Robert Asen
UW-Madison Resident Faculty Fellow
Communication Arts, UW-Madison
"Democracy, Deliberation, and Education: The Challenges and Opportunities of Local Policymaking"
Drawing from a two-year ethnography of three school districts in Wisconsin, this project analyzes local school-board deliberations over education policy. Bringing together citizens with different values, knowledge, interests, and resources, these deliberations demonstrate the perils and promise of local enactments of democracy. My analysis of the deliberations focuses on four major themes: ideology, inequality, trust, and expertise. Analysis of these four themes demonstrates not only how these local Wisconsin communities handled complicated and sometimes contentious issues, but how we may imagine more inclusive, efficacious models of deliberation that foster engagement among members of diverse democratic societies.
Robert Asen is a resident fellow at the Institute for Research in the Humanities and a professor in the Department of Communication Arts at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Asen conducts research and teaches in the areas of public policy debate, public sphere studies, and rhetoric and critical theory. His research explores relationships between social and economic inequality and public deliberation as well as issues that arise in theorizing a post bourgeois public sphere. Asen is the author of Invoking the Visible Hand (Michigan State University Press, 2009) and Visions of Poverty (Michigan State University Press, 2002). Asen has also co-edited two books (with Daniel C. Brouwer), Public Modalities (University of Alabama Press, 2009) and Counterpublics and the State (SUNY Press, 2001).
Russ Castronovo
UW-Madison Resident Faculty Fellow
Dorothy Draheim Professor of English and American Studies, UW-Madison
"Propaganda 1776"
Long a pejorative word since its associations with the flag-waving and jingoism surrounding U.S. participation in World War I, “propaganda” would hardly seem a useful concept for understanding democracy. After all, spreading false information, manipulating facts, and other propaganda techniques are preferred by totalitarian states, not democratic ones. This book project questions such conventional wisdom by examining how popular consent and public opinion in early America relied on the spirited dissemination of rumor, forgery, and invective. Propaganda 1776 considers the extent to which the dispersal and circulation—indeed, the propagation—of information and opinion across the various media of 18th-century print culture helped speed the flow of transatlantic republicanism. The spread of revolutionary material in the form of newspapers, pamphlets, broadsides, letters, songs, and poems across British North America (and later the United States) created multiple networks that spawned new and often radical ideas about political communication.
Russ Castronovo is Dorothy Draheim Professor of English and American Studies. He has written widely on American literature and culture on topics ranging from eighteenth-century communications to Wikileaks. His books include Beautiful Democracy (Chicago, 2007), Necro Citizenship (Duke, 2001), and Fathering the Nation (Berkeley 1995). He has also edited several volumes on American studies, democracy, and U.S. literary history, and has served on the editorial boards of American Literature and American Quarterly.
Laurie Beth Clark
UW-Madison Resident Faculty Fellow
Art, UW-Madison
"Always Already Again: Trauma Tourism and the Politics of Memory Culture"
Always Already Again: Trauma Tourism and the Politics of Memory Culture is a transnational, comparative study of the discourses that surround the production and consumption of memorials. It considers sites on five continents that have been established or are in the process of being established to commemorate a range of past violences. The primary venues in this study are concentration camps in Germany and Poland, slave forts in West Africa, peace parks at atomic bomb blast sites Nagasaki in Japan, genocide memorials in Rwanda and Cambodia, museums established to celebrate the end of apartheid in South Africa, sites being used to commemorate the American War throughout Vietnam, and former clandestine torture centers as well as purpose-built monuments to the disappeared in Chile and Argentina. Trauma tourism is a highly contested practice where competing interests comply with or resist established paradigms. This book argues that such tensions constitute trauma tourism, that trauma tourism owes its substance and richness to contestation.
