Spring 2012 FRAP Awards

The following faculty members received funding awards in spring 2012 through the College’s Faculty Research Award Program (FRAP), which supports the research activities of all regular full- and part-time tenured and tenure-track Amherst College faculty members. Since 2000, FRAP has been endowed by the H. Axel Schupf ’57 Fund for Intellectual Life.

SMALL GRANT AWARDS
Small grants are for $6,000 or less.

Professor Suzanne Dougan
Department of Theater and Dance
Title: Public Health in South Africa

Professor Dougan’s FRAP grant will enable her further investigation into a proposed teaching partnership with the Center for Communication, Media, and Society (CCMS), part of the University of KwaZulu Natal in Durban South Africa. This center was formed to conduct research on public health education through the media and the arts and has established relationships between the university and various non-profit organizations in the surrounding communities. This partnership with the University of KwaZulu Natal will also support the search for possible venues within existing communities in or around Durban to house an initiative that will create a sustainable Public Health/ Performing Arts program addressing the needs of at-risk children living in or around Durban, the capital city of KwaZulu Natal, the epicenter of the HIV/AIDS and TB pandemic in South Africa.  The model being proposed to achieve this goal relies on student mentors working with these children. Under the supervision of faculty and experienced artists, this project envisions South African students from UKZN and Amherst College working together.  Discussions will begin with the various partners at the university needed to develop a curriculum that integrates the multiple disciplines required to educate properly the students from both institutions. The potential fields to be included in these discussions are the arts, social sciences, and natural sciences. By using the power of their own narratives, developed and staged for performances in their own community, and providing a consistent artistic outlet for their own voices, we hope to help them believe a little more in their own agency. The CCMS will conduct the research that will examine our progress.

Professor Jenny Kallick
Department of Music
Title: Architect Opera Video: Film Festival Screenings

Three Louis Kahn sites—Kimball Art Museum “at 40” (Fort Worth), FDR Memorial “Opening” (Roosevelt Island), and Yale Center for British Art (New Haven)—will each present a screening of the video version of ARCHITECT in conjunction with Professor Kallick’s introductory presentation and a follow-up panel discussion. ARCHITECT will also be screened as part of the four-day Architecture & Design Film Festival in New York. FRAP funding will help support these screenings and my presentations.

Since the first FRAP funding for the “Kahn Project,” my collaborators (John Downey ’04 Lewis Spratlan, Amherst professor emeritus, Michiko Theurer ’11) and I have completed 1) the chamber opera—ARCHITECT. A Chamber Opera Inspired by the Life and Work of Louis Kahn; 2) a recording of the opera; and 3) a video version (composed from original still and moving images, and watercolors), all of which will be released this fall by PARMA Recordings and NAXOS as a two-disc package with available digital downloads of performance materials and the ARCHITECT Sourcebook.

Professor Edward Melillo
Department of History/Environmental Studies Program
Title: Out of the Blue: Nantucket and the Pacific World

Professor Melillo will use his FRAP grant to support two weeks of research at the Nantucket Historical Association in Nantucket, Massachusetts, this summer. He is currently working on his second book manuscript, tentatively titled “Out of the Blue: Nantucket and the Pacific World,” which examines how Nantucket whaling crews portrayed their voyages into the Pacific Ocean throughout the late 1700s and early 1800s. During these protracted journeys around the tip of South America and into the immense ocean beyond, a motley assortment of sailors recorded the mundane and the marvelous in their personal journals and their correspondence with those who remained at home. These written records of Nantucket's Anglo- and African-American mariners, Cape Verdean and Wampanoag seamen, seafaring women and maritime widows offer remarkable insights about how members of a small, nineteenth-century community in the northwest Atlantic comprehended distant environments and foreign cultures on the other side of the earth. During frequent long-distance whaling expeditions, Nantucket sailors came to know a distant ocean and its inhabitants in ways that were often more sophisticated and subtle than many contemporaneous (and contemporary) American understandings of the Pacific World. Aboard their “floating factories” and ashore as deserters, shipwreck victims, arms smugglers, or visitors taking leave from long expeditions, these seafarers encountered a diverse array of unfamiliar peoples and ecosystems. This project traces how whalers comprehended these interactions, while also seeking to understand how residents of the Pacific situated such engagements within their own cosmologies.

