2017 film Get Out demonstrated, audiences recognize that the everyday experience of blackness in America is fertile ground for the horror genre. Other African-American writers and artists have noted this before Peele, telling stories that speak to the nexus of tragedy, fear and the grotesque that are at the heart of horror and, all too often, African-American life.

Many works of black horror are not well known, but author Victor LaValle has been receiving well-deserved national attention. LaValle does write “literary fiction,” but to ignore the contributions he makes to American horror fiction would be a willful blindness to his knowledge of and engagement with this tradition. At its best, the horror genre is a site to explore cultural anxieties and fear. Its excesses are sometimes supernatural, and at other times it imagines the worst possible scenario for everyday risks and disasters.

David LaValle; photo by Teddy Wolff

One of the things horror can do well, and at which LaValle excels, is misrecognition.

The murder victim thinks the sound the stalker makes is just the wind. We are not quite sure what uncanny thing we are seeing in the frame. Someone seemingly benign is the villain after all. LaValle’s works are often about monsters and monstrous acts, and he plays with the idea that we know monsters when we see them. In my favorite of his works, The Ballad of Black Tom (2016), he retells an infamous H.P. Lovecraft short story that trafficked in xenophobia and racist images. Racist state violence is the monster that stalks and torments the protagonist. Tommy Tester is an African-American hustler in 1920s Harlem, the kind of man the police treat as born bad. But as readers, we know he loves his father, and is, like many young people, simply trying to make his way. When life takes horrific turns, we find ourselves rooting for Tommy to take his vengeance. We root for acts that are quite literally monstrous, because the persecution of Tommy warrants retribution.

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That we know who the monster is becomes a significant sleight of hand in American Book Award–winner The Changeling. Cultural narratives of bad parenting take surprising turns in a novel that, like Black Tom, has a relationship between parent and child at the emotional center. The love of parents for their children is also at the center of his comic book Destroyer (2017), the tale of a brilliant African-American woman scientist who (spoiler alert) reanimates her 12-year-old son after he is killed by police. This modern-day Frankenstein tale was published on the 200th anniversary of Mary Shelley’s original novel, and like its inspiration, the vulnerability and morality displayed by the monster are designed to place a broader cultural ethics in question.

Artwork by Dietrich Smith

Often described as a Frankenstein update for a Black Lives Matter moment, Destroyer has scenes in which the everyday dialogue we would associate with parenting is paired with the jarring images of illustrator Dietrich Smith. “Cute” is undercut with the grotesque representation of the reanimated dead child, and we are reminded of how the everyday can be made harrowing by violence and so many people’s refusal to see black boys as children. The horror lies in not only what we see but in the recognition of what people do not see and the cost. It lies in what happens to his mother, unmade and transformed by the murder of her son.

However, LaValle’s horror is distinctive in not leaving readers with a feeling of empty dread and despair. While horror can be a pessimistic genre — the monsters, we know, almost always come back — all of LaValle’s works imagine a future for survivors. Crafting narratives of hope in the midst of the horrific is perhaps his biggest sleight of hand of all in his fiction, and it’s why his work may resonate as people try to imagine ways out of hopelessness when everyday horror permeates their lives.

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DIVIDED CITY

DIVIDED CITY

The Divided City DIVIDED CITY 2022 wins $1 million DIVIDED CITY grant DIVIDED CITY DIVIDED CITY DIVIDED CITY DIVIDED CITY DIVIDED CITY DIVIDED CITY DIVIDED CITY DIVIDED CITY DIVIDED CITY DIVIDED CITY DIVIDED CITY DIVIDED CITY DIVIDED CITY DIVIDED CITY DIVIDED CITY DIVIDED CITY DIVIDED CITY DIVIDED CITY DIVIDED CITY DIVIDED CITY DIVIDED CITY DIVIDED CITY

HOW DO BORDERS SHAPE OUR LIVES? WHAT POWERS ENFORCE THEM? WHEN, WHERE AND WHY ARE BOUNDARIES TRANSGRESSED? Over the past four years, the Divided City, an urban humanities initiative administered by the Center for the Humanities, has supported dozens of classes, seminars and research projects investigating the history, mechanisms and contemporary effects of spatial segregation.

Last fall, the university launched a second phase, the Divided City 2022, thanks to a $1 million grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

“The focus on segregation, which both anchored and animated the first four years of the Divided City Initiative, is no less pertinent than it was in 2014,” says Jean Allman, director of the Center for the Humanities, who serves as co-principal investigator with Bruce Lindsey, the E. Desmond Lee Professor for Community Collaboration in the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts.

Allman noted that the original Divided City Initiative received Mellon funding just months before the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. “The Ferguson uprising profoundly shaped the work, the priorities and the collaborative energy of the Divided City and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future,” she says.

“Our original intent was to explore how segregation, in its broadest sense, plays out in cities, buildings, neighborhoods, public spaces and other urban landscapes,” Lindsey says. “Ferguson and all it has come to symbolize — the sustained activism, the militarized police response — has profoundly shaped our work and brought these issues into razor-sharp focus.

“But these problems are not unique to St. Louis,” Lindsey adds. “Segregation, inequality, the urban divide — these are global concerns.”

PIPELINES, BRIDGES AND COLLABORATION With the Divided City 2022, Allman and Lindsey aim to further scholarship on the urban humanities while also building long-term institutional stability.

Priorities include developing more diverse pipelines into architecture and design; building curricular bridges between these fields and the humanities; and fostering collaborative, multidisciplinary approaches to the study of segregation.

New initiatives include an undergraduate minor and a graduate certificate in the urban humanities; an annual Informal Cities Workshop; two new urban humanities courses — “Building a Garden” and “History, Society, and Landscape Urbanism” — offered as part of the Washington University Prison Education Project; and the Divided City Ampersand Program, a series of undergraduate seminars focusing on segregation.

The Divided City 2022 also extends the Center for the Humanities’ “studiolab” pilot program to include a program in the urban humanities. (Inspired by studio and laboratory collaborations, studiolabs are closeknit communities of faculty and students, based at the Lewis Center in University City, focusing on a particular theme or problem for a period of one year.)

In addition, the Divided City 2022 continues funding for the City Seminar, which invites regional and international scholars to share ideas about urban issues.

GRANTS AND FELLOWSHIPS Support also continues for the Divided City Graduate Student Summer Research Fellowships. Intended to forge interdisciplinary connections, the twomonth fellowships are open to graduate students

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The Center for the Humanities hosted an official launch for the Divided City 2022 at the City Museum on October 22.

in the humanities, humanistic social sciences, architecture, urban design and landscape architecture.

In addition, the Divided City 2022 continues support for the Sam Fox School’s Alberti Program.

Sponsored in partnership with PGAV Destinations, the Alberti Program is a free architecture workshop for St. Louis students ages 8–16.

The Divided City provides support for graduate coordinators, who help develop new curricula exploring intersections between design and the humanities.

Also continuing are the faculty collaborative grants, which support projects involving the humanities and at least one other discipline.

Awards of up to $20,000 support research relating to urban segregation/separation, fieldwork in non-U.S. contexts and projects that strengthen connections between the university and the St. Louis community.

In addition to Mellon funding, the Divided City 2022 is supported by the Office of the Provost, College of Arts & Sciences, Center for the Humanities and Sam Fox School’s College of Architecture.

“The focus on segregation, which both anchored and animated the first four years of the Divided City Initiative, is no less pertinent than it was in 2014.”

Jean Allman Director, Center for the Humanities

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DIVIDED CITY

Public Life Survey

“The Shard” by PllaingResource CC BY 2.0

“From my own experience walking the borough … what stood out to me was the coexistence of these ‘two Southwarks.’ Some of the main architectural investments are taking place in this complex part of the city, and while tall buildings like the Shard became iconic landmarks and important touristic attractions, they do not improve inequality. Local dwellers do not have real access to the Shard, which has an expensive hotel and restaurants that are commonly used by wealthy tourists.”

Soledad Mocchi-Radichi PhD student, Romance Languages and Literatures 2019 Public Life Survey participant

The Public Life Survey, building on the seminal work The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces by William H. Whyte, is a graduate-level course offering training in a methodology based on observations, interviews, measurements, photography and mapping to show how public spaces are actually used. Since the Divided City’s launch, the initiative has funded the participation of humanities graduate students in the course, which had traditionally been taken only by graduate students in the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts. The inclusion of humanities graduate students not only provides an opportunity for them to learn about urban planning and design, often a critical component of their dissertation research, but for them to enrich the project with their own humanistic perspective.

Guided by a team of local experts and John Hoal, professor of architecture and urban design and chair of urban design at Washington University, the students travel to an urban location during spring break for a week of intense, on-site fieldwork and produce a graphic description that can be compared with other cities. The survey’s goals are twofold: to better understand how public space is used (and misused) and to use this information to design new public spaces that contribute positively to the life of the city. In past years, the Public Life Survey has taken place in Rotterdam, Netherlands (2017), Rotterdam and Amsterdam (2016) and Berlin (2015).

During the March 10–16, 2019, spring break, the Public Life Survey took to the streets of London for the most recent iteration of the course, “Tall Buildings and the Lively City: Behavioral Studies and City Design.” There, they explored urban life in the tall building locations of the city, including the Southwark borough, and developed an insight into the potential for such buildings to contribute to local communities. They also investigated the challenges that tall buildings pose to a healthy public life through their complex servicing requirements and their impact on microclimate. During their stay, the students visited a number of architectural, urbanism and landscape firms and key contemporary public spaces, buildings and landscapes.

Three humanities graduate students participated in the 2019 Public Life Survey: Soledad Mocchi Radichi, a PhD student in Romance languages and literatures (Spanish); Chi-Yu “John” Liao, a graduate student in Romance languages and literatures (Spanish), and a PhD student in comparative literature (track for international writers); and Sophie Levin, a PhD student in English and comparative literature.

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New Awards FACULTY COLLABORATIVE GRANTS These competitively awarded grants of up to $20,000 for Washington University faculty and their collaborators support local and/or global research relating to urban segregation/separation, fieldwork in non-U.S. contexts and projects that strengthen connections between the university and the St. Louis community.

GROWING GRIOT

Adrienne Davis, Lois Conley, De Nichols, Rochelle Caruthers In the face of heightened disinvestment and a new private development that has displaced much of its surrounding neighborhood, the Griot Museum of Black History aspires to reaffirm and expand its role as a cultural anchor of the St. Louis community. To do this, it is building Growing Griot, a communitycentered engagement framework that includes a series of public-engagement programming that ushers the insights, vision and expertise of community residents; a Learning Lab series of educational endeavors with Washington University students from Arts & Sciences and the School of Architecture; and Team Griot, a group of local arts leaders who have

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joined with the Griot board of directors and staff to steer the development of a formal strategic plan.

