Humanities

Emma Davenport, PhD, JD

ASSISTANT PROFESSOR, EMORY COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES, ENGLISH

Subject to Contract: Liberalism and the Victorian Novel

This book project brings literary and legal analysis together to offer a new way of understanding why democratic states often fail to ensure their citizens’ personal liberty and collective welfare. Liberalism—a broad political ideology espousing ideals of individual agency and personal rights—has historically located its legitimacy in the consent of the governed. Even as old metaphors of “social contract” have given way to newer formulations of capital exchange, freedom of contract remains at liberal democracy’s conceptual core. But even—or especially—in those states that most jealously safeguard contract rights (like the US and Britain), structural inequity remains intractable. This project aims to explain why.

"Subject to Contract: Liberalism and the Victorian Novel" reads the fiction produced contemporaneously with the ascent of modern liberalism as diagnosing the surprising similarity between consensual contract and structural coercion. From the late 1850s to 1900, when political philosophers were developing the contract theory that grounds contemporary liberalism, British novelists were engaged in a parallel project of reflecting on the strange failure of consensual procedures to produce a thriving society. I contend that the affordances of literature—including, for instance, fiction’s dexterity in scrutinizing metaphors like “social contract”—enabled fiction writers to interrogate liberalism’s purported commitment to enacting willed consent. I argue that Victorian novels expose contract as the mechanism by which coercion is integrated into and concealed within ostensibly consensual transactions. This project ultimately demonstrates how the novel is a critical medium for theorizing liberalism’s foundational fictions of consent.

Aminah Hasan-Birdwell, PhD

ASSISTANT PROFESSOR, EMORY COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES, PHILOSOPHY

Early Modern Women on War and Peace

This book project excavates the philosophical responses of early modern women to war and its catastrophic consequences. My analysis reveals the centrality of war to the development of early modern philosophy and the distinctive contribution that these early modern women philosophers make to thinking about this topic. Although there has been a considerable body of scholarship on early modern women philosophers, no study has yet explored how these thinkers are linked by the experience of war and the possibility of peace. The horrors of violent combat and its aftermath and the struggles for peace were profoundly important to early modern philosophical thinking; therefore, the analysis of these topics provides a more complex and deepened understanding of the period. Early Modern Women on War and Peace focuses on the works of Elisabeth of Bohemia (1618-1680), Mary Astell (1666-1731), Madeleine de Scudery (1607-1701), Madame de Lafayette (1634-1693), Margaret Cavendish (1623-1673), and the Duchess of Montpensier (1627-1693). I show that these philosophers who have been underrepresented in, or altogether excluded from, the history of philosophy and history of political thought have made distinctive contributions to the subjects of war and peace. They broke with the traditional thinking about war within the natural right and early liberal framework, which defines it as an essential component of human relations, woven into the fabric of human nature. Understanding these female philosophers’ intervention in this tradition, I contend, changes the landscape of how scholars have conceptualized the political and philosophical ideas in the seventeenth century.

Harshita Kamath, PhD

ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR, EMORY COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES, MIDDLE EASTERN AND SOUTH ASIAN STUDIES

Annamayya: Poetry, Power, and the Making of Gods and Kings

My proposed project will culminate in a critical history of the poet Annamayya (1424-1503 C.E.), his songs inscribed on nearly three thousand copper plates, and his impact on shaping the powerful presence of the Tirumala temple located in Andhra Pradesh, India. My project examines the life of Annamayya and his songs in order to trace the rise of Tirumala from a regional sectarian site to the most popular Hindu temple in the world today. At the broadest level, my research demonstrates that poetry was historically essential to the consolidation of power throughout South India. Annamayya mobilized multiple modes of power, including royal patronage of Tirumala and devotional discourse of the sectarian Srivaishnava community in order to exalt his god and popularize the Tirumala temple. Through Annamayya’s corpus, the god in the Tirumala temple shifted from being a regional manifestation of Vishnu to the primary god of the South Indian landscape, one who is visited by twenty million pilgrims annually.

