CHSS is happy to announce its first-ever round of grant awards. Four awardees are recipients of the Faculty Manuscript Book Workshop! The Faculty Manuscript Book Workshops are an opportunity for generating constructive, informed criticism on near-final book manuscripts, when authors can most effectively utilize such feedback. An expert in the awardee’s field will be invited to present their thoughts on the manuscript, followed by a response from the author and discussion with a broader group of invited faculty. 

 

And the winners are:  

Eladio Bobadilla is a tenure-track Assistant Professor of History. His tenure book is “Without Borders: A History of the Immigrants’ Rights Movement.” The manuscript is a part of the Working Class in American History Series and is under advanced contract with University of Illinois Press. The book argues that the “invasion” of undocumented immigrants ultimately led to the Mexican American-led immigrants’ rights movement. The manuscript also discusses the period from the 1960s-2000s, where Mexican American activists came to relate immigration policy and debates as central to their own struggles for both civil and human rights.  

Jordan Brower is a tenure-track Assistant Professor of English, with a concentration in Film Studies. His tenure book is “Hollywood Signs: A Literary History of the Studio System.” The manuscript follows the arc of the Hollywood system from 1912-1952 by way of its engagement with the concept of the “literary.” The book also discusses the permutations of United States-based literary modernism as it occurs within an increasingly commodified and trans-medial culture. This period discussed in this work is set at a junction of economic, legal, and aesthetic circumstances that defined the art and industry of Hollywood. 

Monica Udvardy is an Associate Professor in Anthropology who is working on a book for promotion to full professor. Her book is entitled “Stealing Cultural Heritage: Tracking Vigango Statues from Kenya and the Ethics of Owning Non-Western Cultural Property.” In 1999, during a panel on Kenyan coastal ethnography, Udvardy recognized a statue from Kenya among a series of slides presented by fellow panelist Linda Giles. The statue had been stolen from one of Udvardy’s informants 14 years earlier. This began a process of research by Udvardy and Giles that culminated in 2007 in the return of two stolen statues from the Kenyan homestead. This manuscript tells the amazing story of the involuntary voyage of those two statues from the Kenyan hinterland to the American heartland. 

Elizabeth Williams is a tenure-track Assistant Professor in Gender and Women’s Studies. Her tenure book is “Primitive Normativity: Sexuality, Race, and Temporality in Colonial Kenya.” While traditional scholarship has argued colonizers universally represented indigenous peoples as sexually deviant, Williams argues an entirely different narrative developed in colonial Kenya, a narrative that emphasized the normativity of Kenyan African sexuality. The book discusses how colonists were able to argue that Africans must be “protected” from the forces of urbanization, Western-style education, and political participation because this would expose them to forms of “civilized” sexual deviance. Professor Emeritus Luise White of the University of Florida, a specialist on Kenya, Uganda, Zambia and Zimbabwe will be serving as manuscript reviewer.