By Kate Rix
Berkeley, March 28, 2011 — With research experience from verdant France to the archives of Brazil’s political police, four new postdoctoral scholars are teaching at Berkeley as 2010-2012 Mellon Postdoctoral Fellows. The fellows bring international talent to Berkeley, with research areas spanning the arts, humanities, and humanistic social sciences, from Italian literature to the recent history of French farming.
“We are extraordinarily grateful to the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for the generous grant of 2.3 million dollars that supports this postdoctoral program,” says Janet Broughton, dean of arts and humanities. “The benefits run in two directions, because tomorrow’s leading scholars have the opportunity to come to Berkeley to stretch their capacities in teaching and research, while Berkeley is enriched by an infusion of fresh perspectives in our classrooms and our broader intellectual community.”
As a cohort, the fellows have opportunities not only to teach and pursue their own research, but also to form connections with more seasoned scholars. The group meets weekly with other postdoctoral fellows and faculty at the Townsend Center for the Humanities. Each week a different scholar gives a presentation of research in progress and receives feedback from the gathered group.
“The Mellon Fellows are outstanding scholars, typically working on a first major book project,” says Anthony J. Cascardi, director of the Townsend Center. “They bring tremendous intellectual excitement to the weekly meetings of the Townsend Fellows. At the same time, these young scholars benefit enormously from the feedback on their work that our advanced graduate students and faculty provide. It’s a wonderful collaborative experience!”
The Fellows
Erika Balsom grew up on the island of Newfoundland, about 20 minutes from the easternmost point of North America. The movies brought the world to her Canadian town, and her love for foreign films developed when she was in high school.
Balsom works in Film and Media, Berkeley’s newest department. Her area of interest lies at the intersections between cinema and contemporary art.
“Around 1990 cinema as mass entertainment became a major fixation for artists,” she says. “Artists started using film again for the first time since the invention of video, as well as remaking and recycling old movies. Cinema took on a unique position as older than ‘new media’ but newer than painting or sculpture.”
Balsom’s research focuses on the ways that cinema has become a fixation in contemporary art and asks questions about what the cinema of the future will look like. She has used her time at Berkeley to turn her dissertation into a book and write several scholarly articles that have been accepted for publication.
But her time here will be cut short, for the happiest of reasons. Balsom has secured a coveted tenure-track position in the Film Studies Department at Carleton University in Ottawa.
“The students at Berkeley are wonderful, and I have been welcomed by the department,” she says.
Venus Bivar began to look closely at the recent history of French farming while studying the Marshall Plan in post-war France.
“After World War II, a lot of Marshall Plan funding was given to France to help finance large irrigation projects, invest in tractors, and rebuild the northeast,” she says. “This nudged along the industrialization of French farming, along the same lines as what took place in the United States.”
There are a lot of romantic ideas about the way food is produced in France, Bivar says, even in France itself.
“The French think that their farming is still very regional,” she says. “But that is a small percentage of the overall market. They have giant Safeway-like supermarkets there too.”
Bivar, who grew up in a farming community, completed her doctorate at the University of Chicago. It was while studying in archives in Paris that she came across documents related to land consolidation and, most interestingly, the robust union of farmers who helped to conceive of a post-war “land bank.”
“Farm union members felt that larger farms would be more efficient. They created incentives for older farmers to retire early if they sold their farms to younger farmers who would use modern techniques,” Bivar says.
At Berkeley she is continuing her research and has taught a seminar on comparative history of farming and a course called “Paris in the Provinces: A History of Modern France.”
“A lot of my Berkeley students are interested in farming and are quite political about it,” she says. “They ask questions and force me to reframe my thinking, which is helpful for seeing the bigger picture.”
Sarah Townsend was at work on her doctorate in Spanish and Portuguese at NYU when she came across a rich, yet unstudied, area of research: the avant garde theater of Mexico and Brazil.
“Most of the work so far had been done on contemporary period, so I started looking back at the history behind it all,” says Townsend.
She settled on the 1920s and 1930s, the period following the Mexican Revolution and a time of political instability in Brazil that culminated in a dictatorship. Under these conditions, Townsend says, theater can acquire a particular power.
“The interesting thing about theater is that, theoretically, it requires a live audience,” she says. “You need people to gather together in a room. This can be politically explosive.”
Both Mexico and Brazil have historically had strong avant garde traditions defined in very national terms. Yet for scholars of theater and performance, the period of the twenties and thirties poses a problem.
“When one looks back, very little meets the eye. Instead, one finds a series of unfinished projects and scattered texts that were never performed,” Townsend says.
Her research, both for her dissertation and now for a book, is to re-examine this period and the importance of theater as a site where intellectuals re-conceptualized the role of art in relation to mass publics.
The possibility of gathering a mass audience together for performances had new, immense power. This was, after all, the time when radio and film were popularized.
Some of the works Townsend discovered may appear “unfinished” to a modern eye, but were in fact meant to be performed as radio plays. Others were intended as spectacles staged in stadiums for 60,000.
“Before this period, what was considered art was very much a phenomenon of elite with formalized venues,” Townsend says. “With new media and mass political movements, that notion of art as elite was called into question.”
“Critics have tended to concentrate on movements or smaller trends,” she says. “I am interested in locating modern Italian literature outside of a few clusters of writers and placing it in a comparative context.”
For this, Ziolkowski needs the help of Franz Kafka, who spent time in Northern Italy and whose idiosyncratic literary features can be found in modern Italian authors. From animal imagery to the incorporation of Kafka as an actual character in a novel, the German-language writer’s influence is woven throughout modern Italian literature. This imprint, however, has not been scrutinized.
“Several scholars have examined what Franz Kafka took from his Italian experiences, but few have scrutinized what Kafka gave to Italy and its literature,” says Ziolkowski. “Kafka did not die a famous author, yet in Italy his influence can be seen very early.”
Part of this influence was propelled by the literati of Trieste, a city situated in northeastern Italy. Often bilingual in Italian and German, these writers and readers often read Kafka to improve their German, even in the 1930s when copies of some of his works were being burned in Berlin.
While Italian authors are rarely mentioned in the canon of modern writers, looking at their body of work though the lens of their shared Kafkan tradition may be a way to construct an identity for modern Italian literature.
“Hopefully,” she says, “this project will help introduce under-read Italian authors to a wider audience, as well as modify the critical understanding of Italian literature.”
