Jonathan Brown (Assistant Professor, Near Eastern Languages & Civilizations)
Lying about the Prophet of God: Forgery, Manipulation, and its Unmasking in the Islamic Tradition

Brown’s project examines the history of forgery in the Islamic religious tradition. Although Sunni Islam was founded on preserving the authentic teachings of Muhammad, countless reports about his words and deeds were forged for various political, sectarian and legal ends. This project traces debates over whether or not reports about Muhammad can be forged for the purpose of homiletics. It places this question in the theoretical framework of the relationship between Truth and reality, utility and authenticity, and also examines similar debates in other scriptural and historiographical traditions.

Jordanna Bailkin (Associate Professor, History and Women’s Studies)
Cold War Dreams: Social Science and the End of Empire

Social Science and the End of Empire analyzes the impact of decolonization and migration on the social sciences in Britain after WWII and explores the ways in which postwar developments in anthropology, legal theory, psychology, and sociology illuminate British efforts to grapple with the distinctive demands of a collapsing, multiethnic empire.

Alexander Dressler (Alvord Fellow, Classics)
Calling the Soul to Syllables: The Philosophical Art of Writing in Seneca’s Moral Epistles

Dressler explores the ways in which the Moral Epistles of the Stoic philosopher and statesman Lucius Annaeus Seneca, reclaim writing as part of ethical and philosophical practice from the critique of textuality in Plato’s Phaedrus. Following Foucault’s late work, numerous scholars have turned to Seneca to understand the origins of the self in recent years, but few have considered the role of writing in Seneca’s development of selfhood. Dressler highlights the important role played by minutes philological details such as diction and metaphor in global theoretical issues of self and other, and ethics and identity.

Habiba Ibrahim (Assistant Professor, English)
The Racial Turn: Blackness, Mixed Racialism, Colorblindness, and the Impasse of Racial Recognition

Ibrahim’s project tracks the transformation of racial rhetoric and argues that late twentieth century recognition of mixed racial identity is not ultimately reducible to any particular political regime or outcome. Instead, it is an impasse that asks how “race” will continue to signify the demands of history, public policy, and popular representation. Ibrahim examines the rhetoric of black-white multiracialism as it relates to representations of blackness, “black” identity and cultural history. Aware that blackness has traditionally encompassed various modes of multiplicity as a result of the law of hypo-descent, Ibrahim intends to highlight how “multiracialism” interfaces with this earlier category, while focusing on late-century rhetorics of race. In short, she asks whether the rhetoric of contemporary mixed racialism operates on a denied recognition of the historical “mixedness” of blackness.

Matthew Levay (Dissertator, English)
Modernism's Crimes: Violence, Degeneracy, and Detection

Levay's dissertation provides an extensive critical account of the representation of crime and criminality in Anglo-American modernism, focusing on the ways in which twentieth-century authors grappled with a pervasive anxiety about criminal behavior and utilized that anxiety in an effort to theorize the functions of violence, rationality, subjectivity, and psychological motivation in literature. Drawing upon a wide variety of sources – including journalistic accounts of urban violence, early studies in criminology, popular crime fiction, and literary works by both canonical and virtually ignored modernists – Levay argues that modernism uses the criminal as a case study for making larger claims about the role of subjectivity in the modern world, often conflating criminality and subjectivity in startling and unprecedented ways.

Ted Mack (Assistant Professor, Asian Languages & Literature)
Textual Identity: The Literature of the Japanese Diaspora

Mack focuses on the Japanese-language literature and criticism of Brazil, particularly during the period of migratory expansion (1908-1941), in order to explore the boundaries of “modern Japanese literature.” This study brings to light examples of the hybridity that has been suppressed in order to preserve the illusion of linguistic, territorial, and cultural identity, stability, and homogeneity that underlies the discipline.

Lorna Rhodes (Professor, Anthropology)
Institutional Interiors

Rhodes’ project examines the total institution, particularly in light of the contemporary expansion of the prison, and considers how recent changes in the social are manifested and reflected in institutional practice. Her work includes an ethnographic analysis of a therapeutic prison in England as well as an exploration of the relationship among the camp, the panopticon, and the therapeutic community in the history and practice of the total institution.

Stephanie Smallwood (Associate Professor, History)
Africa in the Atlantic World: Historical Geographies of Power and Possibility

Smallwood explores the “Atlantic world” spatial metaphor that has come to dominate the literature on early modern contacts between Europe, Africa, and the Americas. With particular interest in the ways the metaphor distorts our understanding of the places and peoples of Africa, Smallwood draws conceptual and analytical insights from the work of historical and cultural geographers in order to better illuminate the uneven power relations that shaped early modern Atlantic spatial relations.

