Institute for the Humanities 2014-15 Annual Report

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Dykes, Dads, and Moms to Watch out For: The Comics of Alison Bechdel exhibition

Unive rsity o f Mi chigan

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Dear Friends,

his past year was a remarkable one here at the institute. We announced last fall “The Year of Life Writing.” Banners outside the institute and across campus kept the Year of Life Writing in the air.

I chose that umbrella theme for selfish reasons.

I’ve spent forty years writing on the thematics, aesthetics, politics, and social uses of genres of life writing—from slave narratives, to women’s autobiographical practices, to human rights testimony, to new modes of online life writing in this age of tweets and selfies and online journaling and StoryCorps. Even after so many decades, I have not lost my fascination for the ways in which humans tell stories about themselves, their families, and their communities; fascination for their acts of remembering, or of witnessing to experiential histories of trauma and violence. The genres and media of the autobiographical are many, the projects diverse, and the stakes high as people tell stories to one another and to anonymous readers. I sought to organize a year-long conversation about this most humanistic element of our everyday lives and our cacophonous environment of social exchange.

A high point of the fall was the spell-binding talk by Jesmyn Ward, a graduate of the U-M English department’s Helen Zell Writer’s Program and a much-honored writer. She spoke autobiographically about her 2014 memoir Men We Reaped, which chronicles in a vibrant, poetic prose, the damaged and lost lives of five young black men, including her brother. In the institute gallery, an installation enabled visitors to listen to the oral histories of U-M student veterans as they engaged lingering and traumatic memories

and afterlives of experiences in the field and staged with artist Jennifer Karady a hyperreal photographic rendering of their traumatic memories. Later in the year, we mounted the first ever exhibition of the art and artifacts of graphic memoirist Alison Bechdel (whose first memoir Fun Home, adapted for Broadway, recently won a Tony award for best musical). The exhibition enabled visitors, including students in a minicourse I taught on “My Comics, My Self,” to experience the energy of the drawn line of life writing, and the complexities of telling stories of family affiliations entwined with stories of discovery of one’s sexual truth.

Elsewhere in this annual report, our curator Amanda Krugliak will tell you more about the events organized under the rubric of The Hub. The Year of Life Writing concluded with the first biennial conference of the International Auto/Biography Association Chapter of the Americas in June. Some one hundred scholars converged on campus from South America, the Caribbean, and across the United States and Canada, and from as far away as Australia.

They spent four days sharing their scholarly work on all aspects of life writing across the hemisphere.

As we begin the next term, the banners have gone up for our next theme: “The Year of Conversions.” Prompted by our participation in the fifteen-partner collaboration on Early Modern Conversions organized out of McGill University’s Institute for the Public Life of Arts and Ideas, we will have a full calendar of exhibits, talks, performances, and conferences focused on the early modern period but far beyond that period. The conversions about which conversations will unfold are multiple— not only religious but also material, gendered,

w w w . l s a . um i c h . e d u / h um a n i t i e s

Christinna Hamilton, Sidonie Smith, Alison Bechdel, and Amanda Krugliak

social, political, and environmental. Please take time to go to our website to see all that is going on.

As troubling as the times can be for humanities disciplines in the academy, I am always buoyed that there are so many allies out there, people whose work, whose everyday pleasures, whose lasting legacies translate the value of the humanities in the world.

I like to think they number in the millions. They are the professional humanists, such as the archeologists and anthropologists who unearth our buried pasts and bring cultures of meaning into our purview, as do the professional humanists unearthing artifacts from the Roman city Londinium beneath London and the possible plague pit amidst the shaft sinkings for the new London rail link. They are also generations of students of the humanities who continue to follow the interests of their youth, through the respite of their wearied, working days, and the unpredictable avocations of their later years.

The work of humanities institutes and centers across the nation and the globe is to join academic humanists and their allies in demanding, and contentious, conversations about the many pleasures of the arts and ideas of life, of human sociality, of human aspiration, of posthuman possibilities, of knowledge from long ago, from below, and from the unfolding future.

\ Sidonie Smith Mary Fair Croushore Professor of the Humanities Professor of English and Women’s Studies Director, Institute for the Humanities

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Sara Ahbel-Rappe, professor, classical studies; John Rich Professor “The Charioteer’s Circuit: Plato’s Self-Moving Myth. Tracking the Migration of Plato’s Myth in Late Antique Text Networks” AhbelRappe

Cotera

This book investigates the reception of Plato’s Phaedrus, and especially the famous myth of the soul (Phaedrus 246-249) from the first to sixth centuries CE. The phenomenon of this text’s migration into exegetical or speculative traditions or even languages far removed from the original site of Plato’s dialogue in terms of the theory of textual networking is analyzed.

Classicist Daniel Selden has used the term “text network” to describe texts whose very composition facilitates migration into a series of narratives at ever further remove from their site of origin (e.g. The Alexander Romance).

Scholars of other periods have used the term more broadly in an effort to think about the circulation of texts while keeping to Selden’s original insight, that text networks “explicitly thematize their own dissemination.” AhbelRappe extends this work in a consideration of how this particular myth, essentially an icon of [trans] migration, helped insinuate Platonism itself into so many disparate regions and religions.

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Maria Cotera, associate professor, American culture, women’s studies; Helmut F. Stern Fellow “The Shock of the Old” Since 2009, Maria Cotera has been developing a digital archive of oral histories and documents related to the development of Chicana feminist praxis in the civil rights era.

The archive includes over seventy oral histories and thousands of letters, posters, photographs, and ephemera, as well as digital copies of dozens of out-of-print books, articles, and unpublished essays, all of which collectively trace the ways in which Chicanas, Latinas, and their allies developed both a method and a theory of localized (and yet still broadly networked) change-making that shaped contemporary conceptualizations of intersectionality. For her project at the institute, Cotera worked on a book, The Shock of the Old, that focuses on the content of the archive, and also the meanings of archives more generally. Cotera is particularly interested in how collaboratively produced digital archives re-imagine the archive, not as a “place” or a “source” (to paraphrase Derrida), but as a practice of engaged, interconnected scholarly inquiry.

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F E L L O W S

Hughes

Holly Hughes, professor, art and design, theatre and drama, women’s studies; Norman and Jane Katz Fellow

Christian Sandvig, associate professor, communication studies, School of Information; Steelcase Research Professor

“Preaching to the Perverted”

“Knowing Algorithms”

The project is a multi-platform memoir which explores Hughes’s experiences as one of the four performance artists denied funding during the height of the culture wars. The project involves traditional print media and audio book, with video and web components.

The algorithm is now a central problem among scholars of culture. In computer science, algorithm refers to a step-by-step procedure for accomplishing a given task.

Yet as human experience is digitally mediated, the experience of texts, other media, and even reality itself is now produced by a step-by-step procedure executed by a computer. This proposal imagines hybrid research involving scholarship, programming, and art that attempts to reveal algorithms at work.

