Institute for the Humanities Annual Report 2019-20

INSTITUTE FOR THE HUMANITIES Annual Report

virtual studio visits with

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michigan artists in a pandemic

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2019-20

INSTITUTE FOR THE HUMANITIES Understand Our World

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TABLE OF CONTENTS Letter from the Director

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The Efroymson Emerging Artist in Residence Program 6 Endowed Lectures 9

Welcome Angela Abiodun 10 Faculty Fellows

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Interdisciplinarity in Spirit and Practice Graduate Student Fellows

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Opening Windows and Imagining Other Possible Worlds

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Visiting Fellows

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Summer Fellows

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Practical Magic 22 Sara McDougall Interview 25 Undergraduate Programs 26 My Year of Marketing for the Humanities Events

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Author’s Forum Airs on NPR’s Alt.Latino

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Gallery

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House Calls 34 Support 37 Affiliates and Staff 38 About the Institute

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LETTER

from the director

dear friends of the humanities institute, I write to you from a time of pandemic and protest in which the humanities prove ever more urgent. Confined in our homes, we turn to literature and the arts to engage our minds and souls; confronting escalating violence, we learn from history and cultural studies about the legacies of past racist ideologies and the ways they shape our present.

At the University of Michigan, we are confronting the inequities and injustices that persist in our own practices, and we plan for the Institute for the Humanities to be an active and committed partner in this endeavor as we use our programming to amplify antiracist voices, to promote a global perspective on antiracism, and to create an inclusive and safe environment where everyone can fully participate. We have already begun this work, as you’ll see in this report, and I look forward to reporting on our further efforts as we move forward.

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As you probably know, the university campus closed in early March, and since that time we’ve been learning to teach, conduct business, and socialize online. No doubt you, too, have made similar adjustments, and I hope that you are staying safe and well.

We canceled institute events scheduled after March 10, and our graduate student and faculty fellows moved their weekly seminar online; the lively exchange that characterized their faceto-face interactions seemed to transfer quite well to the virtual form. We welcome a new cohort of eight faculty and eight graduate student fellows to the institute in August, and we will again be meeting virtually.

In addition to organizing the events that you can read about in this report, we’ve spent much of our year planning expanded programming for our gallery, made possible by a generous grant of $1.14M from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The Mellon funding allows us to put in place consistent programming for each of our exhibitions,

March exhibition by Valery Jung Estabrook (see page 35).

For the past several years, the Efroymson Emerging Artist in Residence Program, funded by the Efroymson Family Foundation, has made the gallery a site for exciting engagements with artists at the beginning of their careers (see article page 6). Some of the Efroymson artists, like this year’s Ruth Leonela Buentello, are having their first solo exhibition in the gallery.

The artists are on campus for several weeks, and we arrange for them to talk to the media and to meet students and classes, in addition to the artist’s talk they give in the gallery. I am confident that the institute’s lively exhibition program, funded in part by our donors, helped to make a convincing case for further support from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

to expand our outreach more broadly in southeast Michigan, and to add two large exhibitions to our annual program.

For more than twenty years, the Institute for the Humanities Gallery has featured work that engages current social issues, provoking discussion and even debate both on campus and in the community.

The gallery’s artists are identified by our visionary curator, Amanda Krugliak, with assistance from Juliet Hinely, our arts production coordinator. Stephanie Harrell plans and manages our many communications about exhibitions and related programming, Laura Koroncey is our graphic designer, Gretchen O’Hair manages travel logistics, and Sheri Sytsema-Geiger keeps us all on track. Angela Abiodun is our new outreach and coordination manager, and you can read more about her on page 10.

In our newest gallery adventure, we’ve gone online!

Because we were not able to organize the group show planned for this summer and supported by The Mellon Foundation, we designed a series of live-streamed visits to artists’ studios called House

The gallery’s success also depends on the generosity of donors. Every other year, we feature a Paula and Edwin Sidman Fellow in the Arts.

In 2019-20 the endowment supported our February-

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Calls: Virtual Studio Visits With Michigan Artists in a Pandemic. For House Calls we commissioned Michigan artists to video-conference with the institute’s arts staff about COVID-19 and artistic practice, about the ways in which isolation is or is not changing their work, and about their strategies for survival in uncertain times. The studio conversations aired on Wednesdays at 4 pm through June 17. You can watch the archive online; see page 34 for more information.

We’re thrilled to have received such a generous grant from The Mellon Foundation, but the institute’s continued success depends on your interest, your presence when possible, and your generosity. We remain immensely grateful to you for your support.

With warmest wishes, –Peggy McCracken, director, Mary Fair Croushore Professor of the Humanities

YO TENGO NOMBRE

The Efroymson Emerging Artist in Residence Program

and the Power of Art to Benefit Diverse Publics

Ruth Leonela Buentello installing Yo Tengo Nombre.

In her exhibition Yo Tengo Nombre, artist Ruth Leonela Buentello explored her cultural identity as a Xicana and a descendent of Mexican immigrants in the United States, contextualized within an increasingly tense present day. The paintings and constructions reference images from family albums and personal memories, along with now-unforgettable news photos chronicling ICE raids, abuse of undocumented immigrants, and children confined in detention centers.

Buentello was the institute’s third Efroymson Emerging Artist in Residence. Each year since 2017, an early-career artist is commissioned to create a new work of art as part of a full-scale exhibition. The residency is supported by a $25,000 grant from the Efroymson Family Fund, a unique donor-led fund of the Central Indiana Community Foundation, under the direction of U-M alumnus Jeremy Efroymson.

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We Need Borders, Ruth Leonela Buentello

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The artist worked closely and collaboratively with curator Amanda Krugliak and gallery coordinator Juliet Hinely, exploring different ways materially to translate her images and content, printing digitally onto fabric and vinyl. She also developed meaningful relationships with U-M faculty, working through critical questions on how best to contextualize sensitively visual culture that bears witness to trauma.

Key to the residency was availing the artist the support, time and space to explore her ideas, take risks, with the

Arts Curator Amanda Krugliak talks to students about Yo Tengo Nombre.

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PORTRAITS OF UNDOCUMENTED YOUTH DETAINED AT THE U.S./MEXICO BORDER INCLUDED IN THE

YO TENGO NOMBRE EXHIBITION.

In some paintings, as part of her process, the artist asked family members to pose for re-enactments of these “breaking news” tableaus.

The overlay of present, past, private and public honored an intricate, sometimes tangled cultural history, where beginnings, ends and undoings run through their collective stories.

work on her own terms to an ongoing visual conversation and painting tradition.

Her compositions incorporate handmade elements, emphasizing the integrity of labor through their physicality and directness, and the empowerment that comes with each brushstroke, stitch, or cutout in succession.

Buentello’s incorporation of traditional themes and methods of narrative painting also challenges these traditions, crafting bold new spaces for Xicana narratives in the annals of art history.

Much of the work in Yo Tengo Nombre was presented publicly for the first time.

Buentello’s compositions suggest relationships to the luminosity of Diego Velazquez, the tenderness of Frida Kahlo, the championed workers of Diego Rivera, and the blurred “ghost” portraits of Gerhard Richter. Rather than derivative, this connects her 8

Buentello’s photo album of the youth asylum seekers she worked with, part of Yo Tengo Nombre.

benefit of countless informed dialogues. The exhibition itself continued to evolve, Beuentello re-engaging daily with the installation and making ongoing edits or additions. The overall project was defined by the fluidity of the creative process and

the value of an informed perspective rather than the finality of a conclusion.

Yo Tengo Nombre extended the institute’s vision of this unique residency opportunity. Dozens of classes from across campus visited the exhibition, with talks and presentations from the artist and curator Amanda Krugliak tailored to each class.

We hosted over 500 U-M students from a range of disciplines, including American culture, anthropology, the Residential College, and the Law School. Students from Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti high schools also visited, further exploring the history of narrative painting, American visual culture, and Buentello’s work from humanist perspectives.

Buentello also attended and contributed to additional gatherings, lectures and events on campus honoring Latinx Heritage Month, which coincided with her exhibition.

The artist gained invaluable teaching experience, further extending her reach beyond the duration of the residency itself.

The extensive and focused class engagement fully activated the gallery’s capacity to enhance academic curriculum through robust arts programming. Most significantly, the exhibition created an opportunity for students to discuss their own histories and family stories,

ENDOWED LECTURES

some directly impacted by current immigration laws and politics, connecting research with the personal, and the institution with the world outside.

Enhancing Cultural and Artistic Experiences

When Marc Jacobson and his wife Constance established the Marc and Constance Jacobson Lectureship in 1989, their hope was that the lectures would enhance “the cultural and artistic experiences of present and future generations of students at Michigan.” The Jill S. Harris Memorial Endowment—established in 1985 by Roger and Meredith Harris, Jill’s parents, her grandparents Allan and Norma Harris, and friends—brings to campus a visitor who appeals to undergraduates interested in the humanities and the arts.

Yo Tengo Nombre, the Efroymson Emerging Artist in Residence program, and the Efroymson Family Fund’s commitment to community and artists, serve as a model for how arts and artists can truly impact a place, buoying our belief in the power of art to benefit diverse publics.

In Buentello’s words: “It’s important that the work is living work, that it lives off it’s viewers and their feedback, and the experiences of them interacting with the work. So, it’s really important for me to have these dialogues with students that are also grappling with these issues.

