“Perhaps nobody knows how to make any human being better, happier, and more capable, but at the very least the humanities, humane learning, and humanistic scholarship help to sustain a universe of thought in which these questions have meaning and in which adults may have the opportunity to work out such problems for themselves.” — Howard Mumford Jones, scholar of English and American literature and chair of the board of ACLS
(Source: acls.org)
After Camp: Portraits in Midcentury Japanese American Life and Politics by Greg Robinson F'04 now available from the University of California Press.
This book illuminates various aspects of a central but unexplored area of American history: the midcentury Japanese American experience. A vast and ever-growing literature exists, first on the entry and settlement of Japanese immigrants in the United States at the turn of the 20th century, then on the experience of the immigrants and their American-born children during World War II. Yet the essential question, “What happened afterwards?” remains all but unanswered in historical literature. Excluded from the wartime economic boom and scarred psychologically by their wartime ordeal, the former camp inmates struggled to remake their lives in the years that followed. This volume consists of a series of case studies that shed light on various developments relating to Japanese Americans in the aftermath of their wartime confinement, including resettlement nationwide, the mental and physical readjustment of the former inmates, and their political engagement, most notably in concert with other racialized and ethnic minority groups.
(Source: ucpress.edu)
ACLS is pleased to announce the recipients of the 2012 Digital Innovation Fellowships. The nine fellows will spend a year dedicated to a major scholarly project intended to advance digital humanistic scholarship by broadening understanding of its nature and exemplifying the robust infrastructure necessary for creating such works. These projects span disciplines and methodologies, but all create new means of scholarly investigation and sharing.
Margot Fassler (Professor, Theology and Music, University of Notre Dame) will create a digitized, sounding model of Hildegard of Bingen’s conception of the cosmos, employing the advanced technology of Notre Dame’s Digital Visualization Theater.
Jesse Rodin (Assistant Professor, Music, Stanford University) and his Josquin Research Project will develop new tools for making Renaissance music searchable.
Eric Kansa (Independent Scholar, The Alexandria Archive Institute and the University of California, Berkeley) will develop a Data Journal for archaeology studies, a project that will make data sharing part of the mainstream of scholarly communications.
Peter Kastor (Associate Professor, History and American Culture Studies, Washington University in St. Louis) will analyze governance in the decades following adoption of the U.S. Constitution, combining narrative and statistical analysis with humanities computing to model forms of cross-disciplinary conversation, and culminate in an online collection for researchers.
Massimo Lollini (Professor, Romance Languages, University of Oregon) will make Petrarch’s early manuscripts available to scholars online via an interface that provides new tools for rich linking and layering of texts as well as visualizations of documents.
Andrew Sluyter (Associate Professor, Geography and Anthropology, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge) will build a Geographic Information System (GIS) of nineteenth-century Atlantic trade networks that will give agency to long-ignored actors like slaves and conceptually transform the Atlantic into a dynamic space of flows rather than a dead space of separation.
Elaine Sullivan (Adjunct Assistant Professor, Egyptology, University of California, Los Angeles) will integrate GIS and three-dimensional modeling to investigate the important cemetery of Saqqara, Egypt, an ancient cult and burial place neighboring the capital city Memphis, allowing researchers to virtually experience the landscape in ways that were previously impossible.
James Tice (Professor, Architecture, University of Oregon) will use GIS to update the Forma Urbis Romae, a cartographic masterpiece of ancient Rome, and then republish it as an interactive website. The end result will highlight the continuity between ancient and modern and reveal how ancient buildings shape subsequent urban form.
Warren Sack(Associate Professor, Film and Digital Media, University of California, Santa Cruz) observes that “software now constitutes a new form of logic and rhetoric, a new means of expression, articulation, and argumentation.” His book project will explore digital ideology and the writing/programming of the institutions of digital life.
See project abstracts.
“The Digital Innovations Fellowship program continues to evolve and expand,” said ACLS Director of Fellowships Nicole Stahlmann. “The current group of fellows, which is the seventh cohort funded through the program, showcases creative research in the digital humanities through the use of innovative research methods, the representation of research results in new and digitally enhanced ways, as well as projects that engage analytically with new forms of knowledge creation.”
(Source: acls.org)
Shakespeare’s Schoolroom: Rhetoric, Discipline, Emotion by Lynn E. Enterline F'03 now available from the University of Pennsylvania Press.
Shakespeare’s Schoolroom places moments of considerable emotional power in Shakespeare’s poetry—portraits of what his contemporaries called “the passions"—alongside the discursive and material practices of sixteenth-century English pedagogy. Humanist training in Latin grammar and rhetorical facility was designed to intervene in social reproduction, to sort out which differences between bodies (male and female) and groups (aristocrats, the middling sort, and those below) were necessary to producing proper English "gentlemen.” But the method adopted by Lynn Enterline in this book uncovers a rather different story from the one schoolmasters invented to promote the social efficacy of their pedagogical innovations. Beginning with the observation that Shakespeare frequently reengaged school techniques through the voices of those it excluded (particularly women), Enterline shows that when his portraits of “love” and “woe” betray their institutional origins, they reveal both the cost of a Latin education as well as the contradictory conditions of genteel masculinity in sixteenth-century Britain.
(Source: upenn.edu)
High Gothic Sculpture at Chartres Cathedral, the Tomb of the Count of Joigny, and the Master of the Warrior Saints by Anne McGee Morganstern G'74 now available from Penn State University Press.