Honni van Rijswijk (Dissertator, English)
The Poetics of Personal Injury: Liability for Suffering in Twentieth-Century Law and Literature

Van Rijswijk’s project evaluates the legal category of personal injury and how it is used as a starting point to investigate representations of pain and suffering. Van Rijswijk focuses on different strategies and techniques used in both personal injury cases and novels to address the interconnected problems of representing suffering, and creating or adjudicating responsibility for that suffering.

Adam Warren (Assistant Professor, History)
Growing the Colony: Embattled Reformers and Disease Prevention in Bourbon Peru

Warren researches the tangled history of efforts by Peruvian doctors and intellectuals to modernize the Spanish colony and generate population growth using early modern science and medicine in the years prior to independence in 1821. Drawing on a wide range of archival materials and focusing on a period of government concern about the effects of epidemics on colonial productivity, Warren explains how a colonial medical politics emerged in Peru, a politics that was rooted not only in elite medical discourse and the decrees of the Crown, but also in the broader tensions of local elite and popular political culture and religiosity.

Sasha Welland (Assistant Professor, Anthropology & Women Studies)
Experimental Beijing: Contemporary Art Worlds in China’s Capital

Welland examines the social role of visual art and competing ideas of aesthetic, cultural, and market value in reform-era China, with a particular focus on how gender shapes contemporary Chinese art worlds. In an analysis of how artists, art objects, and theories such as feminism travel temporally and spatially, Welland’s ethnographic research addresses the mixed legacies of anticolonial and socialist art practices in Chinese art education, the visual representation and interpretation of Chinese femininities and masculinities, encounters between Chinese artists and Western arts professionals, and the intersection of art with transnational urban planning in the capital city.

Paul Atkins (Assistant Professor, Asian Languages & Literature)
From Zen Babbler to Poetic Saint: Fujiwara no Teika at the Intersection of Medieval Japanese Literature and Politics

Atkins' project is a study of the poetry and poetics of Fujiwara no Teika (1162-1241), one of the most influential writers in the classical Japanese literary tradition. Two questions receive extended consideration: What was the nature of the relationship between poetic activity and political power; and how did Teika managed to radically differentiate his work from that of his peers and predecessors while staying within or redefining the boundaries of poetic discourse?

Tani Barlow (Professor, Women Studies)
Vernacular Sociology, Banalization, and the Event of Women in China

Barlow analyzes the history of middlebrow social theory and its relation to transnational commercial advertising in the late Qing dynasty and Republican eras. Barlow illustrates how the advertising culture starring cute women using trade marked, imported commodities and a body of translated vernacular theories about "society" voiced the aspirations of professional elites.

Tami Blumenfield (Dissertator, Anthropology)
Visual Representations of the Na: Reclaiming a Medium

Blumenfield draws on ethnographic research to explore visual mediation and filmmaking practices in Na communities of southwest China. She considers ethical questions raised by collaborative research and government involvement in community representation, and contextualizes these questions by probing new trends in media production and distribution within, and beyond, China.

Tom Foster (Professor, English)
Ethnicity and Technicity: Nature, Culture, and Race in the Cyberpunk Archive

Foster engages narratives produced by writers of color who question how race and ethnicity both survive and are transformed within high-tech, computer-mediated social formations in relation to attempts to foreground issues of race and colonialism within cyberpunk science fiction.  Where contemporary technocultures have always drawn heavily on speculative fiction to define claims for the cultural implications of new technologies, Foster locates a series of interventions in the racial imagery of postmodern technoculture, at the level of its speculative and fictional dimension, interventions that have to be theorized in terms of contemporary shifts in the meaning of "nature" and "culture."

Trevor Griffey (Alvord Fellow, History)
"Integrating a Burning House": Black Worker Struggles for Affirmative Action in the Age of Deindustrialization

Craig Jeffrey (Assistant Professor, Geography)
Performing Democracy: Dramatic Experiments in Public Action

Jeffrey addresses the question of how and to what extent youth theatre is contributing to novel forms of cultural expression, democratization, and education; and how a linked program of research, educational innovation, and outreach work might facilitate further positive change. Jeffrey addresses this question through participatory series of interventions — or 'dramatic experiments' — aimed at understanding and promoting connections between youth theatre, educational institutions, and democratic social movements in the Pacific Northwest and Uttar Pradesh, India.

