Center Fellows
The Red-Faced Demon of Khurasan: Conquest and Rebellion on an Early Islamic Frontier
Robert Haug, Department of History
The Red-Faced Demon of Khurasan: Conquest and Rebellion on an Early Islamic Frontier is a micro-historical study of the Arab Conquests of the seventh century focused on the lives of warrior, governor, and rebel ʿAbdallah b. Khazim (d. 691-2) and his son Musa (d. 704-5). The purpose is to use Ibn Khazim’s exploits in eastern Iran and Central Asia as a lens to explore key issues in the study of early Islamic history—the Arab Conquests and the First and Second Fitnas or Civil Wars, particularly—including the construction of a shared cultural memory and the shaping of an ideal frontier warrior in medieval Islamic society. Current research into the Arab Conquests has largely struggled with reconstructing events from our limited sources. A more focused approach offers a new path for studying the conquests and their meaning in a medieval context that de-centers questions of grand narrative; why and how the Arabs succeeded in rapidly forming a vast empire; while simultaneously opening new avenues to explore them as well as questions of memory and masculinity in reports of the early Islamic caliphate. Ibn Khazim was a striking frontier warrior and medieval chroniclers recorded detailed accounts of his exploits. Unusually detailed accounts of the actions of Ibn Khazim and his son Musa read like adventure stories replete with a mix of swashbuckling heroism and villainous deceit.
Why were these reports were preserved rather than others? How did these reports function within medieval chronicles, local histories, and biographical dictionaries to shape contrasting images of an idealized Muslim frontier warrior extending the limits of the Abode of Islam and a seditious villain bringing violence and strife to the community?
Remembering Non-Humans in American Space Exploration: Memory at the Intersection of Patriotism, Science, and the Environment
John Lynch, Department of Communication
In 1971, Stuart Roosa took 500 seeds into orbit on Apollo 14. After they germinated, NASA distributed them across the United States. These “moon trees” were planted as part of the 1976 Bicentennial celebrations. Animals, specifically non-human primates, have also been celebrated and remembered for their role in space exploration: Miss Able (a rhesus monkey), Miss Baker (a squirrel monkey), and Ham (chimpanzee) were the first American “astronauts” to survive rocket launch. Notably, Miss Able was stuffed and put on display at one time in a Smithsonian exhibit on the early stages of American space exploration. The moon trees and the exhibit of Miss Able are notable examples of public memory of science and space exploration that weave together patriotism, space exploration, and technological creativity, alongside early environmentalism’s optimism that Americans could save the environment while maintaining their prosperity and standard of living.
This project examines the memorials devoted to the nonhuman participants in American space exploration—the bicentennial moon trees and the space monkeys. Such a combination of patriotic, scientific and environmentally-friendly sentiments is notable partly because of its absence from contemporary society, raising questions about why those combined sentiments disappeared and how they could be revived, assuming they should. Studying the public memory of non-humans in space exploration continues my research trajectory of studying museums and memorials devoted to science and medicine. This work began with the 2013 essay on the Creation Museum and
the The Origins of Bioethics: Remembering When Medicine Went Wrong(2019).
Resistance and Rollback: The Politics of Women’s Rights Contestation at the United Nations
Rebecca Sanders, Department of Political Science
The 1979 UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) is one of the most widely ratified international human rights treaties. Yet international women’s rights have been a constant source of controversy. From the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development to the 1995 Fourth World Conference on Women to the contemporary Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) and General Assembly, conservative states and NGOs have sought to block, limit, and roll back the articulation and dissemination of international women’s rights principles at the United Nations and other international fora. Their core targets include sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR) and the concept of socially constructed rather than biologically determined gender roles and identities. Growing coordination between longstanding religious fundamentalists and ascendant far-right patriarchal populists has provided new impetus for these attacks, accelerating and deepening effort to spoil the international women’s rights agenda. In this project, I trace these developments by identifying key actors, documenting their strategies and tactics, and analyzing implications for the sustainability and progressive development of international women’s rights principles.
