The Humanities Center is delighted to announce the Faculty Fellows for the 2018-19 Humanities Center Faculty Research Seminar, “What is Text? What is Author?,” to be led by Professors Katie Ryor (Tanaka Memorial Professor of International Understanding and Art History) and Asuka Sango (Associate Professor of Religion).
2018-19 Faculty Fellows:
Jessica Keating, Assistant Professor of Art History, will work on her book Exotica and Visual Culture at the Court of Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II that sheds light on the variety of meanings—political, dynastic, religious, and ethnographic—of exotic objects acquired in the context of Rudolf II’s Kunstkammer, or art collection. She will focus on the nature of inventories as unique texts that were not singly authored but composed by many minds and hands over extended periods of time and for purposes well beyond the curatorial.
Alex Knodell, Assistant Professor of Classics, will be writing an article for a larger project on the earliest Greek alphabetic inscriptions (emerging and circulating in the Mediterranean world in the early first millennium BCE). The presence of these inscriptions on pottery, often in the form of poetic snippets and involving images of dance, conversation, games, and other “sympotic” activity enables him to view and analyze text as a type of media and as a material practice, and a site for socio-technological innovation.
Austin Mason, Assistant Director of the Humanities Center for the Digital Humanities and Lecturer in History, will be writing an article that employs a material culture approach and digital humanities methods to access the thought world of early Anglo-Saxon England — a world that was without either authors or texts, as traditionally defined. His project uses archaeological objects (such as cremation urns and female brooches) as “texts” that help scholars approach the mythology, poetry, riddles, and other literary elements of this culture.
George Shuffelton, Professor of English, will be writing an article on chronicles written by Londoners in the 14th and 15th centuries. The article will explore the way these anonymous citizens demonstrated self-awareness of their role as historians, and it will accompany a digital humanities project mapping the London locations cited in the 48 surviving chronicles.
Lei Yang, Assistant Professor of Chinese, will explore the factors shaping individual authorship and authorial frustration connected to literary production known as “the theory of venting one’s frustration” in early China. Analyzing extant texts illustrates how authority is embedded and the function of having an author for a specific text in the Han Dynasty (206 B.C.- 220 A.D.), which influenced the entire Chinese literary history.