Erwin Rosinberg, PhD

ASSOCIATE TEACHING PROFESSOR, EMORY COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES, ENGLISH

Modernity, Fiction, and the Countryside

My book project Modernity, Fiction, and the Countryside revises literary-critical narratives that characterize the modernist and contemporary British novel as exclusively urban or cosmopolitan in nature. I argue that the novel as a genre has been and continues to be instrumental in the conceptualization of the countryside and, counterintuitively, that the countryside as we now understand it is a concept largely produced in the twentieth century. Twentieth-century fictions of the countryside tend not to present the “knowable communities” theorized by Raymond Williams; rather, they highlight definitional uncertainties around the boundaries and the uses of the term countryside and its alliance with conflicting ideological trajectories. Although the idea of the countryside may first call to mind the quaint and the nostalgic, I argue that the countryside’s imprecise positioning allows it to act as a container for contested notions of progress and belonging and potentially contradictory systems of value. Moreover, I show how the twentieth-century British novel, in both its high modernist and postmodern phases, remains surprisingly invested in the shifting, supposedly outmoded space of the countryside as an index of potential futures—aspirations toward more ethical forms of community and more sustainable relations to the physical earth—that we are still in the process of imagining.

Caroline Schaumann, PhD

PROFESSOR, EMORY COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES, GERMAN STUDIES

Kinship and Conflict: The Schlagintweit Brothers’ Explorations in the Alps, Himalaya, and Sierra Nevada

My third monograph critically examines the lives and research of the scientists, explorers, and mountaineers Schlagintweit brothers 1842-1880 in the Alps, Himalaya, and Californian Sierra Nevada (the latter of which only Robert Schlagintweit visited). This project revives my interest in nineteenth-century naturalists and depictions of mountains and glaciers while adding a focus on the bigoted legacies of colonial science and early ethnography.

As the brothers measured the land and documented its peoples and cultures, uninhibitedly amassing more than 14,000 artifacts, they ascribed to a world view indebted to enlightenment and European liberalism but rooted in deep-seated beliefs of Western superiority. The Schlagintweits’ extensive writings and publications also including many sketches and photographs provide important insights into the emerging imperial sciences and violent enacting of colonial voyaging but also lay bare the precarious conflicts that challenge one-sided British and German historiographies. Since their journey was dependent on the backing of governing powers in three states—the British East India Company, Prussian King Friedrich Wilhelm IV, and King Maximilian of Bavaria—the expedition’s aims became continually at odds with one another and occasionally undermined from within. Crossing borders from Bavaria to Austria, Prussia, Switzerland, England, India, Tibet, Nepal, and later the United States, the brothers negotiated conflicting European expansionist interests while working with indigenous laborers, assistants, and collaborators. My manuscript considers the Schlagintweits’ attempts to establish their reputation as scientists within these geopolitical frameworks and local networks of indigenous knowledge and practices, offering close analysis of select documents from different parts of their journeys.

Carl Suddler, PhD

ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR, EMORY COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES, HISTORY

No Way Out: The Carceral Boundaries of Race and Sports

In No Way Out: The Carceral Boundaries of Race and Sports, I uncover the hidden fingerprints of police power in sports over the past 150 years and tell the stories of how Black athletes have been forced to navigate the constantly growing police presence in their daily lives. It is a social history of sports, race, and police power in the United States, arguing that Black athletes and communities’ search for liberation in sports have collided with state surveillance, arrested ambition, and carceral boundaries. This story is not just about police presence, but structures that empower the police to control Black people’s lives and futures. The normalization of police presence in predominantly Black spaces of relaxation, play, and competition shapes how young Black folk learn to think about their bodies, how young athletes express themselves on and off the court, how tolerant we become to surveillance, and, most distressing of all, how deeply we internalize the idea that it is “natural” to be corralled and surveilled in spaces meant to facilitate joy and communion. Ultimately, this history encourages us to consider how structural powers serve to take choices away from young, Black people.

With the support of the URC award, I will conduct research for and make significant progress towards completing my second book manuscript.

