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Jonathan Foltz’s latest research project will explore how groundbreaking  modernist writers like Virginia Woolf and Aldous Huxley reacted to the rise of cinema in the early 20th century and how film influenced their work. With a BU Center for the Humanities (BUCH) fellowship next year, Foltz, a College of Arts & Sciences assistant professor of English, will have more time to research his book Modernism and the Narrative Cultures of Film. 

“In a practical sense, I’m finishing my work on a book I’ve been working on for it seems like forever now,” says Foltz. “I’ve put sweat and tears and a lot else into that process, and this is crucial to me. The fellowship at BUCH gives the opportunity to really devote some attention to the finishing touches of the manuscript.”

Foltz is among 11 CAS faculty members named a 2015–2016 BU Center for the Humanities Fellow. Each will receive a semester’s paid leave to pursue research as either a Jeffrey Henderson Senior Research Fellow or a Junior Faculty Fellow. The center provides course-replacement funds to each fellow’s department as well as offices where the fellows can work and regular opportunities to interact with other fellows.

“It’s an incredible honor to be recognized by the University and have my research valued,” says Foltz, one of the junior fellows. “There’s also an intellectual community at the Center for the Humanities, and it’s exciting to be able to share your work with a larger community and get the chance to see all the wonderful things that other professors at the University are up to.”

The fellowships are, among other things, a way to help address a long-running imbalance in research funding for the humanities, says James Winn, BUCH director since 2008.

“We spend, as a nation, at the federal level, $251 on scientific research for every $1 we spend on humanities research,” says Winn, a William Fairfield Warren Distinguished Professor and a CAS professor of English. “Everyone will immediately tell you when I cite that statistic that scientific research is more expensive, which it is. They need atom smashers and big labs, and we just want a laptop and an airplane ticket to an archive—and the precious commodity of time.”

The center, previously known as the BU Humanities Foundation, was founded in 1981 to support and promote the work of the University’s humanities scholars. It is funded entirely through an endowment, which is used to award fellowships and support programs such as lecture series, performances, and exhibitions, as well as prizes for undergraduate and graduate students. The fellowship program has been available to junior faculty since the center’s first year and was expanded to senior faculty in 2005. Fellowships are awarded by the BUCH executive committee, which assesses applications based on scholarly value, the likelihood that a chosen fellow will complete the work, and potential contribution to the overall field.

Among the fellowships’ benefits for the University are increased scholarship and more publications by faculty as well as those less quantifiable, such as prestige and interaction among faculty from different disciplines, Winn says.

During her fellowship, Neta Crawford, a CAS professor of political science, will research how the US military has treated civilian populations in wars dating back to colonial times. Photo by Robert L. Crawford

Neta Crawford, a CAS professor of political science, will use her semester away from teaching as a Henderson Fellow to research her new book, “To Make Heaven Weep”: Civilians and the American Way of War, an exploration of the role civilians have played in America’s wars dating back to colonial times and the ways the US military has behaved toward civilians during times of war.

“My goal is to write the majority of a book that needs a lot of research in archives,” from BU and Harvard to the national war colleges, says Crawford. “This is time that I would not have otherwise to travel to these places. And then I have the chance to think about what all this means, so instead of a book taking me 10 years, which on average my books take, it will take me much less time.”

Faculty selected for fellowships benefit from being around one another, chiefly by taking part in the Fellows’ Seminar, which brings together faculty from different disciplines for debate and dialogue.

“In addition to supporting individual projects…we are a lively community,” Winn says. “The people who hold our fellowships have office space at the center, we have a microwave and a fridge, we have seminars in which they present work to each other. The community aspect, which does something to pull people out of the field-specific discourse of their disciplines, is another added benefit of having a humanities center.”

“It’s nice because I’m a political scientist, and I now get to hang out with other people in different disciplines who think historically and humanistically,” Crawford says. “That’s going to be refreshing to me, and hopefully I’ll have something to say to them about their work, but who knows. I’m just happy to be in a different milieu.”

The other 2015–2016 Jeffrey Henderson Senior Research Fellows and their projects:

Brooke Blower, a CAS associate professor of history, is writing Hidden Fronts: New American Histories of World War II, a book looking at noncombatant Americans stationed around the globe and exploring networks of trade, transport, and politics that connected homefront to battlefield.

Susan Mizruchi, a CAS professor of English, is writing Risk and the Contemporary American Novel, which looks into ideas about risk and representations of disaster and near disaster in the work of writers such as Joyce Carol Oates and Don DeLillo.

Michael Prince, a CAS associate professor of English, is examining the parallel rise and societal roles of deism and the novel between 1670 and 1770 in Deisim and the Genesis of the Novel.

Jon Roberts, a CAS professor of history, is investigating the ways liberal and conservative Protestant thinkers attended closely to issues relating to the well-being of the human psyche and the role of Christianity in contributing to that well-being in The Science of the Soul: American Protestantism and the Mind, 1775–1940.

Kim Sichel, a CAS professor of the history of art and architecture, analyzes the impact of radically designed photographic books from the late 1920s to the 1960s on the future of photography in Making Strange: Modernism and the Making of French Photography Books.

Alice Tseng, a CAS associate professor of the history of art and architecture, investigates the use of architecture to remember and perpetuate emperors as symbolic leaders of a modernizing Japan from 1889 to 1945 in Conspicuous Constructions: The Architecture of Imperial Celebrations in Modern Kyoto.

The other 2015–2016 Junior Faculty Fellows are:

Minou Arjomand, a CAS assistant professor of English, will focus on the role of trials in theater at a moment in history when the mass media were bringing them directly to a mass audience for the first time. Judging in the Company of Others: The Courtroom and the Stage after World War II explores such questions as how seeing reenactments of trials like the Nuremberg and Frankfurt Auschwitz trials in the theater changes the ways audiences judged what they saw.

Yuri Corrigan, a CAS assistant professor of modern languages and comparative literature, is writing Imprisoned in the Other: Dostoevsky and the Riddle of the Self, which brings together philosophy, literary criticism, theology, and psychology in exploring theories of the personality through Dostoevsky’s concept of the human being over the course of his career.

Ana María Reyes, a CAS assistant professor of the history of art and architecture, looks at how one of the most influential Colombian artists of the 20th century challenged pressure on artists to produce “exportable” works promoting Latin American modernism in Beatriz González, Strategic Localism, and the Critique of Cultural Modernization in 1960s Colombia.

Learn more about BU’s Center for the Humanities here.