Letter from the Director

LETTER

from the director

dear friends,

What a strange year. At the Institute for the Humanities, we’ve been grateful for institutional security, but we’ve missed the vibrancy of our busy office, the presence of our fellows in their office and in our halls, and the in-person programs that draw people into our space.

The Institute’s 2020-21 programs and exhibitions were organized under the rubric of “Shelter.” We wanted to explore the security of taking shelter and the precarity of losing it, recognizing that not all shelters are safe, and that the places that shelter us have complex histories. Our Gallery featured artists’ visions of structures, rooms, and shelters, and all of our exhibitions were either outside, like the stunning installation by Ibrahim Mahama on the exterior of the U-M Museum of Art, or visible from the sidewalk. Artist talks were virtual, and we created video introductions to the artists and their works that allowed classes to engage with the exhibitions from a distance. You can read more about the year’s exhibitions in the pages that follow.

We normally begin each academic year by welcoming the Institute’s new cohort of faculty and graduate student fellows. This year we were all working remotely, of course, and our welcome was virtual. We all missed the informal interactions that enliven the fellowship year, but our weekly seminar was no less vibrant and engaging than in the past. Our eight faculty and eight graduate student fellows created a virtual space of exchange that was both rigorous and supportive, and they brought a wide range of research interests to our conversations.

The 2020-21 fellowship group was highly interdisciplinary and included creative writers along with scholars from literature, history, anthropology, philosophy, architecture,

cultural studies, and critical science studies. The fellows studied acoustic environments, biomedical practices, queer modernist narratives, and forms of resistance and co-optation. They led us in explorations of the visual logics of slavery, Redface performances in American theatre, art and ethnicity in China, the politics of architecture in Pinochet’s Argentina, and the ways that voice makes meaning in lyric poetry. We learned about labor practices in archeological excavations, disease and waterways in Haiti, Kant’s thinking about prejudice, nineteenth-century men’s fashion, and the politics of mourning in Israel and Palestine.

Fellows shared their work in a variety of forms: a short story set in the Arab community of Dearborn, a website that documents police murders in Detroit, a set of poems. Their diverse methods included ethnography, analyses of literature and performance, archival research, and even the analysis of brainwaves. Shared questions and concerns emerged over the course of the year, but so did differences, and the mix of disciplinary and methodological positions in our group resulted in rich and productive discussions. I remain very grateful to our fellows for their patience with the online format and for their willingness to engage so generously and thoughtfully with online exchange.

Our fellows are the intellectual heart of the Institute. We are able to fund eight faculty and eight graduate students every academic year, and for the past three years we have funded eight summer fellows in partnership with the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts. I am immensely grateful to the donors who make our fellowship programs possible. Their generosity offers Michigan faculty and graduate students dedicated time for research, a lively intellectual community, and a space for sustained interdisciplinary exchange. The dissertations, books, artworks, articles, stories, poems, musical compositions, websites, and exhibitions that result are an eloquent testimony to the value of this unique opportunity.

After more than a year of confinement in which many have experienced loss and pain, I dare to hope that our future holds resilience and renewed connection. I also hope that we might see many of you—in person!—in the coming year.

With very best wishes,

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