Please join us in congratulating the 5th annual Northeastern University Humanities Center Resident Fellowship Program. This fellowship provides a focused period of time for fellows to pursue research, to collaborate around a common theme, and to share their work with the Northeastern community. The theme for the 2017-18 academic year is “Whose Story?”
2017 – 2018 Whose Story?: We are the stories we tell. A variety of narratives—journalistic, artistic, and scholarly— compete to explain our cultural circumstances and to ground individual experiences within a collective reality, from the news site to the novel, from political rhetoric to religious doctrine. Yet as storytelling platforms have multiplied, audiences have fragmented, and agreement on the significance of any single narrative is increasingly difficult to achieve. The distinction famously attributed to Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan—“Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts”—seems to be breaking down. The media circulation that the historian Benedict Anderson postulated as uniting citizens in “imagined communities” now seems equally capable of dividing them. We seek an interdisciplinary, humanistic conversation about how contemporary narratives of identity and experience, belonging and exclusion, are fostered or censored; how criteria of truth, feeling, or opinion are harnessed to assert a narrative’s importance; and how social and cultural institutions mediate the circulation of these narratives.
Iris Berent: “Our language, our selves”
Department of Psychology
College of Science
Erika Boeckler: “Silent’ and ‘Invisible’ Collaborators: How Material Objects Mediate Stories”
Department of English
College of Social Sciences and Humanities
Mai’a Cross: “The Ultrasocial World: International Cooperation Against All Odds”
Department of Political Science International Affairs Program
College of Social Sciences and Humanities
Martha Davis “An Exploration of Narrative Dissonance, Design and Democracy”
Professor of Law
School of Law
Marina Leslie: “Begetting Crimes: Laboring Women and Fake News in Early Modern Print Culture”
Department of English
College of Social Sciences and Humanities
Carmel Salhi: “The ‘Deserving Refugee’: Iraqis’ Contested Narratives and Identity in Resettlement”
Department of Health Sciences
Bouvé College of Health Sciences
Jessica Silbey: “Intellectual Property Stories”
Professor of Law
School of Law
Daniel Noemi Voionmaa: “Spies, Writers, and Artists: Modernity’s Gaze and Paranoia in Latin America’s Cold War”
Cultures, Societies and Global Studies Program
College of Social Sciences and Humanities
Kathrin Zippel: “Narratives of Belonging and Exclusion of Academics”
Department of Sociology and Anthropology
College of Social Sciences and Humanities
Anjuli Fahlberg – GRADUATE FELLOW : “Dancing around the Devil: Violence, Poverty, and New Geographies of Citizenship in Rio de Janeiro”
Department of Sociology and Anthropology
College of Social Sciences and Humanities
Jonathan Fitzgerald – GRADUATE FELLOW: “Setting the Record Straight: Women Literary Journalists Writing Against the Mainstream”
Department of English
College of Social Sciences and Humanities
*2017 – 2018 Visiting Scholar* Simon Rabinovitch: “Jewish Collective Rights: An International Comparison”
Department of History
Boston University
