Faculty Fellows

FELLOWS

faculty

Charlotte Karem Albrecht

Alena Aniskiewicz

CHARLOTTE KAREM ALBRECHT 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”

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 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.

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

“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.

Marlyse Baptista

Sarah Ensor

Heidi Kumao

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

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”

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, 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.

Petra Kuppers

Ashley Lucas

400+ LIBRARY BOOKS USED FOR RESEARCH BY 2019-20 FELLOWS.