A YEAR IN REVIEW: 2021–22
a n n ua l r e p o rt
10th Anniversary, James E. McLeod Memorial Lecture on Higher Education
The year 2021 marked the 10th anniversary of the James E. McLeod Memorial Lecture on Higher Education. Dean McLeod’s legacy lives on through the John B. Ervin Scholars Program, the James E. McLeod Honors and Awards, and the McLeod scholarship program, touching the lives of nearly everyone who comes to this campus. This year’s lecture, given by Gerald Early, twotime director-chair of the Department of African and African-American Studies, considered McLeod’s role in the rise of the department within the university. Photo courtesy Washington University Photographic Services Collection, Washington University Libraries, Department of Special Collections.
2021–22 ANNUAL REPORT TABLE OF CONTENTS
ON THE COVER
02/LETTER FROM THE DIRECTOR 04/HUMAN TIES 04/A scholar in the game Making the jump from scholar to activist, Noah Cohan, assistant director of the American Culture Studies program, writes about his project and podcast, “Whereas Hoops.” Together with collaborator John Early (Sam Fox School), Cohan tackles a central question — Why are there no basketball hoops in Forest Park? — and enacts a game plan for correcting that omission. Along the way, they explore what park-goers themselves want, the Delmar Divide and St. Louis’ rich basketball history. 06/Dining with ‘nobles, gluttons, opportunists, heirs to thrones, the smart, and the good-for-nothing’ Historian Hayrettin Yücesoy serves up a slice of the impressively epicurean food culture of the medieval Middle East.
08/What was ‘race’ in ancient Rome? Senior lecturer of classics Kathryn Wilson explores the implications of our tendency to ascribe modern racial identities to people who lived in the ancient past. 10/What now? The afterlives of Zika and COVID-19 In the seven years since the Zika virus arrived in Brazil, medical anthropologist Eliza Williamson has studied how the disabling effect of caring for the young afflicted has compounded the already oppressing effects of racism, misogyny and imperialism. Using this critical disability lens, Williamson considers what the aftermath of COVID-19 will produce. 12/DIVIDED CITY INITIATIVE 16/REDEFINING DOCTORAL EDUCATION IN THE HUMANITIES (RDE)
18/EVENTS + OUTREACH
27/FELLOWS
40/FACULTY RESEARCH SUPPORT
18/JAMES E. McLEOD MEMORIAL LECTURE ON HIGHER EDUCATION
28/Muslim women on the minbar Tazeen Ali, assistant professor, Danforth Center on Religion and Politics
44/MINORS
Remembering James McLeod and the rise of Black studies at Washington University In an excerpt from the 10th annual James E. McLeod Memorial Lecture, Gerald Early, the Merle Kling Professor of Modern Letters and two-time director-chair of the Department of African and African-American Studies, remembers his early encounters with McLeod and his stabilizing presence in Black studies at Washington University. 20/FACULTY BOOK CELEBRATION The magic in his hands: Charles Johnson’s artistic versatility University Libraries curator Joel Minor highlights the multifaceted work of Charles Johnson, the S. Wilson and Grace M. Pollock Professor Emeritus at the University of Washington. Johnson headlined the 2022 Faculty Book Celebration, joining a panel discussion, “Reflections on Craft: Connecting Creative and Scholarly Practice,” and delivering the keynote lecture, “Let Your Talent Be Your Guide.”
29/Real estate and the hidden history of the U.S. AIDS epidemic René Esparza, assistant professor, Department of Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies 30/How to constitute a nation Peter Kastor, the Samuel K. Eddy Professor of History and American Culture Studies 31/People get ready Paige McGinley, associate professor, Performing Arts Department 32/Our senses as sources of value Casey O’Callaghan, professor, Department of Philosophy 33/A muse of early America Abram Van Engen, professor, Department of English
46/GIVING OPPORTUNITIES
2
LETTER FROM THE DIRECTOR As I sit down to compose this “letter from the director” — my eighth and final one — I can’t help but pull from my shelves the very first Year in Review (2014–15). I suppose I want to gain a clearer perspective on the passage of time, especially given the distorting impact of two-plus years of global pandemic. That first letter reflects on a first year that was shaped more than anything by the murder of Michael Brown and the Ferguson Uprising that followed. During my initial weeks in the director’s chair, I had tried to strategize around what seemed to be the never-ending “crisis in the humanities.” By August, my main and only question had become: What can this humanities center contribute to struggles for racial justice here, in this town? That question has guided us through each year, from planning events such as “Arts in Struggle: An Afternoon of Creativity, Community and Dialogue on the Struggle for Racial Justice in St. Louis” (2015); to our choice of signature event lecturers, like Christopher Newfield and his 2016 McLeod Lecture, “Why Don’t Universities Promote Racial Equality?”; to our annual sponsorship of the St. Louis International Film Festival’s “Mean Streets” series; to our grants program for community-led projects addressing urban segregation and social justice.
I have been extraordinarily lucky during my time at the center to work with some of the most highly skilled and dedicated staff on this campus, without whom there would be no year to review! While their careful and painstaking labor is not always visible, these pages would have been blank were it not for Kathy Daniel, Alicia Dean, Kathleen Fields, Barb Liebmann, Wendy Love Anderson, Tila Neguse, Laura Perry, Kathy Pierson and Trisha Sutton. A special thanks to Kathleen Fields, who through this Year in Review, the monthly Humanities Broadsheet, “Human Ties” blog, “Life/Lines” community poetry project, center newsletters and so much more has made sure that the work of the center, and of the humanities broadly, is chronicled and amplified.
3
Collaborating with outstanding humanities and arts faculty, including on several Mellon-funded initiatives, has been one of the greatest gifts of being at the center. I have been daily inspired by the collective efforts, especially of those who have devoted so much time and energy to reimagining doctoral training across the breadth and depth of our humanities fields and disciplines. That important work will continue — in the studiolab at the Lewis Center Collaborative, in new graduate courses and in the ongoing exploration of postdisciplinary futures. I am especially proud of the center’s achievements with partners in the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts and throughout the St. Louis region via the twice Mellon-funded Divided City initiative, which began a few weeks before Michael Brown’s murder. Those involved in the Divided City are far too many to list, but I do want to express my deep gratitude to my co-primary investigator, Bruce Lindsey, and our project coordinator, Tila Neguse, for eight extraordinary years of collaboration between the humanities, architecture and urban design focused on the unrelenting challenges of racism and urban segregation across the globe and in our hometown.
A few final thanks — to Gerald Early, the visionary founding director of the center; to Erin McGlothlin, its first director of research and grants, who built such a solid foundation for humanities work at Washington University; and to the two associate directors, Rebecca Wanzo and Ignacio Infante, who have been such brilliant partners on this journey with me. So, as they say, “That’s a wrap!” Over to you, Stephanie Kirk! Welcome to one of the best gigs in town! Jean Allman Director, Center for the Humanities J.H. Hexter Professor in the Humanities Department of African and African-American Studies Stephanie Kirk, professor of Spanish, comparative literature, and women, gender and sexuality studies, has been named the next director of the Center for the Humanities, beginning in July 2022.
4
human ties
A SCHOLAR IN THE GAME Noah Cohan is assistant director of the American Culture Studies program.
What does it mean to be a scholar and an activist? This is a question academics in all fields face in an era of increasingly urgent crises surrounding climate change, social justice and, of course, the COVID-19 global pandemic. In my field, sports studies, there has been no shortage of relevant headlines surrounding topics like athletic labor, contagion mitigation in locker rooms and in the stands, and diversity in management. But in thinking about the role I could play in making a difference, I settled on something closer to home: Forest Park. Specifically, the lack of basketball courts in the park. Despite sporting facilities designed for use in pursuits as various as archery, baseball, softball, cricket, golf, handball, racquetball, ice skating, rugby, football, soccer, tennis, pickleball, paddle boating, canoeing and kayaking, there is nary a basketball hoop to be found in the park’s 1,371 acres. Nor, as I have come to find out, have they ever been present. Though people of all races and ethnicities play basketball, the sport’s association with outstanding Black athletes at the collegiate and NBA levels has led to the game becoming a cultural marker of Blackness. Hence the notion: Build hoops, and Black people will come. Forest Park is open to all St. Louisans, and Black people do use the park. But ask Black park users why there are no basketball facilities in the park, as I have, and the reason is crystal clear to them: The powers that be do not want large groups of Black people, and young Black men in particular, hanging out in the park. As one of the last aspects of public life that is shared across the increasingly fractious American political spectrum, sports make visible many of the social inequities and forms of discrimination (along the lines of race, class, gender and sexuality) that many privileged people would prefer to ignore or discount. Insofar as basketball would function similarly in Forest Park, the park’s power brokers have clearly preferred to render the game invisible.
A finger roll at the Grand Basin, made possible by Whereas Hoops’ mobile hoop exhibition. Image courtesy Whereas Hoops.
I’ve long wondered what I could do to address this glaring absence and its racist implications — especially in the wake of the murder of Michael Brown and all that took place in Ferguson, just 10 miles north of Forest Park. Fortunately, I found a collaborator, John Early, a senior lecturer in the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts, who is not only similarly inclined, but also is an artist with a vision for creatively communicating the problem to an audience beyond academia, including the powers that be. Together, we created “Whereas Hoops,” a multimedia project that tells the story
center for the humanities
5
of basketball in Forest Park and St. Louis at large, and attempts to make visible all the power lines (race, class, gender) that connect them. The name “Whereas Hoops” is inspired by the language of St. Louis Board of Aldermen bills, two of which have been introduced in the last five years proposing to install basketball facilities in Forest Park. Both died mysteriously in committee. The scope of our research also extends beyond Forest Park to include the larger frame of St. Louis, a city that hasn’t hosted an NBA team in 55 years. Despite that absence, the city has a rich history of hoops excellence at the professional and collegiate levels, and a thriving prep scene that produced 2020 Olympic gold medalists Jayson Tatum and Napheesa Collier.
Combining expertise in sports studies and visual communication, organizers Noah Cohan and John Early, both scholars at Washington University, ask not only “Who is welcome at Forest Park?” but “How do we fix this omission?” Image courtesy Whereas Hoops.
We initially shared our research primarily on social media and have since expanded our efforts to include outreach to local parks officials and elected representatives. We’ve also launched a podcast, on which we talk to community members, scholars, artists, historians and even St. Louis hoop legends about their relationship to St. Louis, basketball and the park. In addition to our efforts online, John and I also make regular forays into the park to connect with St. Louisans and ask them: Why aren’t there basketball facilities here when there are so many other sporting amenities? What does that say about who is and isn’t welcome in the park? We have also constructed our own mobile hoop, which we regularly bring to the park to show people that hoops would be a natural fit in St. Louis’ “Crown Jewel.” As far as anyone can tell, our first mobile hoop exhibition on June 5, 2021, marked the first time anyone played basketball in Forest Park in its 145-year history. Our ultimate goal is to make an impact on the built environment of Forest Park: to garner enough support to make basketball hoops a welcoming presence, rather than a glaring absence, in its landscape. To do that, we’ll need to gather the support of city and park officials, as well as plenty of ordinary St. Louisans. It’s time to affirm that we will all benefit when Forest Park is a more welcoming and equitable place for all. Then the park will be someplace to brag about, and play hoops in.
6
human ties
DINING WITH ‘NOBLES, GLUTTONS, OPPORTUNISTS, HEIRS TO THRONES, THE SMART, AND THE GOOD-FORNOTHING’ Hayrettin Yücesoy is associate professor of Middle Eastern history in the Department of Jewish, Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies, with affiliations in the Program in Global Studies and the Department of History.
In the world of writing before print, the known global corpus of dedicated literature on food and cooking remains slim. However, as a specialist in “premodern Middle East,” I am delighted to share that the historical archive of such writing in the dominant languages of the Middle East (Arabic, Persian, Turkish) is embarrassingly rich in both volume and texture. As the scholar and gourmet cook Charles Perry has put it, “There are more cookbooks in Arabic from before 1400 than in the rest of the world’s languages put together.” Let’s scratch the surface by focusing on Ibn Sayyar al-Warraq’s 10th-century Cookbook, written for an unknown patron in Baghdad. Divided into 132 uneven chapters, it includes, besides more than 600 recipes, a substantial discussion of diet, health and decorum. The compendium highlights established as well as avant-garde dishes “cooked for kings, caliphs, lords and dignitaries,” reflecting the cosmopolitan taste-palette of its author’s world. To understand the class-specific nature of taste, one always needs to keep the socioeconomic dynamics in mind. Benefiting from the commercial, agricultural, intellectual and cultural boom from the Oxus to North Africa, Ibn Sayyar’s société did enjoy a “global cuisine,” featuring a wide spectrum of dishes from high and low culinary traditions of the known inhabited world. At the other end of the spectrum, one observes a large swath of people — those who carried the burden of production but rarely cultivated the benefit — living under the conditions of urban poverty: peasants, daily laborers, artisans, small merchants and anyone living in rural areas and not on trade routes. Not only is the author unresponsive to the socioeconomic disparity that enabled this “affluent society,” but he also sees it as the natural order. Consequently, the book, beyond its role as guide to the actual practice of cooking and dining, exposes the class-specific nature of taste. When discussing handwashing, for instance, Ibn Sayyar emphasizes the difference in manners (money clearly would not make the cut) between the commoner and the elite, and explains why the elite’s way is more appropriate, hygienic and courteous.
Folio from a Falnama (The Book of Omens) of Ja’far al-Sadiq, circa 1550. Public domain.
Ibn Sayyar seeks to discipline his reader following a particular moral and aesthetic worldview. The ethics and aesthetics of propriety regulated the experience of the meal as part of disciplining the body in both senses of the word: self-cultivation and the regulation of society according to a particular taste preference. The regulated meal experience (preparation, presentation and consumption of a meal; dinner companions; table manners; conversation around the dinner table location; time) provided a path to self-formation and constituted a “system of communication” that marked the difference between Ibn Sayyar’s worldly elite and the larger society.
center for the humanities
7
For better or worse, Ibn Sayyar is unconcerned with the most filling or most economical food, and instead centers what is healthy, leisurely and pleasurable. He directs his reader’s attention to manner and style irrespective of function. The bare necessity of satisfying hunger is, thus, transformed into an art that requires the knowledge of human being in flesh and spirit, the properties of the ingredients that go into the meal, and the effects of eating on the body. Acknowledging Galen’s Book of Familiar Foods as his source and following the Greco-Mesopotamian dietetic and medical tradition of humors, the author discusses food as a way to maintain the human body in good balance. He explains in some detail and step by step the elemental and humoral properties of each “taste” (a whopping list of eight tastes instead of the usual meager four or five) and how to balance them for a healthy diet. Interestingly, Ibn Sayyar is not interested in any “orthodox” notion or practice of piety. His epicureanism (the emphasis on pleasure, leisure, enjoyment of life and company) and neglect of the religious normativity of his time contrast sharply with the pious ways of life that call for modesty, restraint and self-denial. The reader is reminded of seeking pleasure for the sake of pleasure in all sorts of activities organized around food. The book includes tantalizing references to male and female slavery, hetero- and homoeroticism, and groomed boys and concubines who serve as courtesans and engage male patrons in exchanges of literary sparring, culinary pleasures, flirtations and sexual favors as the following patently
Pages from Ibn Sayyar al-Warraq’s 10th-century Cookbook. Public domain image via National Library of Finland.
humorous lines about fava beans, full of allusions to such sensual joy, show: Fava beans, like unthreaded necklace or gems in virgins’ hands Sweeter than slumber after a sleepless night, or a promise of a rendezvous fulfilled. I came with a group of promising youths: Nobles, gluttons, opportunists, heirs to thrones, the smart, and the good-for-nothing. An exquisite gazelle summoned us Bringing us red wine, as rosy as his cheeks, generously offered, of which our fill we had Induced by the delightful singing, splendidly delivered. Read this way, cookbooks more than reveal and reproduce the Abbasid social fabric. They also carry a “civilizing mission.” In their anthologizing nature, they standardize and canonize knowledge and food practices from a particular sociocultural and literary sensibility and thus fulfill the dual role of codifying the culinary tradition and regulating practices.
