Institute for the Humanities 2017-18 Annual Report by University of Michigan Institute for the Humanities

INSTITUTE FOR THE HUMANITIES Annual Report

20 17

20 18

TABLE OF CONTENTS Letter from the Director

4-5

Undergraduate Student Engagement

6-9

Fellows

10-17

Events

18-21

Gallery

22-25

Initiatives

26-27

Support

28-29

LETTER

dear friends,

from the director

My first year as director of the Institute for the Humanities has flown by! And it is a great pleasure to look back at the events of the year, to recall the stimulating conversations that structured our weekly Fellows Seminars, and to recognize the intellectual and financial generosity of the institute’s many supporters. 2017-18 was the institute’s year of “Archives and Futures.” Our goal was to examine archival practices past, present and future, and to expand our understandings of archives while looking ahead to the future stories they may tell. We had occasions to hear U-M colleagues speak about their own archival work in our bi-weekly FellowSpeak, where they described specific archives—university collections, architectural archives, dance archives, artifacts from the ancient city of Karanis, and lessons from Gandhi’s India.

They also explored the nature of archives after the digital turn, asked whether a compendium can be an archive, and whether ideology obscures the black conservative archive. A series of faculty panel discussions suggested the ways in which archives can speak about sexual identities, practices; offered best practices for archiving the materials of a life; and debated how we archive objects in the present. In our annual Marc and Constance Jacobson Lecture, Professor Shamil Jeppie from the University of Cape Town spoke on the collection and preservation of medieval and early modern manuscripts in the archives of Timbuktu, expanding our consideration of what archives and archival practices can tell us with a focus on knowledge production in pre-modern Africa. A lively series of exhibitions in our gallery and pop-up exhibitions in the Osterman Common Room pushed us to think further about making and using archives, and about the perspectives that archives record.

the year brought artist Chico MacMurtrie to Ann Arbor to collaborate with a team of students to build “Border Crossers.” You can read more about that project on pages 9 and 24 of this report.

This year we have devoted significant effort to developing opportunities and programs for undergraduate students, which you can read about on pg. 6 of this report. Our Student Engagement Group initiated one of our most successful events of the year when they selected author Yaa Gyasi to give the annual Jill S. Harris Lecture. In February an eager audience filled Rackham Auditorium to hear Gyasi interviewed by U-M professors Garav Desai and Aida Hussen-Levy. A lively question-and-answer period followed and a book signing ended the evening.

A group of nine faculty and eight graduate student fellows brought additional intellectual and creative energy to the institute this year. Over the course of the year, our fellows completed books, articles, dissertations, and compositions, and they met to share their work in intense and engaged weekly seminars. One of our fellows reported that the institute fellowship “confirmed the value of scholarly exchange outside my department”; another described the weekly seminar as offering “a much richer concept of the profession in its long life, thanks to the representation of graduate students, junior faculty, mid-career faculty, and senior faculty.” In 2018 we are implementing a new summer term fellowship session, during which eight lecturer and tenure-track faculty will take

Our gallery has also been an important site of engagement for students this year. A series of exhibitions and artist talks expanded and enriched our consideration of archives and futures, inviting our community to think about objects, collection, and classification; history and artistic legacy; violence and commemoration; ancestral objects and abstraction. Our most ambitious project of

up residence at the institute for six weeks of research, writing, and exchange. We look forward to a lively series of events in 2018-19, when our theme will be “Humanities and Environments.” A group of eight faculty fellows and eight graduate student fellows will be in residence, and a postdoctoral scholar and a series of visitors will join what will surely be a vibrant intellectual community. Everything we do depends on the intellectual engagement of our community and the generosity of our donors, and I remain deeply grateful for both. –Peggy McCracken, Director, Institute for the Humanities, Mary Fair Croushore Professor of the Humanities

undergraduate STUDENT 32.4K

NUMBER OF TIMES OUR VIDEOS HAVE BEEN VIEWED ON YOUTUBE

Visiting artist Chico MacMurtrie and undergraduate student GaYeon Ji work on the Border Crossers project at Michigan Engineeringâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Wilson Student Team Project Center on North Campus. Photo: Robyn Han

The Institute for the Humanities has long been committed to engaging undergraduate students in creative and critical thinking about humanistic subjects. Connecting students with the work of the institute and its faculty, visitors, and artists offers firsthand opportunities to gain new insights about the world we live in, and to imagine the future. This year, thanks to the generous support of the Edna Balz Lacy Fund and the Leonard and Eileen Newman Fund, we expanded our undergraduate programming in new and exciting ways, leading to lively conversations and interactions exploring and interpreting the human experience. UNDERGRADUATE ENGAGEMENT GROUP The Humanities Institute Undergraduate Engagement Group works to increase student awareness and understanding of the humanities on campus.This year we initiated regular guest speakers at the monthly meetings to facilitate more interaction between students and humanist scholars. Presenters included our director, Peggy McCracken, who talked to the students about her vision for the institute; Kristin Hass, American culture professor and director of the U-M Humanities Collaboratory, who discussed her own research and the new High Stakes Culture series; and Shamil Jeppie, visiting professor from the University of Cape Town, who discussed his experience during apartheid and the varied and sometimes questionable role of humanists during that time. The group participated in institute projects, including attending events, live tweeting, and promoting our activities via our social media channels. They also provided invaluable advice on how to increase our engagement with other undergraduate students.

“WORKING ON SOLVING ALL THESE PROBLEMS AND BRINGING THIS BORDER CROSSER TO LIFE WITH THE TEAM WAS A TREMENDOUSLY INVALUABLE AND INSPIRING EXPERIENCE. IT CHANGED MY WAY OF THINKING ABOUT PROBLEMS TO SEE THEM AS RELATIVELY SMALL OBSTACLES TO OVERCOME NO MATTER THEIR INITIAL APPEARANCE.” – MAITE IRIBARREN, STAMPS UNDERGRADUATE STUDENT

Jill S. Harris Visiting Fellow Yaa Gyasi and undergraduate students. Photo: Stephanie Harrell

(American culture), Kristin Hass (American culture) and Scotti Parrish (English) with moderator Angela Dillard (Afroamerican and African studies) and explored white nationalist movements and Confederate monuments, who built those monuments and why, and whether a new understanding of history should shape the way we interpret monuments. Both High Stakes Culture events were standing-room only, with stimulating and challenging conversations between students and the faculty panelists.

HIGH STAKES CULTURE High Stakes Culture is a new series, geared toward undergraduate students, that brings humanities perspectives to bear on current debates. The series, presented in partnership with the U-M Humanities Collaboratory, debuted with “What Does it Mean to Take a Knee?” featuring U-M faculty Angela Dillard (Afroamerican and African studies and Residential College), Matthew Countryman (history and American culture), Mark Clague (music), and Kristin Hass (American culture) who discussed the history of sports and patriotism, standing for the national anthem, and the question of who gets to decide what symbols deserve respect and what counts as a gesture of respect.

