CHAT is proud to announce the following recipients of fellowships at the Humanities Center for 2023-2024.
Project: Sensationalism or Watchdog Journalism?: A Historical Analysis of How Journalists Addressed the Investigation of a Suburban Housewife’s Slaying
Project Statement: A housewife was beaten to death in her suburban Ohio home in the mid-1950s. The tragic crime threatened social ideals of middle-class Americans who moved from city apartments to suburbs to seek comfort and security after World War II and the Korean War. Cleveland newspapers competing to serve as significant news sources for urban and suburban audiences provided extensive coverage of her death and the investigation of the crime. Readers and journalists criticized some sensational headlines, stories, and images. Some journalists, however, described their work as pursuits of justice. As a CHAT fellow, I will be working on a monograph that explores what these papers’ extensive coverage of the crime and writings about their coverage reveal about legal, professional, and ethical standards for journalism in the 1950s.
Project: Women’s War of Words: Italian Women Writers and World War I Propaganda
Project Statement: While at CHAT, I will be working on my book on Italian women writers’ involvement in prowar propaganda during World War I. The first conflict to require mass mobilization, and the first mechanized war in Europe, World War I marked a sharp transformation in the modern Western world in terms of mentality, society, and landscape. That the battle front experience deeply impacted men’s subjectivity is acquired knowledge. For this reason, the literature and the propaganda produced by writer-soldiers and male intellectuals have represented the main areas of enquiry in the field on a transnational level. But what did female intellectuals do when the war broke out? Which side did they take? Did they go against mainstream culture and stood for peace, as some strands of feminism would predict? Or did they align with the so-called intellectual interventionism, and contributed to theorize the justness of war? Like their male counterpart Italian women writers generally supported Italy's entry into the war. Some of them were feminists, thus challenging our twenty first century assumptions on women, feminism, and peace culture. I am interested in mapping and defining the national and international context in which Italian women writers endorsed Italy’s entry into the war, developed their collective as well as individual motivations, and engaged in propaganda. My work aims at repositioning Italian female authors in the national and transnational cultural discourse on war produced by women and bringing them into dialogue with male authors who wrote about the war.
Project: Networks of Knowledge, Networks of Power: Development and “Transition” in Central Asia and Beyond
Project Statement: I am a historian of the former Soviet Union, particularly Central Asia, and on the history of development. In my current project I am tracing changing approaches to economic development in the late twentieth centuries by following the work of social scientists who worked in the socialist system before 1991 and afterwards with international organizations or independent states. In the chapters I plan to write this year I examine how post-Soviet Central Asian states dealt with the physical legacies of socialism—especially irrigation systems and electricity networks—while trying to integrate into the world market. These chapters will also examine the tensions between the development plans of Central Asian states and accelerating climate change.
Project: Mediating Women’s Lives: Popular Feminism and Public Memory
Project Statement: As a CHAT Fellow, I will be working on a book project that brings together my research and teaching interests in gender studies, memory studies, and media studies. The most recent emergence of popular feminism has inspired a wave of scholarship debating whether its expressions are merely performative or potentially empowering. Mediating Women’s Lives will join that conversation by considering the increasingly symbiotic relationship between popular feminism and public memory. Over the past decade, a growing number of media texts have reexamined feminism’s past and drawn on women’s shared memory in order to make sense of the present. Exploring case studies from journalism, film, television, podcasts, tourism, and public history, I propose that such narratives are beginning to disrupt patterns of cultural memory construction that for so long have forgotten women’s history and obscured women’s roles in public life. This promise is fueled in part by current social and political conditions that underscore the need for new kinds of reparative public storytelling. Yet it also is an outcome of shifts in the media industries, from the rising creative influence of women media-makers to structural transformations of media distribution, consumption, and funding. By analytically focusing on a confluence of factors, I hope to identify productive models for both narrative change and narrative continuity in media representations of women’s lives and experiences.
Project : Black Italy: Race and Belonging in the Modern Nation
Project Statement: During my CHAT fellowship, I will be working on my new book on the history of Black experiences and ideas of Blackness in Italy from unification to the late twentieth century. Italy offers an interesting site for tracing the evolution of European racial thinking in relationship to the African diaspora. Italians have often been categorized as less than entirely white in the racialized hierarchies of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. My book looks at what that has meant for people defined as Black living in Italian spaces. But it also asks how the Italian state and Italian society have played with Italy's status as the least of Europe's White powers. For the CHAT fellowship period, I am looking specifically at Italian approaches to development in postcolonial Africa after the end of the Second World War. This was a period when Italians were eager to leave behind the explicit racial rhetoric of the fascist regime, but were likewise eager to show themselves to be properly white on a global stage. Their involvement in development schemes in the newly emerging states of postcolonial Africa offered a valuable proving ground.
Project: Multiple and One: Forever Becoming
Project Statement: During the fellowship year, I will work toward completing my second monograph titled Multiple and One: Writing Global Queer Art Histories, currently under contract with Manchester University Press. It is the first book-length study that explores queer, trans, and creolization theories, all of which privilege experience, relations, and becoming to embrace the mutability of identity. I mobilize this intersectional theoretical framework to examine various artists’ works (paintings, videos, installations, drawings, performances, and photography) and exhibitions, including those I have organized. Indeed, my methods include the traditional, close formal analysis of artworks associated with art history as a discipline alongside curatorial knowledge-making and autoethnography. During the fall term, I plan to complete practice-led research at UrbanGlass, Brooklyn, where I am a Curator at Large, that will inform part of the book project. There, I have been working on a series of exhibitions, "Multiple and One," "Transparency and Opacity," and "Form and Formless" (Oct 2023 to Jan 2024), all part of a larger thematic project: "Forever Becoming: Decolonization, Materiality, and Trans* Subjectivity." The exhibition takes the qualities of glass as a point of departure to make connections between decolonial, queer, and trans theories.
