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William H. Morton Distinguished Senior Fellow for the Humanities Institute 2009
Eric L. Santner is currently Chair of the Department of Germanic Studies at The University of Chicago . His books include Friedrich Hölderlin. Narrative Vigilance and the Poetic Imagination; Stranded Objects. Mourning, Memory, and Film in Postwar Germany; My Own Private Germany. Daniel Paul Schreber's Secret History of Modernity; On the Psychotheology of Everyday Life: Reflections on Freud and Rosenzweig (winner Honorable Mention, Koret Jewish Book Prize in Philosophy and Religious Thought; Honorable Mention, James Russell Lowell Prize of the MLA; Honorable Mention, Rene Wellek Prize of the ACLA); Catastrophe and Meaning: The Holocaust and the Twentieth Century, co-edited with Moishe Postone. Two new books appeared in 2005-06: The Neighbor: Three Inquiries in Political Theology (University of Chicago Press), written with Slavoj Zizek and Kenneth Reinhard; On Creaturely Life: Rilke, Benjamin, Sebald (University of Chicago Press). He continues to work at the intersection of literature, philosophy, psychoanalysis, and religious thought.
Amy Allen is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Women's and Gender Studies and Chair of the Philosophy Department at Dartmouth College, where she has taught since 1997. She holds a PhD and MA in philosophy from Northwestern University, and a BA in philosophy from Miami University (OH). Her research interests are in 20th century Continental philosophy, with a particular emphasis on the intersection of critical social theory, poststructuralism, and feminist theory. She has published widely on the topics of power, subjectivity, agency, and autonomy in the work of Foucault, Habermas, Butler and Arendt, including two books: The Power of Feminist Theory: Domination, Resistance, Solidarity (Westview, 1999) and The Politics of Our Selves: Power, Autonomy, and Gender in Contemporary Critical Theory (Columbia University Press, 2008). Her current research project focuses on the relationship between power and reason in the critical theory tradition.
Professor Allen is a member of the executive committee of the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy (SPEP) book review editor of the journal Constellations and Series Editor of the Columbia University Press series New Directions in Critical Theory.
Kathleen Biddick is currently Professor of History at Temple University. Most recently she is the author of The Typological Imaginary: Circumcision, Technology History and the Shock of Medievalism. The spaces of her research have navigated manuscript rooms of the New York Public Library and the British Library, to the trenches of British archaeological digs, to the prison-cells of classical panoptical-style incarceral institutions (built by the British in Dublin in 1850)-- still inhabited by convicts. What links the vicissitudes of such projects is her passion for understanding the intersections between institution and political-theology, put another way, the question of undeadness and creaturely life. In her current Dartmouth project, Sovereignty and the Matter of the Archive, she is exploring the spectrality of institutional form and its relations to the constitution of political theologies, especially as it relates to bureaucratic transformations in governmentality in 12th century Britain and its strong impact on the question (posed so succinctly by Gil Anidjar)-the Jews in Europe and Islam in the West. The medieval materiality of bureaucratic form and its spectral repetition during key moments questioning the status of Jews in Britain in the 17th century and the 19th century forms the crux of her current study.
Rebecca Biron is an Associate Professor of Spanish and Comparative Literature at Dartmouth. Her research interest are Latin American literary and cultural studies, literary theory, gender studies, and Mexican cultural criticism. Publications include Murder and Masculinity: Violent Fictions of 20th-Century Latin America (Vanderbilt University Press, 2000) and City/Art: the Urban Scene in Latin America (Duke University Press, 2009). She has written articles on Mexico City, Elena Garro, Octavio Paz, Rosario Castellanos, Mexican discourses of modernization, and globalization in contemporary film.
As a scholar of American Literature, I investigate how language affects our understanding of individuals, nations and species. While most of my work focuses on the nineteenth century, I am also keenly interested in contemporary literary theory, gender and cultural studies. Because I am a bilingual speaker of English and German, I have always been intrigued by the relationship between multilingualism and national identity. In my book, Transnationalism and American Literature: Literary Translation 1773-1892 (Routledge, 2007), I ask how a work can be or become American absent a unifying mother tongue. Far from being a melting pot in which languages other than English vanish, the United States is now and has historically been an intensely multilingual country. Drawing on historical and contemporary language theory, I argue that the writers who founded American literature (such as Phillis Wheatley, James Fenimore Cooper, Margaret Fuller, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Harriet Beecher Stowe) embraced that multilingualism. They recognized that, to become "American," a literary work had to be readily available in languages other than English. To circulate their works among the nation's linguistically different readers, these writers actively promoted literary translation. Because such translation also allowed texts to be exported to other countries, it fulfilled these writers' desire to create a "world literature" that reached beyond state boundaries. I argue that multilingualism is a hallmark of American literature, which we need to recognize as fundamentally and foundationally transnational. The book I am currently researching recovers the buried history of nineteenth century animal representations on which modern notions of individual and collective identity are based. Animalia Americana: Animal Representation and Identity Construction in Nineteenth Century American Literature works thematically in that it looks at textual portraits of domesticated animals. But what's driving this project are theoretical questions regarding the similarities and differences between animals and human beings, especially in regard to embodiment. By embodiment, I mean the social significance of physical attributes such as race and gender, and a range of physical experiences, such as pain, death, diet, growth, and nakedness. While my focus is on individual identity, I also ask how animal representations affect the collective, metaphorical body politic and American national identity.
