This seminar provides graduate students an opportunity for $2000 topping of stipends, competitive summer funding and conference travel funding, and dissertation research and development. For a complete description of the application process for students, click here. Applications are due March 14, 2008.
After a three-year pilot program, the Mellon Seminars were renewed in 2007-2008 for another three years. These two-semester seminars promote research at the highest level between faculty and doctoral students. Starting with a core of well-developed research by the seminar leader, the seminars invite students from across the humanities to become fellow researchers and collaborators. The seminars support innovative graduate level training and research in the humanities and social sciences.
Seminar leaders receive a research allowance of $5000 per seminar, and will be granted teaching credit and release from one undergraduate course per semester. Additionally, a budget of $6,000 is available to invite guest faculty speakers from other academic institutions whose work is relevant to the seminar.
2008-2009
America and the World
Faculty leader: Ussama Makdisi, Arab-American Educational Foundation Professor in Arabic Studies
This seminar takes as its central problem how American involvement in the world has been studied. It explores the different ways historians, anthropologists, religious and literary critics, among others, have studied how people, ideas, processes, and events that transcend national borders have shaped United States history and culture from the antebellum period through the present. It asks, ultimately, what it means to “globalize” U.S. history and culture. Download a complete description.
Comparison in Theory and Practice
Faculty Leader: Jeffrey Kripal, J. Newton Rayzor Professor and Chair of Religious Studies
Comparison is at the core of the humanities. It is fundamental to cognitive processing. It is basic to the production of meaning, which essentially involves “making connections” that not everyone else, maybe no one, will see. It is also rich in philosophical, cultural, political, and ethical implications, particularly in our modern globalizing world. Although comparative theorizing was central to anthropology, sociology, linguistics, and the study of literature and religions for most of their histories, comparison as such fell out of favor in the 1970s with the rise of poststructuralism and postmodernism. Localism, radical contextualism, complete constructivism, and cultural relativism came to dominate academic discourse as – perhaps not accidentally – religious fundamentalism (a complete hermeneutical collapse of signifier and the signified, that is, a literalist reading of the world) and a disturbing balkanization took over the national and geopolitical scenes. Understandably there are now calls for a return to a renewed and deepened comparative hermeneutics that can offer some beginning answer to this crisis of meaning, that can “read the world “anew.” Download a complete description.
2007-2008
Religious Biopolitics: Transcendental Hygienics Past, Present and Future
Faculty leader: James D. Faubion, Professor and Chair of Anthropology
Student participants: Ann Gleig (Religious Studies), Sarah Graham (English), Andrea Jain (Religious Studies), Daniel Levine (Religious Studies), Valerie Olson (Anthropology)
In the first volume of his History of Sexuality, Michel Foucault traces the clinical and psychoanalytic pastoralism of what he calls the biopolitical "anatomo-politics of the human body" in large part to a Christian confessional that he characterizes as being then and as still being "the general standard governing the production of true discourse about sex." The concepts, disciplines and domains of intervention that Foucault includes within the broader Western European universe of biopower suggest that it has its most purely extra-ecclesiastic realization in nineteenth-century France. There, the church and its clerics are remarkable for their absence. Across the Atlantic, however, the universe of biopower takes a different turn. Its expansion in Europe and in America has the same impetus--the cholera epidemic of 1832. A good many physicians are among its American executors, but its great popularizers are with few exceptions ardent Christians, though sometimes Christians very much of their own cloth. The focus of the research that I will develop in the Mellon Seminar, what I call "religious biopolitics," thus belongs to the history of the refractions of the modern apparatus of governmentality as they mingle with the voluntarism, sectarianism and pragmatic utopianism of an America that has long interposed between the individual body and the general population its ever fissile array of Protestant congregations--which it has exported and continues to export widely around the world. Download a complete description.
2006-2007
Monism, Dualism, Pluralism and Absolute Spirit: Debates on the Oneness of Nature from Spinoza, Descartes and Leibniz to the Romantics and Hegel
Faculty Leader: Mark Kulstad (Philosophy)
Student Participants: Jonathan Abdalla, Ryan Foster, Stan Husi, Brandon Mulvey, Brian Prince
This seminar emerges Professor Kulstad's current work on the philosophical controversies in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries concerning monism for Spinoza, dualism in Descartes, and pluralism in the work of Leibniz. The course was part of an ongoing collaboration between philosophers and historians. It therefore emphasized the importance of collaboration at every stage of intellectual endeavor, from project conceptualization to writing and revision. A balance of History and Philosophy students, the seminar participants reflected this interdisciplinary dialog as they thought through the intersections of the two disciplines that was at the core of the seminar topic.
