20 Mar New Multicampus Research Groups in the Humanities
The Consortium of Humanities Center Directors, under the rubric of the UC Humanities Network, is pleased to announce funding for three new multicampus research groups in the humanities for 2010-11. They are:
California Italian Studies
Co-investigators and their institutions:
Albert Ascoli, Italian Studies, UC Berkeley
Joann Cannon, French and Italian, UC Davis
Claudio Fogu, French and Italian, UC Santa Barbara
John Marino, History, UC San Diego
Deanna Shemek, Literature, UC Santa Cruz
Lucia Re, Italian, UCLA
Funds will support California Italian Studies (CIS), a new electronic journal, and research related activities, including the sponsorship of an annual “day of studies.” CIS is an online, peer-review journal committed
to publishing the finest, most innovative, and most potentially influential scholarly work in the field of Italian Studies today. CIS seeks
contributions which meet the following criteria: interdisciplinarity;
comparative study; critical reflection on theory and method.
Contributions that make the most creative use of the journal’s digital
format are especially encouraged.
Critical Historicities: Between Africa and the Diaspora
Co-investigators and their institutions:
Peter J. Bloom, Film and Media Studies, UC Santa Barbara
Percy C. Hintzen, Director, Center for African Studies and Professor of
African American Studies, UC Berkeley
Stephan F. Miescher, History, UC Santa Barbara
At the heart of Critical Historicities between Africa and the Diaspora is
the question of how teleologies of difference between the African continent
and the Diaspora have ruptured developmental approaches to modernity. In
order to move beyond the complacency of difference implied by alternative
modernities, we seek to establish a context that enables greater engagement
with multi-sited research methodologies both on the African continent
itself as well as in Asia, Europe, the Global South, and North America. We
also seek to examine the relationship between late colonial and
postcolonial national infrastructures on the African continent through the
movement of successive generations abroad, and an examination of how a
sense of integration and return can be more broadly construed.
Early Modern Globalization: Iberian Empires/Colonies/Nations
Co-investigators and their institutions:
Ivonne Del Valle, Spanish and Portuguese, UC Berkeley
Anna More, Spanish and Portuguese, UCLA
This interdisciplinary group, consisting initially of specialists from the
fields of history, art history, and literature, examines the place of the
Iberian imperial experience in the emergence of global modernity and its
consequences. The group will focus on the following areas, among others,
in a dialogue with theories developed in other centuries and other
languages: How the presuppositions of classical antiquity and Medieval
Christianity provide the first racial, political and evangelical paradigms
for global empires in the 16th century; the theoretical and practical
changes these paradigms underwent when they incorporated the experiences of
the colonizers and evangelists in Asian and American colonies; the
particular challenges posed to the establishment of a universal empire by
responses of the African, Asian, and Amerindian peoples who were first
subjected to models of universalization and the ongoing influence of local
forms upon global processes spurred by Iberian colonization; the
differences between the administration of transatlantic colonies and
European colonies (Flanders, Portugal, Italy) and between the politics and
practices carried out within European nations and in transatlantic and
transpacific contexts; and the adaptations to political, aesthetic,
scientific and social ideas generated in American and Asian colonies and
their repercussions for both the history of these regions and the history
of transatlantic and transpacific exchange.
On behalf of the Consortium of UC Humanities Center Directors, thank you
for sharing this information with your colleagues.