Moon-Ho Jung (Associate Professor, History)
Race Radicals: Asian American Political Struggles in the Age of Empire

Jung concentrates on Asian American radical struggles, both within the United States and across the Pacific, and the convergent rise of legalized racism and antiradicalism in American culture from the 1890s to the 1930s. Ultimately, Race Radicals will attempt to explain how these struggles challenged, justified, and reproduced anti-Asian racism in the United States during the first half of the twentieth century.

Ron Krabill (Assistant Professor, Interdisciplinary Arts & Sciences)
Starring Mandela and Cosby: Media, Democratization, and the End(s) of Apartheid

Linda Nash (Assistant Professor, History)
Engineering a Modern World:  Environments, Technology, Agency

Nash is studying the efforts of US policymakers and engineers to export large-scale technologies overseas as part of the post-World War II commitment to global "development" and the ultimate unraveling of the paradigm of technology-driven modernization.  Nash's project questions the presumptive notion of liberal human "agency" that underlies modern social scientific writing.  Building on recent work in science and technology studies, she focuses on the crucial role of specific environments in shaping – and re-shaping – human knowledge and plans while emphasizing that the capacity for "agency" might be better understood as something that emerges from the interaction of humans with particular places and things.

Vince Schleitwiler (Dissertator, English)
Shades of a World Problem: Reading the Literatures of Black and Asian Migrations

Schleitwiler examines the literatures of African American, Japanese American, and Filipino migrations across U.S. imperial domains in the twentieth century to consider how notions of race are made and remade in uneven and unpredictable ways across a global field of imperial competition.  Drawing on the immanent theorizations of literature, literacy, and narrative form constitutive of African American cultural traditions, it seeks to reveal how the dominant racial ideology of U.S. imperial nationalism is conditioned upon intersections of black and Asian racial histories that elude it – or that it must suppress.

Crispin Thurlow (Assistant Professor, Communication)
Elite Mobilities: The Discursive Production of Luxury and Privilege

Elite Mobilities is a critical discourse analysis of the re-orderings of class under global capitalism, focusing on the intersection of geographic and social mobilities in "luxury tourism" where super-elite commodity lifestyles are aggressively reconfiguring supposedly anachronistic notions of distinction and superiority. By scrutinizing those with privilege – those who stand to benefit most from the status quo – Thurlow means to show how elitism is rhetorically and semiotically established as a normative ideal in relation to which all consumer-citizens, regardless of wealth or power, are constantly persuaded and taught to position themselves.

Ta Trang (Dissertator, Anthropology)
Health Rites: Medicine, Market, and Malpractice in Contemporary China

Ta's ethnographic project examines how Chinese citizens engage in various health-seeking strategies – and in some cases desperate life-seeking strategies – in an environment of expanding economic liberalization and restructuring of the Chinese healthcare system. The undergoing transformation is emblematic of the operational logics and rationalities that constitute modern, scientific development in contemporary China and is revealing of the contradictory agenda of economic growth and the cost to human health.

Geoffrey Turnovsky (Assistant Professor, French & Italian Studies)
The Literary Market: Authorship, Society, and the Birth of a Modern Cultural Field in Old Regime France

Turnovsky's project studies the development of authorship in 17th- and 18th-century France through a study of the "literary market," considered as a key institution of modernization both as it allowed writers to become free from patrons, and because it exploited and victimized them. Turnovsky studies the “market” as an imagined space, distinct from the book trade, which reflected the shifting hopes and anxieties of writers grappling with the decline of the old patronage system, and which, in turn, shaped their expectations as modern authors before a new, anonymous public.

José Alaniz (Assistant Professor, Slavic Languages & Literature)
"Death, Dying, and Disability in East European Visual Culture"
Through an analysis of both major and marginal visual culture productions of the last fifteen years, this study seeks to decipher the ways Eastern Europe, at a time of massive socio-economic transformation, has admitted, foreclosed, and problematized opportunities for the representation of disability, death, and dying. Alaniz highlights key works in which the disabled and dying themselves have seized the reins of self-representation in accord with their growing demands for full citizenship and a turn to identity politics, particularly in the ubiquitous medium of cinema and the much-neglected peripheral genre of comics.

Ruby Blondell (Professor, Classics)
"Dangerous Beauty: Containing Helen of Troy"
Blondell's project examines Helen of Troy as a figure of power and danger, more specifically, as an embodiment of the threat posed by female sexuality. After analyzing the nature of that threat in its ancient Greek cultural context, it studies some of the numerous attempts to contain Helen's power in Greek texts and on the modern screen.

