|
|
Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellows
in the Humanities,
Jennifer R. Borland, PhD, Stanford
Manuscripts on the Move: Medieval Medicine, Artistic Exchange, and the Régime du corps
In the Middle Ages, the fluctuating boundaries between cultures, languages, and geographical regions were regularly transgressed by cross-cultural exchanges of all kinds. This study focuses on one particularly well-traveled medical text that demonstrates such exchange. The thirteenth-century Régime du corps (“Regimen of the Body”) was a popular health guide that survives in over sixty manuscripts, spanning multiple languages and contexts. Ranging from luxurious elite manuscripts to more modest productions, these books represent the convergences of Western and Arabic scientific traditions with popular healing practices, literature and religious belief. My research focuses on four illustrated versions of the Régime not only to explore these manuscripts’ audiences and their commentaries on the body, but also to illuminate how medieval visual, textual and cultural content was absorbed and combined through circulation and appropriation. Ultimately, such intersections between science and visual culture contribute to the recognition of medieval Europe itself as an infinitely diverse and mutable construct.
 |
Chiara Cillerai, PhD, Rutgers
The Voices of Cosmopolitanism in Eighteenth-Century American Literature
Voices of Cosmopolitanism considers how a number of early American writers employed the universalizing language of cosmopolitanism to engage in discussions of nationhood. These authors identified community through the dynamic relationship between the local contexts and the British and European metropolises, between local realities and universalizing ideals. The dynamic character of this identification provided a frame for writing one’s identity with different outcomes. On the one hand, individual and group identity reproduced representational and rhetorical techniques that aimed at subordinating any form of otherness within a unifying narrative centered in British culture. In this case, the “mankind” of the cosmopolitan ideal assumed the physical and cultural traits of the English. On the other hand, the dynamic features of the form that identity took within this context challenged the Britain-oriented metanarrative by dislocating it and by repositioning margins and centers within its frame. From this perspective, by looking at the works of writers such as Benjamin Franklin, Phillis Wheatley, Philip Mazzei, and others, I investigate the problematic intersections between elite and non-elite discourses, between the voices of those who had access to power and publication and those who had none, between print and manuscript forms, and between literary genres that emerge within the works of this diverse group of writers.
|
Johanna T. Crane, PhD, UCSF/Berkeley
Disaster, Assistance, Opportunity: AIDS, Science, and Power at the Dawn of Uganda's 'Treatment Era'
Free HIV drugs started to become widely available for the first time in sub-Saharan Africa in late 2004, nearly 10 years after their debut in the West. The advent of the African ‘treatment era’ was historic not only for Africans with HIV/AIDS but also for global HIV science, as international researchers flocked to Uganda and other African countries in order to take advantage of new scientific opportunities. My project examines the impact of this ‘turn towards Africa’ in American HIV research, focusing on research collaborations between American and Ugandan physician-scientists. I argue that though these collaborations operate under an ethic of equal partnership, they also introduce new inequalities related to the production of scientific knowledge about HIV/AIDS. My monograph tracks the transnational flows of knowledge, technologies, money, obligation, protocols, drugs and biological samples that constitute scientific collaboration between U.S. and Ugandan HIV researchers, and explores the significance of such connections in light of the recent explosion of interest in “global health” at American research universities.
|
Sindhumathi K. Revuluri, PhD, Princeton
Sounding France through Others: Empire in Modernist Musical Thought
Anxiety about the invasion of the foreign has always haunted France's quest for self-definition. The nation's fascination with – and imagination of – exotic Others continues to be mediated by the aspiration to identify and preserve an authentic French culture and language. At the end of the 19th century, these dual preoccupations were further complicated by previously imagined exotic elements that now entered lived reality. In Sounding France through Others, I argue that the presence of exotic musics on French soil precipitated an anxiety over France’s musical identity. I propose that this anxiety was eased through absorption of the exotic sounds, thereby erasing the difference they once highlighted. Such a gesture is both a powerful indication of France’s latent imperial authority and the paradox of fin-de-siècle French music: in the process of denoting exotic others, the French musical language became itself exoticized.
|
Andrew D. Witmer, PhD, University of Virginia
God's Interpreters: African Missions, Transnational Protestantism, and Race in the United States, 1830–1910
God's Interpreters situates the development of U.S. racial thought within the social world of transnational religious activity. It tracks scores of nineteenth-century Protestant missionaries and African converts as they journeyed, textually and physically, across the Atlantic and back again, showing how they shaped American ideas about race in the process. The study explores the crucial but complicated results of Bible translation for missionary knowledge of African people and cultures, and the strategies of self-presentation used by African converts visiting the United States. It also explores the tensions between missionary ethnography and domestic racial science, the use of missionary reports by racial theorists and anthropologists, and the heated disputes between missionaries over questions of race and racism. God's Interpreters shows that American racial orders and ideologies were both built and resisted by people, texts, and ideas circulating through webs of interaction and exchange fostered by Protestant missionary work in sub-Saharan Africa.
|
