Author: Morariu, Megan

You SHOULD…Read: Orwell, Leopold, and Teale

“You should…Read: Orwell, Leopold, and Teale

But not the Orwell you think. Read  Politics and the English Language to be reminded that “Political language…is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind” and Shooting an elephant for a concrete example of how “when the white man turns tyrant it is his own freedom that he destroys.”[1] Read Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac to learn that when Canada geese return north in the spring “the whole continent receives as net profit a wild poem dropped from the murky skies upon the muds of March” and the many things a poor farm can teach those willing to learn. Read Teale’s A Naturalist Buys an Old Farm to learn Leopold’s lessons in our own backyard on a farm in Hampton.

[1] And for the best first sentence in an essay: “In Moulmein, in Lower Burma, I was hated by a large number of people–the only time in my life that I have been important enough for this to happen to me.” WARNING: Descriptions in the essay would have offended many in 1936. More will find them offensive now.”

 

-Kent E. Holsinger
Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor,
Vice provost for Graduate Education,
Dean of the Graduate School,
University of Connecticut

Publishing NOW: Jonathan Wallace

Jonathan Wallace
Princeton University and the Brookings Institution
February 4, 2019, 4 pm

Jonathan Wallace is managing editor of the Future of Children journal, a collaboration of the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University and the Brookings Institution that reviews research about children and presents it in language accessible to a nonacademic audience. As a freelance editor, he helps some of the nation’s leading scholarly societies, think tanks, and foundations communicate their findings to policy makers, the media, and the public. He has also been the editor and writing consultant for faculty at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education, Nation and World editor at the News and Observer in Raleigh, NC, assistant director of a university writing center, and, once upon a time, a historian of the Soviet Union. He hates jargon; likes cats, cycling, cooking, and fishing; and isn’t nearly as grumpy as he looks.

Publishing NOW: George Thompson

George Thompson, CLAS Publisher-in-Residence Visit to UConn,
March 12 – March 14, 2019 Contact Steph Beron (stephanie.beron@uconn.edu) for appointment scheduling.

George Thompson will be returning to campus February 26 – March 1, 2019 to continue the CLAS publisher-in-residence program, thanks to the support of Dean Davita Silfen Glasberg, UConn Humanities Institute, and Ken Foote of the Department of Geography.

George has visited UConn regularly since 2015.  His visits are aimed at helping colleagues with their publishing projects. George is particular good at helping faculty develop book projects, but can help with all aspects of academic publishing across a wide range of fields.

George will be available for both group and one-on-one meetings.

You SHOULD…Watch: Diary of a Student Revolution

“You SHOULD…Watch: Diary of a Student Revolution

This documentary, part of the UConn Library’s Archives & Special Collections, portrays the conflict between the radical student movement and President Homer D. Babbidge at the University of Connecticut over ten days in the Fall of 1968.  In addition to its spontaneous takes and candid behind the scenes footage, this minimally narrated piece of Vietnam-era journalism about a very local place in America documents the range of voices, gathering places, and aesthetics of dissent at an important moment in our campus’ history.  In a period when the American invasion of Vietnam was shaken by the Tet Offensive earlier that year, the draft of eligible young men into the military continued, the lack of diversity in the student and faculty body on campus was evident, and the administration’s business as usual approach to campus recruitment for the petrochemical industry drew out students who sought to ‘bring the war home.’  Despite its brevity in timespan, this 1-hour film makes accessible a corresponding archival collection measuring roughly 30 linear feet of Administrative Records, Press Clippings, Underground Newspapers, Photographs, Student Government Documents, SDS Fliers and Posters which document the “Crisis at UConn.”

Diary of a Student Revolution poses many questions to the archive about the role of institutional memory and its power to document, surveil or reflect; its ability to share the voices held within and what they may say of the present; as well as its role in erasure and resuscitation of the historical past.  As documented, student chants of “Keep the Status Quo” mirrored those sentiments of the silent majority which would lead this country to seven more years of war and a deepening rift between parents and children, workers and students, soldiers and statesmen.  This film gives me hope for a student body to make change by clamoring for the impossible till it grows from a din to a deafening.”

