Five Faculty Members Awarded Fellowships
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- Five Smith College faculty members have been awarded prestigious fellowships
for 1997-98. John Davis of the art department, Alice Hearst of the government
department, Vera Shevzov of the religion department and Nancy Sternbach
of the Spanish department all have received fellowships from the National
Endowment for the Humanities. Michael Dettelbach of the history department
has won a Humboldt Research Fellowship, granted by the Alexander Humboldt
Foundation.
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 Davis will spend the next six months
completing a study of the Sherwood Studio Building, constructed in New
York in 1880, the first American building designed to provide both studio
and living space for artists. His study will result in a publication on
the Sherwood, a roster of more than 300 artists who were residents of the
building before 1900. This study is part of a larger project examining
urban culture in the late 19th century. The project, according to Davis,
will treat the Sherwood Studio Building as "an architectural construction,
an urban landmark, a social environment, and a structure that, in many
ways, made it psychologically possible for an entire generation of American
artists to come of age."
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 Hearst will be working on an interdisciplinary
project entitled "Creating the Natural Family: Law and Anxiety in
the Domestic Sphere." She argues that restrictive legal conceptions
about what constitutes a good family emerge from the need to mediate tensions
between liberal and communitarian ideologies in American political culture,
which often flatly contradict one another. Traditionally the chasm between
the two ideologies has been bridged through the use of "nativist"
ideologies -- ideologies that attach moral, cultural and intellectual superiority
to a narrowly defined view of Americanism and that often rest upon stereotypes
of racial, gender and ethnic difference. Her project explores the effect
of nativist ideologies in shaping family law rules and looks at how those
rules must change as those ideologies are revealed.
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- Shevzov is writing a book, Tensions in Tradition: Russian Orthodoxy
Identity on the Eve of Revolution, about "popular" Orthodoxy
and its cultural narratives during the critical decades preceding Russia's
1917 Revolution. Based on research in previously unexplored archives, the
book explores popular religious practices and beliefs of the laity regarding
icons and liturgy, grace and hierarchy, and the church and its structure.
In counterpoint to voices of the laity, the book will also present the
voices of ecclesiastical officials and will set forth those tensions that
arose within the Orthodox tradition during this critical historical period.
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- Sternbach, along with a colleague at Mount Holyoke College, Albert
Sandoval, is preparing two complementary volumes on Latina theater. The
first is a critical anthology of plays, performance pieces and narrative
stories by and about Latinas working in the theater. The second is a volume
of six interpretive essays that locate the plays within a historical, theoretical
and bibliographic context. Sternbach and Sandoval are the first critics
to organize, collect, anthologize and theorize Latina theater as a homogeneous
entity with its own properties, patterns and characteristics.
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- During his fellowship, Dettelbach will be in Berlin researching the
political-economic views of Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859), the Prussian
explorer, naturalist and courtier. Humboldt has long been identified with
the rise to cultural ascendancy of quantitative natural science in the
first half of the 19th century--but as a patron, organizer and popularizer
rather than as a scientist himself.
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- Two historiographical developments have made it imperative to re-examine
the significance of Humboldt and his science, according to Dettelbach.
The first is a growing interest among historians of science in characterizing
the emergence of modern natural science out of Enlightenment natural philosophy
in the early 19th century as a political event or a response to revolutionary
crises in notions of authority and order. The second is the gradual recovery
of Humboldt as a complex political-economic thinker.
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- Together, these two developments provide Dettelbach with a framework
for analyzing Humboldt's work in the sciences as a central part of the
reconfiguration of authority in the Revolutionary era and have pushed him
to develop a more precise and subtle description of Humboldt's role in
Prussian economic and political reforms, using materials in the Berlin
archives.
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