Visiting Fellows

Humanities Institute

Visiting Fellows

Sarah Beckwith, English and Religious Studies, Duke University

Sarah Beckwith, English and Religious Studies, Duke University, works on late medieval religious writing. She is particularly interested in Middle English religious writing in its fully cultural dimensions and in the intersections of writing and religious practice. Her studies of Margery Kempe, the literature of anchoritism, medieval theatre and sacramental culture have appeared in numerous essay collections and journals such as the South Atlantic Quarterly and Exemplaria. Past books include Christ’s Body: Identity, Religion and Society in Medieval English Writing (1993) and Signifying God: Social Relation and Symbolic Act in York’s Play of Corpus Christi (2001). She is now working on The Mind’s Retreat from the Face, a book on medieval and Renaissance drama centering on Shakespeare and the transformation of sacramental culture.

Humanities Institute

Visiting Fellows

Fredric Jameson, Chair of The Literature Program, Duke University

Fredric Jameson (Comparative Literature, Romance Studies) is Chair of The Literature Program at Duke University. His most recent books include Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991, which won the MLA Lowell Award), Seeds of Time (1994), Brecht and Method (1998), and The Cultural Turn (1998), A Singular Modernity (Verso Press 2002). His most frequently taught courses cover modernism, Third World literature and cinema, Marx & Freud, Jean-Paul Sartre, the modern French novel and cinema, and the Frankfurt School. Among Professor Jameson’s ongoing concerns is the need to analyze literature as an encoding of political and social imperatives, and the interpretation of modernist and postmodernist assumptions through a rethinking of Marxist methodology. Professor Jameson will deliver the Institute’s Marc and Constance Jacobson lecture on February 2, 2005.

Humanities Institute

Visiting Fellows

José Kagabo, Sociology, EHESS, Paris, France

Kagabo is Maître de conferences in the Centre d'Etudes Africaines, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales. He will be a visiting professor at the Institute for the Humanities in Fall 2004, the first Global Fellow to come under a new Mellon-funded program that brings one term-long and one shorter term scholar. Dr. Kagabo, a Rwandan sociologist, has been involved in different dimensions of the Rwandan drama, as an expert on the region, as a participant in efforts at reconstruction-particularly in regard to reconstituting the university system-and as an expert witness before a legislative investigation into France's role in the unfolding of the genocide. In the following paragraphs, he gives a brief report of his own professional background and involvement in human rights activities.

1. Research and Teaching

To start my academic life, I collaborated for four years in an international research project on the Balkans. In 1987, I got a position as senior researcher, working and teaching part of time on Africa. I have been teaching various topics in the history and anthropology of East Africa: Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Mozambique, Burundi, Rwanda, Congo (formerly Zaïre) for more than twenty years in many universities.

During the 1980s, I focused my research and teachings on Muslim culture and societies, especially on the history of the spread of Islam and the process of conversion in the African context. At that time I was also leading a fieldwork effort in Mombasa, Nairobi, Lamu (Kenya), Tabora, Ujiji (Tanzania) and the Comoro Islands. Then I began new research on Rwanda, focusing on the genocide and the surrounding events. This research included a systematic investigation of Rwandan press. I collected almost 90% of the newspapers and magazines published between 1990 and 1994 in order to analyze the propaganda that called for the massacres of the Tutsi and Hutu opponents. I am now finishing another investigation of the genocide trials in both the national and international courts. I have already collected much primary material: archives from the former Rwandan government and political parties, minutes of trials, including some cases judged in ICTR (International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda).

2. Work in progress

I am especially interested in a case named “Medias Trials” for two main reasons: 1) this trial is a good demonstration of how propaganda was constructed and used to manipulate people and how the genocide was organized; 2) it seems to me very important to understand how intellectuals were involved in the genocide and, through analysis, reflect on the difference between the so-called “great criminals” and “ordinary people” (see the debate engendered by D. Goldaghen’s book Hitler’s Willing Executioners).. I have collected almost 10,000 pages and 60 hours videotapes of the “Medias Trial.” This summer I will go to Arusha to complete this material in order to continue writing this book, which is at least halfway done. I hope to finish that book during my stay at UM Institute for the Humanities.

3. Human Rights activities

In France I am involved in two NGOs (France Terre d’asile, Secours populaire français) at a high level. In the first, which deals with defending worldwide asylum for political and territorial refugees, I am a staff member (Conseil d’administration). My duties consist of helping to define policies and to control the administration of the NGO. In the second, (Secours populaire français), I am also a staff member but am charged with more responsibilities. I serve as member of the National Secretariat, member of National Committee, and National Treasurer and President of the National Financial Committee. In my capacity as Treasurer and President of financial committee, I have to make sure that the global budget is followed, and sometimes to organize a seminar with all of the local and national services. The Secours populaire français covers the whole national territory (the system of local administration has established 99 departments). In each of these departments, Secours populaire has a “Federal Committee,” which in turn has several local committees.

In Rwanda, I led for four years (1994-1998) a humanitarian program to assist orphans and widows after the genocide. Now I am working on another project called the Youth, Citizenship and Solidarity Foundation. The primary goal is to promote the values of citizenship and human rights in tandem with development in Rwanda’s rural areas. I have already received local and Ministry of Social Affairs’ authorizations and hope soon to receive additional authorizations from the Ministry of Justice and the Ministry of Local Administration. Otherwise I am finishing some houses which will be opened by end of next August.

