With generous funding from the Lynette S. Autrey Endowment and the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Humanities Research Center hosts four visiting professors for one semester each academic year. The fellows teach a course affiliated with a humanities department and take part in the intellectual life of the Center. The HRC sponsors special symposia or conferences centered on their research. These programs give Rice faculty and students significant exposure to eminent scholars from around the world.

2009-10 External Faculty Fellows

Visit the HRC office to examine or borrow selected publications by these scholars.

	Paul Christesen, Spring 2010 Associate Professor of Classics, Dartmouth College Gymnazein: The Origin and Dissemination of Athletic Nudity in Ancient Greece Dr. Christesen’s scholarship insists that the roots of mass sport in ancient Greece and the modern-day West provide invaluable insight into the basic societal conditions and values that define our identity and history, making Greek athletics an ideal place to explore the intersection between classical and modern worlds. Focusing on athletic nudity in particular, his new project investigates the variety of functions which nudity served in its practice by men and women of different social statuses and in diverse social contexts. He is the author of Olympic Victor Lists and Ancient Greek History (Cambridge UP, 2007).

	Matthew Guterl, Spring 2010 Associate Professor of African American & African Diaspora Studies and American Studies, Indiana University Mother of the World: Josephine Baker and the Rainbow Tribe Dr. Guterl has made invaluable contributions to the conversations surrounding the conceptualizations of race within the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Americas. He has helped add to the historiography of slavery and other racialized labor systems an important transnational dimension. His current project re-examines a commonly overlooked episode in the life of superstar Josephine Baker, her effort – subsequent to her career as an entertainer – to adopt and raise twelve children from across the global south, opening up her private life to a new level of public scrutiny. He has authored two books, American Mediterranean: Southern Slaveholders in the Age of Emancipation (Harvard UP, 2008) and the award-winning The Color of Race in America, 1900-1940 (Harvard UP, 2001).

	Mi Gyung Kim, Fall 2009 Associate Professor of History, North Carolina State University The Aerieal Theater: Balloons and the Public in Pre-Revolutionary France Dr. Kim's research focuses on the history of science and its relatonship to broader historical and social transformations, including the processes of nation- and empire-building. Her current project examines balloon mania in eighteenth-century France in order to make new claims about science, reason, and power in a society undergoing fundamental and rapid change. She is the author of Affinity, that Elusive Dream: A Genealogy of the Chemical Revoluion (MIT Press, 2003), a book which connects technical changes in matter theory and chemical dynamics with the emergence of new forms of education, training, and publication. Dr. Kim will teach a course on "Science and Empire" through the Department of History.

	Maria Elena Versari, Fall 2009 Assistant Professor, Universitá di Messina, Italy The Foreign Policy of the Avant Garde Dr. Versari's current project proposes a new systemic interpretation of the historical avant garde by examining its internal strategies of identity and canonization and by reassessing the workings of its system of national and international alliances and networks. While at Rice, she will engage in a new analysis of how the discourse of the avant-garde assumed and reworked the discourse of political internationalism. She is the author of two monographs for the Scala Archives in Florence, one on Wassily Kandinsky and the other on Constantin Brancusi. Dr. Versari will teach a course in the Art History Department, "Cultural Boundaries: Ethnic Myths and the Search for a National Style."