Alumni

Shelley M. Alexander, PhD

Professor, Department of Geography

Applied Ethics Fellow 2021-22

Research Activities

Lessons from Coyote: Decolonization, Jurisprudence and the Geo-ethics of Marginalized Populations

Burdened by the colonial label of ‘pest’, coyotes can experience legally sanctioned, often unrestrained, persecution everywhere in Canada. Yet, evidence shows the species presents minimal risk to people, is ecologically important, and has social systems analogous to those of humans. As such, coyotes are my entry point to critically explore the marginalization of populations, engendered by the intersection of animal ethics, jurisprudence, and colonial worldviews. My aim is to expose the mechanisms and relationships that reinforce speciesism and oppression, and to offer insights and recommendations to de-colonize wildlife conservation and everyday practice towards marginalized non-human and human animals alike. Applied outcomes include characterization of an understudied ethical challenge, support for legal reform, and guidelines that can empower human communities to make ethical and ecologically sustainable choices that embody justness for  for non-human animals. 

Eleonora Buonocore, PhD

Instructor, School of Languages, Linguistics, Literatures and Cultures

CIH Annual Fellow 2021-22

Research Activities

Dante’s Memory: From Fixity to Fluidity

Memory played a key role in the Middle Ages: it was ubiquitous in medieval education, from rhetoric to philosophy and even theology. Dante’s Divine Comedy is a masterpiece of medieval culture, yet, before my research, there was no comprehensive study of Dante’s concept of memory. I argue that memory is one of the underlying structuring principles of the Comedy. Dante begins with a rhetorical memory trap, rooted in the fixity of the art of memory, that is a punishment in Inferno. In Purgatorio memory becomes a force for good, linked to prayer, which reduces penance. In Eden, at the rivers Lethe and Eunoè, signifying oblivion and good memory, there is a paradigm shift: from memory to forgetfulness. This oblivious memory, fluid and altruistic, informed by theology, is the only memory left in Paradiso. My book shows the Divine Comedy’s importance within the studies of memory in the European Middle Ages.

Ryan Pierson, PhD

Assistant Professor, Department of Communication, Media, and Film

Naomi Lacey Resident Fellow 2021-22

Research Activities

Pragmatic Visions: Vachel Lindsay’s “Democratic” Spectatorship and Early Cinema

In 1915, as cinema was coalescing into a major industry, American poet Vachel Lindsay wrote the first book of film theory, arguing for film as a tool of aesthetic enlightenment and political engagement. Pragmatic Visions traces Lindsay’s little-understood theory of how cinema engages viewers. Lindsay argued that film’s sensuous power could offer spectators “visions,” in something like a religious sense, of society’s potential future. But the public nature of film exhibition meant that, unlike private religious visions, cinema’s visions could be debated democratically. This project also unearths the cultural context around Lindsay’s ideas. By locating Lindsay’s encounters with print culture, Progressivism, and primitivism, this project reveals disturbing tensions between the ideal and practice of democracy in turn-of-the-century America—tensions that still exist today.

Annie Rudd, PhD

Assistant Professor, Department of Communication, Media and Film

Wayne O. McCready Fellow 2021-22

Research Activities

Unbidden Exposures: Histories of Candid Photography

Unbidden Exposures will offer the first full-length study of the history of candid photography, focusing on the period between the 1890s and the 1960s. Defining candid photography as a genre in which the depiction of unsuspecting subjects is assigned special revelatory capacities, Unbidden Exposures historicizes the idea that an unposed image is an optimally “natural” or “truthful” image. Topics discussed include the “art of not posing” in late-19th-century commercial portrait studios; the shifting meanings of candid photographs in the news, and the strategic deployment of “behind-the-scenes” aesthetics by political figures; the establishment of the candid camera as a mass-culture cliché, and the artistic appropriation of this trope; and midcentury female photographers’ contestations of candid photography’s truth claims. Through these case studies, this book illuminates the development of a pervasive yet largely unquestioned contention: the idea that the camera can best reveal its subjects when it is itself concealed.

