The 2007-2008 fellows pursued scholarly projects under the theme "How Do We Keep Knowing?" This broad question allowed exploration of the ways in which knowledge is defined, produced, communicated, hidden, renewed, preserved, studied and in other ways made a part of societies and cultures, present and past.

Lauren Clay, Assistant Professor in the Department of History, explored how the organization, representation, and social meaning of business changed in 18 th century France. While scholars have recently approached this issue by examining debates among intellectuals, her work delves into the cultural history of commerce in the urban context, using archival sources to reconstruct legal, social, ceremonial, and cultural interactions. Approaching the commercial revolution as a lived experience, this project investigates the ways urban communities confronted the opportunities and the challenges that accompanied profound economic change.

Leor Halevi, Assistant Professor in the Department of History, focused on commercial relations between Muslims and others. Historians of religion have not studied this topic due to the disciplinary barrier that has kept them from exploring economic matters. Economic historians have written a great deal about it, but they have focused on material exchanges while neglecting Muslim views on forbidden goods and cross-cultural trade. These views are interesting from a religious perspective, especially when they involve complex reasons based on a search for religious knowledge; they are also interesting from an economic perspective, when it can be shown that knowledge of Islamic laws prohibiting the consumption of foreign goods affects economic behavior.

Colleen Murphy, Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy, examined political reconciliation, the process of repairing damaged political relationships which remains one of the most important challenges for societies in transition to democracy. She examineed why and in what way the past must be known for reconciliation to be possible in order to develop a theoretical framework for assessing the effectiveness of promoting political reconciliation through alternative ways of defining, preserving, and communicating the past and also to use this theoretical framework to evaluate the effectiveness of truth commissions, criminal trials, and memorials.

 Christopher Swift, Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication, studied selected German writings on the relationship between rhetoric and aesthetics. Many scholars of the humanities question the relative instrumentality or constitutivity of language: on the one hand, the extent to which language functions as a tool for communicating knowledge that pre-exists its own expression, and on the other, the extent to which language creates the knowledge that it expresses. The popularity of these questions across disciplines has, however, brought with it a great deal of confusion. By analyzing a tradition of scholarship that more rigorously separates the questions of instrumentality and constitutivity from one another, he sought to help sort out this confusion.

The 2006-2007 fellows pursued scholarly projects under the theme "How Do We Keep Knowing?" This broad question allowed exploration of the ways in which knowledge is defined, produced, communicated, hidden, renewed, preserved, studied and in other ways made a part of societies and cultures, present and past.

Katherine Kelly, Associate Professor in the Department of English, investigated a forgotten area of modernist performance – the collaborative efforts of women across national locations, c. 1900-1930, to promote the suffrage cause through the media of suffrage newspaper, demonstrations, and organizations such as the International Woman Suffrage Alliance.

Eric Rothenbuhler, Professor in the Department of Communication, focused on the historical development of radio formats in the 1950s as part of a larger, co-authored book project on The Redefinition of Radio, 1947-1962. As it became industry-wide in the U.S., formatted programming cultivated the audience expectations and listening habits it served, reinforcing the conditions of its own success. This seemingly simple business model, then, participated in reshaping musical culture and imagined social relations.

Diego von Vacano, Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science, examined the problem of race in political theory by looking outside the Western canon. Throughout the Latin American continent the problems that come with racial issues have been debated in much of its intellectual history. They form one of the core issues in Latin American political thought. Hence, by diversifying and internationalizing the canon of political theory, much can be learned about issues that otherwise would not be elucidated by traditional methods and approaches.

  Joan Wolf, Assistant Professor in the Women’s Studies Program, explored how knowledge about breastfeeding is produced. Building on a critique of infant feeding studies, she analyzed how breastfeeding research is communicated to the public by journalists and public health professionals. Her particular interest is the way in which these vectors of scientific information frame breastfeeding in ways that resonate with both a more generalized risk preoccupation and an ideology of total motherhood.

The 2005-2006 fellows are resident in the Glasscock Center this spring, pursuing scholarly projects under the theme "Visual Culture and the Humanities." This theme invited examinations into any aspect of the relationship of images to other forms of human expression and thought. Areas of common interest that were explored included pictorial as opposed to other depictions of history; the ways in which images fill the interstices in language, music, and thought; the centrality of different forms of picture making in human history, society, and culture: the ways in which the visual relates to the literary, the auditory, the olfactory, and the tactile.

Troy Bickham, Assistant Professor in the Department of History, examined the relationship between "Visual Culture and Virtual Imperialism in Britain, c. 1688-1830." In particular his project examines the role of visual culture in producing a national imperialism that transcended barriers of class, gender, age, and geography. The project is especially interested in those venues and exhibits which integrated the visual with other sensory experiences to create virtual experiences, enabling Britons at home to participate in shared understandings of key imperial places and events.

