Office of the Provost and Dean of the Faculty 2023/2024 Senior Sabbatical Fellowship Awards

                                      SENIOR SABBATICAL FELLOWSHIP AWARDS
                                                                            2023–2024

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 2023–2024 fellowship recipients’ research projects.

Gabriel Arboleda, Associate Professor of Art and the History of Art
Research Project: HOME

During this sabbatical leave, Professor Arboleda plans to carry out field research for his second book project.  Tentatively titled “HOME,” this book will explore the topic of housing inequality and the efforts made by people in underserved communities to provide themselves with safe and stable housing. This research is intended to help architects, housing providers, and communities as a whole to address effectively one of the most vexing situations affecting the world today, namely the global housing crisis.

Robert Benedetto, William J. Walker Professor of Mathematics 
Research Project: Instability in Non-Archimedean Dynamical Families

A dynamical system is a quantity or collection of objects that constantly changes its state according to some rule or law.  For example, weather patterns and the atmospheric rules that govern them form a dynamical system; the motion of the planets of our solar system, and the gravitational laws that guide them, form another.  Professor Benedetto studies an abstract kind of dynamical system where the objects belong to a number-theoretic realm known as a non-archimedean field.  Given a continuously varying family of such dynamical systems, there is an instability locus, which is the set of parameters at which some dynamical property of the system changes dramatically rather than gradually.  During the spring 2024 semester, Professor Benedetto plans to study such non-archimedean dynamical families, with a particular emphasis on understanding their intricate and mysterious instability loci.

Sara Brenneis, Professor of Spanish
Research Project: The Spanish Antifascists Greet the Liberating Forces: Americans and Spaniards at Mauthausen

Professor Brenneis is working on a book project that will be written in an accessible register for the non-specialist reader, and which will take advantage of archives in the United States, Spain, and Austria to tell the story of the Spanish antifascists in Mauthausen and their American liberating forces.  In “The Spanish Antifascists Greet the Liberating Forces: Americans and Spaniards at Mauthausen,” Professor Brenneis will weave together correspondence, archival documentation, testimonies, historiographies, and audio-visual material, delving into the personal stories of the individuals behind the overarching history of the end of World War II.  How did these Spaniards and Americans arrive at this particular moment, far from their homes, in the gut of World War II?  How were the experiences of women and people of color inside the camp’s granite walls as prisoners and outside the camp as nurses and soldiers distinct from their white male counterparts?  Why did Spain and the United States become the heart of the fight against fascism?  Why is that fight still relevant to Americans and Spaniards today?

Ashley Carter, Associate Professor of Physics
Research Project: DNA Folding

DNA is often referred to as the “molecule of life.”  It is in every living organism, every bacteria, plant, and animal.  Inside of each organism, DNA is stored in the nucleus of each cell.  In humans, there is about two meters of DNA stored in a 10 µm nucleus, a difference of 200,000.  That is like storing something the height of the Empire State Building in New York City into the thickness of a credit card! How does life accomplish this feat? How is DNA folded into the nucleus? The goal of Professor Carter's research is to determine the physical principles that guide this folding and to determine how these physical principles affect life itself.

Sonya Clark, Winifred L. Arms Professor in the Arts and Humanities and Professor of Art and the History of Art 
Research Project: Interrogating the Roman Alphabet with a Twist

Harris Daniels, Associate Professor of Mathematics
Research Project: Entanglements of Division Fields of Elliptic Curves

Solsiree del Moral, Professor of American Studies and Black Studies
Research Project: “Crime and Punishment in the Caribbean” 

“Crime and Punishment in the Caribbean,” co-edited by Professor del Moral and Alberto Ortiz-Diaz (University of Texas at Arlington), is a collection of chapters that highlight the most recent research on the topic in the region.  Research on crime and punishment in Latin America explores discipline and punishment in the Américas in relation to colonial Spanish and Portuguese empires, nation-state formation in the nineteenth century, and post-1970s neoliberal carceral states.  The scholarship has highlighted the history of prisons and the world inside prisons in the larger countries of Latin America, including Brazil, Mexico and Argentina.  The colonies and states of the Caribbean region have remained relatively neglected in the field.  The collection will bring together new scholarship by early-career scholars on the range of topics and approaches to the study of crime and punishment in the region. With a focus on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the chapters will explore the particular ways colonial states organized colonial peoples, including slaves and freedmen, through a lens of crime, punishment, and social control. It will emphasize a comparative approach to the Caribbean, exploring connections and differences between the colonies of Spain, France, and England.

