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Dear Friends,
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t the end of the year, “moments of being,” to recall Virginia Woolf’s provocative phrase, come back to me. The excitement enveloping our gallery as South African artist Mary Sibande explored with us her new multimedia work. The buzz of the field trip to the Museum of Modern Art Detroit to see the re-installation of our 2013 State of Exception, an exhibition of objects left behind by undocumented migrants moving silently through the Sonoran desert. The tension and anxiety in the seminar room as graduate student fellows workshopped their job letters with faculty fellows. The “aha” moment when one of our former fellows, an architect, talked about the cruciform structure of the local Cabela’s megastore as he superimposed the architectural drawing of St. Peter’s on top of one of Cabela’s. The arresting talk by Katherine Boo, our 2014 Marc and Constance Jacobson lecturer, as she explored her remarkable book on the inhabitants of a Mumbai slum, Behind the Beautiful Forevers. The camaraderie of fellows as they said their goodbyes after spending two semesters around the seminar table together. The unfolding arc of the 2013–14 year encompassed scholarly work in multimedia, creative work from diverse global locations, affective engagement with words and images, with music and drawing, and transformative work of responding to the changes roiling the academy and the challenges of imagining the twenty-first century humanities. You’ll read here about our remarkable series of exhibitions, about our burgeoning activities in the Digital Currents series, and about our commitment to supporting graduate students as they prepare for careers in the academic humanities. To achieve our goals, we seek exciting, promising, and enabling relationships of interest on campus and beyond. This past year we have collaborated with colleagues in units across campus to meet the challenge of a shifting scholarly ecology as more and more faculty and graduate students come to projects that are born digital or digitally environed. These
projects depend on a responsive cyberinfrastructure, upon adequate sources of financial support and technological expertise, upon new tools and platforms. We are not a digital humanities center, but we are a partner in a digital collaboratory dedicated to meeting these needs. This coming year our fellowships will support a good number of faculty and graduate students who take digital cultures as their object of study, build digital archives, or pursue digitally environed opportunities for presenting their work. Our partnerships in the Mellon-funded Humanities Without Walls initiative (directed out of the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign) and the Early Modern Conversions project (directed out of the the Institute for the Public Life of Arts and Ideas at McGill University and funded by Canada’s Social Science and Humanities Research Council) are generative collaborations made possible by foundation funding, robust cyberinfrastructures, and inter-institutional scholarly networks. Now we look forward to the 2014–15 Year of Life Writing, an occasion to ponder with artists, writers, and scholars the heterogeneous genres and media of life storytelling. This focus is dear to my heart. I’ve been a scholar of life writing, capaciously defined, for the last four decades and I never tire of exploring with others the social work that autobiographical narration and acts of self-presentation do in the world. Those of us whose mission is the promotion of humanistic inquiry and the sustained support of robust, and disruptive, conversations across the arts and humanities are always buoyed by the intellectual and pedagogical passions of colleagues and by the sustained commitments of benefactors.To do the work of the humanities in the world, this institute, as all humanities institutes across the country and the world, depends on the generosity of others. Thank you!
Sidonie Smith Mary Fair Croushore Professor
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less legislative creativity than simple recognition of a status “The Star-Spangled Banner” had long achieved through performance. As an emotionally potent answer to questions of national identity, the banner has provided a vehicle for artists to express their interpretation of the nature of citizenship at critical junctures in the country’s history, such as the Battle of Baltimore, the Civil War, the bombing of Pearl Harbor, and Woodstock. The song thus serves as a performative witness to history, enacting collective understandings not only of what it means to sing the anthem, but what it means to give voice to democracy in the twenty-first century.
“Non/Simultaneities: Exhibiting Time and History in Contemporary Germany” Profoundly affected by the cultural and political transformations of the past decades, museum culture has grown in importance, contributing new images and narratives of history. The present study brings into focus a number of German history museums and exhibition projects that have responded to deindustrialization and unification by consciously opening up the temporal and ideological layers of museum discourse. Multiple voices, histories, and methodologies become superimposed in simultaneous projections. Barndt considers exhibition projects ranging from post-industrial landscape exhibitions to new museums in industrial ruins, a number of specifically innovative national and regional history exhibitions. As the time of nature and the figure of ruin feature prominently in these projections, she attends to the question of how these exhibitions develop connective tissues that bind natural history on the one hand to representations of social, cultural, and industrial history on the other. In following these leads, this study contributes to an understanding of the museum as a medium that fundamentally shapes its audience’s sense of time—through architectural form, exhibition narrative, and specific modes of display. Mark Clague, associate professor, music; U-M Humanities Institute National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow “O Say Can You Hear?: A Cultural Biography of the United States National Anthem” This book project explores the transformation of a topical patriotic lyric—Francis Scott Key’s “The Defense of Fort McHenry” (1814)—into the sacred hymn of the United States. Clague argues that the 1931 congressional act that made Key’s song the nation’s anthem was
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Dierdre de la Cruz, assistant professor, Asian languages and cultures, history; Richard and Lillian Ives Fellow “Spirit Logics: Filipino Ghosts and Global Occultisms at the Turn of the Twentieth Century” This project examines modern Spiritism—the belief and practice of communicating with the dead—in the late colonial Philippines. As with other Spiritist communities around the world, Filipino Spiritists regarded ghosts as sources of historical insight at the same time that they embraced the different temporalities conjured with each spirit’s visit: of the past in the present, at times imagining a particular future. In the Philippine context this imagining often betokened anti-colonialism, yet the future was not necessarily that of the sovereign nation. On the contrary, in a period that historians have tended to associate with ideas of “independence” in the shift from Spanish Christian colonial rule to American tutelary imperialism, Filipino Spiritism may have disrupted the teleology of nationalism by projecting alternative visions of a global order, mediated through the afterlife.
