Fellows Talks

Four Questions with Adrian Stegovec

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Adrian Stegovec

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

 A sentence like “She introduced you to me”, where the pronouns “you” and “me” co-occur, isn’t that easy to form in many languages. In fact, in some languages it is downright impossible for certain pronouns to co-occur in a sentence. This is, for example, the case in French, where speakers don’t accept the sentence “Elle te me a présenté”, with the meaning of the English one from earlier, as well as other similar sentences with the wrong combinations of co-occurring pronouns. As part of my project, I investigate the patterns that arise with possible and impossible combinations of co-occurring pronouns across different languages, examining over 100 languages spanning different language families from all over the world.

It turns out that there is surprisingly little variation in the attested kinds of impossible combinations. The co-occurrence of pronouns is always restricted depending on their person – that is, whether they are 1st (“I”, “we”), 2nd (“you”), or 3rd person (“he”, “she”, “they”) - but never depending on their grammatical number or gender. Furthermore, all restrictions conform to the same abstract pattern and vary from language to language in a handful of predictable ways. This is surprising, given that such restrictions are often found in unrelated languages, separated from each other both historically and geographically - indicating that the pattern is not the result of a historical transfer or geographic contact. In my project, I explore the idea that this phenomenon can reveal to us important clues about the universal mental mechanisms we use to create and interpret language.

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

I think what drew me to the topic was the same thing that originally drew me to linguistics. It’s just fascinating that in spite of how different individual languages may seem from one another, there exist patterns underlying the differences which we can uncover by approaching language in a scientific way. In that respect, I’m just happy that I found a topic that is at the same time quite narrow – looking at one very specific phenomenon – and has implications for one of the main problems linguistics deals with.

Although I have already made a lot of preliminary findings – for example, the cross-linguistic patterns mentioned earlier, and I have some ideas of where to take the project next, I can’t completely anticipate what all the details of my analysis will be and what else I will uncover as I work towards them. I think that is the truly exciting bit.

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

I’m looking forward to an environment where I can engage with ideas and questions that I would otherwise not get in a linguistics-only setting. I  think it is important to know how to communicate your ideas to broader audiences, so this year will be a perfect opportunity to hone those skills, see where the topics I work on fit in the broader context of the humanities, get feedback from experts in fields I’m not that familiar with, and learn about the exciting topics they are working on. Hopefully, I can return the favor by also offering a linguist’s perspective on non-linguistic topics.

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 fields that comprise the humanities are so varied that they each bring something unique to the table. Because of that, I’m not comfortable giving an opinion on the humanities as a whole and I’ll focus only on linguistics. Almost everyone has an opinion about language - either the language or languages they speak or what language is in general, and almost everyone also doesn’t know what linguistics is or what a linguist does.

But there’s much to be gained from the study of language, even though most people take it for granted. Linguists have uncovered a lot over the last 50-60 years, but we’re still just scratching the surface. For example, we’re only now starting to seriously explore the neurological and evolutionary side of language. Think also of the technological progress made with automatic translation and voice assistant software. In spite of how advanced these technologies may seem, we’re still far from making computers speak and understand language on par with humans. Consider that, as the voice assistant with the most supported languages, Apple’s Siri currently “speaks” 20 languages. We estimate that there are around 7000 languages spoken in the world today, and the databases required to train such software, given its current limitations, are practically impossible to compile for the vast majority of those languages. In contrast, a child learns their native language without really breaking a sweat, regardless of the language, and working with a very limited input compared to their computerized competitors. Whatever our children are doing, it’s radically different from what Siri’s teams of programmers are doing. The next big steps in the development of such technologies won’t come without first better understanding language itself.

Linguistics has the potential to be a bridge between the humanities on one end and engineering and the natural sciences on the other. Aside from this, I think that being aware of the complexity and the diversity of the world’s languages, and that language can be studied like any other natural object, can help people view the world more critically. If language, which comes to us so easily, is so complex that we are still working on fully understanding it, then perhaps other things we take for granted are worth a second though.

Get to Know Our Fellows: Four Questions with Amy Sopcak-Joseph

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

I will finish drafting and editing my dissertation, “Fashioning American Women: Godey’s Lady’s Book, Female Consumers, and Nineteenth-Century Periodical Publishing.”  The title “Lady’s Book” is misleading – it was actually a monthly magazine published in Philadelphia.  At its peak popularity, it combined elements of modern media that are familiar to us, as if we crossed a literary magazine with a fashion magazine such as Vogue and a domestic tastemaker like Martha Stewart.  The Lady’s Book was one of the most popular periodicals in the mid-nineteenth century, and my study combines its business history with cultural analysis.