Jeffrey Chiu (Dissertator, English)
"Secular Modernity and 20th Century Asian American Culture"
Chiu's project constructs a genealogy of modernity by examining how "religion" has been defined by disciplinary knowledge production as well as how it has been contested in Asian American culture in the 20th century. His work considers how this category has been deployed in the U.S. to regulate and manage Asian populations, as well as other racialized groups. His analysis of religion reveals epistemologies and social formations at once produced by expanding capitalism and yet occluded by secular modernity's norms. He thereby recovers Asian American religious practices and representations as sites for alternative modernities, where norms of race, gender, and sexuality are re-articulated to suggest other modes of social collectivity.

Katrina Hagen (Dissertator, History)
"Internationalism in Cold War Germany"
Hagen's project traces East and West German responses to struggles for independence and national liberation in Africa, Asia, and the Americas. It explores debates about decolonization and national liberation in the context of Cold War rivalries, and in relation to contested interpretations of the ethical implications of European colonialism and Nazi imperialism and genocide.

Danny Hoffman (Associate Professor, Anthropology)
"Life in Motion: Alternative Ethnography of the West African War-scape"
"Life in Motion" is a research project exploring recent trends in multimedia experimental ethnography and African photography. The results of that research will guide the creation of an ethnography of the conflict in Sierra Leone and Liberia which combines the author's text and still photographs in a way that evokes both the trauma and creativity of the contemporary African experience.

Kellie Holzer (Dissertator, English)
"Nation-breeding Fictions: Marriage in the Age of Empire"
Reading 19th century Indian and British social reform movements, marriage laws, and domestic novels together, Holzer constructs "conjoined genealogies" for marriage in England and India to suggest that similar processes of government power functioned at both sites to manage the population through the institution of marriage. The project seeks to decenter Europe in histories of marriage by focusing on several of the institution's "originary moments" formed within the intimacies of the British Empire in India.

Amanda Poole (Alvord Fellow, Anthropology)
"Refugee Resettlement and Place-making in Lowlands Eritrea"

This project in Environmental Anthropology explores the dimensions and perceptions of citizenship and stewardship arising within multiethnic returnee communities, questioning the meaning of "home" to returnees and locals as they establish social relations through resource use and reclaim a symbolic space of remembered violence and displacement. She argues that peace-making is an active project that intersects with place-making—investing the landscape with social meaning, values, and relationships.


Chandan Reddy (Assistant Professor, English)
"Migrating Present: Alienage, Race, and the Politics of Black Internationalism, 1898-1953"
This project investigates different instances in the 20th century in which the mass movement of black people to industrialized cities in the U.S. and U.S. imperialism in the Asia-Pacific reconstituted the meanings of blackness, of "race," and of the political public sphere that black intellectuals engaged in their textual and social practices, producing a "narrative of black alienage."  While for the U.S. reading public the "Asiatic alien" within U.S. territory is a paradigmatic figure of permanent alienage and a disavowal of U.S. imperialism in Asia, for African American intellectuals the "Asiatic alien" figured as an important contrast for thinking about the political conditions of life and work for recently migratory black social groups living in the U.S. and subject to the social violences of U.S. citizenship. Designating a black/white racial binary as a mystification produced by the U.S. nation form, Reddy argues that the "non-national" is defined as a terrain of intersecting racialized histories of colonialism, slavery, imperialism, and migration.

Ileana Rodríguez-Silva (Assistant Professor, History)
"A Conspiracy of Silence: Disentangling Blackness, National Identities, and Colonial Regimes in Puerto Rico (1850-1920)"
Rodríguez-Silva's book project provides a historical analysis of the construction of silences surrounding issues of racial inequality, violence, and discrimination prevalent in Puerto Rico. The study examines how Puerto Ricans from both upper and working classes on the island and in the diaspora collaborated in the construction of a national myth about racial harmony that, in turn, censored debate over racial inequality. The island's case shows that silence is a crucial guarantor of persistent myths of racial democracy in Latin America and the Caribbean, discouraging political mobilization around issues of racial inequality and undermining the important work of anti-racist organizations.

