Sarah Phillips is writing a book about a very technical subject. For decades after World War II, a dwindling number of American farmers produced a burgeoning surplus of food, touching off debates, she says, “between those who believed markets could always be found for American agricultural abundance and those who argued that the United States needed to limit production” in the name of preserving a diversity of farms and production models. These conflicting values shape debates about food production even today, according to Phillips (GRS’04), a College of Arts & Sciences associate professor of history.

Hoping to make her book, The Price of Plenty: From Farm to Food Politics in Postwar America, accessible to lay readers, Phillips just got a big hand. She is among nine faculty members chosen as senior or junior research fellows for the coming academic year by the Center for the Humanities (BUCH).

BUCH fellows get a semester off—along with office space at the center—to work on their scholarship. The center provides course-replacement funds to each selected faculty member’s department. The fellows meet monthly to discuss their work. “I’m looking forward to having help and getting inspiration from all these other great scholars,” Phillips says.

As is another 2017–2018 fellow, Jonathan Klawans, a CAS religion professor. He’d already planned a fall sabbatical, and “the BUCH fellowship makes an enormous difference, by expanding the time frame of my sabbatical from one semester to a full year and by putting me in conversation with an interdisciplinary group of humanities scholars to discuss our works-in-progress.” Klawans plans a monograph on Heresies, Forgeries, and Novelties: Constructing and Crossing the Boundaries of Ancient Judaism, premised in part on the idea that scholars continue to be fooled by ancient Jewish and Christian forgeries. (For example, he’ll disagree with what he calls a scholarly consensus that one ancient text, “Sentences of Pseudo-Phocylides,” was written by a Jew; Klawans believes it the work of an early Christian.)

For Susan Mizruchi, who assumed the center’s directorship last July, the past academic year was her first time overseeing the fellows, and it has her excited about the coming year’s crop.

“The intellectual energy on display at our weekly meetings was a pleasure to see, as was the transformation of each semester’s group from a disparate collection of faculty and graduate students into a democratic community of scholars,” says Mizruchi, a CAS professor of English. “Equally noteworthy each semester was the emergence of a common theme, although neither seminar was originally organized this way.”

In addition to Phillips and Klawans, the other 2017–2018 Jeffrey Henderson Senior Research Fellows and their research topics are:

Paul Katsafanas, a CAS associate professor of philosophy, will analyze the nature and import of sacred values in his book The Secular Afterlife of the Sacred.

Teena Purohit, a CAS associate professor of religion, will study the political movement that first attempted to reconcile Islam in the modern period with Western values in her book Making Islam Modern.

Gregory Williams, a CAS associate professor of history of art and architecture, will explore the works of East German artist and writer Carlfriedrich Claus as they relate to cultural and political transitions taking place in the German Democratic Republic and unified Germany from the 1950s and 1990s in Carlfriedrich Claus: Drawing, Writing, and Instrumental Thinking in the GDR.

Michael Zell, a CAS associate professor of history of art and architecture, will study how the metaphor of the mirror (the preeminent paradigm of painting in 17th-century Holland) related to the rise of fine genre paintings of modern life in the second half of that century in The Poetics of the Mirror and the Image of the Beloved in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Paintings.

The 2017–2018 Junior Faculty Fellows are:

Michael Birenbaum Quintero, a College of Fine Arts assistant professor of musicology and ethnomusicology, will examine Afro-Colombian cultural production in his book Fierce Joy: Sound, Violence, and Community in the Ashes of Politics.

Alexander Nikolaev, a CAS assistant professor of classical studies, will examine the models ancient Greek singers used to create nonce forms (forms coined and used for a specific occasion), and why they used them, in Grammar of Poetry: Artificial Language in Early Greek Epic.

Benjamin Siegel, a CAS assistant professor of history, will study the interlinked rise of the US opioid epidemic and the Indian pharmaceutical industry in The Nation in Pain: American Bodies and Indian Pharmaceuticals in an Age of Distress.