Sarah Florini
A.W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow
Communication Arts, UW-Madison

"Remembering the Past, Reframing the Present: Digital Media, Hip Hop, and the Mnemonic Work of the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement"

Since the 1990s, the mainstream conversations about race in the U.S. have become increasingly dominated by the ideology of "colorblindness." Recently, many have even gone so far as to claim that we have entered a “post-racial” era. Such assertions emerge from and are supported by a dominant historical narrative in which racism was successfully resolved at the structural and institutional level by the Civil Rights Movement. This narrative has become even more recalcitrant with the election of the U.S.’s first Black President, seen by some as proof that Martin Luther King’s “dream” has come to fruition. Such discourses foreclosed both social and conceptual space for discussing racial politics and obscure structural and institutionalized racism, thereby insuring its continuation. My work examines how Black Americans born and raised after the Civil Rights Movement, often referred to as the “Hip-hop generation,” use digital media to create space for alternative interpretations of both past and present racial politics.

Sarah Florini received her Ph.D. in communication and culture from Indiana University in 2012. Her dissertation explores how the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, one of the largest contemporary Black Nationalist groups in the U.S., uses its website and its annual Black August Hip Hop Project concerts to construct and circulate counter-memories and counter-histories that offer an alternative lens through which to understand contemporary U.S. racial politics. She is currently developing a new project that will focus on the use of trans-media social networks to address racial politics and mobilize political engagement.

Ellery Foutch
A.W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow
Art History, UW-Madison

“Arresting Beauty: The Perfectionist Impulse of 19th-century Art and Culture”

The pursuit of perfection pervades 19th-century American art and culture. While historical interpretations of this era posit a binary opposition of competing desires—an embrace of progress and new technologies, versus anti-modernist nostalgia—Foutch’s work identifies and analyzes a previously unstudied phenomenon: the desire to stop time at a “perfect moment,” pausing the cycle of growth, degeneration, and rebirth by isolating and arresting a perfect state, forestalling decay or death. Yet ironically, this very perfection and its suspension are incompatible with vitality, suffocating or eliminating organic life. Four case studies in diverse visual media illuminate this concept of arrested perfection and its ultimate impossibility: Titian Peale’s butterfly portfolios and specimen cases; Martin Johnson Heade’s “Gems of Brazil” hummingbird paintings; films, photographs, and sculptures of bodybuilder Eugen Sandow; and Harvard’s collection of Glass Flowers by the Blaschka family. At the IRH & Center for the Humanities, Ellery will continue developing this book manuscript for publication.

Ellery Foutch comes to Madison from the University of Pennsylvania, where she recently completed her Ph.D. in the History of Art, specializing in American art. At Penn, her research was supported by fellowships from the ACLS/Mellon Foundation, the Wyeth Foundation and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Terra Foundation for American Art, and the Philadelphia Area Center for the History of Science (PACHS). Ellery earned her M.A. from the Williams College Graduate Program in the History of Art and her B.A. from Wellesley College.

Katie Jarvis
A.W. Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Fellow
European History, UW-Madison

"Politics in the Marketplace: The Popular Activism and Cultural Representation of the Dames des Halles during the French Revolution"

This project examines the political activism and cultural representation of Parisian merchants called the Dames des Halles during the French Revolution. In order to highlight the complexity of female political practice, I analyze the economic, ritual, and gendered elements of the Dames’ activism. I inquire how marketplace reform affected their collective concerns. I also study how other actors deployed the Dames’ image for their own political ends, and probes the genre poissard, whose evolving literary representations of the Dames informed their cultural construction. By examining the relationship among the Dames’ economic interests, activism, and literary image, this dissertation creates new pathways in the sociocultural methodology of history.

Katie Jarvis is an ACLS Residency Fellow and a Ph.D. Candidate in European History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her research focuses on popular politics, broadly conceived, during the French Revolution. She is especially interested in the intersection of social and cultural history, as well as gender history. Her dissertation research has been funded by a Mellon/American Council of Learned Societies Dissertation Completion Fellowship, a Fulbright Grant, a Council for European Studies/Mellon Foundation Pre-Dissertation Research Fellowship, the Society for French Historical Studies, L’Institut Français d’Amérique, La Société des Professeurs Français et Francophones d'Amérique, the Western Association of Women Historians, Phi Alpha Theta, and the UW Department of History. She also collaborates on the international work group “Genre et Classes Populaires” to foster dialogue across national and disciplinary boundaries. She received a B.A. in History from Boston College and a M.A. in European History from UW-Madison.

Elizabeth Johnson
A.W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow
Geography, UW-Madison

"Animating Futures, Reanimating Biopolitics: Biomimetic Science and Empire"

Practitioners of so-called "biomimicry" have worked together to create objects like lotus-inspired paints, gecko-inspired adhesives, and lobster-inspired robots by reverse engineering "natural" or nonhuman lifeforms and redirecting them as solutions for human problems. Environmentalists, economists, government officials, and practitioners alike imbue this practice with the potential to engineer a more ecologically sustainable and politically stable future, calling it a "key driver of innovation" and a "game changer" in technological production. As biomimeticists disembodied and re-embody nonhuman lifeforms, however, they also destabilize historic understandings of life and society and challenges many of the concepts that undergird traditional political frameworks, such as territorial borders, notions of human exceptionalism, and conceptions of “life” itself. By connecting together the stated aims of biomimetic production with ethnographic observations of its practice, this study brings these disjunctures to light as well as the potentials of biomimetic design. Arguing that biomimicry creates new life worlds as it creates new technologies, I attend to biomimicry as an act of value production by exploring the practice's socio-political dynamics and the everyday relationships as they blur the boundaries between humans, animals, and technology.

