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tute for for the The Institute theHu Hmanities Annual Report
2012
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Annual Report
2012
The Year of Digital Humanities
Institute for the Humanities > Annual Report 2012 > From the Director
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am delighted to offer you our 2011–12 Annual Report. This year was perhaps the most energizing and intense in the decade I have been director. Our Year of Digital Humanities explored and activated new circuits for the humanities around scholarly practice, book publication, partnership across vast distances, and changes in the global flow of knowledge and relations between the humanities and the arts. The University of Michigan is in the forefront of these changes with its Googlization of the library’s holdings, MPublish academic publishing enterprise, its new digitalculturebooks press, the Digital Media Commons where everything from 3D simulation to electronic music may be created, its School of Information, new digital humanities faculty, and Sweetland Writing Center (which began the year with its own large conference on computers and writing).
The classroom is becoming a digital media space. These changes expand the possible horizons of the humanities for a young generation and are here to stay. But they also bring the danger of flash over focus, tweet over narration, attention deficit over close scrutiny and the aesthetics of absorption. Trash folders pile up as quality of prose diminishes. How to revisit the core values of the humanities in a way that opens them to change in the twenty-first century, but also relies on them for the critique of current attention deficit and blog: this is a central task for the humanities today, and was central to our year (which could have been called the Brave New World) and to those who live—or imagine what it will be to live—within it.
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We used this year to mount the projects you will read about in what follows, and to deepen connections between ourselves, the Hatcher Graduate Library, the Sweetland Writing Center, the School of Information, School of Art & Design, and the Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning around matters digital. These new connections have put in place working groups which it is hoped will continue on into the foreseeable future with the institute’s new director, Professor Sidonie Smith, former chair of English and of women’s studies, former president of the Modern Languages Association, and inventor of the field of study of “life narratives.”
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In the past ten years I’ve worked with 150 fellows, mounted ten projects placing the humanities in dialogue with other regions of the university around issues of significance to our time (media, opera in the Americas, refugees and disaporas, digital humanities…). I have brought to the institute (in its excellent Thayer Street quarters) a museum-quality gallery and, with our curator, mounted forty exhibitions, many of which have served the purpose of bringing the visual into conversation with the scholarly around issues of significance (the state of the museum, the history of collections, the calling forth of ancient peoples and their lost languages and epistemologies, the future of digital projection). I have worked with the University Musical Society and the School of Music, Theatre, and Dance to connect scholarship to performance (operatic, avant-garde, theatrical, global), with the Taubman School of Architecture and Urban Planning to represent shrinking cities, cities in ruin and their vibrancy and possibility in such conditions (i.e. Detroit). The institute has even helped sponsor documentary film. And thanks to the generosity of our board and other friends of the institute,
we have started a residency program in the arts (see p. 20) and have also achieved our target goals of fully funding nine Michigan faculty and eight graduate students to be in residence for the year with extra fellowship money left to start new programs. Sidonie Smith will be at the helm by the time you read this report, on the job articulating her new vision of where the institute ought to be going at this point in time in the light of her conception of the domain, range, and best practices of the humanities, of the relationship between the humanities and other regions of the university (and universe beyond), of the terms of service for the humanities to the college, and of innovation and stewardship. This is as it should be. I wish my successor best of luck and thank you for your ongoing interest in the institute and support of it. Long may that last! As you read this I will perhaps be sitting on the martini ledge of some salt water pool in the tropics, on the job thinking under a cerulean sky. Come join me if you can find me! Good luck to you and as they say in that incisive film The Player, “See you in the next reel.”
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Institute for the Humanities > Annual Report 2012 > Year in Review
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he centerpiece of 2011–12 has been our Year of Digital Humanities. We synergized partnership between the Hatcher Graduate Library (Scholarly Publishing, digitalculturebooks), School of Information, Sweetland Writing Center, and the new digital humanities faculty cluster hires. We explored profound shifts in scholarly practice occasioned by digital methodologies. We considered how scholarly partnerships are formulating across vast distances, taking examples of projects at Michigan and other places which link knowledge production and graduate instruction across China, the Middle East, Europe, America, and, importantly, “southern” locations such as South Africa, Ghana, Cuba, and Brazil. We also considered new developments, many inaugural or even more envisioned than real, in publication wherein digital publication is (or is about to) ring changes in scholarly argument, relationships between image and text, between book and an expansive set of web links, the single author model, and so on. New publication platforms (for example, Vectors) were discussed as models. We reflected on, and brought projects which illustrated, new kinds of relationship between the arts and humanities afforded by digital projection and web design. We brought top national and international exemplars in the various thematic areas brought under the rubric of the year, thus stimulating digital work on campus. We brought representatives of foundations to campus. Finally, our critical purpose was to bring Michigan’s strongly reflective as well as innovative capacities to bear on the digital humanities and to
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do so critically in this age of attention deficit disorder and flattening of prose, thanks to digital realities. The institute mounted a number of events which served to highlight digital work on the Michigan campus, and innovative relationships between the arts and the humanities in a digital world. These events included: Weekly brown bag lectures by Michigan faculty on matters digital. See p. 22. George Lewis and Arnold Davidson in concert/lecture. George Lewis, renowned jazz/avant-garde trombonist, and digital artist, was brought from Columbia Photos opposite Charles Atlas
| Julie Klein
Geri Allen and George Lewis Tara McPherson
| Phil Pochoda
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University along with Arnold Davidson, philosopher from the University of Chicago, to present a concert of his work, and to share a panel with Davidson over a two-day period. Three Andrew W. Mellon Fellowships in Digital Humanities. We brought three fellows to the institute to work in the digital humanities. • Julie Klein, professor of humanities, English/interdisciplinary studies and faculty fellow in the Office for Teaching and Learning, Wayne State University; former fellow, U-M Institute for the Humanities, was in residence for the entire semester, taught the first seven-week interdisciplinary graduate course in the digital humanities at Michigan, and was a central player in the planning process for HASTAC V. • Tara McPherson, associate professor, gender studies and critical studies, University of Southern California; editor, Vectors: Journal of Culture and Technology in a Dynamic Vernacular. McPherson lectured in our Brown Bag Series, gave a fellows seminar with Klein, and participated in the HASTAC V conference. • Phil Pochoda, former director of the University of Michigan Press and previously associate director and editorial director of the University Press of New England, editorial director of Anchor Books and Dial Press
