Institute for the Humanities 2012-13 Annual Report by University of Michigan Institute for the Humanities

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n June, the Commission on the Humanities and Social Sciences released its report on the state of the humanities and social sciences in higher education. In an environment in which the value of liberal arts degrees tends to be undervalued (humanities degrees in particular), the report affirms the importance of a broad liberal arts education for individuals and for the future of the nation. It emphasizes the value of language study, study abroad experience, and the habits of mind a humanities education fosters. Now, more than ever, great universities need robust humanities institutes to promote the work, the values, and the sustainability of the humanities in the academy and in the world. During the past year, this institute supported the intellectual passions of nine faculty and eight graduate student fellows who gathered around the Wednesday morning seminar table to workshop one another’s drafts. The fellows were joined by our visiting fellows: Freehling Visiting Professor David Mitchell shared his work in new disability studies, and Gay Hawkins from the University of Queensland in Australia shared her work on the economic and social relations pertaining to recycled plastic. To foreground the changing ecology of humanities teaching and scholarship, the institute launched its Digital Currents series. Nationally and internationally recognized scholars visited campus: Neil Fraistat of the Maryland Institute for Technology and the Humanities; Wendy Chun of Brown; Carolyn Kane of Hunter College; and Patrick Svensson of Umeå University. We used the occasion of these visits to explore new possibilities for advancing scholarship in and on digital environments.

This year we also imagined new ways of engaging undergraduate students by initiating an internship program, providing major funding for an undergraduate-organized conference on human rights, and involving undergraduates in our four exhibits. In the fall, artist Nigel Poor lived in Alice Lloyd Hall for two weeks and opened her studio to twenty undergraduate students who explored how to create art out of banned books. In winter, artist Lynne Avadenko offered an undergraduate mini-course in book-making to sixteen students. Finally, hundreds of students visited our remarkable exhibition, State of Exception, based on U-M anthropologist Jason De Léon’s Undocumented Migration Project. Through our activities, we hope to inspire students to delve more deeply into the cultures and meanings of humanistic inquiry. And we offer them multiple opportunities to hone skills of writing and communicating, analysis and thick description, programming and marketing. I cannot say enough about the staff here at the institute. They have made my transition into the directorship proceed seamlessly. All of them—Amanda, Patrick, Stephanie, Doretha, and Sheri—are dedicated humanists. And in this world, a world in which Governor Rick Scott announced publicly that the State of Florida doesn’t need any anthropologists, we benefit from all the humanists around us. With the release of the commission’s report, a national discussion of the future of the humanities in higher education has begun. We invite you to join us in that conversation.

Sidonie Smith Mary Fair Croushore Professor w w w . l s a . um i c h . e d u / h um a n i t i e s

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s Adam Ashforth, professor, Afroamerican and African studies; Helmut F. Stern Professor

and women’s specific embodied capacities would have implications for the later Republic when the terrain of participatory politics expanded into the arenas of consumption, popular culture, and reproductive politics, unsettling rather than ordering the republic in its later years.

“The Trials of Mrs. K, and Other Tales of the Quest for Justice and Security in the Shadow of AIDS in Africa” This book tells the story of an HIV/AIDS nurse’s futile struggle to clear her name of charges of witchcraft in a small town in Malawi. The epidemic has exacerbated a pervasive sense of insecurity and injustice in everyday life in heavily affected areas such as Malawi, producing a quest for justice and security with which established institutions struggle to cope. The consequences of this quest, though of the utmost importance in African lives such as Mrs. K.’s, have been largely invisible to the social science of AIDS in Africa. Kathleen Canning, professor, history, women’s studies, Germanic languages and literatures; Helmut F. Stern Professor “Citizenship Effects: Gender and Sexual Crisis in the Aftermath of War and Revolution in Germany, 1914–1930” This study explores the emergence of citizenship as a new language of participatory politics on the German home front during World War I. The perceived feminization of civil society, the declining rates of birth and marriage and the demographic surplus of women in the face of mass death at the front fueled perceptions of a looming sexual crisis among nationalists and militarists. The proclamation of equal citizenship rights amidst Germany’s disastrous defeat, the revolution of 1918, and the collapse of the Kaiser’s rule meant that the citizenship enacted in Germany’s first democratic constitution aimed to reorder civil society, family, and gender. The casting of the new rights and duties of citizens in terms of men

Frieda Ekotto, professor, French, comparative literature, Afroamerican and African studies; Hunting Family Fellow “Vibrancy of Silence: Women Loving Women in Sub-Sahara Africa” In Sub-Saharan Africa, lesbians are acknowledged neither by family systems nor by mainstream discourses. At best, they live in relationships that are denied or condemned. At worst, they live with the fear of being ostracized, disowned, beaten, or killed. By examining how artists use coded language to talk about homosexuality—or simply remain silent as a means to avoid social unrest—it attends to the communities of lesbians, which have been made ghosted/irrelevant/voiceless/ socially marginal. Ekotto will expose the psychological violence suffered by Sub-Saharan lesbians and will demonstrate that lesbian women do indeed have voices, which challenge cultural references and fill the emptiness of silence. Karla Mallette, associate professor, Italian and Near Eastern studies; Helmut F. Stern Professor “Lingua Franca in the Mediterranean” The national languages of European modernity make immediacy their crowning virtue: they maintain an intimate connection to a living, speaking community in a bounded territorial region. But in the pre-modern world, the cosmopolitan languages of literary culture

