21 Jan Fall 2024 IHC Faculty Award Winners
January 21, 2025
The IHC is pleased to announce the results of its Fall 2024 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
“Crossing Borders, Transgressing Boundaries: Religion, Migration, and Climate Change”
Lisa H. Sideris, Environmental Studies
Amanda Nichols, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Environmental Studies
The International Society for the Study of Religion, Nature, and Culture (ISSRNC) is a multi-disciplinary society dedicated to studying the relationships among human beings, their diverse religions, and the earth’s living systems. The society was founded in 2005 and hosted its first international conference at the University of Florida in 2006. In June 2025, ISSRNC President and UCSB Professor Lisa H. Sideris, along with ISSRNC Treasurer and UCSB Postdoc Amanda Nichols, will bring the 12th ISSRNC conference to Santa Barbara. 150 scholars and graduate students, working across interdisciplinary humanities fields (including religious studies, history, anthropology, environmental studies, and political science) from 20 different countries have been invited to attend. Among them are more than a dozen graduate students and professors from UCSB.
FACULTY FELLOWSHIPS
One-quarter teaching release to concentrate on research projects in the 2025-26 academic year
Heather Blurton, English: “Piety and Prejudice: The Ritual Crucifixion Accusation in Late Medieval England”
“Piety and Prejudice: The Ritual Crucifixion Accusation in Late Medieval England” examines the accusation that Jews kidnapped and crucified Christian children in mockery of the crucifixion of Christ as a cultural phenomenon in medieval England. It seeks to understand the tenacious grasp of the idea of ritual crucifixion on the medieval imagination, why it persisted even after the Jews had been expelled from England in 1290, and how its mechanisms can help us to better understand the spread of antisemitism in the Middle Ages.
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 the cemetery of Loma Negra, Peru (CE 200 – 850) located in collections throughout the world today. Through a study of objects’ design and artisans’ technical achievements, this study explores the performance and meaning of these ritual vestments in ancient Moche society. The book also discusses the geographic and temporal landscapes of these objects’ histories and experiences in the twentieth century, modeling one approach to incorporate modern collecting histories into studies of the ancient world.
Howard Chiang, East Asian Languages & Cultural Studies: “The Confucian Freud: Race, Psychoanalysis, and the Politics of Transcultural Science in the Sinophone Pacific”
“The Confucian Freud” examines the history of knowledge production about the cultural underpinnings of mental illness, beginning with the work of the first native psychoanalyst Bingham Dai (1899–1996) in Republican China, and culminating in the birth of transcultural psychiatry. Through case studies in Confucian Freudianism, postcolonial trauma, mental testing, and culture-bound syndromes, the book situates the complex interaction between psychodynamic science and Chinese culture in a transpacific milieu and argues that a new style of science, transcultural reasoning, crystalized over time.
David Stein, History: “Fearing Inflation, Inflating Fears: The Civil Rights Struggle for Full Employment and the Rise of the Carceral State, 1929-1986”
“Fearing Inflation, Inflating Fears: The Civil Rights Struggle for Full Employment and the Rise of the Carceral State, 1929-1986” examines how the abandonment of full employment politics shaped the rise of mass incarceration. “Fearing Inflation” documents how the civil rights movement from the 1940s to the 1980s sought to eradicate unemployment by pursuing governmental guarantees to a good job. Then, during the era of deindustrialization, as policymakers cut back the welfare state and catalyzed immense social dislocations, they instead sought to create a semblance of political stability via increased funding for policing and imprisonment.
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