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Humanities Institute names fellows

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  • Jennifer Gaynor

  • Trina Hamilton

  • David Herzberg

  • Carolyn Higbie

  • Jon Nelson

  • Sasha Pack

  • Ramon Soto-Crespo

  • Hadas Steiner

  • Camilo Trumper

  • Ewa Ziarek

By PATRICIA DONOVAN
Published: Aug. 4, 2011

The Humanities Institute, which promotes innovative, cross-disciplinary research, teaching and community programs in the humanities, has announced the recipients of its 2011-12 Faculty Fellowships.

The fellowships, which are awarded competitively, support a full semester’s leave to permit recipients to devote themselves exclusively to their research.

“We are delighted to partner this year with the Office of the Vice President for Research (OVPR) to increase support for research in the humanities,” says Erik R. Seeman, professor of history, who became director of the Humanities Institute on July 1.

“The OVPR has generously offered to fund two faculty fellowships and we have named these the OVPR/HI Fellowships. The inaugural recipients are Jennifer Gaynor, assistant professor of history, and Jon Nelson, associate professor of music,” Seeman says.

The 2011-12 Fellows and their research projects are:

  • Jennifer Gaynor, assistant professor of history, College of Arts and Sciences, who specializes in maritime Southeast Asia, a region that lends itself to the exploration of histories not framed by state-centered geographies. Her current research project, “Archipelagic Mobility and Same Narrative Transformation,” speaks to the histories of capture, subordination and translocation, and foregrounds the analytical relevance of cultural production by those invested in how the past is retold.
  • Trina Hamilton, assistant professor of geography, CAS, a human geographer who teaches and publishes on corporate social and environmental responsibility, global governance networks, international trade and diverse economies. Her project, “Market Fictions: Constructing Ethical Spaces for the Global Diamond Trade,” analyzes multiple challenges to narratives that describe Canada’s purported monopoly on ethical diamond production.
  • David Herzberg, assistant professor of history, CAS, an expert on modern U.S. history, with particular emphasis on medicines, drugs, popular culture and consumerism. His research project is titled “The Drug War in the Medicine Cabinet: Prescription Drug Addiction in the Age of Miracle Pills.” It will offer the first sustained look at the long history of the licit drug cultures that are regularly “discovered” and touted as new and ominous social problems.
  • Carolyn Higbie, Park Professor of the Classics, CAS, a specialist in the study of ancient Greek epic poetry, history and historiography. Her project, “Imaginative Memory: The Discovery, Reconstruction and Forgery of the Greek Past,” examines a neglected part of Greek intellectual history: the importance of the past to Greeks from the fifth century BC through the second century AD. She will consider why their past mattered to them and how they reconstructed it, even going to far as to support their version of it through forgeries and fakes.
  • Jon Nelson, associate professor of music, CAS, an active performer, teacher, producer and collaborator. He has performed extensively throughout the world, is a founding member of the internationally recognized Meridian Arts Ensemble and can be heard on more than 50 CD recordings featuring such artists as Frank Zappa, Milton Babbitt, Duran Duran, Pierre Boulez, Arto Lindsay and Marisa Monte. For his project, “Switching on the Lights: The Early 20th Century Musical Avant-Garde Goes Electric,” he will adapt and re-orchestrate avant-garde works by von Webern, Stravinsky, Verese, Bartok, Debusy, Ives, Satie, Prokofiev and Ravel for a 10-piece electro-acoustic ensemble.
  • Sasha Pack, associate professor of history, CAS, author of “Tourism and Dictatorship: Europe’s Peaceful Invasion of Franco’s Spain” (New York, 2006), which won the Best First Book Prize from the Association for Spanish and Portuguese Historical Studies, and has appeared in Spanish translation. Pack’s research study, “Europe’s Deepest Border: The Making of the Modern Strait of Gibraltar,” examines the history of the strait since roughly 1860 and how it has bedeviled attempts at border security by kingdoms, empires, alliances and federations operating in that Euro-African space. The work will suggest new interpretive directions for the international history of Western Europe and North Africa during the period under consideration.
  • Ramon E. Soto-Crespo, associate professor of American studies, CAS, director of the UB Latino Studies Program. His research project, “Primitive Futures: The Biopolitics of Sexual Identity in Latino American Culture,” is an interdisciplinary study of current male-male sexual practices in Spanish America, the Anglophone Caribbean and among Latino groups in the U.S. The study compares anthropological and health-related studies of HIV transmission and shows how state agencies tackle the epidemic by conceptualizing sexual practice in Westernized terms of identity.
  • Hadas Steiner, associate professor of architecture, School of Architecture and Planning, an architectural historian whose research concentrates on cross-pollinations of technological and cultural aspects of architectural fabrication in the postwar period. Her study, “Habitat and Home: A Study in Co-evolution” will provide an historical analysis of the evolving use of the terms “habitat, and by extension “ecology,” in architectural discourse, from the abortive “Charter of Habitat” proposed by Le Corbusier in 1949, through the work of influential artist and sociologist John McHale in the 1970s.
  • Camilo Trumper, assistant professor of American studies, a Latin American specialist interested in the connection between urban history, politics and the visual and material culture. His research project, “Ephemeral Histories: Politics, Public Space and Public Art in Allende’s Chile,” is a study of the emergence of alternative sites and forms of political debate at that point in Chilean political history. Using a wide range of interdisciplinary materials, he explores how those historically excluded from the public sphere used marches, public forms of art, protest, land and factory seizures and other tactics to turn the public space into a political arena, fashioning a novel form of political citizenship.
  • Ewa Ziarek, Julian Park Professor of Comparative Literature, CAS, founding director of the Humanities Institute and author of several books on feminist ethics and aesthetics, and modernism and gender. She will work on a new book project, “Natality and Biopolitics,” which explores possibilities and limitations of the feminist politics of “natality” (i.e., entry into the political order) in the age of biopolitics.