Ann Wierda Rowland discusses her current research into a particular coterie of Boston readers at the turn of the twentieth century who regularly gathered to explore the works of John Keats. Through reflecting on the shared reading practices of past audiences, she suggests, we can better understand our own modes of literary engagement in a period that has supposedly witnessed a rapidly declining interest in the written word.
The National Humanities Center is pleased to announce the appointment of 33 Fellows for the academic year 2020–21. These leading scholars will come to the Center from universities and colleges in 15 U.S. states and the District of Columbia, as well as from Canada, China, Germany, and Uganda. Each Fellow will work on an individual research project and will have the opportunity to share ideas in seminars, lectures, and conferences at the Center.
During the 2020 Discovery and Inspiration: Conversations with Scholars series, we will explore the United States Constitution through the lens of the humanities. National Humanities Center Fellows from the fields of African American studies, economics, history, law, literature, and philosophy will discuss how their work informs our understanding of our nation’s founding document and our attempts to form a more perfect union.
With increasing urgency, climate scientists and environmentalists are warning us about the dire need to radically change how we use energy, the ways we grow and distribute food, and many other activities. They’ve described a future in which our planet is increasingly unlivable. But, beyond imagining a world devastated by unchecked greenhouse gas emissions, how might we go about imagining more desirable futures? What resources can we call upon to help us not only avoid disaster but craft a better world? Fellow Joni Adamson, professor of English and director of the Environmental Humanities Initiative at Arizona State University, is working on just these questions.
Aristotle’s thinking on a variety of topics has influenced western philosophy for over two millennia. His writings on ethics, in particular—emphasizing human character and ethical psychology—continue to shape contemporary ideas about personal virtue and moral agency. Fellow Audrey Anton, however, has emphasized the importance of understanding the role that vice plays in Aristotle’s philosophy.
In the opening lines of his most famous poem, “To Althea, From Prison,” Richard Lovelace writes, “Stone walls do not a prison make, nor iron bars a cage...” This line expresses a thought common among imprisoned writers across time—that regardless of the conditions of their imprisonment, the human spirit and the poetic imagination cannot be constrained. Fellow Andrea Brady, however, suggests that the relationship between our poetic traditions and bondage has not been adequately explored in prior scholarly work.
Founded by freed slaves in the early nineteenth century, the candomblé temple Casa Branca in Salvador, Bahia, was the first Afro-Brazilian place of worship in Brazil. But despite its religious and historic significance, the story of Casa Branca’s origins has remained the stuff of oral traditions until the recent discovery of written documents by Fellow Lisa Earl Castillo. Castillo is working on a new book which situates the temple and its founders within the greater social history of Brazil and as a place that offers special insight into the lives of freed and enslaved individuals on either side of the Atlantic.
Since at least the early years of the twentieth century, scholars have taken an interest in the artistic and intellectual productions of so-called “outsiders,” or individuals whose unconventional perspectives and aesthetic expression have often been assumed to result from serious mental illness. These artistic creations and written works are generally defined by idiosyncratic characteristics; they can seem to be obscure, obsessive, inconsistent, and even disconnected from reality itself. Matt ffytche believes that these aesthetic objects—and the ways that “outsider” artists have been classified—deserve to be reconsidered.
Monuments commemorating historical figures, events, and regimes can be found nearly everywhere, yet we often barely notice them. At other times, though, the histories they represent can inflame passions and the monuments themselves become contentious flashpoints for their communities. Fellow Mia Fuller, associate professor of Italian Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, is a cultural anthropologist who has focused much of her scholarly work on Italy, particularly the rise of fascism in the early twentieth century and its legacies which still remain.
When we think of slavery in the Americas, most of us generally think of people from Africa and their descendants who were enslaved and transported across the Atlantic to provide labor for the plantation economies of the New World. But recently, historians have begun to reassess the significance of other forms of slavery in the Americas—specifically the enslavement of millions of indigenous people in the Caribbean and beyond. Fellow Rebecca Goetz, associate professor of history at New York University, is working to recover the history of indigenous slavery as it was practiced by competing colonial powers in the Caribbean and exploring the relationship between the enslavement of native peoples and the development of chattel slavery across the Western Hemisphere.