 –

Graham Stinnett
Archivist
Human Rights and Alternative Press Collections
UConn Library

Diary of a Student Revolution (1969):

http://archives.lib.uconn.edu/islandora/object/20002%3A860070394

 

D’Archive Ep. 4 “Abbie Hoffman, UConn and the War in Vietnam”(2017):

http://whus.org/2017/09/darchive-episode-4-abbie-hoffman-uconn-and-the-war-in-vietnam/

 

UConn Archives Alternative Press Collection:

http://archives.lib.uconn.edu/islandora/object/20002%3A19920001

 

 

 

Get to Know Our Fellows: Four Questions with Jonathan Robins

1. Tell us a bit about the project you are working on at UCHI.

I’m working on a book exploring the global history of the oil palm tree and its main product, palm oil. Palm oil is probably the most controversial agricultural product being produced today: promoters see it as a sustainable way to feed a hungry planet, while detractors argue that it threatens to annihilate biodiversity across the tropics. My project looks to the history of palm oil and oil palm tree to understand how we got to this point.

The book will highlight a series of transformations in the ways that oil palms were grown and used over the last three centuries. The tree is native to western Africa, where it has fed people for centuries. In the nineteenth century palm oil became a globally-traded commodity, used to grease the machines of the Industrial era and to clean workers’ bodies as a key ingredient in soap. By the turn of the twentieth century, palm oil entered the global food system, finding its way into margarine and other manufactured foods. By the start of the twenty-first century, palm oil looked like the most promising biofuel to replace petroleum. Today palm oil is the world’s most widely-consumed plant oil, and the area covered by oil palms is still growing fast across the tropics.

A key point of the book is that this was not a story of steady technological progress. At every stage, individuals, businesses, and governments decided how and where to produce and use palm oil, and these decisions were rooted in political, economic, and cultural contexts. It’s a story about markets and globalization, but also about slavery, land-grabs, and protectionist trading regimes. It’s about science and industry, but also about personal taste, and questions about what is—and isn’t—good for our bodies or the planet. I don’t anticipate reaching any conclusions about whether palm oil is “good” or “bad.” Instead, I want to show readers how the industry has changed over time, and highlight the diversity within that industry, which includes some environmentally- and socially-responsible segments along with highly destructive ones.

 

2. What drew you to this topic and what exciting developments are you anticipating?

This project came out of a long fascination with the so-called “tropical fats” (palm oil, palm kernel oil, and coconut oil). I love to cook and eat, but for much of my life I viewed these fats as off-limits: they were unhealthy, a medical consensus that has largely unraveled in recent years. Palm oil was on my mind when I worked on my first book on cotton agriculture in Africa and America (Cotton and Race across the Atlantic, 2016). I found a wealth of sources on African economic and agricultural history in which palm oil played a starring role. I also saw a real need to connect stories about palm oil in Africa with histories from southeast Asia and Latin America, the three regions where oil palms are grown today.

As I work on the project, I look forward to revisiting six years’ worth of notes, collected in libraries and archives in the US, Europe, Africa, and Asia. I am especially excited to see what the “big picture” looks like as I put the different pieces together. So far, I’ve only been able to work on single case studies, and as I start to compare across regions and across a more generous timeline, I expect to see more and more differences stand out in the ways that people and their environments have shaped palm oil development in different parts of the world.

 

3. What are you looking forward to in regard to this year at UCHI?

I’m not shy about saying that I’m most excited about having time and space to think. It’s a real privilege to be able to spend a year at UCHI focused on a single project. I’m also looking forward to working alongside an interdisciplinary group of colleagues. It’s important to hear perspectives from different disciplines and viewpoints, and good ideas often come from reading and listening well outside one’s own area of expertise. I know from past experience that sharing my own work—and hearing criticism about it—is the best way to develop clear and effective writing.

