*2009-10 PHF Research Assistant
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Graduate Humanities Forum
Research Fellows
Faculty Advisor:
Heather Love, Associate Professor of English
How were New World corporealities, that is, racialized bodies, included within the cartography of empire? This project traces the representations as well as the repercussions of the cartographic grid—the net of intersecting lines of longitude and latitude present in maps—in the New World territories. The purpose of this activity is to historicize the grid, as opposed to just seeing it as an abstract universal, by taking into account its history as a material practice and how it was influential in the construction and categorization of colonial racial types. A wide array of seventeenth and early eighteenth century sources, such as Bernardo de Balbuena’s Mexico’s Grandeur, early modern anatomy illustrations and maps, and images from racial intermingling present in the visual genre known as caste paintings will be examined in aims of understanding how the cartographic (and by extension imperial) grid is both reenacted and systematically subverted in the new territories.
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Todd Carmody, English
Ordinary Depressions: Race, Crisis, and the Remaking of American Liberalism
My dissertation examines the emphasis on and erasure of racial difference in the inclusionary nationalism of interwar American culture. If the New Deal and Popular Front imagined the Depression as a collective crisis that transcended the color line, this project probes the limits of racial liberalism and the politics of visibility as responses to structural asymmetries of power. Considering texts by Sterling Brown, Fannie Hurst, H.T. Tsiang, Paul Siu, and Charles Reznikoff, I outline an intellectual tradition that contests the equation of racial injury with exclusion from a liberal ideal and problematizes the incorporation of racial difference into ethnic paradigms of assimilation. These writers document the “ordinary depressions” obscured by the dominant narrative of shared trauma and the universalizing force of American nationalism. My interdisciplinary focus on the place of race in the liberal national imaginary organizes more specific literary encounters with gender conservatism, sociological models of race relations, and American regionalism.
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Aymar Jean Christian, Communication
The Discourse of Connection in Online Video
Amid the web series boom, a few programs—The Guild, Lonelygirl15, Dorm Life, What the Buck, Fred—have been able to achieve popularity by marshalling zealous fan bases. Experts in online serials—editors of blogs, directors, producers—agree that making a “connection” with viewers is the key to success. Viewer engagement has always been important in media, but new media has made this aspect of serialized production more pronounced, they claim. When Todd Gitlin wrote Inside Prime Time, he described a world where TV network executives had little clue what the audience wanted or who they were. Online, the consensus now seems to be, the producers should know. But what does connection look like? How and why is it created and sustained? This paper seeks to use the rise of the web series and the discourse around its production and distribution to answer these critical questions.
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Sarah Dowling, English
Remote Intimacies: Multilingualism in Contemporary Poetry
My research for the Forum is drawn from my dissertation, which explores contemporary multilingual poetry written in North America. I consider poems that use multiple languages to represent and discuss the history of the Americas, and argue that poems such as the Peruvian-American poet Cecilia Vicuña's Instan and the Tobagan-Canadian poet M. NourbeSe Philip's Zong! use multilingualism historiographically. Vicuña’s and Philip’s works examine and critique proprietary discourses that prevented Native people in the Americas and Africans brought to the Americas as slaves from being recognized as fully human subjects. I argue that these proprietary discourses continue to resonate in the present, and that in Vicuña’s and Philip’s poems they have significant formal implications. Rather than representing a single unique voice, multilingual poems represent the partial, fractured utterances of different voices that speak to each other across languages and across time, calling attention to conflicts, but also proposing intimacy.
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Matt Goldmark, Romance Languages
Transnational Troubles, the Multicultural Myth, and United States' Public Cultures
My research investigates the impact of geo-political difference on intersectional identities in United States’ public cultures. Specifically, how is the fragile fiction of multicultural inclusion troubled by transnationalism? My project begins by questioning the stability of United States’ conceptions of race, ethnicity, sexuality, and class in cultural products that incorporate the global “other.” I focus on television programs, among them RuPaul’s Drag Race and Drawn Together, in order to foreground the domestication of geo-political difference in popular culture. From “African queens” wrapped in American flags to win pageant crowns to Pokémon knock-offs sewing NBA basketball shoes in a cartoon attic, these programs demonstrate that transnational figures often pay disproportionately for the multicultural myth through their labor and bodies. By making connections across disciplinary and cultural divides, I seek to demonstrate the processes and costs of the televisual naturalization of the global other.
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Che Gossett, History
Queer Resistance, Neoliberalism, and Social Memory
My paper focuses on the memorialization of Stonewall through the 2009 “Rainbow Pilgrimage" campaign, as well as the city's dedication of Compton's cafeteria in San Francisco in 2006 and the ways in which both serve to preserve and construct social memory. I am interested in the ways in which inclusion is mobilized as a technology of governance and domination, enclosing radical spaces and dreams (Stonewall and Compton's Cafeteria uprising) into the fold of the state, while failing to address the needs of the communities out from which those acts of resistance and desires emerged. What does the recent designation of Stonewall as tourist site by NYC officials mean in a neoliberal context? Finally, I plan to explore the affective responses to Stonewall and Compton's and how the monumentalization of sites of resistance coincides with teleological narratives in which queer insurrection and trauma are seen as vestiges of the past.