Today, our endowed lectures play an important part in the academic life of the institute and the wider campus. In collaboration with other campus units, we are able to invite Rachel Havrelock giving the 2019-20 Jill S. Harris speakers who engage Memorial Lecture. both academic and community audiences. In fall semester, we collaborated with the Department of Linguistics and the Native American Studies Program to bring Professor Jenny L. Davis from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign for the 2019-20 Marc and Constance Jacobson Lecture. In recognition of the United Nation’s designation of 2019 as the Year of Indigenous Languages, Davis gave a lecture titled “‘In the Future, Robots will Speak Chickasaw’: Indigenous Language Futurism and the Temporalities of Language Reclamation.”

“I think it’s important for students to see this work, to see an artist that is dealing with how to be sensitive about such a tenuous subject...and to learn about someone else’s identity... that it’s not something at a distance in the media—that this is an experience people are living with all over the U.S. It doesn’t matter whether you are living close to the Southern border or not.”

As a contribution to LSA’s Winter 2020 Great Lakes Theme Semester, we brought to campus Professor Rachel Havrelock, of the University of Illinois, Chicago, for the 2019-20 Jill S. Harris Memorial Lecture. Just before campus closed in March, Havrelock, founder and director of the UIC Freshwater Lab, spoke on “Freshwater Stories: Optics, Governance, and Adaptation around the Great Lakes.”

Watch the artist interview at http://myumi.ch/Gk8vZ. –Amanda Krugliak, arts curator 9

welcome

ANGELA ABIODUN On March 9, we welcomed Angela Abiodun as our new collaboration and outreach manager.

In this role, Abiodun will support the institute’s High Stakes Art initiative, funded by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, by developing relationships with community, arts and cultural institutions on campus and around Michigan. Her primary goal will be to develop sustainable, collaborative relationships leading to humanities and arts-related programming.

“ART I S A WAY TO NOT ONLY BUILD CONNECTION, BUT TO FIND ENGAGING WAYS TO COMMENT ON THE STATE OF THE WORLD. THROUGH THESE EXPRESSIONS, WE’RE ABLE TO EXTEND OUR THINKING AND FIND INNOVATIVE WAYS TO BE AND STRUCTURE SOCIETY.” -ANGELA ABIODUN

Abiodun grew up in Southeast Michigan and attended the University of Michigan, earning a BA in sociology and psychology and an MA in educational studies. After college, she spent several years teaching middle and high school English in central Louisiana, an experience she says “left me in awe every day.”

More recently, she honed her community outreach and organizational skills as director of programs for Detroit Food Academy and as the artist residency coordinator for the media arts organization People in Education.

Outside of the office, Abiodun is a yoga instructor and practices with the Iyengar Yoga Detroit studio in Hamtramck. She is also a poet and writer, and a member of 10

Room Project, a writing space for women and gender non-conforming folk in Detroit.

“We live in a world defined by how it can be categorized,” she explains. “I write to expand the bounds of what can exist in this world and the way it can be expressed.

I write to make space for my reality in the archive. I write so the uniqueness of my experiences exist beyond the moment.”

Abiodun’s first day with the institute was also the first day of our undergrad-led Humanities Week.

She jumped right in, scanning student’s MCards and talking to them about the institute as they stopped by for bagels and coffee. Within days, though, COVID-19 hit Michigan and staff began working from home. Despite these challenges, she has quickly become a vibrant member of our team-and an integral part of the four-squares of the new House Calls virtual series-as staff meet on Zoom and look for new ways to virtually engage our communities with the humanities.

–Stephanie Harrell, marketing and communications manager

her own family history as a way to inform an interdisciplinary and historicist methodological approach that is rooted in feminist and queer epistemologies. This project proposes an alternative understanding of Arab American history that centers on women and the role of sexuality in navigating U.S. racial systems.

FELLOWS

ALENA ANISKIEWICZ

faculty

Charlotte Karem Albrecht

Alena Aniskiewicz

CHARLOTTE KAREM ALBRECHT

POSTDOCTORAL RESEARCH FELLOW, SLAVIC LANGUAGES AND LITERATURES “Cultural Remix: Polish Hip Hop and the Sampling of Heritage”

The Syrian American peddling economy and its cultural traces (1870-1955) is an unexpected site for parsing how American perceptions of Arabs have long been rooted in ideas of their sexual and gender difference. After leaving Ottoman Greater Syria, Syrians sold goods across the U.S. while navigating systems of racism that intertwined with gender-sexual norms. Peddling enabled Syrians’ survival and transformed their family structures. While Americans also associated transient labor with homosexuality and scrutinized the numerous Syrian women peddlers, peddling paradoxically came to symbolize Arab assimilability in the United States. This project examines both the history of Syrian peddling as it affected Syrians’ racial positioning and questions of historical knowledge-making about sexuality for Arabs.

The apparent absence of sexuality in most archival sources pertaining to the Arab American community allows Karem Albrecht to foreground how power functions through the creation of historical narratives. As a queer Arab American descendant of this history, she also draws on

“Cultural Remix” analyzes Polish hip hop’s engagement with the texts and traditions of Polish Romantic poets of the Great Emigration.

Deeming the Romantic bard Adam Mickiewicz “the original rapper,” the hip-hop musicians and communities Aniskiewicz considers draw on the legacy of nineteenth-century partition and statelessness to offer a nationally-specific performance of hip hop’s conventional critical, anti-establishment stance, unique here in the ways it affirms a traditional nationalist discourse.

The formal aspects of rap—rooted in sampling, intertextuality, decontextualizing the familiar, and privileging poetic prowess—position the genre as one in which Polish artists can engage and critique the narratives of their nation’s past.

Expanding on these elements of the music, this dissertation theorizes hip-hop sampling of archival audio and “shout outs” to canonical Polish poets as a means to understand the relationship between documentary citation and narrative association in shaping the ways contemporary audiences create meaning from the past. Sampling their heritage, Polish rappers revive the narratives of Poland as an oppressed subject and remix the poetic texts of the stateless nation into hip-hop texts of a contemporary Poland increasingly at odds with both the European Union and its neighbors to the east.

RICHARD AND LILLIAN IVES FACULTY FELLOW, ASSISTANT PROFESSOR, AMERICAN CULTURE AND WOMEN’S STUDIES “An Inconsistent History: Arab American Peddlers and the Making of Sexuality, Gender, and Race”

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MARLYSE BAPTISTA

JOHN RICH FACULTY FELLOW, PROFESSOR, AFROAMERICAN AND AFRICAN STUDIES AND LINGUISTICS “E pluribus unum: Out of many voices, one language”

Marlyse Baptista

Sarah Ensor

This book project seeks to further our understanding of how in multilingual settings, the languages spoken by speakers with different first languages coalesce to give rise to creole languages. Baptista specifically seeks to draw correspondences between linguistic features in the source languages and those of the resulting creoles while examining the processes that give rise to the observable features. The linguistic analysis provides new understandings of the evolution of historical contact and cultural exchange. It follows two stages: first, Baptista identifies linguistic features from 16th century Portuguese and 16th century Spanish that have survived in the creoles under study today.

She also examines feature transmission from African substrates, particularly Wolof, a majority language in that setting. Second, Baptista identifies processes like feature transfer and convergence that allowed source languages to leave their imprint in the resulting creoles.

SARAH ENSOR

STEELCASE FACULTY FELLOW, ASSISTANT PROFESSOR, ENVIRONMENT AND ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE “Terminal Regions: Queer Environmental Ethics in the Absence of Futurity” Heidi Kumao

This project asks what contemporary environmentalism’s (seemingly necessary) emphasis on the future has rendered unthinkable.

By reading queer texts whose animating conditions require their protagonists to bracket questions of futurity as normatively lived, Ensor traces paradigms of relationality, practices of care, 12

political affects, temporal modes, and forms of solidarity that as yet have not found their way into ecocritical conversations and practices of environmental stewardship. The project thus also asks what ecocriticism can learn from queer theory, this field that has long been intimate with illness, with (the specter of ) extinction, with (socially devalued) lives lived as half-lives.

Whether confronting the epidemic contours of the AIDS crisis, tracing the temporary encounters involved in cruising, or reckoning with the lives of non-reproductive subjects, queer literature theorizes not only intimacy without futurity, but also futurity without endurance—and, provocatively, futurity without life itself. The queer archive of my project thereby demonstrates how temporariness, transience, and (apparent) “futurelessness” can engender, rather than preclude, forms of persistence, community, and care. Ultimately, in limning practices that dwell between giving up and seeking to save, the literary works—and the queer temporalities that they embody—allow us to glimpse anew the immanent ethical possibilities of the present.

HEIDI KUMAO

HUNTING FAMILY FACULTY FELLOW, PROFESSOR, ART AND DESIGN “Real and Imagined: Animating the Spaces Between Us” Using experimental animations and poseable puppets, “Real and Imagined” gives physical form to emotion, memory, and relationship dynamics. By translating these intangible experiences into visual narratives, it challenges viewers to rethink the vocabulary used to tell personal stories. Serving as a bridge between different fields of inquiry, this project explores the intersection of visual storytelling, mechanical sculpture, and cognitive science through a feminist lens. By focusing on representations and experiences of (older) women, it seeks to redress their absence from most art, technology, and

popular culture. This art project uses poetic, visual metaphors to highlight and imagine the interior lives of women as they respond to ordinary interactions, conversations, power structures, and the physical challenges of ageing.

It also engages current debates about simulating human behavior and emotion through technology and asks: How can these functions be effectively translated into narrative art forms and animated gestures? What makes an animated gesture read as undeniably human? Female? By emphasizing female subjectivity, “Real and Imagined” provides a much needed, different perspective that addresses the gender stereotyping common to animation and robotics. Work produced during this fellowship year will be exhibited in a solo gallery exhibition in 2020 in New York City.

