Fellowships

2011-2012 SU HUMANITIES CENTER DISSERTATION FELLOWS

The Syracuse University Humanities Center is pleased to announce recipients of its 2011-12 HC Dissertation Fellowships. Nell Champoux G’12 (left) and Soumitree Gupta G’12—doctoral students in religion and in women’s and gender studies/English, respectively—are receiving one-year awards, carrying stipends and benefits. The fellowship program supports students working on doctoral dissertations that contain strong humanistic content and advance one or more areas of study in SU’s College of Arts and Sciences. Both fellows will meet regularly to discuss their dissertation projects during the fellowship year. In the spring they also will lead colloquia around their dissertation research, and will participate in SU Humanities Center events and activities.  

Nell Champoux’s dissertation, “Visionary Architecture: Monastic Magic and Cognition in John of Morigny’s ‘Liber florum,’” is named for the 14th-century Benedictine monk who participated in ritual magic and had visionary experiences, which has altered the study and classification of medieval religions.

Soumitree Gupta’s dissertation, “Arriving Home: Mobile Women, Multiple Temporalities, South Asian Diasporic Texts,” also looks at the concept of human geography. Specifically, she wants to know if liberatory feminist homes for women of color can be imagined without reproducing Western imperialist and anti-Western nationalist teleologies. This kind of literary representation, says advisor Chandra Talpade Mohanty, is not without its challenges. “Soumitree’s work addresses, in productive and original ways, some of the most contested and provocative questions in the field of postcolonial feminist studies: questions of home, nation, and identity,” says Mohanty, professor of women’s and gender studies. 

SPRING 2012 SU HUMANITIES CENTER FACULTY FELLOWS

The Syracuse University Humanities Center Internal Faculty Fellows (Spring 2012) awards carry a one-semester course reduction to complete a proposed research or creative project and to contribute to Humanities Center research activities. The fellowship is not defined as a “research leave,” according to the terms and conditions of The College, and faculty will be expected to contribute service to their departmental unit or program during the period of the fellowship, and to participate in the Humanities Center’s research initiatives and public events. Faculty Fellows will receive an additional stipend for proposed research, as well as consideration of funds for a collaborative research activity, symposium, or other event organized during the fellowship period.

 Amy Kallendar is assistant professor of Middle East History, and associated faculty in the department of Women’s and Gender Studies. She came to Syracuse from the University of California, Berkeley where she earned a PhD in Middle East history in 2007, and teaches courses on the Ottoman Empire, the modern Middle East, Orientalism, Gender, Race and Colonialism, and Popular Culture in the Middle East. Her first book project is a social history of women and the family that governed Tunisia in the Ottoman period (18^th and 19^th centuries). Since the Tunisian Revolution she has turned to more contemporary events, current projects include bloggers and the Tunisian revolution, French support for Tunisian authoritarianism, women, family and representations of Tunisian modernity.

Rania Habib is an Assistant Professor of Linguistics and Arabic at the Department of Languages, Literatures, and Linguistics at Syracuse University. She earned M.A. and Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of Florida. Her field of research is sociolinguistics particularly language variation and change. She is also interested in cross-cultural communication, Second Language Acquisition, Pragmatics, Phonology and Syntax. Her research is interdisciplinary as it combines a number of subfields of linguistics, applying formal linguistic theory such as Optimality Theory and the Gradual Learning Algorithm to sociolinguistic variation. She has also applied qualitative and quantitative methods of analyses to sociolinguistic variation and change. Her research deals with dialectal variation in the Arab World particularly the colloquial Arabic of rural migrant speakers to urban centers in Syria and the change that their speech undergoes because of social factors, such as prestige, age, gender, and residential area. She is also interested in the influence of urban dialects on rural ones without undergoing migration to urban centers. Her current research focuses on the spread of urban features to rural areas due to various social factors such as age; gender; marriage to members from outside the rural community; contact with persons external to the community; increased commuting between rural and urban areas; direct or indirect urban influence of friends, classmates, or relatives, e.g. influence of relatives who live in urban areas; and watching television programs that promote urban dialects. Dr. Habib’s research has appeared in a number of journal articles and book chapters. See Home Page: http://as-cascade.syr.edu/profiles/pages/habib-rania.html

 Stefano Giannini teaches Modern Italian literature. His research focuses on the historical novel, poetry, and the intersections between historical memory and philology. A graduate of the University of Genoa (Italy), he studied at the University of Oregon and completed a Ph.D. in Italian Studies at the Johns Hopkins University. He taught at Wesleyan University in Connecticut, and at the University of Calgary (Canada). At SU he is the coordinator of the Italian program. His book, La musa sotto i portici: caffe e provincia nella narrativa di Piero Chiara e Lucio Mastronardi (Florence: Pagliai, 2008), analyzes the role of coffeehouses in the shaping of the Italian cultural panorama. His articles have appeared in Italian and North American periodicals. 

PREVIOUS SU HUMANITIES CENTER FACULTY FELLOWS 

Elizabeth Cohen, Assistant Professor, School of Citizenship and Public Affairs
Book Project: Citizenship, Naturalization and Jus Soli in Calvin’s Case

Arsalan Kahnemuyipour, Assistant Professor of Linguistics, College of Arts and Sciences
Project: A cross linguistic investigation of verb agreement in copular sentences

Amos Kieve, Professor of Communication and Rhetorical Studies, College of Visual and Performing Arts
Book Project: Unsolved Civil Rights Era Murders: High School Outreach

Bruce Smith, Professor of English, College of Arts and Sciences
Book Project: The Devotions

PREVIOUS HUMANITIES CENTER DISSERTATION FELLOWS

Donovan Schaefer (Department of Religion)

Tanushree Ghosh (Department of English)

Aaron A. Blum (VPA, Department of Transmedia—Art Photography)

 

KJ Rawson (A&S, Composition and Cultural Rhetoric/LGBT)

Jonathan Singleton (A&S, English)