Link to Professor Kagabo's U-M Fall 04 course on Genocide

Humanities Institute

Visiting Fellows

Boris Mikhailov, Photographer, Ukraine

Internationally acclaimed Ukrainian photographer Boris Mikhailov captures the tragedy and the irony of human existence. Staged in a decaying world, Mikhailov’s poignant characters transcend cultures to become icons of our miserable condition. His work, often classified as surrealistic, transposes the great Russian literature into a contemporary visual narrative.

Mikhailov started his work in the Soviet Union in the 1970s, and for thirty years he photographed that nation’s passage from established socialism to its dissolution in the early 1990s. His work is thematically and technically divided into four periods. This exhibition focuses on the third one, created in the post-Soviet era. This recording of the decay of social order is a requiem in three series: first “By the Ground,” then “At Dusk,” and finally “Case History.” Considered together, the three works are a great lament, sometimes mute and subdued, sometimes loud and shrill, on the decay, the collapse of order (“By the Ground”), of hope (“At Dusk”), and finally, of mundane, simple existence (“Case History”). The photography explores several visual rhetorical means (brown or blue coloration of blurred urban landscapes opposed to sharp full-color portraits, panoramic views versus vertical portraits, cropped individuals or full bodies). These varied techniques express profound apprehensions: rumbling, chronic pain, a void.

Boris Mikhailov has had many solo exhibitions worldwide, including in New York (2002, 2005), Helsinki (2001), London (2000), Zurich (1999), Hanover (1998), and Kiev (1997). He has received many prestigious awards, and he is the author of several books (A Retrospective 2003, Salt Lake 2002, Dance—The Hasselblad Award 2000, Case History 1999).

This exhibition is central to “Ruins of Modernity,” a conference organized under the auspices of the Institute for the Humanities with the Center for European Studies and the Center for Russian and East European Studies.

Humanities Institute

Visiting Fellows

Carl Phillips, Poet, Washington University, St. Louis

Carl Phillips (English, Washington University in St. Louis) is the author of seven books of poetry, most recently The Rest of Love. His other books include Coin of the Realm: Essays on the Life and Art of Poetry and a translation of Sophocles’s Philoctetes. A finalist for both the National Book Award and the national Book Critics Award, Phillips won the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award for his book The Tether. Other honors include an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Lambda Book Award, the Morse Poetry Prize, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Library of Congress.

Humanities Institute

Visiting Fellows

Hilda Sabato, History, University of Buenos Aires, Argentina

Hilda Sabato is a historian. Her research work initially dealt with topics related to the foundation of capitalism in nineteenth century Argentina, such as the development of the export sector and the productive structure in the areas of agricultural expansion, the formation of the labor market, and the history of immigration. Since the mid 1980s, she has shifted her interests to political history, and has focused on the relationship between civil society and the state in Latin America, working on the history of citizenship, representation, suffrage, and the shaping of the public sphere. At present, she is involved in a new project on political violence in nineteenth century Argentina.

Born in 1947 in Buenos Aires, Professor Sabato obtained her Ph.D. in 1981 at the University of London. She is History Professor at the Facultad de Filosofía y Letras, University of Buenos Aires, and research fellow of the Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas (CONICET) in the same school. Both institutions she joined after the fall of the military dictatorship in 1983. She has also been a researcher at the Centro de Investigaciones Sociales sobre el Estado y la Administración (CISEA) in Buenos Aires (1978-1992) and a fellow at the Social Science School of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton (1990-91), the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences in Stanford (1998-99), and the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin (2002-2003).

She has published the following books: Cómo fue la inmigración irlandesa en Argentina?, with Juan Carlos Korol (Buenos Aires,1981); Capitalismo y ganadería en Buenos Aires: la fiebre del lanar, 1850-1880 (Buenos Aires, 1989), which obtained the Second National Prize of Archeology and History, and was published in English as Agrarian Capitalism and the World Market: Buenos Aires in the Pastoral Age (Albuquerque, 1990) and granted the Bolton Prize Honorable Mention; Los trabajadores de Buenos Aires: la experiencia del mercado, 1850-1880, with Luis Alberto Romero (Buenos Aires, 1992); La política en las calles: entre el voto y la movilización. Buenos Aires, 1862-1880 (Buenos Aires, 1998), which obtained the Clarence H. Haring Price of the American Historical Association and was published in a revised English version as The Many and the Few. Political Participation in Republican Buenos Aires (Stanford, 2001). She has also edited two collective volumes, publishes regularly in academic and cultural journals, and participates in discussions and exchanges in the public sphere.

Humanities Institute

Visiting Fellows

Arnold Weinstein, Writer, New York City

Arnold Weinstein, by training a classicist, is a playwright, lyricist, poet, translator, stage director, and was for many years an adjunct professor in the English Department of Columbia University. His decades of collaboration with William Bolcom have yielded several volumes of Cabaret Songs as well as adaptations of three works for the Lyric Opera of Chicago: Frank Norris novel McTeague, Arthur Miller’s A View from the Bridge, and Robert Altman’s film The Wedding. He and Bolcom also collaborated on the shows Dynamite Tonight! and Casino Paradise. Weinstein has collaborated with artists Larry Rivers, Andy Warhol, Howard Kanovitz, and Marisol, and his plays include the award-winning Red Eye of Love and Ovid’s Metamorphoses, which had its premiere at the Yale Repertory Theater in 1969 and was subsequently presented on Broadway. At present, he is collaborating with UM-composer Bright Sheng on a martial arts musical based on the Chinese folktale about The Monkey King.