Sandvig conducted a series of programming and ethnographic projects with open access websites as the output that addresses the problem of knowing algorithms.

Rachel Neis, associate professor, Judaic studies, history; Richard & Lillian Ives Professor “Mapping Jews in Late Antiquity: Minority Spatial Practices across Roman and Sassanian Empires” Jews are figured ambivalently with respect to space. Claims about Jews as quintessentially Diasporic on the one hand, and as associated with land and territory on the other, are often backdated to antiquity. This project critically examines the spatial and mapping practices of Jews, including rabbis, who lived in the first several centuries CE in both RomanByzantine Palestine and in Persian-Sassanian Mesopotamia. These practices, which cross the religious, material, and every day, also overlaid the constraints of contemporaneous imperial geographies. Working with a variety of materials, the project considers such things as prayer rules, toilet practices, pilgrimage itineraries, and Jerusalem Temple iconography as means by which Jews sought to shape and signify their space. The aim is also to compare ancient Jewish practices with those of other minorities in order to consider how ancient minority spatial practices can illumine our understandings of religion, identity, empire, and geography.

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Unive rsity o f Mi chigan

Remembering Tobin Siebers Tobin Siebers, V. L. Parrington Collegiate Professor, professor of English language and literature, art and design, and a 2014–15 faculty fellow here at the Institute for the Humanities, died on January 28, 2015. An indomitable champion of the field of disability studies, Tobin wrote field-defining works, including Disability Aesthetics and Disability Theory. In 2009, he was awarded the James T. Neubacher Award in recognition of extraordinary leadership and service in support of the disability community by the Council for Disability Concerns.

Fortunately for us, Tobin shared his work in progress with the fellows during fall term.

In the conclusion to his essay, Tobin issued his searing, and urgent call: “As long as the belief in human inferiority exists, as long as anyone, at any time, may be thought inferior based on mental and physical characteristics, disabled people will continue to be classified as people without quality, not only considered unequal to other citizens but considered less than human and so subject to terrible violence. An alternative view of people with disabilities requires nothing less than the radical rejection of the aesthetics of human disqualification. Only then will the disqualification of disabled people fail, and fail precisely, because it has no basis in human appearances, physical states, and mental conditions deemed inferior.”

Tobin’s generosity, intellect, and humor are greatly missed. As his friend and colleague, U-M Professor Petra Kuppers said, “His legacy lives on in his nourishing critical perspective, his passion and presence, and it will continue to thrive and grow in the thoughts his writings allow us to spin out.”

Siebers

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Melanie Yergeau, assistant professor, English language and literature; Charles P. Brauer Fellow

Wang Zheng, associate professor, women’s studies, history, Institute for Research on Women and Gender; Helmut F. Stern Fellow

“Authoring Autism: On Rhetoric and Neurological Queerness”

“Experiencing Socialist Transformation: Shanghai Residents in the 1950s”

If rhetoric is what makes us human, then what does it mean to deny the autistic’s capacity for rhetoric? This project examines the ways in which the autistic culture movement provides opportunities to rethink long-held ideas about rhetoric and its relation to affect, intent, and human audiences.

Textual sites include clinical scholarship, autism conference booklets, and autistic life writing, primarily that which is digital and/or self-published.

This research project is a social and cultural history that employs archival research, ethnographic study, and discourse analysis in the investigation of socialist reorganization of Shanghai. It is intended to examine many areas vital to our understanding of human experiences during socialist transformation, a recent past that has been rapidly erased in China’s merge with global capitalism. How did residents of a semi-colonial metropolis respond to the Communist Party’s grand scheme of socialist state building? How was the Maoist reorganization of urban life accomplished, accommodated, resisted, or subverted? How and what were new subjectivities formed in the interplay and contestation of multiple discourses in a socialist revolution? Departing from the Cold War assumption of an allencompassing “communist totalitarian régime,” the project seeks to bring to light the dynamics and tensions in the relations between the Maoist state and urban society as they played out in the daily life of ordinary people.

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s David Green, Jr., American culture; James Winn Graduate Student Fellow “’Out of this Confusion I Bring My Heart’: Love, Liberation, and the Rise of Black LGBT Cultural Politics in Late-TwentiethCentury America” This project situates black LGBT cultural and political activism within the history of the black freedom movements in late-twentiethcentury America. Principally, it takes as its objects of analysis literary cultures—political speeches, critical essays, novels, plays, poems, autobiographies—as well as archival sources and oral histories, and examines very closely how these sources reveal the ways that black queer artist-activists discoursed about “freedom” and “liberation” across the civil rights, black women’s, and gay liberation movements. Love, this project argues, functions as a vital intellectual, political, and organizing tool to (re) capture and widen the essence of the “beloved community” as it enables black queer folks to forge new paths on the ever winding, and never ending, long road to freedom.

Alison Joersz, anthropology; Mary I. & David D. Hunting Graduate Student Fellow “Talking Our Way Towards Development: The Political and Ethical Entanglements of Grassroots Organizing in Haiti” The discursive practices of two local development organizations in Haiti are compared by this dissertation. Through debates about organizational strategies and social issues (including political scandals), members at each organization act out different visions of ethics and responsibility in political engagement, differences that can be partially attributed to how each is positioned in relation to the

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development industry and formal politics.

This analysis goes beyond the dichotomy of “corrupt” versus “transparent” organizational behavior, highlighting the role of discourse in shaping social action and the entangled nature of politics, development, and ethics in Haiti.

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Elizabeth Keslacy, architecture; A. Bartlett Giamatti Graduate Student Fellow “The Curatorial Impulse: Reading Postmodern Historicism on Exhibit, 1968–1989”

Keslacy

Architectural exhibition as a key site of the formation of architectural postmodernism is examined by this dissertation.

Complementing the textually based “linguistic turn” that emerged in architectural theory, exhibitions manifested the visual “historical turn” through two primary exhibition types: those that explored historical subjects and those that presented contemporary works that drew upon historical styles. Architects and historians, working as curators, used the medium of exhibition to re-present historical periods, such as the neoclassical and the Beaux-Arts, through interpretations that framed history as model and sourcebook for practitioners, and they assembled contemporaneous projects to identify and validate trends as a way of encouraging their adoption more widely. This project explores the ways which the experience choreographed by the exhibition is reflected in the aesthetic experience proffered by postmodern architecture itself. Further, it considers the demonstrative nature of the exhibition and its implications for practitioners, engendered in the curator’s interpretive agency and in the evolving conception of architecture as museum subject.

