12 CAS Faculty Members Receive Funding for Research

BUFFALO, N.Y. -- Twelve faculty members in the College of Arts and Sciences have been named Humanities Institute research fellows for the 2008-09 academic year.

The research fellowships are offered to tenured and tenure-track faculty members engaged in humanistic research. The fellowships provide the fellows' departments with course replacement funds to free fellows from teaching obligations for a semester so they can focus on a major research project and participate in the Humanities Institute's programs, including lecture series, research projects and conferences organized by the institute.

Fellows are expected to share their research through a presentation -- either via a lecture, exhibition or performance -- that is open to the UB community and the general public.

The Humanities Institute received a record number of applications for fellowships this year, notes Tim Dean, professor in the Department of English and director of the Humanities Institute.

"The quality of applications was superb, showing that humanities research at UB is thriving and vital," Dean says. "We were extremely pleased to receive so many excellent applications from such a range of disciplines, and we tried to make awards across the full range of research areas. I personally am very excited to get to know these researchers next year and to build an interdisciplinary community of humanities research around the Humanities Institute."

Dean says that as the new director of the institute -- he assumed the post in January, succeeding the institute's founding director, Ewa Plonowska Ziarek, Julian Park Professor in the Department of Comparative Literature -- part of his mission involves reinvigorating the culture of research in the humanities at UB.

"The fellowship program is vital to that enterprise, and we were happy to award a record number of fellowships to outstanding researchers this year," he says, adding that CAS Dean Bruce McCombe has been very generous in providing funding for the Humanities Institute.

The 2008-09 Humanities Institute research fellows, their departments and research projects are:

• Ana Mariella Bacigalupo, associate professor, Department of Anthropology, "Living History Through Spirits: Memory, Forgetting and Shamanic Historical Consciousness in a Mapuche Community in Chile."

• Sarah Bay-Cheng, assistant professor, departments of Theatre and Dance and Media Study, "From the Avant-Garde to the Avatar: The Performing Body in the 20th Century."

• David Castillo, associate professor, Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, "Gallery of Baroque Horrors: Origins of the Fantastic in the Age of Curiosities."

• Neil Coffee, assistant professor, Department of Classics, "The Rhetoric of Economics in Classical Rome."

• Anthony Conrad, professor, Department of Media Study, "Realigning Alberti: Projection and Perspective."

• Joan Copjec, UB Distinguished Professor, Department of English, "The Imaginal World: Islam, Psychoanalysis and the Cinema of Abbas Kiaostami."

• Carole Emberton, assistant professor, Department of History, "Between the Law and the Lash: Race, Violence and American Citizenship in the Age of Slave Emancipation."

• Jeffrey Good, assistant professor, Department of Linguistics, "Towards an Areal Grammar of Lower Fungom."

• Elizabeth Otto, assistant professor, Department of Visual Studies, "Modernist Masculinities: Art & Photomontage in Interwar Germany."

• Theresa Runstedtler, assistant professor, Department of American Studies, "Journeymen: Boxing, Race and the Transnational World of Jack Johnson."

• Erik Seeman, associate professor, Department of History, "Death in the New World: Cross-Cultural Encounters, 1492-1800."

• Kari Winter, professor, Department of American Studies, "From Vermont Abolitionist to Virginia Slaveholder? Benjamin Franklin Prentiss and Antebellum Family Values."

For detailed abstracts of the fellows' research projects, go to http://humanitiesinstitute.buffalo.edu/fellowshipsresearch/fellows0809.shtml.