Fellows Projects
The IHR Fellows program provides funding for a research team to engage in a year of research related to the annual theme, share their research with the academic community, and produce a strong application for an external grant.
The Visiting Fellows program is for scholars from other institutions of higher education in the US and abroad to spend spring semester in residence at the Institute for Humanities Research (IHR), participating in the intellectual life of the IHR and the university community. The Visiting Fellowship provides the opportunity to conduct research, collaborate with ASU faculty, and write. The Visiting Fellowship also promotes an exchange of ideas among visitors and ASU Fellows also working on the annual theme. Visitors will participate in weekly fellows meetings and give public lectures and seminars on their research topics while in residence at the IHR.
The 2012-13 theme is: "The Humanities and the Imagination/Imaginary."
Call for Applications for the 2013-14 theme "The Humanities and Home."
IHR Fellows
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Biology, Law, and Public Reason
Principal Investigator(s):
J. Benjamin Hurlbut, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences
The project compares interactions between biology and the law in Britain, Germany, and the US. Combining expertise in biology, law, and political theory, the project clarifies how biology and the law conceptualize each other's roles in regulating new biological entities that disrupt the boundaries between life and none-life, human and non-human, and persons and property.
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From Material to Virtual: The Power of the Imaginary
Principal Investigator(s):
Julie Codell, Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts
This project focuses on representation of Victorian material culture, its objects in their material and social signification and their representation in painting, ads, shop windows and exhibitions in Victorian culture from 1850 to 1890.
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Transforming Gender and Imagination: Butterfly Imagery in East Asian Culture
Principal Investigator(s):
Sookja Cho, School of International Letters and Cultures, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences
Paying attention to the deep engagement with imageries of the butterfly in Chinese and Korean culture, this project traces back and explores the cultural associations and meanings of butterflies in both countries at the various levels of engagement, ranging from the elite literary discourse, to popular vernacular storytelling, and to local religious texts.
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Whiteness on the Border, or Mapping the U.S. Racial Imaginary in Brown and White
Principal Investigator(s):
Lee Bebout, Department of English
This project is an in-depth investigation of the Mexican-descent peoples location within the U.S. racial imaginary. This book project will examine how popular representations of Mexicans, Chicanos, and the border have been used to construct white nationalist discourses.
Visiting Fellows
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Latina/o Literature and the Cross-Currents of U.S. Environmentalism
Principal Investigator(s):
David J. Vázquez, Department of English, University of Oregon
This project aims to develop a book-length study, tentatively titled "Latina/o and the Cross-Currents of U.S. Environmentalism," that identifies parallel and countervailing traditions of environmental thought in contemporary Latina/o literature that speak powerfully to environmental justice frameworks.
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Philosophy as an Art of Dying. Thinking (against) the Violent Imaginary
Principal Investigator(s):
Costica Bradatan, The Honors College, Texas Tech University
This project consists in the completion of a book manuscript titled Philosophy as an Art Dying. The book considers "dying for an idea" in the history of Western philosophy as a distinct intellectual, cultural, and political phenomenon, worth studying in its own right. Therefore, this project aims to explore the under-researched link between philosophy and the imaginary.
2011-2012: The Humanities and Immigration, Migration, and Movement
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"Shielded by the Blood of Christ:" Evangelical Migrants in Mexico and the United States
IHR FellowsPrincipal Investigator(s):
Leah M. Sarat, School of Historical, Philosophical, and Religious Studies
This two-part project will examine the experience of evangelical Christian migrants on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border. In Mexico, the highest rates of evangelical conversion have occurred among impoverished populations, including indigenous communities.
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From Land to Body: Reinterpretations of the Self in Jewish Narratives from the Hellenistic Diaspora
IHR FellowsPrincipal Investigator(s):
Françoise Mirguet, School of International Letters and Cultures
What happens to a society's conception of identity, for the most part defined in relation to a land, when parts of this society leave that land and establish in a world dominated by a totally different sense of self?
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The Experiences of Migrants from the BRIC Countries
IHR FellowsPrincipal Investigator(s):
Claudia Sadowski-Smith, Department of English, Wei Li, Asian Pacific Studies
The BRIC acronym was coined in 2001 for countries - Brazil, Russia, India, and China - considered to be at a similar stage of newly advanced economic development.This project will help address the lack of comparative studies on U.S. migration by examining the histories and contemporary patterns of BRIC migration and its impact on existing theories of movement, diaspora, race/ethnicity, and transnationalism.
