Academic Affairs

This project, presented at the Eastern Sociological Society, is a revised version of a paper presented at the Oral History Association conference in 2010.  The paper explores the meaning of objects in making families and memories from the perspective of two sisters.  The story begins after they moved stuff collected by their mother's and father's families from the 19th century to the present into a self-storage rental unit.  The paper considers how their work process, the objects they tended to, and the decisions they made reflect not only their personal biographies but those of people in similar life circumstances who were born in the mid-twentieth century U.S.  The story then focuses on eight treasures that they saved during the sorting process and took with them from a two-day retreat. Based on written dialogue with each other at the retreat about each of the objects, we reflect on the objects and employ them as 'literal presences' in the room, as 'literal voices' in our dialogue. We, like other scholars, 'question the taken-for-grantedness, or the transparency, of acts of memory in relation to the past' and show how our dialogue constructs personal and cultural meanings and insights.

This project examines the form of slave-marriages through a reading of nineteenth-century novels and short stories that inscribed their occurrence and describes how these nonlegal unions challenged what it meant to be husband and wife in nineteenth-century America.  This book Novel Bondage: Slavery, Marriage, and Freedom in Ninetheenth-Century American Literature,has several goals.  It begins to fill a long-standing gap in knowledge about the slave-marriage and the function it performed in political debates regarding slavery and emancipation.  In particular, it examines the ways in which fictional accounts of slave-marriage were understood by the law and it demonstrates how both the forms of these fictions, and readers' response to them, were implicated in ongoing debates about the natures, purpose, and law of marriage. The book is written for not only a small group of literary historians but for a wider academic community.

The introduction of this book focuses on two families, both of them balanced between poverty and entrance into the middle class in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when the Indian economy was liberalized.  The book explores the impacts of socio-economic class on everyday life in urban India.  It focuses on four aspects of class: indigenous concepts and models of socioeconomic inequality; contemporary class identities and their performance in a recently liberalized economy; the cultural concepts that shape relations among people of different classes; and the immediate and long-term impacts of class inequality on people's lives.  The book includes detailed discussions of the lives of a number of people in different class positions.

This sculptural installation seeks to establish an environment that calls upon associations in the viewer for its impact to be complete.  By creating situations charged with poetic weight, with metaphor and language play, it is Gil's aim to address the issues of culture and identity, perennial themes in his research and creative work.  A field will be established by arranging 400 house forms in a grid or geometric arrangement on the floor of Nullspace Gallery, Jacksonville, Florida.  The house forms will be made of sugarcane paper, dyed a range of blue shades and their arrangement will consider their shades as a design element.  Descending from above, a storm cloud of coffee stained muslin will spiral and spill over the floor, covering those parts of the grid that occur beneath it.  A soundtrack will fill the space with an occasional quiet splashing sound such as that made when a child plays in a pool. clapping palms onto the water's surface.  The use of house forms to create a sea and a landscape at once, and the intrusion of coffee aromas and child sounds, blend to posit an almost surreal situation and environment through which viewers must pass.

This paper, presented at the 16th Congress of the International Association of Buddhist Studies. focuses on a seminal Theravada Buddhist Pali text that contains perhaps the best known religious story in Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia: the Buddha's penultimate incarnation as the selfless and altruistic Prince Vessantara.  Holt's interpretation grounds the story in a more ethical, humanistic discourse.  He projects a three-part essay to assess the wider significance of the Vessantra Jataka in Sinhala Buddhist religious culture beyond its provenance of importance to 18th century painting.  Holt's aim is to illustrate how Vessantara remains one of the most paradigmatic religious characters in Buddhist culture.

Professor Horch wrote a paper to be published in Developmental Neuroscience.  The paper focuses on the anatomical and molecular changes associated with injury, and it describes both quantitatively and qualitatively the anatomical changes induced in the auditory system by injury (removal of the ear).  It also explores whether these two different types of cells grow in close proximity or even overlap at various anatomical points.  The research examines whether the overall complexity of the cells were changing, or if the anatomy was simply being rearranged when recovering from injury.  This is an important question in the field of neurobiology.