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Nancy Linthicum, Near Eastern studies; Marc and Constance Jacobson Graduate Student Fellow “Writing in Cairo in the Age of Mubarak: Literary Networks and Prose Fiction of the 1990s and 2000s in Egypt”

Linthicum

Linwick

Beginning in the 1990s, a new body of experimental prose fiction appeared on the Egyptian literary scene as small, independent publishing houses in Cairo were established and began to publish a number of works written primarily by young Egyptian writers. This dissertation investigates formal and thematic trends and linguistic innovation that emerged in this widely overlooked and misunderstood body of Arabic literature over the course of the 1990s and up to the January 25 revolution of 2011. Using diverse methods and disciplines—literary criticism, Arabic dialectology, and original research and interviews with authors, literary critics, and publishers —Linthicum traces interactions among key literary “actors” tied to Cairo and to this body of literature, including writers, literary awards, state ministries, publishers, literary criticism, books as physical commodities, and others.

Sarah Linwick, English language and literature; Early Modern Conversions Graduate Student Fellow “Ecologies of Kind in Early Modern England”

Massinon

This project explores how early modern English performances and texts that are often comfortably classified as “literary” today also participate in the period’s sociopolitical and scientific discourse about nature. Specifically, the project focuses on works of drama, poetry, and prose romance that engage systems of “kind” (the kind being variously construed as a category of nature, society, or art).

Attending to how early modern performances and texts complicate categorical distinctions between nature, society, and art, the project simultaneously examines how these works

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negotiate the deconstruction and reconstruction of class, gender, race, sex, and species kinds—and variants of these identity categories. A primary goal of this project, then, is to provide a fresh perspective on how some of the period’s unstable, contingent notions of nature contributed to the transformation of identity categories in the period.

Pascal Massinon, history; Mary Fair Croushore Graduate Student Fellow “Participant Listeners: Home Taping and the Political Culture of Recording Technologies in the U.S.” This dissertation investigates the history of magnetic tape recording in relation to debates over aesthetic practice, copyright law, and the industrial organization of entertainment in the United States. From the 1950s, when reel-to-reel tape recorders entered the consumer market, to the late 1990s, when digital media began to supplant cassette tapes as the easiest way to reproduce recorded sounds, consumers’ use of magnetic tape provoked social and political conflicts over the value of recorded sounds and influenced changes within the structure of the recording industry. Even as the practice of home taping raised the possibility that the content industry would not be able to maintain control over the reproduction of its products, it also complexly paved the way towards other profitable models of business organization that combined corporate consolidation, low-cost consumer goods, and flexible production of cultural commodities.

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F E L L O W S Mesli

Rostom Mesli, comparative literature; Sylvia “Duffy” Engle Graduate Student Fellow “In Defense of Identity Politics: For a Queer Reassessment of a Vilified Concept” The processes through which, in the 1970s and early 1980s in France and the U.S., sexual non-normative practices passed from being questions of medical pathology or social deviance to become political positions (and particularly radical political positions) are analyzed by this dissertation. It seeks to understand how deviant sexuality was then articulated normatively, discursively, and politically to the Left. With a particular focus on feminism, gay and lesbian liberationism, women of color feminism, and political sadomasochism, it reassesses the role of identity politics in that process. Against the hegemonic views in queer theory and poststructuralist thinking, it excavates the ways that identity politics was used by earlier activists in ways that were radically non-essentialist and non-homogenizing, and it shows that identity politics was not only conducive but indeed necessary to coalition-building.

Asaf Peres, music theory; Richard & Lillian Ives Graduate Student Fellow “Timbre, Gesture, Space: Towards a Method for Analyzing Studio Produced Popular Music” In the last five decades, the recording studio has revolutionized how creators of popular music approach the process of producing a song. Innovative musical concepts have resulted from a newfound ability to create sounds that were impossible to generate in a live performance. This sonic revolution has greatly accelerated in the past decade, thanks

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to recent technological advancements and the popularization of music production software.

Peres is developing an analytical methodology which addresses these new technological possibilities in songs by artists such as Britney Spears, Rihanna, and Ludacris, with particular focus on musical gestures, sound color, and the formation of imaginary musical space.

Bonnie Washick, political science; Mary I. & David D. Hunting Graduate Student Fellow

Peres

Washick

“Strange Spaces and ‘Stranger Sensibilities’: Conceptualizing Feminist Counterpublicity on the Web” Through a situated analysis of digital feminisms, this dissertation develops an account of the Internet as affording spaces of politics wherein distinctive political visions and practices emerge through the interaction of actors who build, imagine, and “inhabit” different Internet sites. The project illustrates how beliefs about the world are given form in the immaterial spaces of the web and, in turn, have real effects in shaping the lives and experiences of embodied users who navigate these spaces. This relational, world-building approach offers insight into larger questions of democratic politics in “the age of the Internet,” an age characterized by digital, mass publication and concerns about the erosion of community and the commercialization or capture of citizens’ attentions.

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Sharon Greytak Award-winning independent filmmaker Sharon Greytak, selected by The Independent as one of “10 Filmmakers to Watch in 2014,” gave the lecture “Defying Expectation: Sex, Disability, and the Films of Sharon Greytak” and also screened her film Losing It in which Greytak, who uses a motorized wheelchair, embarks on a personal journey to understand the meaning of a disabled identity.

Laura Kuhn Laura Kuhn, the Norman G. Freehling Visiting Profressor, is the founding executive director of the John Cage Trust, and the first John Cage Professor of Performance Arts at Bard College. While at the institute she was at work on The Selected Letters of John Cage for publication by Wesleyan University Press (2015), taught a mini-course, and participated in the Author’s Forum “Merce Cunningham’s Diaries: A Conversation with Laura Kuhn and Peter Sparling.”

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Gillian Whitlock Gillian Whitlock is an ARC professorial fellow at the University of Queensland whose scholarly work focuses on the fields of life writing and postcolonialism, with an emphasis on contemporary writing. While in residence she gave a lecture titled “The Hospitality of Cyberspace,” which focused on maritime voyages filmed and narrated by asylum seekers.

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& s s t m n a e r v g E ro P

Author’s Forum The Author’s Forum is a series on books and ideas presented in collaboration with the University Library and the Ann Arbor Book Festival. The format of the series is conversation based, giving the author and a conversation partner the opportunity to delve into a variety of topics, from the subject of the book to the author’s writing process and more. We also partner with local bookstores, which facilitate the book sales and signings in addition to helping widen the Author’s Forum’s reach among the Ann Arbor community.

