Past Faculty Fellows

Ashley Boyd, Department of English

Palouse Reads: Community Engagement and Action

This project brings young adult literature outside of academia and into the communities we serve to illustrate its impact beyond the university walls and to cultivate relationships with local stakeholders and organizations.

Dean Luethi, School of Music

Washington Sings

Gathering 16 vocalists to record and perform choral compositions by Washington State choral composers.

Alan Malfavon, Department of History

Men of the Leeward Port: Veracruz’s Afro-descendants in the Making of Mexico

Support for work leading to the publication of my first academic monograph focused on the historically understudied Afro-Mexican population of Veracruz which reframes the historical transition between the colonial and national periods of Mexico.

Nikolaus Overtoom, Department of History

The Parthians at War: Combat, Logistics, Reputation, and the First War with Rome

Support to complete writing and revisions of a book manuscript, entitled The Values and Reputation of the Parthians at War, which will investigate concepts of courage and cowardice and acts of presumed just and unjust violence found in Parthian history.

Io Palmer, Department of Art

Unruly Foliage

Creating a series of small scale ceramic wall sculptures inspired by domestic spaces, specifically window boxes, gardens, and flower arrangements and conceptually informed by the lived experience of a BIPOC artist.

Robert Bauman, Professor, Department of History, Tri-Cities

WSU Tri-Cities Latinx Community Oral History Project

      Since 2012, the Hanford Oral History Project, a WSU Tri-Cities program, in partnership with Northwest Public Broadcasting, has conducted over 300 interviews relating to various aspects of Hanford history – including strong themes of Pre-Manhattan Project agriculture, WWI and Cold War Hanford labor, and experiences of African Americans at Hanford and in the Tri-Cities Community. In addition, the Hanford History Project had a book series contract with WSU Press that showcased the oral history collections and featured two volumes: Nowhere to Remember and Echoes of Exclusion and Resistance. In Echoes of Exclusion, my colleague, Robert Franklin, and I identified the most important oral history need in the Tri-Cities as a project focusing on Latin American/Hispanic migration and experiences in the region, beginning in the late 1960s with the end of the Bracero Program. Our primary goals and objectives for this project, then, were to add to the efforts to narrate the history of Pasco, specifically East Pasco, and highlight the experiences and efforts of early Hispanic migrants to the region. In addition, we wanted to document the evolution of the Hispanic/Latinx community in the region by capturing the voices and experiences of a variety of people. We felt that it was vitally important to document the origins and development of this vital and growing community in the Tri-Cities. We thought it important to add to the growing diversity of Hanford-area narrators and provide primary sources for future generations to learn firsthand the history of their community. Another objective was to build on a Humanities Washington grant we had received that enabled us to conduct 5-7 interviews in the summer of 2022. We felt that the CAH fellowship would allow us to provide a richer tapestry of voices and experiences to those we had already collected.

      The significance of our project lies primarily in increasing the knowledge and understanding of the history of the Latinx community in the Tri-Cities and providing a platform for voices that often have been excluded from history. In addition to collecting these voices, another significant contribution of this project has been making those voices accessible. All of the oral histories recorded for this project either have been or will be transcribed in both English and Spanish. In addition, they all (both the actual video interviews and the English and Spanish transcripts) will be available soon on the Hanford History Project website.

      The Latinx community is an important and growing part of the Tri-Cities, and an increasing number of our students are from this community. Indeed, Latinx students now comprise over 50% of the student body on the Tri-Cities campus. One contribution of our project was that we were able to hire two Latinx students to help provide translation for some of the interviews and to transcribe the interviews. In other words, we believe the project has communicated to our Latinx students and to the Latinx community that WSU continues to appreciate their history and value on our campus and in our shared community. We believe this community-based project has increased the public visibility and outreach of WSUTC arts and humanities and advanced WSU’s commitment to diversity and inclusion. Finally, this project has embodied the Land- Grant mission of Washington State University.

      Funds from this fellowship were used for two primary purposes. The first was to conduct interviews. Funds were used for interview costs to pay our partner, Pacific Northwest Broadcasting, for their time and costs recording and producing the videos. Funds also were used to pay student translators for a couple of the interviews, in which the interviewees were exclusively Spanish speakers. The second purpose for fellowship funds was to cover transcription costs (transcribing interviews into Spanish and English). We had three different students o n e graduate student and two undergraduates) work on transcribing interviews for this project. Currently, not all of the interviews have been fully transcribed and uploaded to the Hanford History Project website, but those remaining should be completed and uploaded soon.

Donna M. Campbell, Professor, Department of English, Pullman

The Unknown Edith Wharton: Editing the Unpublished Fiction

      Over the past three years, a number of previously unseen and unpublished short stories and plays have been published in The Atlantic and The Times Literary Supplement, translated from the original French, and produced as a radio drama by the BBC, all pieces that received considerable acclaim in the New York Times, Washington Post, and other popular venues. What makes this fact unusual is that the author of these new works had passed away decades ago: Edith Wharton, who before her death in 1937 had already left an enduring legacy in American fiction.

