Call for Nominations for FSI-Humanities Center International Visitors 2013-14

Nomination Deadline: November 12, 2012

The Stanford Humanities Center and the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) intend to offer up to four short-term residencies to international scholars in academic year 2013-2014. Residencies will be approximately four weeks. Depending on the availability of funds, longer visits of up to eight weeks may be possible.

This will be the fifth year of the program; view the list of 2012-13 visiting scholars.

The purpose of the residencies is to bring next generation leading scholars into the intellectual life of Stanford, targeting 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 FSI.

International scholars in residence will be given shared-office space at the Humanities Center and be invited to weekday lunches with the Humanities Center fellows. They will also participate in a research group at one of the FSI centers. They will receive a stipend of $2,000 per week for the duration of their visit plus a housing and cost of living allowance of up to $3,000. The Humanities Center and FSI will cover travel expenses (economy class) for one round trip from their place of origin.

Stanford departments, programs, research centers, and institutes are each eligible to nominate one candidate for consideration for a residency in 2013-2014.

Details on the nomination process are below. 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 visitors may not offer courses for credit.

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

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 recently hosted an FSI/Humanities Center 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 respective missions of the Humanities Center and FSI and engage collegially with the intellectual communities of the institutes (approx. 500 words: see http://shc.stanford.edu and http://fsi.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 she or he is selected, along with a brief proposal for a possible activity (one to two sentences). 
• Indication from one of FSI’s research centers or programs that the candidate would be of interest to their community. (For the list of FSI’s research centers, and programs, see http://fsi.stanford.edu/centers/). 
• Candidate’s CV. Candidates will normally be scholars affiliated with a non- U.S. university or research institution. Candidates must be non-U.S. nationals working abroad. Candidates are expected to be able to function in an English-speaking academic context, although at the department’s discretion, their departmental activity may be conducted in another language.

Deadline:
Nominations must be submitted by November 12, 2012 to Patricia Blessing at: pblessin@stanford.edu

Questions: Please direct all questions to Patricia Blessing, Executive Officer for International Visitors Program, Stanford Humanities Center.

Humanities Center Funds 16 Workshops for 2012-13

The Humanities Center is pleased to announce that it will fund 16 Theodore and Frances Geballe Workshop Research Workshops for 2012-13. Of the 16 workshops, 8 are new for this year.

The workshops cover a broad range of topics, including Equality of Educational Opportunity, Cognition & Language, and Visualizing Complexity and Uncertainty, which focuses on the digital humanities. Chosen by an interdisciplinary Stanford faculty committee, the workshops aim to bring together faculty members and graduate students in cross-disciplinary dialogue. Many workshop meetings are open to the public and will be posted on the calendar as soon as information is available.

Cities Unbound
The 21st century is undoubtedly the urban century, when the majority of human beings will, for the first time in history, live and work within cities. This workshop looks at the challenge that non-Western urban areas pose to our understanding of institutional, economic and cultural dynamics in cities. It seeks to redefine contemporary humanistic theory by examining these new urban landscapes.

Cognition & Language
Language plays a central role in the coordinated activity that forms our culture and is crucial to much of the abstract thought necessary in science and the arts. But how does language work? How does it interact with the other cognitive processes that shape the human experience? This workshop provides a platform for diverse approaches to the study of the same central question among linguists, philosophers, psychologists, anthropologists, and computer scientists.

Equality of Educational Opportunity
Over 90% of Americans believe that equality of opportunity is absolutely essential as an American ideal. But while this ideal is widely adhered to, its very meaning is deeply contested. The core goal of this workshop is to refine our understanding of the relationship between ideals of equality—especially equality of opportunity—and the public provision of education.

Ethics and Politics, Ancient and Modern
Marta Sutton Weeks Research Workshop
Scholars involved in the study of ancient ethical and political philosophy come together with those working on contemporary political theory in this workshop. Using both empirical political science and historical methods, the group considers, among other topics, the relationship between arguments about justice and systems of law, as well as authority, legitimacy, and obedience in the development of government.

