23 fellows, from near and afar, to come to Humanities Center
Spring means many things to many people. At the Humanities Center, it means that 23 new fellows are gearing up to spend the 2004-05 academic year in residence at 424 Santa Teresa St.
Selected from a pool of more than 300 applicants, the diverse cohort for the coming school year includes faculty from the United States and abroad, as well as Stanford professors, graduate students and undergraduate fellows (who will be chosen Autumn Quarter). The center's mandate is to support interdisciplinary research in the humanities. The kind of intellectual environment this goal fosters makes fellowships at the center among the most coveted in the humanities, according to Elizabeth Wahl, associate director of the center. The External Faculty Fellowships competition, for example, drew more than 200 applicants from around the world; approximately 4 percent of them were offered fellowships.
The incoming fellows from outside Stanford include Sandra Barnes (University of Pennsylvania), winner of the Amaury Talbot Prize for African Anthropology; Pulitzer Prize nominee Christopher Morris (University of Texas-Arlington), who works on Southern environmental history; archaeologist Peter Vargyas (University of Pecs, Hungary), an alumnus of the Oriental Institute of St. Petersburg whose research focuses on the use of silver in the Mesopotamian economy; and Margaret Lavinia Anderson (University of California-Berkeley), a former Berlin American Academy Prize Fellow whose forthcoming book, The Armenian Genocide: A German Story, examines Germany and the Ottoman Empire from the mid-1890s until 1932.
It also takes a team effort to select fellows whose projects are exciting, innovative and likely to have big impacts in their fields. More than 75 Stanford faculty members were involved in the selection processes this past year, according to Humanities Center Director John Bender, the Doyle Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies and the Meier Family Professor in Humanities.
So what do you do with a group of high-powered scholars from so many fields and academic ranks assembled under one roof? You try for "a combination of overstimulation and benign neglect -- because they have to be inspired and have time to get their books written," according to fellowship administrator Chi Elliott.
"Most campus-based humanities centers focus on one or two core activities: offering external fellowships, grants for internal faculty, graduate students or undergraduates; supporting research workshops; or presenting public lectures and events," Wahl said. "Our center is unique in that we do all of these things -- which makes for a very stimulating intellectual environment for our fellows."
The center's fellowships are made possible by gifts and grants from the following individuals and foundations: the Esther Hayfer Bloom Estate, Theodore H. and Frances K. Geballe, Marta Sutton Weeks, the Mericos Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Office of the Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education.
Following is a list of Humanities Center Fellows for the 2004-05 academic year and their book projects.
External Faculty Fellows
Margaret Lavinia Anderson, History, University of California-Berkeley: The Armenian Genocide: A German Story
Sandra Barnes, Anthropology, University of Pennsylvania: Culture in Motion: Coastal West Africa, 1760-1860
Charles Griswold, Philosophy, Boston University: Philosophy and Our Discontents: On Reconciling with Imperfection
Jonathan Holloway, African American Studies and History, Yale University: Jim Crow Wisdom: Memory, Identity and Politics in Black America, 1941-2000
Christopher Morris, History, University of Texas-Arlington: A Big Muddy River Runs Through It: An Environmental History of the Lower Mississippi Valley and Its Peoples Since 1500
Harsha Ram, Slavic Languages and Literatures, University of California-Berkeley: The Peripheral Avant-Garde: Futurist Movements in Russia and the Caucasus
Greg Shaya, History, College of Wooster: Revisiting the Spectacle of the Scaffold: The Public Execution in France, 1800-1939
Peter Vargyas, Ancient History, University of Pecs, Hungary: Before Coinage: Money, Prices and Economy in the Ancient Near East
Internal Faculty Fellows
Margaret Cohen, French and Italian: The Novel and Seafaring
John Felstiner, English: "So Much Depends": Poetry and Environmental Urgency
Charlotte Fonrobert, Religious Studies: Rabbinic Maps of Urban Identities: The Eruv, Mixed Neighborhoods and Symbolic Boundaries
Estelle Freedman, History: The Politics of Rape: Race, Gender and Social Change in the United States, 1870-1980
Hester Gelber, Religious Studies: With Justice and Mercy: The Medieval Retributive Cosmos
Akhil Gupta, Anthropology: Reincarnating Social Theory
James Sheehan, History: The Monopoly of Violence: War and the State in 20th-Century Europe
Geballe Dissertation Fellows
Lela Graybill, Art and Art History: Vulnerable Bodies: Violent Spectacle in Early Post-Enlightenment Europe
Barnabas Malnay, Political Science: Supranationalism and Identity Layering in Spanish Catalonia
Christine McBride, English: From Story to Style: Interlevel Dialogism in Literary Impressionist Narratives by Henry James
Teresa Nava-Vaughn, History: Constructing Authority: Actual and Representational Ascendancy in the Astur Kingdom
Brad Pasanek, English: The Mind Is a Figure of Speech: A Database of 18th-Century Metaphors of Mind
Mary Rose, Linguistics: Mining the Golden Years: How Elders' Speech Informs Sociolinguistic Theory
Brett Whalen, History: Salvation History and the Division of Christendom, 1050-1300
Erica Yao, Art and Art History: Systems of Display at the Qing Dynasty Court: Visual Culture in 18th-Century China
