CENTRE FOR RESEARCH IN THE ARTS, SOCIAL SCIENCES AND HUMANITIES
Who’s here 2012-13 www.crassh.cam.ac.uk
Simon Goldhill Director
Professor in Greek Literature and Culture Fellow of King’s College The academic year 2012-13 brings more people to CRASSH than ever before: we’re delighted to welcome 22 mid- to long-term postdocs in addition to our early career and teaching fellows, visiting fellows and professors, and conference and research group conveners. You can find out all about the research they’ll be doing here within these pages. Our conveners and fellows run over 300 events a year: you can find out more details in our sister publication What’s on as well as on CRASSH’s website. Last year, we raised funds for two multi-person fiveyear projects. The first, supported by the European Research Council, is on The Bible and Antiquity in Nineteenth-Century Culture. We have a team of five directors — myself, Janet Soskice (Divinity), Scott Mandelbrote (History), Michael Ledger‐Lomas (History) and Jeremy Morris (King’s College), and six new fellows, who will collaborate in exploring not just the nineteenth-century obsession with religion and classics but also the pressing question of what pasts matter in the formation of British public and intellectual life. The second project starting from January and funded by the Leverhulme Trust on Conspiracy & Democracy also has six fellows for five years (to be appointed Michaelmas 2012), with three directors (Sir Richard Evans (History), David Runciman (Politics) and John Naughton (CRASSH)). This team will be looking at issues as broad as anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, the role of the internet in contemporary plotting, and the history of political assassination. So, we hope that 2012-13 will see a truly energetic and cross-disciplinary community at CRASSH. And that you’ll find someone you’d like to come and talk to in our new cohort!
Mellon Centre for Disciplinary Innovation Mellon CDI Invited Fellows Bruno Latour (Michaelmas 2012) Judith Butler (Lent 2013) Cornel West (Easter 2013)
Mellon Teaching Fellowship (Lent 2013) Sarah Franklin (Sociology) Martin Johnson (Physiology) Reproduction Revisited: an interdisciplinary seminar ‘Reproduction’ does not appear in Raymond Williams’ famous ‘vocabulary of culture and society’ entitled Keywords (1976). But if it did appear in an updated appendix to that influential volume, it would be as indexical of the concerns of contemporary society and social theory as the entries on Family, Genius, Industry, Naturalism or Sex. Indeed it would combine elements of these, as well as Consumer, Development, Humanity, Individual and Technology. ‘Reproduction’ has become the subject of an increasing amount of social, historical and cultural research not only because it has such a wide range of meanings, but because of the varied ways in which ‘reproduction’ is practiced – socially, biologically, digitally, mechanically and economically. This seminar takes advantage of the unique constellation of ‘reproductive studies’ at Cambridge to re-investigate this term and its meanings in a variety of contexts. Using case studies from history, agriculture, social theory, art, medicine and the contemporary biosciences, the effort is to re-think ‘reproductivity’ in a comparative fashion. What links exist between changing models of reproduction in the life sciences, for example, and in the emerging bioeconomy? What do people mean when they describe reproduction – or reproductive events – in a laboratory, on the internet, in an acting class, or in a venture capital brochure? What relation do these changing ‘modes of reproduction’ bear to meanings of reproductive politics, reproductive rights, or reproductive labour? To keep us on track, we will be closely focusssed on key texts introduced both by the convenors and visiting speakers. These will include books on reproduction by Adele Clarke, Pierre Bourdieu and Jean Claude Passeron, Nancy Chodorow, Jack Cohen, HG Wells and Julian Huxley, Walter Benjamin, Evelyn Fox Keller, Marilyn Strathern and Donna Haraway, among others.
Christos Lynteris Mellon/Newton Postdoc 2011-13 Transregional flows: the social ecology of pneumonic plague in Inner Asia My research focuses on the neglected socioecological aspects of pneumonic plague in Manchuria, Mongolia and the South Siberian steppes of Transbaikalia, where humans share their environment with the natural reservoir of plague: Siberian marmots, also known as tarbagan. Through ethnographic and archival research I seek to establish how Buryat and Mongolian hunters have related to marmots in the traditional foci of plague, whilst also conducting a genealogical investigation in the well-entrenched epidemiological belief in the native knowledge of the disease and ways of hunting its vectors without contracting it. From an anthropological perspective, my aim is to unravel the centrality of cosmological and demonological aspects of human-marmot relations across the region, as well as, their misrecognition by epidemiologists eager to attribute knowledge of plague on native societies. While also exploring the biopolitical context of this operation of misrecognition, the central aim of my research is to demonstrate how scientific interpretations of native engagement with marmots constitutes an act of epistemological enclosure that renders human life outside set boundaries of what cannot not be known unthinkable and unintelligible.
Simon Mills Mellon/Newton Postdoc 2011-13 The English Levant Company: Exploration and Scholarship in 17th- and 18thCentury England My research project investigates the ways in which the English Levant Company acted as a medium for cultural and intellectual exchange between early modern Europe and the Ottoman Empire. With a particular focus on the chaplains who served the English factory at Aleppo, Syria, between 1620 and 1760, the project traces the ways by which knowledge of the cultures, languages, religions, geography, antiquities, and natural history of the Eastern Mediterranean was accumulated and disseminated among scholarly communities in England and beyond. The research is focused on the intersection between overseas trade and new forms of intellectual enquiry: oriental studies, Near-Eastern antiquarianism, various kinds of natural history, and the several attempts to translate works of European Protestantism into Arabic. Drawing primarily on letters, manuscript and printed travel accounts, and on the oriental collections brought back to Europe at this time, I hope to bring to light the ways in which manuscripts, antiquities, and other materials upon which these scholarly pursuits depended were transmitted from the Levant to the libraries, museums, herbaria, and learned societies of Oxford, Cambridge, and London.
Jonathan Mair Mellon/Newton Postdoc 2012-14 Speaking ethically across borders: Moral reasoning and practice in transnational Chinese Buddhism My research aims to contribute to our understanding of cross-cultural moral conversations. To do this, I will be conducting an ethnographic study of UK followers of Fo Guang Shan (FGS), a Buddhist movement that defines itself by the attempt to live ethically in a way that acknowledges but transcends cultural and political boundaries. If we are to pursue recent scholarly interest in the deliberative aspects of ethics, we will need to proceed by looking at moral reasoning not at the consensual centres of moral traditions, but at the border-crossing margins, where nothing can be taken for granted and where appeals to tradition or authority have little traction. FGS is an international Buddhist movement headquartered in Taiwan with millions of members on six continents, and with far-reaching ethical, political and social goals, FGS has growing global influence. FGS is proudly Chinese, and draws most of its members from the Chinese diaspora, but it stresses the importance of adapting tradition freely in order to make Buddhism ‘convenient’ for those with different personal and cultural habits and preferences. So cultivating the ability to reflect on the relation of culture to ethical practice, and to hold ethical conversations across cultural boundaries, is itself an important aspect of FGS ethical life. This grounded cosmopolitanism makes FGS a fascinating case study for the anthropology of ethics and the emerging interdisciplinary conversation between moral philosophers and ethnographers.