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Katherine French, professor, history and women’s studies; Helmut F. Stern Professor Clague
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“Household Goods and Household Interaction in Late Medieval London”
legible only after readers relinquish AngloAmerican assumptions about a racial binary based on the “one-drop rule.”
Webb Keane, professor, anthropology; John This project looks at the material culture of Rich Professor burgess households in late medieval London. “Ethical Life” While burgesses were only a fraction of meNatural and social sciences have long posed dieval London’s population, they were socially hard problems for familiar ways of thinkand economically important, with a sense ing about ethics and morality. If our actions of their own social identity and cultural discan be explained by causes beyond our will tinctiveness. Central to this identity were the or awareness, does this mean we are not values of industriousness, moderation, hierarresponsible for them? What, then, becomes chy, and piety, all enacted within and through the household, and all of which, in their minds, of our understanding of good lives and bad deeds? What place should cultural differdistinguished them from the excesses of the ences and historical change play in our unaristocracy and the shiftlessness of the workderstanding of ethics and morality? The book ing poor. An important aspect of forging this Ethical Life, aims to reconstruct an empirical identity was the acquisition of an expanding approach to ethics in a dialogue between array of manufactured goods: clothing, furniethnography and its neighbors in history, ture, dishware, and jewelry, chosen, used, and psychology, and philosophy. cherished in ways that promoted and created certain kinds of behaviors. These things not Scott Lyons, associate professor, American only made burgess lives more comfortable, culture and English; Hunting Family Fellow it made them who they were. But the use “Touching the Pen: Encountering Modernity in and meaning of objects is neither stable nor Native American Literature” guaranteed; the increasing diversity of new affordable consumer goods had the power Since the American civil rights era, students to create new ways of behaving and being. of Native American literature have read both The very goods that made burgesses who written and oral texts for signs of traditionalthey were could also confound their identity, ism, resilience, and resistance, but what does challenge their values, and reorder household that literary history have to say about moderdynamics and gender roles. nity, desire, and assent? This study examines Indian encounters with modernity—itself asJarrod Hayes, associate professor, French; sociated with “civilization,” industrial capitalSteelcase Research Professor ism, settler colonialism, and globalization—in “Reading across the Color Line: Racialization Native American writing from the removal in the French Americas” era to the present. Textual sites include travel writing in the nineteenth century, educational This project undertakes a comparative study narratives in the age of assimilation, crime of literary texts from the French Americas and courtroom fiction during the rise of tribal (Louisiana and the Caribbean) in which racial sovereignty, and engagements with the natudifference is less visible as skin color and ral world throughout. whose resistance to Anglo-American definitions of race encourages us to understand these definitions as historically contingent. In these texts representations of race become
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Janie Paul, professor, art & design, social work; John Rich Professor “Worthy to the World: Prison Art” Using the extensive digital archive and interviews with the artists of eighteen annual Exhibitions of Art by Michigan Prisoners, which present the work of hundreds of incarcerated artists, this book investigates the ways in which the challenges and conditions of prison life give rise to the aesthetics of prison art. The book also describes how the exhibitions have evolved to heighten awareness of prison issues, form community, and sustain the lives of incarcerated citizens. Elizabeth Sears, professor, history of art; Hunting Family Fellow “Warburg Circles: Towards a Cultural Historical History of Art, 1929–1964”
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This book is a collective biography, a scholarly epic, an account of an international intellectual movement. Its progenitor was the seminally important art and cultural historian Aby Warburg (1866–1929), and its epicenter was the Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg (Warburg Library for Cultural Study) in Hamburg, a research institute that immigrated to London in 1933 after the Nazis had come to power. As a cultural history of cultural historical inquiry, the study focuses on transformations and adaptations of Warburg’s still relevant scholarly project during the Nazi era, the Second World War, and the Cold War. This was a time when heart-wrenching diasporic movements had the collateral effect of radically increasing international scholarly exchange. The archives offer up exquisitely detailed case studies revealing of the operation of socio-academic networks and suggesting the force of intellectual affinity.
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S Joshua Friedman, anthropology; Richard and Lillian Ives Graduate Student Fellow “Formations of Care: Virtuosos, Non-Adepts, and the Sacralization of Yiddish in the U.S.”
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This dissertation explores the attribution of sacredness to Yiddish language and culture in the contemporary United States. Since the late 1960s “ethnic revival,” the notion that Yiddish might be considered sacred has emerged not only from Yiddish language activists—those who seek to create Yiddish speaking communities, or raise new generations of native Yiddish speakers—the idea has also emerged from a broad, liberal Jewish public who purports to “care” deeply for Yiddish, but cannot be assumed to know the language. Based on eighteen months of ethnography with Yiddish activists and within Yiddish institutions in the Northeastern United States, this dissertation explores how those publics help create Yiddish as a sacred domain—how their “care” for Yiddish produces the sacred. By offering the concept of care as a practice that deconstructs bounded categories of religion and secularism, this project contributes to our understanding of the nature of the sacred within secular modernity.
