University of Virginia, College and Graduate School of Arts and Sciences

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Mellon Fellow Projects

Mamadou Dia

Assistant Professor

Kevin Driscoll

Associate Professor, Associate Chair

Natasha Heller

Associate Professor, Associate Chair

The Social Implications of Grammatical Gender in Biblical Law & Early Rabbinic Commentary (c. 300 CE)

Elizabeth Shanks Alexander

Professor

Dreaming Sufism in the Sokoto Caliphate: Dreams and Knowledge in African Islamic Philosophy

Oludamini Ogunnaike

Associate Professor of African Religious Thought and Democracy

“The Long Eighteenth Century?”

“The "Long" Eighteenth Century?” – The focus of my research while a Mellon Humanities Fellow takes off from the ubiquity of the phrase: "the long eighteenth century." Proliferating in calls for participation and panel descriptions throughout art history and visual culture studies, if the mark of an elongated eighteenth century is inescapable, this terminology merits further scrutiny. During my period as a Mellon Fellow, I will consider the rise of a "long" eighteenth century alongside the significant transformation of art historical inquiry into expanded geographical and cultural terrains. What is meant by the "long" eighteenth century? From which vantage points, and for whom, is it long? And to what ends has this elongation been directed? And what impact, if any, has a "worlding" of art history had upon humanistic thinking about the relative length or shortness, the narrowness or breadth, of the eighteenth century? My consideration of these questions will take the form of a historiographic analysis–rooted in art history but with a vantage onto scholarship in allied humanistic disciplines–that will appear in a special issue of Journal 18 that I am co-editing with Prof. Dipti Khera (New York University/Institute of Fine Arts), and that will appear in late 2021.

Sarah Betzer

Associate Professor

“Mining Language: Racial Thinking, Indigenous Knowledge, and Colonial Metallurgy in the Early Modern Iberian World”

I am beginning a new project at IHGC, one that builds from the methods that I developed in my first book, Mining Language: Racial Thinking, Indigenous Knowledge, and Colonial Metallurgy in the Early Modern Iberian World (Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture for the University of North Carolina Press, May 2020). My new project turns from mining to agriculture, another critical vernacular science and a root paradigm of settler colonialism. In what I am tentatively titling Women of Corn, Men of Corn: The Meanings of Maize Agriculture in the Early Americas, I will compare agricultural technologies and the techniques of maize cultivation in two regions of the hemisphere, Mayan-speaking Mesoamerica, where men grew crops, and the Algonquin-speaking Chesapeake, where women took charge of farming. This framework of similarity and difference will allow me to analyze how gender influenced agricultural life, and how agricultural patterns shaped gender systems, before and after the European invasion.

Allison Bigelow

Tom Scully Discovery Chair Associate Professor of Spanish

“State of Place, State of Mind: Vernacular Landscapes in Contemporary French Photography”

Since the mid-1980s, art photographers from metropolitan France have been training their lenses on places throughout the country they call home. Their work constitutes a dynamic, thoughtful, and altogether transformative way of envisioning what on the surface might seem like perfectly mundane locations, but which the photographs endorse as landscapes endowed with the capacity to expand and indeed “scape” our experience and understanding of modern France. My current book project, The Topographic Imaginary: Attending to Place in Contemporary French Photography, introduces readers to a selection of some of the most compelling artists who exemplify this trend. Particularly sensitive to the physiognomic state of the nation today—and to environments both natural and manmade—the pictures they produce depict diverse sectors of terrain from throughout urban, peri-urban, and rural France. They are especially adept at rendering the variegated contours and surface features of some of the nation’s most unheralded and vernacular landscapes more visible than they have ever been before. As they investigate various zones of the real that, under most conditions, would normally elude us, these images contribute to a consistently emerging sense of place and shape our gaze of late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century France in exciting new ways. They invest the places they picture with meaning and re-negotiate how the nation has come to be seen. They revisit, challenge, and disorient dominant conceptions associated with the French photographic tradition and the mythologies it has engendered. And they show how contemporary photographers deploy the medium and experiment with its conventions to reimagine a more traditional and time-worn idea of the country’s shared common space.

Ari Blatt

Associate Professor

“Cairo’s Sabils: Gifting Water”

My research focuses on sabils, or charitable water fountains, as a key location for exploring vernacular water architecture and investigating the underlying conceptual frameworks that give them life. Sabils are important parts of the built environment of Cairo, drawing on religious precedence and enacting everyday ethical notions of reciprocity. They are particularly important in the changing environmental conditions of Cairo and point to the ways in which vernacular and small-scale water infrastructure can add to the picture of urban water resilience in the context of Climate Change. As vernacular memorials, sabils operate as the conduit and material co-producers of hasanat (merits accrued with God) for the souls of departed loved ones. As nodes in neighborly relations, sabils engage neighbors in practices of asynchronous exchanges of the embodied kindness of a cold drink of water and the ephemeral gift of participating in the accrual of divine favor. Sabils are an important manifestation of local process of creative resilience, everyday practices of tinkering and collective action that probe the limits of the possible, work to remake the built environment and stich together fluid social networks, and stake claims to the city. Additionally, the project will investigate the diversity of material forms, practices of care and repair for clay and metal water infrastructure, embodied notions of smell, taste and temperature, a shifting history of social responses to a material context of hardship, and practices of neighborliness that draw on religious traditions to shape the livability and transversability of Cairo’s urban landscapes.