JILL S. HARRIS MEMORIAL LECTURE, HOMEGOING: A CONVERSATION WITH YAA GYASI The Jill S. Harris Memorial fund brings a distinguished visitor to campus each year who will appeal to undergraduates interested in the humanities and the arts. Our undergraduate engagement group selected

The second event, “Why Monuments? Why Now?” featured Walter Johnson (history and African American studies, Harvard University), Matthew Countryman 8

this year’s lecturer, Yaa Gyasi, a millennial writer born in Ghana and raised in Alabama. Her award-winning debut novel Homegoing follows the parallel paths of two halfsisters and their descendants through eight generations, from the Gold Coast to the plantations of Mississippi, from the American Civil War to Jazz Age Harlem. Gyasi arrived in Ann Arbor in time to have lunch with a dozen undergraduate students from our engagement group as well as students from English 285 in which Gyasi’s novel was assigned. The students enjoyed a lively conversation with Gyasi, asking insightful questions about her writing process, characters, and research methods. Homegoing was also selected as the 2018 Book of the Year by Washtenaw Reads, which contributed to the community excitement leading up to the packed event at Rackham Auditorium.

1000+

NUMBER OF PEOPLE WHO ATTENDED THE JILL S. HARRIS MEMORIAL LECTURE BY YAA GYASI

course of a five-week intensive class during which McMurtrie instructed a diverse group of undergraduate students. The team included programmers to solve design challenges, artists for fabrication, and physicists and engineers working on creative structural solutions. Through the creation process, the project investigated constructed entities, curiously exploring what lies on the other side of national, architectural, or environmental borders. Institutionally, the project represented the challenges of reaching across our own campus borders, as the Institute for the Humanities, U-M Museum of Art, Michigan Robotics, Michigan Engineering, School of Information, Penny Stamps Speaker Series, Stamps School of Art and Design, and ArtsEngine all collaborated to make Border Crossers possible.

BORDER CROSSERS PROJECT WITH CHICO MACMURTRIE Students across campus—from humanities, engineering, art and design, and information— worked with Institute for the Humanities visiting artist Chico MacMurtrie during winter semester 2018 to plan, build, and launch a 40-foot robotic sculpture. MacMurtrie, an award-winning artist internationally renowned for making large-scale robotic sculpture, is the artistic director of Amorphic Robot Works in Brooklyn, NY. The project, titled Border Crossers, came to life over the 9

In early March, the Border Crosser—a robotic inflatable arm designed to reach several stories high and bend over a barrier to touch on the other side—was driven by an autonomous vehicle from North Campus to Central Campus, stopping in front of the U-M Museum of Art. A crowd gathered, and after several adjustments and false starts, the Border Crosser rose several stories high, symbolizing, as project curator Amanda Krugliak explained, the humanities in action and the empowerment that can be achieved through working together, overcoming obstacles and divides, and discovering creative solutions. OPEN-MIC POETRY READING In celebration of National Poetry Month and student poets at U-M, Laura Kasischke, U-M poet and 2017-18 Hunting Family Faculty Fellow, organized an open-mic reading featuring U-M undergraduate students reading their original poetry. All undergraduates were invited, and students from across the university, including the Residential College, the School of Information, and Ross School of Business, turned out to read and support their peers.

FELLOWS

PAMELA BRANDWEIN

HELMUT STERN FELLOW, PROFESSOR OF POLITICAL SCIENCE “Antislavery and the Formation of American Capitalist Democracy”

faculty MICHAEL AWKWARD

JOHN RICH FELLOW, PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH AND AFROAMERICAN AND AFRICAN STUDIES “A Horribly Mangled Monstrosity: Disfiguring/ Refiguring Black American Masculinity after Emmett Till”

Michael Awkward

Pamela Brandwein

This project examines struggles within black American expressive culture over the meanings and resonances of Emmett Till. Placing at its center his mother’s comment that, in proposed and published representations, her lynched fourteen-year-old son is often transformed into a contemptible figure whom she neither recognizes nor would let into her house, this project focuses on contestations over depictions of Till and black American boys murdered or psychologically mangled in his wake by individuals perceived to be agents of white racism. Such depictions—by creative writers, film documentarians, and visual artists—contend with and contribute to the challenges of rendering their oft-tragic stories when the truth concerning the lives of black male youth from Till to Mike Brown and Jordan Davis, as well as the meanings of their demises, remains frustratingly elusive.

This project reopens an old scholarly question: what is the relationship between antislavery and capitalism? Once drawing wide attention from scholars and addressing the problem of slavery in western political culture, the antislavery/ capitalism question as it relates to the United States has (mostly) been settled for decades. Across the disciplines, a conventional wisdom has circulated in which the free labor antislavery of Lincoln and the Republican Party is cast as an incipient language of class criticism embedded in pre-modern economic conditions. Upending the standard wisdom, this project puts in its place an alternative. Drawing on new political, economic, and gender history and using new source materials pertaining to antislavery discourse and to the reception of the slave revolt led by Toussaint L’Ouverture in Saint Dominique, this project focuses on discursive competition within the antislavery movement over the problem with slavery as it relates to labor. Pitting free labor antislavery (and its embrace of the northern market system) against “labor movement” antislavery (and its apprehension about the market system), this long running antebellum dispute is either missed or seen inchoately across multiple literatures in U.S. history, law, politics, and political culture. Newly contextualizing free labor antislavery—in fact, unified by new attention to its language and economic contexts, both domestic and transatlantic—the study conceptualizes free labor antislavery as a language of modern capitalism that was part and parcel of an intercontinental circulation of ideas, languages, and texts. On offer is an account of the discursive processes

associated with the formation of America’s distinctive brand of capitalist democracy. At stake is our understanding of the rise and establishment of a distinction between the “commodification of laborers” (chattel slavery) and the “commodification of labor power” (wage labor) as opposite things—slavery and freedom. The project revitalizes class terms in treating political events of the 1820s-1860s but does not offer a materialist account. Instead it combines levels of analysis and unites attention to race, class, and gender relations.

