Graduate Fellows

Humanities Institute

Graduate Fellows

Didem Ekici - Mary Fair Croushore Graduate Student Fellow

Architecture
"Bruno Taut's Vision of the 'Orient': Creating a Universal Architecture"

Ekici plans to research the influence of Orientalism on the German architect Bruno Taut (1880-1938), who fled to Japan and Turkey after Hitler came to power in 1933. Her main objective is to understand how Taut’s earlier Orientalist ideology, during his involvement with the German Expressionist architectural movement prior to 1923, evolved into a broader dialogue between tradition and modernity, and into a search for a universal architecture during with his final years (1936-1938) as an exile in Turkey.

Humanities Institute

Graduate Fellows

Julen Etxabe - Mary Ives Hunting and David D. Hunting, Sr., Graduate Student Fellow

Law
“Laws in Tragic Conflict: Sophocles’ Antigone and Judicial Decision-Making”

Law is not merely a system of external rules, but a comprehensive narrative about lawful and unlawful, right and wrong, good and evil. It so happens that, understood in this way, there is no unitary conception of “the law,” but many, as many as there are legal narratives. What happens when any two of these comprehensive narratives are at odds with each other about matters like euthanasia, religious freedom, or abortion? How can judges justify their decisions, if, arguably, no neutral legal language can ever be articulated? Etxabe is invoking Antigone because it is the archetype of “laws in tragic conflict” and because tragedy provides a theoretical model that challenges dominant theories of rational decision-making.

Humanities Institute

Graduate Fellows

Asli Gür - Sylvia “Duffy” Engle Graduate Student Fellow

Sociology
“Educating the ‘Orient’: Transculturation of Foreign Educational Practices and Imperial Imagination in the Ottoman Empire (1857-1914)”

The Ottoman Empire was never a formal colony of Euro-American powers. Yet, in the nineteenth century, as part of a project of self-reformation, both Ottoman statesmen and various minorities of the empire radically transformed their educational systems by selectively and creatively appropriating certain French, German and American educational institutions. What were the conditions and motivations which led the state elites and Ottoman minorities to modify their own culture by voluntarily adopting these foreign institutional forms? Gür believes that a better understanding of the politics of cultural difference in the nineteenth century will have momentous implications for the ways in which the peoples of the Middle East view the Euro-American world today.

Humanities Institute

Graduate Fellows

Myeong-seok Kim - Mary Fair Croushore Graduate Student Fellow

Asian Languages
“Theories of Emotion in Early Chinese Confucian Texts”

Kim’s current project is to investigate the role of emotion in three important ethical realms: moral judgment, moral motivation, and moral cultivation. However, he engages his philosophical inquiry into emotion in a particular context, namely early China, by analyzing several ancient Chinese Confucian texts including the Analects, Mencius, and Xunzi.

Humanities Institute

Graduate Fellows

Sumiao Li - James A. Winn Graduate Student Fellow

English and Women’s Studies
“Fashionable People, Fashionable Societies: Gender, Fashion, and Print Culture in Britain, 1820-1860”

Li’s dissertation explores the emergence of “fashionable society” as a distinctive and dynamic force in British literature and culture between 1820 and 1860. She argues for the central role of fashion in the social, literary and gender formations of early nineteenth-century England. She believes that an exploration of the past forms of “fashionable society” will shed light on its re-emergence in some current developing countries.

Humanities Institute

Graduate Fellows

Bhavani Raman - Mary Ives Hunting and David D. Hunting, Sr., Graduate Student Fellow

History
“Document Raj: Scribes, Writing and Society in Early Colonial South India”

Raman is studying the transformation of scribal culture and writing practices under East India Company rule in south India. In a region where few people were literate, how did writing change from a kin-based craft practiced by specialist scribes to a de-specialized practice? By viewing the structures of modern imperial state formation from the perspective of scribal agents and by focusing on everyday forms of written communication, such as petitions and title deeds, she hopes to engage with debates on written authority and bureaucratic state formation, on the technology and practice of textual production, and on the relationship between the written and spoken word.

Humanities Institute

Graduate Fellows

Diana Bullen - Mary Ives Hunting and David D. Hunting, Sr., Graduate Student Fellow

The Visual Culture of the Central Italian Foundling Hospital, 1400-1600

Diana Bullen is pursuing an interdisciplinary study that explores the status of the abandoned child in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Italy in the context of the visual culture of charity. Focusing on the institutional environment of foundling hospital, she will study how images constructed ideas about charity toward children, how the display and visibility of both ritual acts and images played a crucial role in charitable administration, and how manipulations of the urban fabric worked to negotiate the places of charity in the early modern Italian city.

