Andrew W. Mellon Research Seminars

These two-semester seminars promote research at the highest level between faculty and doctoral students. Starting with a core of well-developed research, the seminars invite students from across the humanities to become fellow researchers and collaborators. The seminars support innovative graduate level training and research in the humanities and social sciences.

Seminar leaders receive a research allowance of $5000 per seminar, and will be granted teaching credit and release from one undergraduate course per semester. Additionally, a budget of $6,000 is available to invite guest leader speakers from other academic institutions whose work is relevant to the seminar.

The seminars provide graduate students an opportunity for $2000 topping of stipends, competitive summer funding and conference travel funding, and dissertation research and development. Eligible students should be in their third or fourth year of study during the seminar, receive funding from their departments, and be in good standing. Students must enroll in both semesters.

2009-10

Vision, Writing, and Mystery in the Life of Jigme Lingpa
Faculty leader: Anne Carolyn Klein, Professor of Religious Studies
Nicholas Boeving (religious studies), Sarah Graham (English), Michael Heyes (religious studies), Claire Villarreal (religious studies), Elizabeth Wallett (religious studies)

This seminar focuses on the Tibetan visionary poet, philosopher, and meditation master Jigme Lingpa (1729-1798). His life story is replete with meditative achievement, political tensions and literary production. His writings include ecstatic visionary poetry, scholarly commentary, meditative ritual and esoteric autobiography, and their influence continues to shape Tibetan encounters with modernity. Students will collaborate on a book on Jigme Lingpa’s life, writings, and cultural and historical context, and they will write individual scholarly articles for publication together or in appropriate journals of their choice. Download a complete description.

Promises and Agreements 
Faculty leader: Hanoch Sheinman, Assistant Professor of Philosophy
Student participants: Israel Ahimbisibwe (religious studies), Sarai Conway (anthropology), Moti Gorin (philosophy), Stan Husi (philosophy), Elise McCarthy (anthropology), Laura Resendez (anthropogy), Dustin Tune (philosophy)

Promises and agreements have been enjoying a renaissance in philosophy for some time, but there is no doubt they can be fruitfully studied from other humanistic perspectives. The purpose of this seminar is to bring together students who are interested in writing individual and collaborative papers about promises or agreements from any valuable humanistic perspective, including philosophy, history, literature, art history, and religious studies. Download a complete description.

Sheinman has invited several speakers to address his seminar.  Four will also deliver public presentations. All the talks begin at 5 pm and are held in Humanities Building Room 119. Download the series poster here .

October 30, 2009, 5 pm
Self-Governance and Time
Michael Bratman, the U.G. and Abbie Birch Professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences, and Professor of Philosophy, Stanford University
Bratman's areas of specialization are the philosophy of action, practical reason, and shared agency theory. He is at work on a  monograph on shared agency, and a series of essays on practical rationality. He also continues to develop an approach to self-governance presented in his Structures of Agency (Oxford UP, 2007). Bratman is the author of Intention, Plans, and Practical Reason (Harvard UP, 1987) and Faces of Intention: Selected Essays on Intention and Agency (Cambridge UP, 1999).

November 13, 2009, 5 pm
Not Just a Truthometer: Taking Oneself Seriously, but not Too Seriously, in Cases of Peer Disagreement
David Enoch, Associate Professor of Philosophy and the Jacob I. Berman Professor of Law, Hebrew University, Jerusalem
Currently a Harrington Fellow at UT Austin, Enoch's areas of research are mostly moral, political, and legal philosophy. He is working on a book, Taking Morality Seriously: A Defense of Robust Realism, under contract with Oxford UP.

February 26, 2010, 5 pm
Intentions and Wrongful Discrimination
Deborah Hellman, the Jacob France Research Professor of Law, University of Maryland
Hellman's book, When is Discrimination Wrong? (Harvard UP, 2008), argues that drawing distinctions among people is morally wrong if and only if  it is demeaning. She also writes in the area of bioethics (especially clinical medical research), professional role obligations, and most recently on whether campaign finance laws restrict speech.

March 19, 2010, 5 pm
Regarding Doing Being Ordinary
J. David Velleman, Professor of Philosophy, NYU
Velleman teaches ethics and moral pscyhology. His recent book How we Get Along (Cambridge UP, 2009), traces the origins of morality to social interactions understood as improvisational theater. He is currently working on cultural relativism about morality. Velleman's work in the philosophy action includes Practical Reflection (Princeton UP, 1989) and The Possibility of Practical Reason (Oxford UP, 2000). His papers on the self are collected in Self to Self (Cambridge UP, 2006).

