Seminars

ISI seminars run for a year, and are organized around specific themes. Fellows alternate in leading the discussion, pursuing a particular project in which they are interested. Though the theme is common to all, fellows inevitably approach it from their own points of view and disciplinary perspectives. The result is an interdisciplinary exchange which provides intellectual stimulation and furthers the individual and collaborative work of all concerned. The basis for discussion may be a formal or informal presentation; a set of readings (or images, or music); a piece of writing or work of art composed by the presenter(s); or some combination. The ethos is democratic and interactive, allowing for free-flowing discussion and stimulation. Below you will find a description of our current seminar, as well as a list of the Fellows and their projects.

Indeterminacy: A Study of the City and its Environs

In 2024-2025, we looked at Entangled Environments and their interconnected Eco/ Socio/ Techno- Logics. In the 20205-2026 cycle, we turn our attention to the city and examine it through the lens of indeterminacy.

More about the ISI 2025-2026 application call More about the ISI 2025-2026 application call

Recent Seminar News

Seminar News Archive

2019-20 Faculty and Graduate Student Fellows

2018-19 Faculty and Graduate Student Fellows

This year, ISI has eight faculty members and seven graduate students members as its incoming fellows for seminars on the theme of 'Bias.' Over the course of the academic year, the fellows will approach the seminar’s theme of ‘Bias’ from a variety of perspectives in the social sciences and humanities. The fellows receive a generous research allowance, and will be participating in our yearlong faculty seminar.

The 2018-2019 Faculty Fellows are:
Yuriy Brun, Information and Computer Sciences, "Bias in Software Systems"
Brian Dillon, Linguistics, "The Role of Implicit Bias in Guiding Language Processing"
Haivan Hoang, English, "Exploring Racial Bias in Write Across the Curriculum Programs"
Augustin Lao-Montes, Sociology, "Entangled Discriminations/Intertwined Policies: Trans-American Perspectives"
Eliot Moss, Information and Computer Sciences, "The Extent to Which Bias, or Lack of Bias, Is 'Encoded' in Statistical Formulae and Alogrithmic Tests"
Brian Ogilvie, History, "Bias in Science and the History of Science: Charismatic, Ugly, and Marginally Perceptible Creatures"
Banu Subramanian, Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, "De-Colonizing Botany: Un-biasing Vegetal Knowledges"
Linda Tropp, Psychological and Brain Sciences, "How Diversity and Contact Shape Trust: A Multi-Disciplinary Investigation Among Immigration and U.S.-Born Groups"

The Graduate Student Fellows are:
Alice Fiddian-Green, Public Health and Health Sciences, "Critical Turning Points and Opioid Use Trajectories Among Pregnant and Parenting Women"
Kelly Giles, Sociology, "What's Love Got To Do With It?: Understanding Black Women and Their Road to Intimacy, Love, and Marriage During Mid-Adulthood"
Christopher Hammerly, Linguistics, "Response Bias and Decision Models in Linguistic Grammaticality Judgements"
Safi Shams, Sociology, "The Social Form of Economic Rent: The Embeddedness of Contractual Agreements Between Firms"
Thakshala Tissera, English, "Grammar Errors and Instructor Bias in the Writing Classroom"
Porntip Twishime, Communication, "Asian American Heritage Seeking: Personal Narrative Performances of Ancestral Return"
Aaron Yates, Sociology, "The Shape of 'Modern' Sociological Theory: The Institutionalization of Eurocentric Modernity in American Sociology"

We welcome this year’s fellows, and look forward to many engaging and intellectually stimulating meetings in the coming academic year!

ISI Announces 2018 Graduate Student Seminar Fellows

2018 Graduate Seminar Application Call: 'Dissent'

Dissent

Dissent has gained great prominence. How do we conceive of dissent in the past and the present, whether this relates to racism, women’s rights, gay and transgender rights, migrant and immigrant rights, human rights, labor rights, education, health and other areas of stress and vulnerability? In an era in which Islamophobia, racism, and xenophobia are renascent, questions of solidarity and dissent are likely to take on increasing importance. Where scientific consensus—for example on climate change—is under threat, there may for once be a paradoxical overlap between consensus and dissent. Where ‘truth’ itself has become a malleable political commodity, a matter of performance and simulacrum rather than fact, how will we tie dissent to notions of evidence and truth? How will evidence and truth be legitimated?

The Interdisciplinary Studies Institute encourages you to think widely around the topic. We invite you to join a cohort of like-minded—or dissenting—colleagues as we construct a sustained conversation on dissent as our theme for this year. For the first time, we add a forum for graduate students to participate in discussion and engagement across the disciplines. No matter your field, period, cultural focus, discipline or perspective, we invite you to submit a proposal setting out your contribution to the seminar's theme. Graduate Fellows selected to participate in the seminar will receive $200 in research funds (and lunch, see below).

The proposal should describe in no more than 300 words the nature of your project and how you would present it to the seminar. The proposal should be accompanied by a brief 50-word description of how your project contributes to your progress toward degree, a brief endorsement from your principal faculty advisor, and a copy of your curriculum vitae. The 8-10 Graduate Fellows will meet at regular intervals during the Spring 2018 semester. Each Fellow presents once; during their presentation they facilitate discussion of their project, and they receive feedback reflecting the interdisciplinary perspectives of the seminar participants. The obligations of the group include participating in a capstone event at the end of the year, also attended by the participants' faculty advisors. Meetings will be held on 12-2 pm on Wednesdays or Thursdays (the day will decided based on participants' availability), so you must be free at one of those time. Proposal and description of your project's contribution to your degree should be sent by email to @email by December 7, 2017. Your advisor's endorsement should be sent separately to the same address by the same deadline.