Humanities Institute

Graduate Fellows

Claire Decoteau - Michigan Graduate Student Fellow

The Diseased Body Politic and the Corporeality of HIV/AIDS in South Africa

HIV/AIDS engulfed South Africa in its most vulnerable moment – during the period of transition from apartheid to a capitalist democracy. The struggle against HIV/AIDS takes place in a context in which multiple healing systems–bio-medical science, various forms of “traditional” healing, faith-based approaches–compete for the authority necessary to impose their understanding of the disease and the body over the public sphere. This competition is inseparable from South Africa’s recent neo-liberal economic restructuring and the growing power of the international pharmaceutical industry. On the ground, people with HIV/AIDS are struggling against poverty and access to basic services (including health care), while simultaneously negotiating multiple (and sometimes) contradictory health systems. This research focuses on the various healing methods South Africans are utilizing to treat HIV/AIDS and the effects that the combination of these methods has on peoples’ conceptualizations of health, sexuality and their bodies.

Humanities Institute

Graduate Fellows

Philip Duker - James A. Winn Graduate Student Fellow

Diving into Mnemosyne’s Waters: Exploring the Depths of Memory and Musical Experience

Because music is an art that unfolds in time, the possibility for it to be more than a series of fleeting, disconnected moments hinges on a listener’s memory. Duker’s research explores how this seemingly straightforward capacity is understood from diverse disciplinary perspectives, and how each view can highlight different aspects of musical experience.

Humanities Institute

Graduate Fellows

Kim Greenwell - Michigan Graduate Student Fellow

Between Nation, Empire and Colony: Unsettling Events and English-Canadian Identity in the Nineteenth-century British Empire

Greenwell is looking anew at the place of white settler colonies within the nineteenth-century British Empire. With a focus on Canada, she is examining the inherently comparative, narrative processes by which English-Canadians constructed their sense of identity in relation to a complex set of “others” and in response to key events elsewhere in the Empire. Ultimately she argues that the dynamics of identity-formation in such contexts challenge overly simplistic accounts of white racial privilege and compel a rethinking of how we study national, imperial and colonial projects, and the interrelations among the three, more broadly.

Humanities Institute

Graduate Fellows

Edin Hajdarpasic - Michigan Graduate Student Fellow

Beyond ‘Nation vs. Empire’: Reform, Social Movements and the Search for Justice in Late Ottoman Bosnia

Hajdarpasic is studying the emergence of disparate movements that sought to effect political reform in Bosnia and Herzegovina during the late Ottoman period, an era that is usually described as the awakening of Balkan nations. By viewing the national undertakings alongside the demands for radical social change, he aims to arrive both at a contextualized analysis of the political transformations that reshaped the Ottoman Balkans in the nineteenth century and at a nuanced exploration of different local understandings of reform and social justice.

Humanities Institute

Graduate Fellows

Andrew Highsmith - Michigan Graduate Student Fellow

America Is a Thousand Flints: Race, Class and the End of the American Dream in Flint, Michigan

Highsmith is exploring the spatial and structural barriers to racial equality and class fairness in the Flint, Michigan, metropolitan region from World War II to the present. With chapters on housing, urban renewal, schools, suburbanization, tax policies and deindustrialization, his dissertation traces the complex metropolitan contestation between and among the labor and civil rights movements, General Motors, white homeowners and civic elites for control over Flint’s postwar development. In the end, he hopes to show that the roots of urban crises in Flint and Genesee County can be traced back to the postwar triumphs of pro-growth policies that fostered uneven consumer abundance, suburban sprawl, capital decentralization and rigid racial segregation at the expense of social and economic justice.

Humanities Institute

Graduate Fellows

Kristina Luce - Sylvia “Duffy” Engle Graduate Student Fellow

Revolutions in Parallel: The Rise and Fall of Drawing Within Architectural Design

Luce’s dissertation is a historical and comparative analysis of two ways in which architecture can be visually conceived and rendered. The first one involves the ascendancy of drawing within architectural design that developed during the Renaissance and remained ascendant for centuries. The second, which spells the likely passing away for drawing’s ascendancy, is the shift to computer-based design procedures of today.

Humanities Institute