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at Doubleday, and vice president at Simon & Schuster while publisher and editor-in-chief of Prentice-Hall Press. Pochoda was a three-week fellow at the institute where he lectured on the history and fate of the “book” in our Brown Bag Series and also organized a panel on publication for the HASTAC V conference. He, too, was a central player in the planning process and has written a series of articles on the interaction between the intellectual impetus towards digital publication and market forces. A Kidder Residency in the Arts dedicated to digital projection. The institute has a museum-quality gallery and always includes visual exhibition as part of its major projects under the idea that the right kind of visual installation will both be of high artistic quality (hence a model) and the kind of work that solicits and engages dialogue around central themes (stands in dialogue with scholarly work). For the Year of Digital Humanities we chose to commission work from Paul Kaiser and the OpenEnded Group. Combining funds from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation with the Kidder Residency in the Arts, we brought this group to take a complete digital photographic survey of the long-abandoned Packard plant in Detroit, which then morphed into the source Above Mary Kidder and Daniel Herwitz
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Institute for the Humanities > Annual Report 2012 > Year in Review
material for their projection plant, which premiered at the HASTAC V conference in the Duderstadt Center. More than one thousand people saw this show, which then moved to the Detroit Institute of Arts where it was seen by six thousand. The penultimate event in our Year of Digital Humanities was our hosting of HASTAC V International Conference on Digital Scholarly Communication. HASTAC (Humanities, Arts, Science, Technology Advanced Collaboratory) is the central North American consortium of universities and persons dedicated to innovation in the digital humanities and the yearly or biannual (depending) conference attracts a major international group of participants. Our theme was digital scholarly communication in keeping with the purpose of this institute year and we gave it a wide berth with the following program:
allowed to attend individual sessions free-of-charge by showing Michigan ID. An unspecified/significant number attended. HASTAC scholars were blogging and tweeting throughout the conference as were many attendees. A sample of the blogs and tweets may be found at these two sites: http://chronicle.com/blogs/ profhacker/reporting-from-hastac-2011/37717 and http://storify.com/M_Publishing/praise-for-hastac-vuniversity-of-michigan Outcomes finalized or in process of formulation have included: • Publication Prize: The Institute for the Humanities announced two publication prizes in the form of subvention at the HASTAC V conference and thereafter, in order to stimulate submissions of new digital publication to the U-M digitalculturebooks series
• Alt-Ac: Alternative Careers Workshop: This took place the night before the conference. Over seventy people attended.
• Seminars: A possible interdisciplinary seminar in the digital humanities involving faculty and graduate students
• Keynote Addresses:
• Partnerships: New partnerships are being built between M Library, School of Information, and new scholars in the digital humanities.
• Cathy N. Davidson, Duke University, “Now You See It: The Future of Learning in a Digital Age” • Dan Atkins, University of Michigan, “Cyberinfrastructure” • Jim Leach, National Endowment for the Humanities, “Digital Technologies in the Civilizing Project of the Global Humanities” • Siva Vaidhyanathan, University of Virginia, “The Technocultural Imagination” • Josh Greenberg, Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, “Data, Code, and Research at Scale” • Seventy single author, panel, and lightning poster sessions • Tour of Digital Media Commons • Special screenings of work by the OpenEnded Group and opening of plant More than 240 persons enrolled to attend the conference. Nine HASTAC scholars were flown to Michigan courtesy of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. University of Michigan faculty, staff, and students were
In addition to our Year of Digital Humanities we have continued with our highly successful Author’s Forum, where novelists, poets, historians, and others are interviewed about their new books and the public is invited to participate in the conversation. This year our Author’s Forum had a number of fine authors present. Our schedule included: • Anatomy of a Disappearance, Hisham Matar in conversation with U-M’s Anton Shammas • Ghost Writers: Us Haunting Them, a conversation between Keith Taylor, Laura Kasischke, both of U-M, and other ghost writers • House on Diamond Hill: A Cherokee Plantation Story with conversation by Tiya Miles and Kristin Haas of U-M • Fires in the Mind, a conversation with Kathleen Cushman and Shari Saunders • Breaking and Entering, a conversation with U-M’s Eileen Pollack and JoEllen Vinyard
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Institute for the Humanities > Annual Report 2012 > Year in Review
In addition there were three events of special note: • Howard Markel spoke with Daniel Herwitz about his bestselling book An Anatomy of Addiction: Freud, Addiction and the Miracle Drug Cocaine in a special session taped for broadcast on C-Span’s Book TV. Dr. Markel is George E. Wantz Distinguished Professor of the History of Medicine and director of the U-M Center for the History of Medicine. He was John Rich Professor at the institute during the 2006-7 academic year. He is also a professor of psychiatry, public health, history, and pediatrics and author of nine other books. • Second, Rebecca Scott and Jean Hébrard discussed their new book Freedom Papers: An Atlantic Odyssey in an Age of Emancipation. Scott and Hebrard are writing two books, one in English (the present volume) and another in French. They are not, befitting changes in language and academic culture, the same. The English book is more narratively focused, the French more analytical/theoretical. They discussed this difference in perspective along with the amazing story of a family over five generations, in a session also celebratory of a half-decade’s collaboration between the Law in Slavery and Freedom Project they direct with Professor Martha Jones, and the Institute for the Humanities. Scott is Charles Gibson Distinguished Professor History and also professor of law, Hébrard director of the Brazil section of the Institute Sciences Sociales in Paris, and long-term fellow at the Institute for the Humanities.
donor events and joint publication, linking their work in the arts to ours in the humanities. This winter UMS mounted its Pure Michigan Renegade Series, ranging from the maverick work of late Beethoven through the American masters of the twentieth century. We offered the Renegade Series, which began with the first re-staging in twenty years of Robert Wilson and Philip Glass’s masterpiece Einstein on the Beach, our Jacobson Lecture, which was delivered by Peter Galison. Joseph Pellegrino University Professor and director of the Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments at Harvard, Galison is author of the acclaimed book Einstein’s Clocks/Poincare’s Maps and spoke to the context of Einstein’s discovery of relativistic time. He also spoke in the Taubman School of Architecture and Urban Planning. The institute also offered brown bag lectures with Mark Clague, U-M musicologist and fundi of modern American music and musical life; Stephen Rush, himself an iconic American maverick composer working between jazz, Indian music, and American modernism, between text, image and sound and all manner of else; and U-M’s own William Bolcom, a celebrated composer who has gone his own way, felt free to range over every style from serialism to popular song, turning opera into music theatre and music theatre into opera, seeking innovation in everything from his award winning piano studies to his overwhelming Songs of Innocence and Experience. We salute Bolcom’s longstanding generosity to the institute.