UW-Madison Resident Fellow Laurie Beth Clark is Professor in the Art Department where she teaches studio courses as well as graduate seminars on topics in Visual Culture Studies. Clark has been a faculty member at the University of Wisconsin since 1985. Clark’s career merges theory and practice. Her creative projects have been shown in theatres, galleries, museums, gardens, forests, and public and private spaces in more than 150 shows in 35 countries on five continents. Extensive documentation of her creative work can be found at lbclark.net. In conjunction with her current research on trauma tourism, Clark is developing Ossuary, a compendium of bones designed by artists. Her writing has been published in journals (Performance Paradigm, Performance Research, TDR, Theatre Topics, Tourism and Transnational Studies, Visual Culture) and anthologies (Marketing Memory in Latin America-Duke, The Object Reader-Routledge, Blaze: Discourse on Art-Cambridge, A Performance Cosmology-Routledge, Place and Performance-Palgrave, Macmillan, The Art of Truthtelling After Authoritarian Rule-University of Wisconsin, Guerilla Performance and Multimedia- Continuum). She is currently working on the book manuscript Always Already Again: Trauma Tourism and the Politics of Memory Culture.
Ivan Ermakoff
UW-Madison Resident Faculty Fellow
Sociology, UW-Madison
"Enacting state persecution: the Police and anti-Semitic policy from a comparative perspective, 1940-1944"
Enacting State Persecution investigates the factors that shape state agents’ decision to collaborate in, or subvert, the implementation of inhumane policies. The starting point of this inquiry is the observation that a modern state cannot persecute vast groups of people without relying extensively on its civil servants. However, unless these civil servants have been specifically recruited for this purpose, persecuting others, committing acts of violence against specific groups, and, more broadly, committing inhumane acts are not part of their training, worldview and official duties. This study explores the mechanisms that make this violence possible by examining the role played by the French Police in the deportation of Jews from France between 1942 and 1944.
Ivan Ermakoff is Professor of Sociology at UW-Madison. His research agenda has been centered on collective processes and outcomes in times of disruption. Along these lines, he has been studying the adoption of self-limiting norms ("Prelates and Princes," American Sociological Review, 62:405-422), collective abdications (Ruling Oneself Out, Duke University Press), the rise and fall of patrimonial structures of power ("Patrimony and collective capacity," Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 636: 182-203), shifts in epistemic beliefs ("Theory of Practice, Rational Choice and Historical Change," Theory and Society, 39: 527-553), and the implementation of state persecution ("Police et arrestations," Le Genre Humain, 52: 215-243).
Ellen Samuels
UW-Madison Resident Faculty Fellow
Gender & Women's Studies and English, UW-Madison
"Double Meanings: Representing Conjoined Twins"
Double Meanings: Representing Conjoined Twins analyzes cultural representations of conjoined twins in literature, film, media, and popular culture. The guiding principle for this project is to reverse the sensationalism usually attached to public discussions of conjoinment by turning the lens of fascination back onto the cultural meanings attached to representations of such twins. Double Meanings asks what representations of conjoinment can tell us about the workings of power in different cultural settings, especially as conjoinment intersects with more familiar identities of race, class, gender, and sexuality. Unlike previous scholarly works, this project turns away from broad philosophical questions to explore such historically-located areas of inquiry as colonialism, slavery, sexual science, modern consumerism, and globalization, all of which shape the representation of conjoined twins from the nineteenth through twenty-first centuries.
Ellen Samuels is Assistant Professor of English and Gender & Women’s Studies at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, and Director of UW Disability Studies. Her critical writing on disability, gender, and race has been published in numerous journals and anthologies, including Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, The Oxford Handbook of Nineteenth-Century American Literature, Feminist Disability Studies, GLQ: Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literatures of the United States, NWSA Journal, and Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies. Her awards include a 2012 American Association of University Women Publication Grant, the 2011 Catherine Stimpson Prize for Outstanding Feminist Scholarship, two Lambda Literary Awards, and the Ed Roberts Postdoctoral Fellowship in Disability Studies at the University of California at Berkeley. She received her B.A from Oberlin College, her M.F.A. in creative writing from Cornell University, and her Ph.D. in English from the University of California at Berkeley. Her first book, Self Evident: Disability and Bodily Identity, is forthcoming from NYU Press, and she is now working on a new book, Double Meanings: Representing Conjoined Twins.
