Projects

“Truth and Lies”: The 2021-2022 GW Humanities Center

“Archives, Lies and Videotapes: Making Sense out of the Arab-American Television (AATV) Collection” 

William Youmans, Associate Professor, School of Media and Public Affairs

Arab American Television (AATV) was a Los Angeles-based media syndicate. It produced a weekly, bilingual, magazine-style television program from 1980 – 2005. It also published periodicals, videotaped weddings and organized events such as banquets and concerts. Although it’s largely forgotten and there are only a few traces of it online, it left behind a hidden chronicle of Arab America during the 1980s to the early 2000s. The primary method in this project is archival research, starting with the creation of an actually accessible and organized digital archive based thousands of videotapes, photos, documents and audio recordings. This project will go beyond the archive and document the memories of principal members of the AATV staff through interviews to contextualize what we see in the archive, to give it legibility for outsiders and future generations. Besides being a rich record of Arab-American media history, it highlights discrepancies between history, the narratives of the principals and the record as it is contained in the archive. Yet, we must interrogate the lies of archives. Even if this collection were a perfect, holistic record of AATV, it is still largely a mediation of front stage performances. Media are not objective documentations; there are editorial judgments, motivated framings, glaring omissions, biases towards visualization, technical problems as well as the human propensity to behave for cameras.

“‘The Barbary States of America’: The Barbary Wars and the Development of Race”

Matthew Goetz, ABD, History

The Barbary Wars (1801-1805, 1815), fought between the United States of America and the so-called Barbary States of North Africa (Algiers, Morocco, Tripoli, and Tunis), were caused by the enslavement of American sailors by Barbary privateers. My research project examines the impact the Barbary Wars had on American racial ideology and the debate over slavery in the United States. Crucial to my project are the writings of Americans who participated in the Barbary Wars: soldiers, diplomats, and enslaved sailors. Within their writings, the authors crafted their own truth, one in which the “savagery” of Africans made them unsuited for freedom while the white captives’ ability to heroically maintain their virtue in the face of hardship proved their claim to liberty and racial superiority. Antislavery activists, however, contested this “truth” from the moment of its inception. They argued instead that the Barbary Wars were yet another reminder of how the United States remained wedded to slavery despite its ideals of liberty, and how Americans allowed racial prejudice to blind them from their hypocrisy. My preliminary research suggests that the Barbary Wars may have reaffirmed white Americans’ racial prejudice in the short term, but the legacy of the Barbary Wars served as a valuable symbol to antebellum abolitionists, providing a precedent of the Federal Government acting decisively against slavery.

“The Blues of Law and Order: The New York Police Department and Popular Culture, 1973-2001”

Francesco De Salvatore, ABD, American Studies

Since the 1970s, cop shows and films have been one of the most produced and viewed popular culture genres. Representations of police officers have even extended beyond the silver screen to museum spaces, monuments, social protests, and the more mundane, such as flags, pins and t-shirts. Ultimately, an entire cultural industry has developed around the police officer and in large part, police officers, their administrators, and their professional organizations have had a large hand in shaping these cultural productions. Typically this industry has been brushed over as a form of “copaganda,” while the less critical have seen it as a fine means to support the thin blue line. Both of these explanations have failed to truly explain the history of this cultural industry, its implications to the politics and economy of law and order in the era of late capitalism, and most importantly, its endurance as a cultural form. Taking on a materialist approach to the study of popular culture relating to the police, “The Blues of Law and Order: The New York Police Department and Popular Culture, 1973-2001” hopes to expose the fractured and fragile alliance of various political actors and interests that produced a cultural industry around the largest police force in America during the era of post-Fordism. One of the most important actors being police officers themselves, as they not only grew into political actors during this era, but also, cultural producers. By exploring the creation of the film and television department within the NYPD, along with the various NYPD officers that consulted on films and show, wrote novels, and worked as curators, “The Blues of Law and Order” ultimately makes a strong case for how the history of policing, and the history of law and order is as much a cultural history, as it is a political history. 

