HRC Visting Fellows for 2003

Dr Norbert FINZSCH, Department for Anglo-American History at the University of Cologne, Germany: English Biological Warfare during French and Indian War, Pontiac's Rebellion and the Colonialization of Australia, (6 January 2003 to 6 April 2003). Email: Dr Norbert Finzsch

A/Professor Lily KONG, Department of Geography, National University of Singapore: Geographies of the Sacred: Inventing "Place", Constructing "Community", Contesting "Nation", (10 January to 28 January 2003, 1 June to 5 July 2003, 16 November to 13 December 2003). Email: Professor Lily Kong

Associate Professor Jane GOODALL, College of the Arts, Education and Social Sciences, University of Western Sydney: Presumption and the Vital Spark: Early 19th-Century Challenges to the Limits of Human Nature, (31 January 2003 to 26 April, 2003). Email: Dr Jane Goodall

Professor Kay SCHAFFER, Department of Social Inquiry, Adelaide University: Life Narratives and Human Rights within a Global Context, (16 February 2003 to 29 March 2003). Email: Professor Kay Schaffer

Professor Sidonie SMITH, Women's Studies Program, University of Michigan, Ann Arbour: Life Narratives and Human Rights within a Global Context, (16 February 2003 to 29 March 2003). Email: Professor Sidonie Smith

Professor John KEANE, Centre for the Study of Democracy, University of Westminster: Global Civil Society, (25 February 2003 to 22 March 2003). Email: Professor John Keane

Professor Julie GRAHAM, Department of Geosciences, University of Massachusetts: Cooperativism and Communal Subjects-enterprise culture, economic landscapes and human rights for the 21st century, (19 May 2003 to 1 August 2003). Email: Professor Julie Graham

Dr Petra TEN-DOESSCHATE CHU, Department of Art and Music, Seton Hall University, Landscape Paintings of French painter Gustave Courbet (18-19-1877), (9 June 2003 to 24 July 2003). Email: Dr Petra Ten-Doesschate Chu

Dr Charles MEREWETHER, Getty Research Institute, California: The Specter of Being Human, (1 July 2003 to 9 September 2003). Email: Dr Charles Merewether

Professor Ihab HASSAN, English & Comparative Literature, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee: Antipodean Encounters: An Outside View, (1 July 2003 to 30 September 2003). Email: Professor Ihab Hassan

Professor Ben KIERNAN, Department of History, Yale University, Joint HRC/Freilich Foundation Conference and Visiting Fellow: Conference Visitor for "Genocide and Colonialism", (July 2003). Email: Professor Ben Kiernan

Dr Nigel SPIVEY, Emmanuel College, Cambridge, UK, Joint CCR/HRC Visiting Fellow: Art Deep Time. Hand-prints from Arnhem Land, (1 July to 30 September 2003). Email: Dr Nigel Spivey

Professor Jack BARBALET, Department of Sociology, University of Leicester: Weber's Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, (5 July 2003 to 12 September 2003). Email: Professor Jack Barbalet

Dr Melinda COOPER, Department of Sociology, Macquarie University: Policing Life: The Politics of Biological Security, (18 July 2003 to 15 August 2003). Email: Dr Melinda Cooper

Professor Barbara STAFFORD, Department of Art History and the College, University of Chicago: Neoronal Aesthetics: The Biology of Ambiguity, (1 August 2003 to 1 September 2003). Email: Professor Barbara Stafford

Dr Jonathan WHITE, Department of Literature, University of Essex, UK: Lineages of Italian Culture, (15 September 2003 to 15 December 2003). Email: Dr Jonathan White

Dr Mbulelo MZAMANE, USA: Human Righting the Legacy of Apartheid in South Africa, (1 September 2003 to 14 November 2003). Email: Dr Mbulelo Mzamane

Professor Jonathan LAMB, Department of English, Princeton University: The Things Things Say, (16 November 2003 to 10 December 2003). Email: Professor Jonathan Lamb