 

 

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

 

As an undergraduate at Dickinson College, I double-majored in English and history.  I took a number of courses that were cross-listed between the two departments, and I loved looking at nineteenth-century women’s literature as primary sources.  I realized later that I could have been an American Studies major, but as none of my advisors saw themselves in that interdisciplinary field, I was never steered in that direction.  When I came to UConn for a Master’s degree in history many years ago, I took a seminar in the history of the book that introduced me to a field in which I was already doing work without ever realizing it. ‘Book history’ is a misnomer that includes the study of the creation, dissemination, and reception/uses of all kinds of texts, not just books.  My interest in book history and gender analysis led me to tackle the Lady’s Book as a dissertation topic.  Scholars have been digging into the Lady’s Book since the development of women’s history in the 1970s and 1980s.  But my lens is broader than that of previous studies, because I consider the material text – the form in which readers received and interacted with the magazine at home – as an important part of the magazine’s content.  I argue that the advertisements in the magazine, which scholars have not analyzed, help us to understand how middle-class womanhood and consumerism were inextricably linked by mass print culture in the antebellum period.

 

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

As any academic will attest, I feel like having the time and space to think and write for an entire year, without teaching obligations, is the ultimate luxury.  I will miss being in the classroom, because teaching my own courses in American history and talking about primary sources with students has shaped my thinking about the Lady’s Book’s historical context.  But, I am looking forward to working in a community of scholars, getting to learn about their work – and commiserating over rough writing days!

 

 

  1. 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?”

As an alum of a small liberal arts college, I think the value of the humanities is in its capaciousness: that it encompasses a range of fields.  Humanities scholarship is about curiosity about the world around us, and right now there is much to be curious about.  Why do people do what they do, believe what they believe?  How do people solve problems – or how did they do so in the past?  Thinking of higher education institutions as meant to prepare citizens very narrowly for one field that will lead to one kind of job seems to me to limit one’s curiosity and perspective.  If we want to foster innovative thinking and entrepreneurship, shouldn’t we highlight, rather than downplay, the humanities?

 

To this end, some of the most rewarding conversations that I have had with students have been with pre-med and nursing majors who have found value in humanities courses that help them to understand how complicated human relationships are/have been.  Rather than a hindrance or filler, humanities courses and scholarship can prepare us for the complexities of working with a wide range of people – useful to all kinds of majors since most people plan to have careers that include working with other humans.

Get to Know Our Fellows: Four Questions with Aimee Loiselle

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

My scholarship focuses on working women in relation to gender, race, and popular culture and the modern U.S. as a hub for global labor and capital.  In my current project, I argue that U.S. colonial experimentation with the labor of Puerto Rican needleworkers helped to propel a disaggregation of manufacturing by the early twentieth century, yet an American fascination with poor white southerners led the media to spotlight Crystal Lee Sutton in the 1970s.  The dissertation does not simply recover Sutton but reevaluates the context in which she labored, expanding it beyond the South to the Atlantic U.S. as a whole, including Puerto Rico.  The media attention on Sutton led to a Hollywood movie production, Norma Rae (1979), which recycled the narrative of a white working class in isolated, local circumstances.  The result elided a long history of southern labor activism and contributed to the erasure of Puerto Rican needleworkers.  In addition, the Norma Rae icon that emerged from movie publicity in the 1980s served the neoliberal turn in American society.  The icon’s embedded narrative of American exceptionalism and triumphant individualist rebellion converged with the rhetoric of leaders like Ronald Reagan.  As it reinforced that aspirational discourse of bold individuals free in the market, the icon did work to make neoliberal economic projects both more alluring and more rationalized.

 

The project makes interventions in three fields: cultural history with its attention to the power of narrative, history of capitalism and its consideration of political economy, and labor history with its interest in workers.  I use an intersectional frame of analysis to examine the ways gender, race, class, sexuality, and status shape and are shaped by cultural narratives and economic mechanisms.  The resulting history bridges common conceptual and historiographical divisions to set the U.S. into a transnational framework and to explore the connections between economic, cultural, and social structures in modern capitalism through the study of women, gender, and work.