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—Greek, Latin and Arabic, for instance—were used to cheat the limitations of the vernaculars, to communicate across vast reaches of space and time. This project studies the literary lingua francas of the pre-modern Mediterranean for perspective on language as a marker of geographical and historical identity, and on the capacity of certain languages to transcend geo-historical specificity. David Manley, assistant professor, philosophy; Norman & Jane Katz Faculty Fellow “Method in Metaphysics: The Semantics and Subject Matter of Metaphysical Inquiry”

Mallette

Manley

There has recently been plenty of self-doubt among analytic philosophers about the status of metaphysics as a discipline. This project will critique some of the working assumptions behind contemporary analytic metaphysics, and offer a set of positive methodological proposals. This will require an account of the role of natural language semantics, as well as a theory about what makes a given philosophical dispute “merely terminological.” Daniel Ramirez, assistant professor, history and American culture; John Rich Professor “’Alabaré a Mi Señor’: Subaltern Pentecostal Music in American Religious History”

Ramirez

Trevor

The flood of Pentecostal and Pentecostal-like revivalism in the Spanish and Portuguesespeaking Americas in the last quarter of the twentieth century has invited much social scientific inquiry; most such studies, however, lack a careful historicization, and most historical studies overlook the cultural sphere. This project assays a cultural history of (U.S.-Mexico) borderlands Pentecostalism, one of Pentecostalism’s original tributaries,

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and examines pneumatic Christianity’s sonic, lyrical, corporeal, and transnational dimensions in the early and mid-twentieth century. This analytical approach seeks templates to understand contemporary Pentecostalism’s still salient features of migration, mobility, and musicality. Douglas Trevor, associate professor, English and creative writing “Radical Charity and the Long Reformation” This study examines the emergence of a radical redefinition of charity in the early 1300s, when a succession of mystics beginning with the French Beguine Marguerite Porete began to argue that the fervently devout might in fact find themselves visited and fully enriched (perfected) by God’s grace before experiencing bodily death. Throughout the medieval and early modern periods, Spiritualists— those who espoused the doctrine of perfectionism—were accused of inappropriately figuring God as an erotic object. They were also criticized for describing their charitable attitudes toward other humans in erotic terms, and for the extraordinary measure of happiness that these men and women claimed was attainable on earth. This project explores the dissemination of these Spiritualist views during the Reformation, and reads a number of early modern literary works—including the writings of William Shakespeare and John Donne—with this unconventional articulation of caritas in mind.

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F E L L O W S Young

Jason Young, associate professor, architecture; Helmut F. Stern Professor “Skirmishes with the MacroPhenomenal: Letting Go of the City” This project aims to de-simplify certain ubiquitous phenomena like big-box retail landscapes, strip malls, franchise spaces, gas stations, parking lots, retention ponds, and truck stops. These are among the overly familiar situations and spaces that are rarely seen and explored by intellectuals. Despite— or perhaps because of—this, conducting research into cultural formations such as these provides an ideal opportunity to challenge and rethink some of the dominant assumptions and ideas that structure scholarship on American urbanism. This research prioritizes the fluid horizontal spaces of auto-mobility, following from an assertion that the city is a decaying model for academic work. In making this assertion, letting go of the city presents

its own gains and losses, and is, therefore, correlated with letting go of disciplinary control over the imminent wildness of urban subject matter.

Zubrzycki

Genevieve Zubrzycki, associate professor, sociology; Steelcase Research Professor “Stretching the Symbolic Boundaries of the Nation: Jewish Renaissance and ‘Philo-Semitism’ in Contemporary Poland” This project investigates various forms of Jewish-centered enterprises and practices, and analyzes the different meanings they hold for the Jewish and non-Jewish actors and institutions engaged in them. Based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork, archival research and interviews, she shows how the revival of Jewish culture in Poland is part of broader process of redefinition of national identity and the building of pluralism in that society.

endy Chun, professor of modern culture and media at Brown University, gave the 2013 Marc and Constance Jacobson Lecture, “Imagined Networks, Affective Connections.” Chun’s visit was part of our new Digital Currents series exploring humanities scholarship in and about digital environments. View the lecture on our YouTube channel: youtube. com/UMHumanitiesInst

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Fe Brown

Sheree Brown, history; A. Bartlett Giamatti Graduate Student Fellow Candar

DeSimone

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Alison DeSimone, music; James A. Winn Graduate Student Fellow

“‘That Peace Shall Always Dwell Among Them and True Love be Upheld’: Charity, Neighborliness, and Lay Fellowship in Late Medieval and Early Reformation England”

“The Myth of the Diva: Female Opera Singers and Collaborative Performance in Early Eighteenth-Century London”

This project is a two-fold examination of the gendering of the Christian virtue of charity as enacted through the seven works of mercy. First, Brown explores charity as a “religious ideology” as imagined by clerics, who sought to shape lay conduct through a catechetical program that advocated different methods of charitable living for men and women. Second, focusing on Lincolnshire, she investigates the different ways men and women responded to this educational initiative in their religious practices and in daily life. A gendered analysis of medieval charitable practices reveals the multifaceted and dynamic relationship between religious instruction and parishioner behavior. Basak Candar, comparative literature; Mary I. & David D. Hunting Graduate Student Fellow

This dissertation examines the relationship between literature and political violence in twentieth century Turkish and Spanish literature. It especially focuses on the second half of the twentieth century, and discusses the ethical challenges of fictionally representing state-sanctioned violence.