HRC Sabbatical Visiting Fellows for 2003

Professor Ken TAYLOR, Division of Science and Design, University of Canberra: John Sulman, Town Planner: his influence on Australian town planning theory and practice in the early years of the twentieth century, (1 January 2003 to 31 December 2003). Email: Professor Ken Taylor

Emeritus Professor David FIELDHOUSE, Imperial and Naval History, University of Cambridge, UK: TBA, (2 January 2003 to 2 April 2003). Email: Professor David Fieldhouse

Ms Catherine SUMMERHAYES, School of Humanities ANU: Preparation of Monograph's: The Cultural Performance of Film, (10 February 2003 to 9 May 2003). Email: Ms Catherine Summerhayes

Dr John O'LEARY, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand: Native Rites and Native Rights: The Writings of Eliza Hamilton Dunlop, (1 March 2003 to 31 May 2003). Email: Dr John O'Leary

Dr Michael KINDLER, Tomakomai Komazawa University, Japan: Australian Literature and the Rights of Indigenous People: A Humanities Approach to Cross Cultural Education in Far East Asia, (24 March 2003 to 30 June 2003). Email: Dr Michael Kindler

Dr Catherine RIGBY, School of Literary, Visual and Performance Studies Monash University: Recasting the Limestone Plains: Culture and Ecology in Canberra and the ACT, (1 November 2003 to 21 December 2003). Email: Dr Catherine Rigby

HRC Conference Visiting Fellows for 2003

Dr Anita GUERRINI, Enviromental Studies Program, University of California-Santa Barbara, USA: Conference Visitor for Frankenstein's Science: Theories of Human Nature from 1700 to 1839, (21-25 April 2003). Email: Dr Anita Guerrini

Professor Robert MARKLEY, Jackson Distinguished Chair of British Literature, West Virginia University: Conference Visitor for Frankenstein's Science: Theories of Human Nature from 1700 to 1839, (21-25 April 2003). Email: Professor Robert Markley

Visiting Fellows Biographies

BARBALET, Professor Jack Department of Sociology, University of Leicester, UK
Dates: 1 July 2003 – 31 December 2003
Research proposal: Weber’s Protestant Ethic and the spirit of capitalism

Jack Barbalet is currently Professor of Sociology at the University of Leicester, England, where he is Head of Department. He was previously Reader in Sociology at the Australian National University. His publications include Marx’s Construction of Social Theory (Routledge, 1983), Citizenship: Rights, Struggle and Class Inequality (Open University Press, 1989), Emotion, Social Theory and Social Structure: A Macrosociological Approach (Cambridge University Press, 1998), Emotions and Sociology (Blackwell/Sociological Review Monograph, in press), and contributions to leading journals, including British Journal of Sociology, Sociology, Sociological Theory, Mobilization, Theoretical Criminology, and European Journal of Sociology. He is Managing Editor of the Journal of Classical Sociology.

Analysis of social structure and process, and sociological theory are two enduring themes in Jack’s research. Current research is directed to three areas of inquiry: an empirical and theoretical investigation of the size and structure of prison populations in Britain and Australia; the emotional basis of scientific discovery and validation; and, the logic and substance of Max Weber’s sociology. It is the last of these that will be the focus of activity while at the HRC. In particular, research will be directed to a number of under-explored aspects of the famous “Weber thesis” concerning the Protestant origins of capitalism. These include the relevance of late 16th and early 17th century texts on the passions, widely read and influential at the time, but now almost wholly neglected, for the development of a “spirit of capitalism”; the logical structure and empirical basis of Weber’s argument that their religious beliefs ultimately prevented the Jews from effective participation in modern capitalist economies; and related facets of Weber’s sociology.

Among his major interests are sociological theory, political sociology and the sociology of emotions. His publications include Citizenship: Rights, Struggle and Class Inequality (Open University Press 1988), “Vagaries of Social Capital: Citizenship, Trust and Loyalty” in Citizenship, Community and Democracy (Macmillan 2000), “Citizenship, Class Inequality and Resentment” in Citizenship and Social Theory (Routledge 1993), Emotion, Social Theory, and Social Structure: A Macrosociological Approach (Cambridge University Press 1998). See review of latter publication at www.anu.edu.au/pad/reporter/V29/14/enrich.html Since 1990, he has been editorial advisor to the Sage series “Politics and Culture”.

