Graduate Fellows
Danna Agmon
Mary Ives Hunting and David D. Hunting, Sr., Graduate Student Fellow
anthropology and history
Where Do Go-Betweens Go? Colonial Intermediaries in Eighteenth Century India
This project examines French imperialism in India (1664-1761), and uncovers the different ways French traders, missionaries, and other settlers relied on their Indian employees. By foregrounding the tense relationship between the French and their local intermediaries, Danna Agmon exposes difficulties and failures that were a crucial yet hidden aspect of early colonial expansion. She hopes to demonstrate that the often-overlooked French experience in India is thus representative of the fractured, tense, and densely populated early stages of all colonial histories.
Lembit Beecher
James A. Winn Graduate Student Fellow
music composition
Estonia 1944: A Multimedia Chamber Oratorio
Lembit Beecher is working on a multi-media, chamber oratorio based on his grandmother’s and granduncle’s personal memories of Estonia during World War II when their homeland was occupied first by the Soviet Union, then Germany, and then the Soviet Union again. Along with their words, he will mine newspaper accounts, news reports, official records, letters and excerpts from the Estonian national epic Kalevipoeg, for text to set to music. In blurring the lines between music and narrative, documentary and drama, and fact and emotion, he is reaching for a mosaic-type of storytelling that investigates issues of memory, the nature of storytelling, and the relationship of drama to a sense of truth.
Eva-Marie Dubuisson
Sylvia “Duffy” Engle Graduate Student Fellow
anthropology
The Making of Poetic and Political Authority in Kazakh Aitus
Eva-Marie Dubuisson is investigating new forms of authority and social sentiment in post-socialist Kazakhstan as evinced in aitus, a kind of improvisational verbal dueling between two poets. Over twenty years of authoritarian repression and censorship, poets have given consistent voice to sociopolitical critique. Throughout Eurasia, wherever aitus and similar forms of oral epic traditions live on, social actors from radically different walks of life collude in “successful” performance in order to create a cultural and political authority beyond that of the authoritarian state, and a sense of satisfaction for those involved.
Monica Kim
history
Humanity Interrogated: Empire, Nation, and the Political Subject in United States and United Nations Prisoner of War Camps during the Korean War, 1949-1954
Monica Kim researches U.S.-controlled prisoner of war camps during the Korean War, examining how POWs, military personnel, and government officials struggled to define the “prisoner of war” as a political subject during the early Cold War. Interrogation became the most relied-upon tool of the U.S. military for constructing, disciplining, and presenting the prisoner of war. Using military archives, oral history interviews, and international organization archives, Kim examines interrogation practices as engaging with and against other political practices in the POW camps and surrounding areas, while also tracing the conflict over “narrating the POW” starting in the interrogation room through international spheres of debate.
Amy Rodgers
Mary Fair Croushore Graduate Student Fellow
English language and literature
“The Sense of an Audience: Spectators and Spectatorship in Early Modern England, 1576-1612
Rodgers’ dissertation examines discourses of spectatorship that emerge alongside the development of the professional theater in early modern England. The sixteenth century witnessed a surge in a particular form of mass entertainment: professional drama. As the English commercial theater prospered, Tudor-Stuart culture developed new ways to describe the sort of looking that playgoing encouraged. Audience studies have tended to focus primarily on the effects of twentieth-century visual mediums on the modern spectator. Rodgers reframes spectatorship as a subject of inquiry that has been shaped by multiple influences and histories rather than as a telos that culminates in modern viewing technologies and subjects.
