Faculty Research Awards Fall 2020
SMALL GRANT AWARDS
SMALL GRANT AWARDS ARE FOR $6,000 OR LESS.
Professor Klára Móricz
Department of Music
Title: ‘Tis a fool who does not know Lourié’: The Life and Work of Arthur Lourié
He led a life so exceptional that he could be a fictional character at the center of a best-selling novel, yet the composer Arthur Lourié, whose life is a story of Russian modernism, its discontinuity in Russia, and its displacement in exile, still awaits treatment in a biography. Knowledge of Lourié’s life story is important not only for musicians and scholars, but also for those interested in the role of Russian modernism in twentieth-century art writ large. As a scholar who has recently published several articles, a collection of essays on Lourié, and a book on Russian modernism in Paris, and has assembled a trove of documentary materials related to his life, Professor Móricz plans to travel to Basel, Switzerland, and Russia to fill out gaps in her research of Lourié’s life.
Professor Amelia Worsley
Department of English
Title: Lonely Poets and The Romantic Reinvention of Solitude
Professor Worsley will complete final revisions to her book manuscript, titled “Lonely Poets and The Romantic Reinvention of Solitude,” using the resources at Corpus Christi College and the Bodleian library, Oxford University. The book argues that the fundamental paradox of the Romantic turn toward solitude is that it was a shared, and therefore a social, project. Even if the Romantic poets whom this books studies (Mary Robinson, Charlotte Smith, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and William Wordsworth) loved to depict themselves as lonely, they all did so together, at the same moment. Trading on this paradox allowed these poets to embrace the pose of loneliness as central to their vocation, where previous poets had been anxious about doing so. The poets in this book made a point of distinguishing loneliness from solitude, which allowed them to reinvent notions of sociability, subjectivity, and sympathy usually attached to solitariness. Most importantly, their new approach to loneliness allowed them to reorganize previous models of the relation between solitude and interiority. Loneliness suddenly became available as a site where minds and voices might meet, rather than a space in which they would be expected to be bounded off from each other. In order to substantiate the claim that the Romantics invented this new form of loneliness, “Lonely Poet and The Romantic Reinvention of Solitude” includes detailed discussions of early experiments with loneliness in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century British poetry, and makes a series of comparisons between the loneliness of first-generation Romantic poets and the lonely poets who came before them. In effect, it offers a genealogy of loneliness, and therefore contributes to the emergent field of solitude studies, alongside Romanticism.
Professor Kerry Ratigan
Department of Political Science