Center for the Humanities announces Faculty Fellows

Jan. 10, 2006 -- The Center for the Humanities in Arts & Sciences has announced its Spring 2007 Faculty Fellows.

The three recipients are: Patrick Burke, Ph.D., assistant professor of music; Gerald Izenberg, Ph.D., professor of history; and Akiko Tsuchiya, Ph.D., associate professor of Spanish, all in Arts & Sciences.

Each will spend a semester in-residence with the center, researching a new book project while attending a variety of presentations and delivering one formal, public lecture about their work.

Burke will conduct research for Come In and Hear the Truth: Jazz and Race on Manhattan's 52nd Street, 1930-1950, an examination of New York's 52nd Street nightclub district from the Great Depression into the postwar era. Burke argues that jazz of the period both reflected and helped to create U.S. notions of racial identity and proposes a new model of jazz history, one that addresses music's power to inform and subvert racial ideology.

Izenberg's Identity: From Individual Crisis to Collective Politics will explore the modern concept of identity-as-self-definition. In particular, Izenberg will focus on how the concept has evolved from its beginnings in the 1920's down through the present, in both European and American thought and culture.

Tsuchiya's Gender and Deviance in Nineteenth-Century Spain will scrutinize the cultural meanings and anxieties underlying the obsessive fin-de-siècle interest in "gender trouble." In particular, Tsuchiya will examine literary and visual representations — as well as medical, anthropological and political writings on women — to contextualize female deviance and explain how social deviance of any type was often characterized as "feminine" in discourses of the period.

The faculty fellowships, now in their second year, are designed to provide both physical and intellectual environments for innovative, interdisciplinary scholarship and teaching. The fellowships are open to all tenured and tenure-track faculty in Arts & Sciences. Winners are selected by a panel of university faculty and outside reviewers.

Currently in-residence for Spring 2006 are: Erin McGlothlin, Ph.D., assistant professor of Germanic language & literatures; Peter Kastor, Ph.D., assistant professor of history; and Harriet Stone, Ph.D., professor of romance languages.

Applications for the 2007-08 academic year will be accepted July 1 to Oct. 2, 2006, with announcement of the winners next December. For more information, visit http://cenhum.artsci.wustl.edu/ or contact Jian Leng, associate director of the center, at (314) 935-4008 or cenhum@artsci.wustl.edu.