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Candice Hamelin, history of art; Sylvia “Duffy” Engle Graduate Student Fellow “Behind Immaterial and Material Divides: East German Photography between 1949 and 1989”

“Representing Censored Pasts: State Violence in Twentieth Century Turkish and Spanish Literature”

This dissertation examines how female opera singers collaborated artistically and financially with other musicians in order to legitimize their new positions as professional performers, thereby transforming England’s musical culture at a time when anxieties over publicly visible women collided with the emergent reality of female celebrity. DeSimone challenges the dominant perspective of the female performer as “diva” by investigating how their musical contributions to pasticcio operas, English masques, and other theatrical events influenced the production and reception of English and Italian music in London between 1700 and 1720.

Through complementary case studies, this project investigates how the changing culturo-political environment of the German Democratic Republic influenced the artistic practices of leading East German photographers. Relying methodologically on primary sources, visual analysis, and interviews with artists, it speaks to photography’s commitment to promoting and/or circumventing socialist ideology, its concern with the private sphere, its place within and outside of art institutions, and its evolving role from document to metaphor. By examining the disposition and development of East German photography, this research provides insight into the complex relationship that existed between artists and the Socialist Unity Party, suggesting a multiplicity of strategies, policies and practices behind artistic endeavors and responses on the political level.

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F E L L O W S Jackson

Sara E. Jackson, German; Mary Fair Croushore Graduate Student Fellow

Rebecca Ariel Porte, English; Mary I. & David D. Hunting Graduate Student Fellow

“Temptresses & Murderesses: Text, Body and Performance in Fin-de-Siècle Berlin”

“Forms of Logic: Beauty, Truth, & Reason in Twentieth-Century Experimental Poetry”

This dissertation examines stage performances of deadly women in early twentieth-century Germany, and interrogates the ways in which these productions contributed to a larger discourse complex surrounding the construction of normal and deviant femininity and female sexuality in the period. It contends that actresses were active participants in a matrix comprising artistic production, emerging scientific fields (criminology, sexology, psychology), and turn-of-the-century feminisms, which shared convergent and competing interests in the increasingly prominent cultural engagement with female subjectivity and social status.

This project traces the ways in which the intellectual revolutions of the early twentieth century—particularly the rise of analytic philosophy and attendant theories of mind—provoked poets to rewrite the rules for representing consciousness. Reading Gertrude Stein, William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, Susan Howe, and Anne Carson through (on one hand) the thinking of philosophers like C.S. Pearce, Bertrand Russell, & Ludwig Wittgenstein and (on the other) the beauty-truth equivalence inherited from the Romantics, “Forms of Logic” explores the way theories of truth and beauty—categories supposedly exploded by the experiments of high modernism—participate in contemporaneous arguments about the nature and uses of logic, poetry, and the formalized pursuit of truth.

Pedro Monaville, history; Mary Fair Croushore Graduate Student Fellow

Monaville

Porte

Wright

“Decolonizing the University”

Brendan Wright, political science; On June 4, 1969, the police opened fire on Marc & Constance Jacobson Graduate a student demonstration in Kinshasa. Tens Student Fellow of young marchers died on the streets of “Divine Entanglements: Religious Congo’s capital that morning. “Decolonizing Claims-Making and American Democracy” the University” builds on extensive archival In much of the scholarly discussion about research and memory work to retrace the religion’s place in the public sphere, social history of that demonstration and of the scientists and political philosophers have Congolese student movement around 1968. The dissertation provides a different approach conceptualized religion’s political relevance either as a discrete determinant of voting to decolonization by focusing on the intersecbehavior or as a collection of knowledge tions between higher education and political activism in a newly independent African nation. claims about the world. By contrast, this dissertation advances an account of religion as The project seeks to contribute both to the supplying a rich body of aesthetic, rhetorical, understanding of state violence and social movements in the Congo and to the emerging and performative materials that can and have been used in democratic struggles throughfield of historical research on global 1968. out American history. I use a combination of textual, conceptual, and historical analyses to argue that religious traditions not only form a constitutive component of American political culture but also supply crucial forms, figures, and argumentative resources for reimagining foundational commitments and challenging social and political relations. 8

Institu te fo r the Humani ti e s

◆ Top: In the gallery, artist Canan Tolon’s installation Time After Time sparked conversations about space, design, distorted perceptions, and the intersections of art and architecture. ◆ Bottom: Gallery curator Amanda Krugliak introduces visiting artist Nigel Poor (at right).

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Avadenka

Lynne Avadenka was the 2013 Jill S. Harris Visiting Artist at the Institute for the Humanities. Her exhibit Language Comes After Artist: The Work of Lynne Avadenka ran in our gallery while her Land Marks Press limited-edition books, selected from the U-M Special Collections Library, were displayed upstairs in the Frankel Center. She gave the Jill S. Harris Memorial Lecture, “Lynne Avadenka: Of the Making of Many Books there is no End,” (watch on our YouTube channel: www. youtube.com/UMHumanitiesInst) and taught a successful mini-course, “The Book: Body and Soul,” to undergraduate and graduate students. An established book artist from Detroit who has had her own one-woman press for 25 years, Avadenka is a recent Kresge Fellow and was an inaugural fellow at the American Academy in Jerusalem. Her work considers text, ancient and new, often incorporating old scripture, and traditional themes into modern and abstract compositions. It also examines books, handmade and digital, the value imbued into them and extrapolated out of them while wrestling with ideas of meaning, aesthetics, image, and language.