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Traveling Moralities: Obligations, Materiality and Water in Ceará, Northeast Brazil
IHR FellowsPrincipal Investigator(s):
Andrea Ballestero, School of Human Evolution and Social Change
Water is the resource that evokes fluidity, movement and circulation par excellence. With all of its intrinsic resemblance to movement it is perplexing that liberal forms of obligation that derive from the law have not been able to incorporate fluidity and circulation.This project aims to study the role of mobility and materiality in the creation of the Water Pact and explore the meaning of moral obligations when they are created through fluid and circulating mechanisms.
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Central Americans in the US: The Politics of Belonging and Non-Belonging
Visiting FellowsPrincipal Investigator(s):
Yajaira M. Padilla, Assistant Professor, Spanish and Portuguese, The University of Kansas
This project makes humanities-based concerns - national belonging and exclusion, questions of social justice, and the construction of ethnic and cultural identities - central to broader contemplations of immigration, migration and movement.
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Of Borders and Belonging: Toward a Politics of Citizenship at the Crossroads of America
Visiting FellowsPrincipal Investigator(s):
Sujey Vega, Assistant Professor, Department of Sociology, Sam Houston State University
Dr. Vega's recent research illustrates how Mexican residents claimed an ethnic sense of belonging during contemporary immigrant antagonism in local and national contexts. This project illustrates the on-the-ground consequences of heightened politicized rhetoric through an analysis of interview accounts, historical narratives, media discourses, and religious ritual performances from 2004 to 2007.
2010-2011: The Humanities and Human Origins
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The Origins of Leprosy as a Physical Disease and Social Condition in Medieval Western Europe
IHR FellowsPrincipal Investigator(s):
Monica H. Green, School of Historical, Religious and Philosophical Studies
Rachel E. Scott, School of Human Evolution and Social ChangeThis project aims to synthesize the paleopathological/microbiological and historical narratives to examine how understandings of leprosy were formulated in medieval Western Europe, both in terms of explaining it as a physical disease and in developing social mechanisms to deal with it. In doing so, our project will illuminate the origins of social stigma, especially in relation to disease.
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Africa, Christianity and Anthropology: The Debate over Africa’s Role in Human Origins
Seminar FellowsPrincipal Investigator(s):
Andrew Barnes, Associate Professor, School of Historical, Philosophical, and Religious Studies
The goal of this research project is to assess the results of the debate and its effect on both the scholarly and the popular understandings of Africa’s role in the birth of human civilization.
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Bridging the New Moral Psychology to Traditional Ethics
Seminar FellowsPrincipal Investigator(s):
Angel Pinillos, Assistant Professor, School of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies
The goal of this project is to investigate how this empirical work informs human and philosophical understanding of morality. Some aspects of the project are purely conceptual while others involve carrying out empirical investigations of the sort that is characteristic of the growing area of study known as “experimental philosophy”.
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How can the humanities inform the comparative biology of human nature?
Seminar FellowsPrincipal Investigator(s):
Jason Scott Robert, Associate Professor, Center for Biology and Society and School of Life Sciences
This project is aims to explore the epistemological, methodological, and ethical dimensions of what it would mean to take evolution seriously in contemporary neuroscience, and so to reveal the deep secrets of the comparative biology of human nature.
Pages
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2012-2013: The Humanities and the Imagination/Imaginary
Now that the Enlightenment dream of generating perfectly rational human persons and utterly transparent social relations has crumbled, the humanities’ focus on human imaginary processes has become increasingly important. But the human imagination is a double-edged sword.
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The Humanities and Home
When Dorothy Gale utters the last line of The Wizard of Oz, “There’s no place like home,” there seems little doubt that she speaks out of her joy at being safely ensconced on her family’s farm in America’s Heartland.
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2011-2012: The Humanities and Immigration, Migration, and Movement
The purpose of the 2011-12 Institute for Humanities Research Fellowship is to engage humanities scholars from various disciplines in addressing and analyzing the role of the humanities in illuminating the interrelated concepts of immigration, migration, and movement, broadly conceived.
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2010-2011: The Humanities and Human Origins
The purpose of the 2010-11 Institute for Humanities Research fellows theme is to engage humanities scholars from various disciplines in addressing and analyzing the role of the humanities in illuminating—and possibly enriching scientific inquiry into—human origins.
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2009-2010: Utopias, Dystopias, and Social Transformation
This is the body text for the 2009-2010 fellows theme.
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2008-2009: Humanities and Political Conflict
This is the body text for the 2008-2009 Fellows Theme.
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2007-2008: The Humanities and Sustainability
During the 2007-2008 academic year the IHR Fellows projects demonstrated an expansive understanding of sustainability beyond its technological challenges by involving the long-term thinking, sense of history, attention to language and human creativity.
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2006-2007: Humanities in Times of Crises
This is the body text for the 2006-2007 Fellows theme.