Academic Affairs

Fletcher Family Award

The proposal is for funding for travel to the Medical Anthropology conference and the Eastern Sociological Society conference. At the Medical Anthropology conference, Susan Bell presented a paper, "Transnational Patterns of Gender, Sexuality, and Medicalization," that looks critically at a key concept in medical sociology and anthropology - "medicalization" - and reviews its history through the lens of recent feminist and gender scholarship. Bell will participate in two panels at the Eastern Sociological Society: an Author Meets Critics panel in which she is the author and three critics discuss her recently published book, DES Daughters, and "Women in Sociology: Then and Now," where Bell will discuss her perspectives on women's changing experiences in academia.

Fletcher Family Award

In the American Academy of Religion, Jorunn J. Buckley has acted as co-chair for five years of the Critical Theory and Discourses on Religion Group, which sponsored four sessions at the meeting - and also took part in arranging a fifth. Buckley served as presider over the Religion and Revolution Session. In addition, Buckley presented a paper in the Religion, Memory, and Consultation: "Mandaean Colophons as Ethnic Memory." The paper marks a summary of Buckley's current status of research in Gnostic Mandaean religious history. Buckley plans to write at least two new articles related to the topic: one on specific Mesopotamian priestly Mandaean families that allowed women priests (concentrated around the 15th to 7th centuries), and one on the socio-political contexts of two Mandaean priestly dynasties in southern Iraq in the earliest Islamic period (7th-8th centuries).

At the annual meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature, Buckley gave a paper: "Mandaen-Sethian Baptism Connections," in a multisponsored venue: Religious World of late Antiquity Group/Social History and Formative Christianity and Judaism Section/History and Literature of the Early Rabbinic Judaism Section. This paper represents relatively new research, answering a call that a colleague of mine voiced in 1975: to connect texts known from the Egyptian Coptic-Gnostic Nag Hammadi literature with Gnostic Mandaen literature. This study is the first of its kind in the task of cross-Gnostic baptism ritual investigation, including a severe critique of a Canadian colleague's work from the eighties. The paper forms part of a set of projected essays on Mandaen baptism.

Fletcher Family Award

This project seeks partial funding for travel to Dallas and Galveston, Texas to attend the 2010 meeting of the Population Association of America and to collaborate with co-author Rebecca Wong (University of Texas Medical Branch, Sealy Center on Aging, Galveston) on an ongoing research project on the determinants of economic status of the elderly in Mexico. At the meeting, DeGraff will serve as a discussant for a session on gender and the division of labor within households in developing countries. These meetings are important in terms of renewing contacts with colleagues at other institutions, initiating new professional relationships and attending sessions closely related to her areas of research. DeGraff and Wong are collaborating on a second paper which utilizes a novel approach to addressing a methodological issue inherent in socioeconomic status of the elderly that identifies the effects of early-life behaviors on later-life outcomes.

Fletcher Family Award

Miller's research addresses literature's participation in social critique, which has been a central concern in the German context since the 1960s. At the 2009 MLA conference's "Sites of the Aesthetic" panel, Miller delivered his paper, "Literary Experiment and Social Mapping: Orientation in the Works of Uwe Johnson and Alexander Kluge", which compares literary-aesthetic mediations of orientation in the writers Johnson and Kluge. The paper is directly related to his current book project, Literary Experiment and Social Mapping: Toward a Geo-criticism of German Literature in the Cold War, which examines German literary works from 1961-1990 that explore questions of temporal and spatial orientation in society.

Faculty Research Award

This proposal seeks funding to support the cost of indexing Henry's book, Red to Green: Environmental Activism in Post-Soviet Russia, which is currently in press with Cornell University Press. The book challenges the conventional wisdom that Russia's civil society is uniformly weak by revealing the diverse strategies of activism and organization that exist in Russia society, chronicling the evolution of Russia's environmental movement from the mid-1990s to the present day.

Fletcher Family Award

Currently in the collection of the Palace Museum, Beijing, Night Banquet of the Han Xizai depicts five scenes of evening entertainment with suggestive erotic vignettes, which have been the focus of interpretation and debate over the past millennium. This project uses the infamous Chinese painting as a lens to examine cultural practices that literally and figuratively surround Chinese painting. Traditionally, the acts of collecting and viewing art led to physical changes to the artwork itself. Such changes often included long texts that mediated and altered the painting's meaning. This study examines such textual additions in order to understand the painting as a complex co-creation of painter and audiences over the centuries. In effect, it recasts a question central to art history: what is the role of art in a society?

