Current Mellon Fellows: 2011-2012

Elizabeth L. Bennett is an art historian and visual culture theorist specializing in twentieth and twenty-first-century material culture in the United States. She earned her B.A. from Denison University and Ph.D. in the History of Art from the University of California, Berkeley.
Her current book project, “Economies of Valuation and Desire: How New Deal Photography Remade the Old Order Amish,” considers the earliest American photographs
to depict consensual Old Order Amish subjects in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania.
Intervening in the art historical narratives of both the visual culture of the New Deal and twentieth-century representations of religious subcultures in the U.S., the study provides an alternative model for the Great Depression as a historical narrative and popular concept. To the fields of Religious Studies and Visual Culture Studies, it also contributes a critical assessment of photographs of the photography-averse Amish, a subject that has not received consideration in any discipline. Elizabeth argues that these photographs evidence an understudied legacy of New Deal photography: the establishment of ethnographic and anthropological ways of looking with the camera in a domestic context. In these images of the Amish, we see the camera deployed as a mode of surveillance in the countryside, a tool for social gardening with which the vulnerabilities of peripheral populations could be identified, ordered, and “corrected.”

Elizabeth’s research interests extend to the objects and sites of tourism, peripheral American geographies (specifically Guam, Puerto Rico, and other unincorporated Territories of the United States), and vision and dromology.

Elizabeth will be hosted by the Department of Art and Art History

Sarah Carey specializes in nineteenth and twentieth-century Italian literature, visual culture and cinema. She received her B.A. from Stanford University in 2002 and her Ph.D. from UCLA in 2010. Sarah is at work on a book entitled Envisioning Italy: Photography and the Narrating of a Nation, which explores the intersections of photography, literature, and cinema and their connection to the birth and evolution of the Italian nation-state. Such a study, which would be one of the first full-length works in English on the subject, aspires to show how the integration of photography into literary and filmic texts is idiosyncratic–a direct result of Italian visual traditions and the nation’s need to narrate its own story. She has published in Quaderni d’Italianistica, Italian Culture, and CARTE ITALIANE, and has a number of recent and forthcoming publications, including an article just released on alternative outlaws in Italian cinema by the Society for the Interdisciplinary Study of Social Imagery; an essay on photography in Vittorio Imbriani’s 1867 novel Merope IV that will be included in the collection Enlightening Encounters Between Photography and Italian Literature; and a comparative study of the works of Ada Negri, Elsa Morante, and Lalla Romano in the next issue of California Italian Studies. Sarah currently teaches Italian cinema and literature for the Department of French and Italian at Stanford. Her course offerings include “Rebels, Outlaws & Iconoclasts: Italian Cinema from 1943 to 1975,” “Modern Italian History & Literature,” “Italianità: Photography / Literature / Film,” and “Contemporary Italian Cinema: Politics & Spectacle.”

Email [email protected]

Jorah comes to the Mellon Fellowship from UCLA, where he earned his PhD in Philosophy in 2010. In his dissertation, Promising as Paradigm, he explored and criticized the treatment of promising in contemporary moral philosophy. He then presented a novel way of understanding the activity that locates the fundamental source of the bond of a promise in the promisor’s own will.

He is currently turning one of the chapters from his dissertation, about promising to ourselves, into a journal article. He is also writing an article on the phenomenon philosophers call “moral luck,” focusing in particular on whether the recognition that we can be morally lucky or unlucky should make us wonder whether our commitment to morality rests on false pretenses.

Jorah is teaching Philosophy 2: Introduction to Moral Philosophy in the winter, and Philosophy 270: Ethical Theory in the spring.

Email: [email protected]

Julie Draskoczy’s work on the Gulag combines her interests in Stalinism, criminal culture and Soviet subjectivity. Her book project, "Belomor: Criminality and Creativity in Stalin's Gulag," explores the cultural narratives surrounding the construction of Stalin’s White-Sea Baltic Canal, a forced-labor project completed in the Soviet Union in 1933. In 2010, she received her PhD in Russian literature from the University of Pittsburgh, with concentrations in Cultural and Jewish Studies. Julie also works closely with Film Studies and publishes on contemporary Russian cinema. She brings her research into the classroom by teaching university-level English and History courses in San Quentin prison through the Prison University project.