Chun

Wendy Chun gave the 2013 Marc and Constance Jacobson Lecture, “Imagined Networks, Affective Connections.” (Watch on our YouTube channel: www.youtube.com/ UMHumanitiesInst.) Professor Chun visited Michigan for two days as part of our Digital Currents activities. Digital Currents is our new joint project with the School of Information showcasing scholarship in and on digital environments. She met with faculty in the Digital Environments cluster and graduate students in the Digital Environments Workshop and the Digital Environments Reading Group. Chun is professor of modern culture and media at Brown University. She has studied both systems design engineering and English literature, which she combines and mutates in her current work on digital media. She is author of Control and Freedom: Power and Paranoia in the Age of Fiber Optics (MIT, 2006), and Programmed Visions: Software and Memory (MIT, 2011); and is currently working on a monograph titled Imagined Networks. Gay Hawkins, director and professional research fellow, Center for Critical and Cultural Studies, University of Queensland, Australia, was a visiting fellow at the institute. While here, she worked on her collaborative ARC Discovery project and book, Plastic Water, on the global rise of bottled water. Her lecture at the institute, “Branding Water: Markets, Materialities and Value,” addressed this topic. Hawkins has published widely on cultural engagements with the environment, practices of everyday life, media policy and institutions, and theories of materiality and political processes. She brings to her research an innovative interdisciplinary approach that is concerned with the intersections between cultural and material practices and forms of rule.

Hawkins

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David Mitchell was the 2012 Freehling Visiting Professor. While at the institute, he taught the course “Working the Weakness in the Norm: Disability Studies and Theories of Marginalized Embodiment” to undergraduate and graduate students and presented the lecture “The Capacities of Incapacity: Disability and Neoliberal Novels of Embodiment.” His publications include three books (The Body and Physical Difference (1997), Narrative Prosthesis (2000), and Cultural Locations of Disability (2006)), dozens of journal and review articles, four award-winning documentary films (Vital Signs: Crip Culture Talks Back (1995), A World Without Bodies (2002), Self Preservation (2005), and Disability Takes on the Arts (2006)), and the five-volume Encyclopedia of Disability (2005). He has also curated two international disability film festivals and an exhibition for the National Vietnam Veterans Art Museum on disability history. Currently, he is completing work on two new book-length manuscripts: Ablenationalism and the Geo-Politics of Disability and The Capacities of Incapacity: Disability and the Anti-Normative American Novel. Nigel Poor, a San Francisco artist, was in residence during November 2012. She was a visiting artist at the institute and an artist in residence in the Lloyd Hall Scholars Program, where she collaborated with students on their own banned-book projects. Our gallery featured Poor’s photographs and sculptures of banned books, God, sex, and animals talking, while North Quad displayed students’ work produced during her residency. Video monitors in North Quad and Shapiro Library also ran video documenting the students and

Poor in process. Poor received her BA in Photography and Literature from Bennington College in Vermont and her MFA in Photography from the Massachusetts College of Art. Solo exhibitions of her work have been mounted at the Institute of Contemporary Art in San Jose, the Museum of Photographic Arts in San Diego, and the Haines Gallery in San Francisco, among others. She has also been part of many national group exhibitions. She is currently teaching at California State University in Sacramento and is represented by the Haines Gallery in San Francisco. Canan Tolon was the 2012 Kidder Resident in the Arts. Her installation Time After Time started off the year in the gallery. Tolon, who has lived and maintained a studio in the San Francisco Bay Area for over twenty years, has a devoted following abroad, especially in Turkey where she was born. She has exhibited frequently in Istanbul and with recent shows in New York and Berlin. Educated in Germany and England, she earned her master of architecture from the University of California, Berkeley. The recipient of numerous fellowships and awards, she is also an architect and designer. In addition to her painting practice, Tolon works with sculpture and installation, emphasizing the mutability of form. She is represented by the Gallery Paule Anglim, San Francisco.

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T ◆ The studio of 2013 Jill S. Harris Visiting Artist Lynne Avadenka. ◆ Institute for the Humanities Director Sidonie Smith with former fellows and architecture faculty Claire Zimmerman, Keith Mitnick, and Amy Kulper.

he gallery at the Institute for the Humanities continues to be a place for innovative new work, exciting collaborative projects, and engaging public discourse in the humanities at the University of Michigan. Our exhibition program puts into motion multi-disciplinary conversation and direct student outreach with the participation of a wide range of departments including American studies, women’s studies, anthropology, English, and Judaic studies. The gallery is recognized internationally by artists and museums not only for its dynamic installation space, but also for its coveted artist residency programs. This is a distinction unlike any other humanities institute in the country. The gallery offers two artist fellowships a year, awarding artists the time and resources to create within the supportive network of the university. Each exhibition serves as a cornerstone of the institute’s major projects and conferences, as well as the university’s theme semesters. In a year of change and transition, the institute gallery extended its reach, looking forward, exploring further what it can be in terms of creative programming and campuswide engagement. As part of the innovative new Hub series, we thought out-of-the-box, organizing public discussions and presentations on and off site, bringing scholars and artists together in challenging, enlivened conversations. This included supporting the programming of other institutions as well, like the U-M Museum of Art, curating discussion series there about their programs and exhibitions, and sponsoring visiting speakers like Whitney Biennial juror Michele Grabner to talk to students about being an artist and curator. Curator Amanda Krugliak served as a consultant for NPR’s Michele Norris’s Race Card Project, mounting an installation on the Diag and assisting Norris with a performance for her town hall meeting at Rackham Auditorium.