Author’s Forum Events 2014–15 Fourth and Long: The Fight for the Soul of College Football, A Conversation with John U. Bacon and Tyran Steward Robert Hass & Brenda Hillman in Conversation with One Pause Poetry’s Sarah Messer To Forget Venice, A Conversation with Peg Boyers and Nicholas Delbanco Deviations: A Gayle Rubin Reader, A Conversation with Gayle Rubin and Valerie Traub

Detroit Chene Street History Project, A Conversation with Marian Krzyzowski, Deborah Dash Moore, and Karen Majewski The Infintesimals, A Conversation with Laura Kasischke and Megan Levad On Purpose: Lessons in Life and Health from the Frog, the Dung Beetle, and Julia; A Conversation with Vic Strecher and Jim Ottaviani Staging Ground: An American Theater and Its Ghosts, A Conversation with Leslie Stainton, Jim Leija, Martin Walsh, and Leigh Woods Bad Blood, A Conversation with Daniel Herwitz and Linda Gregerson My Beautiful Hook-Nosed Beauty Queen Strut Wave and Wait ‘Til You Have Real Problems: A Conversation with Jeff Kass and Scott Beal Mahmoud Darwish: The Poet’s Art and His Nation, A Conversation with Khaled Mattawa and Anton Shammas Making Callaloo in Detroit, A Conversation with Lolita Hernandez and Laura Thomas Merce Cunningham’s Diaries, A Conversation with Laura Kuhn and Peter Sparling

U-M doctoral candidate Jina Kim at The Data of Life Writing: Gender, Race, and the Digital conference

Rednecks, Queers, and Country Music, A Conversation with Nadine Hubbs and Paul A. Anderson The Betrayers, A Conversation with David Bezmozgis and Natalie Bakopoulos

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Unive rsity o f Mi chigan

Digital Currents

“Weaving Humanities with Twine,” Anastasia Salter, University of Central Florida

The Digital Currents program continues to “Pathological, Remedial, Exceptional: Rhetorics bring attention to issues of pressing relevance of Mental Disability and Pedagogy,” Elizabeth related to the ethics and methods of digital Brewer, Central Connecticut State University culture. Highlights of the year were two Data, Social Justice, and the Humanities one-day symposia we hosted: Data, Social Conference Justice, and the Humanities in October and (together with the Institute for Research on Panel 1: Humanists as Activists: Changing Women and Gender) The Data of Life Writing: Modes of Scholarly Communication Gender, Race, and the Digital in January. Both Chair: Lisa Nakamura, University of Michigan events featured compelling research by Jessie Daniels, City University of New York scholars from Canada and around the United Jacqueline Wernimont, Arizona State University States, as well as from here at the University Michelle Habell-Pallán and Sonnet Retman, of Michigan. And both inspired discussion— University of Washington among panelists and audience members— Panel 2: Social Justice and Archives in the about the benefits and pitfalls of online Digital Age phenomena of self-disclosure, self-expression, Chair: David A. Wallace, University of Michigan activism, and surveillance. At the January Alexandra Stern, University of Michigan symposium in particular, we were pleased Maria Cotera, University of Michigan that five University of Michigan graduate Michelle Caswell, University of California, students had the opportunity to present their Los Angeles research in a session of lightning talks.

Panel 3: Data Representations and the Humanities Our series of digital pedagogy workshops also Chair: Paul Conway, University of Michigan continued this year, with topics such as makJentery Sayers, University of Victoria ing online assignments more accessible and Simone Browne, University of Texas, Austin video game pedagogy. In related fashion, we Moya Bailey, Northeastern University hosted professional workshops for institute fellows and other Michigan graduate students The Data of Life Writing: Gender, Race, on data management, professional website and the Digital Conference design and maintenance, and the future of Keynote 1: “Crowding Attention: scholarly publishing, as well as roundtable Prosopography, Women, and Nationality,” discussions with Michigan faculty and graduAlison Booth, University of Virginia ate students on topics such as teaching with and through video games.–Patrick Tonks, Assistant Director, Institute for the Humanities

Lightning talks by University of Michigan graduate students Faithe Day, Jina Kim, Liz Rodrigues, Emily Waples, and Jessica Zychowicz

Digital Currents Events 2014–15 Digital Pedagogy Workshops “Flexibility and its Discontents: Designing Accessible Classrooms and Assignments,” Stephanie L. Kerschbaum, University of Delaware and Margaret Price, Spelman College “Towards a (New) Video Game Pedagogy: Critical Players and Gameful Assignments,” Edmond Chang, Drew University 13

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Keynote 2: “Mashup, Remix, Rewrite: New Media Studies and Auto/biography Theory and Practice,” Aimée Morrison, University of Waterloo “Data Management and the Humanities,” Jake Carlson and Sigrid Cordell, University of Michigan Libraries

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e v e n t s Roy

Lectures

About the speakers:

2015–16 saw an expansion of the institute’s programming: more events, more nationally and internationally recognized speakers, directed to more segments of the university and regional community. The capacious theme of life writing allowed us to bring memoirists, theorists, and activists together to sustain a coherent yet interdisciplinary conversation.

This year’s three endowed lectures raised the profile of the institute across campus, while also drawing attendees from around southeast Michigan. In addition to the annual Marc and Constance Jacobson lecture and the Jill S. Harris Memorial lecture, we inaugurated the Jean Yokes Woodhead lecture in October with a visit by novelist, essayist, and political activist Arundhati Roy. Rackham Amphitheatre quickly filled to capacity, as did an overflow conference room, where additional attendees listened to Roy’s talk, “The Doctor and the Saint: The Ambedkar-Gandhi Debate: Race, Cast, and Colonialism,” via a video link.

Jesmyn Ward, author of the novel Salvage the Bones and the memoir Men We Reaped, gave this year’s Jill S. Harris Memorial lecture in December to an audience absolutely rapt in silence by her moving account of her life and hometown. One faculty member commented during the discussion following the lecture that Ward’s was the best she had heard in twenty years of attending talks in Rackham Amphitheatre.

Vikram Chandra’s Marc and Constance Jacobson lecture followed in February. Chandra is the author of Geek Sublime, a hybrid of memoir, computer science, and philosophy of language. Both Chandra’s and Ward’s lectures brought the themes of the institute’s Year of Life Writing to a diverse audience extending beyond the boundaries of the campus.

–Patrick Tonks, Assistant Director, Institute for the Humanities

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Arundhati Roy was born in 1959 in Shillong, India. She studied architecture in New Delhi, where she now lives. She has worked as a film designer and screenplay writer in India. Roy is the author of the novel The God of Small Things, for which she received the 1997 Booker Prize.

She has written several non-fiction books, including The Cost of Living, Power Politics, War Talk, An Ordinary Person’s Guide to Empire, Public Power in the Age of Empire, and Walking with the Comrades. Her newest books are Field Notes on Democracy: Listening to Grasshoppers and Capitalism: A Ghost Story, published by Haymarket Books. Roy is the recipient of the 2002 Lannan Foundation Cultural Freedom Prize.

Ward

Chandra

Jesmyn Ward is the 2011 National Book Award winner for her novel Salvage the Bones.

A native of DeLisle, Mississippi, she received her undergraduate degree in English and a master’s degree in media studies and communication from Stanford University. Publishers Weekly called her debut novel, 2009’s Where the Line Bleeds, “Starkly beautiful…a fresh new voice in American fiction.” Her latest work is the 2013 memoir Men We Reaped. She is the recipient of Tulane’s first Paul and Debra Gibbons Professorship, with which, in addition to teaching with the English Department, she will also work closely with the New Orleans Center for the Gulf South and the Newcomb College Institute.

