Center for Humanities Director
Faculty Fellows
CHAT is proud to announce the following recipients of fellowships at the Humanities Center for 2022-2023.
Project: Anything for Selenas
Project Statement: As a CHAT fellow, I will be working on my second monograph project, which interrogates the performative and embodied acts that not only seek to immortalize the Selena’s memory but also, in one way or another, bring the singer back to life. For those familiar with the 1997 biopic, Selena, my title conjures a moment in which a fan mispronounces the singer’s name, saying “Anything for Selenas.” For my purposes, this plurality aptly reveals how multiple Selenas have come to dominate popular culture in the years following her death; she has been resuscitated and resurrected in myriad ways ranging from literal embodiment to AI reproduction. Homing in on the border region and Mexico, I ask the following questions: Who participates in invoking Selena’s memory? To what extent do representations of the singer differ in the U.S. and Mexico? How do vulnerable and Othered communities along the U.S./Mexico border and in Mexico leverage Selena’s image and legacy? Anything for Selenas ultimately seeks to expand upon previous research and fill lacunae by looking to what contemporary U.S/Mexico border and Mexican Selenas can teach us about the singer’s lasting legacy.
Project: The Iran-Contra Scandal and U.S. Democracy
Project Statement: My research interests like broadly in U.S. foreign relations history, especially U.S.-Latin American relations and resistance to U.S. empire in the Americas. My latest project looks into the origins of the current crisis of U.S. democracy, taking as its object the Iran-Contra scandal of the Reagan-Bush years and asking about its impact on the erosion of democratic norms.
Project: A Textile Coincidence (a book of poems).
Project Statement: Jena Osman (PhD in Poetics/English, University at Buffalo, M.A. in Creative Writing, Brown University) is a poet who teaches both Creative Writing and Literature. She has published six books of poetry. Her most recent book, Motion Studies (Ugly Duckling Presse 2019), uses a combination of poetry, essay, speculative fiction, prose collage, and archival images to explore the ways algorithmic surveillance holds power over our everyday lives.
While at CHAT, she will be working on the first draft of a book of poems organized around a series of coincidences and reverberations that thread 19th and 21st century technologies of weaving and translation (particularly machine translation) together. The research behind the poems includes the knot-language of Incan quipus, the myth of Philomela and the “voice of the shuttle,” the complicit connections between 19th century textile technologies and enslavement in the United States, jacquard looms and early computing, the mechanics of machine learning and the algorithms behind Google Translate, and more. The project combines poetic logic and research in order to interrogate history, and to reveal buried connections between the past and present.
2022-2023 Graduate Student Fellows
We are pleased to welcome our new advanced graduate fellows in CHAT for the 2022-23 year!
Project: Hegel's Expansion of Aesthetic Autonomy
Project Statement: I will be working on my dissertation. The dissertation is tentatively titled "Hegel's Expansion of Aesthetic Autonomy." As the title indicates, the work's focus is the nineteenth-century German philosopher GWF Hegel (1770-1831). To oversimplify, Hegel's philosophy aims to dissolve the presupposed dualism that, on Hegel's view, is central to the Western philosophical tradition: the dualism between subject in object. (The opposition has many historical forms, such as ideal and real, finite and infinite, soul and body, possible, and actual, and so on.) My dissertation argues that Hegel's philosophy of art bears directly on the sublation of this opposition. Indeed, I claim, art as a creative activity and receptive practice is crucial for us to learn about our uniquely embodied, rational, and spontaneous nature. Hegel's remarks on art are extensive, yet they remain underexplored. For conceptual reasons, I focus on his philosophical analysis of painting. My main argument is that the creation and experience of paintings helps us dissolve a uniquely human dualism: the antagonism between irrational bodily passion and rational mental activity. I aim to show that, for Hegel, the human is an undivided subject that comprises both. Indeed, on Hegel's view, bodily and mental capacities are interdependent. Awareness of this interdependence is a necessary constituent of one's flourishing.
Project: The Legacy of Second Wave Feminism in Public Interpretations of U.S. Women’s History
Project Statement: As a CHAT Fellow, I will be completing my dissertation, "The Legacy of Second Wave Feminism in Public Interpretations of U.S. Women’s History." Through this project, I am seeking to understand how changing cultural notions of feminism in the United States have impacted the ways in which historic sites who primarily interpret the lives and achievements of female-identified persons communicate their stories. The goal of this project is to both critically examine how Second Wave sensibilities permeate the historical interpretation offered at these sites, and show the work being done to broaden and challenge dominant feminist narratives. This project is rooted in the literature of memory studies, feminist studies, and public history. Social movements participate in their own narrative-building and mythmaking to imply continuity between current and past iterations of the movement. I hope to understand the contours of this phenomenon through a rigorous, critical examination of how the sensibilities of Second Wave feminism permeated the preservation process and agenda for women’s history sites and how current directors/curators are balancing that legacy with the present-day cultural moment. To investigate these ideas, this research will take a mixed method approach of a series of interviews and archival investigation.
