12 Dec Fall 2022 IHC Faculty Award Winners
December 12, 2022
The IHC is pleased to announce the results of its Fall 2022 awards competition. Congratulations to the winners of IHC Faculty Collaborative and Fellowship Awards!
FACULTY COLLABORATIVE AWARD
Award of up $2,000 for collaborative research or instructional projects during the next eighteen months
Listening to Cumbia
David Novak, Music
Raquel Pacheco, Anthropology
Listening to Cumbia will be a multimodal event that brings scholars, practitioners, artists, and archivists together for a symposium on the contemporary cultural and political history of cumbia music in Mexico and the United States. This event will bring together scholars and artists from UCSB, Los Angeles, Monterrey, and Mexico City to present research on cumbia in Mexico City and beyond, focusing on the material archives of cumbia in informal collections and media representations, as well as in baile dances and sonidero (DJ) performances. Both of these contexts – the transnational record circulation and the local dance scenes in Mexico and the United States – are living cultures that depict creative transformations and reveal cultural artifacts that provide insight into the cross-border effects of sound media and the broad effects of popular music as a force of social identity among Latinx communities.
FACULTY FELLOWSHIPS
One-quarter teaching release to concentrate on research projects in the 2023-24 academic year
Alicia Boswell, History of Art and Architecture: “Ancient Moche Metals from Loma Negra, Peru: Performance in the Past and Present”
This study brings together a collection of ancient Moche ritual regalia from Loma Negra, Peru (CE 200 – 850), which today is located in collections throughout the world. In the ancient Americas, metallurgical technology was driven by indigenous ideologies, which saw metals as precious resources from the earth, connecting wearers to celestial bodies. Through a study of objects design and artisans’ technical achievements, this study explores the performance of these ritual vestments in ancient Moche society. It also describes various geographic and temporal landscapes of these objects’ histories and experiences from when they were torn from their provenance.
Utathya Chattopadhyaya, History: “Ganja Matters: Empire and the Pursuits of Cannabis in British India”
“Ganja Matters: Empire and the Pursuits of Cannabis in British India” narrates the history of Indian cannabis under British imperial rule in the long nineteenth century across local, regional, and global imperial scales. It emphasizes how social histories of peasant life, devotional traditions, commodity production, and imperial rule are fundamentally also histories of plant life animated and constituted by the particularities of plant species, their lived environments, and their culturation in human hands.
Mona Damluji, Film and Media Studies: “Pipeline Cinema”
“Pipeline Cinema” is a history of social and spatial entanglements between the oil industry and cinema culture during the mid-twentieth century that bridges and contributes to the fields of film and media studies, Middle East history, and critical infrastructure studies. Based on extensive archival research and interviews, the monograph tells the story of local film production and exhibition practices in Iraq that were inextricable from neocolonial networks of extractive infrastructure planned and built under the banner of national development.
Rachael King, English: “Improving Literature: Media, Environments, and the Eighteenth-Century Improvement Debate”
In the long eighteenth century, “improvement” went from referring to the renovation of gardens and estates to being a master narrative unifying all areas of physical and intellectual change, from urban design to education. This project shows how this process took place through new textual formats, which materialized improvement in works combining verbal, visual, and tactile media. Materials like before-and-after illustrations, pre-ruled account books, and engraved images made improvement graspable as a concept.
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