PETRA KUPPERS

HUNTING FAMILY FACULTY FELLOW, PROFESSOR, ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE, WOMEN’S STUDIES, ART AND DESIGN, AND THEATER AND DRAMA “Eco Soma: Speculative Performance Experiments” “Eco-Soma” is a book project about ecopoetic disability culture perspectives: disabled people and their allies making art to live in a changing world, in contact with allied feminist, queer, trans, racialised and indigenous art projects.

The book hopes to make interventions into disabled futurities, queercrip possibilities, ecocrip queries and kinship networks. It engages forward-leaning speculations that envision social change in the framework of diverse worlds. It focuses on art-based methods of envisioning change, and argues that disability, traditionally seen as an enemy to environmentalism (with concrete ramps supposedly damaging pristine wildernesses), can instead offer imaginative ways toward living well and with agency in climate change, unrest, and challenge. With this, “Eco-Soma” makes interventions in the approach to somatics in performance studies,

locating a phenomenological/political interface as its base, an embodied witnessing as a core eco-soma method. Throughout, “Eco-Soma” will ask its readers and participants to be alert to their own embodied responses, to become engaged witnesses of writing, to extend convivial responses to themselves, as active participants in a shared socio-cultural world.

ASHLEY LUCAS

RICHARD AND LILLIAN IVES FACULTY FELLOW, ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR, THEATER AND DRAMA, ENGLISH, RESIDENTIAL COLLEGE, AND ART AND DESIGN “Prison Theatre: Performance and Incarceration” Obscured behind concrete and razor wire, the lives of the incarcerated remain hidden from public view while inspiring, partly as a result of their obscurity, often lurid and fevered representations that try to imagine or rationalize practices of imprisonment. Inside the walls, incarcerated men and women stage their own theatrical productions, articulating their identities and experiences for audiences using Shakespeare, original devised work, and improvisation, all while carefully monitored by gatekeepers. This book is the first monograph to compare prison theatre around the world. Analyzing prison performances from the United States, Canada, Brazil, Uruguay, the United Kingdom, Ireland, South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand, it looks at the ways in which incarcerated people, professional artists, activists, and even prison staff use theatre as a means to identify, reify, and critique national discourses on criminal justice.

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Petra Kuppers

Ashley Lucas

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LIBRARY BOOKS USED FOR RESEARCH BY 2019-20 FELLOWS.

the gallery and the FellowSpeaks at the institute also enabled me to see connections between my work, the work of other fellows, and of creators beyond the U-M community.

interdisciplinarity in spirit and practice 2019-20 HELMUT F. STERN FACULTY FELLOW My year at the Institute for the Humanities was more enriching than I ever could have anticipated. I was able to write and revise chapters of my monograph and to begin a new book collaboration project, productivity for which I had hoped and planned. But what will remain with me for the rest of my career and intellectual life after the completion of these projects are the profound curiosity and wonder at what interdisciplinary humanities can encompass and strive to achieve and a belief in scholarly and personal generosity.

DIANA NG

As a U-M Dearborn faculty member, I relished the opportunity to engage with colleagues from Ann Arbor. I was incredibly fortunate to have been a member of an extraordinary cohort of fellows. I learned so much about disability and resilience, cultural categories of pain and gender, constructions of race from medieval France to Broadway musicals, movement between languages, hope and agency for incarcerated people, soundscapes, remembering as artwork, and much more from my colleagues. The ethical urgency of their work was inspiring and encouraged me both to interrogate and articulate the premise and rationale of my own scholarship, and also to appreciate what my research and perspective on Roman culture and cognition had to offer to others asking different questions based in other times and places. The programming of 14

In each weekly fellows’ seminar, I learned new ideas and frameworks for thinking, wrote down references to chase down, and witnessed a community of scholars living its fullest potential. Each of us brought to the table our works in progress and our difficult tasks to share, and we were rewarded with supportive insight, challenges to dig deeper or look further, and praise for work that was well done. In this collective, the only agenda items were to help and to learn. Each one of us recognized that we were strong scholars in our own right, but also that we all have much to learn about methodology, writing, and other humanistic disciplines. Never have I seen such true interdisciplinarity in spirit and practice, and it was a great privilege to have been part of this endeavor.

This fellowship year was extraordinary in other ways. There were personal losses for several of us, and the COVID-19 pandemic emerged with one month left in our year together. The empathy, understanding, and respect that marked our intellectual exchanges carried over into our relationships as people. Concern for Scott Stonington, a fellow and practicing physician, and for fellows’ family members on the frontlines of care in the pandemic continues to unify our community in uncertain times. I am so grateful to have experienced the highs and lows of this year with these wonderful scholars and human beings, and I truly have been bettered in so many ways because of this opportunity. –Diana Y. Ng, 2019-20 Helmut F. Stern Faculty Fellow, associate professor of art history, U-M Dearborn

DIANA NG

HELMUT F. STERN FACULTY FELLOW, ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF ART HISTORY “Roman Public Visual Culture and the Cognition of Identity and Commemoration” This book uses cognitive theory as a new heuristic framework for humanistic methodologies of textual, visual, and historical analysis to argue that public sculptural and architectural monuments and rituals afforded sensory engagements that compelled cognitive processes resulting in new personal and social awareness and knowledge. Unlike previous scholarship that assumes, but does not address how, public monuments influenced how Romans considered themselves and their society, this project asserts that Romans thought with visual culture, constantly engaging cognitively with it to understand their world. Moreover, this book advocates for the cognitive importance of ephemeral things and events as on par with the durable monuments that have been invested with far greater agency in current scholarship on Roman commemoration, elucidating why Romans stipulated them in the first place.

institutional silencing of marginalized voices.

Traditional repertoire constructs an officialized soundscape that privileges middle-class male Christian listeners, while visually, bell towers manifest the power, wealth, and longevity of their institutions. Sonic competition is silenced; for example, attempts to sound the Muslim call to prayer from belfries are halted with noise abatement regulations to which bells are not subject. This research affirms that carillons are indeed instruments of community building, and simultaneously, instruments of exclusion.

By comparing the technological, social, and design histories of the carillon and organ, both architectural and institutional instruments in the United States and the Netherlands, Ng challenges the racialized boundaries that construct organ history as an autonomous Christian narrative, and the carillon as a spatio-sonic tool for social harmony. Although bells can enact exclusion, she proposes modes of public engagement that foster a more inclusive public soundscape.

SCOTT STONINGTON

TIFFANY NG

HELMUT F. STERN FACULTY FELLOW, ASSISTANT PROFESSOR, ANTHROPOLOGY AND CLINICAL LECTURER, INTERNAL MEDICINE “Expanding Ethics to Account for Complex Personhood”

Carillons have been erected since the early twentieth century on utopian promises of uniting communities and elevating the Everyman’s taste with Western classical music. Accountability is elusive thanks to the invisibility of carillonists and of their musical agency. Carillon concerts thus remain an uncontested practice in the public social, cultural, architectural, and sonic landscape. This lack of criticality aids the

In Stonington’s fieldwork on end of life care and pain management in Northern Thailand over the last ten years, his interlocutors have described components of their bodies and minds that consist of other beings, yoked to them through past ethical or unethical action. In this project, he asks the question: “How can one make sense of ethical action if one always already partly the other?” Although concepts of “complex” and “hybrid” personhood are common to many non-European cultures, scholars have yet to bring those concepts into conversation with ethical theory. Drawing on Northern Thai understandings of non-self and karma,

RICHARD AND LILLIAN IVES FACULTY FELLOW, ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF MUSIC “Inequality in Public Soundscapes: The Carillon, Organ, and the Politics of Public Space in the Twentieth Century”

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Diana Ng

Tiffany Ng

Scott Stonington

Stonington hopes to use ethnographic material to build a model of ethics that can account for nonbounded personhood.

graduate students SAHIN ACIKGOZ Sahin Acikgoz

Joel Batterman

MARY FAIR CROUSHORE GRADUATE FELLOW, COMPARATIVE LITERATURE “Transgender in Translation: A Transnational Category of Socio-Cultural Analysis in the Turkish Nation-State” In this dissertation project, Acikgoz analyzes the transnational circulation of the category “transgender” in the contemporary world.

Acikgoz argues that a critical analysis of the deployment of the category “transgender” in the Middle East and the Global South can reveal the ideological convergence between modernization and epistemological colonization. Acikgoz draws on medico-legal literature, religious texts, military archives, oral histories, autobiographies, testimonies, films, ethnographies, and ethnographic documentaries from Turkey, Iran, Brazil, Mexico, and the USA to examine how “transgender” as an umbrella term erases the religious, class-based, ethnic, sexual, and racial particularities of the non-Western transgender communities.

Acikgoz suggests a new approach in reading the translation of transgender into these diverse geographic spaces through a post-secular feminist lens, arguing that this reading praxis allows us to accomplish three outcomes. First, it exposes the epistemic erasures of the secular Eurocentric knowledge production. Secondly, it challenges the archival politics of the transgender biomedical modernity. Thirdly, it provincializes the Eurocentric political and cultural capital by problematizing the asymmetries that globalized knowledge circulation maintains.

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JOEL BATTERMAN

MARY FAIR CROUSHORE GRADUATE FELLOW, URBAN AND REGIONAL PLANNING “A Metropolitan Dilemma: Race, Power and Regional Planning in Detroit” Unbeknownst to many, there was once a time when Detroit was at the forefront of metropolitan planning and regional governance initiatives. The region’s highway planners laid out a framework for metropolitan growth in the 1920s. In the years after World War Two, as the region’s economy boomed and development surged into the suburbs, regional elites established a series of metropolitan institutions intended to facilitate regional planning and governance. Assisted by the Ford Foundation, they viewed Detroit as a pacesetter for the nation in planning a “metropolitan future.” What regional planners and advocates for regional cooperation failed to address was the problem of racial segregation and inequality.

