We had a very strong crop of contenders for our reimagined Henry F. May Fund awards this year. Our deepest thanks to all who applied, and we encourage you to do so again when the next cycle opens to fund travel to our Nashville conference in October. Here’s a sneak preview of our May Fund fellows’ scholarship-in-progress. Happy researching!
Yasmin Dualeh, University of Cambridge, “Cultivating Diaspora: An Exploration of the Socio-Political Thought of Arab Intellectuals in the US, 1918-1967”: My dissertation charts the emergence and development of a diasporic political consciousness amongst Arab intellectuals in the US from 1918-1967. It recovers the socio-political thought of this predominantly Syrian, Lebanese and Palestinian diaspora, foregrounding their role as knowledge producers on subjects ranging from, assimilation, race and citizenship; American power and its potential for shaping the post-war Middle East; anti-Zionism; and finally, on political developments within the Arab World such as decolonisation and Arab nationalism. My thesis begins with what Erez Manuela has referred to as the “Wilsonian Moment” in the aftermath of WWI and it ends with the impact of the 1967 Arab-Israeli War. It utilises the underexamined English language output of Arab intellectuals in the US and it intends to offer the first in-depth study of their socio-political thought via an exploration of their political pamphlets, articles in print media, scholarship, and autobiographical texts.
Bobby Cervantes, University of Kansas, “Las Colonias: The Housing of Poverty in Modern Americas”: Scholars of race, housing, and inequality long have focused on the effects of the nation’s commodity-driven housing market. Categories such as “the other America,” “the urban underclass,” “suburbanization,” and more recently “metropolitan studies” draw much attention to the relations of poverty in or near cities. However, broad inequality in other environments, specifically the nation’s rural and peripheral landscapes, is not a mere appendage to modern American history. The interdependent legacies of urban history and rural history remain an important national force, politically and socially, in defining the causes and consequences of poverty today.This paper explores the history of “social housing” as an intellectual and activist tradition in the late-twentieth-century Texas-Mexico borderlands—primarily through renters’ efforts to develop a publicly-owned, permanent housing sector shielded from market pressure. In particular, I describe the development of the social housing idea in las colonias of South and West Texas, where today more than a half-million poor Texans live in rural and unincorporated communities.
Emily Hawk, Columbia University, “Thinking Through Movement: American Modern Dance and Embodied Knowledge in Higher Education”: My doctoral dissertation will be the first intellectual history of the postwar American Dance Boom (1955-1975). The Dance Boom paralleled the postwar cultural ascendency of the United States on the global stage. Domestic economic prosperity bred the idea that the U.S. could and should invest more robustly in its cultural life…These advances led to significant innovation in the dance field: increased financial support enabled young choreographers to found new companies, create new works, embark on domestic and international tours, and hold longer performance seasons in newly constructed venues.The choreographers of the Dance Boom functioned as a cohort of public intellectuals, responding to political issues of their time and u sing performance to share this commentary with a diffuse, diverse audience. Much of intellectual history grapples with the written word, focusing on essays, speeches, and books as vehicles for an author’s ideas. But if intellectuals are those who argue a particular point of view and share their argument with an audience in the hopes of persuading or educating, then dance artists merit inclusion within the canon of intellectual history. I consider choreographers’ use of narrative, technique, casting, and company management as the praxis of their ideas.
Alison Russell, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, “The Posterity of Cherokee Women: Indigenous Constitutions and Gendered Political Spaces”: In 1827, the Cherokee nation produced its first written Constitution. The document was modeled after the United States’ Federal Constitution of 1787 as part of a larger effort to exert sovereignty and protect the Cherokee people from an expanding empire. Echoing a legal understanding if not the exact rhetoric of the U.S. government, franchise and officeholding were explicitly gendered “male.” The construction of public political participation as a masculine action stood in contrast with the matriarchal aspects of Cherokee society. A rich body of scholarship has examined the changing gender roles in Cherokee society, founded on the work of Theda Perdue. Numerous historians have also traced Cherokee efforts to “civilize” or resist removal through legal and diplomatic as well as cultural means. My project embarks on a closer examination of the Cherokee Constitution of 1827 to add another facet to understanding changes to Cherokee political space by connecting ideas of sovereignty and gender in the document.
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