Erik Niblaeus Mellon/Newton Postdoc 2012-14 Local Priests on the Edge of Empire: The Rural Church and Parish Formation in the Eastern and Northern Marches of Germany, c. 1000–1200 The parish priest in his parish church, with its baptismal font, its bell-tower, and its churchyard, is a familiar figure across central and western Europe; and in pre-industrial Europe, one of particular importance. From the central middle ages onward, the parish was the principal locus of interaction between the clergy and the vast majority of the laity. Its origins are unclear: the connection between the parochia of Carolingian Francia and the latermedieval parish is disputed. Scholars tend to agree that most of the Latin West was divided into parishes over the course of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, but ‘parish formation’ as a broader process nonetheless remains something of a mystery, and the older literature on the subject is sometimes riddled with teleologies and anachronistic assumptions. At CRASSH, I will investigate the interplay between this development and the cultural dynamics at the outskirts of the European centre. A wide variety of sources will be consulted: material (church buildings), documentary, narrative, and liturgical. The service books of the local church will be of particular interest, as evidence of the dayto-day activities of the local priest. The geographical concentration will be on a large and diverse borderland area: the ‘frontier’ of the European centre to the east and north of the Kingdom of the Germans, the marches which marked the borders with Hungary, Poland, Bohemia, Denmark, and the Slavic-speaking peoples to the south of the Baltic.
Jenna Ng Newton Trust/ Leverhulme Fellow 2011-13 Camera Present and Absent: space, bodies and movement in digital media I first trained as a finance lawyer in Singapore and London before switching to film studies, in which I was awarded a PhD from University College London (UCL) in 2009. I am currently a Newton Trust/ Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at CRASSH, where I am working on a book project on presence and embodiment in camera-based digital media. I was previously a postdoctoral research fellow at HUMlab, a digital humanities laboratory in Umeå University, Sweden. I am primarily interested in the cultural, technological and critical dimensions of images in digital media, with particular interests in mobile media, haptic devices, motion and virtual capture systems, but have also written on cinephilia, cinema and time and East Asian cinema. I have published and forthcoming work in numerous essay collections and journals, including Animation, Screening the Past and Cinema Journal, and my edited collection, Understanding Machinima: essays on filmmaking in virtual worlds, will be published by Continuum Press in early 2013. I am also generally interested in digital media literacies and am a member of the Cambridge Digital Humanities steering committee, and organise the Digital Humanities Early Career Researchers’ sub-network. Other projects at CRASSH include co-organiser of the Screen Media seminar series; a workshop on real-time physical and virtual collaboration for and funded by the Social Media Knowledge Exchange (SMKE) scholarship scheme; and a conference, ‘Connecting the Dots: movement, space and the digital image’, at CRASSH in Lent 2013. My website can be found at http://knittedgardens.net.
Helen Webster Research Associate 2012-13 Digital Humanities and Transferable Skills Training Scoping Employability for Early Career Researchers I’m a researcher and practitioner in learning development and transferable skills in Higher Education, and am working on two projects at CRASSH to support Early Career Researchers in the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences at Cambridge. The Digital Transferable Skills project is part of the Digital Humanities Network, and aims to encourage PhD students and Postdocs to develop their digital literacy and consider how the digital skills they develop as part of their research can enhance other social, academic or professional contexts. I’ve developed a range of training resources, including an online, peer-led training programme (DH23Things) and workshops on developing, managing and getting the most from your online presence, and planning a digital project. The Employability project contributes to the development of a strategic approach to employability for PhD and Postdoc researchers in the Schools of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences. I’m scoping the career aspirations and development needs of early career researchers in AHSS, and assessing the need for employability initiatives tailored specifically for this group. I will then be making recommendations for future activities to the Schools. As part of this project, I’ll also be running a day’s training event to help early career researchers kickstart their thinking about employability. My own background was in Medieval Studies, with a Phd on German vernacular mystical literature for laywomen in the fourteenth century. I also have a PGCE in Higher Education, and an extensive background in learning development.
Anne Alexander Co-ordinator, Cambridge Digital Humanities Network My current research focuses on the role played by new social media in the uprisings in the Middle East, with a particular focus on the Egyptian workers’ movement. My work explores the relationship between online and offline mobilisation, the role of new media in shifting thresholds of collective action and the impact of ‘digital activism’ on leadership in social movements. At CRASSH, I am the co-ordinator of the Cambridge Digital Humanities Network. The past year was an exciting year for the Network: we were awarded funding from the University as a Strategic Network and from the AHRC for Social Media Knowledge Exchange. The project is led by the University of Cambridge Digital Humanities Network and CRASSH, in partnership with the Centre of Governance and Human Rights (CGHR). Partner institutions are the UCL Digital Humanities Centre, the Institute of Historical Research, School of Advanced Studies, University of London, the Humanities Advanced Technology Information Institute at the University of Glasgow, and the Department of Digital Humanities, King’s College London. It’s a collaborative project that aims to give postgraduate students and early career researchers in the Arts and Humanities opportunities for knowledge exchange with social media practitioners in academia, museums, archives and libraries, and the voluntary sector. Email: digitalhumanities@crassh.cam.ac.uk www.digitalhumanities.cam.ac.uk www.smke.org
Ildiko Csengei Co-ordinator, Postdoctoral Researcher Forum My main field of research is eighteenth-century and Romantic British literature and culture. My monograph, Sympathy, Sensibility and the Literature of Feeling in the Eighteenth Century, asks what makes it possible for self-interest, cruelty and violence to become part of sensibility – a cultural trend of compassion, benevolence and humanitarianism in the eighteenth-century. It explores forms of emotional response, including sympathy, tears, swooning and melancholia through a range of literary, philosophical and scientific texts. Currently I am working on a new monograph, which deals with the emotional experience of the Revolutionary and Napolenonic wars as represented in Romantic literature and in personal accounts by soldiers, doctors and civilians from 1793-1850. As the co-ordinator of the Postdoctoral Researcher Forum at CRASSH I run the Postdoctoral Research Seminar, which runs fortnightly on Wednesdays. I also develop research and career-related events and conferences organised jointly with the University Careers Service. Email: postdocforum@crassh.cam.ac.uk On leave 2012-13
Gareth Atkins Bible and Antiquity in C19th Culture Postdoc A New Israel? Britain & the Old Testament in the Nineteenth Century Disraeli once quipped that he was ‘the blank page between the Old Testament and the New’. The comment was not entirely serious, but it underlines a new sense in nineteenth-century Britain of the problems inherent in reconciling the two halves of the Bible. The British had long imagined themselves as a ‘New Israel’, but exposure to the Bible lands via tourism, travelogues and new forms of scholarship raised new questions about what this meant. Yet despite a growing awareness that ancient Palestine could not be transposed straightforwardly to modern Britain, Israelite theocracy exerted a strong pull nevertheless, not least in debates over religion and the state. Whereas the New Testament dealt chiefly with individual ‘heart religion’, the Old Testament offered concrete prescriptions that made it both more alluring and more problematic for those seeking to build a godly society. My project will lay bare for the first time the breadth and depth of British cultural engagement with the Old Testament. We know a great deal about how nineteenth-century Protestants engaged with the Gospels and apocalyptic books, but almost nothing about their perspectives on Hebrew history and laws. This matters because debates about tithes, anti-slavery, women’s suffrage and sabbatarianism all forced people to confront with texts that were at once familiar and outlandish. By looking at how the Old Testament was mediated, both textually and visually; how it was performed, both in churches and concert halls; how episodes and individuals were used to articulate ideas about individual character and gender; and how British and Israelite history were compared and contrasted, I aim to explore what it meant to be a ‘New Israel’.
