Faculty Fellows Program
2003-2004 FellowsDelia Cosentino, Assistant Professor, Art and Art History
"Visualizing Aztec Ancestry: Genealogies and Pictorial Communication in Colonial Mexico"
This project explores the Aztec pictorial genealogy, a genre of artistic representation used especially in sixteenth-century Mexico as a visual tool for negotiating native power in a culturally changing world. During the term of this fellowship, I will write a requested chapter for an edited volume on Mesoamerican manuscripts, and lay the conceptual groundwork for my own book on the subject of Aztec painted genealogies. I will also organize an exhibit of native codices in facsimile form at the Richardson Library, and will conducted a creative workshop on Aztec painted books at the Mexican Fine Arts Museum.
Camilla Fojas, Assistant Professor, Latin American/Latino Studies
"Border Cinema: Race, Place and the Violence of National Identity"
Border Cinema is a book-length project that explores how cinema represents and partakes in violence as it comes to bear on racialized and immigrant populations and how representation in film affects social attitudes about minorities and immigrants. I explore the symbiotic violence of border narratives-the ways they represent distinctions between places, people, ideas and things that serve abstract typologies of inclusions and exclusion. My aim is to make explicit the connection between this representational violence and the continued social exclusion of immigrant or outsider populations.
Jacqueline Lazu, Assistant Professor, Modern Languages
"Más Pa'lante: A Dramatic Representation of the History of the Young Lords Party in Lincoln Park, Chicago and Beyond" I will research and write a play script that dramatizes the establishment of the Young Lords Organization in Chicago's Lincoln Park neighborhood in the 1960s. I will utilize the Young Lords Papers that are now a part of DePaul University's Special Collections, and will work closely with community members and former Party members to explore the many iterations of public citizenship that were displayed by the organization. The script that results will tell a story that casts new light on the history of Lincoln Park, Latinos in Chicago, and the role of Chicago in the Civil Rights movement.
Paula McQuade, Assistant Professor, English
"Desire and Difference in Elizabeth Cary's Mariam, The Tragedy of Mariam, the Fair Queen of Jewry (1613)" This project explores the relation between gender and desire in seventeenth-century England. According to Protestant marriage manuals of this period, the husband must initiate love; the wife can only respond or 'mirror' his love. The Tragedy of Mariam suggests that there are two problems with this disparity in desire: first, it allows the wife little opportunity to correct a husband's immoderate love; instead it requires that she resort to flattery and dissimulation in order to regulate an immoderate love. Second, by forcing the wife to reflect a husband's disordered emotions, this understanding of marriage makes the wife equally ruled by passion and thus interferes with her ability to use her conscience effectively.
Kimberly Moffitt, Assistant Professor, Communication
"Have we Been Bamboozled? A Proposed Critical Race Media Literacy Program"
Research studies suggest that stereotypes disseminated from mass media are pervasive and may impact the self-esteem and behavior of an individual. This project develops a critical race media literacy program specific to teenagers of African descent at a local Chicago public school. It will provide students with the tools to critically analyze the mediated images of self by viewing a variety of entertainment media segments. It will also engage the community of the elementary school through a series of meetings-designed to foster greater interest, validity, and support-that will take place throughout the design and implementation of the program.
Patricia Monaghan, Associate Professor, School for New Learning
"Homefront: Silenced Voices of War"
The literature of war is inevitably partial, for masterpieces from Red Badge of Courage to Paco's Story end when the fighting stops. But even in apparent peacetime, veterans' families deal with the human residue of war: the post-traumatic stress of parent, child or sibling. This fellowship will support the completion of a fifteen-year project, a volume of poems called Homefront that explores war from an unusual vantage: that of a veteran's child. In addition to completing the final poems for this volume, I will work collaboratively with vocalist Jamie O'Reilly and guitarist Michael Smith to produce a program that combines music with readings of selected poems.
Rachel Shteir, Assistant Professor, The Theatre School
"American Moderns: The Lives and Ideals of the Greatest Theatrical Collaborators of the 20th Century"
American Moderns is a book-length manuscript about the lives and ideals of a disparate group of Americans in the twentieth century who tried to break free of Victorian conventions by creating theatre. Did they succeed? How? My book will tell of four teams of theatrical collaborators and how they infused each other with passion and longing for a different kind of life, as well as new forms. It will examine not only the stories of the challenges these individuals faced, but the art they created through the prisms of social and cultural history.