Tessa Farmer

Assistant Professor

“Mapping Indigenous/UVA Relations”

Mapping Indigenous/UVA Relations: Stories of Space, Place, and Histories is a participatory action methodological project that focuses on sparsely documented Indigenous relations with the University of Virginia. This project combines archival materials related to Indigenous histories and presences in and around UVA with Virginia tribal citizens’ personal digital stories that articulate Indigenous perspectives, knowledge, and stories of space, place, and histories. Digital stories are powerful and brief visual narratives that have the potential to uncover histories layered into the fabric of UVA, Charlottesville, and the surrounding areas. Centering tribal citizens not as research participants, but as research partners, shifts power dynamics inherent in traditional research methods, allowing for new knowledge to emerge that is mediated by Indigenous perspectives and returns this knowledge to communities as Indigenously-informed. This project seeks to offer an alternative to mainstream mapping techniques that, when created by Indigenous peoples, serve as a localized counter-mapping project using multi-sensorial techniques to imbue meaning and ways of knowing spaces and places. As a new modality for “sensing” Indigenous research, digital stories combined with archived materials enable us to conceptualize place not just cognitively, but through the many sensory channels of experience, revealing unspoken insights and embodied or visually-articulated life-worlds not easily captured through traditional means. Taking seriously digital stories as sense-making intimate objects, Indigenous-produced digital stories have the capacity to serve as transformative artifacts of understanding, pushing the production of knowledge – and just what constitutes this knowledge – in new directions to inform our understandings of Indigenous/UVA relations.  

Kasey Jernigan

Assistant Professor of Anthropology and American Studies

“India’s Partition: Literature, Culture, Politics”

How did the partition of the Indian subcontinent resolve the problem of belonging for minority religious communities – in India, Pakistan, and later, Bangladesh? If Pakistan was designed to create a ‘homeland’ for the Muslims of the subcontinent, was India meant to serve as a homeland for the Hindus? How, then, did the Hindus of Pakistan and the Muslims of India learn to live and build community in these newly majoritarian countries? Did the state ideologies of secularism and Islam enable both minorities and majorities to flourish on terms of equality? In ‘The Problem of Belonging after the Partition of India’, I examine debates on political representation alongside literary representations of religious minorities as a way to understand how the contradictions wrought by the partition were sought to be resolved in subsequent decades. This is part of a longer book length project on India’s Partition: Politics, Culture, Memory.

Neeti Nair

Associate Professor

“Mimetic Musical Modernism: The Case of Maurice Ravel”

“If human beings suddenly ceased imitating, all forms of culture would vanish.” This striking statement by René Girard not only ascribes to mimesis the ability to generate culture, but also implicitly challenges scholars to determine how mimesis operates within the cultural field they study. Many have risen to this challenge, but the question still remains: How does mimesis operate within western music, especially during the modern era?

 

The music of the French composer Maurice Ravel (1875–1937) can help us to answer this question. Mimesis manifests itself variously in this music, but most pointedly in two contrasting modernist forms that I refer to as “genealogical” and “commercial.” Genealogical mimesis involves modeling new works on old, and conceives of composition as craft. Commercial mimesis involves the replication, circulation, and transformation of mass-market artistic idioms, such as exoticism. In commercial mimesis, music is a commodity.

 

The first step in my project is to examine the interaction of these categories within Ravel’s music. I then widen the investigation to include a broader swath of modernist music. Finally I situate this body of musical practice within the emergent cultural-intellectual discourse on mimesis at the turn of the twentieth century. Guided by figures such as Tarde, Nietzsche, Frazer, Mauss, and Freud, this discourse gradually pivoted from conceiving mimesis as a threat to western civilization to advancing it as a foundational principle.

Michael Puri

Associate Professor

“Not Me: Addiction, Release, and Response in Central Uganda"

Higher Powers: Alcohol and After in Uganda’s Capital City is a collaborative monograph (co-authored by George Mpanga and Sarah Namirembe) that draws on four years of fieldwork carried out with Ugandans working to reconstruct their lives after attempting to leave problematic forms of alcohol use behind.  Given the relatively recent introduction of Western ideas of alcoholism and addiction in Uganda, most of these people have used other therapeutic resources including herbal emetic therapies, engagements with lubaale spirits, and forms of deliverance and spiritual warfare practiced in Pentecostal churches.  Entailed in each of these therapeutic forms are understandings of the self that have profound consequences for the forms of life and sociality that can follow an effort to stop drinking. While these therapeutic forms differ from one another in substantial ways, they all present challenges to the prevailing biomedical model of addiction as a chronic relapsing brain disease.  In so doing, Higher Powers moves towards a reconceptualization of addiction and recovery that may prove relevant well beyond Uganda.  Further, in attending to these vernacular therapeutic forms, Higher Powers points to the need to attend more carefully to the place of spiritual experiences in processes of personal transformation and argues for the importance of giving renewed attention to forms of indigenous medical and spiritual practice in the medical anthropology of Africa. 