Jeffrey Steele
UW-Madison Resident Faculty Fellow
English, UW-Madison
“The Visible and Invisible City: Antebellum Authors and the Literary Construction of New York City”
My project explores the ways in which a generation of American writers conceptualized a new phenomenon, the emerging metropolis. While nature writing has been widely studied in recent years, we still lack a taxonomy of urban literary forms or a discussion of the most important literary strategies used by city writers. One of the reasons for this critical neglect lies in the connection between New York authors and the history of journalism (which has received little critical attention from literary scholars). With the exception of Herman Melville, all of the writers in my study (including George Foster and Fanny Fern) worked as journalists; five of them (Lydia Maria Child, Margaret Fuller, Edgar Allan Poe, Walt Whitman, and George Lippard) also served as editors. As I examine these authors’ literary construction of New York, I will be paying special attention to their conceptions of urban space, which for most of them contains important non-visual elements and is often discontinuous or folded. One of the primary goals of this project is to move beyond models of nineteenth-century urban writing based upon the flâneur–the strolling journalist who emphasized visual impressions of the city, often at the expense of ‘invisible’ factors such as class and ideological divisions. In this regard, I am following in the footsteps of Marxist and postmodern geographers like Henri Lefebvre and Edward Soja who challenge the mystification of space into a visible plane excluding class or political divisions.
Jeffrey Steele, Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, specializes in nineteenth-century American studies, American women’s writing (especially the writing of Margaret Fuller), and literary and spatial theory. He is the author of The Representation of the Self in the American Renaissance (1987), The Essential Margaret Fuller (1992, Choice “Outstanding Academic Book”), and Transfiguring America: Myth, Ideology, and Mourning in Margaret Fuller’s Writing (2001). He has published numerous articles on Margaret Fuller and her contemporaries, as well as essays on the politics of mourning and nineteenth-century racial stereotypes. Steele is a past President and Current Executive Officer of the Margaret Fuller Society. He also served on the Advisory Board of the Society for the Study of American Women Writers. He is the recipient of a University of Wisconsin System-wide teaching award. In addition to his current project on nineteenth-century urban writing, he continues his research on Margaret Fuller, as well as on representations of gender and race in nineteenth-century advertising.
James Sweet
UW-Madison Resident Faculty Fellow
History, UW-Madison
“Diaspora’s Democracy: The International Dimensions of Slavery in the Making of the United States”
Diaspora’s Democracy argues that African American ideas of belonging, freedom, and citizenship evolved not so much out of peculiarly “American” circumstances; but rather out of vibrant intellectual conversations between slaves and other international actors in Africa, the Spanish and Portuguese empires, Native America, Haiti, the British West Indies, and Canada. The achievement of African American citizenship was the sum of these fitful attempts to forge new moral communities across the diaspora—whether asserting belonging through African nations such as “Igbo,” embracing the Haitian Revolution as an inspirational beacon of freedom, or choosing to run away to British “subject” status in Canada. Emphasizing the importance of these intellectual linkages, Diaspora’s Democracy reconceptualizes early African American history as residing in the liminal space of diaspora, with slavery as the motor force for new forms of international relations across multiple borders.
James H. Sweet is Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His research interests range widely across the history of Africa and the African diaspora. He is the author of two prize-winning books, Recreating Africa: Culture, Kinship, and Religion in the African-Portuguese World, 1441-1770 (2003) and Domingos Álvares, African Healing, and the Intellectual History of the Atlantic World (2011). In addition to Diaspora’s Democracy, he is currently working on two other projects, one on a pirated slave ship in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world, and another on the politics of interracial intimacy in twentieth-century South Africa.