 

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

I had an interest in working women during the 1970s—popular representations as well as their labor and activism.  I am intrigued by the dynamics between women’s decisions, behaviors, work, and status and the cultural narratives about working women and “woman’s work.”  When I conducted several searches, images and articles related to the 1979 movie Norma Rae appeared over and over.  I decided to dig into coverage of the movie, explore the images contained in it, and find out who made the film.  I discovered a controversy regarding the woman who had inspired it.  Crystal Lee Sutton had participated in a 1973-1974 local membership drive as a member of the Textile Workers Union of America (TWUA).  That drive was part of the TWUA/ACTWU 1963-1981 national campaign to organize J.P. Stevens.  Due to her appeal as an attractive, married, working white mother and poor southern mill hand, two major media outlets centered Sutton, one in a long magazine article and the other in a television segment.  That attention led to the interest of two women producers and the esteemed director Martin Ritt.  When Sutton questioned certain aspects of their screenplay, the producers and Twentieth Century-Fox removed her from the production.

 

Movies cannot capture the complexity of historical legacies and contemporary circumstances, and they are usually products intended for sale to as wide an audience as possible for the highest return on investment.  So they cannot be measured for simple “accuracy”—but how a production team makes its decisions to condense or change life stories and the final results offer important insights.  They reveal power relationships and capitalist systems of labor and distribution within the culture industries as well as the ways such products participate in the dissemination, debate, reconstruction, and subversion of meanings.

 

When I described this project to a friend, she mentioned that her mother had moved from Puerto Rico to New York and then to Massachusetts for work in garment factories in the 1970s.  Her story contradicted the dominant historiographical narrative that I was reading of a direct linear relocation of manufacturing from the Northeast to the South to the Global South.  I began to research Puerto Rican women in the textile and garment industry and discovered they were integrated into the national economy as “Puerto Rican needleworkers” at the same time as “Southern mill hands.”  The various groups of women provided distinct labor markets for manufacturers.  Although the women did not interact personally, they were interconnected if not interchangeable labor markets at the macroeconomic level with differing wages, categorizations, and migrations.

 

At this phase, I am most excited to concentrate on my material from the 1980s and the ways individualist cultural narratives like Norma Rae converged with the ascension of neoliberalism.  I have been reading extensively on neoliberalism as a nexus of economic, cultural, and political projects and hope to find more primary sources related to its culture of personal choice in the market and individuals as the principal locus of rights, responsibilities, and power.  The speeches and legislation of the Reagan years will offer rich research into the dynamics of neoliberalism and American pop culture.  I look forward to the time to immerse myself in the rhetoric of Ronald Reagan in particular, because he was so savvy at engaging the media and performance for political and economic policymaking.  The ascendance of neoliberalism was contingent not only on the economic crises of the 1970s and collapse of Keynesianism, but also on the ability of Republicans and right-wing thinkers to deploy cultural narrative and hold sway over national discourse.  America’s captivation with stories of individual heroism fit well with their rhetoric.

 

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

This fellowship year at UCHI allows me the ability to dedicate intensive time to my scholarly pursuits and writing.  I am eager to read primary and secondary sources with the opportunity to move from reading to notes to writing with directed, consistent attention.  Exploring the subtleties and intriguing relationships between groups of working women and between economic and cultural structures has required sustained time and reflection.  Some recent scholars have shifted away from past divisions between cultural history and economic history and into a new history of capitalism that uses multiple angles and methodologies.  As scholars of contemporary history address the Internet, social media, and globalized pop culture, knowledge about the potent but slippery relationship between culture, labor, and finance will be crucial.  Old arguments about culture existing only in a distinct “superstructure” or as a set of aesthetic distractions from “real” structures will continue to give way to more nuanced analyses of how economics, politics, and culture interact.  The time at UCHI will help me contribute to this growing conversation.

 

I am also eager to join regular discussions with other humanities scholars who are diving deeper into their research and writing.  The opportunities for such dialogue exist in every department, but intermingle with teaching and other duties.  As a scholar with a working-class background, finances have been a persistent concern as well.  I feel honored and privileged that I will have the funding and institutional support for daily time and space with exciting scholars who are also fully engrossed in their research pursuits.  UCHI exists as a place of concentration and exchange that is unique to the campus and the local region.

