2022-2023 Senior Sabbatical Fellowships Awards
SENIOR SABBATICAL FELLOWSHIP AWARDS
2022–2023
The H. Axel Schupf ’57 Fund for Intellectual Life supports the Senior Sabbatical Fellowship Program, which increases tenured faculty members’ salaries for one semester of leave from 80 to 100 percent. The fellowships are competitive, and they are awarded by the provost and dean of the faculty and the Committee of Six once their recommendations are approved by the president and the trustees. The following are summaries of the 2022–2023 fellowship recipients’ research projects.
Brian Baisa, Associate Professor of Economics
Research Project: Using mechanism design to understand the social welfare implications of redistribution through markets
Professor Baisa will study how buyers’ heterogenous access to credit and other financial resources shapes market outcomes. Using the tools of game theory and mechanism design, he will study how governments can better regulate marketplaces in cases where differential access to credit is a major concern.
Amrita Basu, Domenic J. Paino 1955 Professor of Political Science, and Sexuality, Women’s and Gender Studies
Research Project: Gendering Populist Leadership: Comparative Perspectives from India and the U.S.
To appreciate the affective appeals of populist leaders, Professor Basu submits that we must delve deeper into the national/nationalist dimensions of populism—and its gendered character. Doing so also reveals connections between leaders’ embodied characteristics and the policies they pursue or eschew. Professor Basu seeks to highlight and deepen our understanding of gender deployment by comparing populist leaders in two multi-ethnic democracies, India and the U.S., which elected to office two of the most influential populist leaders of our times. Her book will compare the different gendered leadership styles of India’s prime minister Narendra Modi and former U.S. president Donald Trump, as well as the gendered leadership styles of female populist leaders in both countries.
Stefan Bradley, Charles Hamilton Houston ’15 Professor of Black Studies and History
Research Project: “Lifting and Climbing: Ruth Simmons, the Ivy League, and HBCUs” and “‘If We Don’t Get It’: Youth and the Ferguson Uprising.”
Lisa Brooks, Henry S. Poler ’59 Presidential Teaching Professor of English and American Studies
Research Project: “Tracking Môlsemsis: An Environmental History of Eastern Coyotes”
“Tracking Molsemsis” is an environmental history of eastern coyotes, focused on the migration of coyotes and their adaptation to the recovering forests of New England. This book centers traditional ecological knowledge and land-based research, but also transcends disciplinary boundaries, drawing on recent research in history, literature, evolutionary biology, and ecology to unravel the story of eastern coyotes’ remarkable historical and ongoing adaptation to climate catastrophes and colonization.
Kristin Bumiller, George Daniel Olds Professor of Economic and Social Institutions
Research Project: The Social Brain: Animal Modeling and Autism Genetics
This project examines the ethical, social, and political controversies that have emerged regarding translational research on autism. The study will consider the potentialities and limitations of the genetic understanding of social brain disorders, ethical concerns raised by the use of genetically modified animals, and concerns about the collection of large data banks of human genetic information.
Sandra Burkett, Associate Professor of Chemistry
Research Project: Structural Investigation of Synthetic Organoclays
Professor Burkett studies hybrid materials that combine inorganic (mineral) and organic (carbon-based) components, which are appealing because of the potential for combining the unique properties of the different constituents, such as the hardness of inorganic materials and the flexibility and processibility of polymers (plastics). During the past several years, her research group has developed a unique family of polymer–clay nanocomposite materials, the hallmark of which is end tethered polymer chains (called polymer brushes) on individual, nanometer-thick sheets of a hybrid organic–inorganic clay. These soluble, polymer brush-based sheets are tailored to vary systematically in both brush bristle density and brush bristle length, which in turn tunes their physical and thermal properties. Professor Burkett plans to use her sabbatical to develop NMR spectroscopic techniques for detailed structural studies of the magnesium organosilicate clays that provide the core template for these materials.
Catherine Ciepiela, Howard M. and Martha P. Mitchell Professor of Russian
Research Project: Tsvetaeva’s Modernism
Ethan Clotfelter, Rufus Tyler Lincoln Professor of Biology and Professor of Environmental Studies
Research Project: Vision and Speciation in convict cichlids (Amatitlania siquia) in Lake Xiloa, Nicaragua
A central question in biology is how we got the biodiversity that we see today. Sympatric speciation, the process by which new species are formed in the absence of geographic isolation, remains poorly understood. In the past two decades, biologists have learned that differences in the sensory environment may drive sympatric speciation in animals. This process is known as sensory drive. Professor Ethan Clotfelter will test several key predictions of the sensory drive hypothesis using a fish species, the convict cichlid, that resides in volcanic lakes in Central America. He will combine opsin gene sequencing, measurements of visual sensitivity (via microspectrophotometry), and measurements of ambient light to determine whether populations of convict cichlids differ in light environment and in their perception of color.
