JONATHAN EBEL
Program for the Study of Religion
Project Title: Faith in the Fight: The Great War and the Religion of the American Soldier

This is a study of religion, violence, and early-twentieth-century America. It is an examination of the faiths of American men and women who participated in the First World War and the changes wrought in those faiths by experiences of combat, suffering, and death. I argue that the First World War was both a war of religion and a religious experience for Americans; and the post-war period in America is best understood as a largely successful period of reassertion of that faith – a period of re-illusionment. The significant ruptures that attended “the Great War” in America provided occasion for a religiously charged return to many pre-war orthodoxies.

Department of Religion (www.relst.uiuc.edu)
Illinois Forum on Religion in America (www.relst.uiuc.edu/events/forum.html

JED ESTY
Department of English
Project Title: Tropics of Youth:  The Bildungsroman and Colonial Modernity

This project proposes a revisionary history of the British novel between 1860 and 1930, charting formal changes in the Bildungsroman, or novel of development. It describes a substantial break between Victorian novels, in which youthful heroes and modernizing societies come of age together, and modernist novels, in which the coming-of-age plot is disrupted or inverted. My hypothesis is that modernist fiction’s challenge to linear time emerges most saliently in relation to the theme of stunted youth and in the context of a specifically colonial problem of stalled development. Thus the modernist novel’s experimental style and its obsessive Peter-Pan thematics work together to encode a rupture in prevailing nineteenth-century narratives of progress, both personal and geopolitical.

http://www.english.uiuc.edu/-people-/faculty/esty.html
 

ELLEN MOODIE
Department of Anthropology
Project Title: Democracy and Security after the Cold War: Shifting Meanings of Violence in Postwar El Salvador

I propose to study the shifting discourses on political transition in postwar El Salvador as a way of exploring larger questions about transformations in meanings of democracy and security in an era defined by the end of the Cold War, the rise of market democracy, and the global post-9/11 security context. Specifically, drawing on archival and ethnographic material collected in fieldwork begun in 1993, I plan to explore ruptures in meanings attributed to El Salvador’s high rates of crime as a way to gain insight onto the consequences of global post-Cold War narratives of triumph.

http://www.anthro.uiuc.edu/faculty/moodie

LISA NAKAMURA
Institute of Communications Research / Asian American Studies Program
Project Title: Interfaces of Identity: Telematic Profiling and Cultural Difference in Digital Visual Media

This project examines the deployment of digital profiling technologies such as facial recognition, retinal scanning, and CCTV (closed circuit television) within television, films, and digital games. New media techniques of profiling and observation in the context of the post-terror state create images or “profiles” of race and gender that represent a rupture from earlier forms of surveillance and regulation, creating a new visual culture of the bodily image.

MARC D. PERRY
Department of Anthropology / African American Studies Program
Project Title: Critical Blackness and the State: Hip Hop in Late Socialist Cuba

This project centers on how Afro-Cuban youth employ rap music and broader hip hop “culture” in fashioning new, transnationally engaged forms of black racial identity and antiracist critiques. Such efforts, I argue, evolve largely in strategic response to neoliberal reconfigurings of racial and class dynamics in a post-Soviet era Cuba, and represent a multivocal (re-)claiming of a critical “black” subject within a previously “non-racial” Cuban national imaginary. These young people thus seek a level of political agency as racially self-identified actors at the shifting, if not ruptive intersections of local and global histories of racialized power
 

This project is the beginning of a larger study on the use of historiography to mediate the rupture of conquest in eleventh- and twelfth-century English culture. Specifically, it examines the powerful and popular historiographic tradition instantiated by Geoffrey de Monmouth’s Latin prose Historia Regum Britanniae and propagated by Wace’s French verse Roman de Brut and Layamon’s English verse Brut, among others. As the tradition develops and expands through various languages and literary forms, the tensions between historical rupture and the aesthetic mechanisms that attempt to efface it emerge as the driving force behind literary production and cultural transformation.

https://netfiles.uiuc.edu/trilling/www/
http://www.english.uiuc.edu

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