Elizabeth R. Johnson received her PhD from the University of Minnesota for doctoral work that focused on the political and social implications of "biomimicry," an emerging field within which scientists reverse engineer biological traits for technological production. Johnson has published articles and reviews in the journal Ephemera: Theory & Politics in Organization and has a co-written essay on labor and time in higher education forthcoming in Acme.

Mary Murrell
A.W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow
Anthropology, UW-Madison

"The Open Book: Digital Form in the Making"

For many decades the future of the book has been worried over. Whether elegiac or celebratory, the observations of scholars, artists, librarians, journalists, and others have presented the fate of the book as a threshold for humankind, the immense significance of which can be assumed if not specified. From the foundations of media studies—whether Walter Benjamin or Marshall McLuhan —the book has been made to characterize an epoch before an ever-modernizing modernity, providing a foil for “modern,” “mass,” and “new” media. During a period that some have seen to be a tipping point from print to electronic forms, my research investigated the efforts of “mass book digitizers” in the United States—computer engineers, digital librarians, lawyers and activists—who are attempting to effect this never quite arriving post-book epoch. As a practice that has met with resistance, celebration, and controversy, mass digitization provided a venue for plumbing the turbulent waters of what I call the “contemporary book”: an arena of experimentation arising from the tectonic encounter of the established modern book system with an emergent assemblage in motion around the authorization, storage, preservation, circulation, and production of knowledge.

Mary Murrell received her Ph.D. in sociocultural anthropology from the University of California, Berkeley, in 2012. Her work at Berkeley was supported by a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, an NSF dissertation improvement grant, a Doreen B. Townsend Center for the Humanities Fellowship, and an ACLS-Mellon Dissertation Fellowship. Before earning her Ph.D., Mary was an acquisitions editor at Princeton University Press, where she acquired titles in the humanities and social sciences.

Trevor Pearce
A.W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow
Philosophy, UW-Madison

"Pragmatism & Biology: Organism, Environment, and Evolution in Early American Philosophy"

The pragmatist philosophers William James, John Dewey, and George Herbert Mead were towering figures in American cultural and intellectual life. What is rarely remembered, however, is their close engagement with new developments in the life sciences at the end of the nineteenth century. Even a preliminary look at the pragmatists' life and writings reveals that many of their core conceptions—the nature of inquiry, the role of the environment, the activity of the mind—emerged out of a dialogue between philosophy and biology. These conceptions are at the heart of the most influential works of pragmatism. Delve into James’ Principles of Psychology and you will discover humans and cuttlefish alike actively shaping their perceptions; open Dewey’s Democracy and Education and you will find a whole section on the role of the environment; browse through Mead’s unpublished Essays on Psychology and you will encounter discussions of animal behavior and embryology. This suggests that if we want to understand the pragmatists and their influence, we need to understand the relation between pragmatism and biology.

Trevor Pearce did his doctoral work in the Committee on Conceptual and Historical Studies of Science at the University of Chicago. His dissertation, "'A Perfect Chaos': Organism-Environment Interaction and the Causal Factors of Evolution," analyzed historical and modern debates about the relative importance of different causal factors in evolutionary history. He also holds an M.A. in Philosophy and an M.Sc. in Evolutionary Biology from U. Chicago, and arrives at UW-Madison after one year as a postdoctoral fellow at the Rotman Institute of Philosophy, University of Western Ontario.

Jerome Tharaud
A.W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow
English, UW-Madison

“Evangelical Space: Art, Experience, and the Ethical Landscape in America, 1820-1860”

Nowadays the term “media” is likely to conjure up ideas of giant transnational conglomerates, cable news networks, and Facebook; we hear constant chatter about the cultural and political consequences of “social,” “mass,” “mainstream,” even “lamestream” media. But media in this modern sense has not always been so ubiquitous or mundane. In early nineteenth-century America, media took on cosmic and utopian dimensions, as mass print promised not only to link people together as never before, but also to connect them to the sacred in new ways. My research explores this pivotal moment in the history of media, focusing on the development of mass print as an instrument of social reform in the United States. It seeks to understand the impact of this print on a number of related domains of antebellum culture, including the popular religious imagination and ideas about the social role of artistic expression. I argue that the pioneering work of Protestant evangelical voluntary associations—so-called “benevolent” societies—in using print to promote a range of reform causes, from foreign missions to temperance, provided a powerful model of moral suasion that many American reformers and artists adopted in the decades before the Civil War.

Andrew W. Mellon postdoctoral fellow Jerome Tharaud earned his Ph.D. in English Language and Literature from the University of Chicago in 2011, with a specialization in nineteenth-century American literature and culture. His doctoral dissertation examines how Protestant evangelicals in the antebellum United States sought to use mass print to shape the morals of the nation, focusing in particular on their use of literary and visual images of the landscape. His research interests include U.S. print culture as well as American religions, art and visual culture, and environmental literature. He is the author most recently of “The Evangelical Press, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and the Human Medium,” a forthcoming essay in Arizona Quarterly. He is currently working to develop his dissertation into a book manuscript; he has also begun a new project that excavates an important but neglected communitarian dimension in the thought of Henry David Thoreau, a writer more often noted for his individualism and celebration of solitude.