Frank W. Stahnisch, PhD

Professor, Department of History
AMF/Hannah Professor in the History of Medicine and Health Care, Department of Community Health Sciences

CIH Annual Fellow 2021-22

Research Activities

Great Minds in Despair – The Forced-Migration of German-Speaking Neuroscientists to North America, 1933 to 1989

In the history of science scholarship, the ‘Brain Gain Thesis’ is often taken as an unquestioned given in studies of the forced migration of physicians and medical researchers following the Nazis’ rise to power in Germany after 1933. Research literature on the receiving countries has primarily tended to take the intellectual, academic, and institutional dimensions of the forced migration wave into account, while the individual fate and adaptation problems of many émigré psychiatrists and neurologists are still considerably under-investigated.  In this project, I thus want to look at the fate of a group of émigré physicians and researchers, who could be classified as early “neuroscientists” and who immigrated to Canada and the US either transitionally or for good. The thesis put forward here is that the process of forced migration most often constituted an end or at least a drastic change to the careers of this group of medical professionals.

Karen Bourrier

Annual Fellow 2020-21 

Research Activities

Mapping Victorian Women’s 
Literary Sociability

How was it possible to make it as a woman writer in Victorian London? What role did social networks—including who you knew and who you lived near—play in literary production? Mapping Victorian Women’s Literary Sociability uses digital mapping methodologies pioneered in geography to answer the literary question of how social networks could sustain the careers of Victorian women writers by geolocating (pinning down latitude and longitude) their addresses in four London neighbourhoods alongside the addresses of other writers, illustrators, editors and publishers. In Victorian London, women were not always welcome in the spaces of the club or the publisher’s dinner, but they did have opportunities to network in each other’s homes and at literary soirees. This project examines the residences of writers, artists, editors and publishers, in four London neighbourhoods to examine how propinquity—proximity leading to frequent interaction—facilitated careers and collaboration in Victorian England. 

William Bridel

Annual Fellow 2020-21 

Research Activities

Exploring the Meaning of Sport and Physical Activity in the Lives of Queer Calgarians: A Socio-Historical Inquiry

From invisibility to outright hostility, sport and physical activity have historically excluded gender and sexually diverse persons in varying ways. At the same time, certain mainstream sports (e.g., softball), gyms, and categorical sport (i.e., organizations and teams created by and for queer persons) have provided safe spaces to be active and to form community—often during times of significant persecution in the broader social context. Following from the Calgary Gay History Project (Allen, 2018) oral histories will be gathered from 10 to 15 queer Calgarians in order to explore the meaning of sport and physical activity in their lives during the second half of the last century. The primary interest is in investigating the relationship between these social spaces and both individual subjectivity and community building. Did sport and physical activity spaces provide opportunities for various forms of resistance in a conservative era, fueled by fear and hatred of difference?

Victoria Fast

Annual Fellow 2020-21 

Research Activities

Digital Justice and Injustice in the Smart City

Cities across the world are increasingly turning to information and communication technologies—to smart cities—with the hopes that doing so will create more livable, resilient places. However, these hopes to date have produced little substantive evidence of improved living conditions. Indeed, a growing chorus of critical voices are questioning the social justness in the smart city. These debates are emerging alongside a burgeoning research agenda called “digital geographies” in which interdisciplinary scholars interrogate the implications of society, space, and technology’s mutual imbrications by looking at how technologies—larger data flows, more sensors, complex analytics software, internet-connected devices, and open data platforms in ‘smart city’ strategies—and socio-political relations come to impact one another in and through places. In this research, I bridge critical smart city scholarship with digital geographies to focus scholarly attention on digital 
(in)justice in the smart city. 

Trevor Stark

Annual Fellow 2020-21 (Naomi Lacey Resident Fellowship)

Research Activities

Weak Politics: Marcel Broodthaers between Poetry and Reification 

The Belgian artist Marcel Broodthaers made the political and financial compromises of culture under capitalism into his medium. Despite abandoning his early career as a poet in 1964, my book argues that the political stakes of Broodthaers’ art turned upon his preoccupation with the history of poetry. I reconstruct Broodthaers’ encounter with the theory of “reification” in a seminar on Baudelaire led by the sociologist of literature Lucien Goldmann in 1969. First developed by Georg Lukács in 1923 and disseminated by Goldmann, reification described the rationalization of the social world for commodity exchange. Developing this political diagnosis, Broodthaers produced works in a variety of mediums that meditated on the obsolescence of poetry faced with the rise of the entertainment industry and the art market. My book reclaims Broodthaers as a resource in urgent contemporary debates on the social value of art and poetry amid intensifying financialization and wealth inequality. 