PAR CASSEL

RICHARD AND LILLIAN IVES FELLOW, ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF HISTORY “Sovereignty in China: The Careers of a Concept” Few concepts in both Chinese history and contemporary affairs are as overdetermined and overused as the idea of “sovereignty,” an idea that was purportedly enshrined in the Treaties of Westphalia (1648) and then disseminated to East Asia and the non-European world through gunboat diplomacy, missionaries, and manuals of international law. In Chinese historiography, “sovereignty” is often employed as a placeholder for a number of related, yet discrete, ideas of state power, such as the legitimacy or authenticity of a given Chinese government, the undisputed authority of a Chinese government to regulate its internal affairs without outside interference, the right of a Chinese government to exercise unchallenged domination in industry, commerce and transportation, or quite simply the undisputed authority of the ruling party in a one-party state. As a result, the idea of sovereignty in Chinese history has become increasingly unmoored from the original context in which it was formulated and often obscures as much as it explains our understanding the

Par Cassel

Aileen Das

emergence of the modern Chinese state. This project explores how the concept of sovereignty entered into Chinese political discourse in the late seventeenth century and demonstrates how it was constantly renegotiated to serve different nation-building and state-building projects in the longue durée of modern Chinese history.

AILEEN DAS

CHARLES P. BRAUER FELLOW, ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF CLASSICAL STUDIES “Classical and Medieval Traditions of Transdisciplinary: Plato’s Timaeus in Arabic” Offering a creation account of everything in the cosmos, Plato’s Timaeus was an authoritative text in many disciplines (e.g. astronomy, medicine, music, and mathematics) in the pre-modern period. This project argues that Plato outlines in the dialogue a “transdisciplinary” conception of knowledge, which views the disciplines as mutually dependent. It will examine how ancient and medieval

philosophers, who held a pyramidal vision of knowledge, criticized the Timaeus for subverting traditional disciplinary boundaries. In particular, the project will focus on the medieval Arabic reception of Plato’s work, as it was particularly polarizing due to its mode of transmission. Lacking a complete Arabic translation of the Timaeus, medieval Islamicate thinkers depended on Arabic translations of later Greek explanations of the dialogue, especially those by the Greek physician Galen of Pergamum (d. c. 217). As this project will reveal, several authors attacked Galen’s interpretations of the Timaeus because he invokes this text to argue for the pertinence of medicine to philosophy. Thus, the project will highlight the responses of different Arabic authors to Galen’s use of the dialogue’s blurring of the cosmic and human bodies to blur the disciplinary parameters of philosophy and medicine.

ANITA GONZALEZ

HUNTING FAMILY FELLOW, PROFESSOR OF THEATRE AND DRAMA “Shipping Out: Transatlantic Maritime Performance and Ethnic Cultural Exchange” This book manuscript investigates maritime performance. Prior to 1950, when air travel became prevalent, maritime highways were the primary way in which global populations migrated and experienced the world. While humanities scholars tend to focus on ports and land-based economic and social systems, first encounters of races and cultures, particularly between 1821 and the middle of the twentieth century, happened within maritime spaces. The research compares and contrasts these early maritime performance sites with contemporary cruise ports where Caribbean residents intermingle with North American and European tourists through cultural performances and economic transactions. Caribbean ports and cruise ship personnel regularly interact with passengers during extended sailings, participating in intercultural performance dialogues often expressed through music and dance exchanges that challenge identity associations. The project is interdisciplinary because its research methodologies intersect with a variety of subject areas: ethnic studies, navigation and mapping studies, historical oceanography, migration studies, Caribbean economics, and of course performance studies.

LAURA KASISCHKE

HUNTING FAMILY FELLOW, PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE “The Time Machine: A Book Length Poem” The Time Machine will be a book-length poem, the concerns of which are primarily cultural and domestic, and, therefore, by necessity, political. Its focus will be on the roles that girls and women have been asked to play, and have opted

to play, from the previous century to the present one. The first section, for instance, is a piece about stenography, a secretarial skill that was once a required course for high school females, and which has since been largely forgotten. In future sections, Kasischke will write further about shifting female roles, and also about violence as it relates to feminine attributes and attitudes that have been encouraged, and the ways that this violence has metamorphosed as women’s roles have changed. The book contains a “true crime” section, subtitled “I was Bonnie & Clyde.” Some of its pieces are directly related to the lives and deaths of Bonnie and Clyde; others more generally explore sexuality, violence, dangerous romantic attractions, and the promotion of certain forms of self-destructive behavior in relationships, as suggested to girls through books, movies, magazines, and by example through the generations. The Time Machine will be a chorus of many voices, and a compilation of many forms.

DOUGLAS NORTHROP

HELMUT STERN FELLOW, PROFESSOR OF NEAR EASTERN STUDIES AND HISTORY “Four Days That Shook the World: Earthquakes and Empire Along the Eurasian Frontier

Anita Gonzalez

Douglas Northrop

RUBY TAPIA

STEELCASE FELLOW, ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH AND WOMEN’S STUDIES “The Camera in the Cage: Prison Photography and the Abject Sentimentality of the Exception”

ALEXANDRA MURPHY

HELMUT STERN FELLOW, ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF SOCIOLOGY “When the Sidewalks End: Poverty & Race in an American Suburb” Two demographic shifts are transforming the relationship between race, class, and space in the twenty-first-century American metropolis: the migration of African Americans to the suburbs and the suburbanization of poverty. This book project investigates the implications of these shifts for the everyday lives of low income suburban residents, how suburban communities are adapting to the demographic and economic transitions they are experiencing, and how theories of urban poverty translate to the suburbs. To do so Murphy draws on threeand-a-half years of ethnographic fieldwork in one suburb as well as interviews, archival materials, and spatial analysis. 12

Disasters can bring hidden histories to light. Northrop’s project uses a collection of traumatic events—major earthquakes that struck urban centers of the Russo-Soviet empire—to gain a fresh perspective on the Central Eurasian past. He hopes to use this case-study approach to write a new kind of imperial history, one that intermingles environmental, cultural, colonial, and technological approaches.

Laura Kasischke

Ruby Tapia

Alexandra Murphy

Magdalena Zaborowska

Since its invention in the mid-nineteenth century, photography’s unique capacity to capture “the criminal” in mug shots, prison identification photographs, and pseudo-scientific visual classificatory systems has made it an indispensable technology of social differentiation, control, and targeted dehumanization. The Camera in the Cage builds upon and departs from histories and theories of photography that illuminate the inextricable connections between photographic and carceral technologies to examine the affective politics of photographs framed in the light of desired—or in some cases, existing—prison reform efforts. She argues that these politics can unwittingly buttress punitive technologies of the prison through constructions of “exceptional,” undeservingly incarcerated subjects, extending the differentiating and dehumanizing work of carceral visualities within and through distinctly sentimental frames. Too often, visual cultures of the prison that center exceptional subjects 13

in order to humanize them reinscribe and reinforce carceral epistemologies by highlighting grave “miscarriages” of a system that otherwise effectively metes out justice. Tapia argues that this approach misrecognizes the structural injustices that uphold the modern prison, invests in it as a justly retributive institution, and falsely constructs witnesses to its exceptional “blunders” as fundamentally moral, themselves.

