[Air-l] deadline approaching: Melon Fellowship at Penn

[Ed Lamoureux]

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/