This year, the division awarded seventeen Mellon Project Grants (MPG) to faculty in the East Asian Languages and Cultures; English; Film and Media; French; German; History of Art; Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures; Music; Spanish and Portuguese; and Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies departments. The grants are designed to support professors undertaking significant research projects, particularly those that involve collaboration, publication, exhibition, performance, public humanities projects, or hosting conferences or symposia.
In addition to supporting a number of publications, the grants will also lead to a bilingual multi-day conference drawing scholars from across the world to consider significant newly excavated Confucian texts from early China (Csikszentmihalyi); an exhibition at BAMPFA exploring how modes of aesthetic experience outside of strictly European domains–a new film installation by the Syrian film collective Abbounaddara in this case–can lead to a renewed imagination of a common world (Lenssen and Pandolfo); and a new recording using period instruments and featuring the award-winning Haitian baritone Jean-Bernard Cerin of the oldest published Haitian Creole text and its multiple musical settings from 1757 to 1942 in colonial Saint-Domingue, France, Louisiana, and modern Haiti (Mathew). The recording will accompany an international conference and publication tracing the music of the Haitian revolution and the extraordinary variety of diasporic musics disseminated in its aftermath across the Americas and Europe.
Performative projects include Both Eyes Open (Gotanda), an opera on the incarceration of Japanese-Americans during World War II, historical and contemporary issues of trauma and generational shame, and Buddhist ideals of healing and social inclusion; and a new dance (Kwan) addressing Anti-Asian hate in the U.S. that creates a space for shared kinesthetic healing and processing between audience and performers. Grant funds will also support the creation of a video and curricular materials for high school and college students to accompany Both Eyes Open
New publications include a macrohistorical exploration of five pivotal historical periods in the formation of ideas about Europe and China (Chen); an examination of screenshots that explores how we “picture” computing and how this envisioning forms the parameters of digital visual culture (Gaboury); and a landmark study on the role of media in language variation and the ways in which people communicate (McLaughlin). As we grapple with AI and Web 3.0, this study will examine what has come before to understand where, when, how, and why media influences what we think and how we use language.
Faculty Research Highlights
Nadia Ellis, an associate professor in English, affiliated with African American Studies, the Center for Latin American Studies, Gender and Women’s Studies, Theater and Performance Studies, the LGBTQ Citizenship Cluster and the OBI Institute will be using her MPG grant to complete her second book, Recuperable Immaterialities, on the relationship between religious ethnography and contemporary novelistic and performance aesthetics in the Black diaspora. Ellis engages a number of recent lines of thought converging Caribbean and Black diaspora literary studies including the rich debate around archival recovery in Black diaspora cultures and the trouble of identifying and identifying with Black subjects in the archive. It explores expansive views of Black life not tied to conventional understandings of politics, time, or the world as we know it. Joining two modes, the book looks at Black religious figures as aesthetic generators while also tracing a line from these historical figures to gestures in contemporary expressive cultures that work out the promise and the trouble of this historical inheritance.
Spanish and Portuguese associate Professor Daylet Dominguez’s second book project, Caribbean Empire: Writing, Filibustering, and Annexation in the Age of the Second Slavery, connects U.S. expansionism in the second half of the 19th century and the Cuban annexationist movement, transcending the still common national and nationalistic paradigms of literary scholarship to focus on the ways in which Cuban and Southern slaveholders imagined themselves as part of the same front, united by chattel bondage, in the decades preceding the U.S. Civil War. During this period, the idea of “The South” included not just the slave-holding states of the U.S., but also the Caribbean. In her book, Dominguez argues for a strong revision of the literary and historical narratives of U.S. and Cuban national traditions that marginalize the Hispanic presence and mischaracterize the complexities of the annexation movement, associating it with the mercenary.
Film and Media Professor and Berkeley Center for New Media affiliate Nicole Starosielski’s MPG project, A Global Public Humanities Project to Green the Internet, will convene a global research group, including UC Berkeley undergraduate and graduate students and artists and students from around the world, to investigate the sustainability of the data centers and cables that support almost 100% of internet traffic. While much research on this impact has been driven by the environmental sciences, the humanities have a key role to play in greening the internet. Her project will explore the social processes and culture exchange underpinning sustainable practices and create and distribute public humanities outputs such as publications, visualizations, and video to help translate sustainability concepts across cultural borders. These will be presented in-person by Professor Starioleski and student collaborators at three industry conferences taking place in Ireland, Hawaii, and Lisbon.
Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures Professor of Assyriology (cuneiform studies) Niek Veldhuis has been a member of the steering committee for the Open Richly Annotated Cuneiform Corpus (ORACC) since its inception in 2007 and an associate editor of the Pennsylvania Sumerian Dictionary. ORAAC is an open source/open data umbrella project that provides tools and standards for the online publication of cuneiform text materials from projects led by scholars from around the world and his MPG project will engage graduate students in adding a currently neglected corpus of old Babylonian Emesal (“fine tongue”) liturgies to these online sources. Unlike mythological texts, which feature prominently in discussions of “Babylonian religion,” liturgical texts are largely unknown outside of a small circle of specialists. Yet these are the prayers and songs that were actively used in temple ceremonies and are of fundamental importance for our understanding of the relationships between humans and gods at that time. The project will provide all editions of these liturgies in one accessible, searchable place with links to glossaries, images, and to museums that hold the objects. The work will culminate with a two-day workshop in collaboration with the Center for Middle Eastern studies including main specialists in the texts who will be asked to base at least part of their papers on the newly available materials, a move intended to broadcast the availability of these texts to scholars.