Lindsay Driediger-Murphy

Annual Fellow 2019-20 (Naomi Lacey Resident Fellowship)

Research Activities

Roman Religious Anxieties

This project demonstrates that many Romans experienced fear and anxiety when interacting with their gods, and considers why anxiety-inducing ways of characterizing the gods rise to prominence in certain contexts in Roman history. To date there has been no systematic study of what Romans believed about the character of their gods. Most scholars hold that Romans saw their gods as benevolent by default. My project seeks to recover a different strand of Roman theology. I identify three key contexts in which Roman sources express concern about the reliability and loyalty of the gods: the Roman conquest of Italy, the Second Punic War, and the collapse of the Late Republic. In each of these periods, I argue, we can see Romans confronting the possibility that the gods might give or transfer their support to Rome’s enemies. This conclusion encourages us to re-evaluate our reconstructions of Roman conceptions of divine-human relationships.

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Derritt Mason

Annual Fellow 2019-20 (Wayne O. McCready Fellowship for an Emerging Scholar)

Research Activities

The Virtual Child: Children’s Literature and Digital Culture

The Virtual Child explores the pre-digital history of “the virtual” in order to think through young people’s digital virtualities with greater nuance. This history illuminates how digital virtual space is a site for contemporary iterations of longstanding anxieties and desires surrounding the child’s own virtual qualities. Drawing on the etymology of “virtual,” The Virtual Child argues that we can characterize children’s literature—including its digital texts—as a genre that typically attempts to manage the child’s virtuality. More specifically, children’s literature aims to instill virtue (purity and moral goodness) in the child, while delimiting and subsequently regulating their Virtu (openness and creativity). By considering pre-digital virtualities in key works of children’s and young adult literature including J.M. Barrie’s Peter and Wendy (1911) and Maureen Daly’s Seventeenth Summer (1942), I maintain that we can better theorize how digital texts for young people endeavour to construct and secure their audiences.

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Timothy J. Stapleton

Annual Fellow 2019-20

Research Activities

Military Culture in British Colonial West Africa (c.1860-1960)

This project will produce a scholarly history of Britain’s colonial military in West Africa from the late nineteenth century conquest to decolonization in the 1950s. Located in Nigeria, Ghana, Sierra Leone and the Gambia, the Royal West African Frontier Force (RWAFF) was Britain’s largest army in colonial Africa yet it has not received much academic attention. This racially hierarchical institution was central in maintaining British rule, it served as a manpower reservoir for Britain’s global conflicts, and it was the catalyst for important social and political change in West Africa. Utilizing documents from British and African archives and with a focus on the ordinary African serviceman and his family, this study will attempt to better understand the military in British West Africa by employing the concepts of “military culture” which looks at basic assumptions that inform how the military works, and “combat motivation” which explores reasons why soldiers fight.

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Morgan Vanek

2019-20 Annual Fellow

Research Activities

Forms of Trade: Significant Omissions in the Records of Empire, 1694-1785

To date, Anthony Henday appears only around the edges of histories of Alberta, where he’s briefly celebrated as the first Englishman to see the Rocky Mountains – but he’s also the first Hudson’s Bay Company explorer to use the empirical forms of record-keeping that the Royal Society would later recommend to all agents of the British empire. As the four extant versions of his journal demonstrate, however, even small changes introduced to regularize the form of these observations have significant consequences for the journal’s argument about the people and places observed. During the period of the proposed fellowship, I aim both to examine the implications of these formal changes for Henday’s theory of environment, and to explore how these changes in the forms of empirical record-keeping might be correlated to changes in both Company and Cree land management practices in western Canada in the second half of the eighteenth century.

