Faculty in the Department of English received two of the four 2018 Faculty of Arts and Social Science Research Excellence Awards, which grant teaching release for a new or ongoing research project.
Prof. Siobhan Bly Calkin will use the time to complete her book manuscript, Narratives of Impassioned Things: Tales of Christian Relics Circulating in Muslim Contexts. The fundamental goal of her research is to understand experiences of cultural dispossession involving religious artifacts. Today, western governments debate policies banning the wearing of the hijab while Christian crosses are toppled and beaten in Egypt. Narratives of Impassioned Things offers a historical perspective on such events. In this book, she studies narratives from the Crusading Period (1095-1500CE) that recount the circulation of Christian relics in Muslim contexts and reflect upon the fates of devotional objects in situations of cross-cultural conflict.
Prof. Sarah Phillips Casteel will devote the teaching release to her book-length study of literary and visual representations of Black victims of the Nazis. Informed by the recent colonial turn in Holocaust studies as well as new transnational and transcultural directions in memory studies, her project addresses the role of artistic media and genres in reconstructing a neglected past. In particular, her FASS Award will support her investigation of the Surinamese artist Josef Nassy, who was interned by the Nazis between 1942-45. Professor Casteel is also currently co-editing with Heidi Kaufman the volume Caribbean Jewish Crossings: Atlantic Literature and Culture. Both book projects build on her previous work at the juncture of Jewish and African diaspora studies in Calypso Jews: Jewishness in the Caribbean Literary Imagination (Columbia UP, 2016). In June of this year, Prof. Casteel pursued her interest in comparative approaches to the Holocaust by participating in the Silberman seminar at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, which examined parallels between Nazi Germany and the Jim Crow South.