Ilyana Karthas
Associate Professor, History
2022-23
Project: "I am offering a new paradigm for understanding modernism in Paris. My book project titled "Arbiters of Taste: Women, Modernism, and the Making of Paris" analyzes the cultural labor undertaken by women to propel modernization of the arts in France, to internationalize French artistic tastes, and to cultivate Paris’ reputation as the center of avant-gardism. As patrons, salonnières, teachers, promoters, entrepreneurs, artists, and expert critics, women played a crucial role in fashioning Paris as a laboratory for artistic innovation."
Kristin Kopp
Associate Professor, German
2022-23
Project: "My book "Disrupting “Race”: on the History of the African Diaspora in Germany," aims to help readers recognize (and then address) erroneous, subconsciously ingrained preconceptions about human geography, mobility, and agency that undergird vestiges of racist thought that continue to affect even those consciously working to combat racism."
Johanna Kramer
Associate Professor and Associate Chair, English
2022-23
Project: "As part of the A&S Writing Group, I have been working on my current book project, "The Use of Proverbs in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales," necessary to apply for promotion to full professor.
The book has two goals:
1) present an unprecedented study of the use of proverbs and other proverbial materials in Chaucer’s "The Canterbury Tales"
2) demonstrate an innovative critical methodology by showing that critically reading medieval texts through the genre of proverbs can attend to long-standing and current questions in literary criticism."
Judith Mabary
Associate Professor, School of Music
2022-23
Project: "My project is a book on the patronage of Jeannette Thurber in the United States, especially that which brought Czech composer Antonín Dvořák to New York to be the Director and Professor of Composition at the National Conservatory of Music of America, an institution she established to provide education in fine-art music for which aspiring musicians and composers would previously have had to travel to Europe to obtain. My efforts this semester have been devoted to writing the section of the book that details Thurber's biography as related to her earliest charitable efforts and promotional activities in which she sought to improve the working conditions of women and offer them greater opportunities in the second half of the nineteenth century. These efforts culminated in her founding of the American Opera Company and the National Conservatory of Music, institutions that together sought to serve American singers as well as composers and musicians from underprivileged and underrepresented populations, primarily African Americans and women."
Anne Meyers
Associate Professor, English
2022-23
Project: "My project is a chapter of a book I am writing on the significance of monuments in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. During this period, the word “monument” could mean either a built architectural fixture or a written text. While scholars have already written on the possibility of reading built monuments in a textual or narrative fashion, few have considered in detail what it could mean for a text to be monumental. This chapter focuses on the massive 1688 publication "The Academy of Armory" by the herald Randle Holme, considering how Holme used heraldry—a visual/historical lexicon traditionally associated with monuments and the preservation of history—as an organizing principle for the materials of seventeenth-century life and experience."
Michelle Morris
Associate Professor, History
2022-23
Project: "I am currently completing an article on lay understandings of witchcraft in seventeenth-century New England. This article is a lead-in for my ongoing book project on the Hartford witchcraft trials of the early 1660s."
Karthik Panchanathan
Associate Professor, Anthropology
2022-23
Project: "I started writing a book titled "Divided We Stand." The book will be comprised of three sections. The first section is a review of theory in evolutionary biology attempting to explain the evolution of (human) cooperation. This section will also link this theory with a broader history of political philosophy attempting to understand human social evolution (e.g. Rousseau’s argument that society emerged from voluntaristic cooperation, Hobbes’ argument that society resulted only after the emergence of social sanctions from the state). The second part of the book applies this theory to the story of human evolution after our split with the ancestors of chimps."
Srirupa Prasad
Associate Professor, Art History, Women's and Gender Studies
2022-23
Project: "A Global History of Tuberculosis" investigates key moments in the conceptualization of susceptibility as they have been articulated and practiced regarding TB in the context of India from the colonial to the postcolonial period. These successive iterations of the concept of susceptibility took shape as physicians, medical research ers, medical missionaries, and political figures in India, the US, and Britain debated the capacity to be affected."
Stephen Quackenbush
Associate Professor, Truman School of Government and Public Affairs
2022-23
Project: "I am working to complete my book titled "Peace Through Victory: Imposed Settlements and Recurrent Conflict." In the book, I develop my deterrence-based theory of recurrent conflict and conduct a variety of quantitative tests of the primary theoretical expectation that imposed settlements are more stable than other types of settlements along with a variety of other empirical expectations stemming from my theory. In the process, I test my theory against alternative explanations stemming from the bargaining, rivalry, and conflict management perspectives."
Dan Sipe
Associate Profesor, French
2022-23
Project: "This project charts alternative approaches to navigating the nineteenth-century city. In its consideration of a more diverse, inclusive, and therefore, historically accurate sample of the uses made of the city by its inhabitants – namely that of women, children, migrants, and other marginalized populations – this study opens new avenues of scholarly exploration and makes new, critical interventions into discussions of the urban environment. The examination of the ways that these groups navigate and understand the city yields a series of heretofore invisible geographies that emerge from behind the well-trodden paths of more prominently studied and placed individuals in nineteenth-century France. Understanding these hidden geographies is a critical step toward recovering and foregrounding the experiences, struggles, and adaptations of these groups and promises to change long-standing paradigms of the nineteenth-century city."
Anne Stanton
Associate Director, School of Visual Studies
2022-23
Project: "My project is to complete the last body chapter of my book, "Turning the Pages: the Power of Narrative in English Gothic Prayerbooks," under contract with Brill."
James van Dyke
Associate Professor, Art History
2022-23
Project: "I am writing "The Social Production of Otto Dix in Critical Detail: A book on the early twentieth-century German painter Otto Dix," drawing attention to overlooked but significant material and iconographic details in selected paintings that help us to understand the social dynamics of the German art world in the 1920s and 1930s."