Participants in the recent conference Metropolis and Micropolitics asked what the micro-political processes are that attempt to mediate, navigate, and/or challenge contradictions in contemporary South Asian cities.

The Simpson Center for the Humanities has been awarded a $625,000 Challenge Grant by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) to support inventive forms of scholarship inspired by new and emerging digital technologies. The largest NEH Challenge Grant ever received by the University of Washington, this award provides a powerful endorsement of the Simpson Center’s vision of the future of scholarship and teaching as well as a compelling incentive to support the humanities. With a successful 1:3 match totaling $2.5 million, the Simpson Center will establish and endow the Digital Humanities Commons. Read more about the NEH Challenge Grant and the Digital Humanities Commons and current digital humanities initiatives at the University of Washington.

"War Capital Trauma," a special issue of positions: east asia cultures critique, was unanimously selected as winner of the 2008 Council of Editors of Learned Journals Award for Best Special Issue. One judge said, “The theme of trauma has been with us for a long while, but this special issue expands it both geographically, with essays that address a number of Asian cultures, and also conceptually, by linking [to trauma] the idea of capital.” With a focus on Asian perceptions of trauma during human rights crises, the issue seeks to understand how the term trauma contributes to political language in literary criticism, epistemology, and psychology. This issue results from work done by The University of Washington's Project for Critical Asian Studies 1995-2006, which was the outcome of two generous Rockefeller Foundation Grants in the Humanities and was sponsored by the Simpson Center.

The Simpson Center for the Humanities conducts two funding rounds each year. From the Fall 2008 round, the Center's Executive Board has awarded funding to the following projects for 2009-10:

RESEARCH CLUSTERS

Dangerous Subjects:
Contention, Violence, and Control in Latin America
Organized by Cynthia Steele (Comparative Literature), Maria Elena Garcia (Comparative History of Ideas), José Lucero (International Studies), and Adam Warren (History)
Despite the decline of dictatorships and internal wars, many observers still consider Latin America a land of dangerous subjects — indigenous people, Afro-Latin Americans, the poor, the mentally ill, and other subjects that are out of place in the dominant imaginaries of modern progress. Through a faculty-graduate student workshop and speaker series, Dangerous Subjects will explore how emerging subjectivities, modes of surveillance, and transnational flows shape the contours of danger in Latin America.

EMERGE: Media in the Early Modern Age
Organized by Geoffrey Turnovsky (French & Italian Studies)
The Early Modern Research Group (EMERGE) provides a crossdisciplinary forum for exploring the meanings and histories of modernity. EMERGE will run two complementary programs to explore media in the early modern age: a series of formal lectures by prominent visiting scholars and an informal works-in-progress group for faculty and graduate students in a range of disciplines to share research.

SYMPOSIA, COLLOQUIA, CONFERENCES

Feminist Legacies / Feminist Futures:
Hypatia 25th Anniversary Conference
Organized by Alison Wylie (Philosophy and Anthropology)
Hypatia will publish its 25th volume in 2010. This is a significant event for the journal as well as feminist philosophy, the flourishing field that Hypatia has helped crystallize. The editors and the Simpson Center (which houses the journal) will mark this anniversary in October 2009, with a conference exploring Hypatia's significance for the future of feminist philosophy as it has taken shape across a range of disciplines. 

Science Studies Network: Representations Speaker Series
Organized by Simon Werrett (History) and Andrea Woody (Philosophy)
The Science Studies Network carries its momentum of science and humanities events into a third year with Representations, a year-long series of speakers and discussion forums that will explore the sciences' practices of representing nature and diverse communities and cultural perspectives in the study of the natural world. The series will consider how practices of visual and textual representation relate to questions of political representativeness and how this impacts issues such as climate change, AIDS, and the development of biotechnology.

Legacies of Unification: Twenty Years of German Unity
Organized by Steven Pfaff (Sociology and International Studies)
Legacies of Unification is a conference to be held in fall 2009, the twentieth anniversary of the peaceful revolution in the former German Democratic Republic that paved the way for German unification in 1990. Drawing scholars from across the United States and Europe, the conference will examine the consequences of German unity for culture and the arts, social policy, and European integration in the recast Berlin Republic.

PUBLIC HUMANITIES

Stafford Creek Reading Group
Organized by Georgia Roberts (English)
The Stafford Creek Reading Group is a monthly reading group at Stafford Creek Correctional Facility, a men’s prison in Aberdeen, WA. The eleven-person group focuses primarily on African American history and has been meeting for two years to discuss works around the themes of Feminism, Marxism, and historiography.