You Should… Read: Aftermath

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Susan Brison’s Aftermath: Violence and the Remaking of the Self (Princeton University Press, 2002)

You really should read Susan Brison’s Aftermath: Violence and the Remaking of the Self (Princeton University Press, 2002). In this era of random terrorist violence, in the age of #MeToo and those who systematically doubt reports of rape, Brison’s insightful analysis of the process of rebuilding a life after cataclysmic violence is more timely than ever. The book combines first person narrative with careful consideration of survivor testimonies, and weaves these together with philosophical and psychological theories about the nature of the self and the effects of trauma. It is a rich and powerful book. The issues are fraught but the writing is not– it is lucid, engaging, and powerful.

(This book is also available through JStor)

-Lynne Tirrell
Associate Professor of Philosophy
UCHI Fellow in Residence 2018-2019
Department of Philosophy

Announcing the 2019 Mellon/ACLS Public Fellows Competition

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The American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) is pleased to announce the ninth annual competition of the Mellon/ACLS Public Fellows Program. This initiative places humanities PhDs in substantive roles in diverse nonprofit and government organizations, demonstrating that the capacities developed in the course of earning a doctoral degree in the humanities have wide application beyond the academy. The two-year fellowships carry an annual stipend of $68,000, health insurance, a relocation allowance, and up to $3,000 in professional development funds for the fellow.

In 2019, ACLS will place up to 21 PhDs as Public Fellows in the following organizations and roles:

• Alliance Theatre (Atlanta, GA) – Community Engagement & Audience Development Manager

• American Public Media (St. Paul, MN) – Senior Research Analyst

• Center for Court Innovation (New York, NY) – Communications Project Manager

• Chicago Humanities Festival (Chicago, IL) – Program Manager

• Citizens’ Committee for the Children of New York (New York, NY) – Policy & Budget Analyst

• Committee to Protect Journalists (New York, NY) – Research Manager

• Community Change (Washington, DC) – Policy Advisor

• Data & Society Research Institute (New York, NY) – Editor

• The German Marshall Fund of the United States (Washington, DC) – Program Officer

• Harriet Beecher Stowe Center (Hartford, CT) – Grants Manager

• Library of America (New York, NY) – Outreach Programs Manager

• National Conference of State Legislatures (Denver, CO) – Legislative Policy Specialist

• National Low Income Housing Coalition (Washington, DC) – Research Analyst

• Natural Resources Defense Council (Washington, DC) – Campaign Advocate, Latin America Project

• PEN America (New York, NY) – Festival Programs Manager

• Public Books (New York, NY) – Associate Editor

• Rare (Arlington, VA) – Community Engagement Manager

• Reinvestment Fund (Philadelphia, PA) – Policy Analyst

• San Francisco Arts Commission (San Francisco, CA) – Community Impact Analyst

• Seattle Office for Civil Rights (Seattle, WA) – Senior Researcher

• World Justice Project (Washington, DC) – Program Manager

Applicants must have a PhD in the humanities or humanistic social sciences conferred between September 1, 2015, and June 21, 2019, and must have defended and deposited their dissertations no later than April 5, 2019. US citizenship or permanent resident status is required. The deadline is March 13, 2019, 9 pm EDT.

Applications will be accepted only through the ACLS online application system.

Applicants should not contact any of the organizations directly. Visit ACLS Public Fellowship Competition for complete position descriptions, eligibility criteria, and application information. This program is supported by a grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

www.acls.org

Four Questions with Dexter Gabriel

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Headshot of Dexter Gabriel

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

My current project, Jubilee’s Experiment: The British West Indies and American Abolitionism, examines the ways in which the emancipated British Caribbean colonies entered into the debates over abolition and African-American citizenship in the United States from the 1830s through the 1860s. It analyzes this discourse as both propaganda and rhetoric, created by abolitionists, black and white, and African-Americans more generally, in antebellum America.

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

This was a public discourse, taking place in newspapers, pamphlets, manuscripts, speeches, and even public spectacles. The most prominent of these were annual memorials of British Emancipation. These were held every August 1, primarily in the Northeast. It was coming across a poster for one of these events that first drew me to the topic, as I wanted to know why thousands of American abolitionists and reformers were celebrating the end of slavery in the British West Indies. What did it mean to them? Why did they think it important? What were they hoping to accomplish? As part of my project, I’m working on digitally mapping these August First commemorations as they took place throughout New England. It will be interesting to see what information they provide about attendants, mass mobilization, and social movements in the nineteenth-century.