China Scherz

Associate Professor

“An Epic Tale of Sorrow and Joy: Slavery, Migration, and the Mediterranean Journeys of an Ottoman Manuscript”

What meaning did a fictional Ottoman tale and the manuscript containing it have to those who copied, read, heard, and owned it? An Epic Tale of Sorrow and Joy is an interdisciplinary microhistory that explores the many meanings, uses, and journeys of an otherwise unremarkable manuscript—the only extant copy of an eponymous Ottoman Turkish story of forced migration, fortune, and loss set in the seventeenth-century Mediterranean—held at the British Library. Tracing the parallel lives of the story’s characters and the manuscript’s early nineteenth-century Ottoman and European owners, this study considers the contexts in which such manuscripts were produced, consumed, collected, and sold, and the lives of the migrants, travelers, and slaves that inspired them. By following this unique manuscript from Izmir to Istanbul and Corfu to London, I aim to bring to light a lost history of cultural exchange and appropriation, travel and migration. 

Joshua M. White

Associate Professor

Mobility and Knowledge in the Mongol Empire

This project investigates patterns of migration, transmission of knowledge, and interreligious history after the Mongol conquests of the Middle East and East Asia in the late Middle Ages (1206-1405 A.D.). This Mellon Humanities Fellowship funds research into the history of Islamic learning under the aegis of the Mongol Empire and, specifically, the founding of “mobile schools,” or madrasas, which accompanied the nomadic (transhumant) Mongolian institution of the ordo, or the peripatetic court. Described by Marco Polo and Ibn Baṭṭūṭa as a traveling city, this royal court played a crucial role in projecting Mongol political power into the world, in transmitting knowledge of science (particularly astronomy) and philosophy globally, from China to the Middle East and to Eastern Europe, and in creating a lively history of religious polemics among Muslims, Christians, Jews, and Buddhists.

Ahmed H. al-Rahim

Associate Professor

Citizen Participation and Urban Planning in Byzantine Athens

My project on Byzantine urbanism and Athens in particular, seeks to reconstruct the topography and spatial layout of Byzantine Athens (4th-15th c AD), and better understand contemporary living conditions and socio-economic activities in the city. Emphasis is placed on city-making processes and particularly the role of non-elite, ordinary people in them. Similar to modern cities, Byzantine ones were stages of key political events ranging from rituals that celebrated imperial power to riots and acts of resistance. I thus approach Byzantine cities as highly political environments and explore city-making activities as political actions. In doing so, I pay equal attention to monumental public spaces such as churches, fora and hippodromes as well as streets, open areas, and common areas out and around houses. I also examine changes in the urban environment that point to ordinary people’s involvement and consider the impact of such activities in enhancing their social capital and political influence. My project provides new approaches to the reconstruction of Byzantine cities by attempting to rewrite Athens’ history from the perspective of ordinary people’s individual and collective experiences. It also contributed to a diachronic study of urban phenomena placing emphasis on the relation between different civic groups, urban planning and political action.

Fotini Kondyli

Assistant Professor

Age of Emergency: Living with Violence at the End of Empire

How did British society respond — or fail to respond — to the use of torture, summary executions, and other atrocities in its overseas empire after 1945?  Although the absence of sustained outrage at the time has often been attributed to the absence of information, awareness of brutal violence was in fact widespread.  Many different communities or “circles of knowing” — soldiers, missionaries, activists, aid workers, journalists, playwrights, filmmakers, novelists — bridged the gap between the conflict zones of empire and everyday life in Britain.  But the same ways of knowing which eroded secrecy about violence also undermined action to stop it.  Age of Emergency chronicles the tactics of accommodation which surfaced again and again in post-1945 Britain: insisting on the unknowability of definitive truth about violence; distinguishing between knowledge of violence and the duty to act on it; valorizing the acceptance of “hard truths” as a virtue in itself; and dissolving specific acts of harm into universal morality tales. 

Erik Linstrum

Associate Professor

Reinventing Photography: Technology and Visuality in Senegal (1860-1960)

My current book project reframes narratives of photography’s origin and originality by zooming into the first one hundred years of photography in Senegal (1860-1960). Senegal has received significant attention as one of the epicenters of modernism in the Black Atlantic, and yet, the advent of photography in the country in the 1840s has hardly been considered in shaping the local experience of modernity. Rather than approaching photography as either a “local” or a “foreign” technology, this project builds on Ariella Azoulay’s idea that photography is not “susceptible to monopolization.” Not only couldn’t the colonizers hold this technology hostage, but no one could. Photography—as analogic image, reproducible copy, movable object, portable technology, and itinerant authorship—travels unbound to time and space and cannot be contained. Based on nearly ten years of field and archival research in Senegal, this book will foreground four case studies, each considering different materialities, genres, aesthetics and authors that will at once undermine the linearity of photography’s history and show how the photographic image, in its analogic relation to the world, is constantly being re-invented and in the process, it has the power to disrupt imperial expectations.

Giulia Paoletti

Assistant Professor

Energetic Media: Thermodynamics and the German Avante-Garde

This project will examine the reception of thermodynamics within the media theory and practice of the 1920s German avant-garde. In the nineteenth century, the science of thermodynamics placed energy, rather than matter, at the center of a new understanding of the physical universe. As the quintessential science of the industrial revolution, thermodynamics was concerned with movement and efficiency, with bodies and engines, with systems and circulation—subjects that would fascinate important strains of the German avant-garde over half a century later. Focusing on artists associated with Bauhaus and the G group, I will investigate how the interwar avant-garde reckoned with a world transformed by the science of energy and took up aspects of the broader cultural imaginary of thermodynamics. I am particularly interested in seeing how individual works negotiated the tension between cultural revitalization—which reflected the avant-garde’s energetic, productivist ambition—and the thermodynamic concept of entropy, which inspired visions of historical decline.

