In February, Professor Timothy Brennan was named Samuel Russell Chair in the Humanities for the College of Liberal Arts for a three-year period, 2014-17. The Russell Chair is awarded to faculty who are making exceptional contributions to their fields and is intended to promote outstanding teaching and scholarship in the humanities. The honor involves an annual allocation of $25,000 in support.
"The chair award is just such an opportunity," observes Brennan. "I am grateful. I was fortunate enough last year to finish the first part of a two-volume study, Borrowed Light, about the anticolonial movements of interwar Europe (roughly 1905-1949). This first volume (Stanford UP, 2014) explores the era's prehistory, going back into the 17th-century scientific Enlightenment as well as its later critics. The literature, music, and social theory of the interwar era--a creative explosion still reverberating today, and involving students and activists from all over the world--was the direct result, I argue, of the time's historically new anticolonial thinking, prompted by revolution on Europe's Eastern periphery. With help from the Samuel Russell Chair, I will be able to bring Volume II to completion, visiting archives in Paris, London, and Buenos Aires and relying (as I did for Volume I) on expert help from Research Assistants among our graduate students. The help I received from students working as R.A.s in Volume I very much affected its final shape, and I hope that process of exchange continues."
Professor Katherine Scheil was named CLA Scholar of the College for 2014-17, an annual award celebrating outstanding achievement by faculty in the College of Liberal Arts. The award recognizes professors who have taken intellectual risks and whose work has had a significant impact on their field; Scholars of the College receive a stipend totaling $10,000 per year for three years to support their research or creative work."With the generous support of the Scholar of the College award," Scheil writes, "I plan to finish my current book on the afterlife of Anne Hathaway, which will entail travelling to the UK for archival work in Stratford-on-Avon and to the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC. Next in the queue is a book on Shakespeare and moral good, exploring the history and longevity of the idea that Shakespeare is 'good for you,' in the curriculum, theatre, general culture, etc. Recent work in cognitive science has shown that reading Shakespeare can make you smarter (see Philip Davis' book Shakespeare Thinking), so there is some scientific evidence to back up this long-standing claim. I'm interested in tracing the historical roots of the idea that Shakespeare is 'good,' and in exploring how that has been manifested in more recent venues."
