Undergraduate Fellowship Research Assistants Bring Benefits and Surprises

By Michael Marconi

On May 22, an audience assembled at the Stanford Humanities Center for a “Tuesday Talk.” Internal and external fellows, international visitors, graduate students and Center staff crowded the Board Room. This was no ordinary “Tuesday Talk;” it was the annual Undergraduate Research Symposium, in which five students reported on the research they had conducted during the year.

These five students, each paired with one of the Center’s fellows, spent the year researching a single topic related to their and their fellows’ common interests. For undergraduates, this provided an opportunity to experience the intellectual life of the humanities early in their academic careers. For fellows, it was a chance to work with Stanford students and receive helpful research assistance.

For historian David Gilmartin, an external fellow from North Carolina State University, it became much more. Gilmartin worked with Albert Pak, a junior double majoring in Philosophy and Political Science, examining voting laws in India and Pakistan. “It was quite interesting because, in a certain sense, he worked as a research assistant, but in another sense, he really just worked as somebody who provided me with an opportunity to try out ideas with somebody who comes from a very different disciplinary background than I do,” Gilmartin said.

For his part, Pak was also influenced by the exchange. “Working on this project forced me to think about my work inter-disciplinarily. This experience will shape my ongoing research for my honors thesis, which is on personal autonomy, but in the realm of addiction [not on South Asian politics]. I hope this will enable me to give a more balanced perspective.”

During the year, Gilmartin asked Pak to look at works on the idea of the voter as an autonomous being in election laws and consider philosophical arguments about the nature of autonomy in political science in order to gain a new perspective on his historical research of voting laws in India and Pakistan.

“We met every week and we had discussions about different authors, mostly coming from disciplines that I wasn’t directly familiar with, mostly philosophy,” Gilmartin said. “And that provided a great opportunity. He would read things and suggest things and prepare outlines and then we would just meet once a week and talk about it. And that was really valuable for me and I hope it was valuable for him as well.”

Other 2011-12 undergraduate fellows were Laura Groenedaal, who worked with historian Kristen Harinh, helping to investigate a side question in Haring’s research concerning a prehistory of text messaging, specifically regarding pager usage. Stephen Hilfer, a senior majoring in English, partnered with Leah DeVun looking at transgender and intersex rights. Kyle Lee-Crossett, a junior majoring in English and Archeology, assisted Paula Findlen in mapping Galileo’s correspondence between 1588-1616. Freshman Cody Leff worked with Margaret Cohen in researching the life of underwater painter Zarh Pritchard.

Fellows Spotlight: Johanna Yunker

by Brianne Felsher

Johanna Yunker

Art cannot be separated from the history and culture that surround and influence it. Johanna Yunker is proving this point in “Socialism and Feminism in East German Opera,” the dissertation she is writing as a graduate student of musicology at Stanford University and a Geballe Dissertation Fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center. Her work looks at the careers and works of two East German artists: Ruth Zechlin, composer and musician, and Ruth Berghaus, opera director and choreographer. How were these women’s lives and artistic products influenced by the socialist state? By the avant-garde art community? By East Germany’s particular type of feminism? These are the questions that Johanna Yunker explores in her work.

The answers are complicated: “Women in East Germany had a very unusual position [because of socialism],” Yunker explains. They had a “literary feminism… It was not about protesting or changing laws.” She shows how the two artists approached womanhood, feminism, and gender roles in different ways. Director Ruth Berghaus’ 1982 production of Les Troyens, for example, featured a strong female lead as well as a program that included exerpts from the novel Cassandra by Christa Wolf, one of East Germany’s most influential female writers. In contrast, Ruth Zechlin wanted people to think of her simply as a composer, not, as many people did, always a “female composer.” Zechlin said of her music, “To me it is entirely unimportant if a work was composed by a woman or a man. It just counts if the music is good or bad.”

Yunker spent a year in Berlin learning German, listening to opera and sifting through musical scores, newspaper reviews, photographs, and decaying VHS recordings of productions from the 1980s. Although both Zechlin and Berghaus have passed away, Yunker was able to gain unprecedented access to both womens’ personal archives through contact with their families. She has been able to digitize much in these archives to preserve them for future generations.