His homepage: www.le.ac.uk/sociology/staff/jmb34.html

COOPER, Dr Melinda
Research Fellow, Department of Sociology, Macquarie University, Australia
Dates: 18 July – 15 August 2003
Proposed Research: Policing Life: The Politics of Biological Security

Sociology. She will be exploring the recent notions about biological or environmental security and risk with relation to the threat of biological warfare. She intends analyzing two recent cases which invoked the threat of a national state of emergency – the South African government’s production of generic AIDS drugs and the US and patent rights on the anthrax antibiotic, Cipro. This research falls within a larger project on the shifting conceptions of life in the contemporary bio-sciences and their political, social and legal ramifications. Recent publications are ‘Transgenic Life: Controlling Mutation’ Theory and Event, August 2001 and ‘ Vitesses de l’image, puissances de la pensee: La philosophie epicurienne revue par Deleuze et Guattari’, French Studies (Oxford) 2002 (forthcoming).

FINZSCH, Professor Norbert
Professor of History and Director of the Department for Anglo-American History at the University of Cologne, Germany
Dates: 6 January to 6 April 2003
Attending conference: Genocide and Colonialism (Sydney 18-20 July 2003) to speak on British biological warfare in North America in the 18th century.

History. Considered to be the leading German scholar in the area of xenophobia, racism and genocide. Among his publications are Identity and Intolerance: Nationalism, Racism, and Xenophobia in Germany and the United States (Cambridge 1998), “Conditions of Intolerance: Racism and the Construction of Social Reality” in Historical Social Research 22 (19970, pp 3-28, “Comment [Blood, ehtnicity and comparative history” in German and American Nationalism: A Comparative Perspective (Oxford 1999).

GOODALL, Professor Jane
College of the Arts, Education and Social Sciences, University of Western Sydney, Australia
Dates: 31 January 2003 to 26 April 2003
Proposed research: Presumption and the Vital Spark: Early 19th-Century Challenges to the Limits of Human Nature

Jane Goodall teaches in a cross-disciplinary Humanities program at the University of Western Sydney. Her research interests are in the cultural history of the performing arts, especially in their relationship to changing paradigms in science and philosophy. She is the author of Artaud and the Gnostic Drama (Oxford University Press, 1994) and her most recent book, Out of the Natural Order: Performance and Evolution in the Age of Darwin (Routledge, 2002), explores relations between the performing arts and the natural sciences in the Victorian era.

Whilst at the HRC she will be working on a new project about electrical romanticism and the spontaneous generation debate in the early nineteenth century, and is one of the conveners of the HRC conference, Frankenstein's Science: Theories of Human Nature.

GRAHAM, Professor Julie
Professor of Geography, Department of Geosciences, University of Massachusetts, USA
Dates: 19 May 2003 – 1 August 2003
Proposed Research: Cooperativism and Communal Subjects – enterprise culture, economic landscapes and human rights for the 21st century

Julie Graham is an economic geographer and Professor of Geography at the University of Massachusetts Amherst in the US. Her principal areas of interest include economic diversity, emerging forms of economic subjectivity, and alternative theories and practices of economy. Her recently completed research project, “Rethinking Economy: Envisioning Alternative Regional Futures” funded by the National Science Foundation, focused on the hidden and alternative economies in the Pioneer Valley of western Massachusetts. With a collaborative team of 12 academic and 17 community researchers in the Valley, the project used qualitative and action research methods to represent the prevalence and viability of non-capitalist economic activity—including non-market transactions, unremunerated labor, and non-capitalist businesses—and to generate an ongoing conversation about alternative economic development in the region.