Hadjipolycarou
Maria Hadjipolycarou, comparative literature; James A. Winn Graduate Student Fellow “Inter-Subjective Histories in the Mediterranean: History and the Poetics of Self in Postcolonial Life-Writing” To date, postcolonial studies have predominantly focused on regions such as Africa, India, and Southeast Asia, but much less so on the Mediterranean. This dissertation shifts questions of postcolonial subjectivity to the Mediterranean during the second half of the twentieth century. The combination of the imperial with the colonial past in these societies brings about the formation of a particular subjectivity that becomes legible in the lifewriting of the writers examined. This dissertation is a study of the temporal consciousness in postcolonial life-writing through select examples from the Mediterranean. It treats postcolonial life-writing as a genre with its own poetics, and focuses on one defining feature: the inclusion of history in personal narratives and the importance this inclusion has for the representation of the self. The project makes life-writing examples from Cyprus its point of reference and compares them with life-writing in Palestine and Algeria. It also extends the comparison to what Derek Walcott called the “New World Mediterranean”: the Caribbean. Jennifer Johnson, natural resources and environment; Richard and Lillian Ives Graduate Student Fellow “Abavubi: The Gendered Practices and Politics of Working with Fish in Uganda”
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Traversing national boundaries and international networks of commerce, control, and expertise, Nyanja (Lake Victoria) has long been a crucible for transformative social dynamics characterized by “the littoral”—literally, the shoreline. It is a place of heightened prospects for actual and economic mobility, alternative moralities of sexual and economic exchange, and competing valuation of space
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and resources for leisure, protein, and politically strategic purposes. As this dissertation will show, Nyanja’s littoral comprises a liminal frontier of possibility, but also constraint, where a uniquely littoral cosmopolitanism continues to emerge around the gendered vernacular practices of fishing. In a region where domestic politics and practices are so often assumed to be aligned along immutable tribal or ethnic lines, at the littoral, identity, belonging and acceptable conduct are actively negotiated, and further, closely linked to the vernacular practices and politics of working with fish and managing fisheries.
1914–1929, between Ford’s Five Dollar Day and the Great Depression. The project argues that while industrialists and real estate developers promoted the ownership of single-family homes as a source of security for workers, this security proved elusive from the start due to shifting real estate values, economic crises, and racial tensions. This perspective challenges histories that site Detroit’s instability in the postwar era, offers a historically grounded perspective on the city’s residential “ruins” of today, and provides lessons to inform the debate around American homeownership in the wake of the 2008 subprime mortgage crisis.
Monique Johnson, history of art; James A. Winn Graduate Student Fellow
Richard Pierre, comparative literature; Sylvia “Duffy” Engle Graduate Student Fellow
“Autofocused: The Countess de Castiglione’s Visual Memoir and Photography as “Mineralogies of the Subject: Languages of Autobiography in Nineteenth-Century France” Stone in German and Russian Lyric Poetry, 1900–1970” This dissertation examines a corpus of photographic portraits of Virginia Oldoini, Countess de Castiglione (1837–1899), produced in Paris between 1856 and 1895 and the culture of related photographic practice by women in France. France was particularly inhospitable to women as photographic practitioners throughout this period, but women were especially active as photographic subjects. This study explores the implications of this position with respect to Castiglione’s oeuvre, photographs of actresses, the legal history of photography, fashion, and the photographic, satiric and popular presses, and reveals the relationship between photography, autobiography, and memoir practices throughout the Second Empire (1852–1870) and the early Third Republic (1870–1940). Michael McCulloch, architecture and urban planning; Mary Fair Croushore Graduate Student Fellow “Building the Working City: Designs on Home and Life in Boomtown Detroit, 1914–1929” This dissertation studies the making of industrial worker’s housing in Detroit in the period
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This trans-historical and cross-cultural dissertation demonstrates how poetic figures of stone developed at the nexus of twentiethcentury German and Russian literatures. In lyric poetry arising in these contexts—from early twentieth-century Modernism to the post-WWII period—figures of stone prompt rethinking of concepts of language and the relationships of the human and nonhuman. At times, texts represent stone as interpretable, communicative, and legible; at other times, texts recognize stone’s resistance to being identified with meaning, utilizing precisely this point to seek out alternative, nonhuman modes of lyric.
McCulloch
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Brian Whitener, Spanish; Mary Fair Croushore Graduate Student Fellow “After the Fall: Mexico, Brazil, and Financialization in the Long 1990s” Through an analysis of cultural texts, this dissertation examines the impact of financialization (the increasing importance of financial actors, markets, and institutions) on Latin American countries and argues that financial-
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ization is the centerpiece, in Latin America, of the restructuring of national economies and their integration into the world market that begins in the mid-1970s. In three chapters that take a comparative approach to Mexico and Brazil, Whitener traces across a variety of cultural objects (including novels, films, and high art) the effects, reactions to, and consequences of financialization across a period he terms, to underscore the unevenness of processes of financialization in Latin America, “the long 90s.” Cookie Woolner, history, women’s studies; Mary I. & David D. Hunting Graduate Student Fellow “’The Famous Lady Lovers’: African American Women and Same-Sex Desire from Reconstruction to World War II”
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This dissertation is a cultural history that examines the emergence of discourse on queer black women through the black press, the entertainment industries, and medical and social science scholarship. Woolner argues that the Great Migration played a crucial role in the creation of queer black networks in the urban North, and the black popular entertainment industry offered new opportunities for women economically as well as socially, serving as the backdrop for many performers’ same-sex relationships. While medical experts, reformers and journalists sought to represent black women who loved women as criminal and immoral, such women were nonetheless able to craft their own sexual subjectivities, both inside and outside of marriage to men, many decades before the modern gay liberation movement.
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S Katherine Boo The New Yorker 2014 Marc and Constance Jacobson Lecture: “Behind the Beautiful Forevers: An Evening with Katherine Boo” Katherine Boo is a staff writer at The New Yorker and a former reporter and editor for The Washington Post. Her reporting from disadvantaged communities has been awarded a Pulitzer Prize, a MacArthur “Genius” grant, and a National Magazine Award for Feature Writing. Tanya Clement University of Texas at Austin 2014 Jill S. Harris Memorial Lecture: “A Brief History, A Few Principles, and Some Suggestions for Developing a Digital Humanities Undergraduate Curriculum” Tanya Clement is assistant professor in the School of Information at the University of Texas at Austin. Her primary area of research centers on scholarly information infrastructure as it impacts academic research, research libraries, and the creation of research tools and resources in the digital humanities. Lily Cox-Richard Artist Thicket exhibition Lily Cox-Richard is a sculptor based in Houston, Texas. She earned an MFA in sculpture and extended media from Virginia Commonwealth University, and has exhibited at Hirschl & Adler in New York, Vox Populi in Philadelphia, the Poor Farm in Manawa, Wisconsin, and Kompact Living Space in Berlin.