In 1967, months after the establishment of the Southeast Michigan Council of Governments (SEMCOG) formalized a new metropolitan political arrangement, Detroit’s Twelfth Street ghetto exploded as black residents protested police violence. In the wake of the rebellion, SEMCOG tried to steer clear of controversy, but it quickly attracted intense suspicion from white suburbanites who feared it could be used to implement desegregation plans and redress metropolitan inequality. Meanwhile, as black elected officials gained power in Detroit, they saw little benefit in cooperating with SEMCOG, which they regarded as a white-dominated institution unwilling to advocate for black interests. This “metropolitan dilemma” is still with us today, and by understanding its history, we can better understand the roots of our present political predicament, and shape a strategy for a “reparative regionalism” that advances racial and economic equality in Detroit and other metropolitan areas.

MEGAN BEHREND

SYLVIA ‘DUFFY’ ENGLE GRADUATE FELLOW, ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE “The Latinity of Middle English Literature: Form, Translation, and Vernacularization” This dissertation offers a new, ethical-aesthetic paradigm to account for Latin-English bilingualism in late medieval British literature.

It challenges the dominant template for literarylinguistic history in the medieval period, which posits monolingualism as the telos of English literature. To accomplish this, Behrend reconsiders the bilingualism of texts traditionally viewed as central to the early “English” literary canon, arguing that each of these works is constituted by negotiations between the English and Latin languages. Her reading of these texts as fundamentally bilingual, rather than vernacular, depends on the category of translation as an analytic lens. While existing models of Latinvernacular translation in the medieval period formulate the relationship between these languages as rivalrous and hierarchical, the project explores how translation mobilizes a range of other sociolinguistic and formal relationships between Latin and vernacular. These complex bilingualisms then have ethical implications for today’s literary critics ranging from what historical narratives we tell to how we organize our canons and even our academic disciplines.

NICHOLAS CAVERLY

DAVID AND MARY HUNTING GRADUATE FELLOW, ANTHROPOLOGY “Restructured City: Demolition and Racial Accumulation in Detroit” This dissertation examines vacant building demolitions in Detroit to understand the production, embodiment, and transformation of structural racisms in the United States. It brings together ethnographic and archival

accounts drawn from living rooms, excavator cabs, regulatory proceedings, municipal offices, and other locations to investigate how transformations of the built environment simultaneously restructure the conditions of inequality, while at the same time maintaining anti-blackness and white supremacy as spatial, political economic, and environmental realities.

Based on twenty-four months of field research, it charts how building removals transform the sociomaterial products of racist disinvestment into differently racialized accumulations of protection and distress. In particular, Caverly attends to demolition as a redistributive project that reorganizes land, economic opportunity, and contamination. Physical buildings are transformed into landfillable waste. Incarcerated people are trained to be demolition labor. Resources are channeled into wealthier neighborhoods. Asbestos-containing building materials become toxin-laced air.

As building removals shape racialized bodies, territories, and bank accounts, they reveal how the recurrence of structural racisms subjects the already marginalized to harm, while absolving the already privileged from responsibility.

Megan Behrend

Nicholas Caverly

KYLE FRISINA

DAVID AND MARY HUNTING GRADUATE FELLOW, AMERICAN CULTURE AND ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE “Thinking Theatrically: Contemporary Aesthetics for Ethical Citizenship” This project begins from the observation that in an era when many Americans question government’s ability to act as a guarantor of democracy, an acclaimed subset of 21st-century women writers of color and queer women writers have turned to the subject of relational ethics: to the local, moral question of how to perform in relation to others. Frisina interrogates the efficacy of their interest in relational performance by identifying and taking seriously an often 17

Kyle Frisina

opening windows and imagining other possible worlds 2019-20 DAVID AND MARY HUNTING GRADUATE FELLOW The time I have spent in residence at the Institute for the Humanities is the most enriching experience I have had as a graduate student at the University of Michigan. I do not say this lightly—the university has offered me ample opportunities for intellectual engagement.

And yet, across my seven years on campus, those opportunities pale in comparison to the models for creative and generous scholarship that I have encountered in the institute. My colleagues this year included literary scholars, artists, historians, gender theorists, performers, linguists, and cultural critics. Some wear more than one of these hats. They are people who inspire me as they angle purposefully across disciplinary fault lines. In their hands, interdisciplinarity is not an empty buzzword; it is a practice that demands ongoing theoretical and methodological innovation.

NICHOLAS CAVERLY

Our weekly seminars and biweekly FellowSpeak lectures were a comforting regularity, especially in a year that is concluding with most of us sheltering at home. It has been my privilege to engage with works-in-progress from colleagues who are pushing at the cutting edges of their fields. To name only a few, their drafts have examined ancient cognitive processes, transhistorical educational institutions, sonic communities of carillon performance, embodied stakes of postcolonial resistance, and new definitions for language itself. Commenting 18

on my colleagues’ work has challenged me to expand my own modes of analysis and scholarly commitments as an ethnographer of racist (and antiracist) environments. In particular, it has done so by opening windows on the diverse ways that humanistic scholars can make conditions of oppression legible while never foreclosing possibilities for liberatory politics.

During my fellowship year I have written and revised an article for publication, completed two chapters of my dissertation, and successfully navigated the academic job market. None of this seemed possible in September. Yet it became so with the support of my colleagues in the institute, all of whom read and commented on an early draft of that article. Outside of our regular seminars, a few graduate student colleagues and I also workshopped chapter drafts, cover letters, and job talks. Their feedback helped me craft work that speaks to a breadth of scholarship rather than a narrow field. I was also buoyed by the care that faculty fellows extended toward graduate students. Without exception, they were reservoirs of encouragement on early career transitions and commiseration about the increasingly precarious state of the academy. Their advice has been invaluable to me, especially on job interview rituals and the need to cultivate life outside of work.

From former fellows, I knew that my fellowship at the Institute for the Humanities would help me better orient my scholarship toward matters of interdisciplinary concern. I was, nonetheless, unprepared to find a community of people who go to such lengths to sustain me both intellectually and personally. As individuals and as a collective, they have indelibly shaped the ways that I think, work, and imagine other possible worlds. –Nicholas Caverly, 2019-20 David and Mary Hunting Graduate Fellow, anthropology

coincident investment in theatrical performance.

Examining how literary works including Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric, Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts, and Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic take up themes of theatrical performance, how they perform on the page, and how their evocations of marginalized bodies are “performed” by and for the books’ wide audiences, she argues that encoded in these texts is a “theatrical” reorientation toward democratic life at once more modest and more radical than we might expect. It is more modest in that subjects—and audiences—are figured as perpetually unable to understand one another. It is more radical in that they are urged to attend to one another anyway. Each chapter combines black, queer, and feminist theater and performance approaches to identity and embodiment with close reading methods from literary studies to elaborate different relational elements of thinking theatrically.

Together, the chapters advance a practice of collaboratively developed, collectively sustained attention: a theatrical ethics of relation.

NADRA’s institutional sites, this research addresses three broad questions: 1) How do NADRA’s biometric identification technologies transform Pashtun experiences, notions and practices of kinship? 2) How does incorporation into and exclusion from NADRA’s databases shape daily practices affecting mobility and access to housing, education and government services?

3) How are NADRA’s day-to-day operations shaped by Pashtun encounters with NADRA, and what does this reveal about Pakistan’s governance and security practices? Additionally, this project historicises biometric technologies by examining early post-colonial and late-colonial fingerprinting and tribal identification practices.

Hashmi hopes to develop an understanding of historically constituted connections between kinship, biometrics, security practices, and the status of ethnic minorities as they crystallise into a networked, state-organised infrastructure.

SHIRA SCHWARTZ

ZEHRA HASHMI

RICHARD & LILLIAN IVES GRADUATE FELLOW, COMPARATIVE LITERATURE “Yeshiva Quirls: A Textual Ethnography of Jewish Gender, Sex and Reproduction”

This dissertation investigates the manner and means by which Pakistan’s biometric identity card system, the National Database and Registration Authority (NADRA), moves from a security-oriented identification system into a broader regime shaping domain of social life outside the realm of security. The NADRA card, built from individual biometric information and databases that consolidate records on citizens’ kin ties and other social data, is a central preoccupation for Pashtun migrants in urban locations. Through multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork in Pashtun neighbourhoods and

This dissertation explores the shifting roles of American Orthodox Jewish women through the changing gendered educational norms of the yeshiva. Since the rabbinic period, the yeshiva has operated as a center of male reproduction, generating lineages of learned men through rabbinic discipleship. Schwartz’s research traces the contemporary re-gendering of the yeshiva from a men’s to a women’s educational institution with the recent advent of women’s yeshivas. Framing Jewish education as a form of gendered reproduction, the project highlights this institutional shift as a reproductive shift, demonstrating how women’s yeshivas restructure Orthodox gender, sex and reproduction.

Centering students’ biomaterial learning bodies, Schwartz registers secondary sex trait

A. BARTLETT GIAMATTI GRADUATE FELLOW, ANTHROPOLOGY AND HISTORY “Biometric Belonging: Datafied Kinship and Databased Governance in Urban Pakistan”

Zehra Hashmi

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Shira Schwartz

changes that occur when students’ gender roles break down, troubling divisions between sex and gender and arguing for the social, spatial and material contingency of both. A textual ethnography, this dissertation toggles between analyses of late-Antique rabbinic texts and the women who study them today, exploring how an ancient male canon and its contemporary educational spaces shape new genders and biomaterial bodies.

