2004-2005 FACULTY FELLOWS COMPETITION:
THE BODY

Congratulations to these Faculty Fellows, who were named in Spring of 2004. They will present papers at the Fellows Conference on April 8, 2005. Awards ranged from $2000 to $8000. For more information about the conference, click here!

Thomas Abowd
Anthropology
Dangerous Bodies/Vulnerable Nations: Arabs and Muslims in a post-'9/11' America

Robert Aguirre
English
Embodying American Indigenes

Lisabeth Hock
German & Slavic Studies
Caught Between Genius and Illness: Melancholy and German Women Writers (1800-1917)

Lisa Vollendorf
Romance Languages & Literatures
Sex, Violence, and the Law in the Hispanic World

Ellen Barton
Linguistics
Experimenting on the Body

Jonathan Flatley
English
Bodies as Machines: Affect and the Experience of Modernity

Bart Miles
Social Work
Rewriting the Homeless Body: Highlighting a Subjugated Discourse

Lisa Maruca
Interdisciplinary Studies
Printing Technology and the Body of Learning

EXPLICATION:

For over two decades, scholars and artists in the humanities have been attempting to liberate the body from its subservient position in the mind/body binary and give it attention in its own right. This work has led to many methodological and theoretical breakthroughs that have allowed new ways of thinking about bodies.

But the body is not thereby conceived as isolated and autonomous; rather, it stands at the interface of the physiological and the psychological, the physical and the cultural, the individual and the social. This perspective foregrounds new themes and pushes forward new questions for the humanities in the 21st century. For instance, the body is increasingly studies as a mode of expression, whether through performance or through decoration and alteration of the body.

Along these lines, scholars ask how the body functions as a site for the marking of identity and difference (for instance, the gendered or the racialized body). Others focus on the body in terms of power, asking how disciplined, civilized, and socialized beings are brought into existence in different cultures and historical periods. At the same time, they consider how embodiment might be a source for grounding agency or resistance. Such topics and questions may lead some scholars to histories and theories of the body that highlight the power dynamics and cultural relations expressed through and on the body; and to question how culture and power relations are implicated and expressed in these histories.

The body as an intersection of the cultural as and the physiological encourages a new perspective on such phenomena as emotions and affect as well as health and illness. It also suggests attention to areas of agreement or of tension between the emerging perspectives on the bodies in the humanities and the current theories underpinning physical sciences of the body. Finally, new attention to the body encourages us to ask what is at stake, philosophically and culturally, in maintaining or, conversely, in moving away from, the mind/body dichotomy.