On the Spectrum: Jewish Refugees from Nazi Austria and the Politics of Disability in Britain and America
Katherine Sorrels, Department of History
This book project traces Jewish pediatricians and disabled children who fled Nazi Vienna for northern Scotland, where they founded an intentional community called Camphill Special School. Camphill soon grew into an international movement for children and adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities. Today, there are over 130 Camphill Villages around the world. Camphill’s success is due in part to the way its founders subverted medical norms in disability care: people with disabilities live with their caretakers in family-style households that stress communal learning, work, and social life. Sorrels' argues that Camphill conceived of a new idea of home, one that met a pressing need that neither individual households nor state institutions could fill. The model they developed is championed by some high-profile disability self-advocates and sharply criticized by others; it has far-reaching implications for our understanding of disability as a category. Based on oral history interviews and extensive archival research, the book reconstructs and contextualizes the moment’s history and culture.
Undoing Paul: Imagining Apostolic Insecurity in the Neoliberal Age
Jay Twomey, Department of English & Comparative Literature
This project seeks to understand the Apostle Paul’s relevance to American cultural politics and U.S. neoliberal hegemony over most of the last century. Although there are many books about Jesus’ significance in the U.S., there are none that treat Paul in similar terms – this despite the (only apparently paradoxical) cliché that Paul was the founder of Christianity. The idea emerged from a study of a Nixon-era historical novel, Taylor Caldwell’s bestselling Great Lion of God (1970), which imagines a Paul whose values, perspectives, and policy positions reflect those of both the emerging New Right and the nascent neoliberal economic order. Her novel gives voice to what historian Rick Perlstein calls the “paranoia and dread,” the “subterranean viciousness” of Nixon’s Silent Majority – its sexism and racism and its misrecognition of capitalism as national identity. But to a surprising extent it also allegorizes the social and economic insecurity that neoliberal policies would soon generate. This dynamic tension between an imaginative construct and its undoing makes Paul an apt figure for the paradoxes at the heart of American culture during the neoliberal era and will be central to the present study. What’s true of Caldwell’s Paul is true also of Pauline appropriations on the left or in the center, and accordingly works of James Baldwin, Flannery O’Connor, Gore Vidal, Toni Morrison, and a handful of others (including a graphic novelist, a Black evangelical hip hop artist, student filmmakers, and some international writers commenting on the American scene, most notably Pier Paolo Pasolini) are discussed. Ultimately, in addition to tracing Paul’s shifting cultural politics, this book seeks to make the case for more tentative and complicated readings of the New Testament works by and about Paul than one tends to find in religious contexts.
Previous Center Fellows
Previous Center Fellows
2021 - 2022
- Robert Haug, Department of History
The Red-Faced Demon of Khurasan: Conquest and Rebellion on an Early Islamic Frontier
- John Lynch, School of Communication, Film, Media, Studies
Remembering Non-Humans in American Space Exploration: Memory at the Intersection of Patriotism, Science, and the Environment
- Rebecca Sanders, School of Public & International Affairs
Resistance and Rollback: The Politics of Women’s Rights Contestation at the United Nations
- Katherine Sorrels, Department of History
On the Spectrum: Jewish Refugees from Nazi Austria and the Politics of Disability in Britain and America
- Jay Twomey, Department of English & Comparative Literature
Undoing Paul: Imagining Apostolic Insecurity in the Neoliberal Age
2020 - 2021
- Lora Arduser, Department of English
Mortuary Science and the Language and Practices of Care
- Peter Langland-Hassan, Department of Philosophy
Speaking, Sensing, and Abstracting Away
- Mikiko Hirayama, Department of German Studies
A New Realism: Modern Japanese Art Criticism of the Interwar Years
- Cassandra L. Jones, Department of Africana Studies
Memory and Liberation in Black Women’s Speculative Fiction
- Kenneth Tankersley, Department of Anthropology
Cherokee of the Cumberland
2019 - 2020
- Derrick Brooms, Sociology
Creating Their Own Stories: Black Males’ Educational Narratives from High School through College
- Isaac Campos, History
Narco-dynamics and the Evolution of Mexico’s War on Drugs, 1912-1940
- Leila Rodriguez, Anthropology
Making It: Constructing the Lives of Unaccompanied Children in an American City