For this upcoming year, as a fellow at the Humanities Center I intend to complete a chapter about the history of New York City police consultants who worked on television shows and films in the 1970s.

“The Good Lie: Disaster Capitalism and Failed Humanitarianism”

Randi Kristensen, Assistant Professor of Writing

This project examines discourses of humanitarianism that both disguise the structural causes of the conditions that require humanitarian intervention, and reproduce them. It argues that the discourses of humanitarianism are a cover story, i.e. an untruth, masking and reinforcing starkly exploitative relations of capital, power, and knowledge. It focuses on the critical and creative responses of Black Caribbean people, broadly construed, to their positioning as sites of economic extraction which creates a need for charity. Concentrating on three locations – Jamaica, Haiti, and New Orleans in the United States – it investigates how their vulnerability to disaster results from the absence of state services and infrastructure as a result of neo-liberal economic policies, called “structural adjustment” by international finance organizations (IFCs), and “privatization” in the US. 

My specific interest is in how writers, filmmakers and artists indigenous to these sites are interpreting and challenging dominant narratives that naturalize such disasters, and the practices and ideologies of humanitarianism that accompany their aftermaths. Literary, visual, installation, and performative arts by Black people provide a counter-narrative and challenge to their marginalization in these processes.

This work is a pioneering contribution to the growing literature of critiques of humanitarianism, ranging from satire websites by and for those in the aid worker community, such as the #stuffexpataidworkerslike blog, to critical texts by aid workers and journalists like Beverly Bell, David Reiff, and Jonathan Katz. This would be one of the first scholarly critiques to amplify the critical, creative voices of local Black knowledge-bearers.

“Lies that Bind”

Theodore Christov, Associate Professor of Honors, History, and International Affairs

My research project, The Lies That Bind, traces the fraught relationship between the individual and the collective with respect to autonomy in the historical development of modern sovereignty. Is the autonomous and free person in conflict with the autonomous and free state?

The idea of founding myths goes as far back as Plato but what kinds of myths we choose to tell and how they continue to shape our collective consciousness is a story that I seek to tell. I do so by focusing on a genealogy of self-determination precisely because no phrase has had greater political resonance in the last century and yet is so little understood, particularly in who is the ‘self’, the ‘people’, the body politic.

In examining the history and growth of the state, the goal is to trace the origins of people’s self-determination as a political and historical category and how it evolved from a primarily individualistic teaching of self-constitution and freedom in the late 18th and 19th centuries to a collectivist doctrine in the 20th century. In doing so, one goal is to put into question the category of the collective as ‘a people’ with—what Rousseau called—a single ‘general will’ and ask, how does the people come into being in the first place?

Some possible questions that may be considered include, but are not limited to: Who is the ‘self’ in self-determination? How did groups come to replace individuals as the agents of self-determination? And more importantly, why do we need to tell ourselves ‘founding lies’ in justifying the coming into being and the continued existence of states?

“Screening Transgender Shakespeare”

Alexa Joubin, Professor of English

Can fiction set us free from harmful lies? In Richard Eyre’s 2004 film Stage Beauty, the seventeenth-century star Ned Kynaston—after a standing ovation for his Desdemona in Shakespeare’s Othello—returns to the darkened theatre to meet his lover, who cajoles him to put on a blond wig. Kynaston retorts, “Would you ask your lady whores to wear a wig to bed?” His lover’s glib, deceitful reply—“If it made them more of a woman”—distorts the truth about Kynaston’s trans femininity. The film, based on the historical figure of Kynaston, offers only partial truths to audiences in its fictionalization of trans life. 

This scene exemplifies the tension between the truth of one’s self-determined identity and cinema’s screening of lies about that identity, and invites fluid interpretations of how one’s body relates to one’s social role. 

