The HRC is delighted to announce its 2008-2009 Graduate Dissertation Fellows:
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Torin Alexander
Religious Studies, “‘What Meaneth This?’: A Postmodern Theory of African American Religious Experience.” Dissertation Director, Dr. Anthony Pinn. Mr. Alexander investigates the significance of everyday life for the study of African American religious experience. His dissertation proposes that research focusing on microscopic expressions of power will lead to a more robust understanding of African American religion. Moreover, he asserts that the real site of liberation is revealed not so much in collective, communal, and coordinated endeavors, but rather in oppositional practices that are often passed over as irrelevant or insignificant.
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Kara Marler-Kennedy
English, “Mourning, Violence and the Historical Novel in Nineteenth-Century Britain.”
Dissertation Directors, Dr. Helena Michie and Dr. Robert Patten. Ms. Marler-Kennedy’s dissertation examines the role of the nineteenth century historical novel as an instrument for the affective development of British readers. This project suggests that the novels captured a highly political relationship between history and grief as integral to the violence that is often necessary in building and destroying the social bonds of community and nation.
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Elitza Ranova
Anthropology, “Re-Inventing Europe: Post-Socialist Change, Culture and Style in Bulgaria.” Dissertation Director, Dr. James D. Faubion. Based on fourteen months of ethnographic research in Sofia, Bulgaria, Ms. Ranova’s dissertation examines the emergence of a new generation of Bulgarian writers, artists, photographers and other culture producers. Ms. Ranova assesses how the discursive opposition between Western and Eastern Europe is being re-imagined through art, style and fashion in the context of post-socialist Bulgaria’s changing social structure.
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Abbie Salyers
History, “The Internment of Memory: Forgetting and Remembering the Japanese American Experience during World War II.” Dissertation Director, Dr. Ira Gruber. Ms. Salyers looks at WWII Japanese Americans’ experience in internment camps and as translators and members of all-Japanese American military units. The dissertation examines the politics of commemorating Japanese American WWII history and the role of individuals and local organizations in inscribing it in public memory.
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Matthew Schunke
Religious Studies, “A Phenomenological Response to Naturalist Accounts of Religion”
Dissertation Directors, Dr. Jeffrey J. Kripal and Dr. Steven Crowell. Mr. Schunke’s
dissertation addresses the ongoing tension in Religious Studies between naturalist
methodologies which reduce religious experience to purely natural social-scientific terms and descriptive methodologies which argue that religious experience cannot be explained in non-religious terms. Mr. Schunke singles out the phenomenology of the French
philosopher and theologian Jean-Luc Marion as a way to avoid the pitfalls of both
naturalist and descriptive methods.
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2007-2008 Graduate Dissertation Fellows
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Cecilia Ballí
Anthropology, "Women and Death on the Border: Gender, Territory, and Power in Ciudad Juárez." Dissertation Director, Dr. James D. Faubion. Ms. Ballí's project focuses on violence towards women along the U.S./Mexican border, especially in Ciudad Juárez. Following eighteen months of ethnographic fieldwork, Ms. Ballí's dissertation seeks to expose the frequent murder of women in Juárez, in the absence of any apparent criminal motives, as radically anti-social acts aimed at undoing society through the vicitimization of its most vulnerable members. Ms. Ballí relies "on anthropology in order to understand Juárez as a loosely bound but real space [...] where the unfolding of globalizing forces and the constant contentation of authority spell terror and death for poor women." |
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Ryan J. Foster
History, "The Creativity of Nature: the Genesis and Development of F.W.J. Schelling's Naturphilosophie." Dissertation Director, Dr. John H. Zammito. Mr. Foster's dissertation is an exhaustive intellectual biography of German metaphysical philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling. Joining recent attempts to revive Schelling's work in defiance of recent trends away from metaphysical thought, Mr. Foster focuses on Schelling's early philosophy of nature (Naturphilosophie) in order to show the ways that philosophy and science can speak to each other in intellectually and ecologically sound ways. By demonstrating a strong sensitivity to the historical moment in which Schelling was working and how that moment influenced his thought, Foster's dissertation will also show how his philosophies of science and nature are still relevant today. |
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David Messmer
English, "Fighting Words: The Politics of Literary Aurality in African American Literature from the Civil War to the Civil Rights." Dissertation Director, Dr. Caroline Levander. Mr. Messmer's work looks at the crucial role that representations of sound and music play in the formation of an African American literary tradition that spans the years leading to the Civil War through the era of Civil Rights. Through an examination of works by Frederick Douglass, Pauline Hopkins, James Weldon Johnson, W.E.B. DuBois, Ralph Ellison, and jazz singer Billie Holiday, Mr. Messmer's dissertation first isolates a persistent tension between written and aural forms of cultural expression and then traces the ways in which African American writers utilize that tension to make intrusions into national concepts of racial politics that would otherwise render them silent. |
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Ann K. Ziker
History, "Containing Democracy: Race, Conservative Politics, and U.S. Foreign Policy in the Post-Colonial World, 1948-1968." Dissertation Director, Dr. John B. Boles. Ms. Ziker’s dissertation examines how the modern American conservative movement took shape around the problems of U.S. foreign policy in a decolonizing world. As anticolonial revolutions remade the international political landscape, the politics of race mingled with public disputes about America’s relationship with newly independent nations in Africa and Asia. She suggests how the twin issues of civil rights at home and human rights abroad helped assemble a new conservative coalition in the United States. Her project aims to bridge the intellectual gap between domestic and foreign historical inquiry. |
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