Shinjini Das Bible and Antiquity in C19th Culture Postdoc ‘Holy Scripture for the Heathens’: Translating the Bible in British Bengal, 1801-1898 To what extent was the unprecedented global circulation of the Bible in the nineteenth century implicated in histories of imperialism? How was the Holy Scripture imposed, appropriated, contested and reworked in the distant colonial outposts of the empire? What was the location of the Bible in histories of colonial modernity? My research aims to answer these questions by exploring the history of Bible translation in colonial Bengal primarily through a study of the myriad Bible societies. It seeks to understand ‘translation’ as an intensely political exercise fraught with issues of authority, authenticity, power and nationalism. While unraveling the material, institutional and linguistic aspects of Bible translation, I am deeply interested in assessing the role of indigenous collaboration and the exigencies of the vernacular print markets. This extends the standard missionary-centric focus of the existing historiography in understanding colonial Christianity. The trope of translation enables me to pursue the relation between Bible and antiquity along two related strands: First, my work collates the frequent references to a Classical European past in framing imperial ideology, as well as draws upon the literature delineating the symbiotic relation between the Christian missions and British Empire. ‘Imperial Bible’ thus becomes an obvious site to understand the convergence of the twin concepts of Christianity and antiquity. Second, by studying the countless editions of translated Bibles and the fervent discussions they stoked in Bengali society, I examine how notions of a Christian antiquity engendered ideas constituting a Hindu Sanskritic tradition with ancient Vedic roots.
Theodor Dunkelgrün Bible and Antiquity in C19th Culture Postdoc Reconciled Angels: Hebrew Biblical Scholarship in the long 19th century My research focuses on Hebrew biblical scholarship from the Enlightenment to the discovery of the Cairo Geniza, the long century that stretches from the collations of Kennicott to the first edition of Kittel, a neglected but pivotal period in the history of the study of the Hebrew Bible. Focusing on Germany and Britain, and on such scholars as Kennicott, Delitzsch, Wellhausen, Strack, Ginsburg, Blau and Kahle, I will explore the ways in which in the course of the 19th century historical and textual critics of the Hebrew Bible both built on and departed from the early modern scholarly traditions of Humanist philology and antiquarianism that disintegrated into disciplines such as Altertumswissenschaft, classics, archeology, and Morgenländische Wissenschaft. I am particularly interested in the confrontation and cross-fertilization of the study Greco-Roman and biblical antiquity and of Christian and Jewish traditions of textual criticism, as well as in the problem of historicism, the history of libraries, the development of technical, auxiliary disciplines such as paleography and diplomatic, and such wider intellectual contexts as the emergence of the Wissenschaft des Judentums, the impact on academic Hebrew scholarship of the emancipation of European Jewry, and the study by Jewish and Christian scholars of each other’s antiquity.
Alison Knight Bible and Antiquity in C19th Culture Postdoc A History of The People: The Bible and the Nation in the Nineteenth Century I am currently developing a project on the Bible and nationalism in nineteenth-century England. The tendency to focus on the Bible’s contributions to England’s shared language, history, and culture (as distinct from its spiritual role) is familiar to modern society, yet it represents a significant change in emphasis from most of the Bible’s history. The study and valorisation of the English Bible was a product of the nineteenth century; it was in this period that the Bible in English emerged as a scholarly discipline and cultural concern. This project investigates the growing emphasis on the Bible’s ‘Englishness’ as a movement involving multiple confessional lines, and which was held in tension with the nineteenth century’s emerging understanding of what ‘Englishness’ meant. The project examines materials such as scholarly histories of the English Bible, new editions of Renaissance and Medieval translations, museum exhibition catalogues, missionary manuals, and translation reference documents, as well as representations of the Bible’s Englishness in literature and visual art.
Brian Murray Bible and Antiquity in C19th Culture Postdoc The Coming of the Milesians: The Bible, Literature, and Classical Antiquity in Nineteenth-Century Ireland My project investigates the ways in which Irish writers reacted to, and engaged with, the historiography of the Bible and classical antiquity in the long nineteenth century. More specifically, I’m interested in the ways in which authors inserted Ireland into biblical and classical chronologies, and how these efforts reflected archaeological, historical, theological, aesthetic and political debates in Britain and Europe during the period. The tendency to view Irish cultural history as a progressive march towards independence, Home Rule, and republicanism has elided the extent to which the key political issues of the day were often religious or theological in nature. While nationalists and republicans took the best part of a century to win the majority of Irish people over to the idea of Home Rule and self determination, the disestablishment of the Anglican Church and the provision of Catholic schools and universities were topics which continually generated reams of print on both sides of the Irish Sea. The Catholic Irish were always eager to align themselves with the victims of ancient Roman imperialism (Jews, Greeks and even Celtic ‘Britons’). However, such analogies were always problematic. Nineteenth-century Irish Catholics commonly appealed to the power of the Roman papacy as a higher imperial power than Protestant Westminster, and with the reinstatement of the Catholic hierarchy in the United Kingdom in the 1850s, Protestants were quick to vocalise their unease at the increasingly pervasive powers of Catholic Rome.
Kate Nichols Bible and Antiquity in C19th Culture Postdoc Visualising the Bible in global Victorian cultures, c.1865-1900. Hellenic forms and Hebraic content? Visualising the Bible in global Victorian cultures will examine the relationship between the Bible and classical antiquity in late Victorian painting and sculpture in Britain and as it diffused internationally, with a particular focus on collection and display in Australia. The project has two major outcomes: an exhibition and catalogue, and a monograph. There is so little existing research on biblical subject matter in late Victorian visual culture that the catalogue’s critical survey of the painting, sculpture, mosaics, stained glass, and illustrated books of this period will be an essential starting point. The monograph will question what it means to classicise visually, examining the biblical themed work of painters and sculptors better known as ‘classicists’. What competing views and claims about different pasts are explored in these images? Did these images offer viewers religious experience? How did their ‘classical’ form relate to or subvert their religious content? Classical sculpture was central to Academic training of painters, and Royal Academicians such as Leighton and Poynter centred their lectures to art students on the relationship between modern art and classical antiquity. These engagements with the classical past are a rich and complex aspect of Victorian historical consciousness – not just escapism, antiquarianism or an excuse to paint scenes that would otherwise be too scandalous. They meditate on and mediate and produce both the classical and biblical past and Victorian present. The project will position Victorian biblical subject painting and sculpture as nuanced dialogues between past and present, ‘east’ and ‘west’, Christianity and classicisms.
Wilson Jacob (Concordia) CRASSH/ Clare Hall Eurias Fellow 2012-13 with support from the Thriplow Charitable Trust gratefully acknowledged Sovereignty in Times of Empire: Islam, Preachers, and Gangsters This research aims to provide a cultural history and theoretical critique of the present terms of violence that pit a rule of law, normally represented by states, against a rule of terror, normally represented by nonstate actors. The C19th encounter between Islamic societies and colonialism is the launching point for a re-examination of violence and sovereignty from the perspective of local forms and networks of embodied power, which further illuminates an alternative history of the modern international order. Rather than being born out of bloody wars between states in Europe as the standard Westphalian model posits or forged from the clash of empires and civilizations, the modern international form imposed on the world might be regarded as the product of a global reconfiguration of relations of power, which took place between and betwixt nations and states. Hence, contrary to the typical history of the colonial encounter as an inherent conflict and protracted struggle for the state between colonial rulers and nationalist movements, my research reframes that history in terms of the contest between ‘traditional big men’ and the modern abstraction of Man that came with universal claims about law and order made both by representatives of Empire and by representatives of ‘the colonized.’ This approach promises a route for rethinking present formations of violence along more complex and nuanced lines that question the reductive clash-of-civilizations framing of post-Cold War geopolitics while offering an alternative historical-theoretical framework for analyzing the politics of terror. The theoretical investigation that seeks to access, and potentially recast, the terms of political modernity from a new vantage point will be grounded in the histories and ongoing social lives of an unlikely pair of figures: ‘preacher’ and ‘gangster.’
