Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities

Letters Archive

Fall 2001, Vol. 10, No. 1 (requires Adobe Acrobat) Memory, Identity, and Political Action 2001/2002 Fellows Vanderbilt Alumnus to Present the 2001 Harry C. Howard Jr. Lecture We the People.... The Citizen and the Constitution 2002/2003 Fellows Program Deirdre McCloskey to Speak in the 2001/2002 Gender and Sexuality Lecture Series

2001/2002 Fellows

Gregory F. Barz, assistant professor of ethnomusicology, is a specialist in African music and music and religion. He is the author of Ngoma! Music and Dance in East and Southern Africa, a textbook on east Africa in the Global Music Series (Oxford University Press). He has also co-edited two collections of essays, and numerous articles on ethnomusicology. He is currently studying how issues of memory and government-sanctioned political action affect women’s musical performances in rural Eastern Uganda. His work draws directly on his research on HIV/AIDS and musical performance, and how social memory is challenged by the uncertainty of a collective future.

David M. Bloome, professor of education, has done extensive research on the social and cultural dimensions of language and literacy, with particular concern for how social groups and social institutions use literacy to define themselves. He has co-authored several books, including Reading Words: A Critical Commentary on Key Terms in the Teaching of Reading; Writing Ourselves: Mass-Observation and Literacy Practices; and Discourse Analysis and the Study of Classroom Language and Literacy Events (forthcoming). His current research interests include the writing and re-writing of the Yizher Bikher (Jewish Memorial Books) and the Mass-Observation Project, a “people’s anthropology” of everyday life in the United Kingdom, which began in 1930.

William James Booth, professor of political science, is Jacque Voegeli Fellow and co-director of the Fellows Program. He is the author of Households: On the Moral Architecture of the Economy and Interpreting the World: A Study of Kant’s Philosophy of History and Politics. He has also co-edited two collections of essays and published articles on Marxist political economy and classical Greek economic theory. His research considers the relationships between political identity, moral accountability, and the politics of memory. In particular, he is interested in the ethics of remembrance associated with the Holocaust in Germany and the Vichy years in France.

Tina Y. Chen, assistant professor of English, specializes in Asian American literature. She is the author of articles on postcolonial Asian America, U.S.–Asian relations, ethnicity on the contemporary stage, and the poetics of displacement in Asian American literature. She is currently studying Asian American subject formation as a politics of impersonation. Her book project, entitled “Double Agency: Acts of Impersonation in Contemporary Asian American Representation,” emphasizes the critical juncture between the visible and the invisible, perception and performance, and impersonation and identity in Asian American subject formation.

Larry J. Griffin, professor of sociology and history and Director of the American and Southern Studies Program, is Spence Wilson Fellow and co-director of the Fellows Program. He is the author of numerous articles on race and race relations in the U.S. South, the methodology of social and historical inquiry, and social inequality. These include “Southern Distinctiveness, Yet Again; Or, Why America Still Needs the South” and “The Promise of a Sociology of the American South” (both in Southern Cultures) and “Memory, Identity, and Representation in/of the South and Appalachia” (Appalachian Journal, forthcoming). He is co-editor (with Don H. Doyle) of The South as an American Problem. He is currently studying memory in the South and its implications for southern identity and political consciousness.

Yoshikuni Igarashi, associate professor of history, has written on Japanese cultural and intellectual history in the interwar period as well as the post World War II period. His book, Bodies of Memory: Narratives of War in Postwar Japanese Culture, 1945-1970, examines the tension between the repression and expression of the trauma of the war, contemplating the impact of the war and Japan’s defeat on postwar Japanese society. He continues to examine the ways in which postwar Japan reconstructed its national identity through reestablishing its relations with the wartime past, and is at work on a second book on postwar Japan and mass consumer society.

Richard H. King, professor in American intellectual history at the University of Nottingham, is William S. Vaughn Visiting Fellow and Visiting Professor of History. Professor King has published extensively on American intellectual history with an emphasis on political and social thought in the twentieth century. His particular areas of interest include African American thought, race and culture, the history of the south since Reconstruction, southern literature, politics and the novel, the philosophy of history, and critical theory. He is the author of The Party of Eros; A Southern Renaissance; Civil Rights and the Idea of Freedom, and editor of Dixie Debates (with Helen Taylor).

Amy Helene Kirschke, assistant professor of fine arts, specializes in African American art history. She is the author of Aaron Douglas: Art, Race and the Harlem Renaissance as well as numerous articles and encyclopedia entries on African American art. Professor Kirschke is particularly interested in addressing the idea of cultural memory in the visual arts. She is currently working on a book-length study of W.E.B. Du Bois’ use of art during his years as editor of The Crisis magazine (1910–1934) to express the political and social issues of the day as well as to create a tie to African heritage.

Michael Kreyling, professor of English, is Rebecca Webb Wilson Fellow and co-director of the Fellows Program. Professor Kreyling works in the fields of American studies, Southern studies, and Southern literature. Among other publications, he is the author of Understanding Eudora Welty; Inventing Southern Literature; and Author and Agent: Eudora Welty and Diarmuid Russell. He is also the author of “U.S. and Italy: The Poetics and Politics of ‘The Southern Problem’,” a comparative study of the south as a “problem” in Italian and U.S. literature from 1860 to the present (forthcoming in Critical Survey [U.K.]). He is currently at work on a literary and biographical study of detective novelist “Ross Macdonald” (Kenneth Millar, 1915–1983).

Charles E. Morris III, assistant professor of communication studies, studies the rhetoric of the American experience and social protest. He is the co-author of Readings on the Rhetoric of Social Protest, as well as journal articles and book chapters on rhetoric, identity and public culture. He is currently completing a book entitled “Closet Eloquence: Passing and the Subversive Art of Discourse in America,” which engages the “closet” as both idiom and relic in queer culture and public memory. He is the book review editor for Argumentation and Advocacy.

Lucius T. Outlaw, Jr., professor of philosophy and Director of African American Studies, has written widely on African philosophy, African American philosophy and the history of philosophy in the west. He is the author of On Race and Philosophy, as well as numerous articles and book chapters. He is currently at work on a study of Ralph Ellison’s efforts to define how identity formation in American society is hampered by the challenges of racial, ethnic, and socio-economic diversities, and is completing a manuscript with the working title, “Race, Reason, and Order.”

Thomas A. Schwartz, associate professor of history, is interested in the history of twentieth-century American foreign relations. He is the author of America’s Germany: John J. McCloy and the Federal Republic and has recently completed a manuscript entitled “In the Shadow of Vietnam: Lyndon Johnson and Europe.” He is currently at work on a book entitled “The Long Twilight Struggle: A Concise History of the Cold War,” which investigates polar representations of the memory of the Cold War: the memory of a triumphant celebration of the defeat of Soviet expansionism and totalitarianism, and the memory of the more questionable and morally dubious undertaking of the United States in fighting the Cold War.

Letters Archive Index

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