Faculty Funds for Research Activities (2008-2009)
Click Here to view IAH Faculty Travel Funds: 2007-2008
Click Here to view IAH Faculty Travel Funds: 2008-2009
Library, San Francisco Church (Lima)
CIS-AH provides a limited amount of travel funds for research-related initiatives. For the current year, actively engaged IAH faculty are eligible for travel funds to attend/participate in academic events related to their field of specialization and Integrative Studies in the Arts & Humanities (guidelines PDF)
The following faculty members have received funds from CIS-AH to participate in academic events/activities that will assist their development/design and implementation of their IAH courses:
IAH Faculty Travel Funds: 2009-2010
Ken Harrow (ENG/ IAH 241F)
African studies Association
" 'Trash' in the Films of Abderrahmane Sissako"
New Orleans, November 19-22 , 2009
In Robert Stam's essay "Beyond Third Cinema: The Aesthetics of Hybridity," he addresses the questions of garbage, hybridity, and heterophony, as they relate to Third or Postcolonial Cinema . I am interested in building on some of the notions of Third Cinema, like Espinosa's notion of "imperfect cinema," but without subordinating the disruptive quality of imperfection to the ideological or doctrinal program of Third Cinema. In part I want to follow Stam's claim that "Garbage, like death and excrement, is a great social leveler, the trysting point of the funky and the shi shi. It is the terminus for what Mary Douglas calls 'matter out of place.' In social terms, it is a truth-teller. As the lower stratus of the socius, the symbolic 'bottom' or cloaca maxima of the body politic, garbage signals the return of the repressed." My paper would seek to explore that notion of "matter out of place," or the materiality of the social space as seen from below, but without the instrumental purposes of establishing a higher truth. The works I will consider include three major films by Abderrahmane Sissako, Heremakhono's La vie sur terre, and Bamako. I will be considering how "trash" functions as a metaphor, a reality, a trope, a global phenomenon, and a psychological state.
My two most recent IAH courses incorporate African cinema, including most recently the cinema of Senegal and Mali, and previously world cinemas. I will teach an IAH 241F course on multicultural British cinemas this summer. In all these cases, I will be dealing with issues of postcolonial cinema that are addressed in this paper.
Catherine Ryu (L&L/ IAH 211B)
The Association of Japanese Literary Studies Eighteen Annual Meeting "Rethinking Gender in the Postgender Era."
"Spatially Conceived: The Female Gender, Desire, and Identity in Yi Yang Ji's Yuhi"
Rutgers University, NJ. Nov. 6-8, 2009.
This study analyzes the relationship between the female gender and its textual representation-one that is filtered through the spatial imagining unique to the narrative logic of Yuhi, the Akutagawa-award winning novella by Yi Yang-ji, a second-generation zainichi Korean woman. Specifically, this study aims to delineate the configuration of the spatial coordinates through which the key characters of the novel construct and negotiate their identities in relation to their respective objects of desire: these objects-variously located in and tied to the registers of the national, the personal, the diasporic, the historic, the linguistic, the cultural, and the familial-constitute the variegated reality of the novel. I ultimately argue that Yi's construction of a novelistic paradigm for representing the spectrum of feminine subjectivity emerges from the differing degrees of spatial mobility with which the female characters pursue their particularized objects of desire -whether real, recalled, or imagined- within, through, and beyond the boundaries of the nation-state (Korea vs. Japan) and their national languages (Korean vs. Japanese).
I have been teaching an IAH211B (Constructions of the Feminine in Japanese Art and Culture) regularly for several years, and the theme of the conference, as well as the focus of my paper, is pointedly related to the issues of gender and identity that I explore with students in this course.
Steve Rachman (ENG/ IAH 207)
Third International Edgar Allan Poe Conference: The Bicentennial. "Lost in Translation: Poe, Baudelaire and "The Purloined Letter"
Philadelphia, October 8 - 11, 2009.
As conference co-chair and President of the Poe Studies Association, I will be chairing several panels, presenting a paper, introducing speakers and events, and bringing several graduate students to present at the conference. I am developing a module on musical adaptations of literary texts that I would like to implement in IAH in a new course. At the conference I will be filming a performance of Gerald Elias' "'The Raven': A Monodrama" and interviewing the performers. This footage will be incorporated in the module on adaptation.