Elizabeth Tacke

ELIZABETH TACKE

JAMES A. WINN GRADUATE FELLOW, ENGLISH AND EDUCATION “Rhetorics of Masking: Negotiating Disclosures of Disability and Trauma”

Sara McDougall

Daniel Y. Kim

Situated within disability studies and rhetoric, this qualitative dissertation explores the tensions inherent in disability and trauma disclosures, and it positions disclosure as context-specific, relational, and embodied. Tacke theorizes disclosures as potential tactics of sideways movement that can work to unmoor dominant readings of disability and trauma. Drawing from participants’ and my own negotiations of disclosure, she theorizes “masking” as a range of rhetorical moves through which actors negotiate disclosure. The primary rhetorics of masking include: 1) disguising the specifics of one’s story by speaking through culturally available narratives or disparate genres; 2) calling on metaphor and other figurative devices to elicit productive ambiguity and co-construct meaning with interlocutors; and 3) drawing upon affective veils, such as humor, to gain needed accessibility and/or soften difficult disclosures for oneself and one’s audience. Disclosure is laden with consequences, and through masking, individuals can more safely process experience, validate their experiences, and gain access to needed resources.

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visiting fellows SARA MCDOUGALL

WINTER 2020 NORMAN FREEHLING VISITING PROFESSOR, ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF HISTORY AT JOHN JAY COLLEGE OF CRIMINAL JUSTICE OF THE CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK “Surviving Illicit Pregnancy in Medieval Christian France” Medieval France largely deserves its reputation as an intolerant and brutal patriarchy, governed by strict interpretations of Christian ideas of sin.

In such a system, if a woman became pregnant as a result of extramarital sex, her swelling belly offered proof of her sexual sin and threatened the honor of her family. Yet even though we imagine the most terrible of consequences for a mother and her child in such circumstances, both literary sources and documents of legal practice tell a far more complex story. The fate of both mother and child was not necessarily tragic. The many responses to illicit pregnancy found in medieval sources indicate that we have misunderstood how this western Christian society understood and responded to sexual sin, misunderstanding as well the place of women in this intensely religious and patriarchal world.

DANIEL Y. KIM

FALL 2019 NORMAN FREEHLING VISITING PROFESSOR, ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH AND AMERICAN STUDIES AT BROWN UNIVERSITY “‘Dark Tales Strewn with Suffering’: Translations and Hauntings of History in the Novels of Han Kang” During his residency, Kim primarily focused on an article, “‘Dark Tales Strewn with Suffering’: Translations and Hauntings of History in the Novels of Han Kang,” for a forthcoming special

issue of New Literary History devoted to the global novel. He also explored a book project on South Korean literary and cinematic works that have begun to circulate globally in translation.

Kim put the finishing touches on his book The Intimacies of Conflict: Cultural Memory and the Korean War and taught the course “The Unended Korean War in Korean/American Literature and Film.”

summer fellows PHILIP CHRISTMAN LECTURER II, ENGLISH “The Writing Process”

This book examines the history of the idea of “the writing process” and traces its emergence, and the changes in the governing metaphors people use to conceptualize how writing gets done, with special attention to the twentiethcentury “process revolution” and the related reemergence of rhetoric as a field of study.

HENRY COWLES

ASSISTANT PROFESSOR, HISTORY “The Scientific Method: Evolution and Experiment from Darwin to Dewey”

ENRIQUE GARCÍA SANTO-TOMÁS PROFESSOR, SPANISH “Vital Signs: Midwifing Fiction in Spain, 1540-1690”

This book project will explore a selection of images of procreation in literature and portraiture (thunderstorms and floods, literary ‘miscarriages,’ monstrous births), as well as characters and scenes (midwives, wet-nurses, surgeons) in the portrayal of a period in which the idea of author and the rapid changes in obstetrics shaped new notions of creation, in both biological and aesthetic terms. SantoTomás will use his time at the institute to write a chapter devoted to Miguel de Cervantes’ take on childbirth in three of his short stories, in which he reflected on the state of medical care in his time, but also on the impact of the novel as an Italianate experiment for a new reading audience, as well as on his role as a pioneer who experimented with the many challenges of writing. Santo-Tomás is particularly interested in refining a number of ideas on mediation and interruption, examined as theoretical constructs that may or may not hold similar values today.

These are three fascinating pieces that will allow him to share all the major theoretical questions of the project with a cohort of colleagues from other disciplines.

This project is a history of the algorithmic, five-step scientific method that is still taught in schools today. It roots this authoritative tool in a history of the human sciences, specifically in developments in early evolutionary psychology during the late-nineteenth century.

Philip Christman

Henry Cowles

Enrique García Santo-Tomás

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practical magic 2019 SUMMER FACULTY FELLOW It’s been nearly a year since last summer’s institute ended. If not for the entire office wall in my home covered in post-it notes with key ideas, concepts, possible structures, and questions to pursue as I write my first book, it might feel like a fantasy, especially since we’ve all been in isolation since mid-March. I’m a lecturer whose appointment requires a full load of writing courses; having professional time and space dedicated to working on my own writing was entirely novel and revelatory in ways that are still unfolding. But the time and space alone—as priceless as those are—cannot account for the value of the Summer Faculty Fellowship. What the institute offers in the way of intellectual, artistic, and—well, human—community makes it a space I’ve heard colleagues from across the university describe as “magical” over and over again.

SHELLEY MANIS

One of the most powerful elements of the institute is the fact that everyone in the room is at a different stage of their working process. We came in along a spectrum from seeds of articles, to book-length projects in vitro, to fledgling research or fieldwork in-progress, to final revisions before publication. Each week, we had two opportunities to sit in two-hour workshops of one scholar’s project, offering our own questions, disciplinary free associations, and genre insights and being inspired by each other’s.

This variety of process and generic perspectives— in addition to disciplinary perspectives—offered 22

me the courage to entirely revamp my own research and writing processes and to refresh my intellectual and artistic point of view. It was tremendously helpful to try out ideas about writing and performance in a room full of careful and curious thinkers with little expertise in performance studies, and I got the indisputably best piece of writing advice I’ve ever received when it came time to workshop my own in-process draft.

Though our little community is now scattered, the work continues, and neither my writing nor my teaching will ever be the same again.

–Shelley Manis, 2019 Summer Faculty Fellow; lecturer IV, Sweetland Writing Center

ANNETTE JOSEPH-GABRIEL

SHELLEY MANIS

How did enslaved children fashion themselves as free citizens through their textual production?

What can their visual portraits tell us about this self-fashioning? How might we redefine citizenship when understood from the perspective of an enslaved child transitioning to the age of adulthood? This book project investigates these questions through a study of the writings of enslaved children whose geographies spanned Haiti, France, Senegal, the United States and England in the nineteenth century. This study explains how young people, writing across a variety of genres including letters, poetry and songs, articulated visions of freedom and citizenship through their textual production. It shows how their literary practices, including bilingual composition and innovations on the formal features of their chosen genres, make important contributions to historical and philosophical understandings of citizenship and freedom. In addition, Joseph-Gabriel examines the visual portraiture of these young people as these images are crucial texts for reading performance and self-fashioning. Studying enslaved children as authors and historical actors sheds much-needed light on a sorely neglected strand of Black Atlantic literary history. Further, examining the ways that enslaved children responded to the denial of their fundamental right to freedom can provide new insight into the ways that textual production and selffashioning constituted resistance to slavery.

This monograph will weave together writing studies and performance, bringing theatrical theories and techniques into the writing classroom to enrich invention, development of argument, and collaboration/peer review—an approach not yet fully articulated in the rich literature in either writing/rhetorical studies or theater/performance studies. Manis wants to model treating a writing classroom like a blackbox rehearsal and performance space.

“Why not move beyond figuring ourselves as performing when we teach, and beyond thinking of writing as metaphorical performance, and into training student writers to invent, draft, revise, and collaborate in an embodied way”?

This book will build on existing research in writing and performance by arguing for teaching writing as performance.

ASSISTANT PROFESSOR, FRENCH “Fashioning the Citizen: Enslaved Children’s Textual Production in the Atlantic World”

LECTURER IV, SWEETLAND WRITING CENTER AND COMPREHENSIVE STUDIES “Beyond Metaphor: Performance and Writing”

Annette Joseph-Gabriel

Shelley Manis

CRISTINE MODEY

LECTURER III, SWEETLAND WRITING CENTER “Ethnographic Study of the Sermon Preparation Processes of Clergy” While numerous practitioner-oriented books about preaching have been written, little has been published about the actual composing practices of clergy. Most clergy members write sermon texts weekly for public consumption in a high-stakes environment and devote considerable time and effort to their preparation, yet writing-studies scholars have not paid attention to these writers’ processes or their conceptualization of this genre and its social function. For this project, Modey will use an ethnographic approach to understand the writing lives of a diverse group of clergy from the Abrahamic faiths, using a semi-structured, 23

Christine Modey

David Morse

ethnographic interview method. She will pose a set of questions related to their training in sermon preparation; their process of sermon preparation; their understanding of the sermon as a genre; and their understanding of their audiences, among other topics. She will record and transcribe the interviews and also collect written artifacts that the participants are willing to share, such as sermon drafts, final versions, and video or audio recordings.

If time permits, she may use ethnographic observation and a think-aloud protocol with selected research participants in order to explore their composing processes in more detail.

DAVID MORSE

LECTURER IV, PUBLIC POLICY “The Occident, a Novel-in-progress”

Antoine Traisnel

4.2K

THE NUMBER OF TIMES PEOPLE WATCHED OUR YOUTUBE VIDEOS DURING THE HOUSE CALLS SERIES.

