Newswise — Four faculty members in the College of Arts and Sciences at The University of Tulsa have won prestigious national awards this year.
Katherine Adams, assistant professor of English, won a fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies; John Bowlin, associate professor of religion, was awarded a Life Sabbatical (or Lilly Fellowship) by the Louisville Institute; Sean Latham, assistant professor of English, won a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Fellowship; and Laura Stevens, associate professor of English, was awarded a Huntington Library Fellowship.
"Obviously these awards speak to the extremely high level of work by our faculty," said Tom Benediktson, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at The University of Tulsa. "All four of these scholars are exploring important cultural issues in historical and literary texts. These are issues that can help all of us understand how we interact and communicate in an increasingly complicated world."
Adams, who specializes in Nineteenth-Century American literature and culture, is at work on a book project, "The Public Uses of Privacy: Gender, Race, and Citizenship in Nineteenth-Century American Life Writing," which investigates how the concept of privacy changed and the role it played in regulating access to public authority and national belonging.
"Privacy is a slippery concept; that's part of what gives it such power in our culture. The term continues to evade exact legal definition and has never had clarity or consistency in general use, yet it is integral to our most cherished fantasies of democratic freedom and individuality," Adams says. Privacy isn't directly named as a Constitutional right, yet in 1965 the Supreme Court described privacy as 'older than the Bill of Rights.' How we define privacy matters profoundly as recent controversies around the Patriot Act, anti-sodomy laws, same sex marriage, and reproductive freedoms demonstrate," Adams says.
Bowlin's project "Tolerence and Forbearance: Moral Inquiries Natural and Supernatural" was one of five such projects awarded this year. "No one " not liberal political theorists, historians of the modern era, social critics or politicians, can say with confidence what tolerance is exactly." Bowlin says. "Scholars can't even decide, without some ambivalence, that tolerance is even a good thing."
Bowlin hopes his work gives an account of the development of tolerance though history and to explain why it is a natural virtue, a genuine moral excellence, while also giving an account of forbearance, spelling out the conceptual and historical relationships that unite this Christian virtue with its secular twin, tolerance.
In a larger sense, Bowlin's teaching addresses issues of the emergence and development of certain moral ideas and practices in the West, the relationship between secular and theological ideas and practices and the narratives we construct about them.
Latham received a Summer Stipend from the National Endowment of the Humanities and is working on his second book "The Art of Scandal: The Open Secrets and Illicit Pleasures of the Modern Novel," which explores the tendency to imagine that seemingly fictional stories are, in fact, merely veiled descriptions of real people and events. Beginning in the early twentieth century, however, key modern novels have deliberately troubled the boundary between fiction and reality.
Works by authors such as James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, Virginia Woolf, and Saul Bellow can all be read as novels in which real people are only lightly concealed in otherwise seemingly fictional texts. Ranging through the history of the novel, the rise of modernism, libel law, and ethnography, this book argues that we must fundamentally re-conceptualize the aesthetics of the novel and the standards of professional criticism in order to recuperate and interrogate a mode of reading that wanders more freely across the divide between fiction and history.
Latham is assistant professor of English at the University of Tulsa where he is editor of the James Joyce Quarterly and co-director (with Robert Scholes at Brown University) of the NEH-supported Modernist Journals Project. His first book is, Am I a Snob? Modernism in the Novel.
Stevens was awarded a Huntington Library Fellowship for 2004-5 to work on "Daughters of Abraham, Whores of Babylon: Eighteenth-Century Readings of Women in the Bible," which examines the ways in which eighteenth-century Protestant readers in Britain and North America interpreted women in the Bible through documents ranging from ballads and novels to funeral sermons and theological treatises, and how biblical women contributed to eighteenth-century understandings of female conduct and Christian spirituality.
Her book, The Poor Indians: British Missionaries, Native Americans, and Colonial Sensibility, published in fall 2004, studies sentimental depictions of American Indians in missionary writings from the English Civil War to the American Revolution."I'm interested in studying how religious texts influence secular culture in ways we might not at first notice. I'm especially fascinated with the ways in which different cultures have interpreted the Bible in ways that speak to their own hopes, questions, and concerns," Stevens says.
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