LAB FOR SUBURBIA

Derek Hoeferlin, James McAnally, Gavin Kroeber, Patty Heyda, Ila Sheren American suburbia has recently emerged as the defining geography of the political moment, but the fields of art and design have largely failed to engage it. Laboratory for Suburbia will begin to develop a platform for critical suburban practice in St. Louis, unfolding through two community-engaged public cultural events: a launch event anchored by an architectural installation and featuring a dynamic program of performances, talks and film screenings, and a series of artist-designed bus tours.

These events will produce research, exchange and propositions that publicly explore the complexities and contradictions of 21st-century suburbia.

SOUND OF SEGREGATION

Eric Ellingsen, Wassan Al-Khudhairi, John Baugh, Casey O’Callaghan, Neo Muyanga The Sound of Segregation (SOS) is a communityengagement tool for hearing what segregation sounds like and a toolshed for responding to those sounds with new sound environments. Each of the partners, subpartners and participants carries their own different disciplinary

and experiential tools to the toolshed. Phase I of this project opens with The Tool Shed at the Contemporary Art Museum, from which three public “walkshops” will take place. The walkshops are protocols of listening, where participants co-produce sound selfportraits. SOS will also co-produce an anarchive.

These sound environments are sculptures that engage, alter and assist the apperception of architectural divisions (partitions, walls) and urban landscapes (gerrymandering of ward boundaries) that are historically conditioned and politically reasserted by segregation.

MAKING AND BREAKING THE PUBLIC: GLOBAL HUMANITIES IN UNCERTAIN TIMES

William Acree and Samuel Shearer The project of the public humanities has transformed the humanities in many ways. However, there has been very little engagement or attempt to challenge traditional definitions of “the public.” The result has been a notion of a generic, homogeneous and passive public that is “out there.” As a research working group — including architects, sociologists, historians, anthropologists, literature and cultural studies scholars, and designers — our collaborative exploration of urban publics seeks to model

the urban humanities as a mode of public humanities work and to examine how urban publics are made and unmade from various locations in the world. Together, and with local communities, we will explore the making of publics and the possibilities of open-forum, urban humanities.

MAPPING LGBTQ* ST. LOUIS

Andrea Friedman, Miranda Rectenwald, Steven Brawley, Chris Gordon In the second phase of Mapping LGBTQ* St. Louis, we continue our efforts to create an enduring and accessible model for interrogating and making visible interconnected axes of urban segregation, linking scholarly research and community knowledge, past and present, to reach a broader public. We will redesign parts of the website to make it more user friendly. We will work with community organizations to convene a series of intergenerational conversations that use Mapping LGBTQ* St. Louis to link the past, present and future of LGBTQ* spaces.

Our aim is to encourage conversations within and across communities about what sorts of spaces are desired or necessary today and how to attain them.

GRADUATE STUDENT SUMMER RESEARCH FELLOWSHIPS This fellowship supports graduate students in the humanities, humanistic

social sciences, architecture, urban design and landscape architecture for two months of full-time research on urban segregation broadly conceived.

Monica Datta MFA candidate in fiction writing, Washington University Francesca Dennstedt PhD candidate, Hispanic studies program, Washington University Deena Essa Master’s degree candidate, Islamic and Near Eastern studies, Washington University Cicely Hunter PhD candidate, American studies, Saint Louis University Bomin Kim PhD candidate, Sustainable Urbanism, Washington University Mary Maxfield PhD candidate, American studies, Saint Louis University Lauren McDaniel Master’s degree candidate, landscape architecture, Washington University Samantha Pergadia PhD candidate, English and American literature, Washington University Larissa Sattler Master’s degree candidate, landscape architecture, Washington University

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RDE INITIATIVE

RDE

Are You Ready?

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REDEFINING DOCTORAL EDUCATION IN THE HUMANITIES (RDE)

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The next generation of PhDs will find a wide range of career paths available to them — if they have the requisite skills, capacities and work experiences. These new skills — collaborative research and writing, public presentation, writing for multiple audiences and best practices for teaching humanities at all levels, to name a few — are central to the success of PhD students aiming for careers in academia and beyond. Training these next-generation PhDs requires nextgeneration faculty — faculty committed to launching new curricular initiatives, transcending disciplinary silos, reaching outside the walls of the academy, reimagining PhD training for a multiplicity of outcomes and facilitating and celebrating those outcomes.

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Launched in August 2018 and with support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Redefining Doctoral Education (RDE) provides opportunities, via workshops and grant programs, for faculty to meet these new challenges.

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Faculty retreats: Experts and practitioners share their experiences — on topics such as digital and quantitative literacy, project management, interfacing with public institutions, community engagement and the public humanities — with a group of faculty from Washington University and neighboring institutions;

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Cross-training grants (up to $15,000): Support for humanities faculty to undertake course work in other departments or schools or at other institutions as relevant to new, innovative teaching strategies;

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Curricular innovation grants: Support for two types of curricular innovation.

Standard grants (up to $7,500) support curricular innovation by one faculty member, and bridge grants ($10,000 to $20,000) support interdisciplinary and/ or inter-institutional teams of two to four faculty interested in teaching across academic and/or institutional boundaries;

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Studiolab communities (up to $210,000): The humanities studiolab draws inspiration from both the studio and the laboratory as pedagogical spaces for humanities research and collaboration.

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Photo courtesy of Pannill Camp

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Pannill Camp, left, associate professor and chair of the Performing Arts Department, and co-hosts Sarah Bay-Cheng (Bowdoin College) and Harvey Young (Boston University), recorded an episode of On TAP: A Theatre and Performance Studies Podcast live at the Conference for Research on Choreographic Interfaces at Brown University in February 2018. Camp shared his podcasting expertise at the first RDE retreat in September 2018.

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These four initiatives facilitate collaboration across humanities disciplines and build new bridges with the social sciences, sciences and our professional schools as well as with neighboring institutions. They are also designed to integrate more closely the research worlds of faculty, postdoctoral students and graduate students, and to incorporate growing numbers of faculty, students and local partners in the transformation of graduate training in the humanities. Finally, and as importantly, they are aimed at bringing a more public face to the humanities work we do.

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RDE, 2018–19 FACULTY RETREAT The first RDE Faculty Retreat was held September 28–29, 2018, with presentations and hands-on activities led by experts and practitioners from higher education, museums, media, the arts and local institutions of learning. Kathryn Temple (Georgetown University) began with a talk on the new opportunities and challenges for PhD students and their faculty. Stacy Hartman, a project manager with Connected Academics, then facilitated an innovative workshop on joy in graduate teaching. Next, a panel including Lois Conley (Griot Museum of Black History), Jess Luther (KWMU), Kelly Pollock (Center of Creative Arts) and Elizabeth Wyckoff (Saint Louis Art Museum) discussed the museums and arts organizations of the local humanities ecosystem. WashU faculty members and podcasters Pannill Camp (Performing Arts) and Melanie Micir (English) led a workshop on podcasting, following a presentation on “The Humanities and Their Publics” by Stephen Aron (History, University of California, Los Angeles).

The second day began with a presentation on design, curation and exhibition from Abigail McEwen (Art History, University of Maryland), followed by a workshop on design and exhibition facilitated by Samuel Shearer (Weil Postdoctoral Fellow, Center for the Humanities) and Betha Whitlow (curator of visual resources, Art History). Then, the topic of the educational institutions of the local humanities ecosystem was discussed by a panel including Eleanor Des Prez (John Burroughs High School), Haliday Douglas (St. Louis Public Schools), Nadia Ghasedi (Special Collections, WashU Libraries) and Layla Goushey (St. Louis Community College).

The group reconvened on October 6, 2018, to meet with Cathy Davidson, distinguished professor and founding director of the Futures Initiative, City University of New York Graduate Center, on training graduate students for community college teaching. (Davidson was the invited speaker for the James E. McLeod Memorial Lecture on Higher Education; see page 18 for more.)

An official launch and information session for RDE was held on November 2, 2018. At this open forum, faculty had the opportunity to network with others who were also thinking about new ideas for humanities graduate education as well as the chance to ask questions about the grant programs.

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GRANTS AWARDED RDE CROSS-TRAINING GRANTS Seth Graebner (Romance Languages and Literatures) How do we recreate the places we read about? The digital turn in humanities scholarship could transform research into the way people imagine specific historical places in literature and other texts. Graebner’s research on the imagination of certain French and North African cities in this period already deals with a corpus of several hundred texts, processed by hand with traditional methods; the next step is to expand this corpus by an order of magnitude.

Digital tools, largely untested in this vein, could not only expand the scope of this work, but also make it visible to graduate students while teaching them transferable technical skills. Graebner hopes to help his students reach better appreciation of what close attention to written detail can reveal. Digital methods will also help them move their work out of the classroom: applications of GIS and eventually of available virtual reality technology will allow students to create the means for the public to see for themselves the results of textual scholarship.

Kristina Kleutghen (Art History and Archaeology) The RDE Cross-Training grant will enable Kleutghen to learn the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) at an intensive workshop at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, Canada. IIIF is a set of open-source universal standards for describing and delivering images online. This framework increases accessibility and functionality for image-based research and teaching by using international and freely available public image repositories. Museums, libraries, universities, archives and other nonprofit cultural institutions are increasingly using IIIF-compatible image-viewing clients to present their digital collections. Not only does IIIF make these digital collections more accessible, but it also improves user engagement by allowing users to compare, manipulate and annotate the digital images. In the future, Kleutghen aims to teach IIIF as part of a graduate seminar where humanities students can develop this transferable digital skill for promoting the humanities outside the research university.

Joseph Loewenstein (English) Loewenstein’s grant facilitates new and supplemental training in computational methods for the digital humanities. A literary scholar and cultural historian, Loewenstein already has two major projects — an edition of the collected works of Edmund Spenser and the enhancement of the digital corpus of English books from the first 225 years of English printing and the provision of tools for the investigation of that corpus — that increasingly depend on computational assistance. His enhanced skills in Python programming for text analysis, basic data cleanup and basic text mining will enable him to complete these portions of his own projects and to directly engage with graduate students learning to use them in their own digital humanities projects.