 

4. Many people wonder what value the humanities and humanities research has in today’s world. What are your thoughts on what humanities scholarship “brings to table?”

While my project is about a plant—the oil palm tree—and the things it produces, it is ultimately about people. Oil palms don’t cut down rainforests by themselves. The kinds of research done by humanities scholars helps us understand why people make some decisions and not others. It goes beyond simply gathering “qualitative data”: in the humanities, we value work that captures the textures and flavors of a place, and emotions and ideas of people, the complex and sometimes contradictory ways in which people interact with each other and the natural world. The humanities also train scholars to tell a good story. The data do not speak for themselves, and when we can craft the results of our research into a meaningful narrative, we can reach the broadest audience.

 

You SHOULD…Read: The Sand Queen

 

“Ok readers: the “bad” and the truly bad humanities. The queen of “bad” is Lady Gaga The Brilliant. Am already standing in line for tickets to A Star is Born coming out in October. Am already planning to see it numerous times. If “bad” is good, she’s one of the best –the Super Bowl of 2017 proved that. Just try to deny her.

 

The truly bad? War. Wanna go there? Read a slew of novels and memoirs out these days or zero in on the best one in the bunch. Helen Benedict’sThe Sand Queen is a multivoiced novel of the early American war in Iraq. In one corner is a young American army woman, Kate, continuously tormented by her male comrades-in-arms as they guard an infamous prison camp (Bucca, it actually existed) and continuously tormented as well by the “enemy” male prisoners she oversees. In another corner is an Iraqi woman near Kate’s age, Naema, whose male relatives get brutally seized by American troops, leaving the family to stand at the prison camp gates with others to plead for news of all the innocent mistreated male family members held there. Be prepared: there is no redemption in this novel for either character or for the reader, no nicey-nice friendship between Kate and Naema that soothes the pain on both sides. No. it’s war, baby. Wanna go now?

 

See Gaga after reading Queen and imagine the anger she would unleash at those gates. ”

 

 

– Christine Sylvester
Professor of Political Science
University of Connecticut

 

 

 

Get to Know Our Fellows: Four Questions with Katherine R. Jewell

 

1. Tell us a bit about the project you are working on at UCHI.

I’m working on a history of college radio since the 1960s. While on first glance this might seem like a straightforward topic, it actually is quite complex. Historians of radio and media have demonstrated how the interplay of regulation, technology, commercial interests, and cultural producers created a complex and shifting landscape for radio broadcasting—which has only grown more interesting with the rise of the internet and music streaming. My archival research focuses on the development of a distinctive culture and reputation of college radio, beginning in the shift towards FM and free-form programming in the 1960s and maturing by the mid-1980s. This culture of college radio, which stands out from the broad swath of college radio history in its myriad incarnations, had significant influence on the music industry and popular music. My goal is to both complicate and broaden that definition — which tends to focus on the genre of “indie” or “alternative” rock — to include a wider perspective of genres and communities. Ultimately, my goal is to reveal how shifting regulation, university goals, and the politics of the culture wars shaped the culture of college radio at the end of the 20th century.