For more information on the seminar or ISI, please contact the Director, John Kingston, at @email or see our website at www.umass.edu/isi. Major funding for ISI comes from the Provost, and the Deans of the College of Humanities and Fine Arts and the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences.

ISI: Director, Board Members, and Graduate Research Assistants

John Kingston, ISI Director, Department of Linguistics
Lisa Henderson, Department of Communication
Randall Knoper, Department of English
Kathleen Lugosch, Department of Architecture
Lauren Silber, Department of English
Wouter van Erve, Department of Political Science

Welcoming our 2017-18 Faculty Fellows

Deadline Extended for ISI 'Dissent' Seminar

2017-2018 Faculty Seminar Application Call: Dissent

Faculty Seminar 2017-18: Call for Applications

Dissent

As we move from the Obama era into a new phase in the United States, the question of dissent is likely to gain ever greater prominence. What will assent and dissent mean in this period, and how will they be exercised? The dynamic of the last presidential election was itself propelled by dissent against standard narratives on the part of specific sectors of the public. How then will dissent be conceived and organized going forward, whether this relates to the Black Lives Matter movement, women’s rights, gay and transgender rights, migrant and immigrant rights, human rights, labor rights, education, health and other areas of stress and vulnerability? In an era in which Islamophobia, racism, and xenophobia are renascent, questions of solidarity and dissent are likely to take on increasing importance. Where scientific consensus—for example on climate change—is under threat, there may for once be a paradoxical overlap between consensus and dissent. Where ‘truth’ itself has become a malleable political commodity, a matter of performance and simulacrum rather than fact, how will we tie dissent to notions of evidence and truth? How will evidence and truth be legitimated?

The political looms large in this call for applications, therefore. Quite possibly there will be moments of anticipation or inspiration from previous eras, whether the period of the Vietnam War, the civil rights struggle, or struggles for gender and sexual equality. At the same time, we might benefit from comparative approaches. How has dissent been organized and theorized in other times and places, or within specific cultures? Are there test cases we can study, whether in China, Russia, the former Soviet bloc, South Africa, Cuba or the Arab Spring? What are the options for national or transnational links? How is dissent in the personal sphere tied to the collective? Not despite but because of the serious issues, does comedy—and its history—offer a platform for dissent?

As always, we wish to stress the disciplinary and interdisciplinary dimensions of our topic. At times dissent will arise specifically because of disciplinary engagement, or the invention of a new discipline: there is Galileo’s reputed ‘And yet it moves.’ At times dissent will arise within disciplines when orthodoxy faces challenge; at times what was dissent will become the new orthodoxy. Will interdisciplinary approaches shake up the disciplines themselves? What then are the implications of our work for dissent and assent? How have artists broken with tradition? How have scientists done so? How has their work affected the public sphere? How will journalists see their role in this day and age? What are our philosophies of dissent? When it comes to dissent, we can think all the way from issues of education and public health to the activism and conformities of social media. Dissent may come into the very way we formulate our questions about dissent.

Guided by this particular political moment, therefore, the ISI encourages you to think widely around the topic, in ways that may help illuminate some of our present predicaments. We invite you to join a cohort of like-minded—or dissenting—colleagues as we construct a sustained conversation on dissent as our theme for the coming year.

The Interdisciplinary Studies Institute is a faculty forum for discussion and engagement across the disciplines. Each year the focal point of our activity is a seminar organized around a specific topic. No matter your field, period, cultural focus, discipline or perspective, we call on colleagues from the humanities and arts to the social sciences and sciences to bring your own inspiration to our theme and tell us how you would like to approach it. We invite you to submit a proposal setting out your particular interests. All fellows will receive a $1500 research allowance.

The proposal should describe in 1-2 pages the nature of your project and how you would present it to the seminar. The proposal should be accompanied by a copy of your c.v. The 8-10 fellows who are selected will meet at regular intervals during the academic year to discuss presentations from each seminar member in turn (each fellow presents once). Among the obligations of the group will be a capstone event at the end of the year. Meetings are on Fridays at lunch, so you must be free at that time. Proposals should be sent by email to [email protected] by Monday, March 6th, 2017.

For more information on the seminar or ISI, please contact the Director, Stephen Clingman, at [email protected] or see our website at www.umass.edu/isi. Major funding for ISI comes from the Provost, and the Deans of the College of Humanities and Fine Arts and the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences, with additional funding from the Dean of the College of Natural Sciences.

Interdisciplinary Studies Institute: Director and Board Members

Stephen Clingman, ISI Director, Department of English

Janice Irvine, Department of Sociology

Lisa Henderson, Department of Communication

John Kingston, Department of Linguistics

Randall Knoper, Department of English

Kathleen Lugosch, Department of Architecture

Banu Subramaniam, Department of Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies

Trespassing

Secrecy, Publicity, Privacy, Security

Value

Emancipation

Engagement: The Challenge of Public Scholarship

Transformations

ISHA 2011-2012

In a world of objects and purported truths about those objects, perhaps it is the transformations of both we should be concerned with. History is a story of transformation, while continuity and change tug at the inner dynamics of politics, society, culture, science. In North Africa and the Middle East, longstanding regimes are changing in front of our eyes. New technologies have come into play, and those technologies themselves are transforming, even as they transform our world. Are we at a new threshhold, seeing the transformation of transformation in our time? The biological universe is one of transformation, as is our physical universe—which we understand now may be a ‘multiverse.’ Works of art transform the ‘real’; morphology is intrinsic to language; translation deals intimately with the tensions of fidelity and change. What are the secrets of transformation, its mechanisms and logics? What factors determine that a state of affairs, stable for so long, will suddenly give way and begin to alter? Or does the apparently stable conceal underlying transformations every day? How do legacies and traditions transform? Does transformation run all the way from the cell to the cosmos? How have our very concepts of transformation changed? Or is transformation only an illusion? From the political to the historical, the philosophical to the musical, the artistic to the political, the biological to the physical, transformation may be an underlying key we have to understand.

