Meet the Fellows
Senior Fellow
William Freehling
VFH Senior Fellow
Lincoln’s Growth - and America's
Showdown in Virginia: The 1861 Convention and the Fate of the Union
I’m writing a book titled Lincoln’s Growth—and America’s, which I hope to finish by the summer of 2010. As the title suggests, the book focuses on Lincoln’s growth during his presidency. The later presidential part of the story is well known. But the earlier part of Lincoln’s life that I will emphasize has not been adequately handled, and it throws great light on how far Lincoln—and the nation he all too well epitomized —had to travel.
Summer 2010 Fellows
Hanadi Al-Samman
Middle Eastern and South Asian Languages and Cultures - University of Virginia
Anxiety of Erasure: Trauma, Authorship, and the Diaspora in Arab Women’s Narrative
My forthcoming book examines the literature of Arab women writers of the European and North American Diaspora. These contemporary Muslim and Christian female authors use their engagement with Western societies to reclaim their voice not as exiles, but as continuing participants in their homelands’ intellectual life. Their double obsession with the motifs of the medieval Shahrazād and the pre-Islamic wa’d al-banāt (female infanticide)—literary and physical annihilation of women—is a fascinating and creative force in their writings. My research analyzes their narrative strategies and provides a framework for deciphering the persistence of the aforementioned motifs.
Rebecka Rutledge Fisher
English and Comparative Literature – University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
The Poetics of Being: Toward a Theory of Metaphor in African-American Literature
My book project examines the philosophical metaphors in Olaudah Equiano's The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano (1789), Frances Ellen Watkins Harper's Sketches of Southern Life (1870), W.E.B. Du Bois's “The Conservation of Races” (1897), and The Souls of Black Folk (1903), Richard Wright's “The Man Who Lived Underground” (1942), and Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man (1952). I establish an understanding of philosophical metaphor while focusing on writings that draw upon metaphor’s capacity at once to institute new categories of knowledge and meaning, and to give voice to African American being or consciousness.
Martien Halvorson-Taylor
Religious Studies – University of Virginia
The Pharaoh’s Palace and the Bed of Ahasuerus: Memory, Diaspora and Identity in the Hebrew Bible
I’m working on a book on collective memory, exile (or diaspora) and identity in the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament). I examine those biblical accounts of the Jew living in exile—among them Moses, Joseph, Esther, Daniel, Judith and Tobit—to elucidate the relationship between, on the one hand, the historical experience of exile and diaspora, and, on the other, how these experiences are collectively remembered and prove formative for Jewish identity.
Keith B. Mitchell
English - University of Massachusetts, Lowell
In the Wake of the World: Legacies of Colonial and Postcolonial Violence in the Contemporary Anglophone and Francophone West Indian Novel
In this study I investigate the work of four contemporary Anglophone and Francophone postcolonial novelists, Wilson Harris (Guyana), Michelle Cliff (Jamaica), René Depestre (Haiti), and Maryse Condé (Guadeloupe) and their unique literary responses to violence as a legacy of Western (neo)colonialism, the Middle Passage, and New World Slavery. While exploring the common theme of violence, I will demonstrate how these novelists use Holocaust language, imagery, and major Jewish characters to set up competing discourses between the two Diasporas.
Vera Parham
History – University of Hawaii, Hilo
From Medicine Creek to Daybreak: The Power of Protest in Pacific Northwest Native American History
The Pacific Northwest is home to a unique legacy of Native American protest from the 1850s to the 1970s. The protests were played out in court cases and in acts of civil disobedience. From treaty rights battles, to hops fields strikes, to fish-ins, to urban demands, the Pacific Northwest became a hot bed of successful Native American protest activity. My book focuses on how and why Native American protests in the Pacific Northwest were successful in meeting many of their demands, as well as how and why the protests developed and proceeded. The major focus will be the Fort Lawton occupation of 1970 and the creation of the Daybreak Star Indian Cultural Center in 1975 in Seattle.