2. What drew you to this topic and what exciting developments are you anticipating?

When I arrived as a freshman at Vanderbilt University in 1997, the first quiz of my college career was not for PoliSci 101 or Inorganic Chemistry: it was on the 7 words I couldn’t say on the radio. I stumbled into college radio at a student activities fair, not really having any idea what it was or what it meant. I was from rural Vermont, and my only exposure to college radio was the commercial Dartmouth station, which had a mostly classic rock format. Little did I know that I was entering college radio at the height of its reputation and modern identity. As a student I witnessed the debut and demise of Napster, and came to appreciate the potential revolution of the digital disruption. A decade after I graduated, Vanderbilt sold its station’s signal, and the station, once a reputed broadcaster in college radio, now exists only online. My experience might suggest that my book project would promote a kind of declension narrative of college radio, arguing that technological disruptions displaced and destroyed the culture of college broadcasting that I trace in my archival research. Instead, my research explores the continually contested nature of that identity, as well as its diversity and complexity. Throughout college radio’s history, it expanded and narrowed its coverage of artists and musical sounds based on many factors from local to national. Universities sought to use stations as community outreach avenues; students sought the airwaves for personal expression; community and activist groups looked to educational stations for quality programming and representation not available on commercial stations. Musicians accessed networks of college students to expand their exposure and to facilitate touring. Each station had a unique relationship with its host institution, student body, and community and related businesses such as record stores, concert venues, and publications. My goal for this project is to dig into these relationships and explore how the national reputation of college radio emerged and declined, and to correlate that reputation to the actual diversity and perseverance of college radio.

3. What are you looking forward to in regard to this year at UCHI?

As I finish my archival research at stations across the country, I’m looking forward to my time at UCHI to put together what I have learned into an engaging and coherent narrative. The research for this project has been exciting. I’ve found so many interesting stories and people, from pioneering community deejays, to fights between students and administrators over station control, to offended listeners who find objectionable content from stations and take their complaints to the FCC. This year will be dedicated to making sense of these stories and to construct an argument that explains the origins, experiences, and role of college radio since the 1960s in a way that does justice to its influence, including its limits, as well as its diversity. My goal is to have a working draft of the manuscript by the end of the year, honed through the conversations and

4. Many people wonder what value the humanities and humanities research has in today’s world. What are your thoughts on what humanities scholarship “brings to table?”

The humanities is about looking beneath the stories we tell about ourselves and others. But humanistic study is about more than unpacking these stories and complicating them. I assert that the humanities have a liberating function.

We often talk about critical thinking as key to humanities’ classrooms. While the term is often vaguely invoked, it’s here where the study of history, of learning based in the humanities, has the power to liberate. For example, the study of history allows us to see what is present and not present in our own lives by experiencing other times and other places. As philosopher John Dewey explained, imagination is not only the pathway to creativity, to create the alternative realities explored in poetry and art, but it places imagination at the center of morality, at the center of empathy, at the center of the learning process — to create what is new, what is better.

The liberating function provided by the study of history and the humanities, receives my favorite illustration from the writer and poet Robert Penn Warren. Willie Stark, Penn’s characters in All the King’s Men, posited a pessimistic view of human nature: “Man is conceived in sin and born in corruption, and he passeth from the stink of the dydie to the stench of the shroud… There’s always something.”

This view of the inescapability of man’s original sin rendered individuals’ actions meaningless. In this view, we might be able to imagine the past, and even use it — in Stark’s case, to smear our political enemies — but it’s the wrong view. Stark’s view of history, and of humanity, is indeed just that: stark. This view contributed to his assistant Jack Burden’s nihilism towards life: to his view that “all the words we speak meant nothing and there was only the pulse in the blood and the twitch of the nerve, like a dead frog’s leg in the experiment when the electric current goes through.” Our lives, our choices, to someone who viewed history and time as a burden, reflected nothing but the Great Twitch — that our actions are the mere electronic responses of our biology.

It is this view of history and information that students often come to college with — seeing a meaningless litany of dates, facts, and figures. Their education becomes yet another reflex, programmed by external forces.

Yet the kinds of questions inherent in humanistic study, in questioning received narratives and representations, endow in students to the power to shape truth, the power to shape life.

Jack Burden made this realization — as he states:

“…all times are one time, and all those dead in the past never lived before our definition gives them life, and out of the shadow their eyes implore us. That is what all of us historical researchers believe. And we love truth.”

Burden, through his own regeneration, through his own embrace of the study of history, came to accept “the awful responsibility of time”—that each present action carries future consequences and that which can, in turn, be traced back to events in the past. Armed with this sense of interconnectedness, Burden was able to finally live, to finally have the courage to face his responsibilities as a human being. In the humanities, we seek to understand truth; we seek it not just for its own sake, but so that we may continue to be active agents in the world around us, shaping our future as historical actors in the past shaped—or failed to shape—theirs.

