Bold thinking is an essential part of Dukes approach to scholarship, and three ongoing projects show the unexpected results.
Adriane Lentz-Smith, Gabriel Rosenberg, and Aarthi Vadde have been named 202021 National Humanities Center Fellows. They will spend a year away from their regular teaching duties as resident scholars at the Research Triangle Parkbased center, researching and writing new books. Chosen from 673 applicants, they join 30 other humanists from the U.S. and four foreign countries working in 18 different disciplines.
Here are the books theyre working on.
In 1985, a Black San Diego resident named Sagon Penn was pulled over by the police. The encounter quickly turned violent. Fearing for his life, Penn shot and killed one officer while wounding another and a civilian who was riding with them.
Penn was charged with murder, and his trial highlighted the rampant racial tensions of 1980s southern California, which would explode with the assault of Rodney King six years later. Though he was eventually acquitted, Penns life deteriorated. He was later arrested on charges of domestic abuse, among other things, and, in 2002, he committed suicide.
Adriane Lentz-Smith, associate professor of History
The basic story itself is riveting and heartbreaking, said Adriane Lentz-Smith, whose project, The Slow Death of Sagon Penn: State Violence and the Twilight of Civil Rights, centers around the case. It has you think about the ways in which state violence becomes more personalized types of violence and travels throughout a community, touching all kinds of folks.
By writing about Penns life in the era of Black Lives Matter, Lentz-Smith, an associate professor of History, hopes to provide historical context to now familiar debates about policing and racism. The Civil Rights Movement didnt begin with Brown vs. Board nor end with the Voting Rights Act, she said. She will use Penns experience to connect individual victims of state violence to the national history of policing, border policies and white supremacy, showing how the struggles of the Civil Rights Movement continue today.
Approaching the topic this way also allows Lentz-Smith to humanize the issues. When you make it not an abstract debate, but a life that we see destroyed, that takes his loved ones and his children with it to see it as tragedy, and not just an individual tragedy but Americas that seems significant, she said.
Gabriel Rosenberg, associate professor of Gender, Sexuality & Feminist Studies
According to Gabriel Rosenberg, associate professor of Gender, Sexuality & Feminist Studies, if you want to understand why eugenics and race science were widely popular in the United States in the early 20th century, you cant just look at intellectual debates over the theorys scientific merits (or lack thereof). The actual answer, he says, can only be found on farms.
There are really intriguing and interesting institutional ties between eugenic organizations and the livestock breeding industry, Rosenberg explained. This is a well-known empirical fact about the history of eugenics, but its often sidelined as a peculiarity.
Rosenberg aims to make it central, because thats what it was at the time. In the early 1900s, most Americans lived in rural areas, surrounded by farm animals. In fact, in 1900, the nations livestock was worth more than the countrys railroads combined. The only asset worth more at the time was land.
As a result, eugenics the practice of selectively mating people with specific hereditary traits was a familiar idea, Rosenberg argues. Many accepted the theory because it mirrored the way they bred their livestock. All that was needed was to apply the same logic to humans with horrific consequences.
By placing farming practices into the history of eugenics, Rosenberg is also making broader arguments about the forces shaping our world. The practice of making meat at these truly world historical levels is reformulating human social relations with each other, fundamentally restructuring human societies, he said. Were creating a new ecology that confines and conditions our own social relations. In other words, the supply chains and husbandry practices that define how we treat animals and nature also define how we treat ourselves.
Is fan fiction a form of literary criticism? Should people who love literature care about self-published novels, Instagram poetry or the millions of words written, read and shared on digital platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr or Reddit?
Aarthi Vadde, associate professor of English
By turning to popular digital forms of writing, associate professor of English Aarthi Vadde is taking questions typically asked by scholars of Internet culture and examining them with a literary lens. The new perspective raises the very question of what makes writing literary, asking what impact its form and venue of publication have even the device on which its read.
Vadde points out that while curling up with a good book is still many readers ideal way to consume literature, its not the predominant mode of reading in the 21st century. I didnt feel like enough people were talking about the actual sociological circumstances of the way literature is consumed today, Vadde said. You cant assume that people are reading the physical book. And if they are reading the physical book, you still have to take into account the ecology that the book exists in.