 

UCHI has been a vibrant part of my graduate studies at UConn.  At events with visiting speakers, Publishing NOW, campus dialogues, and public humanities advocates, I have met interesting scholars, heard innovative research, and received guidance on writing and submissions.  Most importantly, the events foster community for faculty, students, and staff who often work in solitude or departmental enclaves.  The interdisciplinary links have enriched my thinking and scholarship, and I am anticipating more time at such stimulating events as a UCHI fellow.

 

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?”

Humanities studies have been at the center of my growth and explorations since childhood.  As an avid young reader drawn to stories of all types, humanities classes have inspired my educational, creative, and career pursuits and shaped my participation in daily life as a citizen and neighbor.  In my experiences, the humanities include rich documentaries, thoughtful investigations, biographies, and long-form essays as well as the courses, articles, and books of academia—all of which cracked open the world for me.  I was a girl from a working-class background who went to the public library and watched public television to hear stories, meet people, learn histories, and travel to places I could not go without humanities studies.  I later became the first member of my family to go away to college, to publish in magazines and journals, and to attend graduate school.  The humanities made that possible because at a young age I understood the wider world as a complex place filled with obstacles and catalysts, unforeseen consequences and power dynamics, wide-ranging languages and shifting traditions, so I could jump into it without unbearable trepidation.

 

Beyond personal enrichment, the humanities enhance a society and all the people who speak, build, work, teach, parent, vote, open businesses, do public service, or run for political office.  The current ascendance of neoliberalism, with its entwined economic and cultural emphasis on deliverables and transactions, has pushed many humanities scholars to defend our studies in those terms.  We list articles, monographs, op-eds, digital archives, and online exhibits.  While we all must engage in both the rigorous peer exchange required for a scholarly pursuit of knowledge and the pragmatic demands of our institutions and employment, it behooves humanities folks to offer their significance and value in other terms as well.  These terms might bring academic humanities studies into unconventional realms where we do not produce deliverables but rather deepen conversations and shift understandings.  Humanities studies and public events shaped around them can encourage us to stop reacting with impulse, to slow our actions, and to share ideas and questions before our responses.  They guide us to face people and places unknown with a curiosity about similarities, differences, inspirations, and foibles rather than with angst; they help us to see familiar people and places with questions about our own assumptions, inertia, and attachments without the fear of losing ourselves.

 

At this critical moment of accelerating and intensified global technological change, the humanities are extremely vital.  When people address their societies primarily from the perspective of efficiency in productivity and digital technology, they cannot raise the necessary questions to consider broad possible implications and effects.  I have a side research interest in the recent history of Silicon Valley, information technology (IT) venture capitalists, and social media executives.  In articles and interviews, many of them make extreme idealistic comments about the ability of their IT programs, apps, and social media to create a utopia in which people no longer do manual labor and smart technology solves all manufacturing, service, education, transportation, and climate problems.  Humanities scholars recognize that technology is not neutral or inevitable.  We have the ability to connect changes in technologies to power, politics, economics, and culture in ways that IT professionals do not usually consider.  Revelations about Russian agencies and right-wing American digital consultants like Brad Parscale manipulating social media during the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign have exposed the naiveté of many IT leaders and the shallowness of progressive politics disconnected from the critical perspectives of history, philosophy, literature, and cultural and political studies.  If Silicon Valley capitalists and executives had a more substantive background in such fields, they might have been prepared for the ways authoritarian leaders and the quest for power can infuse and bend technologies.  They might be prepared for the inability of smart technology and robotics to solve the problem of the inequitable distribution of resources, income, and wealth.  As digital, robotic, and medical technologies offer increasing capacities to intervene in organic processes, societies need humanities studies and scholars—not only for specific discussions that interrogate the contingency of “technological progress” and the diverse possibilities it raises, but also to enrich our societies to imagine and experience other priorities, people, and ideas outside the digital.  Humanities studies of any time period, society, school of artists, thinkers, or writers push for better questions and empathy and nudge us out of our entrenched reactions and into explorations of how other human beings have faced the dilemmas and joys of their existence.

 

 

 

 

Get to Know Our Fellows: Four Questions with Katherine Grandjean

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

I’m working on a book that explores the violent legacies of the American Revolution, especially in the south. It follows the lives of two brothers from North Carolina, who experienced some of the worst violence of the war as boys and, later in life, became killers. Micajah and Wiley Harpe committed dozens of murders in the 1790s. I’m using their story to explore the unsettlement and the alienation, especially among white men, left behind by the founding moment.