Closed sessions
Marcia Brennan, Associate Professor of Art History, Rice University - September 18, 2009
Dori Kimel, Reader in Legal Philosophy, Oxford University - October 2009
Shaun Nichols, Professor of Philosophpy, University of Arizona - January 29, 2010

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2008-09

America and the World
(l-r)Nichole Payne (anthropology), Jennifer Cary (English), Catherine Fitzgerald Wyatt (history), Laura Renee Chandler (history), faculty leader Ussama Makdisi, the Arab-American Educational Foundation Professor in Arabic Studies, Cory Ledoux (English), Maria Vidart (Anthropology)

This seminar takes as its central problem how American involvement in the world has been studied. It explores the different ways historians, anthropologists, religious and literary critics, among others, have studied how people, ideas, processes, and events that transcend national borders have shaped United States history and culture from the antebellum period through the present. It asks, ultimately, what it means to “globalize” U.S. history and culture.  Download a complete description .

Comparison in Theory and Practice
Faculty Leader: Jeffrey Kripal, the J. Newton Rayzor Professor and Chair of Religious Studies
(l-r) Faculty leader Jeffrey J. Kripal, the J. Newton Rayzor Professor and Chair of Religious Studies, Ata Anzaly (religious studies), Michael Adair-Kriz (anthropology), Andrea Jain (religious studies), Jayme Yeo (English), Elena Claire Villarreal (religious studies), Nicholas Boeving (religious studies), Samhitha Murthy (English), Aaron Pixley (religious studies)

Comparison is at the core of the humanities. It is fundamental to cognitive processing. It is basic to the production of meaning, which essentially involves “making connections” that not everyone else, maybe no one, will see. It is also rich in philosophical, cultural, political, and ethical implications, particularly in our modern globalizing world. Although comparative theorizing was central to anthropology, sociology, linguistics, and the study of literature and religions for most of their histories, comparison as such fell out of favor in the 1970s with the rise of poststructuralism and postmodernism. Localism, radical contextualism, complete constructivism, and cultural relativism came to dominate academic discourse as – perhaps not accidentally – religious fundamentalism (a complete hermeneutical collapse of signifier and the signified, that is, a literalist reading of the world) and a disturbing balkanization took over the national and geopolitical scenes. Understandably there are now calls for a return to a renewed and deepened comparative hermeneutics that can offer some beginning answer to this crisis of meaning, that can “read the world “anew.”  Download a complete description.

12 January, Monday, 5-7 p.m.
The Folklore and Reality of Supernatural Assault Experiences: Comparativism and the Spiritual
119 Humanities Building
David Hufford, University of Pennsylvania

23 February, Monday, 5-7 p.m.
Robust Pluralism: Understanding Forms of Life Different From One's Own
119 Humanities Building
Richard Shweder, University of Chicago

9 March, Monday, 5-7 p.m.
We Carve Out Order By Leaving the Disorderly Parts Out": The Challenge of Comparison in Religious Studies
119 Humanities Building
Kimberley Patton, Harvard Divinity School

30 March, Monday, 5-7 p.m.
Imagining Evil Conspiracy: From Early Christian Cannibalism to Satanic Ritual Abuse
119 Humanities Building
David Frankfurter, University of New Hampshire

2007-08

Religious Biopolitics: Transcendental Hygienics Past, Present and Future
Faculty Leader: James D. Faubion, Professor and Chair of Anthropology
Student Participants: Ann Gleig (religious Studies), Sarah Graham (English), Andrea Jain (religious studies), Daniel Levine (religious studies), Valerie Olson (anthropology)

In the first volume of his History of Sexuality, Michel Foucault traces the clinical and psychoanalytic pastoralism of what he calls the biopolitical "anatomo-politics of the human body" in large part to a Christian confessional that he characterizes as being then and as still being "the general standard governing the production of true discourse about sex." The concepts, disciplines and domains of intervention that Foucault includes within the broader Western European universe of biopower suggest that it has its most purely extra-ecclesiastic realization in nineteenth-century France. There, the church and its clerics are remarkable for their absence. Across the Atlantic, however, the universe of biopower takes a different turn. Its expansion in Europe and in America has the same impetus--the cholera epidemic of 1832. A good many physicians are among its American executors, but its great popularizers are with few exceptions ardent Christians, though sometimes Christians very much of their own cloth. The focus of the research that I will develop in the Mellon Seminar, what I call "religious biopolitics," thus belongs to the history of the refractions of the modern apparatus of governmentality as they mingle with the voluntarism, sectarianism and pragmatic utopianism of an America that has long interposed between the individual body and the general population its ever fissile array of Protestant congregations--which it has exported and continues to export widely around the world.  Download a complete description.

2006-07

Monism, Dualism, Pluralism and Absolute Spirit: Debates on the Oneness of Nature from Spinoza, Descartes and Leibniz to the Romantics and Hegel
Faculty Leader: Mark Kulstad, Professor of Philosophy
Student Participants: Jonathan Abdalla (philosophy), Ryan Foster (history), Stan Husi (philosophy), Brandon Mulvey (philosophy), Brian Prince (philosophy)

This seminar emerges Professor Kulstad's current work on the philosophical controversies in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries concerning monism for Spinoza, dualism in Descartes, and pluralism in the work of Leibniz. The course was part of an ongoing collaboration between philosophers and historians. It therefore emphasized the importance of collaboration at every stage of intellectual endeavor, from project conceptualization to writing and revision. A balance of History and Philosophy students, the seminar participants reflected this interdisciplinary dialog as they thought through the intersections of the two disciplines that was at the core of the seminar topic.

