Current Mellon Fellows: 2012-2013

Elizabeth L. Bennett is an art historian and visual culture theorist specializing in twentieth and twenty-first-century material culture in the United States. She earned her B.A. from Denison University and Ph.D. in the History of Art from the University of California, Berkeley.
Her current book project, “Economies of Valuation and Desire: How New Deal Photography Remade the Old Order Amish,” considers the earliest American photographs
to depict consensual Old Order Amish subjects in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania.
Intervening in the art historical narratives of both the visual culture of the New Deal and twentieth-century representations of religious subcultures in the U.S., the study provides an alternative model for the Great Depression as a historical narrative and popular concept. To the fields of Religious Studies and Visual Culture Studies, it also contributes a critical assessment of photographs of the photography-averse Amish, a subject that has not received consideration in any discipline. Elizabeth argues that these photographs evidence an understudied legacy of New Deal photography: the establishment of ethnographic and anthropological ways of looking with the camera in a domestic context. In these images of the Amish, we see the camera deployed as a mode of surveillance in the countryside, a tool for social gardening with which the vulnerabilities of peripheral populations could be identified, ordered, and “corrected.”

Elizabeth’s research interests extend to the objects and sites of tourism, peripheral American geographies (specifically Guam, Puerto Rico, and other unincorporated Territories of the United States), and vision and dromology.

Elizabeth will be hosted by the Department of Art and Art History

Jorah comes to the Mellon Fellowship from UCLA, where he earned his PhD in Philosophy in 2010. In his dissertation, Promising as Paradigm, he explored and criticized the treatment of promising in contemporary moral philosophy. He then presented a novel way of understanding the activity that locates the fundamental source of the bond of a promise in the promisor’s own will.

He is currently turning one of the chapters from his dissertation, about promising to ourselves, into a journal article. He is also writing an article on the phenomenon philosophers call “moral luck,” focusing in particular on whether the recognition that we can be morally lucky or unlucky should make us wonder whether our commitment to morality rests on false pretenses.

Jorah is teaching Philosophy 2: Introduction to Moral Philosophy in the winter, and Philosophy 270: Ethical Theory in the spring.

Email: jorahd@stanford.edu

Ozgen Felek is Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Religious Studies. She received her first Ph.D. from Firat University (Turkey) in classical Ottoman poetry with a
focus on the Sebk-i Hindi (Indian Style) poetical movement, and her second Ph.D. in the Near Eastern Studies from the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor with an emphasis on Ottoman dream culture and Sufism. She is the co-editor of Victoria Holbrook’a Armagan (Kanat 2006) and Dreams and Visions in Islamic Societies (SUNY 2012). She is particularly interested in religion as the intersection of theology and life. Her study of literature focuses on mystical thought as an expression of the emotional dimension of religions and the spirituality of religious culture, including also its manifestations in art, music, and dance. Her research interests encompass topics as varied as Sufism, Islamic literature, dream culture, religious storytelling in medieval Islamic culture, the narrative aspects and the theatricality of texts, the presentation of violence in medieval and early modern period Sufi texts, and the construction of sexuality and gender identity in hagiographical accounts. She taught in Turkey and the United States courses on religion, language, culture, history, and studio painting, namely Islamic Art of Illumination.

Email: ozgen@stanford.edu

Patrick Iber became a Mellon fellow in 2011 after completing his doctorate at the University of Chicago. His work, situated at the intersection of cultural, political, and intellectual history, focuses on Latin American intellectuals and their engagement with the cultural Cold War. His dissertation, "The Imperialism of Liberty: Intellectuals and the Politics of Culture in Cold War Latin America," explores the actions across Latin America of the two central "front" groups of the early Cold War, the Partisans of Peace and the Congress for Cultural Freedom. In spite of the considerable ignominy on display in those organizations, he continues to believe in the importance of the public intellectual, and has published in magazines such as Nexos, Letras Libres, and the Chicago Review. His future plans include works on the politics of poverty in the Americas and the history of Latin American social democracy.

