Humanities Faculty Spotlight:

Seven Stars in the Humanities: A Humanities Pleiad

A monthly series featuring the achievements of seven faculty members in the College of Humanities. A Pleiad is the term for a group of seven particularly illustrious persons, after the seven daughters of Atlas, who were transformed into the Pleiades, stars found in the constellation Taurus and used for navigation since antiquity. The word derives from the Greek word πλειν, which means to sail: this month, the College of Humanities sails by the light of the Pleiad below.

Georges Tamer, M.S. Sofia Chair in Arabic Studies in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures, comes to us from the Freie Universität Berlin, where he was guest professor in Arabic Studies. Tamer completed his Habilitation at the University of Erlangen-Nürnberg with a study of Hellinistic images of time in Pre-Islamic poetry and the Koran. He has studied philosophy with Jürgen Habermas and written on the work of Leo Strauss; his next project, and his first written in English, will be on The Concept of Time in the Koran. Born in Lebanon, Tamer teaches us that the Arabic culture is and has always been a pluralistic one, with Ancient Philosophy, Eastern Christianity, Judaism, and Islam all playing separate and overlapping roles. At the same time, modern Arabic culture is dependent on the vividness of the past, and Islam provides a deep continuity—in Tamer's words, a "red thread"—that runs through all aspects of religious and secular life. "The Sofia Chair," says Tamer, "provides me with perfect freedom to define the field, and will allow me to bring my teaching and my research into perfect balance." He hopes to establish a post-doc research group, in the name of the Sofia Chair, to explore the various aspects of Arabic culture in the past and present. We are extremely fortunate to have a person of such wide and deep learning, and with such an obvious commitment to both his teaching and his scholarship, on our faculty. We are also extremely grateful to Mr. Zuheir Sofia for his foresight and generosity in establishing this endowed chair position in the Humanities.

Angela Brintlinger, associate professor of Slavic and East European Languages and Literatures, has translated the work of Vladislav Khodasevich for the University of Wisconsin Press. Though Khodasevich was best known as a poet—Nabokov called him "the greatest Russian poet that the twentieth century has yet produced" upon his death in 1939—he was also a masterful biographer, and Derzhavin is a fascinating look at a Russian poet, soldier, and statesman at a time when Russia was at its most triumphant. Through the life of Gavriil Derzhavin (1743-1816) we see the expansion of the Russian empire, the first major peasant revolt, Napoleon's defeat, and the era of Catherine the Great: politics in the great age of poetry. Brintlinger's translation of Khodasevich's nostalgic look at the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century brings us into that particularly Russian world.

Dan Keller, new assistant professor in the Department of English (Newark), studies literacy, new media, and popular culture. His fascination with the connections among these subjects has led to published work on multimodal rhetoric, the literacy practices of video gamers, and the role that video games have played in the transition to a digital culture. A current research project returns the field of composition to its roots in reading pedagogy and theory, which Keller sees as a necessary move as students are increasingly asked to read and write across media. The project combines an empirical study of student reading practices with scholarship in literacy, new media, popular culture, and literary theory, all subjects that he will be teaching in the classroom.

Carolyn Skinner, new assistant professor in the Department of English (Mansfield), studies the rhetoric of nineteenth-century American women, particularly those women who used scientific discourse and epistemology to justify and authorize their public speech and writing, at a time when few women engaged in public rhetorical activity and even fewer possessed an extensive scientific education. A current research project argues for increased attention to nineteenth-century women's scientific rhetoric, using the lectures of Mary Gove (later Nichols) on Anatomy and Physiology as a model for what can be gained by such an approach. Skinner is also working on a book that examines the rhetoric of nineteenth-century women physicians when addressing public and professional audiences, and the implications of that rhetoric for our understanding of historical and contemporary rhetorical theory.

Tryntje Helfferich, new assistant professor in the Department of History (Lima), writes that she "spends most of her free time squinting at old seventeenth-century documents or cuddled up with a microfilm reader." Born and raised in Alaska, Helfferich now studies central Europe during the period of the Thirty Years War (1618-1648), with a particular focus on the diplomatic, military, and religious history of the time. She is currently finishing a book on the German princess Amalia Elisabeth of Hesse-Cassel, and is also working on a source book on the Thirty Years War that will give modern readers a look at the way European rules justified their actions, and how ordinary people survived the long conflict.

Julia Nelson-Hawkins, assistant professor in the Department of Greek and Latin, has won the 2007 Virginia Hull Research Award, given each year to support the research of a female assistant or associate professor in the College of Humanities. Nelson-Hawkins receives this year's award for her book project, "Medicine in Augustan Rome: Therapoetics after Actium," an investigation of medicine and disease in the context of Roman politics at the height of the Roman Empire. The book has an explicitly interdisciplinary emphasis, working in the intersection of literature, history, medicine, and politics. Just as one cannot imagine a current U.S. Presidential debate without a discussion of health care, so the Pax Romana was clearly dependent on the image of healing in an age of imperialist expansion. This will be a significant book and of considerable interest to both specialists and generalists alike.

Guisela Latorre, new assistant professor in the Department of Women's Studies, comes to us from University of California, Santa Barbara, where she was a professor of Chicana and Chicano Studies, concentrating on visual art. Her work on Chicana/o muralists, Walls of Empowerment, is in production at the University of Texas Press, and she has a co-authored article (with Chela Sandoval) in an edited volume soon to appear on the digital murals of Judy Baca. Moving from Chicana/o Studies to Women’s Studies, and from California to the Midwest, Latorre says, presents the opportunity to look at her field in the broader contexts of feminism and pan-Latino studies, using a wider lens to examine the use of the image from Puerto Rico to Central America, and to read artistic expression as a gendered act, crossing national boundaries. She will be teaching courses on Chicana art and feminism, the U.S. Latina experience, and on women in visual culture.