      As co-editor of Volume 30 of The Complete Works of Edith Wharton, a 30-volume series under contract at Oxford University Press for which I am also associate editor, I assembled a team of graduate students who helped to transcribe and edit the unpublished fiction and plays of Edith Wharton. Drawing on some materials already gathered and some to be photographed at the Beinecke Library, Yale University, “The Unknown Edith Wharton” allowed me to hire and train graduate students to transcribe, collate, and begin editing the unpublished works; in addition, the project provided graduate students with training in creating digital and scholarly editions.

      The first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction for The Age of Innocence in 1921, Wharton has long been considered one of America’s finest novelists.  Yet her work, and especially her unpublished work, has never previously appeared in a complete critical edition. “The Unknown Edith Wharton” will increase the public visibility and outreach of WSU arts and humanities faculty by aligning WSU with a major publishing series from a renowned university press. This project will raise visibility for the English Department, for the College of Arts and Sciences, and for WSU as a whole.  In addition, WSU’s association with a prestigious project like this volume will enhance the university’s research profile.

      The results of this project will catalyze WSU’s engagement with emergent fields of humanistic and artistic knowledge by engaging students in a widely public—and, thanks to the open access nature of this particular volume for five years—influential project in the humanities. This project had the following goals:

• Goal 1: Gathering the Unpublished Work. The Beinecke Library Finding Aid for the Edith Wharton Collection includes approximately six boxes of unpublished works. During July 2023, I spent a week photographing materials at the Beinecke Library, Yale University. (Expenditures were covered privately, and no reimbursement was requested from CAH funding.)
• Goal 2: Hiring and Training Students in Transcription. In 2022-23, I recruited and trained the following graduate students in transcribing manuscripts: Fall 2022: Anna Bushy, Rashini Deluwaitte, Sara Brock, Sezin Zorlu; Spring 2023: Nazua Idris, Sezin Zorlu, Sara Brock
• Goal 3: Training Graduate Students in Creating Digital and Scholarly Editions. Training about Digital and Scholarly Editions was conducted during Spring 2023.

      Between Fall 2022 and Spring 2023, the graduate student editors made excellent progress through the following processes:

• Held weekly meetings to discuss theories of editing, digital editions, and specific tasks.
• Developed a system using Google drive to post manuscript images, transcriptions, and corrections.
• Created a shared spreadsheet to track editing assignments.
• Assign one editor to transcribe the piece,
• Assign a different editor to check the transcription.

      By May 2023, the student editors had finished transcribing 22 of the unpublished manuscripts and typescripts, some as long as 80 pages, and a second editor proofed 20 of them, out of a total of about 60 unpublished pieces. We had fully completed 144 pages of manuscript (MS) transcription & checking and 221 pages of typescript (TS) and manuscript transcription prior to checking.

      In Summer 2023, Dr. Trevor James Bond (CAH) and Dr. Donna Potts (Department of English) each granted us an additional $1000 to complete the project. This funding enabled us to continue funding graduate students Sezin Zorlu, Nazua Idris, and Sara Brock over the summer; they transcribed and checked an additional 17 pieces of unpublished fiction.

Ruth Gregory, Associate Professor, Department of Digital Technology and Culture, Pullman

The Contemporary Politics of Cinema Studies Book Proposal & Draft

      The original objective of this project was to complete a book proposal and initial draft for submission for consideration to be a part of the Education and Popular Culture book series with Lexington Books at the request of one of the co-editors of the series. However, over the course of this grant period, the project swelled in size. The book proposal is outlined but needs additional information from primary sources. The need for more archival and primary source research in a variety of global locations slowed down the proposal and draft process. However, the funding from CAH did give the principal investigator time to assess a number of key primary sources for the book that are significant to the argument.

      This project builds off work by cinematic scholars, critics, and filmmakers like Saunie Sayler and Siew-Hwa Beh who published the first feminist response to film in Women in Film in 1972; Janet Staiger, William P. Hobby Centennial Professor Emeritus of Communication and Professor Emeritus of Women’s and Gender Studies; and Douglas Gomery, Professor Emeritus Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland. As you may note by the use of “Emeritus” and the date 1972 for the first edition of Women in Film, this work is a revival of a critical discussion that has almost petered out. In addition, there is a lot of contemporary work by groups as well as the film guilds (unions) about inequity in the industry. However, the intellectual significance of the project is that even though how to teach cinema in higher education has been discussed in the past, there are no works that try and connect the way film is taught at the university level to greater issues of inequity in the film industry. This will be the first book of its kind to bring those two issues together.

      The book The Contemporary Politics of Cinema Studies would revivify discussions surrounding the film studies program canons and what is considered essential knowledge in the field. The current canon traces the artistic innovations of Global North white males through cinematic history. Scholarship that has come out in roughly the last 30 years plus my own original research has shown that there are many other discoveries and innovations that were done by women, people of color, and those whose work was in documentary or experimental films, that should be a part of the canon of cinema studies and replace false “firsts” in the established narrative.