Jeffers Engelhardt, Professor of Music
Research Project: Sounding Religion

In “Music and Religion,” Professor Engelhardt traces the shifting relationship of music and religion in ethnomusicological thinking from the late nineteenth century to the present moment. Two issues are at the center of the project: the shifting status of other-than-human agents in music studies and ethnomusicologists' varying secular/post-secular methodologies and epistemologies.  In the book, Professor Engelhardt shows how ethnomusicology's positivist/comparativist origins have yielded to ways of knowing and conducting ethnography that embrace scholars’ relationships with other-than-human agents.  This move, Professor Engelhardt argues, is both an outcome and an impetus for decolonizing projects and broader representation within the field.

Vanessa Fong, Olin Professor in Asian Studies (Anthropology) 
Research Project: Fertility desires, plans, and outcomes among urban Chinese citizens age Thirty-Eight to Forty-Two

Jonathan Friedman, Professor of Physics
Research Project: Clock Transitions in Molecular Nanomagnets and Silica Defects

Professor Friedman will carry out experimental and theoretical studies of molecular nanomagnets and silica defects to investigate so-called clock transitions that allow for longer storage and manipulation of quantum information.  The research will help establish whether these systems can be used as potential qubits, the fundamental elements of quantum computers.  Professor Friedman and his research group use electron-spin resonance techniques, including a custom experimental probe, to carry out the investigations. The research will help elucidate the mechanisms by which quantum information deteriorates in these materials and help identify ways to increase the timescale over which quantum information can be retained.

Caroline Goutte, Edward S. Harkness Professor of Biology 
Research Project: Advancing Genetic Analysis tools for Notch Signaling in the C. elegans Model System

Professor Goutte will use her fall sabbatical to advance genetic analysis of cell communication in the free-living roundworm C. elegans model system.  Recent advances in genome editing in whole animal studies have opened wide the window of possible genetic investigations.  The overall goal of her research is to uncover the molecular means by which cell-cell communication can be regulated. Her studies focus on a common cellular mechanism known as Notch signaling, and make use of the powerful genetic model system, C. elegans.   Recent work from her research lab has drawn attention to an enzymatic step in the Notch signaling machinery that she plans to investigate in whole animal experiments.  She plans to harness the precision of new genome editing tools to probe the regulation of this machinery at the biochemical and cellular level.  Professor Goutte will visit research labs in other institutions and will use the newly acquired Zeiss 980 confocal microscope at Amherst to pursue research on genetic strains her lab has generated over the past five years.  During her sabbatical, she will also explore ways in which she could adapt these new genetic tools of inquiry to classroom projects.

Rafeeq Hasan, Associate Professor of Philosophy
Research Project: Do Liberty & Equality Conflict

Professor Hasan will attend the M.S.L. Program at Yale Law School and work on his book manuscript,
“Do Liberty and Equality Conflict?”  The book argues that a philosophy centered around the values of freedom and property, far from necessitating libertarian defense of the status quo, can in fact generate a compelling argument for greater socioeconomic equality and the welfare state.  Professor Hasan seeks to articulate a political philosophy that can explain why our investment in personal freedom commits us to building a more equal society.

Maria Heim, George Lyman Crosby 1896 and Stanley Warfield Crosby Professor in Religion 
Research Project: How to Lose Yourself

Professor Heim will spend her spring 2024 sabbatical translating and writing her part of a co-authored book titled “How to Lose Your Self.”  She is working with Jay Garfield and Robert Sharf on a Princeton University Press book in a series called “Ancient Wisdom for Modern Readers. This series presents small, stylish books with advice from ancient philosophers to a broad audience (https://press.princeton.edu/catalogs/philosophy). Their book will be the first with non-Western material. How to Lose Your Self includes translations from Buddhist texts in Pali (Heim), Tibetan (Garfield), and Chinese (Sharf) on Buddhist teachings that deny the "self," that is, an enduring and unchanging selfhood or essence, and explores their implications.

Tariq Jaffer, Associate Professor of Religion
Research Project: Book Projects

Michael Kunichika, Professor of Russian
Research Project: Archaeology in the Twilight of Utopia: Late Socialism and the Rediscovery of the Archaic

“Archaeology in the Twilight of Utopia: Late Socialism and the Rediscovery the Archaic” considers the appeal, both in the Soviet Union and in Europe, of the archaic, especially of prehistory, from the late 1950s to the early 1980s.  Among the many pasts recuperated in the aftermath of Stalinism, the prehistoric was the oldest.  It becomes the subject of a range of works, media, and critical theories, from novels and films to Soviet art-historical and semiotic accounts of prehistory.  Professor Kunichika has begun publishing and lecturing on topics such as the discovery of prehistoric cave painting in the Kapova Cave in the Ural mountains and Soviet art historical debates on the origins of art and the work of the novelist Yuri Dombrovsky.