This book uses the trans lens to examine partial truths in ten Shakespeare-inflected films about gender-crossing. The trans lens frames gender as a set of relationships rather than a fixed destination. This theory furthers our understanding of genderplay as the interplay between truths and lies. 

They illustrate two key questions: what constitutes truths about trans identities, and how does fiction authorize trans life? Film aesthetics have expanded or rejected the idea of “transitivity”—the liminal paths to gender expressions. Investigating contemporary and early modern fiction about gender identities, this book argues that trans individuals’ claims to personal truths increase as they traverse gendered boundaries—independent of their sexed bodies. 

“Suppressing News of a Riot: Slavery and its Erasure at Early GW”

Phillip Troutman, Assistant Professor of Writing and History

On January 18th, 1847, students at a small Baptist college in Washington, DC, launched a riot, shut down classes, and were poiesed to torch an effigy of their classmate Henry Jackson Arnold. A junior from Massachusetts, Arnold had been exposed for helping Abram, an enslaved college laborer, try to file a freedom petition in DC courts. College president Joel Bacon sent Henry packing that very morning; Abram was already on his way to Virginia, possibly for sale south. News of the incident posed an existential crisis for the college and sparked national debate among Baptists, who questioned slavery’s influence on the curriculum and on intellectual freedom there. Columbian College survived nevertheless and went on to become the George Washington University. In fact, the story seemed to threaten the university’s reputation even in 1904, at the very moment Columbian was renaming itself GW and trying to capitalize on the Founding Father’s vision of a national university. In 1903, within months of securing a lucrative fundraising arrangement with the George Washington Memorial Association, university president Charles Needham actively quashed the story of Abram and Henry, blocking the Southern History Association from publishing transcripts of Bacon’s letters describing the secret interracial collaboration. George Washington’s namesake institution apparently could not bear the association with its own past entanglements with slavery. My project explores the 1847 incident, its 1903 erasure, and legacies of both of those actions at GW today.

Testimonio, Precarity, and Migrancy in Contemporary Mexican Literature”

Manuel Cuellar, Assistant Professor of Spanish

The ongoing humanitarian crisis of Central Americans at the border has prompted a reframing of how to give an account of the migrant experience. My project analyzes the recent turn to testimonio (testimony) by Mexican authors Emiliano Monge and Valeria Luiselli as a political and aesthetic strategy to render the plight of Central Americans. Blurring the lines between fact and fiction and at times truth and lies, testimonio, as a political literary genre in Latin America, has become fundamental for reimagining new forms of politics and engagement with the Other. I argue that Monge’s novel, Las tierras arrasadas (2015), and Luiselli’s essay, Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions (2016) explore the precarization of language and migrant lives through testimonio. The novel and the essay test the limits of testimonio as a literary form that can and cannot account for migrancy and displacement. In so doing, they reveal the aesthetic and political implications of identifying with and giving an account of—indeed relating as I contend— the experience and ephemeral voices of a Central American nameless Other. How can we attempt to give voice to the Other? What is the role of literature in the ongoing crisis at the border? In what ways do these projects inform or, quite the contrary, run the risk of reproducing the logics of a neoliberal system that renders migrants disposable? In other words, how can language and writing produce an ethical awakening that may alter our own politics, ethics, and aesthetics?

“Towards a Feminist History of State Neglect”

Sara Matthiesen, Assistant Professor of History and WGSS

Feminist scholarship on reproduction in the United States is necessarily shaped by a political landscape rife with outright lies and incomplete truths. Researchers that uncover messy, complex realities about abortion, contraception, family making, and political activism undertaken in these arenas are often forced to choose between the truth of their results and the political ends that such truth might be put towards. As a Humanities Center fellow, I will work on an article-length project exploring the tendency of historical and sociological scholarship concerned with reproduction to frame people’s reproductive decision-making as a site perpetually under attack across time and place. While such scholarship has produced myriad evidence of public and private efforts to control different people’s reproduction throughout American history, it is also the case that this is the political frame most often applied to the issue of reproductive rights. The essay will explore how this frame–at once political and analytical–has hampered feminist scholars’ ability to document the ways institutional neglect has been equally harmful to the project of reproductive freedom. This, in turn, has left us with fewer models of how to actively mobilize people against state neglect, a far more diffuse but no less devastating force than those typically targeted by campaigns for reproductive rights. This essay offers one path by which a feminist history of state neglect might move the field closer to a more complete truth of how and why reproductive freedom remains out of reach.