RDE CURRICULAR INNOVATION GRANTS Pannill Camp (Performing Arts) Embodied Multimedia Communication: This new cross-disciplinary course helps graduate students develop the ability to communicate effectively in professional contexts in and beyond academia. It begins with the observation that the body is a dynamic communication tool. Students will receive group instruction in verbal and nonverbal expression, voice and physical movement, and one-on-one coaching on a series of practiced communication tasks. Assignments replicate situations familiar to 21st-century information professions: research presentations, video-conference interviews and podcast production. Students will learn to convey complex ideas clearly and present themselves confidently as colleagues and collaborators. This new course will be housed in the Performing Arts Department and will draw on the expertise of its faculty, who have extensive experience teaching public speaking at Washington University and elsewhere.

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The Center for the Humanities invited Cathy N. Davidson — the co-founding director of HASTAC and the Distinguished Professor of English and Founding Director of the Futures Initiative at the Graduate Center, CUNY — to deliver the James E. McLeod Memorial Lecture on Higher Education. This annual lecture honors the esteemed vice chancellor of students, who died in 2011, and addresses the role of the liberal arts in higher education, a subject especially meaningful to Dean McLeod. On October 5, 2018, Davidson gave the lecture “Revolutionizing Higher Education.”

A Conversation With Cathy Davidson: On the Digital in the Humanities and Her Journey to Revolutionize Higher Ed MELANIE WALSH WAS A GRADUATE STUDENT FELLOW IN THE CENTER FOR THE HUMANITIES AND IS A PHD CANDIDATE IN THE DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH.

Cathy Davidson is a distinguished scholar of the history of technology and one of the leading voices in the movement to revolutionize higher education. Here, Davidson talks about childhood math camp, her new book, starting a social network older than Facebook and the role higher education can play in promoting diverse voices.

IN YOUR MOST RECENT BOOK, THE NEW EDUCATION (2017), YOU COMPELLINGLY MAKE THE CASE THAT HIGHER EDUCATION MUST BE REDESIGNED IN THE FACE OF THE DIGITAL REVOLUTION. WHEN DID YOU FIRST BECOME INTERESTED IN DIGITAL TECHNOLOGIES? Math camp was the happiest educational experience of my childhood. I loved theoretical math in grade school even and majored in philosophy of mathematics in college with the intention of going on in artificial intelligence or what at the time was called “quantificational logic” — roughly, machine language, translating human language into code and instructions that can be executed by computers.

BUT THEN YOUR EARLY RESEARCH FOCUSED ON EXPERIMENTAL AMERICAN FICTION AND THE RISE OF THE NOVEL. When I switched into American studies, my interest was still on technology and primarily in the relationship between technological change and cultural, political, educational and social change. I was also interested in the role of aesthetics and aesthetic production in that process during the last great information age, the age of industrialization and the invention of mass printing. That’s when the novel began to emerge as the dominant literary form. Much of my current work applies those principles to the current information age.

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CAN YOU TELL ME ABOUT HOW YOUR WORK STARTED TO ADDRESS THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN TECHNOLOGICAL CHANGES, THE HUMANITIES AND HIGHER EDUCATION MORE BROADLY? In 2002, I attended a meeting convened by the Mellon Foundation of directors of humanities centers. Some other humanities center directors expressed the idea that the humanities had to somehow ward off or do battle with technology, whereas I and David Theo Goldberg, director of the University of California Humanities Research Institute, felt the opposite: that the humanities were important enough to have a major role in understanding, critiquing, applying and addressing the role of technology in society and in education.

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We knew many others who shared our conviction, and we formed a coalition of what would become HASTAC — the Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Alliance and Collaboratory. The National Science Foundation (NSF) was creating “collaboratories” at the time and funded our first meeting. HASTAC is now known at NSF as the world’s first and oldest academic social network — older than Facebook or even Myspace. We have over 16,300 network members dedicated to “Changing the Way We Teach and Learn.” Our other motto is “Diversity Is Our Operating System.”

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WOW, AN EVEN OLDER SOCIAL NETWORK THAN MYSPACE! I HAD NO IDEA. I MYSELF AM A 2016–18 HASTAC SCHOLAR. CAN YOU EXPLAIN WHAT AN “ACADEMIC SOCIAL NETWORK” MEANS? HASTAC Scholars are about 80 percent graduate students and 20 percent undergraduates who are nominated by a faculty member. Scholars can become the eyes and ears of their institution, reporting on events, programs, panels and projects to the network. They can engage one another and make connections with other scholars on HASTAC.org, and they can publish preliminary research, write about their teaching and so forth.

It’s a great place to learn how to write for a larger audience because it is both open and yet not a free-for-all like much of the web. We especially support work that passes on those principles to the next generation, that tells future professors that, as distinct from the extremely hierarchical forms of education that thrive on income and status and racial and gender inequality, higher education should be a “commons,” a place where every student and every member of the community — full professors, starting assistant professors, part-time instructors, administrators, students, alumni — contributes ideas that help us all be better and better informed citizens of the world.

Higher education should be a “commons,” a place where every student and every member of the community — full professors, starting assistant professors, part-time instructors, administrators, students, alumni — contributes ideas that help us all be better and better informed citizens of the world.

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International Humanities Prize & Lecture

Selected by a subcommittee of the humanities center’s executive committee and members of the St. Louis community, David Adjaye is a leading architect of his generation, known especially for his work on major public spaces in North America, Europe and Africa.

In October 2018, the Center for the Humanities awarded the 2018 Washington University International Humanities Prize, in the amount of $25,000, to internationally renowned architect Sir David Adjaye, OBE. While on campus, Adjaye spent time with Washington University students and gave a public lecture on three of his U.S. projects, delving into the people and problem-solving strategies that are foregrounded in each of his designs.

Selected by a subcommittee of the humanities center’s executive committee and members of the St. Louis community, David Adjaye is a leading architect of his generation, known especially for his work on major public spaces in North America, Europe and Africa. When the Adjaye-designed National Museum of African American History and Culture opened in September 2016, the New York Times named it the cultural event of the year. Thirteen months later, his project team won the commission for the UK’s National Holocaust Memorial and Learning Center. It’s projects like these that were recognized with knighthood by Queen Elizabeth II in January 2017 for service to the field of architecture and that earned him a spot on Time magazine’s list of the 100 most influential people that same year.

But it’s Adjaye’s humanistic approach to design that has set him above and apart from his contemporaries. As Thelma Golden, the director of the Studio Museum in Harlem, another Adjaye design, notes in her essay on his work for Time: “His work — deeply rooted in both the present moment and the complex context of history — has envisioned new ways for culture to be represented and reflected in the built environment.”

The International Humanities Prize and Medal are awarded biennially to a person who has contributed significantly to the humanities either through a supremely wellcrafted work or an entire body of work that has dramatically changed how we see or understand a particular place, event, person, idea or field of expression, or through courageously persevering in a humanities pursuit in an atmosphere of persecution.

Past winners are Orhan Pamuk (2006), Michael Pollan (2008), Francine Prose (2010), Ken Burns (2012), Marjorie Perloff (2014) and Bill T. Jones (2016).

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‘Understanding the Relationship Between Things’: Sir David Adjaye and the Social Ramifications of Architecture IGNACIO INFANTE IS AN ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF COMPARATIVE LITERATURE AND OF SPANISH AND ASSOCIATE DIRECTOR OF THE CENTER FOR THE HUMANITIES. Sir David Adjaye has described his own conception of architecture as a way to “produce in the world.” In this sense, Adjaye’s work as an architect — encompassing civic, commercial and residential buildings as well as master planning or design projects — constitutes a creative process through which he critically engages the intricate relationship between geography and form. Adjaye’s commitment to architecture as a profession and discipline thus reflects a deep engagement with a complex world in its many forms (spatial, aesthetic, material) and contexts (social, economic, historical).

Adjaye’s decision to become an architect originally emerged as an attempt to explore the social and historical implications of “form making,” as he explains in the following terms: “I got into architecture because I was searching for a way to produce in the world. I went to art school and thought I would do it through art, but I realized very quickly that I was interested in the social ramifications of form making.”

Adjaye’s creative vision as an architect is deeply influenced by a childhood spent across Africa, as well as his training in art and architecture in Europe (primarily based in London) and Japan. As mentioned in his essay “African Metropolitan Architecture,” Adjaye’s family, originally from Ghana, lived in a range of cities across Africa and the Middle East throughout his childhood — including Dar es Salaam (where he was born in 1966), Kampala, Nairobi, Beirut and Cairo — where Adjaye was exposed to what he refers to as the “incredible diversity that existed in this continent.” Adjaye experienced this diversity as a multiplicity of different geographies, languages and cultures, as well as urban spaces, terrains and climates across Africa. The experience during his childhood of this particular sense of diversity represents for Adjaye the “kind of internationalism” that would become one of the key foundations for the development of his “strategic view” as one of the most notorious creators in the world today.

Adjaye’s impressive work as an architect represents one of the most powerful contemporary examples of the kind of revolutionary work posited by Walter Benjamin as being located “within the production relations of its time.” As Adjaye mentions in his essay “The Lesson of Africa,” one of the main functions of his designs is precisely to unveil the very relations of production — from its most material to its most abstract or symbolic — effectively shaping our world, our spaces and our lives today: “When I look at brickwork, for instance, it is not the

bricks I am interested in but the lattice created by the horizontal and vertical joints, which tells me how the bricks were put together. This approach offers an immediate basis for understanding the relationship between things.”

For Adjaye, architecture constitutes a process in which technique is the result of a critical act of looking into the world: looking at material form as a way of tracing the relations of production shaping those forms and creating new formal configurations whose function is to critically and vibrantly respond to those relations.

The extreme importance of Adjaye’s own strategic view articulated in the many groundbreaking buildings he has designed over the years lies in how his work ultimately aims to unveil the “relationship between things” as a creative exploration of form and space within their most complex social and historical ramifications — joyful and painful alike.

It is precisely the uniqueness and commitment at the core of Adjaye’s creative vision in relation to the conditions of life and production in the world today — as determined by various historical, cultural and economic forces — that impressed the selection committee for the 2018 Washington University International Humanities Prize awarded by the Center for the Humanities. By consistently placing his work as an architect within the production relations of our time through new and impressive forms, shapes and spatial configurations, Sir David Adjaye continues to expand our understanding of our world, our human ties and the very fabric of our human condition.

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Ed Reeve

The extreme importance of Adjaye’s own strategic view articulated in the many groundbreaking buildings he has designed over the years lies in how his work ultimately aims to unveil the “relationship between things” as a creative exploration of form and space

Alex Fradkin

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within their most complex social and historical ramifications — joyful and painful alike.

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Faculty Book Celebration The publication of a monograph or significant creative work is a milestone in the career of an academic. The Center for the Humanities commemorates this achievement annually during the Faculty Book Celebration. The event recognizes Washington University faculty from across campus by displaying their recently published works and large-scale creative projects and inviting two campus authors and a guest lecturer to speak at a public gathering.