 

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

I felt, strongly, that we didn’t know enough about the aftermath of the Revolution—especially the war itself. How people carried on, how they were scarred, how they reconciled the old with the new. Then I found the Harpes’ story, which speaks to some unfortunately perennial themes in American life—violence, crime, and the political alienation of young white men. And happily, it’s also a tremendously compelling story—with a lot of twists and turns. I couldn’t resist it, as a narrator.

 

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

I’m looking forward to writing, thinking, and sharing ideas among scholars from a variety of disciplines. Although I’m mostly using traditional historical records (like newspapers and court documents), I’m also leaning on insights from other disciplines, like psychology and criminology. So, this fellowship year means I will have extra time and resources to write about this history in ways that do it justice.

 

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?”

 I wish I had a pithy answer to this question. There are plenty of practical reasons to study the humanities. I know an engineer who says he happily hires liberal arts majors, these days, because they think about problem-solving in the most creative and fullest ways. But more than that, I don’t think you can appreciate the richness of the human condition without the humanities—The beauty, the tragedy, the artistic heights and cruelest valleys of human behavior. Without history, or art, or literature, how do we know who we are?

 

Get to Know Our Fellows: Four Questions with Jonathan Robins

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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.

 

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

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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.

Get to Know Our Fellows: Four Questions with James Beebe

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What is your academic background and what is your current position in UCHI/at UConn/Your Home Institution?

I am Professor of Philosophy, Director of the Experimental Epistemology Research Group, and member of the Center for Cognitive Science at the University at Buffalo (SUNY). My Ph.D. is in philosophy, but I have extensive training in psychology as well. Most of my research has been in a field known as ‘experimental philosophy,’ where I perform empirical studies of how laypeople and experts in fields outside of philosophy think about questions of perennial philosophical debate—e.g., questions about the nature of knowledge, evidence, and rationally justified belief.

 

What is the project you’re currently working on?

I am currently writing a book entitled The Limits of Skepticism that examines skeptical philosophical traditions in both the ancient and the modern worlds in an effort to understand what distinguishes healthy, constructive doubt from crude denialism. The book considers which kinds of skepticism and doubt should be taken seriously, how far skeptical doubts can be pushed before they collapse, and how illegitimate challenges to our knowledge can be rebutted. As part of my research on skepticism and doubt, I am studying how experts from a variety of fields (environmental science, astrophysics, chemistry, biology, economics, psychology, sociology, anthropology, public policy) approach persistent disagreement within their disciplines and how much doubt (if any) they think members of the general public should have about their fields when specialists within it are known to disagree.

 

How did you arrive at this topic?

In the highly polarized political climate of the U.S., there is a great deal of disagreement among members of the general public, yet this disagreement does not seem to lead people to question their convictions as often it probably should. However, when there is a small amount of disagreement among experts in some field (e.g., in climate science, education, economic policy, healthcare), this disagreement is often leveraged into strong reasons for doubt about certain claims by people who have various personal interests at stake concerning those claims. So, the question of which kinds of doubts we should have about which issues seemed like an important topic to be working on.

 

What impact might your work have on a larger public understanding of your topic?

Because the information age seems to have entered a post-truth stage, in which we are flooded with as much misinformation as information, private citizens must exercise greater discernment in distinguishing reliable from unreliable sources of knowledge and balancing their convictions and doubts. I hope that insights drawn from various philosophical traditions around the world and from the opinions of scientific and public policy experts can help us understand what an intellectually virtuous response to peer disagreement and conflicting expert testimony can look like.

Get to Know Our Fellows: Four Questions with Nancy Shoemaker

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Shoemaker

–What is your academic background and what is your current position in UCHI/at UConn/Your Home Institution?

I’ve been at UConn for almost twenty years now, in the History Department. I had a few short-term jobs after I got my Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota in 1991 and was very happy to be hired at UConn in 1998. I’ve been a professor of history here since 2005. My field of specialization is Native American history. I’ve published books and articles on various topics in Native Studies, from family and demographic history to women’s history to what has been a major interest of mine over the years, the history of race and racism. My last book was about New England Native men who worked in the nineteenth-century American whaling industry. It was the best research experience I ever had. I loved learning about what are now considered obscure places all over the world—Norfolk Island, St. Helena, the Marquesas—and I’ve since expanded how I describe my current academic interests to include maritime history and the history of the U.S. and the world, especially the U.S. and the Pacific. I have just completed another book, which is not out yet but I hope in a year or two. It is about Americans in nineteenth-century Fiji.

