2023-2024
Patrick Greaney, Germanic & Slavic Languages & Literatures
My project examines the central role played by the consumer products company Braun in mid-twentieth-century West German culture. Braun has long been considered by historians to be West Germany’s exemplary design-oriented company, and the firm’s canonical style is often credited as an inspiration by contemporary designers. Drawing on extensive archival research, my project is the first critical history of Braun that shows how the company presented itself as a lifestyle brand for a postfascist culture and responded to 1950s conceptions of race, gender, and sexuality. By fully situating Braun in postwar culture, my project transforms the history of a global brand and design style and deepens the understanding of the tensions between past and present that shaped West Germany’s first decades.
Zachary Herz, Classics
The God and the Bureaucrat: A Story of Roman Law considers how the Roman Empire, an autocratic state ruled by leaders of variable competence and governed according to aristocratic etiquette, could generate the documents we now understand as foundational to liberal legal order. In the third century C.E., jurists (legal philosophers) like Ulpian wrote elaborate treatises on the application of abstract legal doctrine, even as most Roman adjudicators lacked the training to understand the texts written for their ostensible benefit. Men like Ulpian—who briefly served as a regent for the child-ruler Severus Alexander before dying in a military coup—and his mentor Papinian, who was put to death in 212 for refusing to endorse imperial fratricide, wrote guides to a law that did not actually exist. The God and the Bureaucrat argues that these texts are properly understood as an archive of political imagination: of smart men, in perilous circumstances, dreaming of a world that was fairer than their own. These men drafted off of a longstanding tendency in Roman discourse that equated law with archaism, formality, and impersonality; from the speeches of Cicero to the poetry of Horace, Romans viewed law as a set of values as much as statutes. This fantastical jurisprudence would combine with the autocratic legalism emerging from the imperial court into a new kind of law that was abstract and suprapolitical, but nevertheless socially powerful: in other words, into the normative order we now understand as “positive law” and treat as Rome’s greatest legacy. My research roots this legal transformation in the literary movements and political chaos of Imperial Rome; by showing the fantastical origins of the documents we now know as Roman Law, The God and the Bureaucrat sheds new light on how Rome—and law—organize our own fantasies.
Marina Kassianidou, Art and Art History
A Partial History of Touch: Volume I is a mixed-media installation that explores the relational character of mark-making as well as the multidimensional characters of language,
embodiment, and knowledge. The installation revolves around a collection of 19th and early 20th-century Greek schoolbooks that belonged to my grandparents and great-grandparents. I trace marks of use and time found on the pages of these books, such as folds, creases, tears, stains, discolorations, and worm holes, and recreate them as artist’s books and large-scale sculptural drawings. The recreated books and drawings act as records of the history of handling of each original book. The “unreadable” marks that these records hold—marks that may be more readable to a non-Greek audience than the Greek characters in the original books—enable an embodied and potentially shared mode of knowing, one that depends on touching, feeling, and handling objects as we move through the world.
Ashleigh Lawrence-Sanders, History
They Knew what the War Was About is a history of Black Civil War memory from the years of the war to the near-present. While most studies of Civil War memory focus on the Lost Cause or white Southerners or Northerners, there has been less said about the importance of the war for Black history, culture and activism in the 150 years since the War's end. The book highlights the ways African Americans responded to and challenged the Lost Cause’s attempt to rewrite the history of the war. African American criticisms of the Lost Cause--the movement by white Southerners to deny the true cause of the war and to enshrine mythologies around the South’s defeat--reveal the tensions between competing visions of both the past and present throughout the nation. More importantly, however, this book highlights Black self-emancipation in the Civil War as a prevailing narrative amidst these struggles over the historical memory of the Civil War--especially as an important element for various ideological and activist movements within African American communities.