Michael Edwards (History, Jesus College) Early Career Fellow Michaelmas 2012 Clarity, Complexity and Philosophical Genre in early modern Europe Clarity is a strange kind of virtue. As a philosophical trait, it is commonly aligned with characteristics such as precision in argument, demonstrability and even intellectual honesty. To many contemporary Anglophone philosophers, clarity is a goal and a defining characteristic of professional philosophy. An appeal to clarity is therefore both an appeal to a particular vision of the shape and content of philosophical inquiry, and an attempt to define its boundaries. Yet, like most virtues, clarity is also a characteristic with a convoluted and contested intellectual history. My project examines this history at one particularly formative moment - roughly from the 1550s to the 1660s, when academic philosophy in Europe underwent profound and lasting transformations, and when clarity became implicated in these upheavals in a significant way. It explores the extent to which a wide range of early modern thinkers (from RenÊ Descartes to representatives of the Aristotelian and scholastic traditions) constructed complex, and often competing, ideas of clarity from a range of intellectual resources - from materials offered by the rhetorical tradition following Quintilian’s Institutio oratoria, but also from ideas of clarity and transparency in optics, in logic and metaphysics and natural philosophy. Central to this account will be an attempt to understand the role of clarity not as a universal philosophical virtue, but as a particular kind of historically situated intellectual practice that operated within changing early modern understandings of how, and in what form, one did philosophy. Photo courtesy of Nicholas Hare Architects LLP Š Alan Williams photography
Joe Moshenska (English, Trinity College) Early Career Fellow Michaelmas 2012 ‘Foreign Bodies’ in the Life and Work of Sir Kenelm Digby My new project is an exploration of the life and work of Sir Kenelm Digby (1603-65) – pirate, courtier, alchemist, literary critic and editor, philosopher, book collector, political animal, devout Catholic, fighter of duels and perpetual courter of scandal. Digby’s activities and pursuits spanned an astonishing array of the fields comprising seventeenth century culture and intellectual life. By considering his works in their entirety and placing them in detailed context, I seek not only to gain a better sense of this remarkable individual, but also to rethink some of the larger categories and narratives through which the seventeenth century is understood. Digby was a Catholic among Protestants; an Aristotelian among mechanists; a scholastic philosopher who penned an autobiographical romance and edited Ben Jonson’s works; a patriotic Englishman who spent much of his adult life in Paris and voyaged to Algiers and Ottoman Turkey. He was an exception, but one whose very uniqueness sheds light on the religious, political and intellectual struggles of the culture from which he emerged. I will begin by focussing on Digby’s travels and his encounters with foreignness in all its forms. I will start to map the complex networks of correspondence in which he was involved, and which cut across national and confessional divides. His friends and contacts were as varied as Thomas Hobbes, and the Puritan John Winthrop the Younger, Governor of Connecticut. I will also focus on texts from either end of Digby’s life that illustrate his international movements and connections: his autobiographical romance Loose Fantasies, written on an Aegean island in the late 1620s; and his posthumously published cookery book, The Closet of Sir Kenelm Digby Opened, which featured recipes from as far away as China and Russia.
Sophie Read (English, Christ’s College) Early Career Fellow Michaelmas 2012 Perfume and Paradox: The Early Modern Literary Life of Ambergris The work I am going to undertake while at CRASSH will provide the foundation for my next major research project, provisionally entitled ‘Perfume and Paradox: The Rhetoric of Scent, 1550-1750’. This book will explore the place of the sense of smell in general, and of perfumes more particularly, in the literature of that period, drawing on an emerging field of interdisciplinary research into the ‘lower’ literary senses of smell, taste and touch. The first stage of the research is to trace the early modern literary life of a single outlandish substance: ambergris. Ambergris, we now believe, is a pathological growth from the stomach of a sperm whale, possibly caused by illness or irritation; when expelled from the whale and exposed over the course of years to the action of sea and sun, it develops a distinctive odour, like the transfigured ghost of musk, which has led to it being much prized in the arts of medicine, cookery and perfumery. This account of its origin, even now not secure, is relatively recent; when routes of trade and travel were opened up in the early modern period, this valuable but uncategorizable substance was the subject of fascinated speculation, and poets of the time (Herbert, Herrick, Milton) used it as a figure of the mysterious and the exotic. My time at CRASSH will be spent exploring ambergris in the early modern world: the history of its importation, the myths and speculations that surrounded its origin, the beliefs about its medical and aphrodisiac powers, its uses and status, what it smelt like, and, above all, what it signified to the contemporary literary imagination.
Filipa Sa (Economics, Trinity)
Early Career Fellow Michaelmas 2012 The Effect of Tuition Fees on University Attendance: Evidence from the UK Tuition fees were initially introduced in all countries of the UK in September 1998, with students required to pay £1,000 a year in tuition. The establishment of a devolution government in Scotland in 1999 gave it separate legislative powers in many areas, including tuition fees. The new Scottish government removed tuition fees in 2001 and replaced them with an endowment scheme. In England there have also been changes to tuition fees since their first introduction in 1998. In 2004, the government announced that from academic year 2006/07 upfront tuition fees of £1,000 a year would be replaced with variable fees to be paid after graduation. Universities were given discretion over the amount of fees charged, up to a maximum of £3,000 a year. In 2010, the government announced that this cap will be raised to £9,000 a year from academic year 2012/13. This project studies whether the replacement of tuition fees with an endowment scheme in Scotland in 2001 increased university attendance. The differences in tuition fees between England and Scotland provide a useful source of heterogeneity and suggest an experimental design to evaluate the causal effect of tuition fees on university attendance. The conclusions of this study will be useful to infer the effects that the increase in tuition fees about to be introduced in England is likely to have on university attendance.
Stefan Dorondel (Francisc I Rainer Institute of Anthropology, Bucharest) Visiting Fellow Michaelmas 2012
‘Blowing in the Wind’: Mobile Technologies, Global Environmental Agendas and the Struggle for Nature in Romania Global warming caused by the use of fossil fuels is one of threats of our time. Thus, new technologies that transform renewable resources, such as waves, rivers, wind, solar energy, and biomass, into mechanical or electrical energy are hoped to replace the fossil fuels. This research analyzes the implementation of a neoliberal green project promoted by an international corporation and the national government in a commune from Dobroudja (Southeast Romania), and its local economic and environmental side effects. I feature the privatization of communal land and its transformation into a wind park. Villagers have been left without the pastures they used for centuries to graze the animals. Not only has the wind park affected the local economy based on animal husbandry but also has changed villagers’ relationship with their environment. The pastures were the home of numerous wild birds, highly appreciated by the locals. This research reveals the mechanisms of land dispossession for green ends, and of the commodification of nature in the name of global green agendas. The research explores the actors involved in the struggle for land and the new set of relations established across various scales, ranging from local to international, and across multiple domains: economy, environment, property rights, politics, state, and media. While many of the debates in environmental anthropology revolve around land being controlled for agricultural purposes this research seeks to understand how the implementation of a green technology built to mitigate the environmental changes shapes human economy and ecology.