Doing Things with Emotion
Faculty Leader: Meredith Skura, Professor of English
Student Participants: Jill Delsigne (English), Kara Marler-Kennedy (English), Kevin Morrison (English), Joy Pasini (English), Teresa Wei (English)

This seminar interrogates the longstanding scientific model that tends to discourage the academic study of emotion. Understood to both elude scientific measurement and to be peripheral to academic inquiry, emotions have only recently begun to be understood as deeply implicated in out sense of "rationality." The seminar began with readings that represented the different ways scholars have explored emotions in such disciplines as History, Anthropology, Sociology, Psychology, Gender Studies, Linguistics, and Literary Studies. It then proceeded to case studies of how such disciplinary approaches might shape the work of the participants' ongoing research, which theorizes the often surprising relationship between individual and cultural constructions of emotion in early modern England. Because the study of emotion is a field very much still in search of productive methodology and theoretical perspectives, the seminar offers graduate students a rich opportunity to engage in a newly developing interdisciplinary research field.

2005-06

The Existential Sources of Normativity
Faculty Leader: Steven Crowell, Joseph and Joanna Nazro Mullen Professor of Philosophy
Student Participants: Matt Burch (philosophy), Aaron Hinkley (philosophy), Irene McMullin (philosophy), Matt Schunke (religious studies), Will Smith (philosophy), David Snyder (philosophy)

This seminar explored the conundrum implicit in philosophical appeals to reason - they they presuppose the very reason to which they appeal. Taking Heidegger's existential approach to human nature as the focus of this seeming tautology, the seminar asked students from Philosophy, English, and Religious Studies to consider how their own projects engage in this interpretive knot and to explore how their own research might benefit from a Heideggerian approach to the problem of reason. Conversely, Professor Crowell opened his own research in this field to the seminar for consideration and critique.

Plato's Phaedrus and Classical Hermeneutics
Faculty Leader: Harvey Yunis, Professor of Classical Studies
Student Participants: Sarah Graham (English), Brian Prince (philosophy), Hae Young Seong (religious studies), Pumsup Shim (linguistics), Molly Slattery (English), Ryan White (English)

This seminar is unique in that the first semester was devoted to analyzing one text, Plato's Phaedrus, in detail. Yet from this careful textual analysis, the seminar considered more generally the art of interpreting texts - a concern central to the textual work of all humanities disciplines. In the second semester, the seminar critiqued modern hermeneutics from the perspective acquired through the first semester's attention to ancient hermeneutics. This course's premise that the subject is of overarching concern to all humanistic study was borne out by the remarkably diverse group of students who participated, including students from Religious Studies, English, Linguistics, and Philosophy.

2005

Toward a Hemispheric America
Faculty Leader: Caroline Field Levander, the Carlson Professor in the Humanities and Professor of English
Student Participants: Elizabeth Fenton (English), Gale Kenny (history), Cory Ledoux (English), David Messmer (English), Molly Robey (English), Benjamin Wise (history)

This seminar provided a cutting-edge immersion in the field of American studies through adopting a comparative, hemispheric approach that is gradually reorganizing the fields of literature, history, and religious studies, challenging new scholars to both broaden and deepen their analysis of the cultures of the Americas. Through emphasizing a comparativist method that remains attentive to local distinctions while bringing a hemispheric approach to bear on the nation-state, this year-long seminar sharpened the writing of the next generation of Americanist scholars and developed a model for the reorganizing of American studies in the 21st century.

Language Policies as Markers of National and Cultural Identity
Faculty Leader: Rafael Salaberry, Associate Professor of Hispanic Studies
Student Participants: David Katten (linguistics), Natalya Stepanova (French studies), Martin Hilpert (linguistics), Viktoria Papp (linguistics), Vinod Lakshmipathy (philosophy)

This seminar is based on the analysis of case studies on the topic of language as a marker of national and cultural/ethnic identity, with a particular emphasis on language planning, language policies, and political debates on language use. Language planning refers to the ways in which organized communities united by religious, ethnic, political, or social factors attempt to influence language use. Concrete manifestations of such policies are obvious in the case of bilingual education, the establishment of an official national language, the control over gender-biased language, etc. Some of the topics that students investigated in the seminar include: "Framing Language Policy and Language Identity: The Case of the Saami of Northern Europe," "Language Use and Linguistic Evidence in Conflict Resolution and Interethnic Conflict," "Language as Property and Identity in Canada and France in the Context of 'Divagation'," "Language Variation and Language Prestige in Legal and Political Debates with Emphasis on Hungary," and "Bilingual and Bicultural Identities in Russian-French Writers."

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