Congratulations to assistant professors Lilla Balint (German), Fumi Okiji (Rhetoric), and Nathaniel Wolfson (Spanish and Portuguese) on being named 2023 Hellman Fellows!
Established by the late F. Warren and Chris Hellman in 1995, the Hellman Fellows Fund supports the research of promising assistant professors who show capacity for great distinction in their research. Each fellow may receive up to $60,000 in funding to support any research-related needs including research assistants, equipment, or travel.
Lilla Balint (German)
Professor Balint's research focuses on German literature and thought in transnational contexts, theories of the contemporary, aesthetics and politics, literary and cultural theory, and European Jewish literatures. The Hellman award will contribute toward the completion of her book manuscript titled After 1989: History, Memory, and the Contemporary. The comparative project interrogates the historical thinking of literary fiction after the end of the Cold War. It argues that the contemporary takes shape as an experimentation with form, which is an experimentation with time, in the effort to renew models of history. Balint is also affiliated with the Institute for European Studies and the Jewish Studies Program.
Fumi Okiji (Rhetoric)
Professor Okiji works across black study, critical theory, and sound and music studies. Her research and teaching looks to black expression for ways to understand modern and contemporary life. Deepening the engagement established in her first book, Okiji's current project, Billie's Bent Elbow: Unthinkable Nonsense and/or Toward (a) Gathering-Work explores the features of a genre of socio-political gathering that does not rely on (non)identity nor on an insistence on a universalist project. In augmentation of conversations taking place in black theory, and drawing from Adorno and Walter Benjamin on aesthetics, music, dialectics, mimesis, the work also explores the modal anomaly of black life, its subjunctive comportment, and relative ease with contradiction. Music from Cecil Taylor, Don Cherry, Nina Simone, among others, not so much provide example as a further area of theoretical resource.
Nathaniel Wolfson (Spanish and Portuguese)
Professor Wolfson's research interests include topics of Brazilian and Latin American literature and art, media studies and critical theory. His current project is a manuscript that focuses on the crossings of experimental writing, design, and critical technological thought in Brazil in the 1940s through the 1970s. Life of the Sign: Literature, Design and the Cybernetic Imaginary in Brazil dives deeply into national and regional discourses about cybernetics and popular culture under dictatorship (1964-1985). As Brazilian poets, artists, and designers witnessed the military regime's efforts to control a rising field of informatics, they attempted to retool early computer coding to invent alternative symbolic languages.