In her authorial persona as J.K Gibson-Graham (shared with Katherine Gibson, Professor of Human Geography, RSPAS, at the ANU), Dr. Graham has co-authored and co-edited a number of volumes. The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It): A Feminist Critique of Political Economy (Blackwell 1996) challenges the usual vision of capitalism as the naturally dominant form of economy, creating a theoretical space for a politics of economic innovation. More recently she and Professor Gibson co-edited two books with Stephen Resnick and Richard Wolff: Class and Its Others (Minnesota 2000) and Re/Presenting Class (Duke 2001). The essays in these volumes elaborate a vision of economic difference through the lens of class, and offer a new epistemological and emotional orientation to class politics. Currently J.K. Gibson-Graham is working on a manuscript entitled Reluctant Subjects: A Post-capitalist Politics of Class and Community, scheduled to be completed by mid-2003. In this book she traces ethical and micro political practices of becoming, focusing on the cultivation of subjects who can desire and create non-capitalist economic organizations and spaces.

HASSAN, Professor Ihab
Emeritus Vilas Research Professor, English and Comparative Literature, University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee, USA
Dates: 1 July to 30 September 2003
Research proposal: Antipodean Encounters: An Outside View

Ihab Hassan is a writer, critic, and teacher of literature who has recently retired as Vilas Research Professor of English and Comparative Literature from the University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee. He is the author of 13 books and over 200 articles and reviews, and has co-edited, with Sally Hassan, two collections of essays on the humanities. He has also given over 600 lectures and papers, on five continents; and has received numerous teaching awards and research fellowships, including two Visiting Fellowships (1990 and 2003) to the Humanities Research Center in Canberra.

In the last decades, Hassan has written extensively on postmodern culture, travel and autobiographical literature, and the spiritual concerns of an era rife with globalization and counter-globalization. At present, he is completing a personal work, entitled Antipodean Encounters: An Outside View, parts of which have appeared in Peter Craven’s annual anthologies, Best Australian Essays 2000 and Best Australian Essays 2001.

His homepage, which includes some of his articles, can be found at www.ihabhassan.com

KEANE, Professor John
Professor of Politics, University of Westminster, UK
Dates: July – Sept 2003
Research proposal: Global Civil Society

Politics. Founder of the Centre for the Study of Democracy at Univ. of Westminster. His European research interests include modern British, French, German and Czech political thought, theories of politics, power, violence, peace and war, European integration, constitution-making, political sociology of western and central/eastern Europe. Currently working on fear and politics and proposing to explore the idea of global civil society as a way to champion non-violent power-sharing. His publications include Vaclav Havel (London 1999), Civil Society: Old Images, New Visions (1998) and Reflections on Violence (1996).

His homepage is www.wmin.ac.uk/csd/jk.htm

KONG, Assoc. Professor Lily
Dean, Faculty of Arts & Social Sciences and Assoc.Professor, Geography Department, University of Singapore
Dates: 2 January to 30 January 2003, 1 June to 5 July 2003, 16 November to 13 December 2003
Proposed Research: Geographies of the Sacred: Inventing ‘Place’, Constructing ‘Community’, Contesting ‘Nation’.

Geography. Her research examines the nexus between religion and ‘Place’, ‘Community’ and ‘Nation’, using the case of Singapore, a secular developmentalist state and multi-religious society, caught in the countervailing forces of globalisation, modernity and tradition. She is taking various sites of religious practice, both dedicated sites and ones that have been inserted into secular spaces to draw attention to emerging new geographies of religion, that religion may become a primary axis of analysis in geography and the social sciences in the same way as race, class and gender. Recent publications include Landscape: Ways of Imagining the World, Longman 2002 (forthcoming) (co-author), Constructions of ‘Nation’: The Politics of Landscapes in Singapore, Syracuse Univ. Press 2002 (forthcoming) (co-author) and Joo Chiat: A Living Legacy, Editions Didier Millet 2001 (co-author).

LAMB, Professor Jonathon
English Department, Princeton University, USA
Dates: 10 July to 11 August 2003
Proposed research: The things things say.

A graduate of the University of York, he has taught at Auckland and Princeton, and is shortly moving to the Mellon Chair of the Humanities at Vanderbilt. He has written widely on eighteenth-century literature, concentrating in the last decade on voyages in the Pacific. He has co-edited an anthology, Exploration and Exchange (2000) and is the author of Preserving the Self in the South Seas, 1680-1840 (2002). His current project deals with the nonhuman in eighteenth-century literature and culture, and is provisionally entitled, The Things Things Say.

