Visiting Fellows

Humanities Institute

Visiting Fellows

Lawrence N. Powell, Professor of History, Tulane University, New Orleans

Lawrence N. Powell is Professor of History at Tulane University in New Orleans and is a specialist on the history of Louisiana.  Former executive director of the Tulane/Xavier National Center for the Urban Community, he has worked extensively in many of the neighborhoods most affected by the recent flooding.   Powell is the author of Troubled Memory: Anne Levy, The Holocaust, and David Duke’s Louisiana, which won the Lillian Smith Book Prize from the Southern Regional Council.
Humanities Institute

Visiting Fellows

Basil Jones and Adrian Kohler, Handspring Puppet Company and Yaya Coulibaly, Sogolon Puppet Company

Basil Jones and Adrian Kohler (Handspring Puppet Company) and Yaya Coulibaly (Sogolon Puppet Company) are the Paula and Edwin Sidman Fellows in the Art.  They will present Tall Horse under the auspices of the University Musical Society on October 18, 21, and 22, and then remain for a week of residency.
Humanities Institute

Visiting Fellows

Marian Hobson, Professor of French at Queen Mary, University of London

Marian Hobson is Professor of French at Queen Mary, University of London. In 1999, she was made a Fellow of the British Academy. Her first book, The Object of Art: the idea of illusion in the eighteenth-century, is a study of eighteenth-century aesthetics, not just in France but in relation to England and Germany, as well.
Humanities Institute

Visiting Fellows

Nicolette Molnár, Stage Director

Nicolette Molnár, stage director, was educated at Barnard College, Columbia University, and studied directing under the late Götz Friedrich in Hamburg, Germany. She was a Staff Director with English National Opera from 1987 until 1994 and has regularly directed the Apprentice Artist Scenes in Santa Fe since 1996. Molnár’s productions are being seen with increasing frequency in the United States and Europe.
Humanities Institute

Visiting Fellows

Jaq Chartier, Artist

Jaq Chartier is an artist who lives in Seattle. Her paintings explore scientific methods through experimentation with paint and process. All of her works are “tests” to discover something about materials and what they do. An exhibit of her work, related to the theme of “Evolution,” will usher in our winter art shows.
Humanities Institute

Visiting Fellows

Louis Andriessen, Netherlands Visiting Professor and Artist-in-Residence

Louis Andriessen is widely regarded as the leading composer working in the Netherlands today. The Institute for the Humanities joins the Royal Dutch Academy, the University of Michigan’s Office of the Provost, the Center for European Studies, the School of Music, and the University Musical Society in cosponsoring him as the Netherlands Visiting Professor and Artist-in-Residence.

Humanities Institute

Visiting Fellows

Livia Monnet, Professor of Comparative Literature, Film, and Media Studies, University of Montreal

Livia Monnet is Professor of Comparative Literature, Film, and Media Studies at the University of Montreal, Canada. She spent the academic year 2004-2005 in Japan on Japan Foundation and JSPS (Japan Society for the Promotion of Science) grants to do research and write about women’s film, video art, and new media art since the 1990s.
Humanities Institute

Visiting Fellows

Neferti Tadiar

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History of Consciousness, University of California, Santa Cruz
Mellon Global Fellow

 

Neferti Tadiar received a B.A. in English from the University of the Philippines, an M.A. in Comparative Literature at the University of Minnesota and a Ph.D. in Literature at Duke University under the direction of Fredric Jameson. Her work is concerned with the relations between cultural production and political economy within third world and postcolonial contexts. While her research is focused on contemporary Philippine and Filipino culture, she addresses more broadly questions about the role of gender, race, and sexuality in discourses and material practices of nationalism, transnationalism, and globalization, as well as explores the role of minoritarian cultural practices in the social production of wealth, power, marginality and liberation. Her graduate teaching includes studies of the transformations in third world feminist movements and theory in the context of globalization, investigations of the relations between racism and imperialism, theories of modernity and postmodernity, minoritarian aesthetics, affect and labor, and postcolonial theory. Her undergraduate teaching has included courses on women of color, Filipino history and literature, and Asia-Pacific cultural studies. Publications include Fantasy-Production: Sexual Economies and Other Philippine Consequences for the New World Order (2004), Beyond the Frame: Women of Color and Visual Representation, co-edited with Angela Y. Davis (2005), Things Fall Away: Historical Experience and Tangential Makings of Globality (forthcoming). A new book project, Discourse on Empire: Living Under the Rule of Permanent War, is underway.

 

In residence, October 29 – November 12, 2006

 

Humanities Institute

Visiting Fellows

German Kim

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History and Korean Studies, Kazakh National University named after al-Farabi
Mellon Global Fellow

Professor Kim is one of the world’s leading experts on ethnic nationalities in Central Asia.  He has written and edited a large number of books and published more than 150 papers, originally in his native Russian, but translated into Kazakh, English, Korean, German and Japanese.  Of those there are two books that are particularly noteworthy, on this history of the Korean Diaspora.  He is the head of the Department of Korean Studies at the Kazakh National University. He comes as the Mellon Global Fellow to spend a term in residence, teaching a course related to Koreans expelled to Kazakhstan under Stalin and participating in “Routes into the Diaspora,” a conference scheduled for November 6 and 7, 2006.