Vikram Chandra, who spent years working as a computer programmer and consultant, is the author of the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best First Book and the David Higham Prize for Fiction for the book Red Earth and Pouring Rain (1995). He has written many other novels and collections. Sacred Games won a Salon Book Award for 2007. It was also a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction. His most recent book, Geek Sublime: The Beauty of Code, The Code of Beauty, was a New York Times Notable Book of 2014. Born in New Delhi, Chandra currently divides his time between Mumbai and Berkeley, California, where he teaches creative writing at the University of California.

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Actor and writer Eric Bogosian

FellowSpeak The Institute for the Humanities exists to deepen synergies between the humanities, the arts and other regions of the university, to carry forward the heritage of the humanities, and to bring the voices of the humanities to public life. Our FellowSpeak series supports this mission by featuring ongoing exchange with our current fellows both past and present. Held for the most part in the Osterman Common Room, they are an opportunity to hear from our fellows in a more intimate setting, with plenty of time for conversation and questions.

Highlights this year included a visit from former fellow Martha Jones, who introduced her recent project with U-M students on the life of Arabella Chapman, a free African American woman who chronicled post-Civil War life in a unique photo collection; and an informal presentation by visiting fellow Eric Bogosian that preceded his standing-room-only performance as part of our Living Room series.

FellowSpeak Events 2014–15 “Migrations to Modernity: The Many Voices of George Copway’s Running Sketches of Men and Places, in England, France, Germany, Belgium, and Scotland (1851),” former fellow Scott Lyons, American culture and English, University of Michigan “Don’t Look Before You Leap: A Punk Aesthetic for Acting and Writing,” Eric Bogosian, actor and author “Like a Fish Taking Itself onto the Hook: Artistic and Scholarly Creativity under Political Oppression,” Abdilatif Abdalla, poet “The Hospitality of Cyberspace,” Gillian Whitlock, School of Communication and Arts, University of Queensland “Disaster Drawn: Picturing Violence in Joe Sacco’s Comics Journalism,” Hillary Chute, English, University of Chicago

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“The Arabella Chapman Project,” former fellow Martha Jones, history, law, Afroamerican and African studies, University of Michigan “The John Cage Trust: An Accidental Archive,” visiting fellow Laura Kuhn, performance art, Bard College Film Screenings: Losing It and Archaeology of a Woman, Sharon Greytak, filmmaker “Defying Expectation: Sex, Disability, and the Films of Sharon Greytak,” Sharon Greytak, filmmaker “Booger Hollar, NC: Life Writing and the Search for Queer Roots,” former fellow Jarrod Hayes, French, University of Michigan Dear White People roundtable film discussion with Stephen Berrey, American culture; Robin Means Coleman, communications and Afroamerican and African studies; former fellow Frieda Ekotto, comparative literature and Afroamerican and African studies; graduate student fellow David Green, American culture PhD candidate; former fellow Martha S. Jones, history, law, Afroamerican and African studies.

“Other Cosmopolitans,” former fellow Yan Haiping, cross-cultural studies, Shanghai Jiaotong University.

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The Hub The Institute for the Humanities’ gallery and Hub series continues to expand organically, building relationships, connecting the dots, and energizing the university and its outlying communities. It has emerged as an established residency and exhibition program for artists, serving as a laboratory for making new creative work and supporting exciting collaborations across the arts and humanities that are relevant to the challenges facing our diverse campus. Undergraduate students, student interns, faculty, artists, and the public explore the intersections of arts, aesthetics, activism, and humanistic scholarship.

In 2014-15 we presented five main exhibitions and three pop-up exhibitions—a vast array of stories and shared human experiences that honored the institute’s Year of Life Writing.

We also mounted our nationally recognized exhibition State of Exception at Arizona State Museum Combine Studio.

In the fall, artist Jennifer Karady’s Soldiers’ Stories from Iraq and Afghanistan presented photographs and sound stories that represented the memories of veterans returning from combat and the challenges of re-entering civilian life. The project offered numerous additional public discussions and conversations with Karady, U-M scholars, veteran activists and counselors from the Ann Arbor VA hospital, as well as a forum for U-M student veterans returning from service. The exhibition was subsequently a feature story on PBS television’s Detroit Performs, as well as PBS Newshour.

2014 Kidder artist Jen Davis’s Eleven Years explored questions of identity, body image, and intimacy through her bracingly honest self-portraits. The exhibition spurred public discourse among students in relationship to personal images and stories in our over-exposed age of social media.

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Moms, Dads, and Dykes to Watch Out For represented the first serious curation of MacArthur winner and renowned graphic memoirist Alison Bechdel. It included drawings, prints, and ephemera, as well as original works from her acclaimed memoir Fun Home. In partnership with the Department of Afroamerican and African Studies, we launched The Crown Project. This cross-campus double exhibition conceived by artist Shani Peters explored the African and African American dilemmas of identity and self-determination within an institutional hierarchy. Peters engaged with students in DAAS, American culture, and museum studies, and also hosted community workshops and film screenings in Detroit at the Charles Wright Museum.

L.A. street artist Ramiro Gomez’s residency included two weeks in both the fall and winter terms. Gomez’s fall project placed painted cardboard cut-outs of grounds workers and migrant farmers on the U-M Diag, as part of the usual comings and goings of students, faculty, and staff at U-M. Although temporary installations, ephemeral by design, they reminded us of marginalized workers pertinent to our own university life…picking and packing the foods we eat, preparing our meals, maintaining our public spaces. Gomez’s April 2015 site-specific installation Cut-Outs brought cardboard paintings into the gallery, creating a wall-to-wall narrative of the domestic worker.

Cut-Outs will be re-installed as part of the Chicago Humanities Festival in the fall of 2015, with additional support from the Institute for the Humanities.

Institute for the Humanities curator Amanda Krugliak

Brooklyn-based artist Frank Born’s residency produced the Poets and Painter Project. For three weeks, Born painted U-M faculty poets in an open studio on campus, each poet engaged in formal sittings with the artist. The project culminated in a public event of poetry readings, discussion of the intersection of painting and poetry, and the unveiling of the paintings themselves. The paintings will now serve as artifacts of the process and be installed permanently in the English department.

Artist Shani Peters and U-M Professor Raymond Silverman

Other highlights of the year included a visit to our galleries by New York Times art critic Holland Cotter, who commended the achievement of our Hub program. In May, our travelling exhibition State of Exception—based on the research of U-M anthropologist Jason De León—was featured on PBS’s Horizonte with a conversation between co-creators, photographer and former institute fellow Richard Barnes and our arts curator Amanda Krugliak. The exhibition was also cited as must-see show of summer 2015 by the Phoenix New Times.