Rick López, Anson D. Morse 1871 Professor of History and Professor of Environmental Studies
Research Project: Mexican Nature: Visual Culture and the Nationalist Environmental Imagination from the Sixteenth through the Nineteenth Centuries

Historians of the United States. and Western Europe have recognized the connection between nation formation and nature, and their insights guide modern-day environmental policy.  The connection between nation formation and nature within Latin American countries, by comparison, is poorly understood.  As a result, we lack the historical guidance we need to craft conservation policies appropriate to the Latin American setting.  Professor Rick López’s project, which will culminate in a book-length study, helps fill this gap by tracing the connection between nation formation and practices of visualization of nature in Mexico.  It takes this on in three parts. The first focuses on imperial projects in Mexico from the sixteenth century through the early nineteenth century, when Mexico gained independence, examining the ways indigeneity was imagined in relation to knowledge of the botanical resources found within Mexico.  Part two of the book turns to the geographical societies that flourished in Mexico during the nineteenth century.  Part three considers how changes in Mexican landscape related to their evolving views about their national community, and about that community’s connection to local and national environments.

Anna Martini, Professor of Geology and Environmental Studies
Research Project: Geochemical Exploration of Carbon Cycling at Various Scales and Locations

This work is primarily focused on understanding the carbon cycle in anaerobic environments.  It attempts to quantify equilibrium vs. kinetic effects as displayed by a number of different isotopic systems.  Constraining these geochemical and metabolic pathways may inform technologies for both energy production and carbon dioxide sequestration.

Klára Móricz, Professor of Music
Research Project: Profanation and Sanctification of Time: A Biography of Arthur Vincent Lourié

He led a life so exceptional that he could be a fictional character at the center of a best-selling novel, yet the composer Arthur Lourié, whose life is a story of Russian modernism, its discontinuity in Russia, and its displacement in exile, still awaits treatment in a biography.  Knowledge of Lourié’s life story is important not only for musicians and scholars, but also for those interested in the role of Russian modernism in twentieth-century art writ large.  As a scholar who has recently published several articles, a collection of essays on Lourié, and a book on Russian modernism in Paris, Professor Móricz is writing a biography of this mysterious composer.

Susan Niditch, Samuel Green Professor of Religion 
Research Project: Identity in the Hebrew Bible: Self-Definition and the Other

The sabbatical project involves immersion in relevant theoretical and cross-cultural material on ethnicity and othering and an application of this study to several cases drawn from the ancient Israelite tradition.

Kerry Ratigan, Associate Professor of Political Science
Research Project: The Politics of China’s Economic Engagement with Latin America

China’s increasingly global prominence raises questions about the social and political impacts of China’s economic engagement abroad.  Although China has established a significant presence in Latin America, we know relatively little about how Latin Americans perceive China and how Latin Americans interact with Chinese firms on the ground.  Professor Ratigan’s project will examine two related questions: How has Chinese investment shaped South Americans’ views of China? and How do state and non-state actors influence Chinese firm behavior?  The primary aim for this project is to write a book on the social and political effects of China’s economic engagement with Latin America. To this end, Professor Ratigan will conduct intensive qualitative fieldwork in Argentina, Chile, Peru, Colombia, and China.  She will examine how Latin American state and non-state actors work with Chinese firms to influence firm behavior.  In addition to speaking to scholars, she will conduct semi-structured interviews and focus groups with stakeholders in communities that have experienced Chinese investment.  She will also visit managers at Chinese firms in South America to better understand their perspectives.  Finally, Professor Ratigan will travel to China to speak with scholars and, if feasible, representatives of Chinese firms that invest in Latin America.  Professor Ratigan will complement the qualitative research with analysis of survey data on public opinion of China in Latin America.