MAGDALENA ZABOROWSKA

JOHN RICH FELLOW, PROFESSOR OF AMERICAN CULTURE AND AFROAMERICAN AND AFRICAN STUDIES “Archiving James Baldwin’s House: Digital Writer’s Museum, Chez Baldwin in St. Paul-de-Vence, France” “Archiving James Baldwin’s House” is a digital humanities project centering on the famous Civil Rights Movement activist, black queer intellectual who lived internationally, and one of the most important twentieth-century American writers. Limited access to his papers, no authorial sites in the United States, and scarce archives make Baldwin challenging to study and teach, while recent resurgence of interest in his life and oeuvre amplify the timeliness of this project. A digital companion to Zaborowska’s book, Me and My House: James Baldwin and Black Domesticity (Duke UP, 2018), “Archiving” will document and make accessible to students, researchers, and fans Baldwin’s last residence, “Chez Baldwin,” in St. Paul-de-Vence in France, where he spent his last sixteen years and where he created his most enduring household. Having investigated and documented the structure in 2000, when the house was still filled with the writer’s possessions, Zaborowska returned there in 2014, after it had been lost to developers, just before its partial demolition, and will finalize her research there this summer. Studying an archive of objects salvaged from the house, she deploys Toni Morrison’s concept of “literary archeology,” where memory, imagination, and language create continuities in black lives past and present.

graduate students ANOFF NICHOLAS COBBLAH

RICHARD & LILLIAN IVES GRADUATE FELLOW, ENGLISH “The Work of Scientific Play in Nineteenth-Century Britain” Histories of nineteenth-century British science have typically focused on the professionalization of the sciences, emphasizing that work was increasingly seen as an “epistemic virtue,” necessary for the production of objective knowledge. Playfulness, in contrast, was often associated with amateurish or insignificant science. But while it is true that some writers certainly questioned play’s epistemological (and moral) value, scientific play persisted: in popular “rational recreation” texts, in scientists’ bacchanalian social clubs, in scientists’ nonsensical poetry, and in the metaphors and wordplay scientists utilized in their publications. Joining a number of recent works which draw attention to the role of play in the nineteenth century, this project argues that scientific recreations were important to the construction of professional science in ways which still influence our expectations of the sciences today. In the writing of scientists like Charles Darwin and James Clerk Maxwell, popularizers of science such as John Ayrton Paris, and writers of fiction such as Samuel Butler and Arthur Conan Doyle, one can see that the professionalization of science meant not the complete abjection of play, but rather persistent attempts to find new places for play in the scientific process.

JAMES HAMMOND

JAMES WINN GRADUATE FELLOW, ENGLISH “Composing Eugenics: Race and Ability in the History of Writing assessment, 1869-1938” Despite showing that writing assessment has long been a site of race discrimination, scholars have yet to produce a study tracing this discrimination to eugenic ideology. Targeting this critical gap, “Composing Eugenics” interrogates how ideas about “writing” and how to assess it were influenced by emerging eugenic ideas and ideals between 1869 and 1938—a formative period for the emergence of writing assessment in the United States. This project sheds new light on the eugenics-era origins of enduring writing assessment-related inequalities by drawing on data from nine archival sites relevant to key developments/actors in writing assessment history. These documents suggest that for late nineteenth/early twentieth-century educators, ideas about writing quality were often shaped by the eugenic belief that departures from (white) “standard” language marked mental deviance and inferiority. Writing was imagined as a technology for externalizing otherwise invisible mental states, rendering the mind legible—a text to be read and corrected. Pruning out “errors” on the page was imagined as a means of remediating students’ minds and promoting social progress.

Anoff Nicholas Cobblah

Benedito Luis Machava

BENEDITO LUIS MACHAVA

A. BARLETT GIAMATTI GRADUATE FELLOW, HISTORY “The Morality of Revolution: Urban Cleansing, Re-education Camps, and the Politics of Morality in Socialist Mozambique, 1975-1988”

James Hammond

Josh Morrison

FILIPA MELO LOPES

SYLVIA “DUFFY” ENGLE GRADUATE FELLOW, PHILOSOPHY “Gender, Fundamentality and the Social World” Gender difference has a ubiquity, centrality and recalcitrance that many other axes of social difference do not. It has a privileged role in the way we understand and navigate the social world. This is the core intuition explored in this project. Although primarily focused on gender, possible extensions of this thought to disability and race are also considered. Melo Lopes contends that, 14

relative to the flourishing debate on what gender is, this second order question concerning the role of gender has been underappreciated. In this project, she develops a theoretical articulation of the social role of gender difference. With this view in hand, Melo Lopes argues that an effective political strategy towards gender equality must not self-conceive as merely eliminating prejudice or subordination, as if they were detachable elements of our social arrangements. If gender is somehow fundamental to our social world, then gender oppression lies deep at the heart of our lives together. Feminist politics must therefore aim to restructure those very social arrangements and the subjects formed by them.

Filipa Melo Lopes

Michael Schachter

From 1975 to 1988, the ruling party of independent Mozambique, FRELIMO, launched several campaigns to “clean” the cities of citizens it deemed antisocial and thus obstructing the socialist revolution. The party established several internment camps known as re-education centers to rehabilitate these so-called “anti-socials” through forced labor and political indoctrination. These violent campaigns were also carried out by ordinary citizens who denounced and helped to expel their fellow city dwellers. “The Morality of Revolution” examines the historical, ideological, and socio-political dynamics that produced the urban cleansing campaigns and the re-education camps in socialist Mozambique. The dissertation argues that beyond socialist agendas, FRELIMO aimed at reforming the moral outlook of Mozambican society by enforcing ways of being and behaving inspired by puritan Christian ethics. Based on extensive archival and oral research, the study redeems a silenced chapter of Mozambique’s recent 15

history, contributing, among other things, to the understanding of why ordinary people participate in violent schemes of social engineering against their fellow citizens in autocratic regimes.

JOSH MORRISON

RICHARD & LILLIAN IVES GRADUATE FELLOW, SCREEN ARTS AND CULTURE “Reveling in Uselessness: Queer and Trans Media, Emotional Labour, and Cultural Capital “Reveling in Uselessness” studies how queer and trans subjects consume media in ways unintended by their creators as a way to create, maintain, and grow alternative communities and cultures of resistance to the mainstream. Grounded in Marxist and materialist theories of value and consumption, this project traces three specific case studies: kitsch and the phenomenon of the Spice Girls in the late 1990s, bear pornography and the formation of queer (sub) cultures, and the evolving art form of camp as it simultaneously becomes mainstream and is re-appropriated by trans and queer subjects for radical political ends.

