Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities
Announces Fellowship Awards for 2008-09

The IPRH Faculty Fellows for 2008-09, and their research projects, will be:

• Jodi Byrd (American Indian Studies/English)
  Colonial Cacophonies, Postcolonial Worlds: American Indian Studies and the Frontiers of Disciplinarity
  
  
• Melissa Littlefield (Kinesiology and Community Health/English)
  Disciplining Forensics: A Textbook Rhetoric of Literary Boundaries
  
  
• Feisal G. Mohamed (English)
  Historicism, Formalism, and How Practitioners of English Read Milton
  
  
• Sarah Projansky (Gender and Women’s Studies/Cinema Studies)
  Feminist Girls’ Studies as Emerging Discipline
  
  
• Gabriel Solis (Musicology)
  Performing Genre and the Self: Tom Waits, Masculinity, Americana, and Rock at the end of “The American Century”
  
  
• Sharra Vostral (Gender and Women’s Studies/History)
  Producing an Epidemic: Rely Tampons, Toxic Shock Syndrome, and Conflicting Disciplinary Expertise
  
  

The IPRH Graduate Student Fellows for 2008-09, and the projects they will undertake, will be:

• Patrick W. Berry (English, Writing Studies)
  Making Teachers, Making Literacy: Negotiating the Rhetoric of Crisis and Myth
  
  
• Anne Brubaker (English)
  Literature in the Age of Mathematics: Science, Gender, and the Multiplicity of Modernity
  
  
• Peter Craft – Nicholson-IPRH Fellow (English)
  Warfare, Trade, and “Indians” in English Literature, 1652-1719
  
  
• Kevin Healey (Institute of Communications Research)
  The Spirit of Networks: New Media and the Changing Role of Religion in American Public Life
  
  
• Luis Eduardo Herrera (Ethnomusicology)
  Politics of Creation/Creation of Politics: Music Making, Political Repression, and Cold War Strategies in Dictatorial Argentina
  
  
• Jeff Kyong-McClain – Nicholson-IPRH Fellow (History)
  Excavating the Nation: The Discipline of Archaeology and Control of the Past in Republican Southwest China
  
  
• Rebecca Nickerson (East Asian Languages and Cultures)
  Shaping the Body Domestic: Gender, Race, and Physical Culture in Imperial Japan
  
  
• Sarah L. Rasmusson (Institute of Communications Research)
  Whiteness, Girls’ Studies, and White Women as Girls from A-List Girls to Ziegfeld Girls

     In past years, the IPRH has typically awarded six graduate student fellowships, but beginning in the 2007-2008 academic year has increased the number of fellowships to eight, with the generous support of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences (LAS) and the Nicholson Endowment Fund. Two of the graduate fellowship recipients – Peter Craft and Jeffrey Kyong-McClain – have been designated as Nicholson-IPRH Fellows for 2008-2009. The Nicholson Endowment is a gift of Grace W. Nicholson (1906-1998), who pursued undergraduate studies in LAS, and Professor Emeritus John A. Nicholson (1891-1986), a faculty member in the Philosophy Department at UIUC for 33 years. The Nicholson Endowment, which was established in 1999, provides support for the academic programs LAS and excellence in the study of the humanities on campus.

     The annual theme of “Disciplinarity” will allow the Fellows to consider the ways in which, during the past two decades, traditional boundaries in the humanities and arts have been challenged and often dissolved. Important new formations - from fields like cultural studies to genres like multi-media installation - were the result. And yet, there is a widespread sense that disciplinarity still matters. Institutionally, it continues to govern graduate education as well as hiring and promotion. Intellectually, too, it very much holds sway. Not only are there few humanists and artists willing to discard the methods and approaches developed in their fields, but many of them anchor their scholarly and artistic practice in a critical engagement with disciplinary pasts. The result is an active moment for the rethinking of disciplinarity.

     The IPRH’s choice of disciplinarity as the annual theme for 2008-09 reflects the program’s commitment to the ongoing investigation of the conditions of humanistic scholarship and artistic production. It also dovetails with the campus’s engagement with questions of disciplinarity. That engagement ranges from the infrastructural expansion of knowledge production and the promotion of innovative research to the active rethinking of institutional organization and the trajectories of academic careers.

     Faculty Fellows are released from one semester of teaching, with the approval of their departments and colleges. They are also asked to teach one course, during the award year or the year immediately following, on a subject related to their Fellowship. Graduate Student Fellows receive a stipend and a tuition and fee waiver from the IPRH. All IPRH Fellows are expected to remain in residence on the UI campus during the award year, and to participate in the Program’s annual conference and related activities, including a year-long interdisciplinary Fellows’ Seminar.