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Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellows
in the Humanities,
Popular protest in mid-to-late eighteenth-century London, Boston, and Paris developed using surprisingly similar—and
predominantly peaceful—techniques. As political contestations (the Wilkite movement in London, pre-Revolutionary contestations in Boston, and Revolutionary movements in Paris) developed, each group of radical protesters used emerging notions of popular sovereignty to gain voice in the period's controversies. In each campaign, with explicit references to the prior examples, protesters innovated political demonstrations, banquets, petition campaigns, mass-meetings, and occasionally popular insurrections to help influence the political process. All except the last typically remained physically nonviolent. This study aims to be the first to place all three movements in comparative perspective, thereby gaining insight into the adaptations of eighteenth-century popular radicalism across different contexts, and attempting to understand to what extent such movements were cosmopolitan and universalist in
practice. Through examining newspapers, pamphlets, personal letters and journals, official reports, and other contemporary sources, I hope to reconstruct a broad picture of the strategies and methods of the three protest campaigns, and the extent to which they borrowed from international (or indeed transatlantic) examples.
Lisa Cerami
Ph.D., Princeton University; German Studies
Medieval Adaptations: Union, Communion, and Community in German Expressionism
This project explores modern adaptations of medieval mysticism, societal forms, and gothic architecture, which create a
foundation for modernist aesthetics in the first three decades of the twentieth century. I approach the medieval
period as it is both adapted by modernists to enrich the poetic and artistic media of their own time, and, as expressionist
theorists like Wassily Kandinsky, Ernst Bloch, and Wilhelm Worringer conclude, as an adaptable or adapting force that
emerges at various historical intervals according to a principle of necessity. In doing so, I hope to unmask the difficult
interdependency between medieval inheritances and modernist concepts of union, communion, and community, especially as they permeate German expressionist poetry, art, and architecture. In three parts, I will explore the specific
dimensions of modernist artistic production, culminating in an argument for a theory of modernism as the embodiment
of tensions between secular and sectarian, spiritual and materialist, progressive and regressive historical forces.
Farzaneh Hemmasi
Ph.D., Columbia University; Ethnomusicology
Iranian Popular Music in Exile: Media, Politics, and Publics
As a postdoctoral fellow, I will transform my dissertation into a book manuscript. My dissertation is an ethnographic and historical study of the Iranian exile music industry that emerged in Southern California after popular music was banned in Iran following the 1978-79 Revolution. Drawing on interviews with musicians and media producers, my work demonstrates the many transformations Persian-language musiqi-ye pop has undergone since its inception in the 1950s from a symbol of cosmopolitan modernity, to a banned cultural form in the revolution, to a medium for exiles' aesthetic recombination and circulation of Iranian identifications. My work also traces the adaptations of musiqi-ye pop to dispersed geographic locations: I draw on reception studies I conducted in Tehran to account for the popularity of LA-produced pop in Iran, where it is illegal but widely consumed. The book manuscript expands my theoretical discussions of publics and transnationality and incorporates recent fieldwork. I also chronicle the explosion of popular music responding to the Green Movement, some of which incorporates revolutionary music from the 1970s. The project attests to popular musics' real and emergent role in constituting political participation while also demonstrating music's exceptional openness to ideological investment. This occasions reflections on the nature of cultural stability and change in social transformations.
Theresa Runstedtler
Ph.D., Yale University; African American Studies and History
Coons, Cakewalkers, and Dandies: The McAdoos and the Global Imagination of Minstrelsy
Now relatively obscure figures in the annals of African American theater, Orpheus McAdoo and his wife
Mattie Allen McAdoo were once international stars. In the 1880s and 1890s, they led troupes of African American
performers throughout the British Isles, South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand. Their ability to meld the staid
gospel tradition of the Fisk Jubilee singers with the comic irreverence of blackface minstrelsy appealed to audiences
across racial and national lines. In tracing the McAdoos' extensive career, I explore the global history of minstrelsy as
both a white supremacist entertainment and an expression of nonwhite resistance. The McAdoos came of age when
minstrelsy was gaining worldwide popularity. This white American tradition of blackface performance owed its farreaching
success to widespread white anxieties about the political, economic, and social implications of slave
emancipation, imperial expansion, and urban industrialism. In the decades after the Civil War, the McAdoos and other
African American entertainers confronted and confounded the racist stereotypes disseminated by white blackface
performers. These artists carefully engineered their songs and plays to speak back to dominant ideas of race, in
necessarily veiled ways. Thus, their performances provided an important cultural space for the negotiation of black and
anticolonial alliances across national borders. Overall, this transnational history obliges us to think beyond the often
stagnant, domestic political debates over race (and the post-racial) by highlighting the fundamental relation
between the rise of a global color line and the expansion of Western modernity. Even in the twenty-first century,
minstrel stereotypes continue to haunt us as enduring and adaptive constructions in the discursive fight over the racial
status quo.
Rick Warner
Ph.D., University of Pittsburgh; Cinema and Media Studies
Research in the Form of a Spectacle: The Essay as Intermedial Adaptation
This project is a historical examination of the essay form as an intermedial phenomenon that traverses the fields of art,
criticism, literature, and philosophy. While foremost concerned with the audio-visual essay and with four of its most virtuosic practitioners (Jean-Luc Godard, Chris Marker, Harun Farocki, and Alexander Kluge), I demonstrate how their
exercises in film, video, television, and screen-based installation art draw substantially on deeper rooted traditions of
the essayistic that run through other manners of expression and disciplines of inquiry. I argue that the essay form has
historically functioned as a crucial adaptive process that enables fresh forms of creative and critical activity to emerge
between the categories of fiction and nonfiction, art and science. theory and practice.
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