Julie earned a dual degree in Slavic Studies and Comparative Literature at New York University, writing her honors thesis on Stalin’s legacy in samizdat literature. After receiving her BA, she served as an editorial assistant for the YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe. She currently volunteers for the Memorial organization for the protection of human rights in Russia. In the winter quarter, Julie is teaching a self-designed course, "Incarceration as Inspiration: Cross-Cultural Prison Narratives," which focuses on Russian and American penitentiary writing.

Email: [email protected]

Ozgen Felek is Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Religious Studies. She received her first Ph.D. from Firat University (Turkey) in classical Ottoman poetry with a
focus on the Sebk-i Hindi (Indian Style) poetical movement, and her second Ph.D. in the Near Eastern Studies from the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor with an emphasis on Ottoman dream culture and Sufism. She is the co-editor of Victoria Holbrook’a Armagan (Kanat 2006) and Dreams and Visions in Islamic Societies (SUNY 2012). She is particularly interested in religion as the intersection of theology and life. Her study of literature focuses on mystical thought as an expression of the emotional dimension of religions and the spirituality of religious culture, including also its manifestations in art, music, and dance. Her research interests encompass topics as varied as Sufism, Islamic literature, dream culture, religious storytelling in medieval Islamic culture, the narrative aspects and the theatricality of texts, the presentation of violence in medieval and early modern period Sufi texts, and the construction of sexuality and gender identity in hagiographical accounts. She taught in Turkey and the United States courses on religion, language, culture, history, and studio painting, namely Islamic Art of Illumination.

Email: [email protected]

Patrick Iber became a Mellon fellow in 2011 after completing his doctorate at the University of Chicago. His work, situated at the intersection of cultural, political, and intellectual history, focuses on Latin American intellectuals and their engagement with the cultural Cold War. His dissertation, "The Imperialism of Liberty: Intellectuals and the Politics of Culture in Cold War Latin America," explores the actions across Latin America of the two central "front" groups of the early Cold War, the Partisans of Peace and the Congress for Cultural Freedom. In spite of the considerable ignominy on display in those organizations, he continues to believe in the importance of the public intellectual, and has published in magazines such as Nexos, Letras Libres, and the Chicago Review. His future plans include works on the politics of poverty in the Americas and the history of Latin American social democracy.

At Stanford, Patrick is teaching a survey lecture in Latin American history as well as a more specialized course in the history of modern Mexico. In the past, he has taught courses in U.S.-Latin American relations and in the history of Central America. Prior to grad school, he taught in public school classrooms in Texas, California, and Central America.

Email: [email protected]

Minku Kim is an art historian specializing in the Buddhist art and material culture of China. He earned his Ph.D. from the Department of Art History at the University of California, Los Angeles and his M.A. and B.A. from the Department of Archaeology and Art History at Seoul National University (Korea). His primary research concerns Buddhist images and ritual architecture during the Six Dynasties period (220-589 CE).

His dissertation, “The Genesis of Image Worship: Epigraphic Evidence for Early Buddhist Art in China," examined the acculturation process by which the “alien” practice of image worship came to be accepted into Chinese societies. The study offered a new understanding, based on archaeological and epigraphic analysis, of the agencies and stages through which Buddhist ritual practice gradually became incorporated, against considerable odds, into the social mainstream.

Currently, Minku is revising his dissertation into two book-length monographs. First, Sculpture for Worship: The Buddhist Influx and the Rise of Image Cult in Early Imperial China investigates the formation and propagation of Buddhist image-making practices in Six Dynasties China, while addressing diverse topics related to the social value, varied uses, and reception of images, e.g., fetishism, iconophobia, and iconoclasm. Second, The Art of Buddhist Antiquarianism: Buddhist Epigraphic Data from Third-to-Fourth Century China engages with the traditional antiquarian study of Buddhist art in China before the advent of modern science. As a longstanding research project, he is intrigued by the comparative dynamic between Chinese epigraphic formulae and their Indian counterparts.

At the Stanford Department of East Asian Languages & Cultures, Minku is offering an undergraduate survey of Korean art and archaeology (KORGEN 170/ARCHLGY 201) and an advanced seminar on the culture of Buddhist image worship in China (CHINGEN 117/217). He has also taught various courses on Asian art and archaeology at UCLA, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (Taejŏn), and Dongguk University (Seoul).

Email: [email protected]

Seth Kimmel studies the literatures and cultures of medieval and early modern Iberia. He earned his B.A. in Comparative Literature and Religion from Columbia University and his Ph.D. from the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley. He joined Stanford’s Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship of Scholars in the Humanities in 2010.