A. Marie Ranjbar, Women & Gender Studies
From Persian Empire to Pariah State: Environmental Injustice, Racialization, and Coloniality in Iran aims to untether understandings of empire and colonialism from the West, demonstrating how environmental injustice in Iranian Azerbaijan functions as a form of coloniality that is under-theorized in decolonial and postcolonial scholarship. Bridging historical analysis of Iran’s imperial pasts with ethnographic work on contemporary social movements, this book project examines how the desiccation of Lake Orumiyeh disproportionately impacts ethnic minority communities and reproduces relations of coloniality. Using the example of Lake Orumiyeh as an entry point into the history of imperialism in Iranian Azerbaijan, I analyze how conflicts over this region during the 18th and 19th century by the British, Persian, Russian, and Turkish empires shape current struggles over land, environmental resources, and minority rights in Iranian Azerbaijan. While anticolonial scholars have established how Iran has been deeply impacted by Euro-American imperialism, I posit that Iran’s encounters with non-Western empires have created different forms of coloniality not adequately accounted for in Anglophone theory that are critical for understanding environmental violence. The book demonstrates how the racialization of ethnic minorities in Iranian Azerbaijan reflects forms of coloniality that both replicate European racial logics and the current embodiments of non-Western empires (i.e., Russia, Turkey), thereby broadening current debates on imperialism, ontology, and the environment.
Annika Socolofsky, College of Music
Sentinel, Socolofsky's debut full-length opera, intimately captures the internal struggles of an agoraphobic woman battling against the realities of her own trauma and attempting to escape her pain through the construction of her own virtual reality. Created by Danielle Birritella, Sentinel’s creative team consists of librettist Claressinka Anderson, projection designer Hana Soonyeon Kim, and music director Marc Lowenstein. Sentinel is first and foremost about the journey of healing—a rare objective in a medium historically obsessed with the themes of trauma, pain, and sexual violence. This project builds upon Socolofsky's past work with themes of physical and emotional trauma, rage, and neurodivergence as it relates to queerness in her most notable vocal works Don’t say a word and I Tell You Me. A workshop of the initial compositional material is slated for Fall of 2023 at Montclair State University, presented and funded by PEAK Performances.
Nishant Upadhyay, Ethnic Studies
Indians on Indian Lands studies dominant caste Indian diasporic formation within the Canadian settler state. Specifically, it theorizes Indian immigrant labor in resource extraction industries, logging and canneries in unceded lands of British Columbia in the 1960s-90s and the tar sands in Treaty 6 lands of Alberta presently. The book examines these sites as simultaneous spaces of Indigenous dispossession, spaces of racialized-classed-gendered-casted labor formations, and spaces that are further fueling the climate crises. Weaving theory, interviews and conversations, ethnography, cultural and literary analysis, archival research, analysis of recent events, and secondary literature, the book forms the archive of Indigenous and Indian spatial and affective intimacies that exist within and across the afterlives of imperialism. This multi-sited, multi-method, interdisciplinary approach traces the interwoven and simultaneous relationalities, intimacies, and complicities of dominant caste Indian diasporic communities. Indians on Indian Lands adds to the growing scholarship on Indigenous and Asian relationalities within Canadian and U.S. settler states and offers first of its kind multi-sited exploration of contemporary Indigenous-Indian intimacies using mixed-methods interdisciplinary approaches. Overall, the book is an exploration of what it means for brahmin and dominant caste Indians to be on Turtle Island, and what it means to engage in decolonial ways of knowledge production, ethical relationalities, and solidarity praxis.
Tim Weston, History
My book project, Dying to Speak: The Perilous Life of the Journalist in Modern China, is about freedom of speech in twentieth-century China. It revolves around the careers of four celebrity journalists from the early part of the century, all of whom were brutally killed because their newspaper work threatened the interests of powerful political figures. In addition to examining the four men’s colorful careers, I analyze the process by which, after their deaths, they were transformed into martyrs, idealized representations of the crusading, justice-seeking journalist prepared to speak truth to power. Finally, I assess the ways, over the last forty years, the four men have been remembered in the People’s Republic of China, where journalists are forced to tow the Communist Party line and, along with all Chinese citizens, are denied freedom of speech, despite its being guaranteed in the Chinese constitution.
