IATH NEWS
New 2018 IATH Fellows
June 12, 2018
IATH is pleased to announce its Fellowship awards for 2018. For the first time, the Resident Fellowship has been awarded to a pair of faculty: Mona Kasra, Assistant Professor of Digital Media Design in the Department of Drama, and Luke Dahl, Assistant Professor of Composition and Computer Technologies in the McIntire Department of Music. They will collaborate on Immersive Digital Experiences of Embodied Cultural Practices: A Hybrid Research/Practice Collaboration Across Disciplines. The project will create digital environments that collect, preserve, and engage with movement-based cultural and spiritual traditions, rituals, and heritage. Profs. Kasra and Dahl are particularly interested in utilizing virtual and augmented reality technologies and motion capture methods that can both allow scholars to observe and study practices that are not easily accessible to outsiders, and enable community members to control the level and type of engagement and visibility. A successful partnership will respectfully capture, represent, and artistically recreate a community’s practices, and will generate materials for new immersive media environments and performance involving sound, visualization, and movement.
Two Associate Fellowships have also been awarded. One goes to Edith Clowes, the Brown-Forman Professor in Arts and Sciences, Department of Slavic Languages and Literature, for The Politics of Literary Cartograph: A Poetic Geography of Russia’s World Ware and Civil War, 1914-1922. She is looking at place-based identity (that is, an emotional attachment to a particular location or space) in Russian writing during an extraordinarily turbulent period, by building a digitally accessible database of period writing. The project will use mapping and text minding tools to trace Russian printing and publishing culture and expressions of emotional identity as institutions and structures of society collapsed amidst war, famine, and revolution.
The second has been awarded to Marlene Daut, Associate Professor of African Diaspora Studies in the Carter G. Woodson Institute, for La Gazette Royale d’Hayti: A Digital Journey though Haiti’s Early Print Culture. She is gathering together all known issues of two major newspapers of early nineteenth-century Haiti, La Gazette Royale d’Hayti and La Gazette Officielle d’Hayti, as well as Almanach Royal d’Hayti: there is no complete collection of these publications, which document the early years of Haitian statehood and black sovereignty in the 19th century Atlantic world.
Every year, IATH awards a two-year Resident Fellowship and one or more one-year Associate Fellowships to UVA humanities faculty. IATH Fellows work closely with IATH staff to design and implement research projects that use digital tools and methodology to develop and publish their scholarship. Recent fellows have examined early Mormon marriage patterns, the grammar and syntax of endangered languages, prosopography in 19th and 20th century biographies of women, and William Faulkner’s tales of his imaginary Yoknapatawpha County.