In residence, Fall 2006

Humanities Institute

Visiting Fellows

Celestine Uwem Akpan

SmallAkkpan.jpg Careers in the Making Fellow

Celestine Uwem Akpan just completed the MFA Program in Creative Writing at the University of Michigan and will be in residence in fall 2006 as our Careers-in-the-Making Fellow. A Jesuit priest from Nigeria, Akpan has already enjoyed a success that many writers only dream of: The New Yorker published the first story he ever submitted for publication anywhere. He will use this fellowship to work on Fattening for Gabon, a book he describes as comprised of two novellas and three short stories, “all about African children caught up in impossible situations, all set in a different African country, all narrated from the child’s point of view. Whether it’s child slaves, child prostitutes, street children, child soldiers or genocide orphans, my fictions discovers these children the margins. Whether it’s in present or retrospective voice, whether it’s a first-person or third-person narrative, in Michigan I’ve discovered a steady, unpretentious voice to carry the tragedies, ironies, humor and hope of these children.”

In residence, Fall 2006

 

Humanities Institute

Visiting Fellows

David Henry Hwang

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Playwright, New York City

Internationally acclaimed playwright David Hwang has produced several award-winning works, including FOB (Fresh Off the Boat, 1978),Family Devotions (1981), The House of Sleeping Beauties (1983), As the Crow Flies (1986), and M. Butterfly (1988), which won the Outer Critics Circle Award, the Drama Desk Award, and the Tony Award for Best Play of the Year. Hwang is known for plays that are politically conscious, often focusing on the tensions related to immigration, and the balance of conventions, traditions, and values between East and West. A graduate of Stanford University, Hwang also wrote the screenplay for the 1997 film Seven Years in Tibet.  He also collaborated with U-M composer Bright Sheng on The Silver River, and comes to Ann Arbor in in connection with a production of that work (January 20, 2007).

In residence January 2007

Humanities Institute

Visiting Fellows

Sekou Sundiata

Poet and Performance Artist
Eugene Lang College, The New School for Liberal Arts

Sekou Sundiata who appeared at UMS as both a solo theater performer and a front man for his band in 2003, returns with his new work, the 51st (dream) state. (Saturday, January 20, 8 pm). This candid, yet lyrical, contemplation of America’s national identity and its guiding mythologies is both hopeful and questioning. The work features next-generation jazz musicians and vocalists with new music composed by Ani DiFranco, Graham Haynes, and others.

Sundiata says, “Living in the aftermath of 9/11, I feel an urgent and renewed engagement with what it means to be an American. But that engagement is a troubling one because of a longstanding estrangement between American civic ideals and American civic practice. This project is my response to this reality. I take it as a civic responsibility to think about these things out loud, in the ritualized forum of theater and public dialogue.”

The work, which grew in part out of his 2003 Ann Arbor residency and through sustained relationships with members of the U-M community and Detroit-based partners, unites art and civic dialogue through songs, poems, monologues, and video. The 51st (dream) state explores how America defines itself in a new era characterized by unprecedented global influence and power, and what it means to be both a citizen and an individual in a deeply complex, hyper-kinetic society.

In residence January 7- 21, 2007

Humanities Institute

Visiting Fellows

Bob Mankoff

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Cartoon Editor, The New Yorker
Paula and Edwin Sidman Fellow in the Arts

Bob Mankoff, cartoon editor of The New Yorker and president of The Cartoon Bank, is one of the nation’s leading commentators on the role of humor in American politics, business, and life.  He edited The Complete Cartoons of The New Yorker (Black Dog & Leventhal); the best-selling coffee table book for holiday 2004, featuring all 68,647 cartoons ever published in The New Yorker since its debut in 1925.  He describes this as the “golden age of humor,” where humor helps build personal connections in business and personal relationships. 

In 1991, he took out a small business loan and started The Cartoon Bank, a business devoted to licensing cartoons for use in newsletters, textbooks, magazines and other media. The Cartoon Bank initially licensed material that was not published by The New Yorker.  In 1997, The New Yorker purchased The Cartoon Bank from Mankoff, giving The Cartoon Bank access to all cartoons published in the magazine over the past eight decades.

In residence, March 5 – April 6, 2007

Humanities Institute

Visiting Fellows

Charles Stewart

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Anthropology, University College London

Charles Stewart  is a socio-cultural anthropologist who has conducted long-term ethnographic field research on the Greek island of Naxos, and shorter periods of fieldwork in Thessaloniki, Athens and the Greek-speaking enclaves of southern Italy.  His main research interests are religion (especially syncretism), nationalism and perceptions of the past in Greece and cross-culturally.  He has recently edited volumes on anthropological approaches to dreaming, the ethnographic study of historicity, and creolization in historical, ethnographic and theoretical perspective.  He is presently writing a book on dreaming and historical consciousness in Greece, which draws on ethnographic data collected in mountain Naxos and historical sources. He studied English and Classics at Brandeis University and earned his D. Phil. in Social Anthropology at the University of Oxford. 

In residence, March 5 – April 6, 2007