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Wendi Adamek

Annual Fellow 2018-19

Research Activities

Representing Nirvāṇa in Sixth-Century China
The Buddhist doctrine of tathāgatagarbha (buddha-matrix), positing universal potential buddha-nature, could be considered to challenge the fundamental Buddhist teaching of anātman (non-self). This has been a recurring topic in tathāgatagarbha theorization since its inception in the early centuries of the Common Era. The aim of this book project is to examine selected sixth-century Chinese contexts for the development of tathāgatagarbha influenced soteriology, using the lens of the Nirvāṇa-sūtra characterization of nirvāṇa as permanence, joy, self, and purity (chang le wo jing 常樂我凈). I examine hermeneutical and devotional representations based on the Nirvāṇa-sūtra, demonstrating that such representations were an integral part of evolving buddha-nature discourse in China. The classic Buddhist doctrine of non-self, though it would seem to be disjunctive, was actively assimilated into these representations and interpretations.

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Susan Cahill

Annual Fellow 2018-19 (Wayne O. McCready Fellowship for an Emerging Scholar)

Research Activities

States of Observance: The Art of Surveillance in Canada after 2001

How is surveillance depicted, visualized, and imagined by creative practitioners within the Canadian context? How can art provoke new ways of seeing surveillance systems in Canada post-9/11, a period marked by elevating concerns about security and intensifying surveillance tactics? Creative practices offer a singular viewpoint into discussions on the topic, because they surveil the agents and systems of surveillance, and present them to audiences in ways that can reveal the often invisible and unquestioned logic that governs them. This research program brings together creative practices as critical contributions to debates on Canadian surveillance systems. It uses the revisualization of surveillance structures offered by artworks to re-imagine and de-stabilize the processes, technologies, and agents that have contributed to normalizing surveillance and surveillant viewing in the present historical moment.

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Daniel Voth

Annual Fellow 2018-19

Research Activities

Testing the Ties that Bind: Indigenous Women, Kinship, and Politics in Métis and Halfbreed Identity at Red River
In 1869/70 Canada sought to expand its territory westward into the Red River Valley. In that act, the settler state encountered indignant Indigenous peoples who called themselves Métis and Halfbreeds. Scholars have struggled to know if these people were a single, unified Indigenous people, or if the Métis and Halfbreeds should be seen as two distinct, and divided Indigenous peoples. The literature on the debate tends to privilege the perspectives of Indigenous male elites, settler clergy, and European identities. My project will take up the question of Métis/Halfbreed identity and cohesion in 1869/70 by focusing on the way Métis and other Indigenous women anchor Indigenous identity and community, and then by examining how this shapes our understanding of the Red River community’s political positions–taken in response to the expanding settler state.

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Hendrik Kraay

Annual Fellow 2018-19 (Naomi Lacey Resident Fellowship)

Research Activities

From Entrudo to Carnaval in Nineteenth-Century Brazil
This project examines pre-Lenten celebra-tions and the origins of the quintessentially Brazilian carnaval (carnival) through the repression of entrudo, a celebratory form involving banquets, practical jokes, and water fights with syringes and waxen balls filled with perfumed water or other less savory liquids. Castigated as a “barbarous game” after independence (1822), entrudo was nevertheless practiced by people of all classes in the early nineteenth century. After tracing entrudo’s Iberian origins, the criticisms (and defenses) of it, police repression, this project turns to the institution of new forms of “civilized” celebration in the form of balls and public parades by societies of upper-class men. The conflicts over entrudo constituted a struggle about Brazil’s very nature at a time when new ideals such as citizenship and nationhood, challenges to slavery, and openings to outside cultural influences provoked numerous social anxieties involving questions of race, class, and gender.

