Whiting Foundation Fellowships

Fellowships from the Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation

From 2002-2013 Baruch College received $150,000 per year from the Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation to support the research and scholarly writing of excellent teachers among our junior, tenure-track faculty in the Humanities. These funds provided respite from teaching for one year or one semester so that the faculty member could focus on her/his research. The basis for the award was excellence in teaching. For the purpose of these wonderful fellowships, the College defined Humanities broadly.

Applicants submitted:

1. an updated CV;
2. a complete set of teaching observation and post-observation reports;
3. a complete set of student evaluations;
4. sample syllabi, examinations, and a brief statement of teaching philosophy;
5. a copy of their teaching schedule (with rooms) for the upcoming spring semester; and
6. a description of the research project(s) the candidate intends to pursue.

Recipients were selected by a committee appointed by the Provost. The committee members, which included previous recipients of the Colleges teaching awards, observed a class session taught by each candidate.

After their fellowship period, recipients of Whiting Fellowships submitted reports on research and scholarly work carried out during the award period and publicly presented the results of their research.

Whiting Winners at Baruch College

(in reverse chronological order)

Whiting Fellows for the Academic Year 2013-2014

Angie Beeman (Department of Sociology and Anthropology):  One-semester release from teaching to work on a paper and begin work on a book investigating the paradoxical silence on racism within progressive interracial organizations that work against racial injustice. The paper, entitled “Walk the Walk but Don’t Talk the Talk: The Strategic Use of Color-Blind Ideology in Interracial Social Movement Organizations,” examines color-blind rhetoric among European American, Latino/a, and African American activists working in the same group. This paper also evaluates weaknesses in the conceptual work on “color-blind racism” and proposes new concepts that clarify the relationship between ideology and systemic racism. The book will expand upon these ideas and address the consequences of color-blind ideology for movements on the left.

Els de Graauw (Department of Political Science): One-semester release from teaching to conduct research that is part of a study of city immigrant affairs offices in the United States, with a focus on New York City, Houston, Detroit, and Louisville. An increasing number of cities have created such offices in recent years in efforts to tackle local immigrant integration challenges. Yet not much is known about these offices and whether this institutionalization of cities’ commitment to immigrant wellbeing actually advances immigrants’ civic and political integration. The objective of this project is to determine why city officials have established these offices, who has advocated for or opposed them, what functions they do or do not fulfill, what capacity they have to represent different immigrant groups in local politics, and how they work with civil society actors to promote immigrant integration.  The fieldwork for this project includes archival research and interviews with the staff currently and formerly affiliated with these offices as well as other relevant stakeholders, including state and local elected and appointed officials, community advocates, and representatives from grant-making institutions.

Whiting Fellows for the Academic Year 2012-2013

Allison K. Deutermann (Department of English):  Full-year release from teaching to work on a book to be entitled “Audience to this Act”: Hearing, Taste, and Theatrical Form in Early Modern England. “Audiences to this Act begins with a paradox: seventeenth-century anatomists likened the ear to both a funnel and a door; that is, a portal into the body and a protective barrier. These competing models of the ear (and, by extension, of hearing) played a vital role in the formal development and reception of early modern English drama. The twin questions of what and how people should hear in the theater–a largely aural art form shaped new dramatic genres; and playwrights’ answers to these questions helped to introduce new ways of thinking about aesthetics and urban consumption. To hear was to absorb foreign, potentially harmful matter involuntarily, but it was also to sample certain sounds and not others, consuming them by choice and according to taste and judgment. The theater’s exploration of audition thus offers early answers to questions that, to a large extent, are still with us. In noisy, crowded cities, where does the self end and its outside environment begin? How do we signal affiliations with one another in these seemingly anonymous spaces?”