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François Hartog School of Advanced Studies in Social Sciences, Paris “The Future of a Very Old Name?” François Hartog is director of studies at the School of Advanced Studies in Social Sciences, Paris, and chair of ancient and modern historiography. His work closely combines intellectual history of ancient Greece, historiography, and study of historical forms of temporality (his most recent work). Chris Hyndman Eastern Michigan University No-Touching Zone exhibition Chris Hyndman is a painter born in London, Ontario. In 2010 he moved his studio to Chicago, where he spends much of his time when not teaching. Recent shows include exhibitions at the Susanne Hilberry Gallery and the U-M Residential College Gallery. He has been a faculty member at Eastern Michigan University since 2001. Matt Kish Artist and illustrator of Moby-Dick in Pictures “Moby-Dick in Pictures: One Drawing for Every Page” After stints as a cafeteria cook, a hospital registrar, a bookstore manager, and an English teacher, Matt Kish ended up as a librarian. He draws as often as he can, often with whatever he can find. He has tried his hand at 35mm black-and-white photography, making comics and zines, a bit of collage, and lots of pen and ink. Moby-Dick is his favorite novel.
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Mary Sibande Artist, South Africa 2013 Kidder Resident in the Arts; Sibande On Campus exhibition project Mary Sibande lives and works in Johannesburg. She obtained an honours degree in fine art at the University of Johannesburg in 2007. Sibande works in various media including painting, sculpture and photography. She has taken part in the Johannesburg Art City World Premiere Annual Exhibition project, titled ‘‘Long Live the Dead Queen,’’ which premiered in June of 2010 (to coincide with the 2010 World Cup) on nineteen giant building wraps in the inner city. Corine Vermeulen Photographer Obscura Primavera exhibition Corine Vermeulen is a Dutch photographer who settled in Detroit in early 2006. A winner of the 2009 Kresge Artist Fellowships, she recently completed two long-term projects: Your Town Tomorrow (2007–2012) which documents Detroit’s shifting social and geographic ecologies, and Medellin (2009– 2012) which explores present-day conditions in the city of Medellin, Colombia. She received a BFA from the Design Academy Eindhoven (Cum Laude) and an MFA in photography from the Cranbrook Academy of Art, Michigan. Her photographs have been exhibited and published internationally, most recently at Lauba Contemporary Art Space in Zagreb, Croatia and in The New York Times.
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Paul Weinberg University of Cape Town The Other Camera exhibition Paul Weinberg is a South African-born documentary photographer, filmmaker, writer, curator, educator, and archivist. He began his career in the early 1980s by working for South African NGOs and photographing current events for news agencies and foreign newspapers. He has built up a large body of work which portrays diverse peoples, cultures, and human environments “beyond the headlines.” It demonstrates a sustained engagement with indigenous people throughout southern Africa, particularly in rural settings. Weinberg is currently senior curator of visual archives at the University of Cape Town, and lectures in documentary arts at the same university. Peter Whitely American Museum of Natural History “What’s in a Hopi Name” Peter Whitely is curator and professor of anthropology at the Richard Gilder Graduate School at the American Museum of Natural History. He studies the cultures, social structures, social histories, and environmental relations in Native North America from the seventeenth century to the present.
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he Institute for the Humanities innovative Hub series, integral to institute programming and art programming campus wide, continued to flourish this year, presenting five challenging art installations in the gallery as well as accompanying artist talks and panel discussions comprised of U-M faculty and visiting scholars, artists, and curators. In addition, our internationally recognized exhibition State of Exception, which focuses on undocumented immigration, went on tour, opening at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit and slated for Arizona, Tijuana, and Toronto in the very near future.
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This year’s Kidder Resident in the Arts was South African rising art star Mary Sibande, whose work considers race, gender, class, and cultural identity in the post-Apartheid era. The institute-led collaborative project Sibande on Campus spanned the university, with an open studio promoting student engagement, a Penny Stamps lecture by the artist, as well as exhibitions of Sibande’s work at the U-M Museum of Art, Stamps School of Art & Design, Department of Afroamerican and African Studies, and in the institute’s gallery. The most extensive U.S. exhibition of Sibande’s work to date, Sibande on Campus was visited by hundreds of students and incorporated into classroom curriculum. Other highlights of the year included artist Lily Cox-Richard’s appropriation of American sculptor Hiram Power’s work in Thicket, her visual inquiry into the gendering of sculpture. Cox-Richard, the Paula and Edwin Sidman Fellow in the Arts, participated in numerous scholarly conversations related
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to the exhibition, in dialogue with U-M’s Alex Potts (history of art) and Claire Croft (dance) among others. Works created for the Thicket exhibition were also prominently featured in the 2013 Winter edition of Art Journal, along with a critical essay about the work co-authored by former Institute for the Humanities fellow Joan Kee (history of art). In January, visiting scholar Paul Weinberg exhibited archival South African vernacular photography in The Other Camera. Soon after, Detroit photographer Corine Vermeulen explored art as activism in Obscura Primavera, offering a revealing portrait of Medellin, Colombia, and employing workers in Medellin to produce the show catalog, all with the support of the institute. And finally, contemporary artist Chris Hyndman’s meticulously crafted paintings incorporated digital technologies, exploring art and process in an age of digital saturation. During his residency, Hyndman also taught a mini-course related to his painting and theory of color, offered to students from a myriad of departments. Chris’s work prompted a rigorous public discourse about painting in a new age, with participants Matt Biro (history of art), Beverly Fishman (Cranbrook Academy of Art), Alison Gass (MSU Broad Art Museum), and Lance Winn (University of Delaware). A focal point, catalyst, and a destination for progressive, challenging exhibitions and programming in the arts and humanities at Michigan, our Hub series continues to expand, to connect the dots, and to energize the university and outlying communities. Amanda Krugliak Curator, Institute for the Humanities
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evelopment of digital tools for mapping, visualizing, and analyzing literary and artistic works. Investigation into the ways online culture is changing the way we interact with each other. Teaching methods that promote student reflection about that online culture while making use of online tools for discussion and learning. What do all of these methods or projects have in common? That is what the Digital Currents initiative is designed to explore: the connections and disconnections between various scholarly approaches to the digital. Digital Currents brings the Institute for the Humanities together with the School of Information, faculty together with students, and administrators together with classroom instructors to discuss the future of the networked university. We provide a forum for scholars from the University of Michigan and around the country to showcase the work they are doing on teaching and research both in and on digital environments. By in digital environments, we mean pedagogy and research that uses digital tools to advance humanities scholarship and teaching. From the history of our “algorithmic culture” to an interactive digital archive for documenting performance practices of underrepresented people, Digital Currents means harnessing the possibilities of the digital to advance humanities work for the greater good.
