Class of Fellows chosen for Center for Humanities and the Arts

Eight members of the University of Colorado Boulder campus have been named Center for Humanities and the Arts (CHA) Faculty Fellows. Three external reviewers rated the applications from a pool of 41 applicants in the first of what's planned as an annual competition.

"We are very excited about this first class of Fellows," said Helmut Muller-Sievers, director of CHA. "The breadth and quality of these projects show how strong and inventive the humanities and arts are at CU-Boulder. The Center for Humanities and the Arts is proud to support such excellent faculty."

The 2011-12 recipients are:

Lucy Chester, associate professor, department of history and the International Affairs Program

Chester's research project is titled "Networks of Decolonization: Britain's Withdrawal From South Asia and Palestine." She will examine anticolonial and imperial connections between British India and the Palestine Mandate in the decades leading up to Britain's withdrawal.

Elspeth Dusinberre, associate professor, department of classics

Dusinberre will study impressions left by sealstones on the Aramaic tablets of the Persepolis Fortification Archive (ca. 500 BCE) and created drawings of collated images to illuminate the imagery of these ancient artifacts and bring them into scholarly discourse on the tremendous working apparatus of the Achaemenid Persian empire (ca. 550-330 BCE).

Jill Heydt-Stevenson, associate professor, department of English

Heydt-Stevenson will complete the research and writing of a chapter titled "The Media of Archaeology: Romantic Travel to the Middle East" from her book "The Afterlife of Things: Belongings in 18th- and 19th- Century French and British Literature." Analyzing unpublished and virtually unexamined letters and manuscripts of travel accounts to the Mideast, she will explore the mutual impact on British and Syrian cultures of the earliest Westerners' journeys to Palmyra, an ancient, ruined city in Syria, investigating how their travel accounts transformed this city in the desert into the media sensation of 18th- and early 19th- century Europe.

Janice Ho, assistant professor, department of English

Ho's book project, titled "Liberal Englishness, Alterity, and the Twentieth-Century British Novel," examines how representations of modern English national identity are shaped by principles of liberalism in the works of major 20th-century novelists such as Conrad, Forster, Woolf and Rushdie.

Michael Huemer, associate professor, department of philosophy

Huemer will complete a book project titled "Freedom and Authority." The book argues that there is no philosophically satisfactory account of the basis for political authority, and thus that authority is a moral illusion.

Karen Jacobs, associate professor, department of English

"Trace Atlas: Itineraries of Postmodern Literary Space" investigates a selection of recent theoretical works and post-1980 American novels that imagine post-Cartesian engagements with space, mapping and the atlas form, often against the backdrop of what is imagined to be a shattered or ungraspable global space.

Mithi Mukherjee, associate professor, department of history

India is emerging as one of the most important countries in Asia and the world for the 21st century, yet there has been little work on India's understanding of its place in the world. This project is a historical inquiry into India's quest for its place in the world by way of an exploration into the nature and origin of India's role in the making and evolution of the United Nations, particularly as leader of the nonaligned movement.

John Slater, assistant professor, department of Spanish and Portuguese

Professor Slater's book project, "Momentary Monuments: The Reign of the Hapsburgs and the Vegetable Kingdom," demonstrates how early modern Spanish fascination with natural history developed into a political philosophy that opposed corporal models of the state. He shows how Spanish kings were often represented as rational gardeners of a vegetable kingdom, rather than the heads of a body politic.