Fellows

Annaliese Bischoff
Landscape Architecture and Regional Planning
“Green Transformations Through Public Art”

Anne Ciecko
Communication
“Transformations of Arab Gulf Cinema and Media Cultures”

Stephen Forrest
Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures (Japanese)
“Ehon hôkan: Transformations in 17th-century Japan”

David Glassberg
History
“History and Ecology in a No Analog World”

Peter Haas
Political Science
“The Anthropocene Transformation and Collective Understanding”

Jon Machta
Physics
“Modeling Complexity and Transformation”

John McCarthy
Linguistics
“Convergent Evolution in Human Language”

Max Page
Art, Architecture and Art History
“Towards a New Ethos for Historic Preservation”

John Simpson
Commonwealth College
“Music into Art: Transforming ‘The Planets’”

Michael Sugerman
Anthropology
“Bronze Age to Iron Age in the Eastern Mediterranean”

Millie Thayer
Sociology
“Social Movements and Feminist Transformations in Brazil”

(Ir)rationality and Public Discourse

ISHA 2010-2011

We appear to be in an era when rationality and irrationality are at war with one another. Consider the manifestations, from ‘tea party’ rage, to the persistence—if not renaissance—of creationism; from suicide bombing as a form of political language to an insistence that government should keep its hands off the government program of Medicare. There are ‘birthers’ and conspiracy theorists of all descriptions, controversies around the science of global warming, indeed controversies about the nature of science altogether. Bloggers feel entitled to say anything about anything, and what is true may no longer be of interest or value. The US, having bailed out Wall Street, is accused of drifting towards socialism. Certainly, there are examples of reasoned argument, in settings ranging from the political to the juridical and beyond. And yet, rationality has its own complicated history: a European enlightenment which tolerated and even propagated slavery; the sciences of past and present regarding race, sexuality and gender, or normal and abnormal behavior. And to take it further: what of the arts, whose deepest inspirations may come when going beyond the ‘rational’? Certain trends in psychology suggest that our ‘reasons’ are prompted in preconscious ways that have very little to do with rationality. Given these challenges, is anything left that one could call ‘rational’? When we seem to need rationality more than ever, are there clear rules for what counts as rational discourse? How is reason constructed? What are its limits? Can reason prevail?

Fellows

Lee Badgett
Center for Public Policy & Administration; Department of Economics
"Building Bridges from Reasoned Research to Raucous Policy Debates"

Jacqueline Castledine
University Without Walls
"Gender, Jazz, and Justice: The Discourse of Black Liberation"

Sally Galman
Department of Teacher Education and Curriculum Studies
"Understanding the Experiences of Girls and Women in Evangelical and Fundamentalist Christian Contexts and the Mediating Effects/Collusion of Schooling"

Janice Irvine
Department of Sociology
"Moral Panics and the Politics of Emotion"

Barbara Krauthame
Department of History
"Runaway Slave Women as Rational, Political Actors in the Antebellum United States"

Kathryn Lachman
Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures
“Literary Jihad: Islamic Fundamentalism in Contemporary Francophone Writing"

Donna LeCourt
Department of English
"Cyberpublics: Teaching for the Public Sphere"

Sabina Murray
MFA Program, Department of English
"Researching the Life of Roger Casement"

Asha Nadkarni
Department of English
"Eugenic Feminism: Reproductive Citizenship and National Development in the United States and India"

Daphne Patai
Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures
"Intellectual Opportunism and the Decline of Reason"

New Human Disciplines

ISHA 2009-2010

As ISHA enters its tenth year at UMass, we announce a seminar theme for 2009-10 of ‘New Human Disciplines.’ Partly in celebration of our first decade, partly looking ahead, our aim is to help shape a consideration of our pasts, presents, and futures in various fields of human study and creative activity. A series of contexts makes such an investigation more resonant. In the national and global setting we face economies in crisis, political change in the air, urgent questions about our separate and collective futures. Campuses nationwide face realignments, reorientations, contractions, new possibilities. In these settings, what are the new contours of human exploration—or explorations of what it means to be human? Artists, scholars, and scientists all focus on exploring or giving expression to humanity, and have long done so within disciplinary boundaries. Yet, increasingly, many cross these boundaries in the name of new interdisciplinarities. What do such collaborations achieve, how can they be fostered, what new forms of ‘discipline’ can be imagined? What are our tasks, our failures, and our responsibilities both within and beyond our disciplines? What are the prospects and liabilities in the construction of new human ‘subjects’? Historically, how have new disciplines arisen? What have been their legacies, and what can we learn from the past? Alternatively, how is humanity being ‘disciplined’ by change, new regimes of authority, technology, and interaction? What will provide our sense of purpose and frame in human terms? It is with some of these questions in mind that ISHA has designed a year-long seminar around the theme of New Human Disciplines.

