FY 1994 Annual Report to the Regents

Highlights from the Humanities, 1994

• Among the books by faculty in the UM history department published last year was Juan Ricardo Cole's Colonialism and Revolution in the Middle East: Social and Cultural Origins of Egypt's 'Urabi Movement (Princeton University Press). Cole, associate professor of history and director of the Center for Middle Eastern and North African Studies, based his work on newly available documents in the Egyptian National Archives and addresses issues in the theory of modern revolutions in non-Western countries.

• Ronald Grigor Suny, Alex Manoogian professor of modern Armenian history, published two books last year: Looking Toward Ararat: Armenia in Modern History (Indiana University Press) and The Revenge of the Past: Nationalism, Revolution, and the Collapse of the Soviet Union (Stanford University Press). Suny is continuing his research on Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin and the making of the Soviet Union, 1879-1924.
• The Black Stork: Eugenics and the Death of "Defective" Babies in American Medicine and Motion Pictures since 1915 (Oxford University Press) by Martin Pernick, professor of history. Pernick has also served as historical advisor on two film projects with supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities about the historical construction of disability and of tuberculosis.

--Donald Munro

• Donald Munro, professor of philosophy and Chinese and associate of the Center for Chinese Studies, received the UM's Warner G. Rice Humanities Award for 1993-94. He gave two public lectures on The Distortion of Inquiry in China: "The Consequences of an Elite Disease" and "Opportunities for a Cure." The "elite disease" that Munro examined is the new form of an early Chinese view of the world where one's will is the dominant factor of experience, and thus "holding correct thoughts" is all that is necessary to understand and change the world.
• Yi-tsi Feurerwerker, associate professor of Chinese literature, is studying theories and practice of cross-cultural translation and will lead to an anthology of translations and analytical essays on contemporary Chinese fiction.
• Madhav Deshpande, professor of Sanskrit and linguistics, is completing research on Sanskrit phonetics based on his analysis of a fifth century B.C. text in Pune, India.
• Robert Danly, professor of Japanese, is finishing work on the expanded sixth edition of The Norton Anthology of World Masterpieces.
• Kenneth Lieberthal, professor of political science and associate of the Center for Chinese studies, has written Governing China (W.W. Norton) and is now studying the formation of the Peoples Republic of China. Lieberthal has also directed the Michigan-Beijing University project on sub-county change in China. This international research project included extensive survey research, an international conference in Beijing in October, and a series of scholarly papers.

• Alina Clej, associate professor of French and comparative literature, has written A Genealogy of the Modern Self (Stanford University Press), what she calls the first step in an "inquiry into the origins of European modernism." This work explores "a transitional moment in English romanticism, when subjectivity becomes simultaneously a matter of aesthetic fabrication and an object of bourgeois consumption."

• The department of English language and literature honored the distinguished career of Russell Fraser, Austin Warren professor of English, with its Impact Award for his books, editions, and essays, including major articles on Ben Jonson, baseball, Milton, and biography published in recent years.
• Also receiving an award from the department was Betty Louise Bell, assistant professor of English, women's studies, and American culture, for Faces in the Moon (University of Oklahoma Press). Her first novel, Bell presents the story of three generations of Cherokee women through the tales the women tell to preserve their history and explain their lives.
• Enoch Brater, professor of English language and literature, for The Drama in the Text: Beckett's Late Fiction (Oxford University Press)
• Laurence Goldstein, professor of English language and literature, for The American Poet at the Movies: A Critical History (University of Michigan Press).
• John Knott, professor of English, for Discourses of Martyrdom in English Literature 1563-1694 (Cambridge University Press).
• Thylaias Moss, assistant professor of English language and literature, for Small Congregations: New and Selected Poems (Ecco Press) and I Want to Be (Dial Books for Young Readers) and several individual poems and stories.
• William Paul, assistant professor of English language and literature and of film and video studies, for Laughing Screaming: Modern Hollywood Horror and Comedy (Columbia University Press).
• Alan Wald, professor of English and American culture, for major essays published from 1988-1994, some of which are collected in The Responsibility of Intellectuals: Selected Essays on Marxist Traditions in Cultural Commitment (Humanities Press).

• Associate professor of philosophy Elizabeth Anderson's Value in Ethics and Economics (Harvard University Press).
• Edwin Curley, professor of philosophy, prepared Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan: with Selected Variants from the Latin Edition of 1668 (Hackett) and A Spinoza Reader (Princeton University Press).
• Physics and Chance: Philosophical Issues in the Foundations of Statistical Mechanics (Cambridge University Press) by Lawrence Sklar, professor of philosophy, was nominated for the Lakatos Award in Philosophy of Science.
• Papers by David Velleman, associate professor of philosophy ("The Guise of the Good"), and Steven Yablo, associate professor of philosophy ("Mental Causation"), appeared in Philosopher's Annual after being selected among the ten best papers of the year in philosophy.

From Symposium Poster, January 1994

The Center for Russian and East European Studies (CREES) and the department of Slavic languages and literatures organized "Shostakovich: The Man and His Age," a January 1994, multimedia event on campus. Taking the lead was Rosamund Bartlett, CREES associate and Russian literature professor. Shostakovich remains a central figure in Soviet culture and walked the tightrope of Soviet cultural politics. Shostakovich was severely criticized by state authorities but also earned prizes from Stalin. Two decades after his death, scholars do not know quite what to make of him. The week-long conference aimed at a more accurate portrait of what it was like to be a creative artist in the Stalin years. Besides the scholarly seminars, the event also featured films and art exhibits and the Borodin Quartet performing all 15 of Shostakovich's string quartets.

Oliver Stone, the movie director, often criticized for fictionalizing history in his unconventional and provocative work, may be in a cinematic class by himself, according to a new book by professor of communication Frank Beaver. For the book, Oliver Stone: Wakeup Cinema, Beaver draws on thousands of critical media responses to Stone's films and analyzes the stylistic, thematic, and technical elements of the movies he directed or wrote, including "Midnight Express," "Platoon," "The Doors," and "JFK."