Each year a specific yet broad area of research is pursued by the Center. UWM faculty, and faculty from other UW-System schools and beyond, 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 2011-2012 is "What is 21st Century Studies" in which the Center explores what the discipline of 21st century studies might entail. A study of the present and very recent past? Contemporary, cutting-edge interdisciplinary work in the humanities, arts, and sciences? The deployment of digital modes of research, analysis, and representation? A challenge to traditional institutional structures and the development of new scholarly methods?
For the 2011-12 academic year, the Center is joined by two post-doctoral Provost Fellows: International Fellow Charlotte Frost (PhD; The School of History of Art, Film, and Visual Media; Birkbeck College, University of London) and Interdisciplinary Humanities Fellow Rebekah Sheldon (PhD, English, City University of New York).
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 2011-12 Fellows:
Rachel Ida Buff (History, Comparative Ethnic Studies) will explore the historical context of immigrant rights in her book-in-process, “This Way Out: Deportation and Immigrant Rights Discourse.” Her project will investigate both the emerging multiethnic discourse beginning with the Depression and the emergence of power within the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), arguing that immigrant rights discourse has gained significant traction despite efforts to subvert it.
Rebecca Dunham (English), an award-winning poet, will do research for a book-length poetic sequence entitled “Black Horizon: A Documentary in Verse” in which she will explore the intersection of global environmental events, specifically the BP oil spill, and poetry as a documentary form. This work will have her travel to the Gulf region to speak with the people who it has affected most, as well as experts in those fields relevant to the disaster, in order to gauge the aesthetic impact of this tragedy.
Charlotte Frost (PhD, Art History, Birkbeck College, University of London), one of our two Provost Fellows, will investigate the ways the production of art historical knowledge is shifting from book to digital formats. Her work at the Center will result in the founding of an experimental art history book series in a hybrid print/digital format, as well as completion of her own book, “Art History Online: Mailing Lists, Digital Forums, and the Future of Criticism,” also in a hybrid format.
María del Pilar Melgarejo (Spanish & Portuguese) will investigate the work of two writers who have used the aesthetic space of poetry to challenge oppression. Candelario Obeso, a 19th-century Colombian poet, initiated “Poesía negra” (black poetry), a poetic vernacular which he used to give voice to the voiceless. Linton Kwesi Johnson, a contemporary Jamaican poet, is recognized as the progenitor of dub poetry—a performance poetry rooted in oral tradition—that emerged in Jamaica and England in the 1970s.
Michael Newman (Journalism) will work on his book project, “Play TV: Early Video Game History.” Newman’s project participates in the emerging academic field of game studies, treating video gaming as a social and cultural practice with historical significance in the 21st century mediascape. Of particular interest is the emergence of gaming within domestic space and the context within which audiences engage with these new technologies and cultural forms.
Rebekah Sheldon (PhD, English, CUNY), one of our Provost Fellows, will examine the formal qualities of fiction that capture and transmit feeling via her book project, “Affective Futurities: Non-Representational Criticism and the Physics of Reading.” Through a lens of recent feminist scholarship on ontology, she will investigate the formal strategies at play in specific works of Chuck Palahniuk, William Burroughs, Mark Z. Danielewski, and Samuel Delany.
Nathaniel Stern (Art and Design), an experimental installation and video artist, printmaker, and writer, combines new and traditional media to challenge the notions of space, vision, and power. In his ongoing collaborative project Distill Life (with Jessica Meuninck-Ganger), he attempts to “expand our conception of printmaking and digital image making, while nimbly reminding us that art is always made in the margins of other art” (Nicole Ridgway). As a fellow, he will continue his work with the series and plans to exhibit his work in South Africa as well as at other regional and national shows.
Kristin Sziarto (Geography) will investigate the intersection of sexuality education and the construction of the human body in her research project, “The Production of Bodies, Spaces and Affects in Sexuality Education.” The project aims to challenge the notion of adolescents as dangerous agents to themselves, advancing instead the notion of adolescents as modern, healthy, knowing subjects. In support of this conception she will undertake a case study, interviewing key actors in the greater Milwaukee community involved with sexuality education efforts.
Heather Warren-Crow (Art and Design) is currently immersed in her book project, “Girlhood and the Plastic Image,” which intervenes equally in the fields of girl studies and digital culture studies, arguing that reproduction, dissemination, and consumption of plastic images are understood in connection to feminine adolescence. This project will enable her to consider the role of youth in the discursive formation of presentness and futurity.
For fellows from previous years, see the list of Center Fellows Since 1974.
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