Karen Cardozo
Commonwealth College

Banu Subramaniam
Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
Joint project: “Transgenic, Transgeneric, Transgenreic Futures: Imagining the New Human Disciplines”

Elizabeth Chilton
Department of Anthropology
“Cultural Heritage in the Twenty-First Century”

Aline Gubrium
Community Health Studies

Krista Harper
Department of Anthropology
Joint project: “Participatory Digital Research: Creative Human Sciences for Social Justice”

Yehudit Heller
Commonwealth College
“Translation as a Place”

James Hicks
Comparative Literature (UMass), American Studies (Smith)
“Lessons from Sarajevo: An Interdisciplinary Inquiry into the Representation of Inhumanity”

Amanda Walker Johnson
Department of Anthropology
“Disciplinary Knowledges/Disciplining Children”

Randall Knoper
Department of English
“Gertrude Stein, the American Pragmatists, and Neuroscience”

Shona Macdonald
Department of Art and Art History
“The Studio Lab”

Brian Ogilvie
Department of History
“Objects and Their Disciplines: Collaboration, Indifference, and Contestation in Natural History and Natural Theology”

Public Thought, Public Art, Public Effect

ISHA 2008-2009

The relation of the worlds of thought and art to the public sphere is a matter of perennial contemplation, and it is time to consider it again. We live in an era of intense challenge, political, economic, cultural, ecological, yet it is not clear how those in the worlds of scholarship, writing, or art should respond. Scholars, writers, and artists in various times and places have done so in various ways. Some have gone to the barricades; some have taken on the mantle of public pronouncement (Zola, J'Accuse); some have felt that public involvement would betray the intrinsic commitment of their work; some have felt their truest contribution must be through the very forms of their thought or art. As Gabriel García Márquez put it, "The writer’s duty—his revolutionary duty, if you like—is to write well." Currently in the USA we confront a dizzying array of tendencies. This has been an era of documentary, taking on highly important issues. Questions of public space and public memory have come to the fore in relation to issues of design and artistic practice. Universities have in some ways opened their doors, working with local communities, or sending students to work with communities farther afield. Yet it has also been a period of retreat, of anti-intellectualism more generally, where finding a public voice is by no means easy. What examples can we find? What forms of inspiration? Or caution? What principles should guide us?

It is with some of these questions in mind that ISHA has designed a year-long seminar around the theme of Public Thought, Public Art, Public Effect. Our fellows for the year are as follows.

Fellows

Milan Dragicevich
Department of Theater
“Tyrants and Avenging Angels: Milosevic and the West in the Theatrical Arena.”

Sally Galman
Department of Teacher Education and Curriculum Studies
“Public Intellectuals in the Landscape of "Care": Pre K-12 Teachers, Identity, and Work.”

Daniel Gordon
Department of History
“The Headscarf: A Comparative View of Law and Public Culture.”

Elizabeth Krause
Department of Anthropology
“A Manifesto for Voice”

Joseph Krupczynski
Department of Art, Architecture, and Art History
“Engaged Spatial Practices in the Public Realm”

Young Min Moon
Department of Art, Architecture and Art History
“Public Moments: Recent Dialogic Practices from South Korea”

Sabina Murray
Department of English
Rendered Contemporary: The Art of Adapting Fiction to Film.

Shawn Shimpach
Department of Communication

Frank Sleegers
Department of Landscape Architecture and Regional Planning
Temporary Public Art - A Strategy to Rebuild Shrinking Urban Communities.

Jenny Spencer
Department of English
Politics and Live Performance in Contemporary British Theatre.

Leah Wing
Department of Legal Studies
Murals in the North of Ireland/Northern Ireland.

James Young
Judaic and Near Eastern Studies Department
Memory at Ground Zero

Other Worlds

ISHA 2007-08

Cosmologists and philosophers contemplate the fine-tuning question: that is, if things had been different at the origins of our universe in even the smallest way, we would live (or not live) in a very different universe, or no universe at all. Yet, one paradox of the universe we do inhabit is that it has given rise to creatures (ourselves at least) who can imagine, and frequently do, the possibility of other worlds and the complicated nature of this one—sometimes so complicated that it seems "otherworldly" indeed. What is it in the nature of things, or the nature of the human mind, that prompts such imaginings? What gives shape to these imaginings, whether in science, religion, the humanities, or arts? How does the form of human imagining sometimes give us entry into a different kind of world? The capacity is so "universal" we can take it for granted, but surely it could do with some scrutiny. Imagining other worlds happens in the writing of history, or anthropology, or ethnography. Music is perhaps a world of its own; languages and cultures propose different versions of the world. Ethics proposes a better way of being in our world; politics a way to get there. Works of literature, art, and film have always imagined utopias or dystopias. Architecture reshapes our everyday space; the poem, painting, movie allow us to be "in" another world. How does memory imagine a world that might (never) have been? How do we imagine the future? How do minds imagine the worlds of other minds?

It was with these thoughts in mind that ISHA "imagined" the world of a seminar in 2007-08. Our Fellows were as follows.

Fellows

Sky Arndt-Briggs
German and Scandinavian Studies
Building a Better Future: Urban Utopia and the Working Class in Berlin, 1880-1933.

Polina Barskova
Humanities, Arts and Cultural Studies (Hampshire College)
The "Other" Other World: Vectors of Aesthetic Opposition in Petersburg/Leningrad, 1917-1944.

N. C. Christopher Couch
Comparative Literature
Future Oceans, Future Minds: Ecology and Intelligence in David Brin's Uplift Universe.

Jane Degenhardt
Department of English
Staging the Muslim "Other" World: Imagining Christian Conversions to Islam in Early Modern Theater

Bill Gibson
Department of Economics
Visualizing Alternative Economic Systems: An Agent-Based Modeling Approach.

Laurie Godfrey
Department of Anthropology
Ghosts of the Past and Orphans of the Future: A Palaeontologist Contemplates Planet Madagascar.