      The significance of this work is to discuss what it means to be in the contemporary moment and still using this exclusionary canon that focuses on white male achievement from the Global North. What does that mean for students who do not identify as a white male? How do these issues translate to the wider film industry where women and people of color are not widely represented in key positions behind the screen?

      The funds paid for part of my 2023 summer salary. Specifically, it gave me time to coordinate the translation of 18,000 words from French to English from early filmmaker Alice Guy-Blache. It also gave me the time to complete a Fulbright application to India for Spring 2024 to do primary research on the early Bengali filmmaker Hiralal Sen.

      While the funds were used to partially cover a summer salary for myself during 2023, this is an ongoing project that started as soon as the funds were granted in Spring of 2022. In October 2022, I gave a presentation at Sheffield Hallam University in England regarding my ongoing work on this project called “The Problem with Firsts: A Critical Look at Cinema History & Ideology.”

      Using additional professional development funds from my department during this trip, I also was able to do the initial archival research on the filmmaker Alice Guy-Blache at the Cinematheque in Paris. Her letters and notes are the products that constituted the 18,000 words of French that were translated to English during the Summer of 2023.

Lawrence Hatter, Associate Professor, Department of History, Pullman

The Past is Never Dead: History, Law, and Indigenous Sovereignty on the U.S.-Canadian Border

      The overall goal of this project is to publish a sole-authored monograph titled The Past is Never Dead. This bookwill explore the unfolding of Michael Mitchell’s legal battle with the Canadian government to uncover the role that the creation of historical knowledge plays in settler colonial regimes. Interpretations of the past lay at the center of Mitchell’s case. His assertation of Mohawk sovereignty across the Canada-US border depended on both diplomatic and legal history. More specifically, Mitchell’s legal team pointed to Indigenous rights recognized by the Treaty of Utrecht (1713), the Jay Treaty (1794), and the Treaty of Ghent (1814), which, they argued, protected Indigenous rights of free movement between Canada and the United States.

      History was on trial in the contest between Mitchell and the Canadian government. Both sides called upon historians to offer their expert testimony to bolster their legal arguments about the contemporary rights of the Akwesasne Mohawk people. The experts at trial, however, drew upon the broader body of historical knowledge produced by academic historians who did not need to appear in court for their research about the colonial past to shape the future of Indigenous communities.

      The Past is Never Dead makes several important contributions. First, it forces historians of early America to confront the concept of the “vanishing Indian.” An essential part of the settler colonial project of the United States and the British Empire in North America, the erasure of Indigenous peoples still exercises an insidious influence over how historians of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries think about the resistance of Native peoples in the past and present. Second, by recognizing the continuity of Indigenous communities, like Akwesasne, The Past is Never Dead challenges the periodization that underpins master narrative of US history. Put simply, historians usually characterize the North American story of contact between Indigenous people and Euro-American colonists in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as a shift from an earlier period of fluidity and resistance to the later rigidity of nineteenth-century nation states and “modern” international borders.

      In the case of the Canada-US border, historians of the early American republic and pre- Confederation Canada usually point to the War of 1812 as a transformative moment in the rise of modern nation states and the consequent decline of Indigenous sovereignty. In short, after 1815, Native peoples “vanish” from the master narrative of US history, which shifts its focus away from questions of American “westward expansion” to explore the sectional tensions that led to Civil War. Mitchell’s case is part of a lengthy legal canon whose continued unfolding in the present day demonstrates the persistence of Indigenous resistance to national borders. By emphasizing the continuity of Indigenous communities on the Canada-US border, The Past is Never Dead examines the dynamic relationship between history and law. I argue that conflicting legal decisions have important implications for the kinds of conclusions that historians can draw about the past. Historians need to be attuned to case law because judicial decisions about whether certain treaty stipulations relating to Indigenous sovereignty are still in force, or have expired, can have a dramatic impact on the narrative arc of US and Canadian history. In the Mitchell case, did 1815 mark the end of Indigenous movement between the Canada and the United States or not? The answer to this question has changed over time and space, as Canadian and US courts have issued contradictory rulings. There is no telling how future courts might rule.

      Recognizing the symbiotic relationship between law and history means adopting a critical perspective on the power of narrative in the creation of historical knowledge. As story tellers, historians are often captivated by narrative and the traditional arc of a beginning, middle, and end. But historians need to be particularly careful in writing about ends when the stories they tell continue to unfold in court rooms in the present. There is nothing “academic” about interpreting the past when this act can also shape the future.

