Fellows Talks

Four Questions with Jason Chang

Posted on by
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.

Four Questions with Dorit Bar-On

Posted on by

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.

Four Questions with Ellen Litman

Posted on by
Ellen Litman

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
  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?”
    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.

Four Questions with William McMillan

Posted on by

  1. Tell us a bit about the project you are working on at UCHI.
    My project leverages my research on a theologically conservative but culturally flexible church in Manhattan to think through the limits, tension points, challenges, and opportunities for evangelical Christianity (in conversation with other religious traditions) in the contemporary era of advanced modernity.
  2. What drew you to this topic and what exciting developments are you anticipating?
    The training that I received in a particular theological tradition before transitioning to sociology actually helped broaden my perspective and provided me with greater flexibility and nuance in appropriating a particular set of religious commitments as an analytic or grid through which to make sense of the world. This paradox of pursuing a more robust set of convictions and arriving at a more capacious view of the world intrigued me and set me on the path to think through the adaptability and flexibility that is often entailed in a given religious tradition. One exciting development that I am anticipating is clarifying and substantiating ways that evangelical Christianity and other religious traditions are conversing with and/or positively articulating more immanent conceptual frames in response to today’s increasingly secular cultural climate.
  3. What are you looking forward to in regard to this year at UCHI?
    I am looking forward to rich conversations with other scholars, as well as genuine interdisciplinary exchange. It is a privilege to be part of such a talented and diverse academic community and to think through and dialogue about such weighty, relevant, and important issues.
  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 scholarship brings to the fore questions of meaning, purpose, aspiration, value, and telos. Answers to these questions are existentially unavoidable, though they are sadly and far too frequently ignored. The power and promise of various technologies and societal changes are touted, as science elaborates more and more a detached description of the world—the world of things. While all well and good, these tools and descriptions only go so far. Important questions inevitably emerge, such as: How can one discern between better and worse uses of a given technology? Is bigger, faster, and more efficient always the best course of action when it comes to human beings? How might the tools and techniques of science help human communities over the long term? Such questions fall in the sweet spot of humanities research, which at the end of the day concerns wisdom and deep reflection on what it means to live a noble, honorable, and worthwhile human life.

Four Questions with Richard Frieder

Posted on by

  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.

Four Questions with Adrian Stegovec

Posted on by
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

Posted on by

  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

Posted on by

 

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

Posted on by

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

Posted on by

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.