Teresa Shawcross (Amherst College, US) Visiting Fellow Michaelmas 2012
Cosmopolitan Networks in an Age of Revolutions: Ruling the Mediterranean World at the End of Empire, 1274-1348 This project examines the consequences of the end of empire by tracing the collapse in the late Middle Ages of the Byzantine Empire and the Holy Roman Empire as Mediterranean powers, as well as the rise of newer powers such as the Kingdom of France. My focus is on the creation of a new cosmopolitan elite that was responsible for reshaping both the theory and the practice of government. I use the life and travels of a key representative of that elite, Theodore Palaeologus (b.1291/2-d.1338) as a way into the larger questions. He belonged to an important group that was not bound to the vicissitudes of local politics, but pursued careers spanning the eastern and western Mediterranean. He moved between Byzantium and Italy; his networks stretched even further afield. The efficacy of these long-distance connections belonging to a pre-digital age has been almost entirely overlooked. I intend to hone in on the particularities of each political and intellectual milieu in which Palaeologus was active. At the same time, I shall trace the exchanges of political, economic, and personal information that occurred between these milieux, drawing attention to the existence of a series of networks key to understanding the period. I wish to demonstrate the importance of these networks in the circulation of ideas about the origins and nature of legitimate political authority. Above all, I will delineate the attempt by imperial powers to control not merely the raw materials or manufacturing of the Mediterranean, but also late medieval commerce and finance.
Duncan Bell (Politics, Christ’s College) Early Career Fellow Lent 2013
Dreamworlds of Empire: Utopia, Race and the Project for a New Anglo Century While at CRASSH I will be conducting research for a book project, provisionally entitled Dreamworlds of Empire, which will explore British and American attitudes to global power, empire, and race at the end of the nineteenth century and into the first two decades of the twentieth. In particular, I am interested in how American observers viewed the British empire - as template for their own imperial ambitions, as a lesson from history about decline and fall, or as a competitor for global dominance - and how in turn the British viewed the growing power of the American state. Some of the most ambitious political projects of the time envisaged the unification of the two states - and of the British settler colonies in Australia, Canada and New Zealand - into a vast global ‘Anglo-Saxon’ political community. At CRASSH I will be researching how these debates drew on, and innovated within, existing languages of patriotism, race, nation, and state. And I will also be exploring how they invoked historical mythologies to bolster their visions and in doing so expressed a form of utopian desire, a belief in the world-transformative power of racial unity.
Matthew Dyson (Law, Trinity College) Early Career Fellow Lent 2013
Understanding Legal Development: Method in Law, History and Language The project is to develop further methodological tools for studying legal development. For present purposes legal development could be described as how, why and when law changes. The study of legal development seeks to identify cross-jurisdictional drivers of legal change. My research is therefore backward and forward looking within Europe. For instance, an understanding of the factors behind legal change would enrich any discourse on the convergence or divergence of legal systems. Similarly, when harmonisation of a matter is being considered, an understanding of forces which might draw systems closer, or pull apart surface unity, would aid in effective planning. The facilities and environment at CRASSH are perfect for exploring and combining the It methods of history, linguistics and law. The aim is to try to make the methodological tools of each discipline more intelligible to the other. In particular, each discipline has a stronger theoretical grounding for its own techniques and that grounding may shed light on the assumptions and allowances made in other disciplines. This exploration of intelligibility would also affect legal method, helping to make law more accessible to those in other disciplines. While understanding legal development itself is the primary goal, it is advanced no less if non-lawyers were able to add to the knowledge of lawyers more easily. The project is therefore proudly collaborative and interdisciplinary.
Richard Serjeantson (History, Trinity College) Crausaz Wordsworth Fellow 2012-13 (Lent) Descartes Before Dualism: New Evidence
A contemporary manuscript of René Descartes’ ‘Regulae ad directionem ingenii’ has recently come to light among the collections of the Cambridge University Library. Lacking both the name of its author or a title, it has been hitherto completely unknown to scholarship. It offers a new and independent witness to the problematic text of Descartes’s first work of philosophy. More than this, however, the new manuscript provides a copy of what is evidently an early draft of Descartes’s treatise. In this paper I will discuss some of the principal points of textual and philosophical interest that the new manuscript raises; perhaps the most striking of these is the picture it offers us of a Descartes who is not yet a dualist. I shall also discuss other outstanding issues raised by the manuscript, including the questions of when it was copied, who might have copied it, and how, finally, it came to reside in the collections of the CUL.
Dana Arnold (Middlesex) Visiting Fellow Lent 2013 Ambivalent Geographies
My current research aims to renegotiate of the boundaries of architectural history; to critically engage with past and present histories and disclose latent assumptions about ‘east’ and ‘west’ through the biases and absences in the writing of architectural and cultural histories. This work has developed from my recent engagements with architectural history and its historiography across a broad territory including the Middle East and China. Together these combine to produce an archive of systems of regulation and resistance in a transcultural context that help us understand the dynamics of flow across geographical and intellectual regions. Of particular interest here is the study of architecture produced in ‘distant’ and ‘different’ geographies that have been put under the totalizing rubric of the ‘non-west’. The ambivalence I seek to interrogate lies as much in the intellectual as in the historiographical geographies of the discipline, and it is here that the notion of transculturation comes to the fore as a means of repositioning the west within these. My case study is the architecture of the British concession in Tianjin (also known as Tientsin), China. Tianjin recontextualises western architecture, and, specifically in this study, British architecture and planning, as it is transposed, deracinated and juxtaposed in an eastern (non western) environment. Tianjin brings new dimensions to the ambivalent geographies of architecture that offer fresh opportunities for rethinking the borders of architectural history in a globalised, transcultural context.
Lauren Arrington (Liverpool) Visiting Fellow Lent 2013
Art, Empire, and Revolution, 1890-1930: the case of Casimir and Constance Markievicz An historiography focused on the rise of the nation and literary criticism intent on describing and defining a national literature have occluded an understanding of the way in which the Irish Revival of art, literature, and politics at the turn of the twentieth century was informed by transregional movements – the rise of modern art and antiimperialist discourses – that developed through the transfer of narratives across Europe. This project examines the movement of the social elite between European capitals, the exchange of narratives of national identity, and the development of systems of representation (particularly painting and the theatre) that codified regional preoccupations in forms that transcended the national questions and addressed wider debates about the nature of empire and the pathways of revolution. Casimir Markievicz (1874-1932) was a painter and playwright from the Polish-settled western Ukraine, who married Constance Gore Booth (1868-1927) from the Protestant landed-class in the west of Ireland. Their lives exhibit the fluidity of the European social elite; they travelled frequently between Paris, Poland, the Ukraine, London, and Dublin before they were separated by the First World War and the Irish Revolution. This project investigates the exposure of the Markieviczes to radical ideas about modern art, sexual politics, and anti-imperialism during their years in Paris and their subsequent travels. An emphasis on transregional developments in artistic and theatrical representation and theories of anti-imperialism and revolution will facilitate a reassessment of scholarly focus on the nation as an organising principle in the fields of literature and history.
Anders Ekstrom (KTH, Sweden) Visiting Fellow Lent 2013
From Pompeii to Fukushima: Time, intermediality and transregional imaginaries in disaster discourse In the early 21th century, transregional imaginaries are defined to a staggering extent by the representation of disasters. How did this tendency to exhibit the exceptional as part of the ordinary come about? My current research explores the long-term history of representing natural disasters and other extreme events, investigating how new mediascapes connect with earlier ones and their particular modes of spectacular realism. The representation of volcanic eruptions, earth quakes and floods has a long history, for example in 18th century theater, 19th century panoramas and 20th century disaster movies. But in the last two decades, the conditions for representing nature dramas have changed fundamentally. Not only does the use of new media and portable technologies such as cell phones, digital cameras and mobile internet connections allow audiences around the world to see and share images of how nature dramas are unfolding in real time and over great distances; the issue of climate change has created a new, transregional frame of understanding in which catastrophes that take place on large distances from each other are being connected in new ways. During my stay at CRASSH, I will concentrate on a case study on a contemporary media format, which globally distributes images of catastrophes and dramatic natural phenomena on a daily basis: moving pictures via web TV on web news services.
