9 January 2012

Dear Humanities and Arts Faculty,

It gives me great pleasure to announce the winners of this year’s faculty fellowship competition. They were selected by a panel of external reviewers from more than 30 applicants. The reviewers were unanimous in their praise for the high quality of the applications. I very much hope that those of you who were not successful this year will consider applying again next year.

2012-13 Faculty Fellowships:

Adam Bradley, Associate Professor of English
Why Song Lyrics Matter presents a theory and a practice for analyzing the poetics of popular song. Looking comparatively across genres, it seeks to understand such matters as how (and to what extent) the music of a song conditions the lyric and how (and to what extent) considerations of commerce impact aesthetics. Practically, the book suggests ways of reading lyrics with an eye toward form. The result is a critical investigation that rises above entrenched ideological debates about the artistic identity of song lyrics to measure the depth and diversity found in the poetry of song. 

Carlo Caballero, Associate Professor of Musicology
Ballet and Ballet Music in France, 1849–1908: A Missing History between Two Golden Ages. This study bridges a sixty-year gap (1850-1908) in the history of French ballet. These are forgotten decades that lie between the innovations of romantic choreography in the 1830s and the arrival of the Ballets Russes in 1909. Histories of music and dance have portrayed this long period as either a desert or an era of decadence, often dismissed in a transitional sentence between chapters. Such presumptions of insignificance must be weighed against a much higher density of historical evidence than scholars have been willing to gather. Only a historical examination that takes both the specific successes and failures of later nineteenth-century French ballet seriously can account for the renewal of ballet in France after 1890, which prepared the ground for the enthusiastic reception Diaghilev's Russian troupes in 1909.

Brian Catlos, Associate Professor of Religious Studies
The Medieval Mediterranean was the crucible of Islamic, Christian and Jewish culture, the cradle of Crusade and jihad, and a region of collaboration and acculturation among members of different ethno-religious communities. Scholars of political, institutional and economic history have been divided on the nature of Mediterranean history, some seeing it as evidence of the fundamental incompatibility of what they see to be opposing “civilizations,” while others have seen these groups functioning in complex relationships of interdependence and symbiosis. Meanwhile, scholars of art, literature, technology and intellectual currents have been turning away from the established teleological narrative of a singular European culture emerging for an interrupted Classical past, towards an understanding that cultural currents ran back and forth among the ethno-religious communities of the medieval Mediterranean – a broad process, one byproduct of which was the emergence of European modernity. Taking an innovative, multi-dimensional approach, this project sets out to untangle the apparent paradoxes inherent in ethno-religious interaction in the Medieval Mediterranean – both in conflict and convivencia – in order to understand the dynamics of communal identity and question many of the assumptions commonly made regarding historical categories, the nature of culture and the emergence of modernity in Europe, the Middle East and North Africa. An interdisciplinary work that engages with a number of Humanities and Social Science disciplines, it represents the culmination of nearly ten years of the candidate’s research, and will appeal to a broad range of scholars and readers.

Jackie Elliott, Assistant Professor of Classics
Professor Elliott’s study concerns an early and highly influential but today fragmentary Roman epic poem, Ennius' Annales; it tackles the related issues of the nature of our evidence for the poem, the methodology of working with fragments, the reception of the poem in antiquity, and the reconstruction of literary history from a modern perspective, in the format of a  commentary. 

Mitzi Lee, Associate Professor of Philosophy
Professor Lee is writing a book entitled Aristotle's Theory of Justice, in which she attempts to show that, contrary to a widespread understanding of Aristotle, justice is a central virtue in his ethics and the central guiding principle in his political philosophy. 

Myles Osborne, Assistant Professor of History
Professor Osborne’s book, Making Mau Mau: Publicity, Propaganda, and the Press in Kenya, 1940-1963, will center the Mau Mau rebellion in the wider movement of decolonization and the Cold War.  It will study how Britain, the United States, and the Soviet Union, as well as intellectuals in Kenya and the Caribbean, fought to gain control over the public image of Mau Mau, and use it to develop and support their own agendas.

We will celebrate these announcements and other news at our year-end party on May 2, 2012 from 3:30-5:00 in Macky 201. Please stop by!

Helmut Muller-Sievers
Director, Center for Humanities and the Arts
Eaton Professor of Humanities and Arts
Professor of German, Courtesy Professor of English