In the 1790s the sculptural decoration of many French cathedrals was destroyed, and monastic churches were stripped of their royal and noble tombs. As a result, modern art historians have remained largely unaware of the link between architectural sculpture and monumental tomb sculpture. Some years ago, Anne Morganstern recognized the hand of a master sculptor who worked at Chartres in the little-known tomb of a nobleman. This connection prompted the author to investigate the relationship between the two. In High Gothic Sculpture at Chartres Cathedral, the Tomb of the Count of Joigny, and the Master of the Warrior Saints, Morganstern offers a new study of the sculptor whom Louis Grodecki associated with a group of stained-glass windows that he attributed to the “Master of Saint Chéron.” Morganstern proposes that the windows reflect the designs of the sculptor whom she calls the “Master of the Warrior Saints,” whether or not he was their designer. She also shifts the chronological framework associated with the south transept porch back approximately twenty years, a move that has broad implications for scholarly consideration of the development of French High Gothic sculpture.
(Source: psupress.org)
ACLS Learned Society News. The 222nd Annual Meeting of the American Oriental Society begins today in Boston. The encouragement of basic research in the languages and literatures of Asia has always been central in its tradition. This tradition has come to include such subjects as philology, literary criticism, textual criticism, paleography, epigraphy, linguistics, biography, archaeology, and the history of the intellectual and imaginative aspects of Oriental civilizations, especially of philosophy, religion, folklore and art. The scope of the Society’s purpose is not limited by temporal boundaries: All sincere students of man and his works in Asia, at whatever period of history are welcomed to membership.
(Source: umich.edu)
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ACLS Learned Society News. The Association for Asian Studies’ Annual Conference begins today in Toronto. Each spring, AAS holds a four-day conference devoted to planned programs of scholarly papers, roundtable discussions, workshops, and panel sessions on a wide range of issues in research and teaching, and on Asian affairs in general.
Benefits of attending:
(Source: asian-studies.org)
March 27th: "Day of the Digital Humanities" -
The Day of DH project is a collaborative publishing project for digital humanists around the world to document what they do.
(Source: emto-blog)
ACLS Fellows in the News. Rev. John W. O'Malley F'88 speaks on “The Council of Trent and Michelangelo’s ‘Last Judgment’” at St. John’s University today. His presentation is part of the university’s fourth annual Catholic Lecture Series.
(Source: stjohns.edu)
Golden Holocaust: Origins of the Cigarette Catastrophe and the Case for Abolition by Robert N. Proctor G'89 now available from the University of California Press.
The cigarette is the deadliest artifact in the history of human civilization. It is also one of the most beguiling, thanks to more than a century of manipulation at the hands of tobacco industry chemists. In Golden Holocaust, Robert N. Proctor draws on reams of formerly-secret industry documents to explore how the cigarette came to be the most widely-used drug on the planet, with six trillion sticks sold per year. He paints a harrowing picture of tobacco manufacturers conspiring to block the recognition of tobacco-cancer hazards, even as they ensnare legions of scientists and politicians in a web of denial. Proctor tells heretofore untold stories of fraud and subterfuge, and he makes the strongest case to date for a simple yet ambitious remedy: a ban on the manufacture and sale of cigarettes.
(Source: ucpress.edu)
ACLS Fellows in the News. Lizabeth Cohen F'93 has been selected as Dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.
In a statement, University President Drew G. Faust, who served as the Dean of Radcliffe prior to ascending to the presidency, praised Cohen’s academic prowess and leadership abilities.
“Liz Cohen is a distinguished and imaginative scholar with a deep knowledge of Radcliffe and Harvard and a strong dedication to Radcliffe’s pursuit of new ideas and collaborations across the academic disciplines, the professions, and the creative arts,” said Faust in a statement. “[A]s interim dean she has already strengthened Radcliffe’s ties to people and programs across Harvard and beyond.”
(Source: thecrimson.com)
ACLS Fellows in the News. Aurelian Craiutu F'08 will speak on “America as Seen by Tocqueville and French Liberalism” today at Brigham Young University. Craiutu’s research interests include French political and social thought (Montesquieu, Tocqueville, Constant, Madame de Staël, Guizot, Aron), varieties of liberalism and conservatism, democratic theory, as well as theories of transition to democracy and democratic consolidation in Eastern Europe.
(Source: news.byu.edu)
Colonizer or Colonized: The Hidden Stories of Early Modern French Culture by Sara E. Melzer F'98, F'87 now available from the University of Pennsylvania Press.
Colonizer or Colonized introduces two colonial stories into the heart of France’s literary and cultural history. The first describes elite France’s conflicted relationship to the Ancient World. As much as French intellectuals aligned themselves with the Greco-Romans as an “us,” they also resented the Ancients as an imperial “them,” haunted by the memory that both the Greeks and Romans had colonized their ancestors, the Gauls. This memory put the elite on the defensive—defending against the legacy of this colonized past and the fear that they were the barbarian other. The second story mirrored the first. Just as the Romans had colonized the Gauls, France would colonize the New World, becoming the “New Rome” by creating a “New France.” Borrowing the Roman strategy, the French Church and State developed an assimilationist stance towards the Amerindian “barbarian.” This policy provided a foundation for what would become the nation’s most basic stance towards the other. However, this version of assimilation, unlike its subsequent ones, encouraged the colonized and the colonizer to engage in close forms of contact, such as mixed marriages and communities.
This book weaves these two different stories together in a triangulated dynamic. It asks the Ancients to step aside to include the New World other into a larger narrative in which elite France carved out their nation’s emerging cultural identity in relation to both the New World and the Ancient World.
(Source: upenn.edu)
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