A new season is upon us: the leaves are changing, there’s a chill in the air, and the Kluge Center has begun to welcome the first residents from last year’s competitions. The first cohort of fellows from our partnership with the British Research Councils has arrived, along with several other scholars. We welcomed a total of 11 new fellows at the Center this month; most of them new faces but some familiar ones as well.
Ananya Vajpeyi is a 2012 Kluge Fellow who has returned to finish her residency at the Kluge Center after completing the first half in the fall of 2013. Dr. Vajpeyi is an intellectual historian based at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, New Delhi. She is also a Global Ethics Fellow with the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs, New York. Vajpeyi was educated at the Nehru University in Delhi, at the University of Oxford, where she read as a Rhodes Scholar, and at the University of Chicago.
Ananya has been writing on the life of Dr. B.R. Ambedkar, arguably modern India’s greatest juridical thinker, political leader and social reformer. Ambedkar is known as a founding father of the Indian Republic, a driving force behind the Indian Constitution, the founder of a sect of protestant neo-Buddhism called “Navayana”, and the representative of India’s outcaste community, the Dalits. When she began this project, she intended to produce a complete biography, but over time the outline of her book has gradually begun to look more like an intellectual life. There are several major areas of thematic concern that may be found in Ambedkar’s works, and many of these have not been sufficiently addressed in the scholarly literature. A more in depth look at Dr. Vajpeyi and her project will appear in the coming months.
Many of our Fellows are pursuing unique and innovative research, and Maria Maclennan is no exception. Maria has just arrived as an Economic and Social Research Council Fellow to work on her project “Finding Forensic Jewels: An In-Depth Review of Current and Historical Newspaper and Periodical(s) at the Library of Congress.” She is currently pursuing her Ph.D. at the University of Dundee in Scotland, and will be in residence for a period of three months.
Maria’s research investigates the potential of jewelry as a tool to aid the post-mortem identification of human remains within the scientific practice of Forensic Human Identification (FHI). The research looks at the proposition of Forensic Jewelry from the dualistic perspective of both forensic science and jewelry design, applying the relevancies and appropriateness of the design-led and craft-centric approach of Contemporary Jewelry Design (CJD) to an otherwise scientific field of enquiry. Through an auto-ethnographic and practice-led methodology, her work questions how the CJD practitioner may add value to a field that is ordinarily understood to be far removed.
Additional scholars who arrived in October are:
- Sarah Chadfield
British Research Council Fellow, Royal Holloway, University of London, “Muriel Rukeyser and the ‘real.'” - Elia Corazza
Kluge Fellow, Independent Scholar, “New Music for a New Dance: Diaghilev’s Ballet and Music.” - Emma Doubt
British Research Council Fellow, University of Sussex, “Photographic Sovereignty in the Work of Jennie Ross Cobb and Francis Benjamin Johnston: A Comparative Case Study.” - Nicole Lidenberg
German Fellow, Goethe University, “Passing and Split Habitus in Ellison’s Three Days Before the Shooting.” - Ben Phillips
British Research Council Fellow, University College London, “George Kennan and the Russian Revolution in Exile, 1885-1898.” - Pier Pischedda
British Research Council Fellow, University of Leeds, “Anglophonic Influence in the Translation of Onomatopoeia in Italian Disney Comics.” - Kirstin Smith
British Research Council Fellow, Queen Mary, University of London, “How do Stunts Produce and Enact Value? Stunts as Performative and Discursive Practice in Late Nineteenth Century New York.” - Antony Stewart
British Research Council Fellow, Newcastle University, “Tracking Foreign Intervention through Medicine and Social Science in Haiti, 1900-1950.” - Ruth Wasem
Kluge Staff Fellow, Congressional Research Service, “Whom We Shall Welcome: The Legislative Drive to End the National Origins Quota.”
Check back next month for scholars arriving in the month of November. Click here for the full list of scholars currently in residence at the Kluge Center.