That ecology is defined by the Internet. We spend most of our reading time on digital devices, reading not just news articles and e-books, but social media posts, reviews and other kinds of everyday writing. And writing them ourselves. Writing is eclipsing reading as a literacy skill, Vadde said. Its so important to write in all areas of work and play these days. Thats something that is very different than the old idea of the reader and writer having a very clear boundary between them.
Titled We the Platform: Contemporary Literature after Web 2.0, Vaddes project examines how the social web is changing the relationship between literature and literacy, or the broader understanding of how people read and write today. She will examine works of literature that probe the conditions of reading and writing, make creative use of digital platforms and reflect upon the computing technologies shaping our interaction with all kinds of art, including Teju Coles Twitter fiction, Jarett Kobeks self-published satire I Hate the Internet and more.
In doing so, Vadde will analyze how the principles and rhetoric of Web 2.0, alongside its tech, influence the form and circulation of literature.
Learning to use digital tools is not enough, she said. Humanists should more pointedly address the philosophies behind those tools. We the Platform will show how literary works and humanistic criticism can play key roles in the dialogue on responsible computing.
More:
The Police State, Livestock Breeding and Web 2.0: Research by 3 Duke Professors - Duke Today
- Anton Chaitkin: the British Monarchy & Euthanasia - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Rate the The Mental Hygiene Society - Yale University connection - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Len Horowitz files pandemic charges against Rockefeller - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Judge Napolitano on Forced Vaccinations in Massachusetts - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Joseph Moshe (MOSSAD Microbiologist): “Swine flu vaccine is bioweapon” - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Canadian study that suggests seasonal flu shots raise a person's risk of catching swine flu - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Doctor Admits Vaccine Is More Deadly Than Swine Flu Itself & Will Not Give It To His Kids - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Ineffectiveness And Dangers Of Flu Shots - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Maafa 21 - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Doctors Concerned FluMist Vaccine Could Spread Live H1N1 Virus - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Martial Law Soon - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Humanity's Greatest Challenge - Fear or Love - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Does the Vaccine Matter? - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Ten questions about flu vaccines that doctors and health authorities refuse to answer - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Swear NO Oaths (UNDERSTANDING JURISDICTION) - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- WARNING! Goodbye U.S Sovereignty... Hello One World Government ! - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Glenn Beck interviews Lord Monckton on the Soviet style takeover of America by the NWO & BHO - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- TAVISTOCK - THE BEST KEPT SECRET IN AMERICA - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Become a Free Man { SUI JURIS } - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- The Income Tax Trial of the Century - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Gary Null Speaking Out Against vaccines at the NYS Assembly Hearing | 10-13-2009 - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- WHO memos 1972 explains how to turn vaccines into a means of killing - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- The Swine Flu (aka 'H1N1) That's Not A Flu At All - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Lord Christopher Monchton, 3rd Viscount Monckton of Brenchley, answers critics of his claim that Obama intends to cede U.S. sovereignty - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Swine Flu Government Data Scam Government using fraud to generate flu hysteria - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- The Strecker Memorandum video - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- United States Patent 4,647,773 Gallo -Continuous production of retroviruses - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE APPROPRIATIONS FOR 1970 : The funding of the Bio-terrorism AIDS virus - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- The Merchants of AIDS - full article - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Another Tool of Eugenics: Fluoride - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- 1988: Dr. Jonathan Mann : Killed in Plane Crash - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Boyd