Patricia Wilde, Associate Professor, Department of English, Tri-Cities

Intersectional Rhetorics of the Archive: Searching for Stories of Black Women in American Civil War

      Outside of Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, and Susie King Taylor, Bowser is one of the most well-known Black women associated with the Civil War. As her story is often recounted in popular sources such as Ken Burns’s Civil War documentary, podcasts including Stuff You Missed in History and Uncivil, and a host of other digital and print articles, Bowser was a formerly an enslaved woman who worked as a spy in the Confederate White House. In this position, Bowser gained access to secret documents which she memorized and shared with Elizabeth Van Lew, a wealthy, white woman who ran a spy ring in service of the Union. When Van Lew’s journal was posthumously published in 1911, she noted that one of her informants was a Black woman named Mary who “never fails! Most generally our reliable news is gathered from negroes, and they certainly show wisdom, discretion and prudence, which is wonderful” (94). Van Lew elaborated on this disclosure during an interview that she gave shortly before she died. When Jefferson and Varina Davis inquired about a servant, Van Lew, who was on “intimate terms” with the Davises, supplied them with a recommendation (Van Lew 2).

      Although Bowser was not identified specifically in this interview, the name “Mary Elizabeth Bowser” was included in a 1911 Harper’s article and has subsequently come to refer the Black woman who worked as a spy in the Confederate White House, though recent discoveries have challenged this nomenclature. Extant archival artifacts, including materials housed at the Virginia Public Library, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, and the archives at the University of Texas Austin have contributed to this popular retelling of Bowser’s life. But several historians, including Elizabeth Varon and Lois Leveen, question the veracity of this narrative, claiming that some of the evidence proffered is exaggerated and inaccurate. Inspired by Saidiya Hartman’s notion of “histor[ies] written with and against the archive,” which attends to the past for purposes of the present while also critiquing the archive, I rhetorically analyze these archival artifacts to 1) raise questions about archival methodological standards and their Eurocentric origins 2) illustrate how these archival epistemologies continue to privilege the perspectives of white soldiers and politicians and 3) bring the resulting, but inevitable, entanglement of history and memory more clearly into focus.

      Most broadly, the project’s focus on Black women’s contributions to the Civil War could help diversify public memories of the war, an important cultural touchstone that had “a greater impact on American society and the polity than any other event in the country’s history,” as historian James McPherson asserts. Woven into the social fabric of the present-day United States, this cataclysmic experience has conventionally centered the political and martial efforts of white men who fill the pages of history books and “official” sites of memory. Countering this dominant narrative, my research will highlight Black women’s experiences during the war, focusing specifically on the rhetorical mechanisms—in this case, archival collections—that give rise to narratives of the past. Relatedly, this project will also advance rhetorical investigations of archives and archival research that seek to make legible the power that saturates collections. Historically, the archive was considered to be a neutral repository of artifacts that documented the past; the process of accession, organization, arrangement, and description was deemed a science.

      Yet poststructuralist thought calls these stances of objectivity into question. Using rhetorical theory to unpack the ways that meaning circulates through the archive and archival practices, I aim to extend critiques of the archive made by scholars in an array of fields. But while I am interested in how the archive constrains knowledge, particularly in regard to marginalized populations, I am also invested in researching rhetorical interventions that advance principles of equity, access, and inclusion in archival collections. To this end, I investigate the rhetorical dimensions of participatory archival practices, community archives, archival amnesty, reparative descriptions, and socially-just approaches to metadata creation.

Avantika Bawa, Associate Professor, Department of Art, Vancouver

The Scaffold Series

      This ongoing series of installations reflects my interest in responding to the built and natural environment, through the language of drawing and construction. Using primarily scaffolds I have made several installations that take the scaffold beyond its functional purpose to an aesthetic engagement with space.

      The first two installations of this series were completed in Mumbai, India (Another Documentation, 2012) and Astoria, OR (Mineral Spirits, 2016).

      #FFFFFF exhibited at Ditch Projects, Springfield, OR further advanced the Scaffold Series. Here the scaffolds were painted in a glossy white and arranged with a deliberate attention to pure form, in response to the interior of the gallery and the seeming quietness of the space.

      The third and most recent reinstalled, A Pink Scaffold in the Rann, highlighted the marvelous landscape of the Rann of Kutch in India (Salt Desert). Through a grand gesture, evident in its large scale, it embraced the color pink as it is a dominant color during sunrise in the Rann, and also popular in the local craft. It is the most ambitious work I have done to date.

      I am curious to see how many more iterations I can create using scaffolds as primary and maybe sole objects. How might color, scale, placement, formation, location and weather play a role in my Scaffold Series. I have the following installations scheduled:

      1– Micro Installations and Interventions: During the pandemic-induced shut down, I worked (remotely) with my colleague at WSUV, Noah Matteuchi to 3-D print a series of mini scaffolds in plastic. These miniature marvels are a treat and have allowed me to create temporary installations in minutes and in the most bizarre locations. I want to, and intend to continue this series of micro installations that often become interventions as well. Currently, we do not have the facilities to print these in metal on campus. Funds from the grant will however enable me to work with a printer in New York City to do so.