Sarah Misemer, Assistant Professor in the Department of Hispanic Studies, focused on the importance of the iconic symbol of the train in the literature of the River Plate in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in "Hacia Adelante, Mirando Para Atras: Ensayos Sobre Literature y Trenes (Moving Forward, Looking Back: Essays on Literature and Trains)." One of the train’s most important legacies for literature and the arts is the particular reordering of space and time that rail travel provoked in the traveler’s spectatorial experience. The train simultaneously epitomizes the notions of linear progress and backward nostalgic glance, as well as modernization and anachronism.

Antonio C. La Pastina, Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication, studied"Constructing Brazil: The Representation of a Nation in U.S. Popular Culture." The historical relationship between the United States and Brazil is central to this investigation of the process through which images of Brazil were created. His research focused on the representation of the Brazilian body in television and film, and on the connections made between race and gender in tourist imagery.

 Lynne Vallone, Professor in the Department of English, conducted her research on "Beyond Innocence: Picturing Death, Disfigurement and Desire in Contemporary Photographs of Children," which explored art photography of children that challenges conventional fantasies of the child as pure and beautiful. This project also exposed both adult fascinations with children’s bodies and fears of their loss.

Anthony Mora, Assistant Professor in the Department of History, developed a project entitled "'The Prestige of Race:' African Americans, Mexican Americans and Ideologies of Racial Difference in Chicago," in which he will showed how competing racial ideologies affected the way that African Americans understood and represented their racial position vis-à-vis other racialized groups from 1900 to 1930.

Anne Morey, Assistant Professor in the Department of English, focused on "Consumers for Christ: A History of Religious Filmmaking in the United States." She integrated the current crop of Christian films into a discussion of Hollywood's long relationship with its Christian critics and colonizers.

Patricia Phillippy, Associate Professor in the Department of English, looked into "Women in Document and Monument in Early Modern England." She examined the material conditions of women's lives and deaths in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England, based on monumental artworks and the documents attending their construction.

Ralph Schoolcraft, Associate Professor in the Department of Modern and Classical Languages, conducted research on "Visual Propaganda: André Malraux and Politics," examining Malraux's uses of visual media for political propaganda from 1930-1969.

Theodore George, Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy, explored "The Quickening of Culture: Kant, Nature, and the Ends of the Human" in which he reconsidered the relation of culture to nature. His research focused on Kant's interpretation of nature in the Critique of Judgment as an inexhaustible resource that first grants to culture its purposes and, ultimately, its definition.

Melanie Hawthorne, Professor of French in the Department of Modern and Classical Languages, focused on "'As a Woman, My Country is the Whole World': National Culture, Gender, and Sexual Identity." She examined the intersections of gender and sexuality in the construction of national culture through the example of three expatriate women artists and writers based in Paris in the first half of the twentieth century.

Edward Portis, Professor in the Department of Political Science, looked into "Community, Conflict, and Cultural Democracy." He eveloped and defended a theory of cultural democracy, focusing on understanding the conditions under which open electoral institutions might enable popular determination and redetermination of the meaning of collective identity.

Larson Powell, Assistant Professor in the Department of Modern and Classical Languages, conductedresearch on "The Differentiation of Cultur," developing a theoretical framework for studies of media and culture, critiquing culture as "text" or "identity" in favor of a re-linking (or re-opening) of humanities to sociology.

Colin Allen, Professor, Department of Philosophy, "What is Culture? Taking a nonhuman perspective." An examination of the growing attention primatologists are paying to "cultural phenomena" in nonhuman animals. This
investigation requires a hard look at human culture and asks whether humans are as special as we may think we are.

Mary Ann O'Farrell, Associate Professor, Department of English, "The Force of Manners." A re-examination and re-definition of the genre "of manners" by weighing the cultural use and status of manners in traditional and non-traditional texts in light of scholarship on the everyday, on race, gender, and ethnicity, and on aesthetics and class.

José P. Villalobos, Assistant Professor, in the Department of Modern and Classical Languages, "Bordering Images: Cultural expression from within la frontera." A questioning of the usefulness of stereotypes of life on the U.S.-Mexico border that see it as a paradigm for the postmodern condition or as characterized by the lawlessness of narco-culture. A new interpretation of border culture that pays attention to what local artists create and how their cultural products engage with outside renditions of their culture.

Cynthia Werner, Assistant Professor, Department of Anthropology, "Manipulating and Misunderstanding Notions of Central Asian Culture: Local and International Perceptions of Nationalism, Tribalism, and Islam." An examination of the ways in which Central Asian culture is understood and used by local residents, who manipulate notions of "traditional" culture while pursuing nationalist programs, and by foreign reporters, who rely on problematic notions of "tribal culture" and "Muslim culture" in their reporting.