Paul Dobryden

Assistant Professor

Religion of Humanity: Spirituality, Politics and the United Nations

My year as a Mellon Fellow will support work on a book in progress, called The Religion of Humanity: Spirituality, Politics, and the United NationsThe Religion of Humanity explores the religious history of world government, going back into the nineteenth century and forward to the late twentieth, though centrally concerned with the UN and its religious contexts, constituencies, and contestations in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s. The long arc of the plot follows the intersecting histories of two great liberal dreams of the modern age—the religious vision of a shared “religion of humanity” and the political vision of world government—as they converged and diverged across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. At its most expansive, then, this is a book about human oneness, and how that was conceived, spiritually and politically, across nearly two centuries. At its most narrow, it’s a book that examines in detail the religious and political struggles around the United Nations in the mid-twentieth century. The Religion of Humanity will be the first book to examine the religious history of the UN and world government at this scope, including both the religious genealogy of its animating ideals and the many shades of religious significance it came to acquire once established. The theoretical concerns that frame the project, about spirituality, liberalism, cosmopolitanism, and secularism, come from religious studies, political theory, and US religious and political history.

Matthew Hedstrom

Associate Professor

Border Patrol on the Digital Frontier: China, US and the Global Battle for Data Security

The Internet once promised the free and open flow of data across borders, but the demands of national sovereignty are increasingly limiting the movement of data between countries. Nowhere is the tension between the free movement and the regulation of data flows more significant than in the Sino-US relationship. Through analyses of corporate case studies, Chinese data regulations, and interview data, I contend that China’s increasing control of the global movement of data draws much of its power from a combination of US investors and the absence of a centralized US media and technology policy. Using cases from the global entertainment, payment, mobility, surveillance, and cybersecurity industries, my project examines how US free-market policies ultimately enhance, rather than counteract, Chinese efforts to enact new standards and control the global movement of data.

Aynne Kokas

Assistant Professor

Hindu-Muslim Cosmopolitan Cultures in Early Modern South Asia

My current research project explores the fashioning of a cosmopolitan Persian Indian intellectual culture in early modern South Asia at the hands of the Mughal Empire (r. 1526-1857). Specifically, this project focuses upon the particular phenomenon of "translation," both of texts and of broader religio-cultural worlds. The Mughal court devoted considerable resources toward patronizing the translation of numerous Hindu Sanskrit texts into the Persian language, including the text that is the focus of my inquiry, the Sanskrit Yoga-Vasistha. These translations were typically accomplished by teams of Hindu and Muslim court-scholars working in tandem; I analyze these translations, accordingly, as the collaborative effort of Hindu and Muslim scholars to draw upon the vast resources provided by their respective religio-cultural-intellectual traditions in order to forge a new, cosmopolitan inter-religious lexicon in the Persian language. How did these translators find a vocabulary with which to express Hindu, Sanskrit theological ideas – including Hindu notions of God, conceptions of salvation and the afterlife, etc. – in a Persian Islamic idiom? How did these two communities of scholars – one Muslim and the other Hindu – find a shared, common language with which to communicate and to render one another’s religious beliefs mutually comprehensible, such that they could collaboratively craft a new literary and scholarly lexicon – “Hinduism expressed in Islamic terms” – that any educated Persian-reader (Muslim, Hindu, or otherwise) would be able to read and comprehend? These translations thus document, in effect, a kind of early modern Hindu-Muslim “dialogue”: I aim to reconstruct the intellectual and cultural processes by which this dialogue was crafted.

Shankar Nair

Assistant Professor

The Politics of Emergency Claim-Making and it Alternatives

The contemporary world is rife with what might be called “emergency claim-making.” Public officials, journalists, scientists, citizen activist groups and others claim that particular situations are emergencies. In so doing, they seek to direct attention and resources to particular groups or issues, justify exceptions to normal rules and procedures, and/or defend the use of violent force. Their claims, which sometimes reinforce or compete with each other, are accepted, rejected, or ignored by different audiences.

The aim of my book project is to bring the politics of emergency claim-making into view, elucidate how it functions in the context of large-scale global issues such as climate change, epidemics, violent conflict, and migration, evaluate it normatively, and consider alternatives to it. My research so far suggests that the politics of emergency claim-making—as a distinctive set of discourses, institutions, and practices—is a poisoned chalice, especially for marginalized groups: it promises a lot, yet delivers much less—and sometimes does more harm than good. However, it is almost impossible to resist, especially given the dearth of other options. A central aim of the book, therefore, is to show that the politics of emergency claim-making is merely one kind of response to urgency among others; it is not inevitable. Indeed, its limitations offer ample reason to search out alternative languages, practices, and institutional forms for addressing urgent issues.

Jennifer Rubenstein

Associate Professor

South by South/West Asia: Transregional Cartographies of Cinematic Action Genres

I plan to spend my fellowship year developing my second major research project, whose working title is South by South / West Asia: Transregional Cartographies of Cinematic Action Genres. This project arises out of my broader interests in histories of “world cinema” along South-South axes, namely Middle East - South Asia circulation histories of popular cinemas.  South by South / West Asia examines the interface between the geopolitics of wars (the World Wars, the Cold War, and the War on Terror) and the distributions and shifts in global action genres and location shooting – e.g., action adventure films, espionage films, and sci-fi action films – across the Middle East and South Asia. 