Kristin Stilt (Assistant Professor, School of Law)
"The Space, Meaning, and Embodiment of Islamic Law in Medieval Cairo"
Stilt studies the space, meaning, and embodiment of Islamic law in the first half of the political regime of the Mamluk Sultanate (1250 C.E. to 1517 C.E.) in its capital city, Cairo. Law in general, and Islamic law in particular, is not an autonomous field of study that can be examined discretely on its own, but rather influences-and is influenced by-the social setting.  Thus examining the face of the law, the content of the law, and the geography of the law's reach offers the possibility of learning a great deal about life in the place and time period under study.


James Tweedie (Assistant Professor, Comparative Literature)
"The Age of New Waves: Globalization and Art Cinema from 1959"
This book project examines the origins of the concept of the cinematic "new wave," the proliferation of new waves on the contemporary international film festival circuit, and the relationship between these claims to cinematic newness and the "economic miracles" from which they often emerge. With chapters on French cinema in the late 1950s and 1960s, Taiwan's new wave in the 1980s, and mainland Chinese film in the 1990s, the project situates these recurrent claims to novelty within a longer trajectory of world film and examines the increasingly ambivalent invocations of transnational image flows during the current era of globalization.

Alys Weinbaum (Associate Professor, English)
"The New Biologic: Rethinking Reproductive Labor in Transnationalism"
Weinbaum's project explores transformations in contemporary cultural production (literature, film, and visual art) that reflect the emergence of new biotechnologies, the mapping of the human genome, and the creation of a global market in body parts, genetic materials, and medicalized and biologized human labor power. In the broadest sense, The New Biologic is an interdisciplinary feminist and science studies project that attempts to understand how culture functions as a repository of contestations over the meaning of human reproduction, and how culture can be mined as a political resource that enables apprehension of transformations in the meaning of human reproduction that might otherwise remain inchoate.

Robert E. Abrams (Associate Professor, English)
Bad Housekeeping: American Domesticity and the Grotesque
Abrams explores the way the grotesque lays siege to domestic frameworks and values in 19th-century American literature and painting. In works ranging from Lily Martin Spencer's Truth Unveiling Falsehood to Edgar Allan Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher," the grotesque, Abrams argues, opens up a range and depth of existential possibility otherwise banished from mainstream, officially sanctioned representations—often as prescriptive as they are descriptive—of American home and family life.

Richard Block (Assistant Professor, Germanics)
From Classical Weimar to Zion: Remapping a Literary History through Textual Configurations of Homosexuality
Block's working thesis asserts that race emerged as a privileged category to anchor the shifting modalities of ethnicity and sexuality and serves as well to re-mark the Jew as queer and thus absolutely different. He also examines how Jewish responses to this turn give rise to a literary Zionism.

Nicole Calian (Dissertator, Germanics)
Re-Inventing the Human Being: Kant and the Discourse of Anthropology
Calian's dissertation analyzes the emergence of anthropology as a science in eighteenth-century Germany as it develops against the backdrop of the process of secularization and the metaphysical void created by this process. Immanuel Kant's seminal lectures on pragmatic anthropology exemplify the new understanding and shaping of this knowledge-based discipline as it takes hold during the Enlightenment.

Catherine Connors (Associate Professor, Classics)
Roman Geographies
Connors's project examines representations of geography in Roman literary, philosophical, scientific, and visual texts, exploring the ways in which geographical information communicates ideological assumptions about the nature and scope of ancient Roman Imperial power.

Evelyne Ender (Professor, French and Italian)
Imagining Gender
Ender's project focuses on gender at the crossroads between aesthetics and autobiography in works by H. F. Amiel, Henry James, Thomas Cottle, B. Morisot and G. Caillebotte. She argues that each of these artists engages in a work of imagination and memory that aims for "goodness" – that is an empathic engagement with forms of experience that are marked by sexual difference.

Nicholas Halmi (Assistant Professor, English)
The Genealogy of the Romantic Symbol
This project conducts an interdisciplinary, comparative study of a distinctive concept of the symbol formulated by German and British writers in the Romantic period (c. 1780-1830). It aims to explain how this concept, which remained significant in various disciplines (literary criticism, psychology, theology) into the twentieth century, developed in response to Romantic crises in the understanding of the mind, nature, the organization of knowledge, and the structure of human society.

