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Penn Faculty Fellows
Warren Breckman
Patricia D’Antonio
Barbara Fuchs
Michael Gamer
Lisa Mitchell
Ralph Rosen
Robert Vitalis
Penn Faculty Mellon Research Fellows
2007–2008
Warren Breckman
Associate Professor, Modern European History
Adventures of the Symbolic: French Postmarxism and
Democratic Theory
The crisis of Marxism presents unprecedented challenges to political theorists trying to imagine radical political change. Jettisoning the Marxist base-superstructure model, postmarxists have participated in the broader ‘symbolic turn’ in twentieth-century French thought.This shift freed theorists from one type of determinism, but threatened to reinstate determinism in the symbolic order. The symbolic turn thus presents both opportunities and challenges for radical thinkers. Questioning how the symbolic order might be transformed, postmarxist theory turns to notions of historical indeterminacy, spontaneous rupture, historical creation, and the ‘Act’. These issues frequently bring postmarxism into proximity with theological discourse, thus complicating Marxism’s longstanding hostility to religion. For the ‘Origins’ seminar, I will explore this convergence through a study of the resurgence of the theological trope of ‘creatio ex nihilo’ in recent theory. What function does this play in avowedly ‘atheistic’ theorists like Zizek, Badiou, or Castoriadis? How are we to distinguish their usage from other recent revivals of this theme in a vocally ‘theistic’ movement like ‘Radical Orthodoxy’? What does this return imply for where ‘theory’ is now?
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Patricia D’Antonio
Associate Professor, History of Nursing
Owning Origins: Nursing in 19th Century Philadelphia
If one wishes to speak of origins one must also address the issue of ownership of origins narratives. Who has the power to construct such narratives – and how do different modes of inquiry become vested with particular kinds of authority in particular contexts? Narratives about the origins of modern nursing stand a fascinating case in point. Historians and literary theorists have long told stories that seek to explicate what they see as the relatively disempowered subject position of nurses. Many nurses, on the other hand, dismiss such stories as irrelevant theorizing divorced from what they see as more complicated realities of their practice and their social world. This project seeks rapprochement between these different perspectives in a reconstructed narrative about the origins of modern nursing in 19th century Philadelphia. It seeks the origins of the discipline in multiple perspectives, and it uses textual and archival data to probe the mid to late nineteenth century experiences of several generations of lay and medical Philadelphia men and women who supported and sought the medical education of women – as physicians, as nurses, and as mothers.
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Barbara Fuchs
Professor, Romance Languages & Comparative Literature
Exotic Nation: “Maurophilia” and the Conflictive Construction of Spain
In the early modern period the question of Spain’s origins was a singularly fraught one, as Spaniards struggled to imagine themselves in opposition to the most common perception of them elsewhere as enduringly “Moorish.” I focus on the eventful century between the fall of Granada and the expulsion of the Moriscos in 1609 to explore how Moorishness complicated the construction of Spain both by Spaniards themselves and by other Europeans. Within Spain, I analyze the romanticization of Moors in literary texts—what critics have referred to as “literary maurophilia”—and the more complex, often silent presence of Moorish forms in Spanish material culture. I expand my reading of Spanish texts, artifacts, and practices by charting the broader European construction of Spain, deliberately racialized as African by travelers and Protestant propagandists alike.
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Michael Gamer
Associate Professor, English
Waverley and the Object of (Literary) History
This talk focuses on Scott's first novel in relation to his career as failed anthology-maker, reprint-tycoon, and canon-builder, and originator of historical fiction. Seminar participants do not need to have read Waverley; Or, 'Tis Sixty Years Since; I'll provide summaries and passages with which we may work. I'm especially interested in Waverley's self-proclaimed identity as an origin -- in this case a new genre -- and in what it means for an author to claim no generic affiliation with his contemporaries or immediate predecessors. I take up these questions in the context of Scott's extremely detailed (and almost entirely fictitious) stories of the novel's inception and composition. This presentation is part of a book project on Romantic collected works and the copyright reforms of 1774 and 1808.
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Lisa Mitchell
Assistant Professor, South Asia Studies
Origins and Identities: Historicizing Historical Linguistic Ideology
India possesses a remarkably long formal tradition of language analysis, dating to at least the fourth century BCE. Yet little attention has been paid to the mechanisms through which language ideologies in India were transformed under colonial rule while simultaneously made to appear unchanging. The new ideologies of language that emerged during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries relied centrally on data found in India for the discovery of the Indo-European and Dravidian language families and for the birth of historical and comparative linguistics. But they also had dramatic implications for popular conceptualizations and representations of language within India. This project traces the impact of these new understandings of the origins and genealogies of languages and of the etymologies of words on conceptions of identity and community in contemporary South Asia.
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Ralph Rosen
Professor, Classical Studies
Ancient Greeks on the Origins of Medicine, Intelligent Design,
and the ‘Nature of Humankind’
Ancient Greek theorizing about the origins of medicine began to distance itself from mythological paradigms and sought to explain health and disease in exclusively physical terms. Some Greek medical writers took a fundamentally pessimistic view of humankind’s “original state,” describing early humans as weak and unsuited for the life they found they had to live. Others, however, marveled at the complexity of human anatomy, and spoke with admiration of a divine “craftsman,” responsible for an original prototype of the human body, but incurring no responsibility for its frailties. Rosen will explore the ancient discourse about the origins of medicine and suggest that the specific needs of a developing scientific discipline gave rise to a number of idiosyncratic conceptions about human nature and human interaction with the environment.
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Robert Vitalis
Associate Professor, Political Sciences
North Versus Black Atlantic: Race, Empire, and the Origins of American International Relations
My project, part of my next book, North Versus Black Atlantic: Race, Empire, and the Origins of American International Relations, is a biographical and interpretive essay, the first ever, on Merze Tate (1905-1996, Ph.D., Radcliffe and Harvard, 1941). Tate was the first black woman to receive a Ph.D. in international relations, the first African American woman to receive an Oxford Literature degree, the first American woman to study at the most prestigious advanced studies program in the world, Alfred Zimmern’s Institute of International Studies in Geneva, the first political scientist to write on arms control in the United States as well as the first to study America’s nineteenth century Pacific empire. She nonetheless died in obscurity, at least as far as white scholars go.