• Third, visiting fellow Imraan Coovadia, South African fiction writer and professor of English at the University of Cape Town, was in conversation with Herwitz about his new novel The Institute for Taxi Poetry, an oblique meditation on postcolonial South Africa’s loss of the popular front/leftist politics told in an endearing, idiomatic, funny way. No year would be complete without a sustained collaboration with the University Musical Society. We have long achieved synergy between their presenting events and the marshaling of university resources such as fellowships, seminar, large public presentations,
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Photos opposite Rebecca Scott and Jean Hébrard
| Laura Kasischke
Hisham Matar
| Imraan Coovadia
William Bolcom
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Institute for the Humanities > Annual Report 2012 > Fellows
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n 2011–12, the Institute for the Humanities offered year-long fellowships to nine Michigan faculty and seven outstanding graduate students that facilitate deep and important research across the humanities and arts. We also brought visiting scholars and extraordinary artists to the university, mounting a broad array of public events that include seminars, lectures, conferences, and exhibitions. These activities span the various colleges and departments within the university and bring the voices of the humanities and arts to public life in clear and tangible ways.
2011–12 Faculty Fellows Kathryn Babayan, associate professor, history and Near Eastern studies; Hunting Family Professor “The Emergent Friend/Self in Epistolary Culture of Early Modern Isfahan” This project investigates the diffusion of subjective forms of knowledge in early modern Isfahan, before print culture, through the circulation of friendship letters in manuscript albums. As the Safavi imperial state extended its control into the hitherto lightly regulated sites of quotidian experience, Isfahan experienced shifts in the ways friendship and desire were socially practiced. Babayan sees transformations in both epistolary practices and in the practices of friendship as parts of a ‘civilizing process’ where books on conduct were mobilized to regulate desire. It is through this critical link between civility, friendship, and letter writing that she explores the unfolding of early modern subjectivities in Isfahan.
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Marlyse Baptista, professor, linguistics and Afroamerican and African Studies; Hunting Family Professor “The Founder Principle in Creole Genesis: Uncovering the Founding Populations and their Languages in Creole Formation” This project examines the implications of the founder principle for the genesis of Creole languages. According to such principle, the grammatical properties of a given Creole language are in part those of the languages spoken by the original populations that contributed to its genesis. The ultimate objective of this project is to uncover traces of the founding European (Judeo-Spanish) and African languages (Wolof and Mandinga) that left a lasting imprint on the grammatical structure of specific Creole languages.
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Daniel Hack, associate professor, English; John Rich Professor “The African Americanization of Victorian Literature” This book recovers a rich history of African American engagement with nineteenth-century British poetry and fiction, from the antebellum period through the early decades of the twentieth century. Hack argues that this history challenges existing understandings of both canonical Victorian literature and the African American literary tradition, and he considers its lessons for the study of cultural dissemination and appropriation more generally. Joan Kee, assistant professor, history of art; Helmut F. Stern Professor “What Art Has to Say About the Law” The complex relationship between visual art and politics is vividly denoted through how art engages with its forms of regulation, namely, the law. This is particularly so in the US, where sweeping changes in society from the 1960s to the present radically affected legal approaches to ideas of property, contract, equality, privacy, identity, and enforcement. “What Art Has to Say About the Law” explores how contemporary art responds and, in some cases, plays a role in these ideas. Matt Lassiter, associate professor, history and architecture and urban planning; John Rich Professor “The Suburban Crisis: The Pursuit and Defense of the American Dream” This project explores the transformation of American suburbia from World War II through the end of the twentieth century by connecting the areas of politics, popular culture, and public policy. The utopian mythology of the “american dream” exists in a state of perpetual crisis, from battles over racial and class integration, to anxieties over delinquent youth and “family values,” to moral crusades for wars on crime and drugs, to the environmental critique of sprawl. The book traces the effects of grassroots suburban politics on patterns of metropolitan development and the evolution of national policies.
Artemis Leontis, associate professor, classical studies and modern Greek; Hunting Family Professor “Greek in the Flesh: The Alternative Archaeologies of Eva Palmer Sikelianos” This project is a book-length cultural biography on the most influential western visitor to Greece after Lord Byron. A wealthy New York heiress and cosmopolitan visionary who sought to revitalize the modern spirit by animating lost arts she traced in Greece’s ruin, Palmer spent all her money reviving the Delphic Festivals in the ancient site of Delphi during 1927 and 1930. This manuscript uses Palmer’s creative reconstructions of Greek weaving, dress, dance, music, and tragedy to uncover entanglements between archaeology, women, sexuality, modernism, and Greece during the first half of the twentieth century. David Porter, professor, English; Helmut F. Stern Professor “English Literature of the early Qing Dynasty: A Study in Historical Cosmopolitanism” This project is a comparative study of the literary cultures of China and England in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Exploring the striking convergences that appear between these seemingly distant contexts promises to cast new light on developments once thought to be unique to Europe and to complicate, from a Eurasian perspective, familiar cultural histories of early modernity.
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Institute for the Humanities > Annual Report 2012 > Fellows
Sean Silver, assistant professor, English; Helmut F. Stern Professor “Imagining Things: A Material History of the Eighteenth-Century Mind” This project suggests that the history of collecting practices in eighteenth-century Britain directly influenced developments in contemporary imagination theory–developments which in many cases remain in place today. When John Locke—philosopher and bibliophile—insists that “the mind... is a cabinet,” he refers, I argue, to his own cabinet collection of books. Rockhound Alexander Pope similarly alluded to his grotto, curator Robert Hooke to his “repository,” numismatist Joseph Addison to his drawer of medals, and so on. This project therefore offers a new history of the eighteenth-century mind as the material history of its metaphorical models. Xiaobing Tang, professor, Asian languages and comparative literature; Steelcase Professor “Scenes and Visions: Contemporary Chinese Visual Culture” This project is a study of shifts in artistic or cinematic visions that in contemporary China foreground emerging structures of visibility. Tang places current developments in their historical contexts and examines key concepts such as experimentation, the avant-garde, and representation.
2011–12 Graduate Student Fellows Efrat Bloom, comparative literature; Marc and Constance Jacobson Graduate Student Fellow “Writing and Dislocation: The Poetics of the Mother Tongue” This project examines the attempts of three twentiethcentury displaced poets to establish in writing the threads of continuity to a “place of origin” through which the viability and meaningfulness of the literary enterprise can be reassured. It shows how the desire for the “origin” inflects and undermines writing, and how the recognition of the origin’s inaccessibility evolves into a new understanding of writing, its limitations, and its contingencies.