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We presented four museum-quality exhibitions in the gallery, each a catalyst for cross-campus collaboration and focused student involvement. Canan Tolon’s installation Time After Time brought faculty and students from the Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Design to the institute for conversations about space, design, distorted perceptions, and the intersection of art and architecture. Former fellows Amy Kulper, Keith Mitnick, and Claire Zimmerman joined us for a Hub round table focused on Tolon’s installation. Next, in partnership with Arts at Michigan, San Francisco artist Nigel Poor took residence in Alice Lloyd residence hall for two weeks, opening her studio and sharing ideas with twenty undergraduate students for the Banned Books Project. In the gallery, the institute mounted God, sex, and animals talking, an exhibition of Poor’s photographs and sculptures about banned books and presented another display in North Quad of the students’ work produced during her residency. Professor Holly Hughes and her Interarts class from the Stamps School presented an evening of performance about censorship as part of the project as well. Video monitors in North Quad and Shapiro Library also ran video documenting the students and Poor in process, spreading the word about the humanities throughout the campus community. Perhaps our most ambitious and risky project to date was State of Exception, an exhibition based on U-M Anthropologist Jason De León’s Undocumented Migration Project. De León has spent the last five years archiving objects left by undocumented immigrants entering the U.S. through the Arizona desert. Krugliak and former institute fellow Richard Barnes teamed up with De León to present a conceptual exhibition of objects with video shot by Barnes on location in Arizona. The institute hosted a panel of scholars, Samaritans, and a representative from the Tucson

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coroner’s office to talk about this heated issue and each of their unique experiences. The exhibition was visited by hundreds of viewers. Dozens of full classes from at least six different departments visited the exhibition and built it into their curriculum. Both North Quad and Shapiro Library ran video related to immigration and De León’s research. State of Exception was featured on the LSA website, and received national press coverage, with an article on the project featured in Salon.com. It caught the attention of other institutions and museums nationally and internationally, and plans to travel are currently in the works. A two-page photographic spread based on the installation was published in the New York Times Magazine on July 21. To conclude the year, Detroit book artist Lynne Avadenka exhibited her work and handmade books. In a collaboration with the U-M libraries and the Frankel Center for Judaic Studies, the institute hosted Avadenka,

a past Kresge Fellowship winner and inaugural fellow at the American Academy in Jerusalem. During her fellowship with the institute, she taught a mini-course on making books, which filled to capacity. She also visited classes in Judaic Studies. The discussion brought together Avadenka, Curator Amanda Krugliak, Associate Professor Paul Conway from the School of Information, Conservator Cathleen Baker from the U-M Special Collections Library, and Associate Professor Hannah Smotrich from the Penny W. Stamps School of Art & Design for challenging discourse considering the whole notion of the book in a digital age. The exhibition program and gallery put in motion the institute’s great capacity and vast range for student outreach and engagement as well as scholarship and innovation. It served as a meeting place as well as a hub, supporting projects and programs throughout the university as well as proving relevant to the global community. Photo: Richard Barnes

E v e n t s

Digital Currents

The Hub

Humanities scholarship in and about digital environments

Expanding the reach of gallery exhibits and arts programming

Exploring Humanities Cyberinfrastructure Day 1: Library Lightning Talks

“Lynne Avadenka: Of the Making of Many Books There is No End,” 2013 Jill S. Harris Memorial Lecture by Lynne Avadenka, visiting artist

Exploring Humanities Cyberinfrastructure Day 2: Patrik Svensson Lecture, “The Humanistiscope” “Digital Compositing: From the Alpha Channel to the 2.0 Look, Dirt Style,” Carolyn L. Kane, Hunter College “Imagined Networks, Affective Connections,” 2013 Marc and Constance Jacobson Lecture by Wendy Chun, Brown University North Quad Translation Mondays: “The Story of Google Translate,” Joshua Estelle, Google “Digital Humanities Centers as Cyberinfrastructure,” Neil Fraistat, University of Maryland.

◆ State of Exception exhibition.

Books/Texts/Fonts/Archives in a Brave New Digital World, panel discussion with Lynne Avadenka; Paul Conway, School of Information; Cathleen A. Baker, University Library; Hannah Smotrich, Art & Design; and Amanda Krugliak Language Comes After Artist: The Work of Lynne Avadenka, exhibit State of Exception: UMS on Film: Which Way Home State of Exception: Richard Barnes, Jason De León, Amanda Krugliak, the first major curation of the work of Jason De León’s Undocumented Migration Project State of Exception: “Of Braceros Fracasados and Other Success Stories: Border Ballads and Laments,” Daniel Ramirez, history and American culture State of Exception: Panel discussion with Stephen Brighton, University of Maryland; Kathryn Ferguson, author; Robin Rieneke, PhD candidate, University of Arizona; and Jason De León, anthropology State of Exception: Student Workshop and round-table presentations featuring Jason De León and students who have participated in the Undocumented Migration Project and Field School State of Exception: Video Exhibition