By on digital environments, we mean research and teaching that advances our consciousness of the effects that ubiquitous media have on our ways of living together in society. Through discussions of media infrastructure around the world and in different eras, as well as workshops that explore the place of the digital in the classroom, Digital Currents also means raising awareness about the complexity of our digital present and future.
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This year, the Digital Currents initiative held workshops and lectures to investigate pedagogical issues and opportunities related to digital media, as well as to explore current research into digital culture. Alongside a November conference showcasing research on the implications for society of developing media infrastructures, the institute hosted a series of workshops about digital pedagogy. Those workshops—on topics such as using corpus linguistics in the writing classroom and playing with Wikipedia in the history classroom—provided programming to support a new certificate for graduate student instructors in teaching with digital media (a joint venture by the institute, the Center for Research on Learning and Teaching, and Rackham Graduate School). The institute also supported an Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program project through which students created digital visualizations of the humanities research process based on interviews they conducted. In order to introduce undergraduate students to the work of the institute as well as to methods of digital scholarship, we also offered a mini-course winter semester titled Moby-Dick and Mapping. Co-instructors Patrick Tonks (assistant director for programming at the institute) and Justin Joque (visualization librarian) guided students in using mapping as a critical analytic technique to delve into a classic novel. This course was listed by the Michigan Daily as an “interesting course” for Winter 2014 and was featured in the April 14 edition of the University Record. Patrick Tonks Assistant Director for Programming, Institute for the Humanities
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The Hub
Thicket, video installation at Shapiro Undergraduate Library
Innovative exhibitions and arts programming
State of Exception, exhibition at Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit
Sibande on Campus,...of Prosperity (sculpture, 2011), Sophie-Velucia (mixed media), murals, and prints, exhibition at Slusser Gallery
State of Exception, roundtable discussion with Jason De León, U-M; Bob Kee, Tucson Samaritan; Adriana Diaz, Dream 9 activist, and students from the Undocumented Migration Project field school in Arivaca
Sibande on Campus, brown bag at GalleryDAAS with Mary Sibande, 2013 Kidder Resident in the Arts Sibande on Campus, new work/paintings, exhibition at Institute for the Humanities
State of Exception, exhibition talk at Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit with Richard Barnes, photographer; Amanda Krugliak, Institute for the Humanities; and Jason De León, anthropology
Sibande on Campus, prints, exhibition at GalleryDAAS Sibande on Campus, The wait seems to go on forever (mural, 2008), exhibition at U-M Museum of Art
State of Exception, youth tour at Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit State of Exception, guided tour with Medical Arts Program
Sibande on Campus, lecture by Mary Sibande, 2013 Kidder Resident in the Arts, Penny W. Stamps Speaker Series Sibande on Campus, behind-the-scenes video installation at Shapiro Undergraduate Library
The Other Camera, “The Emperor of Sophiatown: Peter Brook Does Can Temba,” lecture by Daniel Herwitz, U-M
Sibande on Campus, student discussion at North Quad
The Other Camera, Paul Weinberg, exhibition & curator talk
The Survival of Art, Sarah Nesbitt, Common Room exhibition
The Other Camera, video installation at Shapiro Undergraduate Library
Seeing is Believing: A Consideration of Image, Memory, and the Velocity of Time, panel discussion at UMMA with Jennifer Karady, artist; Scott Hocking, artist; Jessica Frelinghuysen, artist; Amanda Krugliak, curator
The Other Camera, guided tour with Medical Arts Program Stop Making Sense: Constructs and Narratives, Real and Imagined, panel discussion with U-M Stamps School faculty and artists Heidi Kumao, Matt Kenyon, and Melanie Manos; Terri Sarris, screen arts & cultures; and Amanda Krugliak, Institute for the Humanities
Thicket, exhibition by Sidman Visiting Artist Lily Cox-Richard Thicket, Sidman Visiting Artist Lily Cox-Richard in conversation with Alex Potts, history of art Thicket, panel discussion with Clare Croft, dance; Jamie Jones, English; Amanda Krugliak, Institute for the Humanities; and Lane Relyea, Northwestern University; with remarks by artist Lily Cox-Richard
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Obscura Primavera, photographs Medellin 2009-2012, Corine Vermeulen, exhibition Obscura Primavera, Artist conversation with Corine Vermeulen, visiting artist, and Vince Carducci, College for Creative Studies No-Touching Zone, Chris Hyndman, exhibition & artist talk
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No-Touching Zone, Painting in the Age of Digital Saturation, panel discussion with Chris Hyndman, visiting artist; Matthew Biro, art history; Beverly Fishman, Cranbrook Academy of Art; Alison Gass, Broad Art Museum; Lance Winn, University of Delaware; and Amanda Krugliak, Institute for the Humanities.