Andrew Dole, Professor of Religion
Research Project: Suspicion and the Study of Religion; Oxford Handbook of Friedrich Schleiermacher
“Suspicion and the Study of Religion” continues the project of Reframing the Masters of Suspicion: Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, which was published by Bloomsbury Academic in 2019. The successor volume focuses on literature in religious studies from the past generation that is recognizably downstream of Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud. The focus will be on work that practices what Professor Dole has called “suspicious explanation,” where a suspicious explanation is an attempt to explain some observable phenomenon by postulating the existence and/or causal efficacy of “hidden” factors that bear negative ethical valuations. Suspicious explanation is a device that figures strongly in the areas of work that are variously labeled critical theory and genealogy. It is also a device that exists in an uneasy relationship with at least one conception of social-scientific work, the conception according to which the social sciences aim at providing the kinds of information about the way human beings behave in large numbers that can be used to intervene in the dynamics of large-scale social phenomena. The thesis of the book is that work in religious studies that practices suspicious explanation circulates somewhat uneasily within a space defined, on the one side, by a desire to produce information that can be used to refine existing scholarly and/or religious practices (what Professor Dole terms ‘justice-oriented social science’) and, on the other side, criticism that makes strong evaluative and, at times, moral claims about persons and movements without a clear orientation to a practical result.
Christopher Dole, Professor of Anthropology
Research Project: Psychiatry in Ruins: Loss and Liveable Futures in Post-Disaster Turkey
Based on ethnographic research with the survivors of a massive earthquake that struck western Turkey in 1999 and a group of Turkish mental health professionals who provided humanitarian psychiatric care in the wake of the earthquake, “Psychiatry in Ruins” examines the relationship between transnational forms of psychiatric expertise and long-term experiences of loss and suffering in a context marked by catastrophic destruction. As such, Psychiatry in Ruins engages a set of forces and processes that have emerged as a defining feature of our so-called “Age of Catastrophe”—namely the vital convergence of large-scale disaster, scientific expertise, and human suffering.
Thomas Dumm, William H. Hastie ‘25 Professor of Political Science
Research Project: Public Catastrophe and Personal Trauma
This project is an investigation into ways catastrophic events traumatize people, what the political effects of trauma are, and how those may serve to deepen or ameliorate the damage done to polity and society.
Amanda Folsom, Bicentennial Professor of Mathematics
Research Project: Mock and Quantum Modularity
David Hanneke, Associate Professor of Physics
Research Project: Probing the Vibrating Molecular Ion
Knowledge of the fundamental laws of physics can be advanced through precise measurements of well-chosen quantities. Many models of new physics seek to unite quantum mechanics with gravitation or to explain phenomena such as dark matter. Some of these models predict that the fundamental "constants" of nature should drift or oscillate. Professor Hanneke searches for such changing constants by use of the quantum states of molecular ions. During this sabbatical, he will investigate the energy difference between two states in the vibrational structure of the oxygen molecular ion. These states are sensitive to changes in the mass of the proton relative to the electron. He will refine his experiment to measure the energy difference and to calibrate that difference to high accuracy.
Elizabeth Herbin-Triant, Associate Professor of Black Studies and History
Research Project: Spindles and Slavery: Abolitionists, Anti-Abolitionists, and the Business of Manufacturing Slave-Grown Cotton
Examining textile manufacturers and workers, small business owners, church leaders, and fugitives from slavery, “Spindles and Slavery: Abolitionists, Anti-Abolitionists, and the Business of Manufacturing Slave-Grown Cotton” tells the story of antebellum Lowell, Massachusetts—a place deeply tied to the South’s “peculiar institution” and shaped by competing currents of antislavery activism and anti-abolitionism. This book project examines support for slavery beyond the southern slaveholding class, considering how the manufacturers who bought cotton produced by enslaved people made sense of their role and how this group of business leaders (some of whom became political leaders) helped to sustain slavery. It also explores the rise of anti-slavery societies in Lowell and how the work of these societies was influenced by African-American residents of Lowell.