      3 – Art Beyond, Ashland, OR: I have been invited by Scott Malbaurn, Curator of the Schneider Museum, to participate in this new and exciting outdoor art adventure in Southern Oregon. Responding to COVID-19 restrictions and providing safe opportunities for audiences to engage in artworks, artists will create sculpture and site-specific outdoor installations at various sites in and around Ashland, OR. I will be creating a new iteration of the Scaffold Series for this project.

      Collectively the Scaffold Series has enabled me to explore the endless possibilities of a single structure by pushing permutations and combinations of color, form, scale, and location while responding to the topography and geography of the site. Over the course of time, I intend to expand upon this series, by exploring new terrain and different ways of configuring these installations.

      My projects related to the Scaffold Series have engaged the cultural community of the Oregon, Washington, California and beyond. They served as a catalyst to initiate discussions around the role of Modernism in art and architecture.

     As an artist, I have been making site-specific installations for over 19 years. These works respond not only to the site, but also the history and geography of the space they occupy. The works initially allude to logic and function, but in essence defy both, reflecting the regional, cultural and geographic influences of the time and space in which I am working.

      Although I create each work to be an independent entity, it often becomes a platform and a stage for other possibilities—performative and physical, staged and upstaged, planned and spontaneous. For example, A Yellow Scaffold On the Ranch, part of the inaugural year of Art Beyond (curated by Scott Malbaurn), was installed on Willow-Witt Ranch in the Cascade mountain range. This installation inspired Terry Longshore (professor at Oregon State University) to write a new composition, Framework: Scaffolded Clouds, which was performed by Left Edge Percussion upon the scaffolds themselves.

Troy Bennefield, Associate Professor, School of Music, Pullman

The Lost Works and Legacy of Julius Hijman

      The goal of this project was to research and disseminate information on the life and works of composer Julius Hijman, edit and publish many of his works from manuscript, and produce the first-ever recordings of his important compositions.

      Even before the war, Hitler’s Germany was a difficult place for artists of all types, not just those of Jewish heritage. The conditions in Germany, and later much of Europe, forced composers to emigrate or stop working altogether. Many that did not leave were persecuted, sent to Concentration Camps, or simply murdered. Many compositions during this time were lost, stolen, or destroyed. To make matters worse, many of these composers were forgotten in the post-war era as Europe, and the world, tried to move forward. Because of this, the impact of the composers’ music on their culture is insignificant. In a recent project proposal shared with me, Carine Alders wrote, “Music written by pre-war composers has long been labelled as conservative and old-fashioned. Their place in history has been erased retroactively, they are not mentioned in post-war publications.” Research continues across Europe and the Americas to identify these lost composers and promote their stories and work, but much more needs to be done.

      When I approached Carine about collaborating on this project, her quick response indicated her immediate interest in the life and works of Julius Hijman. Carine wrote to me:

“One composer that I’ve been interested in for a long time is Julius Hijman. A few months ago I discovered his granddaughter [lives] in Seattle . . . . For some odd reason, his music has always escaped performance by the Leo Smit Foundation. . . . I think there is lots more to be known about his time in the US and how he managed to rebuild his career there. . . . Migration from the Netherlands has been overlooked in international research about suppressed composers. Do you know the book Sounds of War by Annegret Fauser? I’d be very interested to know if Julius Hijman was involved in the US war effort as a composer or musician.”

      Julius Hijman was born in 1901 in Almelo, Netherlands. By 1922 he was performing professionally and studying composition.3 Julius traveled across Europe, performing, promoting contemporary music, and playing his own pieces. He and his wife settled in Berlin and although his work was not always well-reviewed, his future as a composer seemed very bright. However, when Hitler came to power in 1933, he, like so many other composers, left Berlin and returned to Amsterdam. “Already in the early 1920s, Julius expressed his anti-militaristic and pacificist ideals, and although he was non-observant, his Jewish origin was sufficient reason to worry about the Nazi regime.” Julius’s career was beginning to flourish in The Netherlands and even France, but aware of the impending disaster awaiting Europe, moved to the United States with his family in 1939.

      Julius’s time in the US was productive with him teaching, producing concerts, and even earning an honorary doctorate from the New York College of Music. His post-war activities in the US and in Europe appear extensive and significant, which makes the lack of attention to his life and work all the more baffling. After his sudden death of a heart attack in 1969, his widow sent the majority of his manuscripts to the Royal Library in The Hague and he, like so many of his European contemporaries, became another composer whose legacy was interrupted by the reality of the Nazi regime and whose search for a permanent home in the aftermath deprived him of the exposure he deserved.

      This project has been successful in presenting Hijman’s works to international audience’s increasing interest around similar composers, having his works published and performed, and producing recordings that can be distributed around the world. These accomplishments are in addition to the increased personal scholarly exposure and achievement.