With information access rising, the critical thinking skills of the humanities become increasingly essential: our students are barraged by information; they need the ability to question, to separate fact from fiction, propaganda from persuasive argument. They need to be able to understand how the statements of others reflect worldviews and experiences different from theirs. With polemicists charging that digital media is dumbing the younger generation, enhancing students’ critical thinking is an increasingly important task. As students of the human condition, we have a responsibility to apply not only our skepticism and our skills, but also our ability to imagine, to enter into the worldview of someone else, and to do so with understanding and compassion.

You SHOULD…Look At: Pincushions

 

“You SHOULD…Look At: Pincushions”

 

 

“The method of reading material things as scripts aims to discover not what

any individual actually did but rather what a thing invites us to do.”

 

— Robin Bernstein, Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil

Rights  (2011): 11.

 

“Round, filled with stuffing, and covered with shiny fabric, pincushions are ornamental objects despite their quotidian purpose. As household commodity, they embody a distinct home-tied intimacy. An object which dates back to the fourteenth century, pincushions were arguably in their heyday during the Victorian “cult of domesticity” era. In the mid- to late-nineteenth century, it was believed that having a tomato on the mantle would bring prosperity and wealth. A tomato pincushion served as a convenient facsimile when tomatoes were out of season.

 

For me, a pincushion immediately reminds me of my mother, a Japanese woman and military wife who used patterns bought at the Base Exchange to make my clothes. The pincushion she owned both fascinated and scared me. Bordered by eight clinging figures with identical faces and matching pony tails, my mother’s pincushion was strikingly “exotic.” But what scared me were the faces, which featured exaggerated slanted eyes and thin smiling mouths. Their faces were a constant reminder of my own difference as one of the few Asian Americans in my school. My non-Asian American classmates took considerable pleasure in highlighting that difference by “slanting” their eyes, asking if my family ate dogs, and telling me to “go back to where I came from.”

 

It was not until graduate school, when I made the fateful decision to shift my area of focus from Victorian literature to Asian American studies, that I came to see my mother’s pincushion as a historically-driven artifact. When Chinese immigrants were recruited en masse in the 1850s and 1860s to labor in mines and work on the western portion of the transcontinental railroad, they were met with great xenophobia and racial violence. Unlike their Irish counterparts, Chinese railroad workers – as so-termed “sojourners” — were not allowed to bring their families. As early as 1854, in People v. Hall, Chinese were – along with indigenous people and African Americans – prohibited from testifying against whites in the newly annexed state of California. After 1878, in a ruling issued by the Ninth Circuit Court in California, Chinese immigrants were denied the right to naturalize. And, in 1882, Congress passed what would – until recently – be the only immigration prohibition to name a specific ethnic group: the Chinese Exclusion Act.

 

Cast as inassimilable subjects, treated as disposable “coolies,” and depicted as a “yellow peril” Chinese immigrants faced considerable discrimination in the U.S. labor market. As Irish women moved out of the laundry business, Chinese men unable to find work, filled the void. They came to dominate – out of racialized necessity – the industry, a reality reflected in laundry service product advertising which repeatedly accessed a Manchu hair style (the queue) and traditional dress to economically depict “Chinese-ness.”

 

In closing, situated within a longue durée history of immigration and racialization, the pincushion my mother owned was both byproduct of and testament to fact that the United States – notwithstanding claims otherwise – was not always a welcoming “nation of immigrants.” Despite this, the very fact it was in her possession, coupled with its intimate connection to an Asian American childhood, accentuates a nostalgia that I cannot fully shake.”

Cathy J. Schlund-Vials
Associate Dean for Humanities & Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion

College of Liberal Arts and Sciences
Professor of English and Asian/Asian American Studies