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Amelia Kiddle

Annual Fellow 2017-18

Research Activities

The Mexican Oil Expropriation of 1938 and the Roots of Resource Nationalism in Latin America

This project investigates the influence of the 1938 Mexican oil expropriation on resource nationalism in Latin American history. The expropriation became a touchstone, reverberating throughout the world, changing business practices, government policies, labour relations, and discourses of resource nationalism. Through qualitative historical analysis, we will investigate the history of resource nationalism in Latin America stemming from this critical event. Although the expropriation held multiple meanings for individuals, social groups, and governments throughout the region, it framed the transnational flow of ideas regarding resource nationalism and continues to influence Latin American petroleum policies into the present. The primary outcome will be a co-authored monograph to be published in both Spanish and English that will heighten awareness of the historical roots of contemporary energy issues. It is timely given that the government has now decided to end its oil monopoly, abandoning the country’s long history of sovereign control over the extraction of this national asset. Ironically, the Mexican government is now inviting the successors of the very companies that were expropriated in 1938 to cooperate in the development of Mexico’s natural resources. By studying the transnational history of the Mexican oil expropriation of 1938 we can begin to recognise the effects that the new landmark change in Mexican petroleum policy may have in the region.

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Jack Lucas

Annual Fellow 2017-18

Research Activities

Political Authority and Democratic Reform in the Western Canadian City

Who should have the right to vote? Are proportional voting systems desirable? Should policymaking be entrusted to technical experts? While these questions may seem to share little in common, what holds them together is a concern about political authority – a concern about who should have the power to govern. Through much of the twentieth century, Western Canadian cities led North America in their willingness to experiment with new answers to these questions – experiments that included proportional electoral systems and the early enfranchisement of women. 

My research will explore these democratic experiments, explaining how they emerged, why they were implemented, and how they embodied changing ideas about political authority. I will write two comparative-historical studies – on enfranchisement and proportional electoral systems – as well as a broader essay on the development of urban political authority in Western Canada. These papers are part of a book-length project on the development of political authority in the Western Canadian city.

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Sabrina Perić

Annual Fellow 2017-18

Research Activities

Ilegala: Reading, Radicalism and Paramiltarism in Bosnia and Herzegovina, 1932-1942

While radicalization today is spoken of as a new phenomenon, the integration of youth and disenfranchised citizens into larger political projects deemed ‘radical’ or ‘extreme’ has long sustained paramilitary activity around the world. In order to understand this phenomenon, I am studying a historical case of radicalization: the rise of Communist Party youth in the 1930s Kingdom of Yugoslavia and their subsequent transformation, in the early 1940s, into Yugoslav Partisan paramilitary units, and eventually the National Liberation Army of Yugoslavia (NOV). This project will ask: how did ordinary civilians ally themselves with Communist politics and become members of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia (KPJ) in the 1930s? And, furthermore, how did these Communist Party members organize themselves from local KPJ committees into paramilitary units during World War II? This project, in particular, plays close attention to the role of engineers, scientists and miners from Bosnia and Herzegovina's resource extraction industry in the rise of Communist politics. Dr. Perić is especially interested in the cultural tactics used by these industrial elites in promoting new ideas, such as literacy campaigns, reading circles and informal libraries. Her research is intended to provoke a broader discussion of the usage of cultural forms and cultural objects in non-state violence and paramilitary organizations.

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Murray McGillivray

Annual Fellow 2016-17

Research Activities

The Gawain Poems: A Linguistic Study

The project seeks to examine the language used in British Library MS Cotton Nero A.x. (art.3), the famous unique manuscript of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and three other poems commonly thought to be by the same author. The examination will be based on the text established in the Cotton Nero A.x. Project critical editions, gawain-­‐ms.ca, which will be complete at the time the Fellowship begins. These new critical editions form a solid basis on which to examine the phonology, orthography, morphology, syntax, and lexicon of the Middle English dialect in which the poems are written. Two main products of this research are envisaged: a review of the phonology, orthography, morphology, and syntax of the poems, to be published as a longish chapter among the introductory chapters to the online manuscript facsimile (gawain-­‐ms.ca; gawain.ucalgary.ca); and a lemmatized glossarial index and concordance to the poems.

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Rachel Schmidt

Annual Fellow 2016-17

Research Activities

Non-Literary Discourses in Cervantes´s Late Prose

The study will show how non-literary genres shaped Cervantes´s two last major prose works, Don Quijote II (1615) and Los Trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda (1617). The Spanish novelist used the thematics of genres such as domestic governance, dueling, natural history and humanistic letters to structure the episodes in the second part of Don Quixote, but also constructed the conversations that link these episodes through discourse related to these genres plus religion and medicine. In the Persiles he employed cosmography and astrology to introduce irony into the allegorical pilgrimage of Protestant Scandinavian prince and princess to Rome. Through analyzing these non-literary discourses, I illuminate political and social nuances that have been lost to 21^st-century readers who are no longer familiar with the conventions, language, and ideas of the writings in which they circulated, nor the debates, which they summarized in a nutshell.

