Visiting Fellows

Humanities Institute

Visiting Fellows

John Baines

The Oriental Institute and Queen's College, Oxford University

A distinguished scholar in his field of Egyptian art, religion, and literature, Baines was our first Norman Freehling Visiting Professor to be in residence for a full academic year. In the fall, he taught undergraduate students about "Ancient Egyptian Art and Architecture." In the winter, he and Piotr Michalowski offered an innovative course for graduate students: "Cultural Legitimations of Premodern Elites."

Baines' public lecture, "Ancient Egyptian Biographies in Performance, Image, and Text," drew on his newest major project, a study of Egyptian biographies. In a talk richly illustrated with slides, Baines explained, "Vast numbers of biographical self-presentations survive from ancient Egypt, ranging from large tombs, through statues and pictorial decoration, to texts. Quite often, different media are integrated in single artifacts or compositions, and texts were often inscribed in places where few had access, including sarcophagi that became invisible after burial. The works possessed meaning in relation to performances among the living." Most of his examples were of statuary and texts of the Ptolemaic period (305–30 BCE).

So what made this Oxonian Egyptologist such a wonderful presence here this year? First of all, he really was really here (often arriving before the staff) and deeply immersed in the life of the Institute. A model colleague, he came to each talk that featured any of our current Fellows as well as to most of our public events, and always helped keep the discussion lively. In such forums, as well as in private conversations in the kitchen and hallways, we came to appreciate the breadth of his knowledge. From music to art, philosophy to literature, he spoke with the easy authority that comes from deep knowledge and long familiarity, yet was unfailingly modest, gracious and appreciative.

He completed four articles, composed four new ones, made substantial progress on a volume of collected articles (Visual and Written Culture in Ancient Egypt), gave eight visiting lectures and began a project to work on a major unpublished artifact in the Freer Gallery in Washington, DC. During one of his trips to the Oriental Institute in Chicago, he joined Paul Freehling and his son Joel for dinner, allowing a chance for the Freehlings to become acquainted with the holder of their family's Visiting Professorship.

Being here for a whole academic year, Baines observed, means you get to know colleagues within the Institute and so a real community develops. Our group was splendidly diverse,he noticed, with Fellows - both faculty and graduate students - from a wide range of disciplines in what British people would call humanities and social sciences, as well as artists and musicians. As a result, we had very varied weekly seminars and brown bags, which acted as focus and diversion.

Humanities Institute

Visiting Fellows

Douglas Crimp

Art History and Visual and Cultural Studies, University of Rochester

We were pleased to welcome Douglas Crimp back to the Institute where he had earlier visited, in 1991, to take part in a conference on “The Constructed Body.” This year the conference on “Gay Shame” brought him to town. The conference opened with a screening of Warhol’s Screen Test #2, a short film in which the viewer sees only the face of Mario Montez and hears only the voices of Mario and Ronald Tavel, who plays the director in this purported—and unscripted—film test. Mario, in drag and heavily made-up, brushes his/her blond wig through most of the “test,” while responding to Tavel’s instructions. The film grows excruciating as Tavel increasingly asks Mario to perform humiliating acts. Crimp’s essay, “Mario Montez, For Shame,”served as required reading for all conference participants. The essay concludes that “Tavel’s purpose in Screen Test #2 is to solicit from Mario exactly what we see: Mario’s irresistible, resplendent vulnerability. We see his soul enlarged before us most conspicuously at those moments when Mario is overcome with shame.”

In the Fellows’ Seminar, Crimp presented recent work on an essay that will eventually become, in his next book, a chapter devoted to the relation of the Warhol films to the Theater of the Ridiculous, founded by Tavel. “The brief residency was thus extremely fruitful for me,” said Crimp, “since it has been my goal to think in advance about the overall design of this book rather than to approach it piecemeal, essay by essay, or film by film, as has been the case up to this point.”

Humanities Institute

Visiting Fellows

George Gittoes

Paula and Edwin Sidman Fellow in the Arts

In our memories, Gittoes’ visit is still buzzing with sights and sounds and mobs and happenings—it seems impossible that he was actually here for just one week! He arrived from New York with his teen-aged son, Harley, on a Sunday, and their first business was to join art coordinator Amanda Krugliak in mounting his show of “Recent Sketches” (see also “Arts,” p. xxx). Early in the week, Larry Cressman and Annie Fisher’s Residential College classes crowded into our diminutive gallery space to see the exhibit and talk with this courageous and committed activist/artist. They heard his first-hand stories of conflicts in Afghanistan, Bosnia, Bougainville, Burma, Cambodia, Congo, East Timor, Israel-Palestine, Mozambique, Nicaragua, Pakistan, Rwanda, Somalia, South Africa, Southern Lebanon. (Since leaving Ann Arbor, he has twice been to Iraq.) Next, WUOM arts reporter Tamar Charney interviewed him as they strolled around the exhibit.

Gittoes spoke with our Fellows in their Seminar before trekking up to the School of Art + Design to critique the work of students in Jim Cogswell’s figure painting class. He also gave a talk, “Night Vision,” in our lecture series, To Do Justice To (see below, p. xxx). All during their visit, his son Harley followed him unobtrusively, video camera in hand, to capture footage for a New York film crew doing a story on him. At week’s end, Gittoes went back to New York to prepare for his trip to Baghdad, but left us with a magnificent portfolio and scroll as reminders of his visit.