-What is the project you’re currently working on?

My new book project—the one being funded by the Humanities Institute—is about the history of soap from the seventeenth century up to the present, more particularly about the history of how soap is made and about soap’s raw ingredients, so about the production of soap more than about its consumption, though I will deal a little with its consumption since obviously the two are related. This research is a big step away from anything I’ve previously done since it is more explicitly world history. I would also categorize it as environmental history since my focus will be on the extraction of the many oils used in soap—mostly tallow, olive oil, coconut oil, palm oil, whale oil–and how these geographically distinct materials came to conjoin in an ordinary household product.  Soap is what I call a “global composite.” The world is represented in every bar of soap, and yet the chemical process that creates soap obscures from view what it’s made of and consequently also obscures the environmental, social, and global impacts spawned by the mass manufacture of soap that began in the seventeenth century and mushroomed every century thereafter.

-How did you arrive at this topic?

The history of soap probably seems a big move away from my earlier work in Native American history, but my interest in soap emerged out of the Native American whaling project so there is a connection. One of whale oil’s biggest uses was as an ingredient in soap. I didn’t think much about this early on. But there came a day when I decided that I needed to find some whale-themed gift to give to all the people helping me–archivists, people who wrote reference letters for me, and so on. I could not find anything attractive and affordable until after months of searching, I stumbled across the possibility of making my own soap, which I then learned how to do. I then made a sperm whale stamp based on one I found in a Native American whalemen’s voyage journal, which I stamped onto every bar of gift soap. My journey from complete ignorance about soap to producing it in my kitchen using exotic materials from around the world that I ordered online and were brought to my door by Federal Express and UPS is one I want to share with readers. The sense of wonder when I opened and sniffed a bottle of myrrh essential oil or got my hands greasy in a big tub of palm oil (certified as sustainably produced by the online supplier, but who knows for sure?) also made me want to know the history behind the sourcing of these materials.

-What impact might your work have on a larger public understanding of your topic?

We take soap for granted. It is completely naturalized as a feature of most people’s daily routines, and yet not many people know how soap is actually made, what it’s made from, and who makes it. It is also considered highly virtuous for its cleansing and sanitizing properties. Behind this seemingly innocuous consumer product is a vast global workforce and an environment transformed to produce the oils that make soap possible. I like to think that people’s intimate relationship with soap would make them interested in finding out more about it. When Americans, for instance, worry about their global and environmental impact, they think about Nike sweatshops or global warming and the buzz about these big problem issues that make it into the general media seem all about finding easy fixes to prevent labor exploitation and catastrophic environmental degradation. By making people more aware of how something so ordinary as soap has engendered massive changes in global social relations and human relationships to their environments, I would be promoting awareness of how global interconnections and human dependence on oils are so complete and complex, there are no easy fixes. Soap is not the only global composite. We are surrounded by them. However, soap was one of the earliest and became one of the most entrenched as integral to human existence.

Get to Know Our Fellows: Four Questions with Ruth Glasser

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–What is your academic background and what is your current position in UCHI/at UConn/Your Home Institution?

I have a B.A. in Comparative Literature from the University of Wisconsin and a Ph.D. in American Studies from Yale.  I probably gravitate towards interdisciplinary programs because I’ve never been sure what I wanted to be when I grew up.  Still don’t.

In non-Humanities Institute civilian life I am an Assistant Professor in Residence in the Urban and Community Studies Program and am based at UConn’s Waterbury campus, where I’ve been since 2002.  Between Yale and UConn I worked as a freelance public historian on a variety of books, curriculum projects, exhibits, documentaries, and other more community-based history projects mostly focusing on Puerto Rican and Latino history.   At UConn, the community engagement has continued with service learning projects for students in the history and urban studies courses I teach.

-What is the project you’re currently working on?

The working title for my book project is “Brass City/Grass Roots: The Persistence of Agriculture in Industrial Waterbury, 1870-1980.”  I’ve been working in a variety of archives around the state and conducting oral history interviews as well as reading massive piles of secondary literature on topics ranging from gardening to garbage, thanks to the Humanities Institute.