- Stephanie Sadre-Orafai, Anthropology
Real People, Real Models: Casting Race and Fashion in 21st Century America
- Olga Sanmiguel-Valderrama, Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
Latinx in Agribusinesses
- Willard Sunderland, History
Leviathan: Russia and the World in the Age of Peter the Great
2018 - 2019
- Susan Allen, Anthropology
Out of the Mire of the Past: Reviving Cultural Narratives from a Vanished Wetland Landscape in South Albania
- Kristen Iversen, English & Comparative Literature
Wink's Lodge: The West’s Hidden African American Jazz Club and Literary Salon
- James Roane, Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
Dark Agoras: Insurgent Black Social Life and the Politics of Place in Philadelphia
- Sunnie Rucker-Chang, German Studies
The Uses of ‘Blackness’ in Yugoslavia: Dimensions and Legacies of an Idea
- Philip Tsang, English & Comparative Literature
The Obsolete Empire: Untimely Belonging in Twentieth-Century British Literature
2017 - 2018
- Littisha A. Bates, Sociology
Navigating School Inequality: How Parents Pursue Magnet School Admission
- Anthony Chemero, Philosophy
Being With
- Stanley Corkin, English & Comparative Literature and History
Making The New, New Boston, 1970-2017: Cities, Meanings, and Mass Culture in the Neoliberal Age
- Carolette Norwood, Women’s, Gender, & Sexuality Studies
Jim Crow Cincinnati: Gender, Race, and Violence in Urban Space
- Michal Raucher, Judaic Studies
Birthing Jewish Ethics: Reproduction and Ethics among Haredi Women in Jerusalem
- Guy-Lucien Whembolua, Africana Studies
The Impact of Malaria Control on Maternal and Child Mortality in the Democratic Republic of the Congo
2016 - 2017
- Aryay Finkelstein, Judaic Studies
Emperor Julian and the Jews: The Place of Jews in the Making of a Pagan Empire
- Gergana Ivanova, German Studies
Unbinding The Pillow Book: Gender, Adaptation, and the Afterlife of a Japanese Classic
- Heidi Maibom, Philosophy
Coming to Grips with Perspective Taking
- Furaha Norton, English & Comparative Literature
The Uses of Realism in the Postmodern Literary World: Reading Toni Morrison After George Eliot
- Shailaja Paik, History
The Politics of Performance: Caste, Sexuality, and Discrimination in Popular Culture in India
- Earl Wright, II, Africana Studies
Jim Crow Sociology
2015 - 2016
- Ashley Currier, Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
The Politicization of Homosexuality in Malawi
- Andrés Pérez-Simón, Romance Languages & Literatures
Baroque Lorca: Revisiting Lorca’s “Impossible Theater”
- Jeffrey M. Timberlake, Sociology
The American Urban Population from World War II to the Present
- Valerie Weinstein, German Studies
Anti-Semitism and Film Comedy in Nazi Germany
- Rina Williams, Political Science
Excluded, Mobilized, Incorporated: Women and Religious Nationalist Politics in India, 1915 - 2015
2014 - 2015
- Zvi Biener, Philosophy
Organizing the Disciplines: Applied Mathematics, the Geometrical Manner, and the Unification of Knowledge in Early-Modernity
- Jana Braziel, Africana Studies
All Too Human? Haiti, Humanities, Human Rights since Aristide
- Peter Langland-Hassan, Philosophy
Inner Speech: From Perception to Reflection
- Brianna Leavitt-Alcántara, History
Alone at the Altar: Gender, Devotion, and Marriage in a Guatemalan City, 1670-1870
- Rebecca Sanders, Political science
Permissive Constraint: The Paradox of Law in the “Global War on Terror”
2013 - 2014
- Erynn Masi de Casanova, Sociology
Dress Blues: Men's Work Clothing in Corporate America
- Erika Gasser, History
Vexed with Devils: Manhood, Demonic Possession, and Witchcraft in Old and New England
- Angela Potochnik, Philosophy
Doing Science in a Complex World
- Armando Romero, Romance Languages & Literatures
Discrediting Order: An Insider's view of Latin American literary movements of the '60's and '70's.
- Katherine Sorrels, History
The Evolution of Europe: social Darwinism and the ideal of integration in fin de siècle Austria
2012 - 2013
- Vanessa Carbonell, Philosophy
Knowledge and Moral Obligation
- Sarah Jackson, Anthropology
Reconstructing a Cultural Model of Materiality: Investigations of Classic Maya Objects and Identities
- Ethan Katz, History
Burdens of Brotherhood: Jews and Muslims, from North Africa to France
- Adrian Parr, Women's Gender and Sexuality Studies
Common Spaces
- Wendy Kline, History
Birth in Transition: Modern Midwifery and the Controversy over Home Birth
2011 - 2012
- Donald French, Mathematical Sciences
Mathematical and Computational Study of Problems Arising in the Social, Biological, and Physical Sciences
- Todd Herzog, German Studies
The Banality of Surveillance
- Amy Lind, Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
Governing Sexuality: Development, Family Norms and the Struggle for Sexual Rights in Ecuador
- Jenefer Robinson, Philosophy
What Are Emotions?