Digital Currents
Humanities scholarship in and on digital environments
Martha Nell Smith, University of Maryland, College Park: “Time for a Thaw: Visibility, Exclusion, and Futures of Digital Humanities,” Digital Environments Research Series Ryan Cordell, Northeastern University, “How Not to Teach Digital Humanities,” Digital Pedagogy Series Claire Zimmerman, University of Michigan, “The Labors of Albert Kahn,” Digital Environments Research Series Anita Gonzalez, University of Michigan, “Digital Play: Mapping Journeys and Digitizing Stories,” Digital Environments Research Series Tanya Clement, University of Texas, Austin, 2014 Jill S. Harris Memorial Lecture: “A Brief History, A Few Principles, and Some Suggestions for Developing a Digital Humanities Undergraduate Curriculum,” Digital Pedagogy Series Jessica Marie Johnson, Michigan State University, “Markup the Bodies: African Diaspora, Ph.D. and Blogging Slavery as Radical Media,” Digital Environments Research Series Ted Striphas, Indiana University, “Algorithmic Culture,” Digital Environments Research Series
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T. Mills Kelly, George Mason University, “Exploring, Remixing, Analyzing: Teaching History with Digital Media, Digital Pedagogy Series
Being Nuclear, a Conversation with Gabrielle Hecht, history, and Elizabeth Roberts, anthropology
Mary Gray, Indiana University; Lisa Nakamura, University of Michigan; and Molly Wright Steenson, University of Wisconsin; Analytics, Architectures, & Archives mini-conference Lisa Spiro, Rice University, “Digital Pedagogy in Practice,” Digital Pedagogy Series
Dear Edward: Family Footprints, a Conversation with Paul Weinberg, University of Cape Town, and Daniel Herwitz, history of art, philosophy, comparative literature, and art and design
Laura Aull, Wake Forest University, “Using Computer-Based Tools to Analyze Academic Writing with Students,” Digital Pedagogy Series
Darktown Follies, a Poetry Reading by Amaud Jamaul Johnson, University of Wisconsin, Madison
Author’s Forum
The Imperative of Integration, a Conversation with Elizabeth Anderson, philosophy and women’s studies, and Elizabeth Hinton, Afroamerican and African studies
A series on books and ideas presented in collaboration with the University Library, Ann Arbor Book Festival, and Great Lakes Literary Arts Center
Elias Khoury, novelist, in conversation, in Arabic, with Anton Shammas
Girls I Know, a Conversation with Douglas Trevor, English, and Eileen Pollack, English From Stone to Flesh: A Short History of the Buddha, a Conversation with Donald Lopez, Asian languages and cultures, and Bill Zirinsky, Crazy Wisdom Bookstore The Cineaste: Poems, a Conversation with A. Van Jordan, English, and Peter Ho Davies, English Primates, a Conversation with Jim Ottaviani, M Library, and John Mitani, anthropology
Akvavit Theatre performs a staged reading of Kristina Lugn’s play Ruth and Roger
Exploring the reception of Greek and Roman antiquity in different historical, critical, and creative contexts
Objects as Texts
Anselm Kiefer, a Conversation with Matthew Biro, history of art, and Silke-Maria Weineck, German Translation for Vulnerable Times: Virgil’s Aeneid, a Reading and Discussion with Translator Sarah Ruden
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Coming Out Swiss: In Search of Heidi, Chocolate and my Other Self, a Conversation with Anne Herrmann, professor emerita of women’s studies and English, and Helmut Puff, German
Contexts for Classics
Hoda Barakat, novelist, in conversation, in Arabic, with Anton Shammas, Near Eastern studies
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Terms of Inclusion: Black Intellectuals in Twentieth-Century Brazil, a Conversation with Paulina Alberto, history and romance languages and literatures, and Tiya Miles, Afroamerican and African studies
Classicisms in the Black Atlantic Objects as Stage: Dancing the Façade of Angell Hall CfC-CTI Classical Receptions Workshop
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Early Modern Conversions
Rethinking early modern Europe as an “age of conversion”
“Mindful Bodies: Tools of Transformation in Early Modern England,” Evelyn B. Tribble, University of Otago, New Zealand
FellowSpeak
Ongoing exchange with our fellows past and present
“[Polish] Gentiles doing Jewish stuff... and the Jews who love/hate them,” Erica Lehrer, Concordia University, Canada; and Magdalena Waligórska, University of Bremen, Germany “Skirmishes with the MacroPhenomenal,” Jason Young, architecture “The Labors of Albert Kahn,” Claire Zimmerman, architecture “Lives of the Great Languages: Cosmopolitan languages in the pre-modern Mediterranean,” Karla Mallette, Romance languages & literatures “Witchcraft, Justice, Human Rights: Current Concerns and African Examples,” Adam Ashforth, Afroamerican and African studies “’My Dream:’ An Intermedial Turn in Urban Aesthetics and Chinese Cosmopolitanism,” Yan Haiping, Shanghai Jiaotong University, China “Current Projects,” Sir Michael Boyd “What’s in a Hopi Name?” Peter Whiteley, Richard Gilder Graduate School “The Future of a Very Old Name?” Francois Hartog, School of Advanced Studies in Social Sciences, France
“Democratic Representation and the Constituency Paradox,” Lisa Disch, political science and women’s studies “’My Dream:’ An Intermedial Turn in Urban Aesthetics and Chinese Cosmopolitanism,” Haiping Yang, Shanghai Jiaotong University
Major Lectures 2014 Jill S. Harris Memorial Lecture: Tanya Clement, University of Texas, Austin, “A Brief History, A Few Principles, and Some Suggestions for Developing a Digital Humanities Undergraduate Curriculum,” Digital Pedagogy Series 2014 Marc & Constance Jacobson Lecture: Katherine Boo, The New Yorker, “Behind the Beautiful Forevers: An Evening with Katherine Boo”
Publishing Practice Series Discussions and workshops to help faculty and graduate students successfully navigate the changing landscape of scholarly publishing. Presented in collaboration with Michigan Publishing.