In mid-February, the Center for the Humanities welcomed Caroline Levine, the David and Kathleen Ryan Professor of Humanities, Cornell University, as its keynote speaker. First, the humanities center partnered with Washington University Libraries to host the panel discussion “Art and Democracy.” Levine, author of Provoking Democracy: Why We Need the Arts, was joined by Rebecca Wanzo (Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies), Ignacio Sánchez Prado (Romance Languages and Literatures, Film and Media Studies, and Latin American Studies), and moderator Ignacio Infante (Comparative Literature and Romance Languages and Literatures), all from Washington University. Rachel Greenwald Smith (English), Saint Louis University, also participated in the panel.

Later in the afternoon, the Faculty Book Celebration kicked off with two brief talks by faculty members related to their new works (more on the following pages). Levine then gave her keynote lecture, “Sustainable Forms: Routine, Infrastructure, Conservation.”

Levine noted in her lecture that literary and cultural studies have long prized moments of rupture and resistance. But as neoliberal economics undoes prospects of secure work and as fossil fuels radically disrupt long-standing ecosystems, she argued that it is increasingly clear that we need not more radical disruption but more stability. Levine asked how we might best support and sustain collective life over time. She turned to the tools of formalist analysis to sketch out some arrangements of space and time, some organizations of power and resources, and some patterns of distribution and conservation, that are more supportive of the common good than others.

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Faculty Speakers JOHN HENDRIX is associate professor of art and chair of undergraduate design in the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts at Washington University. He is a New York Times best-selling illustrator and author of many children’s books, including Shooting at the Stars, Drawing Is Magic and John Brown: His Fight for Freedom. His most recent work, The Faithful Spy: Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the Plot to Kill Hitler, was reviewed by the New York Times and received a 2019 gold medal from the Society of Illustrators. In his signature style of interwoven handwritten text and art, Hendrix tells the true story of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a pastor who makes the ultimate sacrifice in order to free the German people from oppression during World War II.

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MICHELLE PURDY is assistant professor of education and director of undergraduate educational studies in the Department of Education at Washington University. With research, teaching and service commitments to race, culture and equity in education, her specialties include the history of U.S. education, the history of African-American education, the history of school desegregation and the history of policy, access and opportunity. Her book, Transforming the Elite: Black Students and the Desegregation of Private Schools, analyzes how and why historically white elite private schools, or the most prestigious independent schools, opted to desegregate when not legally obligated to do so and the experiences of the first black students to desegregate such institutions.

Combining social history, policy analysis and oral history, Purdy examines the desegregation of the well-known Westminster Schools in Atlanta, Georgia, alongside national efforts to diversify independent schools.

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Routine Maintenance: Caroline Levine on the Forms That Sustain DEBORAH THURMAN IS A LYNNE COOPER HARVEY FELLOW IN AMERICAN CULTURE STUDIES AND PHD CANDIDATE IN THE DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH. In advance of her keynote lecture at the Faculty Book Celebration, Caroline Levine was interviewed about her analysis of social and artistic forms, defense of repetitive structures and how she found support in sources ranging from Victorian literature to The Wire.

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YOUR RECENT BOOK, FORMS, THINKS ABOUT STRUCTURES THAT ORGANIZE LITERATURE, LIKE GENRE AND RHYME, ALONGSIDE STRUCTURES THAT ORGANIZE PEOPLE, LIKE ARCHITECTURE AND SCHOOL SYSTEMS. WHAT FIRST INSPIRED YOU TO COMPARE THE TWO? My first book made an argument about suspense in the 19th-century novel. Rather than just a cheap marketing technique, I argued, suspense fiction actually shared a crucial structure with the scientific experiment: in both cases, you are faced with a mystery — or a hypothesis — and then expected to wait, suspended, to see whether your hypothesis fits the truth.

My second book seems at first like a totally different project. I was investigating debates about public art, obscenity, copyright and propaganda in the 20th century. To my surprise, I came across a common structural tension: communities rejected art in the name of democratic majorities while artists justified their work as valuable for its challenges to mainstream tastes and values. I thought a lot about how forms can be shared across domains: the same form shaping scientific experiments and popular novels or animating both artists and their antagonists.

Forms argued that artistic and social forms have a lot in common and that we can use the same tools to analyze them.

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What about maintenance — the work of keeping our spaces, feeding our bodies and preserving infrastructures?

No human society can survive without this labor. I think it’s time to revalue repetition for the sake of sustainability.

YOU ENGAGE WITH A WIDE-RANGING ARCHIVE, FROM 19TH-CENTURY NOVELS TO THE WIRE. HOW DO YOU CHOOSE THE BEST EXAMPLES TO ILLUSTRATE YOUR IDEAS? OR DO YOU START WITH THE ARCHIVE AND WORK FROM THERE? Somewhere along the way, I realized that if you have a transhistorical theory of how the world works, then logically any example should do. This made the selection hard — and sometimes arbitrary. I knew Victorian literature and culture best, so lots of my examples come from 19th-century Britain. But I wanted to make sure I included premodern and non-European forms, for example, to test the validity of my theory. The Wire was an unusual case because I had been teaching it for years and had the intuition that it was saying something that I wasn’t seeing in any theory, so it was by working through the text that I sharpened my own theoretical contribution.

YOUR WORK MOUNTS A DEFENSE OF REPETITIVE PATTERNS AGAINST A SCHOLARLY TENDENCY TO CELEBRATE THE UNIQUE AND THE DISRUPTIVE. WHY DO YOU THINK SCHOLARS ARE SUSPICIOUS OF REPETITION? Modernity is in thrall to innovation. Think about how we tell the history of art and literature and technology as stories of breaks and disruptions. At the same time, modernity ushered in one of the most terrifying kinds of repetition: the deathly routines of factory work. For many theorists since the 19th century, art alone is the force that can break through the routines of modern existence. But what about maintenance — the work of keeping up our spaces, feeding our bodies and preserving infrastructures? No human society can do without this labor. I think it’s time to revalue repetition for the sake of sustainability.

THE PROJECT OF REVALUING REPETITION HAS SOME FOREBEARS WITHIN SECOND-WAVE FEMINISM — PEOPLE LIKE MIERLE LADERMAN UKELES, WHO HAS WORKED TO REFRAME ACTS OF MAINTENANCE (E.G., SWEEPING THE FLOOR) AS A KIND OF ART (“FLOOR PAINTINGS”).

I love Ukeles and have just been writing about her in my newest work. Celebrating innovation has allowed us to overlook or dismiss the work of maintaining collective life — which has often fallen to women. If women’s work is so repetitive that it can’t count as creative or heroic, is that a problem with women’s work or with our aesthetic values? For this I’m turning to Ukeles and bell hooks and Susan Fraiman’s new work — feminist arguments for the value of routine maintenance.

Levine draws on a wide-ranging archive — including Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and HBO’s The Wire — in her book Forms.

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EVENTS + OUTREACH

Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah and Its Archive of Outtakes ERIN MCGLOTHLIN IS ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF GERMAN AND JEWISH STUDIES. On July 5, 2018, Claude Lanzmann, the renowned French documentary filmmaker, died at the age of 92. He left behind an unparalleled oeuvre of films, including his masterwork Shoah (1985), which painstakingly reconstructs the complex history of the Holocaust through the contemporary testimony of eyewitnesses. With a running time of nine-and-ahalf hours, Shoah presents Lanzmann’s own filmed interviews with dozens of Holocaust survivors, bystanders and perpetrators (some of the latter of whom Lanzmann filmed clandestinely) alongside long sequences of footage of present-day locations in which the genocide took place.

As Holocaust literature and film scholar Sue Vice writes about the aesthetic and narrative composition of the film, “This is a deceptively simple format, yet Shoah’s standing is unrivaled in both film history and Holocaust representation.” While Lanzmann is best known for the singular achievement that constitutes Shoah, his opus also contains a number of other documentaries about the Holocaust, including A Visitor from the Living (1999), Sobibór, October 14, 1943, 4 p.m. (2001), The Karski Report (2010) and The Last of the Unjust (2013). Lanzmann’s last film, The Four Sisters, which features his interviews with four women who had survived the Holocaust, premiered the day before his death.

All of Lanzmann’s documentary films about the Holocaust are based on a massive archive of film footage that Lanzmann began creating in the early 1970s for Shoah. The largest part of the archive comprises footage of the interviews Lanzmann conducted in more than half a dozen languages in over 10 countries with many dozens of people, including Jewish survivors, German perpetrators, Polish eyewitnesses and Holocaust historians, while a smaller but substantial portion of the collection

contains location footage of the present-day sites of mass murder during the Holocaust. Filmed over the course of over 10 years, this extensive collection contains over 230 hours of footage, yet only around 21 total hours of this footage appears in Lanzmann’s films, meaning that over 200 hours of what film scholars refer to as “outtakes” were not released theatrically.

Still image from The Four Sisters

by Claude Landzmann.

EVENT: “The Holocaust in Literature and Film: Revisiting Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah”

In 1996, Lanzmann ceded control of these materials Sue Vice, University of to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Sheffield - Holocaust (USHMM), which owns the Shoah archive jointly Memorial Lecture with Yad Vashem (the Israeli national Holocaust museum and research institute). Since that time, November 5, 2018 the USHMM’s Spielberg Film and Video Archive has worked to preserve the thousands of film and audio reels, to convert them to a digital format and to make them accessible online not only to researchers and filmmakers (including Lanzmann himself, who utilized the USHMM’s collection to make his post-Shoah Holocaust documentaries), but also to members of the general public. Almost all of this extensive archive is currently available for instant viewing on the USHMM’s website.

The Shoah outtakes are a valuable resource for historians, since they constitute one of the earliest archives of high-quality Holocaust video testimonies. But the archive of outtakes is also compelling to those interested in the cinematic memory and representation of the Holocaust, for it provides a fascinating glimpse into Lanzmann’s method and practice of filmmaking, which was uncompromising and disciplined in its pursuit of its goal of disclosing the traces of the Holocaust as they persist in the memory of its eyewitnesses.