The exciting new Pop-Up Series of exhibitions in the Osterman Common Room focused on energetic and timely presentations that included brief artist visits related to the graphic memoir as a contemporary art form.

In September, artist G.B Tran’s exhibition Vietnamerica, based upon his book of the same name, presented original drawings and prints chronicling his family’s story, as well as his own, as Vietnamese Americans post-1960.

Later in the year, graphic memoirist Phoebe Gloeckner’s exhibition Diary of a Young Girl offered a quirky and eclectic documentation of her award-winning memoir. It included personal papers, objects, and diaries, and resonated with young students still finding their own authentic voices.

–Amanda Krugliak, Curator, Institute for the Humanities

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Hub Events 2014–15 Soldiers’ Stories from Iraq and Afghanistan New Work: Photographs and Sound Installation by Jennifer Karady About the artist: Jennifer Karady is an internationally known, award-winning artist based in Brooklyn, NY. Her critically acclaimed project, Soldiers’ Stories from Iraq and Afghanistan, has been exhibited widely, including at SF Camerawork, CEPA, the University of Denver, the Berman Museum, and the Palm Springs Art Museum. Her work was featured in The New York Times, Kunstbeeld, on National Public Radio, and reviewed in Frieze. Public collections include the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Palm Springs Art Museum, and the Albright Knox Gallery. Karady’s numerous residencies and awards include the Corporation of Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, the Headlands, Puffin Foundation, Brooklyn Arts Council, and the Blue Mountain Center. In 2013-2014, she was awarded the Witt Residency at the University of Michigan, and grants from Getty Images and the Compton Foundation.

Additional Events: • Conversation with U-M student veterans and artist Jennifer Karady • Photographs and Stories by Jennifer Karady, exhibition at Slusser Gallery • Panel on War & Memory with artist Jennifer Karady; curator Amanda Krugliak; Sheila Rauch, Ann Arbor VA Hospital and U-M Department of Psychiatry; and Arlene W. Saxonhouse, U-M Caroline Robbins Collegiate Professor of Political Science and Women’s Studies.

• Combat Paper Nevada Presentation, Art Workshop, Exhibition, and Panel on Women in the Military with Tina Drakulich, president of the David J. Drakulich Art Foundation, Reno; Lt. Col. Jo Meacham, retired from the Nevada Air National Guard; and Luana Ritch, retired from the U.S. Army.

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Eleven Years: Exhibition by Jen Davis About the artist: Jen Davis, the 2014 Kidder Resident in the Arts, is a New York-based photographer. She received an MFA from Yale University and BFA from Columbia College, Chicago. Davis’ work has been exhibited both nationally and internationally. She is a recipient of the New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in 2013. Her first monograph titled Eleven Years, published by Kehrer Verlag (Germany) was released in 2014 accompanied by her first solo show in New York City at ClampArt. Davis is represented by Lee Marks Fine Art, Shelbyville, IN and ClampArt, New York, NY. Additional events: • Curator’s Conversation with the artist and special guests • Body and Image: A discussion with artist Jen Davis Dykes, Dads, and Moms to Watch out For: The Comics of Alison Bechdel

The Crown: Contemporary Construction of Self in America, Installation & Video

Artist Jen Davis

About the artist: Shani Peters is a multidisciplinary New York-based artist. Originally from Lansing, MI, she completed her BA at Michigan State University and her MFA at The City College of New York. She has exhibited/presented work in the US and abroad, including the Schomburg Center for Black Culture and Research, the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, Contact Theatre, Seoul Art Space Geumcheon, and the National Gallery of Zimbabwe.

Additional events: • The Crown: Contemporary Construction of Self in America: Interactive Portrait Exhibition at GalleryDAAS • Workshop, Chameleon Street film screening, and Q & A w/the artist and filmmaker Ramiro Gomez: Cut-Outs

About the artist: Alison Bechdel is a cartoonist and graphic memoirist. She self-syndicated her award-winning comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For from 1983 to 2008. She is the author of Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, named by Time magazine the Best Book of 2006, and the memoir Are You My Mother?

Bechdel’s comics have appeared in The New Yorker, Slate, McSweeney’s, The New York Times Book Review, and Granta. The recipient of a 2014 MacArthur Fellowship, she is a Marsh Professor at Large at the University of Vermont.

About the artist: Ramiro Gomez lives and works in West Hollywood, CA. He was born to immigrant parents in San Bernadino, CA. After leaving the California Institute of the Arts, Gomez worked as a live-in nanny with a Beverly Hills family, where he keenly observed the relationships between heads of households and their staff, the impetus for his first major project, Domestic Scenes. His exhibitions include the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center and the AFL-CIO National Convention. His work has been covered in the Washington Post, NPR, the Los Angeles Times, Hyperallergic, Huffington Post, and CNN. He is represented by Charlie James Gallery, LA.

Additional events:

Additional events:

• Stamps Speaker Series: “Drawing Lessons: The Comics of Everyday Life”

• Artist talk by Ramiro Gomez Painter & Poets Project: Pop-Up Exhibition by Frank Born About the artist: Born in Texas and educated at Duke University, Frank Born has made a cultural home for himself in both his home state and his adoptive cities of San Francisco

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Above: Diary of a Teenage Girl: Pop-Up Exhibition

by Phoebe Gloeckner Right: U-M Professor Ruth Behar gives one of the keynotes at Encounters Across the Americas: Archives, Technologies, Methods.

Major Conferences

and Brooklyn, New York. He is best known for his idiosyncratic, gestural paintings.

His commitment to the process of painting—the exchange between painter and subject—results in surprisingly intimate yet thoroughly modern portraits, complex yet unencumbered. He has exhibited widely in both galleries and museums.

Encounters Across The Americas: Archives, Technologies, Methods

Vietnamerica: Pop-Up Exhibition by GB Tran About the artist: GB Tran is a Vietnamese American graphic artist. Born and raised in South Carolina as a son of immigrants, his first book, Vietnamerica: A Family’s Journey, was published in 2011.

The 2015–16 Year of Life Writing culminated June 4–7 with the institute’s hosting of Encounters Across The Americas: Archives, Technologies, Methods, the first biennial conference of the International Auto/Biography Association—Americas Chapter. Scholars from Brazil, Jamaica, Argentina, Canada, and around the United States came together to share research and discuss the diversity of modes of life writing across North and South America.

Additional events: • Artist talk by GB Tran Diary of a Teenage Girl: Pop-Up Exhibition

by Phoebe Gloeckner About the artist: Phoebe Gloeckner is a graphic novelist and a professor at the University of Michigan Stamps School of Art and Design.

She is the author of The Diary of a Teenage Girl: An Account in Words and Pictures (now a film), and A Child’s Life and Other Stories, as well as many short stories, illustrations, and comics which have appeared in a variety of publications over the last 25 years. She was the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2008.

