• Christian de Pee, assistant professor, history; Hunting Family Faculty Fellow — “Visible Cities: Text and Urban Space in Middle-Period China, Eighth through Twelfth Centuries”

Between the eighth and 12th centuries, Chinese authors created literary forms and genres that made the cities of the period visible in new ways. Rather than using these texts to reconstruct the physical layout of Tang- and Song-dynasty cities and then analyzing these reconstructions, de Pee proposes to understand writing as a replication of movement through space and to understand the resulting text as a landscape. This approach will preserve historical continuities between textual form and urban space, as well as historical ways of experiencing the urban landscape.

• Lisa Disch, professor, political science and women’s studies; John Rich Professor — “Rethinking Re-Presentation”

Disch’s research seeks to rehabilitate political representation as a form of democratic politics in its own right. She argues that political representation does not merely mirror but mobilizes, not merely reflecting existing demands but generating them. Inspiration on this point is taken from literary and cultural scholars who are accustomed to think of representation as an activity. As a political theorist, however, Disch will need to address the question of how to evaluate that activity.

• Basil Dufallo, assistant professor, classical studies and comparative literature; Hunting Family Faculty Fellow — “The Captor’s Image: Greek Art in Roman Ekphrasis”

While at the institute Dufallo plans to complete work on a book titled “The Captor’s Image: Greek Art in Roman Ekphrasis” (under contract with Oxford University Press), which focuses on descriptions of Hellenic art objects (ekphrasis) in classical Latin literature. Dufallo’s book argues that a new understanding of this technique affords us much fresh insight into what Greek culture meant for the Romans, specifically into how the Romans understood the Greek influence on their own identity.

• Julia Hell, associate professor, German; Helmut F. Stern Professor — “Imperial Ruins: Imagining the Decline of Rome from Napoleon to Hitler”

In the wake of the Roman Empire, all modern European projects of imperial mimesis were haunted by the specter of decline, captured in images of Rome in ruins. In “Imperial Ruins: Imagining the Decline of Rome from Napoleon to Hitler,” Hell explores the role played by the Roman Empire and its ruins in European discourses about empire between 1800 and 1945, tracing the visual scenario of the imperial ruin gazer across a wide variety of textual and visual materials, ranging from the end of the 18th century to 1945.

• Carol Jacobsen, professor, art and women’s studies; John Rich Professor — “Trial in Error”

Jacobsen will research and produce a new body of work in video and photography titled “Trial in Error.” The project is based on historical and contemporary public documents and interviews with women recently released from prison, and will be presented in New York and elsewhere.  

• Amy Kulper, assistant professor, architecture; Steelcase Research Professor — “Immanent Natures: the Laboratory as Metaphor in Architectural Design”

Kulper’s book considers the role of the scientific laboratory in shaping the experimental legacy of the discipline of architecture. Her proposed research is to pursue the analogical construction of architecture as a laboratory in all of its aspects, including as a fundamental link between positivist experiment and artistic experimentalism; as an instrumental lens on the natural world that helps construct spatial typologies appropriated from the sciences; as a trope that contributes to architecture’s preoccupation with its own design methods and processes, among others.

• Alaina Lemon, associate professor, anthropology; Hunting Family Faculty Fellow — “Penetrating Minds: Reading Others in a ‘post’ Orwellian World”

The Cold War conditioned the rise of techniques central not only to surveillance and espionage, but also to stage and screen. Cell phones or social networking sites may seem the newest. Lemon’s research juxtaposes older but more diffuse techniques for “penetrating minds”: acting and telepathy. Her book will trace conversations across the ocean that knit theatrical aesthetics to paranormal science, while also stiffening the Iron Curtain, and will track how it is that techniques for reading others now perform other social realities.