Monica Ringer, Professor of History and Asian Languages and Civilizations
Research Project: Ruins: Conquest and Contestations of Antiquity

In the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, antiquity become the ‘origin’ story for modernity. Typically, the appropriation of antiquity is treated as a European story of the post-Renaissance ‘rediscovery’ and ‘reclamation’ of a natural birthright.  The association with antiquity was connected to new, civilizational explanations of difference and assertions of European cultural superiority.  Claiming to be the sole heirs of antiquity served to explain ‘modernity’ as inherently European, and by extension, to insist that to modernize was to Europeanize.  Antiquity was central to European conceptions of self, and more particularly, to the European modern self.  This picture needs to be complicated and extended outside of the borders of European history.  Ottoman and Iranian scholars were also interested in asserting their own connection to antiquity—one that they believed offered an alternative genealogy of the origins of modernity—one not dependent on transmission from (and thus imitation of) Europe. The Ottomans, since the conquest of Constantinople in 1453, had also laid claim to being the direct heirs of both Hellenic and Eastern Roman antiquity and by the nineteenth century, were scrambling to establish museums and fund archaeological digs to pursue these claims as they also expressed claims to modernity.  Similarly, Iranians scholars in the nineteenth century also asserted claims to antiquity—to Aryan, pre-Islamic origins as the foundation of their own secular modernity. Like the Ottomans, Iranians were concerned to reclaim their own ‘heritage’ through archaeological digs, and an assertion of continuity with antiquity.

Professor Ringer’s project seeks to lay bare the full extent of the competition over antiquity as it was claimed by French, English, Italian, Ottoman and Iranian scholars.  Widening the scope of the project beyond well-trodden paths and opening it up to greater comparison—both within and beyond Europe—will illuminate the extent of shared/different constructions of antiquity as the foundation of modernity, as well as the ways in which these relationships to antiquity also shaped positionality within the modern.  What did antiquity mean to various scholars in different traditions?  Where was antiquity located, both temporally and physically? What do different articulations—as ‘narratives of meaning’—reveal about definitions of ‘modern’?  How do these contested origin claims suggest the variety of possible moderns, their relationship with each other, and their location in the context of nineteenth-century European imperialism and colonialism?

Paul Schroeder Rodríguez, R. John Cooper '64 Presidential Teaching Professor of Spanish 
Research Project: Community-based filmmaking in Abya Yala

This is a multi-modal project to help visibilize community-based filmmaking in Abya Yala /the Americas. The project includes a digital map of community-based organizations that produce, exhibit, and distribute their own films; (a couple of academic essays on the history of this practice; and an open- access reader that will center community voices and experiences with this form of filmmaking.

Nishiten Shah, Professor of Philosophy
Research Project: Experiments of Living

Professor has noted the following.  It is obvious to anyone paying attention that our country is ailing; deep ideological divisions threaten the stability of our democracy.  Conservatives and liberals disagree about almost everything: abortion, immigration, taxes, healthcare, global warming, race, gender, religion, you name it.  It is true that liberals and conservatives tend to mouth the same words to express many of their values (“free speech,” “democracy,” “equality,” “fairness”).  But the intractability of our political disagreements tells us that this agreement in “values” is merely an agreement in rhetoric. This unfortunate circumstance is bound to make even the most hopeful of people pessimistic about the answer to one of the fundamental questions of political philosophy: whether it is possible to find an ideologically neutral basis for the principles of our democratic political order.  There have been several famous attempts to solve this problem, by either grounding basic political principles on a common standpoint derived from a minimal set of shared values, or by seeking a rational convergence on such principles from a set of diverse values. Shah shall instead investigate an attempt to ground a basic political principle of liberty in the conditions of our common human reason. Not the rationality of self-interest, famously depicted by Thomas Hobbes in his attempt to provide a contractual justification of political principles, but the epistemological rationality on which John Stuart Mill bases his principle of equal liberty in an intriguing but overlooked argument in On Liberty.

Rebecca Sinos, Edwin F. and Jessie Burnell Fobes Professor in Greek (Classics) 
Research Project: Architectural Sculpture and the Experience of Greek Sanctuaries

The project's aim is to study the evidence of Greek texts together with the archaeological evidence of Greek sanctuaries, especially temple sculpture, to gain a better understanding of the experience of those who worshipped in these numinous spaces.

Lee Spector, Class of 1993 Professor of Computer Science 
Research Project: Disaggregated Objectives in Machine Learning and Beyond

Professor Spector will extend and disseminate the lessons of recent work in machine learning in which multiple objectives are considered individually, without aggregation and the loss of information that aggregation generally entails. The "lexicase selection" method, which uses random sequences of objectives instead of aggregate measures, has been shown to improve the problem-solving power of a form of machine learning known as genetic programming, in which Darwinian processes of variation and selection are used to discover computer programs that solve problems. In this project lexicase selection will be further studied, extended, and applied both in genetic programming and in other forms of machine learning.  Generalizations of lexicase selection’s core idea, of assessing systems by means of random permutations of criteria, may also have benefits beyond machine leaning, possibly in any quantitative discipline that uses aggregation.  Professor Spector will explore these possibilities and also work to present the general concepts of lexicase selection and disaggregated objectives to a broad audience.

