Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellows in the Humanities, 2006–2007

Project
Walking in Exile

Kinga Araya
PhD 2004, Concordia University, Independent Scholar, Quebec, Art History, Visual Arts

Walking in Exile will be a study of travel by foot performed by contemporary artists who live and work in North America. Taking into consideration the history of black people walking in the United States towards freedom, as well as diverse international walks against political and social injustice, Dr. Araya will select and examine seven to nine travels by foot performed by contemporary exiles who for different personal, political, or economic reasons were forced to leave their native countries and came to live in major cities in North America. Particularly interested in their walking performances conceptualized as exilic works of art, she will consider diverse forms of walking art that could involve sculptural, music, dance, audio, video, and other new media elements. How did some exiled people choose the most humble act, such as walking, to communicate the intense history of personal, geographical, and cultural displacements, thus helping us to redefine the phenomenon of global human displacement? (Dr. Araya's homepage.)


Project
“A certaine tickling humour”: Passport Records and the Re-Fashioning of English Foreign Travel, 1560–1660

John Ghazvinian
PhD 2003, Oxford University, Contract Author, Harcourt Trade Publishers, History

The story of early modern English travelers has generally been treated by scholars as a subplot to larger narratives—whether political history, art history, or, more recently, textual criticism and constructions of the Other. It has never been discussed as a distinct development within the cultural history of Britain, with a unique narrative of its own. Historians have traditionally downplayed that a growing number of travelers took part in a self-fashioning exercise that consciously emphasized a “mere curiosity to see”. In an effort to correct both these tendencies, Dr. Ghazvinian will argue that it is time to study the growth of “curiosity travel” from 1560–1660 as a distinct topic within British cultural history, in much the same way that we study crime or witchcraft. An exhaustive textual and demographic analysis of nearly 2,000 passport records is expected to shed important new light on the nature of early modern travel in England in the century leading up to the Stuart Restoration and the “birth” of the Grand Tour.


Project
The Abduction of Memory: American Stories of Captivity, Travel, and Conversion

Susan Lepselter
PhD 2005, University of Texas at Austin, Instructor, Social Anthropology, New York University

From the Bay Colonies’ first best seller about the Indian abduction of Mary Rowlandson to contemporary “alien abductee” websites, captivity narratives have for centuries revealed the ambivalence in American ideologies of mobility, expansion, and settlement. Developing a chapter from her dissertation (“The Flight of the Ordinary: Narrative, Poetics, Power and UFOs in the American Uncanny”) Prof. Lepselter will for this book project use ethnographic fieldwork and text-based research to comparatively interpret captivity and travel narratives in America as they change over centuries. Focusing primarily on Indian captivity narratives and UFO abduction stories, her work will foreground the uncanny elements of both these genres to illuminate unspoken anxieties and desires in American narratives of mobility and stasis, from colonial expansion and settlement to class mobility and frustration.


Project
From Brazilian Bioprospector to Masonic Revolutionary: The Extraordinary Transatlantic Career of Hipólito José da Costa (1774–1823)

Neil Safier
PhD 2004 Johns Hopkins University, Assistant Professor, History, U Michigan

A Brazilian-born naturalist turned Freemason, Hipólito José da Costa (1744–1823) spent two years as a spy for the Portuguese in Philadelphia. Dr. Safier will produce a complete annotated translation of Hipólito’s journal recounting his stay in Philadelphia. In that time, Hipólito commented on the customs and mores of the nascent American nation, visited colleges and cultural institutions along the Atlantic seaboard, and met with such early American luminaries as John Adams, Charles Willson Peale, and Thomas Jefferson. Previous studies of Hipólito’s life and works—especially by Brazilian scholars—have focused on his political writings. Safier’s approach will emphasize Hipólito’s formation as a naturalist, following the methodological insights drawn from recent studies on Robert Boyle, Buffon, and Joseph Banks that have demonstrated the close interconnections between political philosophy and the study of natural history in the early modern period.


Project
Fugitive and Foreigner: Cultures of Travel in the Black Atlantic, 1830–1865

Edlie Wong
PhD 2003 University of California, Berkeley, Assistant Professor, English, Rutgers

How did slavery fundamentally shape ideas about travel and travel culture of the period? Legal distinctions over categories of mobility became obligatory as white slaveholding travelers, tourists, and migrants began to travel among states, crossing from slave to free jurisdictions accompanied by slaves. While the Constitution’s Fugitive Slave Clause fixed fugitive flight as a crime punishable by recapture and re-enslavement, no comparable federal regulation existed for slaves traveling to and within free jurisdictions with a master’s consent. In landmark British and American freedom suits fought over slaves traveling in free territories, antislavery legislation, specifically in the form of personal liberty laws, began to restrict the slaveholder’s “freedom to travel” in a manner, according to proslavery ideologues, disturbingly akin to the slave before slave law. To what extent did slavery fundamentally change our understanding of the meanings, contexts, and forms of these untold histories of travel?