CHAMPAIGN, Ill. – The Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has announced its Fellowship Awards for 2004-2005.
Five U. of I. faculty members and six U. of I. graduate students have won awards to spend the next school year engaged in research projects that consider the year’s theme: “Difference.”
Fellows also will participate in the yearlong Fellows’ Seminar, and will present their research at the IPRH annual conference in late spring of 2005.
Two postdoctoral scholars have been named recipients of the Illinois Humanities Post-Doctoral Fellowships and will spend the year in residence at the Urbana-Champaign campus, also engaged in research projects related to the theme; they also will teach one course apiece in an appropriate academic department.
The IPRH Faculty Fellows, their departments and their projects:
• Shefali Chandra, history and women’s studies, “Gender and Ambivalence in the English Ecumene”;
• Frances Gateward, cinema studies and comparative and world literatures, “A Different Image: African American Women Film Makers”;
• Dianne Harris, landscape architecture, “Constructing Identity: Race, Class, and the Ordinary Postwar House, 1945-60”;
• Nichole T. Rustin, Institute of Communications Research and Afro-American Studies, “Beyond Category: Jazz, Masculine Difference, Race, and the Emotions in 1950s America”;
• Christian Sandvig, speech communication, “Within and Without Wireless Internet: Visual Narratives of an Activist Subculture.”
IPRH Graduate Student Fellows, their departments and projects:
• Brett Boutwell, musicology, “Receptive Dissonance: Arbitrating Artistic Meaning in the New York Schools of Music and Painting”;
• Jeremy Engels, speech communication, ” ‘we can never count with certainty on its tranquil submission’: Or, How Violence Produced and Destroyed Difference in Early America”;
• Marina Levina, Institute of Communications Research, “Re-imagining the Genetic Body: The Human Genome Project and the Narratives of Difference in Popular and Scientific Discourses”;
• Daniel Tracy, English, “The Circulation of Culture and the Culture of Circulation: Disseminating and Differentiating Modernist Identities”;
• Li-Lin Tseng, art history, “The Difference Between the Development of the Silent Films of D.W. Griffith and Zheng Zhengqui in the 1920s”;
• Kerry Wynn, history, “The Embodiment of Citizenship: Sovereignty and Colonialism in the Cherokee Nation, 1880-1920.”
The Illinois Humanities Post-Doctoral Fellows and their projects:
• Becky Conekin, “Taste Matters: A History of the Notion of Taste in 19th and 20th Century Britain and the United States”;
• R. Jonathan Moore, “The Devil Went Down to Hoopeston: Pagans, Cornjerkers, and American Identity.”
According to Matti Bunzl, IPRH director, the new theme will allow the Fellows to “consider the many ways in which difference is constitutive of the human experience.”
“On the most basic level, it operates through sets of oppositions that make cognition possible,” said Bunzl, a member of the anthropology department at Illinois.
“In social life, ‘difference’ structures all meaningful distinctions from kinship relations to systems of justice and inequality,” Bunzl said. “In the realms of culture, it creates meaning, whether through language or the arts.
“Difference engenders binaries like past/present, normal/abnormal, nature/culture, primitive/civilized, center/periphery, high/low, harmony/dissonance, and virtual/real. In the global arena of transnational capital, post-national politics and ever-increasing population flows, such distinctions as good vs. evil, secularism vs. religion and hegemony vs. empire now appear even more important.”
Faculty Fellows are released from one semester of teaching. They also are asked to teach one course during the award year or the year immediately following on a topic related to their fellowship.
Graduate Student Fellows receive a stipend and a tuition and fee waiver from the IPRH.
All IPRH Fellows, including the Post-Doctoral Fellows, are expected to remain in residence on the U. of I. campus during the award year, and to take part in the program’s annual conference and related activities, including a yearlong interdisciplinary Fellows’ Seminar.
Applications for the IPRH Fellowships are typically distributed in the early fall for the following academic year, and U. of I. faculty and graduate students are invited to apply for the awards, which each year follow a different thematic topic. The theme for 2005-2006 will be “Belief.”
More information about the IPRH Fellowship Programs can be found online, or by contacting Bunzl or associate director Christine Catanzarite at 217-244-7913.