“New Directions at Michigan Publishing,” Paul Courant, Aaron McCollough, and Sarah Lippincott, Michigan Publishing “Building Your Online Identity,” Jonathan McGlone, Michigan Publishing “Starting and Sustaining a Journal,” Rebecca Welzenbach, Michigan Publishing “Copyright for Humanists,” Kristina Eden, Michigan Publishing
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IN IT TI IA V ES Mini Grants The Institute for the Humanities co-sponsors a wide variety of faculty and student projects—in the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts as well as the broader university—which serve to strengthen the intellectual and cultural life on campus and beyond. All of the events we fund have a component open to the public and support our mission to deepen synergies between the humanities, the arts, and other regions of the university; to carry forward the heritage of the humanities; and to bring the voices of the humanities to public life. To view the list of the projects supported in 2013–14, visit www.lsa.umich.edu/humanities/ whatwefund/cosponsorships. Contexts for Classics In the fall of 2013, the Institute for the Humanities began its affiliation with Contexts for Classics (CFC), an interdepartmental faculty initiative founded in 2000 that aims to rethink the discipline(s) of classical studies from various critical, historical, and pedagogical perspectives. CFC sponsors several events annually and emphasizes curricular offerings across the university that explore the relationship between antiquity and modernity and interrogate the construction of a classical ideal. Co-sponsors include the College of Literature, Science and the Arts; the Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studies; the Department of Classical Studies; the Department of Comparative Literature; and the Program in Modern Greek. Humanities Without Walls Humanities Without Walls is an extensive consortium of fifteen humanities institutes in the Midwest and beyond which aims to create new avenues for collaborative research, teaching, and the production of scholarship in the humanities, forging and sustaining areas of inquiry that cannot be created or maintained without cross-institutional cooperation leveraging the strengths of multiple distinctive campuses. The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation awarded $3 million to the Illinois Program for Research
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in the Humanities (IPRH) at the University of Illinois at Urbana - Champaign to fund the first two years. The grant, led by IPRH Director and Principal Investigator Dianne Harris, will make possible two initiatives: one supports the development of summer workshops for pre-doctoral students in the humanities who intend to pursue careers outside the academy; a second initiative will fund cross-institutional teams of faculty and graduate students pursuing research that focuses on “The Global Midwest.” Early Modern Conversions Early Modern Conversions is a new, multi-disciplinary project with sites for research at universities around the world. U-M is one of the funded sites for primary research. The goal of the project is to rethink early modern Europe as an “age of conversion” and to develop a historical understanding of conversion that will address corporeal, sexual, epistemological, psychological, trans-human, political, and spiritual kinds of transformation. A grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada will provide the primary funding for the five-year project, including support for graduate student research. McGill University in Montreal is the home of the project, which will be directed by Professor Paul Yachnin. Support for Undergraduate Study Abroad The Institute for the Humanities has established a partnership with the Program in International and Comparative Studies to provide scholarship support for undergraduate internships and study abroad opportunities as well as research grants. Scholarships range from $500 to $3,500 for a total of $20,000 in annual scholarship support.
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S U P P O R T
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he Institute for the Humanities is a center for innovative, collaborative study in the humanities and arts. To facilitate scholarly inquiry and communication, the institute provides year-long research fellowships for Michigan faculty and graduate students and short-term fellowships for visiting scholars and artists who come from around the world. Throughout the year, several series of events showcase works-in-progress and catalyze interdisciplinary exchange around emergent areas of humanities scholarship. The Hub series sponsors four-six curated exhibitions in the art gallery and expands the reach of art practice and performance to the larger university community and the public. Drawing on Michigan’s remarkable resources, we seek to become a national leader in advocating for the humanities in higher education and serve as a national and international center for scholarly research in the humanities and creative work in the arts. By engaging with the institute through your gifts, you directly support the university and the institute in our mission to: ◆ Engage and address the world as a premier institute that boldly integrates the humanities with the arts. ◆ Stand at the forefront of public outreach and service through the humanities and arts. ◆ Maximize scholarly impact by funding precious time and opportunities for Michigan’s best emerging scholars. ◆ Encourage and promote cutting-edge research across the humanities and the arts. Please support the Institute for the Humanities generously as together we make a profound and continuing difference in our university and the world.
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Ways to Help Us Achieve our Aims We would be glad to talk with you about funding—fully or partially—any of the items below. Name the Art Gallery The institute’s museum-quality gallery has gained national attention for the high quality of its four-six curated shows mounted annually. An endowment to name the gallery would ensure that the institute will continue the tradition of superb exhibitions that showcase the synergies between the work of humanities scholars and creative artists. It will also enable the institute to expand outreach to undergraduate students and the general public and to multiply the sites of curation across campus and in digital environments. Support Digital Humanities Innovation One of the major shifts in how humanists do their work is in the area of digitally assisted research—from the level of multimedia scholarly composition and communication to the mining of big data for the study of large-scale phenomena. The institute aims to be an incubator for the conceptualization and implementation of collaborative projects in and on digital environments. Through this start-up fund, the institute will seed new projects, help facilitate collaborative teams of faculty and students, and prepare teams to seek outside funding. The institute will also use these funds to pilot an undergraduate “digital humanities corps.” Endow a Humanities and Public Policy Post-Doctoral Fellowship The institute would like to provide a one-year fellowship for a humanist working in a public policy arena—such as public policy and built environments, the expressive life, education policy, language policy, life-long learning and health, and social media and public policy.
