Undergraduate Research Awards for Spring 2007

The Melbern G. Glasscock Center for Humanities Research has made awards to two undergraduate students for the Spring of 2007 under its Undergraduate Research Award Program. These awards are designed to encourage and support research in the humanities by undergraduate students at Texas A&M University. Audre Honnas and Geraldine Gray have both received awards of $500 for research expenses in order to pursue their current projects.

Audre Honnas, a Communication major, is currently studying the influence of entertainment media on civic culture. Using case studies such as Ronald Reagan’s 1966 gubernatorial campaign and Arnold Schwarzenneger’s 2003 gubernatorial campaign, her project explores the ways entertainment media intersects with American civic culture. She hopes to illustrate the ways in which entertainment media can be said both to debase and to democratize American politics.

Geraldine Gray, a History major, is examining the history of women in Jamaica and Barbados between 1750 and 1838. Specifically, her work investigates the contradictions between women’s lived experiences during the period and the legal structures that sought to legislate gender and sexuality. She also intends to examine the ways women protested against these practices.

Another call for this award will be distributed in fall 2007. For more more information, please contact James Rosenheim, Director, and 979-845-8328 or j-rosenheim@tamu.edu, visit the Center’s website at http://glasscock.tamu.edu.

2007-2008 Glasscock Graduate Scholars Announced

The Melbern G. Glasscock Center for Humanities Research has named three Glasscock Graduate Scholars for academic year 2007-2008. The awards are designed to encourage and support research toward completion of a thesis or dissertation in the humanities by graduate students at Texas A&M University. They are made possible by the generosity of Corey C. ’92 and Maggie Brown and of Layne E. ’73 and Gayle Kruse, members of the Glasscock Center’s Development Council. The following students, who will occupy offices in the Glasscock Center, were selected to receive awards of $3000 each:

Zeba Imam, Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Communication, will be studying the relationship between citizenship and women’s identity in India. Relying on the frameworks of citizenship literature and discourse theory, she hopes to articulate the subject positions Hindu and Muslim religious nationalist discourses are offering women. In doing so, she will then be able to assess how the identities inherent in these subject positions are affecting women’s citizenship within the Indian state.

Kiyoon Jang, Ph.D. candidate in the Department of English, is examining American gothic authors and texts in order to trace the pre-modern shift from the autonomous author to the reader-dependent author. In her dissertation, she proposes “ghost writer” as a new critical term to describe nineteenth-century gothic writers from Charles Brockden Brown to Henry James. She considers these writers’ re-configuration of the author as a ghost that comes into being because readers believe in it.

Sudina Paungpetch, Ph.D. candidate in the Department of History, will be exploring U.S.-Thai relations during the Vietnam War. Specifically, her dissertation will focus on the extent to which the influence of American democratic ideas helped bring about positive changes in Thai society. By connecting the U.S. presence in Thailand to the spread of democratic ideas throughout Thai culture, her work will contribute to the new historiographical trend of cultural diplomatic history. Sudina has also been named as one of the winners of the department’s Charles C. Keeble (’48) Dissertation Fellowship Award.

The Glasscock Center will make another call for these awards in spring 2008. For further information contact James Rosenheim, Director, at 979-845-8328, at
j-rosenheim@tamu.edu, visit the Center’s website at http://www.glasscock.tamu.edu.

Publication Support and Travel Grant Recipients Announced for Spring 2007

The Melbern G. Glasscock Center for Humanities Research has awarded two Publication Support grants to be used toward the costs of publishing scholarly manuscripts which have been accepted for publication or are currently in press. The following faculty members were selected to receive awards:

Paul Almeida (Department of Sociology), for translation into Spanish of his forthcoming book Waves of Protest: Popular Struggle in El Salvador, 1925-2005

Troy Bickham (Department of History), for illustrations in his articles “Eating the Empire: Intersections of Food, Cookery and Imperialism in Eighteenth-Century Britain,” to appear in Past and Present, and “Defining Good Food: Cookery Book Illustrations in Britain” to appear in the British Journal for Eighteenth Century Studies


The Glasscock Center has also awarded grants for travel to archives or to undertake field work to further humanities-related projects. The following faculty members were selected to receive these awards:

Theodore George (Department of Philosophy) for research on his project “Objectivity: Hermeneutics and Philosophy”

Dror Goldberg (Department of Economics) for research on his projects on the beginnings of paper money

Rebecca Schloss (Department of History) for research on her project “France at the Edges: Life in France’s Atlantic Port Cities, 1700-1850”

Adam Seipp (Department of History) for research on his project “In a Foreign Land: GIs, West Germans, and Cold War Future in Franconia, 1950-1980”

The Glasscock Center will make another call for these awards in fall 2007. For more information, contact James Rosenheim, Director, at (979) 845-8328, visit the Center’s website at http://www.glasscock.tamu.edu.