Project: In Search of the World: Two Generations of Mexican Writers Projected into World Literature (Mid-Century and the Crack)
Project Statement: As a CHAT Graduate Student Fellow, I will be working on my dissertation In Search of the World: Two Generations of Mexican Writers Projected into World Literature (Mid-Century and the Crack). This investigation is a sociological analysis of Mexican literature of the second half of the 20th century. My argument is that in a world literary system that has constantly perpetuated hegemonic practices of cultural power, it is crucial to pay attention to the conditions and alternative forms that peripheric literatures have developed to challenge that structure. By pointing out the particularities of the Mexican literary field during the 60s and the 90s, two periods of crucial economic, social, and political transformations, I will show the alternative strategies these authors develop to form part of the world literature, considering the impact that the process of neoliberalism and globalization have had on literary productions. To achieve this, I shall observe the specificities of the Mexican literary field in relation to its own conditions of production, circulation, and legitimation, whether they are institutional, commercial, social, etc. Therefore, for my research I will carry out an analysis of the material conditions, processes, practices, actors, and social relations on whom authors depend to transcend the national literary space.
Project: Addiction as Compulsion
Project Statement: Arthur's dissertation is a response to the increasingly favored view among philosophers that addiction is not a compulsion. Arguments for this conclusion are critiqued. It is usually assumed that whether addiction is a compulsion depends on whether addictive behaviors are individually compulsive at some rate or frequency, but in fact it is a matter of whether addiction typically compromises control over the addictive behavioral pattern -- and therefore over the shape of one's life. Furthermore, the scientifically supported possibility that addiction compels in virtue of involving intense negative emotions is routinely overlooked. Philosophically informed empirical research is required to settle whether addiction is a compulsion, but on the available evidence we should suppose it is. From a novel analysis of addictive compulsion follow unexpected implications regarding moral and legal responsibility for addictive behavior.
Project: Impossible Art: Synesthesia, Sensory Mimesis, and the Emergence of Cross-modal Modern Art & Literature
Project Statement: As a 2022-2023 CHAT Fellow, I will be completing my dissertation, Impossible Art: Synesthesia, Sensory Mimesis, and the Emergence of Cross-modal Works of Modern Art and Literature.During my study of modern art and literature, I repeatedly observed efforts by authors and artists to produce works that attempted to defy sensory boundaries. When the Futurist painters write in their manifesto that they want to paint sounds, noises, and smells, they are not speaking metaphorically. I tracked the idea of (literally) painting sound back to the eighteenth century; it was a series of, more or less, unsuccessful attempts. Since then, however, research into clinical synesthesia—a biological condition in which a person perceives sensations in one sense modality through stimulation of a different sense modality—has developed extensively, peaking just prior to Modernism and again in the twenty-first century. My dissertation argues that the most recent findings of neuroscientific research into clinical synesthesia can be an aid for deciphering cross-modal artworks. Furthermore, like clinical synesthesia, these cross-modal works of art demonstrate that the human body is a thought-responsive system. However, unlike clinical synesthesia, which is automatic and involuntary, inducing synesthesia by spectating works of art in specific ways outlined in my dissertation, provides a scientific ground zero for testing how we might use our minds to alter the conditions of our bodies. This has serious implications for maintaining physical health, much like the under-studied placebo effect, in which mental conditions are somehow set to either restore or optimize physical health.
Project: Queering the Museum: Utopian Futurity in Contemporary Exhibitions
Project Statement: Erin Riley-Lopez is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Art History at Tyler School of Art and Architecture, Temple University. Her specialty is in contemporary art with research interests in queer, trans, and feminist theories, exhibition histories, institutional critique and performance art.
Project: Youth, Agency, and Environmental Activism: The Challenge of Communicating Climate Change in sub-Saharan Africa
Project Statement: As a CHAT graduate student fellow, I will be completing my dissertation titled “Youth, Agency, and Environmental Activism: The Challenge of Communicating Climate Change in sub-Saharan Africa”. Even though Africa has contributed the least to global climate change, communities across the continent are increasingly bearing the brunt of the growing climate crisis, which casts more doubt on the future of African youths who are already disadvantaged, vulnerable, and marginal in the political and economic sense just by virtue of being born in this part of the world. Despite the surge in youth-led global climate activism, less attention is paid to voices originating from the Global South, and while scholars have interrogated the media’s relationship with our understanding of the environment, and the way we engage with or speak for the natural world, there is a serious lack of coverage of the issue when it comes to the African continent. Moreover, there is something different about the plight of young African environmental activists, or at least something that manifests as more challenging when it comes to their capacity to be seen and heard. Therefore, this dissertation investigates how youth across sub-Saharan Africa are using media to confront the climate crisis by educating the public and challenging misconceptions while elaborating a youth-centered social movement network across multiple nations. To do this, it draws from scholarship on African media studies, media activism and citizens’ media, and ecological activism, to conduct a multi-sited ethnography, using case studies of activists from Ghana, Senegal, South Africa, and Uganda, on digital platforms (Facebook and Twitter). This is then combined with in-depth interviews with each of them and an analysis of the texts they have produced.
Research Assistant
Chloe Huh Prudente is a PhD candidate in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Temple University. Her research focuses on the Asian presence in contemporary women’s multigenerational novels.
Project Statement: As a CHAT Graduate Student Fellow, I will be working on my dissertation Family Across the Seas: Making Asian (Latin) American Family Histories Visible in Multigenerational Novels. Through a close reading of the novels that suggest Asian (Latin) American immigration experiences, I analyze how literature becomes an ideological tool for the writers to describe and acknowledge Asians and people of Asian descent in the Americas. Over the course of this year, I began to see the larger implications of my research following the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic and the exponential increase in anti-Asian crime cases around the world. My research emphasizes the significance of narrating silenced Asian American history. I demonstrate how the writers’ conversation with the historical facts and existing literature becomes instrumental in bringing the visibility of Asians in the Americas and their involvement in nation-building.