Funded Projects Query Form
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Research and writing two chapters for a book about a new interpretation of Plato’s definition of justice in The Republic.

Although Socrates offers a novel definition of justice in Book 4 of Plato's Republic, it is argued that the place to learn what justice really means for Socrates in The Republic is Book 1. It is here that, through a series of conversations, Socrates teaches that conventional rules of justice, though important, are to be set aside if they lead to harmful consequences; that justice harms no one, neither friend nor foe; that justice cares for others and, in particular, for the weaker; and that the function of just government is first and foremost to encourage virtue in its citizens.

Research and writing leading to a book on the interrelationship of immigration standards and slavery in federal policy, constitutional reform, and political action after the Civil War.

Immigration and slavery are separate subjects but their histories are tightly entangled. Before the Civil War, the federal government played almost no role in immigration. National laws regulating the movement of one kind of people (immigrants) would have affected the movement of others (free black and slaves). The states set their own terms for the admission, exclusion, and expulsion of foreigners, and for the movement of free blacks and enslaved persons. Only after slavery was abolished did the Supreme Court rule unequivocally that immigration was a federal matter. By this time, the Chinese were subject to the kinds of racial practices that had been used against free blacks in the antebellum era. To justify Chinese exclusion, the Supreme Court ruled in 1889 that federal authority over immigration resided in the inherent sovereignty of the nation, rather than any particular part of the Constitution. This doctrine has been the basis of U.S. immigration policy ever since.

Writing a historical study comparing the political philosophies of Thomas Jefferson (president, 1743-1826), Alexander Hamilton (secretary of the treasury, 1757-1804), and Abraham Lincoln (president, 1809-1865).

Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton are rightly depicted as adversaries in the American founding era. Jefferson was the tribune of people and a believer in small government based in the yeoman farmer. Hamilton promoted government support for banking and industry and showed deep skepticism toward democracy. This project argues that Lincoln serves as a synthesis of Jeffersonian and Hamiltonian ideas. Lincoln's thought marries Jefferson's preference for self-sufficient labor and natural rights to Hamilton's belief in a national economic policy and skepticism of Jeffersonian populism. Looking at each statesman's views on economics, presidential power, war, the Constitution, natural rights, and populism we see that Lincoln was able to blend ideas of both founders to build better than either intended. As the nature of the founding-era conflicts still inhabit contemporary politics, we can prosper from appreciating Lincoln's fusion of the best of Jeffersonian and Hamiltonian ideas.

Research and writing leading to a book about interracial collaboration in theater in New York City in the 1920s and 1930s, with analysis of performances staged on Broadway, in Harlem, in Greenwich, and in films.

I seek an NEH Summer Stipend to complete my third book, a monograph that charts a fresh account of one of the most vital moments of U.S. culture. Racing the Great White Way: a Counter History of 20th-Century Broadway shows that during a time when U.S. culture was profoundly segregated, the theatre was a site of interracial collaboration. Diverse theatre artists were integrating not only theatrical spaces, but also shaping aesthetics and cultural discourse. The project steers the reader away from the glistening lights of Broadway toward sparse performance spaces in the Village or the basement of the Public Library on 135th Street. Broadway and its adjacent spaces were not only major producers of theatre but also crucial architects of cultural work during the 1920s and 1930s. The central claim of the book is that by racing beyond Broadway, we discover not only a rich history of diverse theatrical performances, but also a powerful archive of U.S. culture transitioning to modernity.

Research and writing of an article on “The Book of Negroes,” a Revolutionary War manuscript that documents Black loyalists to the British cause held at the British National Archives as part of the British Headquarters Papers, 1774–1783.

