Graduate Fellows
Graduate Fellows
Julia Carlson - Mary Ives Hunting and David Dyer Hunting, Sr., Graduate Student Fellow
English
"Romantic Emphasis: Poetry and the Marks of Culture, 1750-1850"
Carlson's dissertation examines eighteenth- and nineteenth-century ways of calling attention to locations in space and time. She traces debates over what to emphasize—and how to emphasize—in such disparate fields as cartography, grammar, elocution, acting, portraiture, and poetry. Performing close readings of lines, points, and curves, she explores the relations between such phenomena as the eighteenth-century invention of the contour line for showing relief and the simultaneous promotion of the exclamation point for showing feeling. In this way, she is able to tease out the symbolic "logics" that support Romantic systems of emphasis and consider the involvement of these systems of emphasis in British aesthetics and ideologies.
(734) 936 1725
Graduate Fellows
Jennie Malika Evenson - Michigan Graduate Student Fellow
English
"Reformation England in the Age of Discovery"
Evenson is tracing the ways that travel and trade influenced the English Reformation. By paying particular attention to interaction with Muslims and Jews who operated extensive trade routes through the Ottoman Empire in the Mediterranean, Evenson has derived some important new geo-political and economic contexts for studying the Reformation. Her research into the dynamic interactions among Protestants, Catholics, Muslims, and Jews challenges many traditional studies, and directs much needed attention to the influence of Judaism and Islam on the conceptualization of Protestantism in sixteenth-century English literature and culture.
(734) 763 5515
Graduate Fellows
Jennifer Goltz - James A. Winn Graduate Student Fellow
Music Theory
"The Unsingable Note: The Roots of Pierrot lunaire in Cabaret"
Goltz's study draws on original archival research, musical analysis, and her own performance experience to explore cabaret culture and the great twentieth century composer Arnold Schoenberg's involvement in cabaret as a conductor, composer, and arranger of cabaret songs. Her aim is to shed new light on Pierrot lunaire, one of the most significant musical compositions of the twentieth century. In these 1901 cabaret songs, Schoenberg demonstrated compositional sophistication by engaging gender identity issues and homosexuality through drag performance and double-entendre, along with stylistic vocal gestures that defy notation. According to Goltz,"his foreshadowing of sinister elements, present in later cabaret style of Weimar Germany, reaches full bloom in Pierrot lunaire."
(734) 936 1865
Graduate Fellows
Stefan Henning - Michigan Graduate Student Fellow
Anthropology and History
"Nowhere Beyond Good and Evil: Chinese Muslim Activism as Ethical Critique, 1929 to 2001"
Henning is concerned with Muslim activism in China from the 1920s to the present. He is asking how Muslim activism in the domains of translation, magazine publication, and religious education inspired visions of personhood and polity alternative to secularization and nation-building. His project draws on archival research and fieldwork in Beijing and in Lanzhou City on the upper reaches of the Yellow River.
(734) 936 1720
Graduate Fellows
Suzanne B. Spring - Mary Fair Croushore Graduate Student Fellow
English and Education
"The 'Voice' of Form: Re-reading Dickinson, Re-reading Writing"
Epistolary form, Spring argues, is a productive entry point in theorizing acts of reading and writing in English Studies. Her socio-historical examination will engage the letter-form in two areas: composition & rhetoric and Emily Dickinson studies. After establishing mid-nineteenth century New England as a culture of the letter, Spring turns her attention to Mount Holyoke Female Seminary as a site where a rhetoric of the letter can serve as a central context for understanding women's writing practices. Finally, she narrows her focus to Emily Dickinson's poetic corpus, understanding Dickinson's "lyric letters" within a tradition of poetic and rhetorical production.
(734) 936 1870
Graduate Fellows
Yofi Tirosh - Hunting Family Graduate Student Fellow
Law
"Signifying the Self: Law, Culture, and the Regulation of Identity"
Tirosh's dissertation explores contemporary legal theories of how identity is constituted and maintained. Such theories are essential to determining what elements of identity should be protected by the law. Her research focuses on cases involving dress style, body size, names, and accent: traits that are located at the literal and conceptual margins of identity. Is it, for example, an infringement of religious freedom to require that an orthodox Jewish air-force captain remove his yarmulke while wearing his uniform? Should an African-American flight attendant, who is fired for wearing cornrows, have a race discrimination claim? Such cases provide a rich account of law's understanding of the relations between the "core" and "penumbra" of the self, between being and doing, or – to invoke legal language – between status and conduct.
(734) 763 4466
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