His current book project, Erasing the Difference: The End of Islamic Iberia and the Transformation of the Disciplines, argues that early modern debates about the narratives, rituals, and languages shared among Old Christians and religious minorities in the Hispanic World reshaped the fields of theology and philology. The book, which examines inquisitorial guidebooks, scholastic commentaries, philological treatises, humanist correspondence, and both forged and canonical holy text, complicates conventional genealogies of tolerance, textual historicism, and religious reform.

Seth works with texts written in Spanish, French, Arabic, Latin, and Hebrew, and his other research interests include theories of secularism and religion, manuscript and early print culture, the history of cartography, and colonial narrative. He is currently teaching an introduction to medieval and early modern Iberian literature, and in the spring he will offer a seminar on the conventions of reading and the mechanics of textual production, circulation, and collection in the early modern period. Like the two graduate seminars he taught last year—“Secularism: The Boundaries of Religion in Early and Post-Modernity” and “Andalusian Iberias”—both of this year’s courses are in the Department of Iberian and Latin American Cultures.

Email: [email protected]

Beatrice studies the art of the early Middle Ages. Her dissertation project, which she is working to publish as a book, examines primarily 8th–10th-century images of the cross in pictorial media in which the cross is depicted as a material, physical object. In this form, the pictorial cross displays attributes similar to those of the metalwork cross-objects used in the Church's liturgical performance. She describes this pattern of representation as an intersection of media, of pictorial and liturgical space, and of historical, eschatological, and ritual time. The argument of the project turns upon the cross as a key to understanding instrumentality as an essential, emphasized, and even celebrated component of early medieval artwork. She emphasizes the centrality of manufacture to the self-proclaimed projects of medieval artwork, and the importance of visual strategies that establish an indispensable place for art within the world of the Church. She views manuscripts as experiential spaces as well as objects engaged in ritual performance; and is especially interested in analyzing narrative and symbolic modes in early medieval painting. She studies neglected corners of Carolingian art, focusing on manuscripts from the historically and artistically messy region of western France. She analyzes the contents of the manuscript paintings in close relationship to objects, actions, and spaces outside the boundaries of the books, examining the project of book-making relative to a broader view of art-making in the Carolingian world.

Beatrice comes to Stanford from Harvard University, where she completed her Bachelor's, Master's and doctoral degrees. While researching her dissertation she lived for several years in Germany, England and France, where she also worked in museum collections. She will be teaching a course on medieval book illumination in the Art and Art History Department at Stanford.

Jamie Kreiner is a historian of the Middle Ages with special interest in political culture, the place of religion in society, and the productive capacities of language and textual representation. She received her Ph.D. in history from Princeton University in 2011.

Jamie’s current project, The Social Functions of Hagiography in the Merovingian Kingdom, is a history of how a post-imperial society transformed its standards for political legitimacy and social responsibility in the seventh and eighth centuries, and how hagiography helped engineer those changes. The book identifies and explains how the sense of a “public” and “public good” took root and recast a kingdom’s priorities and practices; and it argues that hagiography played a pivotal role in this transformation by deploying specific rhetorical and cognitive strategies to effect the social order for which it so energetically argued. As a study of semiotics and its social instantiation, the project responds to both the possibilities and criticisms of structuralism and poststructuralism in historical practice by asking how specifically narrative can interact with subjects and structures to bring about change.

In 2011-2012, Jamie will be teaching a course on saints in the Middle Ages and a seminar on pre-capitalist economy and society.

Email: [email protected]

Jennifer Lockhart’s research explores the ethical significance of different forms of philosophical writing. In her dissertation, “Kierkegaard: Indirect Communication and Ignorant Knowledge,” she examines the rich and varied pseudonymous authorship of the 19th century philosopher Søren Kierkegaard. There she makes the case that his pseudonymously authored works ought to be read as responding to a hitherto under-theorized form of practical irrationality that she calls ignorant knowledge. The ignorant knower, like the person suffering from weakness of will, fails to live as he knows (or purports to know) he ought to live. However, unlike the weak-willed person, the ignorant knower manages to remain unaware of the disconnect between what he claims to know and how he is in fact living. A philosophical treatise directly stating ethical truths would be practically useless for an ignorant knower who already takes himself to know everything contained in it. In her dissertation, Jennifer offers an interpretation of Kierkegaard’s writings according to which their form—pseudonymity—is essential to their aim of communicating indirectly with an audience suffering from ignorant knowledge. She is currently working on developing her dissertation into a book manuscript that advances this understanding of Kierkegaard’s authorial strategies and investigates the implications of recognizing the problem of ignorant knowledge for contemporary ethical thought.