Mary Coffey studied Art History and Cultural Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Before joining the faculty at Dartmouth she taught at Pomona College (1999-2001) and was a Faculty Fellow and Internship Coordinator at New York University's Graduate Program in Museum Studies (2001-2004). She is currently completing a book manuscript on the post-revolutionary national culture project in Mexico that explores the relationship between Mexican muralism and the development of a federal complex of public museums devoted to national art, history, and anthropology. This project demonstrates that mural artists helped to shape the visual and ideological strategies for narrating the nation's history, culture, and social makeup pioneered by the "Mexican School of Museology" and eventually instantiated in the world famous National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City. By tracking the at times contradictory and even contestatory collaboration between muralists and museums, the book endeavors to demonstrate how mural art was both a populist avant-garde practice and a willing participant in post-revolutionary modernization, social regulation, and state- formation. Coffey's second book project explores the transnational marketing and exhibition of Mexican folk art in the advent of the neoliberal reform of the Mexican state and economy in th 1990s. This project seeks to understand the political, economic, and affective links between folk art producers in Mexico and their consumers abroad.
Jennifer Fluri is Assistant Professor in Women's and Gender Studies and Geography at Dartmouth College. Her interests are Women's political movements and women's leadership in South Asia and the Middle East. She is the recipient of the Feminist Nationalist Reproduction Scholarship.
Klaus Milich is Visiting Lecturer of American Literary and Cultural Studies at Dartmouth College. He was Assistant Professor in American Studies at the Humbolt-Universität zu Berlin where he received his Ph.D. in American Literary and Cultural Studies. Between 1978 and 1993, he was a free-lance essayist, writer and journalist for the academic program on German Public Radio (ARD), national and international newspapers, literary and cultural journals. He has held visiting professorships at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis (1997), and at Keele University, Great Britain, the David Bruce Center for American Studies (1998). He is the author of several books, including Early Postmodernity: History of a European-American Cultural Conflict (Frankfurt/New York: Campus Verlag, 1998).
Andrew McCann is Associate Professor of English at Dartmouth College. His interests are primarily on nineteenth-century British literature, romantic and Victorian, though much of his research is concerned with the ways in which colonial print-cultures adapt this material. His most recent research traces the relationship between evolutionary anthropology and aesthetic experience, both in Britain and the settler-colonies of nineteenth-century Australia. It focuses in particular on the visions of extinction that appear in the popular fiction of empire. He also has an ongoing interest in critical theory and its ability to engage with contemporary political contexts and creative practices. Publications include Marcus Clarke's Bohemia: Literature and Modernity in Colonial Melbourne, Melbourne University Press, 2004 and Cultural Politics in the 1790s: Literature, Radicalism and the Public Sphere, London, Macmillan Press, 1999.
Donald E. Pease is Professor of English and the Avalon Foundation chair of the Humanities at Dartmouth College. The author or editor of eight books, his Visionary Compacts: American Renaissance Writing in Cultural Context received the Mark Ingraham prize for the best book in the humanities in 1987. The recipient of Guggenheim, Mellon Foundation, Ford Foundation and NEH Fellowships, Don Pease serves as Chair of the Master of Arts in Liberal Studies program at Dartmouth College. In 2002, he delivered the Drue-Heinz Lectures in American Literature and serve as a Lord Rothermere visiting scholar at Oxford University.
Adam Sitze
Adam Sitze is Assistant Professor of Law, Jurisprudence and Social Thought at Amherst College, where he has taught since 2005. He has published on topics of legal, literary, and critical theory in journals such as English Studies in Africa, American Imago, South Atlantic Quarterly, Law and Critique, Law and Humanities, Law, Culture, and the Humanities, Theory & Event, Theoria: A Journal of Social and Political Theory (Natal, South Africa), and Pretexts: Literary and Cultural Studies (Cape Town, South Africa).
Carsten Strathausen is Associate Professor of German and English and Chair of German and Russian Studies at the University of Missouri at Columbia. He is the author of The Look of Things: Poetry and Vision around 1900, published in 2003 by the University of North Carolina Press, and the editor of A Leftist Ontology, a collection of essay on contemporary political philosophy forthcoming next spring from the University of Minnesota Press. Currently, he is completing a manuscript on The Aesthetics of New Media.
Dale Turner is Associate Professor of Government and Native American Studies. He is a Teme-Augama Anishnabai from northern Ontario. His area of study is political theory. Professor Turner's community has been involved in a century old land dispute with the provincial and federal governments, which has recently resulted in an unfavorable Supreme Court decision. This experience has led him to study philosophy in an attempt to better understand the meaning of "sovereignty", and especially the meaning of indigenous or "tribal" sovereignty, in both theory and practice. Professor Turner's courses reflect the importance of asserting and protecting tribal sovereignty in Indian Country. At the same time, students are encouraged to develop their critical thinking skills, especially when thinking about contemporary Native American issues. He teaches courses in government, indigenous philosophy and Contemporary Native American Issues. He is presently writing a book on indigenous thought and sovereignty in the 21st Century.
Donald Pease 