Funded Projects Query Form
162 matches

Research and writing to complete an anthology and study of autobiographical writings by Spanish-American female mystics in colonial Latin America. 

My book project deals with a chronologically structured anthology and study of the writings of Spanish American Creole-Mulatto female mystics in colonial times, still a huge gap in available scholarship, to be completed over the course of twelve months of full-time work. This will be a full reworking of my 600 page doctoral dissertation, although I have been revising it for the past three years. Devoted to the spiritual autobiographies only of Creole mystics from the first three viceroyalties of Spanish America, the study took as its point of departure the earliest authors whose extant works constitute the beginnings of this mostly conventual tradition: María Magdalena de Lorravaquio Muñoz (New Spain); Saint Rosa de Lima (Peru), and Jerónima del Espíritu Santo (New Grenade). This book will be the first comprehensive study on the development of this discourse as a genre and its most significant continuators in each of the viceroyalties, adding the viceroyalty of Río de la Plata.

Research and analysis of materials to be incorporated into a public history course focused on understanding narrative strategies employed in museum exhibits. 

I will be conducting a study of the intersection between literary and film studies, museum interpretation and design, and public history to improve my course Public History and the Power of Storytelling. The initial work of the project will be to visit ten to twelve historical exhibitions at West Coast museums to observe how these exhibitions are currently using narrative elements to present their historical objects and materials. After gathering this observational data, I will analyze how the exhibitions have crafted their historical narratives, how various storytelling elements have been deployed, how attempts to craft historical material into a coherent story has shaped displayed content, and then consider what other narrative methods and frameworks might be employed to strengthen the appeal of these exhibitions for visitors. Gathered data, analysis, and findings will be used to support and enhance my course, which is part of a new Public History Minor at Saint Mary’s College.

Research and writing of a book about the influence of spirituality on masking traditions in New Orleans Mardi Gras.

Black maskers embody one of the most vibrant carnival practices in New Orleans. On Mardi Gras, these African Americans adorn themselves with hand-sewn suits and regalia of feathers, beads, and rhinestones. They engage in performance activities that date back more than a century. Over the past sixty years, and with controversy, some maskers began to characterize their practices as having an overt spiritual dimension. The project explores a history of investments in a material culture informed by spiritual practices outside mainstream Christianity and away from traditional themes in Black masking. Their designs also include memories of slavery and segregation, current topics of resistance (e.g., political movements like Black Lives Matter), policies (e.g., Critical Race Theory), and crises (e.g., Covid-19). Drawing on participant observation and ethnography, I will write a book on how spiritual beliefs and practices shape, challenge, and transform artistic decision-making. [Edited by staff]

Research and writing leading to a book on Mexican American educational reform efforts in New Mexico and Texas between 1880 and 1940.

This project explores challenges to the omissions and negative characterizations of Mexican Americans in public school textbooks of New Mexico and Texas between 1880 and 1940. Mexican Americans fought discrimination by voting, asserting their right to jury service, and challenging segregated schools. They sought to revise public school textbooks to be more inclusive, challenge racist notions about Mexican Americans’ educational abilities, and preserve archives related to Mexican American history. Activists and scholars believed textbooks did not reflect Mexican Americans’ cultural legacies, and justified their second-class citizenship because the general public was unaware of their participation in formative events in the region’s and nation’s history. As they engaged in civic action for access to education, Mexican Americans strengthened U.S. democracy, reminded the nation to respect their citizenship rights, and created new historical narratives that included their contributions.

Research and writing leading to a critical biography of Philippa Schuyler (1931-1967), a mixed-race pianist, writer, and Goodwill-Ambassador who was also the daughter of conservative Harlem Renaissance journalist George Schuyler.

Good Women Die is a black feminist critical biography that re-examines the short life of biracial American Philippa Schuyler, a child-prodigy-turned-Goodwill-Ambassador from Harlem. The socially conservative Schuyler traveled the world as a musician, writer and humanitarian. A vast photographic archive documents her social significance during the mid-twentieth century, while numerous choices she made about self-representation reveal how her racial identity shifted across borders. This transnational feminist cultural studies project complicates previous readings of Schuyler's archive and her public personae by centering her voice, her negotiations with whiteness, her interests in dreams and divinations, and her travels across the continent Africa. This biography as an open access digital publication will incorporate many of Schuyler’s audio and visual archives. NEH funding will facilitate the completion of this full manuscript and support its availability to general audiences.