Professor Sean Redding
Department of History
Title: African Women Farmers in the Eastern Cape, South Africa: Social iconoclasts and economic pragmatism, 1963-2000

Research on this project will take Professor Redding back to a part of the Eastern Cape, near the small towns of Engcobo and Elliot, which she visited briefly in 2011. This is a region whose history she has studied and written about, particularly for the period up to 1963. However in her 2011 trip, she met with several women who are part of an agricultural cooperative that has been functioning since 2000, and she was struck by how different conditions in the region are to those that existed at the height of the apartheid regime in the 1950s and 1960s. These changes include a much less densely populated countryside with real improvements in land use and productivity, and more favorable conditions for at least some women to operate as independent agricultural producers. The historical question that interests her is whether (and how) these women were able to break out of certain culturally-expected roles to become more independent.  Historically, women’s socially accepted roles were confined to family life, although the whole idea of what constituted “family life” was often quite elastic. Married women living in the rural areas from the 1880s through the 1950s often worked the land very much on their own as their husbands spent years at a time working in one of the major cities. People considered this arrangement respectable as long as the woman remained married; if the marriage broke down or the husband died, then the woman faced the choice of either moving into another man’s household or of being ostracized. South African society has undergone seismic political, social and economic changes since 1963, and those changes have had an impact on women across all classes. Most of the literature on women in South Africa in the post-apartheid period has focused exclusively on women living in towns, cities and informal settlements, a focus that is understandable given the massive rural-to-urban migration that occurred post-1990. But people have often seen rural women as being more “authentically” African and as icons of African cultural traditions, so there is a question about how women can reconcile the demands of their traditional identities with the dramatic alterations in their social circumstances. Professor Redding hopes to explore how rural women’s roles changed, and what types of social upheaval and redefinition surrounded those changes, both through interviews with a few, selected women and through consulting archives from the post-1963 period in the Cape Archives Depot. The interviews will give her some specific cases, and will allow her to ask the women whether they see themselves as having broken out of old roles or having more subtly redefined them, as well as charting some individual family histories. The archival material will provide a broader context as government officials, including magistrates, chiefs and headmen (sub-chiefs) kept track of social, cultural and economic changes.

Professor Boris Wolfson
Department of Russian
Title: Russian Performances

Russian Performances, co-edited with colleagues from Harvard, Princeton and Williams, will be the first book-length volume to examine the uses of performance in Russian cultural history from an interdisciplinary and theoretically engaged perspective across different time periods. This collaborative project will consider the multitude of ways in which Russian culture from the imperial, Soviet, and post-Soviet periods has constructed, and continues to construct, itself with an eye towards its audience, internal as well as external, using a wide range of theoretical and interpretive paradigms in contemporary scholarship. Russian Performances will engage scholars of history, art, theater, anthropology, film, literature, theater, religion, political theory, and philosophy in asking how the connections between discrete performance practices and traditions (on stage / screen) and conceptions of self-understanding as they developed in Russia since the 18th century can be theorized and yet understood within their historical context.

LARGE GRANT AWARDS
Large grants are for more than $6,000 and up to 30,000.

Professor Amrita Basu
Departments of Political Science and Women’s and Gender Studies
Title: Fasts as Modes of Resistance in India

Professor Basu proposes to study the impact of protest fasts on democratic politics in India.

The first part of the study explores why fasts have been such important mechanisms of protest in India by examining their cultural and religious underpinnings, their meaning and significance. The second part analyzes Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi’s fasts during the colonial period. Since Gandhi was uniquely aware of the complicated ethical and political consequences of fasting, studying his principles reveals the dissonance between his views and those who claim fidelity to his legacy. The third part examines the different characteristics and impact of several important fasts in post-colonial India. Underlying this study are questions about the relationship between protest fasting and democratic politics in India. What determines whether fasts secure popular support and state concessions? How do debates about the ethics of fasting reveal popular understandings and disagreements about the relationship between state and civil society, institutionalized and non- institutionalized forms of power, and the meanings of coercion and persuasion? Are all protest fasts potentially coercive? Should the ethics of protest fasts be evaluated relative to the legitimacy of the state or the integrity of fasting leaders?  This study will contrast the state’s response to fasts by Ana Hazare, the celebrated leader of the anti-corruption movement, and another movement leader, Irom Chanu Sharmila, who has sought to fast ever since November 2000 to protest the presence of Indian Armed Forces and its brutality towards civilians in her home state of Manipur in northeast India. Whereas the state readily conceded to Hazare’s demands so that he would end his fasts, it has detained Sharmila on grounds that suicide is illegal and kept her alive through force feeding.  Professor Basu will determine which of a variety of factors explains the state’s more conciliatory response to Hazare than to Sharmila.