Adam Honig, Charles E. Merrill 1908 Professor of Economics
Research Project: Elections and Financial Instability
This project explores the effect of national elections on financial instability. There are a number of channels through which elections can create problems in the financial sector. Elections create uncertainty about future government policies, which can impact economic decisions of forward-looking agents before those policies go into effect. Elections can also create economic risk and uncertainty by hindering effective policy reactions to adverse shocks or by causing political instability with economic ramifications. These in turn could affect default risk and the profitability of investment, creating financial instability. Through a cross-country study, this project will explore these channels to determine whether, and if so how, national elections generate financial instability.
Michael Hood, Professor of Biology
Research Project: Risk of New Disease Emergence
We face a growing threat from the emergence of new infectious diseases as a result of global changes in the environment and anthropogenic influences on the distributions and abundances of species. Professor Hood will work during the upcoming sabbatical leave on research projects and scholarship on the topic of risk factors for the disease emergence, and in particular the role of genetic variation in susceptibility to pathogens that the host’s species has not encountered previously. This project uses a tractable, non-agricultural plant disease, where experiments and observational studies are being conducted under a grant from the National Institutes of Health, and leave will provide critically valuable time for analysis, synthesis, and manuscript preparation.
Larry Hunter, Stone Professor of Natural Sciences (Physics)
Research Project: A search for long-range spin-spin interactions and optical cycling in thallium fluoride
Professor Hunter will spend his sabbatical in the fall of 2022 advancing his two NSF funded laboratory experiments. Both of these experiments play a role in searching for new physics beyond the standard model of particle physics. In the first project, he hopes to make high-precision measurements of long-range spin-spin interactions (LRSSI) by using the Earth as a source of electron spin. In the new experiment, he will compare the relative precession frequencies of Hg and Cs magnetometers as a function of the orientation of an applied magnetic field with respect to fixed directions on the Earth’s surface. Using this approach, he previously established bounds on LRSSI that were as much as a million times more sensitive than previous searches. He also applied this method to extract bounds on velocity-dependent LRSSI that were largely inaccessible to earlier experiments. He has now realized a new “pump-then-probe” Hg-Cs co-magnetometer that is relatively immune to AC light shifts and retains high magnetometer sensitivity. Current measurements suggest that this system should improve the experiments’ sensitivity to LRSSI by at least an order of magnitude. Further improvement in sensitivity should be possible with a recently funded laser upgrade that should arrive in a few months. At this level, the experiment will provide the most stringent test of several possible suggestions for physics beyond the standard model of particle physics. In the second project he proposes to continue his work to improve optical cycling in thallium fluoiride (TlF) in support of the CeNTREX collaborations cryogenic-beam experiment to measure the electric-dipole moment (EDM) of the Tl nucleus. He has already demonstrated the cycling of 55 photons from the likely detection states which should allow every molecule that is transferred to this state to be detected. He hopes to continue to improve the optical cycling in TlF and to use his cryogenic-beam apparatus to demonstrate optical forces and transverse cooling in TlF. The realization of transverse cooling could substantially improve the sensitivity of a second-generation TlF EDM measurement. Both of these projects have as their long-term goal the investigation of the fundamental properties of nature. Even though they are relatively modest table-top experiments, they have important implications for particle physics. The LRSSI experiment tests for hypothetical ultra-light spin-one mesons (e.g. Z prime), dark or hidden photons, paraphotons, weakly interacting sub-eV particles, torsion-gravity and unparticles. The existence of such particles could have important implications for dark energy and dark matter. The TlF EDM experiment has the potential of improving our knowledge of the nuclear Schiff moment and the QCD theta parameter, providing important constraints for physics beyond the standard model of particle physics, including supersymmetry. An observation of a nuclear EDM would violate time symmetry and could illuminate the mystery of the matter/anti-matter asymmetry of the universe.
Catherine Infante, Associate Professor of Spanish
Research Project: Objects of Exchange: Women, Material Culture, and the Circulation of Knowledge in the Early Modern Mediterranean
Kannan Jagannathan, Bruce B. Benson ’43 and Lucy Wilson Benson Professor of Physics
Research Project: Lifetimes and decays of mesons and baryons containing heavy quarks; completion of the paper on dynamical symmetries from a geometric point of view; and the many contributions of Amherst Astronomer David Peck Todd (1855–1939).