Ethnic Minorities, Religious Communities, Rights, and Democracy in the Modern Middle East and Central Asia
Linda Randall Meier Research Workshop
The conceptual focal point of this workshop is the minoritization of religious and ethnic communities and the uneven trajectory of their rights in both more and less democratic states of the 20th- and 21st-century Middle East and Central Asia. The group encourages comparative and transnational research among the different cultural and political zones of the region, as well between the region and its close neighbors with important structural similarities, like the Mughal Empire, British India, and modern south Asia.

French Culture
The French Culture workshop brings together participants from a wide range of disciplines to examine questions relevant to French culture and society from the modern period (1650 to the present). Topics of discussion include political and intellectual history, imperialism and colonialism, nationalism and national identity, immigration and minorities, gender, and francophonie.

Graphic Narrative Project
Humanities Center Fellows Research Workshop
From centuries-old Japanese woodblock prints and political cartoons to manga, superhero serials, comics journalism and webcomics—pictures and words have been brought together by visionary artists who saw the potential to tell stories of human civilization in ways not possible via text or image alone. The Graphic Narrative Project looks at the many manifestations of this medium.

Interdisciplinary Approaches to Consciousness
The subjective characters of our sensations—colors, tastes, pain—are immediately apparent to us. However, explaining consciousness has proved to be exquisitely difficult for both neuroscientists and philosophers. This workshop will tackle the nature of conscious experience in three case studies: the problem of qualia, consciousness and literature, and zombies in philosophy, literature, film and/or science.

Interdisciplinary Working Group in Critical Theory
The Interdisciplinary Working Group in Critical Theory will draw together faculty and graduate students from across the humanities and qualitative social sciences to address current theoretical debates by reading and discussing texts that both define and disrupt disciplinary thinking. Each quarter will have a thematic focus: network theory in autumn, visual literacy in winter, humanist empiricisms in spring.

Language, Information, and Techné
This workshop explores the diverse technological and technical conditions of mediation that bring language into being. How can we bring language back in to information technology? How do different devices and modes of inscription bring out different social forms? The goal is to build new vocabularies to reclaim language’s originary materiality and technicity, as well as its cultural and historical specificity.

Recombinations: Art, Medicine, Bioscience
This workshop brings together faculty and students interested in exploring the interstices of the arts, medicine, humanities, and bioscience. Participants come from a diversity of fields, including medical anthropology, classics, English, music, drama, philosophy, and psychology to develop connections, courses, and further programs in an interdisciplinary mode. The Stanford Arts Initiative is a co-sponsor.

Representing Time in Historiography, Ancient and Modern
This workshop will explore ancient Greek and Roman conceptions of time and the ways that these informed early modern and Enlightenment historiography and chronography. The focus will be the rhetoric (both verbal and nonverbal) by which historians engaged time in writing and visual art, simultaneously representing it and allowing it to be understood in distinct ways.

Science and Technology in the Postcolonial World
In studies ranging from micro-level laboratory ethnographies to analyses of the shifting geopolitics of science, from histories of science in early modern colonialism to theoretical approaches to technology today, this workshop will be a venue for scholars to discuss broad comparative questions that seek to understand the history and culture of science in terms of global power relationships.

Spatial Legacies: Urbanism, Movement, and Identity
Blokker Research Workshop
By focusing on a variety of geographic and historical dimensions, the workshop introduces archaeology and its unique perspective on materiality, landscape, and environment into wider discussion. Topics are global and range from the origins of cities in ancient China to the material culture of colonial exchange to the politics of revitalizing Los Angeles’ historic center.

Theoretical Perspectives of the Middle Ages
Gathering scholars from different disciplines and area studies, this workshop looks at various representations and theories of the global medieval past, and seeks to define their current relevance. In its discussions of such topics as crusade literature, phenomenology and the digitalization of archives, or revisiting the Annales School's interdisciplinarism, the group advances new research methods that, rather than preserve old paradigms of disciplines, envision novel ways of doing medieval studies from a practical and theoretical perspective.