Samhita Sunya

Assistant Professor of Transnational Cinema

Moral-Political Subjectivity in the Global HIV/AIDS Pandemic

Throughout the course of the year I would like to ask the following question: what kinds of politico-moral persons are constituted in institutional contexts that combine human rights and personal responsibility approaches to health, and how these kinds of subjectivities relate to local, national, and global forms of the politico-moral represented in health policies? To do so I will draw from research data that I have accumulated over the past twelve years through transnational, multi-sited ethnographic studies of moral and political subjectivity in HIV/AIDS prevention and treatment programs. This research was carried out in some of the world’s most active contexts of international, national, and local collaboration in the response to either large or rapidly growing HIV/AIDS epidemics - Indonesia (Bali), South Africa (the Western Cape), the United States (New York City), Canada (Vancouver), and Russia (St. Petersburg). HIV/AIDS programs in each of these locations increasingly and ambiguously combine human rights and personal responsibility approaches to treatment and prevention, two approaches which until recently were considered incompatible. Therefore, they provide opportunity to ask questions such as: Are there more distal, non-health related consequences of the therapeutic practices of local HIV/AIDS programs that inadvertently shape the political and moral subjectivities of participants in such programs? If so, are they related to the particular combination of moral discourses (human rights, personal responsibility, and local) underlying the therapeutic approach? How are any such consequences experienced by participants and how have they altered their everyday social and political interactions in their networks and communities?

Jarrett Zigon

William and Linda Porterfield Chair of Biomedical Ethics and Professor of Anthropology

Of Cities and the Poetic Imagination in the Premodern and Precolonial Maghrib, 9th-19th Centuries AD

I am working on a new monograph addressing the poetic configuration of the city in the unduly neglected poetry of premodern and precolonial North Africa—hereafter the Maghrib. By exploring the poetic (re)construction, (mis)representation, and (mis)interpretation of al-mad na (the city), the study sheds critical light on the ways in which premodern Maghribi poets constructed idealized and demonized images of their home, host, and rival cities.

Nizar Hermes

Assistant Professor

Refugee Century: An International History

In my project, I am exploring the reasons for the surge in refugees around the world in the past century by adopting a historical approach. I am interested in posing a few questions that require fresh research to answer: how do states and governments of the wealthy western world “see” refugees? Have western/northern states constructed a political regime to contain and perhaps regularize the global refugee problem? If so, how, when, where was such a regime constructed? How have states interacted with international organizations and NGOs (the UN on the one hand and NGOs such as the International Rescue Committee on the other)? What is the global division of labor? How has global refugee policy been shaped by the international politics of war?

William Hitchcock

Professor

The Travels of Islamic Philosophy: The Global Afterlives of Ibn Ṭufayl’s Ḥayy ibn Yaqẓān, 17th c. – 21st c.

I am researching and writing a new monograph exploring the mobile life and afterlives of a single classical Arabic philosophical text as it traveled across Asia, Africa, and Europe. In six chapters, it will examine modern editions and translations of Ibn Tufayl’s twelfth‐century allegory, Hayy ibn Yaqzān, from 1671 to the present. Hayy ibn Yaqzān narrates the story of a boy on an island; he is raised by a doe, eventually attains knowledge of God, and attempts to spread this knowledge. There are over twenty‐five extant modern Arabic editions, some scholarly and some popular of this text. It was translated into over fifteen languages, including all major European languages, Chinese, Hebrew, Japanese, Malay, Turkish, and Urdu. The seventeenth‐century journey of this allegory to Europe is well‐documented, but its global itinerary beyond Europe has been neglected. This project gathers these texts: the allegory’s modern Arabic editions, its modern non‐European translations, and its European reception history.

Murad Idris

Assistant Professor

Unexpected Kinship: Disability and Human Rights in the Literature of the Global South

To complete his book manuscript, Unexpected Kinship, which studies the vibrant literature of the Global South, which contains many colorful figures of disability who not only propel their narratives forward, but also do intricate cultural work. These characters may reflect the reality that, according to the United Nations, most of the world’s disabled people live in developing countries, but authors also deploy characters with these exceptional bodies to signify on a countless number of topics.

Christopher Krentz

Associate Professor

The Kongolese Atlantic: The Central African History of the Haitian Revolution

To finish her manuscript, The Kongolese Atlantic, which tells the remarkable history of Mwana and the more than 300,000 other Kongolese men, women, and children who survived slavery in Saint Domingue, won the only successful slave revolution in history – the Haitian Revolution (1791-1804) – and founded the first black republic, Haiti. Historians have yet to understand the social and cultural history of this important group of people who founded post-independence Haitian society. What was the social and cultural impact of the Kongolese in Saint Domingue? How did Central African men and women use Kongolese knowledge and spiritual technologies to mediate the experience of slavery on both sides of the Atlantic world? Mobley analyzes the Haitian Revolution through the African history of the enslaved revolutionaries. The principal argument of her work is that in order to study the social and cultural history of Africans in the Atlantic world, historians must first understand their lives in Africa: who they were, where they came from, and what cultural tools they brought with them across the Atlantic Ocean.