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Jennifer Finn, Greek and Roman history; Mary I. and David D. Hunting Graduate Student Fellow “Shaping Kings: Mesopotamian Kingship in the Age of Alexander” Studies of Alexander the Great have traditionally viewed him through the lens of western sources, deaf to the voices of his millions of Near Eastern subjects. This project makes use of both Near Eastern and Greco-Roman material (literary as well as archaeological and art historical) and anthropological models for the creation of meaning between cultures. The result is an argument that Alexander’s appreciation of pre-existing kingship models in both Greece and the Near East provided a paradigm for the manipulation of his own unique multinational, mytho-historical kingship. Noah Gardiner, Near Eastern studies; Mary Fair Croushore Graduate Student Fellow “Tracing the Corpus Bunianum: Sufism, Books, and the Occult Science of Letters in Late Medieval and Early Modern Periods” The controversial thirteenth-century Sufi Ahmad alBuni wrote a number of works on the occult science of letters (‘ilm al-huruf), an esoteric Islamic discourse on the role of the letters of the Arabic alphabet and the names of God in the creation and sustenance of the cosmos. Working from the texts and paratexts of hundreds of surviving manuscripts from the thirteenth through sixteenth centuries, this project traces the transmission and reception of al-Buni’s works as they circulated between esoteric Sufi groups, professional magical practitioners, and the courts and elite households of the Mamluks and Ottomans. Gardiner draws on recent work in materiality studies to examine this premodern praxis that operated at the intersection of divine speech, written texts, and the physical world.
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Institute for the Humanities > Annual Report 2012 > Fellows
Recep Gul, music composition; James A. Winn Graduate Student Fellow “Mübadele/Ανταλλαγή: Remembering a Human Catastrophe through Music” This project is a chamber oratorio for small orchestra and singers based on the 1923 Greco-Turkish compulsory religious population exchange that forced one million Orthodox Christians to leave their homes in Turkey and emigrate to Greece, in exchange for half a million Muslims emigrating from Greece to Turkey. Utilizing life stories of the exchanged people as well as folk poetry and folk music as texts, this new musical work seeks to re-imagine past events by using the individual and collective experiences of the time in a contemporary classical music setting. Sarah Hillewaert, anthropology and Afroamerican and African studies; Sylvia “Duffy” Engle Graduate Student Fellow “Between the Expected, the Respected, and the Desired: Renegotiating Identities in an East African Muslim Town.” Hillewaert’s dissertation focuses on the struggles of Muslim youth in Lamu, Kenya to find a balance between respect for religious ethics, expectations of cultural mores, and the economic pressure or desire to participate in global culture. Analyzing shifts in language use and daily behavior, it demonstrates how linguistic and semiotic practices can mediate the formation of social groups and relations in contexts of rapid change. Amr Kamal, comparative literature; Mary Fair Croushore Graduate Student Fellow “Out of Place: Tales Inside and Outside Department Stores” This project examines the role of nineteenth-century department stores as a retail network that shaped French and Egyptian national identity, and Mediterranean culture at large. In particular, it highlights how the department store became a strategic literary symbol for the rewriting of French and Egyptian history and for negotiating the writers’ position within their society, amid the competition between the British, French, and Ottoman empires.
Melanie Sympson, history of art; Mary I. and David D. Hunting Graduate Student Fellow “Strategies of Representation and Artistic Experimentation in Manuscripts of the Roman de la rose” This project revisits the contexts and purposes of medieval visual innovation through an examination of manuscripts of the Roman de la rose, the most popular romance of the later middle ages. Striking differences in both the quantity and the quality of illustration suggest that artists thoughtfully met the challenge of giving pictorial form to the dream narrative, in anticipation of satisfying a variety of audiences. By situating an analysis of these manuscripts in relation to broader social, economic, and artistic developments, this project elucidates some of the reasons behind profound changes in representational strategies that characterized the visual arts in this period.
Visiting Fellows Uwem Akpan, Norman Freehling Visiting Professor, was born in Ikot Akpan Eda in southern Nigeria. After studying philosophy and English at Creighton and Gonzaga universities, he studied theology for three years at the Catholic University of Eastern Africa. He was ordained as a Jesuit priest in 2003 and received his MFA in creative writing from the University of Michigan in 2006. “My Parents’ Bedroom,” a story from his short story collection, Say You’re One of Them, was one of five short stories by African writers chosen as finalists for the Caine Prize for African Writing 2007. Say You’re One of Them, which Akpan completed during his time as a Career-in-theMaking Fellow at the U-M Institute for the Humanities, won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Book (Africa Region) 2009 and PEN/Beyond Margins Award 2009. While in residence again this year he worked on his second book, a novel, and taught an undergraduate advanced fiction writing course.
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Institute for the Humanities > Annual Report 2012 > Fellows
Geri Allen performed with George Lewis and Lewis’s interactive music system in a concert at Rackham Auditorium as part of the institute’s Year of Digital Humanities. Allen is associate professor of music at U-M and an internationally known composer and pianist. Since 1982, she has recorded, performed, or collaborated with a diverse array of artists. In addition to many notable collaborations, Allen has released a number of recordings under her own name, including the ambitious and critically acclaimed Timeless Portraits and Dreams. Her work as a composer has been honored by SESAC and has won her commissions from Jazz at Lincoln Center, Music Theatre Group, American Music Theatre Festival, Stanford University, and, most recently, from the Walt Whitman Arts Center and Meet the Composer who commissioned For the Healing of the Nations, a Sacred Jazz Work, composed in tribute to the victims and survivors of the 9/11 tragedy. She continues to concertize all over the world. Charles Atlas, a visiting artist whose Joints Array video installation ran in the gallery, is an innovator in combining dance and performance with film and video. His documentaries, TV productions, multi-channel video installations, and live electronic performances all reflect a unique approach to creating and capturing movement with the camera. Over his long career, Atlas has collaborated with leading figures in dance as well as music and art, including Merce Cunningham, Marina Abramovic´, Antony and the Johnsons, Leigh Bowery, and, most recently, Mika Tajima and New Humans. His work has been exhibited at museums and galleries across the United States and Europe. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, three “Bessie” awards, and a Foundation for Contemporary Art’s Biennial John Cage Award. Atlas’s visit was presented in relationship to the fiftieth anniversary of the Ann Arbor Film Festival. His film The Legend of Leigh Bowery was shown in conjunction with the U-M Museum of Art. See also In the Gallery, p. 20.