Terri S Wilson, School of Education
Schools of choice often focus on the needs, interests, and identities of particular communities. These schools raise philosophical questions about justice and recognition. What kinds of identity should be recognized by the state, and how might such identities be supported through public education? My project, How Different Should Schools Be? Justice, Recognition and Choice in Education, explores debates about the purposes and limits of school choice. Drawing on original research in three distinctive schools, my project leverages concrete cases of school choices to build novel, textured arguments about the justifiable limits of choice. I argue that claims of recognition must be considered alongside the broader structural forces that shape identity differently for different students. Certain non-dominant communities do have powerful reasons to establish schools that support their cultural and linguistic identities, but such claims do not apply to more privileged communities that seek to create schools of their own. Identity claims are neither equal nor interchangeable.
2022-2023
Maisan Alomar, Women & Gender Studies
Race for the Cure examines the transhumanist movement–which positions itself as a cutting-edge and future-oriented endeavor to eliminate mortality–as part of a long historical arc of medically rehabilitative research and practice that has exploited and exacerbated gendered, race, and class inequality. It analyzes key moments in the post-WWII “rehabilitative turn”– including a new look at the origins of the Tuskegee Study – to situate the contemporary transhumanist movement as part of this history of research ethics, gendered and racial subjectivity, and unequal access to healthcare. Amidst the present global health crisis, which understandably has led to the proliferation of hurried efforts to develop rehabilitative technologies, examining this precedent shows: At every stage from conceptualization to testing to distribution, the development of rehabilitative medical technologies risks exploiting and reproducing historical inequities evident in earlier attempts to define and rehabilitate disability.
Angie Chuang, Journalism
American Otherness examines journalism’s cultural role in producing American identity and navigating racial equity through case studies. The book project focuses on eight distinct news-media narratives that span the first two decades of this century, bracketed by the 9/11 terrorist attacks and the COVID-19 pandemic. These narratives include the news coverage of the undocumented mostly-Latinx youth pursuing residency through the DREAM Act/DACA, the Barack Obama “birther” debate, and the Atlanta spa shootings. My research argues that journalism’s struggle to embody an ideal of racial equity mirrors a broader cultural struggle over Americanness—and that the mainstream news media are very much enmeshed in this process, at once hindering and enabling progress and self-reflection.
David Ciarlo, History
Ciarlo's new book project, Selling War: Advertising, Propaganda, and the Origins of the Fascist Aesthetic in German Visual Culture, 1910-1925 offers a visual history of the First World War, using images that were widely seen at the time, but are now largely ignored or forgotten—namely, those of advertising. My research shows how belligerent, warlike imagery circulated widely in German commercial culture long before the German state begin its (better-known) efforts to disseminate official propaganda. Moreover, my exploration of advertising shows how graphic designers were the first to craft the themes that would be picked up by later official propaganda: advertisers created and circulated visions of hyper-masculine militarism, of smugly-confident technophilia, and of a type of German-ness that was increasingly racialized (as "whiteness") and these widely-circulated visions became an important means by which ordinary Germans at home or at the front actually "saw" the war. Selling War, then, will argue that even the horrors of trench warfare could be re-imagined through the ceaseless repetition of martial themes in mass-produced commercial imagery. Moreover, the imagery of the hyper-masculine, militarized, and racially-pure "German" that emerged in the advertising of the war years formed the core of a "fascist aesthetic" which the National Socialists (Nazis) would first borrow from and then coopt.
Brianne Cohen, Art & Art History
Cohen’s The Empathic Lens: Contemporary Art, Ecology, and Kinship in Southeast Asia is the first study to explore a 21st-century efflorescence of artistic projects in Southeast Asia that urge widescale publics to prevent socio-environmental violence by envisioning ecological empathy through more sustainable, Indigenous cosmologies. This artwork employs the camera lens not only to document destruction of local landscapes, but also to galvanize feeling for inanimate matter, plants, animals, and humans through the imagining of more embodied, interconnected forms of kinship, an understanding of familial, environmental relations central to Indigenous knowledge. Major museums and cultural venues throughout the world widely exhibit the work of these artists from Cambodia, Vietnam, and Singapore, yet publics in the United States and Europe may not recognize their names yet because they remain marginalized and understudied in Euro-American scholarship – names such as Khvay Samnang, Tuan Mami, or Nguyễn Trinh Thi. The Empathic Lens analyzes and introduces English-speaking, arts-and-humanities audiences to this body of environmentally engaged, camera-based artwork, which presents an alternative, more ethical picture for planetary living through the lens of sustainable, Indigenous worldviews.