Additional events: • Artist talk by Phoebe Gloeckner

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EVENTS

Initiatives Contexts for Classics This was our second year of affiliation with Contexts for Classics (CFC), an interdepartmental faculty initiative founded in 2000 that aims to rethink the discipline(s) of classical studies from various critical, historical, and pedagogical perspectives. CFC sponsors several events annually and emphasizes curricular offerings across the university that explore the relationship between antiquity and modernity and interrogate the construction of a classical ideal. Co-sponsors include the College of Literature, Science and the Arts; the Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studies; the Department of Classical Studies; the Department of Comparative Literature; and the Program in Modern Greek.

Contexts for Classics Events 2014–15 “Soprano Obligato: The Black Woman’s Voice in Cicero’s America.” MLK Day presentation by Heidi Morse, University of Michigan, with response by Yopie Prins, University of Michigan “Power and the Mediterranean,” a Mediterranean Topographies Interdisciplinary Workshop symposium “Ancient Rome in Silent Cinema,” Jerome Classical Lectures by Maria Wyke, University College, London Humanities Without Walls

to fund the first two years. The grant, led

by IPRH Director and Principal Investigator Dianne Harris, makes possible two initiatives: one supports the development of summer workshops for pre-doctoral students in the humanities who intend to pursue careers outside the academy; a second initiative funds cross-institutional teams of faculty and graduate students pursuing research that focuses on “The Global Midwest.”

Early Modern Conversions Early Modern Conversions (EMC) is a multidisciplinary project with sites for research at universities around the world. U-M is one of the funded sites for primary research. The goal of the project is to rethink early modern Europe as an “age of conversion” and to develop a historical understanding of conversion that will address corporeal, sexual, epistemological, psychological, trans-human, political, and spiritual kinds of transformation. A grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada has provided the primary funding for the five-year project, including support for graduate student research. McGill University in Montreal is the home of the project, directed by Professor Paul Yachnin.

The institute’s participation in the EMC project began in earnest this past year, with the inauguration of a new graduate student fellowship specifically tied to the EMC initiative. Sarah Linwick, PhD candidate in English, served as this year’s Early Modern Conversions graduate student fellow in residence at the institute. This spring, we hosted a series of talks by current U-M graduate students on topics related to conversion in the early modern period. This year set the stage for the institute’s “Year of Conversions,” coming in 2015-16.

Humanities Without Walls is an extensive consortium of fifteen humanities institutes in the Midwest and beyond which aims to create new avenues for collaborative research, teaching, and the production of scholarship in the humanities, forging and sustaining areas of inquiry that cannot be created or maintained without cross-institutional cooperation leEarly Modern Conversions Events 2014–15 veraging the strengths of multiple distinctive campuses. The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation “On the Road Again: Mystery Staging and awarded $3 million to the Illinois Program Conversion in Henry VI Part III.” Sheila Coursey, for Research in the Humanities (IPRH) at the U-M graduate student in English University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign 20

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“The Disappearance of Agnes Bowker: Reconstructing Nature in Reformation England,” Sarah Linwick, U-M PhD candidate in English and the 2014-15 Early Modern Conversions Graduate Student Fellow at the Institute for the Humanities.

The great advantage that students found in this kind of project was the opportunity to explore patterns in and gain insights from a literary text while using skills—such as data compilation and display—of relevance to their work in their home disciplines.

“Conversion, Contagion, and Concepts of Change in Shakespeare Performance Studies,” Lauren Eriks, U-M graduate student in English.

Chicago Humanities Festival Since 2003, the Institute for the Humanities has partnered with the Chicago Humanities Festival to bring Michigan faculty to give presentations at the annual two-weekend festival. The festival is hugely popular and draws enormous attendance, thereby expanding the reach of Michigan faculty, widening the university’s profile both within and beyond alumni circles, and connecting with area alumni and friends. In 2014, two faculty participated in the festival. Ruth Behar, professor of anthropology, recounted her fascinating travels across cultures in her presentation “An Island Called Home” and Philip Deloria, professor of history and American culture, made a case for Dakota Sioux artist Mary Sully’s place in the canon of American art in “The Next Vivian Maier.”

Undergraduate Initiatives For the second year this winter, I was happy to have the chance to co-teach an undergraduate course with Justin Joque (Visualization Librarian here at Michigan). Last year we had great success with our course “Mapping Moby-Dick,” so this year we tried a similar format for the course we called “Visualizing Frankenstein.” In both mini-courses, students were asked to conceptualize and create a data visualization project instead of a final essay. Both courses drew students from disciplines not usually represented in Institute for the Humanities initiatives including engineering, neuroscience, and biology.

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Beginning this year, we provided the chance for undergraduate students in any discipline in the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts to form student-run interest groups. The idea was to create a space in which students could discuss topics that have inspired them from classes they have taken: to allow them to carry that academic conversation into their lives outside the classroom and beyond the four years of college. Three student-organized groups formed this year, around a diverse set of interests, from affect theory, to Buddhism, to coming-of-age stories. One of the organizers of the latter group wrote to us at the end of the school year that the experience “was such a special way to finish up our time here as undergrads. We will all miss the university and all of the opportunities that it has allowed us. The additional community we were able to foster and learn from in these last couple of months was truly unforgettable.”

The institute also continued its partnership with the Program in International and Comparative Studies to provide scholarship support for undergraduate internships and study abroad opportunities as well as research grants. Scholarships range from $500 to $3,500 for a total of $20,000 in annual scholarship support.

Next year, the institute will have a newlyformed Undergraduate Advisory Group. Six motivated students have been accepted as incoming members of this group, which will serve as liaison to the undergraduate population on campus. I look forward to working with this committee to consider what kinds of programming and initiatives the institute can sponsor to appeal to and benefit undergraduates.

–Patrick Tonks, Assistant Director, Institute for the Humanities

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EVENTS

Artist GB Tran.

Choreographer and dancer Kyle Abraham.

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Living Room Series

“A Voice and Nothing,” Joseph Keckler

2014–15 marked the launch of the Living Room Series, an engaging series of pareddown performances in intimate spaces.

Visiting artist Eric Bogosian, as part of our partnership with Armenian Studies, revisited his signature monologues from the ‘80s, and offered the opportunity to consider shifting gender roles in the context of the history of performance. Brooklyn singer-songwriter Richard Buckner’s original songs and expressive voice served as vignettes of a life in an evening of guitar and vocal performance unplugged at the Kerrytown Concert House.

McArthur winner, dancer, and choreographer Kyle Abraham presented a powerful solo performance in the studio, followed by a conversation with visiting UC Black Studies scholar Stephanie Batiste. And finally, New York performance artist Joseph Keckler explored personal stories, and opera. Keckler, a U-M graduate, continues his ascent, recently performing in the new Broadway play Preludes.

