[Air-l] deadline approaching: Melon Fellowship at Penn
Ed Lamoureux
ell at bradley.edu
Thu Oct 7 13:29:08 PDT 2004
I believe Oct. 15 is the deadline for this application. Just in case
anyone on the two lists (NMC and Aior) missed the announcement, a
reminder:
http://humanities.sas.upenn.edu/topics05.htm
Penn Humanities Forum
Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Humanities
Call for Applications, 2005–2006
Five (5) one-year residential Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowships are
available for untenured scholars who received or will receive their
Ph.D. between December 1996 and December 2004. (You must have your
degree in hand no later than December 2004 to be eligible.) The
fellowship is open to all scholars, national and international, who
meet application criteria.
The fellowship stipend is $42,000, plus health insurance.
The programs of the Penn Humanities Forum are conceived through yearly
topics that invite broad interdisciplinary collaboration. We have set
Word and Image as the theme for the 2005–2006 academic year.
Research proposals are invited on this topic in all areas of
humanistic study, except educational curriculum-building and the
performing arts.
Fellows teach one freshman seminar each of two terms in addition to
conducting their research.
Word and Image
2005–2006
Topic Director: Catriona MacLeod
Associate Professor and Undergraduate Chair of German
"Mixed media" culture has changed from a novelty to the norm in our
day. University disciplines struggle to justify their borders. Small
children outperform their media-challenged parents. The Internet,
films, television, advertising, video games, and high-art hybrids
(installations, performance art) demand an ever-increasing ability to
decode interactions between words and images.
Under the circumstances, this would seem an opportune moment to
investigate the word-and-image relation. First, we must recognize that
it has a past. Indeed, the connection between the verbal and visual has
been fundamental to the history of several humanistic disciplines. We
might revisit the ancient yet pressing debate about the respective
abilities of words and images to represent. From the Renaissance
“paragone” or competition among the rival arts, to the
eighteenth-century “sister arts,” to Romantic ideals of synthesis and
recombination, the word-image relationship has been a continuous theme
of literary and art historical thought.
How words and images represent and whether they enjoy a harmonious
kinship, engage in border skirmishes, or seek to annihilate one
another, are not merely formal matters. The history of iconoclasm alone
tells us about the ideological stakes in the debate. The emotion and
loyalties involved in the process of memorialization— notably, after
the World Trade Center disaster—seem to demand multi-media expression.
And the word-image opposition is linked to other strongly ideological
binaries: masculinity versus femininity, time versus space, abstraction
versus materiality, art versus nature.
Our inquiry must also encompass new technologies for meshing words
and images. For example, the verbal “crawler” at the bottom of the
television screen occupies the same visual field as the visual footage
of an entirely different news story. Here broadcast news demands that
we make simultaneous sense of discontinuous media. The new information
resources available via the Internet and in software applications
present us with constantly mutating layerings of words and pictures.
Do such media images act as supplements or “illustrations” to words,
or vice versa? What relation lies between word and image, what are its
claims, and how does it insert itself into our consciousness?
Much contemporary art explicitly refuses traditional classification
and explores intersections between media: for example, land art,
installation art, video art, or (a recently coined term)
“word-and-image art.” In current literature, to cite only one example,
the fiction of W. G. Sebald has attracted critical attention for its
interweaving of narrative and photography. Our current preoccupation
with hybrid forms could helpfully be historicized: what do they have in
common with the illuminated manuscript, the emblem book, the cartoon,
the comic strip, or film? How has the visual entered literary genres,
how have words and texts changed the way we view and “read”
art—historically, or in the present?
With this broad view in mind, the Penn Humanities Forum invites
applications from interested scholars in all humanistic disciplines
as well as Political Science, Anthropology, History of Science,
Architecture, Design, and Communications.
Edward Lee Lamoureux, Ph. D.
Director, Multimedia Program and New Media Center
Associate Professor, Speech Communication
1501 W. Bradley
Bradley University
Peoria IL 61625
309-677-2378
http://hilltop.bradley.edu/~ell
http://gcc.bradley.edu/mm/
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