Jennifer received her Ph.D. from the University of Chicago and her B.A. in philosophy from the University of Georgia. Her research interests extend to Kant’s practical philosophy, moral luck, moral testimony, and the philosophy of love, sex and marriage. In the philosophy department at Stanford, Jennifer will be teaching a course on the philosophy of religion and a course on sexual ethics.

Email: [email protected]

Peter O’Connell studies the languages and civilizations of ancient Greece and Rome. He received his bachelor’s and doctoral degrees from Harvard and an M. Phil. degree from the University of Cambridge, where he was a Frank Knox Fellow. His special interests include Greek prose of all periods, Classical Athenian literature and culture, Greek law and Greek religion.

His current book project discusses the performative effects of the language of sight in speeches from Athenian trials of the fifth and fourth centuries BC. The texts of these speeches are all that survive of dynamic performances that sought to persuade jurors through voice, words, gestures and appearance. Peter’s research shows how litigants’ words work together with their physical appearance, how litigants plant images in their jurors’ minds, and how litigants bring their speeches to life by referring to people in the courtroom. His work draws on traditional philology, legal anthropology and modern linguistics.

Peter is teaching two courses this year in Stanford’s Department of Classics: Lysias and Antiphon in the fall and Greek prose composition in the winter and spring.

Email: [email protected]

In his research as in his teaching, Yann Robert is particularly interested in exploring the intersection of literature, justice and politics in seventeenth and eighteenth-century France. He is currently an Andrew W. Mellon Fellow at Stanford University, as well as Associate Chair of Undergraduate Studies in the French department, with a special focus on undergraduate recruitment and retention. He received his doctorate from Princeton University in 2010, and while there, was awarded an Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship (2004 - 2005), a Jacob K. Javits Fellowship (2005 - 2009), and a Whiting Fellowship (2009 - 2010).

Yann Robert’s current book project examines the aesthetic, legal and political implications of the rise in eighteenth-century France of a remarkably ritualistic brand of theater, one that no longer staged distant or fictitious stories but sought instead to reenact current events, down to the smallest details. This study explores the various functions of such a theater -- culturally: as a site of national memory, or as one of cathartic forgetting; politically: as a democratic forum, or as an instrument of state propaganda; and legally: as a popular tribunal, or as a travesty of justice -- in an attempt to better understand the unprecedented intertwining of politics, justice and drama in the years before and during the French Revolution.

His critical edition (with Mark Darlow) of Laya’s revolutionary play L'Ami des lois was published in 2011 by the Modern Humanities Research Association. He has also published articles on Rabelais’ Gargantua, Rotrou’s Saint Genest, Diderot’s Entretiens sur le Fils naturel and Paradoxe sur le comédien, and Flaubert’s Tentation de saint Antoine, as well as on the institution of the “claque” in nineteenth-century French theater.

In 2011 - 2012, Yann Robert will teach two classes of his own design: in the Winter, an advanced seminar entitled “French Theater through the Ages,” and in the Spring, a bridge course entitled “Constructing the French”.

Email: [email protected]

Paul Roquet holds a Ph.d. from the East Asian Languages and Cultures department at the University of California, Berkeley, with a Designated Emphasis in Film Studies. His research focuses on audiovisual media, with particular interests in environmental aesthetics, soundscape studies, and the use of media as a form of mood regulation. Roquet's published work includes essays on cinema, music, literature, and art in contemporary Japan. His dissertation title is "Atmosphere as Culture: Ambient Media and Postindustrial Japan." Paul will be hosted by the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures.

Adena Spingarn will receive her PhD in English from Harvard University in May 2012. Her dissertation, “Uncle Tom in the American Imagination: A Cultural Biography,” examines Uncle Tom’s transformation in American cultural understanding from a heroic Christ figure in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s 1852 anti-slavery novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, to a submissive race traitor. A contributor to The Root, Vogue, and Uncle Tom’s Cabin in the National Era with an article forthcoming in Theatre Survey, her current writing and teaching focus on 19th- and 20th-century American literature and cultural history, with a special emphasis on African American literature and literary history.

Adena will be hosted by the English Department.