The Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities at the U. of I. has awarded its annual faculty and graduate student fellowships for the 2018-19 academic year to seven faculty members and seven graduate students. IPRH also announced the Ragdale Residential Creative Fellow for 2018.
Faculty fellows are released from one semester of teaching, with the approval of their departments and colleges, and receive a research allocation. Graduate student fellows receive a stipend and a tuition and partial fee waiver from IPRH. All fellows are expected to remain in residence on the Illinois campus during the award year, and to participate in the program’s yearlong interdisciplinary Fellows Seminar. The theme this year is Race Work.
“We are pleased to welcome another outstanding cohort of faculty and graduate students to the IPRH community for the 2018-19 academic year,” said Antoinette Burton, the director of IPRH. “The excellence and innovation of the scholarship produced by our fellows is widely known, as is the reputation for transformative scholarship in the humanities at Illinois. I look forward to joining the work of next year’s IPRH fellows as they investigate what ‘Race Work’ means across a range of scholarly subjects at a moment when critical thinking and doing on this subject is imperative at many scales.”
The faculty fellows and the research projects they will undertake are: Andrea Stevens (English), “Racial Masquerade and the Caroline Court, 1625-49”; Verena Hoefig (Germanic languages and literatures), “Vikings, Vinland and White Nationalism”; Maryam Kashani (gender and women’s studies/Asian American studies), “Kinship by Faith: Race, Displacement, and Islam in the Bay Area”; Natalie Lira (Latina/Latino studies), “‘Low Grade Mexican Mentality: Race, Disability and Sterilization in California Institutions for the Feebleminded, 1920s-1950s”; Rini Bhattacharya Mehta (comparative and world literature/religion), “Mens Hierarchicus: Race’s Intellectual Labor and the Global Right”; Krystal Smalls (anthropology/linguistics), “The Pot and the Kettle: Young Liberians and the Semiotics of Anti/Blackness in the Making of Contemporary Black Diaspora”; and John Murphy (communication), “Protean Texts of Civil Rights: Baldwin, Hamer and King.”
The graduate student fellows and their projects are: Rea Zaimi (geography and geographic information science), “Afterlives of Disinvestment: Vacancy and the Devalued Labor of Revitalization in Chicago”; Marcelo Boccato Kuyumjian (music), “Performing Samba: Aesthetics, Transnational Modernisms and Race”; Heather Freund (history), “Loyal Subjects or Internal Enemies?: Reconsidering ‘Newly Adopted Subjects’ in the British Caribbean, 1763-97”; John Marquez (history), “Freedom’s Edge: Slavery, Manumission and Empire in Rio de Janeiro, 1761-1808”; Juan Suarez Ontaneda (Spanish and Portuguese), “Mobilizing the Stage(s): Race, Gender and Performance in Brazil, Colombia and Peru (1940-2000)”; Erica Melko (English), “Literatures of Decolonial Love: Intimacy and the Colonial Entanglements of Race and Indigeneity”; and Megan White (history), “Rice Empires: Japanese Rice, the USDA and the Inter-Imperial Development of the Gulf Coast Rice Industry, 1880-1924.”
IPRH renewed its annual IPRH-Radgale Residential Creative Fellowships program, thanks to a gift from an anonymous donor. The IPRH-Ragdale Residential Creative Fellow for summer 2018 is Carlos R. Carrillo (music). Carrillo will spend his Ragdale residency working on a music composition titled “Baquine.” The piece will be a cantata for voices, two saxophones obbligato and orchestra. The vocal parts will include a solo female voice and a children’s choir, and will have an approximate duration of 30-35 minutes. The baquine is an ancient tradition practiced in Puerto Rico and other parts of the Americas in which the death of a child is not received with a mournful ceremony but rather with a celebration, as the child, according to their belief, has now become an angel. The tradition fell into disuse due to medical advances that lowered the child mortality rate.
The Ragdale Residential Creative Fellow will join 12 other artists-in-residence for three weeks this summer at Ragdale, one of the largest interdisciplinary artists’ communities in the country, located in Lake Forest, Illinois.
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