The Institute for the Arts and Humanities is pleased to announce the faculty members awarded Fellowships in both the Faculty Fellows program and the Academic Leadership program for the spring 2013 semester as we prepare to welcome them here at Hyde Hall.
Faculty Fellows Program
The Faculty Fellows program provides a semester leave to work on research and creative projects or to develop new material for courses and programs. Fellows gather in Hyde Hall weekly to share a meal and discuss their work in an interdisciplinary setting, under the guidance of IAH Associate Director Laurie Maffly-Kipp.
The Faculty Fellows program comprises several fellowships. IAH Faculty Fellowships support work related to the arts, humanities and qualitative social sciences. Creative Campus Fellowships are a component of The Rite of Spring at 100 initiative, a partnership with Carolina Performing Arts that is funded by the Mellon Foundation. Offered in conjunction with the UNC Provost’s Office as a University teaching award, the Chapman Family Faculty Fellowships are awarded to outstanding teachers who regularly teach undergraduate students.
The Faculty Fellows and their respective projects for the semester are:
Allen Anderson, Whitton Family Fellow/Creative Campus Fellow
Professor, Department of Music
“Developments”
Anderson’s project is a musical composition for winds, brass and percussion entitled 11 Developments. The work takes as its inspiration Pablo Picasso’s suite of eleven lithographic images of a bull, “Le Taureau,” from 1945. Like the Picasso, the composition will be a dynamic collection of states or variations on an image, though in this case the image is musical. The prints are a source of attitude and possibility, and the music will similarly explore ideas of reduction, abstraction and the progression of densities.
Jessica Berman, Visiting Fellow
Professor, Department of English
“Modernism in Performance”
Jessica Berman is a visiting professor at UNC in spring 2013 as part of The Rite of Spring at 100 initiative, and she will be joining the IAH Fellows at their weekly seminars. She is an associate professor of English, affiliate associate professor of gender and women’s studies, affiliate associate professor of language, literacy and culture, and chair of the Department of English at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC). She holds a bachelor’s degree in history from Princeton University and a Ph.D. in comparative literature from the University of Chicago. Her current project looks at modernist artists who worked in multiple media, with an eye toward the performance practices they employed.
Erin Carlston, Epsy Family Fellow/Creative Campus Fellow
Associate Professor, English and Comparative Literature
“Antipodal Modernisms”
Carlston is focusing on writing by New Zealanders and Australians during the first half of the twentieth century. She will be looking at the cultural, economic and political relationships between Anglo-European modernisms and antipodal writers. She is also exploring the question of how antipodal literatures are treated—or not treated—in the U.S., Canadian and British academies. One might expect them to enter into conversations about international modernism, postcolonialism, the Global South, and/or Commonwealth literatures, but instead they often seem to fall into the cracks between academic specialties.
Patrick Curran, Chapman Family Fellow
Professor, Department of Psychology
“Applied Multilevel Modeling for the Behavioral and Social Sciences”
Curran’s program of teaching and research is primarily focused on the development and application of novel statistical models to the study of high risk child development. One such approach is the multilevel model in which data are allowed to cluster in groups such as siblings nested within a family or students within a classroom. However, these models are primarily used in the field of education and are less widely known within the behavioral sciences. During his fellowship, Curran will work to complete a textbook entitledApplied Multilevel Modeling for the Behavioral and Social Sciences, the goal of which is to expand the use of this approach in a broader array of research applications in the social sciences.
Emilio Del Valle-Escalante, Wilmer Kuck Borden Fellow
Associate Professor, Department of Romance Languages and Literature
“Before and After Genocide in Guatemala: Rebuilding the Contemporary Maya World through Literature (1960-2012)”
This project examines the poetry authored by ten contemporary Maya writers from Guatemala: Francisco Morales Santos, Luis de Lión, Humberto Ak’abal, Gaspar Pedro González, Victor Montejo, Maya Cu Choc, Pablo García, Rosa Chavez, Manuel Tzoc, and Sabino Esteban Francisco. Valle-Escalante will be exploring how these writers develop and negotiate their cultural identity and indigenous rights during and after the civil war in Guatemala, spanning 1960 to 2012.
Florence Dore, Irwin and Carol Belk-First Union Fellow
Associate Professor, Department of English and Comparative Literature
“Forms of Privacy: Reading Transparency in the Postwar Southern Novel”
As the American South became interracial, suburban, and air-conditioned, the tendency in the region and beyond was to assert the South’s distinction. The postwar U.S. was perceived as a public, urban and global nation. In reaction to this sense, American intellectuals across a range of disciplines created an idea of the South as the seat of American authenticity. Dore will be working on a book entitled Forms of Privacy: Reading Transparency in the Postwar Southern Novel, which argues that southern novelists of the era created a different idea of the South to contrast this notion, instead responding to integration by creating a self-consciously inauthentic, “transparent” aesthetic that resembled low art forms like television and rock and roll music.
