Visiting Fellows

Humanities Institute

Visiting Fellows

Kim Anno and Anne Carson

Kim Anno is the Paula and Edwin Sidman Fellow in the Arts. A painter and bookmaker, she teaches in the California College of the Arts.

Anne Carson is a poet and teaches in the U-M’s departments of English, Comparative Literature, and Classics.

”The Mirror of Simple Souls,” their book, exists in 40 handmade editions, published by One Crow Press in Minnesota.

The books and artifacts of its creation form the exhibit on view in the Osterman Common Room from April 5 through June 18, 2004.

Humanities Institute

Visiting Fellows

Stephanie Jordan

Stephanie Jordan, Dance, University of Surrey, Roehampton, UK
In residence October 26–November 8

Stephanie Jordan is a trained musicologist and dance historian. Her book, Moving Music, transformed the field of dance studies and brought the serious study of the history of dance to musicologists who have tended to overlook the dance component of the music they work on (Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring is a prime example). Jordan’s current project, a book about Stravinsky and Dance, has received the support of the Stravinsky Foundation in Basle. During her visit, she will take part in a symposium cosponsored by the Center for Russian and East European Studies and the Department of Dance: “From the Mariinsky to Manhattan: George Balanchine and the Transformation of American Dance.”

Humanities Institute

Visiting Fellows

Marsha Kinder

Marsha Kinder, School of Cinema-Television, University of Southern California
In residence January 12–25

Marsha Kinder began her career as a scholar of eighteenth-century English literature. Today she chairs the Division of Critical Studies in the University of Southern California’s School of Cinema-TV, where she has been teaching since 1980. Since 1997 she has directed The Labyrinth Project, an art collective and research initiative at USC’s Annenberg Center for Communication, producing interactive documentaries in collaboration with independent filmmakers. With Hungarian media artist Peter Forgács, Labyrinth created “The Danube Exodus: The Rippling Currents of the River,” an interactive installation that premièred at the Getty Center in Los Angeles in August 2002. Also a cultural theorist and film scholar, Kinder has published over one hundred essays and ten books, including Playing with Power, Blood Cinema, and Kids’ Media Culture. In 2001, she was named a University Professor, an honor that has been bestowed on only ten professors in USC’s history. While here, Kinder will discuss the possibility of a future exhibition at the UM Museum of Art in 2006.

Humanities Institute

Visiting Fellows

Margo Mensing

Margo Mensing, Art and Art History, Skidmore College
In residence March 14–21

Margo Mensing, a UM alumna, is an artist on the faculty of Skidmore College, where she teaches Fiber Arts. Her work ranges across diverse media, from video to knitting, but the content always derives from her textile training and sensibility. She relies on her background in history for narrative constructions that typically focus on the life and times of particular individuals, such as Robert Louis Stevenson, Fanny Stevenson, his wife, and Margaret Stevenson, his mother. Many of her recent installations are collaborative and she often works with community members. In January through March 2004, the Residential College plans an exhibition of work from her recent projects, including three large drawings from “Banking on It,” works made from punched circles from security envelopes.

Humanities Institute

Visiting Fellows

David Rieff

David Rieff (in residence September 14–20)
Writer and journalist, New York

David Rieff, an American writer and policy analyst, has written widely on topics ranging from war, human rights, and humanitarian assistance in Africa, to Third World immigration to the United States, to cultural issues. He covered the Bosnian war, spending extended periods of time in Sarajevo during that siege, and the earlier genocide in Rwanda. More recently, he has reported from Southwest Asia. He is the author of five books, including Los Angeles: Capital of the Third World, and Slaughterhouse: Bosnia and the Failure of the West. His new book, A Bed for the Night: Humanitarianism in an Age of Genocide, was published in October 2002. David Rieff was awarded the first Haniel Fellowship in History and Public Affairs at the American Academy in Berlin. He is currently working on a book on terrorism, counter-terrorism and state power.

Humanities Institute

Visiting Fellows

Denise Riley

Denise Riley, School of English and American Studies, University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK
In residence Winter Term 2004

Professor Riley has a rich and varied background in European philosophy and political thought, including philosophy of language, poetry and poetics and social and intellectual history. Her books include War in the Nursery: Theories of the Child and the Mother, “Am I That Name?” Feminism and the Category of “Women” in History and The Words of Selves: Identification, Solidarity, Irony. Besides being a scholar, she is a poet, and in 1996, was Writer-in-Residence at the Tate Gallery, London. At present, she is working on a volume of her own essays on the “everyday emotionality” of language. It will cover such topics as “false consolation, the retrospective construction of truth, an inflated sense of presence, a defence of solitude, the nature of linguistic embarrassment, recovery from verbal attack, shyness, unease and guilt in speech, and the feeling of lying when you’re truth-telling.”

Denise Riley is the 2003-2004 Norman Freehling Visiting Professor.

Humanities Institute

Visiting Fellows

Albie Sachs

Albie Sachs, Justice of the South African Constitutional Court
In residence January 25–31

Justice Sachs has long been a leader in the struggle for human rights in South Africa and was a freedom fighter in the African National Congress. Twice he was detained without trial by the security police under the Apartheid regime. He describes his detention in The Jail Diary of Albie Sachs, which was made into a play in London. He is also the author of numerous books on issues of gender, the law and human rights. His most recent book, The Soft Vengeance of a Freedom Fighter, relates his recovery from an attempt by the South African security forces to kill him. His essay, “Preparing Ourselves for Freedom,” delivered in 1990 to the African National Congress at the moment of its return to a new South Africa, argued strongly against the politically correct concept of art as a “weapon in struggle” and for the potentially liberating role for an art free to express diversity and subjective human aspiration. It was a classic for the new government. He now serves on the South African Constitutional Court. Justice Sachs will deliver the Institute’s Marc and Constance Jacobson Lecture.