Abhijit Gupta (Jadavpur)
Charles Wallace India Trust Fellow Lent 2013 Cultures and Politics of the Transregional: Missionary print networks in early 19th-century South and South-East Asia In my research into the history of printing and publishing in colonial Bengal, I have been increasingly persuaded that a new methodology needs to be deployed in order to compose a narrative of what may provisionally be called the ‘missionary nation’. The Baptist missionaries took the lead in Bengali language printing in the early 19th century and the Mission Press at Serampore grew to supply a market extending from Afghanistan in the west to Sumatra and Java in the east. It is not possible to accommodate such a history within the parameters of the nation-state, nor can it be configured solely in terms of the colonial project. How, then, may one compose the print network set up by the missionaries? How was it sustained? Who were the personnel who participated in this network? How may their movement, individually and severally, across oceans and state borders, be measured? The proposed project seeks to engage these questions by considering the cases of two Baptist societies—one in Serampore and one in Calcutta—in the first half of the 19th century. In recent years, there has been a distinct transnational turn within book history. Most of the ‘national book history’ projects which were undertaken from the Nineties onwards have come to an end, and there is now growing awareness about the need to question the unproblematic correlation between print and nationalism. This can be carried out at two levels: first, by recovering more historical evidence about transnational and trans-regional print networks; second, by reexamining the negotiated nature of nationalism and the phenomena of migration, diaspora and technologies that enable such negotiations.
Rachel Havrelock (Illinois, Chicago) Visiting Fellow Lent 2013 Pipeline: How Oil Created the Modern Middle East and How Water Can Transform It Pipeline investigates how the shift from an oil economy to a water economy could transform the Middle East. I argue that Western oil extraction determined the borders, nature, and character of Middle Eastern States. As these states undergo tremendous upheaval, Islamisim – defined in large part by the oil producing states of Saudi Arabia and Iran – exerts the strongest political influence. I question the viability of the nationstate in an environment of global capitalism and internationalist religious movements. In place of the failed nation state, I propose a regional model of governance based in large part on equitable water distribution. I focus on regionalism as a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and present a political extension of current developments in shared water infrastructure development. I advance a model both regional and federal concerned with the pressing issues of resource use and depletion. I substantiate my policy recommendations through historical analysis of the oil pipelines built during the colonial administration of the Middle East. The Kirkuk-Haifa pipeline represents a case in which Western capital created the ideal political and economic conditions for oil extraction. It presents an example of a kind of uneven transregional development whose effects continue to reverberate, particularly in the troubled U.S.-Iraq relationship and in the Arab-Israeli conflict. The water pipelines transferring water between Israel and Jordan that resulted from the 1994 peace accord offer a very different model. A regional relationship that involves Jordan, Israel, and, to a certain degree, the Palestinian Authority results from water exigencies.
Gabriel Paquette (John Hopkins)
Balzan Skinner Fellow 2012-13 (Lent) Romantic Liberalism in Southern Europe, c. 1820-1850
In 1820, revolutions broke out in Spain, Naples, and Portugal. The revolutionaries overthrew absolutist regimes and forced monarchs to accept written constitutions and some representative institutions. In the case of the Iberian countries, these years also were marked by the final dismemberment of their Atlantic empires. By 1823, the fledgling liberal governments in Southern Europe had collapsed. The leaders were imprisoned, exiled, or executed. Over the course of the succeeding decades, cycles of revolution and reaction dominated the politics of Southern Europe. The political tumult occurred against the backdrop of, and helped to inform, an extraordinarily fertile cultural moment, Romanticism, which in turn cross-pollinated the political thought of the epoch. By focusing on several leading political writers, poets, historians and novelists from different Southern European countries, the lecture will explore and analyze the intersections, connections, and divergences between Liberalism and Romanticism in Southern Europe in the first half of the nineteenth century. I will deliver the Balzan Skinner lecture at 5pm Thursday 25 April at CRASSH followed by a colloquium on Friday 26 April. For full details please visit www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/events/2083/.
David Monteyne (Calgary) Visiting Fellow Easter 2013
Architecture and the Flow of Immigrants to Canada
Beginning in the mid-19th century, the Canadian government and Canadian transportation companies built a network of immigration architecture across the country. ‘Immigration sheds,’ where transoceanic liners would dock, immigrants would be processed, and from which trains of ‘colonist cars’ would whisk them away to remote areas of Canada, were complemented by prairie immigration halls, by quarantine hospitals and detention centres, as well as by privately-run immigration facilities and land offices in railway stations. This architecture extended beyond the borders of Canada, as potential immigrants were recruited, and eventually examined and tentatively approved, in offices and clinics across Europe and elsewhere. While at CRASSH, I hope to compare and contrast the architecture, and more specifically the spatial processes, manifested at the different points of transregional movement. The goal of the project is to interpret official intentions evidenced by the architecture, but also to trace and locate unofficial, informal practices of people who occupied, used, and were processed through the spaces. Immigrant memoirs and oral histories offer insights into the ways that the people who comprised these flows negotiated spaces of control and of new cultural experience.
Christopher Burlinson (English, Jesus College) Early Career Fellow Easter 2013
Cross-Channel Devotions: The Writings of Elizabethan Puritans in England and the Netherlands This project has to do with the traffic in information – including poems, letters, and other kinds of writing – between English puritans on either side of the English Channel in the late sixteenth century. During that period, many English and Scottish scholars and soldiers, merchants and religious exiles, travelled to cities in the Netherlands such as Amsterdam, Leiden, and Rotterdam, often setting up home and establishing churches there. One of these churches, attached to the company of Merchant Adventurers (English traders in woollen cloth based in Antwerp and Middelburg), was founded at the end of the 1570s, and many of the most prominent English Puritan divines and teachers of the day acted as preachers there. My project aims to understand these international connections not just as part of the history of religious exile and community, but also through the travels of texts – both literary and otherwise – across the English Channel. This documentary exchange was significantly more widespread, more varied, and more alert to literary as well as theological developments than has yet been appreciated, and consisted of exchanges that self-consciously followed the routes of trade and commerce, serving functions of community, devotion, and consolation at both ends. How were texts and documents, printed books and manuscripts, letters and poems, transported and exchanged between English Puritans in England and those based in churches in the Netherlands? In what ways – literary, textual, and epistolary – and by what routes did these people speak to one another across the sea?
Emma Hunter (History, Gonville & Caius) Early Career Fellow Easter 2013 Concepts of Democracy in mid-twentieth-century Africa Africa’s mid-twentieth century moment of political transition and reconstitution as a continent of nationstates has long been analysed through the analytical lens of ‘nationalism’. But this focus has obscured other stories. For while not all those reflecting on and arguing about politics were nationalists, all were asking serious questions about the nature of government and the state, and asking what types of citizenship and what forms of accountability might be possible in a period of political reform. These debates have too often been forgotten. My project seeks to recover these arguments and to do so in a comparative context, taking ‘concepts of democracy’ as a focus. The concept of democracy is often understood as a western export, either accepted or rejected wholesale. In contrast, this project seeks to explore it as a ‘concept in translation’, investigated through a comparative case study of three African countries , Tanzania, Kenya and Senegal, in the era of decolonization. This is not a study of ‘great men’ and their thoughts; rather I intend to seek out public thinking in diverse forums, from letters to the editor in local and national newspapers to local histories and petitions and letters preserved in national archives, as well as more conventional texts such as parliamentary debates and political speeches. I plan to use my time at CRASSH to work on a book arising from this research, taking advantage of the interdisciplinary environment which CRASSH offers to do so.