For Black loyalists during the American Revolution, loyalty meant liberty. Responding to British Proclamations that promised freedom in exchange for fealty to the Crown, three thousand Black loyalists left New York in 1783 to start new lives elsewhere at the end of the American Revolution. Their long-overlooked stories are preserved in a little-known text called “The Book of Negroes.” The few historians who have discussed this book have treated it as little more than a ledger, but I argue that it is one of the earliest and largest collections of circumatlantic Black authorship, if we just know how to interpret it. This NEH grant would support the development of a peer-reviewed article concerning Black loyalist writing as it is represented in “The Book of Negroes.” Specifically, it would fund archival research at the National Archives in Kew (UK) to access the British Headquarters Papers, 1774–1783, a collection that contains “The Book of Negroes” and its ancillary documents.

Writing of a chapter and related article for a book examining cultural representations of the Korean War.

The Korean War is commonly known as the “forgotten war.” Curiously, however, it was first named as such in a US News and World Report in 1951 when the war was still active. While the moniker has come to generally mean that there is scant cultural memory of the Korean War, memory is an ironic pathway to understanding the forgetting which first concurred with the unfolding of the events of war. My current book project, purposefully entitled “Unforgetting the Korean War,” comparatively examines representations of the Korean War in American literature and culture during the 1950s and the post-Cold War era to elucidate the cultural politics of memory on this war. It attempts to locate the cultural politics of the war in the very trope of forgetting by analyzing assemblies of Korean War representations—which are surprisingly numerous, varied, and noteworthy—at two high points of literary and cultural engagement with the war.

Research for a book on the craft brewing industry’s impact on urban renewal.

This project examines the craft brewing industry's structural, cultural, and political effect on American cities. Since the 1980s, small scale, independently-owned brewing operations have acted as a catalyst for urban revitalization and cultural change. Architects and city planners have begun calling the process of craft breweries acting as beachheads for urban revival “beer urbanism.” This project seeks to historicize this process through an in-depth and comparative examination of the craft brewing industry in various U.S. cities. More than an exploration of craft brewing, this project is about cities, how they change, and for whom. In addition to situating beer urbanism in the context of recent American urban, cultural, and political history, this project also addresses broader questions about capitalism, gentrification, and unequal urban renewal.

Research and writing one chapter of a book interrogating the significance of policies governing property rights in slaves before and after Emancipation.

Until the US Civil War, legal recognition of property rights in slaves enabled slaveholders, merchants, and investors to buy and sell slaves on credit and to mortgage slaves. The US government’s wartime decision to abolish slavery without reimbursing slaveowners for the lost value of freed slaves threatened to send this complex system of finance, founded on human property, into chaos. From 1864-1871, southern and federal lawmakers and judges, as well as everyday southerners, argued over who ought to be responsible for the financial burden of emancipation. This project explores the little-known history of white southerners’ defense of their perceived right to own slaves or to be reimbursed for their value. Their debates, ranging from former Confederate states to the US Capital, reveal that immediate, uncompensated emancipation in the US South was not an inevitable outcome of Union victory in the Civil War, and the process of emancipation extended well beyond the abolition of slavery.

Research for a book on British, Canadian, Caribbean, and American immigration legislation during the 1790s in response to the French Revolution.

An NEH Summer Stipend will make possible two months of archival research in London focused on reconstructing legislation passed in the British Caribbean against aliens between 1793 and 1794. This research is part of my next book project, Alien Invasions and Revolutionary Contagion, which provides the first comparative study of British, Canadian, Caribbean, and American aliens acts passed during the 1790s in response to the movements of individuals fleeing revolutionary France. The book places aliens acts in their broader context and also elucidates how international rivalries and fear of French-inspired radicalism shaped security policies, early immigration law, and citizenship practices throughout the Anglo-Atlantic world. At its broadest level, it documents a critical shift in how “aliens” and "enemies" were defined during the Age of Revolution, where political principles, rather than religious affiliation, came to distinguish “insider" from "outsider."

Research and writing leading to a biography of the influential American Egyptologist George A. Reisner (1867-1942).