There are few things that arouse in us greater distaste than to see a human being caught up in [death], at least if we are to judge by the efforts we make to keep corpses out of sight,” writes Karl Ove Knausgaard. This novel-in-progress is set in a contemporary city where the distaste for death has taken on new dimensions. Corpses are considered repulsive; when someone dies, people flee and a crack team of specialists, known as Purge, arrives with the promptness of EMTs and removes the corpse to a place unknown.

This conceit inspires the story of Daniel Wheal, an architect who, for unknown reasons, continues to set off sensors that inform Purge that he’s dead—when in fact he’s still alive.

Throughout the novel, Purge arrives to take him away and each time he escapes. Eventually Wheal takes refuge in Sterling Park, a public housing community where city services, such as police and sanitation—including Purge—don’t operate, giving him a temporary sanctuary in which he can wrestle with his society’s great unacknowledged mysteries: the nature of death and the fate of the dead.

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ANTOINE TRAISNEL

ASSISTANT PROFESSOR, COMPARATIVE LITERATURE AND ENGLISH “Martha: A Life in Captivity” Traisnel will use the time and resources offered by the fellowship to write the conclusion of his book, Capture: Early American Pursuits and the Making of a New Animal Condition. The conclusion reflects on the last days of Martha, the “last passenger pigeon,” who outlived her species by four years under the care of the Cincinnati Zoo. Where Capture opens on an image of Audubon’s attempt to smoke out a bird that refuses to die, it will close on the image of a zookeeper tending to the lifeless, frozen body of Martha—the tragic culmination of the move from animals to “the animal” charted throughout the book—in an effort to preserve the last remnants of a species. If “capture” names as a hegemonic paradigm that accounts for the systemic disappearance of animals under Western biocapitalism, the conclusion asks what an “ethics of capture” might look like. For Traisnel, this entails imagining the relationship to animals that is still possible— and even demanded—by an age in which they appear, whether encased or encaged, always at a remove. The ethics of capture describes a collective responsibility toward animal subjects whose lifeworlds one shares but cannot fully comprehend. Traisnel aligns the ethics of capture, elaborated from the work of ethologist Jakob von Uexküll, with recent work in queer, feminist and environmental studies in the works of thinkers like Donna Haraway, Anna Tsing, and Sarah Ensor. Against the doxa of sustainability and reproductive futurity that has guided the disciplines of animal studies and ecocriticism in recent decades, he argues for an ethics of care beyond the utopian promises of human-animal communion or animal liberation.

SARA MCDOUGALL WINTER 2020 NORMAN FREEHLING VISITING PROFESSOR

interview engage with scholars and researchers on campus with medical knowledge connected to pregnancy and infancy.

With every day I spend here, I am increasingly aware of how special Michigan is as an institution, particularly for the humanities and for interdisciplinary collaboration.

Sara McDougall is an associate professor of history at John Jay College of Criminal Justice of the City University of New York

CAN YOU TELL US ABOUT THE RESEARCH PROJECT YOU ARE WORKING ON THIS YEAR? My research into medieval court records has meant that I have spent a considerable amount of time in French municipal and national archives. While reviewing material from this period in history, I am always fascinated by the difference in the punishment allotted to women in comparison to men. Rather than assume any consistency, I’ve found that it is important to consider how conceptions of personhood and individual agency have changed over the past several centuries, not always for the better. I have certainly learned that legal practice surrounding illicit pregnancy in medieval France

is much more nuanced than what I had originally expected.

HOW DOES BEING IN THIS ENVIRONMENT WITH OTHER FELLOWS DRIVE YOUR PROJECT? I am in awe of the institute and the energetic environment it fosters for interdisciplinary collaboration. Each week, all of the fellows meet to discuss each other’s work and give constructive feedback.

The wide array of disciplines represented by this year’s cohort has been immensely helpful in working through obstacles in my own research.

I really appreciate that the humanities are a vital part of university life, in and outside the institute. In the coming months, I hope to

WHAT ADVICE WOULD YOU GIVE TO UNDERGRADUATES? WHY DO YOU THINK UNDERGRADS SHOULD STUDY THE HUMANITIES? My best advice to students is to always look for which subjects excite you and motivate you to continue examining them, day after day. The job market is uncertain and changes often; it’s best to do what you love, but at the same time be willing to question and explore other fields. I thought opera was the only career for me and I was completely wrong! While it might appear daunting and ill-defined at first, try to relax and take advantage of all of 25

the resources that Michigan has to offer. Learn from taking on new opportunities that you might feel unequipped to tackle at first. Find out if you really love what you think you love, but also try to take a course on a topic you think you hate, or that you think you’re not good at. This is a time to try and to explore, you may surprise yourself. And know that training in the humanities in particular promises skill sets and training that can facilitate lifelong exploration and the ability to pursue careers in a variety of disciplines.

–Evan Binkley (History of Art, 2020). Binkley was an active member of the Humanities Under graduate Engagement Group. He is a 2020 recipient of the prestigious Marshall Scholarship.

Read the entire interview online at http://myumi.ch/nb9ox

undergraduate

PROGRAMS

We kicked off the 2019-20 academic year with “Understand Our World,” a campus-wide campaign to engage undergraduate students and heighten the visibility of the institute and the humanities at Michigan.

A series of visually striking banners, posters, social media posts, and a new video (watch at http://myumi.ch/er0Ex) and brochure highlighted all that the Institute for the Humanities has to offer undergraduate students. Thanks to the generous support of the Edna Balz Lacy, the Leonard and Eileen Newman, and the Winifred Polk funds, we continue to find innovative ways to connect with undergraduate students, building awareness of the creative and critical thinking that comes from work in the humanities.

HUMANITIES WEEK The Humanities Undergraduate Engagement Group initiated an ambitious project this year in organizing the institute’s first Humanities Week, aimed at engaging undergraduate students with the institute and humanities-related topics.

Although the program was cut short due to COVID-19, it brought in hundreds of new students and set the foundation for future planning.

• Daily Grab’n Go Breakfast • Humanities Course Fair for Non-Humanities Students • Career Panel: Life & Career with a Humanities Degree • Living Library: Unjudge Someone

CLASS GALLERY VISITS Class visits to the gallery brought in dozens of classes, totaling over 700 undergraduate and area high school students, to engage with the art and subject matter, with a formal presentation

by Arts Curator Amanda Krugliak and discussion tailored to their curriculum.

LOOK 101: SEEING ART IN AN INSTAGRAM WORLD A series of discussions hosted

by Arts Curator Amanda Krugliak, offering a fresh take on the basics of looking at and evaluating art in the gallery.

“Understand Our World” street pole banner in front of the Institute for the Humanities.

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FIRST MAN: SAMUEL CODES WATSON MURAL PAINTING Artist Tylonn J. Sawyer worked with Lauren Mills, Kevin Moore, Moteniola Ogundipe, Olivia Prado, and Amanda Taylor—students from Stamps in Color, a group of artists, designers, and creatives of color from the Stamps School of Art and Design—to create a mural on the first floor of the Modern Languages Building to honor the first African American student admitted to the University of Michigan.

HIGH STAKES CULTURE The High Stakes Culture series, presented by the Institute for the Humanities and the Humanities Collaboratory, brings humanities perspectives to bear on current debates.

U-M humanities faculty explore the topics as a panel, followed by an extended Q & A with the audience.

MEDIA & MARKETING INTERNSHIPS Media and marketing interns participate in social media and other marketing initiatives throughout the year. They gain hands-on experience with social media analytics, event promotion, and institutional branding, among other skills.

This year’s interns were Julia Margalit (BA, art history and communications and media, 2020) and Cameron Sackett (BA, communications and media, 2020).

COURSE OFFERINGS • “The Unended Korean War in Korean/American Literature and Film,” taught by Daniel Y. Kim, associate professor of English and American studies at Brown University and 2019 Norman Freehling Visiting Professor • “Hip-Hop in Eastern Europe and Russia,” taught by Alena Aniskiewicz, 2019-20 Postdoctoral Research Fellow • “Saints and Sinners: Illicit Pregnancy in Medieval Europe (c 200-1500),” taught by Sara McDougall, associate professor of history at John Jay College of Criminal Justice of the City University of New York and 2020 Normal Freehling Visiting Professor • “Provocations and Other Acts: Arts and Humanities as Social Practice,” taught by Amanda Krugliak, Institute for the Humanities arts curator UNDERGRADUATE ENGAGEMENT GROUP The Humanities Institute Undergraduate Engagement Group works to increase student awareness and understanding of the humanities on campus and connects students with faculty, visitors, and other students who share an interest in the humanities. Bi-weekly meetings feature an invited guest, including humanities faculty, visiting fellows, and artists, who discuss their scholarship and career paths with group members.

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Stamps School of Art and Design student Moteniola Ogundipe working on Tylonn Sawyer’s mural First Man: Samuel Codes Watson.

GALLERY INTERNSHIP The undergraduate gallery intern assists gallery staff in all aspects of the program, including exhibition installation and daily maintenance of the space. This year’s intern was Robyn Han (BA, product design, 2019).

1000+ BAGELS

JILL S. HARRIS MEMORIAL LECTURE The Jill S. Harris Memorial SERVED DURING Fund brings a distinguished HUMANITIES WEEK visitor to campus who will appeal to undergraduates interested in the humanities and the arts. Rachel Havrelock gave this year’s lecture, titled “Freshwater Stories: Optics, Governance, and Adaptation around the Great Lakes.”

my year of marketing for the humanities On one of my first days as a marketing and social media intern at the Institute for the Humanities, I was armed with a stack of posters and told to take the bus to North Campus to distribute them. Little did my supervisor know that, although I was a senior in LSA, I had avoided taking the bus to North Campus my entire time at Michigan. Posters in hand, I headed to CC Little and boarded the bus heading north.

