Newswise — MILWAUKEE _ Each year, the Center for 21st Century Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee constitutes a group of fellows who develop a research project in the critical, public or digital humanities. Fellows are released from some teaching duties to complete their research and contribute to the life of the center that year. This year’s fellows span a range of humanities disciplines; their work represents a vital cross-section of 21st century studies.
“Plotting Yiddish Drama”
Joel Berkowitz’s work (foreign languages and literature) focuses on a new initiative of the Digital Yiddish Theatre Project, the research consortium he co-founded in 2013. The Digital Yiddish Theatre Project recently launched a new undertaking called Plotting Yiddish Drama, which provides a powerful digital reference tool for the study of the Yiddish dramatic repertoire in the form of a searchable, metadata-enriched data set of the plot synopses of Yiddish dramas. As of the summer of 2018, 36 of these synopses are available online, with plans to expand that number into the hundreds. Plotting Yiddish Drama will serve specialists as well as lay people seeking information on Yiddish drama’s rich cultural legacy.
“Hume and the Limits of Thought as the Foundation of Science”
Miren Boehm’s work (philosophy) is both historical and philosophical. Her main philosophical question concerns the limitations of cognition and how these limitations affect scientific theorizing. The work is also historical because Boehm examines this question within David Hume’s philosophy. Hume was concerned with the foundations of science in a very special kind of way that interpreters are only now beginning to understand. Boehm plans to devote her year at the center to writing a book that will explore the relationship between experience and observation and thinking as well as the implications, as Hume understands them, for scientific theorizing.
“Terms of Occupancy: Discourses of Itinerancy in the 20th and 21st Centuries”
Rachel Buff (history) is working on a new project that looks at the words used in policy and popular culture for people on the move: migrants, refugees, vagrants, fugitives and so on. These words shape the political context in which we understand belonging and exile. The project will take shape in various scholarly and critical public interventions.
“Her Stories: Daytime Soap Opera and US Television History—Public and Digital Projects”
In the final stages of completing a book, “Her Stories: Daytime Soap Opera and US Television History,” which is under contract with Duke University Press, Elana Levine (Journalism, Advertising, and Media Studies) will use her fellowship to launch more public-facing and digital outreach efforts connected to her scholarly work. “Her Stories” is a history of the U.S. daytime television soap opera as a gendered cultural form and a central force in the economic and social influence of American broadcast network television from the late 1940s through the 2010s. It traces the production, reception and narrative history of the U.S. television genre of the daytime “soap opera,” daily dramatic serials that were named after the domestic goods advertised to the programs’ presumed audience of women. The projects emerging from the book are meant to share its insights about this genre, its connections to women media creators and audiences, and its significance in shaping American television history as a whole with a broader public than might access an academic book. These projects include a moving-image documentary, potentially in multiple-episode series form, and one or more web-based projects that share some of the primary materials Levine has gathered in researching this book. Among these is a large collection of fan-targeted magazines about the genre that Levine aims to catalog and present digitally in order to contextualize these publications and the insights they offer for understanding feminized media culture and the history of American television.
“Ritual, Bureaucracy, Game: Modernity and its Cultural Forms of Control”
Over the fellowship year, Thomas Malaby (anthropology) will continue to develop his work on the increased role that games and game-like systems — designed overwhelmingly by private institutions — play in digitally mediated experience. The primary argument of “Modern Games,” the book planned as the culmination of this research, is that this shift to using games is part and parcel of a larger turn in modernity toward contriving systems (elections, the market, empirical inquiry) whose legitimacy, in contrast to most earlier regimes, rests precisely and explicitly on their indeterminacy. It furthermore suggests that digital networking technology has vastly increased the scope of this modern institutional project of deploying games, and raised new possibilities for institutional manipulation and control.
“Staging the Resistance: Performing the Politics of Translation in Modern Japan”
Aragorn Quinn’s (foreign languages and literature) book project explores the intersection of translation, politics and performance in modern Japan. Grounded in the aftermath of the Meiji Restoration in 1868 and tracing its legacy on stage, this project tells the story of the crucial role that performance — specifically embodied memory — played in the changing understandings of the imported Western concepts of “liberty” (jiyū) and “revolution” (kakumei).
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