Most archaeological biography projects do not reflect the broad brushstrokes of international relations and global change. But the individual currently under study—George A. Reisner (1867–1942, Harvard AB 1889)—is exceptional in several ways. Not only did Reisner pioneer crucial aspects of modern archaeological method as we understand them today, but he did so on an international stage, as an American expatriate working primarily in Arab countries (Egypt, Sudan) dominated by British political control and a French antiquities service. His story covers nationalism, imperialism, colonialism, the birth of scientific archaeology, the history of Harvard and of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the discovery of ancient art masterpieces and their ultimate museum destinations (under the partage system), and the issues of repatriation and cultural patrimony before they became the “hot topics” they are today. It is time that Reisner’s story, and his impact on the archaeological world, was told.

A biography of Patriarch Tikhon Bellavin (1865-1925), head of the Orthodox Church during the Russian Revolution.

This project will be the first complete biography of Patriarch Tikhon Bellavin (1865-1925), who became head of the Orthodox Church in the midst of the Russian Revolution and played a decisive role in guiding the Church in the face of a militantly hostile atheist regime. Based on extensive new primary sources, it follows his career in the Russian Empire and in North America before 1917, which played a formative role on Tikhon as a leader, as well as his role as head of the church from 1917 onward. Although the Soviet authorities labeled him a counter-revolutionary and repeatedly arrested him, Tikhon sought to defend the Church against the Bolsheviks’ assaults against it while at the same time was open to negotiation in a way that prepared the church for surviving in the hostile environment.

Research and writing one chapter of a book on women’s humor in New York City, 1920–1950.

Women’s humor has been largely overlooked and undervalued, yet it offers a unique perspective in critiquing existing social structures and rethinking gender roles in American society. While there has been a recent resurgence in the role of women in comedy, this book looks back at the innovators and ground-breaking female humorists of the twentieth century. In particular, I will focus on the women of wit of the interwar period: Edna St. Vincent Millay among the Greenwich Village bohemians, Dorothy Parker among the Algonquin wits, Tess Slesinger of the Menorah Journal, Jessie Fauset and Nella Larsen among the Harlem Renaissance writers, Dawn Powell of the Lafayette circle, and Mary McCarthy among the Partisan Review crowd. Through the use of satire, irony and wit, these women were able to mask their social critique through the palliative form of laughter, and to set the stage for future generations of smart, sassy women.

Research and revision of an article of transcription of a medieval manuscript housed at the Cleveland Public Library.

The focus of this project is a detailed study of a medieval manuscript held in the Cleveland Public Library, MS W q091.92-C468, which is one of the most unusual medieval English manuscripts in North America, and also one that holds tremendous promise for researchers. The final goal of this project is an article that will identify and analyze the texts contained in this manuscript and argue that their careful combination was intended to frame and interpret English national history in the context of Josephan history, particularly the Roman destruction of Jerusalem in 70 AD. In preserving and carefully curating unique versions of popular texts, the compiler of this book constructed a national history that posits England’s rise as a direct counterpoint to Jerusalem’s fall and deploys the destruction of Jews and Judaism as a lens through which to comprehend England’s birth and ascent as a nation.

Research leading to a book on the way that Chaucer discusses aural and textual media such as spoken word and manuscripts in his literary texts, and the ways in which he conceptualized the circulation of media and culture.

This project is a chapter of a book-in-progress titled “Chaucer’s Premodern Media.” While medieval culture lacked the machine technologies that we associate with the term “media,” this book demonstrates that it had extensive philosophical, political, and spiritual discourses of media and mediation. The project counters a common assertion among media theorists that no media exists before the arrival of the printing press in the West. The chapter I plan to complete during the summer, “Ambient Media in Chaucer’s House of Fame,” brings together the scientific and communicative senses of “media.” Following thirteenth-century Latin translations, Aristotle’s theory of sense perception through natural media, including air, was newly available to medieval audiences. Chaucer’s poem uses Aristotle’s theories to examine how bodies and their environments generate what we now call communicative media: written words and images, but also the physical milieux that transmit texts and content.

