Fellowship Recipients, 2005-06
Hisham Bizri
Committed to making cinema with which both authors and viewers can relentlessly examine
themselves as persons, Professor Bizri, Department of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature,
will complete work on his film script titled Cairo, which deals with the social, aesthetic, and
personal lives of Cairenes. The film will be readied for production in 2007.
Juliette Cherbuliez
Juliette Cherbuliez, a professor in the Department of French and Italian, focuses on marginal
and liminal subjects in the early modern period who, by their very exclusion, give definition to the
shifting limits of state authority during that era. During the tenure of her fellowship, she will
reexamine French literary history and the intersection of cosmopolitanism as a major thread in this
history, focusing on the figure of Medea.
Susan Craddock
Professor Craddock, Department of Women's Studies and Institute for Global Studies, will study
Somali communities in the Twin Cities to focus on their perspectives on tuberculosis and its
treatment. She will also examine Somali accounts of their immigration experiences and living
conditions in the United States as a way to better understand the social and economic factors
that place Somalis at higher risk for contracting the disease.
Ann Hironaka
Professor Hironaka, Department of Sociology, will examine the historical and social processes
through which military strategies and state interests were formed in the period leading up to
the First World War with particular focus on how the international community and global discourses
shaped the perceived security of nation-states.
Karen Ho
Professor Karen Ho, Department of Anthropology, is working on a project is entitled "Eradicating
Poverty Through Profit: Wall Street, Microfinance Institutions, and the Commercialization of Capital
Market Access." It aims at investigating neoliberalism in action through close ethnographic study of
the creation of a new commercial market: the poverty market of micro financial services for the poor.
Chris Isett
Utilizing medical and forensic reports included in over one million legal records stored at China's
First Historical Archives in Beijing, Professor Chris Isett, Department of History, will examine
anthropometric data and proposes to develop the first national anthropomorphic index of body heights
to gauge whether nutrition was improving, worsening or unchanging in China during the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries.
Lynn Lukkas
Professor Lynn Lukkas, Department of Art, will utilize the term of her fellowship to explore in
greater depth the intellectual relationship between her current creative work and recent research
in the neurosciences, biomedical engineering, bioethics, world economics, and geo-political relations
by focusing on an interactive project that utilizes the viewer's breathing, heartbeat, brainwaves
and other bodily responses as part of a creative installation.
Rachel Schurman
During her semester, Professor Schurman, Department of Sociology, will continue research for a book whose
title is "Making Biotech History: How Social Activists Changed the Course of Genetic Engineering in
Agriculture" on the social movement that has arisen against agricultural biotechnology and the dramatic
impact it has had on the development and spread of this controversial new technology.
Madelon Sprengnether
During her semester in residence, Professor Sprengnether, Department of English, plans to investigate
the ways that contemporary neuroscience—based in recent discoveries about areas of the brain involved
in specific brain operations, such as encoding, retrieval and degradation of memory—helps to elucidate
contemporary practices of memoir writing. She will also complete her own memoir-in-progress, Great River Road, which addresses these issues in the context of the cumulative effects of memory over time.
Dara Strolovitch
Professor Strolovitch, Department of Political Science, will focus her research on the issue of the
globalism of social justice advocacy in the United States by examining the ways in which and the extent
to which American civil and human rights, racial and ethnic minority, economic justice, HIV/AIDS, and
women's organizations and social movements are connected to international organizations and movements
in other countries, as well as to transnational organizations.
Shaden M. Tageldin
Professor Tageldin, Department of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature, will complete her book
manuscript, Disarming Words: Empire and the Seductions of Translation in Egypt, which shows how acts of
literary and cultural translation attached post-1798 Egyptian intellectuals to French and British empires
even as they imagined themselves to be resisting or overcoming colonial domination.
Visiting Fellows, Spring 2006
John Gery
John Gery, Research Professor of English at the University of New Orleans and Director of the Ezra Pound Center for Literature, Brunnenburg , Italy , is a poet and critic of modern and contemporary American poetry. This spring he plans to complete a draft of a new collection of poems, Have at You Now! , as well as a short book, Pound's Venice: A Walking Guide . His ongoing research involves cultural identity, parody, and American poetry at the turn of the twenty-first century.
Biljana D. Obradovic
Biljana Obradovic, poet, translator, and Associate Professor of English at Xavier University of Louisiana in New Orleans, who has survived hurricane Katrina (although her house has not), will be working on her poems this semester for her latest collection. She will also work on a multigenre memoir (poems, dreams, prose, letters...) of a diasporic poet from ex-Yugoslavia who has lived and studied on three continents, trying to establish her identity—as she says, “I see myself hanging above the Atlantic ocean between my two homelands, unwanted in both, not belonging to one, not belonging to the other; suspended in air, I don't know whether I will land or plunge in deep, and never come out alive.”
Visiting Fellows, Fall 2005
John Dobry
Tulane University
Peter Gerlich
University of Vienna
Emily Lambertson
Tulane University