Humanities Institute

Visiting Fellows

Jean Hébrard

Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris

During a busy two-week visit, Jean Hébrard worked intensively with his long-time colleague, Rebecca Scott (history), visiting two classes (“The Law in Slavery and Freedom” and “Colonial Latin America”), and talking about the work of writing in various contexts and eras. Throughout his stay, Scott provided expert simultaneous translation.

His formal lecture, “Inventing the Material Basis for the Early Modern Diary,” argued that studying the actual physical items used in personal writing—paper, notebooks, pens— may lead one to “reach some of the cultural practices of the men and women who used them. The objects in question carry within them a certain logic of use that… forces the hand of those who employ them. In short, by scrutinizing these objects, long since abandoned by their users, we may catch a glimpse of practices that have remained veiled, and whose modalities have largely been lost through the passage of time.” In a later meeting with the Early Modern Studies Group, he continued the discussion begun in his lecture.

Speaking to the Fellows’ Seminar, Hébrard discussed personal writing in a truly personal context. His texts were the writings of his own great-uncle Moïse (1898–1985), beginning with a journal he kept during World War I, and subsequent reworkings of the same materials. Hébrard commented, “What the historian finds in these materials is not only the narrative of a life, but also an act of writing and even more an act of memory. These texts have made their way to us because particular care was taken not only to write them but to save them.”

His final major public presentation was at a round table on “Licit and Illicit Encounters: Spaces of Sociability, Legal Culture, and the World of Slavery” sponsored by the Atlantic Studies Initiative and the Program in Latin American and Caribbean Studies. There his topic dealt with administering slavery through writing in nineteenth-century Brazil.

Humanities Institute

Visiting Fellows

Linda and Michael Hutcheon

University of Toronto

The Hutcheons—she, a professor of English and Comparative Literature, and he, a professor of medicine and Medical Director of the Lung Transplant Program at the University of Toronto—were high-school sweethearts (we even saw their prom photo) who ultimately married. They found intersections in their divergent professional paths over their mutual love of opera and their fruitful scholarly collaboration that has yielded two books: Opera: Desire, Disease, Death (1996) and Bodily Charm: Living Opera (2000).

Their joint public presentation for the Institute was “Picture This! The ‘Phenomenal Image’ in Opera.” They looked at visual analogues to phenomenal songs in Wagner’s The Flying Dutchman, Mozart’s The Magic Flute, Berg’s Lulu, and Korngold’s Die Tote Stadt. As they took turns at the podium, showing slides and video clips and playing music, their presentation took the form of a multimedia duet, as spellbinding as it was scholarly. Musicologist Naomi André served as an appreciative and enlightening respondent.

In our Fellows’ Seminar, they presented a history of their work together, “Known by the company they keep: interdisciplinarity, interdiscursivity, and collaboration.” In addition, Linda Hutcheon gave a talk, “Adapter/Abductor,” that looked at the fraught theoretical question of intentionality in the context of adaptation.

Summarizing their visit, they wrote, “Imagine two weeks in scholars’ heaven: peace and quiet, splendid facilities, a provocative conference [“Gay Shame”] in the middle of our stay, intellectually stimulating colleagues, the most helpful and gracious staff. What more can we say? We enjoyed getting such constructive and enthusiastic responses to our own papers, and we learned much from the other presentations we heard in this richly intellectual environment. You put us in touch with so many colleagues at the University who shared our interests.

Humanities Institute

Visiting Fellows

Goenawan Mohamad

Poet and journalist, Indonesia

This respected Indonesian poet and activist/journalist joined us for five weeks in the fall term. During his stay he taught a course on the traces of the "West" in Indonesian political and literary ideas, using translations of the letters of Kartini, the daughter of a Javanese regent at the beginning of the twentieth century, as a primary source for discussion. He also participated in a round-table discussion with co-collaborators on Kali, an opera for which he wrote the libretto. These four used their time together at UM to move the project forward and to open its early progress to the round-table audience under the auspices of the Jill S. Harris Memorial Fund.

Two lectures on campus brought Goenawan to students' attention. He delivered the keynote address ("An Indonesian Response to the US''War on Terror'") in a conference organized by students in Southeast Asian Studies. In a subsequent lecture, "Poetry and the End of the Holy," he argued that the end of the holy comes about when it loses its terror - the kind projected in the images of Kali, the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch, or words from the Bible and the Koran. This happens when the holy has become so routinized that we experience what Heidegger called a destitute time.” “And what,” he asked, “are poets for, in a destitute time?”

In a visit to Wallace House for an exchange of ideas with the Michigan Journalism Fellows, Goenawan talked about his own experiences and thoughts in connection with the events of September 11th—and his analysis of coverage of these events by the US press. By chance, he had been in New York City on the day the airplanes attacked the World Trade Center. He witnessed the agony and the terror, and joined mourners in Union Square. But, he said, the moment of sharing was short-lived, as the US media began to portray the day’s events as an American tragedy. “At Rockefeller Center, only US flags were flown, not those of other nations. Patriotism is beautiful, but the dark side is exclusion…. This kind of patriotic self-censorship goes against the great tradition of American journalism.” Goenawan’s gentle but impassioned talk gave rise to a lively discussion.