Doing Things with Emotion
Faculty Leader: Meredith Skura (English)
Student Participants: Jill Delsigne, Kara Marler-Kennedy, Kevin Morrison, Joy Pasini, Teresa Wei
This seminar interrogates the longstanding scientific model that tends to discourage the academic study of emotion. Understood to both elude scientific measurement and to be peripheral to academic inquiry, emotions have only recently begun to be understood as deeply implicated in out sense of "rationality." The seminar began with readings that represented the different ways scholars have explored emotions in such disciplines as History, Anthropology, Sociology, Psychology, Gender Studies, Linguistics, and Literary Studies. It then proceeded to case studies of how such disciplinary approaches might shape the work of the participants' ongoing research, which theorizes the often surprising relationship between individual and cultural constructions of emotion in early modern England. Because the study of emotion is a field very much still in search of productive methodology and theoretical perspectives, the seminar offers graduate students a rich opportunity to engage in a newly developing interdisciplinary research field.
2005-2006
The Existential Sources of Normativity
Faculty Leader: Steven Crowell (Philosophy)
Student Participants: Matt Burch, Aaron Hinkley, Irene McMullin, Matt Schunke, Will Smith, David Snyder
This seminar explored the conundrum implicit in philosophical appeals to reason - they they presuppose the very reason to which they appeal. Taking Heidegger's existential approach to human nature as the focus of this seeming tautology, the seminar asked students from Philosophy, English, and Religious Studies to consider how their own projects engage in this interpretive knot and to explore how their own research might benefit from a Heideggerian approach to the problem of reason. Conversely, Professor Crowell opened his own research in this field to the seminar for consideration and critique.
Plato's Phaedrus and Classical Hermeneutics
Faculty Leader: Harvey Yunis (Classics)
Student Participants: Sarah Graham, Brian Prince, Hae Young Seong, Pumsup Shim, Molly Slattery, Ryan White
This seminar is unique in that the first semester was devoted to analyzing one text, Plato's Phaedrus, in detail. Yet from this careful textual analysis, the seminar considered more generally the art of interpreting texts - a concern central to the textual work of all humanities disciplines. In the second semester, the seminar critiqued modern hermeneutics from the perspective acquired through the first semester's attention to ancient hermeneutics. This course's premise that the subject is of overarching concern to all humanistic study was borne out by the remarkably diverse group of students who participated, including students from Religious Studies, English, Linguistics, and Philosophy.
2005
Toward a Hemispheric America
Faculty Leader: Caroline Levander (English)
Student Participants: Elizabeth Fenton, Gale Kenny, Cory Ledoux, David Messmer, Molly Robey
This seminar provided a cutting-edge immersion in the field of American studies through adopting a comparative, hemispheric approach that is gradually reorganizing the fields of literature, history, and religious studies, challenging new scholars to both broaden and deepen their analysis of the cultures of the Americas. Through emphasizing a comparativist method that remains attentive to local distinctions while bringing a hemispheric approach to bear on the nation-state, this year-long seminar sharpened the writing of the next generation of Americanist scholars and developed a model for the reorganizing of American studies in the 21st century.
Language Policies as Markers of National and Cultural Identity
Faculty Leader: Rafael Salaberry (Hispanic Studies)
Student Participants: David Katten, Natalya Stepanova, Martin Hilpert, Viktoria Papp, Natli Leduc
This seminar is based on the analysis of case studies on the topic of language as a marker of national and cultural/ethnic identity, with a particular emphasis on language planning, language policies, and political debates on language use. Language planning refers to the ways in which organized communities united by religious, ethnic, political, or social factors attempt to influence language use. Concrete manifestations of such policies are obvious in the case of bilingual education, the establishment of an official national language, the control over gender-biased language, etc. Some of the topics that students investigated in the seminar include: "Framing Language Policy and Language Identity: The Case of the Saami of Northern Europe," "Language Use and Linguistic Evidence in Conflict Resolution and Interethnic Conflict," "Language as Property and Identity in Canada and France in the Context of 'Divagation'," "Language Variation and Language Prestige in Legal and Political Debates with Emphasis on Hungary," and "Bilingual and Bicultural Identities in Russian-French Writers."
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