Fellows 2006-2007

Hilde De Weerdt is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville. She teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on pre-modern Chinese history, world history, and historical methods. Her research interests converge on bureaucracy, information, and empire, and straddle intellectual history, the cultural history of Chinese elites, and political and legal culture in imperial China.

Between the tenth and the thirteenth centuries Chinese elites developed both an interest in current affairs and the means to tap into, transform, and commercialize official sources of information on current affairs. News and Identity in Imperial China, 10th-13th Centuries proposes to reconstitute the networks of information sharing among literate elites and offers a case study of the political uses of print technology, and of the relationship between changing information networks and structural transformations in elite identities.

Christine Guth is an independent scholar who has taught Japanese art history at Princeton, the University of Pennsylvania, Harvard, Stanford and Berkeley. Her publications focus on collecting and canon formation in the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Her current project builds on this foundation to explore the reception, appropriation, and transformation of a single Japanese woodcut that has become a global icon.

Popularly known as “The Great Wave,” Hokusai’s woodcut Under the Wave off Kanagawa is arguably the single most famous work of Japanese art outside of Japan. Guth's project in Beyond Influence: The Great Wave as a Global Icon is to elucidate the changing metaphorical readings that have given this image such widespread and lasting resonance.

Christian Henriot is a historian of modern China with a particular interest in urban history, wartime China, and the use of NITCs in research and teaching. He received his training in Paris, Hong Kong and Stanford. He is a research fellow at the Institut d’Asie Orientale (CNRS-Lumiere Lyon 2 University).

The Virtual Shanghai project is a research platform that aims at writing the history of Shanghai through the combined use of textual records, photographs and GIS mapping.

Matthew Jockers is Academic Technology Specialist and Consulting Assistant Professor of English at Stanford. His research and teaching are focused on Irish-American literature and humanities computing. Jockers writes custom software applications to support his research and is the developer of the Irish-American Literature database (IALD) hosted by the Western Institute of Irish Studies.

The Macro-Analytic Method: Quantitative Methods for Large Scale Literary Analysis is a project investigating and developing technologies for mining electronic literary corpora. Using custom software to process thousands of literary texts, the research provides a means for tracking and exploring literary history and stylistic trends over the course of centuries or throughout the expanse of genres.

Troy Jollimore received his Ph.D. from Princeton University and is currently Associate Professor of Philosophy at California State University, Chico. He is the author of a philosophical monograph, Friendship and Agent-Relative Morality, as well as a book of poetry, Tom Thomson in Purgatory.

The Nature of Loyalty develops and defends a novel philosophical interpretation of the concept of loyalty and its significance in ethical theorizing and in moral practice, particularly in the context of personal relationships.

Boris Lanin has taught literature and rhetoric in Russia, UK, Japan, Hungary, and the USA. His current position is Head of Literature and Principal Research Professor at the Russian Academy of Education (Moscow).

Symbols of Power and Political Rhetoric in NIS: The Montage of Attractions in Totalitarian and Post-Soviet Culture examines semiological aspects of the project of political culture in the post-Soviet NIS. The study focuses on the emergence, character, and social functions of the symbolic and discursive polarization between new authorities and the populace, as reflected in public ceremonies, demonstrations, open public meetings, and spectacles.

Carolyn Lougee Chappell is the Frances and Charles Field Professor of History and the Martin Family University Fellow in Undergraduate Education at Stanford University. A specialist in early modern Europe, she writes on the history of women and families, religious history, demographic history, and the history of eduction.

Lougee Chappell is currently working on a book titled Beyond Berneré: A Huguenot Family Faces the Revocation. This history of one French Protestant family over the course of seven generations, from their ancestral estates in Southwest France to their new homes in Holland, Ireland, and Prussia, calls into question the standard picture of the Huguenot dispersion as a type of migration distinct-because of the migrants' religious motivations-from later mass population movements. The experience of the Robillard de Champagné reveals a multiplicity of factors-personal and social, religious and material- that, in shifting combinations, incited some, but not all, among the Protestant subjects of Louis XIV to leave his realm.

Konstantin Pollok is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Philipps-University at Marburg (Germany). He is the author of Kants “Metaphysische Anfangsgründe der Naturwissenschaft“. Ein Kritischer Kommentar (Hamburg: Meiner, 2001). He has published critical editions of Kant’s Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science (Hamburg: Meiner, 1997) and of Kant’s Prolegomena (Hamburg: Meiner, 2001). His current research interests include, in addition to Kant’s philosophy of physical nature and the history of science, normative aspects of Kant’s epistemology in general, and in relation to Kant’s ethics and aesthetics.

Eric Porter (Ph.D., University of Michigan, 1997) is Associate Professor of American Studies at UC Santa Cruz. His interests include black cultural and intellectual history, US cultural history, comparative ethnic studies, and jazz studies. His current book project examines W.E.B. Du Bois's writings from the 1940s and 1950s.

The Knot of Race: The Challenge of W.E.B. Du Bois' Mid-Century Writings surveys and analyzes iconic African American scholar and activist W.E.B. Du Bois's thought during the 1940s and 1950s, with an eye toward using it to help us understand race as an overdetermined social category and racism as a multilayered, protean, global phenomenon articulated both through affirmations and disavowals of race. Du Bois's mid-century thinking provides important insights for developing a social analysis and an antiracist politics relevant to the present.