MICHAEL SCHACHTER

MARY FAIR CROUSHORE GRADUATE FELLOW, COMPOSITION AND MUSIC THEORY “The Black Clown: a Vaudeville Oratorio for BassBaritone, Chorus, and Orchestra” “The Black Clown” is an original largescale musical production for bass-baritone, chorus, and orchestra. Based on the dramatic monologue of the same name by Langston Hughes, The Black Clown will be a new theatrical experience for our times: at once a devastating commentary on the African-American and minority experience, a celebration of the genius of Hughes (who was prescient enough to speak painful truths about America still relevant today), and an ambitious musical work breaking

down barriers of conventional categorization. Commissioned by the American Repertory Theater, the work will be featured at the Loeb Mainstage in Cambridge, MA in a run of performances starting on August 29, 2018.

ANA MARIA SILVA

Ana Maria Silva

Duygu Ula

DAVID AND MARY HUNTING GRADUATE FELLOW, HISTORY “Roots in Stone and Slavery: Permanence, Mobility, and Empire in 17th-Century Cartagena de Indias” In 1610, when the first church officials arrived in Cartagena de Indias (modern Colombia) to establish a permanent tribunal of the Inquisition, the city was the principal port for trading in African captives in Spanish South America. As policies aimed at ensuring religious orthodoxy tightened throughout the seventeenth century, Cartagena also became a vibrant commercial center at the crossroads of Atlantic, Pacific, and Andean routes, attracting voluntary migrants such as Spanish officials, military engineers, missionaries, and Portuguese merchants of Jewish ancestry who made Cartagena their new home. During this period, the labor of enslaved people transformed Cartagena from a settlement of wooden huts into a city made of stone, increasingly surrounded by walls and fortifications. This dissertation explores ideas and mechanisms of attachment to place in seventeenth-century Cartagena in order to understand the formation of urban systems of inclusion and exclusion, and the ambiguous relationships between mobility, rootedness, and empire in a slave society. She looks at how ideas about racial and religious difference intersected with local policies aimed at regulating urban growth and shaping the possibilities for forced and voluntary migrants to become rooted in the city.

DUYGU ULA

for a full three hours. “His visit really supported one of the goals of the class,” Brown explained, “to demonstrate the political and ethical importance of manuscript in the contemporary world.”

MARY FAIR CROUSHORE GRADUATE FELLOW, COMPARATIVE LITERATURE “Aesthetics in Dissent: Queer Cultural Productions in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia and Turkey” Organized around comparative close readings of contemporary art, film and literature from Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia and Turkey, this project examines representations of sexual minorities, the way in which nation states police queer bodies, and how cultural productions resist that policing. Ula positions these selected works within their national, cultural and historical contexts, and uses them to explore the relationship between local modes of queerness and the western-centric and homogenizing impulses of queer studies that dominate discussions of gender and sexuality in North America and Western Europe. Focusing on artistic, cinematic and literary moments of resistance to local-national and western concepts of gender and sexuality alike, Ula’s work advocates for a local queer aesthetics and theory that take their bearings from cultural, historical and artistic contexts that have hitherto been underrepresented in queer studies. In doing so, it simultaneously complicates discourses of gender, sexuality and identity, and narratives of geographic and cultural difference.

“ THE F EL LOWS H IP CONFIRMED THE VALUE OF SCHOLARLY

EXCHANGE OUTSIDE MY DEPARTMENT.” – 2017/18 FELLOW

visiting fellow

SHAMIL JEPPIE Marc and Constance Jacobson Visiting Fellow Shamil Jeppie at the studios of campus radio station WCBN, photo: Stephanie Harrell

We welcomed Shamil Jeppie, associate professor of history at the University of Cape Town and former director of the Institute of Humanities in Africa, as the Marc and Constance Jacobson Visiting Fellow. Jeppie’s research and publications focus on social and cultural history in South Africa and West Africa, and he is founder of the Tombouctou Manuscripts Project, which explores the formation of a culture of collecting in Timbuktu.

MARC AND CONSTANCE JACOBSON’S EARLY GIFT ESTABLISHED AN ENDOWED LECTURESHIP THAT HAS BROUGHT PUBLIC INTELLECTUALS, DISTINGUISHED SCHOLARS, ARTISTS, AND WRITERS TO THE INSTITUTE FOR THE HUMANITIES AND THE UNIVERSITY.

The highlight of Jeppie’s visit was the Marc and Constance Jacobson Lecture on the Tombouctou Manuscripts Project, “Archives and the Future: A View from The Most Distant Place.” The lecture situated Timbuktu in a larger network of settlements with traditions of advanced literacy scholarship, and manuscript book making and collecting, and asked what can the ways these manuscript libraries were kept and conserved— but also dispersed and often destroyed—over the past century and more can tell us about the place of archives from the period before European contact in parts of the African past. Over the course of his time on campus, Jeppie engaged firsthand with U-M students. He visited Professor Catherine Brown’s graduate seminar on materiality and media theory in comparative literature, and generously engaged the students 17

The institute’s Undergraduate Engagement Group invited Jeppie to their monthly meeting, which took place in the days after the devastating February 2018 school shooting in Parkland, Florida. Over dinner, Jeppie talked openly about his experience as a student activist in apartheid South Africa, the role students played in changing that system, and the impact the humanities do or don’t have in current events. Jeppie met with classicists, medievalists, linguists, and scholars of modern Africa while on campus, as well as with archivists and curators in Preservation and Conservation at the library and at U-M’s world-renowned Papyrology Collection. On one particularly cold Michigan afternoon, he also made his way to the offices of WCBN, U-M’s freeform radio station, where he was interviewed for Living Writers, a show featuring conversations with writers and makers, hosted by T Hetzel. “It was a great honor for me to be hosted by the institute,” Jeppie wrote from South Africa. “The university has a great reputation in all fields of learning (and apparently also in football) and I always wanted to meet various members of the excellent faculty there. My visit was filled with genuine intellectual and personal exchange.” The Jacobson’s hope was that these endowed lectures would enhance the cultural and artistic experiences of students and faculty at Michigan. From the first lecture by Simon Schama in 1989 to this year’s visit by Shamil Jeppie, the Marc and Constance Jacobson Lecture continues to foster discussion, dialogue, and debate at the University of Michigan.

U-M English professors Gaurav Desai (l) and Aida Levy-Hussen (r) interview Jill S. Harris Visiting Fellow Yaa Gyasi. Photo: Lisa Powers

AUTHOR’S FORUM A series on books & ideas presented in collaboration with LSA and the University Library.

