The Steering Committee of the Center for Feminist Research is delighted to announce our inaugural class of New Directions in Feminist Scholarship Fellows. This new program will provide funding and other forms of support for emerging work by feminist scholars at USC, and New Directions Fellows will meet throughout the year to develop their projects in a research seminar devoted to an annual theme. The 2008-09 seminar, directed by Alice Gambrell (English), will address the topic of “Mediated Identities.”
New Directions Fellowship projects for 2008-09:
Velina Hasu Houston (Theatre), “Writing a Woman’s Life: The Impact of Theatre on Identity Formation”
Anikó Imre (Critical Studies), “Transnational Feminism and the Mediated European Public Sphere”
Tara McPherson (Critical Studies), “Re-coding the Self: Transformation in the Era of Late Capitalism”
D. Travers Scott (Annenberg), “Electro-Sensitives: Health Discourse, Technological Subjectivity, and the Diseased Feminine”
NEW DIRECTIONS FELLOWSHIPS:
Each year, the CFR invites research proposals from USC faculty for an interdisciplinary research seminar broadly related to feminist topics, themes, or methods. The annual Seminar Director then calls for applications from other faculty, advanced graduate students, and resident artists to become New Directions Fellows. Fellows are awarded research stipends of $5000 to pursue their own research related to the seminar's annual theme.
The seminar's theme in 2008-2009 is “Mediated Identities,” directed by this year’s Seminar Director, Professor Alice Gambrell (English).
This seminar will bring together researchers in all areas of gender studies and/or media studies with scholars of gendered topics who publish their work in non-traditional forms. We will explore--in historical, cultural, activist, aesthetic, and other terms--how media and consumerism help to form such “identity” categories as gender, nation, sexuality, race, or class. We will also consider how the medium through which research is made public helps shape its messages: Why, for example, have feminist scholars played such active roles in interrogating and extending the appropriate vehicles for scholarly publication? Seminar discussions will also be shaped by the specific projects of seminar participants.
Because non-print publication is such an important part of this subject, suitable projects may include—along with familiar academic forms of publication and creative work--innovative mixtures of these forms. Media under consideration (or put into play) by fellowship recipients during the course of the seminar could include sound-based, visual, print, electronic, theatrical, or other forms.
New Directions in Feminist Scholarship Seminars offer a setting where faculty and advanced graduate students pursuing related research can work intensively on their own ongoing projects in a collegial atmosphere that encourages productive experimentation and provides both intellectual and material support. Proposed seminar projects are to be completed in publishable form by year’s end.
During the course of the academic year, New Directions Fellows participate in a series of workshop sessions focused on the development and presentation of their own work. Fellows are expected to meet in seminar at least six times during the academic year. They are also expected to participate in related public Seminar events. In addition to the research account, New Directions Fellows during 2008-9 will have access to the facilities and resources of the Institute for Multimedia Literacy.