Call for Nominations for Arts Writers/Practitioners 2011-12

The Stanford Humanities Center and the Stanford Institute for Creativity and the Arts (SiCa) intend to offer up to two short-term residencies to arts writer/ practitioners in academic year 2011-12. Stanford University departments, programs, and research centers are each eligible to nominate one candidate for consideration through their chair or director. Nominations must be submitted by November 1, 2010.

About the Residencies

The purpose of the residencies is to bring high-profile arts writer/practitioners into the intellectual life of Stanford, targeting especially those scholars who would be of particular interest to departments and other units on campus and who fit within the respective missions of the Humanities Center and SiCa.

Residencies will be approximately four weeks. Depending on the availability of funds, longer visits of up to eight weeks may be possible. Arts writer/practitioners in residence will receive an office at the Humanities Center and be invited to weekday lunches with the Humanities Center fellows. They will also participate in SiCa’s programming during the academic year. They will receive a stipend of $2000 per week for the duration of their visit plus a housing and cost of living allowance of $3,000 for the month. The Humanities Center and SiCa will cover travel expenses for one round trip from their place of origin.

Nominating units are asked to commit to hosting at least one activity with the candidate, should the nomination be successful. Examples of such activities include: student workshops, faculty discussion sessions, departmental lectures, participation in departmental colloquia, etc. Note that these residents may not offer courses for credit.

Eligibility and Nomination Process

Stanford University departments, programs and research centers are each eligible to nominate one candidate through their chair or director. Preference will be given to departments, programs and research centers that have not previously hosted a Humanities Center/SiCa visitor. Nominations should include:

—Brief rationale for nomination, including a précis of the candidate’s profile and an explanation of how the candidate would fit with the department’s goals, faculty and mission and engage collegially with the intellectual communities of the institutes (approx. 500 words: see http://shc.stanford.edu/ and http://arts.stanford.edu/ for more information about the two institutes)

—A commitment from the nominating unit to host at least one activity with the candidate if he or she is selected, along with a brief proposal for a possible activity (one or two sentences).

—Candidate’s CV. Candidates will normally be artists and writers with a high degree of visibility. Candidates may, but need not, be affiliated with a university or research institution. Candidates are expected to be able to function in an English-speaking academic context.

Deadline

Nominations must be submitted by November 1, 2010. Please submit nominations electronically to Beth Stutsman (bstutsman@stanford.edu).

Selection Process

Selections will be made by a committee convened by the Humanities Center and SiCa. Especially appropriate are candidates who are finishing a project and are in position to share the results with colleagues on campus.

For questions, contact Beth Stutsman (bstutsman@stanford.edu).

Center Director Aron Rodrigue Quoted in the New York Times

Humanities Center director Aron Rodrigue was quoted in a recent New York TImes article on the genetic similarity of Jews. Rodrigue is an internationally renowned scholar of modern Jewish history and the Ottoman Empire. At Stanford since 1991, he is currently the Anthony P. Meier Famiy Professor and Director of the Stanford Humanities Center.

Read the article: Studies Show Jews’ Genetic Similarity

Former Director John Bender Publishes The Culture of Diagram

Former Humanities Center director and Stanford English professor John Bender has co-authored a book with Stanford art history professor Michael Marrinan called The Culture of Diagram (Stanford University Press, 2010).

The Culture of Diagram explores a terrain where words meet pictures and formulas meet figures, foregrounding diagrams as tools for blurring those boundaries to focus on the production of knowledge as process. It outlines a history of convergence among diverse streams of data in real-time: from eighteenth-century print media and the diagrammatic procedures in the pages of Diderot’s Encyclopedia to the paintings of Jacques-Louis David and mathematical devices that reveal the unseen worlds of quantum physics. Central to the story is the process of correlation, which invites observers to participate by eliciting leaps of imagination to fill gaps in data, equations, or sensations. This book traces practices that ran against the grain of both Locke’s clear and distinct ideas and Newton’s causality—practices greatly expanded by the calculus, probabilities, and protocols of data sampling.

“Traditional pictures are said to open windows onto the world. We wanted to show how diagrams broke the window, shattering visual knowledge into multiple scales and points of view.” Bender said. He also observed that: “Diagrams often are drawings like those engineers make in which each thing is shown at whatever size will make it clear to the viewer, but the user is the one who puts it all together into a machine or a building. People often think of pictures as final objects but diagrams are not finished. They are tools for users to work with as their minds encounter the world.”

Read more about The Culture of Diagram on The Human Experience: Inside the Humanities at Stanford University.

To look inside the book, visit Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Culture-Diagram-John-Bender/dp/0804745056.