- David Stradling, History
Cleveland's Burning River: The Cuyahoga and the Environmental Crisis
- Jay Twomey, English and Comparative Literature
2 Corinthians
2010 - 2011
- Isaac Campos-Costero, History
Drugs, Justice, and Subaltern Mexico City, 1934–1940
- Jennifer Malat, Sociology
Social Factors Affecting Health Care Experiences
- John Martin, Philosophy
Cartesian Semantics
- Thérèse Migraine-George, Romance Languages and Literatures
(Post)Francophone Writers and the Creation of a New World Literature in French
- Gary Weissman, English and Comparative Literature
The Author in the Well: On Misreading and Rewriting Literature
2009 - 2010
- Jintai Ding, Mathematical Sciences
Post-quantum Cryptography and Long Term Security
- Richard Harknett, Political Science
Nuclear Prominence: Security and the Contestability of Costs
- Tamar Heller, English & Comparative Literature
A Plot of Her Own: Rhoda Broughton and English Fiction
- Laura Jenkins, Political Science
The Politics of Religious Conversion in India
- Christopher Phillips, History
The Rivers Run Backward: The Civil War on the Middle Border and the Creation of American Regionalism
- Leah Stewart, English & Comparative Literature
Lucy's War
2008 - 2009
- John Drury, English & Comparative Literature
The Bad Soldier
- Wayne Durrill, English & Comparative Literature
Nat Turner and the Great Slave Conspiracy
- Chris Gauker, Philosophy
Words and Pictures: An Essay on the Perceptual Control of Word Choice
- Larry Jost, Philosophy
The Argument of the Eudemian Ethics: An Individualist Approach
- Michele Vialet, Romance Languages & Literatures
Daughters of the French Colonial Empire: Recasting Cultural Inheritance
- Annulla Linders, Sociology
Rowdy Crowds and Reluctant Witnesses: Cultural Change, Audience Manipulation, and the Transformation of the American Death Penalty
2007 - 2008
- Stanley Corkin, English & Comparative Literature and History
Starring New York as Itself: Film, Globalization and Cultural Narratives of Decline and Rebirth 1969-1981
- Michael Griffith, English & Comparative Literature
Trophy: A Novel
- John McEvoy, Philosophy
The Historiography of the Chemical Revolution: Patterns of Interpretation in the History of Science
- Maura O'Connor, History
The London Stock Exchange and Geographies of Risk and Investment in the Nineteenth Century
- Thomas Polger, Philosophy
Realization and Explanation
- Hilda Smith, History
Not the Less True: Women Intellectuals and Constraints of Intellectual History
2006 - 2007
- Russel Durst, English & Comparative Literature
Founding Figures in Composition Studies
- Sigrun Haude, History
Survival During the 30 Years War (1618-1648)
- Thomas Moore, Political Science
China, East Asia, and Regional Order in an Era of Globalization
- Debashis Pal, Economics
Why are the Optimal Contracts Not Used: Understanding the Divergence between Optimal and Conventional Contracts
- Vernon Scarborough, Anthropology
How to Interpret an Ancient Landscape
- Richard Schade, German Studies
Gunter Grass’s Graphic Art and Literary Texts
2005 - 2006
- Edward Dickinson, History
Sex, Freedom, and Power: Sexual Morality and Public Decency in Germany 1885-1935
- Katharina Gerstenberger, German Studies
Constructing Sites: Writing the New Berlin
- Wendy Kline, History
Taking Their Bodies Back: Consciousness-Raising and the Struggle to Define Women’s Health in Modern America
- Robert Skipper, Philosophy
Assessing Scientific Theories: From a Biological Point of View
- Rhys Williams, Sociology
The Construction of the Public Good in American Political Culture
- Julian Wuerth, Philosophy
Kant’s Account of the Self, Pre-Critique