The first project will analyze new data on the decay modes, branching ratios, and lifetimes of charmed and bottom mesons and baryons. A second task will be to complete an earlier study of dynamical symmetries in physics. And a final project is a historical/biographical multi-disciplinary project focusing on the contributions of David P. Todd.
Jeeyon Jeong, Associate Professor of Biology
Research Project: Investigation of the Cellular and Physiological Effects of Chloroplast/Mitochondrial Iron Export in Arabidopsis thaliana
Iron is an essential metal nutrient for virtually all organisms, including plants. It is required for vital metabolic processes, but paradoxically, iron is also cytotoxic when it is not properly regulated. Therefore, organisms evolved delicate mechanisms to tightly control iron. This project focuses on understanding the molecular mechanisms that regulate iron in plants by studying the effects of chloroplast and mitochondrial iron export at the molecular, cellular, and physiological levels. The expected outcomes of this study will provide knowledge significant for its scientific merit and critical insights that can be applied to improve agriculture and human health.
David Jones, Associate Professor of Geology
Research Project: Quantifying the Effects of Sedimentation Rate on Geochemical Proxies Using Integrated Geochronology and Sedimentary Geochemistry
Scott Kaplan, Professor of Computer Science
Research Project: Efficient Memory Hierarchy Analysis for Real Workloads
Professor Kaplan will develop tools to gather the memory usage patterns of real workloads from live systems, and then use those patterns to project the performance, cost efficiency, and energy profile of those workloads under a range of possible memory hardware configurations. He will then use this analytic model to project the efficacy of future memory devices based on their potential performance, costs, and capacities.
Michael Kunichika, Associate Professor of Russian
Tanya Leise, Brian E. Boyle Professor in Mathematics and Computer Science
Research Project: Analyzing and Visualizing Circadian Clock Data
Tanya Leise, who died on January 18, 2023, was an applied mathematician who studied biological clocks, particularly the mammalian circadian clock. Her sabbatical research in fall 2022 focused on creating new ways of visualizing circadian clock data, as well as continuing ongoing research collaborations to examine how the circadian clock regulates metabolism and other important functions that contribute to our health.
Adam Levine, Associate Professor of Art, Film and Media Studies
Research Project: The Etheric Body
Professor Levine will complete research, production and postproduction on The Etheric Body, a feature-length experimental documentary. The project explores the story of Thelma Moss, a parapsychologist who ran a controversial lab at UCLA during the 1960s and 70s. Using a combination of first-person testimony, archival material, contemporary footage and reenactment, The Etheric Body will employ a hybrid approach both in terms of material and its presentation of historical events.
Jen Manion, Professor of History and Sexuality, Women’s and Gender Studies
Research Project: Queer Resistance to Policing: A History
Professor Manion will research the history of LGBTQ resistance to policing from the American Revolution to the Transgender Revolution. The project will identify LGBTQ people, organizations, and networks that worked on issues of criminalization, police violence and harassment, and imprisonment throughout American history. Very little is known about the people who resisted harassment, arrest, violence, and imprisonment for transing gender and/or engaging in same-sex intimacies for nearly two hundred years, from 1776 to 1966. This project will offer a re-periodization of queer and trans resistance by shedding light on these lesser-known figures and moments. The post-1966 era of LGBTQ movement building and resistance to policing has been the subject of important research. This project will focus explicitly on the rise and fall of police violence and incarceration as explicit issues of concern for LGBTQ organizations. In the face of mass incarceration of Black and Latinx Americans, the question of when and why these issues were dropped as visible LGBTQ movement priorities is an urgent one. How did this shift affect those LGBTQ people who were still routine targets of the carceral state throughout this era? In launching this new project, Manion will travel to LGBTQ community archives all over the country to examine one of a kind records focusing on those targeted by police including Black and Latinx LGBTQ communities, transgender women, homeless youth, and those assigned female at birth who identify as LBTQ—alll groups whose histories are woefully understudied.
Trent Maxey, Professor of Asian Languages and Civilizations and History
Research Project: Japan’s Automotive Modernities
Professor Maxey researches the cultural and social history of the automobile in twentieth-century Japan. One focal point examines the adoption of the automobile to interwar Japan through the lens of the driver as a socially constructed agent. By tracing the social construction of the chauffeur, the taxi driver, and the owner driver, Maxey argues that a form of mobility fetishism was invoked to elide difficult issues of socioeconomic class and promote the automobile as a vehicle for respectable leisure and freedom. A second focal point studies the two decades spanning the Manchurian Incident of 1931 and the end of the Korean War in 1953 to identify the industrial origins of Japan’s explosive motorization in the 1960s. Rather than treating the Second World War as a chronological dividing line that places the roots of Japan’s explosive motorization in the post-war era, he argues that the technological and industrial foundation for mass motorization took shape in response to the demands of imperial expansion and total war.