Imraan Coovadia, University of Capetown, South Africa, and 2012 visiting fellow at the institute, is a writer and literary historian. His publications include The Institute for Taxi Poetry, Green-Eyed Thieves, Authority and Authorship in V.S. Naipaul, and High Low In-between, which won the University of Johannesburg prize and the Sunday Times Fiction Award. He writes regularly for newspapers, including the Mail and Guardian and the Sunday Independent. Coovadia gave a brown bag lecture, “Reading Lolita,” and participated in the Author’s Forum with conversation partner Daniel Herwitz as part of the institute’s and the university’s ongoing Africa initiative. See also pg. 7. Arnold I. Davidson is the Robert O. Anderson Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Philosophy, the Department of Comparative Literature, the Committee on the Conceptual and Historical Studies of Science, and the Divinity School at the University of Chicago. Executive editor of Critical Inquiry, he is also a director of the France-Chicago Center. His major fields of research and teaching are the history of contemporary European philosophy, the history of moral and political philosophy, the history of the human sciences, and the history and philosophy of religion. Davidson gave a brown bag lecture with George Lewis, “Improvisation as a Way of Life,” and was part of the panel discussion following the George Lewis/ Geri Allen concert, all part of the institute’s Year of Digital Humanities. Mark Dion, the 2011–12 Paula and Edwin Sidman Fellow in the Arts, created the site-specific installation Waiting for the Extraordinary in the institute gallery. Dion’s work examines the ways in which dominant ideologies and public institutions shape our understanding of history, knowledge, and the natural world. Dion holds a BFA and an honorary doctorate from the University of Hartford School of Art. He has received numerous Photo opposite Mark Dion
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Institute for the Humanities > Annual Report 2012 > Fellows
awards, including the 2008 Lucelia Award, Smithsonian Museum of American Art. He is represented by Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York, NY. Dion gave a brown bag lecture, “The Making of Waiting for the Extraordinary,” a Penny W. Stamps lecture in collaboration with the U-M School of Art & Design, and he met with many undergraduate classes. His work is part of our ongoing interest in art which reflects on the institutions of the museum and the university as an ensemble, and does so through installation. See also In the Gallery, p. 20. Peter Galison gave the 2012 Marc & Constance Jacobson Lecture, “Einstein, Clocks, and the Materiality of Time.” Galison is a leading historian of science whose research explores the interaction of experimentation, instrumentation, and theory in physics. An author, film producer, and MacArthur Award-winner, he is the Joseph Pellegrino University Professor in the Department of the History of Science at Harvard University. Galison was brought in relation to the University Musical Society’s Renegade Series, specifically its remounting of Einstein on the Beach. Jean M. Hébrard has worked for many years on the cultural history of south-west Europe focusing on the history of writing. He participated in the large-scale enquiries on the history of reading and writing carried out in France in the 1980s and the 1990s and published numerous articles and books in this field. Recently he has extended his research area to the colonial world of Iberian and French Empires (particularly Brazil and SaintDomingue). Professeur associé at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales , Paris, and visiting professor at the University of Michigan, he is a member of the Centre de Recherche sur le Brésil Contemporain and of the Centre International de Recherche sur les Esclavages. Hébrard, along with co-author Rebecca Scott, participated in the Author’s Forum around their recent book Freedom Papers: An Atlantic Odyssey in the Age of Emancipation. See also p. 7. Photos opposite Uwem Akpan
| Kathryn Babayan
Reception for Mark Dion’s Waiting for the Extraordinary
Marial Iglesias Utset, visiting fellow, worked as a professor of philosophy and history at the University of Havana for the past 25 years. Her book Las Metáforas del Cambio en la Vida Cotidiana, a history of everyday life in Cuba during the US military occupation, has received several prizes, including the Clarence H. Haring Prize awarded by the American Historical Association. The book has been recently translated into English and published by the University of North Carolina Press under the title A Cultural History of Cuba during the US Occupation, 1898-1902. For her current research project, “A Creole Family and Its Slaves in Saint-Domingue and Cuba: A Narrative of a Trans-Atlantic Experience,” a narration of the Atlantic travels of a single family and its slaves that links the lives of Europeans born on the French Atlantic coast, people from west-central Africa, and Caribbean Creoles, she has been awarded a long-term fellowship from the John Carter Brown Library. Utset gave the brown bag lecture “Law in Slavery and Freedom.” She was brought as part of the institute’s ongoing relationship with the historical and legal project the Law in Slavery and Freedom. Paul Kaiser was the 2011 Kidder Resident in the Arts. With his OpenEnded Group, Shelley Eshkar and Marc Downie, he has pioneered approaches to digital art combining non-photorealistic 3D rendering, body movement through motion-capture and other means, and artworks directed or assisted by artificial intelligence. The OpenEnded Group’s 3D digital projection Loops was exhibited in the Institute for the Humanities gallery and their institute-commissioned installation plant premiered in the Duderstadt Center Gallery on North Campus, both as part of the institute’s Year of Digital Humanities. See also In the Gallery, p. 20 Julie Thompson Klein, Mellon Visiting Fellow in the Digital Humanities, is professor of humanities in the English department at Wayne State University. She is co-editor of the University of Michigan Press series digitalhumanities@digitalculturebooks, and her book Mapping Digital Humanities is forthcoming from U-M Press. Klein also serves on the execu-
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Institute for the Humanities > Annual Report 2012 > Fellows
tive board of the Humanities Arts, Science, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory (HASTAC). She is an internationally known expert on interdisciplinary history, theory, and practice. Klein gave a brown bag lecture, “Mapping Digital Humanities Today,” and was a key organizer in the 2011 HASTAC V conference, both part of the institute’s Year of Digital Humanities. George Lewis is the Edwin H. Case Professor of American Music at Columbia University. The recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship in 2002, an Alpert Award in the Arts in 1999, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Lewis studied composition with Muhal Richard Abrams at the AACM School of Music, and trombone with Dean Hey. Lewis’s work as composer, improvisor, performer, and interpreter explores electronic and computer music, computer-based multimedia installations, text-sound works, and notated and improvisative forms, and is documented on more than 140 recordings. Lewis performed his Interactive Trio with Geri Allen in a concert at Rackham Auditorium, followed by a panel discussion, and also gave a brown bag lecture, “Improvisation as a Way of Life,” with Arnold Davidson, all part of the institute’s Year of Digital Humanities. Robert Mankoff, the cartoon editor of The New Yorker, gave the 2012 Jill S. Harris Memorial Lecture, “If You Can’t Say Something Nice Then Draw It: The Role of Stereotyping in New Yorker Cartoons.” More than 800 of his cartoons have been published in The New Yorker in the past thirty years, including the best-selling New Yorker cartoon of all time. He is the author of the book The Naked Cartoonist: A New Way to Enhance Your Creativity, published in 2002, about the creative process behind developing magazinestyle cartoons. He has also edited dozens of cartoon books and published four of his own. Notably, he edited The Complete Cartoons of The New Yorker (Black Dog & Leventhal), the best-selling coffee-table book for the 2004 holiday season, featuring all 68,647 cartoons ever published in The New Yorker since its début, in 1925. Mankoff graduated from Syracuse University College of Arts and Sciences in 1966.