“Truth and Lies in the History of the World Trade Center”

Dara Orenstein, Associate Professor of American Studies

Most of us think of the World Trade Center as a singular site that became meaningful in the event of its destruction. We don’t think of it as a generic type, a spatial form that arose in New York City at the same time as in Bombay and that followed the launch of world trade centers in New Orleans, San Francisco, and Seattle; we don’t think of it as an icon of the Age of Three Worlds, a companion to the Berlin Wall (which went up a decade before NYC’s Twin Towers, and fell a decade before, too). We also don’t think of it—in this case NYC’s, specifically—as a force in the history of capitalism for the three decades that it stood; we don’t think of it as articulating the subordination of industry to finance at the local and global scales. As we approach the twentieth anniversary of 9/11, my new book project on NYC’s Twin Towers will tackle, to start, two sets of questions regarding the latter aporia. First, who exactly leased offices in the buildings? What kinds of firms, with what kinds of relationships to the seaport? And second, how were the buildings perceived? Did they spark conspiracy theories akin to those that engulfed them after they collapsed? Hanging over this investigation is a problem that suggests why this subject requires a cultural historian: How is it even possible to recover the true stories of the buildings? The papers of the Port Authority of NY & NJ were destroyed with Tower One. Old listings of individual tenants are no longer available. But what other artifacts can shed light on the daily life of the Twin Towers? Three telephone books from 1977-1979 for the “World Trade Area” (note, not “Wall Street”) will provide an initial glimpse.

“Culture in Crisis”: The 2020-2021 GW Pilot Humanities Center

“Capitalism and Impunity: Exceptions in Economic History”

Trevor Jackson, Assistant Professor of History

Capitalism and Impunity: Exceptions in Economic History is a history of impunity in European finance across the very long eighteenth century.  Unlike other histories of the origins of banking and finance, it is focused on inequality, malfeasance, and crisis; unlike other histories of inequality and capitalism, it is focused on the origins of international financial markets and central banks rather than industry and wage labor.  Capitalism and Impunity adapts the concept of impunity from the sphere of international criminal law to the study of financial crisis.  Each chapter shows how the capacity for impunity changed through the course of one or more international financial crises: 1720, 1793-97, and 1825.  Structuring the book around financial crises means focusing on how each crisis was unique rather than part of a general pattern.  Each crisis after 1720 has been informed by the distorted historical memory of previous crises, and the resolution of each crisis has defined the institutional parameters in which the next crisis took place.  Each time, popular anger at perceived injustice and the attendant improvised policy responses produced efforts to eliminate the capacity for impunity, but succeeded only in changing who could act with impunity, and how.  The 1720 crisis moved impunity from a personal characteristic of sovereigns to a professional attribute adhering to the necessary functions of technically skilled managers of capital.  The crisis of the French Revolution politicized impunity, deploying it as a tool of statecraft and governance in England and coding it as a category of counter-revolutionary malfeasance in France.  The Panic of 1825 settled the parameters of impunity in the reconstructed international financial system.  Since the nineteenth century, markets themselves act with impunity, and crises are natural, inevitable, and intelligible.  Capitalism and Impunity shows how financial crises stopped being crimes and became natural disasters instead.

