Each year a specific yet broad area of research is pursued by the Center. UWM faculty, and faculty from other UW-System schools, are selected to participate as Fellows. Lectures, seminars, conferences, and colloquia are coordinated around the year's research theme. The focus of our research in 2009-20011 is "Figuring Place & Time" in which the Center considers explores hegemonic and alternative temporalities and spatialities.
Beginning with the 2010-11 academic year, the Center will be joined by Matthew Burtner (Composition and Computer Music, Virginia) as its first Provost’s Fellow in the Humanities.
The Center also hosts faculty from other countries who come to us with Fulbright or ACLS Fellowships, or support from their own institutions. Typically, the Center provides these International Fellows of the Center, as they are designated, with an office in the Center along with the other Center Fellows and as much research assistance, including library privileges, as possible.
The 2009-10 fellows:
David S. Allen, Associate Professor of Journalism and Mass Communication at UWM, is the author of Democracy, Inc.: the Press and Law in the Corporate Rationalization of the Public Sphere (University of Illinois Press, 2005). His project at the Center concerns the role of time and place in the management of dissent as reflected in the recent proliferation of government-designated free speech zones and their impact on the public sphere. This research will develop into a book that argues that time and space designations for dissent limit discourse to the detriment of a discursive public sphere. More . . .
Erica Bornstein is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at UWM and the author of The Spirit of Development: Protestant NGOs, Morality, and Economics in Zimbabwe (Stanford, 2005). Her project at the Center concerns the temporal and atemporal aspects of humanitarian relief efforts, commonly described as both an urgent response to crises and a "timeless" impulse. She anticipates that this work will contribute to a monograph that builds on ethnographic research on philanthropists, volunteers, and humanitarian workers conducted in New Delhi. More . . .
Bruce Charlesworth is Assistant Professor of Film, Video, and New Genres in UWM's Film Department. During his fellowship at the Center, he will develop Retraction, a new multimedia narrative environment that explores anticipation and the passage of time through several successive video and sound-equipped rooms connected by closed doors. The project will grant viewers the opportunity to engage with fictional characters and builds on earlier work concerning the psychology of anticipation. More . . .
Jennifer Johung is the Center's first Masters of Liberal Studies (MLS) Fellow, an Assistant Professor of Contemporary Art in the Art History Department at UWM, and Director of UWM's Art History Gallery. Her research at the Center will examine the concept of home as re-imagined in the intersections between contemporary art and architecture. The project proposes that, while place may no longer be a sustainable category, being in place is nonetheless possible, as home is always in the process of being resituated. She will also teach a graduate seminar in the MLS program. More . . .
Nan Kim, Assistant Professor of History at UWM, will explore the temporality and geopolitical landscape of the residual Cold War with a focus on the ongoing division between North and South Korea. Her work examines how, in this period of continuing uncertainty on the Korean Peninsula, the disruptions caused by national division are being remembered, challenged, and reconfigured. At the Center, she will work on a book that builds upon previous research about separated families, the war bereaved, and reconciliation in divided Korea. More . . .
Jason Puskar is Assistant Professor of English and has published articles in such journals as Daedalus and American Literary History. His research at the Center will explore the cultural history of the push button, modernity's most common interface with the mechanical world. His work will examine the button as a juncture in history, a tiny place that collapses distance into proximity, and in turn condenses duration into instantaneity. More . . .
Manu Sobti, Assistant Professor in the School of Architecture and Urban Planning at UWM, will focus on Central Asia's Oxus River boundary to explore medieval cultural encounters between Persians and Arabs. His work examines how physical borders and boundaries delineate the nature of cultural interactions and determine the development of historical time and place. He is writing a book that unravels how conflict, reconciliation and interaction between medieval Persian and Arab communities created urban forms alongside this geographically significant and politically critical divide. More . . .
Deborah J. Wilk is an Assistant Professor of Art History in the Department of Art at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater. Her project examines the way architecture was used to structure and narrate visual and textual investigations of immigration, focusing on the architecture of Castle Garden and Ellis Island. Additionally, she will explore how images of breastfeeding immigrant mothers brought to the forefront issues of ethnicity, citizenship, and eugenics. More . . .
Robert P. Wolensky, Professor of Sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point, has studied the history and culture of Northeastern Pennsylvania for more than three decades, and has written five books on the area. His research at the Center addresses the complex relationships between narrative, memory, place and time in a specific American cultural landscape, namely the anthracite coal region of Northeastern Pennsylvania. During the Fellowship, he will be working on a book tentatively titled Anthracite Stories: The Shifting Ground of Narrative and Memory in the Anthracite Coal Region of the United States, 1830-2000. More . . .
For fellows from previous years, see the list of Center Fellows Since 1974.
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