The National Humanities Center is pleased to announce the appointment of 38 Fellows for the academic year 2018–19. These leading scholars will come to the Center from 15 US states, as well as from Brazil, Canada, China, Colombia, Jamaica, Mexico, South Africa, and the United Kingdom. These newly appointed Fellows will constitute the forty-first class of resident scholars to be admitted since the Center opened in 1978.
Legalized slavery has been abolished around the world, yet human trafficking remains a significant problem. Though slavery may not take the exact forms it did in the nineteenth century, approximately 45.8 million persons in 167 countries endure modern forms of slavery. Fellow Laura Murphy, Associate Professor of English and Director of the Modern Slavery Research Project at Loyola University New Orleans, is currently at work on a book about the way survivors of forced labor have mobilized the discourse of slavery in the twenty-first century to reinvigorate their struggles for freedom. In this podcast, she discusses the generic conventions of the slave narrative and how they complicate our notions of what it means to be free.
First emerging in the Italian Renaissance, the sonnet was used to document and address a problem, such as the pain of unrequited love. Under the shadow of slavery and then Jim Crow, African American poets from Phillis Wheatley to Natasha Trethewey have adopted the sonnet’s 14-line form to poetically register political protest. Fellow Hollis Robbins is currently at work on the first book-length examination of the African American sonnet tradition. In this podcast, Robbins draws on examples from writers such as Claude McKay and Gwendolyn Brooks to explain how the formal qualities of the sonnet— structured around an argument—exemplify what W.E.B. Du Bois famously called “double-consciousness.”
The Teagle Foundation recently named Andrew Delbanco from Columbia University as its president beginning July 2018. A noted literary scholar and social critic, Delbanco has twice held fellowships at the National Humanities Center (1990–91; 2002–03) and served as a trustee of the Center from 1996 until 2006 when he was made an emeritus trustee. Delbanco has been a member of the Teagle Foundation board of directors since 2009 and has served as chair of its program committee since 2014. In 2012 he received a National Humanities Medal from President Barack Obama.
The average American produces four and a half pounds of trash every single day, and, as a whole, the U.S. generates nearly a quarter of a billion tons of garbage each year. Yet one person’s trash is another’s treasure. What can we learn about ourselves from what we discard and what we keep? What stories are contained in the detritus of contemporary life? In this podcast, Fellow Stephanie Foote discusses her current work on the “art of garbage” and the intersections of consumer culture, the global economy, and the environment. She also speculates about how contemporary literature mediates the presence of planetary waste.
In the decades following the Civil War, African American intellectuals focused much of their attention beyond the borders of the United States and, in doing so, engaged global histories of colonization, slavery, immigration, and imperialism. While a significant body of scholarship attends to the work of politicians, clergy, actors, and artists, relatively little attention has been paid to the role of black historians. In this podcast, Fellow Stephen G. Hall introduces and expands on important issues at play in his study: the sources black historians enlisted to frame critical events, the community they engaged beyond the walls of the academy, and the ways their discourse was intertwined with activism, from anti-imperialism to Pan-Africanism to the Civil Rights Movement.
As they are usually understood, the designations “nuclear wasteland” and “pure wilderness” are opposites; when they converge into nature reserves on the sites of decommissioned nuclear weapons lands we often describe this circumstance as “paradoxical” or “ironic.” Peter Galison argues that the categories of wastelands and wilderness are far from opposites; that their relation is more intriguing (and disturbing) than a binary of purity or corruption. Removing parts of the earth in perpetuity—for reasons of sanctification or despoilment—alters a central feature of the human self, presenting us in a different relation to the physical world, and raising irreducible ethical questions about who we are when land can be classified, forever, as not for us humans.
Over the past century, revolutions in technology and increased mobility have fostered connections across vast spaces and among different cultures. Still, Americans’ sense of regional identity remains strong. Fellow Wendy Griswold has studied how literary culture helps produce and maintain regional identity for much of her career. In this podcast, she discusses the third installment of her ongoing project exploring how art and literature are integral to American “place-making.” Building on her previous work, she argues that by drawing on the fields of neurobiology and neuroaesthetics—examining how our brains respond to different sensations and stimuli—we may be able to shed new light on the ways we experience places and form lasting emotional attachments to them.
How do scholars become fascinated by their subjects? How do the processes of research, analysis, writing, and teaching change their perspectives of the world? This series, presented in partnership with the Chapel Hill Public Library, explores these questions through public discussions with leading scholars from the NHC. These informal dialogues will highlight the personal aspects of scholarship—how scholars became interested in specific fields of study, what fuels their passion for their subjects, about the larger questions that intrigue them, and the influence their scholarship has on their ways of thinking about and living in the world.
A democratic society relies on the ability of citizens to address one another in a measured and temperate fashion, yet civil debate in recent years has become increasingly contentious and polarized. In this podcast, Fellow John McGowan, professor of English and comparative literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, discusses how literature—specifically comedy—can help us recognize our shared humanity and help us find ways to transcend our differences.