Ilan Stavans, Lewis-Sebring Professor of Humanities and Latin American and Latino Culture 
Research Project: Three Books: "The Jewish-Mexican Cookbook," "Conversations with Dictionary Makers," and "Translation as Home."

Professor Stavans will complete the following three books: "The Jewish-Mexican Cookbook" (coauthored with Margaret Boyle), which features one hundred recipes; "Conversations with Dictionary Makers"; and the collection of essays "Translation as Home" (edited by Regina Galasso).

Wako Tawa, Willem Schupf Professor in Asian Languages and Civilizations and Director of Language Study 
Research Project: Japanese grammar reference book for learners of Japanese as a foreign language

Professor Tawa is writing a Japanese grammar reference book for learners of Japanese as a foreign language.  The current popular teaching method, “the communicative method,” promotes teaching foreign languages without emphasizing grammar instruction. Teaching Japanese using this communicative model to college students has been proven inadequate, and in fact, many teachers of Japanese have found this to be the case.  Grammar is what builds a solid foundation for further studies of the target language.  Most instructors of Japanese are in agreement about the importance of grammar but nevertheless continue to try to follow the communicative method in their teaching.  They do sooner or later include some grammar in their teaching because their students ask grammar questions.  Most instructors are troubled, however, when grammar questions are asked, because they are puzzled as to how they can best respond to these questions.  One of the reasons for this problem is that there is a significant gap between theory and practice in Japanese grammar, and there is no consistent Japanese grammar reference book available to learners and teachers of Japanese as a foreign language.   proposed Japanese grammar reference book will be designed for all learners and teachers of Japanese who use the currently popular textbooks, none of which include thorough grammatical descriptions and explanations.

Timothy Van Compernolle, Professor of Asian Languages and Civilizations
Research Project: Literary-Cinematic Exchanges in Interwar Japan

Professor Van Compernolle will use his sabbatical during the fall 2023 semester to complete the manuscript for his book, which is tentatively titled “Celluloid Metaphors: Literary-Cinematic Exchanges in Interwar Japan.”  This project is an effort to cross the boundaries between fields and media in order to document the creative dialogue between literature and cinema during the 1920s and 1930s, a period in which each art had a heightened awareness of the other.  The project is also an effort to move literary-cinematic study beyond the dominant framework of the adaptation of a literary or dramatic work for the screen, using Japan as a case study.  Professor Van Compernolle has completed a rough draft of the manuscript and plans to use the sabbatical to travel to Japan to gather the material he could not access during the pandemic and use it to complete the book project.

Niko Vicario, Associate Professor of Art and the History of Art
Research Project: Shiny New Thing: Metal after and within the Digital

In Professor Vicario’s second book project, “Shiny New Thing: Seams, Seamlessness, and the Erasure of Labor from Art,” he focuses on the relationship between digital technologies associated with the internet and the use of metal in a range of art and architectural practices since the 1990s.  How did metal accrue new use values once divested of industrial might, transported from the realm of rusty decline and retrofitted to materialize icons of a new millennium being heralded as simultaneously a wireless and a cultural economy?  In this project, Professor Vicario is invested in thinking about continuities between and across industrial and informational understandings of technology.  He highlights metal as their common medium through analysis of specific works of art and architecture, both iconic and lesser-known.  In the 1990s, in the wake of widespread deindustrialization in the West, a “new economy” was hailed, centered around the Internet, accompanied by rampant digital utopianism and theorizations of globalization as frictionless flow.  Within this context, metal sculptures and buildings were constructed as emblems of technological advance.  Professor Vicario will argue that metal’s relationship to the digital era is complex and multivalent, not least because it is the often-obfuscated substrate of twenty-first century technology.  Metal proves both an often-invisible conduit of our networks and devices and, when rendered visible, a recalcitrant obstacle to the mystification enveloping them.  Professor Vicario is interested in exploring how metal functions both formally and metaphorically in an era rhetorically dominated by the claims to dematerialization associated with digital transmission and circulation.  As such, the buildings, sculptures, images, and installations he analyzes expose the seams composing a rhetoric of seamlessness and materialize a discourse dominated by a rhetoric of dematerialization. As such, this project has significance for art history, architectural history, media theory, and the history of technology.

Amelia Worsley, Assistant Professor of English
Research Project: Unwilled Constraint in British Eighteenth-Century Poetry