Boston University Arts & Sciences

The Boston University Humanities Foundation has named eight faculty members as Junior Faculty Fellows for 2011–2012. The winners of these coveted fellowships, chosen by the nine members of the Foundation's Executive Committee, will pursue their individual projects while meeting regularly to exchange ideas with each other and with the Senior Research Fellows, who were named in November.

• Peter Alrenga, Assistant Professor of Linguistics, "Negation in the Expression of Comparison: A Case Study in Semantic Uniformity"
• Wiebke Denecke, Assistant Professor of Chinese, Japanese, and Comparative Literature, "In the Footprints of Others: Early Japanese and Latin Writers and Their Own Literature"
• David Liebesman, Assistant Professor of Philosophy, "The Meaning of Mass Nouns"
• Ashley Mears, Assistant Professor of Sociology, "Searching for Gisele: Gatekeepers of the Global Cultural Economy"
• Thomas Michael, Assistant Professor of Religion, "Early Chinese Sages and Shamans"
• Teena Purohit, Assistant Professor of Religion, "Cosmopolitan Islam in an Identitarian Age"
• Simon Rabinovitch, Assistant Professor of History, "Autonomism and the Origins of Jewish Nationalism in Late Imperial and Revolutionary Russia"
• Dylon Robbins, Assistant Professor of Romance Studies, "Popular Music, Political Subjectivity, and Intellectual Authority in Brazil and Cuba"

In congratulating the eight new Fellows, Foundation Director James Winn noted the range and excellence of their projects. "I look forward to working with this new crop of Fellows," he remarked, "and I can already see some intriguing points of contact that will facilitate our conversations."