8
human ties
WHAT WAS ‘RACE’ IN ANCIENT ROME? Kathryn Wilson is senior lecturer in the Department of Classics. My Teaching Gallery exhibition at the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, Colonizing the Past: Constructing Race in Ancient Greece and Rome, examined the development of a selective, racialized interpretation of antiquity, one in which the ancient Greeks and Romans were White and all other peoples of the ancient Mediterranean were not. This is a common idea that has had lasting impact in our world, but it is anachronistic to think of the ancient Greeks and Romans as White. Contemporary racial categorizations, especially “Whiteness” and “Blackness,” are fundamentally products of the modern era. The question of whether race existed in some form in the premodern past is extremely murky. The Greeks and Romans would never have thought of themselves as part of an identity group with others solely because they shared a skin color, nor should we assume that all Greeks and Romans even had the same skin tone. But does denying the existence of race in antiquity sanitize our view of ancient people, who could be just as xenophobic and oppressive — does it have to be this concept of race to be “race”? Or does trying to apply the term too broadly water down its impact? The type of evidence we would want in order to understand the structural impacts of race in the ancient world is largely gone. We cannot truly know, for example, what it meant to live in Athens as a person marked as “non-Greek,” or how that person would have defined their own identity. All we have are elite male Greeks and Romans writing about other peoples. I chose to use a teaching gallery to explore these issues because art often reveals the implicit assumptions of a culture that are not obvious in the literary evidence. In the gallery, I included a sample of some of the ancient materials from the Kemper collection to show the range of colors used to depict skin. It can be hard for modern audiences to unthink our own tendency to use skin color as the ultimate signifier of racial identity. For most of these objects, the color of the skin doesn’t mean anything about the person’s race.
On one ancient artifact, skin color is a marker of identity: a drinking cup with the face of an African woman on it, using a deep black glaze. This is a challenging object to study because her facial features resemble the racist caricatures of blackface. But whereas blackface images were intended as dehumanizing mockery, the Greeks and Romans did not have the same aesthetic or cultural biases. This woman is exoticized, but we should not assume the maker thought she was ugly or laughable. It is still a stereotypical representation of a subaltern person, but, as Shelly Haley has written, we should not assume that the same anti-Black beauty norms existed in antiquity that are prevalent in contemporary culture. The remainder of the exhibit, a collection of pieces from the Renaissance to the 20th century, examined how artists have constructed an image of Greco-Roman antiquity that aligns with modern racial formations. These artists were rarely shaping a narrative intentionally, but their works have had a powerful influence on what we imagine the ancient Greeks and Romans looked like, including race. Part of the reason people assume the Greeks and Romans were White is the long history of European artists depicting figures from classical mythology and ancient history as Europeans. We have internalized that image of Greco-Roman antiquity.
center for the humanities
I am particularly interested in the way that temporal boundaries to race have been constructed, such that ancient cultures can be appropriated into Whiteness while the modern inhabitants of the same places are excluded. In the exhibit, mythological Trojans are depicted as White, but modern girls in Smyrna are not. These contrasts establish temporal boundaries to Whiteness and they demonstrate its irrationality, but they are not arbitrary. They determine who gets to claim the past as theirs. One thing I appreciate about the Teaching Gallery is that it demonstrates the range of roles museums can play. My exhibition used the museum as a place of scrutiny and examination, where the narratives of the past can be questioned and emended. Classics is hardly blameless in creating the link between Whiteness and the ancient Greeks and Romans, and we have a responsibility to dismantle that link, as well as to better understand how it shapes our field today.
9
TOP: Anne-Louis Girodet de RouçyTrioson (French, 1767–1824), The Meeting of Aeneas with Anchises in the Elysian Fields, 1820. Pierre noire and ink wash heightened with white on vellum, 11 x 14 13/16”. Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, Washington University in St. Louis. University purchase, Plant Replacement Fund, 1962. BOTTOM: Narcisse Virgile Diaz de la Peña (French, 1807–1876), The Smyrna Girls, 1875. Oil on mahogany panel, 12 1/2 x 15 7/8”. Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, Washington University in St. Louis. Bequest of Charles Parsons, 1905.
10
human ties
WHAT NOW? THE AFTERLIVES OF ZIKA AND COVID-19 K. Eliza Williamson is a medical anthropologist and a lecturer in the Program in Latin American Studies and the Department of Romance Languages & Literatures.
In a WhatsApp exchange late last year with L., one of my research participants in Brazil, she told me about the hardship she was experiencing. Not only was Brazil’s rising COVID-19 death toll devastating especially structurally vulnerable families like hers — as of fall 2021, the virus has killed over 672,000 Brazilians — but she was feeling “exhausted” by her daily care duties and “paralyzed” by “everything we go through” as mothers of disabled children in contemporary Brazil. L. is the mother of a young son diagnosed with a severe form of congenital Zika syndrome (CZS), a conjunction of neurological malformations that impact sensory, motor and cognitive development. What brought Zika to international headlines was not the virus itself, but instead the precipitous rise in cases of microcephaly (small head size due to incomplete brain development) and other neurological malformations caused by the virus’ ability to break through the placental barrier and infect developing fetuses. Most
of the 3,500-plus Brazilian children born with CZS have multiple disabilities and will need specialized care for the rest of their lives. The state of Bahia, where I have been researching on issues of health equity for the past 15 years, has the highest number of confirmed cases of CZS in the nation. Since 2016 I have followed a group of families who are living with the embodied consequences of the Zika virus. When I tell people that I’m researching disability in the context of Zika, people tend to assume I’m referring to the kids’ disabilities. But most of my work thus far has been with the children’s mothers. Bahian mothers in my research have had to contend with limited access to basic necessities and health services as well as exacerbated social isolation and the deaths of loved ones. While few of them identify as “people with disabilities,” our ongoing conversations have called my attention to how they themselves are disabled by intensive caregiving under conditions of constraint. L.’s references to exhaustion and paralysis were only partially metaphorical. Like most of those directly impacted by Zika, she relied primarily on the paltry government assistance paid monthly to impoverished disabled people or their caregivers. It was barely enough to cover basic necessities, let alone her son’s extensive care needs. Her husband, who was working only sporadically, had not bothered to learn how to properly feed their son, so that even the precious little time L. had to rest or socialize was interrupted by urgent calls telling her to come home and resume her caregiving duties. Both Zika and COVID-19 bare stark racial, gender and class inequalities around the world. In Brazil, families raising kids with CZS are primarily Black or Brown, poor and living in neglected areas of the city. Mothers are usually the primary or sole caregivers for their disabled children. While the federal government initially failed to collect racial data in relation to COVID hospitalizations and
center for the humanities
11
deaths, scholars and activists note that the virus — as well as the government’s grave mishandling of the outbreak — has disproportionately impacted Black and Indigenous communities. Both pandemics also highlight the necessity of engaging with critical disability studies to understand the unequal, embodied impacts of infectious disease outbreaks. This context exposes how ableism intersects with racism, misogyny, imperialism and other forms of oppression and asks how disability is unequally distributed globally, and how it is produced through various forms of structural violence. Perhaps the most obvious connection between COVID-19 and disability is the phenomenon of “long COVID”: those lingering effects of COVID infection that include fatigue, headache, difficulty breathing and concentration or memory issues. COVID can be directly disabling. And certainly, disabled and chronically ill people are disproportionately represented among those most at risk of dying from COVID infection. But there is also the mental and physiological strain caused by watching loved ones die, being socially isolated during quarantine, being overwhelmed by family care responsibilities, fearing infection, losing a job or experiencing food and/or housing insecurity. All of these can lead to diminished embodied capacities, and all are compounded by ongoing structural violence.
Mothers in Bahia, Brazil, play with their small children, born with congenital Zika syndrome, on a foam floor mat. Photo by the author, March 2018.
What does it do to the bodyminds of mothers to care intensively for their children in a social and political context that does not support them? How has the COVID-19 pandemic — and the measures implemented to contain it — shaped this care, and what impact will its aftermath have on the families? It may be years, and probably generations, before we comprehend the full impact of Zika or COVID-19. But by closely attuning to the stories of those living with the consequences of these outbreaks, their structural causes and their collateral effects, we can begin to grasp what it means to live with the complex, embodied effects of pandemic disaster.
12
the divided city
THE DIVIDED CITY: AN URBAN HUMANITIES INITIATIVE The Divided City, launched in fall 2014, is an urban humanities initiative in partnership with the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and Washington University’s Center for the Humanities and Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts. This multipronged research, education and community-engagement project combines the disciplinary strengths of scholars and professionals in the humanities, architecture and urban design. Primary investigators: Jean Allman, the J.H. Hexter Professor in the Humanities and Director, Center for the Humanities; and Bruce Lindsey, the E. Desmond Lee Professor for Community Collaboration, Sam Fox School, both at Washington University. More at thedividedcity.com.
City Seminar The City Seminar was founded in 2007 as a forum through which scholars across disciplines and from colleges and universities throughout the St. Louis area share ideas, research methods, theories and topics on urban issues in the United States and abroad. Cosponsored by the Divided City since 2014, this seminar has been especially effective in bringing architecture, urban design and humanities scholars into regular dialogue. November 8, 2021 Geometry Problems: Future Military Interventions in the Undivided African City Danny Hoffman, the Bartley Dobb Professor for the Study and Prevention of Violence, Jackson School of International Studies, University of Washington What is an African city to a soldier? The answer to this deceptively simple question will profoundly impact the lives of millions of people in the coming decades. For much of the global military establishment, Africa’s urban spaces are becoming a problem at precisely the moment that security discourse is shifting from counterinsurgency to climate change and conventional peerto-peer warfare. What might recent events signal about the future direction of both foreign and domestic military engagements in African cities — and the consequences for those who live there? Extreme forms of segregation were the heart of colonial and postcolonial security measures in African cities. Is a different spatial order emerging for the continent’s urban battlespaces? April 12, 2022 The House and the City Daniel Blum, architect and educator More than two-thirds of the European population lives in cities. This makes the city a conditio sine qua non for European architecture. We never face a tabula rasa condition, neither physically
nor intellectually. The resilience of the European city is deeply rooted in its ability to transform, to adapt, to recover. This constant evolutionary process over centuries is transcending built fabric to what we call identity — the individual character of each city — which is often praised but cannot be produced as a whole. In this sense, each house can be regarded as a tone in the symphony (or cacophony) of a city. Every new house, every refurbishment, is a change in the city fabric that influences its overall tune. Each house is an opportunity to add to, adjust or even heal the fabric of the city in its constant evolution driven by social, economic and cultural forces. April 25, 2022 ‘And Here They Are Trampling on the People’: Housing, Urbanization and Revolution in Cuba William Kelly, ACLS Emerging Voices Fellow, Washington University How did the 1959 Cuban Revolution impact the urban housing crisis in Cuba? The notion that housing is a human right was a central pillar of revolutionary ideology. In service to this idea, the new government ostensibly banned evictions in 1959 and nationalized all urban rental property in 1960 with the intent to provide every Cuban with a decent home. But what was the lasting impact of these policies? As Cuban cities fell into neglect and disrepair in the decades that followed, the island’s most vulnerable citizens, including large numbers of Afrocubans, were forced to build illegal communities and face down government demolition brigades as they made claims to the city. Examining their struggles helps us understand how the revolutionary mission to create universal housing access functioned at the ground level.
center for the humanities
Faculty Collaborative Grants These grants support collaborative research, field institutes and community engagement on urban segregation broadly conceived. For Children by Children: Crossing the Divide Toward a Common Ground, led by Petra Kempf (assistant professor, Sam Fox School) and Meredith Lehman (head of museum education, Kemper Art Museum), supports the development of arts-based curriculum through which children will have access to aesthetic tools to meaningfully voice their opinion and to advocate for themselves. The place-based, creative learning platform will focus on locally existent conditions in a neighborhood, including its climate, both ecological and socioeconomic, and the natural and built environment that gives it shape. Community Grants These grants support community-focused organizations and individuals in the St. Louis metro area engaged in community work or creative practice related to urban segregation, providing direct support for projects in the humanities, arts and design that engage the lived realities of the divided city. Mobile Stories: A Creative Inquiry is a mobile storytelling project focused on migration and resilience. In this project, grantee Dail Chambers will interview community members to collect stories of resilience. The collection of stories will then be edited and included in a sound installation in North St. Louis. Our Time: Films and Workshops by Formerly Incarcerated Folk for Formerly Incarcerated Folk, led by Harvey Galler (STL Reentry Collective), will host a series of public screenings and workshops that offer strategies to better support systemimpacted people in the St. Louis community, centering the diverse narratives and experiences of formerly incarcerated people to ground local conversations about mass
incarceration and reentry around those who have experienced it. Superfun is an “alt-institution” creative practice project — developed by artists Aaron Owens, Jenny Price and Allana Ross — that mimics the federal Superfund website and program for the St. Louis region. It connects the dots from extreme toxicity in the United States to Americans’ everyday fun — cars! toys! rec centers! — and thereby makes visible what Superfund tends to obscure: the ubiquity and relentless production of industrial toxins, the endemic failures of cleanup and remediation, and how Superfund actually actively feeds an economy that prioritizes growth and profits while being hard-wired to ignore social and environmental costs. MARSH Food Patch Partnership (a food forest at the intersection of the Patch and Carondelet neighborhoods in south St. Louis) connects the issues of climate ecology and urban agriculture, neighborhood disinvestment, cultural exchange, historical land ownership inequities, poverty and food insecurity by building a structural framework for community involvement in land management and food production. Hosted by Alisha Sonnier and Jami Cox, “BlackTea” is an audiovisual podcast series that pairs informational programming with hot social topics. In communities where there are educational and income disparities, there are also gaps in access to information. Tailoring their series to a young audience, the hosts of “BlackTea” bring much-needed attention to local and national issues perpetuating economic and racial disparities, as they work to bridge the information access gap in underserved communities in our city.