Research and writing for two essays examining the self-representation of new categories of ethnic identification in U.S. media in the last twenty years.

“Brown Looks” examines how Brown queer filmmakers have shaped their own representation within American televisual culture since 9/11. A still emerging racial category, Brown has gained traction in the United States, owing to panic over border securitization and anxiety about national identity. Against mainstream media which overrepresents “the browning of America” in contradictory terms – either as a national threat or a sign of multicultural progress – this project studies how Brown queer independent films, serials, and comedy sketch shows reverse the camera, offering a gaze that deconstructs this neoliberal dualism. This grant will fund the completion of two essays that aim to develop the nascent field of Critical Brown Studies by closely reading media that has been integral to the self-racialization of brown skinned people in the United States.

Research and writing for a book examining the origins and shifts of American political perceptions of Russia as captured in print culture from the 19th and 20th centuries. 

This project outlines the prehistories of Eurasian philosophy, its ideological uses within Russia, and, just as importantly, how this set of ideas was reworked and repurposed in the US in ways that contoured not only in relations with Moscow but also had vast consequences for domestic movements concerned with economic justice and racial equality. First outlining the historical racialized "othering" of Russia vis-a-vis Europe, I then examine how early twentieth century reactionary forces in the US mobilized against movements for racial equality, gender parity, or economic justice by deploying the specter of communism to conflate non-whiteness with activist politics. I then examine the myriad ways that American and US-based writers of various races, ethnicities, genders, sexual orientations, and creeds recognized, critiqued, and reworked this conflation in the service of liberation for all.

Research and writing leading to a narrative history book of Blaxploitation film framed in relation to multiple, contemporaneous politics of Black self-representation.

Blaxploitation: A Narrative History investigates the emergence of a Civil Rights Movement Black cultural discourse that wrestled over cinematic representation throughout the 1970s. Coined in 1972 by activist Junius Griffin, the term highlighted how upon “discovering” Black filmgoing audiences, the (white) film industry exploited Black actors to create and promote cheaply made films for Black people. Rather than overtax the theme of white exploitation of Black labor, my book argues that the term blaxploitation also identifies lesser known, yet ongoing, intraracial conflicts among Black artists, activists, and intellectuals.

Research and writing leading to a book reassessing female solidarity in the Victorian novel.

My monograph project challenges traditional accounts of female solidarity as a driver of narrative and social success for women. By contrast, my project shows that in prominent novels of the late nineteenth century, antagonism and indifference are surprisingly effective tools for women looking to break out of traditionally defined roles. On the one hand, this antagonism disrupts the status quo in unanticipated ways—a patriarchal society that has come to expect solidarity between women finds it difficult to deal with female competition—and it helps open new domestic and professional pathways for women. On the other hand, in the effort to achieve gender equality, the professional New Woman’s rhetoric recycles distinctly sexist, racist, and classist mid-Victorian conventions, thereby bringing middle-class Englishwomen dialectically into the labor pool of the British empire, even as they resist patriarchal institutions.

Completion of a book and two open-access articles about Indigenous hip hop musicians, media professionals and the concept of sonic sovereignty.

What does sovereignty sound like? The book Sonic Sovereignty: G/local Hip Hop and the Shifting Popular Music Mainstream answers this question through ethnographic research and media analysis undertaken with Indigenous hip hop musicians and media professionals. The research is rooted in Winnipeg, an Indigenous music broadcasting center in Canada whose resonance is heard across borders. It reveals the wide and deep impacts of Streetz FM, the first Indigenous hip hop station, and probes the forces that led to the station’s closure, even as its music continued to find popularity with audiences. I extend research that explores the racialization and gendering of urban-format popular music and detail the implications on how Indigenous artists are heard—and silenced—through popular music distribution. Musicians are actively building what I call sonic sovereignty, navigating the expectations of mainstream airplay while pushing aesthetic and political boundaries.

