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Penn Regional
Research Fellows,
Alan Baker, Assoc Professor of Philosophy, Swarthmore College
The Network Perspective
Networks are all around us. As persons, we are ourselves the units in a
network of social relationships of various kinds. As organisms, we are the
delicate result of a network of biochemical reactions. My project focuses
on the assumptions that underly the ‘new science of networks’, and on the
implications it has for our engagement with the world around us. A
striking feature of the network perspective is its emphasis on the
connections between entities rather than on the entities themselves. This
emphasis arises from the fundamental character of network models.
Typically all the ‘nodes’ in a network are treated as identical: they are
literally reduced to nothing – to dimensionless points with no intrinsic
properties. What distinguishes one network from another is the pattern of
‘links’ between its nodes. It is this pattern which becomes the object of
analysis and which gives a network its characteristic signature.
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Peter Gaffney, Visiting Asst Professor, Haverford College
Connectionism and Ontological Realism
Connectionism, as an emerging paradigm in both cognitive science and artificial intelligence, has come to signal a general transition away from the traditional symbolic paradigm (symbolism) towards non-symbolic approaches to producing and manipulating information. According to William Bechtel and Adele Abrahamsen, authors of Connectionism and the Mind, the new paradigm focuses on the causal processes by which “units excite and inhibit each other,” rather than methods of storing and manipulating symbols. I propose to investigate the specific ways in which this new paradigm engages, challenges or supports Gilles Deleuze’s “ontological realism”: the investigation of how the real may be directly created through those same processes of “subjectivation,” such as language, thought and visual culture, which organize affect into representations.
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Emily Hage, Asst Professor of Art History, St. Joseph's University
International Venues of Exchange: Dada Art Journals, 1916-1926
During World War I and its aftermath, a time of strict censorship, fervent nationalism, and limited travel and exhibition opportunities, the Dadaists used the journal medium to create an international network of exchange. This group of visual artists, writers, and performers, who were gathered in cities worldwide, forged a sense of membership based on diversity and distance rather than on conformity and proximity by producing and exchanging art journals. International Venues of Exchange: Dada Art Journals, 1916-1926 is a book-length analysis of the critical, if often overlooked, role of the journals. It analyzes their central role in developing the Dadaists’ bizarre and widely emulated strategies of display and examines journals from cities not typically associated with Dada. Thus this study, currently being written, broadens and deepens present perceptions of Dada, one of the most influential art movements of the twentieth century.
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Rachel W. Hall, Assoc Professor of Mathematics, St. Joseph's University
The Sound of Numbers: A Tour of Mathematical Music Theory
The Sound of Numbers is a book about the mathematics of music theory—that is, the use of mathematics to describe, analyze, and create musical structures such as rhythms, scales, chords, and melodies. Music theorists have used mathematics to solve musical problems for centuries, and some composers have turned to mathematics for inspiration. Mathematicians, too, have investigated musical questions. However, there has been a significant disconnect between these fields since the eighteenth century. This book aims to interpret the work of music theorists in a manner that is accessible to readers with scientific training and some background in music, and it aims to connect questions familiar to music theorists with problems and techniques that arise in mathematics.
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Deborah Harrold, Lecturer, Political Science, Bryn Mawr College
Algeria Reconnecting: Cultural and Political Imagination after Civil War
This project seeks to map and analyse the role of dense, attentuated, and broken connections in Algeria. This is particularly salient after the civil war when many aspects of national history and contemporary society are suspect. However, Algeria remains constituted through networks of global connections; energy, people, ideas. I foreground the meaning and articulation of these connections internally: in Algerian political economy and political imaginary. The strong internal print media, robustly Algerian wedding celebrations, internal transportation networks, and cell phones are critical sites for the project. While all these aspects of social, economic and political life have global connections, they are intensely national in their operation, and offer rich and nuanced understanding of national culture and national identity in an age of globalization.