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

First, I’m looking forward to getting work done on the manuscript. I’m grateful that the fellowship will allow me the space and time needed towards that goal. I’m also looking forward to engaging with the other scholars in residence, and the chance to work, dialogue, share and exchange ideas within a vibrant intellectual community.

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 remain a fundamental part of a liberal arts education. It helps us explore the human experience and provides a better understanding of both our own society and the world we live in. Within my own work, research into the history of slavery and emancipation helps us understand how people in the past grappled with the immense moral issues of their day—and perhaps offer some insight into how we might do the same in our time.

 

 

You Should…Read: Heavy: An American Memoir

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"You should. . . read Kiese Laymon’s Heavy: An American Memoir (Scribner, 2018)

There are so many reasons you should read Kiese Laymon’s intensely personal story, but let’s start with this: writing so alive it jumps off the page and double-dares you to stay up all night with it.  You should take that dare, but you should also take it seriously.  Addressed to his brilliant, complicated, professor mother, Laymon’s memoir recalls in vivid, often excruciating detail his own experience occupying a large black body in Mississippi—the more to abuse, terrorize, demonize, and shame. The path to adulthood, for Laymon, thus becomes a literal exercise in learning to disappear: as he continues his education in Ohio and Indiana, and goes on to become a professor himself in upstate New York, he starves and runs himself to exhaustion in an effort to become unassailable. We can guess before we know that it’s a futile endeavor because we see the evidence strewn everywhere: the tear gas canisters lobbed over the border at people seeking asylum provide merely the latest proof that ours is a nation still soaking in a hate-fueled white supremacy that just can’t break its habit of inflicting harm upon brown, black, AND LGBTQ bodies.  But Laymon’s book offers far more than further evidence of the racism and violence that makes his story a peculiarly American tale. This courageous book is steeped in a politics of love that will help readers develop just the sort of “radical moral imagination” Laymon’s own mother fostered in him and which we will all need if we are to learn how to “talk, listen, organize, imagine, strategize, and fight fight fight” with and for vulnerable children everywhere."

- Kathy Knapp
Associate Professor
Department of English
University of Connecticut

Four Questions with Jason Chang

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Jason Oliver Chang

  1. Tell us a bit about the project you are working on at UCHI.
    This project has allowed me to learn a great deal about Asian maritime history and has taught me how little I know. My initial interest in Asian sailors who came to the U.S. but did not become immigrants has opened up a broad inquiry across the Indian Ocean, the archipelagos of southeast Asia and the coastal regions of the South China Sea going back to the seventeenth century.
  2. What drew you to this topic and what exciting developments are you anticipating?
    I was very much seduced by the concept of sailors as being estranged from the national and international order, but sailors are difficult to study because they do not leave many records. More importantly, I have found sailors and the maritime world not all together separate from terrestrial and continental histories, but deeply intertwined but often shadowed from each other.
  3. What are you looking forward to in regard to this year at UCHI?
    I’m looking forward to finding out how wrong I was about my maritime subject. With a great deal of new research from India, UK, China, Singapore, New Zealand, and the Middle East, I know my earlier conceptions will be altered and that is exciting.
  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?”
    One thing this project has taught me is how regionally diverse, complex, and interlinked seemingly mundane lives can be when put together comparatively. This realization underscores, for me, the enormous value of exploring subjectivity, cultural production, and epistemology in power relations. Not only because it is important to understand the dynamics between the hegemon and subaltern but also to account for, acknowledge, and ward against the erasure of ways of being, ways of signifying, and ways of knowing by those who struggle to be recognized.

The William Benton Museum of Art featured in the Boston Globe

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It’s streets lined with shops, galleries, boutiques, and eateries, the quaint old whaling village of Mystic has long been a Bostonian’s go-to day trip. If you did the aquarium last time, try the Mystic Museum of Art. By the banks of the Mystic River, the community art hub houses a permanent collection, rotating exhibits, and, through Dec. 22, a Holiday Gift Market. Shop sailor knot bracelets, ornaments, wine stoppers, pottery, handcrafted soaps, handcrafted jewelry, prints, and the like. Free admission. 9 Water St., Mystic, 860-536-7601. www.mysticmuseumofart.org.

Lauren Daley can be reached at ldaley33@gmail.com. Follow her on Twitter @laurendaley1.

Upcoming Events: Talk by Professor James Rice, “‘Early Modern’ and ‘Indigenous’ Histories”

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The Early Modern Studies Working Group has a few exciting events in the next few weeks.