Celine Dauverd, History
All the Kings of the Mediterranean examines the conquest of North Africa (1450-1620) through the prism of seven Renaissance popes. By investigating on the one hand soft power through rhetoric and authority, and, on the other, raw power through secular jurisdiction and alliance politics, it argues that popes sought leadership over all confessions. By examining 15-17th c. documents in six different languages, I reveal that popes’ ecumenical identity was the signifier of their redefined imperium. Acting as potent ideological fuel whose imperial interests choreographed wars in Africa, popes adroitly consolidated their sovereignty over the Mediterranean world at the expense of Iberian rulers and Muslim warlords. Bridging classical studies, religious history, and international relations, this project brings an alternate history to the Maghreb conquest.
Mithi Mukherjee, History
The Asian Dissent examines the dissenting judgment of the Indian jurist Radhabinod Pal in the Tokyo Trials of 1946, held by the victorious powers of the Second World War to try Japanese wartime leaders. In this lone dissent Pal mounted the most significant legal challenge from the colonized world in Asia to the existing discourse of international law and its connections to empire and race in the twentieth century. By exploring the complex and conflicting geopolitical and cultural discourses that undergirded this historic act of defiance, The Asian Dissent seeks to insert anticolonial resistance into the heart of the story of international law, empire, and international relations. As the search for a new post-imperial international law that could meet the challenges of a globalized world becomes ever more urgent, Pal’s anticolonial perspective has become particularly salient.
Yumi Roth, Art & Art History
Filipiniana Americana is a play on words and the associations we have with terms like “Americana” and, to a lesser extent in the US, “Filipiniana.” As categories, “Americana” and “Filipiniana” seem to describe quintessential aspects of each culture, yet, when combined, what can the new, hybrid term suggest? Though Filipinos were present and represented in the American West from the late 19th c. (e.g. the 1899 Greater America Exposition in Omaha, NE and Buffalo Bill's Wild West show), the myth of the American West does not include Filipinos. As an artist, I am interested in the forms that these stories and knowledge can take, from objects to video to site-based installation. Filipiniana Americana describes the larger project of locating the intersection between “Filipinoness” and “Americanness” couched in the American West.
Honor Sachs, History
Sach’s project, “Freedom by a Judgment,” which traces the story of a mixed-race family of slaves named the Colemans as they sued for freedom claiming Indigenous ancestry over multiple generations. The Colemans claimed descent from a maternal Indian ancestor named Judith, an Apalachee woman born in Spanish Florida who was captured by the English and sold into slavery. As Judith’s children and grandchildren were sold, they initiated freedom suits by claiming Indigenous heritage. This project documents their complex personal histories as they worked within the evolving legal system of the early United States to define their own understandings of race, rights, and family.
Laura Winkiel, English
Modernism and the Middle Passage is a literary history of modernism written from the vantage point of the sea and the legacy of the slave trade. The sea has long been viewed in the West as wasted, empty space and a lawless zone that hides its history and swallows its traumas, especially the mass atrocities on board slave ships. Modernism and the Middle Passage’s attention to the ocean and its role in slavery remaps modernist literary history across centuries, nations, races, and even the nature/culture divide that defines the human. It compares Anglophone writing from Africa, Britain, the Caribbean, and the US within the common frame of Atlantic history and situates newly published works by Zora Neale Hurston and Claude McKay within modernist writers’ focus on the aftereffects of the slave trade. The book presents the sea as a material entity that invites new kinds of planetary connectivity, new histories of slavery and colonization, and new modes of thinking the human to emerge.