Jill Miller, Professor of Biology and Thomas F. Pick Reader in Environmental Studies
Research Project: Miller Sabbatical
Research interests in the Miller laboratory center on the ecology and evolution of plant reproductive systems, focusing on features that promote outcrossing between individuals: specifically, the evolution of separate (as opposed to combined) sexes, the evolution of physiological mechanisms that prevent self-fertilization in hermaphrodites, and chromosomal differences that constrain patterns of mating. Goals for the upcoming sabbatical leave include travel to field locations in the southern hemisphere (southern Africa and Australia) to collect materials and perform field experiments and completion of manuscripts from previous work in the laboratory.
Sean Redding, Zephaniah Swift Moore Professor of History
Research Project: “Decolonizing the colonial curriculum for African students in South Africa, 1848–1954.”
The proposed research over the sabbatical will develop a longer project that connects women, missionary activities, demands for independent schools for African children (one not dominated by white missionaries or state officials), and broader political engagement. Discussions of education for African students in South Africa often focus on the Bantu Education scheme initiated in the 1950s by the apartheid government. Over the following years, Bantu Education as a program for systemically under-educating African schoolchildren created several surges of political activism from students and their parents. But the system of education that Bantu Education replaced was one based on mission schools, funded partly by missionary societies, partly by school fees and other contributions from parents, and partly by subsidies from the colonial government. The mission societies and their schools had agendas that some parents and students found objectionable at various times, and the government overlaid its own objectives and standards on the curricula that these schools taught. Parents’ objections to mission and government control of churches and schools historically led to the founding of separatist churches and of separatist schools, particularly in the rural areas where the majority of African families lived until the 1950s. African women were prominent in these educational movements, sometimes pushing for deeper Christian engagement in the curriculum and other times promoting an education that reflected the older rural culture. Educational activism often led to broader political and social activism, at least by the 1910s. Well-known women political activists from the 1930s onward were often influenced by these protests over education. The research will entail traveling to South African archives in Cape Town, Pretoria, and Durban. Cape Town and Pretoria have government archives that document both the state educational system for Africans as well as political activities by Africans and various social uplift organizations. The Killie Campbell Archives in Durban (affiliated with the University of KwaZulu-Natal) has personal papers of missionaries working in Zululand and elsewhere. Research in mission archives that are available in the U.S. on inter-library loan (on microfiche) will supplement these sources. The ultimate goal for the research will be the production of a book-length manuscript, as well as conference presentations.
Yael Rice, Associate Professor of Art and the History of Art and of Asian Languages and Civilizations
Research Project: The Reconstitutive Codex and the Limits of Mughal Albums
Catherine Sanderson, Poler Family Professor of Psychology
Research Project: Evaluating the Effectiveness of Bystander Training for Law Enforcement Officers
Professor Sanderson will be working with students to examine the effectiveness of the Active Bystandership in Law Enforcement (ABLE) Project, which is part of the Georgetown University Law Center’s Innovative Policing Program. The ABLE Project was developed in the summer of 2020, shortly after George Floyd’s murder, in an attempt to meet the overwhelming interest by police departments across the country in establishing active bystandership programs. This national program is designed to create a police culture in which officers routinely intervene when they see another officer engaging in bad behavior (from lying on a report to planting evidence to assaulting a suspect) and thereby works to both avoid police mistake and promote officer health and wellness. This training helps officers understand the very normal factors that inhibit people from speaking up in the face of problematic behavior, including fear about making a mistake, a desire to avoid being ostracized, and a tendency to obey authority. The officers then learn practical strategies and tactics to overcome those inhibitors, and practice these strategies during scenario-based role plays. After a similar program was implemented in the New Orleans Police Department in 2015, the department experienced a reduction in police misconduct, uses of excessive force, and citizen complaints as well as an increase in citizen satisfaction with and respect for the police and in officer job satisfaction. During the spring of 2022, Professor Sanderson will teach a research tutorial called Social Norms, Social Change, which will explore how social norms are created, misunderstood, and changed. She and her students will also focus specifically on exploring the psychological factors that inhibit police officers from stepping up as well as strategies that can help overcome these inhibitors. Students will directly assist with designing and conducting research on the effectiveness of the ABLE Project, including reviewing empirical literature on active bystandership training programs, designing appropriate qualitative and quantitative measures for collecting data on the effects of ABLE training, and conducting statistical analyses on data gathered from police departments to evaluate the short- and long-term effects of ABLE training. Professor Sanderson will produce a manuscript, with student co-authors, describing the results of this work.
