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Penn Faculty Research Fellows,
Kristen Stromberg Childers, Assistant Professor of History
Seeking Imperialism’s Embrace: National Identity, Decolonization, and Assimilation in the French Caribbean
In 1946, the French Caribbean islands of Martinique and Guadeloupe voted to transform their status as colonies to become integral departments of France. With this vote for change, Martinique and Guadeloupe prompted a massive experiment in the fusion of cultures, histories, and identities that were at once entwined and vastly different. The people of the Antilles hoped to partake in the financial, social, and cultural benefits of association with the “mother country” to counteract the powerful memories of a slave past, while the French hoped to assimilate Antilleans into a “universal” culture that ignored racial and ethnic difference. This transformative process reveals much about the realities of decolonization and the human, political, and cultural costs of overcoming a violent history and creating inclusive democracies today.
Emily Dolan, Assistant Professor of Music
Timbre, Aesthetics, and Musical Culture in the Age of Haydn
The 18th century witnessed a remarkable reevaluation of the musical medium: early
enlightenment thinkers argued that an individual musical sound—a single note played on an oboe, for example—was meaningless. Throughout the century, however, composers, musicians, theorists, philosophers, and scientists became increasingly fascinated with the qualities—both acoustical and emotional—inherent in tones and timbre. My project explores this profound change by drawing on philosophical discussions of sensation and cognition, musical works, instruments and musical machines, orchestration treatises, and 18th-century acoustical science. In particular, I examine what it means to think about musical sonority, how the concept of timbre alters ideas of musical meaning, and the changes in music`al culture that made timbre the focus of attention for composers, philosophers, music critics, and scientists.
David Grazian, Associate Professor of Sociology
The Knowledge Industries and the Changing Postindustrial City
In recent decades, former manufacturing cities like Philadelphia have transformed into global postindustrial centers dominated by local and international firms specializing in knowledge creation and symbolic and/or cultural production. I plan on researching emerging urban initiatives that attempt to forge links among knowledge-based industries in the new economy, young members of the “creative class,” and the postindustrial cities in which they circulate. By investigating four knowledge-based industries based in postindustrial cities that employ young college graduates— management consulting, advertising and public relations, television production, and software design—I hope to gain insight into how these professions have rapidly changed over time, and how the professional lives of young people are shaped by the ever-evolving postindustrial city.
Nancy Hirschmann, R. Jean Brownlee Endowed Professor, Political Science
Change of Life: A Political Theory of Illness and Disability
I wish to explore the issue of “change” through the lens of illness and disability. “Change” ranges from the most practical changes the body experiences to the more abstract questions of self-identity and one’s relation to others and the social. These changes brought by illness and disability pose a threat to the able-bodied: for anyone could become disabled or ill at any time. The fear of such change, and the uncertainty and indeterminacy of the body they reveal, are issues that we refuse to confront: the sick and disabled are the “ultimate other” because “they” embody what “we” most fear becoming. This fear poses the greatest paradox, namely the difficulty in changing how the able-bodied think about disability and illness when “we” refuse to acknowledge our current beliefs. I plan to use the seminar as a way to help me think through this paradoxical dimension of change, of how changes occur in the self and the social, in the framing of identity and in the shaping of social categories.
Beth Linker, Assistant Professor, History and Sociology of Science
Walter Reed, Then and Now
Often considered the crown jewel of military medicine, Walter Reed Hospital has recently come under fire, with maimed veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan claiming they receive sub-standard care. This project will place the recent events at Walter Reed in historical perspective, using the First World War—when rehabilitation for injured U.S. soldiers was first instituted—as its starting point. This project addresses change on many levels, from the way World War I prosthetics were initially designed to be symbols of “liberty” to now when bionic appendages are showcased on the White House Lawn, garnering support for the Iraq war. The most fundamental change addressed in this project, though, is that which is experienced by the disabled soldiers themselves. For some the change is so profound that they feel they have lost their former pre-war selves and must begin life anew.
John Tresch, Assistant Professor, History and Sociology of Science
The Romantic Machine: Science and Utopian Technologies in France, 1820 to 1851
Romanticism has often been interpreted as a reaction against the changes brought by industrialization. This commonplace relies on a familiar opposition setting mechanism, calculation and reductionism against aesthetics, emotion and organic thought. On the contrary, The Romantic Machine shows how, in France after Napoleon’s fall, science and art were seen as complementary or even equivalent instruments for uniting a society fractured by revolution and reaction. Romantic literature, arts and popular spectacle relied on science and technology as their inspiration and vehicle; reciprocally, romantic enthusiasms infused mechanical innovations, scientific research and technological utopias. Focusing on specific technologies— steam engines, electromagnetic instruments, daguerreotypes, mass-scale printing— this book explores unexpected connections between such diverse phenomena as nature painting, plans for a national railroad, fantastic literature and positivist sociology.
Beth Wenger, Associate Professor of History
History Lessons: The Invention of American Jewish Heritage
American Jewish history has been fashioned virtually from whole cloth. The United States was tabula rasa in terms of Jewish history, an outpost far removed from the centers of Jewish culture, a country where Jews had no past. “History Lessons” examines the ways that American Jews created new historical narratives, uniquely suited to the American environment. On holidays and special occasions, in times of war, during national celebrations and moments of group reflection, Jews pieced together a new collective heritage, constructed with a comparative gaze toward Europe and replete with expectations for the possibilities of Jewish life in America. Never monolithic and always contested, American Jewish heritage helped to define what the United States meant for Jews as well as what Jews meant to the nation.
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