FRAP Awards FRAP Awards Spring 2023

Faculty Research Awards Spring 2023

SMALL GRANT AWARDS
SMALL GRANT AWARDS ARE FOR $10,000 OR LESS.

Professor Jeffers Engelhardt
Department of Music
Title: Voicing Estonia

Professor Engelhardt will use his FRAP grant to support research in Estonia on a book project called “Voicing Estonia.” The project is a critical meditation on voice and embodiment, linguistic and demographic precarity, and racialized identities in twenty-first-century Estonia. Taken together, Professor Engelhardt’s ethnographies and histories of voice amplify key concerns in the interdisciplinary field of voice studies by articulating continuities between individual and collective voices, material and metaphorical aspects of voice, speech and song, and language and affect in a musical, linguistic, and socio-historical field. The project analyzes the politics of culture and social imagination in Estonia beyond the colonizing frame of the “post-Soviet.” Here, narratives of victimhood, survival, and national renewal mobilized through the Singing Revolution (1987–1891) and European integration confront the realities of war in Ukraine, waves of Ukrainian refugees arriving in Estonia, linguistic and demographic precarity, and racialized difference in twenty-first-century Europe. This research period focuses on the intimacy of voice in Estonia through the unusual phenomenon of ingressive phonation (speaking and singing while breathing in) that is an everyday part of gendered Estonian speech and the performance of regilaul, the signature genre of Estonian traditional song. The technique of ingressive phonation—air flowing over the larynx in an opposite direction producing inefficient vibration and a raspy sound with fewer formants and more noise—amplifies the embodied, material apparatus of the voice. As Estonian interlocutors have suggested, ingressive speech is the voicing of intimacy and empathy, and ingressive singing is the quintessential expression of the “unbroken melodic pleasure” (katkematu mōnu) of regilaul performance. Ingressive phonation, it seems, is an essential way of understanding how vocal bodies are constituted and performed as Estonian bodies. Professor Engelhardt will spend time at the sound archives of the Estonian National Literary Museum continuing research with recordings from the 1930s through the 2000s to document the historical aspects of ingressive phonation and will continue ethnographic work in a community of regilaul singers.

Professor Caroline Goutte
Department of Biology
Title: Updating Genetic Tool Kit for investigating Notch Signaling Regulation in C. elegans

Professor Goutte will use her fall sabbatical to expand the genetic tool kit that she uses in her research lab. Recent advances in genome editing in whole animal studies have opened wide the window of possible genetic investigations. Professor Goutte will visit research labs to learn and develop new tools that can be applied to her research program. The visited labs are at leading medical research institutions and will allow her to consult with experts about adapting recent techniques and tools to her own research at Amherst. 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 Edward Melillo
Department of History and Environmental Studies
Title: King of Mendoza: The Irishman Who Rescued the Guidebook to Aztec Civilization

This project explores the intertwined stories of nineteenth-century Irishman Edward King and the Codex Mendoza, a lavishly illustrated guidebook to Aztec civilization written by indigenous Nahua scribes and Spanish friars in 1542. On a rainy afternoon in 1814, King rediscovered the Codex Mendoza after it had spent more than two hundred years languishing among the stacks of Oxford University's Bodleian Library. King devoted his life to the promotion of the Codex Mendoza, and without his efforts, it is unlikely that the world would know this text of colossal importance. Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has lauded the Codex Mendoza as “the Aztec jewel, a national treasure of Mexico,” while U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sonya Sotomayor referred to the codex as “a revelation about Latino identity.”

Professor Klára Móricz
Department of Music
Title: Profanation and Sanctification of Time: A Biography of Arthur 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, and has assembled a trove of documentary materials related to his life, Professor Móricz plans to travel to Yerevan to participate in an intensive-immersion Russian language course and to Basel, Switzerland, to spend a month studying the Lourié Collection in the Paul Sacher Stiftung.

Professor Ingrid Nelson
Department of English
Title: Wildness and Forms of Life in the Middle Ages

This new project will explore how a medieval concept of “wildness,” which inheres in both persons and places, imagines and articulates the possibility of an alternative political system to the Western model of sovereignty and private property that is emerging in the West in the Middle Ages. With FRAP funding, Professor Nelson will begin to explore how wildness is represented in medieval archival materials, particularly manuscripts of maps and literary romance texts, and will present her preliminary findings at conferences in London and the U.S.

