Former UCHI fellow Helen M. Rozwadowski discussed her book “Vast Expanses: A History of the Oceans” on “Time to Eat the Dogs” Podcast.
Four Questions with Jason Chang
- 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. - 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. - 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. - 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
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”
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
Four Questions with Dorit Bar-On
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.
You Should…Read: If Beale Street Could Talk
You SHOULD…Watch: The Movies of Feng Xiaogang
“For more than two decades, the movies of veteran Chinese filmmaker Feng Xiaogang entertained the Chinese-speaking world. He created a new genre of commercially successful Chinese New Year Celebration Films (Hesui Pian). Newsweek called him the Chinese Steven Spielberg, but he does not easily fit into any classification. His movies, unlike Hollywood productions, are based on Chinese social and cultural trends, reflecting fast-changing popular tastes in the People’s Republic of China. Born in Beijing, Feng Xiaogang speaks and acts in a straightforward manner, like a northerner. As a filmmaker, he believes in freedom of artistic expression, tackling sensitive topics and challenging official and cultural norms.
His early comedies and melodramas made him famous. They cover diverse topics to which people can relate. Big Shot’s Funeral (2001) is a satire about commercialization of funeral; Cell Phone (2003) is about extra-marital affair exposed by modern mobile phone technology; If You Are the One (2008) is about a rich bachelor having a difficult time finding a lover. Feng Xiaogang’s later movies cover more serious topics, such as the Chinese Civil War of 1945-49 in Assembly (2007), the devastating Tangshan earthquake of 1976 in Aftershock (2010), and, most recently, interpersonal relations within the People’s Liberation Army dance troupe during the Cultural Revolution in Youth (2017). The secret of his success lies in his ability to be ahead of his time, as well as in his long-term collaboration with such prominent writers as Wang Shuo and Liu Zhenyun, and with actors Ge You and Fan Bingbing, who star in his movies.”
-Victor Zatsepine
Associate Professor of History
University of Connecticut
Four Questions with Ellen Litman
- Tell us a bit about the project you are working on at UCHI.
My project is a novel in stories, tentatively titled Love Lessons, which tells the story of a group of friends who come of age during perestroika, in the final years of the Soviet Union. As high-school and college students, they witness and, in some cases, actively participate in the political events of those years, but over time their energy and hopes for the new democratic Russia turn to weariness and despondency. In her recent book The Future is History, Russian-American journalist Masha Gessen writes of “the death of a Russian democracy that had never really come to be.” In my novel, I want to explore, on a personal level, why and how this had happened. My novel unfolds between 1990s and the present, and in the course of it, some of the characters in the novel remain in Russia while other choose to emigrate. While the two major themes of my work have been immigration and Russia, up until now I have approached them separately. In Love Lessons, I want to bridge the two worlds by connecting the modern-day Russians and the diaspora and by showing how, regardless of their location, the history has shaped their worldview and continues to influence their attitudes and choices. - What drew you to this topic and what exciting developments are you anticipating?
Like my characters I grew up in the Soviet Union and lived through perestroika, so the topic definitely has some personal significance. Although it’s been over twenty years since I left, I remain deeply invested in the Russian politics and culture, and it pains me to see the country revert to its totalitarian state. I think my novel is driven by the need to understand why this has been happening and why the protest movement in Russia has become virtually nonexistent in recent years. Another motivation for this book is the Modern Immigrant Narratives class I have taught the last three semesters and, more specifically, the idea of transnationalism, which allows one to step away from the “old world” vs. “new world” binary view of immigration. I find it liberating to see the immigrant experience not as a linear process, but as a way of maintaining multiple connections between the two worlds. In the past I have felt the need to justify why I was writing about Russia. There was this implicit assumption that as a writer (and as an immigrant) I was supposed to become more American, i.e., move on to more “American” topics. Not only the idea of transnationalism made it easier for me to accept that yes, I was still compelled to write about Russia, but it also challenged me to envision a new kind of immigrant novel that Love Lessons might become. - What are you looking forward to in regard to this year at UCHI?
I am so immensely grateful for being given this year at UCHI. I am looking forward to the time and space to focus on the new book. But I am also excited to learn during this upcoming year, to be inspired and motivated by the research of the other fellows and visiting scholars. In our usual academic life, it is so easy to get bogged down by the day-to-day teaching and service responsibilities and so hard to carve out the time to explore what lies beyond our immediate teaching or research topics. Finally, I’m excited to embrace the community of my fellow fellows. Writing (and research) can be such a lonely endeavor. I hope we’ll be able to help, motivate, and support one another in our respective projects. - 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?”
It seems that we’re living in particularly dark and dispiriting times. Faced with either Russian or American political news, I find it hard to remain hopeful. If anything does give me hope, though, it is humanities. To me humanities are about telling stories – stories of who we are, who we used to be; stories of where and how we live; stories of our languages, beliefs, ideas, mistakes, and successes. By telling these stories, we, scholars and writers, have a chance to change things for the better, to inspire empathy and understanding, break stereotypes, answer questions.
You SHOULD…Read: the On the Origin of Species
“Why should you read a 19th-century book on the already familiar concept of evolution? The most obvious reason is banal: it is one the most important books ever written, which changed the way we see the world and our place in it. But that aside, why is this a useful book for someone who works in the humanities?
The book is a monumental example of epistemic humility. Darwin valued facts and cared deeply about the truth. He appreciated that revolutionary ideas require strong evidence, which is why he worked on his manuscript for 20 long years, testing, discussing, and fact-checking his ideas and amassing a mountain of evidence from a variety of disciplines in his systematic quest for the truth.
It is also a magnificent story of intellectual courage and integrity. Darwin knew that many would be offended or disappointed by his findings, including the powerful religious establishment and his beloved wife. He regretted that his ideas would make them feel uncomfortable, but he knew that as a scholar, his paramount duty was to tell the truth as he perceived it.
In addition to its scientific value, the book has great literary merit. Darwin was an excellent communicator of ideas, and his elegant style makes his grand narrative vigorous as well as inspiring. This is why the last sentences of the volume are so often quoted:
Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”
–Dimitris Xygalatas
Department of Anthropology & Cognitive Science Program
Former UCHI Fellow