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Roger Mathew Grant, Music
La battuta della musica: Interconnected Epistemologies of Time and Meter in Seventeenth-Century Rome
In 1611, Agostino Pisa used some of the most vitriolic language in the history of music theory to charge the city of Rome with what he saw as an absolute incompetence in the practice of “beating,” or conducting, musical meter. His indignation formed one important position in a lively debate concerning meter and the musical beat in Rome involving countless theorists and performers. My project addresses the terms of the debate on the musical beat in Rome, the temporal ideologies it intersected with, and the material practices of the hand that were pressed into its service. I seek to recover an understanding wherein the musical beat, la battuta, was connected not only to temporal measure, but also fundamentally connected to motion in the act of beating. Moreover, I hope to reposition the history of meter in a broader context, evincing aspects of the interconnected epistemologies of meter and time through history.
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Jeehyun Lim, English
Reading Race and Capital in Ha Jin
This project examines the contemporary bilingual writer Ha Jin’s prose through the economy of race and capital. Two theses popular since the postwar era are behind the economy of race and capital which I pose: the model minority discourse, which posited that Asian Americans are well suited for economic integration because of their cultural values, and bilingualism as human capital, which was persuasively used to advocate bilingual education in public schools and transform the liability of bilingualism into an asset. As a writer whose life in the U.S. is intimately tied to the historical turmoil in modern China and who continuously works through questions of exile, immigration, and writing in and between two languages, Ha Jin’s prose raises interesting questions about the cultural capital of bilingual writers in Asian American cultural criticism. In this project, I focus on his representations of China, the question of ethnic authenticity and his self-reflections on the bilingual writer to examine how race and capital function in the reception and understanding of Ha Jin’s prose as part of Asian American literature.
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Deirdre Loughridge, Music
Hot Air Balloons and Music: Connecting Earth and the Infinite at the End of the Eighteenth Century
Today, hot air balloons provide peaceful, aimless rides for vacationers, and momentary visual delight for accidental spectators. In the 1780s, however, hot air balloon flights were accompanied by clamorous celebration, and connected people and spaces in new ways. My project examines the link hot air balloons forged between earthly and celestial regions, and the questions they occasioned about sonic communication in the late eighteenth century. Through readings of texts from the hot air balloon craze, I will develop a new history of the spectacle of hot air balloon flight that takes into account the sonic yet wordless connections made between spectator and aeronaut, and the partial yet promising connection achieved between earth and heavens. I will also draw a historical connection between the hot air balloon craze and the development of early Romantic music aesthetics. The loss of articulate sound between earth and hot air balloon suggests examining not only what instrumental music could mean for early Romantics, but also what it – uniquely – could connect. For early Romantics, instrumental music, functioning like a hot air balloon, could connect man to higher, infinite realm.
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Rachael Nichols, English
The Human Animal: Tangles in Science and Literature, 1870–1920
Charles Darwin’s Descent of Man (1871) explained human evolution in terms of kinship between human and animal species, and its publication sparked a period of intensified interest in the “human animal.” As critics and historians have noted, many saw this kinship as a marker of degeneration, a new fall inaugurating civilization’s decline. My project, in contrast, considers the potential this new formulation offered for reimagining what it meant to be human, particularly at a time marked by rapid social and technological change. Curiosity about the human animal expressed itself in the development of new sciences and in new literatures, from the literary naturalism of Jack London to the proto-science fiction of Mark Twain. Reading US novels, newspaper articles, and scientific texts together, I uncover the unstable, transgressive, and ultimately creative connections being made between the human and the animal at the turn of the century.
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Mara Taylor, German
Sex, Sociality, and Suicide: Queer Female Subjectivities in Medical Science and Homosexual Literature in Germany and Austria 1860-1933
My project draws from my dissertation, which traces the emergence of the lesbian identity category in modernity. Examining a range of Austro-German cultural productions, I uncover a fraught struggle between the mainstream scientific world and marginalized lesbian literary cultures. Popular medical sexological discourse sought to taxonomize and control lesbian identity for the modern episteme. Female authors, conversely, depicted sexually deviant women who reject nomenclature and forge agency through negative, anti-social means: turning inward and even committing suicide. Instead of dismissing this negativity, I argue that it signifies positively within these texts. My dissertation’s analysis of modern sexuality zooms in on deeply personal questions concerning what it means to connect over issues of sexual identity, what it means for a scientific expert to group and connect individuals according to specific traits, as well as how and why individuals disconnected from mainstream sexual paradigms and how they reconnected in search for agency.
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