Through an analysis of fasts, this study seeks to illuminate the reasons for the growth and significance of the powerful anti-corruption movement in India. It also seeks to contribute both to theoretical and political analysis of direct action versus representative forms of protest as well as to normative theory analyzing the ethics and desirability of extra-institutional protest within Indian democracy.

Professor Jeffery Ferguson
Departments of Black Studies and American Studies
Title: An Integrated Anthology of American and African-American Literature

This FRAP award will fund a meeting in May 2013 of the editorial board of a major anthology project headed by Professor Ferguson, along with Werner Sollors and Glenda Carpio of Harvard University. Currently available anthologies of African American literature, such as the stalwart Norton Anthology of African American Literature, tend to exclude non-African-American authors, even though most of the works that they include depend crucially on a wider national and at times worldwide intellectual context.  Anthologies of American literature, such as the Heath or the Norton, do include a small range of African American authors, but one looks in vain through the pages of these books for the many interesting intellectual connections and influences that animate our racial past.  This anthology will correct this deficit by offering a truly integrated account of our national literature.   As the first anthology of American Literature to have its primary existence on the worldwide web, it will also provide a rich, flexible, and multi-dimensional learning experience for today’s multi-tasking student through links to a range of immediately available literary, musical, and visual sources selected to enhance the appreciation of classic writing.  To put the matter simply, the goal is an anthology suited for the twenty-first century.

Professor Anna Martini
Department Geology
Title: Paleoenvironmental Records and Early Diagenesis of Marl Lake Sediments

In July, Professor Martini led a team of young scientists, including Alyssa Donovan ’13, Mark Hellmer ’13 and Eric Steinbrook ’15, to western Ireland to study the history of Lough Carra, a post-glacial marl lake. Within the sediments of this lake resides a geochemical and biological record of past climate, land-use changes and finally the remarkable human environmental impact of the past ~100 years.  Carbonate sediments (marl) from lakes have provided long-term records of climate and land-use changes through the use of proxies, such as stable isotopic data, trace metal concentrations, faunal assemblages, and pollen analyses. More specifically, the oxygen isotope composition of carbonate minerals precipitated via biological mediation is assumed to be in near isotopic equilibrium with d18O of lake water and the d13C of the DIC pool. In lakes with good drainage (~relatively short residence times) the d18O marl values reflect the isotopic composition of the meteoric precipitation, which is directly related to mean annual temperature. These records have been widely used to model both past and future climate change. The students collected meter-long cores and pore waters from 5 sites on the lake to assess the recent changes to the lake, and collected an 8-meter core using a Usinger Piston Corer in 30 feet of water depth.  Upon return to Amherst, students began to analyze the collected sediments and waters. They will continue with this as part of three senior thesis projects during the academic year.

Professor Ilan Stavans
Department of Spanish
Title: A Journey through Jewish Latin America

Professor Ilan Stavans will use his grant to support his research for a book that he is writing that will explore Jewish life in Latin America from the end of the fifteenth century to the present. There are approximately half a million Jews in the region today: 220,000 in Argentina, 160,000 in Brazil, and the rest, in descending order, in Mexico, Colombia, Peru, Venezuela, Puerto Rico, Cuba, Panama, and the countries that make the rest of the Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking confederation of American states. About half of all these Jews are of Sephardic descent and the rest are Ashkenazi. Professor Stavans has already visited all the nations in the region, many of them on numerous occasions, and has accessed for different projects a variety of legal, governmental, and personal documents dating from the colonial period to the present. These documents explain how the Jews came to settle in these shores. Tentatively called “A Journey through Jewish Latin America,” the book will look at the history, politics, and culture of the Jews in Latin America in chronological order through a thematic prism. Professor Stavans’s plan is to travel back and interview major players (rabbis, community leaders, journalists, politicians, teachers, lawyers, doctors, writers, and TV personalities) in order to create a thorough, objective picture of Jewish life in the region. The interviewee comments will be interwoven, producing a composite that also uses historical analysis and personal reflections.