Carmen Hsu, Burress Faculty Fellow
Associate Professor, Department of Romance Languages and Literatures
“Kingdoms, Peoples, and Manners in Distant Lands: Chronicles of East Asia in Early Modern Spain”
Hsu’s current book project investigates how East Asia was represented in early modern Spanish historiography written between 1577 and 1619 by authors from dissimilar backgrounds, including missionaries, soldiers, civil administrators, poets and merchants. The study will evaluate the ways in which political and religious factors, contemporary intellectual concerns, and earlier literary conventions such as Greco-Roman and medieval images of Asia contributed to early modern Spain’s notion of East Asia. The goal is to reassess the concept of the “chronicle of the Indies” and to deepen the understanding of the making of the early modern Spanish worldview.
Todd Ramon Ochoa, Edith Lewis Bernstein Fellow
Assistant Professor, Department of Religious Studies
“Bembé: Creole Becoming and the Limits of Representation”
Ochoa’s project is a book on an African-inspired Cuban religion called Bembé in which he will explore how to characterize a religion that cultivates cultural and ethnic differences inherited from slave history as resources for the production of new ritual forms. Bembé is founded on a combination of Ewe-Fon (West African), Kongo (Central African) and Spanish Catholic cultures, and this book will be an ethnographic treatment of a rural Bembé community that will require the production of a new descriptive and analytical language capable of conveying their lives and traditions. Ochoa aims to challenge how we think not only about Afro-Cuban religion, but about the religions of the African Diaspora as a whole.
Hong-An Truong, J. Scott and Nancy Cramer Fellow/Creative Campus Fellow
Assistant Professor, Department of Art
“A Chilly Night at a Desolate Palace”
Using performance, Truong will a create a new video work that juxtaposes Stravinsky’s 1913 ballet The Rite of Spring and cai-luong, a form of Vietnamese folk opera created contemporaneously in the early 1900s during French colonialism. Working with cai-luong performers, this video will re-imagine narrative and performance aspects of The Rite of Spring and “A Chilly Night at a Desolate Palace,” a tragic cai-luong story about two lovers torn between their feelings and responsibilities towards their countries. Informed by the avant-garde work of filmmakers such as Jean Rouch and Maya Deren, “A Chilly Night at a Desolate Palace” will be an experimental ethnography of performance that explores the colonial, historical and aesthetic intersections between The Rite of Spring and cai-luong.
Heather Williams, Nelson Schwab III Fellow
Professor, Department of History
“Jamaican Journeys”
Williams will spend her fellowship working on an oral history project about the stream of Jamaican immigrants who entered the U.S. between 1965 and 1980, during the Civil Rights Movement. She plans to record the personal narratives of Jamaican men and women, capturing accounts of their experiences in Jamaica and of migrating to the U.S. Many of the people in this cohort of immigrants experienced racism, both from African American and white communities, for the first time in their lives, and they encountered these questions of race and racial identity at a particular moment in American history in which public policy underwent profound change. This oral history archive will be of both popular and scholarly significance, and Williams aims to produce a documentary film to be used in courses and to make the interviews accessible to a wider audience.
The IAH Faculty Advisory Board selects new classes of Fellows in the fall each year. Please visit our Faculty Fellows page for more information.
Academic Leadership Program
In addition, the IAH is pleased to announce the eight faculty members chosen to participate in our 2013 Academic Leadership Program (ALP). The ALP provides an environment for honest discussion and cultivates leadership skills and long-term networking.
Activities for the ALP participants include weekend retreats, weekly meetings in Hyde Hall and off-site leadership development workshops, including a five-day intensive leadership development training experience at the Center for Creative Leadership in Greensboro, N.C. IAH Associate Director Kim Strom-Gottfried; Rob Kramer, founder of Kramer Leadership; and Jeanine Simmons, IAH Coordinator for Faculty Programs, lead the ALP.
The following faculty members make up the 2013 forum of the ALP:
Cheryl Mason Bolick
School of Education
Jan Boxill
College of Arts and Sciences, Department of Philosophy
Kia Caldwell
College of Arts and Sciences, Department of African and African-American Studies
Michael Gerhardt
School of Law
Janet Guthmiller
School of Dentistry
Mark Katz
College of Arts and Sciences, Department of Music
Randall Styers
College of Arts and Sciences, Department of Religious Studies
Anthony Viera
School of Medicine, Family Medicine
Nadia Yaqub
College of Arts and Sciences, Department of Asian Studies
Please visit our ALP page for more information, including eligibility and application requirements.