The Humanities Center is pleased to announce the faculty fellows for the academic year 2015-2016. Faculty Fellows work on their own individual research projects related to a common theme, and they also read pertinent theoretical and critical work that will enrich both their conversations and their scholarship. The multidisciplinary group promotes excellence and innovation in scholarship, and then extends the resulting intellectual excitement to the rest of the campus through a public forum.
This year’s Faculty Research Seminar theme, selected in collaboration with the Global Engagement Initiative, is Food and Culture. The seminar is organized by Laura Goering, Professor of Russian.
2015-2016 Faculty Fellows
Trish Beckman, Assistant Professor of Religion, St. Olaf College will explore how beyond commensality but before monism, food emerges as a site of genuine and generous theological speculation with pragmatic consequences. In particular, Kabbalist exegesis of Passover and manna materials, Christian eucharist mysticism, and Sufi fasting practices all manifest comparable—but not identical—approaches to Divine Being itself.
Mara Benjamin, Associate Professor of Religion, St. Olaf College is interested in developing a Jewish theological analysis of feeding one’s child or children by revisiting traditional theological configurations, which often require thoroughgoing critique when women’s social and historical experiences are made central.
Clara Hardy, Professor of Classics will investigate the motif of child eating, particularly in the context of the story of Tereus, Procne and Philomela. While Sophocles wrote a tragedy with this plot, it survives only in fragments; the fullest and most influential version of the story from the ancient world is found in Ovid’s Metamorphoses (6.412-676). Exploring this version and its ancient context (literary, mythological, and cultural) will form the foundation of her research.
Lise Hoy, Assistant Professor of French, St. Olaf College will explore the tension between Decadence and Naturalism in nineteenth-century French food writing by comparing Huysmans’s representation of food in his purposeful rejection of Naturalism to Zola’s use of food as a tool in his politically-charged Naturalist doctrine embodied in the Rougon-Macquart series, most specifically in Le Ventre de Paris (The Belly of Paris).
Christine Lac, Senior Lecturer in French will analyze the 2010 UNESCO resolution that added the “Gastronomic meal of the French” to its register of intangible heritage and the problematic and political consequences it has for our understanding of culture and identity in France in the 21st century.
Nikki Melville, Associate Professor of Music will work together with Zeitgeist, the St-Paul-based new music ensemble, and with Boston composer, Ben Houge, to create five musical works designed to partner with five dining courses, each prepared by a Saint Paul chef. These musical works will be written forZeitgeist’s instrumentation of two percussion, piano, and woodwinds plus an electronic score. The musical works and partnering dishes will be enjoyed as a “Food Opera” by diners at Zeitgeist’s Studio Z in Lowertown St. Paul.
Constanza Ocampo-Raeder, Assistant Professor of Anthropology will complete an article titled “Cevichito Rico, Cevichito Fresquito: Revealing Freshness Fantasies of the Peruvian Gastronomic Movement and Harsh Realities of Artisanal Fishing in Northern Piura”. Based on multiple seasons of ethnographic work with artisanal fishing communities, her research confronts the limited understanding of artisanal fishing practices and the inherent problems within a scarcely questioned culinary movement that promises sustainable development.
Katie Ryor, Professor of Art will engage in an examination of the imagery of plants and marine creatures by literati artists and primary sources drawn from a variety of texts to elucidate not only the expansion of a specific painting genre in China, but to explicate the new meanings that images of plants and food had during the late Ming dynasty.