“Climate Change—and COVID-19—in American Popular Culture”

Michael Svoboda, Assistant Professor of Writing

Americans are caught in a vortex of intermingled crises: a pandemic, an economic downturn, and brutally revived questions of racial justice. Amid the almost hourly alerts about these problems, news media also offer Americans occasional glimpses of a looming global crisis: climate change. Sometimes these crises are explicitly linked. Scientists have asked how much COVID-19 shutdowns might reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Activists and policymakers have suggested the pandemic’s deep disruption of our economy could create an opening for a green recovery. And the broader public discussions prompted by Black Lives Matter protests have forced environmental organizations to confront the systemic racism within their own, almost entirely white, ranks.

Embedded within public disputes over these crises is a deeper but not fully articulated debate over American history. Like many climate activists, proponents of aggressive action against the COVID-19 virus have invoked the memory of World War II, when FDR’s administration oversaw a massive mobilization of military production. In dueling op-eds on the coronavirus crisis, however, very different lessons are being drawn from the war by conservatives and liberals. Indeed, from the more extreme pieces on the right, one might infer that a coordinated federal response is more to be feared than the virus. This, liberals need to recognize, is the result of a decades-long effort to counter and revise public memory of the war. 

In Climate Change—and COVID-19—in American Popular Culture, cultural critic Michael Svoboda will compare how these two very different but related crises have been depicted on magazine covers, addressed in advertisements, narrated in documentaries and films, and debated in political cartoons and commentary. Through these interconnected studies, he hopes to show how the decades-long conflict over American history has shaped, and likely stunted, our ability to respond to such complex, global, and pervasive crises.

“The Coronavirus Crisis and American Astrology”

William Burns, Adjunct Professor of History

Astrology is a lens through which tens of millions of Americans understand the world, but the social and cultural history of modern astrology is largely uncharted territory.   The project studies the impact of the Coronavirus epidemic on American astrology and vice-versa.  Questions to be asked include: What claims did astrologers make to predict the virus?  How did astrologers, both as individuals and as a profession, deal with alleged failure to predict the virus?  What courses of action did astrologers recommend for dealing with both the virus and the periods of isolation it involved?  Has the chaos and uncertainty of the coronavirus era caused more to turn to astrological guidance?

            This project studies the writings, videos and podcasts of professional astrologers from late 2019, when the first news of the virus emerged from Wuhan and astrologers were preparing their predictions for the following year, to the summer of 2020, when the virus had become an established fact of life throughout much of the world.  I will trace the way in which the pandemic was fitted into astrological models and the way in which it was deployed as either a validation or an attack on the idea of astrological prediction.  I will also attempt to evaluate the impact of astrology on the country’s reaction to the virus.  Depending on where research takes me, I may also consider astrological treatment of other events of this tumultuous year, such as the BLM protests or the Presidential election.

“Creative Contagion and the Diffusion of Innovation: Social Network Analysis and the Plague of Ancient Athens”

Diane Cline, Associate Professor of History and Classics

A culture is in crisis: a plague has killed a third of the population. International travel and trade has slowed to a trickle. People living in the outskirts had to leave their jobs to shelter inside the city walls. Unemployment rose. Morale plummeted. Faith in their higher powers was lost. And now the plague has killed its leader. His successor was the worst sort of demagogue, leading the people to make poor decisions, threatening democracy as a form of government. That’s right, we are talking Pericles and the city of Athens around 430 to 403 BCE.

What happens to social networks when the complex system is disrupted by a crisis, such as a plague?  Which elements of resilience combined to raise the Athenians back up after they lost the war in 404 BCE? Since 2010, I have used the people of ancient Athens as a sandbox for exploring the application of social network analysis and complex adaptive systems theory to ancient history. In a paper I gave in Edinburgh and published in 2018 (on the CV), I presented the case for seeing the social networks of Athenian artisans and construction-workers (480-430 BCE) as a complex adaptive system, with self-organizing properties, growing and adapting to maximize opportunity, power, and collaborative capacities. My social network analysis begins by studying the complex system as it was collapsing in and just after 429 BCE, and then contrast that with how the networks inside the city looked when they revived.