A brief biography can be found at http://web.princeton.edu/sites/english/Faculty0001.htm

MEREWETHER, Dr. Charles
Collections Curator, Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, USA
Dates: 19 June – 12 Septemer 2003
Proposed research: The Specter of Being Human

Dr Charles Merewether is an art historian and Curator at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Sydney. He has taught at the University of Sydney, Universidad Autonoma in Barcelona, the Ibero-Americana in Mexico City and University of Southern California and was a Research Fellow at Yale University. He has lectured and published extensively on issues concerning the reconfiguration of modernism and the avant-garde in non-European cultures, on issues of aesthetics and violence and the role of the archive in contemporary art and culture. His has just completed a book of essays On the Trace. Other publications include: A Marginal Body (1987), Conditions of Uncertainty (2000) and Anxieties of Revelation (2001). His current projects include two book-length projects, the first on Japan/France/USA in the immediate post World War Two period and second on recent Chinese art. He is the Advisory Editor of and a contributor to the journal Grand Street.

MZAMANE, Dr. Mbulelo
Formerly Vice Chancellor of the University of Fort Hare, South Africa and Professor of English Studies and Comparative Literature
Dates: 1 June – 31 August 2003
Proposed research: Human righting the Legacy of Apartheid in South Africa

South African writer and activist. He is working in the area of human rights –bridging the two cultures in the post-apartheid era. That is, the culture of liberation that is non-racist and the apartheid culture with its springs of racism from the West. Working on issues of global apartheid with millions lacking basic rights of humans. He sees two problems when the discourse on racism focuses on skin colour. First, it ignores the global context. Apartheid is practiced outside the West in cultures such as Japan and China. Secondly, such a focus appears to condone the apartheid between and within the oppressed groups themselves. His concern is global apartheid and human rights. His publications include collections of his stories, The Children of the Diaspora and Other Stories of Exile, Vivilia Publishers 1996, The Children of Soweto: A Trilogy, Longman African Classics 1987 and Mzala: The Short Stories of Mbulelo Mzamane, Ravan Press 1980 which have all been reissued in recent years.

A biography can be found at www.adelaidefestival.org.au/red/popup/2001prog/mm.html

RIGBY, Dr Catherine
School of Literary, Visual and Performance Studies Monash University
Dates: 1 November to 21 December 2003
Proposed research: Recasting the Limestone Plains: Culture and Ecology in Canberra and the ACT

Kate Rigby is Senior Lecturer in German Studies and Comparative Literature at Monash University, and a Humboldt Fellow. Among my publications are Transgressions of the Feminine: Tragedy, Enlightenment and the Figure of Woman in Classical German Drama (Heidelberg: Winter, 1996); numerous articles in the areas of German studies and ecological thought; and, with Silke Beinssen-Hesse, Out of the Shadows: Contemporary German Feminist Theory (Carlton, Melbourne: Melbourne UP, 1996). In addition, I am co-editor (with Constant Mews) of a volume of essays on Ecology, Gender and the Sacred (Clayton, Melbourne: Centre for Religious Studies, Monash University, 1999) and (with Freya Mathews and Sharron Pfueller) of the new journal PAN (Philosophy Activism Nature). I am presently completing a monograph entitled Topographies of the Sacred: Romanticism, Ecology and the Poetics of Place, which is to be published by the University Press of Virginia in their series Under the Sign of Nature: New Directions in Ecocriticism.

For several years, my research has explored intersections of various kinds between religion, philosophy, literature and ecology. Although I am by training a Germanist, who has ventured into the somewhat wider terrain of European Comparative Literature and Critical Theory, I have become increasingly fascinated by the question of sense of place among non-indigenous Australians. While I am at the HRC, therefore, I plan to embark on a study of culture, environment and human rights in Canberra and the ACT, focussing initially on the period of British exploration and early settlement. This will form part of a larger eco-cultural history of the area, into which I intend to weave some autobiographical elements, based on my own experience of growing up in Canberra in the 1960s.