Golem with Maya Barzilai (Near Eastern studies and Judaic studies) and Kathryn Babayan (Near Eastern studies)

Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy with Heather Ann Thompson (history, Afroamerican and African studies and Residential College) and Angela Dillard (Afroamerican and African studies and Residential College)

Beheading the Saint with Genevieve Zubrzycki (sociology) and Andrew Shryock (anthropology) HIGH STAKES CULTURE A new series that brings humanities perspectives to bear on current debates, presented by the U-M Institute for the Humanities and the U-M Humanities Collaboratory.

The Kelloggs: The Battling Brothers of Battle Creek with Howard Markel (history of medicine, pediatrics and communicable diseases, psychiatry, history, English, health management and policy) and Michael Schoenfeldt (English)

EVENTS

BOOKS MAJOR LECTURES Presenting distinguished visitors to enhance the humanities at Michigan. “Homegoing: A Conversation with Yaa Gyasi,” Jill S. Harris Memorial Lecture with Yaa Gyasi, Gaurav Desai (English) and Aida Levy-Hussen (English) “Archives and Futures: A View From “The Most Distant Place’” Marc and Constance Jacobson lecture by Shamil Jeppie, University of Capetown

DISCUSSED SINCE THE FIRST AUTHOR’S FORUM IN 2011

“What Does it Mean to Take a Knee?” with Angela Dillard (Afroamerican and African studies and Residential College), Matthew Countryman (history and American culture), Mark Clague (music), and Kristin Hass (American culture)

The Book of Wonders with Douglas Trevor (English) and Peter Ho Davies (English) How to Read African-American Literature with Aida LevyHussen (English) and Victor Mendoza (women’s studies and English)

“Why Monuments? Why Now?” with Walter Johnson (history and African American studies, Harvard University), Matthew Countryman (American culture), Kristin Hass (American culture) and Scotti Parrish (English) with moderator Angela Dillard (Afroamerican and African studies and Residential College)

Early Modern Cartesianisms with Tad Schmaltz (philosophy) and George Hoffmann (French)

ARCHIVES & FUTURES PANELS Examining archives and archival practices past, present, and future. “Art & Archive” with The Hinterlands (Liza Bielby and Richard Newman) and Design 99 (Mitch Cope & Gina Reichert), moderated by Amanda Krugliak “Sex and the Archives: A View from the Trenches” with Katherine Sender (communications, women’s studies), Gayle Rubin (anthropology and women’s studies), and Victor Mendoza (English and women’s studies) “Archiving the Materials of Life” with Magdalena Zaborowska (American culture, Afroamerican and African studies), Stephen Ward (Residential College and Afroamerican and African studies), and Artemis Leontis (modern Greek) “Archiving Objects in the Present” with Kristin Hass (American culture), Jason De Leon (anthropology), and Scott Hocking (artist), moderated by Amanda Krugliak and Lucy Cahill “Archives of Speculative History” with Jillian Walker (playwright) and Anita Gonzalez (theatre and drama)

FELLOWSPEAK Ongoing exchange with our fellows past and present. “The Shock of the Old: Archives After the Digital Turn,” Maria Cotera (American culture and women’s studies) “Architects in the Archives: The Research, Design, and Curation of a Bicentennial Exhibition,” Sarah Rovang (architecture and urban planning) “Collecting for the Academy: University Museums and the Production of Knowledge,” Kerstin Barndt (German) “The Design of Environment: Rethinking Architecture at the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum (1968-1976),” Elizabeth Keslacy (architecture and urban planning)

“What is a People? Some Lessons from Gandhi’s India,” Mrinalini Sinha (history, English, and women’s studies)

“I FOUND THE OPPORTUNITY TO HEAR FROM O T H E R F E L LO W S T O B E T R A N S F O R M AT I VE; IT’S WONDERFUL TO BE THE BENEFICIARY OF SO MANY DISCIPLINARY PERSPECTIVES.” – 2017/18 FELLOW

“Hiding in Plain Sight: Does Ideology Obscure the Black Conservative Archive?” Angela Dillard (Afroamerican and African studies and Residential College) “Desire and Evidence: Dancing in the Archive with Jill Johnston,” Clare Croft (dance)

Angela Dillard, associate dean for undergraduate education, at High Stakes Culture: What Does it Mean to Take a Knee? Photo: Emma Richter, Michigan Daily

“Modernities Past: Redefining Modernity in 19th-Century African America,” Xiomara Santamarina (English, Afroamerican and African studies, American culture)

DIGITAL PEDAGOGY & RESEARCH SERIES Scholarly and teaching practices in and about digital environments.

FILM Documentaries and feature films inspiring conversations on the relationship between archives and justice.

“Omeka in the Classroom” with Alix Keener, U-M Digital Scholarship Librarian

Selma screening and discussion

“Nursing Clio: Making Archives Public,” roundtable discussion

“Compendium as Archive? Muslim Ethical Thought and its Circulation in Colonial India,” Farina Mir (history)

“Digital Pedagogies” lightning talks and workshop “Scalar in the Classroom,” Alix Keener and Justin Snell of U-M Librar

“Karanis: Archives and Futures in an Ancient Egyptian Town,” Arthur Verhoogt (papyrology and Greek)

“Understanding your Online Presence” workshop

“Publishing Without Walls” workshop

NUMBER OF EMPTY CHAIRS AT OUR STANDING ROOM ONLY HIGH STAKES CULTURE EVENTS

Here’s to Flint and Off the Record screening and discussion with filmmakers Kate Levy and Shanna Merola Sins Invalid screening and discussion with Petra Kuppers (English language and literature, women’s studies, art, and theater and drama)

2018 Efroymson Emerging Artist in Residence Matthew Angelo Harrison working on site in the Institute for the Humanities gallery. Photo: Robyn Han

GALLERY Innovative exhibitions

and arts programming.

MAIN GALLERY We celebrated the 20th anniversary of our gallery program this year, which continues tothriveas a place for innovative new work and exciting collaborative projects. Each exhibition, curated by Arts Curator and Assistant Director forArts Programming Amanda Krugliak, brings new perspectives to the instituteand actively engages the campus c ommunity with the humanities.

natural world. Appropriating archaeological, field ecology, and other scientific methods of collecting, ordering, and exhibiting objects, Dion’s work questions the objectivity and authoritative role of the scientific voice in contemporary society, tracking how pseudoscience, social agendas, and ideology creep into public discourse and knowledge production.