“Culture and the Coronavirus: A GWU Documentary Project”

Melani McAlister, Professor of American Studies

The project will document the experience and responses of the George Washington University community to the COVID crisis, while also providing a showcase for humanities and social science research on the pandemic. The project includes two components: the collection of oral histories and archival materials, developed in collaboration with the GWU University Library, and a website of exhibits and scholarship that draws in part on those materials. Culture and the Coronavirus aims to document the social and political impact of the pandemic, including the impact of choices made by government, medical practitioners, individuals, and GW itself.

COVID-19 is a scientific and medical problem, but it is also an issue of policy, politics, and values. In the US, as elsewhere, the pandemic is deeply shaped by culture(s)—by ideas about the body, the individual, and social responsibility; by hope and anxiety, beliefs and values; and by deep divides of race, region, religion, and class. The policy response to COVID in the United States and other countries—and the arguments about those policies that have crisscrossed our country and our world—cannot be understood outside a framework that links science and culture, technology and politics. In this realm, the humanities and interpretative social sciences have a great deal to contribute to one of the great scientific and technical issues of our time.

The project’s archival component is focused on assembling personal memories and reflections from a broad swath of the GW community–students, staff, faculty, and alumni—along with collecting and documenting other kinds of materials: photographs, emails, and journal entries. The project website will provide an interdisciplinary space of exhibits, narratives, and scholarship.

“Loot!: Cultural Property Theft & the Financing of Global Political Violence”

Jennifer Wells, Assistant Professor of History

Soon after the Islamic State stormed across the deserts of Syria and Iraq in 2014 and 2015, images emerged of militants, clad in black, looting and desecrating monuments and museums whose edifices and artifacts dated back to Hammurabi’s Mesopotamia. Pillaging UNESCO World Heritage sites not only “culturally cleansed” the Levant of idolatrous objects, but also provided the militants with a robust revenue stream as Greek cornices, Roman statues, and Byzantine mosaics made their way to the black market. ISIS is hardly the first state to loot and sell culturally significant art and artifacts. The Islamic State’s methods and scope, however, are significant for understanding how non-state actors in the twenty-first century finance themselves while simultaneously achieving broader, ideological aims.

Loot! sits at the intersection of history, law, political science, anthropology, archaeology, international affairs, and security studies. It examines cultural property theft and destruction in Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and Asia since the 1990s. Drawing upon international charters, legal records, satellite imaging, witness statements, archaeological research, and interviews conducted across four continents and in 25 countries, it argues that the pace of cultural property theft and destruction is accelerating during conflict and that we are witnessing a radical transformation in how non-state actors and illegitimate states finance themselves, evading international sanctions and challenging local and global stability. Conflict is expected to increase 13%-26% over the next century as climate change intensifies demands for dwindling resources, particularly in the sub-Saharan African belt, Middle East, and Central Asia, regions that already have the highest concentration of rebel groups and unfettered access to cultural heritage sites. Because the international community has proven reluctant to prosecute individuals for cultural property theft and destruction, non-state actors have, in the past decade, become increasingly aggressive and sophisticated in their sale of appropriated objects. A systematic, comprehensive study as to the nexus between looted artifacts, the financing of global political violence, and the cultural genocide that often motivates these crimes is thus critical for security worldwide and can lead to meaningful, enforceable changes at the international level.