Graves: Interview with Alex Jones - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Boyd Graves: Letter to Ninth Circuit Court - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Gallo and Litton Bionetics: Creators of Aids - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- This site is being developed - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- 2002: Eleven microbiologists mysteriously dead over the span of just five months - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Kissinger, Eugenics and Nazis - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- July 27, 1990: Aids is man-made - By William Cooper [Killed by Law enforcement in 2001] - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- The Merchants of aids - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Why we should not trust the health market. - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Dr. David James preview - conscious media network - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- AIDS HIV BAYER CORPORATION HEMOPHELIA TAINTED BLOOD SUPPLY - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Ugandians not dying fast enough. International Eugenists (Aids experts) want them to engage in casual sex - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Proof that AIDS was engineered to kill primarily blacks - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- In lies we Trust. The history of American Bioterrorism - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Dallas: A possible Aids Cure? - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Glutathione Accelerator - Any Good? - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Dr. Boyd Ed Graves International AIDS activist dies age 57 - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Genocide in Progress with novel flu virus. - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Genocide in Progress with new flu virus- CDC is suspect - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Vaccines: The Bargain Basement Technology of the 20th Century - December 13th, 2009 [December 13th, 2009]
- Anthrax - as American as Apple Pie. Eustace Mullins - December 13th, 2009 [December 13th, 2009]
- Swine flu: Some pregnant women shunning H1N1 vaccine - December 13th, 2009 [December 13th, 2009]
- CFR lies to get You to take the Shot - December 13th, 2009 [December 13th, 2009]
- US spraying Ukraine?? - December 13th, 2009 [December 13th, 2009]
- Eustace Mullins: Murder By Injection - December 13th, 2009 [December 13th, 2009]
- Microbiologist nabbed by FBI after warning us that vaccine is a bioweapon deployment - December 13th, 2009 [December 13th, 2009]
- Airplanes sprayed mysterious substance over Ukraine days before pneumonic plague outbreak - December 13th, 2009 [December 13th, 2009]
- NIH Whistleblower Alexander S. Jones: Deadly Flu Spreads Across Ukraine - December 13th, 2009 [December 13th, 2009]
- RBD Change D225G in Ukraine Lungs Raises Concerns - December 13th, 2009 [December 13th, 2009]
- Young Boy in Agony After AH1N1 Nasal Flu Mist - December 13th, 2009 [December 13th, 2009]
- Unconfirmed Reports of Large Numbers of Deaths from the Vaccine in the Ukraine - December 13th, 2009 [December 13th, 2009]
- Vaccinations are Causing Impaired Blood Flow (Ischemia), Chronic Illness, Disease and Death for us All - December 13th, 2009 [December 13th, 2009]
- British scientists suspect that swine flu virus has mutated in Ukraine. - December 13th, 2009 [December 13th, 2009]
- Vaccination: Federal Health Agencies Continue to Deceive Americans - December 13th, 2009 [December 13th, 2009]
- Ukraine plagues and now heavy supply and personnel movement in and out of US Deep Underground Military Bases (DUMBs) - December 13th, 2009 [December 13th, 2009]
- College Students Getting Smarter, Shunning H1N1 Vaccine - December 13th, 2009 [December 13th, 2009]
- Deeper down the rabbit hole - December 13th, 2009 [December 13th, 2009]
- Ukraine Pneumonic Plague Research Nov 2009 - December 13th, 2009 [December 13th, 2009]
- Keiser on 'Tsunami alert': Dubai debt crisis awakes storm? - December 13th, 2009 [December 13th, 2009]
- Christopher Story - EU Corruption - December 13th, 2009 [December 13th, 2009]
- John Harris - Undermining Democracy - December 13th, 2009 [December 13th, 2009]
- The first case of HIV/AIDS cure and no mention in the media. Why? - December 13th, 2009 [December 13th, 2009]
- What is AIDS? - January 7th, 2010 [January 7th, 2010]
- Europe to Investigate the UN Over “Pandemic” Scam - February 13th, 2010 [February 13th, 2010]
- Nuke @ Olympics ????? - February 13th, 2010 [February 13th, 2010]
- Intelligent Anti-Fluoride Statement - Dr. J. William Hirzy - February 24th, 2010 [February 24th, 2010]
- Testimony [4-9] Fluoride's Definitive Medical Indictment - February 24th, 2010 [February 24th, 2010]
- History Lesson - March 10th, 2010 [March 10th, 2010]
- As the Bank System fails so will society - March 13th, 2010 [March 13th, 2010]