Faculty Research Award

Vete-Congolo's book fills in a significant gap in comparative studies on Caribbean oral texts in the three main languages spoken in the region. It offers new approaches in the interpretation of the Caribbean folk tales in relation to history, politics, philosophy and psychology. The bulk of the argumentation rests on my presentation of the system of oral tales from the Caribbean as the most distinctive factor characterizing Caribbean identity. It was orality, she argues, that constituted the first most important means through which the African presence was retained in the Americas.

Rusack Fund Award

This project examines the politics of property in and along water in Croatia, an area undergoing dramatic transformations as a result of its integration into the global economy after five decades of socialism under Yugoslavia. Croatia also seeks integration into wider political networks, having become a candidate for European Union membership in 2004. Through participant-observation and interviewing, I explore interrelated contests over access to and ownership of Croatia's waters, coast, and marine resources. Fieldwork in the summer of 2010 will examine the failure of efforts to establish a marine protected area off the island of Losinj.

Fletcher Family Award

This project examines symbolic and conceptual features of class among residents of the South Indian city of Madurai. It focuses on four topics: 1) conceptual models of class, 2) display and interpretation of class through symbolic markers, 3) emerging class identities and their relation to economic changes, and 4) interactions of class with other forms of hierarchy and identity.

Fletcher Family Award

Between 1946 and 1989, the communist government in Bulgaria supported an ideological regime that undermined religion and promoted atheism. Despite this, the state maintained close links with all of Bulgaria's traditional religious communities and worked together with religious leaders to promote socialist agendas. After 1989, religious freedoms were guaranteed in the constitution, but the legacy of state interference with religion continues, ostensibly to protect the rights of religious minorities as well as atheists. Today, Bulgaria is one of the few countries in the world that offers constitutional protection of "non-believers." My research project will examine how faculty and students at Bulgarian schools of theology understand the relationship between government and religious institutions.

Fletcher Family Award

At the center of this project is the collective experience of tens of thousands of devout Russian Orthodox believers who defied norms of faith, authority and identity by claiming personal salvation through the teachings and prayers of the charismatic lay preacher Ioann Churikov (1861-1933). Both marginalized and persecuted for their unorthodox Orthodoxy, they provide an ideal case study through which the explore patterns of religious toleration and cultural pluralism over the course of Russia's 20th century. They are also a valuable resource for studying Orthodox and socialist praxis, and analyzing the relationship between Orthodox and socialist frameworks of meaning.

Fletcher Family Award

Funding from this award will pay for analysis of metal artefacts recovered from the DGB-1 (Kuva) site, a large Iron Age archaeological site in the northern Mandara Mountains of Cameroon. These materials were recovered during excavation in the summer of 2008, and include some for the first non-local artefacts (probably originating in North Africa) recovered from sites in this part of the southern Lake Chad Basin. Analysis will include conversation and archaeometallurgical characterization fo the artefacts, and will provide invaluable information about the site's economic and political relations in the mid-second millennium AD.

Fletcher Family Award

From 1938 to 1940, Secretary of State Cordell Hull's trade agreements program continued apace even as circumstances made it obsolete. The agreements, Hull argued, offered "the only sound foundation for world peace"; by September, 1939, the salient fact of the world was war. What specific ideas about the connection between international trade and world peace caused Hull and his subordinates to continue to press for the program? This project seeks to answer this and related questions using archival evidence from the State Department's Trade Agreements Division, the Interdepartmental Committee on Trade Agreements, and other collections of personal and government records.

Fletcher Family Award

Though Nicholas Copernicus (d. 1543 C.E.) did not cite any astronomer within 200 years of his lifetime, specialists in Copernican studies agree that he had sources. In addition to some European sources, there is overwhelming circumstantial evidence that Copernicus knew of recent developments in astronomy in Islamic civilization (Islamic astronomy). Because Copernicus did not read Arabic, the question of how he could have learned of Islamic astronomy is complicated. This project seeks ot identify the role that Jewish scholars plays in transmitting Islamic astronomy to Copernicus and other Renaissance scholars.

Research Award

Perkinson has been offered a short residency at the Nierländisches Forum (NF), which is associated with the Freie Universität in Berlin. During his residency, Perkinson will present a scholarly lecture, and will have the opportunity to take part in discussions with a number of prominent scholars on a new research project: a rethinking of the category of "court art" produced in Europe between the thirteenth and sixteenth century.

Fletcher Family Award

The 1963 March on Washington, the centerpiece of which was Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech, played a key and then formative role in the nation's history. Women played a significant role in the organizing that led up to the March as well as in the larger civil rights struggle of which the March was a part. Yet before and during the March on Washington, women were largely ignored by the male organizational leadership and by the media. This book project is a series of linked biographies of five women who sat on the podium at the March.