The Center for the Humanities Announces the 2012-2013 Faculty Fellows
The Center for the Humanities in Arts & Sciences is pleased to announce its Fall 2012 and Spring 2013 Faculty Fellows. The Spring 2013 Faculty Fellows were selected in conjunction with the Center’s first annual theme, “Mobility and Rootedness.”
Each Fellow will spend a semester in-residence at the Center, researching a new book project while performing various Fellow duties, including delivering one formal, public lecture about his or her work.
Professor Keane’s book project, “The Poetics of Anger in Juvenal's Satires,” reveals how an ancient verse corpus explores the pleasures and perils of anger and angry speech. Keane argues that Roman satirist Juvenal’s work is more than learned parody: it exhibits a deeper interest in the psychology, morality, and aesthetics of anger, engages with Greco-Roman philosophical and rhetorical literature on the emotions, and reflects continually on anger's proper role in satire. From his monologues railing against social upstarts and deviants to his derisive vignettes of other people caught in anger's grip, the satirist appears fascinated with the emotion's power, its ugliness, and its complex relation to morality and to humor.
Professor Zwicker’s broad subject is the role of gossip, rumor, and scandal in the fashioning of early modern literary lives. His particular focus is the rich archive of materials relating to the life and writings of John Dryden—the most important, the most prolific, and certainly the most reviled literary figure of the second half of the seventeenth century—an age that specialized in literary abuse and insult. “Gossip, Rumor, and Scandal” will examine how and why Dryden attracted the admiration but also the envy and dismissive slurs that distinguish his presence in the literary culture of Restoration London. Beyond Dryden, the aim of Zwicker’s work is to interpret the meaning and the role of gossip and scandal in the project of writing a literary life: what gossip and scandal tell us of the private and public identity of literary figures.
Professor Brown’s book project, “The United States, Under West Indian Eyes,” will examine Anglophone Caribbean literary representations of the region’s powerful northern neighbor. The project aims to unsettle the received view of the interchange between America and the West Indies as one of unchanging, unilateral oppression. Brown will argue that the United States represented far more than simply a repellent and alien cultural force either before or after the English-speaking islands achieved national independence. The project’s investigation of Caribbean literature will show that America—as image and material reality—was a far more discordant concept in the eyes of the Caribbean populace, embodying not only a terrifyingly racist, expanding imperial power, but also a rich source of anti-British cultural resistance, pan-African solidarity, and perhaps most importantly, economic mobility.
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Professor Miki’s book project, “Insurgent Geographies: Blacks, Indians, and Conquest in Postcolonial Brazil,” will demonstrate that popular imagination and scholarly works alike associate conquest and colonization with early colonial Latin America. But Miki contends that they were also fundamental to modern Brazilian history. Her project places black and indigenous people at the center of a nation-building process that was based on territorial consolidation, slavery, and violent indigenous conquest. Scholarship on Latin America treats Indians and blacks as separate subaltern populations divided geographically into indigenous Spanish America and African Brazil. By considering modern Brazilian history through the interrelated lives of black and indigenous people, Miki's work helps re-conceptualize the relationship between race and nation building in nineteenth-century Latin America. Mobility and rootedness help explain the shared experiences of African diasporic and indigenous Latin American people.