Charles Griswold
Professor, Philosophy
Self and Other: Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Adam Smith on Freedom, Authenticity, Sympathy, and Narrative
Few questions have been so persistently raised in the history of Western philosophy as that of the nature of the self. Building on my earlier work, I propose to write a book about Rousseau's dissatisfactions with the fate of the self in modernity, using the work of Adam Smith as a foil and drawing on the resources of contemporary philosophy. I shall focus on four interconnected issues: freedom ("natural" or of self, rather than political); the loss of freedom and the ensuing "theatricality" of self as well as of the social and moral world; "pitié" and sympathy as means of understanding self and other; and narrative as a way of understanding, explaining, and unifying. These themes are central to Rousseau's conception of what it means to be a self. I shall interpret as well as evaluate his position, shedding new light on his and Smith's philosophy, as well as the issues themselves. Relatively few philosophers have recently written about Rousseau; even fewer have examined Rousseau and Smith together. I wish to help fill both gaps, thereby also contributing to our understanding of the modern age as well as of the four issues mentioned.
Dorothy Kelly
Professor, Romance Studies
Living in Death: The Material Past in Balzac, Flaubert, and Baudelaire
In the field of post-Revolutionary French literature, much work has been done on memory, usually understood as regret for a past that can never return. Dorothy Kelly has observed, however, that Balzac, Flaubert, and Baudelaire each use images of the living dead to portray the past as a dead body that continues to act on the present. Through Pierre Bourdieu’s ideas of the “present past” and his theories of the reproduction of culture, she will show in her book project that these images of the living dead constitute a different understanding of the past, which runs counter to the prevailing view of memory as regret. This other view brings to light a social force that prohibits change as it reproduces culture automatically and makes the past inescapable.
Christopher Martin
Associate Professor, English
The Figure of Retire: Constituting Old Age in Early Modern English Literature
My study argues that over the last quarter-century of Elizabeth I’s reign the experience and imagination of old age undergo an elemental change, as external, socially “constituted” definitions of senescence find themselves challenged by a more individuated sense of a person’s “constitution” or physical makeup (a usage that enters the language in the mid-1500s). To contest prevailing critical notions that English elders of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were beholden to a public decorum that obliged them to relinquish practical agency, I examine how the period’s benchmark literary works—from Edmund Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender to Shakespeare’s King Lear—portray aged figures who struggle precisely to reclaim this agency, rooted in a private but equally authoritative self-awareness of their own enduring constitutions. In an historical setting that saw both the protracted reign of an aging monarch whose self-image of her vulnerable yet hardy constitution significantly shaped her evolving political establishment, and an emerging prospect of acute generational strife, the resulting conflict uniquely imprints one of the richest periods in English literature.
Nina S. Silber
Professor, History
The Civil War in American Life, 1929-1941
As countless commentators call up images of Abraham Lincoln and the
Civil War to discuss and describe the recent election of Barack Obama, we are reminded, again, that a bloody and tumultuous nineteenth century conflict remains a touchstone in American culture. My research project investigates the way Americans invoked, remembered, and derived meaning from the US Civil War, not in 2008, but during the period of the Great Depression and the New Deal. Although separated from the sectional conflict by 75 years, the period between 1929 and 1941 witnessed an extraordinary amount of reflection on the Civil War and Reconstruction, including a wave of popular literature and film exploring the conflict, commemorations celebrating the 75th anniversary, re-imaginings by writers and politicians of the life and character of Abraham Lincoln, and an extensive public works initiative that recorded the memories of former slaves. In exploring these varied invocations of the Civil War, this project aims to illuminate the way historical memory allowed Americans, north and south, black and white, as groups and as individuals, to shape a narrative of the past that would give meaning to their lives amidst the social upheaval of the present.
Michael Zell
Associate Professor, Art History
For the Love of Art: Gift Giving, Amateurs, and the Poetics of Painting in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Culture
My project seeks to ease the competition between the opposing models of marketplace and patronage currently dominating the study of seventeenth-century Dutch art by proposing alternative paradigms and avenues of investigation. Drawing upon anthropological, economic, and literary models, and focusing on specific artists and artworks, I highlight the reciprocity between patronage and the art market in theDutch Republic, where artistic innovation and the collecting practices of liefhebbers (artlovers) were mutually reinforcing phenomena. To undertake this multidisciplinary study, I explore forms of exchange of art and representations that materially or metaphorically attempted to resist the operations of monetary transactions or the dependency of conventional patronage relationships. In these conditions, I demonstrate, artworks were conceived to address and nurture idealized experiences of viewing. Through a variety of representational and allusive devices, Rembrandt, Vermeer, and other artists thematized the intimate, noncommercial triangulations they sought to foster between their works, the beholder, and the artist himself.