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Cosponsored Events SEPTEMBER 28–29, 2018 BROADWAY BODIES: AN INTERDISCIPLINARY CONFERENCE ON THE MUSICAL Organized by the American Culture Studies Program and Department of Music NOVEMBER 1–11, 2018 MEAN STREETS: VIEWING THE DIVIDED CITY THROUGH THE LENS OF FILM AND TELEVISION 27th Annual St. Louis International Film Festival NOVEMBER 3, 2018 XV LESSONS AND LEGACIES CONFERENCE — THE HOLOCAUST: GLOBAL PERSPECTIVES AND NATIONAL NARRATIVES Organized by the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures NOVEMBER 13–15, 2018 HUMANITIES LECTURE SERIES: HOLY MOSES: AN APPRECIATION OF GENESIS AND EXODUS AS LITERATURE AND THEOLOGY Organized by the Interdisciplinary Project in the Humanities MARCH 14–16, 2019 ETHNOGRAPHIC FUTURES Annual spring meeting of the American Ethnological Society Organized by the Department of Anthropology MARCH 19, 2019 STRATEGIC NEGATIVITY: RATCHETNESS AND REALITY TELEVISION Organized by the Law, Identity, and Culture Speaker Series

MARCH 20, 2019 NEGATIVE KANYE: BLACK GENIUS, ICONOGRAPHY AND THE POLITICS OF DISOBEDIENCE Organized by the Department of Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies and the Department of African and African-American Studies MARCH 29–30, 2019 PERFORMING MORRISON SYMPOSIUM Organized by the Performing Arts Department APRIL 6, 2019 BEYOND THE FILM: INTERDISCIPLINARY APPROACHES TO MOVIE AUDIENCES AND THEIR ENVIRONMENTS Organized by the Film and Media Studies Program APRIL 20, 2019 KEEP THEM SACRED: HONORING GENERATIONS OF INDIGENOUS WOMEN 2019 Washington University Pow Wow Organized by the Buder Center for American Indian Studies

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Center for the Humanities: A Community of Scholars

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TABEA LINHARD

Antifascist Writers on the Run In the spring of 1939, supporters of the defeated Spanish Republic had to flee north across the Pyrenees. Roughly a year later, Jewish and antifascist refugees took the same paths to flee south, on their way to Lisbon, and from there to the Americas. In her current project, Unexpected Routes: Exile, Geography and Memory, Tabea Linhard, professor in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures and the programs in International and Area Studies and Comparative Literature, explores the work and the circuitous journeys of these refugees, which intersected in France, North Africa, the Caribbean and Mexico.

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WHAT IS YOUR GOAL WITH THIS BOOK? My book is about how refugees made it out of Europe and to the Americas, via North Africa, in the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War and during World War II. Escaping from fascism was tremendously difficult and implied facing cruel bureaucracies, constantly shifting borders and prejudice in the transit and exile countries. I am interested in the ways in which the refugees experienced and chronicled their journeys from Europe to the Americas. Their voices reveal myriad contradictory emotions and attitudes: fear, nostalgia, hope, optimism, selfrighteousness and even chauvinism. I think that if we do not pay attention to these often raw and extremely contradictory documents, we miss part of the story of what (until 2015) had been the most massive forced displacement in history.

HOW DID YOU SELECT THE GROUP OF WRITERS YOU’RE LOOKING AT? While I was conducting research for my previous book, I came across The Excursion of the Dead Girls, a novella by German writer Anna Seghers (1901–83). The text was first published in Mexico and in Spanish translation in 1944. Seghers wrote it while she was recovering from a severe traffic accident and after finding out that her mother had been put to death in a concentration camp. Seghers’ work led me to other German writers who had settled in Mexico and also made me curious about how this cohort of writers related to another community far more familiar to me: the Spanish Republican exiles in Mexico.

HOW DID THESE WRITERS REFLECT ON THEIR EXILE? They express different degrees of awe and perplexity about the places they crossed and where they settled. The writers I study were committed antifascists, they denounced imperialism and racism, and yet their works bubble with exoticizing, Orientalist and even prejudiced tropes and narratives.

TELL US ABOUT THE APPROACH TO MAPS YOU TAKE IN THE BOOK. WHY IS THE COMBINATION OF GEOVISUAL TOOLS AND TEXTUAL ANALYSIS IMPORTANT? Most of the refugees’ itineraries were complex and labyrinthine, and I needed to incorporate maps in order remember who was where, when and why. Yet I wanted maps to do more than serve as an illustration of the texts. I began tinkering with geovisual tools in order to find ways in which maps could help us understand how these refugees experienced specific places. About a year ago, I came across a map that for me beautifully illustrated the experience and the memory of displacement. It is the complete opposite of a high-tech map: a hand-drawn map that young Fritz Freudenheim drew of his family’s path from Berlin to Montevideo.

The map (archived at the Jewish Museum in Berlin) follows some cartographic conventions and undermines others (scale, legend), which, in my view, is what makes it so effective.

Anna Seghers published her widely (and wildly) selling novel The Seventh Cross while in exile.

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TIMOTHY MOORE

Ancient Theater Gets Its Groove Back It’s a golden age of musical theater. The Hamilton cast recording, for instance, has spent more than 145 weeks on Billboard’s top 40 chart. So, imagine the missing magic if the music were stripped from these performances. Would we understand them in the same way? Such is the case with ancient Greek and Roman theater, which is more often read on the page than staged in its original sonorous form.

Timothy Moore, the John and Penelope Biggs Distinguished Professor of Classics, hopes to address this situation in his project Unheard Melodies: Music and Meaning in Ancient Greek and Roman Theater.

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WHAT IS THE MOST COMMON MISCONCEPTION ABOUT ANCIENT THEATER? The most damaging misconception is our assumption that ancient Greek and Roman plays sounded much like modern “straight” plays, with no musical accompaniment, song or dance. In fact, almost every ancient play was structurally similar to a modern musical, with alternation between scenes that were spoken and scenes that were sung to the accompaniment of a wind instrument called aulos in Greek, tibia in Latin. The ancient playwrights created both pleasure and meaning by combining words with music, so we miss much of what Greek and Roman theater was about if we imagine only spoken words.

HOW WILL YOUR BOOK ADDRESS THIS MISUNDERSTANDING? Fortunately, the meters of Greek and Roman plays (almost all plays were written in verse) allow us to see musical patterns, even though almost no written melodies survive from antiquity. One meter was almost always spoken, others nearly always sung, and ancient rhythm was heavily dependent upon meter. I want in my book to explain how metrical patterns reveal much of what music contributed to ancient plays, often in ways analogous to what composers and lyricists accomplish in modern musical theater. Creators of American musicals, for example, often use reprises of songs sung earlier in the play to reinforce messages and contribute to the spectator’s experience. Metrical repetition suggests that ancient playwrights did the same thing.

YOU PLAN TO PUBLISH A WEBSITE ABOUT THIS PROJECT AS WELL AS A BOOK. HOW ARE THEY DIFFERENT FROM ONE ANOTHER, AND WHY IS IT IMPORTANT TO DO BOTH? The website is already well underway, thanks to superb work by colleagues and students at Washington University’s Humanities Digital Workshop. It will provide a comprehensive guide to the what: what musical patterns occur where in ancient theater, what kinds of characters perform what kinds of music and the musical structure of each play. The book will present the how and the why: how ancient playwrights used musical patterns to produce various effects and what those effects mean for our understanding of the plays.

IN WHAT WAYS DO ANCIENT PLAYS SPEAK TO CONTEMPORARY AUDIENCES? Musical theater has never been more important than it is today. For a significant number of people around the world, musical theater is the only theater they know. And the ancient plays remain profoundly relevant.

I note, for example, a production of Sophocles’ Antigone by Upstream Theater here in St. Louis in October 2014. This play from about 440 BCE, in which a body lies unburied in a public place, inspired profitable discussion about ethics and authority right in the middle of the controversies surrounding the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson.

Norman McGowan and Dennis Lebby as Choristers in a performance of Antigone by Upstream Theatre. Photo

by Peter Wochniak.

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DOUGLAS FLOWE

Omitted History Historian Douglas Flowe doesn’t study the heroes of history. Instead, his research is primarily concerned with themes of criminality, vice, leisure and masculinity — and specifically how they converge with issues of race, class and space in American cities. Flowe features these issues in his first book project, “Tell the Whole White World”: Black Men and the Politics of Black Criminality in Early Twentieth Century New York City.

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YOUR BOOK TAKES ON THE SUBJECT OF BLACK CRIMINALITY, WHICH HAS NOT BEEN EXTENSIVELY COVERED. WHY DO YOU THINK THAT IS? Historians have avoided the subject of black criminality to a large extent after the 1965 report by Daniel Patrick Moynihan that assessed the “urban crisis” of that decade as the result of historical conditions and black pathologies that ultimately impacted black family, economic and crime outcomes. Many scholars interpreted his report as essentially “blaming the victim” by foregrounding a “culture of poverty” among African Americans rather than structural issues of segregation, economic displacement and urban redesign. In the decades after his report, many liberal historians have attempted to refute this argument by focusing on black political, economic and cultural self-determination and have specifically avoided crime. Recently, a number of historians have changed this trend. I see my work as fitting in this new historiography by including a study of men and masculinity as they relate to criminality, which has not yet been done.

WHAT IS YOUR GOAL WITH THIS BOOK? My book examines the subject of black men and criminality in order to introduce extralegal activities as an important part of the historiography of African-American history. It interrogates the meaning of “crime” in the lives of individuals forced to the margins of public and economic life and whose lawful conduct was often surveilled and criminalized to protect the interests of dominant groups. By focusing on what their actions and behaviors represented to them, this work acknowledges their contribution to the formation of black masculine identity, for better or worse.

I argue that the convergence of black discontent with the inequalities and violence they encountered in the urban North and the efforts of civic and progressive leaders to restrict their lives produced the circumstances for crime among black men. This reality clashed violently with their expectations of freedom, economic autonomy and the ability to create sustainable patriarchal households.

WHY IS IT IMPORTANT TO UNDERSTAND THIS HISTORY? Historical work is most useful when it has the capacity to address current and future issues. In my work I seek to understand how the features of American society have created circumstances where African-American men are disproportionately affected by stigmatization, economic marginalization, racial violence, police brutality and mass incarceration in the present.

Can we see participation in underground economies as fortifying a sense of control and economic power for black men? Did civic surveillance, police brutality, public racial violence, segregation in housing and leisure, and criminal stigmatization foster a sense of isolation, distress and nihilism that made crime and violence viable remedial options for them? These questions are still crucial to contemporary discourse about black communities and urban structures of power. By understanding how pre- and post-emancipation historical factors affected their lives, I formulate a framework for understanding the rationale behind certain types of illegal acts and argue that understanding this history can contribute to conversations about issues that affect black communities today.

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ALEX STEFANIAK

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WHO WAS CLARA SCHUMANN? Clara Schumann had one of the longest, most wide-ranging careers of any 19thcentury European concert pianist. She made her debut in 1828 at the age of nine and continued performing into the early 1890s. Though based in Germany, she toured from Dublin to Budapest and from St. Petersburg to Paris, ultimately giving over 1,200 concerts. In addition to performing, Schumann worked as a composer, editor and teacher.

