Hall Center announces 2012-13 Research and Creative Work Fellows


Jonathan Earle


Stanley Lombardo


Roberta Pergher

Forrest Pierce

Kathryn Rhine

Ann Wierda Rowland



LAWRENCE — The Hall Center for the Humanities has announced its Humanities Research Fellows and Creative Work Fellows for the 2012-2013 academic year. Jonathan Earle, Roberta Pergher, Kathryn Rhine and Ann Wierda Rowland were selected as Research Fellows. Stanley Lombardo and Forrest Pierce were awarded Creative Work Fellowships.

Hall Center Fellows are selected through a highly competitive process. Fellowships provide a semester of release from teaching, an office in the Hall Center and a small research stipend. Fellows often use the time to work on book manuscripts or a large-scale work of art.

Earle, associate professor of history, will work on his book project “Electing Abraham Lincoln: The Revolution of 1860,” to be published by Oxford University Press. The book will focus on a number of turning points during the election cycle that yielded the nation’s 16th president — moments when the course of events could have taken entirely different directions.

Pergher, assistant professor of history, will work on her book project “Fascist Borderlands: Nation, Empire and Italy’s Settlement Program, 1922-1943.” Using the policy of population settlement, Pergher’s project explores the character, contradictions and enigmas of Italian expansionism, locating it in the dilemmas of imperial rule in the interwar period.

Rhine, assistant professor of anthropology, will work on her book project, “The Unseen Things: HIV, Secrecy and Wellbeing among Women in Nigeria.” The ethnography will describe the skillful ways in which HIV-positive Nigerian women attempt to deceive others by masking their symptoms, diagnosis and treatment.

Rowland, associate professor of English, will work on her book project “Keats in America,” which takes up the question of what role Americans, an idea of America and the transatlantic exchange of money, manuscripts, artifacts and other forms of cultural capital have played in the formation of Keats’ posthumous reputation and critical reception.

The Creative Work Fellowship competition received a number of especially strong applications this year. As a result, the Hall Center, with the support of the School of Music and the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, took the unusual decision to offer two Creative Work Fellowships for next year:

Lombardo, professor of classics, will finish a revision of his verse translation of Dante’s “Purgatorio” and “Paradiso” for publication — along with his already completed and published translation of “Inferno” — as a single-volume complete “Commedia.” Lombardo’s translations of Homer’s “Illiad” and “Odyssey” have won critical acclaim and a wide readership, as has his translation of Virgil’s “Aeneid.”

Pierce, assistant professor of music, will spend his time at the Hall Center working on “Il Cantico del Sol,” a 10-movement cycle for unaccompanied choir, that will set texts from the Cantico delle Creature of Francis of Assisi.

 

Fri, 12/16/2011

author

Kristine Latta

Media Contacts

Erin Curtis Dierks