WAITING FOR THE EXTRAORDINARY Installation by Mark Dion

Mark Dion Redux panel discussion with Osman Khan, Sarah Rose Sharp, and Paul Amenta, moderated by Amanda Krugliak

Mark Dion’s work examines the ways in which dominant ideologies and public institutions shape our understanding of history, knowledge, and the 22

“Waiting for the Extraordinary” Penny W. Stamps lecture by Mark Dion

AMERICAN BERSERK Exhibition by Valerie Hegarty Throughout her career, Brooklyn-based artist Valerie Hegarty has explored fundamental themes of American history and particularly the legacy of 19th-century American art, addressing topics such as colonization, slavery, Manifest Destiny, nationalism and environmental degradation. Elaborating upon visual references to the arthistorical canon of North America, Hegarty repurposes the ideological tenets of such works into a critical examination of the American legacy. “American Berserk” artist talk by Valerie Hegarty OF 72 Exhibition by Ebony G. Patterson Jamaican artist Ebony G. Patterson’s work revolves around questions of identity and the body. Of 72, a mixed media work on fabric, considers the 2010 “Tivoli Incursion” in Kingston, Jamaica. Patterson studied at Edna Manley College of Visual and Performing Arts and the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis. An assistant professor in painting at the University of Kentucky, she has shown her artwork in numerous solo and private exhibitions and is represented by Monique Meloche Gallery. “Of 72” Penny W. Stamps Lecture by Ebony Patterson BORDER CROSSERS Installation by Chico MacMurtrie Chico MacMurtrie is the artistic director of Amorphic Robot Works, an interdisciplinary creative collective located in Brooklyn, NY. His work explores the intersection of robotic sculpture, new media installation, and

performance and investigates organic life from deep within, finding geometry in all living systems. This project was sponsored by the U-M Institute for the Humanities in collaboration with U-M Museum of Art, Michigan Robotics, Michigan Engineering, School of Information, Penny Stamps Speaker Series, Stamps School of Art and Design, and ArtsEngine. Live Robotic Border Crossers performances “Border Crossers” Penny W. Stamps Lecture by Chico MacMurtrie ABSTRACT ANCESTRY: MACHINE-WORKS ON PAPER Exhibition by Matthew Angelo Harrison, Efroymson Artist in Residence Matthew Angelo Harrison is a sculptor who explores the implication of emerging technologies and the porosity of cultural identity. His artwork is often created by machines that he designs and builds from scratch. Harrison is interested in aspects of manufacturing, specifically its hidden performative aspect. He received a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Matthew Angelo Harrison in conversation with Amanda Krugliak

POP-UP EXHIBITIONS POSSESSION Pop-up exhibition by Jaye Schlesinger For the past several years, Ann Arbor artist Jaye Schlesinger has worked almost exclusively in oils and her subject matter has evolved to become “the common object.” She usually isolates an 24

object from its normal context and portrays it in a way that allows it to become symbolic, metaphorical, or provocative. Her aim is to create an “object portrait” rather than a traditional still life composition. Jaye Schlesinger in conversation with Amanda Krugliak WORLD LEADERS Pop-up exhibition by Chanel Von Habsburg-Lothringen Los Angeles artist Chanel Von Habsburg-Lothringen’s work addresses the American notion of aspiration, mortality, and persona. She holds an MFA in photography from Cranbrook Academy of Art. From the University of Michigan, she holds a BA in social science and history of art, and is a graduate of the Residential College. Chanel Von HabsburgLothringen in conversation with Amanda Krugliak PRE-FAB/POST-FAB: ART IN A READYMADE ERA Pop-up exhibition by Heidi Barlow, Shaina Kasztelan, Bailey Scieszka Heidi Barlow, Shaina Kasztelan, and Bailey Scieszka are three young women artists based in Detroit. Their work, although varying in style and form, speaks

Of 72 exhibition by Ebony G. Patterson. Photo: Robyn Han

11,000

NUMBER OF START-TOFINISH VIEWS OF OUR INSTAGRAM STORY ON BORDER CROSSERS

to a generation growing up with the influence of mass consumption, internet shopping, the glut of plastic toys, fake jewels, and tchotchkes. INTERIOR STREETS Pop-up exhibition by Carl Wilson Detroit artist Carl Wilson is known for his stark black and white linocut prints. The selftaught artist sees himself as a documentarian of lives easily ignored in a world obsessed with materialism and celebrity. Wilson is the recipient of a 2013 Kresge Artist Fellowship and is an alumni of the historic Yaddo Artists’ Community. Carl Wilson in conversation with Amanda Krugliak 25

PAST/PRESENT/FUTURE: A DIGITAL PROJECTION SERIES A series of short digital projections about exhibiting the ways in which humans tackle the archive. Curated by multidisciplinary artist Keaton Fox, the series includes works by Kevin Arrow, Pierre Chaumont, Faith Holland, and Keaton Fox. FRAME SALON SERIES A salon series on visual art, performance, and identity, presented in collaboration with UMS, hosted by Jennifer Harge (Detroit-based performance artist and U-M alumna) and by Taylor Renee Aldridge (art critic, curator, and cofounder of ARTS.BLACK).

“WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THE DIGITAL HUMANITIES IS INNATE COLLABORATION AND INTERDISCIPLINARITY. IN MY COURSE, GAMES F OR DIGITAL HUMANISTS, I LEARNED FABULOUS WAYS TO INCORPORATE GAMES INTO THE CLASSROOM, AS WELL AS IDEAS FOR DEVELOPING GAMES FROM MY OWN RESEARCH.” -NICHOLAS HOLTERMAN, DIGITAL HUMANITIES SUMMER INSTITUTE GRANT RECIPIENT

“NEW-MODEL HUMANITIES PUBLICATION” GRANT PROGRAM

I N I T I AT I V E S

2017-18 inaugurated this small grant program to support experimentation with and planning for new concepts of hybrid scholarly publication for tenured and tenure-track faculty. The institute is committed to supporting humanities faculty as they engage a radically transformed publishing system, as a new ecology of scholarly communication is upending the legacy print system of book publishing in the humanities and humanistic social sciences. The program was initiated to support the increasing numbers of faculty at U-M who are interested in new options for communicating their work in a diverse range of platforms and formats (print-on-demand, e-book, open access website, web archives). 2017-18 grant recipients were Clare Croft, “Difficult Dances”; Carol Jacobsen, “For Dear Life: Women’s Decriminalization and Human Rights in Focus”; Shachar Pinsker, “Digital Mapping of Urban Cafés, the Silk Road of Modern Jewish Culture”; and Matthew Solomon, “The Heart of Darkness.”