Within the concert world, she commanded extraordinary prestige and celebrity.

Her name could sell out a concert, and she became a staple of musical life in several major musical centers: London, Vienna and Leipzig, for example.

Tradition and Transformation: Clara Schumann and the Creation of Classical Music German pianist and composer Clara Schumann had famous men in her life — she was wife to Robert Schumann, one of the most successful composers of the Romantic era, and she mentored composer Johannes Brahms — but she was a significant musician in her own right, says Alexander Stefaniak, assistant professor of music. As one of the most acclaimed concert pianists of her time, her professional career as a performer merits its own in-depth study.

Stefaniak is at work on a book, Hearing Clara Schumann: Performance, Aesthetics and Listening in the Culture of the Musical Canon, that foregrounds Schumann’s public activities on the concert stage and analyzes how, as a performer, she strategically engaged with larger musical and cultural currents.

BRIEFLY, WHAT IS YOUR BOOK ABOUT? Clara Schumann built her career during a pivotal phase in the invention of what we now generally call “classical music” — the decades between the 1820s and the end of the 19th century. This musical culture centered on supposed masterworks by venerated composers, a canon that solidified during Schumann’s career.

Schumann and her contemporaries embraced the belief that performers should be simultaneously reverent and revelatory interpreters of this music.

My book explores Schumann as a strategist within this culture, showing how she cultivated prestige and asserted authority as an interpreter. Considering this issue means analyzing the ways in which she and other contemporary performers exercised creative and entrepreneurial agency. It also means bringing together a wide variety of sources, including musical compositions, press discourse and documents of performance events.

WHAT IS THE MOST COMMON MISCONCEPTION ABOUT SCHUMANN? It’s very common to see Clara Schumann portrayed as a pure idealist: as a performer who selflessly based her career on her deeply held artistic credo and her strong belief in the music she performed. Schumann was undeniably invested in the ideologies of “classical music.” But she was also a savvy strategist and an ambitious professional. My book explores how these aspects of Schumann’s outlook went hand in hand and were crucial to the everyday work of being a concert pianist.

IN WHAT WAYS DO WE SEE HER LEGACY TODAY? “Classical music” as we know it is a 19-century invention — not just the repertoire, but many of its institutions and core beliefs about performing and listening. Clara Schumann was part of the culture that created this musical world. But at the same time, Schumann and her compositions have figured prominently in efforts to make “classical music” more inclusive — particularly to include more music by women composers on the concert stage and in the classroom. For present-day classical-music audiences, she’s at once the embodiment of an established tradition and an icon of transformation.

Clara Schumann, watercolor by Adolph von Menzel, 1854

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JULIE SINGER BRIEFLY, WHAT IS YOUR BOOK ABOUT? The English word infant and the French word enfant both come from the Latin infans, which literally means “unable to speak.” In my new book I’m looking at the places in medieval French literature where toddlers, infants and even fetuses do talk. I’m finding that the voices of these very minor characters are used as test cases to work through some very important questions about the human condition: personhood, the interplay of nature and nurture, innocence, justice, responsibility.

Baby Talk: Listening to the ‘Little Guy’ in Medieval French Literature By the 15th century, the admonition that “children should be seen but not heard” was already circulating in Europe.

Their younger peers, of course, were physically and developmentally limited in their ability to talk. So, when the writers of medieval French texts attribute utterances and speech to their youngest characters, what are they telling us? Julie Singer, associate professor of French, takes on this question in her current project, Out of the Mouths of Babes: Children’s Voices in Medieval French Literature.

HOW ARE CHILDREN FEATURED IN WRITINGS OF THIS PERIOD? Children appear frequently in medieval literature, especially in epics, which often have a genealogical focus, and in romances, which will typically devote a few lines to the childhood of the future hero in order to show that he’s been exceptional from the start. But the role of these child characters, particularly in the courtly texts that tend to garner the most scholarly attention, is usually quite small. As my project has developed, I’ve found myself working more with literary genres that are less studied today — such as devotional manuals and other religious writings for lay readers — but that were very widely read in the Middle Ages. This is where the really weird stuff starts to happen…

CAN YOU GIVE AN EXAMPLE FROM ONE OF YOUR TEXTS? In the medieval West, the conventional wisdom holds that newborn boys cry out “Aahhh” and newborn girls cry out “Ehhhh.” Their cries are interpreted in various ways: as simple interjections expressive of discomfort, as the audible trace of biological sex difference, as the two syllables of the name Eva (Eve), even as abbreviations for long lamentations about the misery of the human condition.

The discussions of these interpretations end up shedding light on major medieval debates about speech, reason and the mechanisms by which language can signify.

Another neat example is a 15th-century poem that is the first text in which a number of French baby talk words are written down. Most of these words (like dodo, for “sleepy time”) are still used today! The poem tells us about how some seemingly transparent concepts like “native” and “foreign” language were constructed in the multilingual environments of late medieval courts.

Bibliothèque Nationale de France

HOW ARE THE QUESTIONS ABOUT PERSONHOOD AND SUBJECTIVITY EXPLORED IN YOUR WORK RELEVANT TODAY? The question of fetal personhood, and when life begins, is obviously still a hot-button issue today. Medieval writers didn’t reach a consensus on this matter either, but they offer a number of fascinating perspectives on the question. More generally, I think my project is relevant because of the ways my medieval authors explore what happens when the “little guy” (literally, in these cases!) speaks truth to power. For these writers, there are many truths that only the most marginalized voices can express.

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LUIS ALEJANDRO SALAS

The Feuding Physician of Ancient Rome Galen of Pergamum, physician to two Roman emperors, wrote his way into history as one of the most important medical minds in the annals of science and philosophy. How did Galen’s doctrine come to dominate Western and Arabic medicine for close to 1,500 years? Luis Alejandro Salas, assistant professor of classics, investigates this question in his current book project, Cutting Words: Polemical Dimensions of Galen’s Anatomical Experiments.

Woodcut illustration of a demonstration by Galen, from Andreas Vesalius’ 1543 De humani corporis fabrica

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BRIEFLY, WHAT IS YOUR BOOK ABOUT? Cutting Words examines a series of narratives in the work of Galen of Pergamum, an influential Greek physician and philosopher writing in the late 2nd century CE, about anatomical experiments. I use Galen’s accounts of these experiments to explore his intellectual and professional engagement with rival practitioners, painting a fuller picture of what theoretical issues were at stake in his own work and how medical debate in the 2nd century played out in the public sphere. One of my aims in writing this book has been to contribute to a growing movement among scholars of Greco-Roman antiquity that engages with science writing as a part of the rich range of ancient literary production rather than as writing apart from it.

SET THE SCENE FOR US: WHAT WAS MEDICAL PRACTICE LIKE IN THE 2ND CENTURY GRECO-ROMAN WORLD? A theme that runs throughout Cutting Words is that experiments (and accounts of them) often perform a credentialing or licensing function in the Greco-Roman world. Throughout Greco-Roman antiquity, there were no socially sanctioned places of medical practice or learning like hospitals and universities. We are so accustomed to a multitude of culturally accepted signs of professional authority that it can be difficult to imagine how patients and practitioners alike might make judgments about legitimacy in their absence. We see that public demonstrations were one way in which this kind of social function was fulfilled for ancient Greeks and Romans. One important takeaway from this observation is that for them, professional legitimacy was a highly contested space, in which intellectual elites, especially in the bustling world of 2nd century Rome, strove for authority in dazzling displays of learning, technical skill and dramatic persuasion.

WHAT WERE SOME OF THE HOTLY DEBATED QUESTIONS? One of the particular disputes you would be likely to hear a lot about involves the location of identity in the body. The two main candidates for its place were the heart and the brain, with an astounding array of arguments for each position. Perhaps Galen’s most famous experiment is aimed at establishing that the body’s control center is in the brain. In the experiment, which was conducted before a public audience, he would block a series of nerves responsible for voice production to show that the brain is the source of sensory-motor function rather than the heart, typically by dissection or ligation. These experiments were performed exclusively on animal subjects, often chosen to maximize the effect of the spectacle on audience-goers.

HOW DID GALEN BROADEN HIS AUTHORITY BEYOND THE AUDIENCE-GOERS? Galen leveraged book technology to (re)perform the sorts of public demonstrations typically held before a live audience for readers, whose experience of these experiments was not limited by the practical considerations of a live performance. Galen’s written performances and reading audiences were not limited by time, place or by the many observational challenges that might affect members of a live anatomical demonstration.

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

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

FALL 2018 ADWOA OPONG | DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY Elite Women and the Architecture of PostWar Feminism in Ghana, 1945–1970 Focusing on the Federation of Gold Coast (Ghana) Women — one of the largest and most influential women’s organizations to emerge at the dawn of Ghana’s independence in 1953 — Opong’s research questions the broader gendered politics of state-building in post-colonial Africa. In foregrounding the complexities and contradictions in the federation’s vision for all women and the Ghanaian nation, her dissertation recovers alternative imaginings of nation from the perspective of educated urban women.

MELANIE WALSH | DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH Postwar Redux: How 21st-Century Networked Readers Remediated, Recirculated and Redefined American Fiction Walsh’s dissertation tracks the pre-internet writings of four important late 20th-century American authors — James Baldwin, Kurt Vonnegut, Sandra Cisneros and Chris Kraus — as they were recirculated by networks of readers in the 21st.

Through the lens of #BlackLivesMatter tweets, licensed Amazon fan fiction, an anti-censorship protest movement called Libtrotraficante and an Amazon Studios television adaptation, “Postwar Redux” sketches a living history of post-internet literary readership and excavates a new literary history of the post-1945 period of American writing. Making the claim that new ways of reading and circulating literature also demand new methods of analysis, Walsh's dissertation combines close reading and traditional archival research with social media archiving, computational analysis and geospatial mapping.

CORINNE ZEMAN | DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH AND PROGRAM IN COMPARATIVE LITERATURE Transcultural Capital: Anglo-Islamic Traffic on the Early Modern Stage Zeman’s dissertation seeks to make sense of the ambivalent internationalism of 17th-century England and specifically how Islamic culture was folded into the fabric of metropolitan life in London. Looking beyond the analytical model that presumes Islamic culture as invariably xenos — a stranger in English borders — Zeman looks to domestic and urban dramas that entangle the foreign and the familiar.