Research for a book on the history of insurance in modern France.

I will use my funding to perform two months of research in France on a book about the social and cultural role of insurance in creating French notions of economic citizenship from the Enlightenment through the early twentieth century. The development of insurance from a little-known and frequently condemned financial tool used largely by mariners to a possible answer to France’s “social question” representing a “third way” between liberal individualism and state-dominated socialism is a story that has yet to be told. This book, which draws on previously untapped archival sources, traces the history of a broad array of financial instruments designed to mitigate risk and precarity– including agricultural, health and life insurance, retirement annuities, and savings plans – and  shows how the logic of insurance not only transformed discussions of social welfare by displacing prior ideas of fault and responsibility, but also explores the growing conceptualization of the welfare state as insurer.

Archival research for a book on the Czech reception history of the 1942 assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, Nazi Germany’s governor of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia.

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 anti-Nazi 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. “Heydrich’s Shadow” 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 surprising shifts in the interpretation of the assassination under Nazi, Communist, and liberal democratic rule, suggesting that “memory” is best understood as an unstable framework of meaning.

Research and writing leading to an ethnographic monograph on the use of language (both Arabic and English) to create communities of nonconforming Muslims in North America.

Muslims on the Margins tells the ethnographic story of a multi-sited community coalescing around creative (re)interpretations of the Qur’an, critical questioning of taken-for-granted Muslim norms, and radical inclusion of those who are ‘queer’ in various ways. The book's humanizing, ethnographic, and sociolinguistic approach centers on the voices and interpretations of LGBT and gender-nonconforming Muslims and their allies collected over a 45-month period in North American face-to-face and international online groups that label themselves “progressive” or “inclusive.” By examining how eclectic participants form small and large-scale communities, learn and teach one another the norms of these communities, and find meaning in their practices, the book will lead to deeper understanding of Muslim diversity, overturn stereotypes that Islam and queerness are incompatible, and encourage appreciation for both similarities and differences across religious beliefs.

Writing of a book on Levantine Joint-stock Companies and the origins of capitalist development in the Middle East (1850-1925).

The Business of Property is framed by two questions: First, how did land in the Levant become commodified? Second, how was this process of commodification – with its related impetuses and impacts – related to the development of capitalism around the Mediterranean basin? I argue that prominent Beiruti families who formed joint-stock companies in the mid-nineteenth century relied on forms of sharecropping rooted in the Ottoman social formation as the most efficient techniques for local capital accumulation in the Levant. Only during the First World War did the firms’ land tenure arrangements in parts of Greater Syria and Palestine begin to take on a commodified form, making them acceptable to European buyers. Indeed, the crisis of World War I concretized processes that were already underway in the Levant from the mid-nineteenth century and transformed the shape of capitalism globally.

Research for a biography of Thomas Wentworth Higginson (1823-1911), artist and public intellectual of the 19^th Century.

Colonel Thomas Wentworth Higginson (1823-1911) has been remembered as a soldier, poet, scholar, historian, feminist, and radical. Although Higginson enjoys cameos in virtually every book written on antebellum reform, women’s rights, or the Civil War, the only complete biography was published fifty-two years ago and did not offer rigorous documentation. Drawing on archival materials housed in the Boston area, the proposed biography of Higginson will offer lay readers, students, and specialists in American literature an opportunity to appreciate this fascinating, multi-faceted man’s life. [Edited by staff]

On-site research at Monticello for a short biography of Sally Hemings, one of Thomas Jefferson’s most historically notable slaves.