After she receives her doctorate, Yunker expects to teach music, and hopes to “continue [researching the] large cultural picture.” We shall be watching as she integrates feminism, culture, and art of the twenty-first century into her own professional and personal life.

Everyday Comedy

By Camryn Douglass

Scene: After a swim at the beach, a man attempts to dry himself off while standing in front of a light post. He flings the towel around his back, inadvertently wrapping the towel around the post behind him. He pulls the towel back and forth (around the post, not his back) and is confused about why he cannot get dry. The man is frustrated and he goes home dripping wet. The audience shrieks with laughter.

Malcolm Turvey

This scene from Jacques Tati’s Monsieur Hulots’ Holiday may not be as grand as a house collapsing around Buster Keaton, but it elicits the same joy from the audience. Why? Because Tati has shown the audience a character they can all relate to. He is someone they could know, and the basic misunderstanding represented is a common experience. It is this mastery of the comic ordinary that first attracted the interest of External Faculty Fellow Malcolm Turvey who is examining Tati's unique comedic style for his upcoming book Play Time: Jacques Tati and Comic Modernism.

“Tati is interesting for a number of reasons,” Turvey remarks. “His first three films (The Big Day, Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday, and My Uncle) were very, very popular with ordinary people. When they were released they did well in the theaters, and they’ve since gone on to have a long afterlife. On the other hand, he also cultivated a very challenging–some even say avant-garde–style of filmmaking. So he brings together this highly idiosyncratic, difficult, challenging visual and oral style, and combines it with the more popular genre of comedy. He exemplifies a trend in avant-garde art of the twentieth century, which is to draw on comedy.”

Hidden Comedy

Some are quick to relegate comedy to the category of mere distraction, but Turvey sees much more in Tati’s art. “One of the unusual things about his films is you always notice something new when you rewatch them,” Turvey says. “He deliberately hides a lot of the gags and comedy in his movies. He exemplifies this kind of larger commingling of avant-garde, advanced art, and popular comedy.”

After speaking with Turvey, it is very clear that Tati’s art of comedy is special. It is not simply gag after gag watching someone with incredible abilities entertain. Tati is trying to do something with his work. “If you watch a Charlie Chaplin film, Chaplin comes off as a very extraordinary person. He’s different from everyone else.” Turvey explains. “Tati wanted his major comic character, Monsieur Hulot, to be totally ordinary.” And herein lies the element of Tati’s filmmaking that makes him so unique among his peers: Tati did not shoot to be an outlier. As Turvey points out, Tati wanted to portray characters that you felt you knew–your friend, your uncle, your teacher. Rather than elevate comedy as a spectacle, Tati sought to make comedy accessible to everyone. He wished to “suggest that comedy is not something that only experts can do, but rather it’s something that anyone and everyone can be involved in.” He wanted to “democratize comedy, and take it out of the hands of specialists.”

Comic Modernity

Tati took special care to bring comedy to the masses. He took the emphasis off of himself, and invited a kind of participatory spectatorship. Other comedic directors tended to frame something funny in a close up, so the viewer is fed the joke. Tati, however, tended to avoid close ups and preferred that the viewer seek out the joke. He created an active experience where the viewer is largely dependent upon his or her own participation in order to get the fullest experience of the movie. If the viewer was not actively looking all throughout the scene, she would miss the joke altogether.

Why did Tati work so hard to layer his comedy and get the viewer involved? Tati wanted to “transform life in some way,” Turvey explains. “He hoped, I think, that once he’d shown you while watching a film how funny ordinary things can be, you would then go out into the world, and notice ordinary things as funny.” Tati hoped to teach the viewer to look for humor in everyday life. Perhaps this is one reason his films are so appealing. They teach us to look for humor, rather than wait for it.

Turvey also has another suggestion. Much of Tati’s comedy surrounds the failures of his character, Monsieur Hulot, has at fitting in to modern society. “The modern world is difficult for many people to live in,” Turvey explains. Tati’s films strive to show comedy in everyday life. They relate to a common struggle most people face. By showing us in films how to look for the funny parts of modern life, people can better cope with the struggles of living in a modern world.

See if you can find the hidden comedy in this clip. Hint: it has to do with a sock.