Author: Berkowitz, Adam

New Director of UCHI

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The University of Connecticut Humanities Institute (UCHI) is pleased to announce the appointment of Michael P. Lynch as Director of the Institute. His appointment became effective on July 1, 2014. Michael returns to the Institute as Director after having served as a member of the Advisory Board (2010-2012) and a Residential Faculty Fellow (2006-07).

Michael P. Lynch is Professor of Philosophy and has been at UConn since 2004. The author or editor of seven books including In Praise of Reason: What Rationality Matters for Democracy, Truth as One and Many, and True to Life, Lynch is the recipient of the Medal for Research Excellence from the University of Connecticut’s College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, and has held grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Bogliasco Foundation. Lynch, whose work has been translated into multiple languages, is a contributor to the New York Times “The Stone” weblog, and has made appearances on NPR’s On Point, The Brian Lehrer Show, Colin McEnroe and many others. He lectures frequently nationally and internationally, and is presently working on The Knowledge Machine: Knowing More and Understanding Less in the Age of Big Data (W.W. Norton).

Michael recently shared his goals for the Institute in an interview for the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences web post.

Michael replaces Sharon M. Harris as Director following her retirement from UConn after five years as Institute Director and nine years as Professor of English.

For more information, please see Dr. Lynch’s bio here.

Humanities Institute Initiatives Awards Announced

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The Humanities Institute is pleased to announce that the following projects have been granted seed money as a Humanities Institute Initiative.

Recognized both for their keen scholarly engagement and for their potential as recipients of major external funding grants, the following projects represent the best of the new digital scholarship in the humanities:

  • Anke Finger, Literature, Culture and Languages: “ReMEDIAting Flusser”
  • Brendan Kane, History: “Reading Early Modern Irish: A Digital Guide to Irish Gaelic (c.1200-1650)”
  • Gregory Colon Semenza, English: “The History of World Literatures on Film: Web Resource”
  • Roger Travis, Literature, Culture and Languages: “An open-source platform for practomimetic, game-based learning”
  • Fiona Vernal, History: “Upper Albany Documentation Project (Hartford, CT)”

We congratulate these outstanding scholars and wish them the best for their year at the Institute.

UCHI Announces 2014-15 Fellowship Awards

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The University of Connecticut Humanities Institute is pleased to announce its Fellowship Awards for 2014-15.

External Faculty Fellowships

  • Rachel L. Greenblatt, Harvard University, Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations: ”A Beautiful and Costly Procession: Jewish Street in Imperial Celebration-Prague and Frankfurt Festivities on the Birth of a Habsburg Crown Prince (1716)”
  • Joseph McAlhany, Carthage College, Classics: “Language, Tradition, and the Scholar: The Fragments of Marcus Terentius Varro”

UConn Faculty Fellowships

  • Fakhreddin Azimi, History: “The Ascendancy of Khomeini: Illusions of Secularity and Rise of Political Islam”
  • Frank Costigliola, History: “Kennan and Russia”
  • Martha Cutter, English: “Picturing Slavery: Illustrated Books and the Visual Culture of the Transatlantic Abolition Movement, 1820-1855”
  • Jeffrey Dudas, Political Science: “Regeneration through Rights: Law, Family, and the Making of Modern American Conservatism”
  • Hassanaly Ladha, Literatures, Culture and Languages: “The Idea of Africa: Hegel, Architecture, and the Political Subject”
  • Fiona Somerset, English: “The Implications of Consent”

UConn Dissertation Fellowships:

  • Gordon Fraser, English: “American Cosmologies: Race and Revolution in the Nineteenth Century,” Draper Endowed Fellowship
  • Christina Henderson, English:“Cities of the Future: Literary Utopias, World’s Fairs, and the Making of American Progressivism,” Draper Endowed Fellowship
  • Beata Alexandra Moskal, Linguistics: “Universals in Morphology and Morpho-Phonology,” UCHI Dissertation Fellowship
  • Lucia I. Garcia Santana, Literatures, Culture and Languages: “Transatlantic Intellectual Meridian: Spain in the Configuration of the Argentinean Field of Cultural Production (1900-1950),” UCHI Dissertation Fellowship

We congratulate these outstanding scholars and wish them the best for their year at the Institute.