Mark Alonge
Assistant Professor
Classical Studies
Liturgy and literature: a hymn to Zeus from Crete
This project locates the study of ancient Greek hymns at the intersection of two key problems in the study of ancient Greek culture, the relationship between Greek religion and Greek literature, on the one hand, and the balance between local variation and Panhellenic uniformity, on the other. Hymns form a recognizable poetic genre across the Greek world, although any hymn must also incorporate the traditions and theology of the specific cult for which it is composed and performed. At the same time, the representations of the gods in hymns are not isolated from other, often widespread, poetic modes of religious expression. Therefore, the interpretation of Greek hymns needs to take into account both their liturgical and literary qualities, and also should not rely simply on local traditions but also consider a broader, even Panhellenic, context for their composition.
The analysis of one hymn in particular, a Hellenistic hymn to Zeus from eastern Crete, serves as a case-study for the kind of approach I am advocating.
Peter Bokulich
Assistant Professor
Philosophy
Description and Possibility
My project is motivated by the simple recognition that although we can accurately describe our world in a wide variety of ways, there is only a single actual world that makes all of these descriptions true. This straightforward fact, I argue, places significant constraints on the relationships between all true descriptions. While some of these constraints are obvious, others are quite subtle, and have escaped philosophers’ accounts of the ontology of our world. In particular, I argue that a misunderstanding of the relationship between various claims about possibility and necessity underlies several currently popular arguments for mind-body dualism. A more adequate metaphysical account of how we can accurately describe the likelihoods of events (and the powers of things) reveals not only that these dualist arguments fail, but also that we have very strong reasons for believing that everything in our world is physical. This project will form the core of my book, tentatively titled The Actual, the Possible, and the Physical, which articulates and defends the thesis of physicalism.
Deborah Burton
Assistant Professor
Music Theory
Puccini the Musician
“I told you I want to make people cry: this is the point. But do you think it is easy? Its horribly difficult.” Giacomo Puccini
In 2008, one-hundred-fifty years after Puccini’s birth, we can state unequivocally that this composer succeeded in making people cry (as well as display a range of other emotions). But how did he do it? Although Puccini has been accepted more and more into the academic canon, he remains a cipher, with the extraordinary physical and emotional effects of his music barely explored. In fact, very little analytical attention has been paid to his music at all. One must still ask, Who is Puccini? Is he the traditionally trained scion of five generations of church musicians from Lucca, or is he a commercially successful cobbler, as the composer Mahler labeled him? Does he belong more to the nineteenth or the twentieth centuries? Is he a Verdian or a Wagnerian? A Modernist or a traditionalist? (Even the avant-garde composer Webern didn’t know: after hearing Puccini’s La fanciulla del West, he said “I must say that I liked it a lot...Have I erred completely?” Is he a Verist or, given his close ties with DAnnunzio, a Decadent? In many ways, Puccini fits all of these descriptions in some way, but the answer I propose is that he is ultimately Puccini the Musician. Writing a book on this topic, I will give me the chance to fill this gap, and my voice as a theorist who has researched and published on Puccini’s works for over a decade will be heard in a way that brings together in a coherent manner the many analytical insights I have and will discover.
Gina Cogan
Assistant Professor
Religion
The Princess Nun: Bunchi, Sovereign Power and the Family in Early Modern Japan
The Buddhist nun Bunchi was famed for her strict practice. An imperial woman, she lived from 1619 to 1697, roughly the first century of the early modern period in Japan (1603 – 1868). While her siblings served as abbots and abbesses of elite monasteries and convents in Kyoto, she built her convent, Enshōji, in Nara, far from the imperial palace. While they wore silk robes, she wore ones of hemp. This work uses an account of Bunchi’s life and work to questions the assumption that she, by virtue of a practice classified as “strict” was a better cleric than her silk-wearing, urban peers. It investigates the discourse of world-renouncing that creates a center of those deemed strict and marginalizes those deemed too close to the secular world. It focuses on family as a central concern of clerics, including ones like Bunchi, that is ostensibly repudiated by the dominant ideology of the austere monk that enjoined not only sexual relations but family ties. Bringing to the fore this widespread clerical concern with family not only undermines the conventional picture of Buddhist monastics as world-renouncing, it also places new value on the family-centered practice of those previously marginalized, such as women and non-elite monks.