Dennis DeHart, Associate Professor, Department of Art, Pullman

Rambles Through the Wawawai; A Re-photographic Project and Hells Canyon: An Exotic Terrane

      Creation of lens-based (drone, video, still photography, etc.) works focused on the Snake River, including specifically Hells Canyon Wilderness and the Wawawai County Park. The project also includes an exhibition, in collaboration with the WSU Department of Manuscripts, Archives, and Special Collections.

      The trans-disciplinary creative research traverses’ multiple approaches to scholarship. While positioned within visual art, the works produced engage with a diversity of ideas across multiple disciplines and fields.

      In essence, I produced three interconnected, while equally distinctly focused projects. You can find each of these projects, including images and context on my website.

      Rambles Through the Wawawai; A Re-photographic Project

      For four seasons, I’ve visited the Wawawai County Park area and adjacent environs, whose known history includes ancient and more contemporary uses. Each season brings a different aesthetic to the landscape, ranging from hot, arid summer wheatgrass lands to crisp, wintery snow-covered hills. What remains constant is the abundance of sunlight dancing on the lake.

      My visits included wandering along the Snake River, via the railroad tracks, west, towards the Lower Granite Dam. Each walk is a kind of journey, in which I intuitively trace the landscape with my camera. The camera invites a mediation on place, encouraging me to contemplate the contours of the land while moving through the changing environs. Each visit reveals a different reading of the landscape, informed in part, by the reviewing and editing of images made during previous visits.

      Aided by historical photographs and the known history, I like to visualize what the landscape looked like before the flooding of the river plain. I also imagine what the environs will look like in the future when the dams are gone and the river is free flowing and wild again. It gives me hope. I have developed complicated emotions for the Wawawai, simultaneously celebrating the beauty of place while lamenting loss.

      Hells Canyon: An Exotic Terrane

      An exotic terrane terrain is a piece of the Earth’s crust that has merged with another landmass and has a separate and entirely different geologic history.

      Hells Canyon: An Exotic Terrane is an interdisciplinary artist project, centered around Hells Canyon Wilderness / National Recreation Area and adjacent environs. The works focus on place, including a visual celebration of natural beauty, quality of light, and aesthetics. Exotic Terrane also engages with contemporary issues related to public lands, water, and borders. The works are both a celebration and critique of western spaces, in relationships to identity, mythology, and power.

      How is this work informed by and contribute to conversations around social and environmental justice in addition to land and water rights?

      My art focuses on land and water, including examining the connections, conflicts and intersections of nature and culture. The works are informed by readings and research that include a diversity of voices and perspectives. Often what these readings have in common, is a reevaluation and dismantling of myths and narratives that have historically dominated the “west.” Included is a selection of books that I have read in 2021, in regard to my project:

      Aerial + Fossils + Objects

      These works are a creative response to visual, experiential, and technical research focused on Hells Canyon. Initially, the project focused on creative forms of mapping, while developing a broader knowledge of place. As the works evolved, my understanding and experience became more nuanced, and poetic and aesthetic possibilities formed artistically.

      Naturgemalde is untranslatable German term that can mean a ‘painting of nature’ but it also implies a sense of unity or wholeness. The term is associated with Prussian naturalist and pioneering environmentalist, Alexander von Humboldt. Humboldt was less interested in isolated facts, but instead in connecting them, and believed that one’ s own emotions and subjective views were necessary, to completely experience nature interconnected. Inspired by Humboldt, I am compelled by deep time, and the relative incomprehensibility we have, of truly understanding geologic change. I am also interested in the richness of an ecological world view, focused on the importance of interdependency and how everything is interconnected.

Martin King, Assistant Professor, School of Music, Pullman

From the Back Row to Center Stage: New Music for Horn, Tuba, and Piano

      This project aimed to address several problems found in the world of chamber music. First, it is a historically established fact that women, people of color, and LGBTQ+ individuals were excluded from commissions and performances of their music during the time when the majority of the standard repertoire was written. The result of this bias towards past music has left all current composers, but especially those with marginalized identities, off the chamber music stage. Second, this bias towards certain larger, standard chamber ensembles makes it difficult for performers with fewer musical resources at their disposal to make music. A wind quintet cannot function without a bassoon, and a brass quintet must have two trumpets to perform the standard repertoire. For a student or professional at a smaller school or residing in a more rural area, performing these works may not be possible. An emphasis on these standard ensembles creates a significant barrier to entry for many musicians. Finally, certain instruments have historically had difficulty gaining popularity with students and the broader chamber music audience. The tuba was often considered ill-suited to playing anything other than bass lines. The first tuba concerto ever written, composed by the great Ralph Vaughn Williams, was initially panned by critics because it was written for the tuba. The instrument was seen as unsuited for melodic playing. The horn has had more success in chamber music given its longer history, but it is often considered “too hard” for younger players and lacks repertoire outside of the traditional chamber ensembles.

