Dr. Sarah Misemer Publishes Book on Trains and Nostalgia in the River Plate

Sarah M. Misemer, associate professor in the Department of Hispanic Studies, has recently published her book, Moving Forward, Looking Back: Trains, Literature, and the Arts in the River Plate (Bucknell University Press, 2010). Professor Misemer was an Internal Faculty Fellow in the Glasscock Center for Humanities Research from 2005-2006. The Internal Faculty Fellowship allowed her to “begin working on this project in a serious manner.”

Misemer’s main area of research is contemporary Hispanic theater and performance, with a focus on Argentine and Uruguayan drama.

In Moving Forward, Looking Back: Trains Literature, and the Arts in the River Plate, Professor Misemer examines images of trains and nostalgia in the River Plate. She argues the train in regional literature and film is a modern anachronistic indicator of the national identity of the River Plate. Through text, film, and historical accounts, Misemer traces the importance of the train, marking key moments in Argentine and Uruguayan history from 1854 to the present. She shows that the train is not only an icon of the nineteenth-century’s Naturalist movement, but is a powerful contemporary metaphor used to communicate the cultural values of the region.

The Glasscock Center annually offers four Internal Faculty Fellowships which include a $1,000 research bursary, a one-course teaching release in the spring semester of the fellowship year, and an office in the Glasscock Center for the fellowship year. The next deadline for applications for Internal Faculty Fellowships is 3 March 2011. To learn more about the Glasscock Center Internal Faculty Fellowship or apply online, please visit the website.

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.

Internal Faculty Fellows Symposium

On 20-21 September 2006, the 2005-2006 Internal Faculty Fellows of the Melbern G. Glasscock Center for Humanities Research put on a symposium, “Show & Tell: Visual Culture and the Humanities,” that put forward the projects they had worked on while on leave in spring 2006. Professor Michael Ann Holly, Director of Research and Academic Programs of the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, and a noted historian of art, served as the symposium’s keynote speaker on Friday night. In her talk on “The Melancholic Art,” Professor Holly intriguingly investigated the ways in which art history is at its core a melancholy discipline. Arguing that art history is about recovering loss, but without a lost object, she explored the ways in which the very physicality of art objects poses a challenge to the recovery of their history. Invoking art historians, critics, and philosophers from Freud and Nietzsche to Warburg and Ankersmit, Holly argued that the melancholy unconscious of the history of art could nonetheless find compensations in the presence of these meaningful objects. For art historians, she claimed, the fear of losing that which is always already gone – that is, the cultural context from which the work of art emerged – leads to the critic’s celebration of what remains.

The presentations of the Glasscock Center’s Internal Fellows on Saturday ranged widely. Troy Bickham (History) assessed the awareness ordinary Britons had of the growing British empire in the eighteenth century in his study of the ways images of empire figured in their daily life. Using thousands of grocers’ trade cards, Bickham explored how the images they used to depict the most common consumables of empire – coffee, tea, tobacco, and sugar – rested on particular stereotypes and generated strong associations. These, more than abstract concepts of nationalism, brought empire home to the bulk of the metropolitan population. Lynne Vallone (English) provided an illustrated account of photography and the image of the child by juxtaposing modern photographers’ images of childhood flesh with those of nineteenth-century memorial photography. She compared the ways that both Victorian photos of dead children and contemporary images of children “displaced from childhood” preserved, fixed, and fetishized the child’s body. Sarah Misemer (Hispanic Studies) in a paper on “Moving Forward and Looking Back at the River Plate” demonstrated ways in which the railway and railroad industry helped to shape the identity of modern Argentina and Uruguay. From the time of the mid-nineteenth century achievement of nationhood, the train has appeared recurrently first in literature and then in film as a metaphor for modernization and nation-building. Where its first apearnce was straightforwardly celebratory, the train now provides a means of commenting – nostalgically, critically, ironically – on Argentine history both before and since the return to democracy in the 1980s. In his presentation on “Building Cool: How Brazil Became Modern,” Antonio La Pastina (Communication) discussed the ways of seeing Brazil that were current in the United States from the 1930s to the 1960s. He showed that in addition to being conveyed through everything from Walt Disney cartoons to Carmen Miranda’s performances, images of Brazil and things Brazilian were also associated with modernity, beginning no later than the influential Brazilian Pavilion at the 1939 New York World’s Fair. Although no representations operated in isolation from others, La Pastina argued that images of modernity – linked to visions of “cool” – ranked high in the multi-layered understandings of Brazil circulating in the United States.