SPRING 2019 LING KANG | DEPARTMENT OF EAST ASIAN LANGUAGES AND CULTURES Voicing China: The Technologies of Speaking and the Sonic Modernity in China Kang’s project investigates the techniques and technologies of four major mediums of human voice in modern Chinese enlightenment and revolutions: public speaking, poetry recitation, literary writing and cinematic sound reproduction. Taking an interdisciplinary approach that brings together literary analysis, psychology, physiology, linguistics, acoustics and media archaeology, Kang argues that the significance of voice as a means of communication and mobilization lies not only in what it says, but also, and more importantly, in how it speaks, in the manipulation of its sonic materiality — tones, pitches, rhythms, volumes, etc. Kang challenges the seemingly transparent association between voice and agency in previous scholarship and argues for a more dynamic conceptualization of the relation between the two.

ROSE MIYATSU | DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH Seeking Asylum: Mental Illness and Post-1945 American Novels Miyatsu’s dissertation project focuses on fictional “madwomen” in asylumbased novels of the second half of the 20th century and examines how these women use the confining space of the asylum to imagine more inclusive and nonhierarchical forms of community that can incorporate difficult and even painful lives. The texts that she examines provide a different vision of mental illness as potentially productive, rather than simply broken or destructive, and capable of fostering new ways of being together.

ASHLEY PRIBYL | DEPARTMENT OF MUSIC Sociocultural and Collaborative Antagonism in the Harold Prince/ Stephen Sondheim Musicals, 1970–79 Harold Prince, who strived to challenge his audience’s political complacency, often clashed with Stephen Sondheim, whose primary consideration was individual characterization and narrative arc. Rather than attempting to find a middle ground between the interior world of the show and the exterior cultural context, Prince and Sondheim independently followed their own paths and intuitions, a mode of creation that Pribyl calls antagonistic collaboration. Focusing on four musicals — Company (1970), Follies (1971), Pacific Overtures (1976) and Sweeney Todd (1979) — she shows how Prince and Sondheim’s antagonistic collaboration yielded politically and culturally complex works.

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FELLOWS

Kling Undergraduate Honors Fellows Every spring, five to seven Washington University sophomores are admitted into the Merle Kling Undergraduate Honors Fellowship, where they conduct a humanities-oriented research project under the supervision of a faculty mentor.

Kling Fellows meet weekly in an interdisciplinary seminar where they present drafts of their work, review one another’s writing, read and think about the role of the humanities in university life, and occasionally get off campus to see humanities research in action around the St. Louis metro area. Senior Kling Fellows publish their research findings as articles in our annual journal, Slideshow.

CLASS OF 2019 SETH BLUM Majors: International and Area Studies, Mathematics Minor: Arabic Mentor: Nancy Reynolds Contested Waters, Contested Futures: The Environmental Imaginary and Depoliticizing Water in the Jordan Valley, 1967–1972 Through analyses of USAID, Department of State, World Bank and Jordanian archives, Blum traces the underlying environmental and economic imaginaries of the existing infrastructure and planned development of the Jordan Valley between 1967 and 1972. Integrating scholarship from environmental history, political ecology and Middle Eastern studies, Blum explains the significance of changing environmental claims made for and about the valley.

HELEN LI Major: International and Area Studies Minor: Psychological and Brain Sciences Mentor: Geoff Childs China’s Reality: Teachers’ Responses to “Left-Behind Children” in a Town in Rural Sichuan Over the past 30 to 40 years, China’s rural-to-urban migration has led to unprecedented numbers of “left-behind children,” minors left in the care of rurally based grandparents or other guardians while one or both parents seek work in cities.

Through an ethnographic case study in a rural Sichuan school, Li analyzes the responses of local teachers to the “crisis” of left-behind children and their viewpoints on the past, present and future care of the left-behind children in their communities.

Jean Allman

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BYRON OTIS Majors: Painting, Art History Mentor: Nathaniel Jones Dutch Women’s Eyes: Reading Genre Painting Through the Reciprocal Gaze

CLASS OF 2020 CHRISTIAN BAKER Major: Religious Studies Minor: Text and Tradition Mentor: Lerone Martin Gods Bring Da Ruckus: The Wu-Tang Clan and the Five Percent Nation

By examining a group of Dutch Golden Age genre paintings in which women gaze out of the picture at the viewer within the contexts of women’s history in the 17th century and modern theories of the gaze, Otis reveals the complexity of the relationships Dutch painters built between images and viewers. The identity of the viewer is called into question when the gaze they present is reciprocated, allowing the gaze within the painting to warp and challenge the viewer’s own identity.

FIONA ECKERT Majors: International and Area Studies Mentors: Margaret Garb and Venus Bivar Incorporated to be a Sewer: A Historical Analysis of Air and Water Pollution in SmallTown Illinois

ABBY ROCHMAN Major: International and Area Studies Minor: Writing Mentor: Seth Graebner “Either the Republic Will Be Universal or It Will Not Be”: The Bicentennial Parade of 1989 and a Symbolic Argument for French Grandeur in a Post-Cold War Europe In 1989, France felt its global status weakening and its founding myth threatened in the face of a reunified Germany and the end of Soviet Russia. Rochman explores the ways in which France’s 1989 bicentennial celebration of the French Revolution exemplified ongoing French efforts to change the way the myth of the French Revolution functions in French national identity, focusing principally on the idea that French culture, political or otherwise, is simultaneously universal and particularly French, and emphasizing France’s claim to universalism as symbolic justification for its involvement (and even leadership) in global politics.

LEXI SLOME Majors: Linguistics and Psychological and Brain Sciences Mentor: Kristin van Engen A Tough Nut to Crack: A Study on the Syntactic Mobility of Idioms Idioms such as “kick the bucket” and “pop the question” were originally considered completely frozen expressions that could only be memorized and repeated by a language’s speakers. However, more recent linguistics scholarship has shown that while idioms are fixed expressions, they allow for some variation. Slome’s research suggests that idioms’ ability to appear in multiple types of sentences, otherwise known as syntactic mobility, is key to understanding the structure of idioms and how speakers use them in different types of sentences. This analysis has implications for future theoretical and experimental research as well as bilingual education and second language acquisition.

TANVI KOHLI Major(s): International and Area Studies Minor: Anthropology and South Asian Language and Civilization Mentor: Shefali Chandra Jagmeet Singh and the Diasporic Subject: Global Indians in North America LOPAKA O’CONNOR Majors: History and Economics Mentors: Elizabeth Borgwardt and Steven Hirsch “An Island Lost in the Ocean”: American Empire and Filipino Exiles in Guam MONICA UNZUETA Major: Latin American Studies Minors: Spanish and Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies Mentor: Bret Gustafson “Basta de Impunidad”: Activist and Institutional Responses to Gender Violence in Bolivia ERICA WILLIAMS Majors: Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies, and Cognitive Neuroscience Mentor: Rhaisa Williams A Serious Matter: Self-Making Within Historically Black Greek-Letter Sororities, 1908–2018 JANE YANG Major: International and Area Studies Minor: Anthropology Mentors: Zhao Ma “Otherness” in Chinese National Cinema

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FACULTY RESEARCH SUPPORT

Internal Grants

FACULTY RESEARCH SUPPORT

SUMMER FACULTY RESEARCH GRANTS Open to all tenured or tenure-track faculty; funded projects are intended to advance the field of study in which it is proposed and make an original and significant contribution to knowledge.

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Joanna Dee Das | Performing Arts Department Dancing for God and Country: Performing the Politics of Conservatism in Branson, Missouri Akiko Tsuchiya | Romance Languages and Literatures Spanish Women of Letters in the Nineteenth-Century Antislavery Movement: Transnational Networks and Exchanges Henry Schvey | Performing Arts Department Tennessee Williams and St. Louis John Klein | Art History and Archaeology Who Needs a National Portrait Gallery?

Lerone Martin | Religion and Politics J. Edgar Hoover’s Stained-Glass Window: The FBI, Religion and National Security in American History Hayrettin Yucesoy | Jewish, Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies Political Prose Revolution: The Formation of Political Language in the 8th Century Middle East ROLAND GRIMM TRAVEL AWARDS Open to all tenured or tenure-track faculty; awards fund research in Asia.

Zhao Ma | East Asian Languages and Cultures “Korean Thugs,” Narcotic Enterprise and the Criminal Underworld in Wartime Beijing, 1930s–40s Hayrettin Yucesoy | Jewish, Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies Political Prose Revolution: The Formation of Political Language in the 8th Century Middle East

FACULTY RESEARCH SUPPORT

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

Nathan Vedal | East Asian Languages and Cultures From Tradition to Community: Scholarly Culture in Early Modern China MAXWELL C. WEINER HUMANITIES RESEARCH GRANTS Funded by a bequest from Maxwell C. Weiner, the grants support tenured, full-time faculty in the humanities who do not currently receive an annual research fund in order to facilitate the pursuit of new research directions.

Tili Boon Cuillé | Romance Languages and Literatures Mediating Relationships: Magical Agents, Commodity Fetishism and Book Illustration Edward McPherson | English The View From Above Rebecca Copeland | East Asian Languages and Cultures Narratives of Leaving: Japanese Women and Stories of Separation, Divorce and Parting Marvin Marcus | East Asian Languages and Cultures Japanese Writers Speak: Personal Reflections on Literature and Life COLLABORATIVE RESEARCH SEED GRANT Open to all tenured and tenure-track faculty in the humanities and humanistic social sciences; encourages the establishment of research partnerships and funds preliminary work that lays the foundation for original, expanded collaborative research projects capable of attracting external funding or the publication of new co-authored research.

No new awards made

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FACULTY SEMINARS Grants to tenured or tenure-track faculty to support seminars on a particular subject or theme. Groups meet at least twice per semester, when participants and guests present and discuss informally their own work as it relates to the theme.

READING AND WRITING GROUPS Grants to tenured or tenure-track faculty and to humanities graduate students to support reading and writing groups on a particular subject or theme.

Wastelands (renewal)

Approaches to Literary Pedagogy Reading Group (renewal)

Eighteenth-Century Interdisciplinary Salon (renewal)

Comics as World Literature (new)

READING GROUPS

Conversations From the Global South (renewal) Digital Approaches (renewal) Disability Studies Reading Group (renewal) Early Americanists in St. Louis Reading Group (EASTL) (new) Early Modern Reading Group (new) While most of the members of the Sports and Society Reading Group are affiliated with Washington University, we have several participants from local universities. One such contributor is Chuck Korr, professor emeritus of history at the University of Missouri–St. Louis, who has enriched the group with his deep knowledge of the field of sports studies. Never one to brag, Korr let slip to a visiting speaker that he had once hosted a scholarly conference on sports and society that featured legendary baseball player Jackie Robinson just a few months before the Hall of Famer’s premature death. Pursuant to that conversation, we urged Korr to present a history of that 1972 event as well as its sequel in 1983. He responded with a treasure trove of documents related to the two conferences — including programs, correspondence and newspaper clippings, both local and national — and provided his own narrative of two very different moments in sports and St. Louis history. The result was a lively exchange about athletes, protest, power and scholarship, and the connections between the late 1960s to early 1970s period of athlete activism and our own more recent period of sporting demonstration. Invigorated by Korr’s example, we pondered what it would take to put on a similar conference today, a goal we hope to work toward in the next few years.