It was surprisingly easier than expected, and I triumphantly returned to the office, almost too embarrassed to share my “success” story.

JULIA MARGALIT

While interning at the institute, I met artists and scholars, sat in on lectures and heard about thought-provoking topics, and got to see what it takes to run a successful educational organization. For my first social media assignment, I spent time with our Efroymson Emerging Artist in Residence Ruth Leonela Buentello. Hearing about her artistic process and her inspiration for the exhibition was an intimate and eye-opening experience that not many are privy to. As time went on, I had many opportunities to converse with our faculty and graduate student fellows. As an undergraduate, I was wowed by their accomplishments and research. Through these regular interactions, I was inspired to produce social media content that highlighted the compelling scholarly work being conducted at the institute.

Along with my regular social media responsibilities, I also assisted in planning our first-ever Humanities Week with our Undergraduate Engagement Group. Humanities Week will remain one of the most memorable projects of 28

my undergraduate career. Working alongside our Undergraduate Engagement Group, Stephanie Harrell, the institute’s marketing and communications manager, and Cameron, my co-intern, we programmed an entire week of humanities events that would be of interest to undergrad students. There was a lot of discussion about what types of events should be selected, which would be the most popular, and how we would market the project to the student body.

Collaborating as a group to achieve this goal brought the Undergrad Engagement Group closer together, and we showed up to our group meetings excited to present ideas, suggest potential speakers, and review drafts of marketing materials. Although Humanities Week abruptly ended as classes went online due to COVID-19, I am proud to say that we produced a dynamic series of humanities-focused events that brought in new undergraduate students, many of whom had never even heard of the Institute for the Humanities.

I am grateful for the opportunity to share the value of the humanities with the undergrad population here at the University of Michigan.

Working alongside Stephanie, our curator Amanda Krugliak, and the rest of the institute staff was educational and eye-opening. And it all started with an adventurous bus ride to North Campus.

–Julia Margalit (BA History of Art & Communication and Media, 2020)

EVENTS MAJOR LECTURES Presenting distinguished visitors to enhance the humanities at Michigan. “‘In the Future, Robots will Speak Chickasaw’: Indigenous Language Futurism and the Temporalities of Language Reclamation,” Marc and Constance Jacobson Lecture by Jenny L. Davis, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign “Freshwater Stories: Optics, Governance, and Adaptation around the Great Lakes,” Jill S. Harris Memorial Lecture by Rachel Havrelock, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, founder and director of the UIC Freshwater Lab

High Stakes Culture,“The Power of the Pronoun.”

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HIGH STAKES CULTURE A series that brings humanities perspectives to bear on current debates presented in collaboration with the U-M Humanities Collaboratory.

“The Power of the Pronoun.”

U-M faculty Angela Dillard, Scott Larson and Robin Queen “Cultural Contagions: Xenophobia, Scapegoating, and Coronavirus.” U-M faculty Angela Dillard, Alexandra Stern, Kin-Yee Ian Shin, Yi-Li Wu (cancelled due to COVID-19)

AUTHOR’S FORUM A series on books & ideas presented in collaboration with LSA. Eva Palmer Sikelianos: A Life in Ruins, a conversation with the book’s author Artemis Leontis (modern Greek and comparative literature) and Yopie Prins (English and comparative literature)

AUTHOR’S FORUM Airs on NPR’s Alt.Latino

In late November, 2019, Felix Contreras, host of NPR’s Alt.Latino, talked to U-M’s Jesse Hoffnung-Garskof (American culture) about Hoffnung-Garskof ’s new book Racial Migrations: New York City and the Revolutionary Politics of the Spanish Caribbean.

The interview was recorded and aired on Alt. Latino, NPR’s pioneering program about Latin Alternative music and Latino culture.

The event was part of our Author’s Forum series, a collaboration between the Institute for the Humanities and the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts. Additionally, Wallace House-a U-M program that recognizes, sustains and elevates the careers of journalists-was instrumental in recommending and coordinating Felix Contreras’s participation.

Listen to the interview at http://myumi.ch/QAXgY

Moment of Reckoning: Imagined Death and Its Consequences in Late Ancient Christianity, a conversation with the book’s author Ellen Muehlberger (history, classical studies, Middle East studies) and Deborah Dash Moore (Judaic studies, history) Author’s Forum Presents: Racial Migrations New York City and the Revolutionary Politics of the Spanish Caribbean, A Conversation with Jesse Hoffnung-Garskof (American culture) and Felix Contreras The Center of the World: Regional Writing and the Puzzles of PlaceTime, a conversation with the book’s author June Howard (English, American culture, women’s studies) and Joshua Miller (English, Judaic studies) Eardrums: Literary Modernism as Sonic Warfare, a conversation with the book’s author Tyler Whitney (German) and Tung-Hui Hu (English) (Cancelled due to COVID-19) 30

From the 2019 Marc and Constance Jacobson Lecture, “In the Future, Robots will Speak Chickasaw.

The Divo and the Duce: Promoting Film Stardom and Political Leadership in 1920s America, a conversation with the book’s author Giorgio Bertellini (film, television, and media and Romance languages and literatures) and Jay Cook (history, American culture) (Cancelled due to COVID-19) WORKSHOP Careers for Humanities PhDs: Publishing graduate student workshop with U-M alumnus Nick Geller (PhD Classical Studies, 2015) of Yale University Press

FELLOWSPEAK Scholarly presentation of on-going work by current fellows with informal conversation and Q & A

“‘Dark Tales Strewn with Suffering’: Translations and Hauntings of History in the Novels of Han Kang,” Daniel Kim

“Being and Acting the Other: Expanding Ethics to Account for Complex Personhood,” Scott Stonington

“Cognitive Theory and Science as Frameworks for the Understanding of Roman Public Commemoration,” Diana Ng

“‘He’d be a good rhymer’: Polish Hip-Hop and the Legacy of Romanticism,” Alena Aniskiewicz

“Down and Out and Pregnant in Medieval France,” Sara McDougall

“E Pluribus Unum: Out of Many Voices, One Language,” Marlyse Baptista

“Terminal Regions: Queer Environmental Ethics in the Absence of Futurity,” Sarah Ensor

“Syrian Women’s Labor and the Early Arab American Peddling Economy,” Charlotte Karem Albrecht

“Real and Imagined: Animating the Spaces Between Us,” Heidi Kumao

“Eco Soma: Speculative Performance Experiments,” Petra Kuppers “Community Carillon/ Corporate Carillon,” Tiffany Ng “Prison Theatre: Performance and Incarceration,” Ashley Lucas

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HOSTED EVENTS THAT WERE ZERO-WASTE.

Fellows seminar with Norman Freehling Visiting Professor Daniel Y. Kim.

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White on White: Stone Mountain by Tylonn J. Sawyer, in the Osterman Common Room.

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GALLERY Innovative exhibitions and arts programming.

WHITE HISTORY MONTH, VOL 1 Tylonn J. Sawyer ABOUT THE ARTIST: Tylonn J. Sawyer (b. 1976) is an American figurative artist, educator, and curator living and working in Detroit, Michigan. His work centers around themes of identity, both individual and collective, politics, race, history and pop culture. Sawyer is a professor of art at Oakland Community College and teaches drawing at the College for Creative Studies in Detroit. In 2014, Sawyer started the first teen arts council in Michigan for the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit. He earned an MFA in painting from the New York Academy of Art: Graduate School of Figurative Art and a BFA in drawing and painting from Eastern Michigan University.

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ABOUT THE EXHIBITION: Mining symbols of power and oppression from the historical strata of western art, Sawyer exposes truths, while covering others to gain a clearer picture of concepts that have shaped our current society. Within the context of his figurative drawings and paintings Sawyer presents an alternative to the historical record that often accompanies well known images throughout art history.

Inspired by current trends to redact post Civil War Confederate monuments from the American landscape, Sawyer poses the questions: Why are some symbols of oppression lauded, considered sacred and become canonized while others cause the public to demand their destruction? Is there a logical thread in the tapestry of oppression? Can this thread be observed and considered? Lastly, can this thread then be unraveled? Additionally, this exhibition featured a series of drawings titled Grâce Nóir, which featured Black women whose works have contributed to shaping the landscape of visual culture.

RELATED EVENTS: As part of his residency, Sawyer also worked with U-M students to create a mural to honor Samuel C. Watson, the first African American student admitted to the University of Michigan. The mural is on view on the first floor of MLB. Opening Reception and Artist Conversation LOOK 101: Seeing Art in an Instagram World, the Art of Tylonn J. Sawyer

VIRTUAL STUDIO VISITS WITH MICHIGAN ARTISTS IN A PANDEMIC

“What is the value of the arts during times of crisis?” “How do you find hopefulness in this moment?” The series offers a twist on the more predictable gallery visit format which is often carefully choreographed, formal, “ready for company.” House Calls focuses on something more personal instead.

As artists walked us through their spaces, very real conversations in the midst of crisis emerged.

Sarah Rose Sharp discussed the strength she has drawn from going through the pandemic while living in Detroit. Judy Bowman from Romulus showed us art created with her 90-year-old mother while in isolation together. Sajeev Visweswaran, who splits his time between Ann Arbor and New Delhi, India, touched on his sense of privilege in being able to go through the pandemic in the U.S. instead of India.

Screenshot from House Calls series. Clockwise from top left: Amanda Krugliak, artist Yen Azzaro, Angela Abioudun, and Juliet Hinely.

