People
Graduate Student Fellows - 2009-10
Jennifer Baldwin
Anthropology/College of Medicine
Project Title: “Society Saw Me as Expendable”: Representing the Experience of War-Acquired Disability and the Politics of Caring for Wounded Veterans
With large numbers of soldiers returning with disabilities, there is a need to understand the veteran’s disability experience, as well as the space that these soldiers’ bodies and lives represent within the nation. This project examines how veterans enact disabled subjectivities within the contexts of veterans’ care and discourses on the war and veterans’ rights. By examining the experience of war-acquired disabilities in relation to the politics of providing care for veterans, this project aims to inform understandings of disability. Moreover, this work assesses the efficacy of care for veterans, thus potentially contributing to improvements in services for veterans with disabilities.
Leïla Ennaïli
French
Project Title:
Representation of Foreigners and Immigrants in 20th Century French Literary and Filmic Narratives
The representation of foreigners and immigrants in 20th century French literature and films offers an angle from which to understand current debates on the redefinition of national identity. This project aims at understanding how otherness is constructed in fictional narratives and how it is also undermined. Representation is approached from four different angles: memory, the relations between the foreigner and the “French,” the body of the foreigner, and the spatial dimension in which he evolves.
Susan N. Johnson-Roehr
Architecture
Project Title:
(Il)legible Landscapes: Representations of Knowledge and Power at the Astronomical Observatories of Sawai Jai Singh II, 1721-1743
This project investigates the representation and control of astronomical knowledge in historical landscapes of varying geographic scales. Based on twelve months of archival research and field work, my project considers the ways in which specific locations and geographies contributed to or undermined representations of knowledge and power in Northern India during the first half of the 18th century. This work expands on current disciplinary methodologies not only by mobilizing space as a critical analytic in my examination of the astronomical observatories built by Maharaja Sawai Jai Singh II, but also in its reconsideration of the patron’s (in)ability to control the representational qualities of both local and transcontinental scientific institutions.
School of Architecture – www.arch.uiuc.edu
Jennifer L. Lieberman – Nicholson/IPRH Fellow
English
Project Title:
Power Lines: Electric Body Politics in American Literature and Culture, 1889-1953
My dissertation analyzes fictional and historical accounts of lived electrical experiences, arguing that written representations – including literature, newspaper articles, and scientific texts – shaped American perceptions of electricity, and that electrical technologies changed how writers perceived and practiced their art. At this intersection of literary studies and technological history, I analyze representations of electricity as an agent for social change, specifically focusing on how historically-minoritized groups, such as women and African Americans, imagined that electricity might be used to equalize American social landscapes. Fundamental to my project are questions about how representations shape technological experience and, consequently, how they might incite social action.
Sara D. Luttfring
English
Project Title:
Designing Women: Representing the Female Reproductive Body in Early Modern England, 1600-1660
During the early modern period, it often fell to women to interpret their bodies and the bodies of their offspring for men, and to construct legible narratives about reproduction through their words, behavior, and appearance. My project examines the effects of women’s narratives about their bodies on sexual and national politics by analyzing points of contact between representations of the female reproductive body and the patriarchal state. These contact points demonstrate the crucial role women’s bodily narratives played in the representational crises and competition that determined the sexual and textual forms through which gender and state politics were produced and reproduced.
Melissa Rohde
History
Project Title:
Working America’s Enchanted Lands: American Indian Tourism Labor, 1900-1950
Between 1900 and 1950, American Indian communities engaged in tourism work as a means to adapt to changes in the political, economic, and natural environments. My dissertation looks at two case studies of Native American communities’ incorporation of tourism work: Anishinaabeg in northern Wisconsin and northern Pueblos in New Mexico. The intersection of work and recreation in tourism influenced representations of American Indians by popularizing commodified visions of “Indianness.” Tourism also became a tool communities used to create and build tribal industries and labor opportunities, to restructure communities’ labor systems, and to exert a voice in regional and national politics.
Martha Althea Webber – Nicholson/IPRH Fellow
English (Center for Writing Studies)
Project Title:
Crafting Citizens, Sewing Subjects: Democratic Action, Nongovernmental Organizations, and Transnational Craft Literacy
This dissertation examines the organized production of sewn handicrafts as they interact with transnational spaces of democratic participation; specifically, the spaces for democratic action opened up for participants and facilitators of the Amazwi Abesifazane South African national quilt project. I argue these quilt workshops, organized under the theme “What Democracy Means to Me,” present limited but strategic opportunities for their participants, who are largely marginalized women of color from rural areas. Through critical ethnographic fieldwork and archival research, my dissertation analyzes the representational practices surrounding the national quilt project and the function of handicraft NGOs in the “global South.”
Chia-rong Wu
Comparative and World Literatures
Project Title:
Encountering Spectral Traces: Ghost Narratives in Chinese American and Taiwanese Fiction and Film
This research project explores the topics of ghost narrative and the spectral representation as cross-cultural phenomena in the contemporary literary and film production from Chinese America and Taiwan. Ghost narrative refers to the storytelling wedded to the motives of ghost haunting and the figurative manifestation of ghosts in fiction and film. This project aims to examine the spectral representation from two diverse perspectives regarding history and gender figuration. In analyzing the spectral manifestations in the contexts of Chinese America and Taiwan, I attempt to unpack the historical, social, and psychoanalytic implications behind the ghostly representation in a global context.