Hagop Sarkissian (Department of Philosophy): Full-year release from teaching to write a book tentatively titled The Ethics of Personal Resonance or Resonance Ethics. “The book will be a sustained reflection on certain social psychological data suggesting that we are more enmeshed in one another’s behavior than we ordinarily think, that we seem to surreptitiously and automatically affect one another’s behavior through triggers arising from features of our own presence as a person. How should we respond to these data? What revisions or changes to our normative commitments might we entertain in light of them? I conceive of this as an ethics of resonance; that is, a normative project aimed at adducing how we ought to orient ourselves to enmesh nature of social life. Most of my professional talks and presentations over the last year have been concerned with this topic in one way or other, outlining certain chapters or key arguments and trying to uncover possible resources in the history of philosophy to address them. (Most recently, I presented an outline of central arguments to the CUNY Philosophy Graduate Center colloquium series.) The book is a considerable expansion of research initially conducted for my dissertation, but goes far beyond it. Hence, I think of it not as a dissertation book but rather as a book that will summarize a line of inquiry that began in my graduate years and has reached a point of maturity meriting sustained treatment and presentation.”

Whiting Fellows for the Academic Year 2011-2012

Brian Phillips Murphy (Department of History): One-semester release from teaching to begin work on book, tentatively titled Corrupting the Republic. His research will examine how Americans re-defined political and financial corruption in the aftermath of the American Revolution and the founding of the federal union. One of the chief complaints about the British colonial regime was that monopolistic corporations, Parliamentary interests, and self-serving advisors had corrupted British rule in North America. His goal is to uncover how corruption was identified immediately before the Revolution, and what aspects survived or were incorporated into Americans’ understanding of official misconduct in their new political institutions and power centers.

Karen Shelby (Department of Fine and Performing Arts): Full-year release from teaching to complete a draft of her manuscript Flemish Emancipation and the Memory of the Great War. The book examines the 19th-century Flemish Movement, a combination of intellectual and Catholic ideologies, which was exacerbated by the Great War and the unusual political situation that developed in the trenches of the Belgian Front. The text pays particular attention to the ways in which several Flemish political parties have utilized the memory, rituals, signs and symbols of the Great War in the past two general elections in the attempt to create an autonomous Flemish state.

Whiting Fellow for the Academic Year 2010-2011

Sandeep Sreekumar (Department of Philosophy) Full-year release from teaching to work on a set of papers in jurisprudence and ethics. The first paper will analyse the conceptual relations between rights, duties, values, and interests, with a view to showing how the proper role of rights lies not in the specification of any full theory of moral or political values but in the implementation of those values in a patterned deontic economy (so that rights are far less important to philosophical ethicists than many believe, even though they remain of great use to policymakers). The second paper will examine a trilemma which arises from our intuitions regarding the duties we owe to humans whom we are thinking of bringing into existence, and will seek to demonstrate that this trilemma indicates not so much a need for a new overarching theory in reproductive ethics as the need to excavate the tacit assessments underlying those intuitions, upon doing which we may see that the trilemma resolves itself.

Whiting Fellow for the Academic Year 2009-2010

Gregory Snyder (Department of Anthropology/Sociology): Full-year release from teaching to work on two papers that have emerged out of his ethnographic study of professional street skateboarders. “The Subculture Career and the Creative Class: The Case of Skateboarding and Graffiti” will look at the phenomenon of subculture careers highlighted in his book Graffiti Lives (2009) and apply it to the world of skateboarding. “The Subcultural Production of Urban Space:  Street Skating for Posterity,” will be an empirical look at the process of professional street skateboarding.

Whiting Fellows for the Academic Year 2008-2009

Julie Des Jardins (Department of History): One-semester release from teaching.

Thomas Teufel (Department of Philosophy): Full-year release from teaching to work on a set of papers investigating Immanuel Kant’s conception of “reflection” in the Critique of the Power of Judgment. The first paper seeks to show that “reflection” there does not refer to the comparison of objects with concepts, as is commonly held, but to an epistemologically much more fundamental cognitive operation. The second paper seeks to show that this operation provides an explanation of teleology in nature that is superior not only to theological but also to Darwinian accounts.

Whiting Fellows for the Academic Year 2007-2008

Timothy Aubry (Department of English): Full-year release from teaching to complete draft of his manuscript, Literature as Self-Help: Postwar U.S. Fiction and the Middle-Class Hunger for Trouble, which assesses the rhetorical and psychological strategies various popular postwar novels offer middlebrow readers for coping and coming to terms with particular social and historical dilemmas.

