Humanities Institute names faculty fellows for 2016-17

UB’s Humanities Institute (HI), an internationally noted center for innovative cross-disciplinary research and community programs, has announced the recipients of its 2016-17 faculty fellowships.

The fellowships were awarded following a competitive process that provides eight faculty members with a full semester teaching release, allowing them to concentrate on their individual projects. The fellows’ departments, meantime, are provided with course replacement funds to cover classes while the fellows are on leave.

“These pioneering HI-funded projects represent but a sample of the original and broadminded research that’s the trademark of the humanities, arts and social sciences at UB,” says David Castillo, professor of Romance languages and literatures and incoming director of the Humanities Institute. “The promise of these projects and the many others that comprised this year’s pool attests to the health of the humanities at UB.”

This is HI’s eleventh class of recipients. All of the fellows will deliver presentations this academic year as part of HI’s free Scholars@Hallwalls series.

Castillo notes his predecessor as HI director, history professor Erik Seeman, tells him that this year’s applicant cycle was the strongest under Seeman’s leadership.

“I will certainly keep this in mind the next time I hear about an alleged crisis of the humanities,” he says.

In addition to HI funding, Jaume Franquesa, assistant professor of anthropology, and Elizabeth Mazzolini, assistant professor of English, will be funded in collaboration with the Office of the Vice President for Research and Economic Development, for they singularly represent the interdisciplinary mission of both HI and OVPRED, according to Castillo.

“Executive Director Libby Otto and I very much look forward to the vibrant conversations that this scholarly collective will no doubt spark around the UB campus and the Buffalo community at large,” Castillo says.

This year’s fellows, and their research projects:

This is a study of borderline personality disorder (BPD) as a historically and socially constructed mental illness in the modern United States. Psychiatric professionals characterize and often disparage BPD as a female illness unresponsive to psychopharmacology or psychotherapy. Cahn argues that the highly volatile “borderline” has helped stabilize psychiatric knowledge — and authority — in the face of psychiatry’s own instabilities. She stresses the importance of listening to women’s articulations of mental suffering and expressed need for a coherent “self,” even in an era of post-structuralist doubt about the existence of a “unified self.” By making psychiatry central to women’s social and political history, Cahn teases out relationships between gender, feminism and “mental illness.”

Currie’s project is focused on the figure of music in the later life and work of the Palestinian critic, political activist and musician Edward Said, from 1989 to his death in 2003. In particular, it spirals out from a series of meditations, close-readings and micro-historical reconstructions centered on an evening in Beirut in 1972 when Said met the great French author Jean Genet. Said was struggling against the leukemia that would eventually kill him when he set about founding the now famous West-Eastern Divan Orchestra with the conductor Daniel Barenboim, whom he randomly met in a hotel lobby. The two meetings, with Genet and Barenboim respectively, are seemingly unrelated. Yet by making recourse to the language and practice of ghosts and haunting, Currie demonstrates an uncanny resonance between them. Genet thus becomes one of the secret origins of the orchestra and how its as-yet-unfulfilled challenge — to activate a fully transformative potential for human being through musical practice — is passed on now to us.

During the Roman domination of the Greek-speaking world, developments in the Greek concept of free and frank speech (parrhēsia) reveal the continued political and ethical significance of frankness, which belies the putative de-politicization of later Greek culture. Under the Roman Empire, frank speaking might take place in a number of public and private contexts, including the emperor’s court, a civic assembly, a meeting between friends and a satirical screed. In each of these venues, frankness is distinct from modern protected speech in that it presupposes a certain danger in speaking, which in turn elevates the speaker’s status. The frequent references to frankness in Greek literature of the Roman Empire show the political, philosophical, social and cultural importance of the practice of frank speaking, as well as how it is closely connected with Greek identity and freedom at a time when the actions of the Greek cities were constrained by Rome.

Franquesa’s project aims to contribute to the comprehension of energy transitions through a historically informed, socially situated study of the development of renewable energy in Spain. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Southern Catalonia, he analyzes the institutional arrangements, cultural mediations and relations of production through which the energy from wind is harnessed. While dominant narratives adopt a technology-centered approach presenting renewable energy as involving, in itself, a rupture with the existing patterns of energy use, Franquesa’s research shows that energy transitions are complex, multilayered processes that open possibilities for new social arrangements, while also highlighting the ways that such social arrangements rework inherited relationships of power.

Mack offers a new prehistory of cultural anthropology through a wide range of 18th-century texts, from novels to devotional manuals and pattern books. She argues that while “habit” is usually understood as the obverse of enlightenment, the writers of the period were instead focused on rethinking the habitual in relation to modernity. In so doing, they asked probing questions about topics we now associate with the discipline of anthropology: about the relationship between the observer and the observed, for instance, and about the social status of material objects and beliefs. The project focuses on 18th-century Britain, but its larger questions are wide-ranging and intersect with current debates about the relation between literary studies and the social sciences, and about the relation between academic theory and everyday practice.

Mazzolini’s book project investigates and critiques the centrality of the singularly guilty human as the primary site of environmental responsibility within ecocriticism. After providing a genealogy of guilty subjectivity via the underlying conception of the “anthro” of the Anthropocene Age, the book goes on to investigate other affects associated with guilt, with one chapter each devoted to parsimony, shame and pessimism. In the individual chapters, she links each affect to a particular site of environmental engagement.

Milletti will be working on her second novel, “Room in Hotel America,” which fully elaborates a brief anecdote discovered in Carl Sifakis’ “Great American Eccentrics: Strange and Peculiar People.” The narrative, called “The Guests Who Wouldn’t Check Out,” recounts the story of the Romero de Cainas family — a wealthy Cuban family who immigrated to the U.S. in 1924, then withdrew into the posh, opportunely named Hotel America, outside Times Square in New York City. The family’s resistance to leaving their rooms becomes a source of inquiry in the novel — a storyline about patriarchal power, wealth and troubled pasts — even as it becomes a mechanism for discussing more broadly the issue of American insularity (the different kinds of rooms we inhabit) within the realm of global politics.

Negrete will be completing a book that investigates an unrecognized global female avant-garde that emerged in the 1960s. These artists revised the Freudian notion of hysteria and thus upheld the creative power of aesthetic encounters beyond pleasure in order to reshape subjectivity and unsettle the social link. She traces the ways in which a set of experimental works made by diverse writers and artists across various texts and other media confront this very problem. She argues that these works go so far as to propose their own, unique reading practices, seeking to transmit a sensation rather than convey a meaning. Negrete proposes a critical approach attuned to the inventive modes of subjectivity that emerge from these unprecedented reading practices.