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The Public Policy Fellow will teach a graduate course in his/her area of expertise and advise graduate students on public policy projects. Humanities in the World Initiative This initiative will fund collaborative projects with scholars and graduate students around the region, the nation, and the world. Support will be used to bring a scholar in the humanities to Michigan from abroad to teach for a semester and to contribute to scholarly initiatives involving transnational collaboration or scholarly initiatives on transnational formations. Funding will also be used to underwrite innovative global conferences/events on humanities contributions to the crucial issues of our times. Build the Institute’s Strategic Fund Gifts to the Strategic Fund will provide unique opportunities to try new initiatives, experiment with new audiences, and infuse the institute with new programming ideas. Possible initiatives may include traveling humanities salons, innovative course development, production of multi-media white papers on public policy issues, and hands-on faculty development in new modes of scholarly communication.
How to Give One of the easiest ways to support the humanities is through an outright gift to the Institute for the Humanities. The University of Michigan makes giving such gifts very easy through a number of methods, including: ◆ Credit card, check, cash wire transfer. ◆ A secure gift either through the U-M Development website (http://leadersandbest.umich.edu/find/#/give/basket/ fund/307128) or by mailing appropriate documentation with assistance from the institute’s development officer Jennifer Howard (see below).
◆ Gifts in Kind: You may donate items of personal property or physical assets that may be of value to the institute, such as books, works of art, etc. Please check with the development officer or the director of the institute for what kind of items are of best value to the institute. ◆ Payroll deduction for U-M faculty and staff. Endowments The Institute for the Humanities seeks support for programs that foster the humanities among the U-M campus community as well as for residents of Michigan and beyond. You can create a lasting fund in your name or in honor or memory of someone you love and respect by establishing an endowment at the University of Michigan, benefiting the institute. Gifts may also be given to any existing endowment. Endowments may be created through outright or deferred gifts. The institute’s development officer can help you structure an endowment gift that best fits your philanthropic and financial goals. All donors are recognized by U-M; the College of Literature, Arts & Sciences; and the Institute for the Humanities. Estate and Deferred Gifts The Institute for the Humanities continues to enrich and stimulate new generations of fellows. Through an estate bequest or deferred gift you can embrace future generations. Planned gifts provide many unique benefits that may reduce your estate and income taxes and help you avoid capital gains. The institute’s development officer can provide you and/or your financial advisors with the assistance necessary to explore and formulate a planned gift to the institute. To discuss your gift in more detail please contact us at humin@umich.edu, 734-936-3518 or contact the institute’s development officer Jennifer Howard, LSA Development, 734-6156239 or jhow@umich.edu.
◆ Securities: A gift of securities can help you receive a valuable tax deduction and avoid capital gains tax. ◆ Matching Gifts: You can leverage your gift to the institute with a matching gift from your employer (check with the institute’s development officer or ask your employer if your company offers a match).
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Staff Doretha Coval, fellows coordinator Stephanie Harrell, communications specialist Amanda Krugliak, curator Sidonie Smith, director Sheri Sytsema-Geiger, administrative manager Patrick Tonks, assistant director Institute for the Humanities Board of Visitors David Arch, Oak Brook, IL James Foster, chair, Pittsburgh, PA Willard Fraumann, Chicago, IL Paul Freehling, Chicago, IL Eugene Grant, Mamaroneck, NY Louise Holland, Winnetka, IL Marc Jacobson, Norfolk, VA Mary Kidder, New Albany, OH Richard Mayer, Winnetka, IL Bennett Root, Jr., Pasadena, CA William & Marjorie Sandy, Bloomfield Hills, MI Institute for the Humanities Executive Committee Sara Blair, associate dean, English Frieda Ekotto, French, comparative literature, Afroamerican and African studies Susan Juster, history Valerie Kivelson, history Keith Mitnick, architecture Lisa Nakamura, American culture, screen arts Alex Potts, history of art Derek Collins, ex officio; associate dean, humanities; classical studies Sidonie Smith, ex officio; Institute for the Humanities
Nondiscrimination Policy Statement The University of Michigan, as an equal opportunity/affirmative action employer, complies with all applicable federal and state laws regarding nondiscrimination and affirmative action. The University of Michigan is committed to a policy of equal opportunity for all persons and does not discriminate on the basis of race, color, national origin, age, marital status, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, disability, religion, height, weight, or veteran status in employment, educational programs and activities, and admissions. Inquiries or complaints may be addressed to the Senior Director for Institutional Equity, and Title IX/Section 504/ ADA Coordinator, Office of Institutional Equity, 2072 Administrative Services Building, Ann Arbor, Michigan 48109-1432, 734-763-0235, TTY 734-647-1388. For other University of Michigan information call 734-764-1817. The Regents of the University of Michigan Mark J. Bernstein, Ann Arbor Julia Donovan Darlow, Ann Arbor Laurence B. Deitch, Bingham Farms Shauna Ryder Diggs, Grosse Pointe Denise Ilitch, Bingham Farms Andrea Fischer Newman, Ann Arbor Andrew C. Richner, Grosse Pointe Park Katherine E. White, Ann Arbor Mary Sue Coleman, ex officio
Acknowledgements Savitski Design, graphic designer
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