Writing leading to a book on race and the building of the Burma Road, a major infrastructure project in the China-Burma-India theater of World War II.

This study will become the first book on African-American GIs building the Burma Road, including pipelines to transport Lend-Lease Act supplies to China, America’s ally in WWII. Accomplished during wartime in difficult terrain and at the mercy of subtropical elements, the Road was not only an engineering miracle but unique in U.S. military history with Black GIs as the major force, engaging in the most racially and ethnically diverse region in WWII, and resulting in a casualty rate higher than the army’s WWII combat average. The subject spans the histories of WWII, African Americans, and Afro-American-Asian encounters, but has been largely neglected by scholarship in these fields while also remaining absent from public memory. The book’s historical narrative is established within an analytical framework that examines America’s race issues in the context of the global politics of (anti)racism and (de)colonization and reassesses African Americans' contribution to the victory of WWII.

Research and writing leading to a book about women working in the contemporary U.S. and global film industry, with a particular focus on producers, writers, and directors.

How Female-Driven Films Are Valued From Pitch to Premiere explores the realities of women working above-the-line as producers, writers, and directors in the U.S. and global film industry since the emergence of the #metoo and Time’s Up movements. The book examines how industry cultures and business practices “value” female-driven projects (starring, written, produced, and/or directed by women) and the barriers women must face to get their films made. Grounded in five dozen in-depth interviews conducted from 2016 to 2020, this longitudinal study traces individual creatives and their female-driven projects across each filmmaking stage—development, financing, production, film festivals, marketing and distribution. The Award for Faculty at HSIs will support the completion of the first scholarly book length account that highlights the value of contemporary women’s labor, voices, and storytelling from the point of view of filmmakers who are working to change a historically male-dominated system.

Research and writing leading to a book on prisoners of war and their role in imperial competition in 18th century British and Spanish America. 

Captive Exchanges addresses themes of warfare and incarceration as well as empire and cultural contact in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world. Prisoners of war acted as crucial conduits in the development of military and commercial intelligence in the long conflict between the growing British colonies of the southeast and the Caribbean and Spanish Florida. This monograph uncovers the experiences of prisoners of war before the codification of international laws about the taking and holding of captives. People seized by an enemy might be closely confined, subject to interrogation, allowed to wander freely, or quickly returned to their countrymen. British, Spanish, and French agents of empire, enslaved Africans, and Indigenous people from throughout the southeast experienced captivity in culturally specific and shifting ways. Investigating the impact of intelligence-gathering by prisoners reveals networks of information inadvertently created by captives and officials on the edges of empire.

Research and writing leading to a history of debt and finance in post-independence Ghana, 1950-1980.  

Financing Africa’s Future will be the first book-length study to situate Africa’s postcolonial past within a broader history of international business, private investment, and financial crime. As the first sub-Saharan African country to gain independence in 1957, Ghana became a hot economic opportunity zone attracting businessmen and investors from around the world. I argue that decolonization and the process of nation-building rested on intricate and intimate negotiations of credit, contracts, and massive loans. Such financial transactions not only funded vital development projects, but were also social affairs connecting networks of people and institutions in and beyond the continent. By fusing financial and business history with social and cultural analysis, Financing Africa’s Future brings human relationships to the center of a dynamic economic history that has all too often been reduced to national narratives of disappointment and decline.

Preparation of a book interpreting the work of German Romantic philosophical poet Novalis (1772-1801) plus a one-volume selected edition of his philosophical and literary writings.

This two-pronged project offers the first comprehensive philosophical account of the German Romantic thinker Novalis that takes into consideration his work as a philosopher, poet, and natural scientist. It promises to shed light on a figure essential to the history of humanistic efforts to understand ourselves and our world and should be of value to specialists and educated laypersons alike. It provides an integrative reading that shows his late lyric poems and novels to be essential in any adequate interpretation of his philosophical achievement. Its publication goals are twofold: (1) a monograph offering the first comprehensive interpretation in English of the totality of Novalis’s oeuvre, including his poetic writings, as a sustained contribution to philosophy, centered on the idea and conditions of a philosophical system in Kant and his earliest successors, and (2) a one-volume translation of a comprehensive, carefully edited selection of Novalis’s philosophical and literary writings.

