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National Humanities Center

National Humanities Center Names Fellows for 2016–2017

The National Humanities Center announces the appointment of 37 Fellows for the academic year 2016–17. These leading scholars will come to the Center from 17 states, Argentina, South Africa, and the United Kingdom; they constitute the thirty-ninth class of resident scholars to be admitted since the Center opened in 1978. Robert D. Newman, president and director of the National Humanities Center, said, “This tremendous group of scholars is conducting interesting and important work across a range of humanistic fields. We are delighted to provide them support and look forward to their arrival.”

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Emperor and Eunuch in Late Imperial China: A Complex Relationship

In imperial China, eunuchs were household servants of the emperor, their duties generally limited to cooking, cleaning, and other mundane chores. At times, however, they became influential members of the government, their power even eclipsing that of officials and the emperor himself. In this lecture, Norman Kutcher will examine and reflect on specific emperors’ relationships with their chief eunuchs, using these case studies to explain the complex dynamic that could sometimes arise between emperor and eunuch.

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The Andrew Cayton Memorial Fund

The Andrew Cayton Memorial Fund has been established to support the critical work of humanities scholars at the National Humanities Center, where Drew was a Fellow during the 2012–2013 academic year. Specifically, this fund will support the Center’s annual webinars in early American studies, enriching the work of high school teachers across the country, but with an audience now expanding to include community college teachers and adult education generally. The Fund is made possible by generous contributions from Drew’s friends and associates.

zines

Janice Radway, “From the Underground to the Archive in Ten Years: Girl Zines, the 1990s, and the Challenge of Historical Narration”

In the early nineties, a certain cohort of dissident, non-conforming girls turned to self-publishing to express their deep dissatisfaction with conservative reaffirmations of normative femininity. Calling themselves “Riot Grrrls” after several influential all-girl punk bands, they crafted handmade publications known as “zines” in order to voice their disaffection and to think through alternative ways of being in the world. These young women quickly caught the attention of the mainstream media and a range of academics and librarians alike. Within ten years, at least three major collections of girl zines had been collected at places like Smith College, Barnard College, and Duke University. This lecture explores the significance of girls’ self-publishing efforts, the complex reasons for their zines’ quick assimilation into legitimate cultural institutions, and the political benefits and drawbacks to this kind of memorialization.

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Beth Berry, "The Transformation of Early Modern Japan"

Mary Elizabeth Berry is the Class of 1944 Professor of History at the University of California, Berkeley and the first recipient of the Founders’ Fellowship at the National Humanities Center. An authority on the history of pre-modern Japan, she has been working on a project examining the remarkable changes in Japanese life that occurred in the midst of the Tokugawa shogunate (1603–1868). She sat down with us this spring to share a bit about her research.

Thomas Brown, Invention of American Solider Monuments

Thomas Brown, “The Invention of the American Soldier Monument”

The soldier monuments that began to proliferate across northern and southern communities during the 1860s differed sharply from antebellum American commemorations. The emergence of this cultural form partly reflected patterns of recruitment and death in the Civil War. Local memorial initiatives also expressed competing ideas about the legacies of the war and the extent to which military service constituted a model of citizenship.

Judith Farquhar, Institution and the Wild

Judith Farquhar, “Institution and the Wild: Salvaging and Sorting Traditional Medicines in China”

China has a distinguished modern history of supporting its national heritage of traditional medical knowledge. In recent years, research has focused on traditional medicine of the minority nationalities of China. This “multicultural” process expresses particular features of Chinese state power as it engages and manages local variation. And it reveals many forms of life that escape nation-state projects. This discussion considers the relations in practice between grassroots medical institution-building and the healing powers that both inform it and evade it.

NHC entrance

Center Receives NEH Grant in Support of Fellowship Program

The National Humanities Center (NHC) has been awarded a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities in support of the Center’s residential fellowship program. The $272,700 NEH grant, along with $126,000 in matching funds from NHC donors, will be used to support the work of scholars conducting advanced humanities research at the Center over the course of the next three years. “The NEH has been a tremendous partner, not only in supporting our fellowship program but in education and public outreach,” said NHC president and director Robert D. Newman.

Elizabeth Schechter

Elizabeth Schechter, “The Other Side: Self-Consciousness in the ‘Split-Brain’ Subject”

Ordinarily, the two cerebral hemispheres of the brain are joined by a large fiber pathway. In a “split-brain” surgery, this pathway is cut. Afterwards a split-brain subject may behave as if she had two conscious minds, one in each hemisphere. Many philosophers and neuropsychologists have argued that in fact she does. If that’s right, however, then why doesn’t anyone view a split-brain subject as containing or consisting of two persons, each with her own rights and responsibilities? In her talk, Elizabeth Schechter argues that self-consciousness provides the answer.