ACLS News

Art historians Carolyn Dean (Professor, University of California, Santa Cruz) and Dana Leibsohn (Professor, Smith College) combine their expertise on the art of New Spain and the Andes to co-author a book that explores how indigenous art, global trade networks, and cosmopolitan ambitions intersected in colonial Spanish America.

Philosophers Karen Detlefsen (Associate Professor, University of Pennsylvania) and Andrew Janiak (Associate Professor, Duke University) draw on the history of early modern philosophy, the study of gender relations in Enlightenment Europe, and the history of modern physics to produce the first English-language book on Émilie Du Châtelet’s (1706-1749) philosophy and its intellectual landscape.

Anthropologists Judith Farquhar (Professor, University of Chicago) and Lili Lai (Lecturer, Peking University) join their research on heritage cultures of China’s minority nationalities and the rise of medical diversities in the modern world to investigate confrontation between the cultures of folk healing and the formal health sector in China.

Historians Clare Crowston (Associate Professor, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign) and Steven Kaplan (Professor Emeritus, Cornell University) synthesize economic, quantitative historical, and cultural and intellectual historical approaches to the study of apprenticeship in France from 1675 to 1830, an activity and an institution that affected all aspects of social life.

Historians Alastair Bellany (Associate Professor, Rutgers University, New Brunswick) and Thomas Cogswell (Professor, University of California, Riverside) reignite the debate on the causes of the English Revolution of 1640-60 by employing a new interdisciplinary methodology that places histories of media, image-manufacture, and popular perception at the core of analysis.

Literature scholars Rachel Buurma (Assistant Professor, Swarthmore College) and Laura Heffernan (Assistant Professor, University of North Florida) incorporate their expertise on the Victorian and Modern eras in their examination of the major archives of mid-century literary critics; their research will illuminate the alternate ways that English professors of the past created value in the classroom—ways that are not necessarily tied to literary canons, aesthetic form, or trans-historical ideas of the human.

Digital humanities scholars Jeremy Douglass (Postdoctoral Scholar, University of California, San Diego), Mark Marino (Associate Professor, University of Southern California), and Jessica Pressman (Assistant Professor, Yale University) develop a collaborative method of digital humanities scholarship that integrates “traditional” hermeneutics with more recent methodologies—media visualization, critical code studies, and digital forensics—to provide the multiple perspectives necessary to approach digital media and its poetics.