Christina Mobley

Assistant Professor

Savage Storms in Literature of the Americas

To work on her book Savage Storms, which seeks to answer the following question: What role do tropical cyclones play in literatures and cultures of the Americas? Rogers argues that storms are a disruptive, destabilizing force in twentieth-century narratives written in English, French and Spanish. They are environmentally catastrophic, producing major changes in landscapes and ecosystems. Storms have similarly tumultuous effects on humans, rending social, familial and political fabrics. They provoke migration and create diasporas, often exacerbating inequalities and sometimes encouraging community solidarity. Savage Storms is a new research project that enters into dialogue with several of the categories established by theMellon Humanities Fellows Program: oceanic connections, diaspora, literary works and the effects of climate change lie at the heart of this project.

Charlotte Rogers

Assistant Professor, Spanish

"Telling Matters: Narratives of Ecological Entanglements in Modern Italy"

Project Summary:  Located at the juncture of Italian Studies and ecocriticism, my project aims to explore a selection of texts (in an Italian landscape considered at once in its cultural and topological, semiotic and geographical dimensions), in which the boundaries between what is human and nonhuman, organic and inorganic become blurred and indistinct, and ultimately delineate an ontological condition of inter-connectedness, reciprocity and relationality between materials, places and living organisms. Functioning at once as territory and map, as individual site and cognitive instrument, Italy here is a microcosm, a “local” place that may enlighten the situation of many other “global” places and collectives.

Taking inspiration from the still valid advice by Cheryl Glotfelty (among the scholars who significantly contributed to ecocriticism’s “first wave”) to keep “one foot in literature and the other on land,” I intend to sketch an alternative aesthetic and topographic map of the so called Bel paese by investigating, in tandem, a number of imaginative and physical terrains in modern and contemporary Italy where the places, the human bodies, and the substances that have varyingly marked the nation’s path towards modernity, from the early twentieth century until today, come to “meet” and interact. More in particular, within a conceptual framework informed by  recent theoretical developments within the environmental humanities (biosemiotics, cultural ecology, posthumanism, environmental history, material ecocriticism), I wish to explore the narrative eloquence and agency of (some of) the organic and inorganic materials (e.g. concrete, steel, marble, petroleum, wood, trash) that, in their interaction with human beings’ own selves, corporality, agency and imaginative stories, have contributed to make (but, simultaneously, also “un-make”) the country that is Italy today. This effort will ultimately allow me to reflect on the role these particular, localized Italian narratives (but, by extension, also narratives in general) can play in raising awareness and shaping ideas about our engagement with the places we inhabit and the environment (in Italy and beyond) in the era of the Anthropocene.

Project Update/Status:  For my chapter on "Oil," I am currently exploring Italy’s discursive and material encounter with petroleum, from the general exuberance and "oil boosterism" of the early modernist decades of the 20th century and the years of the economic "boom" (1950s-60s), to more recent critical responses concerned with its toxic effects on bodies and the environment.

Enrico Cesaretti

Professor

"Inventing Informality"

Project Summary: Training a critical, historical lens on these issues, my current book project, Inventing Informality, traces how the bidonville––a term first coined in the 1920s to describe an area on the periphery of Casablanca distinguished by the rapid construction of unauthorized dwellings by recent rural migrants to the city––came to be understood as a distinct urban form and social space. From the outset, these areas were contested spaces, defined by divergent mappings, representations, and perceptions, evident not least in the fact that a Moroccan Arabic term, karian, a reinterpretation of the French word for quarry, was coined around the same time to describe these same spaces. Examining the emergence of the bidonville/karian first in cities in the Maghrib in the 1920s and 1930s and subsequently in France, the book reveals that these developments were direct consequences of late colonial policy.  Products of strategic exclusions yet fully enmeshed in rapidly expanding urban infrastructures and material processes of industrial production, these sites varied considerably in their response to local topography, conventions of property ownership, and patterns of rural-urban migration. 

Through the analysis of buildings and constructed landscapes, maps, urban plans, written reports, photographs, and literary descriptions, Inventing Informality considers the bidonville as an urban form, a subject of visual representation, a site of knowledge production, an object of reengineering, and a place of social and spatial reinvention on the part of its inhabitants.  My research aims to contribute to a broader rethinking of planetary urbanism through the lens of the aesthetics and ethics of the informal, one that reconsiders how the bidonvilles of Casablanca, the slums of Mumbai, the shantytowns in Lagos, the favelas of Rio, the gecekondu in Istanbul, and the ‘ashwa’iyyat of Cairo have been conceived at once as globally distributed symptoms of distinctively 21st-century urban conditions and as productive paradigms for urban theory and design practice.  While Mike Davis and other have understood mega-slums as defining architectures of neoliberalism and global economic restructuring, such assessments have overlooked the longer-term historical processes through which these urban areas first emerged. 

Project Update/Status:  One of the surprising discoveries that I have made in my research is the wealth of photographic documentation of the bidonvilles in Casablanca and in other major cities along the coast in Morocco during the decade between the end of WWI and Morocco’s Independence in 1956.  While much of this material is the product of the distinct perspective of colonial officials and social scientists, it has been exciting to discover a much broader visual archive of relatively ephemeral urban developments than I had anticipated.

