People

Soo Hong is a sociologist of education who studies the relationships between schools and families/communities, exploring the impact of race, culture, social history, and political life. She explores the central role of families and communities in school transformation through models that emphasize parent leadership, community organizing, and democratic forms of participation. Hong is the author of the recently released Natural Allies: Hope and Possibility in Teacher-Family Partnerships (Harvard Education Press, 2019) as well as A Cord of Three Strands: A New Approach to Parent Engagement in Schools (Harvard Education Press, 2011). At the center of her research and teaching is a desire to develop action-oriented research that is integrated with practice and grounded in the lived experiences of young people and families in urban schools.

While at the Newhouse Center, she will be working on a project, entitled “Essential Understandings: New Teachers’ Beliefs About Family and Community.” In this project, she will explore the beliefs and experiences of new teachers as they enter the classroom for the first time to understand the views and perspectives they bring about families into their work as educators, the questions and challenges they encounter, and the early experiences with students’ families that shape and influence their evolving practice as teachers.

Veronika Fuechtner is an associate professor of German at Dartmouth College, where she also teaches comparative literature, Jewish studies, and women’s and gender studies. She also holds an appointment as adjunct associate professor in the department of medical education at the Geisel School of Medicine. Fuechtner is the author of Berlin Psychoanalytic: Psychoanalysis and Culture in Weimar Republic Germany and Beyond (California, 2011) and co-editor of Imagining Germany, Imagining Asia (with Mary Rhiel, Camden House, 2013) and A Global History of Sexual Science 1880-1960 (with Douglas Haynes and Ryan Jones, California, 2017). Her research interests include the history of psychoanalysis and sexology, the relationship between science and culture, discourses on race and ethnicity, German-language modernism, contemporary culture, German-language film, and global cultural and scientific histories. Her work has been supported by the American Council of Learned Societies, American Psychoanalytic Association, Deutsche Schillergesellschaft, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, National Endowment for the Humanities, Social Science Research Council, and the American Academy in Berlin.

Abstract: Killer Jokes: The Lasting Laughter of German Humor on Colonialism and Slavery

German humor has such a profoundly bad reputation that even the idea of it has served as the butt of many jokes. One might think of Monty Python’s Killer Joke as effective warfare against the Germans, or of Mark Twain’s painful experience of the Awful German Language, which helped cement the stereotype that Germans are neither very good at producing nor at appreciating humor. While my project discusses many examples of the genre, it doesn’t answer the question of whether German humor might be funny. Instead, it explores when and why humor on controversial topics becomes socially acceptable, and when and why it ceases to be acceptable: how does the evaluation of humor shift over time and how do communities of laughter constitute, disband or go undercover? I engage these larger questions using visual humor on colonialism and slavery as it relates to dramatically shifting politics of the nation, gender and race from the 19th through the 21st century. My project thus subscribes to the notion that humor is never universal or based on automatic reactions, but always historically and culturally contingent and contextual.

Sara Kippur is Associate Professor of French at Trinity College in Hartford, CT, where she also serves as Chair of the Department of Language & Culture Studies (on leave in 2020-21). Her research is at the intersection of 20th-21st century French and Francophone literature, translation studies, cultural studies, and book history. She has published a scholarly monograph on modern and contemporary self-translators, titled Writing It Twice: Self-translation and the Making of a World Literature in French (Northwestern, 2015), and she is co-editor of the volume Being Contemporary: French Literature, Culture, and Politics Today (Liverpool, 2016), which examines current, pressing issues in the field of French Studies.

While at the Newhouse Center, she will be working on her current book project, a literary history tentatively titled Transatlantic Pacts: America and the Production of Postwar French Literature. The book demonstrates how institutional shifts in the U.S.—in literary journalism, the expansion of Hollywood, the rise of television, and the explosion of the college textbook industry—transformed how French literature was produced and read both in America as well as, more surprisingly, in France itself. Drawing on archival collections in France and the U.S., Transatlantic Pacts examines a slate of unknown, and lesser known, literary materials to show ties between American cultural institutions and the writing of some of France’s most renowned postwar writers—authors such as Samuel Beckett, Assia Djebar, Marguerite Duras, Romain Gary, Eugène Ionesco, Alain Robbe-Grillet, and Jean-Paul Sartre.