Salman Hameed
School of Cognitive Science (Hampshire College)
Gods from Outer Space: UFO Religions and Modern Science

Don Maddox
French and Francophone Studies
Chronosyntonization and the Cosmological Imagination

Young Min Moon
Department of Art, Architecture and Art History
Out of the Interstitial Realm: Text in Art

Monika Schmitter
Department of Art, Architecture and Art History
Inner Space and Outer Appearance: The House as Portrait in Renaissance Venice

Martin Wobst
Department of Anthropology
The Evolution of Theory of Mind and False Belief Understanding

Cultural Ownership

ISHA 2006-07

Is ownership an adequate model when it comes to matters of culture? Who should be the stewards of cultural artifacts, be they archaeological remains, works of art, or languages? Can a group claim primary ownership of what it views as its cultural heritage, or must competing interests be recognized? If so, what kinds of interests may make a legitimate claim, and how is their legitimacy determined? Should a balance be struck between the interests of scientific investigation and the conflicting claims of an indigenous people? Who owns topics, experiences, or forms that may be used or appropriated in works of literature, art, or music? Are certain images sacrosanct or to be treated with special care for cultural reasons? What is at stake when Western pharmaceuticals use resources regarded as indigenous in other parts of the world to develop profit-making but also life-enhancing medicines? Should restrictions and obligations be placed on scholars who seek to work with contested materials, and if so, what kinds? Does the search for authenticity occlude the realities of cultural fusion and transmigration? What issues are at stake when a group does not have the means to preserve its culture but preservation has a primary value?

In various forms and in various locations, such questions are salient ones today. Some are reinforced because of the realities of globalisation; some emerge from a long history of colonialism and its aftermath; some derive from other legacies of conflict; some are intrinsic to newly developing forms of interaction. Because of the importance of these issues, the Interdisciplinary Seminar in the Humanities and Fine Arts selected the theme of Cultural Ownership for its seminar of 2006-07.

Fellows

Sky Arndt-Briggs
German and Scandinavian Studies
Changing Definitions of Cultural Ownership: The Absorption of Communist East Germany into a United Capitalist Germany.

David Bollier
Independent
Dreams of a Common Culture.

Olga Gershenson
Judaic and Near Eastern Studies Department
Soviet-Jewish Film, Owned and Disowned.

Laetitia La Follette
Department of Art, Architecture and Art History
Did True Go Wrong? Cultural ownership, antiquities and the museum.

Robert Paynter
Department of Anthropology
Native American Graves and Repatriation.

Oriol Pi-Sunyer
Department of Anthropology
The Papers of Salamanca and Other Cultural Property Episodes in Catalonia.

Banumathi Subramaniam
Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
Genes "R" Us? Genetics, Cultures, and the Limits of Individual Ownership.

Anthony Tuck
Department of Classics
Restless Culture: Terrorist Financing, Drugs and the Illicit Market for Antiquities.

Paul Walsh
Department of Theater
Actor Research, Cultural Appropriation, and the Ownership of Experience.

Martin Wobst
Department of Anthropology
Indigenous Archaeologies and Cultural Ownership

Religious Politics

ISHA 2005-06

In the last decade and more, the rise of religious politics has been remarkable. Catholic bishops have barred political candidates who support abortion rights from taking communion. Pope John Paul II condemned the United States’ invasion of Iraq. Monuments to the Ten Commandments were installed by Judge Roy Moore in his courthouse in Alabama, and then removed by the order of another federal judge. The Supreme Court recently heard oral argument on whether the phrase “under God” should be struck from the Pledge of Allegiance. The Georgia and Kansas state governments have recently debated whether and how evolution should be portrayed in textbooks and taught in public school science classes. President Bush granted federal funds to faith-based charities. And, of course, planes were flown into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and a field in Pennsylvania on September 11, 2001 for reasons that at least in part involved religion. These are just a few of the more recent instances where religion and politics have confronted one another; their number could easily be increased and the scope of the list expanded enormously by including all the confrontations between religion and politics that don’t directly involve the United States. These are all examples where politics and religion are somehow at odds with one another; one can equally easily recall examples where religion and politics are instead in harmony. The issues raised by both the cases of confrontation and the cases of cooperation between religion and politics are equally diverse, and perhaps no other kind of interaction between human activities prompts such strong reactions from both participants and observers. For these reasons, and because of the topic’s patent timeliness, ISHA selected ‘Religious Politics’ for its theme in 2005-06.

Fellows

Jay Demerath
Department of Sociology
Religion, Politics, and the State: the USA and India.

Thomas Hilbink
Department of Legal Studies
Gods and Governments, Religion and Law.

Janice Irvine
Department of Sociology
Religion and Sexual Politics in the USA.

Laura Lovett
Department of History
Religion, Motherhood, and Gender in the Scopes Trial.

David Mednicoff
Department of Legal Studies
Islam and the Rule of Law in Contemporary Arab Politics.

Oriol Pi-Sunyer
Department of Anthropology
Immigration, Islam and Spaces of Belonging in Multiethnic Spain.

Susan Shapiro
Judaic and Near Eastern Studies Department
Representations of Minority Religions and Cultures in Modern Western Nation-States.

Ervin Staub
Department of Psychology
Dutch-Muslim Relations in Amsterdam.

Banumathi Subramaniam
Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies
Science and Religion in South Asia: Debates on Race and Caste in India.

Emily West
Department of Communication
Religion and the First Amendment.

Marriage and its Alternatives

ISHA 2004-05

For our 2004-05 theme, ISHA focused on marriage, a topic of current but also enduring interest, which can be approached intellectually (as it can personally, socially and culturally) from a range of different directions. Recent discussion on the question of gay and lesbian marriage alerts us to the fact that marriage has always been a social and cultural construct whose boundaries have in some ways been inclusive but in others exclusive and ideological. This encouraged us, for our seminar topic, to open up a larger discussion. What have been the wider contours and variations of marriage historically and across different cultures? What were the intersections between the civil and religious realms with regard to marriage in different eras, and how were they formulated in various countries and cultures? How has marriage been fragmented along class and racial lines by heteronormative barriers? How have those excluded from marriage fashioned alternative institutions and forms of recognition? Did marriage have a secret as well as overt history? What of other forms of marriage entirely: polygamy, polyamory, sacerdotal chastity and symbolic ‘marriage’ to a transcendental power? How has the law of marriage changed? What are some of the legal and/or economic implications of marriage, custody and divorce that now apply to gay marriage? What of the economics and sociology of marriage more generally? How have marriage and its alternatives been represented in literature, theater, art and film?