James D. Rice
History – State University of New York, Plattsburgh
Tales from a Revolution: Bacon’s Rebellion and the Transformation of Colonial America
My book-in-progress reframes Bacon's Rebellion as but one episode in a broader transformation of the eastern woodlands that was rooted more in "Indian Country" than in colonial society; it incorporates the considerable body of scholarship on Chesapeake politics and society that has appeared in recent decades, including a revised understanding of the origins of slavery in Virginia; and it is an experiment in narrative: unlike much historical writing, in which "narrative" simply means "chronological," Tales is consciously plotted in a way that a novelist would instantly recognize. The book, I hope, will have something new to say to professional historians, but in a way that is accessible to a broader audience.
Maria Rybakova
Classics – San Diego State University
Finding Myself in the Iliad: Simone Weil and Rachel Bespaloff Reading Homer
During World War II, two French intellectuals who had to flee France because of their Jewish origins wrote essays in which they presented their interpretations of Homer’s Iliad: Simone Weil - The Iliad, or The Poem of Force (1939), Rachel Bespaloff - On the Iliad (1942). Why do these two women turn to the Iliad, the world of heroic masculinity? Why do the two philosophers, both of them Jews, during the Holocaust, turn to the Hellenic civilization rather than the Jewish tradition? How did their sense of the tragic and/or heroic shape their own destinies? I hope to show how the ancient Greek heroic epic allowed contemporary women thinkers to define their identities in the modern world in the face of annihilating war.
Resident Fellows - Spring 2010
Hanadi Al-Samman
Middle Eastern and South Asian Languages and Cultures - University of Virginia
Anxiety of Erasure: Trauma, Authorship, and the Diaspora in Arab Women’s Narrative
Theodore C. DeLaney
History- Washington and Lee University
School Desegregation in Western Virginia and Southern Identity
W. John Green
History – Senior Research Fellow, Council on Hemispheric Affairs, Washington, D.C.
Kill the Messengers: A History of Political Murder in Latin America
Martien Halvorson-Taylor
Religious Studies – University of Virginia
The Pharaoh’s Palace and the Bed of Ahasuerus: Memory, Diaspora and Identity in the Hebrew Bible
Maurie McInnis
Art History - University of Virginia
Slaves Waiting for Sale
Kristin Swenson
Religious Studies – Virginia Commonwealth University
Serpents of Fire and the Winged Cherubim: Biblical Images of the Supernatural
Resident Fellows - Fall 2009
Hanadi Al-Samman
Middle Eastern and South Asian Languages and Cultures - University of Virginia
Anxiety of Erasure: Trauma, Authorship, and the Diaspora in Arab Women’s Narrative
Eric Gary Anderson
English- George Mason University
On Native Southern Ground
Theodore C. DeLaney
History- Washington and Lee University
School Desegregation in Western Virginia and Southern Identity
Corinne T. Field
History - Independent Scholar, Charlottesville, Virginia
Perpetual Minors: Women’s Rights and the Struggle for Equal Adulthood in America
Mitchell S. Green
Philosophy - University of Virginia
The Evolution of Language
Maurie McInnis
Art History - University of Virginia
Slaves Waiting for Sale
Resident Fellows - Summer 2009
Laura Browder
English and American Studies - Virginia Commonwealth University
When Janey Comes Marching Home: Stories of American Women in the Iraq War
Ellen Contini-Morava
Anthropology - University of Virginia
Noun Classification in Swahili
Don DeBats
History - Flinders University (Adelaide, Australia)
Town and Country: Using New Sources and New Methods to Analyze Tradition and Modernity in the Politics and Society of 19th Century Virginia
Caroline Janney
History - Purdue University
The Civil War in Memory
Katherine McNamara
Literature - Independent Scholar, Charlottesville, Va.
From the First Beginning: A Literary Memory of Peter Kalifornsky and His
Discovery of Writing
Hermine Pinson
English - College of William and Mary
A Memoir of Healing
Sabra Statham
Music - Lock Haven University
Digital Access to American Composers in Letters and Documents
Kathleen Wilson
Material Culture - Independent Scholar, Alameda, Calif.
Irish People, Irish Linen