Resat Kasaba (Professor, International Studies)
Empire, States and People
Kasaba's project studies the new policies, institutions, and ideologies that developed in the nineteenth century to establish a close control over the territories and the communities that had been ruled by the Ottoman Empire for more than four hundred years. The study contends that these shifts in state practices and ideologies prepared the groundwork for the transitions from the Ottoman Empire to the new nation states at the end of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Jennifer Kathleen Ladino (Dissertator, English)
Back to Nature: American Nostalgia from the Closed Frontier to the End of Nature
Ladino is writing a genealogy of nostalgia for nature in American literature and culture since 1980, sketching dominant forms of nostalgia that take nature as an object—such as nostalgia for Edenic, unoccupied landscapes or for the wild, untamed frontier—and also tracking an undercurrent of progressive "counter-nostalgia" for nature that has imagined more productive ends. Her project suggests that counter-nostalgia—as a narrative catalyst, an individual emotional experience, or a source of collective consciousness—can model or facilitate social justice.

Brian M. Reed (Assistant Professor, English)
Cross-Media Exchange in the New York Schools of Poetry and Painting
Reed's project addresses a fundamental question—what is an artistic medium—by exploring the interzone between the purely verbal and visual arts. It examines a series of collaborations, borrowings, and other exchanges between avant-garde poets and painters who were working in close proximity in the years 1950-1975.

Kara Reilly (Dissertator, Drama)
Automata and Mechanical Theatres: A Spectacular History of Machine-based Mimesis
Reilly's project explores automata and mechanical theatres as immediate precursors to our digital world; they bear the evidentiary traces of the long history of mechanized spectacle. While we might call the technology of our postmodern world a "digital" culture, and the older technologies of automata "analogue" culture, this study explores specific cultural performances that generated wonder through the spectacle of theatrical technology from the Italian Renaissance to the present.

David Shields (Professor, English)
Positions: The Arc of a Body
Shields' book project is an exploration of the terrors and pleasures of having a body: the animal joy of childhood, adolescence's sexual frenzy, the physical breakdown of middle age, old age's confrontation with oblivion. A major thread is the symbiosis of sex and death; a major goal of the book is to make readers feel, in their own bones, the fact of mortality.

Nikhil Pal Singh (Associate Professor, History)
Exceptional Empire: A Short History of U.S. Imperialism
Singh's project explores the problematic of U.S. imperialism in comparative historical perspective. Insisting upon the institutional and ideological specificity of U.S. state violence and power projection across time, it also inquires into the historical continuities, legal and philosophical convergences between liberal empire, settler colonialism, and fascism.

Benjamin J. Stenberg (Alvord Graduate Fellow in the Humanities, Philosophy)
Toward a Linguistic Conception of Thought
Stenberg's dissertation addresses the relationship between thought and language. Specifically, he is attempting to develop the philosophical foundation for the view that thought depends upon language: in order to think one must be a well-practiced member of a linguistic community because thoughts themselves are in fact constituted by linguistic symbols.

Andrew Nestingen (Assistant Professor, Scandinavian Studies)
Criminal Scandinavia: Genre, Imagined Belongings, and the Consequences of Globalism
Nestingen's book project studies ways in which crime fictions were used to revise dominant notions of ethnic belonging in the Nordic nation-states during the 1980s through 1990s. The study employs the context of globalization to argue that these popular genres situate audiences in relation to transnational public spheres rather than bounded national ones.

Cynthia Steele (Professor, Comparative Literature, Spanish & Portuguese Studies)
Shards of History: Subaltern Stories from Chiapas
Steele's book compares conflicting versions of history and myth in the southern Mexican state of Chiapas, as written by both Mayan and ladino (non-Indian) writers. It draws on postcolonial, subaltern, and feminist theories to address tensions between government support and political dissidence, Mayan traditionalism and human rights, and conflicting claims to authenticity and authority.

Todd Tietchen (Dissertator, English)
Productive State(s): Radical Democracy in the Globalizing U.S.
Tietchen's project examines Cold War intellectual and artistic production within the context of U.S. post-war political maneuvering. Despite the hindrances of Cold War anti-communism, an oppositional intelligentsia involved in a critical analysis of emerging U.S. globalism was able to generate vibrant oppositional thought and strategies. Tietchen argues that such developments demonstrate that the most potent strains of radical democratic and anti-imperialist thought emanate not from within the boundaries of a national intellectual tradition, but from extranational intellectual formations that work within and across national borders.

John Toews (Professor, History)
Freud, Masculinity and Viennese Modernism 1890-1918: The Idea of Autonomy
Toews's study examines the problem of refashioning masculine identity in the emergence and evolution of Freud's oedipal theory, especially in terms of the way this theory is shaped in his letter exchanges with significant others and through the narrative constructions of the major clinical case studies. The development of Freud's theory of masculinity is contextually framed by the European "masculinity crisis" of the turn of the century and the emergence of early Modernism in Viennese literature and art.