–Amanda Krugliak, Curator, Institute for the Humanities Performances 2014–15 Richard Buckner in Concert Richard Buckner is an American alt-country singer-songwriter. Born in California, he currently resides in Brooklyn, New York. His 1994 debut album, Bloomed, was a critically acclaimed, predominantly acoustic collection of original songs steeped in the traditions of southern country and rural folk. His most recent album, Surrounded, was released in 2013

by Merge Records.

Joseph Keckler is a singer, writer, actor, and interdisciplinary artist. He has performed at South by Southwest, The New Museum of Contemporary Art, Merkin Hall, Joe’s Pub, and BAM Fisher. He was recently featured on WNYC’s “Soundcheck” and BBC America’s “The Nerdist.” The recipient of a Franklin Furnace Grant and a Fellowship in Interdisciplinary Work from the New York Foundation for the Arts, he was named “Best Downtown Performance Artist, 2013” by the Village Voice.

“In the Studio with Kyle Abraham,” Kyle Abraham and Stephanie Batiste American choreographer Kyle Abraham is a 2013 MacArthur Fellow and 2012 USA Ford Fellow. He began dancing at the Civic Light Opera Academy and also studied at the Pittsburgh Creative and Performing Arts School, SUNY Purchase, and received an MFA from the NYU Tisch School of the Arts.

He performed with a variety of modern dance companies prior to starting his own, Abraham.In.Motion. Stephanie Batiste, associate professor of black studies and English at UC Santa Barbara. Her research and teaching focus on the ways in which cultural texts, like literature, theater, performance, film, art, and bodies, act as imaginative systems that create identity, cultural values, human interactions, and possibilities of justice.

“100 Monologues,” Eric Bogosian Eric Bogosian is an author and actor known for his plays and films Talk Radio and subUrbia.

He is the recipient of three Obies, the Drama Desk, and the Berlin Film Festival “Silver Bear.”

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s u p p o r t Photo: LSA’s Jenny Howard; Board of Visitors members Marc Jacobson, Louise Holland, Paul Freehling, and Mary Kidder

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-five curated exhibitions in the art gallery—and beginning in fall 2014 several smaller pop-up exhibitions in the Osterman Common Room—expanding the reach of art practice and performance to the larger university community and the public.

The institute has also launched a set of curricular initiatives addressed to undergraduate students and graduate students. Drawing on Michigan’s remarkable resources, we seek to become a national leader in advocating for the humanities in higher education and serve as a national and international center for scholarly research in the humanities and creative work in the arts. By engaging with the institute through your gifts, you directly support the university and the institute in our mission to: ◆ 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 and/or Endow the Art Gallery The institute’s museum-quality gallery has gained national attention for the high quality of its four-five curated shows mounted annually. An endowment to name the gallery and/ or three-four shows would ensure that the institute will continue the tradition of superb exhibitions that showcase the synergies between the work of humanities scholars and creative artists. It will also enable the institute to expand outreach to undergraduate students and the general public 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 and on digital environments. Through this start-up fund, the institute will seed new projects, help facilitate collaborative teams of faculty and students, and prepare teams to seek outside funding. The institute will also use these funds to pilot an undergraduate “digital humanities corps.”

Endow a Humanities and Public Policy Post-Doctoral Fellowship The institute would like to provide a one-year fellowship for a humanist working in a public

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policy arena –such as public policy and built environments, the expressive life, education policy, language policy, life-long learning and health, 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 in the World Initiative This initiative will fund collaborative projects with scholars and graduate students around the region, 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 Institute’s Strategic Fund Gifts to the Strategic Fund will provide unique opportunities to try new initiatives, experiment with new audiences, and infuse the institute with new programming ideas.

Possible initiatives may include traveling humanities salons, innovative course development, production of multi-media white papers on public policy issues, and hands-on faculty development in new modes of scholarly communication.

How to Give 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 (http://leadersandbest.umich.edu/find/#/give/basket/ fund/307128) 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.

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◆ Matching Gifts: You can leverage your gift to the institute with a matching gift from your employer (check with the institute’s development officer or ask your employer if your company offers a match). ◆ Gifts in Kind: You may donate items of personal property or physical assets that may be of value to the institute, such as books, works of art, etc. Please check with the development officer or the director of the institute for what kind of items are of best value to the institute. ◆ Payroll deduction for U-M faculty and staff.

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. Gifts may also be given to any existing endowment.

Endowments may be created through outright or deferred gifts. The institute’s development officer can help you structure an endowment gift that best fits your philanthropic and financial goals. All donors are recognized by U-M; the College of Literature, Arts & Sciences; and the Institute for the Humanities.

Estate and Deferred Gifts The Institute for the Humanities continues to enrich and stimulate new generations of fellows. Through an estate bequest or deferred gift you can embrace future generations.

Planned gifts provide many unique benefits that may reduce your estate and income taxes and help you avoid capital gains. The institute’s development officer can provide you and/or your financial advisors with the assistance necessary to explore and formulate a planned gift to the institute.

To discuss your gift in more detail please contact us at humin@umich.edu, 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 Lucy Cahill, gallery assistant 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 Willard Fraumann, Chicago, IL Paul Freehling, Chicago, IL Eugene Grant, Mamaroneck, NY Louise Holland, Winnetka, IL Marc Jacobson, Norfolk, VA Mary Kidder, New Albany, OH Richard Mayer, Winnetka, IL Bennett Root, Jr., Pasadena, CA William & Marjorie Sandy, Bloomfield Hills, MI Institute for the Humanities Executive Committee Frieda Ekotto, French, comparative literature, Afroamerican and African studies Deborah Keller-Cohen; linguistics, women’s studies, education Valerie Kivelson, history Keith Mitnick, architecture Lisa Nakamura, American culture, screen arts Douglas Trevor, English Derek Collins, ex officio; associate dean, humanities; classical studies Sidonie Smith, ex officio; Institute for the Humanities

Acknowledgements Savitski Design, graphic designer Photography: Sarah Nesbitt and Peter Smith 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.

The Regents of the University of Michigan Michael J. Behm, Grand Blanc Mark J. Bernstein, Ann Arbor Laurence B. Deitch, Bloomfield Hills Shauna Ryder Diggs, Grosse Pointe Denise Ilitch, Bingham Farms Andrea Fischer Newman, Ann Arbor Andrew C. Richner, Grosse Pointe Park Katherine E. White, Ann Arbor Mark S. Schlissel, ex officio Cover: Photograph by Jennifer Karady, from the series Soldiers’ Stories from Iraq and Afghanistan. ​U-M student and ​​f​ormer Lance Corporal West Chase, U.S. Marine Corps, Combat Service Support Company 113, I Marine Expeditionary Force, veteran of Operation Iraqi Freedom and Operation Enduring Freedom, with fiancée, Emily Peden; Ann Arbor, MI, May 2014, 48 in. x 48 in. chromogenic color print.

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Inside back cover: Ramiro Gomez: Cut-Outs exhibition

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