On March 7th, we are please to announce that Professor James Rice will be giving a talk titled “‘Early Modern’ and ‘Indigenous’ Histories.” The talk begins at 1pm and will be preceded by a lunch at 12:15. The talk will explore the intertwining questions of periodization, theories of historical causation, and identity. The ways in which scholars have traditionally periodized the ‘Early Modern’ match up with certain important turning points in Native American history, and that’s not a coincidence. Yet any attempt at marking the beginning and end dates of the Early Modern also serves to elide important continuities in Indigenous histories – elisions with significant consequences for the politics of today.

Professor Rice is the chair at the Tufts History Department and the Walter S. Dickson Professor of English and American History. His major publications are Tales from a Revolution: Bacon’s Rebellion and the Transformation of Early America (2012) and Nature and History in Potomac (2009). Currently, the Early Modern Cross Cultural Interactions Reading Group is reading Tales from a Revolution on Tuesday’s between 12-1 in the UCHI conference room. All are welcome to join.

On February 21st we will be holding our first transcribathon meeting in the UCHI conference room at 11am. As always, we will be transcribing John Ward’s diary along with a guest transcription. All are welcome.

 

You Should…See: Duke Riley’s Now Those Days Are Gone

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Now Those Days Are Gone Duke Riley 2017 Seashell Mosaic on wood

"This beautifully detailed work of art measures three and half feet tall and fourteen feet long, using thousands of shells to depict the USS Kansas. The Kansas was a Connecticut-Class Battleship built in New Jersey and launched in 1905 to become a part of the, so called, Great White Fleet. This fleet, order by President Theodore Roosevelt, consisted of several other battleships that circumnavigated the globe making various military and diplomatic stops to display U.S. naval power in the aftermath of the Spanish-American War. This victory lap around the world sought to celebrate White American racial superiority as the fleet made stops in the recently occupied Caribbean and Pacific Island colonies. The delicate seashell construction contrasts vividly with the brutally destructive power of the battleship with canons, guns, and torpedoes. The warm colored shells in the sky suggest a maritime sunset with radial embellishments in the upper corners. The radiating rays seem to indicate a ubiquitous presence invoking the circumnavigation of the Great White Fleet. Riley’s use of the artwork’s title, now those days are gone, within the piece draw greater attention to multiple inflections of the phrase and it’s relationship to the U.S. imperial power. On the one hand, the phrase invokes a nostalgia for nationalist imperialism, yet the tender construction of the piece reverses this meaning to show it’s fragile nature. The nostalgic interpretation also points to a contemporary decline of U.S. global power and the dangers of reasserting such a position now. Alternatively, the title might indicate that such small battleships, as the Kansas, were immediately eclipsed by the larger, faster, and more deadly Dreadnaught class of battleships. In this interpretation, the days of small battleships are gone, ironically reflected in the tender material of the seashells replaced by behemoth war machines growing ever larger. In the multiple meanings which this artwork puts in play, it also signals a possible future without battleships. One without the racial ideologies and imperial economies which fuel seaborne violence."

- Jason Oliver Chang
Associate Professor of History and Asian American Studies
Director, Asian and Asian American Studies Institute
University of Connecticut

Four Questions with Dorit Bar-On

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1. Tell us a bit about the project you are working on at UCHI.
We humans are not the only minded creatures in the world. Nonhuman animals, too, can have various affective and cognitive states of mind. But (as far as we know) we are the only creatures who speak their mind. The question of interest to me is how that could come to pass. My project is a philosophical investigation into the origins of linguistic meaning, integrating conceptual tools and theoretical insights from linguistics, comparative psychology, biology of communication, and cognitive science (among other fields).

2. What drew you to this topic and what exciting developments are you anticipating?
I have always been interested in language – its nature and structure, and its connection to mind. In more recent years, having learned about extensive research into animal communication, I became interested in continuities and discontinuities between nonhuman animal communication and human language and the time-old question of how language could have evolved from animal communication.

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

I am planning to complete a manuscript in progress titled Expression, Communication, and Origins of Meaning

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?”

Based on my experience of talking to people from diverse disciplines over the past 10 years, I see the kind of thinking cultivated in the humanities – broad yet detail-oriented, integrative, attentive to connections of ideas and similarities in patterns of thought – as immensely useful no matter the discipline or inquiry. Humanists’ common intellectual practice of ‘standing back’, taking stock, and adopting a broader perspective can have a transformative effect on any field of research.