      This project addressed these three problems listed above by the commissioning, recording and performing outlined previously. Alec Wilder wrote the first horn, tuba, and piano trio in 1963 for his dear friends John Barrows and Harvey Phillips, two of the best brass musicians in New York City. The work took decades to become popular because the instrument grouping was too “unusual.” According to Dr. Jean Martin-Williams, Professor at the University of Georgia:

“A particularly engaging combination is the horn and tuba. However, there is still a lack of quality literature for these instruments. Many players of these instruments hoped that the success of Alec Wilder’s Trio for Horn, Tuba, and Piano would result in a deluge of pieces for this well-suited combination of conical instruments, but such has not been the case.”

      The PI and team believe that this combination of instruments sounds wonderful and has great potential. A small, diverse, and quality repertoire already exists for this ensemble, with works by Elizabeth Raum, James M. Stephenson, Barbara York, Trygve Madsen, and Jean-Francois Leze to name a few. Despite the existence of this repertoire, there have been less than five total albums of horn, tuba, and piano music ever recorded.

      It is very important for new music for brass chamber ensembles to continue to be promoted by performers and educators. Promotion of this music benefits composers and performers alike. This project provided high-profile exposure for the performers in this project, the composers whose music is featured in this project, and for this unique ensemble featuring two under-utilized brass instruments. Elevating the music of composers with marginalized identities is very important work, and something this project will accomplish.

      This project contributed a new work to the brass chamber music repertoire by a prominent composer, funded by the Center for Arts and Humanities at WSU. This project helped establish the PI and collaborators as one of the premier horn, tuba, and piano trios in the world with an album published by a major record label. The performance tour, combined with the album and the new work by Catherine Likhuta, will raise the profile of the performers, the WSU School of Music, and the Center for Arts and Humanities.

      This grant funded a $4,000 commission of a new work by the Ukrainian-Australian composer Catherine Likhuta titled Crikey! The grant also funded the publication of this album on Centaur Records, one of the prominent classical record labels in the United States.

Laurie Mercier, Professor, Department of History

Gendering Spaces: Men, Women, and Industrial Work in the U.S. and Canadian Wests

      This book project tackles an important question about why occupational segregation of the North American job market has persisted, resulting in a gender wage gap in both the US and Canada. Although women have made advances in many professional fields, this study probes the history of what has hampered their entry into “nontraditional” occupations that have historically paid higher wages than the service sector where women have concentrated.

      My research considers the role of regional identity in perpetuating gender ideologies in workplace culture. It compares how men and women negotiated, perpetuated, and challenged gender boundaries and ideals in industrial communities, unions, and workplaces in the US Pacific Northwest and western Canada from the 1930s to the present. Here the leading industries and unions perpetuated the belief that jobs in woods, mills, docks, fishing fleets, mines, and smelters required rugged masculinity, and hence they became socially and historically constructed as the domains of white men. Yet they also share a decidedly unromantic dependence on the vagaries of markets, corporate decisions, and resource supplies. The industries have resisted hiring women and racialized ethnic groups except when labor demands have overwhelmed traditional rigid boundaries erected. The male breadwinner ideal and the reputed toughness of the work that supposedly discouraged women and people of color from employment often disintegrated when labor markets expanded, when families required multiple breadwinners, or when these “rugged” jobs became seasonal and low-paid, such as fish processing and agriculture. Often locked out of jobs and unions and discouraged from some public spaces, nonetheless women in Western industrial communities frequently contested the masculinist myths about the “nature” of work, particularly through their union auxiliaries and efforts to enter male workplaces. They sought to reshape the class politics, cultures, and spatial arrangements of their communities, and to surmount divides both within and across communities, states and provinces, and nations.

      The objective of the CAH fellowship was to provide some additional time during the spring 2022 semester to organize existing research, conceptualize book chapters, and carry out additional research in Pacific Northwest archives.

      This project represents one of the first studies to provide a comparative analysis of the gendered character of work and community life in a transnational region. By concentrating on principal US and Canadian Western industries, and their unions and communities, this research contributes to a paucity of literature about cross-border associations on the northern US border. Although capital freely crossed borders as industries globalized in the twentieth century, scholars have seldom looked closely at the cross-border relationships within unions to compare how working- class women and men absorbed, negotiated, and contested ideologies about gender, race, capitalism, nation, and labor. By situating this investigation in a region that often exaggerated the gender exclusivity of central occupations, I hope to illuminate how gender ideologies remained entrenched after World War II–when Rosie the Riveters famously gained access to nontraditional jobs–and how women in industrial communities found ways to influence union, company, and community affairs.

      Studying how spaces and places become gendered, and how that gendering is challenged, helps us to understand how inequalities take root, persist, and change over time. This project will help to explain why barriers continue to exist but also offer ideas from the past about how they can be dislodged. I expect that this broad comparative study will make a significant contribution to our understanding of the modern North America West, labor, and women’s and gender history.

      During the award period, I was able to make progress on my book project about gendered work patterns in the Northern West during the 20th century. The CAH Faculty Fellow award provided me the time (through a course release in spring 2022) to focus on reading new literature, organizing my research materials (collected over the past decade), and conceptualizing book chapters. I participated in all CAH Fellows seminars in 2021-22 and presented the chapter outlines and main arguments about my work at the last seminar in April.