Sheila Crane

Associate Professor, Architectural History

"Aquatint Empires"

Project Summary:  My research examines the importance of what used to be known as 'English Coloured Books' to the conceptualization and visualization of the British Empire. A great many of these images were produced in the medium of aquatint, a tonal intaglio process that encouraged certain types of visual themes, historical narratives, and viewer responses. Three ambitious and beautifully illustrated publications lie at the heart of my account, Thomas Daniell’s Hindoo Excavations (1803), William Alexander’s Costume of China (1805), and Samuel Daniell’s African Scenery and Animals (1804–05). My research has taken me to two of the three locales represented in these books, namely Western India and Southern Africa, and I look forward to traveling to Beijing in September. I have completed most of my primary research in archives in London, New Haven, Johannesburg, and Cape Town, and I’m looking forward to pressing ahead with analysis and writing of the book.

While based in art-historical methods, this project could also be described as a historicist version of media studies, as I examine a moment in which British artists traveled further than ever before, but were compelled to send their drawings and paintings back to London to be reproduced and distributed. Bibliographic studies, and my work with the Rare Book School, has also been invaluable to the questions and methods pursued here. My research asks what these publications might reveal about Britain’s place in the world following the Treaty of Amiens of 1802. More broadly, it considers seriality as empire: how did elaborate aquatint publications color British visions of Africa, Asia, and beyond?

Douglas Fordham

Associate Professor

"Water Development in the Global South, 1960s to the Present"

Project Summary:  I am in the midst of working on a book on the development of clean water and sanitation for the developing world. As of now I am concentrating on two things: first, the World Bank, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), and the World Health Organization (WHO) sponsored International Drinking Water Supply and Sanitation Decade that ran from 1978 to 1990. The goal was ambitious: provide 2 billion people, in urban and rural settings, with clean water and adequate sanitation. Never had the water needs of the developing world been so vigorously and systematically attacked. By the end of the Water Decade, the World Bank and the UNDP had become the leaders in water development around world—a position they still hold. Tremendous technological breakthroughs had been achieved and global clean water coverage had increased substantially—though nowhere near the target of water for all. Providing adequate sanitation, on the other hand, had largely failed. Second, I am concerned with the consequences of the Decade’s successes and failures for water and sanitation development in subsequent years. One cannot overstate the Water Decade’s influence on global water history both in terms of its ambition and its legacy. The global community entered the Decade optimistic, committed to equity and improving the world’s health (this was the same period during which the WHO embarked on its Health for All by 2000 campaign and attempted to institute primary health care as the goal of global public health). By the end of the Decade most were chastened, ambitions were tempered, and a new way of evaluating success or failure—cost effective analysis—in public health had come to dominate.

Project Update/Status: To date, I have gathered material from the archives of the World bank and the World Health Organization. In Summer 2016, I began research in India.

Christian McMillen

Professor

"Between the Mediterranean Sea and the Indian Ocean: Silk and the Commerce of Fashion in the Early Modern Period"

Project Summary:  This project investigates the impact of the trade of silks from the Indian Ocean into the territories of the Ottoman Empire and specifically into Istanbul during the early modern period. Some South Asian silks brought to Istanbul were both novel and popular among Istanbulites, which in turn spurred local weavers to imitate them. In this way, both Ottoman artisans and consumers emerged into the global eighteenth century and participated in the fashion cycles shared between China, South Asia, and Europe, as well as those in west Asia. This research and its publication aim to balance existing scholarship on luxury textiles, which emphasizes the brisk commerce in goods and fashions in the Mediterranean exclusively, and to extend the period of study into the eighteenth century, which has been largely neglected. In doing so, it also addresses the larger historiographical problem of Ottoman decline, showing that craftsmen, merchants, and customers responded actively to challenges posed by changing political, economic, environmental, and social circumstances. 

Textiles were the second largest trade commodity, worldwide. In the Ottoman Empire, silks especially were the subject of edicts controlling their trade and use; their production, too, was regulated by associations of craftspeople and the central authorities. Due to both their beauty and high prices, luxury fabrics themselves left abundant traces in written sources including shipping manifests, customs registers, inventory lists, and even ledgers of diplomatic gifts. Perhaps the most important source, however, are the silks themselves, which attest inherently and inarguably to changes in technology and taste. This project uses these sources and others to show how the silk industries of the most enduring Islamic empire evolved over the longue durée, continuously adapting in unrecognized and often surprising ways.

Project Update/Summary:  I spent June of this year (2016) at archives in Istanbul looking for documentary evidence for silks from India arriving in the Ottoman Empire. Among the many relevant inventory lists, records of taxation and customs dues, shipping manifests, and descriptions of craft practice, I found a record from 1716 that gives the names, quantities, and prices of silks that an emissary named Hüseyin Bey brought from India to the imperial palace. The list intriguingly combines Ottoman and South Asian terminologies for textiles. Equally exciting, an early eighteenth-century file from another archive also contains two pieces of a new type of patterned silk and a berat (imperial license) that permits its production; this attests to weavers’ agility and their willingness to innovate in order to preserve their livelihoods.

Amanda Phillips

Assistant Professor

"What Good is Music?"

Project Summary:  As a Mellon Humanities Fellow, my project explores the interaction between music and human rights, from a theoretical and practical perspective. In recent years, practitioners and scholars have increasingly looked beyond legal understandings of human rights and humanitarian law to embrace a more humanistic approach. Through initiatives such as film festivals, storytelling, and collective singing groups, human rights actors are more than ever engaged with art as a means to testify against abuses, and to protect and promote rights. At the same time, within scholarship there is a steadily growing body of work on human rights and the humanities. Scholars have explored questions of personhood, ethics, voice, violence and subjectivity that are central to the project of articulating universal rights. This work predominantly explores the relationship between literature and human rights, considering rights’ documents as literary texts, or examining historical narratives, novels and other texts as forms of jurisprudence; and has thus far focused largely on discourse and principles, rather than on rights practice.

