Center Celebrates Humanities Publications
Scholars and staff from across departments and colleges gathered in CAS on March 28, 2024 to share their recent work and celebrate books with humanistic content published within the last twelve months. The event featured co-authored volumes, translations, and monographs totaling thirteen publications. These publications highlight the importance of humanistic thought and collaborative scholarship in an age of increasing reliance on the quantitative and the individual. Following an introduction from Center director Juliet Floyd on the importance of building bridges and a response from Dean Stan Sclaroff, authors and editors shared their works and expressed their thanks to collaborators and communities both within and beyond Boston University. Many also thanked the Center for the Humanities for the support they received in developing their ideas and during the writing and editing process. What follows is drawn from faculty members’ remarks on the publications:
Director Floyd spoke to the importance of Sally Sedgwick’s (PH) new volume Time and History in Hegelian Thought and Spirit, which looks into ideas such as the “fate” of world history. Floyd called the book the “most lucid” presentation of Hegel’s definition of knowledge as an exclusively retrospective concept.
Cathie Jo Martin (PO) was happy to present her work to a room full of humanists, having started her research as self-proclaimed “outsider” to the humanities while she held a BUCH Henderson Senior Research Fellowship in the 2014/2015 academic year. BUCH recently interviewed Professor Martin about her book, Education for All?: Literature, Culture and Education Development in Britain and Denmark.
Another former Faculty Fellow who presented a publication is Brooke Blower (HI), whose Americans in a World at War: Intimate Histories from the Crash of Pan Am’s Yankee Clipper follows a single flight to convey the scope and range of American engagement with the world and focus on the stories of noncombatants during World War II. More information about Blower’s book is available in this article from The Brink.
Teena Purohit (RN) used her time as a Faculty Fellow in AY 2017/2018 to work on her book, Sunni Chauvinism and the Roots of Muslim Modernism. Purohit also thanked the Department of Religion for its continued support for her work in Islamic studies. Her book explores “exclusionary impulses of modernism” in South Asia, the Middle East, and North Africa.
Koritha Mitchell (EN) spent time as a Visiting Professor here at BU to publish her edition of Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, the first long-form autobiography of a formerly enslaved African American woman. Drawing on the latest scholarship on Jacobs’s life, Mitchell explores how Jacobs laid the foundations for modern activist movements.
Petrus Liu (WLL) also edited stories that intersect with activism for Platinum Bible of the Public Toilet, the first English-language collection of short stories by Cui Zi’en, China’s most famous and controversial queer writer.
Christopher Maurer (RS) also published a work in translation this year: a new translation of Federico Garcia Lorca’s 1933 lecture on duende. Finding Duende, Duende: Play and Theory | Imagination, Inspiration, Evasion includes annotations that make this version the most accurate translation yet.
Also from Romance Studies, Jim Carter recently published his collaborative volume, Ecologia e lavoro: Dialoghi interdisciplinari. Pushing back against the idea that environmental protection and job creation are diametrically opposed, Carter and his collaborators explore how ecology and labor have been mutually exposed to capitalist extraction in Italy.
Professor Emerita of French Elizabeth Goldsmith proudly presented another collective work, Mobility and Masks: Cultural Identity in Travel Literature, which had been published just the week before. This volume grew out of BU’s Travel Writing Group, and it includes contributions from a number of scholars from BU and peer institutions. Inspired by the COVID-19 pandemic, Goldsmith, Sunil Sharma (WLL), Eugenio Menegon (HI), Catherine Yeh (WLL), James Johnson (HI), Roberta Micallef (WLL), Manuela Coppola, and Mary Beth Raycraft explore the intersection of travel and masking across history.
James Johnson (HI) also presented a separate project at the celebration. Johnson edited the fifth volume of A Cultural History of Ideas in the Age of Empire, a series which traces the development of themes such as knowledge, ethics, history, and the arts across time. Johnson’s volume focuses on the nineteenth-century, incorporating work by over ten scholars to create a fuller picture of nineteenth-century ideas.
Margaret Litvin’s (WLL) project also took a transhistorical approach. Her co-edited anthology, Russian-Arab Worlds: A Documentary History, traces the interaction between the Arab and Russian worlds from the eighteenth-century up to the present day. Litvin was happy to note that this project grew out of a conference on the same topic that received support from the Center.
Andrew Shenton and Rachana Vajjhala from the Musicology & Ethnomusicology Program also received support from the Center. Shenton’s Olivier Messiaen’s Turangalîla-symphonie analyzes the complex innovations Messiaen made to his musical language, while Vajjhala’s Kinetic Cultures: Modernism and Embodiment on the Belle Epoque Stage explores how ballet fit into projects of national rehabilitation.
Conversation flowed as scholars responded to the projects and enjoyed refreshments. The Center looks forward to supporting even more innovative faculty research and celebrating a new batch of humanistic publications in the coming academic year.