Visualizing Complexity and Uncertainty: Exploring Humanistic Approaches to Graphic Representation
This workshop brings together humanists engaged in visualization projects with experts from the fields of geography, cartography, communication design, the visual arts, and computer science to look at visual techniques as scholarly method. Using specific projects as case studies, the workshop will look for ways to convey the complexity and nuance of humanistic modes of inquiry.

Dissertation Writing Group to Continue in 2012-13

The Stanford Humanities Center will sponsor a Dissertation Writing Group in 2012-13.

This program fosters intensive and supportive exchange across humanistic fields for those in the final stages of dissertation writing. Graduate students from a variety of humanities departments present and discuss their work in a multidisciplinary context. Students whose projects cut across a number of fields may find this forum especially helpful to their scholarship.

Eligibility
Stanford graduate students from humanities departments who have advanced to the chapter-writing phase of the dissertation.

Commitment
Meetings will be held at the Humanities Center from 4 to 6 pm on Thursdays every other week. Eligible students may sign up to participate during one of three quarters (autumn, winter, or spring) and must agree to attend all meetings held during that quarter (5 meetings total). Participation will be limited to a maximum of 10 students per quarter.

Format
Up to two participants will pre-circulate a chapter or portion of a chapter (no more than 35 pages) by Friday of the week preceding each meeting. The group will read these chapters in advance. Each chapter will receive approximately 45 minutes of structured feedback and constructive critique. A short portion of each meeting will be devoted to general concerns of the group.

Guests
Participants may invite advisors, committee members, and other interested parties to read pre-circulated chapters and attend the meeting at which they present.

Facilitation
The Associate Director of the Humanities Center will run the workshop.

Sign up now!

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.

FSI-Humanities Center International Visitor Spotlight: Patrick Wolfe

By Camryn Douglass

Patrick Wolfe is a professor of history at La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia and an FSI-Humanities Center International Visitor for 2011-12 in May. We spoke with him a bit about his time at Stanford last week:

What are you working on while at Stanford University?

Patrick Wolfe

What I’m trying to do while I’m here is finish off a large book that tries to put fairly well understood histories of the American West in comparative perspective. I’m organizing established, known material into an understanding that puts settler-colonialism as the primary factor involved in the history of the United States West in the post-Gilded Age era. It operates with a wide time frame, and it’s already taking me much too long to write because I keep adding bits! That’s the problem with comparative work. It just gets more and more tempting to say, “Hey, let’s see if this works somewhere else as well, or doesn’t.” In which case, the difference can be interesting. I’m hoping to leave Stanford with a raw first draft of the whole thing.

Please tell us a bit about how your project started.

My study of aboriginal history and aboriginal issues led me to wider questions of colonial and racial matters. I encountered a lot of U.S. students asking questions about aboriginal issues in relation to civil rights, or in relation to Native American issues. Since then I’ve been thinking more and more comparatively, or perhaps thinking comparatively about more and more places. My work is centered on indigenous histories in Australia and the United States, but for comparative purposes I stray outside those realms to issues regarding African Americans, Afro-Brazilians, and Palestinians.

What is settler-colonialism?

Settler-colonialism is a form of colonialism that is exclusive. It’s a “winner take all,” a zero-sum game, whereby outsiders come to a country, and seek to take it away from the people who already live there, remove them, replace them, and displace them, and take over the country, and make it their own. As such it’s different from the forms of colonialism which we saw in, say, British India, or the Dutch East Indies, or somewhere like that, where foreigners went, and sat on top of Native society, and put it to work for them. In settler colonies foreigners come to eliminate the Natives, to get rid of them. Not necessarily bodily, not necessarily physically. Classically, there are assimilation policies which, rather than physically exterminating Native people, seek to transform them into white people.

In the U.S., reservations are a classic mode of eliminating Natives. They don’t get rid of them, but they box them up in a fixed locale, and that has the effect of rendering the rest of their territory available for settler use for the railroads, for ranches, for plantations, for mining, whatever, it may be for forestry. Another such technique would be the allotment policy that was brought in on a general scale towards the end of the 19th century, which sought to break down reservations into private lots owned by individual families who could, of course, then sell them off to white people. So, again, it’s not the straightforward physical violence of the frontier, but it has the effect of eliminating the Native people.

