Townsend Fellows
The Townsend Fellows group is the longest-running of all the Center’s programs. The program supports the research of assistant professors and graduate students at the dissertation stage. Throughout the year, the fellows meet for regular discussions together with several tenured faculty, an Emeritus Fellow, a Librarian Fellow, a Museum Fellow, and three Mellon Postdoctoral Fellows. These discussions offer the fellows interdisciplinary peer review of their works in progress in an informal mentoring setting. The Fellows program receives core funding from the Townsend Endowment. The Center also has endowments for graduate student support contributed by Jeffrey Berg and by Irving and Jean Stone.
The Townsend Center Fellows 2008-2009
Lucinda Barnes, Chief Curator, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive
Kathleen Donegan, Assistant Professor, English
Elizabeth Gand, Graduate Student, History of Art
Jonathan Haynes, Graduate Student, Film Studies
Jack Jackson, Graduate Student, Political Science
Cody Marrs, Graduate Student, English
Annie McClanahan, Graduate Student, English
Melissa Murray, Assistant Professor, School of Law
Gautam Premnath, Assistant Professor, English
Robert Raddock, Graduate Student, South and Southeast Asian Studies
Karl Whittington, Graduate Student, History of Art
They are joined by senior faculty fellows:
John Efron, History
Hannah Ginsborg, Philosophy
Kinch Hoekstra, Law and Political Science
Donald McQuade, English
Kate Van Orden, Music
Project Description:
Lucinda Barnes, Chief Curator and Director of Programs and Collections, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, did graduate work at USC on the development and evolution of Constructivism, from its inception in Russia in the early 20th century to its propagation throughout Europe and the US between WWI and WWII. Her BAM/PFA exhibition Measure of Time explored some of these themes, extending her investigation to later 20th century art as well as works involving new and experimental media. In addition, Barnes has organized a wide range of exhibitions focusing on the strength and scope of Berkeley Art Museum collections, including Turning Corners (an exhibition focusing on aspects of innovation and experimentation); Near and Far (looking at world art of the nineteenth century); The Subject is Art: 1400-1800; Fast Forward (an exhibition highlighting recent acquisitions), and Hans Hofmann: The UC Berkeley Art Museum Collection, which is touring nationally and internationally.
Assistant Professor of English Kathleen Donegan is using literature to correct a one-sided view of early U.S. history as either an Anglo-American triumph or a Native American tragedy. Her book project “Seasons of Misery: Catastrophe and the Writing of Settlement in Colonial America” examines the focus on suffering in texts issuing from the first English settlements in North America and the Caribbean. English settlers of the Roanoke, Jamestown, and Plymouth colonies reported highly traumatic experiences, as confirmed in accounts by bonded servants, African slaves, and Native Americans. The English accounts documented more than personal suffering. In Donegan’s view they also gave settlers a way to confront and legitimize the violence that permeated their lives, and thus made it easier to bear by proving their capacity to survive. Their tales of misery contrast sharply with reports of debauchery during the English conquest of Barbados that Donegan also examines.
Elizabeth Gand is writing the first comprehensive study of one of America’s greatest living photographers. Gand’s dissertation in Art History, “Wild Child: Helen Levitt’s Photographs and Films,” explores Helen Levitt’s depiction of working class life in her native New York, particularly her images of children at play. Levitt’s fascination with children—for which she first gained recognition in 1943—reflected a trend shared by many contemporaries in the 1930s. In 1938, the United States Congress passed the Fair Labor Standards Act to prohibit child labor, and the anti-war movement published photographs of children killed in air raids as well as drawings by young war survivors to mobilize public opinion against Germany’s expanding Third Reich and Spain’s Civil War. Gand relates Levitt’s concern for the vulnerability of children to such public displays of lost innocence. By situating Levitt in this way, Gand offers insight not only into one artist’s development, but also into the affective history of childhood in the United States.
According to Jonathan Haynes, Western Europe looked to American cinema to reinvent itself following the devastation of World War II. Haynes’s dissertation in Rhetoric/Film Studies, “A History of Water: The Cinema in the Mid-Atlantic, 1958–1983,” conceives of this relationship as a “mid-Atlantic object” that aided cultural exchange rather than cultural imperialism. “The cinema was a place,” Haynes writes, “where Europe looked at America looking at Europe. For example, François Truffaut’s writings about Hitchcock … helped to re-establish Paris as the ‘cultural capital of the world’.” The relationship declined in the 1970s in tandem with the close of the so-called “American Century,” a period between the Spanish American War and the Vietnam War when the United States enjoyed a reputation for freedom. Haynes focuses on the French New Wave, New German cinema, and Francis Ford Coppola’s Zoetrope experiment in the 1980s. By way of contrast, he considers how New Taiwanese directors re-imagined French cinema in the 1980s and 90s just as Western European filmmakers had re-imagined American cinema in previous decades.