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Time, Narrative, and Voyeurism in Video, panel discussion with Y. David Chung, art and design; Osman Khan, art and design; Lily Cox-Richard, art and design; Amanda Krugliak Remainders: The Banned Book Project, Video Exhibition Remainders: The Banned Book Project: Nigel Poor Exhibition: Remainders: god, sex, and animals talking Remainders: The Banned Book Project: Interarts Student Performance Remainders: The Banned Book Project: Reworking Reader’s Trash, panel discussion with Nigel Poor, visiting artist; Christi Merrill, comparative literature and Asian languages and cultures; and Patricia Yaeger, English Remainders: The Banned Book Project: In Response: The Student Project/Exhibition Remainders: The Banned Book Project: “The Underground Book Railroad: Reading and Censorship in Women’s Prisons,” Meg Sweeney, English Chris Jordan: Running the Numbers, campus-wide installation ◆ Yofi Tirosh, Tel Aviv University, presented “The Right to Be Fat” as part of Big Word, a new series exploring emerging topics in the humanities.

Grupo Krapp Performance Group panel discussion plant video screening and panel discussion with Paul Kaiser, artist; Scott Hocking, artist; and Amanda Krugliak

Author’s Forum

A series on books & ideas presented in collaboration with the University Library, Ann Arbor Book Festival, and Great Lakes Literary Arts Center.

American Night: The Literary Left in the Era of the Cold War: A Conversation with Alan Wald, English; Howard Brick, history; and Dina Karageorgos, PhD candidate, English How to Be Gay: A Conversation with David Halperin, English; and Valerie Traub, English YaliniDream and V.V. Ganeshananthan, Sri Lankan/diasporic writers, performance artists, and activists; and Sumathy Sivamohan, University of Peradeniya; in conversation RACE: Are We So Different?: A Conversation with Yolanda Moses, University of California; and Lester Monts, music and senior vice provost for academic affairs Arabs and Muslims in the Media: Race and Representation after 9/11 and Arab America: Gender, Cultural Politics, and Activism: A Conversation with Nadine Naber, women’s studies and American culture; and Evelyn Alsultany, American culture

◆ Michael Barr, professor of law, discussed his new book No Slack: The Financial Lives of Low-Income Americans as part of the Author’s Forum, our series on books and ideas.

Heritage, Culture, and Politics in the Postcolony: A Conversation with Daniel Herwitz, philosophy, history of art, comparative literature, art and design; and Adam Ashforth, Afroamerican and African studies The Selvage: A Conversation with Linda Gregerson, English; and Daniel Herwitz, philosophy, history of art, comparative literature, art and design

Workshop on Disability and Cross-Sensory Translation Day 1: Blind Field Walk and U-M Museum of Art with Carmen Papalia, artist Workshop on Disability and Cross-Sensory Translation Day 2: “Twice-Described Description: Notes Toward an Ekphrastic Culture,” Susan Schweik, University of California Berkeley

“The Capacities of Incapacity: Disability and A Conversation with Amitav Ghosh, author; Neoliberal Novels of Embodiment,” David Anton Shammas, comparative literature and Mitchell, visiting fellow Near Eastern studies; and Jonathan Freedman, “The Right to Be Fat,” Yofi Tirosh, Tel Aviv English, American studies, Judaic studies University In the Light of Darkness: A Photographer’s Journey After 9/11: A Conversation with Kate Brooks, journalist; and Juan Cole, history

FellowSpeak

The Chicana por mi Raza Digital Humanities Project: A Conversation with Maria Cotera, women’s studies and American culture; and Shana Kimball, University Library No Slack: The Financial Lives of Low-Income Americans, A Conversation with Michael Barr, law; & Sheldon Danziger, public policy

Ongoing exchange with institute fellows past and present

“Tehching Hsieh, In Good Faith,” Joan Kee, history of art “The Victorian Souls of Black Folk,” Daniel Hack, English “Branding Water: Markets, Materialities and Value,” Gay Hawkins, University of Queensland

Big Word

Exploring emerging humanities topics

Disability Studies Spring Conference: Autism Speaks Back: Neurodiversity and Disability Studies Dis/color: Race and Disability, panel discussion with Mel Chen, University of California Berkeley; Nirmala Erevelles, University of Alabama; and Jina Kim, English and women’s studies

“‘The authority: whatever he said, it is not right:’ Elite and Non-elite Literary Reaction to Authoritative Regimes in the Ancient World,” Jenn Finn, former Mary I. and David D. Hunting Graduate Student Fellow “Early Modern Glass in the History of Cognitive Technology,” Sean Silver, English

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hrough minigrants, the institute supports a wide variety of projects across the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts and the broader university and community. All of the events we support through minigrants have a component open to the public. The projects listed below received support from us in 2012-13. Regional Meeting of the International Plato Society James Acheampong, Ghanaian Drum Carver and Performer

“Russia’s Internal Colonization: Where History and Literature Converge” “Silence and Translation” Michicagoan Conference “Francis the Holy Jester” play starring Mario Pirovano Italian Film Festival USA 2013 “Beyond 1989: Feminist Film Theory,” Patrice Petro lecture “Montage and Storytelling in Weimar Germany,” Patrizia McBride lecture Amitav Ghosh visit