Patrick Wolfe will give a lecture on settler-colonialism on Thursday, May 24 from 3-5 pm in the Stanford Humanities Center Board Room. All members of the Stanford Community are welcome.

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.

International Q&A with SiCa-Humanities Center 2011 Arts Writer/Practitioner M.K Raina

By Marie-Pierre Ulloa

Why and how did you become a theatre artist?

M.K. Raina

It all started long back, when I was a school kid of seven years. Our school principal, Mr. Deena Nath Nadeem, a legendary poet of the Kashmiri language, wrote a verse play for the children of the school. The play was about birds, animals, humans, and their inter-relationships. It was a futuristic thing dealing with the co-existence between these two worlds–that is the human and the non-human world, nature. It had lovely songs set to folk melodies that we, as children, sang. Later these became big hit songs over the radio. I had a major role to play, that of an orphan child driven away by evil uncles along with my little sister into a forest full of trees, birds and animals–a microcosm of nature, where these children are taken care of by the inhabitants of this forest.

It is from this experience that I started my journey as a child actor in all sorts of plays, where a child was needed. All these plays were in my mother tongue, Kashmiri.

Now, looking back, I think I perhaps had a hidden desire to perform and organise group activities. In my early years, we had formed a performance group in our locality and we would often create some kind of improvised performances and show it to our friends and some times to our elders. Most of the times, I remember I used to lead such endeavours and my fellow child artists had to follow my instructions. Many a times there would be arguments and showdowns, and the elders would have to intervene. Perhaps this was a part of our very tight-knit community living and also part of our Hindu-Muslim interconnectivity.

During all these growing-up years, I had the privilege of being encouraged by my parents and my grandmother. They never objected to my activities or interfered in any way from my childhood to my college days. My state of Jammu and Kashmir offered me a three-year scholarship to join the National School of Drama, New Delhi, where I got trained as a theatre professional. Along with my theatre activity, I studied biology chemistry up to university level. At one point I had a choice either to become a doctor like my father or become a biochemist, but I followed my heart. This decision surprised my entire clan except my parents, since no one in my family had ever ventured into the world of arts. My parents’ simple encouragement and faith in me has been my inspiration all these years. I have stayed a free-lance theatre person all these forty years working not only in India but also in South Asia both in theatre and films.

What are the three or four seminal plays in a theatre director’s dream repertory, and in yours in particular?

One cannot speak for other directors, since each director works in his own world and under his particular national culture specifics and social conditions. For me, I always had this desire to deal with classics from Sanskrit plays like KALI DASA’S Shakuntla, or Bhasis – urubhangam. Among contemporary plays I love plays that deal with the predicament of a human condition in the present social-political environment. I love themes and concepts developed by me in collaboration with traditional and professional performers, a kind of lab work, which later develops into a major theatre production. The themes one has dealt with in the area of my work are the concepts of displacement of people involving different cultures, beliefs, histories, violence and memory.

Who are your models and mentors, if any?

This is a difficult question, for a person who lost his home, his town, and who has witnessed violence and has escaped death many times, in cross fires. All models and mentors vanished during the many trials one has undergone. It is a sad and lonely state to be in. Hence I always look inwards into myself for inspiration and courage. I have always said that I am like a stream of water flowing down the hill, making its own path around any obstacles and moving on, and one day this stream will naturally dry up and become invisible.

I have no Gurus. I learned from many teachers and some of them have been the poorest of the poor with great wisdom.

Which are the most critical skills in order to become a good theatre director?

The most important skill is experiencing life in all its colours and shades. One can study in the best universities and learn skills from great teachers and masters. But if one does not learn and absorbs the essence of compassion and subsume it into one’s soul, all knowledge and skills will remain a bag of tricks and empty shells. Mahatama Gandhi once said, “If you are in a dilemma about a decision that you have to take, and you do not know what to do, at that moment recall the face of a poorest and most impoverished human being in front of you and think, can this particular action of yours change his life and empower him. Then you will be able to make the right decision.”