We are pleased to welcome our new advanced graduate fellows in CHAT for the 2023-24 year!
Project: Disidentifying with ‘America’: the Idea of Development in Contemporary Asian American Narratives.
Project Statement: As a 2023–2024 CHAT fellow, I will be completing my dissertation, Disidentifying with ‘America’: the Idea of Development in Contemporary Asian American Narratives. My project is inspired by the changing significance of envisioning the U.S. as “home” for contemporary Asian American literature. In the domestic context, the stakes involve rethinking national membership in the racial landscape of post-Civil rights America. In the global context, it means thinking about the legacy of U.S. imperialism that initially displaced Asian immigrants from their homelands. Thus, centering narratives of development thematizing post-1965 Asian immigrations and displacements, my dissertation examines how contemporary Asian American cultural works narrativize and resolve the contradictions of Asian immigrants’ national identification against the legacy of U.S. (neo)colonialism and militarism.
Project: Sex robots at home: A political-economic analysis of a changing industry
Project Statement: As a CHAT graduate student fellow, I will be completing my dissertation titled, Sex robots at home: A political-economic analysis of a changing industry. This dissertation takes a critical approach to analyze public discourse from business, political, legal, and cultural institutions to discern the power dynamics and consequences developing from the sex robot industry. These dynamics have wider reaching effects on communicative artificial intelligence and robotics. Discourse about sex robots shapes the sex robot industry’s categorization, its acceptance, and its potential future by giving credence to certain narratives about sex robots, their creators, and their users. As the sex robot industry is being formed logistically and technologically, the language various stakeholders employ to conceptualize sex robots is similarly developing, clarifying the importance of the sex robot industry and the stakeholders’ own formative claims. This project operates at the intersection of human-machine communication, political economy and legal studies, and feminism. Together, this approach adds to the growing critical literature on how humans react to increasingly interactive technology. To do so, critical political economy theory and a critical discourse analysis method are utilized to elucidate the relationships impacting social, economic, and legal constraints. Results indicate popular social restrictions on sex robot designs versus consumer and privacy protections, mirroring other forms of artificially intelligent technologies. This work incorporates implications across political, legal, and communication studies.
Project Statement: My doctoral research is an archaeological and archival project which focuses on enslaved resistance during the 17–19th centuries on the island of Anguilla, located in the British West Indies. I examine everyday practices of resistance within the landscape of a single plantation site, as well as larger forms of enslaved resistance that, I argue, transcended not only plantation boundaries but also imperial geographies. My research operates at two different geographic scales to understand forms of resistance both large and small. At the scale of the plantation, my research is concerned with the ways in which power and control is encoded in the Anguillan plantation landscape, as well as the ways in which enslaved persons carved out opportunities for agency within these confines. At the largest scale, my research examines evidence for inter-island emancipatory networks that enslaved Anguillans forged outside of English control.
Through archival research, I found that self-liberation or escape of enslaved Anguillans to nearby non-British islands was a frequent occurrence and an extreme source of tension for slave holding class. The archaeological component of my research at this larger scale asks if material culture can illuminate emancipatory social networks. I employ Neutron Activation Analysis (NAA) to conduct sourcing studies on Afro-Caribbean ware, which are ceramics made by potters of African-descent in the Caribbean with local clays. Recognizing that consumer goods do not just spontaneously appear in households, my archaeological analysis of material culture investigates the social networks behind maroon (fugitive) geographies. I hypothesize that enslaved Anguillans likely traded goods with the enslaved of nearby islands in addition to developing networks of self-liberation. This type of chemical analysis on ceramics recovered archaeologically from enslaved contexts allows me to investigate networks of exchange between enslaved Anguillans and their contacts on nearby islands.
Project: Neither Then nor Now: Queer Temporalities & Interwar Portraits of Expatriate Sapphists
Project Statement: As a CHAT Fellow, I will be completing my dissertation, Neither Then nor Now: Queer Temporalities & Interwar Portraits of Expatriate Sapphists. My project examines the portraiture of/by queer American women artists living in 1920s Paris, such as Romaine Brooks, Berenice Abbott, Djuna Barnes, and Eyre de Lanux. I employ several queer theoretical lenses, including those pertaining to performance, reception, trauma, archives, and temporalities. I also engage with historical sexology, queer literary studies, and theoretical physics.
The dissertation takes as its premise that the portraits of expatriate Sapphists make meaning in a unique way, one that is not temporally confined. By looking beyond present circumstance to also assume a simultaneous past and future, my project provides an intervention for understanding queer portraits beyond heteronormative rules of representation and reception in American art, offering deeper and more nuanced perception of the links between private biographies and public images. Given the complicated visibility of interwar queerness, as it was both pathologized and often criminalized, my project considers the subjective power of portraiture and rethinks its (auto)biographical nature, examining the function and repercussions of interwar sapphic portraiture as a site for displaying queer bodies and archiving queer history.