2010-11 Geballe Research Workshops

The Stanford Humanities Center is pleased to announce that fifteen research workshops have been selected for 2010-11. The Theodore and Frances Geballe Research Workshops bring together groups of approximately 100 Stanford faculty and over 200 advanced graduate students, as well as visiting scholars and those at other local institutions to present their current research and otherwise explore topics of common intellectual concern. Workshops meet regularly (at least three times a quarter) during the academic year.

Archaeology Today
Faculty Coordinators: Lynn Meskell (Anthropology), Jennifer Trimble (Classics)
Graduate Student Coordinators: Adam Nazaroff (Anthropology), Claudia Liuzza (Anthropology)

Capitalism’s Crises
Faculty Coordinator: Sylvia Yanagisako (Anthropology)
Graduate Student Coordinators: Ramah McKay (Anthropology), Hannah Appel (Anthropology)

Environmental Norms, Institutions, and Policy
Blokker Research Workshop
Faculty Coordinator: Debra Satz (Philosophy and Ethics in Society)
Graduate Student Coordinator: Rachael Garrett (Environment and Resources)

Ethics and Politics, Ancient and Modern
Marta Sutton Weeks Research Workshop
Faculty Coordinators: Chris Bobonich (Philosophy and Classics), Josh Ober (Classics, Political Science, and Philosophy)
Graduate Student Coordinator: Ben Miller (Philosophy)

French Culture Workshop
Faculty Coordinators: Dan Edelstein (French), J.P. Daughton (History)
Graduate Student Coordinator: Melanie Conroy (French and Italian)

Global Justice
Linda Randall Meier Research Workshop
Faculty Coordinator: Joshua Cohen (Political Science, Philosophy, and Law)
Graduate Student Coordinators: Ruth Kricheli (Political Science), Rob Barlow (Political Science)

Graphic Narrative
Faculty Coordinators: Andrea Lunsford (English), Scott Bukatman (Art, Art History, Film and Media)
Graduate Student Coordinators: Angela Becerra Vidergar (Comparative Literature), Haerin Shin (Comparative Literature), Mark Vega (English)

The Literary Public Intellectual
Faculty Coordinators: Russell Berman (Comparative Literature) and Saikat Majumdar (English)
Graduate Student Coordinator: Nikil Saval (English)

Medieval and Early Modern Studies
Humanities Center Fellows Research Workshop
Faculty Coordinators: Laura Stokes (History), Bissera Pentcheva (Art and Art History)
Graduate Student Coordinators: Erin Lichtenstein (History), Chris Kark (Iberian & Latin American Cultures), Marco Aresu (Italian Literature)

Mythos & Logos: Religion and Rationality in the Humanities
Claire and John Radway Research Workshop
Faculty Coordinators: Brent Sockness (Religious Studies), Nadeem Hussain (Philosophy)
Graduate Student Coordinators: Peter Woodford (Religious Studies), Noreen Khawaja (Religious Studies)

Republic of Letters
Faculty Coordinators: Caroline Winterer (History), Paula Findlen (History)
Graduate Student Coordinators: Marcelo Aranda (History), Biliana Kassabova (French)

Seminar on Enlightenment and Revolution
Research Workshop in Honor of John Bender
Faculty Coordinators: Blair Hoxby (English), Heather Hadlock (Music)
Graduate Student Coordinators: Stephen Osadetz (English), Jenna Sutton (English)

TransAmerican Studies Working Group
Faculty Coordinators: Ramon Saldivar (English and Comparative Literature), Roland Greene (English and Comparative Literature)
Graduate Student Coordinators: Guadalupe Carrillo (English), Jennifer Harford Vargas (English), Cristina Jimenez (English)

Working Group on the Novel
Marta Sutton Weeks Research Workshop
Faculty Coordinator: Nancy Ruttenburg (English)
Graduate Student Coordinators: Sarah Allison (English), Mike Benveniste (English), Joseph Shapiro (English)

Workshop in Poetics
Faculty Coordinator: Roland Greene (English and Comparative Literature)
Graduate Student Coordinators: Kathryn Hume (English), Noam Pines (Comparative Literature)

How is Innovation Taught? On the Humanities and the Knowledge Economy

Former fellow (2008-09) Dan Edelstein’s recent essay in Liberal Education reflects on the central role the humanities play in developing innovative thinking. Edelstein asserts that while the humanities are not more innovative than the sciences, they do require students to practice innovative thinking earlier on in their studies. Read the full article»

Dan Edelstein is assistant professor of French at Stanford University and the author of The Terror of Natural Right: Republicanism, the Cult of Nature, and the French Revolution (University of Chicago Press, 2009).

Fellows Update Spring 2010

Here is what we have heard from you since February. Please stay in touch, and if you have news to share, send an email to shc-newsletter@stanford.edu.

2004-2005

BRETT WHALEN published his first book, Dominion of God: Christendom and Apocalypse in the Middle Ages (Harvard University Press, 2009).

