Fletcher Family Research Grants - Fall 2005

Pamela Ballinger, Professor of Sociology and Anthropology
Italy's Forgotten Refugees
This project consists in a book manuscript in preparation entitled Italy's Forgotten Refugees that examines the flight of ethnic Italians from Istria, a peninsula under Italian sovereignty until annexed by Yugoslavia after World War II. In the book, I contextualize this specific episode of population transfer in a wider picture of postwar refugee flows and refugee experiences. I am requesting monies from the Faculty Research Fund to conduct additional research necessary for completing Chapters Seven and Eight. I also plan to publish several journal articles, distinct from the book manuscript, as a result of this additional research.

Joanna Bosse, Assistant Professor of Ethnomusicology
Becoming Beautiful: Ballroom Dance and the Transformative Experience
I seek a Faculty Research Award to fund ethnographic research travel necessary for the completion of my book manuscript, tentatively titled, Becoming Beautiful: Ballroom Dance and the Transformative Experience. This ethnographic work explores themes of personal transformation, following middle class, cosmopolitan social dancers from the Midwest United States on a journey of personal change as they seek to become more beautiful and sexual through the performance of ballroom dance. Driven by the desire to become beautiful, confident, and sexual--socially encoded and culturally constructed concepts--these dancers engaged discourses of race, gender, class, and age through performance.

Nicola Denzey, Visiting Assistant Professor of History
The Bone Gatherers: Lost Women in Rome’s Ancient Underground
This application requests a Faculty Research Award to cover the publishing subventions for my forthcoming book, The Bone Gatherers: Lost Women in Rome’s Ancient Underground (under contract with Beacon Press). The book includes twelve black-and-white photographic reproductions and a map. Under the contractual terms of the press, the cost of the copyright permissions for these photographs is the author’s responsibility. The map, too, must be contracted out to a graphic artist. This expense is not covered by the press. I am seeking assistance to defray the artist’s costs and copyright costs of the images for my book.

Charles Dorn, Assistant Professor of Education
Educational Imperialism in the American Century
Sharing a belief in education’s capacity to improve people’s lives, a variety of formal and informal United States-based groups, including educators, missionaries, government officials, and professional associations, employed education to project “American” values into the international arena throughout the twentieth century. However, these groups were not unilaterally engaged in an imperial project. Instead, they held disparate conceptions of what constituted “American” values and chose significantly different strategies for promoting them. This Organization of American Historians panel discussion will examine these groups’ objectives while illuminating how an inability to avoid ideological constructions of “America” frequently undermined their intended efforts.

Kristen Ghodsee, Assistant Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies
The Miniskirt or the Veil? Gender, International Aid and Islamic Revivalism on the Edge of Europe.
My research examines the intersections between the recent resurgence in more “traditional” Islamic practices among Bulgaria’s Slavic Muslim minority (Pomaks) and the global flow of economic aid from international Islamic charities and foundations into the countries of the postsocialist world. Through in-depth interviewing and participant-observation, I am examining women’s and men’s culture among the Pomaks living in the two cities of Madan and Rudozem and the villages of Chepintzi and Trigrad, all within 15 kilometers of the Bulgarian/Greek border. Bulgaria’s Muslim community has historically professed a very moderate, syncretistic and almost secular version of Islam. As the political and economic situation in the region deteriorated after the collapse of Bulgarian communism in 1989, however, significant amounts of international aid began flowing into the region to help build new mosques, provide job training and create Koranic schools. Furthermore, some local youth have won full scholarships to study at Islamic secondary schools and universities in various Arab countries, and they have returned as bearers of new Islamic cultural practices that are alien to the region, but that are slowly growing in popularity. My study aims to understand the conflicts and compromises being made between the local Islamic traditions and the newly imported Islamic traditions from the Gulf states and from Iran, and what the implications of this new contact are for gender relations and gender identity in the region.

Jonathan Goldstein, Professor of Economics
Class Struggle in the North Maine Woods: The Reserve Army of Petty Capitalists
This project analyzes the unique nexus of power/class relations in Maine’s wood harvesting industry with a focus on the declining economic well-being of loggers from 1973 to 2000. The power relations analyzed are the concentrated ownership of land, the vertical integration of land ownership and mill operations, the monopsony power of employers of loggers and the response of loggers. The strategic responses of agents to these power relations are analyzed with an emphasis on the formation of the Maine Woodcutters Association and its aftermath (1975-1980) and changes in the employment contract used in landowners’ and paper companies’ logging operations.

Gary M. Green, Visiting Assistant Professor of Visual Art
Maine Trees: A Suite of Large Iris Giclée photographs
For the past two or so years I have been making photographs of trees using a traditional 8x10-inch view camera and an array of alternative and archaic processes, as well as contemporary digital technology and ink jet printing techniques. The images themselves are of a fairly traditional subject but the view of these trees — close up, cropped to show only their trunks and the background — are distinctly contemporary in their visual approach. It is the conjunction of these old and new views and technologies, and the dialog this tension creates, that form the core of this exploration.

Michael Kolster, Assistant Professor of Art
Time of Change: New Orleans Rebuilds
I propose to photograph the efforts to rebuild three specific residential neighborhoods in New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Over the course of two years this project will ask three questions: (i) What do these neighborhoods look like immediately after the water has been removed? (ii) What remains after all that cannot be salvaged is cleared away? (iii) What combination of new and vestiges of the old result? The photographs will comprise a time series tracking visual manifestations of the rebuilding process to reflect how we perceive change in the landscape.

Peter Lea, Professor of Geology
Recent Sedimentary Record of Androscoggin Lake
Androscoggin Lake, in Leeds and Wayne, Maine, normally lies a few feet above the Androscoggin River, and drains to that river. During high flow events, however, the water surface in the Androscoggin River rises, causing flow to reverse and bring water and sediment into Androscoggin Lake. I propose to collect, analyze and date several cores from Androscoggin Lake to construct records of human and climatic changes in the Androscoggin drainage over the past several millenia. These records will provide a comparison to records from intertidal sediments in Merrymeeting Bay, allowing a more-detailed view of environmental change in the region.

Stephen Perkinson, Assistant Professor of Art
The Manuscript Book at the Dawn of Printing
This application requests support for my new research project concerning a group of illuminated manuscripts produced c. 1450. Although these books were created at the precise moment of the invention of the printing press, they were produced entirely by hand in ways that are both traditional and innovative. My project will explore the images and texts in these manuscripts, seeking to clarify our understanding of this crucial period in cultural history. The funds would support research in Europe, enabling travel to libraries housing these manuscripts.

Thomas Pietraho, Assistant Professor of Mathematics
Geometric Decomposition of Associated Varieties and Highest Weight Theory
I am seeking travel support for collaboration with Professor David Vogan of MIT. This grant will support two projects. Our goals are to understand fundamental objects arising in representation theory from a geometric viewpoint, and study the decompositions of highest weight modules by studying their associated formal characters. Two coincidences enhance this proposal. The proposed trips will be coordinated with the weekly Lie Group Seminar at MIT, allowing me to attend the foremost seminar in this field. Second, Roman Bezrukavnikov, an expert at applying methods of equivariant K-theory in this context will be visiting MIT during this time. His input will be invaluable.

Irene Polinskaya, Assistant Professor of Classics
Epigraphic Evidence for the Cult of Zeus Pasios on Aegina
The project aims at preparing a new edition of an ancient inscription from the island of Aegina that mentions Zeus Pasios, presumably a deity of local cult.