13
ACTION: Percy Green and the Veiled Prophets by Colin McLaughlin is a new original play about Percy Green, his group of activists (Action Committee To Improve Opportunities for Negroes) and their series of protests against the Veiled Prophet Organization. While analyzing the political and economic landscape of St. Louis, and how racism and entrenched economic power have exacerbated and maintained disparity and inequity, the story culminates in the Veiled Prophet Ball of 1972, when the group infiltrated the segregated event and “unveiled” the Veiled Prophet. 2022 Graduate Summer Research Fellows These fellowships support two months of full-time research by graduate students (MUD, MArch, MLA, DrSU or PhD) at Washington University, University of Missouri–St. Louis and Saint Louis University. The fellowships forge sustainable interdisciplinary connections among graduate students in the humanities, architecture and urban design. From Washington University Sewasew Assefa, Anthropology; Jessica Baran, Art History and Archaeology; Kaché Claytor, Romance Languages and Literatures (Spanish); Abraham Diaz, Architecture; Yamile Ferreira, Romance Languages and Literatures (Spanish); Bob Peniel Inapanuri, Architecture and Urban Design; Clark Randall, Sociology; Maurice Tetne, Romance Languages and Literatures (French); Ran Wei, East Asian Studies From Saint Louis University Emily Colmo, American Studies
14
the divided city
SOUNDS OF STREET PROTEST By Gicela Medina and Rodrigo Viqueira Gicela Medina is a second-year student in the Hispanic studies PhD program and cohost of “Street Politics Across the Americas” along with Rodrigo Viqueira, who is a PhD candidate in Hispanic studies and who is also pursuing a graduate certificate in Latin American studies. “Street Politics Across the Americas” was supported by The Divided City Initiative in 2021.
The year 2020, without a doubt, inscribed itself in history and changed many of our lives in what felt like one day to the other. Suddenly, our work spaces, our college campuses, our children’s schools, our favorite bars and restaurants were all closed down “until further notice.” All at once, we were now avoiding the streets which we had previously occupied every day, without much thought, as we commuted to work or school or when we walked down to the nearest coffee shop for our daily dose of caffeine. 2020 became a year that changed how we perceive streets and how we relate to each other in public spaces. When the pandemic started, I, Rodrigo, was juggling Zoom classes and the remains of my social life in St. Louis, but most of my mental energies were absorbed by the tracking of the pandemic in Uruguay (my home country). Then in May 2020 the murder of George Floyd occurred, and the long history of marginalization and criminalization in the streets became unavoidable. I, Gicela, was across the country in sunny Los Angeles, California, just finishing my last semester as an undergraduate, also on Zoom. I still remember the loud security alerts I received on my phone from the County of Los Angeles warning its residents of the curfew in place, deterring us even more from being out in the streets. In my house the news about what was going on in the streets, for weeks, seemed to be playing all day. A few months later, as I relocated to St. Louis in July and prepared to begin graduate school at WashU, the Black Lives Matter mobilizations had dwindled but nevertheless were still very much present. Now in retrospect, as we reflect on this time period, it is curious to think about how this moment, in which we were meant to stay home
center for the humanities
as much as possible and “avoid” the streets, was also the same time in which streets became flooded in unprecedented ways with immense amounts of people all over the country, united under the same claim: “Black Lives Matter.” As scholars working in Hispanic studies, we found it hard not to hear, in the chants, songs and protests that flooded the streets, the echoes of a long history of hemispheric mass mobilization. We began to question how different people, in different regions across the Americas protest and what encourages them — us — to do so. With the support of Professor William Acree, we embarked on a research project that examined the hemispheric history of political uses of the street, one that could include the United States as well as Latin America. As PhD students in the humanities we were not accustomed to working collaboratively, nor had we ever considered the possibility of creating media content. However, the issue of public space bridged our personal research interests and resonated with what we were experiencing around us, and the idea of developing a podcast was born.
We created the podcast “Street Politics Across the Americas” (SPAA) because we wanted to foster a conversation that went beyond the academic realm to better understand why the occupation of the streets and the public space became so important in the past years. We reached out to activists and academics in Argentina, Brazil, Colombia — and locally: Los Angeles and St. Louis. With them, we are able to have meaningful conversations about what protesting looks like when it’s done by different people in different regions of the world and to reflect on how marginalized groups have used, and are using, the public space. We started SPAA with a series of questions in mind — we now leave you with those same questions: What happens when invisibilized bodies, faces and voices occupy the public space? How do the dynamics of race, class, gender and the urban space interact in these cases? What is the future of street politics in the age of social media? Join us as we continue this conversation on SPAA. “Street Politics Across the Americas” is available at anchor.fm/spaapod.
15
LEFT TO RIGHT: Workers gathered at the Plaza de Mayo, Buenos Aires, October 17, 1945; Gloria Vallin, organizer for the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights, speaks at a demonstration in support of a bill that would give undocumented farm workers a path to citizenship (2021); Slam Das Minas SP, a slam collective for and by women, performs their poem “Manifesto Slam Das Minas” in a plaza of São Paulo, Brazil (2017).
16
rde
With a $1.5 million grant from Mellon Foundation and spearheaded by the Center for the Humanities, Washington University’s Redefining Doctoral Education in the Humanities (RDE, or “Ready”) initiative focuses on providing humanities faculty with opportunities to acquire the skills, capacities and experiences necessary for training the next generation of humanities PhDs for success both within academia and in the world beyond. This faculty-first approach consists of four components: faculty retreats, cross-training grants, curricular innovation grants and studiolab living-learning communities.
REDEFINING DOCTORAL EDUCATION IN THE HUMANITIES (RDE)
Funding for new projects was paused in the 2021–22 academic year due to the COVID-19 pandemic, but already-funded projects carried on (see the Spotlight section for one such project). Competitions for new funding will resume in 2022–23. A new home for humanists “What exactly are we looking for?” The question, posed by Abdallah Belhadj, a senior in biology, is at once simple and loaded. A beat passes. “I’ll take a run at it,” says Joe Loewenstein, professor of English. “What’s there? What’s available to be thought about, with these materials? What analyses might bear fruit?” It’s a classically Socratic exchange, and one that gets to the heart of “Freedom | Information | Acts,” the first in a new series of yearlong interdisciplinary investigations known as “studiolabs.” In this initial studiolab, students are exploring how interviews filmed for Eyes on the Prize — the iconic civil rights chronicle produced by Blackside, the great documentary film company founded by Henry E. Hampton, AB ’61 (English) — compare to roughly contemporaneous interviews, with many of the same participants, by celebrated documentarian Jack Willis.
“Eyes is perhaps the canonical telling of the civil rights era,” says David Cunningham, professor and chair of sociology, who co-teaches “Freedom | Information | Acts” with Loewenstein and is also director of the Digital Humanities Workshop (HDW), and Douglas Knox, assistant director of HDW. “As much as anything, it has shaped the public’s knowledge of the civil rights movement.” But digging into both filmmakers’ archives, which are housed within WashU Libraries, suggests a fascinating counterfactual. “In Willis, we have a trove of alternative accounts that could have been used to create a different telling,” Cunningham explains. “We also glimpse hundreds of alternative directions that Hampton’s team could have taken — by selecting different figures, asking different questions or even just using different quotes. There remains a lot of debate among movement veterans, and among people who study the movement, about how we tell the civil rights story — and what that means for understanding our current political moment.” Bridging the gaps Organized by the Center for the Humanities and partially underwritten by a grant from the Mellon Foundation, the studiolabs also build on a series of campus conversations and initiatives about the future of humanist inquiry. “We’ve been thinking a lot about how to integrate new capacities into graduate training,” says Jean Allman, director of the Center for the Humanities, who conceived the studiolab model as part of her Mellon grant. “Collaboration, project management, quantitative analysis, engaging the public and writing for multiple audiences, competency with digital and other media — these are all essential to success both within and beyond the academy.” Meredith Kelling, a doctoral candidate in literature and a Lynne Cooper Harvey Fellow
center for the humanities
17
in American Culture Studies, notes that, over the last several years, the graduatelevel Digital Approaches Reading Group and Loewenstein’s Humanities Digital Workshop also have grappled with divides between public and institutional forms of knowledge. “There are a lot of questions about the role of the university and what goes on outside its borders,” says Kelling, who worked closely with Loewenstein, Cunningham and Knox to develop the “Freedom | Information | Acts” syllabus. “How do workers in the academy meaningfully bridge those gaps?” It’s a question the studiolab grappled with directly. Over the course of the fall and spring semesters, students and faculty used the Hampton and Willis collections to design and then co-teach a new capstone research course for the WashU Prison Education Project (PEP), which provides classes at Missouri Eastern Correctional Center in Pacific, Missouri. For the first time, PEP students will have access to primary archival materials. The spirit of the times Back at the Lewis Collaborative, an interdisciplinary group of nearly 20 students, faculty and staff have gathered in the studiolab suite to discuss the mechanics of digital transcription. Though the Film and Media Archive’s Eyes on the Prize portal includes full transcripts of more than 300 interviews, some important raw materials remain. Chief among these are audio recordings for what Hampton called his Eyes on the Prize “School,” a twoweek colloquium, including vibrant sessions with a distinctive mix of movement veterans and leading academics, that preceded the production’s launch. “Students, even graduate students, don’t generally have a lot of opportunity to think about how those materials are constructed,” Kelling says. “We thought, especially for humanities and social sciences students, this is a crucial point, and something they can take to their own research.”
Loewenstein points out that contemporary, AI-powered transcription software is a useful tool, but that fixing the inevitable mistakes — to say nothing of untangling the crosstalk, false starts and filler words inherent to spoken language — still requires editorial decision making. Soon, the conversation turns to interview strategy. For their first assignment, students contrasted four key Eyes interviews — with Stokely Carmichael, Amzie Moore, E.D. Nixon and Rosa Parks — with Willis’ approach to the same speakers. Naomi Kim, a first-year graduate student in English, points out that, in speaking with Parks, the Eyes team cast a wide net, asking about life in Montgomery, the day-to-day reality of racial discrimination and Parks’ reaction to the murder of Emmett Till, among other topics. Conversely, “Willis is very focused on the day of the protest,” Kim says. “It reminded me of a courtroom and witness stand, with the lawyer saying, ‘Tell us what happened.’” The studiolab also worked closely with Jami Ake, assistant dean in Arts & Sciences and senior lecturer in the Interdisciplinary Project in the Humanities, to design the PEP research methods course, which launched with the spring semester, for the WashU Prison Education Project. Additionally, the studiolab hosted a short residency with Judy Richardson, the series associate producer and director of education for Eyes on the Prize, as well as a Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee veteran. “One thing that’s been gratifying is that many of the students’ questions are less about ‘what’ than ‘how,’” Loewenstein concludes. “‘How are we going to do this?’ ‘How should we do this?’ ‘What will it cost in terms of time and expense?’ “These are unusual questions for a humanities seminar.” Excerpted from “A new home for humanists” by Liam Otten/ Washington University Marketing & Communications
Participants in the Freedom | Information | Acts studiolab shared their work during a public open house at the Lewis Collaborative in May 2022. Photo courtesy Meredith Kelling.
18
e v e n ts + o u t r e a c h
McLEOD MEMORIAL LECTURE ON HIGHER EDUCATION On the 10th anniversary of the James E. McLeod Memorial Lecture on Higher Education, the Center for the Humanities invited Gerald Early, the Merle Kling Professor of Modern Letters and two-time director-chair of the Department of African and African-American Studies at Washington University, to deliver the lecture. 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, who was a friend and mentor to Early. On September 30, Early gave the lecture “Remembering James McLeod and the Rise of Black Studies at Washington University.” To the right, we’ve excerpted a portion of Early’s lecture, which is available in its entirety on the humanities center website at humanities.wustl.edu.
Gerald Early gave the 10th annual James E. McLeod Memorial Lecture on Higher Education, which he established in honor of his late friend and mentor during his term as director of the Center for the Humanities.
Remembering James McLeod and the Rise of Black Studies at Washington University I met James McLeod for the second time when he accompanied Chancellor Danforth on his annual visit to the Black studies offices. I doubt if the Chancellor annually visited every academic unit of the university, but I suppose Black studies required his special attention. The visits were pleasant. The Chancellor seemed interested and concerned. James McLeod seemed a nice man. I first met James at the job talk I gave in November 1981. I was not sure why he came to the job talk. He was not in Black studies. He was or had been an assistant professor in the German department. It was a long, dumb and boring talk. He was kind about it, indeed, impressed. He came to all my long, dumb and boring talks during my early years here. I thought he was a glutton for punishment. He was courtly in a way that certain educated Southern Black men are. He seemed to think I had possibilities. He was assistant to the chancellor at that time and I was impressed with his possibilities as well. As time passed, I thought of him more and more as the university’s version of Daniel. I thought James could not only interpret the dreams of the people in Brookings but that he could actually tell them what they had dreamed. Like Daniel was always true to himself as a Jew, James always seemed true to himself as a Black person, even as he worked among the Whites, even though he did nothing that drew attention to the fact that he was Black. I was impressed by this because it is difficult to do. One can be loyal to many things serially that seem to be antagonistic to each other, but
center for the humanities
James E. McLeod (1944–2011). Early described McLeod as a bridge between university administration and African and African-American Studies. Photo courtesy Washington University Photographic Services Collection, Washington University Libraries, Department of Special Collections.
it is quite an act of the imagination, a real act of ingenuity, to be loyal to many things simultaneously that are antagonistic to each other. He had the uncanny ability to make antagonistic interests lie down together like lambs and lions do in heaven. He was the type of Black person who is called a bridge. *** I did not see James often on campus, as he was an administrator working in Brookings and I was a faculty member teaching class and trying to write essays. Two things would happen to change that: first, after returning from a two-year postdoctoral leave, a new dean of the faculty changed my appointment so that I was now in the English department officially and was only secondarily in Black studies, or AFAS as it had become. I had to struggle to stay connected to AFAS. Second, James McLeod would become the director of AFAS in 1987. …
19
Because James was not in the field, he had no ideological stake in it. … In this way, he gave a beleaguered program breathing room. We junior people could think about tenure and not which side we were on in faculty meetings. In fact, James hardly ever held a faculty meeting. It was a relief because, for James, everything had value. James was on everyone’s side. For him, Black studies was capacious. It contained multitudes. It was bigger than the sum of its disagreements. James constantly preached that AFAS was for everyone. … He did not see it as an academic unit or a listing of courses or even a major but rather as an experience, as much for the faculty as it was for the students. During those years under James’s leadership, AFAS felt like an experiment. Try something, he seemed to say to us, it might work; and if it doesn’t work, the failure will be good for you because Black people ought not fear and knuckle under to failure. James taught us all something important, crucially important, in those years: Do not fear the program’s uncertainty, rather embrace it as a way for you to grow, as a way for you to get nearer to something. Being Black itself is the act of wrenching assurance from uncertainty.
