Hall Center announces 2016-17 resident fellows

LAWRENCE – The Hall Center for the Humanities has announced several College of Liberal Arts & Sciences researchers who will be fellows in residence for the 2016-2017 academic year.

Hall Center Fellows are selected through a highly competitive process. Fellowships provide a semester of release from teaching, an office in the Hall Center, and a small research stipend. Fellows often use this time to work on book manuscripts, large-scale works of art, or dissertations.

Verónica Garibotto, assistant professor of Spanish & Portuguese, was named a research fellow. She will work on her book project, “Historicity at a Crossroads: Rethinking Testimonial Cinema.” She analyzes the historical and ideological trajectory of Argentine post-dictatorship testimonial films — i.e., first-person film accounts of the military regime that ruled the country between 1976 and 1983, enunciated by survivors and victims’ relatives. She hopes to illuminate testimonial cinema’s transformation over time, to unveil the ideological core of contemporary political projects and to elucidate the genre’s role within these projects and within the transnational film industry.

Misty Schieberle, associate professor of English, was named a research fellow. She will work on her book project, “Christine de Pizan’s 'Epistre Othea' in England: Two Middle English Translations,” which evaluates two translations of "Epistre Othea" against 12 French manuscripts and three early printed editions. Not only will Schieberle produce a much-needed updated volume of these texts — not edited since 1942 and 1970 — but she also challenges scholarly assumptions about one of the versions as a “flawed” translation.

Erik Scott, assistant professor of history, was named a research fellow. He will work on his book project, “Soviet Defectors and the Border of the Cold War.” The project examines the history of defection and uses it to investigate how the national and ideological borders of the socialist world were defined, disputed and sometimes transgressed. It focuses on Soviet defectors (perebezhchiki) and the development of the Soviet border regime in particular but also considers how defection developed in other settings. It looks at how capitalist states facilitated the practice, even though they were not always sure what to do with defectors themselves, often viewing them as ideologically unreliable and psychologically unstable, or as potential Soviet spies.

Marni Kessler, associate professor of history of art, will work on her book project, “Materializing Food in Late Nineteenth-Century French Visual Culture,” which focuses on a photograph by Edgar Degas and paintings by Claude Monet, Édouard Manet, Antoine Vollon and Gustave Caillebotte that, like many depictions of food, have mainly been interpreted within a still life painting tradition. Against this tendency, Kessler will demonstrate the rich personal, historical and theoretical significance of these works despite their deceptively mundane subject matter.

Cathy Joritz, assistant professor of film & media studies, received a Creative Work Fellowship. She will work on “Film Feast,” a traditionally animated short film that illustrates the pitfalls of endless online movie consumption: a vice new technology has made us all capable of indulging in.

Vitaly Chernetsky, associate professor of Slavic languages & literatures, received the Hall Center’s inaugural Mid-Career Research Fellowship. He will work on “Displacement, Desire, Identity: Migration and Diasporization in Slavic Literatures,” a book project which retraces the historical trajectory of the diasporic communities of the “Second World,” from the mass emigration from the Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires shortly before their collapse and associated revolutions and civil wars, to the continuous waves of refugees and displaced persons produced by later revolutions and wars.

George Klaeren, doctoral candidate in history, received a Richard and Jeannette Sias Graduate Fellowship in the Humanities. He will work on his dissertation, “Encountering the Enlightenment: Science, Religion, and Catholic Epistemologies Across the Iberian Atlantic, 1680-1815.”

Chelsea Murdock, doctoral candidate in English, also received a Richard and Jeannette Sias Graduate Fellowship in the Humanities. She will work on her dissertation, “Drawing the Line: Archival Space, Digitization, and the Social Action of Indigenous American Ledger Art.”

Resident fellows present on their work-in-progress in the Resident Fellows Seminar, open to all faculty, staff and graduate students. A schedule will be released in the fall semester.

For more information about the Hall Center’s faculty and graduate student resident fellowships, please contact the Hall Center at hallcenter@ku.edu or call (785) 864-4798.