For the seminar, we invited prospective participants to consider marriage from any of these or other angles. The result was a productive consideration of the topic across a variety of settings. For further information, contact our seminar fellows below.

Fellows

M.V. Lee Badgett
Department of Economics
“States of Change: What the U.S. Can Learn from Europe about Same-sex Marriage.”

Joyce Berkman
Department of History
“‘Marriage as Legalized Prostitution’: nineteenth-century critics of marriage in England and the United States.”

Daniel Gordon
Department of History
“Why is Gay Adoption, and more generally, the movement for gay family rights, so controversial in our society?”

Sherrill Harbison
German and Scandinavian Studies
“Marriage, Religion, Sagas: Icelandic Background.”

Bernie Jones

Department of Legal Studies
“Antebellum Southern Justices on Interracial Families and Inheritance Rights.”

Eliot Moss
Department of Computer Science
“The Changing Rite of Matrimony in the Anglican and Episcopal Books of Common Prayer, 1549-1979.”

Alice Nash
Department of History
‘"La vie des chrétiens": Abenaki Catholicism in the late 17th century.’

Susan Shapiro
Judaic and Near Eastern Studies Department
"Social Contract/Sexual Contract: Moses Mendelssoh's JERUSALEM and the Divorce Case of a Prominent Viennese Jewess."

Just War and Reparations

ISHA 2003-04

For the first time, ISHA conducted a year-long seminar on two linked themes: Just War and Reparations. Below are some of the issues we invited our Fellows to consider. We also held a public conference on these topics in Spring 2004 with invited guest speakers as well as our seminar participants.

Just War

Recent events raise again the grave question: Can war ever be morally justified? At least since Augustine, the theory that states are sometimes justified in resorting to force has challenged the radical pacifist rejection of war as always immoral. Just war theory has itself been challenged by realism, which argues either that states, in fact, pursue power and self-interest rather than justice and morality, or argues that states ought (in the prudential sense) to do whatever they need to do to secure power and security. In either case, the realist response to our question is skepticism about the relevance of moral, as opposed to prudential, concepts when it comes to the affairs of states.

In this light ISHA felt it would be valuable for scholars across a range of disciplines to take a fresh look at the justifiability of war. For example, just war theorists hold that there must be just cause for warfare and a probability of success, among other requisites. Can just war theorists provide a satisfactory grounding for these requirements? Similarly, can we justify rules for just conduct in war, and for just terms for an end to war? Pacifists argue that non-violent civil disobedience and economic sanctions are just as effective as war in dealing with an aggressor state. Is this view overly idealistic? Does the success of non-violent resistance depend largely on the moral character of the aggressor? Are just war theorists overly idealistic when they argue, against realists, that a state driven solely by interest in power and security, and lacking moral components such as justice, ultimately could not maintain the support of its citizens? Can a war be just if it is waged not by the state, but by an ad hoc group pursuing its own ends, and perhaps using unconventional tactics? Is either the threat, or practice, of any type of nuclear deterrent morally permissible?

War is not only an issue for social, political, moral, economic and historical theorists, but for artists and journalists. Wars are represented as just or unjust in fiction, the visual and performance arts, musical lyrics, and the news media. How do artists achieve representations of a just war? (Consider Delacroix's Liberty Leading the People.) Picasso's Guernica, Poussin's Rape of the Sabine Women, and Goya's The Third of May clearly depict the horrors of particular wars. But can there be visual pacifist arguments, or visual arguments for just war theory? How has music historically influenced listeners to embrace either pacifism or the view that a particular war is just or unjust? How does the news media's choice of stories, images, names and epithets affect our views about which wars are just or unjust, or whether we come to think that justice is irrelevant to questions of war.

Reparations

Reparations, or making repair for harm done, is an ancient concept, which has recently surfaced in many debates, most notably in the demand for reparations by African Americans for centuries of enslavement. While this topic can be easily approached from the vantage of history, it has a less well known but an equally significant presence in other disciplines. Contemporary controversies also give this topic a certain resonance across disciplines. For instance, the art world and art historians are presently involved in discussions over the ownership of and compensation for paintings confiscated by Nazis that are now housed in museums in Europe and this country. In Women’s Studies, scholars are exploring the idea of compensation for sex crimes and the gendered dimension of reparations, most prominently in the demands of Korean “comfort women” for reparations from the Japanese government. Political scientists, philosophers and legal theorists are studying the work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa to explore how admitting responsibility for historical crimes might act as an alternative to the complicated work of determining the amount and beneficiaries of reparations. Similar issues have arisen in the newly established democracies in Chile and Argentina of how best to deal with the atrocities of the military juntas. Individuals, states as well as corporate entities are being held responsible for present-day crimes, in cases involving the despoiling of the environment and harm done to persons, or historic wrongs such as slavery and colonialism.

The idea of reparations normally does not imply revenge but just recompense and it is connected to the notion of distributive justice when linked to continuing wrong and inequalities, whether they be sexual, racial or economic. It raises questions about the nature and scope of legal and moral responsibility, issues of our responsibility towards our history and how that responsibility shapes our identity as a people and a nation and our vision of a just future. All of this suggests the possibility of approaching the idea of reparations from a broad range of disciplines ranging from history, sociology, anthropology, law, economics, political science, psychology to the arts, literature and philosophy.

