2008-2009 Theme:
"Hauntings"

Congratulations to these Faculty Fellows, who were selected in the spring of 2008. They will present papers at the Fellows Conference in the spring of 2009.

Robert Burgoyne
Professor, English
Haunting in the War Film

Jorgelina Corbatta
Professor, Classical and Modern Languages, Literatures and Cultures
The Argentine Dirty War's haunting repercussions today*

Alexander Day
Assistant Professor, History
Haunting History: The continuing affects of the Cultural Revolution on Chinese intellectual politics

Ken Jackson
Associate Professor, English
"Hauntology": The Ghost(s) of Shakespeare Continental Philosophy

Janet Langlois
Associate Professor, English
"Other Words:" Return of the Dead and Other Mystical Experiences in Health-Related Contexts

Elena Past
Assistant Professor, Classical and Modern Languages, Literatures and Cultures
The Specter of Lombroso in Contemporary Italian Crime Fiction

Fran Shor
Professor, History
Mississippi Hauntings: Exorcising the Ghosts of Past Civil Rights Murders

EXPLICATION:
“Thou art a scholar, speak to it, Horatio!”

The terrified guards at the beginning of Hamlet beg Horatio to speak to the uncanny apparition of the dead king's ghost. Why do they look to Horatio as one especially able to "speak to" -- both with and about--the ghost? Because he is a scholar. But why ask a scholar to speak to a ghost? Especially a skeptic who has already scolded the frightened guards, "'tis but fantasy!" and who declares that he "will not let belief take hold of him"? Confronted by the ghost, even he has to admit its presence. Even worse, deprived of the scholar's preferred response to such things--which is haughty, knowing dismissal--Horatio has to admit he has no idea how to talk to or about the ghost.

Horatio's dilemma is not an uncommon one for scholars in many different disciplines. As we work in and through the past, we find ourselves grappling with many ghosts, and in some sense are the ones, because we are scholars, to sort it out. At the end of the 20th century and into the first decade of the 21st century, scholarship is still humbled by such hauntings. For all the advances that have been made in various disciplines, we cannot seem to exorcise our ghosts completely. We often say we are “haunted” by memories and history. Much music and poetry, of course, is still said to be “haunting.” But what does this mean in the 21st century? Why is this spectral metaphor so indispensable? Does this persistent haunting have anything to do with the seemingly ever present attention to spirit and spiritualism? After all, one tends to need specters to make “pure” spirit manifest. In what sense are we now haunted by virtual realities? Or do virtual realities render us into the apparitions? The most material thing in modern global capitalism – money – has itself a certain spectral quality. We do not know what it is precisely. We alternately want more of it and want to get rid of it, but it both eludes us and remains indispensable at the same time (“A specter is haunting Europe – the specter of Communism,” Marx famously wrote). There has been an extraordinary revival of interest in spiritism, as well as the metaphorical sense of haunting in terms of layered history (for instance, the colonial carvings of lands and peoples in the Middle East that now represent a return of the repressed), the haunting of the Holocaust through European memory (the museums dedicated to it are but an example), the African religions and languages still “haunting” practices all through the Caribbean, native gods and customs infiltrating the Catholicism of South and Central America. We are at a point where people desperately want to connect to a world of the spirit, to some confirmation of an afterlife, and at the same time re-live history in contemporary events and policies. Can societies be haunted? Are there geographical spaces that gather the past to themselves? Can debt be a kind of haunting?

In brief, this faculty fellowship competition invites scholars from all disciplines to address -- via the term and concept of haunting – that which they normally take for granted: the distinction between real and unreal, the actual and inactual, the living and the non-living, being and non-being, presence and non presence.

*Title subject to change.