Professor Yael Rice
Department of Art and the History of Art and Department of Asian Languages and Civilizations
Title: The Reconstitutive Codex and the Limits of Mughal Albums

"The Reconstitutive Codex and the Limits of Mughal Albums" is a study of the production, recycling, and circulation of albums in and beyond South Asia between the seventeenth and early nineteenth centuries. Known as muraqqas, from the Arabic for “patched” or “mended,” these stitched books contain collaged assemblages of paintings, drawings, calligraphies, and European prints, creating, in effect, a material agglomeration of every page. The overwhelming majority of Mughal albums have been unbound and disseminated widely, so it is not at all unusual to find folios from a given album residing in multiple, far-flung collections around the world. It is understandable, then, that the primary objective of much art historical scholarship on Mughal albums has been to reassemble these fragmentary books and, in doing so, recover the codices’ vestal states. This project, on the other hand, asks: what if Mughal albums were meant to be taken apart, rearranged, and put back together again? There is abundant evidence to show that their dispersal and reconstitution began at the Mughal court as early as the sixteenth century, suggesting that these phenomena were integral to the album’s very conception. "The Reconstitutive Codex" argues that the capacity for an album to regenerate and recirculate was driven, in part, by its patchwork, atomistic appearance, which invited the viewer to virtually—if not physically—disassemble the pages’ complex arrangements. This FRAP grant will enable Professor Rice to do research on South Asian albums in Dublin at the Chester Beatty Library and on South Asian albums and archival materials related to their eighteenth-century English collectors in London at the British Museum, British Library, Society of Antiquaries, and Royal Society. Her research trips will take place in May 2023.

Professor Eric Sawyer
Department of Music
Title: Workshop Performance of The Onion

This FRAP grant will enable the mounting of a workshop performance of the opening four scenes of The Onion, a new opera, with music by Professor Sawyer and the libretto by Professor Sawyer and Ron Bashford, associate professor of theater and dance. At the opera’s center is a machine, the Onion, that can return a subject’s mind through layers of memory to a moment of their past with realistic vividness. The inventor’s household becomes its testing ground in a story of unforeseen consequences and the transformative power of shared memory. The performance will take place on Sunday, June 4, in the Holden Theater on campus, and will be open to the public and followed by a discussion with the audience. The goal will be a solid, off-book rendition of the music with piano accompaniment and a theatrically effective staging.

Professor Amelia Worsley
Department of English
Title: Literature's Loneliness AND Wordsworth and Lucretius

At a moment when solitude studies is suddenly becoming a new interdisciplinary field of study, this collaboration offers a space for people working on solitude and lyric studies in the Romantic period to workshop emergent work and discuss future collaborations. The field of eighteenth-century and Romantic studies is currently putting renewed emphasis on cultural exchange among the Romantic movements that arose not only throughout Europe and Britain, but beyond, making the importance of collaborations such as these particularly timely. A FRAP-funded research trip to spend time in the Wordsworth Trust’s Jerwood library in rural Grasmere will enable Professor Worsley to have access to Wordsworth’s own copy of Lucretius, as well as his other books on the classics, and, most importantly, the manuscripts of the three texts that are most influenced by his philosophy. Professor Worsley has noted that it is crucial to examine deletions and word choices, since so much of this argument is focused on the use of specific Lucretian diction.

LARGE GRANT AWARDS
LARGE GRANT AWARDS ARE FOR MORE THAN $10,000 AND UP TO $50,000.

Professor Sara Brenneis
Department of Spanish
Title: The Spanish Antifascists Greet the Liberating Forces: Americans and Spaniards at Mauthausen

This is a book project designed to reach a wide audience. Professor Brenneis will take advantage of archives in the United States, Spain, and Austria to tell the story behind the Spanish antifascists in the Mauthausen concentration camp and the American forces who liberated the camp. Weaving together correspondence, archival documentation, testimonies, historiographies, and audio-visual material, Professor Brenneis’s book, "The Spanish Antifascists Greet the Liberating Forces: Americans and Spaniards at Mauthausen" will delve into the personal narratives of individuals caught up in the waning days of World War II. The book will work through larger conceptual questions via the intimate stories of the men and women from two countries an ocean apart who found themselves flung together in May of 1945. How did these Spaniards and Americans arrive at this particular moment, far from their homes, in the gut of World War II? Why did Spain and the United States become the heart of the fight against fascism? How did Spaniards and Americans become witnesses to the Holocaust? 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 is the fight against fascism still relevant to Americans and Spaniards today?

