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Regional
Research Fellows, 2008–2009
Lloyd DeWitt, Assistant Curator, Philadelphia Museum of Art
Rembrandt's Image of Jesus
After painting biblical scenes for twenty years, the seventeenth-century Dutch artist Rembrandt changed his image of Jesus in the middle of his career, choosing a young Jewish man as model in nine small paintings, one of them now in the Philadelphia Museum of Art. This was the first ethnographically accurate Christ in history, an experiment typical of the culture of the Dutch Golden Age. Two panels were installed in his bedroom in 1656; thus, the series marks how Rembrandt thought about change in his own life during his affair with Geertge Dirckx. This series shows Rembrandt’s new ways of thinking about Jesus and a youthful and idealized corollary to his realistic self-portraits of the period.
Priya Joshi, Associate Professor, English, Temple Univ
Nationalism and Public Fantasy in Bollywood Cinema
Nationalism and Public Fantasy in Bollywood Cinema is a book-length study nearing completion that examines post-Independence India's relation to film, one of the most powerful and popular forms of twentieth-century narrative. It analyzes the manner in which blockbusters made in Bombay (or Bollywood as it is often called) in certain turbulent decades helped imagine the nation that is India. I argue that Bollywood's most popular hits symptomize the aspirations and repressions of the newly created national community. Through their narratives of conflict, compensation, and contradiction, popular Hindi films expose the political unconscious of India in striking and contestatory ways, and help illuminate the genealogy of the nation in perhaps a richer and more complex manner than a more formal, discursive history might.
Dustin Kidd, Assistant Professor, Sociology, Temple Univ
Legislating Creativity: The Intersections of Art and Politics
Legislating Creativity explores social change through an examination of debates faced by the National Endowment for the Arts in the 1980s and 90s. This book project focuses on the ways that art and political structures transformed one another through their intersections during the moment of controversy. It relies on historical analysis of several controversial projects and a contemporary revisiting of the entities involved. The book observes that Congress has moved away from direct funding for artists, responding in part to the notion that all art is political; that the art world now takes content more seriously, responding to the political focus on content above formal concerns; and that the artistic dimension of some projects is often diminished if they are also seen as political.
Lisa Kirschenbaum, Professor, History, West Chester Univ
Imagined Revolution: The Soviet Union, the Spanish Civil War, and the Making of International Communists
The project examines how women and men imagined and helped to constitute “international communism.” Much of the scholarship on international communism addresses its institutional history. By contrast, I am interested in its cultural and personal dimensions. I focus on connections between the Soviet Union and Spain, because the Spanish Civil War played a pivotal role in (re)defining and galvanizing international communism in the 1930s. Identification with the Soviet project and travel to the Soviet Union shaped Spanish communists’ identities and priorities. During the civil war, the apparent achievements of Soviet industrialization, coupled with Soviet aid to the Republic, magnified communism’s appeal and deflected attention from the Stalinist Terror. In the Soviet Union itself, heroic Spaniards became powerful emblems of communist revolution.
Ellen Ledoux, Assistant Professor, English, Rutgers, Camden
Popular Reforms: Progressive Ideology and Gothic Writing 1760–1820
Popular Reforms argues that gothic texts work to change their contemporary political world by offering viable alternative solutions for vexed problems such as slavery, economic disparity, gender inequality, and institutional corruption. I trace the gothic’s evolving social consciousness—using drama, poetry, and chapbooks in addition to prose fiction—to reveal the gothic’s reform message reaching segments of the British public at nearly all class levels. During its zenith, the gothic mode dominated almost every type of artistic expression. By exposing the ways that gothic texts not only criticize society but also demand that it improve, Popular Reforms recasts the gothic as a deeply idealistic, and even optimistic, mode that changes political thinking in the street, in the theater, and within the walls of parliament.
Charlene Mires, Associate Professor, History, Villanova Univ
Changing Views of Space and Place at the End of WWII: The Search for the Capital of the World
In 1945-46, Americans in more than 175 cities and towns offered their communities as potential “Capitals of the World” – that is, as headquarters sites for the new United Nations Organization. This widespread outbreak of boosterism provides a range of case studies of Americans’ perceptions of themselves and their communities in the context of world affairs. To understand these relationships, this project builds upon scholarship on globalization, international affairs, and urban history, linked through application of ideas of place and space in cultural geography. The actions of civic leaders can be explained largely by the change they experienced during their lifetimes. Born in the late nineteenth century and around the turn of the twentieth, they had seen changes in transportation, communication, and world affairs that made it possible to imagine the world far beyond the places where they were born. They inhabited not only a confined place (their hometowns) but an expanded space extending as far as technology, migration, and mass culture could go. They could seriously imagine their hometowns as Capitals of the World.
Kory Olson, Assistant Professor, French, Stockton College
Mapping the Paris of the Future: French Cartographic Discourse, 1900-1939
Cartographer J.B. Harley emphasizes that “maps are never value-free images,” they are a language used to mediate differing views of the world (53). For present-day academics, analyzing historical map discourse (text, shapes, and colors) helps identify emerging trends and prominent ideas. For Paris, the twentieth century brought considerable change. Automobiles clogged its narrow streets and residents moved further away from the city center in search of affordable housing and open space. These trends, among others, created new challenges for the French government as it looked to modernize its infrastructure and enhance daily life for its citizens. In this project, I examine various proposed urban reforms published between 1900–1939, along with their cartographic discourse, to explore shifts in urban policy and attitudes towards the French capital.
Meredith Ray, Assistant Professor, Italian, Univ of Delaware
The Alchemy of Gender: Women’s Voices, Female Bodies, and Alchemical Discourse in Early Modern Italian Texts
The problem of change was intrinsic to early modern ideas about alchemy. Alchemical transmutation aimed not only to turn one substance into another but in doing so, to reveal—through change—the interconnectedness of all things. This transformative process was conceptualized using the language and imagery of gender: the central metaphor of the “great work” was that of the chemical wedding, in which male and female elements were sealed together in a womblike vessel. Alchemy’s gendered language and imagery filtered into popular discourse via vernacular literary works, “libri di segreti,” and medical manuals. Many such texts were aimed at a female public, which was itself undergoing a kind of transformation as it adapted to the emergence of the bourgeois household and changing roles for women. This project examines the concept of change as it relates both to the construction of alchemical practice and to its use as a didactic tool for readers in sixteenth and seventeenth century Italy.
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