Jack Jackson grapples with one of the most pressing questions in American politics over the past eight years: What constitutes lawful action? His dissertation “Critical Legal Theory Against Dark Times” examines the thin line separating law and politics today. Combining his doctoral training in Political Science with his prior experience as an attorney, Jackson challenges ideological discourse (both Right and Left) that reduces law to a “crude and simple” politics. Such rhetoric denies differences in the order and magnitude of political acts whether they are lawful or not, and can grant a semblance of legality to anti-constitutional powers. At the same time Jackson criticizes the view that the law should be entirely distinct from politics, instead arguing for a blurred distinction between them. His argument rests on analysis of a new phenomenon that he calls “law that is not a law but also not lawless.” His examples include Bush v. Gore (which was not supposed to set a precedent), the doctrine of unilateralism in the invasion of Iraq, the “due-process procedures” of Guantanamo Bay, the “legal interpretations” of torture, and the congressional “law” in the Terri Schiavo case.
Linking politics with literature, Cody Marrs examines the relationship between temporal experience and the formation of the United States between the Revolution and Reconstruction. His dissertation in English, “American Velocities: Capital, Slavery, and the Chronopolitics of Early U.S. Literature,” compares disparate concepts of time in works by European American writers of the Revolution, African American narrators of slavery, Transcendentalists, and post-Civil War poetry by Walt Whitman and Herman Melville. Probing the politics of time, Marrs challenges the accepted notion that nationhood depended on a standardized concept of time in print culture. Instead, Marrs identifies several disparate temporalities in the texts he studies. He attributes these differences to political and social factors, particularly contradictions caused by regional differences, capitalism, slavery, and racial segregation.
Using economics to support cultural analysis, on the other hand, is Annie McClanahan’s dissertation in English, “Salto Mortale: Narrative, Speculation, and the Chance of the Future.” McClanahan’s title references Marx’s salto mortale or “fatal leap,” which describes the risk between a commodity’s potential and actual value in the marketplace. McClanahan combines her literary training with historic and current market theory in order to theorize the relationship between narrative form and the future. Central to her argument are the pivotal changes that have occurred across the world since 1989, and notions of history developed during the Cold War and since 9/11. She attributes the rampant concern today to predict the future—especially in speculative finance and political ideology—to the acceleration of capitalism. The purpose of her project, however, is not to analyze economic trends, but to consider how narrative patterns shape social content. In contemporary novels and films, for example, she identifies structural devices (like foreshadowing) that enrich the way the future can be conceived.
The research of Assistant Professor of Law Melissa Murray sheds light on a powerful controversy in the United States today: the legal definition of marriage. Murray is investigating how marriage has influenced the criminal justice system, and how criminal law has dictated the patterns of intimate life in the U.S. since the 19th century. Combining legal and social history, her project “Marriage as Punishment: The Intersection of Criminal Law and Family Law” looks closely at sexual practices legitimized by family law as the entry to marriage. To reinforce the social norms underlying these practices, criminal law prohibited bigamy, incest, sodomy, and other acts deemed a threat to marriage. In turn, marriage served as a defense against specific sex crimes. As Murray explains, family and criminal codes worked together to “protect marriage as the licensed site of sexual activity and to characterize sexual relationships outside of marriage as non-normative, deviant, and socially destructive.”
In “Mobile Republics: Postnational Itineraries of Authorship between India and the Caribbean,” Assistant Professor of English Gautam Premnath aims to redirect how postcolonial literary criticism construes the author’s relationship to state power. He focuses on the influential body of work produced by contemporary Indian writers working in English, highlighting their often tense relationship with received narratives of Indian nationalism, and showing how their positions and attitudes invoke ideologies of authorship generated in Indian diasporic writing. Focusing on one especially significant diasporic context, he shows how Indo-Trinidadian writers of the 1950s and 60s cultivate distinct forms of critical detachment from ascendant Caribbean nationalism, and traces how these eventually come to authorize a new postnationalist dispensation in Indian writing. At the core of the project is an account of how V.S. Naipaul’s exilic mode of authorship is adopted and recirculated by Indian writers like Amitav Ghosh. But Premnath also discerns a “counternational” tendency in Trinidadian writers like Sam Selvon and Indians like Arundhati Roy, that has the potential to renew and reinvent national agendas in both India and the Caribbean.
Robert Raddock introduces politics to the study of India’s spiritual roots. His dissertation in Southeast Asian Studies, “How to Read like a Renunciant: Shankaracarya’s Commentary on the Brhad Aranyaka Upanishad,” reevaluates the reception of the oldest Sanskrit text seminal to Hinduism. Compiled in the 5th century BCE, the Brhad Aranyaka Upanishad was interpreted in a radical manner in the 9th century by Shankaracarya, the most famous exponent of Advaita Vedanta philosophy. Shankara urged the male Brahman reader to renounce village life and go into the forest to contemplate the oneness of the self and world spirit. Shankara’s message, Raddock explains, has made him into an icon of Hinduism and India in the sense he is seen as “world-renouncing, apolitical, and idealist.” Raddock revises this image by pointing out the existentialist and political content of Shankara’s commentary, arguing that he shares with ancient Roman and Greek philosophers (especially Socrates) the view that philosophical discourse cannot be divorced from philosophy as a way of life.
