Academic Affairs

Fletcher Family Award

My research includes conducting archival research at the Istituto Nazionale della Previdenza Sociale (INPS) in Rome during June 2009. INPS operated a colonial entity in Libya from 1934 to 1960. The INPS archive contains rich and varied documentation about how Italian colonialism ended and settlers made their way back to Italy. This research will inform a journal article on repatriation from former Italian possessions lost after World War II. This specific article will, in turn, become a chapter in my larger book project, Forgotten Refugees: Decolonization, Displaced Persons, and the Reconstruction of Italy.

Fletcher Family Award

Rooted in the sociology of class and the natural environment, this project is a study of how members of the U.S. rural working class define and negotiate the sometimes competing ideals of environmental protection and economic development.  Using interview methods, the study will focus on the case of rural working class communities that have stakes in the management of forest-related industries in Maine’s north woods.  While most sociological research in this area has focused on why working people do or do not join in environmental movements, this work will address how the historic development and social relationships of class structure have shaped different class-based orientations towards natural resource use.  This research will enhance scholarship on the forces that shape rural workers’ consciousness of environment and development in the U.S., and contribute to policy discussions about models of green forms of development and natural resource management in rural America.

Fletcher Family Award

This project seeks funding for two short research trips.  The first is to travel to the rare book room at the Smith College library to study artist’s books by breast cancer activist Martha Hall so that I may finish revisions of an invited chapter in the Sage Handbook of Qualitative Health Research (“Visual Methods for Collecting and Analyzing Health Data”), and the second is to travel to the studio of Anna Schuleit in New Hampshire to interview Schuleit about two of her works of art, “Habeas Corpus” and “Bloom,” for an article-length manuscript, “Claiming Justice: Anna Schuleit's Celebration and Memorialization of Asylums and the People Who Lived and Worked in Them," to be submitted for publication in a special issue about representations of illness in the journal health.

Fletcher Family Award

This is an application for covering work needed to finish a complicated index of priests (with Middle Eastern names) in my book The Great Stem of Souls: Reconstructing Mandaean History (Gorgias Press, Piscataway, NJ), published first in 2005 and then, in a corrected version in 2006.

Faculty Research Award

The letters shed a revealing personal and professional light on Drowe's scholarly cirlce and on a particular era in the history of 20th century Near Eastern Scholarship. Lady E.S. Drower (1879-1972) was a pioneering figure in Mandaean studies, mainly due to her decades of fieldwork in Iraq and her securing of many Mandaean manuscripts, which came to constitute the Drower Collection at the Bodleian Library, Oxford University in the 1950's.

Fletcher Family Award

This paper analyzes the impact of liberalized trade on the welfare of households. While there is a
broad consensus in the literature that free trade generates economy-wide welfare gains, little
attention has been placed on the distributional effects of trade liberalization reforms on households
that differ in terms of income, age, education and location. Focusing on the case of Ecuador, and
using household-level data, we construct an Applied General Equilibrium Model in order to
quantitatively assess the potential impact of a Free Trade Agreement between the United States and
Ecuador on the different types of Ecuadorian households.
This project is joint work with Stanley Cho, Lecturer at the University of New South Wales
(UNSW) in Sydney, Australia.

Faculty Research Award

This application for a Faculty Research Award requests support for my most recent series of photographic work, entitled “Camera Sight.” In this body of work I am photographically examining the notion of the photographic moment itself, as well as examining some of the disciplinary structures surrounding how we hold and use cameras. I am also exploring various approaches to/uses of photographic technologies, looking at confronting—and hopefully defying—photographic expectation.

Fletcher Family Award

"Kopitar & the Russians"; Book

A thorough assessment of Jernej Kopitar’s (1780-1844) attitudes toward Russia and her scholars from ca. 1800 until his death. After discussing Kopitar’s thought and his place in the intellectual life of Central Europe in the first half of the 19^th cen., analyzes the evolution of these attitudes as reflected in his published writings and extensive correspondence.

Jernej Kopitar & the Nature of Slovene Nationalism”; article.

A study of the roots of Slovene nationalism and Kopitar’s role in its development; argues that the unique combination of Enlightenment and Romantic principles in the thinking of Kopitar and his associates produced the blend of cosmopolitanism and particularism that characterizes modern Slovene culture.

Fletcher Family Award

The rise of digital technologies has the potential to open new directions in collaborative
ethnography. Despite the ubiquity of these technologies, their infiltration into popular
sociological research methods is still limited compared to the uptake of older Web 1.0
applications such as e-mail and online scholarly research portals. Building upon my
existing work in ‘digital ethnography’, this project will use the cutting edge Web 2.0
technology of Twitter, a web-based application to which users send mobile phone ‘text
messages’. I will use this technology to conduct digital ethnographic research on a
specific musical community, ‘The Taqwacores’, an international Muslim punk music
scene which largely began in Boston. My project will involve the design and creation of
a research website, ‘taqwaTWEET’. I would employ two students - one as a fieldwork
assistant and one to assist with the programming- related aspects of the taqwaTWEET
website. A professional technology consultant would also be retained to help with
designing some of the technical aspects of this project.

Fletcher Family Award

This proposal is for funding for a 30 day trip to Dalian, China. I will spend that time updating a book manuscript. The manuscript is finished, has been reviewed, and I will be doing final revisions and updates this summer (2009). Stanford University Press has expressed strong interest in publishing it, but have requested I include an update on my previous research. In Dalian, I plan to do follow-up interviews with people I have worked with previously, and to collect information about changes in the area (such as population changes, factory growth or decline, make-up and origin of population).

Fletcher Family Award

This Faculty Research Award would partially fund recording engineering, editing, art design, and producer’s fees for the premiere recording of my composition Throw Down or Shut Up! (scored for baritone saxophone, guitar, percussion, and piano).  Performers for the recording are the highly regarded New York-based new-music quartet Flexible Music, and New Focus Recordings will release the disc.  In Throw Down or Shut Up! (2005), I sought to marry the harmonic and scalar language of 20^th-century French composer Olivier Messiaen to the “groove”-based syncopated rhythmic language of James Brown.

Fletcher Family Award

In an overwhelmingly Catholic country, religion is intertwined with state and civil society. Although many of the institutional sites of caring for children—orphanages and centers for street children—are run and maintained by transnational religious organizations (including the Catholic Church and evangelical Protestant churches), adoption is also shaped by state legal policies and procedures and increasingly by nationalist rhetoric that criticizes the adoption of Bolivian children by foreigners. Almost no research on the historical development of legal adoption in Bolivia, the contemporary institutional framework for adoption and fostering of children, or the public perceptions of (national or transnational) adoption has been published in English. This is crucial contextual information that I will gather through interviewing scholars and adoption professionals and visiting research centers and archives in La Paz, Cochabamba and Sucre.