-How did you arrive at this topic?

It’s an odd story since it has nothing to do with my usual Puerto Rican/Latino research.  Really the project emerged organically [pardon the pun] from my students’ and my involvement with a Waterbury organization called Brass City Harvest, that has been working since 2007 to create new sources of fresh food and jobs for the city through community gardens, greenhouses, a mobile produce van and more recently, a soon-to-be-completed food hub where area farmers can process their produce for sale.  I was teaching an intro course in which we considered food deserts and food justice as contemporary urban issues.  My students began to do service learning projects with Brass City Harvest and I joined the board for a while.  The executive director asked me to do some research for a little exhibit on farming in Waterbury’s relatively recent past.  I had had no idea about the local farming sector, and when I started talking to people and uncovering sources the project seemed worthy of something more lasting than the original exhibit, so that’s how the book came about.

-What impact might your work have on a larger public understanding of your topic?

As Sue Pronovost, the executive director of Brass City Harvest said when she asked me to do the exhibit, it’s hard to convince people that it’s possible to grow things in a city like Waterbury when they don’t realize that it’s happened before.  This project will hopefully reknit together past and present and future by showing that people did raise, process, and market food in Waterbury not too long ago so it is entirely possible for it to happen again.  The food sector could be an important part of Waterbury’s revitalization as well as a way to improve its public health and sense of community,

In a more general way, I hope to historicize the topic of urban agriculture, which is mostly talked about in academic and popular literature as an entirely contemporary phenomenon.  But the story of Waterbury’s agricultural past is not unique, and there are many more such stories to be told about cities and towns which supposedly were 100 percent industrial until industry left.  I hope to be part of an ongoing academic and popular conversation about how and why cities used to support their food sector, when, how and why they withdrew that support, and how they can support it again.  In our era of deindustrialization, we need to look at ways to economically and socially revitalize our cities and there are many lessons to be learned from the past.

Get to Know Our Fellows: Four Questions with Eleni Coundouriotis

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coundouriotis

-What is your academic background and what is your current position in UCHI/at UConn/Your Home Institution?

I am a Professor of English with an appointment also in our Program in Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies, housed in the Department of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages. I have also been involved for many years with the Human Rights Institute and much of my teaching and research is around human rights. My education was in Comparative Literature and I specialize in the novel, in particular on how novelists engage problems of historical narration. Most of the primary texts I engage with are from postcolonial literatures, especially Anglophone and Francophone African literatures.

 

-What is the project you’re currently working on?

My current project has a tentative title of “The Hospital and the State.” It brings together a number of interpretative essays on contemporary works that focus on the hospital as a setting and use this setting as way to explore state failure. The project asks questions about the nature of political action and responsibility and where these rest in countries that have suffered significant brain drain, including the departure of many writers and intellectuals. The topic of the hospital seems to engage expatriate writers and this is intriguing to me. In this project, I also return to questions that have engaged me in earlier work concerning the writing of history. How do diasporic writers engage political and historical questions about their countries of origin? What does this distance mean to them and why do they repeatedly create characters who take on leadership roles in those countries?

 

-How did you arrive at this topic?

This is a hard question to answer because I feel that I am still arriving at my topic… Book projects take some time to become fully coherent. Indeed, by the time that happens, the book is finished! However, the easy answer to this question is in part through teaching courses in contemporary Anglophone fiction where this convergence of texts that focused on hospitals became apparent to me. I was also invited to participate on a panel on “Literature and the State in Africa” and first developed my ideas around this convergence for that occasion. However, the project now includes works by writers outside Africa, most notably Amitav Ghosh and Michael Ondaatje. My interests in human rights, and humanitarianism more particularly, have kept me engaged with scholarship on global health and the history of hospitals in Africa. The project is also an extension of my thinking on the narration of war, which was the topic of my previous book. Many of these novels take place during or after war.

 

-What impact might your work have on a larger public understanding of your topic?

In so far as the topic will focus on ideas around leadership and political agency, I hope that it can help spur a conversation about how we conceive these. My work always seeks to complicate our understanding of how historical narratives come to gain currency and takes up the challenge of decentering our perspective. Disseminating the work of writers from the Global South is additionally part of my effort to change a larger public understanding.