20
e v e n ts + o u t r e a c h
FACULTY BOOK CELEBRATION The annual Faculty Book Celebration honors the recent publications by faculty in the humanities and humanistic social sciences with a display of their work and public lectures by two new Washington University authors and a nationally recognized scholar-author. On March 3, the center was thrilled to host Charles Johnson, the S. Wilson and Grace M. Pollock Professor Emeritus at the University of Washington. Washington University Libraries acquired Johnson’s papers — both published and unpublished work from the multiaward-winning author spanning nearly six decades — in 2021. The celebration began with a noon-hour panel discussion, “Reflections on Craft: Connecting Creative and Scholarly Practice,” cosponsored by University Libraries, which featured Johnson in discussion with Washington University faculty members Rebecca Copeland (Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures), Joanna Dee Das (Performing Arts Department), Gerald Early (Departments of English and of African and African-American Studies) and Shreyas R. Krishnan (Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts). Joel Minor, curator of the Modern Literature Collection and manuscripts at Washington University’s Olin Library, organized an accompanying exhibit of the Charles Johnson Papers, “The Magic in His Hands,” which presented attendees and subsequent visitors with highlights from Johnson’s expansive career. The afternoon lectures kicked off with brief introductions to two new books by Diana Montaña, assistant professor of history; and Julia Walker, associate professor, Department of English, and associate professor and chair, Performing Arts Department. Johnson’s keynote address, “Let Your Talent Be Your Guide,” covered his long and winding career trajectory, the spirit of which he said was captured in a statement by John Muir: “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.” Exhibit curator Minor provided an introduction to Johnson and his body of work to the campus and St. Louis community on the humanities center’s blog, Human Ties. An abridged excerpt is presented at right and is available in its entirety at humanities.wustl.edu.
Charles Johnson — philosopher, novelist, screenwriter and professor emeritus, University of Washington — was the keynote speaker for the Faculty Book Celebration.
The magic in his hands: Charles Johnson’s artistic versatility Joel Minor, curator of the Modern Literature Collection and manuscripts at Washington University’s Olin Library The Charles Johnson Papers, housed in the Julian Edison Department of Special Collections, is a literary archive as multifaceted as the man himself. Spanning Johnson’s entire oeuvre, these rare and unique items represent his work as a cartoonist, philosopher, novelist, professor, screenwriter, essayist, literary scholar and short fiction writer, and serve as a testament to Johnson’s wide-ranging career as a public intellectual. Here, we take a closer look at just three spheres of these inspiring contributions. The Philosopher Johnson has a PhD in philosophy, has taken vows as a Soto Zen Buddhist, is a lifelong Kung Fu practitioner and has become a Sanskrit scholar in recent years, all of which have influenced his fiction and nonfiction writing. He has described his interests as “that place where fiction and philosophy — both Eastern and Western — meet.” Buddhism is not the only religion Johnson is adept at mining for practical philosophical
center for the humanities
purposes. Again, he looks to both Eastern and Western traditions in this practice — particularly, Buddhist, Hindu and JudeoChristian texts. In the textbook Philosophy: An Innovative Introduction, Johnson and his coauthor Michael Boylan take an innovative approach to the study of philosophy by pairing short stories written by Boylan and Johnson with pivotal aspects of selected classic readings. The book, also in the exhibition, is a prime example of Johnson’s core interest in fiction and philosophy coming together for pedagogical purposes.
LEFT: Draft of a talk delivered at the Buddhism Ethics Symposium at West Chester University, in which Johnson postulates how the philosophy of Buddhism can benefit black Americans. RIGHT: The Pocket Canons book series republished individual books of the King James Bible as separate volumes, encouraging readers to approach them as literary works in their own right. Each volume includes an introduction by a different writer. Proverbs, a book known for its timeless wisdom, features Johnson.
The Novelist Back in college and graduate school, as Johnson was following his callings as a cartoonist, journalist and philosopher, he heard another calling when on a whim he took a class by novelist John Gardner. Soon Gardner became his creative writing mentor at SIU-Carbondale and later played a major role in the editing and shaping of Johnson’s first published novel, Faith and the Good Thing (1974).
His ensuing novels — Oxherding Tale (1982), Middle Passage (1990) and Dreamer (1998) — all incorporated philosophies and folktales from various traditions into compelling historic narratives, sometimes mixed with magical realism. His literary awards are numerous, but most significant is the 1990 National Book Award for Middle Passage. Two of his novels have been adapted for the stage, and all have been translated into numerous languages.
21
among them the 1985 Writers Guild Award for outstanding script in the category of television children’s show. Unproduced projects are found in the Charles Johnson Papers, too, including a wide range of materials related to a 1994 attempt to adapt “The Black Panther” into a film starring Wesley Snipes. In the exhibition we included a film treatment and a holograph note from Marvel publisher Stan Lee.
LEFT: In this three-page letter, filed with Gardner’s edits of the novel, Johnson explicates some of the philosophical concepts behind the plot and characters. RIGHT: On this heavily edited draft page opening chapter two of Dreamer, Martin Luther King is struggling internally with having just met a man who is the spitting image of him but seemingly the polar opposite in other ways.
The Screenwriter From the mid ’70s to the mid ’90s, Johnson was an active and successful scriptwriter, mainly for television. In all he wrote over 20 screenplays and teleplays, and his papers contain not only drafts but materials toward production and promotion, such as with Charlie and the Fritter Tree, a fictionalized retelling of the life of the oldest living American at the time, a 134-year-old exslave and cowboy named Charlie Smith. The movie first aired on PBS in 1978. Booker, a PBS movie cowritten by Johnson about the influential educator, orator, writer and presidential advisor Booker T. Washington, received multiple awards,
TOP: This photo shows Johnson on the set of Charlie and the Fritter Tree and is one of many taken on the set of the television movie that are in the Charles Johnson Papers. BOTTOM: Promotional postcard for Booker, circa 1985.
22
e v e n ts + o u t r e a c h
New books by faculty in the humanities and humanistic social sciences, 2021 William Acree*
Associate Professor, Department of Romance Languages & Literatures
Fronteras en escena: la construcción de la cultura popular moderna en la Argentina y Uruguay (Spanish edition) (Prometeo Editorial, 2021) G’Ra Asim
Assistant Professor, Department of English
Boyz n the Void: A Mixtape to My Brother (Beacon Press, 2021) Mary Jo Bang
Professor, Department of English
Purgatorio, by Dante Alighieri (translated by Mary Jo Bang) (Grey Wolf Press, 2021)
“I began working on Purgatorio in 2012, the year I finished translating Inferno, and I finished in 2020 — that’s eight years by the calendar. I did, however, take a two-year break after I’d translated the first three cantos … so work-wise, it was a six-year effort. When I look back, that two-year break might have been the end of the translation except that a British Dantist asked me to participate in a multi-translator version of Purgatorio. He wanted me to contribute several cantos so I asked him to assign me at least two that I hadn’t yet translated. He gave me cantos 1, 4 and 5, which meant I had to go forward. And once I’d finished canto 5, it felt like I had found my way and would keep going until I finished.”
Joe Barcroft
Professor, Department of Romance Languages and Literatures
Spanish Vocabulary Learning in Meaning-Oriented Instruction (edited with Javier MuñozBasols) (Routledge, 2021) Pamela Barmash
Professor, Department of Jewish, Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies
In the Shadow of Empire: Israel and Judah in the Long Sixth Century BCE (edited with Mark W. Hamilton) (Society of Biblical Publishers, 2021)
John Baugh
Margaret Bush Wilson Professor, Department of African and African-American Studies
African American English: Structure, History, and Use (updated re-release) (Routledge, 2021) Lois Beck
Professor, Department of Anthropology
Kuch-nameh-e Iliyati (Diaries of Nomadic Tribes) (Hamara Press) Heather Berg
Assistant Professor, Department of Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies
Porn Work: Sex, Labor, and Late Capitalism (University of North Carolina Press, 2021)
“Doing the labor of writing this book at the same time as I was writing about labor brought up all sorts of connections for me, and porn workers taught me a lot about how to think about my own job. One performer joked that she would write an ethnographic exposé about faculty exploitation when I told her how much I got paid as a lecturer (as much per month as she made in two five-hour scenes).”
John R. Bowen
Dunbar-Van Cleve Professor, Department of Anthropology
Pragmatic Inquiry: Critical Concepts for Social Sciences (edited with Nicolas Dodier, Jan Willem Duyvendak and Anita Hardon) (Routledge, 2020) Patrick Burke*
Associate Professor, Department of Music
Tear Down the Walls: White Radicalism and Black Power in 1960s Rock (University of Chicago Press, 2021) Fellowships: National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship; Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Library and Archives Research Fellowship (Center for Popular Music Research, Case Western Reserve University) Other funding: Sigmund Strochlitz Travel Grant, Thomas J. Dodd Research Center, University of Connecticut
Research sites: Bentley Historical Library (University of Michigan); Thomas J. Dodd Research Center (University of Connecticut); Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Library and Archives (Cleveland, Ohio); Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture (New York Public Library); Library for the Performing Arts (New York Public Library); Fales Library (New York University); Gaylord Music Library and Olin Library (WashU)
Rebecca Copeland
Professor, Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures
The Kimono Tattoo (Brother Mockingbird, 2021)
“I started the novel with the idea of a translator beginning a translation only to find the literary text spilling over into her real life. That was the only ‘outline’ I had. Everything else just kind of appeared of its own accord.”
Yamamba: In Search of the Japanese Mountain Witch (edited with Linda C. Ehrlich) (Stone Bridge Press, 2021)
Talia Dan-Cohen
Assistant Professor, Department of Anthropology
A Simpler Life: Synthetic Biological Experiments (Cornell University Press, 2021) James L. Gibson
Sidney W. Souers Professor of Government, Department of Political Science
Judging Inequality: State Supreme Courts and the Inequality Crisis (with Michael J. Nelson) (Russell Sage Foundation, 2021) Matthias Goeritz
Professor of Practice, Comparative Literature Program
Spools: Gedichte (Wallstein Verlag, 2021) Amerika, oder Reisen ins Herz des Herzens des Landes (Edition Faust, 2021)
center for the humanities
Marie Griffith
John C. Danforth Distinguished Professor, John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics
Making the World Over: Confronting Racism, Misogyny, and Xenophobia in U.S. History (University of Virginia Press, 2021)
“This book emerged very differently from every other book I’ve published, as it originated from an invitation to deliver a set of three lectures in Charlottesville, Virginia, in a collaboration between the University of Virginia and University Baptist Church. It is a book of essays aimed to speak to issues of our time, not a scholarly monograph. I decided to take up current controversies over how Americans can tell an honest narrative about U.S. history, one that confronts such realities as slavery, controversies over immigration, and misogyny without the usual sugarcoating of school textbooks and much more. The title, Making the World Over, as well as much of the inspiration and the framing of the book, come from James Baldwin: ‘We made the world we’re living in and we have to make it over.’”
John Heil
Professor, Department of Philosophy
Appearance in Reality (Oxford University Press, 2021) “I was stunned to learn that the book is available as an audiobook!”
Relations (Cambridge University Press, 2021)
Peter J. Kastor
Samuel K. Eddy Professor, Department of History
French St. Louis: Landscape, Contexts, and Legacy (edited with Jay Gitlin and Robert Michael Morrissey) (University of Nebraska Press, 2021) Tom Keeline
Associate Professor, Department of Classics
Cicero: Pro Milone (Cambridge University Press, 2021)
“Most of my research took place in the library, but I did spend a memorable morning in the Roman Forum at the approximate site of the ancient murder trial that I was studying. I was trying to figure out the acoustics of the open-air courtroom by eavesdropping on tourists. Don’t worry: I ultimately found a better method, involving digital modeling done by other scholars, to reconstruct the sound properties of the ancient court.”
Hillel Kieval
Gloria M. Goldstein Professor of Jewish History, Department of History and Department of Jewish, Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies
Prague and Beyond: Jews in the Bohemian Lands (edited with Kateřina Čapková) (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021) Mijeong Mimi Kim
Teaching Professor, Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures
What is Metaphysics? (Polity Books, 2021)
Advanced Korean (edited with Jaemin Roh) (Routledge, 2021) Jonathan L. Kvanvig
Professor, Department of Philosophy
First-Order Logic: A Concise Introduction, second edition (Hackett, 2021)
Depicting Deity: A Metatheological Approach (Oxford University Press, 2021) Zakiya Luna
23
Paul Michael Lützeler
Rosa May Distinguished University Professor in the Humanities, Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures
Hermann Broch und die Menschenrechte. AntiVersklavung als Ethos der Welt (Hermann Broch and Human Rights: Anti-Slavery as World Ethos) (De Gruyter, 2021) Die Europaeische Union zwischen Konfusion und Vision. Interdisziplinaere Fragestellungen (The European Union between Confusion and Vision) (edited with Michael Gehler) (Boehlau, 2021) Rebecca Messbarger
Professor, Department of Romance Languages and Literature
Die Anatomin (The Lady Anatomist) (film) (2021)
Erin McGlothlin*
Professor, Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures
The Mind of the Holocaust Perpetrator in Fiction and Nonfiction (Wayne State University Press, 2021)
“It’s not easy to spend so many years ‘inhabiting’ the consciousness of men (whether fictional or nonfictional) who played an active role in genocide, and, although I’m very proud of the book and gratified to have written it, I’m not sure I would set out again to engage with this material. But I can say that I’ve learned a lot about how people narrate their own implication in extreme violence, and my work in this area has given me a deeper understanding of the ways in which the human psyche almost reflexively tries to disavow pain caused to others. To put it a different way, working on this book revealed to me new ethical dimensions that I continue to find both fascinating and troubling. I feel very fortunate to be able to think and write about these vexing issues.”
Associate Professor, Department of Sociology
Black Feminist Sociology: Perspectives and Praxis (edited with Whitney Pirtle) (Routledge, 2021)
*Former Faculty Fellow in the Center for the Humanities
24
e v e n ts + o u t r e a c h
FACULTY SPEAKER Diana Montaño*
Assistant Professor, Department of History
Electrifying Mexico: Technology and the Transformation of a Modern City (University of Texas Press, 2021)
Many visitors to Mexico City’s 1886 Electricity Exposition were amazed by their experience of the event, which included magnetic devices, electronic printers and a banquet of light. It was both technological spectacle and political messaging, for speeches at the event lauded President Porfirio Díaz and bound such progress to his vision of a modern order.
Diana J. Montaño explores the role of electricity in Mexico’s economic and political evolution, as the coal-deficient country pioneered large-scale hydroelectricity and sought to face the world as a scientifically enlightened “empire of peace.” She is especially concerned with electrification at the social level. Ordinary electricity users were also agents and sites of change. Montaño documents inventions and adaptations that served local needs while fostering new ideas of time and space, body and self, the national and the foreign. Electricity also colored issues of gender, race and class in ways specific to Mexico. Complicating historical discourses in which Latin Americans merely use technologies developed elsewhere, Electrifying Mexico emphasizes a particular national culture of scientific progress and its contributions to a uniquely Mexican modernist political subjectivity.
Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado
Jarvis Thurston and Mona Van Duyn Professor in the Humanities, Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, Film and Media Studies Program and Latin American Studies Program
Mexican Literature as World Literature (anthology editor) (Bloomsbury, 2021) Wolfram Schmidgen
Professor, Department of English
Infinite Variety: Literary Invention, Theology, and the Disorder of Kinds, 1688–1730 (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021)
George T. Sipos
Leigh Schmidt
Lecturer, Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures
Edward Mallinckrodt Distinguished University Professor, Danforth Center on Religion and Politics
The Church of Saint Thomas Paine: A Religious History of American Secularism (Princeton University Press, 2021) Fellowships: NEH Fellowship, National Endowment for the Humanities, Washington D.C. Other funding: Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor; John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics Research sites: Bentley Historical Library, Chicago History Museum, the Institute for Thomas Paine Studies at Iona College, the Wisconsin Historical Society, the Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Columbia University, the Bishopsgate Institute in London, the New York Public Library, the New-York Historical Society, the Library of Congress, the American Philosophical Society, the Harvard University Archives, the Shelby County Historical Society and the Special Collections Research Center at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale Number of years spent working on the book: 5
David Schuman
Senior Lecturer, Department of English
Tenkō: Cultures of Political Conversion in Transwar Japan (edited with Irena Hayter and Mark Williams) (Routledge, 2021) Alexander Stefaniak*
Associate Professor, Department of Music
Becoming Clara Schumann: Performance Strategies and Aesthetics in the Culture of the Musical Canon (Indiana University Press, 2021)
“I started writing one of the chapters as a standalone article around 2015, so the book has been about six years in the making. One of my favorite parts of researching this book was exploring the complete run of Clara Schumann’s concert programs at the Robert Schumann Haus. I spent several days feeling like I was watching her in real time as she organized her professional life, tried to win over audiences in new cities and learned from her experiences.”
Paul Steinbeck*
Best Men (Tammy Press, 2021)
Associate Professor, Department of Music
The Art Ensemble of Chicago (French edition) (Presses Universitaires du Midi, 2021)
Henry I. Schvey
Professor, Performing Arts Department
Blue Song: St. Louis in the Life and Work of Tennessee Williams (University of Missouri Press, 2021)
“The realization that I shared so much with Tennessee Williams, even the fact that we lived at the same exact address in New York City (15 West 72nd Street) for a number of years while I was in high school. I also discovered that Williams and I, in effect, changed places — he left St. Louis (and Washington University!) for Broadway, while I left New York and made my home here. I also discovered while writing the book that (despite his intentions to leave it behind) Williams never put St. Louis behind him; the city — and especially his family — haunted him to the very end of his life.”
Claudia Swan
Mark Steinberg Weil Professor in Art History, Department of Art History and Archaeology
Conchophilia: Shells, Art, and Curiosity in Early Modern Europe (edited with Marisa Anne Bass, Anne Goldgar and Hanneke Grootenboer) (Princeton University Press, 2021) Abram Van Engen
Professor, Department of English
Feeling Godly: Religious Affections and Christian Contact in Early North America (edited with Caroline Wigginton) (University of Massachusetts Press, 2021)
center for the humanities
FACULTY SPEAKER Julia Walker*
Associate Professor, Department of English; Associate Professor and Chair, Performing Arts Department
Performance and Modernity: Enacting Change on the Globalizing Stage (Cambridge University Press, 2021)
How do ideas take shape? How do concepts emerge into form? This book argues that they take shape quite literally in the human body, often appearing on stage in new styles of performance. Focusing on the historical period of modernity, Performance and Modernity: Enacting Change on the Globalizing Stage demonstrates how the unforeseen impact of economic, industrial, political, social and psychological change was registered in bodily metaphors that took shape on stage. In new styles of performance — acting, dance, music, pageantry, avant-garde provocations, film, video and networked media — this book finds fresh evidence for how modernity has been understood and lived, both by stage actors, who, in modeling new habits, gave emerging experiences an epistemological shape, and by their audiences, who, in borrowing the strategies performers enacted, learned to adapt to a modernizing world.
James Wertsch
David R. Francis Distinguished Professor, Department of Anthropology and Global Studies Program
Gerhild S. Williams
Barbara Schaps Thomas and David M. Thomas Professor, Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures and Comparative Literature Program
Ottoman Eurasia in Early Modern German Literature: Cultural Translations (Francisci, Happel, Speer) (University of Michigan Press, 2021)
“Like most of my work this book, too, grew out of work on a previous project (Mediating Culture in the 17th-Century German Novel, 2015). I found the whole topic of Ottoman Eurasia fascinating and decided to work on it in greater detail.”
Acerra Exoticorum or Historisches Rauchfass, vol. 1 (edited with Flemming Schock) (Weidler Buchverlag, 2021)
Carol Camp Yeakey
Marshall S. Snow Professor, Interdisciplinary Program in Urban Studies
Cancer Navigation: Charting the Path Forward for Low Income Women of Color (with Anjanette Wells, Vetta L. Sanders Thompson, Will Ross and Sheri Notaro) (Oxford University Press, 2021)
How Nations Remember: A Narrative Approach (Oxford University Press, 2021)
Research sites: People’s Republic of China, Taiwan, India, Russia, Republic of Georgia, Azerbaijan, Estonia, South Korea “Sometimes I felt sidetracked by other responsibilities as I tried to write this book, but I tried to work on it early every morning for over a decade, even for just an hour or so. I also came to realize that everyday encounters could guide my thinking if I could be patient enough to let them challenge and lead my thinking.”
*Former Faculty Fellow in the Center for the Humanities
25
26
e v e n ts + o u t r e a c h
EVENT COSPONSORSHIPS Every year, the Center for the Humanities cosponsors humanities and humanistic social sciences events with departments, programs and academic initiatives at Washington University. 1.
The Nonmarriage Roundtable Conference, October 2021. Organized by the Washington University School of Law.
2.
Divided City Film Series, St. Louis International Film Festival, November 8–20, 2021. Organized by Cinema St. Louis.
3.
“Jewish Physicians and Their Patients: Rescue Strategies in Nazi Occupied Poland,” November 10, 2021. Organized by the Holocaust Memorial Lecture Series.
4.
Fireside Chat With Lawrence Fields, March 29, 2022. Organized by the Department of Music.
5.
“Combating Caste on U.S. College Campuses,” Dalit History Month, April 1, 2022. Organized by the Department of Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies.
6.
“Disability in Brazil: Experiences, Arts, Activisms,” April 11, 2022. Organized by the Program in Latin American Studies.
7.
“Indigenous Resilience: Healing, Leading and Protecting With Indigenous Love,” 31st Annual Washington University in St. Louis Pow Wow, April 16, 2022. Organized by the Katherine M. Buder Center in the Brown School.
center for the humanities
27
CENTER FOR THE HUMANITIES: A COMMUNITY OF SCHOLARS Faculty Fellows
Tazeen Ali
René Esparza
Peter Kastor
Paige McGinley
faculty fellow
faculty fellow
faculty fellow
faculty fellow
BECHS-Africa Fellows ACLS Emerging Voices Fellow Graduate Student Fellows Kling Undergraduate Honors Fellows
Casey O’Callaghan
Abram Van Engen
faculty fellow
faculty fellow
Austin Dziwornu Ablo
bechs - africa fellow
Mariama Zaami
bechs - africa fellow
William Kelly acls emerging voices fellow
Erin Barry
Elena Farel
graduate student
graduate student
Constantine Karathanasis
Lauris McQuoidGreason
Soledad MocchiRadichi
graduate student
Xin Yu
fellow
fellow
graduate student
graduate student
graduate student
fellow
fellow
fellow
fellow
Min Wang
Aaliyah Allen
Lauren Bush
Malcolm Douglass
Jack Grimes
Matthew Layden
graduate student
kling fellow
kling fellow
kling fellow
kling fellow
kling fellow
fellow
Hechen Liu
Kiara Mallory
Ranen Miao
Christian Monzón
Jordan Rivera
Chloe West
kling fellow
kling fellow
kling fellow
kling fellow
kling fellow
kling fellow
28
f e l lo ws
Briefly, what is your book about? “The Women’s Mosque of America” is about how American Muslim women negotiate the marginalization they face in their patriarchal religious communities while also navigating the Islamophobia that is prevalent in mainstream U.S. society. Specifically, it uses the Women’s Mosque of America, a woman-only mosque in Los Angeles, to show how American Muslim women navigate both of these terrains. I analyze the WMA as a platform for Muslim women, especially lay Muslims without any formal Islamic training, to cultivate forms of authority that are based on the Qur’an, the central scriptural text for Muslims, and center women, while also speaking to the sociopolitical climate of the United States. Overall, the book demonstrates how American Muslim women assert themselves as meaningful religious actors in the U.S. and beyond, and offers new insights on Islamic authority as it relates to the intersections of gender, religious space and national belonging.
MUSLIM WOMEN ON THE MINBAR Tazeen Ali John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics The 2015 founding of the Women’s Mosque of America (WMA) in Los Angeles gave Muslim women in the United States access to something they hadn’t had before: the minbar, the platform from which a sermon is given. Traditionally, weekly Muslim prayer services are led by men and are mostly attended by men. But the foregrounding of women’s voices — and leadership — at WMA is intended to invest Muslim women with control over their own spiritual development. With her new book, The Women’s Mosque of America: Authority & Community in US Islam, Tazeen Ali, assistant professor in the Danforth Center on Religion and Politics, explores the dynamism of Islam and the women who interpret it, who approach the Qur’an as a tool to resist social hierarchies, build community and empower themselves.
Women’s Mosque of America, Los Angeles. From the call to prayer, to the prayer, to the sermon — all aspects of WMA’s services are led by women. Photo by Faezeh Fathizadeh, The Pluralism Project, Harvard University.
What is the Women’s Mosque of America? What happens differently at this mosque because women are in leadership positions? The Women’s Mosque of America is an emergent multiracial womenonly mosque in Los Angeles that has been hosting monthly Friday prayer (Jummah) for Muslim and non-Muslim women, girls and boys under age 12 since January 2015. The whole congregation is female: A woman leads prayer as the imam, does the call to prayer (adhan) and delivers the sermon (khutbah). Part of what plays out differently based on the fact that women are in leadership positions here is the content of the sermons themselves, which connect sacred scriptures to women’s lived experiences. WMA sermons range widely in topic but include sensitive subjects like sexual violence, divorce, motherhood and grief that many women feel are not addressed in other mosques. It is a mosque that appears very committed to cultivating community and also flattening the hierarchy of religious leadership. For example, after the prayer is complete, all of the congregants sit together in a circle with the imam and ask her questions about the khutbah, and then engage in a general dialogue with each other about topics related to Islam and women. WMA leaders also really lean into particular ideas of the feminine, and they see the mosque as an intimate safe space for women to share their vulnerabilities with each other. Who are the congregants? The WMA community is diverse in age, race and religiosity. There is a core constituency of African American Muslim women, and Black, South Asian, white, Arab, East Asian and Latina women also regularly attend. This racial and ethnic diversity itself is representative of the overall demographics of Muslims in America. There are also white Christian and Jewish women who come as interfaith allies.
center for the humanities
REAL ESTATE AND THE HIDDEN HISTORY OF THE U.S. AIDS EPIDEMIC René Esparza Department of Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies
Residential segregation based on racial and economic inequality is a pre-existing condition that exacerbates any transmissible health threat — from tuberculosis to COVID-19 to AIDS. René Esparza, assistant professor in the Department of Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies, takes up the history of AIDS and racial segregation in his new book project, “From Vice to Nice: Race, Sex, and the Gentrification of AIDS.” Weaving methodologies from medicine, geography and history to construct a case study in Minnesota’s Twin Cities, Esparza exposes the enabling conditions of injustice and impoverishment that continue to catalyze ill health and disease — as well as collective remedies against them.
At the height of the AIDS epidemic, bathhouses became targets of urban renewal. Dick Brown was a gay resident of Minneapolis who urged city officials to shut down the 315 Health Club, the busiest and largest bathhouse between Chicago and the West Coast. John Ritter, “Dick Brown continues solo campaign to close bathhouse,” Equal Time, May 27, 1987.
29
Briefly, what is your book about? “From Vice to Nice” rethinks the history of the U.S. AIDS epidemic in relation to the gentrification of central cities and its attendant system of residential segregation. It focuses on the spatial determinants of health to insist that the driving forces behind the racial disparities of the U.S. AIDS epidemic have not been the deviant behaviors of LGBT people or people of color but rather the unequal living conditions in which these populations have been historically confined, conditions that become embodied as ill health and vulnerability to disease. Tell us about the “risk behaviors” theory of the epidemic. HIV continues to infect tens of thousands of Americans each year, disproportionately impacting communities of color. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in 2019, 36,801 people received an HIV diagnosis in the United States and its dependent areas. Black/African American people accounted for 42% of all new cases, though they represent only 13% of the U.S. population. Research shows that specific practices of sex and drug abuse — that is, “risk behaviors” — cannot explain this demographic profile. Black men who have sex with other men (MSM) have comparable or even lower rates of unprotected anal intercourse than MSM of other races or ethnicities. They report fewer sex partners than white MSM. They are also less likely to report substance use or engage in commercial sex work. Epidemiologists are now focusing on “sexual networks” to explain these racial disparities. Black MSM are more likely to participate in networks of sexual partners that include Black men already living with HIV. The higher viral load in smaller — and, I would add, more segregated — sexual networks compounded with other social determinants (poverty, homelessness, unemployment, mass incarceration, lack of education and inadequate access to health care) all contribute to the disparate risk for HIV infection among Black men. How is racial segregation central to the story of the epidemic? The history of America’s urban “ghettos” serves as the prehistory of the U.S. AIDS epidemic. Due to the racism and homophobia that pervaded postwar housing benefits, people of color and LGBT people were systematically excluded from white heterosexual suburbia. This postwar ghettoization of people of color and LGBT people resulted in a pattern of geographic concentration and social interaction that would sustain the U.S. AIDS epidemic in the 1980s. Thus, the economic and social isolation established through residential segregation ensured that the primary drivers of the epidemic would likewise be the racialized poor and gay and bisexual men.
30
f e l lo ws
HOW TO CONSTITUTE A NATION Peter Kastor Department of History and Program in American Culture Studies With the ratification of the Constitution in 1788, the nascent “United States of America” faced a daunting new challenge: creating and staffing a governmental mechanism, transforming the collective vision of the American Revolution into interconnected cogs and components. “Tasks ranging from the heady — creating a federal court system and federal jurisprudence — to the seemingly mundane — delivering the mail — all provided ways for the federal government to reinforce the notion that the states were indeed united,” says Peter Kastor, the Samuel K. Eddy Professor of History and American Culture Studies. How did this experiment in federal government come to be? Kastor tackles this question in his current book and digital project, “Creating a Federal Government.” Briefly, what is your book/project about? “Creating a Federal Government” is a multiplatform project that combines a book and website to reconstruct and understand the federal government during its first decades from 1789 to 1829. My goal was to tackle a specific question: How did Americans govern themselves during the Constitution’s first tumultuous decades? Despite volumes of historical political analysis and bookshelves full of Founding Father biographies, some basic questions remain unanswered: What did the federal government do and how did it do it? Who served in the federal government and where? How large was the federal government and how did it change over time?
Scene at the Signing of the Constitution of the United States (1940) by Howard Chandler Christy.