SCHAFFER, Professor Kay (Kathryn)
Department of Social Inquiry, Adelaide University, Australia
Dates: 16 February 2003 – 29 March 2003
Proposed Research: Life Narratives and Human Rights within a Global Context.

Kay Schaffer is a Professor in the Department of Social Inquiry at the University of Adelaide where she teaches in the areas of gender studies, cultural studies, media and globalisation. She is the author of several books, including Women and the Bush (Cambridge, 1988) and In the Wake of First Contact: The Eliza Fraser Stories (1995). Her latest publications include the edited anthologies: Indigenous Australian Voices: A Reader (Rutgers, 1988), Constructions of Colonialism (Cassell, 1998) and The Olympics at the Millennium (Rutgers, 2000). Kay Schaffer is the past president of the Cultural Studies Association of Australia and serves on several national and international editorial and advisory boards.

She is presently working on a co-authored study (with Sidonie Smith) on Human Rights and Storytelling in a Global Context. Professors Schaffer and Smith will take up Visiting Fellowships at the HRC together in mid-February. They hope to complete the final draft manuscript for the book at this time.

SMITH, Professor Sidonie
Women’s Studies Program, University of Michigan, USA
Dates: 16 February – 29 March 2003
Proposed research: Life Narratives and Human Rights within a global context

English. Women’s Studies. Life Narrative and Feminist Studies. Recent publications Reading Autobiography: A Guide to Interpreting Personal Narratives (Univ. of Minnesota Press 2001) and Moving Lives: Women’s Twentieth Century Travel Narratives (Univ. of Minnesota Press 2001). Co-Edited Writing New Identities: Gender, Nation, and Immigration in Contemporary Europe (Univ. of Minnesota Press 1997). Currently working on a joint project with Kay Schaffer, Univ. of Adelaide located at the intersections of law, politics, cultural and personal life. Studying the way narratives challenge the concepts of subject and citizenship. Issues cover the politics of traumatic memory, the production of imaginary national pasts and futures. Case studies of Stolen Generations in Australia, Post-Tiananmen Chinese students/activists, Post-Apartheid South Africa, Korean Comfort women.

STAFFORD, Professor Barbara
Department of Art History, University of Chicago, USA
Dates: 1 August 2003 to 1 September 2003

Art history. Current interests cover art and imaging theory from the late 17th century to the Romantics in Western Europe. Also contemporary media and visualisation techniques. Focus is on the intersections between the arts and the sciences in the early modern and modern periods. Recent publications are the co-authored catalogue for an exhibition, Devices of Wonder: From the World in a Box to Images on a Screen (Getty Research Institute 2001); Visual Analogy: Consciousness as the Art of Connecting (Cambridge: MIT Press 1999) and Good Looking: Essays on the Virtue of Images (Cambridge: MIT Press 1996).

Her homepage is at http://home.uchicago.edu/~bms6/

TAYLOR, Professor Ken
Cultural Heritage Research Centre, University of Canberra
Dates: 1 January to 31 December 2003
Proposed research: John Sulman, Town Planner: his influence on Australian town planning theory and practice in the early years of the twentieth century

Ken Taylor is Professor of Landscape Architecture and Co-Director Cultural Heritage Research Centre at the University of Canberra, from where he retires at the end of 2002. He has degrees in Cultural/Physical Geography, Town Planning and Landscape Architecture. His research interest focusses on cultural landscapes - their place meaning with associated community values and heritage management - and the city of Canberra, its planning history, idealism behind its inception and its future as an internationally renowned garden city. He is preparing a book on Canberra the landscape city in association with the National Capital Authority and one on Canberra's suburbs as a result of three years of weekly broadcasts with ABC Radio (2CN Canberra) on Canberra's suburbs.

He is involved in heritage work in India and Indonesia through AusHeritage of which he is a Board member and has been a visiting academic at various universities in the USA, Canada and UK. In relation to place meaning and landscape he is working with the National Library of Australia for an exhibition on Aboriginal images of country and European Australian images of landscape portrayed in prints and writing.