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Tara McPherson, visiting fellow, is associate professor of gender and critical studies at the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts and co-director of the USC Center for Transformative Scholarship. She also serves as the faculty chair for USC’s Provost Initiative in the Arts and Humanities. Her books and edited collections include Reconstructing Dixie: Race, Gender and Nostalgia in the Imagined South and Interactive Frictions (forthcoming), coedited with Marsha Kinder. Her new media research focuses on issues of convergence, gender, and race, as well as the development of new tools and paradigms for digital publishing, learning, and authorship. As part of the institute’s Year of Digital Humanities, McPherson gave the brown bag lecture “Digital Meaning and Learning” and participated in the HASTAC V conference. Phil Pochoda, visiting fellow, recently retired as director of the University of Michigan Press. Previously, he was associate director and editorial director of the University Press of New England; editorial director of Anchor Books and Dial Press at Doubleday; and vice president at Simon & Schuster while publisher and editor-in-chief of PrenticeHall Press. He has a PhD from Princeton in history and sociology. Pochoda gave the brown bag lecture “Digital Scholarly Publishing: A Systems View” and participated in the HASTAC V conference as part of the institute’s Year of Digital Humanities.
Photos opposite Spring Seminar attendees tour the U-M Digital Media Commons Cathy Davidson
| Robert Mankoff
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Institute for the Humanities > Annual Report 2012 > In the Gallery
T
he gallery at the Institute for the Humanities is a place for innovative new work, exciting collaboration, and engaging public discourse in the humanities at the University of Michigan. As the gallery exhibitions continue to be incorporated into the curriculum of a range of departments including art and design, music, American culture, women’s studies, museum studies, and anthropology, the arts program at the Institute for the Humanities puts into action “across the diag” multi-disciplinary conversation and direct student outreach. Over a three-year period, the gallery has cultivated an internationally recognized reputation as a first-rate installation space and artist residency program among artists, galleries, and museums—a distinction unlike that of any other humanities institute in the country. The gallery now 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.
The fall schedule debuted with internationally acclaimed artist Mark Dion, who, as a Paula and Edwin Sidman Fellow in the Arts, produced the installation Waiting for the Extraordinary. Dion chose as his theme to build his exhibit off of the founding philosophical documents of the University of Michigan, thus using exhibit as occassion for a reflection on the university and knowledge more generally. To create the exhibition, the institute and Dion teamed up with departments and institutions throughout the university, achieving new attendance records and an all-time high in undergraduate participation. Over 300 people attended the opening, and nearly a dozen classes visited to consider the work and to learn from the artist first-hand. The installation will be remounted this Photos opposite Joints 4tet for Ensemble plant by the OpenEnded Group
| Newspaper Diary exhibit
summer in its entirety at SITE Santa Fe contemporary arts space in New Mexico, and also at the Minneapolis Museum of Art in 2013. In December 2011, digital artist Paul Kaiser became our very first Kidder Resident in the Arts. This new residency represents a three-year funding commitment to the gallery by Robert and Mary Kidder. Each year, one artist will be in residency at the institute for two to five weeks, producing and exhibiting new work inspired by their time in Michigan and created almost entirely on site. Kaiser and his collaborative team the OpenEnded Group produced plant, a new 3D video installation about the abandoned Packard plant in Detroit. plant premiered at the U-M Duderstadt Center on North Campus, while Loops, the OpenEnded Group’s 3D composition created with the legendary Merce Cun-
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Institute for the Humanities > Annual Report 2012 > In the Gallery
ningham, was installed in the institute gallery. These two exhibitions, as well as Kaiser’s brilliant 3D lecture at the Michigan Theater and video screening at the Duderstadt Center, were central to the institute-sponsored HASTAC V conference on digital scholarly communication, illustrative of the institute’s place on the cutting edge of the humanities.
2011–12 Events
The Kaiser projects represented cross-dialogue and collaboration with the Duderstadt Center as well as the U-M library system, and were viewed by over 1000 people during their run on campus. In January of 2012, plant was reinstalled at the Detroit Institute of Arts and viewed by over 6000 visitors, including numerous classes from the Detroit public schools. plant will be remounted again in New York City at Aperture Gallery in the fall of 2012.
Mark Dion Lecture, in collaboration with the School of Art & Design’s Penny W. Stamps Distinguished Speaker Series
Charles Atlas’s Joints 4tet for Ensemble, a ten-monitor video installation incorporating Super 8 footage of Merce Cunningham as well as recordings of John Cage, opened in the gallery in January 2012. Exhibited at the New Museum in New York City last spring, the ground-breaking installation was recently purchased by the Tate Modern. It was a boon to have Atlas here to talk to students first-hand about the current art scenes in New York and London, as well as his early days as Merce Cunningham’s assistant. We mounted this show as our contribution to the fiftieth anniversary of the Ann Arbor Film Festival, thus putting installation in dialogue with cinema. To conclude the year, the institute presented a new portfolio of trompe l’oeil photographs by esteemed U-M School of Art and Design professor emerita and past institute fellow Joanne Leonard. Newspaper Diary considered books, newspapers, and our innate desire to make connections between our personal lives and the world going past, even as we are aware of the impermanence of both. The opening brought in fans and supporters of Leonard’s work from throughout the university and Ann Arbor community, a reminder of the institute’s ongoing mission of service, providing support far-reaching and also close to home. The year in the gallery was full of possibilities, successes, and nothing short of extraordinary. It further represents a testament to the vision of the institute, and is sure proof that the next step revealed always proves the most remarkable. Amanda Krugliak, curator
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Conferences