“The Alchemy of Air: How Two German Chemists Fed the World and Fueled a World War,” Thomas Hager Latin American Film Series 25th North American Conference on Chinese Linguistics

Michigan Medieval and Early Modern Seminar Marcin Wodzinski lecture “Trouble with Gypsies: Representation, Law, and Identity in Early Modern England,” David Cressy lecture Filmmaker Agnieszka Holland

Cuba Double Week

Penny Stamps lecture series: Sally Mann

“Translating Slavery, Translating Freedom; Francoise Massardier-Kenney

Penny Stamps lecture series: Chris Jordan

“The Port Huron Statement and the Making of the New Left”

From Bodies to Billboards graduate student symposium

“Lineages of the Literary Left: A Symposium in Honor of Alan Wald”

David Glover and Cora Kaplan visit

Sri Lankan Artists in Residence: Theatre of Risk “The State of the Book: A Celebration of Michigan Writers and Writing” “Spain and the Modern Arab World” CLIFF Forum: “X is Political” Grupo Krapp Dance/theater-Buenos Aires “Pouring Tea: Black Gay Men of the South Tell their Stories” “Connecting with Communities through the Archive” “Picturing Empire: Race and the Lives of the Photographs of Dean C Worcester in the Philippines” Musica Mestiza, Residential College “God is not Dead: The Neglect of Spirituality in Psychoanalysis and Queer Theory,” Jean Allouch lecture

“Animal Acts” “Andreas Eckert: Global Studies meets African Studies” “Imagination and Make-Believe in Art and Philosophy” “Proclaiming Emancipation” exhibit, conference, classroom and public history project Art/Science Research Alliance on AutophagyVideo Project, molecular, cellular and developmental biology “Native Women Language Keepers: Indigenous Performance Practices Symposium” “The Union of All Oppressed Peoples: Black and Asian Radicals on Empire and Coloniality,” Minkah Makalani lecture “Afrolatinidades,” Marta Moreno Vega lecture

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anel discussions bring together fellows, visiting artists, and the broader university community.

“Friday, Riding Westward,” in honor of Lincoln Faller

El Anatsui residency

“Islam, Society, and Politics in Central Asia”

Cine-concert Georges Méliès

“Islam in Contemporary Spain: Identities and Representations”

DeVries-Vanderkooy Memorial Lecture

“Globalizing the Word: Transnationalism and Native American Literature” “Colonial Ruptures and the Politics of Knowledge”

Werner Grilk Annual Lecture: “The Sovereignty Effect,” Josef Vogl “William Morris Carpets: Action in Design” lecture by Caroline Arscott “Claiming Citizenship: African Americans and New Deal Photography” symposium

“The Qur’an in the World” “The Ethics of Medieval Translation,” Emma Campbell lecture

“Cultural History of Cartography” symposium

DAAS Living Poets Series: Nikky Finney “Race and Italian American Writing,” Robert Viscusi lecture “Creole Languages and Indigenous Sovereignty” Artistic Residency for Japanese benshi Kataoka Ichiro “Archaeological, Ethnographic and Paleoenvironmental Perspectives on Caribou Hunting in the Great Lakes” African Print Cultures workshop

“Terrorism and the ‘Years of Lead’ in Italian Film,” Alan O’Leary “Altmannerisms: Conversations Celebrating the Opening of the Robert Altman Archive” Object of the Story: American History Workshop and the “Appeal of the Real” “Home(town) Security” Majora Carter lecture “Politica Comun: Rethinking the Common” Penny Stamps lecture series: Michelle Grabner James Baldwin symposium and film screening

Steven Meyer Residency

“Architecture, Image, Action”

“Celebrating Tagore: Translations through Music, Dance and Poetry” Public events at 2013 Linguistic Institute John Baines lecture

The Early Modern Colloquium: “Violence in the Early Modern Period” Sex and Justice Conference Chicago Humanities Festival

“Hauntings” graduate student conference “’The turf, the path, the gravel’: Reflections on the Academic Life in Honor of Anne Herrmann” “From Artifact to Art: Tibetan Paintings from the Himalayan Hills”

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s u p p o r t

he Institute for the Humanities is a center for innovative, collaborative study in the humanities and arts. To facilitate scholarly inquiry and communication, the institute provides year-long research fellowships for Michigan faculty and graduate students and short-term fellowships for visiting scholars and artists who come from around the world. Throughout the year, several series of events showcase works-in-progress and catalyze interdisciplinary exchange around emergent areas of humanities scholarship. The Hub series sponsors four curated exhibits in the art gallery and expands the reach of art practice and performance to the larger university community and the public. The institute is currently launching a set of curricular initiatives addressed to undergraduate students and graduate students. Drawing on Michigan’s remarkable resources, we seek to become a national leader in advocating for the humanities in higher education and serve as a national and international center for scholarly research in the humanities and creative work in the arts. By engaging with the institute through your gifts, you directly support the university and the institute in our mission to: ◆ Engage and address the world as a premier institute that boldly integrates the humanities with the arts. ◆ Stand at the forefront of public outreach and service through the humanities and arts. ◆ Maximize scholarly impact by funding precious time and opportunities for Michigan’s best emerging scholars. ◆ Encourage and promote cutting-edge research across the humanities and the arts. Please support the Institute for the Humanities generously as together we make a profound and continuing difference in our university and the world.