Professor Rafeeq Hasan
Department of Philosophy
Title: M.S.L. Degree at Yale Law School

Do we have property rights prior to the establishment of legal order? John Locke says: yes, natural property rights are conferred by labor alone. Thomas Hobbes says: no, property rights come into existence only through the decree of a sovereign. Immanuel Kant says: yes, “but only provisionally.” This intriguing claim from Kant’s Doctrine of Right (1797), his treatise on the moral foundations of law and state, is notoriously obscure, for it seems both to affirm and to deny natural property rights. Among the many issues Professor Hasan seeks to explore by pursuing a master of studies in law at Yale is the one at the heart of Kant’s claim: that certain aspects of morality are both prior to law and yet depend on law to be realized. Attending to such rights raises crucial questions underexplored by contemporary political philosophy. Does the fact that the state can redistribute property mean that my own holdings are in some sense not truly mine? Should background economic injustice excuse theft or allow the state to reverse contractual arrangements? Professor Hasan’s hunch is that material for answering these questions is richly available within the history of common law thinking.

Professor Justin Kimball
Department of Art and the History of Art
Title: On the Street: Now and Then

Justin Kimball will be working on two distinct but connected projects simultaneously. Each will culminate in a book. The first deals with people at events in public spaces across the United States. The pictures he makes won’t be about specific places or regions, or even about the events themselves. They will be about people, although these varied spaces will certainly contribute context. He wants to link the people in these photographs by the raw physical, psychological and tactile moments that they share. The second project is to prepare and submit for publication a book of black-and-white photographs made in the streets of New York City and Los Angeles between 1984 and 1992. These pictures are about how a shared physical environment influences people’s experiences, including their experiences of each other.

Working on both projects at once is critical to Professor Kimball. Each will inform the other in terms of style and subject matter. As importantly, as he alternates projects, Professor Kimball anticipates a conversation between his past and present selves. He looks forward to seeing what traces of older concerns might manifest in the new pictures, and to discovering which resolved concerns have disappeared from his work.

Professor Kerry Ratigan
Department of Political Science
Title: The Political Impacts of China's Economic Engagement with Latin America

China’s global impact, economic and political, is rapidly growing, while global public opinion of China is changing just as quickly. China has one of the largest economies in the world with substantial outward investment and growing amounts of foreign aid. Amid greater exposure, personal experience, and media attention, individuals across the world are updating their views about China, particularly in regions like Latin America. Although China’s engagement with Latin America has deepened significantly in recent years, we know relatively little about how Latin Americans perceive China and how Latin Americans interact with Chinese firms on the ground. This project examines two related questions: (1) How has Chinese investment shaped South Americans’ views of China? (2) How do state and non-state actors influence Chinese firm behavior? Employing qualitative and quantitative research, Professor Ratigan is writing a book on the social and political effects of China’s economic engagement with Latin America. This project entails three main streams of research: analysis of existing public opinion data from Latin America, an original survey experiment on perceptions of China, and semi-structured interviews with stakeholders. This project will advance our understanding of how local stakeholders interact with Chinese firms and the impacts of Chinese economic involvement for foreign perceptions of China.

Professor Robert Sweeney
Department of Art and the History of Art
Title: A Renewed Painterly Exploration and Abstraction of the Landscape of the Connecticut River and Watershed

Over the next eighteen months, Professor Sweeney will continue to work on his ongoing series inspired by the landscape surrounding the Connecticut River, which has been a nearly constant presence throughout his life. He will resume seeking out and identifying specific sites near the river and within its watershed area as it runs through four states: New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, and Connecticut. Many small landscape studies will be painted at these sites directly from nature. He will also develop a body of work in the studio consisting of a number of larger oil paintings which will be abstracted from selected on-site paint studies. The overall goal of this project will be to use the language of paint to build on Professor Sweeney’s direct responses to the landscape by drawing on sensory impressions, memory and imagination to capture the unique qualities of light, color, pattern, form, and space that characterize these evocative places.