KEVIN COE
Department of Speech Communication - Nicholson-IPRH Fellow
Project Title: Why We Fight: Presidential Justifications for War From WWII to Iraq

No decision that a nation makes is more consequential than the decision to go to war. In the United States this momentous decision is made, most centrally, by the president. Scholars have examined presidents’ wartime discourse, but have been too quick to categorize it as uniform and have largely ignored the role that news media play in transmitting this discourse to the public. With this in mind, I undertake a comprehensive analysis of presidents’ wartime communications since World War II, and consider press reactions to these communications, to illuminate how elite discourse attempts to justify the social and political ruptures created by war.

http://netfiles.uiuc.edu/kmcoe2/www
http://www.thegodstrategy.com

MELISSA FREE
Department of English
Project Title: Elsewhere England: Late Colonial South Africa, British Identity, and the Authorial Informant

Authorial informants were a late imperial breed of men and women who had (or still) lived or served in, or who routinely visited the colonial sites about which they wrote as “insiders.” These influential personalities, among them H. Rider Haggard, Olive Schreiner, and John Buchan, produced an idea of South Africa that was at once quintessentially English and inversely Other. My project exposes the denial of both hybridity—between colonizer and colonized—and rupture—between colonial and metropolitan—that generated the sense of heightened Englishness in their frontier fiction and nonfiction alike. Thus, it demonstrates that the elsewhere England of late colonial South Africa was, at once, replica, reaction, and model.
 

WILLIAM HOPE
Department of Anthropology
Project Title: "Donde nace lo cubano": Aesthetics, Nationalist Sentiment, and Cuban Music Making

This research explores the interrelationships between Cuban music making and cultural nationalism, the changing relations between artists and the state, and the situations of Cuban music within the transnational music industries. Specifically, I examine music making as a venue for nationalist sentiment from the complementary vantage points of ethnographic study and social history of two prominent musical traditions, Cuban son and punto guajiro. I emphasize the ways distinct contexts of musical performances frame social interactions and cultural meanings through the generation of signs of experience that constitute the aesthetic and ethical orientations with which people interpret and engage their social world.
 

This project examines two recent intertwined phenomena: welfare state retrenchment and the dramatic explosion of incarceration. I argue that a profound rupture occurred in the 1970s where the state abandoned programs that stressed rehabilitation and reintegration to embrace strategies of punishment and surveillance that individualized responsibility for social problems. These new punitive policies constructed sections of the population as racially coded anti-citizens, against which full citizenship was defined. I investigate key policy shifts in criminal sentencing, welfare, and drug policy, with attention to the role of popular culture, the Vietnam War, and the resistance of welfare recipients and prisoners.
 

JIN-KYUNG PARK
Institute of Communications Research
Project Title: Constructing Racial "Backwardness": Colonial Governance, Medicine, Female Reproductive Physiology, and Conjugality in Colonial Korea

My project explores the role of colonial science and medicine in the political processes of legitimation and reproduction of Japanese colonial governance in early twentieth-century Korea. It specifically examines the cultural work of scientific and medical discourses in the social construction of a serviceable historical rupture – a rupture between the era of the Confucian Chosŏn Dynasty (1392-1910) and the emergent era of “modernizing” colonial Korea (1910-1945). I argue that the Japanese colonial premise of transforming traditional Korea into a “civilized” territory relied heavily on the production and reform of racial “backwardness” in the reproductive physiology and health, sexual practices, and conjugal relations of Korean women.

VICTOR PICKARD
Institute of Communications Research
Project Title: Media Democracy Deferred: Rupture and Resolution in U.S. Communications Policy, 1945-1949

In the 1940s, U.S. media suffered a crisis of legitimacy. Excessive commercialism, misrepresentations of marginalized people and ideas, and lack of accountability helped to foment a broad-based media reform movement, producing radical criticism and progressive policy initiatives. However, subsequent industry-led counterattacks combined with Cold War politics to demobilize media activism. To recover crucial debates and recuperate lost alternatives, this project examines this historical rupture in the contract between society and commercial media. By illuminating how an industry-friendly postwar settlement defined media’s democratic requirements, this project is as much about the present and the future as it is about the past.

www.victorpickard.com
 

JAMES H. WARREN
Department of History
Project Title: Empire and Anxiety: Colonial Revolutions, Public Men, and the Idea of Authority in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Britain  

This project challenges narratives about reform and progress as a key characteristic of Britain and empire in the mid-1800s. Revolutions throughout the British Empire undermined the surety of colonial power, producing an anxiety about the stability of personal, political, social, cultural, and colonial authority. I examine how public men reconstituted authority, in both colonial and metropolitan settings, through competing formulations and performances of masculinity. Underlying the project is a methodology that narratively registers the impact of colonial and imperial fault lines both temporally and spatially by questioning fundamental assumptions about bounded periodizations and geographies that mark modernist historiography
 

HUI XIAO
Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures
Project Title: Rupturing Modernity, Engendering Interiority: Divorce in Post-Mao Chinese Literature and Culture

Neoliberalism has reconfigured all aspects of post-Mao China’s social life including marriage patterns. This project will explore how China’s neoliberal turn is naturalized through literary and cultural representations of divorce. I argue that divorce is often narrated in terms of constructing a privatized middle class interior space, which is predicated on a rupture of the “revolutionary modernity.” In post-Mao divorce narratives, the women who have come of age in the Maoist era are depicted as repository of the revolutionary legacy; their husbands, who have come to stand for entrepreneurs in the neoliberal market economy, are justified to divorce them. Thus, the historical rupture is rendered a private issue to be solved within the domestic domain.

www.ealc.uiuc.edu/ealc/people/grad_china.htm
www.frchina.net/person.php?id=256

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