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Charles Tepperman

Annual Fellow 2016-17

Research Activities

Film Production Culture in Canada: Case Study of a Creative Producer

This project initiates a consideration of Canada’s film production culture by focusing on the role of the producer. Studies of Canadian cinema have traditionally examined prominent directors, government institutions, and questions of national identity, ignoring the immediate contexts of film production – and the role of the producer, in particular – almost entirely. Yet producers play a critical role in Canadian filmmaking by navigating financial and cultural considerations, assembling key creative ingredients (from actors and directors to script source material), and facilitating the film’s national and transnational circulation. Using Canada’s most commercially successful film producer as a case study, this project adapts new methodologies from studies of film industries elsewhere to a Canadian context, examines a range of textual, archival, and filmic source materials, and generates new insights about the role of the producer in Canadian cinema.

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Cheryl Dueck

Annual Fellow 2015-16

Research Activities

National Pasts, Transnational Presence: Post-Communist Cinemas of Central Europe

This project seeks to gain understanding of the cinematic response to post-communist transition in Central Europe, where both the means of film production and the thematic content of films have been affected by the societal rupture since the collapse of socialism in 1989-90. I will make the case that there has been a shift from the national to the transnational in cultural identity and memory in cinema of the region, as precipitated by the dismantling of nationalized film production, the rise of funding bodies developed to foster pan-European cultural policy and European identity, and the necessity of audiences from multiple nations and cultures. In 2015, I will engage with local elements of the transnational audience, namely Central European diaspora communities in Calgary through public screenings and panel discussions. I will analyze 1) remembrance and national myths on screen (Hungarian Uprising, Prague Spring, Solidarnosc and the Fall of the Berlin Wall), and 2) the artistic decisions that serve to make film stories of the secret police in socialist countries appealing to varied cultural audiences.

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Ishtiyaque Haji

Annual Fellow 2015-16; 2005-06

Research Activities

Luck’s Influence on Obligation and Responsibility (2015-16 project)

Something is a matter of luck if it is beyond our control. My fundamental objective is to develop the view that luck significantly affects the breadth both of what is morally obligatory for us and conduct for which we are morally responsible. I first show that owing to luck, we frequently lack alternatives – we can do no other than what we in fact do. Since alternatives are required for obligation, luck undermines or restricts obligation, to derive the further skeptical conclusion that the range of what we are morally responsible for is curtailed.

Freedom's Fragile Steps: Authenticity, Education and Responsibility (2005-06 project)

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Elizabeth Rohlman

Annual Fellow 2015-16

Research Activities

Telling the Stories of Geography: Compositional Process, Narrative Design, and Communal Identity in the Sarasvatī Purāņa

My project is the final phase of a monograph on the Sarasvatī Purāņa, a regional text composed in the western Indian region of Gujarat between the 12^th and 15^th centuries. The book explores the evolution of the text over the course of several centuries, which resulted in two distinct and theologically opposed recensions. Focusing on the intertextual, this project seeks insight into the compositional processed through which the Sarasvatī Purāņa manufactured its own textual and religious authority. While this investigation will not reveal a single, human author of the Sarasvatī Purāņa, it will illuminate the human presence that guides the text’s continual recreation.

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Stefania Forlini

Annual Fellow 2014-15

Research Activities

Stefania Forlini has a SSHRC-funded pilot study to develop a computer-assisted approach to the study of early science fiction (1840-1899) in order to provide a more rigorous account of its emergence and evolution in the context of popular periodicals.  Rather than focusing on a few supposedly representative texts to define early science fiction (as most critics do), this study will employ technologies of textual analysis and data visualization to assess a much larger sample of published works, tracing the evolution of formal features that came to define this popular genre.

