Many faculty members in the humanities have received support from OVPR discretionary funds. Among them is Tobin Siebers, professor of English. Siebers has been developing a new area of scholarship looking into the way that images in literature, painting, and advertising communicate cultural meaning.
Not every object develops the psychological sway of an image, and how an image wields the power "to influence and orient us" is not well understood. Drawing on thinking in psychology, psychoanalysis, and philosophy, Siebers is at work on a book about what it means to say that something is an image and how an object becomes an image. Siebers wants to understand "by what representational process an object is rendered psychologically captivating." He also will take an historical approach to try to understand the emergence of our present "culture of the image," whereby certain representations of images that appear in literature, painting, or advertising take on great fascination and meaning.
Another faculty member in the humanities who has recently received OVPR funds is Veronica Gregg, a specialist on Caribbean literature who applies a feminist perspective to writing by women from this region. Her approach is in keeping with scholarship on writers of Africa and the diaspora that examines the constructs of race and gender, criticisms of patriarchy, and the intertwining of socio-political, historical, economic, and literary concerns. Gregg is an assistant professor of English and Comparative Literature and an associate of the Center for Afroamerican and African Studies.
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