2011 HASTAC V International Conference on Digital Scholarly Communication Lectures, Concerts, & Films
George Lewis: Interactive Trio, with Geri Allen in a digital acoustic concert Paul Kaiser Lecture, in collaboration with the School of Art & Design’s Penny W. Stamps Distinguished Speaker Series Marc and Constance Jacobson Lecture: Peter Galison, Harvard University, “Einstein, Clocks, and the Materiality of Time” UMS’s Pure Michigan Renegade on Film, The Legend of Leigh Bowery, a 2002 film by Charles Atlas (with director Q&A) Jill S. Harris Memorial Lecture: Robert Mankoff, cartoon editor at The New Yorker, “If You Can’t Say Something Nice Then Draw It: The Role of Stereotyping in New Yorker Cartoons” In the Gallery
Waiting for the Extraordinary, Mark Dion, Paula & Edwin Sidman Fellow in the Arts Loops and plant; Paul Kaiser, Kidder Resident in the Arts, with the OpenEnded Group Joints Array, Charles Atlas Newspaper Diary, Joanne Leonard
Photos opposite Paul Courant
| Megan Ankerson | Joanne Leonard
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Institute for the Humanities > Annual Report 2012 > Events Author’s Forum
An Anatomy of Addiction: Sigmund Freud, William Halsted, and the Miracle Drug Cocaine: A Conversation with Howard Markel and Daniel Herwitz Anatomy of a Disappearance: A Conversation with Hisham Matar and Anton Shammas Ghost Writers: Us Haunting Them: A Conversation with Keith Taylor, Laura Kasischke, and Other Ghost Writers The House on Diamond Hill: A Cherokee Plantation Story: A Conversation with Tiya Miles and Kristin Hass Freedom Papers: An Atlantic Odyssey in the Age of Emancipation: A Conversation with Rebecca Scott and Jean Hébrard Fires in the Mind: A Conversation with Kathleen Cushman and Shari Saunders. Breaking and Entering: A Conversation with Eileen Pollack and JoEllen Vinyard The Institute for Taxi Poetry: A Conversation with Imraan Coovadia and Daniel Herwitz Spring Seminar
“Log On to the Humanities: How New Technologies Expand the Humanities and How They Don’t”; Finn Brunton, Phil Pochoda, Paul Kaiser
Brown Bag Lectures
“Immanent Natures”; Amy Kulper, architecture “Technological Enchantment and Literacy in the Digital Age”; Ben Gunsberg, English “The Making of Waiting for the Extraordinary”; Mark Dion, artist, 2011 Paula and Edwin Sidman Fellow in the Arts “Velocity/Growth: Essays and Experiments in the Digital Humanities”; Finn Brunton, information “Law in Slavery and Freedom”; Marial Iglesias, University of Havana “Improvisation as a Way of Life”; Arnold Davidson, University of Chicago, and George Lewis, Columbia University “Digital Scholarly Publishing: A Systems View”; Phil Pochoda, library “The Alchemy of Estrangement”; Alaina Lemon, anthropology “The Nuclear-Proof Internet and Other Myths”; Tung-Hui Hu, English “Mapping Digital Humanities Today”; Julie Klein, Wayne State University “Digital Media and Learning”; Tara McPherson, University of Southern California “Remembering Alberto Ginastera,” Ken Kiesler, music, with pianist Barbara Nissman
“Changes in Communication that Derive from New Information Technologies”; Paul Courant, information, public policy, economics “History of Post-Modern Opera”; Stephen Rush, music “Say You’re One of Them”; Uwem Akpan, Norman Freehling Visiting Professor “Rainy Sea Architecture”; Keith Mitnick, architecture “Video in Performance and Video as Performance”; Charles Atlas, video artist “Ancient Roman Ecphrasis: Overturning Theoretical Assumptions”; Basil Dufallo, classical studies and comparative literature “Dot-com Design: Reflections on Coolness, Usability, and the Versioning of Web History”; Megan Ankerson, communications “Monologue Marking Time”; Amanda Krugliak, performance artist and curator, Institute for the Humanities “American Musical Mavericks and the Quotidian Creativity of Community”; Mark Clague, music, “Ultimate Pictures: Word and Image in the Works of Peter Weiss”; Alan Itkin, comparative literature “Maverick American Music”; William Bolcom, music, “Reading Lolita”; Imraan Coovadia, University of Capetown
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Institute for the Humanities > Annual Report 2012 > Support
D
evelopment is a longstanding adventure and this year proved the rule. The Lillian Ives bequest, articulated early in the institute’s history, came due in the amount of $1.8 million, allowing our fellowships new purchase. We are deeply grateful to the late Lillian Ives for this money.
Our Spring Seminar took up the thread of the digital humanities with Kidder Resident in the Arts Paul Kaiser returning to present his digital projections (made with the OpenEnded Group), Phil Pochoda (Andrew W. Mellon Fellow in fall 2011) also returning to speak to the relationship between intellectual exigency and business models that drive the turn toward digital publication, and recent digital humanities hire in the School of Information Finn Brunton speaking to the brave new world of algorithmic process which in certain respects supplants human agency even in the field of cultural production. The encounter with this brave new world (and terms for its critique) proved exciting and unnerving for our board and friends. This annual report could not be written without memorializing one of the institute’s warmest, most generous friends in its history: John Rich, whose passing at the age of 86 in January 2012 has been mourned. A Michigan graduate with an MA in eighteenth-century literature, Rich made his way to the early days of television and became a Hollywood legend, directing Photos opposite Paul Kaiser
| Spring Seminar banquet
Loops by the OpenEnded Group John Rich | Jim Foster
numerous episodes of The Colgate Comedy Hour, Our Miss Brooks, Gunsmoke, The Dick Van Dyke Show, Gilligan’s Island, and All in the Family (including the “Sammy’s Visit” episode), and was instrumental in merging the Screen Directors Guild with the Radio and Television Directors Guild to create the current Directors Guild of America. From his work with Dick Van Dyke in live television to his brilliant and biting social satire (with Sammy Davis Jr.), he has been pathbreaking. His generosity, sharp critical eye, perfectionism and professionalism, his zany love of jokes and absolute integrity in their recitation, his adoration of the path into the scholarly humanities he was offered (as a top MA student) but chose not to take, left us, at the institute, his happy beneficiary. The institute’s endowed John Rich Professorship has hosted a generation of top faculty scholars, among them the classicist and Associate Dean for the Humanities Derek Collins, award-winning author Howard Markel, and Linda Gregerson whose poetry has been finalized for the National Book Award. The Rich legacy is here to stay, even if his voluble, critical intelligence and powerful belly laugh will no longer grace our Spring Seminars. Thank you John Rich and also thank you Pat Rich.
