IPRH announces fellowship awards for 2008-09

The Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities has awarded its annual Faculty and Graduate Student Fellowships to six faculty members and eight graduate students from the UI campus for the academic year 2008-09. The theme for the year is “disciplinarity,” and the new fellows will spend the year engaged in research on projects that will consider the term in all its varied meanings. The fellows will participate in the year-long Fellows’ Seminar, and will present their research at the IPRH annual conference in late spring 2009.

The IPRH Faculty Fellows and  their research projects:

• Jodi Byrd, American Indian Studies and English,“Colonial Cacophonies, Postcolonial Worlds: American Indian Studies and the Frontiers of Disciplinarity”

• Melissa Littlefield, kinesiology and community health and English,“Disciplining Forensics: A Textbook Rhetoric of Literary Boundaries”

• Feisal G. Mohamed, English,“Historicism, Formalism and How Practitioners of English Read Milton”

• Sarah Projansky, gender and women’s studies and cinema studies,“Feminist Girls’ Studies as Emerging Discipline”

• Gabriel Solis, musicology,“Performing Genre and the Self: Tom Waits, Masculinity, Americana, and Rock at the End of ‘The American Century’ ”

• Sharra Vostral, gender and women’s studies and history,“Producing an Epidemic: Rely Tampons, Toxic Shock Syndrome, and Conflicting Disciplinary Expertise”

The Graduate Student Fellows and their projects:

• Patrick W. Berry, English and writing studies, “Making Teachers, Making Literacy: Negotiating the Rhetoric of Crisis and Myth”

• Anne Brubaker, English,”Literature in the Age of Mathematics: Science, Gender and the Multiplicity of Modernity”

• Peter Craft, English,”Warfare, Trade and ‘Indians’ in English Literature, 1652-1719,” Nicholson-IPRH Fellow

• Kevin Healey, Institute of Communications Research,”The Spirit of Networks: New Media and the Changing Role of Religion in American Public Life”

• Luis Eduardo Herrera, ethnomusicology,”Politics of Creation/Creation of Politics: Music Making, Political Repression, and Cold War Strategies in Dictatorial Argentina”

• Jeff Kyong-McClain, history,”Excavating the Nation: The Discipline of Archaeology and Control of the Past in Republican Southwest China,” Nicholson-IPRH Fellow

• Rebecca Nickerson, East Asian languages and cultures,”Shaping the Body Domestic: Gender, Race and Physical Culture in Imperial Japan”

• Sarah L. Rasmusson, Institute of Communications Research,”Whiteness, Girls’ Studies and White Women as Girls From A-List Girls to Ziegfeld Girls”

In past years, the IPRH has typically awarded six graduate student fellowships, but since the 2007-2008 academic year has increased the number of fellowships to eight, with the support of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and the Nicholson Endowment Fund. Two of the graduate fellowship recipients have been designated as Nicholson-IPRH Fellows for 2008-2009. The Nicholson Endowment is a gift of Grace W. Nicholson (1906-1998), who pursued undergraduate studies in LAS, and emeritus professor John A. Nicholson (1891-1986), a faculty member in the philosophy department for 33 years. The Nicholson Endowment, which was established in 1999, provides support for the academic programs in LAS and excellence in the study of the humanities on campus.

“The annual theme of disciplinarity will allow the fellows to consider the ways in which, during the past two decades, traditional boundaries in the humanities and arts have been challenged and often dissolve,” said Christine Catanzarite, interim director. “Important new formations – from fields like cultural studies to genres like multi-media installation – were the result.

“And yet, there is a widespread sense that disciplinarity still matters. Institutionally, it continues to govern graduate education as well as hiring and promotion,” Catanzarite said. “Intellectually, too, it very much holds sway. Not only are there few humanists and artists willing to discard the methods and approaches developed in their fields, but many of them anchor their scholarly and artistic practice in a critical engagement with disciplinary pasts. The result is an active moment for the rethinking of disciplinarity.”

Faculty Fellows are released from one semester of teaching, with the approval of their departments and colleges. They also are asked to teach one course, during the award year or the year immediately following, on a subject related to their fellowship. Graduate student fellows receive a stipend and a tuition and fee waiver from the IPRH. All IPRH fellows are expected to remain in residence on the UI campus during the award year, and to participate in the program’s annual conference and related activities, including a yearlong interdisciplinary Fellows’ Seminar. 

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