Why a book and a website? The book and the website are both motivated by my goal of crafting a project that will challenge scholars and engage a general audience. I always imagined the book as a narrative story, one that would explain how the Founding Fathers sought to create and run the complex institutions of government. But I also wanted to tell the story of what it was like to serve in that government, and that topic could be addressed only through a quantitative analysis of the federal workforce. As I built my dataset, I became increasingly excited by the prospect of sharing that data through a publicly accessible website. Can you give us an idea of the website’s scope? How might others consult it? The data for the website currently consists of the following: •
9,467 appointees to civil office (not counting the Post Office) with 24,926 records of federal employment • 11,206 officers in the U.S. Army, Navy and Marine Corps • 32,132 postmasters in 8,360 local post offices • 28,000 letters from people requesting federal appointments or recommending others for federal appointment The website will enable people to find or track the career of an individual federal employee or ask broader questions about government institutions. It will also map the locations of federal governance, identifying where federal officials served and also how individual federal officials moved from one place to another. Why is this the right time for this project? At this very moment, Americans are debating the proper role of government on one hand and the meaning of the Founding Fathers on the other. To answer these questions they have often looked to the ideas that structured the federal government, in the process ignoring what the federal government did. My project asks people to consider the government the Founders actually built, in all its possibilities, limitations and prejudices.
center for the humanities
PEOPLE GET READY
and its central feature was a regular workshop that met for months before, during and after the sit-ins. Participants studied the theories of nonviolent direct action and identified the Jim Crow “racial routines” (a phrase I borrow from Stephen Berrey) that they would attempt to transform. They also role-played direct action scenarios, discovering and exploring direct action tactics. The constant repetition of rehearsal helped make the demonstrators’ fear more manageable. And the intimacy and friendships that grew in the workshops cultivated trust and solidarity as participants built the Beloved Community.
Paige McGinley Performing Arts Department “Many of us know a good deal about what we might call the signature events of the midcentury Black freedom struggle,” says Paige McGinley, associate professor of performing arts. “But what is less well known is how ordinary people prepared to do extraordinary things.” With her new book project “People Get Ready,” McGinley is writing the first in-depth investigation of the ethos and culture of rehearsal embedded within the Black freedom struggle from the early 1930s to the late 1960s. You’re writing about the anticipatory work activists performed before they engaged in actions. Can you give us a specific example of one of these rehearsals? While at the humanities center, I’ve been working on a chapter about the campaign to desegregate downtown Nashville. This was an interracial campaign with Black leadership (key players included Diane Nash, the Rev. James Lawson and John Lewis),
31
Before sitting in, protesters practiced nonviolent tactics and trained themselves to endure abuse and assault. Image courtesy Civil Rights Movement Archive.
What other forms did these rehearsals take? Another mode of preparation was theater itself: In the first chapter, I look at the amateur plays and skits collectively created by interracial workers’ education programs that dramatized union organizing, particularly among Southern sharecroppers in the 1930s and early 1940s. But some practices of preparation were decidedly inwardlooking — meditation, for example, which emerges as a thread that extends from the Quakers of the 1940s to Black Power collectives in the late 1960s and early 1970s. What kinds of sources are you looking at as you uncover these stories? Any surprises? The best recent surprise was being able to read the diary kept by the Rev. James Lawson while he was imprisoned for resisting the draft in the early 1950s. The Lawson Papers are held at Vanderbilt — which expelled him from their Divinity School for his leadership of the Nashville campaign but has recently founded an institute for the study and practice of nonviolence in his name, and with his blessing. The diary is a remarkable document in that we can see one of the great activists and intellectuals of the 20th century (in his early 20s at the time) working out ideas that would become so pivotal a decade later. How will this book, with its origin in performance studies, add to our understanding of the civil rights movement? What will it say to current activists in the movement for Black freedom? Well, a lot of other scholars and activists have already made this point, but I hope this book will underscore that the protests and direct actions of the midcentury movement were anything but spontaneous. Robin D.G. Kelley pointed out years ago that “marches are not movements,” and it is my hope that this book will illuminate the difficult and pleasurable practices that took place behind the scenes of a movement that informs struggles for Black lives today.
32
f e l lo ws
OUR SENSES AS SOURCES OF VALUE Casey O’Callaghan Department of Philosophy We know well the five senses — hearing, seeing, taste, touch and smell — that we use to interpret our environment. These senses affect what we like and dislike, the paths we take and the projects we take up. But our perceptual abilities and limitations differ, which means we value them uniquely and they lead us in divergent directions. What seems a common bond — our ability to perceive the world through our senses — is actually a site of unexamined difference. “Negotiating these differing cares, concerns and obligations, as communities and as cultures, is a tremendous social challenge,” says Casey O’Callaghan, professor of philosophy. “Understanding their sources is a start.” With his book-in-progress, “Reverberating Differences (Our Senses as Sources of Value),” O’Callaghan is exploring the significance of diversity in perception.
skills, training and life stage. Becoming a skilled radiologist changes how you see X-rays. And vision and hearing, of course, decline with age. Each of these differences in sensory capacities can have evaluative and normative upshots.
Briefly, what is your book about? The main idea I want to explore is how our senses shape what matters to us and what we care about, rather than just what our senses tell us about our environment. So, it’s useful to investigate how differences in the capacity to see, hear, touch, taste, smell or feel pain impact people’s likes and dislikes, cares, concerns and projects. Someone with an excellent sense of smell might be drawn to perfumery, while the loss of hearing might be devastating to a devoted musician. A lot more of the meaning in our lives traces to our senses than we tend to realize.
What sources and fields are you drawing from? For detailed characterizations of the sources of sensory diversity among perceivers and across a lifetime, I rely mostly on perception science, from behavioral psychology to sensory neuroscience. Research on multisensory perception, perceptual learning and perceptual expertise has been especially illuminating.
Why was it important to include in this study people whose sensory capacities differ dramatically from what is statistically typical? It’s tempting to think the way our senses work is mostly the same from person to person, and even for a given person over a lifetime, so there’s a standard bundle of human sensory capacities. If that’s right, and if our senses are sources of value, we should like the same foods, music and art.
Philosophy provides the framework for thinking about axiology, or questions of value. It offers useful distinctions among different types of evaluative and normative questions. So, things can be good or bad, and better or worse, comparatively or with respect to a standard. But it is very different to be good epistemically than to be good aesthetically or morally.
In fact, sensory capacities differ a lot from person to person, and each of our senses changes a great deal over the course of a lifetime. Considering sensory disabilities — such as blindness, deafness, anosmia (loss of smell), ageusia (inability to taste) and analgesia (inability to feel pain) — shows clearly how one’s distinctive sensory capacities impact questions of meaning and value. But perceivers also differ in sensory capacities due to their background, experience,
Image by Claudio Schwarz via Unsplash.
center for the humanities
A MUSE OF EARLY AMERICA Abram Van Engen Department of English
LEFT: Frontispiece for An Account of Anne Bradstreet: The Puritan Poetess, and Kindred Topics, edited by Colonel Luther Caldwell (Boston, 1898). Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts. RIGHT: Anne Bradstreet, Several Poems Compiled with Great Variety of Wit and Learning, 1678. Library of Congress Rare Book and Special Collections Division.
In 1650, Anne Bradstreet became the first person from British North America to publish a book of poetry, The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America. “[The book] made her famous, and for almost four centuries, Bradstreet has been canonized, printed, anthologized, studied and taught,” says Abram Van Engen, professor of English. But the most recent biography appeared long ago, and additional scholarship on 17thcentury religion, gender and politics invites the reconsideration of her writing. With his book-in-progress, “Anne Bradstreet’s World,” Van Engen intends to produce a new cultural and literary biography of Bradstreet that will reshape our understanding of both her world and her work. Who was Anne Bradstreet and what can we learn from her? Anne Bradstreet was born and educated in England, came to New England on the Arbella in 1630, and lived the rest of her life in Ipswich and Andover. In these towns,
33
Bradstreet raised eight children while producing poetry on every conceivable topic — politics, science, medicine, philosophy, religion and more. Today, she is best known for extraordinary elegies, lyrics and meditations that wrestle with faith and doubt while mourning losses and seeking comfort. Those writings still speak to many readers today. And today, we can understand those writings in whole new ways. Over the last three decades, a host of scholars have revised what we know about early modern women’s writing, transatlantic Puritanism, book history, English politics and New England conditions. Much of what we thought was unique about Bradstreet actually fits a broader pattern of women’s writing spread across the Atlantic. She was not a solitary genius on the American strand; she was instead a brilliant voice in a much larger movement. Beyond a broad synthesis, this biography will contribute to the burgeoning scholarly interest in secularization, building on my work more generally in religion and literature. Recently, scholars such as Alec Ryrie have argued convincingly that unbelief arose most pervasively and persuasively from within the practice and experience of religion itself. Anne Bradstreet’s writings lend themselves to a detailed analysis of this claim, since her work registers so much doubt within the context of faith. I want to explore that tension and its consequences. What has surprised you in your recent research on Bradstreet and/or publishing in the 17th-century American colonies? This may sound silly, but I have been surprised to discover just how wide and deep the Atlantic still runs. For years now, scholars have been calling for transatlantic studies of early modern culture. We know that New England was closely connected to England, not to mention the plight, politics and conditions of those in Africa, the Caribbean, the Americas and elsewhere. We know we should not separate people into national buckets that didn’t, in their own day, exist. Despite such knowledge, Bradstreet never crosses the sea. Those who study early modern women in England seldom, if ever, mention Bradstreet. If they do recognize her, they talk only about her 1650 London book, The Tenth Muse, even though Bradstreet’s most beloved and best-known poems never appeared in it. Meanwhile, Americanists love to teach Bradstreet’s most famous poems, which appeared later, but they seldom situate Bradstreet among the many English women who were writing on many of the same topics and in many of the same ways. Anne Bradstreet’s world was far larger than most treatments of Anne Bradstreet have given us to understand.
34
f e l lo ws
BECHS-AFRICA FELLOWS AUSTIN DZIWORNU ABLO AND MARIAMA ZAAMI Austin Dziwornu Ablo and Mariama Zaami, both scholars from the University of Ghana, took up residence at the Center for the Humanities during the spring 2022 semester. They joined with the support of the Building Capacity for Early Career Humanities Scholars in Africa (BECHSAfrica) Fellowship Program, funded by the Mellon Foundation. The residential fellowships allow for targeted mentorship and guidance for the selected scholars by identified senior scholars who share their research interests, while also providing an avenue for interaction and the sharing of research ideas and methodologies with peers. Participating institutions include University of Ghana, American University in Cairo (Egypt), Stellenbosch University (South Africa) and Washington University. Ablo and Zaami joined the community of fellows in residence at the Center for the Humanities in Umrath Hall, which includes Faculty Fellows, Graduate Student Fellows and Merle Kling Undergraduate Honors Fellows. Here, we asked them about their scholarly background, research interests and the work they plan to complete during their fellowships. Austin Dziwornu Ablo Ablo is a senior lecturer at the Department of Geography and Resource Development at the University of Ghana. He earned a PhD in development geography from the University of Bergen (Norway) in 2016. His research interests revolve around urban studies, natural resource governance, entrepreneurship and development.
With a disciplinary background in human geography, he draws upon relational perspectives, political ecology and political economy, as well as organizational and institutional approaches to explore humanenvironment interactions at multiple scales. His research focuses on urban sprawl, land-use change, housing, private urbanism, natural resource governance and politics, climate change and environmental sustainability, entrepreneurship and employment, gender, and rural development.
result in the social exclusion of her study populations. During her fellowship, she will develop two manuscripts from her PhD research: “Perceptions of Racial Profiling Among African Immigrant Youth in Calgary, Alberta” and “‘Feeling a Sense of Belonging’: Experiences of Social Inclusion Among African Immigrant Youth in Calgary.”
Ablo is working on a Norwegian Research Council-funded project, “Enclaving: Patterns of Global Futures in Three African Cities.” Focusing on the metropolitan cities of Accra, Maputo and Johannesburg, the project produces new and empirically supported knowledge on the globally relevant phenomenon of enclaving, including the way this a) impacts and shapes heterogeneous patterns of urban housing, b) relates to dynamics of inequality and c) is integral to cultural orientations which are generative and transformative of the urban order. During his fellowship, Ablo will explore research funding opportunities, conduct a systematic literature review and draft and complete several articles based on his research. Mariama Zaami Zaami is a lecturer in the College of Humanities at the University of Ghana. She earned a PhD in sociology from the University of Calgary (Canada) in 2017. Her research focus is on race, ethnicity, equity, immigration and the intersections that exist to either include or exclude immigrants. Zaami’s PhD research highlighted the dynamics of social inclusion and social exclusion that Ghanaian and Sudanese immigrant youth face in navigating social spaces in Calgary. Her findings indicated that the interplay of diverse intersecting factors — including ethnicity, race, gender and immigration status — collectively
TOP: Austin Dziwornu Ablo BOTTOM: Mariama Zaami
center for the humanities
35
ACLS EMERGING VOICES FELLOW WILLIAM KELLY Historian William Kelly joined the Center for the Humanities for 2021–22 as an Emerging Voices Fellow, funded by a program from the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) that supports recent PhDs in the humanities and humanistic social sciences. Specifically, the competitively awarded fellowship seeks to identify and assist a vanguard of scholars whose voices, perspectives and broad visions will strengthen institutions of higher education and humanistic disciplines in the years to come. Kelly, who earned a PhD in history with a focus on Latin American and Caribbean history from Rutgers University in 2021, worked closely with the Divided City initiative. How does your experience teaching at a public school in Washington, D.C., connect with your current research and scholarly interests? Growing up with a lot of material uncertainty, particularly housing insecurity, I was always drawn to the Cuban Revolution because, rhetorically, it was a social project based on the ideas of equality and basic human dignity. So it makes sense that I was drawn to revolutionary urban housing policy, as it was based on the idea that housing was a human right. As I moved into my archival research and started to piece together the history of urban housing from the ground up, I think that the lessons I learned about structural racism as a teacher in D.C. let me see beyond the racially equalizing rhetoric of the revolutionary state. As a teacher I had already begun to
William Kelly joined the Divided City initiative as an ACLS Emerging Voices Fellow. Photo courtesy William Kelly.
think of cities as divided spaces where space itself contributes to and exacerbates racial and socioeconomic inequality. That helped me begin to understand the social geography of Cuban cities and how, despite the socialist project, in many ways we see similar sorts of dynamics of inequality there as we see in cities in the United States and elsewhere. What are you most looking forward to in joining WashU and the Divided City initiative this year? I’m really looking forward to working among an interdisciplinary community of scholars who are thinking deeply about urbanism and racial inequality in a global context, especially as I am working on my book manuscript and delving into the comparative aspects of my project. The Divided City initiative is one of the very few spaces within the academy that is dedicated to fostering dialogue between humanities scholars and architects. That makes it an ideal space for me, as my own history of urbanism in Cuba is really a microcosm of exactly that sort of dialogue. I’m writing an institutional history in many ways, one that revolves around the legal and governmental structures the revolutionary state created to manage housing. And to do that I’m drawing very heavily on a large corpus of work that Cuban architects and urban planners have produced since 1959. But I’m writing this history from the perspective of ordinary people, particularly those most disenfranchised, predominantly Afro-Cuban citizens who for various reasons have benefited the least from revolutionary housing reforms. So the institutional history frames the narrative, but the story I’m telling is really about how Cubans have experienced these institutions, how they have been personally impacted by them.