OPED PROJECT For the second year, in collaboration with ADVANCE and the College of LSA, the institute offered an OpEd workshop for twenty faculty from humanities, social science and natural science departments. The OpEd Project is a think tank and leadership organization founded to ensure the full range of human voices is included in history. It partners with universities and other organizations to target and train underrepresented experts, especially women, to take thought leadership positions in their fields, connecting them with a network of highlevel journalist mentors. In addition to the workshop a public interactive lecture on “Owning Expertise: A Live Experiment in How Credibility Works and How Ideas Rise” was presented. Publications resulting from both years of OpEd workshops include:

DIGITAL PEDAGOGY AND RESEARCH HWW PREDOCTORAL CAREER DIVERSITY SUMMER WORKSHOP As a member of the Humanities Without Walls (HWW) Consortium, the Institute for the Humanities nominates University of Michigan graduate students for the HWW pre-doctoral fellowship competition.

Funded by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Catherine Fairfield (English & women’s studies), Michelle MayCurry (American culture), and Eshe Sherley (history) were selected as pre-doctoral fellows for 2018. The threeweek workshop aims to help prepare doctoral students for careers both within and outside the academy.

This year we offered events related to scholarly and teaching practices in and about digital environments. These included workshops on the digital tools Omeka and Nursing Clio, as well as a workshop and lightning talks on digital pedagogies. Additionally, for the fourth year, the institute offered grants to four graduate students to attend the Digital Humanities Summer Institute in Alberta, Canada. This year’s awardees were Eimeel Castillo Dona (history and women’s studies), Casidy Campbell (American culture), Nicholas Holt (romance languages & literatures), and Mika Kennedy (English).

Derrick Darby, philosophy, “Confederate Monuments are Visible, but Racial Injustice is Embedded in American History,” Detroit Free Press, and “When Black Children are Targeted for Punishment,” The New York Times. Christiane Gruber, art history, “Trump is Wrong. ISIS Can’t be Beaten by Torture,” Newsweek and “What Would a Muslim Want with a Portrait of Christ?” Newsweek. Martha Jones, history and law, “The 14th Amendment Solved One Citizenship Crisis, but it Created a New One,” The Washington Post. Tiya Miles, American culture, history, Afroamerican & African studies, women’s studies, and Native American studies, “The South Doesn’t Own Slavery,” The New York Times. Meghan Duffy, ecology and evolutionary biology, “This Polluted Lake Shows Why We Are All Stakeholders When It Comes to Clean Water,” Ensia.

SUPPORT 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 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 to ﬁve curated exhibitions in the art gallery—and another four to six smaller pop-up exhibitions in the Osterman Common Room —expanding the reach of art practice and performance to the larger university community and the public. The institute has also launched a set of curricular initiatives addressed to undergraduate students and graduate students. 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:

THE I N S T I T UT E FO R THE H U M AN I T IE S I S A CE NT ER F OR I N N OVAT I V E , CO LLABOR AT I V E S T U DY IN TH E H U M ANI T I E S AND A RT S .

• 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. Photo: Lisa Powers

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 and/or Endow the Art Gallery The institute’s museum-quality gallery has gained national attention for the high quality of its four to ﬁve curated shows mounted annually. An endowment to name the gallery and/or three to four shows 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. 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.”

(http://leadersand-best.umich. edu/find/#/give/basket/ fund/307128) or by mailing appropriate documentation with assistance from the institute’s development officer Andrea Stevenson (see below). • 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). • 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.

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

ENDOWMENTS

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:

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.

• Credit card, check, cash wire transfer. • A secure gift either through the U-M Development website 29

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, 734936-3518 or contact the institute’s development officer Andrea Stevenson, LSA Development, 734-615-6494 or andreast@umich.edu.

AFFILIATES AND STAFF STAFF Nina Barraco, graphic designer Lucy Cahill, gallery assistant Stephanie Harrell, communications specialist Amanda Krugliak, arts curator and assistant director, academic programming Peggy McCracken, director Gretchen Oâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;Hair, fellows coordinator Sheri Sytsema-Geiger, administrative manager INSTITUTE FOR THE HUMANITIES EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE Gaurav Desai, English Lucy Hartley, English Matthew Lassiter, history, urban and regional planning Ishani Maitra, philosophy Anthony Mora, American culture and history Arthur Verhoogt, ex officio; dean, Rackham; papyrology and Greek Claire Zimmerman, architecture and history of art Anne Curzan, ex officio; associate dean, humanities; English, linguistics, education Peggy McCracken, 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 481091432, 734-763-0235, TTY 734-647-1388. For other University of Michigan information call 734-764-1817. THE REGENTS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN Michael J. Behm, Grand Blanc Mark J. Bernstein, Ann Arbor Shauna Ryder Diggs, Grosse Pointe Denise Ilitch, Bingham Farms Andrea Fischer Newman, Ann Arbor Andrew C. Richner, Grosse Pointe Park Ron Weiser, Ann Arbor Katherine E. White, Ann Arbor Mark S. Schlissel, ex officio

202 S. Thayer • Suite 1111 • Ann Arbor, MI 48104 734.936.3815 • www.lsa.umich.edu/humanities

ABOUT THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN INSTITUTE FOR THE HUMANITIES

ABOUT THE 2017-18 YEAR OF ARCHIVES AND FUTURES

The Institute for the Humanities is a center for innovative, collaborative study in the humanities and arts. Each year we provide fellowships for Michigan faculty, graduate students, and visiting scholars who work on interdisciplinary projects. We also offer a wide array of public and scholarly events, including public lectures, conferences, art exhibitions, and performances.

Archives are vital extensions of human memory. They tell stories about daily life, individuals, and institutions, preserving the past for the future as they anticipate a future in which memories matter. But archives are not neutral repositories of history. Their value and usefulness are impacted by collection practices, storage capacities, technology, and accessibility.

Our mission is to serve as a national and international centerpiece for scholarly research in the humanities and creative work in the arts at the University of Michigan. We exist 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. Since 1987 the institute has granted fellowships to over 400 Michigan faculty fellows, Michigan graduate student fellows, and visiting fellows. The Institute for the Humanities: • Encourages fellows to talk and debate, informally and formally— all in an effort to reach beyond the assumptions of a given discipline. • Promotes innovative teaching in the humanities, encouraging fellows to add perspectives from other disciplines to the courses they teach. • Brings nationally known scholars, artists, and performers to Michigan to participate in programs, conferences, and fellowships. • Offers programs reaching out to university and public audiences. • Brings together those who create—artists, musicians, actors, writers—with those who analyze these art forms.

During the bicentennial anniversary of the University of Michigan, the Year of Archives and Futures examined archives and archival practices past, present, and future. We considered objects that question authority, explored museums and their production of knowledge, investigated the written heritage of an ancient African city, and much more, aiming to expand our understanding of archives, all while looking ahead to the future stories they might tell.

Front Cover: Visiting artist Chico MacMurtrie’s Border Crosser launches in front of UMMA. Photo: Levi Stroud