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Susan Franceschet

Annual Fellow 2014-15

Research Activities

Susan Franceschet's current research focuses on the executive branch of government, asking what sorts of effects women's greater presence has on the role of the cabinet in policymaking and governance. This project uses the case studies of Spain and Chile where women's cabinet presence equaled that of men's under the governments of Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero and Micelle Bachelet. 

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Saulesh Yessenova

Annual Fellow 2014-15

Research Activities

Saulesh Yessenova's project focuses on nuclear and biochemical military projects that the Soviet state ran in Kazakhstan during the Cold War. It examines a range of issues, from the establishment of those projects in Soviet Kazakhstan to the post-Cold War situation marked with political debates and controversies surrounding the damage done by the testing and development of nuclear and biochemical weapons to environment and human health in Kazakhstan.

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Christian Bök

Annual Fellow 2013-14

Research Activities

Xenotext project, which involves inserting a poem via genetic code into a microbe. The resulting organism will ensure poetic immortality of a quite literal kind. The Xenotext is a literary exercise that explores the aesthetic potential of genetics from the viewpoint of the Humanities—doing so in order to make literal the renowned aphorism of William S. Burroughs, who has declared that “the word is now a virus.” Working in collaboration with the Institute for Biocomplexity and Informatics (IBI) at the University of Calgary, I have been conducting interdisciplinary research, funded for the last four years by a SSHRC Research/Creation Grant, striving to address the implications of biotechnology for the Humanities by creating a “xenotext”—a beautiful, anomalous poem, whose “alien words” might subsist, like a harmless parasite, inside the cell of another life-form. I am striving, in effect, to create an example of “living poetry,” doing so, in order to highlight the contributions that the Humanities can, in fact, make to other scientific endeavours.

Noreen Humble

Annual Fellow 2013-14

Research Activities

Xenophon's View of Sparta

My project is to complete a monograph presenting a new reading of a treatise entitled the Spartan Constitution by the Athenian author Xenophon (c. 430-355 BCE). This work is central to our understanding of the ancient Greek state of Sparta at the height of its power (c. 500-370 BCE), and in turn to our understanding of the origins and impetus for the mythologisation of Sparta, which continues in the 21st century (e.g. the recent film 300).

The Spartan Constitution is a short treatise examining how Sparta came to be so powerful. It includes information about eugenics, the education system, the routine of daily life, military practices and the role of the kings. Its penultimate chapter openly chastises the Spartans for their present behaviour. It has traditionally been regarded as a praise, defence or idealisation of Spartan culture. My reading challenges these current assumptions about the work. I argue that it is an analytic work which explores openly both the positive and negative aspects of Sparta and her rise to power. I agree with others that the work belongs broadly to a type of writing about constitutions (politeia-literature) but I argue that it does so in a manner typical of philosophic enquiry.

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Richard Zach

Annual Fellow 2013-14; 2006-07

Research Activities

The Collected Works of Rudolf Carnap (2013-14)

Rudolf Carnap (1891-1970) was one of the leading philosophers of the twentieth Century. He was certainly the most important member of the Vienna Circle school of logical empiricism, and through his long and distinguished career in the U.S., Carnap exerted a significant influence on leading English-speaking philosophers such as Quine, Goodman, Kripke, Hempel, and Kuhn. He made important contributions to logic, philosophy of science, epistemology, philosophy of language, and the foundations of probability. However, Carnap’s work is widely scattered and often technical, which makes painting a comprehensive picture of his thought difficult. This inherent difficulty of Carnap’s work, together with long-running misconceptions about the doctrines he and the logical empiricists held, has led to a prolonged period of neglect, from about 1960 until near the end of the twentieth century. An editorial team of 14 distinguished

researchers from the U.S., Germany, France, and Canada is preparing The Collected Works of Rudolf Carnap (14 vols.) for publication with the respected Open Court publishing house. The volumes Zach is responsible for will contain Carnap’s logical writings up to 1942, including the Logical Syntax of Language (1934), Carnap's anti-metaphysical and epistemological writings from the heyday of the Vienna Circle, and his articles on logic, epistemology, metaphysics, and philosophy of science from the post-war period.

The History of Logical Metatheory (2006-07)

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