IHR Fellows Program
The 2008-09 theme is “Humanities and Political Conflict.”
Applicants for the IHR Fellowships should demonstrate how humanities content and methodology contribute to the analysis and/or solution of compelling political conflicts in the contemporary world. Such conflicts can include everything from religious wars across the globe, to conflicts in American political parties, to conflicting political ideologies, to the effects of our nation’s immersion in the war on terrorism, to international conflicts over global warming. Humanities contributions could include historical contexts and theoretical frameworks, philosophical or ethical analyses, linguistic and rhetorical studies, literary analyses, visual cultural analyses, and/or comparative approaches. Proposed projects should be conceptual or theoretical enough to create interest for people outside of specific specialties within the humanities.
2008-2009 ASU FELLOWS
The IHR ASU Fellows program provides funding for two research teams to engage in a year of research related to the annual theme, share their research with the academic community (via lectures, a conference or symposium), and produce a strong application for a large external grant.
Dawning of Liberty
Project Directors:
Paul Espinosa, Transborder Chicana/o and Latina/o Studies
Daniel Cutrara, Film and Media Studies
Collaborator: Daniel Ramirez, Religious Studies
The Dawning of Liberty is a documentary film project on the life and times of Padre Antonio José Martínez, a 19th century New Mexican. Martínez (1793-1867) was one of the leading historical and intellectual figures in the American Southwest during the 19th century, living through a period of rapid transformation of the region. Like tens of thousands of other 19th century individuals who lived in what is now the American Southwest, Martínez found himself caught between two worlds – the Mexican-Spanish culture which he had defended for most of his life and the Anglo American culture which was taking over his native land through conquest. His life was a microcosm of the clashing political interests and competing value systems that have shaped the history of the region.
Religion, Politics and Violence
Project Directors:
Arieh Saposnik, School of International Letters and Cultures
Yoav Gortzak, Political Science
While a general scholarly consensus held it to have been on the wane in the 1960s and 1970s, religion today has clearly reemerged as a crucial socio-political force and is a key component of some of the most hotly contested political struggles around the world. Much of the now burgeoning body of work on the relationship between religion and political conflict, however, suffers from two major shortcomings: It lacks integration across the disciplines and it is too narrowly focused on one single aspect of the relationship between religion and political conflict, namely the role of religion as the root cause of violent political conflict. This project proposes a corrective to this by offering to stretch our understandings of religion and conflict each as individual concepts, and then by augmenting the range within which the relationships between the two are conceived. The project will combine a social science based approach of international relations and security studies with a humanistic perspective rooted in cultural history and the study of cultures broadly conceived to understand the changing relationship between sacred and profane as they shape contemporary political, social, cultural, and military conflict—and the interface between them.
SPRING 2009 VISITING FELLOWS
The Visiting Fellows program is for scholars from other institutions of higher education in the US and abroad to spend spring semester in residence at the Institute for Humanities Research (IHR), participating in the intellectual life of the IHR and the university community. The Visiting Fellowship provides the opportunity to conduct research, collaborate with ASU faculty, and write. The Visiting Fellowship also promotes an exchange of ideas among visitors and ASU Fellows also working on the annual theme, which in 2009 will be The Humanities and Political Conflict. Visitors will participate in weekly fellows meetings and give public lectures and seminars on their research topics while in residence at the IHR.
Lawrence Bogad
Theater and Dance
University of California Davis
Serious Play: The Role of Performance in Contemporary Nonviolent Activism
Can creative street theatre give voice to marginalized social movements, providing an efficacious alternative to the violence of desperation? This study will examine the advantages and limitations of absurdist, satirical, and/or solemn performance art as an activist tactic. It will also document how current groups draw inspiration from, and innovate upon, the techniques of nonviolent civil disobedience pioneered by Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr.
Serious Play will comparatively critique three performance activist groups—the Clown Army (www.clownarmy.org), the Oil Enforcement Agency (www.oilenforcementagency.org), and 1000 Coffins—with which I have earned the unique position of critical observer. This election season provides a precious opportunity to analyze these groups through the lens of social movement and performance theory. All three groups use nonviolent street performance to spark political dialogue because they lack the resources to hire lobbyists or buy commercial airtime. Does their mixture of Gandhi, King, and Harpo Marx work to surprise, entertain, and provoke citizenry, politicians, and the media, or is it an unwelcome and bizarre distraction? Serious Play will put activist theatrics in the context of the historical lineage of passive resistance to give us a more complicated understanding of the role of performance in the history of social change in the United States.
Gabriele Schwab
Comparative Literature
University of California Irvine
Haunting Legacies: Violent Histories and Transgenerational Trauma
This is a book project on violent histories, transgenerational trauma and political conflict. Working at the intersections of literary studies, anthropology and trauma theory, the book approaches violent histories from the perspective of transgenerational trauma and explores the role of literature and writing in witnessing and mourning, conflict resolution and reconciliation. Grounded in the reading of texts --fiction, poetry,
memoirs and creative nonfiction -the book includes reflections on Jewish and German holocaust literature, and postcolonial literature from the US, New Zealand, Chile and Guatemala and deals with diverse topics such as traumatic writing, memory, torture, rape and disappearances as well as the cultural politics of emotions (guilt, shame, humiliation, and grief). The theoretical framework draws on trauma theory, narratology and critical theory, including Arendt, Agamben, Derrida, Mbembe, Fanon and Ngugi Wa Thiong'O. It will also include reflections on redress and reconciliation movements as well as human
rights interventions in violent political conflicts.