Louise Joy (English, Homerton College) Early Career Fellow Easter 2013
Literature’s Children: On Re-Reading Childhood Classics My CRASSH fellowship project explores the ways in which conceptions of childhood constructed in and through children’s classics continue to haunt contemporary theories of what adult reading is not. Despite the fact that many of the children’s classics are not, and never have been, exclusively, or even in some cases primarily, read by children, critical treatment of such texts continues to refract discussion through the lens of the supposed ‘child reader’. While we routinely associate texts by writers including Carroll, Stevenson, Hodgson Burnett, Barrie, Nesbit, Milne and Tolkien with childhood and children, it is in fact often adults who read, re-read and value these works. This project starts from the premise that the ‘child reader’ addressed by and through the children’s classics represents a way of reading, and not a type of reader. By interrogating how such works play out fantasies to overthrow or un-imagine adult self-consciousness, my work aims to bring into plainer view a particular way of reading made possible (and popular) by the children’s classics. In so doing, it aims to account for the powerful influence of such texts on the lives and reading habits of adults. By shifting the focus away from the texts themselves and instead onto the nature of the reading experiences that they offer, and in reflecting on what is at stake in identifying such reading experiences as belonging to children, it provides a new way of theorising a type of reading activity or mind-set the legitimacy of which adults seek to deny.
Gabriel Leon (Ecomomics, St Catharine’s College) Early Career Fellow Easter 2013
Natural Resources and their Impact on Economic and Political Institutions Social scientists have long argued that differences in political and economic institutions are crucial in explaining the persistent economic, social and political differences observed across countries. The idea that natural resources cause weak institutions, which in turn lead to suboptimal outcomes, has a long history in the study of economic and political development. This idea is compelling because resource rich Latin America, Africa, and the Middle East have done quite poorly economically and politically. However, it has so far been difficult to properly test this proposition. Economists have largely focused on studies that look across countries and show that there is a relationship between their reliance on natural resources and weak institutions, but whether the relationship is positive or negative depends on the specific study. Furthermore, they have failed to successfully address the question of whether this relationship is causal. The aim of my research project is to provide a comprehensive data-driven study of the relationship between natural resources and institutions. It will consider the key question of whether natural resource endowments have a causal impact on the quality of economic and political institutions, and will do so in a more disaggregated way than has been done before. In particular, it will ask the following questions: Which institutions are most affected? Is the impact particularly important on economic institutions? Or is it mainly on political institutions? Are property rights and human rights affected to the same degree? I will collect a comprehensive dataset of natural resource endowments by country, drawing from numerous sources, including geographic and geological data.
Gaurav Desai (Tulane) Visiting Fellow Easter 2013 ‘Frail Skiffs Tossed on the Ocean of Life’: Gender and Romance in Nineteenth Century Zanzibar The title of my project, ‘Frail Skiffs Tossed on the Ocean of Life’, comes from a remarkable autobiography written by the nineteenth century Zanzibari princess Sayyida Salme. Salme was born on August 30, 1844 as the daughter of the Sultan of Zanzibar, Seyyid Said. As a young woman, Salme met a German merchant, Heinrich Ruete, who was her next door neighbor and they developed a romance that resulted in a pregnancy that could not be socially sanctioned. Assisted by the wife of the British Vice-Counsel, Salme fled to Aden in 1866 to await her fiancé. There she was baptized into the Anglican Church and given the Christian name Emily. The couple had three children and settled in Hamburg but tragedy soon struck when Heinrich died in a tram accident. My project looks at her life as a widow in Europe and her attempts to get her inheritance from her brothers in Zanzibar. Ruete’s story is a fascinating case study of the culture and politics of transregional identities in a world caught between a Zanzibari monarchy and the arrival of British and German colonialism in the East African Indian Ocean. Her story is at once one of relative subalternity to her more powerful brothers but also one in which she can manipulate the competitive colonial rivalries between the Germans and the British to work to her own benefit.
Vincent Guillin (Québec à Montréal) Visiting Fellow Easter 2013
A British Moralist on French Soil: The Early French Reception of John Stuart Mill’s Ethical Thought Although most of his works had been translated in French in the last third of the 19th century, the thought of John Stuart Mill never completely acclimatized to the French intellectual landscape. During my stay at CRASSH, I would like to address two crucial aspects of this ambivalent reception of Mill’s ideas in France: first, the role played by the political economists gathered in the Société d’économie politique and by the sociability network existing around Gilbert-Urbain Guillaumin’s publishing house in the early translation and diffusion of Mill’s economical and political ideas (with a special emphasis on Mill’s malthusianism, which sparked a much heated debate in these circles); second, the global rejection of Mill’s utilitarianism, not only by the Kantian-oriented tradition that was then predominant in France but by the vast majority of professional philosophers and publicists alike. In other words, I would like to focus on the difficult transplantation of Mill’s ethical ideas on French soil.
Katherine Luongo (Northeastern) Visiting Fellow Easter 2013
Border-Crossing Beliefs: African Witchcraft in the Trans-Regional Arena of Asylum Violence motivated by witchcraft beliefs has claimed numerous lives across the African continent as individuals and groups have engaged in lethal, extrajudicial punishment of men, women, and children accused of being witches. Reports from the African press and generated by the United Nations, other humanitarian organizations, and governments on the African continent indicate that deadly violence against accused witches has been expanding sharply over the last decade. Previously regarded by state authorities, policy-makers, and scholars as a law-and-order problem best addressed on the local and/or national levels, witchcraft-driven violence has lately emerged as an urgent global human rights matter as increasing numbers of African asylum-seekers mobilize allegations about witchcraft-driven violence as a basis for their asylum claims. These asylum-seekers assert that having been accused of practicing witchcraft places them at high risk of being killed. They argue that such accusations, together with the absence of state protection from anti-witchcraft vigilantism in their respective countries of origin, imbues them with a particular, transnational legal identity – ‘member of a persecuted social group.’ This designation renders asylum-seekers eligible for protection in a receiving state and introduces the prospect of resettlement in a host nation. My project constructs an historical ethnography of witchcraft-driven violence in the five countries that my preliminary research has shown to have the most significant concentrations of asylum-seekers making witchcraft allegations – Cameroon, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ghana, Nigeria, and Tanzania – and analyzes how witchcraft allegations made by asylum-seekers from these countries operate in contemporary, global asylum settings.
Urmila Nair (John Hopkins) Visiting Fellow Easter 2013
Buddhism and Science: Somatizing the Mind, Contemplating the Body This research project focuses on the neuroscientific and psychotherapeutic valences that meditation acquires in the context of modern psychopharmacological societies. First, I shall continue my re-working of the dissertation thesis When the Sun’s Rays are as Shadows – the Politics of Secrecy in an Exilic Tibetan Ritual into a monograph. It analyzes how an esoteric meditational ritual performance may be conceived, by its monk performers and exile Tibetans more broadly, as a political act, of the same kind as public political demonstrations for instance. This project is on the uncanny valences that Tibetan Buddhist meditation comes to acquire in the context of the so-called “Buddhism and Science” discourse. This is a discourse that, in recent decades, has emerged from dialogues between the Dalai Lama and Tibetan Buddhist practitioners on the one hand, and a network of neuroscientists, psychologists and others at U.S. and European universities on the other. The latter seek to study meditation in laboratories with a view to understanding its influence on the modern biochemical subject, a subject understood in terms of neurochemical balances and imbalances, a subject who is thus quite alien to traditional Tibetan Buddhist meditational discourse and practice. I shall be engaged in reading research and putting together a project proposal towards grant applications and research permissions.