As the university moved to remote classes and work in the midst of the COVID-19 public health crisis, so did the physical space of our gallery. In this time of shared vulnerability and isolation, it felt imperative that we be responsive and connect directly with the artists in our communities. With the support of a grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, we translated plans for a summer regional art exhibition into our newly created web series House

Calls: Virtual Studio Visits with Michigan Artists in a Pandemic. Every week for ten weeks, our gallery team made a virtual studio visit to a regional artist from communities across the state of Michigan. Each artist was commissioned to participate in the project and receives an honorarium for their engagement.

Our outreach and impact was immediate, like a first aid kit for artists, asking the questions, “How are you doing?”

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In all these small details, it becomes apparent that our human connections are what remain most critical. We are reminded of what’s missing—all the comings and goings, the ideas shared, the small human exchanges that make our university and communities vibrant. House Calls offers intimacy and sustenance during a time of social distancing, reaffirming that our human relationships and our commitment to one another can be reparative even in a new world unrecognizable.

Watch the House Calls series at http://myumi.ch/BolAQ. –Amanda Krugliak, arts curator

HOUSE CALLS ARTIST LINEUP Sarah Rose Sharp, Detroit Sajeev Visweswaran, Ann Arbor and New Delhi, India Judy Bowman, Romulus Mandy Cano Villalobos, Grand Rapids Lavinia Hanachiuc, Ann Arbor Rashaun Rucker, Detroit Yen Azzaro, Ypsilanti Ricky Weaver, Ypsilanti Ijania Cortez, Detroit Levon Kafafian, Detroit

HH(C)*/AN AMERICAN INTERIOR Valery Jung Estabrook ABOUT THE ARTIST: Valery Jung Estabrook was born in Plantation, Florida, and grew up on an organic pear farm in rural southwestern Virginia. She holds an MFA in drawing and painting from Brooklyn College and a BA in visual art from Brown University. Her work has been exhibited in major cities both domestically and internationally, including New York, Los Angeles, Lagos, Bilbao, and Melbourne. In 2018 she received the Gold AHLT&W Foundation Contemporary Visual Art Award, an annual award recognizing artists of Korean heritage in the United States. She currently resides in Albuquerque and teaches experimental art at the University of New Mexico.

ABOUT THE EXHIBITION: *Hometown Hero (Chink): An American Interior re-creates a lifesize living room sewn by hand, suggestive of the artist’s history

HH(C): An American Interior installation by Valery Jung Estabrook.

growing up in rural southwestern Virginia. The installation includes a custom upholstered recliner embellished with a Confederate flag motif, and a plush TV emanating country music karaoke sung by the artist.The exhibition challenges the notions of heritage, Southern nationalism and “traditional” American culture, providing a window into the tensions of being a perpetual foreigner in one’s own hometown. Reflecting on her exhibition title, Estabrook states, “The second part of the title, ‘chink,’ is a word that is fundamentally linked to my lifelong experience as an Asian American.

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Yes, it’s offensive—an incredibly painful slur. But that same pain is something that I, unfortunately, think of when I think of home. I include it because I must in order to have an honest discussion about the America that I know.”

RELATED EVENTS: Opening Reception and Artist Conversation LOOK 101: Seeing Art in an Instagram World, the Art of Valery Jung Estabrook

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UNDERGRADUATE ST UDENTS WHO TO URED OUR EX HIBITIONS THROUGH CLASS VISITS.

YO TENGO NOMBRE Ruth Leonela Buentello, Efroymson Emerging Artist in Residence ABOUT THE ARTIST: Ruth Leonela Buentello is an interdisciplinary artist from San Antonio, TX. She is known to create narratives based on her Xicana identity.

She received her Bachelors of Fine Arts at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2011 and is a recipient of the 2017 Joan Mitchell Painters and Sculptors grant. She is currently a full tuition scholar at Maine College of Art where she will receive her MFA in 2021.

ABOUT THE EXHIBITION: This series of paintings was inspired by the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” immigration policy and the images of migrant families being separated and detained at the US-Mexico border that dominated media outlets across the nation since the summer of 2017. Focusing on images from the US media sources that exposed the violence of migrants’ dehumanization, vulnerability, fear, loss, and criminalization, the paintings document the embodiment of state-authorized brutality and erasures of personhood.

RELATED EVENTS: Opening Reception and Artist Conversation LOOK 101: Seeing Art in an Instagram World, the Art of Ruth Leonela Buentello

Stories of Refuge installation by Tania El Khoury.

STORIES OF REFUGE Tania El Khoury ABOUT THE ARTIST: Tania El Khoury is a contemporary artist whose work focuses on audience interactivity and is concerned with the ethical and political potential of such encounters. She creates installations and performances in which the audience is an active collaborator. She was a 2019 Soros Art Fellow and the recipient of the Bessies Outstanding Production Award, the International Live Art Prize, the Total Theatre Innovation Award, and the Arches Brick Award. El Khoury holds a PhD from Royal Holloway, University of London.

She is associated with Forest Fringe collective of artists in the UK and is a co-founder of Dictaphone Group in Lebanon.

ABOUT THE INSTALLATION: Since the beginning of the Syrian revolution in 2011, Syrian refugees have been fleeing the brutal regime in search of safe haven. Munich, Germany, is one of the cities where many Syrian 36

refugees land after crossing unofficial borders through different European countries.

Tania El Khoury, and her art collective Dictaphone Group, collaborated with a group of Syrian refugees who had recently arrived in Munich. El Khoury gave each of these participants/ collaborators a discreet camera for a day, their only instructions being to film their daily lives in Munich. Together they produced three videos, presented in this installation and viewed from bunk bed barracks in the gallery.

RELATED EVENTS: “As Far As My Fingertips Take Me,” presented in conjunction with the University Musical Society HOUSE CALLS

SUPPORT Drawing on the University of Michigan’s remarkable resources, we seek to become a national leader in advocating for the humanities in higher education and to 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 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.

The institute is currently focused on raising funds in support of the art gallery and its exhibitions. The institute’s gallery has gained national attention for the high quality of its curated shows mounted annually.

The Gallery and Arts Programming Fund, an expendable gift fund, was established in 2019 for this very purpose. The institute is also seeking to establish endowments to name the gallery and/or one of its three to five annual shows ensuring the institute is able to continue its 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 through programming centered on gallery exhibitions and visiting artists.

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The Institute for the Humanities is a center for innovative, collaborative study in the humanities and arts.

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 its secure gift website (https://leadersandbest. umich.edu/find/#!/scu/ lsa), search on the term “humanities” and available funds will be listed.

To discuss establishing an endowment or bequest in detail please contact us at humin@umich.edu or 734.936.3518 or contact the institute’s advancement officer Jeff Jelinski, LSA Advancement, 734.615-6333 or jjelinsk@umich.edu.

AFFILIATES AND STAFF STAFF Angela Abiodun, collaboration and outreach manager Stephanie Harrell, marketing communications manager Juliet Hinely, arts production coordinator Laura Koroncey, graphic designer Amanda Krugliak, arts curator/assistant director, creative programming Peggy McCracken, director Gretchen O’Hair, fellows coordinator Sheri Sytsema-Geiger, administrative manager

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.

STUDENT STAFF Robyn Han, curatorial intern Julia Margalit, marketing and media intern Sydney Moore, office assistant Cameron Sackett, marketing and media intern INSTITUTE FOR THE HUMANITIES EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE Stephen Berrey, American culture and history Benedicte Boisseron, Afroamerican and African studies Caryl Flinn, film, television and media; women’s studies Lucy Hartley, English Ishani Maitra, philosophy Peggy McCracken, ex officio; Institute for the Humanities Anthony Mora, American culture and history Alexandra Stern, ex officio; associate dean, humanities; American culture, history, women’s studies, obstetrics and gynecology Arthur Verhoogt, ex officio; associate dean, academic programs and initiatives; papyrology and Greek Johannes von Moltke, German and film, media and television

THE REGENTS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN Jordan B. Acker, Southfield Michael J. Behm, Grand Blanc Mark J. Bernstein, Ann Arbor Paul W. Brown, Ann Arbor Shauna Ryder Diggs, Grosse Pointe Denise Ilitch, Bingham Farms Mark S. Schlissel, ex officio Ron Weiser, Ann Arbor Katherine E. White, Ann Arbor WWW.LSA.UMICH.EDU/HUMANITIES 202 S. Thayer Street, Suite 1111 Ann Arbor, MI 48104-1608 734.936.3518 38

ABOUT THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN INSTITUTE FOR THE HUMANITIES

The Institute for the Humanities acknowledges that the University of Michigan, named for Michigami, the world’s largest freshwater system, sits on land stewarded by Niswi Ishkodewan Anishinaabeg— the Three Fires People, who are the Ojibwe, Odawa, and Potawatomi—along with their neighbors the Seneca, Delaware, Shawnee, and Wyandot nations.

Research into the human condition—how we live in the world and how we live with each other—is vital to the cultivation of a just and equitable society. At the Institute for the Humanities, we facilitate work that examines humanities traditions broadly across space and time, deepens synergies among the humanities, the arts, and disciplines across the university, and brings the voices of the humanities to public life.

Each year we provide fellowships for Michigan faculty, graduate students, and visiting scholars who work on scholarly and artistic projects. We also offer a wide array of public and scholarly events, including public lectures, workshops, discussions and art exhibitions.

Since 1987, when Arthur Miller read from his memoir Timebends at our inauguration, the institute has granted fellowships to over 500 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.

Arts Curator Amanda Krugliak interviews artist Tylonn J. Sawyer.

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202 S. Thayer Street, Suite 1111 Ann Arbor, MI 48104-1608