My presentation will be on Poe and Baudelaire and is entitled, "Lost in Translation: Poe, Baudelaire and "The Purloined Letter." Revisiting the readings of Edgar Allan Poe's "The Purloined Letter" by Bonaparte, Lacan, Derrida, Johnson, and Irwin, this paper argues that a minor error in Baudelaire's translation can help to reframe the critical context for the tale as a model of signification. Rather than seeing the letter as a symbol of an absent or deferred signifier, the paper argues that the letter function as a marked card in a closed or rigged system of signification.
Elvira Sanchez-Blake (SPP/ IAH 211C)
19th Annual Conference "Asociación Internacional de Literatura y Cultura Femenina Hispánica"/ Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales-FLACSO.
October 1-3 2009, Quito, Ecuador.
"Demasiados héroes, de Laura Restrepo: Los hilos invisibles de la "no memoria"
The focus of this presentation is the analysis of memory and oblivion in the quest for the truth behind the historical process of Argentina's Dirty War. I explore Laura Restrepo's novel, Demasiados héroes, and the juxtaposition of elements: truth and falsehood, heroes and antiheroes, history and counter-history, voices and silences. The correlation of these oppositions brings about a series of considerations about pivotal historical political events happening in South America during the seventies and eighties. I also confront contemporary questions regarding the legacy of the revolutionary processes and the subsequent repression imposed by military regimes in countries such as Argentina, Chile and Uruguay.
Social political issues related to recent historical events in Latin American countries as well as literary works, especially narrative by women writers, are subjects of my current research and areas of study that will be integrated in the course "Latin American Through Another Lens" programmed for the spring 2010.
Hsiao-Ping Wang (LL/ IAH 207)
Conference "Literary Study, Cultural Politics and the Crisis of the Humanities."
The China Academy of Literary Theory, Haerbin, China August 3-7, 2009.
"Rethinking Telos in Cultural Studies of Modern Chinese Literature"
The focus of my research is on constructive approach to gender studies in the context of power politics across social boundaries. Central to my topic is independent creativity of defiant writers who have made the unprecedented breakthrough by rendering hegemonic hierarchies powerless in the individual space of everyday lives, though elites have downplayed agency of defiant contestants across the gender division. Recent scholarship has call attention to underlying polemic of cultural products that is created by the subjectivity inherent in indigenous philosophy rather than duplicating the external force as phrased in dichotomy. Instead of steering the critical thrust to polarized genders, the real battle is fought between power brokers and underprivileged contenders, which complicates the crisis of humanities. In order to advance knowledge, critics have to rethink the tension in a larger picture by bringing forth theoretical significance of the far-reaching vision in the multicultural debate. My participation in the conference will provide a chance to upgrade my research so as to update my teaching of IAH 207: "Individualities in Cross-Cultural Studies of Chinese and Japanese Literature."
Malcolm D. Magee (HST/IAH 201)
2009 Conference of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations: The United States in the World/ The World in the United States.
(Falls Church , Va. , June 25-27, 2009). "Damned logic and stubborn facts, the application of patterns of faith to the international policies of the Wilson administration."
This conference involves international historians from all over the world. Among issues that will be dealt with are the international involvements of non-state actors, histories of gender and race, cultural history, religious history, environmental history, transnational history, and histories of migration and borderlands. The conference also involves scholars working in areas other than U.S. history and deals with issues of pedagogy in the field of international history. It will be a particular help as I continue to develop the IAH 201 course "US and the World."
My paper examines the manner in which religious patterns of thinking affected Woodrow Wilson?s approach to foreign policy from 1913 until 1921 and seeks to show where religion and U.S. foreign policy intersect. Wilson ?s manner of thought, his way of believing how the world should be run, undergirded the way he conducted American foreign policy at the beginning of the 20th century. This religious pattern has become an important thread in light of subsequent developments in the history of American foreign policy. In has become of particular importance in U.S. policy in the early 21st century. Participating in this conference will assist me in gathering new themes and approaches that will be integrated in my offering of IAH 201: US & the World.