The result of linking the two themes has been a successful consideration across a wide variety of settings and problems--from the legal history, theory and philosophy of Just War to considerations of Reparations in relation to slavery and its aftermath in the USA, as well as the Armenian genocide. Presentations this year included an ISHA first--a video documentary in progress (on the Armenian genocide) by Eileen Claveloux. For further information, contact our seminar Fellows below.

Fellows

Arlene Avakian
Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
The Armenian Genocide.

Anne Broadbridge
Department of History
Gengis Khan and Just War.

Eileen Claveloux
Department of Art, Architecture and Art History
Video on the Armenian Genocide.

Ann Ferguson
Department of Philosophy
The Philosophy and Politics of Just War.

David Mednicoff
Department of Legal Studies
Just War and International Relations.

James Smethurst
W.E.B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies
Reparations for Slavery in the Twentieth Century.

Ron Welburn
Department of English
Theories of War in the European Conquest of North America.

Migrations

ISHA Spring 2003

For Spring 2003, ISHA selected the theme of 'Migrations', a topic which allows a broad range of approaches and directions. In the call for applications, prospective participants were asked to consider some of the following observations in formulating their projects:

Some migrations are voluntary, others are forced. Major migrations have occurred historically; many are continuing now. Some migrations take place individually, others by or across communities. Some are defined by class, others by race, ethnicity, or gender; many are created by political or economic forces. Migrations are human but of course take place in nature as well, and these offer us a different model, of migration as a form of 'natural necessity'. Migration takes place at different levels and orders of existence. Diseases migrate, genes migrate, animals and birds migrate. Terrorism migrates. Fashion migrates, language migrates, in metamorphosis over time and space. Art, music, literature are reformulated by and through migration. In migration culture is both preserved and transformed, both for the migrant and host communities. Whereas some migrations change us wholly, others--whether in nature or human society--reinforce longer-term patterns of continuity and stability. The migrations of the internet are virtually instantaneous. Through the media ideas, icons, and ways of seeing migrate…

The result was a set of stimulating reponses, drawn variously from the disciplines of Art History, Comparative Literature, English, German Language and Literature, Linguistics, and Women's Studies. Here is a list of participants in the seminar, with a short description of their projects. Please feel free to contact them.

Fellows

Ulrike Brisson
German and Scandinavian Studies
The Migrant Banana or Exoticism in Migration.

Walter B. Denny
Department of Art, Architecture and Art History

Laszlo Dienes
Comparative Literature

Laura Doyle
Department of English
Selections from book project Traumas of Entry: Race and the Fictions of Liberty in Atlantic Modernity (1630-1930).

John Kingston
Department of Linguistics

Banu Subramaniam
Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
The Rhetoric of Biological Invasions

Sustainability and Stewardship

ISHA Fall 2002

In our time questions of ‘sustainability’ and ‘stewardship’ have come to the fore with unprecedented intensity. The past century has seen a dramatic increase in the power of humans to reshape our environment and that of our descendents, whether through depletion of natural life forms and resources, the introduction of toxic and other substances, or simply the accumulated stresses of an expanding world population. That, in and of itself, provokes any number of questions. How will the forces underlying these developments be balanced? How far do we have a duty beyond the interests of our species to steward the environment we have inherited? What should the ratio be between sustainability and economic development, whether aggressive or otherwise? How do uneven and inequitable forms of economic development affect sustainability in different parts of the country or the world? Or, framing the question somewhat differently, are there ways in which economic development and sustainability might be harmonized? We are interested too in how we understand these problems. How do scientists ‘map’ sustainability, and what kinds of paradigms and projections do they use? What are the strengths and limitations of these paradigms, and what other forms of understanding might by applicable?

Questions related to the theme within human society and culture come to mind. For instance, in an increasingly homogenized global environment, how will cultural diversity be sustained? We are aware that whole languages have become extinct in the past, and that more are threatened today: why has this occurred, and what are our commitments and responsibilities there? How do we ‘steward’ the memory of the past – bequeathing not only a meaningful record to our descendants, but a meaningful way of approaching the record? How do marginalized groups sustain their own place and sense of the world? Artworks too need stewardship – as do movie industries in various countries, faced with the homogenizing capacities of Hollywood. Have literatures or other cultural forms proposed, even implicitly, models of regeneration we might follow? What of key institutions – universities, schools, medical systems, welfare programs – that need sustaining: what will meaningful stewardship mean there in the twenty-first century?

‘Sustainability and Stewardship’ is a topic that can be approached from many different directions, and our call for applications resulted in a wide set of stimulating responses, drawn variously from the disciplines of economics, history, community health sciences, plant and soil science, landscape architecture and regional planning, anthropology, educational policy, English, and natural resources conservation. Here is a list of participants in the seminar, with a short description of their projects. Please feel free to contact them.

Fellows

James Boyce
Department of Economics
‘Sustaining Agricultural Biodiversity’.

Judith Davidov
Department of English

David Glassberg
Department of History
‘Managing the Sense of a Bioregion’.

Daniel Gerber
Community Health Studies

John Gerber
Department of Plant, Soil and Insect Sciences

Elisabeth Hamin
Department of Landscape Architecture and Regional Planning
‘Sustainability, Equity and Protected Landscapes’.

Francis Juanes
Department of Natural Resources Conservation

Sangeeta Kamat
Department of Educational Policy, Research and Administration

Brooke Thomas
Department of Anthropology

Cultures & Co-Existence

ISHA Spring 2002

The spur to the ISHA topic for Spring 2002 was the awful tragedy of September 11th, 2001, and the many issues it raised. Yet, while like many others, we felt drawn to face the sudden shock of the present, we also wanted to range widely in our thoughts and investigation of some of its underlying themes. Prospective participants were asked to consider a range of questions, among them the following: What are the problems and complications involved in the co-existence of various cultures, both across and within, national or geographic boundaries? Are there, or have there been, successful models for co-existence?