Matthew Schulkind, Professor of Psychology
Research Project: Music Cognition and Autobiographical Memory Research
Professor Schulkind will continue ongoing work in his lab to better understand the acoustical properties of music that elicit emotional responses from listeners. In addition, he will continue to examine questions related to how autobiographical memories influence identity and how narratives of events relate to memory for those events.
Krupa Shandilya, Associate Professor of Sexuality, Women’s and Gender Studies
Research Project: Poetry, Protest and Bollywood Cinema
“Poetry, Protest and Bollywood Cinema” argues that mid-twentieth century Urdu poetry has become a weapon of resistance against the marginalization of Muslims and other minorities in the wake of Hindu nationalism in India. Born from the resistance to colonialism in the early-mid-twentieth century, this poetry is now being resurrected in today’s protests (2016 and 2019–2020) and in left-leaning Bombay cinema (2014–2019) to raise objections to India’s explicitly anti-Muslim policies. Professor Shandilya argues that the metaphors, images and tropes of Urdu poetry challenge the Hindu-right’s victimization of religious and ethnic minorities and reassert the latter’s claim to political belonging. This book argues that the rhetorical terrain of poetry co-constitutes the public discourse on rights and justice.
Raphael Sigal, Associate Professor of French
Research Project: “The World in a Book, the Book in a Pocket” & “Notes on Milk”
During his sabbatical year, Professor Sigal will complete a manuscript titled "The World in a Book, the Book in a Pocket" and gather material for a new book project, tentatively titled "Notes on Milk."
Caroline Theoharides, Associate Professor of Economics
Research Project: Human Capital and Labor Markets in the Philippines
During her sabbatical, Professor Theoharides plans to pursue a series of projects related to human capital and labor markets in the Philippines. Specifically, her work seeks to use large administrative datasets on migration episodes from the Philippines to explore topics such as the transmission of reproductive health norms through international migration and the design of policies to better protect international migrants against employer abuse. She also seeks to extend her work on reproductive health norms through migration to explore the interaction of reproductive health access and political participation.
Martha Umphrey, Bertrand H. Snell 1894 Professor in American Government In the Department of Law, Jurisprudence and Social Thought
Research Project: Law and Loss: Mourning and the Legal Imaginary in the Matthew Shepard Case
Professor Martha M. Umphrey will work on a book-length manuscript that explores criminal trials as sites of mourning and the reconstruction of loss. In particular, she will continue research and writing on the 1999 trial of Aaron McKinney for the infamous murder of Matthew Shepard, exploring the political and jurisprudential shift in legal doctrines concerning criminal responsibility from the psychological concept of “gay panic” to a political discourse condemning “hate crimes.”
Amy Wagaman, Professor of Statistics
Research Project: Improving Communication in Statistics and Data Science
Wendy Woodson, Roger C. Holden 1919 Professor of Theater and Dance
Research Project: Leeway, a full-length multi-media theater piece
Professor Woodson will spend her sabbatical writing a new multi-media theater piece titled Leeway. This piece will include text, choreographed movement, video projection and sound design to create an interactive world featuring five performers who are out of place, looking for a sense of terra firma. Throughout the course of the performance different fragments of stories about displacement in different voices and languages, real and virtual are heard and seen. In the unfolding of the piece a shared ‘meta’ narrative is woven from the different fragments. The desire with this project is to forge a coherent story/place from fragmented multiple memories of arrivals and departures that encourages a sense of shared experience and incantation.
Andreas Zanker, Associate Professor of Classics
Research Project: "Roman Conceptualization: Grammatical Declension, Literary Genre, and Historical Decline"; and "Brill Research Perspectives in Classical Poetry: Horace."
Professor Zanker will work on his new research guide on Horace in conjunction with his already submitted project on ancient Roman conceptualization. It is likely that he will need to juggle these two priorities as feedback emerges and deadlines draw near.