36
f e l lo ws
GRADUATE STUDENT FELLOWS Fall 2021 Erin Barry Department of History The Dread Sex Cases: Space, Community and Sexuality in the Regulation of 1970s Adult Theaters Elena Farel Department of Music African American Opera Performers in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries Lauris McQuoid-Greason Department of Romance Languages and Literatures In(form)al: Disappropriative Practices and Aesthetic Regimes in Late Neoliberal Mexico (2000–2020) Soledad Mocchi-Radichi Department of Romance Languages and Literatures The Ludic Sphere: Popular Entertainment and Urban Public Space, Río de la Plata 1870–1933 Spring 2022 Constantine Karathanasis Department of Classics Enter Homo Oeconomicus: Civic Motivation and Civic Education in Aristophanic Comedy Xin Yu Department of History The Art of Mobilization: Print Culture and Rural Transformation in China, 1450–1644 Min Wang Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures Detecting Quotidian Modernities: Vernacular Modernism in Modern Chinese Detective Fiction (1914–1949)
center for the humanities
37
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. Class of 2022 Lauren Bush Being-Online: A Heideggerian Phenomenology of Virtual Embodiment Philosophy-Neuroscience-Psychology & Germanic Languages and Literature majors Nic Koziolek (Philosophy-Neuroscience-Psychology), mentor
Matthew Layden Tearing Down the Wall: Postwar Silence and the Exploration of Trauma Through Literature History major Lori Watt (History), mentor
Malcolm Douglass Shot Dead in Dallas: The Kennedy Assassination and the Persistence of Conspiracy History major; Religion & Politics minor Elizabeth Borgwardt (History), mentor
Hechen Liu The Model Worker System and the Loss of Honor: A Case Study into the Private Lives of Retired Socialist Workers in Yangpu, Shanghai Anthropology & East Asian Studies majors Zhao Ma (East Asian Languages and Literatures) and Bret Gustafson (Anthropology), mentors
Kiara Mallory ‘I Hope You Haven’t Died In Vain’: Emmett Till and the Poetic Contours of Memory English Literature & African and African-American Studies majors; Medical Humanities minor Mary Jo Bang (English), mentor Christian Monzón ‘¿México Vive Aquí?’ Space, Power, and Identity in the Cherokee Street Frontier-Border Latin American Studies & Political Science majors Bret Gustafson (Anthropology), mentor Class of 2023 Aaliyah Allen Femcees and Identity: Interrogating Black Women’s Representation in Contemporary Mainstream Rap American Culture Studies major; Music & Psychological and Brain Sciences minors Zachary Manditch-Prottas (African and African-American Studies), mentor Jack Grimes Out with the Homosexual Peace Party: Jünger’s Warrior Hero and the Political Masculinization of German WWI Soldiers Philosophy & Political Science majors; Writing minor André Fischer (Germanic Languages and Literatures), mentor
Ranen Miao Intimate Racial Discrimination from Queer Men of Color: Racial Erotics in the 21st Century Political Science and Sociology majors; Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies minor Cynthia Feliciano (Sociology), mentor Jordan Rivera The Acceleration of Cultural Appropriation Through TikTok History major; Writing minor Raven Maragh-Lloyd (African and AfricanAmerican Studies), mentor Chloe West The Tudor Myth: Sixteenth-Century Memories of the Wars of the Roses History major; Legal Studies & Religion and Politics minors Mark Pegg (Religion and Politics), mentor
38
f e l lo ws
RESEARCH, REVISE, REPEAT: TRAINING THE ACADEMY’S NEXT SCHOLARS What does it take to join the professoriate — and would you want to? Those questions ground Arts and Sciences’ two undergraduate honors fellowships in the humanities, the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship and the Merle Kling Undergraduate Honors Fellowship. Over a two-year period, students accepted into the programs are matched with faculty mentors and attend weekly seminars to learn how to develop a scholarly research question, how to create and execute a research plan, and what it means to be a good citizen of the academy. Faculty director Jonathan Fenderson, associate professor of African and AfricanAmerican studies, emphasizes the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship’s role as “an intimate learning community” that creates space for minority and underrepresented students to take a deep dive into humanities and social science research. Funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the program, now in its 30th year, aims to diversify the academy and to provide students from underrepresented communities the support they need to excel in it. Taking the Mellon Mays Fellowship as its model, the Merle Kling Undergraduate Honors Fellowship takes a similar approach, with a focus on facilitating the students’ original research and demystifying careers in the academy, says faculty director Jean Allman, the J.H. Hexter Professor in the Humanities and director of the Center for the Humanities. “I can remember when I was a freshman at university I didn’t know what a graduate
Kling Fellows visiting the George B. Vashon Museum, which houses a collection spanning 250 years of AfricanAmerican history in St. Louis, in fall 2019. Photo courtesy Jean Allman.
student even was,” Allman says. “We try to make institutions of higher learning more transparent to students and then to explore the pathways into those institutions if they’re interested.” Below, we talked to Fenderson and Allman about the push-and-pull of teaching the research process, the students’ “fingerprints” on one another’s work and the moments of self-discovery they make along the way. What are your goals for the students in each cohort? JONATHAN FENDERSON: The first thing I do is to help them to understand the different definitions of a fellowship. I want them to, yes, think about the fellowship as financial support, but, more importantly, to think about the definition of “fellowship” that emphasizes a community or a group of people coming together to be supportive of each other for a common goal. It’s learning how to be a good colleague, how to be supportive, how to give good feedback and how to help people through stressful times. Then I try to focus on helping them craft a research question and explore the different research methods that will allow them to pursue that question. By the end of their junior year, they’ve hammered out a solid research question and they’ve identified a way to answer that question — the method,
the primary-source materials they want to work with, etc. As seniors, it’s a matter of just executing the research plan. For most of us who do research, we always have this great plan at the beginning, and at some point it changes. I try to share with them that research is a living thing that causes the researchers to constantly adapt and change and rework their plan. Ultimately, by the time they are finished with the Mellon program, all of the seniors have produced a senior thesis. Usually it’s a multi-chapter, long-form project that they have conceptualized and thought through; they’ve conducted all the research for; and they have some type of findings or main argument that they’ve advanced in this work. There are a few ways we measure our success: the most immediate way is by ensuring that the students successfully complete their thesis and gain a deeper understanding of the research process. We want the fellows to be able to recognize their intellectual growth and feel empowered through their research experience. And we also want each fellow to walk away with a sense of community and connection to the other fellows and to the program. We want them to think about the unique experience they had but also about the importance of building a supportive
center for the humanities
network if they decide to pursue a career in the academy. JEAN ALLMAN: I could just follow everything Jonathan says with “ditto, ditto, ditto.” But I’ll rephrase it slightly differently. The big goal is to get students to understand research as a process. These students are highly motivated, but they’re also very attentive to grades. They tend not to want to go out on a limb. At first, they don’t believe me when I say, “I want you to understand the process, and the process might not end with the perfect paper. I care less about what you end up with than I do that you really explore each of these pieces of the research puzzle.” It’s about that tacking back and forth between “This is my question” and “Oh, this evidence doesn’t quite answer that question” and so you revise the question. They begin to appreciate that that’s what it’s actually about, revising and rethinking and meeting the new challenges. Once they realize they can experience challenges and not worry about failing, it goes smoothly. I want them to recognize a good question and how to think about methods that help answer that question. Then, I ask them to take the big leap and to think of themselves as in dialogue, as peers, with other scholars. They’re accustomed to reporting on secondary literature, but not engaging it and thinking of their work as being in conversation with the work of other scholars. It’s a long process to get them not to treat the secondary source the same as a primary source of evidence. It’s a big step to be able to situate their work in an intellectual landscape in a meaningful way. While it is true that for those students who go on to graduate school or law school or the Fulbright program, their final Kling paper is usually an excellent piece of original writing that is tailor-made for applications of all sorts. But that final product isn’t more important than the process that led to that
final product. It’s the skills learned through the process that students will carry with them for a lifetime. FENDERSON: That’s right! Another thing that’s important is that they understand that all intellectual work is a collective enterprise. Each single-author book or single-author paper is still a collective enterprise; you’re incorporating other people’s ideas. As much as we want them to understand themselves as individual scholars, we want them to understand their connection to everyone else. All of us who value our colleagues in the academy can point to other people’s fingerprints on our work. The cohorts themselves are quite interdisciplinary. How does that shape what each student produces? ALLMAN: Because they’re so interdisciplinary, they push each other. They each have different sets of questions. The students will say to each other, “But I don’t understand what you’re saying.” They remind one another that not everybody is in the same discipline and they’re not going to understand particular theories or methods, so in their writing they push each other to understand voice and audience in interesting ways. They also push each other in completely new research directions. A student working on urban gentrification might be asked,
39
Undergraduate fellowship program leaders (clockwise): faculty directors Jean Allman (Kling) and Jonathan Fenderson (Mellon Mays); and coordinators Wilmetta ToliverDiallo (Mellon Mays) and Wendy Love Anderson (Kling).
“Have you thought about what GIS would contribute to your project?” The next thing you know, they are off and running. Again, and as Jonathan so eloquently described it, it is an extraordinary collective enterprise. Talk about fingerprints! Their fingerprints are all over each other’s papers — and they know it — by the time they’re done. FENDERSON: I would just agree with everything Jean said. The benefit of having a kind of community that’s so interdisciplinary is not only does it help us understand the way other people are thinking about things, but it helps us situate ourselves better. Sometimes we’re so close to the topic and we know the immediate audience we’re speaking to, but somebody who’s further away can shine a light and give us a sense of exactly where we’re standing. Sometimes the students get a little nervous about the interdisciplinary factor and, then, when you have a conversation about it, they realize human beings don’t fit into disciplines. They’ve been thinking interdisciplinarily their whole lives. In fact, we’re not asking them to change their behavior as much as we’re asking them to take stock of all the ways they’ve already been doing these things.
40
f a c u lt y r e s e a r c h s u p p o r t
INTERNAL GRANTS 2021–22
SUMMER FACULTY RESEARCH GRANTS Rebecca Copeland | East Asian Languages and Cultures Uno Chiyo: Bad Girl of Good Housekeeping Robin McDowell | African and AfricanAmerican Studies Digging, Drilling, and Dependence: Resource Extraction and Black Life on the Cajun Coast ROLAND GRIMM TRAVEL AWARDS Rachel Brown | Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies Imperial Friendships: Settler Colonialism and the “New Humanitarianism” in the U.S. and Israel Jianqing Chen | East Asian Languages and Cultures & Film and Media Studies Put Down the Hoe, Pick Up the Smartphone: The Emergence of Rural Internet Influencers in Contemporary China Rebecca Copeland | East Asian Languages and Cultures Uno Chiyo: Bad Girl of Good Housekeeping COLLABORATIVE RESEARCH SEED GRANTS Flora Cassen | Jewish, Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies Translating the Americas: Early Modern Jewish Writings on the New World Melanie Micir | English The Paris Project FACULTY SEMINARS C21 STL: A Faculty Seminar on the Contemporary (2020–23) Convener: Melanie Micir (English) WRITING GROUPS NEW Interdisciplinary Dissertation and Publication Writing Group Graduate student conveners: Trent McDonald (graduate student in English), Heesoo Cho (graduate student in History)
Interdisciplinary Postdoctoral Writing Group Postdoctoral fellow conveners: Anna Whittington (postdoctoral fellow in Interdisciplinary Program in the Humanities), Rosanne Liebermann (postdoctoral fellow in Jewish, Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies) RENEWALS Literary Translation Workshop Graduate student convener: Olivia Lott (graduate student in Romance Languages and Literatures) Religion and Literature Writing Group Graduate student conveners: Ann Marie Jakubowsk (graduate student in English), Shirley Anghel (graduate student in Romance Languages and Literatures) READING GROUPS NEW The Real of Psychoanalysis and Marxism Reading Group Graduate student conveners: Santiago Rozo Sanchez (graduate student in Romance Languages and Literatures), Katja Perat (graduate student in Comparative Literature) Transregional East Asia Reading Group Graduate student conveners: Haochen Wang (graduate student in History), Kejian Shi (graduate student in History) The Literature and Performance Reading Group Graduate student conveners: Alexandra Swanson (graduate student in English), Sara Brenes Akerman (graduate student in English) The Genre-Bending Reading Group Graduate student conveners: Karla Aguilar Velasquez (graduate student in Romance Languages and Literatures), Maddie HouseTuck (graduate student in Performing Arts), Yuhua Shi (graduate student in East Asian Languages and Cultures)
center for the humanities
RENEWALS Medical Humanities Reading Group Conveners: Carolyn Sargent (Anthropology), Corinna Treitel (History) Queering the Transnational Conversation Reading Group Conveners: Jeffrey McCune (Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies & Performing Arts), Zeles Vargas (graduate student in Anthropology) A History of the Present Reading Group Conveners: Shefali Chandra (History), Andrea Friedman (History) Sports and Society Reading Group Conveners: Noah Cohen (American Culture Studies), Sunita Parikh (Political Science) Projecting Latin American Cinema Reading Group Graduate student conveners: Yamile Ferreira (graduate student in Romance Languages and Literatures), Rodrigo Viqueira (graduate student in Romance Languages and Literatures) Poetry and Poetics Reading Group Graduate student conveners: Alex Mouw (graduate student in English), Ann Marie Jakubowsk (graduate student in English) Kierkegaard and Existentialism Reading Group Graduate student convener: Judith Carlisle (graduate student in Philosophy) Here Comes Everybody: The Finnegans Wake Reading Group Graduate student conveners: Ian Clark (graduate student in English), Matthew Thompson (graduate student in English) Early Modern Reading Group Conveners: Rob Henke (Comparative Literature & Performing Arts), Julie James (graduate student in Art History and Archaeology)
Approaches to Literary Pedagogy Reading Group Graduate student conveners: Charlotte Fressilli (graduate student in English), Ana Quiring (graduate student in English) SUMMER RESEARCH SEED GRANTS Paul Steinbeck | Music Black Earth: Nicole Mitchell and the Future of Creative Music Diana Montaño | History (Dis) Placing Necaxa: Power Networks and Erased Histories in Mexico (1890s–1914) WEINER HUMANITIES RESEARCH GRANTS Rebecca Messbarger | Romance Languages and Literatures Ghostly Light: How Criminal Corpses Animated the Italian Enlightenment Michael Sherberg | Romance Languages and Literatures Italian Literature, Middle Ages and Renaissance Ila Sheren | Art History and Archaeology Contemporary Art on the U.S.-Mexico Border; Eco-art Harriet Stone | Romance Languages and Literatures Observing, Interpreting and Inventing the World William Acree | Romance Languages and Literatures Mapping Street Cultures and Writing the Humanities of the Future Javier García-Liendo | Romance Languages and Literatures Schoolteachers and the Making of Popular Modernity in Peru
41
Stephanie Kirk | Romance Languages and Literatures Global Martyrs: Jesuit Missionaries in Early Modern England, Ireland and the Hispanic World Melanie Micir | English Disappearing Women: Old Age and Modern Fiction
42
f a c u lt y r e s e a r c h s u p p o r t
BEST ADVICE FROM RECENT FELLOWSHIP & GRANT AWARDEES Become a strategic front loader. Being a strategic front loader is about conveying compellingly at the outset of your proposal the value of the project and its appeal — hopefully broad — to scholars from beyond your field (or specific area of expertise). Strategically this means presenting the problems/questions/themes in need of attention, and suggesting how your project will provide solutions, answers or a meaningful frame of exploration, all within the first paragraph or two. You want readers to come away from that paragraph knowing the significance of your project and the path you’ll take. — Billy Acree (RLL) Readers may have to sort among many proposals and may develop (even unwittingly) strategies of elimination. Therefore, it’s important to grab their attention early. Make sure your first paragraph explains the novelty of your project. — Michael Sherberg (RLL) Know the audience for your proposal. It will likely include scholars outside your subfield, so you must write with smart but not especially knowledgeable readers in mind. You might consider asking a smart friend in another academic field to read it and give you feedback on where you need to assume less specialized knowledge. — Laurie Maffly-Kipp (Religion and Politics)
Think of a fellowship application as a pedagogical device. We are teaching our field — what matters in it, what moves have been made, how our own scholarship changes the landscape and why all of it is exciting. I think trouble can arise when we approach fellowship applications as carving out a space for ourselves: We get too narrow and speak too much to specialists in our own field. But if we think of ourselves as teachers when we write these, then we automatically begin speaking beyond just the people who know our field well. And readers of fellowship applications (at least in my experience) like to learn something in the process.
you do that. I always include a separate paragraph or section that lists in as much detail as possible the research methods (it doesn’t have to be long but it does have to be specific) — for historians, for instance, not only the archival institutions but the series titles within specific collections held there; how do you expect they will answer your research questions? Reviewers will move quickly through large stacks of proposals, so be sure yours is legible for skimmers.