At Stanford, Patrick is teaching a survey lecture in Latin American history as well as a more specialized course in the history of modern Mexico. In the past, he has taught courses in U.S.-Latin American relations and in the history of Central America. Prior to grad school, he taught in public school classrooms in Texas, California, and Central America.

Email: piber@stanford.edu

Beatrice studies the art of the early Middle Ages. Her dissertation project, which she is working to publish as a book, examines primarily 8th–10th-century images of the cross in pictorial media in which the cross is depicted as a material, physical object. In this form, the pictorial cross displays attributes similar to those of the metalwork cross-objects used in the Church's liturgical performance. She describes this pattern of representation as an intersection of media, of pictorial and liturgical space, and of historical, eschatological, and ritual time. The argument of the project turns upon the cross as a key to understanding instrumentality as an essential, emphasized, and even celebrated component of early medieval artwork. She emphasizes the centrality of manufacture to the self-proclaimed projects of medieval artwork, and the importance of visual strategies that establish an indispensable place for art within the world of the Church. She views manuscripts as experiential spaces as well as objects engaged in ritual performance; and is especially interested in analyzing narrative and symbolic modes in early medieval painting. She studies neglected corners of Carolingian art, focusing on manuscripts from the historically and artistically messy region of western France. She analyzes the contents of the manuscript paintings in close relationship to objects, actions, and spaces outside the boundaries of the books, examining the project of book-making relative to a broader view of art-making in the Carolingian world.

Beatrice comes to Stanford from Harvard University, where she completed her Bachelor's, Master's and doctoral degrees. While researching her dissertation she lived for several years in Germany, England and France, where she also worked in museum collections. She will be teaching a course on medieval book illumination in the Art and Art History Department at Stanford.

Peter O’Connell studies the languages and civilizations of ancient Greece and Rome. He received his bachelor’s and doctoral degrees from Harvard and an M. Phil. degree from the University of Cambridge, where he was a Frank Knox Fellow. His special interests include Greek prose of all periods, Classical Athenian literature and culture, Greek law, Greek epigraphy and Greek religion.

His current book project, The Performance of Persuasion: Seeing and Hearing in Attic Forensic Oratory, discusses the performative effects of the language of sight in speeches from Athenian trials of the fifth and fourth centuries BC. The texts of these speeches are all that survive of dynamic performances that sought to persuade jurors through voice, words, gestures and appearance. Peter’s research shows how litigants’ words work together with their physical appearance, how litigants plant images in their jurors’ minds, and how litigants bring their speeches to life by referring to people in the courtroom. His work draws on traditional philology, legal anthropology and modern linguistics.

He is the author of an article entitled, "Hyperides and Epopteia: A New Fragment of the Defense of Phryne," which is forthcoming in Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies. He is also beginning a new project on Attic documentary inscriptions as visual recreations of performances in the Athenian assembly.

Peter is hosted by the Department of Classics. Last year, he taught an upper-level Greek course on Lysias and Antiphon and Greek prose composition. This year, he is teaching Beginning Greek and a graduate seminar on "Narrative, Persuasion and Emotion in Classical Athens."

Email: poconnell@stanford.edu

Paul Roquet holds a Ph.d. from the East Asian Languages and Cultures department at the University of California, Berkeley, with a Designated Emphasis in Film Studies. His research focuses on audiovisual media, with particular interests in environmental aesthetics, soundscape studies, and the use of media as a form of mood regulation. Roquet's published work includes essays on cinema, music, literature, and art in contemporary Japan. His dissertation title is "Atmosphere as Culture: Ambient Media and Postindustrial Japan." Paul will be hosted by the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures.

Adena Spingarn will receive her PhD in English from Harvard University in May 2012. Her dissertation, “Uncle Tom in the American Imagination: A Cultural Biography,” examines Uncle Tom’s transformation in American cultural understanding from a heroic Christ figure in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s 1852 anti-slavery novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, to a submissive race traitor. A contributor to The Root, Vogue, and Uncle Tom’s Cabin in the National Era with an article forthcoming in Theatre Survey, her current writing and teaching focus on 19th- and 20th-century American literature and cultural history, with a special emphasis on African American literature and literary history.

Adena will be hosted by the English Department.