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Regional Faculty & Professional Fellows
Genevieve Abravanel
Jesse Couenhoven
Susanna Gold
Jack Hinton
Tanya Kevorkian
Martha Lucy
Graham MacPhee
Jill Rappaport
H. Rosi Song
Amanda Weidman
Regional Faculty & Professional Research Fellows
2007–2008
Genevieve Abravanel
Assistant Professor, English, Franklin & Marshall College
Britain’s Hollywood: American Influence, the Movies, and the
Erasure of Origin
In the years between the wars, Hollywood cinema began to enjoy unparalleled global popularity and, in the eyes of many in Britain, to herald a new era of American influence. To its British detractors, Hollywood threatened to undermine British values abroad as well as to americanize the working classes at home. Americanization, also marked by the spread of such mass-produced commodities as jazz records and Ford motor cars, seemed capable of erasing cultural specificity altogether. As a result, critics such as F.R. Leavis furiously invented lost origins through nostalgic return to English folk and literary traditions. Dr. Abravanel will consider how this interwar reinvention of English culture rests on reactions against such American mass forms as the Hollywood film.
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Jesse Couenhoven
Assistant Professor, Moral Theology, Villanova University
The Origins of Evil
Myths of the fall are one way of puzzling over whether an individual’s moral evil can have an external source. I answer this question in the affirmative, arguing that while moral evil has its ultimate origins within human beings, not an external force, we are nevertheless shaped in tragic ways that lead to individual and communal falls. This might seem a depressing view of the human condition, but I maintain that its honesty is ultimately more hopeful than “optimistic” alternatives, since the knowledge that some of our most serious failings are not simply “up to me” provides crucial insight into human character, and not only motivates gracious responses, but permits us to formulate responses that are aware of one of the deepest problems of evil.
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Susanna Gold
Lecturer, Tyler School of Art, Temple University
“Of My Father’s Hue”: Racial Composition and Its Expression in American Visual Media
Although racial mixing or “amalgamation” has long been a stable point of inquiry in the study of 19th- and 20th-c American culture, few scholars have examined visual art in terms of the varied biological origins and subsequent racial categorization of its figures. In response to this gap, I analyze images addressing the practice of racial mixing, and investigate how these cultural forms communicate ideas about the role of heritage in a complexly ordered racial system. My work departs from the longstanding reliance of art historians on the strict division of social groups into insurmountably distinct racial categories, and is instead concerned with the fluidity of race—the mutual identifications experienced among those with diverse ancestral histories—, providing new avenues for understanding how biological origins affected identity construction.
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Jack Hinton
Assistant Curator, European Decorative Arts & Sculpture
Philadelphia Museum of Art
Origins in Portrait Sculpture: Jean-Antoine Houdon and His Busts
of Benjamin Franklin
Whilst portrayals of Benjamin Franklin are frequently encountered in this city, none can rival the sensitivity, detail, and spontaneity of the portrait of Franklin first realized by the French sculptor Jean-Antoine Houdon in 1778, of which a marble version of the bust, carved in 1779, crowns the sculpture collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Although a familiar image, the origins of Houdon’s portrait are enigmatic, stemming from uncertainty over whether Franklin posed for the artist, or if this astonishingly lifelike depiction was created before sculptor and celebrated subject had ever met. This project will investigate the physical origins of the sculpture, and examine this iconic work in relation to Houdon’s sculptural practices, his approach to portraiture and commercial strategies as the ‘Sculptor of the Enlightenment’.
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Tanya Kevorkian
Associate Professor, History, Millersville College
The Social History of Music in Germany during the Baroque Era
It is notoriously difficult to define not only the social origins of Baroque music, but also the concept of “Baroque” itself. The transition to the Baroque was in many ways seamless: important venues, patronage systems, ensembles, and audiences were established in a time labeled either as Renaissance or Reformation. Professor Kevorkian argues that continuities with systems established earlier were thus constitutive of the Baroque. She also examines the origins of Baroque music historiography. From the mid-18th century, musicians’ biographies stressed specific social contexts. From the mid-19th century, scholars published archivally based studies of Baroque music, although they did not use the term “Baroque” until the 1930s. Not least, the distinction between Baroque and Classical patronage, reception, and production that is still fundamental to musicology emerged relatively late.
