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On Feb. 13, the Syracuse University Humanities Center announced its 2023 Humanities Faculty Fellows cohort, an annual initiative honoring outstanding faculty researchers from the College of Arts and Sciences and the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs.

The Faculty Fellowship provides research funding and support from the Humanities Center for fellows to explore and publish research on social and historical issues, according to the College of Arts and Sciences website. The four fellows include associate professors Luvell Anderson, from the Department of Philosophy; Theo Cateforis, from the Department of Art and Music Histories; Dana Olwan, from the Women’s and Gender Studies Department; and Tessa Murphy, from the Maxwell School’s Department of History.

Gareth Fisher, a 2022 Faculty Fellow and associate professor in the Department of Religion, said the overall goal of the Humanities Center is to foster a dialogue between scholars in the humanities, and specifically to forge connections between that scholarship and broader themes, trends and concerns in academia.

At SU, the Humanities Center gives each fellow research funding and course relief from their regular teaching duties over the semester-long fellowship period to allow for more time to focus on their projects, Cateforis said.

Each year, the center’s advisory board chooses one of the fellows to connect their research to a theme for SU’s annual Syracuse Symposium, an event series featuring lectures, exhibits and performances related to the humanities.

Anderson, this year’s Symposium Faculty Fellow, will relate his research to this year’s symposium theme of “repair.”

To Anderson, “repair” means reconnection. In his research project, titled “Discourse Under Conditions of Oppression,” he explores philosophical connections between language and interpersonal communication, he said, and the possibility of shared understanding across different cultural groups.

“A lot of things happening in our world today demonstrate a severing of the connection between different groups,” Anderson said. “I’m trying to think through ways of repairing a possible connection between groups so that they can come together to shape a shared vision of society and shared strategies for getting to that vision.”

Some fellows in the cohort chose to focus their research on historical social issues and events. Cateforis is working to examine the effects of 1990s alternative rock music genre on American culture, while Olwan is researching the evolution of marriage and divorce laws in the Middle East and North Africa.

In “‘Alternative to What?’ Mainstreaming the Margins in 1990s Rock,” Cateforis said his work will distinguish connections between the alternative rock genre and feminist issues, race, communication and the medical humanities.

“It’s a way of getting people to understand how this musical moment in the 1990s… has broader reverberations within culture and society,” he said.

Olwan’s project, “Mediated Choices: Law and the Right to Marriage and Divorce in the Arab World,” examines the politics of agency, freedom and justice, according to the Humanities Center website.

Murphy, this year’s Maxwell Faculty Fellow, will build upon previous work and delve into the history of British colonies in the Caribbean region. Her project, “Slavery in the Age of Abolition,” will culminate in the production of her second book manuscript and a database for students and researchers, as well as for descendants of people who were enslaved in the colonies, she said.

Through her research, Murphy said she hopes to better understand the lives and experiences of enslaved peoples in the early 19th century by examining registries created by the British Crown.

Unlike the Faculty Fellows from the College of Arts and Sciences, the Maxwell Faculty Fellow has only one course released from their teaching schedule, meaning that Murphy is continuing to teach while also conducting research.

Murphy said she brought some registries she’s been transcribing to her class, HST 330: Slavery and Freedom in the Americas, for students to analyze in order to make historical connections and contextualize information.

“(The Fellowship) has been a really good opportunity to integrate my research into my teaching,” Murphy said. “It was wonderful to see because they really got some very interesting things out of it.”

For the Faculty Fellows who did receive full course relief, like Cateforis, the extra time they’ve been able to spend on their research has been particularly invaluable.

“I love teaching–so much that I invest a tremendous amount of time in course preparation, lectures, grading, and contact with students,” Cateforis said. “So having that time free that I normally would otherwise be using to teach and write is invaluable.”

Fisher explained that the fellowship was vital to his research process. He said his project on the revival of Buddhism in China benefited greatly from the extra time teaching relief afforded him.

“In a lot of our regular life as professors, it’s just very busy and we’re teaching and we’re on committees and we’re doing research,” Fisher said. “So this really kind of forces us to…really be part of the life of the Humanities Center, when we have the fellowship and then also afterward as well.”

Published on March 7, 2023 at 1:53 am