Writing and revision for an edition of the collected works of Guyanese belletrist, Egbert Martin (c. 1861-1890).

Following emancipation in the 1830s, Guyana (then British Guiana) witnessed a boom in literary output. Technological advancements in printing in the colonies and the rise of a new Black middle class meant that, for the first time, Afro-Guyanese voices were being heard. At the forefront of a growing group of Black literary figures was Egbert Martin, the colony’s “most important nineteenth-century poet,” according to Laurence Breiner’s Introduction to West Indian Poetry (Cambridge UP, 1998) and, in the words of the Harlem Renaissance writer Arthur Schomburg, “one of the greatest Negro poets in history.” The Complete Works of Egbert Martin brings together all of Martin’s known writings, many of which have been remained unpublished since they first appeared in Guyanese periodicals in the 1880s and many of which I have newly discovered.

Research leading to the revision of an undergraduate course and a peer-reviewed article on minority health and urban design in Baltimore since 1900.

My project “The (pathogenic)-CITY” is intended as a significant step towards rectifying a major gap in education about the chronological history of racial disparities by focusing on how urbanization, urbanicity, and residential segregation have transformed minority health and well-being in Baltimore since the early 1900s. My proposed course will be a substantial effort to change viewpoints and contribute to the development of new methodological and theoretical notions for a broader interdisciplinary discourse by discussing the role of urban designers, theorists, and town planners. I will study the historiography of urbanization, racial segregation, and its consequence on health disparities in Baltimore, which is a “living archive” and witness its changing urban landscape. This project will expand knowledge by filling the gaps in the multi-discipline arena that is timely and urgent for broader humanities disciplines and HBCU institutions.

My book project, Migrants or Refugees? Violence and Coerced Migration in Southern Mexico and Guatemala, 1950-2000 investigates the causes and impacts of Guatemalan migration into southern Chiapas. Throughout the first half of the twentieth century, the border between Guatemala and Mexico had little impact on social and economic networks that developed with the regional coffee economy. Lasting economic, social, and cultural ties formed between communities on both sides of the border. By early 1981, violence from the Guatemalan Civil War (1963-1996) and deepening poverty pushed growing numbers of Guatemalan campesinos to migrate for work on Mexican coffee fincas. Simultaneously, intensifying conflict led thousands of indigenous villagers to abandon their homes and seek safety in Mexico. Some Guatemalans were depicted as unwitting ‘victims’ who deserved asylum and assistance. Others were labeled as “too political” or “opportunistic” and received little support.

Research and writing leading to a book that will reconsider Christian/Muslim relationships and the concept of translatio studii et imperii in medieval epic by analyzing examples of object exchange in selected texts.

My second book project, Translating Empires of the Saracens in European Epic, analyzes 12th-14th century medieval European epics, tracing within these narratives the movement from ‘Saracen’ or Muslim possession into ‘Frankish’ or Latin Christian possession of a set of symbolic objects conferring the imperial authority upon their bearers, among them swords, oliphants, horses, and sovereign tents. I argue that these object transfers serve as the material expression of the widespread (otherwise linguistic) trope of ‘translatio imperii et studii’, the transfer of past imperial authority and cultural prestige to Europe. Read in this way, these objects allow us to make a fresh case both for the central role of ‘Saracen’ or medieval Muslim empires in Europe’s earliest imperial self-fashioning and for medieval Europe’s inclusion of a Muslim inheritance among its cultural forebears.

Research and writing leading to a book about contemporary Filipino American art and visual culture.

This book-length manuscript is about contemporary Filipino American artists and small businesses that create and exhibit visual culture with resourceful, do-it-yourself modes of inventive survival. This project merges “high art” shown in galleries and film festivals with “low” visual culture in ordinary small businesses in order to document and theorize, across these very different exhibition venues, a continuous pattern of inventive artistic and everyday cultural practices that emanate out of material need, racialized experience, and everyday resilience.

Writing and revision to finalize the manuscript of a book examining how some Harlem Renaissance artists challenged the racial discourse circulating in a major mass market periodical.  