The proposed project contributed to current understanding of the impact of different institutional designs, by systematically exploring the processes that generated new technological knowledge across and within countries over the critical period that extended from the 18th through the early 20th centuries.  In particular, the project compares and contrasts institutions that award prizes for technological achievements to those that offer formal intellectual property rights.  Khan proposes to exploit the natural experience arising from the international variation in the rules and standards that were designed to stimulate invention, from the pre-industrial era through the Second Industrial Revolution.

This project consists of traveling to a dozen of selected artists' homes and studios, interviewing the artists and photographing their studios.  Armed with these materials, alongside with the mental notes, he will go back to his own studio and make paintings of those twelve interiors, in the sense of twelve allegorical portraits of invisible sitters.  The idea is to make a series of paintings of these unique environments of artists who had an impact on Kobaslija's own development as a painter, and in doing so create a group of metaphorical portraits of these extraordinary artists. The completed project will be exhibited in New York at the George Adams Gallery. A subsequent exhibition at the Rena Branstein Gallery in San Francisco is also a possibility.

This research focuses on the mechanisms by which bacteria are able to break down and metabolize complex and/or toxic molecules in the environment.  This particular project will focus on elucidation of the pathways used by these microbes to metabolize antibiotics.  Much is known about how microbes synthesize antibiotics, how antibiotics inhibit growth and how microbes become resistant to antibiotics, but very little is known about how these medically important molecules are used as a food source.  As antibiotics are metabolized they are removed from the local environment, an event that could be positive in cases where the presence of antibiotics is undesirable or negative if drugs are being stored for medical use.  A better understanding of how antibiotics are metabolized will help us address these issues.

This project is part of an ongoing inquiry on the role of cultural centers in post-colonial heterogeneous societies, particularly focusing on Mauritius.  The rising numbers of cultural centers in Mauritius can be read, on the one hand, as an indicator of increasing tolerance of the diverse and rich ethnic population or on the other hand, as symptomatic of a need to affirm a specific ethnic identity due to, for example, marginalization practices in the socio-economic arena.  No scholarly work to date has formally taken into account the way in which cultural centers inform daily practices amongst the diverse ethnic groups, therefore shaping the expression of Mauritian national identity.The case study of Mauritius, a complex cultural mosaic, will establish a unique paradigm that Lindo can use to analyze other diasporic communities that inform this area of work.

In a co-authored paper, Nelson argued that a globally sustainable future can only emerge if the world's crop production systems can access the latest agricultural technology and claim the most arable lands and most favorable growing climates.  They investigate scenarios of future global change in urban area and cropland at the grid cell-level and measure the impact of this change on the provision of food, several ecosystem services, and biodiversity.  By comparing scenarios and their impact, they can begin to identify the global pattern of urban, cropland, and irrigation development that is significant enough to meet future food needs but has less of an impact on global ecosystem service an habitat provision.  In general, to jointly provide desired levels of urban land, food production, and ecosystem service and species habitat provision, global society will have to become much more strategic in its allocation of intensively managed land uses in arable areas.  Agricultural production across the globe will need to be able to access the latest agricultural technology, the best soils, and climate conditions.  Otherwise, the tradeoff between global food production and ecosystem service provision will be very steep.  Therefore, as agricultural production continues to shift to the developing world, the paper argues that the technology transfer must accompany this shift and the most arable lands must be chosen for cropland development.  In the paper, the authors illustrate a method for quickly and transparently evaluating the performance of potential global futures on the tradeoffs between food production and ecosystem services.

This paper analyzes the German filmmaker Hans-Christian Schmid's 2009 legal drama Storm.  The film, a pan-European production with an international cast, offers its audience a critical reflection on the relationship between human rights and transnational politics.  A gender-focused analysis demonstrates how the movie's conflation of the intimate sphere with the political brings questions of justice and human rights into stark relief.  The latter half of the paper poses and offers possible answers to the questions of what makes this film "German" beyond the fact that its screenwriter and director are both German born.  The answers themselves are critical reflections on the changing meaning of what it means to be "German" in an era in which the nation-state is becoming an increasingly fragile entity and migration is radically altering German demographics.  The paper also underscores how Germany's fascist past has allowed, or perhaps implored, today's Germans to be particularly cognizant of the trauma of the war, the effect of mass migration due to ethnic violence, and the importance of giving a voice to the victims of atrocities.