Ways to Help Us Achieve our Aims We would be glad to talk with you about funding—fully or partially—any of the items below. Name Our Gallery The institute’s museum-quality gallery has gained national attention for the high quality of its four curated shows mounted annually. Funding the gallery would ensure that the institute will continue the tradition of superb exhibitions that showcase the synergies between the work of humanities scholars and creative artists. It will also enable the institute to expand outreach to undergraduate students and the general public and to multiply the sites of curation across campus and in digital environments. Support Digital Humanities Innovation One of the major shifts in how humanists do their work is in the area of digitally-assisted research—from the level of multimedia scholarly composition and communication to the mining of Big Data for the study of large-scale phenomena. The institute aims to be an incubator for the conceptualization and implementation of collaborative projects in digital environments. Through start-up funds, the institute will seed new projects; help facilitate collaborative teams of faculty and students; and prepare teams to seek outside funding. The institute will also use these funds to pilot an undergraduate “digital humanities corps.” Endow a Humanities and Public Policy Faculty Fellowship The institute plans to pilot a course-based graduate certificate program in The Humanities and Public Policy. As part of this program, the institute will provide a one-year fellowship for a humanist working in a public policy arena— such as public policy and built environments, the expressive life and life-long learning and

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health, education policy, language policy, and social media and public policy. The Public Policy Fellow will teach a graduate course in his/her area of expertise and advise graduate students on public policy projects. Underwrite the Humanities without Walls Initiative This initiative will fund collaborative projects with scholars and graduate students around the region (of the CIC), the nation, and the world. Support will be used to bring a scholar in the humanities to Michigan from abroad to teach for a semester and to contribute to scholarly initiatives involving transnational collaboration or scholarly initiatives on transnational formations. Funding will also be used to underwrite innovative global conferences/ events on humanities contributions to the crucial issues of our times. Build the Director’s Strategic Fund Give the Director the flexibility she needs to make the institute even greater than it is.

How to Give One of the easiest ways to support the humanities is through an outright gift to the Institute for the Humanities. The University of Michigan makes giving such gifts very easy through a number of methods, including: Credit card, check, cash wire transfer. A secure gift either through the U-M Development website or by mailing appropriate documentation with assistance from the institute’s development officer Jennifer Howard (see below). Securities: A gift of securities can help you receive a valuable tax deduction and avoid capital gains tax. Matching Gifts: You can leverage your gift to the institute with a matching gift from your employer (check with the institute’s development officer or ask your employer if your company offers a match).

Gifts in Kind: You may donate items of personal property or physical assets that may be of value to the institute, such as books, works of art, etc. Please check with the development officer or the director of the institute for what kind of items are of best value to the institute. Endowments The institute for the Humanities seeks support for programs that foster the humanities among the U-M campus community as well as for residents of Michigan and beyond. You can create a lasting fund in your name or in honor or memory of someone you love and respect by establishing an endowment at the University of Michigan, benefiting the institute. Or you may add to an existing endowment. Endowments may be created through outright or deferred gifts. The institute’s development officer can help you structure an endowment gift that best fits your philanthropic and financial goals. All donors are recognized by U-M; the College of Literature, Arts & Sciences; and the Institute for the Humanities. Estate and Deferred Gifts The Institute for the Humanities continues to enrich and stimulate new generations of fellows. Through an estate bequest or deferred gift you can embrace future generations. Planned gifts provide many unique benefits that may reduce your estate and income-taxes and help you avoid capital-gains. The institute’s development officer can provide you and/or your financial advisors with the assistance necessary to explore and formulate a planned gift to the institute. To discuss your gift in more detail please contact us at humin@umich.edu, 734-936-3518 or contact the institute’s development officer Jennifer Howard, LSA Development, 734-6156239 or jhow@umich.edu.

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Staff Doretha Coval, fellows coordinator Stephanie Harrell, communications specialist Amanda Krugliak, curator Sidonie Smith, director Sheri Sytsema-Geiger, administrative manager Patrick Tonks, assistant director Institute for the Humanities Board of Visitors David Arch, Oak Brook, IL Jeremy Efroymson, Indianapolis, IN S. Cody Engle, Chicago, IL James Foster, chair, Pittsburgh, PA Willard Fraumann, Chicago, IL Paul Freehling, Chicago, IL Beverley Geltner, Ann Arbor, MI Eugene Grant, Mamaroneck, NY Louise Holland, Winnetka, IL Marc Jacobson, Norfolk, VA Mary Kidder, New Albany, OH Richard Mayer, Winnetka, IL Virginia Nicklas, Pittsburgh, PA Bennett Root, Jr., Pasadena, CA William & Marjorie Sandy, Bloomfield Hills, MI

Institute for the Humanities Executive Committee Sara Blair, associate dean, Rackham; English Susan Juster, history Valerie Kivelson, history Peggy McCracken, comparative literature, French, womenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s studies Lisa Nakamura, American culture and screen arts and cultures Andrew Shryock, anthropology Scott Spector; history, Judaic studies, Germanic languages and literatures Derek Collins, ex officio; associate dean, humanities; classical studies Sidonie Smith, ex officio; Institute for the Humanities Acknowledgements Design: Savitski Design Photography: Peter Smith, except where noted Front and back cover: Backpack display from State of Exception, photo: Richard Barnes. Inside front and back cover: Canan Tolonâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s paintings in the Time After Time exhibit.

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