My project extends this inquiry by considering how music is imagined in the global rights regime, and how it interacts with the everyday practice of rights’ work. Moving beyond prevalent assumptions of music as inherently good and doing good in the world, I examine music’s possibilities but also its limits. How is music apprehended and applied vis-à-vis rights? What expectations are placed on both? How does music serve as a form in which a more just and equitable world can be conceived, and how does it not? I explore these questions through the lens of the imagined: the ways in which the project of universal rights rests on the need to imagine; and the resulting implications for music and art, as well as for the populations intended to be benefited. I apply these ideas to examples of musical human rights initiatives, based on ethnographic study in the Republic of Guinea and the US, to consider their efficacy, outcomes and underlying assumptions. Lastly, I aim to propose ways in which music and rights work can be made more effective and locally responsive.

Project Update/Status:  During Spring 2016, I began work on a chapter on music, rights and the imagination, as part of a larger book project on music and human rights. I also conducted ethnographic research in Guinea during the summer of 2016, including interviews with musicians and NGO workers. I have also very much enjoyed conversations with the other Fellows in my cohort and the opportunity to share ideas and work.

Nomi Dave

Assistant Professor

"Guadalupe in the Public Square: Aesthetic Solidarity and the Pursuit of Justice"

Project Summary:  In Guadalupe in the Public Square I articulate a constructive framework for “aesthetic solidarity” which complements and augments current Christian ethical discourse on intellectual solidarity and practical solidarity.  At the theoretical level, aesthetic solidarity represents a novel integration between the fields of religious aesthetics and social ethics.  At the practical level, this framework addresses the growing polarization of political and ethical discourse in the United States by asking what role symbols—including explicitly religious ones—might play in cultivating justice, defined as the minimum threshold of solidarity for promoting basic human dignity in society. This project asks how such symbols can potentially inform the emotional and imaginative lives of democratic citizens toward shared ethical goals in a pluralistic society.

My analysis excavates a central problem for the relationship between religion and politics: liberal democracy requires certain legitimate curtailments of religion in the public square in order to maintain political stability across a plethora of background theories and comprehensive doctrines, but it also demands meaningful engagement with religious particularity in order to foster robust democratic participation, especially among communities which have been historically marginalized in American public life.  Such a problem unearths a crucial question for Christian ethics—as well as religious, philosophical, and political ethics—in the 21st century: What role ought religious symbols play in fostering justice in a liberal and plural political context?

In this book, I propose that “aesthetic encounters” are crucial for public engagement of religion in the 21st century. Reflecting on the use of Our Lady of Guadalupe—symbolic of human dignity, political empowerment, and solidaristic justice among Mexican-Americans and Chicanos/as—this project endeavors to articulate a more adequate framework for engaging religious aesthetics in public life. I propose an ethical framework for solidarity that seeks to articulate the moral significance of aesthetics in acts of interpretation that undergird the pursuit of community and the common good in pluralistic contexts. 

Project Update/Status:  This spring, I presented portions of the work at conferences in Toronto, Canada and Bogotá, Colombia. These conference, both global in scope, served as a rich site for conversations and development of the project. Additionally, the work benefitted from both formal and informal conversations with other IHGC Mellon Global South fellows, offering interdisciplinary perspective that has been crucial for the project. Having drafted a monograph proposal, I am now engaged in revising the manuscript for publisher submission. Through the assistance of the IHGC Mellon Global South Fellowship and a UVA faculty summer stipend, I am able to spend the entire summer of 2016 conducting archival research on Guadalupe’s role in social justice movements and updating the manuscript with insights resulting from conversations with colleagues in religious ethics and beyond.

Nichole Flores

Assistant Professor

"When Rights Go Wrong: Multiculturalism and Women's Rights"

Project Summary:  Why and how do multiculturalism and women's rights go wrong, and how can they be made right again? When Rights Go Wrong answers these questions by comparing three very different cases: polygyny in South Africa, indigenous women's right to return to the reservation in Canada, and the face veil ban in France. Despite their many differences, these three cases share important similarities. In all three, politicians seeking votes declared that a policy conflict between multiculturalism and women's rights existed, and that they must solve it. In all three, politicians favored the set of rights most likely to win them votes. To justify their choice, politicians argued that their preferred set of rights served national interests. In contrast, minority women's organizations argued that multiculturalism and women's rights were indivisible. They demanded both the right to reinterpret their cultural traditions and the right to shape public policies that targeted them. This suggests that policy conflicts between multiculturalism and women's rights are not inevitable, that when these conflicts erupt they contribute to nationalist fervor, and that empowering minority women's organizations to speak and be heard when liberal democracies debate issues like polygyny could redeem both multiculturalism and women's rights.

Project Update/Status:  As an IHGC Mellon Fellow, I have had the opportunity to complete my on-site field research for this project and I am currently preparing a book proposal and drafts of the first two chapters for university press review. During the spring semester of 2017 I will teach a new course that builds on some of the findings of this project titled, “Power, Violence and Inequality in the Global South."

Denise Walsh

Associate Professor