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Martha Lucy
Mellon Fellow in Renoir Studies, The Barnes Foundation
The Evolutionary Body: Science, Self, and Soma in French Art
of the Fin de Siècle
This study explores the relationship between evolutionary theory, modernism, and the representation of the body in late nineteenth-century French art and visual culture. Dr. Lucy reveals how new ideas about human origins and evolution were absorbed into artistic vocabularies of the time, and argues that certain artists, such as Odilon Redon and Edgar Degas, seized upon Darwinism’s destabilizing potential as a critical part of their modernist approaches. These artists produced what she calls an “evolutionary body”—a conception that disrupted long-held paradigms of the body as immutable, God-given, and whole. For its articulation of a fragmented body and self, and its volatile intersection with questions of race and gender, the artistic engagement with evolutionary theory must be seen as an essential part of the modernist project.
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Graham MacPhee
Assistant Professor, English, West Chester University
Feeling English? Towards an Emotionology of Origin
While conceptions of a pure and ultimate origin have become less and less fashionable in the academic humanities, they have become increasingly widespread within popular political and cultural discourses of affiliation, belonging and identity. In Britain, the emergence of a richly diverse multicultural society has given rise to a literature which celebrates migrancy and diaspora, yet at the same time British culture has witnessed a resurgence of an ethnically exclusive language of origin associated with ‘Englishness’. Drawing on critical voices from within postcolonial studies which caution against too easily discounting the question of origin, Professor MacPhee will argue in his book project for a renewed attention to the desire for rootedness, location, persistence, and return within contemporary British literature and culture. The project will explore how recent articulations of migrancy, multiculturalism, and national identity may map territories of belonging somewhere between the polarities of a pure origin and an absolute rootlessness.
Jill Rappoport
Assistant Professor, English, Villanova University
Giving Women: Sisterhood and Exchange in the Early
Women’s Movement
Images of women exchanging gifts saturated the popular imagination during the nineteenth century, a time when many women lacked property and all faced limited professional options. Afforded marginal positions with respect to the burgeoning capitalist marketplace, women located alternative forms of economic power and satisfaction elsewhere, using a broad spectrum of gift practices to establish communities of thought and action. Jill Rappoport, in her book project, draws on anthropological gift theories as well as schools of new historical and feminist literary studies to identify and examine representations of Victorian women’s gift exchange that would be fundamental to the emerging women’s movement. Varied forms of giving, and the obligations they created, were central not only to nineteenth-century women’s literary imagination but to the development and mobilization of a socially-conscious, economically-savvy, and politically active sisterhood.
H. Rosi Song
Assistant Professor, Spanish, Bryn Mawr College
The Seduction of Hispanism: A Genealogy
Hispanism, broadly defined, is the study of the Spanish language and its culture. Historically speaking, its significance expands beyond the academic discipline to become a strategy of cultural expansion that can be traced to Spain’s history after the loss of its colonies in the New World. Domestically, it served as a unifying narrative that silenced the country’s linguistic and cultural diversity. It also provided a way to continue Spain’s imperial aspirations by preserving a cultural relevance in its one-time colonies as well as in the rest of the world. This project explores the ideological dimension of the concept of Hispanism not only as a dominating political force, but also an interpretive and representational cultural model for Spanish America and Spain.
Amanda Weidman
Assistant Professor, Anthropology, Bryn Mawr College
The Female Voice in Tamil Cinema
Song sequences are a central element of Indian popular cinema. The voices in these songs are those of “playback” singers, recorded in the film music studio and subsequently “lip-synched” by actors. Playback singers, whose voices are immediately recognized by Indian audiences, have become celebrities in their own right. The respectable female playback singer in particular has become a cultural icon, one whose singing voice might be matched up with on-screen characters of varying social status, but whose “original” persona remains that of a married, upper-caste woman.
I will trace a genealogy of this figure and her voice, looking at how Indian nationalist notions of femininity worked together with technologies of sound recording and reproduction to naturalize both a particular vocal sound and an ideology about women’s voices. Second, I will explore the ways in which playback singing both preserves and disturbs supposedly “original” voice-body relationships.