Humanities & Arts

My dissertation, “The Drama of our World: Spectator and Subject in Medieval Kashmir and Early Modern Europe,” is a comparative study on characterizations of the subject, the poet and the dramatic spectator in long-tenth century Kashmir and long seventeenth-century France and England.

Daniel Sada is one of the most complex writers in the landscape of Latin American literature. Often compared to Joyce for his linguistic experimentation and rigorous attention to form, he has produced over 15 works of poetry, short stories and novels, leaving behind a plethora of genetic materials, the study of which will allow us to better understand his creative process, in all its specificity, and the dynamics of his poetics.

The objective of this project is to rethink the evolution of 17th and 18th-century letter-writing practices in France through an interdisciplinary approach that combines literary studies, cultural history, and media theory. My research charts the emergence of practices for building a socially-oriented persona through letters, and traces how letter-writers used these practices to present themselves in society to their social networks, from the court society of 17th-century France through the Enlightenment.

“Spectral” music, a contemporary movement initiated in the 70’s, uses the acoustic properties of sound as its main source material. In “spectral” music works, scientific tools and techniques are used alongside sensibility and sound perception.  As it combines a scientific and sensorial exploration of sound, this music raises fundamental questions on the frontier between art and science.

This project seeks to explore the ways in which capitalism as a social process was re-established, reorganized, and operated in the late Ottoman Empire, especially between 1881 and 1914. In doing so, I will look at the Public Debt Administration (PDA), a European creditors-led institution that was tasked with collecting tax revenues of certain imperial monopolies and turned into the most important hub for the imperial capitalist economy through its more than twenty offices extending from Yemen to Salonica.

It is an honor to be selected as a Visiting Student Researcher by the France Stanford Center and to carry out my research in technology and music at the Institute for Research and Coordination in Acoustic/Music, the worldʼs largest research center dedicated to both musical expression and scientific research in Paris. This research will allow me the opportunity to acquire real, technical  autonomy with a number of computer programs on IRCAM software such as Max, OpenMusic, Modalys, AudioSculpt, and Spat.

Our project focuses on clerical celibacy in its medieval context—the celibacy rulings of the eleventh century and their Carolingian precedents—examining the implications of celibacy not just for priests (as others have done), but for women, and particularly for priests’ wives. In these linked workshops, we examine the celibacy movement from a gendered standpoint, investigating the effects on medieval communities and families of the movement to eliminate priests’ wives.

In the last century, major breakthroughs in our understanding of ‘identity’ have changed the way that we think about ourselves and the world around us. In the Humanities, fields such as Race and Ethnicity Studies, Gender Studies, History, and Literary Studies have taught us to think of who we are and how we identify ourselves from an intersectional, multicultural, and interspecies viewpoint.

We live in an age of racial, ethnic and religious tension. Our project produces an alternative narrative by asking why people cross religious boundaries, what social and cultural imaginaries make this possible, and what possible futures do these shared spaces suggest?