This biography will tell the life story of Sally Hemings, the Anglo-African woman claimed by Thomas Jefferson as a slave, who was half-sister to his dead wife, mother to his five youngest children, and a member of an extensive kinship network of African Americans centered on his Monticello plantation. As such, the book will also be an introduction to race, gender, slavery, and freedom in the first fifty years of the American republic. The chapters will follow the chronology of Hemings’s life from her birth in 1773 until her death around 1835, with each focusing on a key question that has perplexed historians who have written about her. The final chapter will look at the ways she has been interpreted at the Monticello historical site and in popular culture.

Research leading to a book on the translation and reception of the works of Herman Melville, American novelist, in France and Belgium.

Pequod on the Seine identifies and explores the networks and exchanges that made Melville’s works visible and significant to the French and European literary worlds engaged in the national conflicts of the Second World War. My study contravenes the dominant scholarly narrative of the “Melville revival” of the 1920s—the discovery and republication events thirty years after Melville’s death that rescued his novels from oblivion—showing that this story about American literature typically, and incorrectly, confines itself to the boundaries of the United States. My research corrects for the US-national focus, locating the uptake of Melville’s writings between the United States, France, and Belgium. Focusing on Melville, my study takes as its premise that even the most canonical objects for the study of US culture have both existence and afterlives beyond that culture.

Research and writing two chapters of a book about the stories of displacement and migration told by Afghans living in the Washington, D.C. area.

Afghans have experienced an almost unparalleled level of social trauma in recent decades, suffering through invasions by foreign powers, years of civil war, and ongoing military efforts to create a sustainable political future. I have partnered with members of the Afghan diaspora in the greater Washington, D.C. area to collect their stories about displacement from Afghanistan, movement abroad, and emplacement in the U.S. This NEH summer stipend is to support writing a book manuscript with the data collected. Using ethnographic methodologies, the book explores how individuals who have fled Afghanistan and now live in the U.S. narrate their experiences.

Research and writing two chapters of a history of the Muslim Student Association and its role in shaping modern American Islam.

Founded in 1963, the Muslim Students’ Association has played a crucial role in shaping American Islam on a national scale. This book-length project demonstrates how the ostensibly secular American university has served as an indispensable site for the coalescence of American Muslim community and identity from the mid-twentieth century onwards. Muslim Students and the Making of American Islam closely analyzes six case studies to explore the imaginaries and strategies through which Muslim students have enacted their visions for Islam, as they negotiated their relationship to other activist projects in the U.S. and to global Muslim revivalist movements. Through these processes, I argue, the MSA made the ideal of a unified American umma (community) into a key and contested project for American Muslims writ large.

Research for a book on the permeability of the prison from the postwar period to the end of the 20^th century.

The prison has become an urgent site of inquiry for scholars of the humanities, but historians of U.S. prisons have only begun to analyze the relationship of prisons to the outside world. My research demonstrates that, until recently, practices such as furlough, conjugal visits, clemency, and religious outreach rendered prisons surprisingly porous. This project is about the "thickening" of prison walls in the late 20th century U.S. and examines the invention and decline of practices that had connected people to free society. By historicizing the impermeability of the prison, I trace the increasing social isolation of prisoners as cause and consequence of punitive policies. In a moment characterized by presentism and the rapid-fire spread of information, my work provides much-needed context for a national conversation about prisons and thus contributes to the NEH’s goal of advancing civic education and embracing the humanities as a means of building “A More Perfect Union.”

Research and writing leading to a book about dances depicting the Holocaust and its history, memory and trauma, from 1960 to the present.

The Holocaust has been a major focus of film, theater, literature, and visual art. Dance has also served as a powerful forum to address the Holocaust; there have been many such works, yet there are no books on this topic. Holocaust Dances addresses this gap by examining depictions of the Shoah, history, memory, and trauma in select dances created between 1960 and the present. I will argue that dance has served as a fertile platform for making an embodied intervention into an immensely complex history of trauma and loss, intolerance and bigotry. Holocaust dances have the potential to make manifest traces of the past, nudge memorials and archives out of stasis, and involve viewers and participants in collective and performative acts of witnessing and commemoration.