“Pages of the Uyghur Past: A User-Friendly Archive for a Community in Crisis”

Eric Schluessel, Assistant Professor of History

The widespread destruction of cultural sites in Xinjiang or East Turkestan, the homeland of the Uyghur people and many other groups, is now well documented. It has been accompanied by heightened restrictions on scholarly and cultural institutions, especially those concerning the region’s history. This destruction and closing-off of cultural resources in the Uyghur homeland has inspired a revival in the diaspora in places from Istanbul to Washington, DC, where people are working to recreate the cultural and intellectual life that once thrived in Uyghur cities. One key component of that revival, as identified by some diaspora scholars, is access to literary, religious, and historical manuscripts from the region, particularly those written in the Chaghatay Turkic language, which is closely related to modern Uyghur. This project aims to support scholarship and popular understanding of the region’s history by developing a user-friendly online portal to make such manuscript written sources from the Uyghur homeland freely available and easily usable for research or study. While many of these sources are in open access digital collections, many more circulate only in private digital copies. Moreover, paleographic and interpretive issues make these works difficult to access and approach. The portal will include updated metadata in Uyghur and English, as well as transliterations glosses, and descriptions of the works to aid reading. This year, we will develop a pilot version of the portal, tentatively named “Sayrami” after one of the region’s most famous historians.

“Reading and Meaning in Early Modern and Modern Humanisms”

Heather Bamford, Associate Professor of Spanish

Addressing the crisis in the humanities requires both a definition of reading and an identification of the meaning we hope that our readings convey. My current monograph project, Unprinted: Reading and Meaning in Early Modern Iberia, defines reading and meaning in manuscript texts in early modern Spain in the first two centuries of the print era, from 1500 to 1700. Early modern Iberian manuscripts came on the heels of multi-confessional medieval Iberia: they are the writings of Old Christians and the descendants of Muslims and Jews known as Moriscos and Conversos, respectively. Neither medieval manuscripts nor printed books—Spain’s “unprinted” texts in Spanish, Latin, and Spanish in Arabic script—evince many manuscript cultures and forms of reading and meaning production. These diverse forms of meaning, some of them non-semantic (conveyed through touch or the sound of non-sensical text, for instance) raise questions about the meanings we hope that our students’ readings produce, from the acquisition of knowledge to the production of the presence of the past. Reading and meaning are the building blocks of hermeneutics and other methods of understanding, including faith and magic. Scholarship on medieval and early modern manuscripts centers on the ambiguous categories of manuscript culture and reading practices. The main difficulty would seem to be the meaning of culture, but the notion of reading practices is no less problematic. While “culture” often conflates the vast range of uses of manuscript texts, “practices” either discourages a recognition of difference among similar methods of reading or leads to a fixation on a specific manifestation of reading. Our challenge, as humanists, is to question both culture and practice. It is to ask why we read in the first place and to identify the type of meaning we seek.

“The Rise of Quarantine in Late Medieval Spain”

Abigail Agresta, Assistant Professor of History

I am in the early stages of research on a history of quarantine in fifteenth-century Spain. When plague reappeared in Europe with the Black Death of the mid-fourteenth century, doctors and municipal authorities responded to the initial shock with existing models of public health: models that emphasized hygiene and the role of the local environment in mitigating epidemic disease. As plague outbreaks continued over the next few generations, however, medieval culture adapted to these recurrent crises. The authorities began increasingly to stress the role of person- to-person contagion, and to emphasize restriction of human movement over hygiene measures. In Spain, this shift from environments to bodies dovetailed with other social developments, including new movement of people through the growing African slave trade and rising concern over religious “contagion” from the peninsula’s Jewish and Muslim populations. The rise of quarantine in Italy has interested historians of medicine for many years, but its emergence has been little studied outside of Italy. Nor has the emphasis on plague contagion been approached as a cultural as well as a medical phenomenon, which my early research suggests that it was in Spain.

This academic year, I intend to lay groundwork for this project, which will ultimately draw on extensive archival research. As I will be on parental leave during the fall semester, this work will be done in the spring and summer. In the spring, I plan to complete background research with secondary and published primary sources at the Library of Congress and via Interlibrary Loan. I will also make use of recent advancements in aDNA analysis, which allow the movement of historic plague epidemics to be traced in novel ways. I would employ a student RA to help complete a detailed timeline of plague outbreaks in the Iberian peninsula. This timeline will allow me to precisely direct future archival work, and will provide the data for a GIS map of plague outbreaks to be made available online. During the summer of 2021, I will use the GW Humanities Center funding to visit the Arxiu del Regne de Mallorca and the Archivo del Reino de Valencia to survey their material. I will use the data collected to complete an article on quarantine and the slave trade. I plan to present a draft of this article to the Humanities Center community during the fellowship year.