— Abram Van Engen (English)
— Jessica Rosenfeld (English)
Don’t hesitate to draw explicit links between your research and contemporary events/ debates in your proposal. Privately, you may wish to argue for the relevance of your research on its own precisely drawn terms, but showing how your work can inform contemporary understandings of X or Y is very helpful for reviewers who are reading quickly and almost certainly do not share your expertise. While you don’t have to pitch your project as anything other than what it is, emphasizing its broadest possible relevance can be a good strategy.
Receiving a major grant is a great honor, but being turned down, which anyway is the more likely outcome, is actually not that bad. Putting together a competitive proposal will, without a doubt, advance any research project, and while reading reviewers’ comments may at first feel like being kicked around, the feedback is going to be invaluable for future iterations of the grant proposal and for the project as a whole. We should never let a good rejection go to waste.
— Paige McGinley (PAD) It seems basic, but be sure to read carefully the grant description and application instructions — and follow them! If they ask you to describe your plan for the fellowship period, make a section of the proposal called “Plan for the fellowship period.” Weave in core words from the call and organization’s mission: If they look for comparative projects, explain how yours is explicitly comparative and use the word; if they want interdisciplinary or collaborative research, use those terms and explain how
— Nancy Reynolds (History) Make the biggest sustainable claim you can for the significance of your research.
— Tabea Linhard (RLL)
center for the humanities
WORKSHOPS AND RETREATS Proposal Writing Information Session and Workshop The competition for external funding in humanities and humanistic social sciences is fierce. Since 2014, the Center for the Humanities has organized an information session and workshop for faculty and postdocs pursuing such opportunities. The August 2021 program included an information session held via Zoom on proposal writing from a reviewer’s perspective, led by humanities center director Jean Allman, and a discussion of “the best of the best advice” from recent fellowship and grant awardees (a selection of which is shared at left). Faculty who were preparing to submit a proposal in fall 2021 or spring 2022 were invited to workshop their proposals with small peer groups, led by Jean Allman (African and African-American Studies), Ignacio Infante (Comparative Literature, Romance Languages and Literatures), Jessica Rosenfeld (English) and Rebecca Copeland (East Asian Languages and Cultures). Participants gave critical readings of one another’s proposals and offered observations at their first meeting. At the second meeting, they shared their revised proposals.
Scholarly Writing Retreat The annual Scholarly Writing Retreat offers Washington University humanities and humanistic social sciences faculty, postdocs and graduate students the opportunity to jump-start their summer writing in a motivated, supportive and collaborative atmosphere. Returning to an in-person format for the first time since 2019, 25 participants signed up for the 2022 year’s retreat, held May 24– June 3. Participants fanned out across writing spaces in Umrath Hall and gathered for a weekly communal lunch and optional group discussion on writing strategies. As members of this structured and supportive virtual writing community, participants made progress on a range of projects: dissertations, book chapters, proposals and articles.
43
44
minors
CHILDREN’S STUDIES Amy Pawl, Teaching Professor of English; and Desirée White, Professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences; Co-Directors In the Children’s Studies minor, students learn about children and childhood while drawing on the expertise of faculty from across Washington University. Minors develop a sophisticated interdisciplinary understanding of childhood and the issues surrounding the treatment and status of children throughout history. Accordingly, the minor attracts students with a broad range of interests. In 2021–22, students combined the minor with majors in Anthropology, Biology, Cognitive Neuroscience, Global Health and Environment, Educational Studies, Psychological and Brain Science, and Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies. Prior years have included students from American Culture Studies, Art History and English. All majors are welcome, and the Senior Seminar this year was greatly enriched by the diversity of student expertise brought to each session! Graduates from the Class of 2022 share their experiences MARY KATHERINE TOWNSEND, African and African-American Studies “As an African and African-American Studies major with interests in Spanish and children, I structured my courses within an interdisciplinary framework that would meet not only major/minor requirements but personal interests. For example, within Professor Gerald Early’s class “African Americans and Children’s Literature,” I was able to study the way that black childhood
specifically was conceptualized through the various pieces of literature that were written for or about black children in the past century. Engaging with this literature allowed me to see the parallels that remain today, especially as I furthered my studies within the AFAS department.” EMILY XU, Biology “Before I took even one course that was categorized under Children’s Studies, I was already volunteering with children in schools, at The Magic House and in the hospital. In spite of my familiarity with overseeing and mentoring children, though, I did not yet have an intellectual framework that I could apply to my work. The minor framed childhood from multiple perspectives: I studied childhood in a literary setting; as an experience that shifts depending on time and place; and as a process that involves overarching patterns of development based in biology (my major). Now, I can confidently claim that the Children’s Studies minor has provided me with an academic foundation for my future roles in the field of medicine.” ALLIE KAPLAN, Psychology “The Children’s Studies minor has led me on a path of discovery and deep engagement with the St. Louis community and with topics such as race, gender and socioeconomic status. My experience with the minor complemented my Psychology major and furthered my interest in
Graduating seniors (left to right) Mary Katherine Townsend, Emily Xu, Allie Kaplan and Maisie Rees share their experiences in the Children’s Studies minor.
understanding how children develop social cognition and learn to engage with the world around them. The courses that I have taken within Children’s Studies greatly impacted my future career path. This fall, I will be pursuing a clinical psychology PsyD at Loyola University Maryland, with the ultimate goal of becoming a child psychologist.” MAISIE REES, Educational Studies “The Children’s Studies minor and my Educational Studies major were incredibly complementary. The Children’s Studies minor helped me find the specific topics that piqued my interest, while also exposing me to a holistic view of childhood that considers the wide range of historical, social and family contexts that impact children’s lived experiences. I was able to personalize my minor experience to fit my special interests, focusing on early childhood and children with disabilities. With this foundational understanding of the complexities of childhood, I feel excited and prepared to continue my journey in higher education with the Early Childhood Special Education master’s program at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.”
center for the humanities
Celebrating Medical Humanities’ newest graduates (left to right): Kiara Mallory, Zoe Hancock, Noor Ghanam, Auriann Sehi, Alicia Yang and Josephine Moten.
MEDICAL HUMANITIES Rebecca Messbarger, Director and Professor of Italian and Affiliate Faculty in History, Art History, and Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies It was an eventful year for the undergraduate minor in Medical Humanities. As a course of study that brings the insights of the arts and humanities to bear on medical practice, Medical Humanities captured in extraordinary ways the historic experience of COVID-19 that we are living and the necessary interpretive power of the humanities to make sense of this time. COVID was a vital touchstone in Medical Humanities courses, student projects and such extracurricular programming as the “Covid Archive” led by past director Corinna Treitel, and the “Requiem of Light Memorial” for the 4,000 St. Louisans lost to COVID that director Rebecca Messbarger organized with the help of student volunteers. Noor Ghanam: “The med hum minor has been my favorite experience at WashU… I learned that medicine is a deeply justice oriented and humanistic field.” Kiara Mallory: “I came to WashU premed and went straight to the med school to do research in immunology. … I was studying cells and bodies, but [Medical Humanities] taught to me to look at the whole human being.” Alicia Yang: “My question coming into college was, How am I supposed to ‘take into my arms a patient and a family that have disintegrated’ because of illness?. … Medical Humanities helped me answer that question [and taught me about] the importance of
45
language for a patient’s understanding of their illness and my understanding of my own humanity.” This year, the minor added a new thematic focus on Medicine, Race and Ethnicity to our current disciplinary clusters and expanded its core curriculum to include, among other courses, Sowande’ Mustakeem’s “Women and Crime in the Evolution of American History” and Geoff Ward’s “Histories of Racial Violence, Legacies and Reckonings.” Medical Humanities also co-sponsored a panel discussion organized by Messbarger on the Black Rep’s production of Charly Evon Simpson’s play Behind the Sheet, inspired by the true story of Dr. J. Marion Sims’ harrowing experimental gynecological surgeries on enslaved Black women to find a cure for obstetric fistula. Director Ron Himes joined Hedwig Lee, professor of sociology; Sowande’ Mustakeem, professor of history; Dineo Khabele, MD, the Mitchell & Elaine Yanow Professor of Obstetrics & Gynecology and chair of the Department of Obstetrics & Gynecology at Washington University School of Medicine; and Yolanda Wilson, professor of philosophy at Saint Louis University’s Gnaegi Center of Healthcare Ethics to discuss the layered suffering endured by the “Mothers of Gynecology” and the ongoing legacy of racist and racialized medicine. This year also saw new opportunities approved for medical humanities students to
study in Copenhagen, Stockholm, Chile and Kings College, London. We look forward to further development of our programming during the upcoming 2022–2023 academic year, which will include a student-run symposium on “Race and Medicine in St. Louis: Past to Future.” We invite you to peruse our website, which features student projects, faculty and student profiles, and selected programmatic initiatives.
46
g i v i n g o p p o rt u n i t i e s
Scenes from the 2022–23 academic year. The Center for the Humanities was thrilled to return to inperson events, including fellow workshops, a scholarly writing retreat and public lectures such as the James E. McLeod Memorial Lecture on Higher Education and Faculty Book Celebration. Virtual viewing options enabled access to even greater audiences.
GIVING OPPORTUNITIES
How You Can Help Your support enables vital humanities research and the dissemination of new findings, scholarly exchanges, student research experiences and engagement with the greater public.
The Center for the Humanities is dedicated to the promotion of humanistic thinking, inquiry and scholarly production as activities essential to this university, the community we serve and the broader world. The center facilitates the work of humanists, both faculty and students, by nurturing innovative research, transformative pedagogy and vibrant community engagement locally and globally.
A $1.25 million endowment will permanently support the entire Faculty Fellowship program; $200,000 will endow one Faculty Fellowship.
Please take part in helping us to expand and deepen the reach of the humanities and the important contributions our center achieves. The Center for the Humanities asks for your support in promoting our mission at Washington University as well as in our local community and around the world.
$1 million will endow one postdoctoral fellow in residence at the humanities center; $90,000 will support a postdoctoral fellow for one year. $600,000 will endow the entire Graduate Student Fellowship program; $30,000 will support the entire program for one year. $300,000 will permanently endow a Visiting Scholar program, allowing for an extended visit each year by a new high-profile scholar. $200,000 will permanently endow the annual James E. McLeod Memorial Lecture on Higher Education. $15,000 provides funding for the Kling Undergraduate Honors Research Fellowship program for one year. $15,000 will fund the publication of the Humanities Broadsheet for a full academic year. $5,000 will fund a First Book Workshop for one of our Faculty Fellows. $1,000 will provide flexible funding and qualify you for membership in the William Greenleaf Eliot Society. Gifts of any amount provide vital, ongoing support. To make a gift in support of the Center for the Humanities, please contact Director and Professor Stephanie Kirk (314-935-5576 or skirk@wustl.edu) or Executive 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 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, University Advancement, Attn: Deborah Stine, One Brookings Drive, MSC 1202-414-3100, St. Louis, MO 63130.
center for the humanities
47
48
ADMINISTRATIVE STAFF
Jean Allman Director, Center for the Humanities Professor, Department of African and African-American Studies J.H. Hexter Professor in the Humanities, with appointments in History and Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies Ignacio Infante Associate Director, Center for the Humanities Associate Professor, Comparative Literature and Romance Languages and Literatures
Executive Committee Patrick Burke | Associate Professor of Ethnomusicology and Chair of the Department of Music Joanna Dee Das | Assistant Professor of Dance Danielle Dutton | Associate Professor of English Matt Erlin | Professor of German Jonathan Fenderson | Associate Professor of African and African-American Studies
Wendy Love Anderson Assistant Director of Academic Programs
Melanie Micir | Associate Professor of English
Alicia Dean Administrative Coordinator II
Ila Sheren | Associate Professor of Art History and Archaeology
Kathleen G. Fields Publications and Communications Editor
Zoe Stamatopoulou | Associate Professor of Classics
Caitlin McCoy Assistant Accountant II
Corinna Treitel | Professor of History
Laura Perry Assistant Director for Research and Public Engagement Trisha Sutton Administrative Cluster Supervisor The Center for the Humanities congratulates Barbara Liebmann on her retirement and thanks her for her service as the humanities center’s administrative coordinator from 2006 to 2021. We also congratulate Tila Neguse, longtime coordinator for the Divided City Initiative, on her new role as associate director of Washington University’s Center for the Study of Race, Ethnicity & Equity.
Contact details Center for the Humanities Washington University in St. Louis MSC 1071-153-207 One Brookings Drive, St. Louis, MO 631304899 314-935-5576 Umrath Hall, Room 217 cenhum@wustl.edu humanities.wustl.edu facebook.com/WashUHumanities twitter.com/WashUHumanities
center for the humanities
A VIEW THROUGH THE YEARS In tribute to Jean Allman Director, Center for the Humanities, 2014–22
49
Center for the Humanities MSC 1071-153-20 Washington University in St. Louis 1 Brookings Drive St. Louis, MO 63130-4899
Nonprofit U.S. Postage PAID St. Louis, MO Permit No. 2535