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Institute for the Humanities > Annual Report 2012 > Support
2011–12 Minigrants Through 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 2011–12. Women Visualizing Africa film series, comparative literature Ann Arbor Film Festival
Erica Mott residency, art & design
“Theory in Ancient Greek Archaeology” conference, classical studies
Conversation with Callaloo publisher Dr. Charles Rowell, English
“Realism in Italian Cinema from the Fascist Regime to after WWII,” Romance languages & literatures “Milosz Remembered,” Slavic languages & literatures “Kleist Ancient/Modern,” German languages & literatures Horace W. Davenport Lecture in the Medical Humanities, history of medicine Michigan Lecture in Judaism and Christianity in the Roman World, Daniel Boyarin lecture, Near Eastern studies “Barbarians, Monsters, Hybrids and Mutants: Asian Inventions of Human ‘Others’” symposium, history of art “Cultural Identity of Netherlandish Painting,” German languages & literatures “Early Modern Medieval: Reconstructing Japanese Pasts,” history “Editing History,” English “Tennessee Williams @ 100” conference; music, theater & dance
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Damir Arsenijevic visit, Slavic languages & literatures
“Spacespirit,” James Chaffers exhibit, Afroamerican & African studies “Contemporary Research in Arab American Studies” conference honoring Michael Suleiman, Arab American studies and American culture Michigan Medieval and Early Modern Seminar, Romance languages & literatures “Politica Comun: Rethinking the Common,” Romance languages & literatures Kim Marra residency, art & design “Hooked: Addiction, Society, Culture,” history “Meanings and Makings of Queer Dance,” dance Michigan Alliance for Screen Studies meeting, screen arts & cultures “Room for Another View: China’s Art in Disciplinary Perspective” conference, history of art Charles Fraker conference, Romance languages & literatures
Language: The Human Quintessence, LSA theme semester; linguistics “Transforming Landscapes in Andean Societies” conference, anthropology “El escritor ante su obra: Un conflicto permanente,” Donato Ndongo, Romance languages & literatures “Methods & Processes,” Ben Patterson performance & exhibition, Afroamerican & African studies and history of art Comparative Literature Intra Student and Faculty Forum, comparative literature Evening with Alex Rivera, Rackham Interdisciplinary Workshop “Education for Peace and Global Awareness,” Maya Soetoro-Ng, American culture SOYUZ symposium, anthropology Project to Catalogue and Preserve Endangered Archives in Uganda and South Sudan, history “Deadly Medicine” exhibit and panel discussion, Taubman Health Science Library Early Modern Colloquium Annual Conference: “Nations and Empires of the Early Modern Period,” English
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Institute for the Humanities > Annual Report 2012 > Support
Grilk Lecture: Barbara Hahn, “The History of Dreams Remains to Be Written,” German Social Relations & Cross-Cultural Communications in the Medieval and Early Modern World, symposium in honor of Diane Owen Hughes, history “The Geologic Turn: Architectures New Alliance,” architecture & urban planning 40th Annual Dance for Mother Earth Powwow, Mother Earth Powwow James Baldwin symposium and film screening, American culture Italian Film Festival 2012, Romance languages & literatures Visit and lecture by Turko-Cypriot writer Mehmet Yashin, Romance languages & literatures Goldring Symposium on Media and American Popular Culture, screen arts & cultures “Media and Experience” workshop, screen arts & cultures Barry Bergdoll visit, art & design German Film Institute 2012, German “The Port Huron Statement and the Making of the New Left,” history Public Panel on oral tradition and the Hebrew Bible, classical studies Ann Arbor Book Festival Moroccan novelist Albert Swizza, American culture “The Aesthetic & the Ethical” colloquium, philosophy Zora Neale Hurston Lecture of the Humanities featuring Farah Griffin, Afroamerican & African studies
Support the Institute with Your Financial Gifts The Institute for the Humanities is a center for innovative, collaborative study in the humanities and arts. Each year we provide fellowships for Michigan faculty, graduate students, and visiting scholars who work on interdisciplinary projects. We also offer a wide array of public and scholarly events, including weekly brown bag talks, public lectures, conferences, art exhibits, and performances. Our mission is to serve as a national and international centerpiece for scholarly research in the humanities and creative work in the arts at the University of Michigan. We exist 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. All of this energy, insight, and contribution is made possible by the support of dedicated friends who value the humanities and arts and who step forward each year to provide generous financial support. 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 cuttingedge 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.
“Taste-Making: Programming, Criticism and the Public” panel discussion, screen arts & cultures Photos opposite Mark Clague
Ways to Help Us Achieve our Aims We would be glad to talk with you about any of the items below whether you are interested in funding partially or fully. Name our Gallery
Allow us to include exhibitions in everything we do by giving us the funds to secure top quality work and mount more shows. Our museumquality gallery already gains notice in the Chronicle of Higher Education and many other publications. Endow our Emerging Scholars Prize
Lend your stamp of approval to the best new scholarship the humanities has to offer, thus dignifying the new generation of humanists. Our enterprise stands or falls on young people. Support a Careers-in-the-Making Fellowship
Support a recent recipient of a master’s degree in a creative field for one term, providing time to complete work that will serve as a bridge along their path to a fulfilling professional career.
| Barbara Nissman | Tung-Hui Hu
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Institute for the Humanities > Annual Report 2012 > Support Enhance our Web Technology
Give us the means to communicate with you and with our scholarly colleagues worldwide. In five years time we shall, with your help, live as much on the web as on “dry land.” Underwrite a Public Outreach Event
Allow us to bring the best of the humanities to the public. Check out our track record of seminars, brown bag lectures, Author’s Forum events, as well as our collaborations with the University Musical Society, the Royal Shakespeare Company, and the Chicago Humanities Festival. Underwrite an Exhibition
Stamp an exhibition with your name on it and watch how we build unique intellectual activity around it. Build the Director’s Discretionary Fund
Give the director the flexibility he or she needs to make the institute more excellent. Contribute to our General Fund
Allow our outstanding staff to grow to keep up with our vision.
How to Give
Endowments
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:
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.
· 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 David Cave (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 · Payroll deduction for U-M faculty and staff.
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 David Cave, PhD, LSA Development, 734615-6456 or dcave@umich.edu.
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Affiliates and Staff Staff Daniel Herwitz, director Terry Jansen, administrative manager Doretha Coval, fellows coordinator Amanda Krugliak, curator Stephanie Harrell, communications specialist Institute for the Humanities Board of Visitors David Arch, Oak Brook, IL Janet Cassebaum, Ann Arbor, MI Jeremy Efroymson, Indianapolis, IN S. Cody Engle, Chicago, IL James Foster, chair, Pittsburgh, PA Willard Fraumann, Chicago, IL Paul Freehling, Chicago, IL Rosemary Geist, Washington, MI 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
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,
Institute for the Humanities Executive Committee David Chung; art and design, Korean studies Donald Lopez; Asian languages and cultures Susan “Scottie� Parish; English language and literature Rebecca Scott; history, law Andrew Shryock; anthropology Scott Spector; history, Judaic studies, Germanic languages and literatures Derek Collins, ex officio; associate dean, humanities; classical studies Daniel Herwitz, ex officio; Institute for the Humanities, comparative literature, history of art, philosophy, art and design
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 Julia Donovan Darlow, Ann Arbor Laurence B. Deitch, Bingham Farms
Acknowledgements Peter Smith, photography, unless otherwise noted Savitski Design, graphic designer
Denise Ilitch, Bingham Farms Olivia P. Maynard, Goodrich Andrea Fischer Newman, Ann Arbor Andrew C. Richner, Grosse Pointe Park S. Martin Taylor, Grosse Pointe Farms Katherine E. White, Ann Arbor Mary Sue Coleman, ex officio
Institute for the Humanities 1111 Thayer Building 202 S. Thayer Street Ann Arbor, MI 48104-1608 ph: 734.936.3518 fx: 734.763.5507 e: humin@umich.edu
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