2020-21 Bingham Faculty Fellows: The Anthropocene, Environment, and Modernity
Commonwealth Center for the Humanities and Society (CCHS)
For the Call for Applications for this theme follow this link.
Paul Griner, EnglishProject: Little Sisters of the Poor and other stories Paul Griner is the author of the story collections Hurry Please I Want to Know and Follow Me (a Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers selection), and the novels Collectors, The German Woman, and Second Life. His work has been published in Playboy, Ploughshares, One Story, Zoetrope, Narrative, Tin House, and Bomb, and has been translated into a half dozen languages. He teaches Creative Writing and Literature at the University of Louisville. Hurry Please I Want To Know won the 2016 Kentucky Literary Award. His novel The Book of Otto and Liam will be published in April, 2021 He is the recipient of UofL’s Outstanding Teaching Awards at both the college and university levels, the College of Arts and Sciences Outstanding Scholarship, Research and Creativity Activity Award for Humanities, and the Graduate School’s Outstanding Mentor Award. Reading List:
|
|
Kristi Maxwell, EnglishProject: For Once I am an assistant professor of English and an affiliate faculty member of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. My research centers on experimental forms in poetry and hybrid writing and issues of representation and difference. As a Fellow, I will be working on a project tentatively titled For Once, which consists of poems and an interwoven essay. Idiomatically, “for once” is a frustrated interjection and a call for change: that this time be different, for once. The poems in the manuscript-in-progress are lipograms, writing that excludes one or more letters. They take as their starting place the names of endangered species and emerged out of a desire to manage my own climate despair. Specifically, I’m working with the beautiful outlaw (a lipogram that does not use the letters in the subject’s name—in this case, the name of the endangered species) to explore what happens when what is endangered is instead absent—gone. The piece “Cheetah,” for instance, uses 21 of 26 letters, all but “a,” “c,” “e,” “h,” and “t,” so no articles, no cats, no being, no are or were or was, no choice, etc. (no etc.). The formal strategy of the lipogram nods to global trends regarding climate change and strategies of elimination (eliminating carbon emissions, red meat consumption, plastic, and so on). Reading List:
|
|
Nicholas Paliewicz, CommunicationProject: "Corporate Colonization in the Anthropocene." Nicholas Paliewicz is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication. He studies argumentation and public discourse with emphases on environmental rhetoric, public memory, and social movements. He is co-author of three books—The Securitization of Memorial Space: Rhetoric and Public Memory; Racial Terrorism: A Rhetorical Investigation of Lynching; and Memory and Monument Wars in American Cities: New York, Charlottesville, and Montgomery—and has published essays in journals such as Argumentation and Advocacy, International Journal of Communication, Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, and Environmental Communication: A Journal of Nature and Culture. As a fellow for the CCHS he will continue research on how corporations, particularly mining companies, mediate their rhetorical identities at different places and spaces as non- or post-human subjects. In the Anthropocene—a geological epoch marked by irrevocable planetary impacts—studying how corporations work as networks and forces is a necessary step for moving beyond modernity’s grasp on subjectivity and embracing new possibilities for social change, decoloniality, anti-racism, and survivance in an age of ecological precarity. Reading List:
|
|
Rachel Singel, ArtProject: An Ecological, Psychological, and Aesthetic Investigation into the Possibilities of Papermaking as a Process and Art Form Rachel Singel is an Associate Professor of Art at the Hite Art Institute, University of Louisville. She received a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Virginia in 2009 and a Masters of Fine Arts in Printmaking from the University of Iowa in 2013. Her research focuses on printmaking and papermaking with native plants, with a particular emphasis on non-toxic processes. Singel has participated in residencies at the Penland School of Crafts, the Venice Printmaking Studio, Internazionale di Grafica Venezia, Art Print Residence in Barcelona, Spain, and Wharepuke Print Studios in New Zealand. She has studied non-toxic printmaking at the Grafisk Eksperimentarium studio in Andalusia and will continue her research at Proyecto 'Ace International Artist Residency Program in Buenos Aires, Argentina in Summer 2021. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally and represented in private, public, and museum collections. Reading List:
|
|
Angela Storey, AnthropologyProject: "Politics at Peripheries: Infrastructure, Environment, and the Informal Everyday in Cape Town" I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology, focusing on the politics of urban environments. My CCHS project builds from a decade of ethnographic research in Cape Town, South Africa, exploring how residents of informal settlements engage in multiple forms of political labor as they struggle for expanded access to water, sanitation, and electricity infrastructure. Our world is increasingly an urban one, with significant urbanization centered in the global south. Visions of urban futures, and the environmental constraints and possibilities they hold, should be defined by global south cities such as Cape Town, Mumbai, and Santiago. My research examines how entwined material and activist labor at the edges of the city challenge understandings of resource politics. I ask: What would it mean to reimagine an environmental modernity grounded in global south cities, in the everyday lives and struggles located at the city’s periphery? Reading List:
|
|
Jennifer Westerfield, HistoryProject: “Mapping the World in the Early Modern Era: Claude Sicard in Egypt, 1712–1726” I am an Associate Professor in the Department of History, where my teaching focuses on the ancient Mediterranean world. My PhD is in the field of Egyptology, and most of my work to date has dealt with the religious and cultural history of Egypt in the late Roman period. My first book, Egyptian Hieroglyphs in the Late Antique Imagination (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019), deals with the ongoing cultural significance of the ancient hieroglyphic writing system in a period when hieroglyphic texts remained a prominent feature of Egypt’s visual culture but could no longer be read with any accuracy. My long-standing curiosity about the ways in which Egypt’s ancient past has been reinterpreted over the centuries has led to an interest in the emergence of Egyptology as an academic discipline in the early modern period. As a CCHS fellow, I will be researching a key figure in the development of scientific Egyptology, the French Jesuit missionary and explorer Claude Sicard (1675-1726). Sicard spent the last fourteen years of his life in Egypt, where he divided his time between trying to convert Egypt’s Coptic Christian population to Roman Catholicism and carrying out extensive research into the country’s geography and history. In this project, part of a larger intellectual biography of Sicard, I focus on his efforts to produce the first scientific maps of the Nile valley and seek to situate Sicard and his cartographic research with respect to the institutional networks that made his research possible: the Jesuit order, the French mercantile community, and the Republic of Letters. Reading List:
|