Fellows Archives | Page 7 of 11 | National Humanities Center

Fellows

%customfield(subject)%

Nancy J. Hirschmann, “Bringing Back the Body: A Political Theory of Disability”

For years, public discourse and policy debates about people with disabilities have focused on the rights of those with medically recognized impairments. Increasingly, however, scholars of disability studies, including Fellow Nancy J. Hirschmann, professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania, are reshaping the way we see our bodies, the range of freedoms we enjoy, and the limitations we experience. In this podcast, Hirschmann helps us make sense of the complex relationship between freedom and disability. She speaks about her latest book project, Freedom, Power, and Disability, which builds on her work on the intersections of politics, gender, and philosophy.

%customfield(subject)%

Elaine Scarry, “Imagining Color: Color Threads in Proust and Murasaki”

Literature, unlike the other arts, has no material content. The pictures are made on the mental retina. When we imagine a color, do we think of a piece of language that spells out the name of the color or does a physical (or quasi-physical) event take place in the brain? This lecture traces out the moments at which two great colorists, Marcel Proust and Lady Murasaki, summon color into being both in the worlds of their respective novels, and on the “mental retina” of the reader. Using contemporary neuroscience as well as classic experiments on the imagination from cognitive psychology, the lecture examines the phenomenon of color threads, the background colors against which our imagination carries out its acts of image-production, and the unexpected relationship between color and mortality.

%customfield(subject)%

Maud Ellmann, “‘Vaccies Go Home!’: Evacuation, Psychoanalysis and Fiction in World War II Britain”

On September 1, 1939, the British government launched a program ominously codenamed Operation Pied Piper, whereby thousands of children were evacuated from the cities to the countryside. This operation brought class conflict into the foreground, laying bare the drastic inequalities of British society, but also provided the foundations for the development of child psychoanalysis. This talk by Maud Ellmann examines the impact of the evacuation crisis on psychoanalytic theories of the child, comparing these to the depiction of children in wartime fiction.

%customfield(subject)%

Alan Taylor, “Educating Citizens and Reforming Generations”

​In the wake of the American Revolution, political leaders insisted that their new republic could not survive without improved and more comprehensive public education meant to create better informed citizens. But the push for educational reform often ran afoul of local legislators and voters, who balked at the taxes needed to fund expanded systems of education. In his talk, historian Alan Taylor discusses this​ ​intriguing irony—that republican reliance on popular sovereignty complicated efforts by elites to improve voters through education.

%customfield(subject)%

Benjamin Kahan, “The Great Paradigm Shift: Locating Lost Models of Sexuality”

Scholars in gender and sexuality studies have largely ignored or dismissed attempts to explain the causes of sexual deviation for a variety of reasons. In this podcast, Fellow Benjamin Kahan discusses how his work, exploring “the historical etiology of sexuality,” moves past those scholars’ dismissal of early sexuality theories in hopes of producing a fuller understanding of how contemporary attitudes and notions about sexuality developed.

%customfield(subject)%

Blake Wilson, “Poetry and Music in Early Modern Italy”

While we often think of Renaissance-era Florence and the surrounding area as brimming with intellectual inquiry, artistic genius, and political intrigue, music and poetry were also important elements of life and to the Studia Humanitatis, the core of early modern education. In this podcast, Fellow Blake Wilson, professor of music at Dickinson College discusses his current project exploring the music and oral performance traditions of the late Middle Ages and Renaissance — how it was composed and performed as well as its relationship to other art forms in creating the rich civic and cultural life of the Renaissance.

%customfield(subject)%

Making Negro Literature: Literary Workspaces at the Margins of Print Culture

As part of her ongoing effort to chronicle African American literary culture at the turn from the nineteenth to the twentieth century, Elizabeth McHenry has been focusing on African American bibliographies, which emerged as experimental knowledge structures that provided ways of mapping and making sense of an emerging and rapidly evolving canon of “Negro literature.” These bibliographies were not just “lists,” but exploratory documents, where black intellectuals thought critically and advanced arguments about the boundaries and contours of black literature and authorship.

%customfield(subject)%

Nancy Wicker, “Vicious Vikings as Cultural Ambassadors”

Popular sources present the Vikings as ruthless warriors yet also take great pains to portray their decorated weapons, jewelry, clothing, houses, and ships—that is, their art. In this talk Nancy Wicker will discuss the patrons who sponsored that art, the artisans who made the objects, and the men and women who used the works, at home in Scandinavia as well as across the diaspora where Vikings raided, traded, and settled, from the North Atlantic to Russia and beyond.

%customfield(subject)%

Douglas Campbell: “Assessing the Historical Accuracy of the Book of Acts”

Surviving accounts of the foundation of the early Christian church are extremely limited, leaving scholars with few sources beyond the narrative found in the fifth book of the New Testament, the Acts of the Apostles. And, for centuries, questions have persisted about the book of Acts itself: Who wrote it and for whom? What was the document's purpose? And, how historically reliable is the account it provides?

National Humanities Center

National Humanities Center Names Fellows for 2017-18

The National Humanities Center announces the appointment of 34 Fellows for the academic year 2017-18. These leading scholars will come from 14 states, Greece, and the United Kingdom. Chosen from 630 applicants, they represent humanistic scholarship in English language and literature; environmental studies; European languages and literature; history; history of science; medieval studies; music history and musicology; philosophy; religion; sociology; South Asian studies; and theater, dance, and performance studies.