Resident Fellows
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Susan K. Harris is the Hall Distinguished Professor of American Literature and Culture. She has MA degrees from Stanford and Cornell and a PhD in English and History from Cornell. Harris specializes in 19th-Century American literature, both women's fiction and the writings of Mark Twain. Her books include 19th-Century American Women's Novels (Cambridge University Press, 1990); The Courtship of Olivia Langdon and Mark Twain (CUP, 1996); and The Work of the Late Nineteenth-Century Hostess (Palgrave, 2002). She also edited Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Houghton Mifflin, 2000) and has written over twenty articles, essays and chapters on Mark Twain, Harriet Beecher Stowe and American Women's Fiction. View Vita (PDF) |
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Anthony Corbeill will complete his third book, Boundaries of Sex and Gender in Ancient Rome. The project analyzes five different areas in which ancient Roman sources treat the categories that we label “sex” and “gender.” Individual chapters cover: the supposed origins of grammatical gender and its relationship with biological sex; how Latin poets manipulate noun gender for literary purposes; the existence in archaic Rome of gods displaying both male and female characteristics; the treatment of hermaphrodites; and the development of the myth of Ganymede, boy-lover of Jupiter. By adopting a roughly chronological survey of these disparate topics, he explores how the boundary between biological sex and social gender was defined, preserved, and contested. An introduction will discuss how research into Roman grammar, poetry, and theology can contribute to twenty-first century debates over sex roles and the maintenance of “compulsory heterosexuality.”
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Byron Caminero-Santangelo will work on his project, “The Greening of African Literatures,” in which he addresses the gap between “ecocriticism” (literary studies focused on environmentalist issues) and the concerns of African authors and critics. Thirteen years ago, the martyrdom of Nigerian writer and environmental activist Ken Saro-Wiwa helped bring attention to grave environmental problems faced by Africa and to the significant role writers can play in the struggle for environmental justice. Yet, little literary scholarship has explored the intersection of African literatures and “ecocriticism.” In his project, Caminero-Santangelo examines both how an environmental lens offers fascinating new ways of looking at African literary texts, and how those texts can be a means to revise and revitalize ecocriticism itself. In the process, he argues that African literatures can help us understand the pitfalls of prominent projects for environmental sustainability and imagine alternative models that will address these pitfalls. |
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Garth Myers will focus on writing three chapters of his book, African Postmetropolis: Urban Theory and Contemporary Zanzibar. He seeks to contribute to a broad effort among African studies scholars to transform debates and discussions across the world of urban studies through engagement with the vibrancy and complexity of African cities. As African societies come to live in cities, they do so in ways that challenge prevailing urban theories and models. Yet major debates in urban studies bypass the continent or use its cities merely as exemplary dystopias. He is building the book largely around his recent research in Zanzibar, but he will also illustrate his case with historical, literary, and ethnographic research results from other African cities, including Dodoma, Dar es Salaam, Mogadishu, Lusaka, and Cape Town. |
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Svetlana Vassileva-Karagyozova will work on her book project, “Communism through the Eyes of a Child.” Her research examines a selection of Polish pseudo-autobiographical novels that were published after 1989 but that depict the characters’ coming of age prior to the fall of Communism. The initiation novels of this last communist generation atomize the grand narrative of “official” history by presenting individual accounts of people’s lives from the narratorial perspective of a social outsider. The project investigates the three major institutions that shaped Polish youth: the family unit, the socialist school system, and the Catholic Church. It argues that young Poles were given no opportunity to negotiate their belief systems and structure independent identities. As a result their initiation into adulthood was prematurely aborted or voluntarily suspended, leading in some cases to suicide and in others to a lonely existence on the margins of society. |
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Thomas Huang will use the Creative Work Fellowship to work on his project entitled “Compound curvilinear forms: construction methods derived from the bamboo canoe project.” He will use boat forms to explore and understand the Chinese immigrant experience: the vessel, the movement, the migration, the spirit of hope, wonder and apprehension in the unknown, the traditions of navigating the uncharted, and the displacement. Specifically, he will explore the potential of using bamboo in place of the traditional cedar strips used in the construction of cedar strip canoes. He has been invited to exhibit his furniture and sculpture work at the Center for Furniture Craftsmanship at Wexler Gallery in Philadelphia. At the Hall Center, he will document this body of work through photography and video, and turn this documentation into instructional media for the classroom and for publication.
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PAST HALL CENTER HUMANITIES RESEARCH & CREATIVE WORK FELLOWS |
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SIAS GRADUATE FELLOWSHIP IN THE HUMANITIES |
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Keri Behre, doctoral candidate in English, was selected to receive the Richard and Jeannette Sias Graduate Fellowship in the Humanities. Behre will spend the 2009–2010 academic year in residence at the Center completing her dissertation and assisting in public humanities work. Her dissertation project, titled “Appetite and Authority on the Early Modern English Stage,” examines the representation and regulation of bodies in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century English drama, seeking new understandings of how early modern identities were established and maintained through food. |
Featured Resident Fellow
Garth Myers
Humanities Research Fellow
During his residency in the Fall of 2009, Garth Myers will focus on writing three chapters of his book, African Postmetropolis: Urban Theory and Contemporary Zanzibar.
Featured Publication
A Passion for Nature: The Life of John Muir
by Donald Worster
Moving Encounters: Sympathy and the Indian Question in Antebellum Literature
by Laura Mielke
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