Irene Mata is an Associate Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies and the Faculty Director of the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship Program at Wellesley College. She was born and raised in an immigrant family in the El Paso/Juárez border area and earned her BA and MA in English and Women’s Studies from New Mexico State University and her PhD in Literature from the University of California at San Diego. Her research interests include the analysis of gender, labor, immigration, and representation in contemporary cultural productions. She has also studied and published essays on how current globalization projects have impacted the lives of women on the U.S./Mexico border area and how those changes are represented.

Her first book, Domestic Disturbances: Reimagining Narratives of Gender, Labor, and Immigration (UT Press), suggests a different way of looking at Chicana/Latina immigrant stories, not as a continuation of a literary tradition, but instead as a specific Latina genealogy of immigrant narratives that more closely engage with the conditions of immigration occurring in our current historical moment. Her current manuscript, Beyond the Moment: The Art of Resistance in Latinx Performance, engages with various texts that rely on previous moments of resistance to imagine new—and future—visions of social change.
 

Project description:
My project, tentatively titled Beyond the Moment: The Art of Resistance in Latinx Performance, seeks to explore the work of various cultural producers who use their creativity to tell stories of their communities’ fight for social justice and equality, while simultaneously focusing on uncovering the historical inspirations responsible for contemporary art, literature, and performance. In illustrating how earlier movements have impacted newer movements and their ideas of social justice, I situate the creative works of Luis Alfaro, Coco Fusco, Virginia Grise, Irma Mayorga, and the No Papers No Fear organizers, as forms of cultural activism that seek to both archive previous movements of struggle and to find ways to combine and reassemble these past forms of activism into dynamically intersectional modes of resistance that actively imagine more egalitarian futures. My project engages with these texts in an effort to build on an archive of struggle and opposition and document the cultural modes of resistance that are working towards an intersectional vision of social change. Ultimately, this project aims to contribute to the growing Chicanx/Latinx literature and theatre scholarship that centers the cultural productions of artists invested in using art as a tool for social change.

Mary Kate McGowan works in metaphysics, philosophy of language, feminism, philosophy of law, and their various intersections. She has published on the free speech status of (allegedly) harmful categories of speech (e.g., pornography and racist speech); she writes about silencing (ways that our ability to communicate can be interfered with), and she has written about the scope of a free speech principle (i.e. investigating which sorts of actions ought to be covered by one and why). Her book Just Words: On Speech and Hidden Harm was published by Oxford University Press in 2019 and Speech and Harm: Controversies Over Free Speech, co-edited with Ishani Maitra, was published in 2012 also by Oxford University Press.

While at the Newhouse, she will continue work on Words in Action: A Textbook in Social Philosophy of Language. This is a textbook, co-authored with Ishani Maitra and under contract with Oxford University Press, and it is the first textbook in the exciting new subfield of applied (or social) philosophy of language. Chapter topics include: lying and deception, telling and testimony, silencing, jokes, consent, generics, slurs, linguistic oppression, sneaky linguistic devices, and language and law. Her next project is a public philosophy book on silencing. She hopes to start that project during the fellowship year.

Lawrence Rosenwald is the Anne Pierce Rogers Professor of English at Wellesley College, where he has been teaching since 1980, and a member of the Advisory Board of the College's Program in Peace & Justice Studies. He has published work on diaries, translation, the relations between words and music, literary multilingualism, and antiwar literature. He has also published literary and scholarly translations from French, German, and Yiddish, and has written and performed some fifty verse scripts for early music theater pieces, working with the Amherst Early Music Festival, Voices of Music, Artek, and the Texas Early Music Project.  His Newhouse project is a book about being a pacifist critic, about what pacifist literary criticism might look like.