“Jim Crow Modernism, The Saturday Evening Post, and the Harlem Renaissance” makes three interrelated claims. First, I argue that early twentieth century American modernism is best understood as “Jim Crow modernism.” Second, I pursue this argument by focusing on George Horace Lorimer’s editorship of The Saturday Evening Post and his long running practice of publishing black dialect stories written by white authors in order to describe the politics and practices of stereotyping that occupied a central position in American print culture. Third, I argue that we can better understand the achievements of African American authors of the Harlem Renaissance by reading their work as being in dialogue and contestation with the Post’s white authors, and with Jim Crow modernism more broadly. Ultimately, my project provides a greater understanding of the constructions of blackness that dominated American print culture, and an enhanced contextualization of the literature of the Harlem Renaissance.

Research and writing leading to a book on state responses to famine in China, 1800-1976.

My book project maps changing Chinese responses to calamity by employing case studies of three major famines that struck North China under governments with very different ideological foundations. Because the prospect of fellow humans starving to death is so disturbing, famines generate intense discussion of a given culture’s ultimate values. Yet conceptions of what ethical responses to famine entail are neither static nor universal. China experienced radical change between the late-Qing (1800-1912), Republican (1912-49) and Maoist (1949-76) periods. I examine how such change impacted state and societal responses to the North China Famine of 1876-79, the Henan Famine of 1942-43, and the Great Leap Famine of 1958-62. I find that in twentieth-century China, the rejection of long-held cosmological interpretations of famine made it easier for the state to engineer disasters in the name of a supposedly greater good, and harder for leaders to accept blame for and relieve calamities.

A course revision project resulting in a digital repository of materials to facilitate cultural comparison in Italian language instruction for Spanish speakers and oral testimonies of Italian-Latino/a bicultural identity.

The project Memoria Presente (i.e., “present memory”, which translates into the same expression in both Spanish and Italian) proposes the expansion of an existing course, “Italian for Spanish Speakers,” to include advanced-level humanities content and a preliminary set of oral histories. The project leverages the cultural commonalities between Italy and Latin America as the result of shared colonial and migratory experiences which have affected numerous aspects of life. The goal is to organize materials from interdisciplinary sources that connect the linguistic and cultural experiences of Italy, Spain and Latin America and embed them in an advanced class so that Hispanic students can become further aware of trans-national affiliations rooted in a common past, and develop tri-lingualism and tri-culturalism through an accelerated path. A second goal is seeding a digital repository with resources that can be useful to other teachers for both existing classes and new extensions.

Preparation for publication of a book about African American theater and Black Masks magazine (1984-2020), which will include essays about significant African American administrators, playwrights, actors, directors, and designers.

The book I propose, "A History of African American Theatre Through the Lens of 'Black Masks' Publication, 1984–2020, will be an historical overview of the disciplines in Black theatre, told through the life stories of their respective African American theatre practitioners: administrators, playwrights, actors, directors, and designers. I will write an original essay for each chapter, providing historical context and addressing some of the challenges particular to each discipline. Each of the five chapters will also contain selected original biographical articles about significant Black theatre professionals in the discipline. These will be drawn from the archives of "Black Masks" magazine, my 35-year old publication on the Black performing arts. The articles, based on firsthand interviews, will be arranged chronologically within each chapter. Ultimately, the book will be a vibrant, discipline by discipline chronicle of Black theatre through the lives of those who lived it.

Research and writing leading to a book on the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich (1904-1942), Nazi governor to Bohemia and Moravia and an architect of the Final Solution.

The May 1942 assassination in Prague of Reinhard Heydrich—the second highest ranking official of the Nazi SS, one of the principal architects of the Final Solution, and the governor of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia—was one of the boldest acts of resistance in World War II. It was also one of the most controversial in that it precipitated horrific mass reprisals that led to the deaths of approximately 5,000 people. The Afterlife of a Death explores the curious transformation in the Czech lands of the memory of the killing of Heydrich. Whereas in 1942 and for years thereafter the assassination was widely understood as a reckless and ill-conceived endeavor, by the 1990s it came to be celebrated as the single most important act of Czech resistance. This book project traces the shifts in its interpretation under Nazi, Communist, and liberal democratic rule, suggesting that what is commonly termed “memory” is better understood as the social framework of meaning.