TEN-DOESSCHATE CHU, Dr Petra
Department of Art and Music, Seton Hall University
Dates: 1 June 2003 - 15 August 2003
Proposed research: Landscape Paintings of French painter Gustave Courbet (1819-1877)

Petra ten-Doesschate Chu has a Doctoraal degree from the University of Utrecht (Netherlands) and a PhD from Columbia University (New York City). She teaches art history at Seton Hall University and co-directs the University’s graduate program in museum studies.

A specialist in nineteenth-century art history; she has published six books, most recently Nineteenth-Century European Art (Abrams/Prentice Hall, 2003). She also is the author/co-author of two exhibition catalogues and some thirty articles and chapters in anthologies. Since her graduate days, she has been the recipient of numerous fellowships and awards, including a Guggenheim and fellowships in the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She is the founder and managing editor of Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide, one of the first electronic journals in art history.

WHITE, Dr. Jonathan White,
Department of Literature, University of Essex, UK
Dates: 15 September 2003 to 15 December 2003
Proposed research: Lineages of Italian Culture

Jonathan White is a product of three continents. English by birth, he had his childhood mainly in the United States, his adolescence and early maturity entirely in Australia, and his professional career (after his doctorate at Cambridge) for the most part in the U.K. at the University of Essex. His academic interests are divided between Postcolonial Studies and Italian Cultural Studies, though in the last decade he has been concentrating on the latter, having spent several years writing his major work to date, ITALY: the Enduring Culture (Continuum and Leicester University Press, 2001). This is a study of dynamic continuities, as well as crises and fissures, in Italian culture. It takes a fluid and interdisciplinary approach, asking at every point how modern culture and society in Italy have emerged from earlier configurations. In an age of academic monographs on specialized topics, it bucks the trend by looking in a highly comparative way at several different periods in the formation of modern Italy, from the rapid rise of powerful merchant cities in Dante’s time to millennial change of the present technological age. There are specific chapters on Dante and cities; Boccaccio’s treatment of sexuality, class and economics; Renaissance ‘ideal-city’ theory; eighteenth-century Venice; Opera in relation to politics and television; the Language of Cinema; History in the Sicilian Context; and Italian Emigration.

White’s first opuscule of any consequence, on Shakespeare's Coriolanus, was in Italian and extracted largely from his Cambridge Ph.D. - Teatralità e politica nel "Coriolano" di Shakespeare, a cura di Daniela Corona, (Libreria Dante: Palermo, 1979). In the early 'Nineties he edited a book for Johns Hopkins University Press, entitled Recasting the World: Writing After Colonialism (1993), with chapter contributions mainly from persons associated in some way with critical and cultural studies in postcolonialism at his own institution, the University of Essex. His work in this volume is an Introduction mainly devoted to the somewhat neglected topic of postcolonial poetry, especially the work of Derek Walcott, and a comparative chapter on the novelists Salman Rushdie and Nadine Gordimer. White is at present (2002-03) on a fellowship at the Italian Academy of Advanced Studies in America at Columbia University, New York, completing a sequel volume to his recent book on Italy, to be entitled Lineages of Italian Cultural History. His work during the fellowship at the Australian National University in Canberra will largely be towards a further book, more global than Italian in its comparative scope, to be entitled On Inhumanities. His first chapter written for this book, entitled ‘Walcott, the Middle Passage, and Massacres of Native Americans’, is about to be published separately in the journal Agenda. Other chapters will deal comparatively with massacres in the Odyssey and in the Bible and their subsequent representation within European painting and sculpture; the aftermath of Culloden and its mediation by way of ‘Highland clearances’; the bloody suppression of republicans by the Bourbons (aided by Nelson) after the fall of the Neapolitan Republic in 1799; the rounding up of Jews in Italy 1943-1945; Indian Partition; and reflections on the World Trade Center disaster. The book promises to be highly comparative and, although trawling far back in history for its initial exemplification, very much about the nature of, and how we might best think about, ongoing instances of inhumanity. Its comparativism will, in other words, at all times be philosophical as well as historical in its nuancing.

His homepage is at www.essex.ac.uk/literature/Current/individualpages/jonathanwhite.htm