From a positive angle we might ask how (and why) peoples of different cultural, religious and national identities have co-existed with one another, or at least worked out some kind of accommodation. Or, what of more asymmetrical relationships between superordinate and subordinate peoples in states, nations, and empires? What might we learn from recent examples of conflict and (sometimes) reconciliation, whether in Bosnia, Rwanda, South Africa or the Middle East? What are the preconditions for co-existence, or the catalysts of conflict?

If cultural difference has been a topic for politics, geography and history, it certainly has been so in the arts and literature as well. How have art and literature worked with cultural difference? Do the arts merely reproduce difference in some ideological way, or do they hold out hope for cultural fusion and transformation? What are the ‘border crossings’ of culture? What exactly do the ‘culture wars’ mean? What might constitute cultural peace?

‘Cultures and Co-Existence’ is a topic that can be approached from many different directions, and our call for applications resulted in a wide set of stimulating reponses, drawn variously from the disciplines of anthropology, psychology, music, communication, history, literary theory, and linguistics. Here is a list of participants in the seminar, with a short description of their projects. Please feel free to contact them.

Fellows

Audrey Altstadt
Department of History
‘Culture Wars in Soviet Azerbaijan’.

Julie Hemment
Department of Anthropology
‘Globalization, Civil Society, and Women’s Activism in Post-Socialist Russia’.

Lisa Henderson
Department of Communication
‘Dorothy Allison and the Cultural Production of Class Belonging and Identification’.

R. Radhakrishan
Department of English
‘Co-Existing in the Hy-phen.’

Emanuel Rubin
Judaic and Near Eastern Studies Department
‘Trope, Tajwid, and Cantus Planus: Musical Evidence for the Interaction of Judaism, Islam, and Christianity in the Middle Ages’.

Elisabeth Selkirk
Department of Linguistics
‘Language, Identity and Culture in the USA’.

Ervin Staub
Department of Psychology
‘Basic Needs, Cultural Beliefs: Co-Existence and the Origins of Terror’.

Ear and Eye/Sound and Sight

ISHA Fall 2001

For Fall 2001 our seminar topic was ‘Ear and Eye/Sound and Sight’. Prospective participants were asked to consider a range of questions, including the following:

How does it matter that an experience is seen or heard? Visual and aural experience may differ in their epistemological, aesthetic, cultural or historical value. Physically, sounds must take place and change over time, whereas visual events can be instantaneous and static. How does this fundamental difference affect our response to and creation of auditory vs visual experiences? How does choosing a mode of expression alter what we seek to express? Does ‘sensuous’ differ in meaning when looking at a painting vs hearing a song? If one sense is dulled, is the other more sensitive? How readily does a sense experience cross modalities? Is it possible to paint with words, to create visual poems?

How does music accompany or relate to text, performance or movie? How do oral and written literatures differ, and do we value them differently? Is the text we see on the page transformed into inner speech? Does a signed language differ fundamentally from a spoken language? What is stored in memory when one hears a sound, sees a picture? Do historical events and their significance differ if we come to know about them through our eyes or ears? How have different periods valued or constructed seeing and/or hearing? How do different cultures do so? How has seeing and/or hearing changed through and in relation to technology?

Our call for applications resulted in a wide range of stimulating reponses, involving variously, the disciplines of anthropology, music, communication, theatre history, writing, art, as well as others. Here is a list of participants in the seminar, with a short description of their projects. Please feel free to contact them.

Fellows

Doris Bargen
Asian Languages and Literatures
‘Screened Sight and Sound in Classical Japanese Courtly Culture.’

Peter Elbow
Department of English
The Oral/Aural Dimensions of Writing.’

Henry Gonzales Geddes
Department of Communication

Arthur Kinney
Department of English

William Moebius
Comparative Literature

David Samuels

Department of Anthropology

Joyce Smar
Fine Arts Center

Reproduction

ISHA Spring 2001

Our Spring 2001 seminar was on the theme of Reproduction. Even on the face of it, this is a theme that can be approached from various directions--genetic, legal, mechanical, cultural, technological--and that can be addressed in various locations and periods. From a biological or social point of view, how has reproduction changed in our century? What about the practicalities and/or ethics of cloning: is there such a thing as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ reproduction? Or, from a different angle, how might reproduction relate to translation: how do principles of cloning and/or difference work there? How does the internet affect reproduction: of works of art, music, literature--or teaching? How do we judge the quality of a reproduction in relation to an original? Is performance--of music or drama--a kind of reproduction? What of copyright or patenting in a world of the internet and/or genetic engineering? How do political systems, or cultures reproduce, and with what effects?

These were among the issues that prospective participants were asked to consider. The result was a highly energetic and productive seminar ranging from art and art history, to movies, to the political and literary discourse of reproduction, to the politics and ideology of communications systems, to the reproduction of memory in images and texts--and much more.

For an article from the UMass Campus Chronicle on the Spring 2001 seminar, click here.

As a followup to ISHA’s first seminar on ‘Reproduction,’ a group has continued to meet, under the title of ‘Beyond Reproduction.’

The following were the participants of the Spring 2001 seminar on Reproduction, with a short description of their projects. Feel free to get in touch with any of them, should you have an interest in their work and/or specific project.

Fellows

Christine Cooper
Department of English

Stephen Harris
Department of English

Susan Jahoda
Department of Art, Architecture and Art History
‘Frictional Contacts and other Stories.’

Laetitia La Follette
Department of Art, Architecture and Art History

Marty Norden
Department of Communication

Mari Castañeda Paredes
Department of Communication
‘The Commercial Reproduction of New Media.’

Nina Scott
Spanish and Portuguese

Patricia Warner
Department of Theater
‘Dressing the 18th Century: Costume for the Movies.’

Beyond Reproduction

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