Jane Rhodes (Macalester College) Visiting Fellow Easter 2013
Transatlantic Blackness in the Era of Jim Crow: Race and Gender in the Life of an African American Expatriate This is a study of African American psychoanalyst and expatriate Marie Battle Singer, and the processes of memory, trauma, and transformation during the era of Jim Crow. Singer left the United States 1948, arriving in Britain where she trained with Anna Freud at the Hampstead Clinic, earned a doctorate, and taught at Cambridge. Her interracial marriage to a Scottish poet plunged her into Britain’s literary community and exposed her to new social crises. This project traces how Singer negotiated the legacy of her childhood in Mississippi through her refashioning as a successful British intellectual. Her story is considered against the backdrop of volatile racial politics in Britain and the civil rights movement at home. As a black woman, Singer encountered distinct challenges that reveal how race, gender, sexuality and class shape life chances. This project considers how one transnational black subject negotiated these intersecting identities across national and cultural boundaries.
Neil Safier (British Columbia) Visiting Fellow Easter 2013
The Cosmopolitan Amazon: A Deep History of the World’s Largest River My project looks at Amazonia as a transnational site for cultural exchange and circulation. When complete, this project will constitute a ‘cosmopolitan’ history of the Amazon and its place in the global imagination. The aim is to move away from a model that posits the Amazon basin as a remote field laboratory populated by bureaucrats and isolated indigenous tribes and instead to understand the region as a space in which an eclectic range of individuals — from Bolognese architects to Russian princes— as well as waves of immigrants in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries contributed in conjunction with native groups to the region’s social, cultural, and intellectual formation. Scholars have often considered Amazonian history as a series of predominantly local phenomena, removed from their transoceanic implications. By arguing that Amazonia became consolidated as a geographical notion and a global presence during this early period, my project seeks to redefine the region and situate its emergence within the complex politics of an imperial age. My goal is to use the insights of archaeology, anthropology, and world history to rethink the Amazonian past with regard to more ambitious time scales and broader geographical circuits. ‘The Cosmopolitan Amazon’ will move beyond a strictly territorial understanding of Latin American history, suggesting that the history of South America be understood in a trans-regional context, reflecting not only intra-continental contact and exchange but also transoceanic and intercontinental migrations.
Robert Levin ŠAscherman
Humanitas
Visiting Professorships 2012-13
Robert Levin (Michaelmas 2012) Humanitas Visiting Professor in Chamber Music
Philippe de Montebello (Michaelmas 2012) Humanitas Visiting Professor in the History of Art
Martin van Creveld (Lent 2013) Humanitas Visiting Professor in War Studies
Melanne Verveer (Lent 2013) Humanitas Visiting Professor in Women’s Rights
Chen Yung-fa (Easter 2013) Humanitas Visiting Professor in Chinese Studies
Gareth Evans (Easter 2013) Humanitas Visiting Professor in Statecraft and Diplomacy
Eric Schmidt (TBC) Humanitas Visiting Professor in Media
Graduate group conveners 2012-13
Fran Bigman English Robert Pralat Sociology Anne Hanley HPS Sophie Zadeh John Appleby Family Research Salim Al-Gailani HPS Susanna Graham Zeynep G端rtin-Broadbent Family Research Jesse OlszynkoGryn HPS Mike Humphreys History Robin Whelan Classics Graeme Ward History Gruia Badescu Architecture George Carothers Geography Viesturs Celmins Social Anthropology Andrew Hoolachan Architecture William Carruthers HPS Allegra Fryxell History Julie Lawrence Archaeology and Anthropology Tatiana V Vakhitova Sustainable Development Peter Guthrie Sustainable Development Aidan Parkinson Sustainable Development Marcos Pelenur Sustainable Development Jenny Ya He Engineering Alison McDougall-Weil Engineering Design Centre Aaron Gillich Architecture Daniel GodoyShimizu Martin Centre Daniela Krug Peter Armitage Martin Centre Berhard Dusch Manufacturing Magdalini Makrodimitri Architectural and Urban Studies MariaChristina Georgiadou Sustainable Development Antonio Andreoni Development Studies Stuart John Barton History Ivano Cardinale Judge Gian Paolo Faella James Lewis Wilson Roslington History Simon T Abernethy English George Carothers Geography Kristen Klebba History Kavita Ramakrishnan Geography Graham Riach English Rob Turner English Ranald Lawrence Architecture Austen Saunders English Hannah Scally History Michael Ashby History Katy Barrett HPS Molly Dorkin History of Art Hank Johnson History of Art Adrian Leonard Winton Centre Lavina Maddaluno History Lucy Razzall English Michelle Wallis HPS Sophie Waring HPS
Faculty group conveners 2012-13
Mike Higton Cambridge Inter-faith Programme Marcella P Sutcliffe History Martin Jones Archaeology Tim Bayliss-Smith Geography Roel Sterckx FAMES Emma F Wilson French Jenna Ng CRASSH Barbara Bodenhorn Social Anthropology Heather J Cruickshank Sustainable Development Richard Irvine Social Anthropology Jonas Leonhard Tinius Social Anthropology Tom Rowley Simon Lewis Alexander Etkind Rory Finni Slavonic Studies Harald Wydra POLIS Anastasia Piliavsky Social Anthropology Alice Taylor History
Conference conveners 2012-13
Andrew Webber German & Dutch Axel Bangert German & Dutch Isabelle McNeill French Emma F Wilson French Annamaria Motrescu South Asian Marcus Banks Oxford Christos Lynteris CRASSH Clare Foster Classics Geoffrey Edwards POLIS Anand Menon Birmingham Christopher Hill POLIS Hubertus Juergenliemk POLIS Francoise Barbira Freedman Social Anthropology Beatrix Shlarb Ridley Plant Sciences Margaret Adey Sustainability Leadership Barbara Bodenhorn Social Anthropology Gavin Alexander English Geoffrey Webber Music John Rink Music Richard Rex Divinity Huw Price Philosophy Maria Carla Galavotti Bologna Hasok Chang HPS Anna Alexandrova HPS Fraser Macbride Philosophy James Carleton Paget Divinity Judith Lieu Divinity Simon Gathercole Divinity Jenna Ng CRASSH Joel Isaac History Michael O’Brien History James T Kloppenberg Harvard Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen Wisconsin-Madison Luke Skrebowski History of Art Devika Singh History of Art Marcus Waithe English Claire White French Nick Long Social Anthropology Henrietta Moore Social Anthropology Joanna Cook Goldsmiths Qiaosheng Dong Classics/ Needham Jenny Zhao Classics David Sedley Classics Rebecca Flemming Classics Lauren Kassell HPS Peter Jones History Fay Glinister History Sandra Brunnegger Social Anthropology Karen Ann Faulk Carnegie Mellon Simon Mills CRASSH VÊronique Mottier Sociology Robbie Duschinsky Northumbria Daniel Weiss Divinity Netta Chachamu Cardiff Ying Jin Architecture Tony Hargreaves Architecture Mike Batty UCL Michael Wegener Dortmund Alison Sinclair Spanish & Portugese Karen Arrandale Clare Hall Mari Jones French Christopher Connolly French John Forrester HPS Shirlene Badger HPS
$3"44) t "MJTPO 3JDIBSE #VJMEJOH 8FTU 3PBE t $BNCSJEHF t $# %5 www.crassh.cam.ac.uk t FORVJSJFT!DSBTTI DBN BD VL