Christopher Lehrich
Assistant Professor
Religion
Music Hath Charms
My current projects focus on music and food, on both of which I expect to work throughout the year. The music project concerns ways in which ritual has been represented and depicted in Western so-called “classical” music, using the lens of music history to reexamine persistent problems in the study of religion and to intervene in musicological discussion of crucial works and aesthetic trajectories. The food project examines discourses about “gourmet” cuisines, primarily in Japan, France, and America, aiming to use comparative analytical approaches from the study of myth and ritual to develop deeper theoretical foundations in the nascent field of “food studies.”
Paolo Scrivano
Assistant Professor
Art History
Architecture and Planning Between Italy and the United States, 1945-1965
In the years following the end of the Second World War, Italian architects and planners paid particular attention to examples imported from the United States, with the “American model” becoming a reference for many Italian designers, planners, and critics. The relationship between Italy and the United States, however, was non-linear: the circulation and adoption of American models was subject to deviations and often met with resistance.
The aim of my research is to reconsider the means and effects of the circulation of cultural and formal models between the two countries, to analyze the way in which these models were developed in one context and then transformed when transferred to a new one, to examine the fortune of this cultural exchange, in terms of circulation, amplification and also simplification or misinterpretation.
This investigation of the Italian-American exchange in architecture and planning is situated in the larger context of the postwar dissemination and diffusion of American cultural models. My study tries to recognize the specificity of the Italian case and, at the same time, considers its value as a paradigm: in fact, the Italian-American relation epitomizes the mutual yet unbalanced link that today still ties the United States to much of the rest of the world.
Andrew Shenton
Assistant Professor
Music and Theology
Music in World Religions
Music is an integral part of the liturgies of almost every major religion. It is a powerful cohesive and a proclamation of common identity. It is the traditional element of many rituals connected with the life cycle, and is often used as a way of mediating ones relationship with God. Since music is fundamental to the religious experience and has not yet been subject to rigorous comparative scrutiny, this project proposes:
1. Development of both an on-campus and distance education course at Boston
University to serve as the model for a course/textbook for use throughout the world.
2. Two publications: a textbook for a course entitled ‘Music in World Religions’ and
a large-scale, multi-volume, multi-media publication dedicated to ongoing research.
My project seeks to put both the religion and its music in cultural and historical context. I will be using interdisciplinary methodologies, including theological studies and musical analysis, and aim to broadly explain the role of music in each of the religions so as to be comprehensible to people who belong to the other religious groups. I aim to provide a basic framework for understanding the issues surrounding the duties and practices, rituals, scriptures, articles of faith, holy days, prayers and denominational differences for each religion in a way that is comprehensible to the general reader. By using music as the point of entry for broad study of religious and cultural issues, the project seeks answer two fundamental questions: What is the role of music in the religions of the world? What is the attitude of world religions towards music?
Keith Vincent
Assistant Professor
Modern Languages and Comparative Literatures
Haiku in Prose: Shaseibun and the Abortive Beginnings of Japanese Realism
Shaseibun, or “literary sketching” is a genre of modern Japanese prose that staged a short-lived but spirited insurgence against the main stream of the modern Japanese novel from about 1898 to 1912. Initially put forth by the poet and haiku reformer Masaoka Shiki (1867-1902) as a kind of haiku in prose, shaseibun was later practiced and theorized by Shiki’s friend the novelist Natsume Sōseki (1867-1916) and many other writers in the circle surrounding the haiku journal Hototogisu [The Cuckoo]. Shaseibun are never plot-driven, often humorous, and tend to be written in the first person and the present tense. And while they tend to present themselves as autobiographical (and sometimes are) they are often also flagrantly fictional, even to the point of narrating events in the afterworld, from the distant past or, in one famous example, from the perspective of a nosy and opinionated house cat. Because of its emphasis on realism the shaseibun genre has tended to be conflated with literary naturalism and it has rarely been systematically studied as a genre in its own right. In my project for the Humanities Foundation I hope to define the contours of the genre and ask what its brief life has to say about Japanese literary modernity.