David Riggs has been a member of the Stanford English Department since 1969. He specializes in Renaissance literature, with an emphasis on the lives of early modern playwrights. His first book, Shakespeare's Heroical Histories: Henry VI and Its Literary Tradition (1971), traces the influence of Shakespeare's grammar school education and apprentice work in the theater on his earliest plays. Subsequent publications include biographies of Ben Jonson (1989) and Christopher Marlowe (2004). He is currently working on a biography of Shakespeare in his thirties. He was previously a Fellow at the SHC in 1982-83 and 1998-99.

From Hamnet to Hamlet: the World of William Shakespeare, 1596-1601 is a biography of Shakespeare during his mid-thirties. Riggs' narrative begins in the summer of 1596, which saw the death of Shakespeare’s only son Hamnet (or Hamlet); it concludes with the making of Hamlet three or four years later.

Matthew Sommer (BA, Swarthmore College, 1983; MA, University of Washington, 1987; Ph.D., UCLA, 1994) taught Chinese history at the University of Pennsylvania for seven years before joining Stanford's History Department in 2002. He is the author of Sex, Law, and Society in Late Imperial China (Stanford University Press, 2000).

On the basis of 1700 legal cases, Sommer plans to write an unprecedented history of same-sex union and masculinity in eighteenth-century China. This study will shed light on major issues in Chinese history and the comparative history of sexuality: the impact of the skewed sex ratio in late imperial China; alternative patterns of alliance and identity found in different social milieus; and the applicability to China of models of sexuality and modernity derived from Europe.

William Tronzo, Visiting Professor in the Department of Visual Arts at the University of California at San Diego, received his training in art history at Harvard University and has held research appointments at the American Academy in Rome, Dumbarton Oaks Center for Byzantine Studies in Washington D.C., the Bibliotheca Hertziana in Rome and the École des Hautes Études en sciences sociales in Paris. His recent publications include an edited volume on St. Peter’s as well as studies on mixed media in the twelfth century, the nature of ornament in medieval art, the Norman Palace in Palermo and the relationship between sculpture and drawing in the painting of Giotto. In 2002-03, he helped organize an exhibition on Norman Sicily, Nobiles Officinae, which took place in Palermo (Palazzo Reale) and Vienna (Kunsthistorisches Museum).

Tronzo's year at the SHC will be spent writing a book titled Petrarch’s Two Gardens: Landscape and the Image of Movement on the image of movement in landscape, particularly the designed landscape or garden, at a critical moment of change from the medieval to the early modern world. This book, in eight chapters, will focus on a set of sites in Western Europe (primarily Italy, France, Germany and England), which were developed between the twelfth and the early sixteenth centuries, with additional reference also to Byzantium and the Islamic world.

Kären Wigen trained as a geographer at Berkeley and now teaches History at Stanford. Her early research focused on the economic transformation of the Japanese countryside during the Tokugawa-Meiji transition (The Making of a Japanese Periphery, 1750-1920); a second book explored the history of geographical ideas in the West (The Myth of Continents: A Critique of Meta-Geography, co-author with Martin Lewis). Recently, she has begun looking at geography textbooks and maps to explore the evolution of regional identity and geographies of the imagination in the alpine reaches of central Honshu.

Native Places, Global Times: A Century of Regional Rhetoric in Nagano, Japan tracks the shifting contours of Nagano identity over the course of the twentieth century, showing how local elites repeatedly re-positioned their native place in a rapidly changing national and global context. Its aim is to expose the politically charged nature of chorographic education by attending to the media and messages through which local ideologues talk about the nature and function of regional belonging over time.

Jonah Willihnganz is a Lecturer in the Program in Writing and Rhetoric at Stanford. He is the author of several essays on sound and modernism, including pieces on Kenneth Burke, Henry Roth, and Richard Wright. His current writing and teaching focus on the experience of radio.

"The Sound of Modernity: Orson Welles and the Voice of Radio" will examine how the human voice emerged as a powerful site of struggle in America during the 1930s and 40s. Building on previous research on period fiction, the project turns to radio, particularly the radio of Orson Welles, and pursues one basic question: what can the dramas for the disembodied voice teach us about the changing place of sound and the human voice in modern, mediatized culture?

Martina Winkler graduated in history, law and comparative literature. She completed a dissertation on Czech history, and now focuses on Russian Imperial history. The initial work on her current project on cultures of ownership was done at Stanford, where she spent a year as a Humboldt-fellow at the Center for Russian Studies.

For Russian history, a presumed lack of private property has often been described as a vital reason for economic as well as political backwardness. Rather than following this traditional pattern, Winkler's book Perceptions of Property and Ownership Among the Russian Elite, 18th and 19th Centuries discusses property and ownership as culturally constructed perceptions in contexts of nationalism, politics, economics and gender, and analyses the radical changes of ownership perception in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

Linda M. G. Zerilli is professor of political science at Northwestern University. She is the author of two books: Signifying Woman: Culture and Chaos in Rousseau, Burke, and Mill (Cornell University Press, 1994) and Feminism and the Abyss of Freedom (University of Chicago Press, 2005). Zerilli has also published numerous essays in the areas of democratic theory, feminist theory, and continental philosophy.

Toward a Democratic Theory of Judgment examines the problem and practice of political judgment in the context of late modernity.