The Syracuse University Humanities Center has announced recipients of its 2010-11 Dissertation/Thesis Fellowships. Tanushree Ghosh and Donovan Schaefer, doctoral students in English and religion, respectively, will receive one-year awards, carrying stipends and benefits. The residential program, now in its second year, supports students working on doctoral dissertations that contain strong humanistic content and advance one or more areas of study in SU’s College of Arts and Sciences.
“We are extremely proud of Tanushree and Donovan, both of whom exemplify the interdisciplinary spirit of the humanities,” says Gregg Lambert, Dean’s Professor of the Humanities who directs the SU Humanities Center and The Andrew W. Mellon Central New York Humanities Corridor, involving SU, Cornell University and the University of Rochester. “They will play a leadership role at SU by using their research to engage the campus community.”
Lambert says that both fellows are expected to meet with him regularly to discuss their projects, to lead colloquia around their dissertation research and to participate in SU Humanities Center events and activities. “They are some of our best ambassadors,” he says.
Ghosh, whose research includes Victorian studies and 19th-century visual culture, is working on a dissertation titled “Looking at Others: The Affective Fashioning of Liberal Subjectivity in Late 19th-Century Britain.” “My project examines liberal and reformist social attitudes in Great Britain,” she says, adding that her research touches on Victorian British novels, print culture and intellectual history. Ghosh’s advisers are Michael Goode, professor of English at SU, and Linda Shires, professor and chair of English at Yeshiva University, both of whom specialize in 19th-centurty literature and culture.
Schaefer’s dissertation, “Radical Embodiment: On the Possibility of Animal Religions,” argues that religion can be viewed as an embodied phenomenon. “I sketch out a model of bodies as primarily affective, comprising interconnected systems of bodily technologies,” he explains. “If religion is embodied, it is also available to bodies of nonhuman animal species, especially if we move away from the cognitively oriented definitions of religion common in popular and scientific frames and toward a more feminist understanding of religion as an embodied, affective process.” Schaefer’s advisor is John D. Caputo, the Thomas J. Watson Professor of Religion and Humanities.
Based in the historic Tolley Building, the SU Humanities Center is home to the Mellon CNY Humanities Corridor and Syracuse Symposium, whose theme for 2010 is “Conflict, Peace and War.” The center also supports other cross-platform projects, including the “Faculty Works” lecture series, Arts and Sciences’ new “Humanities in the Digital Age” Excellence Initiative, The Jeanette K. Watson Distinguished Visiting Professorship in the Humanities and a variety of graduate and faculty fellowships.