1997-98

JOHN BENDER (also 1988-89) and Michael Marrinan (Art and Art History) published The Culture of Diagram (Stanford University Press, 2010). The Culture of Diagram explores a terrain where words meet pictures and formulas meet figures, foregrounding diagrams as tools for blurring those boundaries to focus on the production of knowledge as process. Read more about the book on Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Culture-Diagram-John-Bender/dp/0804745056.

1993-94

PERICLES LEWIS Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Yale, recently published his third book, Religious Experience and the Modernist Novel (Cambridge University Press, 2010). He is now working on a new edition of the Norton Anthology of World Literature, for which he is editing the 20th-century volume.

JOHN MORAN GONZALEZ published his first book, Border Renaissance: The Texas Centennial and the Emergence of Mexican American Literature (University of Texas Press, 2009). The Troubled Union: Expansionist Imperatives in Post-Reconstruction American Novels, which he first worked on as his dissertation during his fellowship year, will be published by Ohio State University Press in October 2010.

ALLEGRA GOODMAN has a new novel, The Cookbook Collector, appearing in July, 2010. Goodman’s short story “La Vita Nuova” is featured in the April 26 issue of The New Yorker. Read an email exchange between Goodman and Cressida Leyshon, a fiction editor at the magazine, about art, writing, and Goodman’s new novel, here: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2010/04/this-week-in-fiction-allegra-goodman.html

HANS ULRICH GUMBRECHT will receive an honorary doctorate from Aarhus University, Denmark. Gumbrecht, the Albert Guérard Professor of Literature in the Division of Literatures, Cultures and Languages, will receive the honorary degree on Sept. 10, 2010, in conjunction with the university’s 82nd anniversary. Rumor has it the Danish queen will be present at the ceremony.

1992-93

MICHAEL FELLMAN has just published In the Name of God and Country: Reconsidering Terrorism in American History with Yale University Press. Read more about the book on Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Name-God-Country-Reconsidering-Terrorism/dp/0300115105/ref=ntt_at_ep_dpi_3

1988-89

ANNIE FINCH published a book-length narrative and dramatic poem, Among the Goddesses: A Libretto in Seven Dreams (Red Hen Press). Her first book of poetry, Eve, was reissued as part of Carnegie Mellon University Press’s Classic Contemporaries Poetry Series, and her second book of poetry, Calendars, was released in an audio CD format, read by the author, by its original publisher, Tupelo Press. Annie also published two related textbooks with the University of Michigan Press: A Poet’s Ear: A Handbook of Meter and Form and A Poet’s Craft: A Complete Guide to Making and Sharing Your Poetry. Annie was awarded the 2009 Robert Fitzgerald Award for contributions to the art and science of prosody.

Humanities Center-SiCa Arts Writers/Practitioners in Residence 2010-11

The Stanford Humanities Center and the Stanford Institute for Creativity and the Arts (SiCa) are pleased to announce that two international artists have been chosen to come to Stanford in 2010-11 as part of a jointly sponsored pilot program. Nominated by Stanford departments and research centers, the artists will be on campus for four-week residencies. They will have offices at the Humanities Center and will be affiliated with their nominating unit, the Humanities Center, and SiCa.

These residencies bring high-profile arts writers/practitioners into the intellectual life of the university, targeting artists whose arts practice and writing engage with the missions of both the Humanities Center and SiCa.

The following artists have been selected for the upcoming academic year:

Victor Gama is a creative musician, folklorist, instrument maker, and computer musician from Lusophone Africa. Born in Angola, Victor Gama’s music addresses the relationship between technologies and artistic traditions with a particular focus on musical styles and histories of Africa and the diaspora. Trained in electronic engineering, he draws on his interests in diasporic music and in computer generated music. During his residency, he will conduct a public solo performance of his music using his own designed musical instrument (Pangeia Instrumentos). He was jointly nominated by the Center for African Studies, the Department of Art and Art History, the Latin American Studies Center and his nomination was also supported by the Cantor Museum.

Milica Tomic is a Serbian artist working at the intersection of performance art forms, using video, film, photography, light, and sound installation. Her work centers on political violence, nationality and identity with an emphasis on the tensions between intimate experience and media-constructed images. Among her projects is the use of art to address war crimes in Bosnia and Herzegovina and in Kosovo. During her residency, she will present a selected number of her works in which she used art in order to re-actualize past traumatic events. She has exhibited globally including at Venice Biennale in 2001 and 2003, Sao Paulo Biennale in 1998, Istanbul Biennale in 2003 and Sydney Biennale in 2006. Ms. Tomic was nominated by the Department of Drama.

While at Stanford, the artists will offer informal seminars, demonstrations, student workshops and public lectures and will also be available for consultations with interested faculty and students. For additional information, please contact Marie-Pierre Ulloa, mpulloa@stanford.edu.