• Anton Shammas, professor, comparative literatures and Near Eastern studies; Helmut F. Stern Professor — “Blind Spots, and Other Essays on Translation”

This book project is based on Shammas’ personal experience as a practitioner of translation, from and into Arabic, Hebrew and English, and as a teacher of translation theory; and on some of the blind spots he detected in both. The essays will span different foundational moments in the history of translation, starting with the translation into Latin of an 11th-century book by an Arab mathematician to whom Cervantes owes his novelistic perspective and ending with the attempts at translating the pain of tortured Palestinian prisoners into the legal English language of the affidavit.

• Katherine Brokaw, English; James A. Winn Graduate Student Fellow — “Tudor Musical Theater: Staging Religious Difference from ‘Wisdom’ to ‘The Winter’s Tale.’”

Brokaw’s dissertation examines performances of both sacred and secular music in drama from the late-medieval morality plays to those of Shakespeare. The plays she explores re-present on stage the music that was significantly prevalent in religious and social life, such as Catholic ritual in sung Latin, Protestant hymns, peddler’s ballads and country dances. These musical moments echo with Tudor England’s religious changes, and with ongoing disputes about the spiritual efficacy of musical ceremony.  

• Puspa Damai, American culture and English; Mary Ives Hunting and David D. Hunting Sr. Graduate Student Fellow — “Welcoming Strangers: Hospitality in American Literature and Culture”

By exploring 19th- and early 20th-century American literature, this study seeks to demonstrate the centrality of hospitality and abuse of hospitality in American culture. Reading literary texts closely and in context, this study contends that examining American literature from the point of view of hospitality creates a space or threshold for the other of the nation and empire to be heard and received.

• Ben Gunsberg, English and education; Sylvia “Duffy” Engle Graduate Student Fellow — “The Old Promise of New Media Composition”  

This project explores relationships between technological innovation and composition pedagogy in American colleges and universities by analyzing the ways prominent conceptions of print-mediated writing have changed over the past half-century. Gunsberg links this historical analysis to more recent controversies, arguing that the proliferation of “new media” and Internet technology recasts and reconfigures older pedagogical promises to suit the demands of the precipitous digital revolution.

• Alan Itkin, comparative literature; Mary Fair Croushore Graduate Student Fellow — “Classical Motifs and the Representation of History in the Works of W.G. Sebald”

Itkin’s dissertation argues that the representation of the traumatic historical events of the 20th century in the works of the German author W. G. Sebald owes an essential debt to the classical tradition of epic poetry of Homer, Virgil, Ovid and Dante. He argues Sebald’s works reject a realist mode of historical representation in favor of one modeled on the idea of raising the dead past and bringing it into the living present associated with three linked classical motifs: nekyia (the raising of the dead), ekphrasis (the description of a work of art), and katabasis (the journey into the underworld). 

• Graham Nessler, history; Mary Fair Croushore Graduate Student Fellow — “A Failed Emancipation? The Struggle for Freedom in Hispaniola During the Haitian Revolution, 1789-1809”

Nessler’s dissertation examines conflicts over the meaning of liberty and citizenship in the colonies that became Haiti and the Dominican Republic during the Haitian Revolution (1789-1809). This revolution brought about the transformation of the French slaveholding colony of Saint-Domingue into the emancipationist and independent nation of Haiti. During this period, Santo Domingo (the colony that later became the Dominican Republic) also experienced profound political and social changes. Nessler’s project investigates the implications of these political changes for the 15,000 men, women and children who were held captive in Santo Domingo when its cession transpired.

• Nafisa Essop Sheik, history; A. Bartlett Giamatti Graduate Student Fellow — “Relations of Governance: Gender, Law and the Making of a Colonial State”  

Nafisa Essop Sheik’s work explores how administrative struggles over gendered customary practices among European settlers, Zulu-speaking Africans and immigrant Indians shaped the making of a colonial settler state in Natal, on the east coast of South Africa, in the 19th century. She investigates the ways in which colonial discourse and legal interventions around intimate relations, such as marriage, created a 19th century British colonial state that was gendered by its own administrative efforts.