The impetus for this project arises out of the research for my first book, a history of environmental crisis in the city of Valencia in the later Middle Ages. An article based on that research, on shifting understandings of plague in late medieval Valencia, was published in April in Speculum (the premier journal in Medieval Studies). This current project stands at the crossroads of several thriving fields: the history of religious coexistence in Iberia (sometimes called convivencia), environmental history, and history of medicine. Examining the recurring crisis of late medieval plague epidemics will shed light on connections between these fields and open up new avenues for all three.

“’Such a Spoiled World’: The Anxiety of Sustainability in Renaissance France”

Pauline Goul, Assistant Professor of French

The analogy between the current pandemic and premodern plagues is already a topos, but it risks missing the complicated sense that the world is, in many ways, spoiled.[1] We are witnessing first hand (again) the concordance of competing, related crises.[2] My work looks at how writers in sixteenth-century France apprehended those complications, the inextricability of human inhabiting of the earth and of the very consequences of this inhabiting, in other words, an early modern version of a care for sustainability. This year, I will be completing two chapters of my book manuscript. The first focuses on the perception of the limitedness of resources in travel narratives and natural history written about the New World by French explorers, and the other on how the same New World and the wars of Religion prompted Montaigne’s denunciation of the “spoiled world” in the Essays

I argue that the crisis in culture in Renaissance France was deeply intertwined with a crisis in the environment; the perception that the environment is not as much of a stable ground as previously assumed. This year in particular, I will study the affect that was related to the perception of such crises: this allows me to define anxiety as being at the intersection of environmental and affect studies.


[1] The roots of such a global pandemic have to do with intensive agriculture, also a reason for climate change. We are not merely undergoing the pandemic, we provoked it.

[2] Many articles written since the beginning of the covid-19 pandemic have highlighted 1/ that there are similarities between the denial of the risks of covid-19 by a great portion of the population and the denial of the risks of climate change and 2/ that the current state of the climate worsens the effects of the pandemic. 

“Womanist Characterization of African American Literature for Applied Impact”

Jameta Barlow, Assistant Professor of Writing

This project will map seminal African American literature onto the eight modalities characterizing Womanism, in an effort to explore the utility of a humanistic intervention during these COVID-19 and racial trauma and healing political moments. A public database of catalogued Womanist modalities withi African American literature will be the major outcome of this project, as well as future pilot interventions employing the modalities and literature as affirmations and behavioral change approaches.

Womanism is a transdisciplinary humanistic perspective, epistemology and methodology that has been employed throughout the world to address environmental issues, sexual violence and mental health, among other social issues. Specifically, Womanism is “a social change perspective rooted in Black women’s and other women of color’s everyday experiences and everyday methods of problem solving in everyday spaces, extended to the problem of ending all forms of oppression for all people, restoring the balance between people and the environment/nature and reconciling human life with the spiritual dimension,” (Marparyan, 2012; Phillips, 2006). Womanism is both interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary in its theoretical framing, ontologies, epistemologies and methodologies. 
As a community psychologist and public health scientist, I engage in Womanism modalities in my work to disrupt cardiometabolic syndrome (e.g., diabetes, heart disease, stroke, hypertension) among Black communities. Central to this work is my curriculum of “writehealing” where I use writing to address self-care, harmoninzing and coordinating and mutual aid and self-help. However, a major gap in this work is a database of relevant African American literature that can be utilized for intervention. This project offers a humanistic approach for applied impact. A database that allows the user to discover African American literature based on a Womanist modality, emotions and psychological outcomes bridges multiple disciplinary gaps.