Glasscock Challenge Scholarship Recipients for 2007-2008

The Melbern G. Glasscock Center for Humanities Research is pleased to announce this year’s winners of the Glasscock Challenge Scholarship, Hannah Jones and Wanjun Zhang. This scholarship provides recipients with $10,000 per year for three years and allows for an additional award of up to $5,000 for serious study-abroad experience. The purpose of the scholarship is to encourage adventurous students in technical and scientific disciplines to explore the humanities beyond the requirements of the core curriculum in order to integrate the lessons of the humanities into their life’s work.

Hannah Jones is currently majoring in Biomedical Science, with the future goal of attending the College of Veterinary Medicine. She plans to take additional coursework in Philosophy and History in order to broaden her understanding of the relationship between the humanities and the scientific disciplines that form the core curriculum of her study.

Wanjun Zhang is also majoring in Biomedical Science and plans to pursue a career in Veterinary Medicine. She intends to focus on History in her humanities work, studying both European and Asian cultures.

This scholarship is made possible through the generous gift of Susanne M.and Melbern G. Glasscock ’59.

Internal Faculty Fellows Named for 2007-2008

The Melbern G. Glasscock Center for Humanities Research has named its 2007-2008 Internal Faculty Fellows. They will be resident in the Glasscock Center in Spring 2008, pursuing scholarly projects under the theme “How Do We Keep Knowing?” This broad question will allow exploration of the ways in which knowledge is defined, produced, communicated, hidden, renewed, preserved, studied and in other ways made a part of societies and cultures, present and past. We anticipate that conversation about how we keep knowing may include interrogation of any and all those terms by scholars from all the humanities disciplines and from the social sciences that adopt humanities perspectives. The recipients of these fellowships will be released from teaching during Spring 2008 and will receive a $1000 research stipend. The Center is pleased to announce the following Fellows and their projects.

Lauren Clay, Assistant Professor in the Department of History, will explore how the organization, representation, and social meaning of business changed in 18th century France. While scholars have recently approached this issue by examining debates among intellectuals, her work will delve into the cultural history of commerce in the urban context, using archival sources to reconstruct legal, social, ceremonial, and cultural interactions. Approaching the commercial revolution as a lived experience, this project will investigate the ways urban communities confronted the opportunities and the challenges that accompanied profound economic change.

Leor Halevi, Assistant Professor in the Department of History, will be focusing on commercial relations between Muslims and others. Historians of religion have not studied this topic due to the disciplinary barrier that has kept them from exploring economic matters. Economic historians have written a great deal about it, but they have focused on material exchanges while neglecting Muslim views on forbidden goods and cross-cultural trade. These views are interesting from a religious perspective, especially when they involve complex reasons based on a search for religious knowledge; they are also interesting from an economic perspective, when it can be shown that knowledge of Islamic laws prohibiting the consumption of foreign goods affects economic behavior.

Colleen Murphy, Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy, will examine political reconciliation, the process of repairing damaged political relationships which remains one of the most important challenges for societies in transition to democracy. She will examine why and in what way the past must be known for reconciliation to be possible in order to develop a theoretical framework for assessing the effectiveness of promoting political reconciliation through alternative ways of defining, preserving, and communicating the past and also to use this theoretical framework to evaluate the effectiveness of truth commissions, criminal trials, and memorials.

Christopher Swift, Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication, will study selected German writings on the relationship between rhetoric and aesthetics. Many scholars of the humanities question the relative instrumentality or constitutivity of language: on the one hand, the extent to which language functions as a tool for communicating knowledge that pre-exists its own expression, and on the other, the extent to which language creates the knowledge that it expresses. The popularity of these questions across disciplines has, however, brought with it a great deal of confusion. By analyzing a tradition of scholarship that more rigorously separates the questions of instrumentality and constitutivity from one another, he seeks to help sort out this confusion.

Other activities around the theme “How Do We Keep Knowing?” will include a lecture series by that name. The Center anticipates naming further Internal Faculty Fellows for 2008-2009. A call for applications will be made in the spring of the 2007-2008 academic year. For further information contact James Rosenheim, Director, at j-rosenheim@tamu.edu, at 979-845-8328, or visit the Center’s website at http://glasscock.tamu.edu.