Social Sciences
Collating Middle English texts for study on alliterative long line
This project will be to review poetic texts in Middle English with attention to particular details of rhythm, sound, and meter. Emphasis will be on textual study and collation, with some attention as well to secondary research. Student Tasks and Responsibilities: Student will assist with a number of separate tasks looking at text and recording where particular phenomena occur.
Passages in American Studies and Music
I am a cultural and intellectual historian who works on the twentieth-century US. I am currently writing a scholarly book entitled HEARING LOSS: THE DREAMLIFE OF MODERN JAZZ. This book involves original research and critical reflection on U.S. music, literature, film, and intellectual life, especially in the 1950-1970 period. The projects look at jazz music, fictional and non-fictional writings about jazz music, and cinematic reflections on the music life in that period. I am seeking a UROP research assistant. Research in archives and old periodicals is important to the project. In addition, I am also undertaking preliminary research on several other topics, including a study of US culture and film in the 1970s.
Student Tasks and Responsibilities: Students consult with the advising professor and then do research in campus libraries and collections and related resources of U-M. Students meet regularly with the advising professor to "process" the research, brainstorm new directions, and discuss methods and archives. Students will locate and retrieve (and often discuss) relevant sources in campus libraries, archives, the web, and so forth; photocopying or taking notes from said sources; retrieving books and materials from libraries; and related activities.
Presidential Campaign Songs
In anticipation of the 2008 Presidential election, this project will identify and find copies of songs used in campaigns throughout American history using the collections of the UM Clements Library and internet resources. Results from this project will be used in an article and public concert on campus in fall of 2008. Student Tasks and Responsibilities: Tasks will include online and archival research to identify and locate copies of songs. The ability to read music is not required, but dedicated independent work with an attention to detail and a nose for detective work is a must. The researcher will also be expected explore the historical context of each election and how the particular song chosen was effective.
Resettlement of Japanese Americans in Postwar Chicago
My project will examine the ways in which Japanese Americans (mostly second generation Nisei) experienced their lives after internment in a new city. Not only will we explore what kinds of jobs and housing situations they had to endure, but also how they interacted with other established racial and ethnic minorities in the Chicago area. Through archival research - newspapers, government documents, and contemporary sociological studies - the UROP student will learn the sleuth-like method of an historian. In using other sources (literary, social science, visual), the student will also gain a stronger sense of what it means to be an interdisciplinary scholar. Student Tasks and Responsibilities: Database searches; newspaper archives; government document collection; transcription of possible primary sources; research and reading of non-governmental sources.
Latina Feminisms Archival Project
U.S. feminist historiography has tended to elide, diminish, or ignore the contributions of women of color to the theoretical formation of contemporary feminist thought. This is partially due to the fact that so much of what women of color have written has been lost to the archive, because women of color had minimal access to the mainstream publishing industry, and because so many of their texts were published by small independent presses. These texts do exist. However, in most cases they reside not in libraries, but in the personal/private archives of women who are still living. I have spent the last few years collecting some of these texts and am currently working on a multi-pronged research and archival recovery project that will bring them back into publication as an edited series with contextualizing introductions (written by me) as well as essays by and quotes from Chicana feminists.
Student Tasks and Responsibilities: 1. Preparing two short manuscripts (The Chicana Feminist by Martha Cotera, Diosa y Hembra by Martha Cotera) and one long manuscript (Dorinda Moreno's collection, La Mujer en Pie de Lucha) for future publication. 2 Contacting activists and authors who contributed to Moreno's book. 3. Researching other out-of-print publications by Chicanas and Latinas.
Law and Medicine in Nineteenth-Century America
My project will investigate the relations between the medical and legal communities that developed during the nineteenth century around the issue of individual mental ability, concentrating in particular on the concept of idiocy and its allied terms. It will examine the emerging field of medical jurisprudence as a site where medical and legal concerns came together, and analyze how doctors and lawyers negotiated the meanings of shared terms in the course of the practical business of applying general diagnostic categories to particular individuals. Research will center on analyses of medical jurisprudence texts, law and medical journals, and court cases where mental competency was adjudicated.
Student Tasks and Responsibilities: Student will be asked to do library research to find books and articles relevant to the project. Some work will need to take place in the medical and law library. Some opportunities for tracking down legal cases may be possible.
Worlds of the Prison in Eastern Europe
Worlds of the Prison is a cross-cultural comparison of poems, fiction, and memoirs that represent life in large, open-air, but restricted spaces, such as concentration camps, prison camps, ghettos, and besieged cities. These spaces and the texts that discuss them have played a conspicuous role in the historical consciousness and modern literatures of Eastern and Central Europe, yet little scholarly attention has been paid to the features that connect these texts across national traditions or distinguish them from conventional prison literature. First-person prison-cell narratives generally describe the existential horrors of living in cramped isolation or awaiting execution; they are often meditations on the meaning of justice, and they draw very clear distinctions between the prison and the “outside.” Poems and stories about camps and ghettos, on the other hand, construct a terrifyingly plausible world-within-a-world. Here, the daily lives of captives are a strange imitation of the world on the other side of the wall or barbed-wire fence. Most of the research for this project will occur in the library. Literature about concentration camps and gulags has had an extremely rich and complicated reception, both in Eastern Europe and in the English-speaking world. At this stage of the project, a major goal will be to use library resources to reconstruct the critical reactions and polemics surrounding this literature.
Student Tasks and Responsibilities: (1) to locate and retrieve articles and essays responding to key texts in popular and scholarly periodicals. The student will be asked to take an active role in prioritizing which areas of a text's reception history require the most urgent attention. (2) To locate maps, photographs, and other visual resources relevant to key events and locales. (3) To engage in an ongoing discussion of how literature and history intersect.