Jessica Lang (Department of English): One-semester release from teaching to work on Textual Survivors: Holocaust Representation and the Third Generation, which examines a selection of the most recent contributions to Holocaust literature by considering a range of texts written by authors who are at least three generations removed from the Holocaust, and some who are not direct descendants of Holocaust survivors.

Robin Root (Department of Anthropology/Sociology): One-semester release from teaching to investigate how revivalist Christianity (institutions, social networks, beliefs) mediates risk, stigma, and the flow of biomedical information regrading HIV testing and treatment in Swaziland.

Whiting Fellows for the Academic Year 2006-2007

Ali Nematollahy (Department of Modern Languages and Comparative Literature): One-semester release from teaching to do research on ideas of decadence in late 19th-century France. Prof. Nematollahy endeavors to unearth connections between the Symbolist and Decadent movements in literature and expects to link his study to the Naturiste movement and federalism, while developing and exploring their broader political and social dimensions.

Cheryl Smith (Department of English): One-semester release from teaching to work on two articles and perhaps to begin work on a book.  The first article explores the tension within English departments between writing instruction and literary study and how these tensions play out in the important undergraduate core English courses.  The second article analyses the high-stakes testing environments in writing programs and the effectiveness of evaluating student writers within such environments.  The book-length study would examine the complicated role English departments play within the academy.

Dov Waxman (Department of Political Science): Full-year release from teaching to develop a book-length study of Jewish foreign policy whose working title is Jewish Foreign Policy:  A Case Study of Trans-State Ethno-Nationalist Foreign Policy.  Professor Waxman notes that a study of Jewish foreign policy is critical for understanding international relations and has to date received little attention because international relations as a discipline privileges “the state” as the principal unit of analysis, rather than non-state actors such as multinational corporations, ethnic or national diaspora.

Whiting Fellows for the Academic Year 2005-2006

María Mercedes Andrade (Departments of Modern Languages and Comparative Literature and Black and Hispanic Studies): Full-year release from teaching for book-length project entitled, Ambivalent Desires:   Elites
and the Notion of Modernity in Columbia, 1890s-1950s. The manuscript will build on previous research and will include new research on Ignacio Gómez and Fabiola Aguirre.

Katherine Pence (Department of History): One-semester release from teaching for work on three interrelated projects: final editing of her first book (on German consumer culture during the Cold War); completion
of a first draft of a short introductory level book on European consumption; and a new research project on Germany’s cultural and economic relationships with de-colonizing countries in the 1960s and 1970s.

Whiting Fellows for the Academic Year 2004-2005

Shelly Eversley (Department of English):   Full-year release from teaching. Archival research for her book, Integration and Its Discontents: African-American Literature, 1944-1967.

Noriko Watanabe (Department of Modern Languages and Comparative Literature): One-semester release from teaching. Book-length study of rakugo, a 300-year-old professional storytelling genre in Japan
that is still active today.

Whiting Fellows for the Academic Year 2003-2004

Benedetto Fontana (Department of Political Science): Full-year release from teaching. Book with the working title Hegemony and State in Gramsci, which will explore the concepts of state and hegemony
in the thought of the Italian political intellectual, Antonio Gramsci.

Mary McGlynn (Department of English): One-semester release from teaching. Book-length study of contemporary fiction of Britain and Ireland, entitled Urban Peripheries: Versions of the Vernacular in Contemporary
Fiction of the British Isles.

Whiting Fellows for the Academic Year 2002-2003

Stephanie Golob
(Department of Political Science): Full-year release from teaching. Two projects: Globalizing the Rule of Law? Epistemic Communities, Chilean Judicial Culture, and the Repatriation of the Pinochet Case, and A Polis Too Far? Building a North American Community.

Geanne Rosenberg
(Department of English): Full-year release from teaching. Two books: one on the role of lawyers as advocates for the freedom of the press; the other focused on major disasters that have afflicted American corporations.

Nancy Yousef
(Department of English): One-semester release from teaching. A book-length interdisciplinary study of the concept of autonomy in enlightenment philosophy and literature, Isolated Cases: Literature, Philosophy, and the anxious Imagination of Autonomy.