In 2010, the Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere, with the support of the Robert and Margaret Rothman Endowment for the Humanities, began a program to award summer fellowships to faculty in the humanities disciplines. The objective of these fellowships is to allow recipients to make significant progress on existing creative/research projects during the summer months. The most recent recipients are below:
Summer 2024
Porchia Moore (Professor, Museum Studies)
The King’s Palace That Burnt; Added Beauty to It: The Benin Bronzes and the Museum
Between 2023 and 2028 over 20 new museums will be constructed on the continent of Africa. This is unprecedented as scholars argued that Africa could not care for cultural heritage objects for decades because of climate, geography, and conflict. This project examines the emergent global urgency to return Nigeria’s Benin Bronzes as an act of solidarity with the Black Lives Matter Movement. The project investigates Nigeria’s forthcoming Edo Museum where the repatriated objects will reside and contributes to creating 21st-century frameworks for museum praxis; interrogating whether or not repatriation on the continent reinscribes colonialist frameworks.
Richard Kernaghan (Professor, Anthropology)
Rivers in Nomos: Moving Terrains of Law Through the Apaporis – Tabatinga Line
How do physical terrains inflect legal relations in present day Amazonia? What can regional practices of river navigation disclose about the precise ways those terrains transform claims to possession, ties of hospitality, or even territorial threat? By focusing on locales in proximity to—or that pass through—the Apaporis-Tabatinga Line (an international boundary that emerged from colonial histories of Spanish-Portuguese confrontations and where today state regimes of Colombia, Brazil and Peru reach their territorial limits) this study rethinks legal relations aesthetically from a setting of rivers and from landscapes that move.
M. Carmen Martinez Novo (Professor, Center for Latin American Studies and Anthropology)
Surviving fascism in the past and undoing it in the present: family memory and private archives in Spain
Prof. Martinez Novo’s project investigates the history of her family during the Spanish Civil War, the Francoist Dictatorship, and the transition to democracy. The nature of the research required undoing and reimagining the anthropological research process, its methods, and narrative style to adequately convey family memory. It also demanded gathering an array of eclectic items from private and public collections to piece together past experiences and overcoming the web of silence and forgetting that surrounds Spain’s violent past.
Stacey Liou (Professor, Political Science)
All Assembled: Protest and the Politics of Interpretation
Gatherings are legible as protests when public audiences see them as politically rational – the strategic acts of a unified political collective. By examining these discourses, the book project reconstructs several conventions of legible political action, finding that audiences evaluate street gatherings’ political rationality by considering their verbal claims, material presence, and emotional resonance. The work contributes to humanistic social science by analyzing protest normatively, attending to the social meanings and values that it carries.