Nathan Suhr-Sytsma, PhD

ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR, EMORY COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES, ENGLISH

African Poetry Worlds

African Poetry Worlds addresses the questions: what is new about twenty-first-century African poetry in English? How is anglophone African poetry distinct from other bodies of anglophone poetry? Why does poetry continue to matter for writers and readers in and beyond Africa? I argue that twenty-first-century African poets—and the pan-African communities they constitute—are engaged in worldmaking; they renew a quest for freedom amidst historic and continuing unfreedom, not just by challenging neoliberal political economies or stereotypical images of Africa that circulate globally, but also by breaching customary norms of representation for gender, sexuality, and family. More than just representing new social realities, recent poems by Africans enact new self-understandings about what it means to inhabit African lifeworlds. Each chapter of this book manuscript concerns how poems think sensuously through dilemmas pertaining to African peoples’ experiences of race (Ch 1), nation/diaspora (Ch 2), generation (Ch 3), motherhood (Ch 4), and futurity (Ch 5), with a conclusion on planetary crisis. Composed and circulated in performance, in print, and on screen, these poems increasingly depend, in turn, on a new media ecology. As contemporary African poets work through dilemmas of how to confront socio-existential situations and forge institutional networks, they fashion original poems with particular technical repertoires and mediated formats. Reorienting understandings of African literature and lyric poetry, the book will at once address the tendency of African literary/cultural studies to discount poetry and challenge scholars of poetry to do justice to living writers from the Global South.

Daniel Walter, PhD

ASSISTANT PROFESSOR, OXFORD COLLEGE, HUMANITIES

Forced Migration and Second Language Learning: Investigating Syrian and Ukrainian Refugees learning German in Hamburg

The aim of this project is to understand how Syrian and Ukrainian refugees in Germany are engaging (or not) in German language learning through language and culture courses offered through the German government, as well as their daily experiences in work and community spaces.

I am interested in collecting interviews with speakers within these communities in Hamburg, Germany through connections with educators teaching German as a foreign language. In doing so, I hope to gain insight into their ability to express themselves in German and how their feelings about language education in Germany plays a role in their life.

The interviews conducted for this project will consist of questions related to the goals expressed in the government provided programming, what the refugees believe the purpose of these courses is, the effectiveness of these courses, challenges that these people face within these courses, and their recommendations for improvements to current practices.

The information these people can provide about their learning experiences, as well as aligning those experiences with linguistic outcomes measured through our questions, will provide important information for the German government about the effectiveness of its programming, as well as more broadly for how language training can be improved for refugees in other contexts.

Jing Wang, PhD

ASSISTANT PROFESSOR, EMORY COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES, FILM AND MEDIA

Globalizing Independent Cinema: Circulation of Independent Chinese Documentaries in Global Media Industries (1991-2017)

Using a media industry studies approach, my book Globalizing Independent Cinema examines the multi-dimensional, dynamic relationships between national independent cinema culture and the global film industry, as manifested in the overseas circulation of Chinese independent documentaries, from their domestic production sectors into global markets. My methodologies include extensive interviews with both domestic and transnational industrial professionals, evaluation of previously overlooked archival materials, discourse analysis within trade journals, and my own experience as a former documentary filmmaker for China Central Television.

The book argues that overseas circulation of nonmainstream Chinese documentary film has been mediated by transnational independent film circulation networks, consisting of key non-major industry stakeholders rather than Hollywood media conglomerates. These networks involve multidirectional cross-border flows of funding, production and distribution partnerships, creative talent and ideas, and media products. By analyzing particular stakeholders’ roles and mapping out their manifold interconnections, it uses Chinese independent cinema to demonstrate how transnational media contra-flows from non-Western countries have become multilayered, hybrid processes. These encompass both powerful forces for cultural homogeneity as well as countervailing pulls toward maintaining cultural specificity and autonomy on local levels. An understanding of Chinese independent documentary’s integration into global independent film circulation networks is useful in two respects: First, it exemplifies a model of transnational film networks in which national and global collaborators are fully intertwined, and second, it reveals the deep complexities and challenges for nonmainstream media products that flow from the non-Western world into the global media marketplace.