Faculty Fellows
Paul Anderson - Hunting Family Professor
Associate Professor, American Culture and Center for Afroamerican and African Studies
"Hearing Loss: The Dreamlife of American Jazz"
Hearing Loss: The Dreamlife of American Jazz
Paul Anderson’s work in cultural history offers a new window into the world of modern jazz. While prominent accounts of modern jazz’s musical and social worlds are often vanguardist and forward-looking, Anderson circles backward to explore alternative narratives in terms of retrospection, nostalgia, and loss. Among other threads, his reconstruction of the dreamlife of modern jazz traces various efforts to repair the fraying ties between modern jazz and popular music in the 1950s and 1960s and pays special attention to the fate of the popular song form, especially the ballad, within the period’s creative tumult.
Philip Deloria - John Rich Professor
Professor, History and American Culture
"Crossing the (Indian) Color Line: A Family History"
Crossing the (Indian) Color Line: A Family History
In June 1931, Deloria’s grandmother—white, patrician, and pious, with a good job in New York City—agreed to marry his grandfather, an American Indian athlete-turned-minister whom she had met only a few days earlier. Their surprising union brought together two grand histories of colonial encounter. Deloria will write their history and also inquire into the consequences of their marriage, which unleashed devastating tensions surrounding racial crossing, the authority of men and women, the preservation and recording of Native cultures, and the possibilities for reconciliation among histories and memories defined by the dispossession of Native North America.
Tirtza Even - Helmut F. Stern Professor
Assistant Professor, School of Art and Design
"Once a Wall, or Ripple Remains"
Once a Wall, or Ripple Remains
“Once a Wall, or Ripple Remains” is a documentary project that aims to question the stability of any perception, record, or rendering of a series of videotaped encounters that took place in the summer and fall of 1998 in the Occupied Territory of Palestine. Spanning more than eight years, it also draws on a wide range of media (from single-channel video, CD-ROM, website, to written text and 3-D animation). Even seeks in this work to incorporate the documented images’ passage through media and through the history impacting their perception.
Andrew Herscher - Hunting Family Professor
Assistant Professor, Architecture and Slavic Languages and Literatures
"Violence Taking Place: The Architecture of the Kosovo Conflict"
Violence Taking Place: The Architecture of the Kosovo Conflict
How does violence take place? In this project, Herscher attempts to answer that question by examining the intersection of architecture and political violence in Kosovo. Approaching destruction as a violent counterpart to architecture’s constructive endowment of material with meaning and effect, his examination focuses on sites where destruction has been threatened, feared, inflicted, experienced and remembered. Paying close attention to the material form, social situation, interpretation and memory of destruction, he understands each of these features as potentially salient in determining destruction’s political, social and cultural dimensions.
Katherine Ibbett - A. Bartlett Giamatti Faculty Fellow
Assistant Professor, Romance Languages and Literatures
"Compassion and Commonality: Forms of Fellow-Feeling in Seventeenth-Century France"
Compassion and Commonality: Forms of Fellow-Feeling in Seventeenth-Century France
In her study, Ibbett considers the discourse of compassion in relation to the political discourses that explain and justify both domestic absolutism and the colonial projects of seventeenth-century France. Looking at how the notion of a French public develops through the private yet shared compassionate response to representations of suffering, she argues that the language of compassion plays a key role in the establishment of the newly self-conscious nation. The project draws on dramatic theory, political thought, popular novels, and accounts of colonial life and asks how and to what ends a culture famed for its inwardness and centralizing tendencies might nonetheless imagine its relations with situations and people beyond its boundaries.
Marcia Inhorn - Helmut F. Stern Professor
Professor, School of Public Health
"Reproducing Masculinities: Islam, IVF-ICSI, and Middle Eastern Manhood"
Reproducing Masculinities: Islam, IVF-ICSI, and Middle Eastern Manhood
Marcia Inhorn’s project investigates the intersecting domains of “Islamic masculinity” and “Islamic bioethics” as they are manifested in the realm of reproductive technoscience in the Middle Eastern region. Drawing upon Islamic fatwa literature, Middle Eastern gender scholarship, Arabic-language popular literature, and Middle Eastern men’s own reproductive narratives and oral histories (collected from more than 250 men), the project examines how differences in Islamic legal opinion are shaping notions of manhood in Middle Eastern societies where new biotechnologies of assisted conception are being introduced.
Scott Spector - John Rich Professor
Associate Professor, German Languages and Literatures and History
"Violent Sensations: Sexuality, Crime, and Utopia in Berlin and Vienna, 1860-1914"
Violent Sensations: Sexuality, Crime, and Utopia in Berlin and Vienna, 1860-1914
Vienna and Berlin were crucial sites in the development of modern conceptions of gender and sexuality, and also in the political emancipation movements these conceptions inspired. Prominent in this context were the birth of the science of sexology, the earliest articulations of homosexuality as an identity, the concomitant movement to abolish persecution of sexual minorities, and the “first-wave” feminisms of the turn of the century. At the same time, these cities became host to prurient fantasies that held a surprisingly prominent place in the period’s high culture, science and popular culture. Spector’s synthetic analysis shows how these narratives of sexuality and violence are part of a self-critical discourse on and of the modern subject.
Johannes von Moltke - Steelcase Research Professor
Associate Professor, Germanic Languages and Literatures and Screen Arts and Cultures
"Moving Pictures: Film, History, and the Politics of Emotion"
Moving Pictures: Film, History, and the Politics of Emotion
Johannes von Moltke investigates the interplay between history, emotions, and politics in the cinema. Focusing on the cinematic representation of German history in particular, he studies the ways in which filmmakers have used different genres (such as melodrama, comedy, or thrillers) to elicit specific emotions about the historical figures and events presented on film. As our historical distance from the “Third Reich” and the Holocaust increases, von Moltke suggests, these emotions shift in subtle but surprising ways. The project investigates not only the formal construction of these films and their appeal to spectator emotion, but also the broader political implications of this shift in our emotional relationship to history. It outlines a theory of spectatorship as an “affective practice” that both defines particular viewing publics and participates in the construction of community through emotion.