— Noah Cohan, lecturer in American Culture Studies and convener, Sports and Society Reading Group

Finnegans Wake Reading Group (new) History of the Present (renewal) Kierkegaard Reading Group (renewal) Medical Humanities (renewal) Mind and Perception Group (new) Poetry and Poetics Reading Group (new) Projecting Latin American Cinema (new) Queering the Global/Transnational Conversation (renewal) Sports and Society Reading Group (renewal) WRITING GROUPS American Religions (renewal) Religion and Literature (renewal)

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FACULTY RESEARCH SUPPORT

Proposal-Writing Information Session Sean Garcia

The competition for fellowships and other grantfunded activities is fierce. To assist in these efforts, the Center for the Humanities hosted an information session for faculty and postdoctoral students in the humanities and humanistic social sciences interested in pursuing external funding.

In past years, the humanities center has hosted both a Proposal-Writing Information Session and a Proposal-Writing Workshop on the same date. This year, the center split up the programming, kicking off with the information session on April 29. The Scholarly Writing Retreat (see next page) followed soon thereafter, during which time participants could write their fellowship proposals. In fall 2019, the humanities center will again offer its Proposal-Writing Workshop for those submitting proposals to national competitions.

Sean Garcia

The spring information session began with a panel of faculty who have served as grant reviewers for nationally competitive grant-making organizations: Ignacio Infante (Comparative Literature and Romance Languages and Literatures), Mark Valeri (Religion and Politics) and Rebecca Copeland (East Asian Languages and Cultures). Together, they gave advice on “How to Write a Winning Proposal.”

The second half of the program featured recent fellowship winners Lerone Martin (Religion and Politics), Paige McGinley (Performing Arts Department) and Abram Van Engen (English), who reflected on their proposal-writing experiences.

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Scholarly Writing Retreat The Scholar Writing Retreat offers Washington University humanities and humanistic social sciences faculty, postdocs and graduate students the opportunity to jump-start their summer writing in a motivated, supportive and collaborative atmosphere. Common projects included writing book proposals, dissertation/book chapters, articles and fellowship applications.

During the weeks of May 21 and May 28, participants brought their laptops and research materials to the Center for the Humanities and worked intensively on their individual projects in communal spaces, following a schedule of focused writing periods, lunch breaks and coffee breaks.

Sean Garcia

Now in its sixth year, the retreat remains popular: 27 people signed up to join in.

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MINORS

MINORS MINORS MINORS

HERE’S WHAT SOME OF THE MINOR’S GRADUATING SENIORS HAD TO SAY ABOUT THEIR EXPERIENCE:

MINORS MINORS MINORS MINORS MINORS MINORS MINORS MINORS MINORS MINORS MINORS MINORS MINORS MINORS MINORS MINORS MINORS MINORS MINORS MINORS MINORS MINORS

Children’s Studies In the Children’s Studies minor, students learn about children and childhood while drawing on the expertise of faculty from across Washington University. Minors develop a sophisticated interdisciplinary understanding of childhood and the issues surrounding the treatment and status of children throughout history.

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

Accordingly, the minor draws students with majors, among others, in Education, Psychology, English, History and American Culture Studies, or students whose career plans include child-oriented specialties such as family law or pediatric medicine.

In June 2019, Gerald Early, the Merle Kling Professor of Modern Letters and chair of the Department of African and African-American Studies, concluded his 13-year term as director of the Children’s Studies minor.

Longtime advisory committee member Amy Pawl, senior lecturer in the Department of English, became director on July 1, 2019. Pawl serves alongside co-director Desirée White, professor of psychological and brain sciences, to lead the minor.

“I’ve come to the realization that Children’s Studies has allowed me to question my assumptions about children and childhood. It’s given me space to analyze and critique the majority opinion on childhood and has allowed me to see the inconsistencies that arise within society regarding children.”

Esther Okedina “I would say my knowledge of children expanded from a working knowledge of how children behave to a more expansive and theoretical understanding of more aspects of children. ... Overall, I am glad to have pursued a minor in Children’s Studies.”

Alex Sandoval “As I complete my Children’s Studies minor, I am more aware of children’s needs and experiences, and I’m prepared to be an advocate on their behalf in my future career.”

Juliana Berlin

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Medical Humanities

HERE’S WHAT SOME OF THE MINOR’S GRADUATING SENIORS HAD TO SAY ABOUT THEIR EXPERIENCE:

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

“I value my humanities education because it pushed me to assess the field that I hope to enter and to identify ways in which my peers and I can improve it. Additionally, the humanities in general helped me to develop a different way of thinking: I now feel confident assessing open-ended questions and contributing original ideas. The minor perfectly balanced my hard science major and provided me with a well-rounded education. The medical humanities showed me the subjective, emotional and human side to medicine, a side I hope to remember in years to come.”

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

Katherine (Katie) Penvose “There are a lot of different ways to pursue the medical humanities, but something that I realized is that the biggest contribution I can make, with the experience I’ve had in undergrad and with this program, is sharing my thoughts and perspectives with other [medical school] students and with other physicians that I encounter.”

Mehak Kalra “It’s definitely shaped my college experience in that there are a lot of classes that, except for the Medical Humanities minor, I would never have considered and that I really ended up enjoying.

“An A in organic chemistry won’t make you a great doctor, but a degree in medical humanities might!”

Rachel Thornton

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GIVING OPPORTUNITIES GIVING OPPORTUNITIES GIVING OPPORTUNITIES GIVING OPPORTUNITIES GIVING OPPORTUNITIES GIVING OPPORTUNITIES GIVING OPPORTUNITIES GIVING OPPORTUNITIES GIVING OPPORTUNITIES GIVING OPPORTUNITIES GIVING OPPORTUNITIES GIVING OPPORTUNITIES GIVING OPPORTUNITIES GIVING OPPORTUNITIES GIVING OPPORTUNITIES GIVING OPPORTUNITIES

More than ever, the humanistic perspective plays a vital role in working to resolve today’s complex problems. The Center for the Humanities promotes the advancement of the humanistic disciplines by funding new research and facilitating exchanges between scholars, changemakers and the interested public.

Please take part in helping us to expand and deepen the reach of the humanities and the important contributions our center achieves. The Center for the Humanities asks for your support in promoting our mission at Washington University as well as our local community and around the world.

GIFTS TO THE ANNUAL FUND Direct your annual Washington University gift to the Center for the Humanities to support ongoing programs such as the James E. McLeod Memorial Lecture on Higher Education; the Faculty Book Celebration, which honors our faculty’s scholarship and inquiry; publication of the Humanities Broadsheet, a monthly publication that highlights humanitiesrelated events on campus and in the St. Louis area; or our faculty workshops that provide an important forum for faculty development in grant-seeking, academic publishing and public engagement.

Century Club membership begins with an Annual Fund gift of $100 or more. Annual Fund gifts of $1,000 or more earn membership into the Eliot Society, a leadership society that benefits from exclusive events and offerings such as the Black Tie Annual Dinner and discounted rates for the Whittemore House.

1/ The Sound of Segregation’s Tool Shed, Divided City/Chris Bauer 2/ Sir David Adjaye, International Humanities Prize/ WUSTL Photos 3/ James E. McLeod Annual Lecture on Higher Education/ WUSTL Photos 4/ Proposal Writing Information Session/Sean Garcia 5/ Faculty Book Celebration/ WUSTL Photos

GIVING OPPORTUNITIES

ENDOWMENT GIFTS Endowment gifts are invaluable resources that bolster the strength, quality and success of Washington University and the Center for the Humanities.

Endowed fellowships, endowed academic and research programs, and endowed facility funds provide critical permanent support for faculty teaching and research and for myriad student educational experiences. Fellowships, which may be designated to provide permanent funds for undergraduate, graduate and postdoctoral fellows, or faculty fellows, provide key resources that further the critical import of the humanities today by supporting discovery, innovative research and curriculum development With an endowed gift of $50,000, you will provide support for lectures and programming, thus helping us to disseminate the knowledge and research of our talented community. With a gift of $100,000, you will be able to endow a fellowship and thus dramatically enhance a new scholar’s ability to dig deep into today’s most pressing questions.

To make a gift in support of the Center for the Humanities, please contact Director and Professor Jean Allman (314-935-5576 or jallman@wustl.edu) or Senior Director of Development Deborah Stine (314-935-7377 or deborah_stine@wustl.edu).

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

MAKE A GIFT OR PLEDGE BY MAIL To make a gift by mail, please include an explanation of the purpose for your gift and a check made payable to Washington University. Send to: Washington University in St. Louis, Alumni and Development Programs, Attn: Deborah Stine, One Brookings Drive, Campus Box 1202, St. Louis, MO 63130.

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Administrative staff

Executive committee

JEAN ALLMAN Director, Center for the Humanities Professor, Department of African and African-American Studies J.H. Hexter Professor in the Humanities, with appointments in History and Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies On leave spring 2019

WILLIAM ACREE Associate Professor of Spanish

REBECCA WANZO Interim Director, Center for the Humanities, spring 2019 Associate Director, Center for the Humanities Associate Professor, Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies

MONIQUE BEDASSE Assistant Professor of History COLIN BURNETT Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies REBECCA COPELAND Professor of Japanese Language and Literature MATT ERLIN Professor of German and Chair of Germanic Languages and Literatures KRISTINA KLEUTGHEN David W. Mesker Associate Professor of Art History

IGNACIO INFANTE Associate Director, Center for the Humanities Associate Professor, Comparative Literature and Romance Languages and Literatures

MELANIE MICIR Assistant Professor of English

WENDY LOVE ANDERSON Academic Coordinator

ZOE STAMATOPOULOU Associate Professor of Classics

KATHY DANIEL Grant and Contract Coordinator

RAFIA ZAFAR Professor of English

KATHLEEN G. FIELDS Publications and Communications Editor

CONTACT DETAILS

BARBARA LIEBMANN Administrative Coordinator TILA NEGUSE Coordinator, Divided City Initiative

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 humanities.wustl.edu Umrath Hall, Room 217 Facebook & Twitter: @WashUHumanities

CENTER FOR THE HUMANITIES

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

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