By combining research on maps, religion, and sexuality, Karl Whittington seeks to rescue Opicino de Canistris from his marginalization as the “psychotic artist” of the Italian Middle Ages. Whittington’s dissertation in Art History, “The Body-Worlds of Opicino de Canistris, Artist and Visionary (1296–ca. 1354),” presents the first art-historical study of Opicino’s works in over seventy years. In his triple role as artist, cleric, and scribe, Opicino combined expertise in drawing maps (mappaemundi and portolan sea-charts) with personal visions of God that he attributed to divine revelation. His art depicts fantastical bodies, which Whittington calls “body-worlds,” that serve as topographical maps. Endowed with racial, moral, and gender identities (male, female, dual sexed, or androgynous), these body-worlds convey both real and mystical or religious meanings. Whittington argues that Opicino’s portolan charts also contributed to the development of linear perspective, though they depict light from God’s point of view rather than the human eye.
Senior Fellows
John M. Efron is the Koret Professor of Jewish History and Director of the Institute for European Studies. He earned a Ph.D. in history from Columbia University in 1991 and taught at Indiana University for ten years before joining Berkeley’s History Department in 2001. A specialist in the cultural history of German Jewry, his work has largely focused on the relationship between medicine and the formation of modern Jewish identity. He has published numerous articles on these issues in addition to the books Medicine and the German Jews: A History (2001), Defenders of the Race: Jewish Doctors and Race Science in Fin-de-Siècle Europe (1994), and Jewish History and Jewish Memory: Essays in Honor of Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi (1998), which he co-edited. He recently completed a new volume The Jews: A History, of which he was the general editor and author of the section on the modern Jewish experience. He is currently at work on a new study, provisionally titled, Orientalism and the Jews in the Age of Emancipation.
A member of the Philosophy Department since 1988, Professor Hannah Ginsborg holds a Ph.D. in philosophy from Harvard (1989). Her research focuses on Kant and issues in contemporary epistemology and philosophy of mind. Her publications include The Role of Taste in Kant's Theory of Cognition (1990) and her forthcoming The Normativity of Nature: Essay on Kant's Critique of Judgment (Oxford UP). The latter will present a selection of her numerous articles on Kant’s aesthetic theory, philosophy of biology, and theory of judgment. Recently she has written about the content of perceptual experience, the question of whether experiences can be reasons for belief, rule-following, and the ontology of concepts.
Assistant Professor Kinch Hoekstra is a political theorist in the Department of Political Science and the Jurisprudence and Social Policy Program of the Law School. He recently joined the Berkeley faculty from the University of Oxford where he earned a Ph.D. in philosophy in 1998 and subsequently worked as Lecturer in Philosophy and Fellow and Tutor in Ancient and Modern Philosophy. His research focuses on the history of political thought up to 1700. He has published many articles on Thomas Hobbes, including analyses of his conceptions of philosophy, prophecy, natural law, tyranny, democracy, mixed government, political obligation, and the rationality of obedience to the law. He has two books forthcoming from Oxford University Press: Thomas Hobbes and the Creation of Order (2009) and a two-volume critical edition of Hobbes’s translation of and commentary on Thucydides.
A leader both in university administration and the study of American popular culture, Professor Donald McQuade has authored and edited many books on writing, American literature and advertising. He served as the General Editor of The Harper American Literature as well as co-wrote the popular textbook Seeing & Writing (2000, soon to appearin a fourth edition), which focuses on shifts in writing and research methods in contemporary education — as well as on the interface between written and visual culture. McQuade has held several senior leadership positions on campus since joining the English Department in1986. Most recently he served as vice chancellor for University Relations for eight years before returning to teaching and research in spring 2008. He holds a M.A. and Ph.D. from Rutgers University. He is currently at work on a new edition of Frederick Winslow Taylor's Principles of Scientific Management as well as on a book entitled The Culture of Efficiency, which assesses the impact of Taylor's principles on twentieth-century American culture.
Professor Kate van Orden joined Berkeley’s Music Department one year after receiving her Ph.D. in music history and theory from The University of Chicago in 1996. A specialist in cultural history, she has published many articles and book chapters on French vernacular culture and the Renaissance chanson. Currently Editor-in-Chief (2008–10) of the Journal of the American Musicological Society, she previously edited the volume Music and the Cultures of Print (2000). The research for her other book Music, Discipline, and Arms in Early Modern France (2005) prepared her to reconstruct a famous equestrian ballet that was performed for the engagement of Louis XIII in 1612. Her book won the Lewis Lockwood Award from the American Musicological Society, and the ballet received its modern premiere under her direction at the Berkeley Festival of Early Music in 2000. Also a bassoon player, Van Orden has performed in concerts across North America and Europe and has over forty CDs to her credit.