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Jennifer Hirsch, Asst Professor of Art History, Maryland Institute College of Art
Transmissions of Fascism: Broadcasting, Bonifica, and the Built Environment
This project will address strategies employed for representing Italian fascist building projects and territorial expansion at home, in Italy and the colonies, and abroad, in the U.S., between the years 1922 and 1945. Thus, my study aims to analyze not only the diverse architectural vocabulary employed in governmental and civic buildings commissions by the fascist regime as part of the general bonifica (fascist land reclamation) program but also, and in particular, images of building projects that appeared in Italian publications connected to other media such as periodicals and posters related to radio and cinema. In considering transmissions of fascism, my project will broaden its scope to include buildings – as well as images of those buildings – sponsored by the Italian government in the U.S.
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Grace M. Ledbetter, Assoc Professor of Classics and Philosophy, Swarthmore College
Ballet and the Greeks
Every generation of artists configures its own relationship to the ancient Greek and Roman worlds. Is Classicism a stable value, or is it continually reinvented? If we have lost a romantic, sentimental attachment to ancient Greece as a transhistorical cultural ideal, what significance can Greek myth have for us today? Ballet and the Greeks is a book length study that examines how classical antiquity has influenced the origins and historical development of ballet, from the court ballets of the Renaissance, to the 20th century Neoclassicism of George Balanchine. Balanchine’s Apollo, Orpheus, and Agon mark three pivotal moments of classicism in the cultural context of the1940s and 1950s. Each of these ballets, somewhat paradoxically, employs Greek sources to innovate its art form radically.
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Timothy McCall, Asst Professor of Art History, Villanova University
Art, Gender, and Chivalric Masculinity in Early Renaissance Italy
My project investigates the construction and representation of aristocratic masculinity and patriarchal power. Adopting a dynamic model of power as generative and proliferating, I elucidate the ways in which numerous dynasties utilized chivalric imagery to challenge and position themselves among other regimes. This project, the first book-length study of masculinity in fifteenth-century Italian art, builds on the productive and lively focus on issues of gender in Italian Renaissance art of the last two decades. I extend these valuable investigations of femininity and female agency, to explore and ultimately denaturalize representations of noble masculinity. Representations of both men and women bolstered signorial authority; accordingly, I shift attention to the interdependent, inter-relational nature of gendered constructions of patriarchal power visualized through images of noble men and women.
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James B. Salazar, Asst Professor of English, Temple University
Captivating Arabia: Echoes of the Barbary Captivity Narrative
in Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Culture
My project examines an overlooked nexus of intercontinental connection in the nineteenth century: the Barbary captivity narrative. Written by American sailors, diplomats, and travelers captured and enslaved by North African “pirates,” Barbary captivity narratives not only fascinated readers with their exoticized portraits from the crossroads of Middle Eastern, African, and European cultures; their provocative accounts of “white slavery” also incited new forms of commercial activity, military intervention, and cultural contact between the U.S. and North
Africa. My project makes visible the role this alternate network of transatlantic exchange played in the formation of national culture in the U.S., while also rethinking literature’s imagined capacity to establish connections across social divisions within cultures as well as between cultures.
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Elly R. Truitt, Asst Professor of History, Bryn Mawr College
Magical Mechanisms: Automata in the Medieval West
Magical Mechanisms is an inquiry into the intellectual underpinnings and cultural meanings of medieval automata—self-moving objects most often in human and animal form. By examining a variety of medieval literary genres, including romance and epic, as well as historical chronicles, travelogues, philosophical treatises, archival documents, and manuscript paintings, I trace the ways that medieval automata in the form of people, animals, and the universe itself were described and created in Europe in the medieval period. I pay special attention to the relationship between textual and material culture in medieval Europe, the relationship between the Latin Christian West and the Dar al-Islam, and the early modern legacy of medieval science. In this way, my project offers a counterpoint to the traditional historiography of the Scientific Revolution, which often presents the idea of the clockwork universe and mechanistic models of natural action as novel intellectual developments.
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