Melissa Nicolas, Associate Professor, Department of English

Covid-19 Narrative Collection

      The goal of this project is to create an open-access archive of personal narratives about living through the COVID-19 pandemic. There are three objectives:

1. to collect personal stories in situ in order to preserve, for posterity, the lived reality of this historic moment
2. to create an open-access living repository that scholars, students, researchers, and the broader public can both contribute to and utilize for their own purposes (professional or personal).
3. to engage in public scholarship that connects WSU to its local communities

      The COVID-19 Narrative Collection was intended to contribute to the Center’s goal to “expand WSU’s capacity for foundational research in the humanities” by creating an open access archive that scholars and students from all over the world could turn to for research about the pandemic.

      Additionally, the CNC marked a new path for me as a researcher and scholar. Until recently, I have mostly worked within the realm of composition studies, but over the past 5 or so years, I have been transitioning my scholarly focus to disability studies and the rhetoric of health and medicine. The CNC was an ideal pivot project because it allowed me to draw on twenty years of experience as a qualitative researcher while turning my focus towards public engagement and the need for story in the world of health and medicine. As such, the CNC was intended to contribute to the work of the emergent sub-field of the rhetoric of health and medicine within Rhetoric and Composition Studies.

      I used the fellowship for one month summer salary that allowed me time to research other Covid projects, create a mock-up of the digital interface I wanted for the project, and onboard a graduate student research assistant. After this background work was completed, I reached out to WSU’s Social and Economic Sciences Research Center (SESRC) for help with building the interface for this project.

      Because I am new to the world of building digital archives, I am grateful for the help of the SESRC in connecting me with a web-designer. However, since I had little knowledge about the logistics of building such a site, I severely underestimated how long it would take for the design to be completed. In fall 2021, the SESRC estimated that the site would be done in about 2 months, but there were multiple setbacks on the design side and the site was not ready to go live until late May 2022.

      Since one of this project’s goals was to capture the “lived reality of this historic moment” (Section 1), the delay of about 6-7 months in being able to use the site for data collection, significantly impacted the project’s purpose. The CNC was designed to have participants write, record, or create other digital media narratives on their own terms, without the presence of a researcher, so no data was collected while the site was being prepared. By late May 2022, people were ready to move on from the pandemic, anticipating a “return to normal” and a Covid-free summer. The window of opportunity for collecting the so-to-speak “live” accounts of people’s experiences with COVID had closed.

      While this outcome was disappointing for me (and my RA), I gained valuable knowledge about digital collection tools and now have the infrastructure built for a new project I am developing that seeks to collect narratives of people who have been in psychiatric hospitals. This new project will repurpose the CNC collection tool and will further my work in disability studies and the rhetoric of health and medicine. I anticipate that the new project will meet similar goals and objectives as the CNC project.

      I created and presented a poster at WSU’s Academic Showcase in Spring of 2022 about the project, and I presented on the methodology of the CNC in a Rhetoric of Health and Medicine symposium on the pandemic in the Summer of 2022. I look forward to taking what I have learned and done (the CNC collection portal) into future projects.

Jeffrey C. Sanders, Professor, Department of History

Strontium 90: An Unnatural History

      Strontium 90: An Unnatural History focuses on the cultural and environmental history of strontium 90. I expect to reach a broad audience of both academics and intellectually engaged citizens with this book. Beginning in 1945 with the first fission reaction and in every reaction thereafter, the US, the UK, and the Soviet Union released large quantities of strontium 90—the unstable, dangerous, and radioactive version of naturally occurring strontium—into the world’s atmosphere and ecosystems. Because strontium 90, is “bone seeking,” meaning that it seeks out and bonds with calcium-rich materials, including certain soils and plants, milk, and human bone, it became a source of dread, threatening to riddle humans with cancer. In their efforts to trace this radiation through global ecosystems, the element ultimately became a source of scientific knowledge as well as political volatility in postwar life. Just as radioactive strontium moved through ecological systems, this project will follow the twists and turns of this material as it wended its way through atomic cultures between 1945 and 2000.

      The Center for Arts and Humanities fellowship supported a course release for me in the fall of 2021 and provided travel funds that I originally had planned to use in the fall for several archival research trips related to my project on the history of strontium 90. The CAH allowed me to reroute my plans due to the pandemic-related closures of several archives during the grant.

      First, the course release gave me time to write. During the fall I was able to complete revisions on “Assaying Risk: Project Sunshine and the Half lives of Strontium 90” that will appear soon in Making the Unseen Visible: Science and the Contested Histories of Radiation Exposure, eds. Jacob Darwin Hamblin and Linda Marie Richard. The collection will be published with Oregon State University Press this year. During the fellowship, I presented my work to the other fellows in my cohort who provided excellent feedback that has actually affirmed and challenged some of the ideas that I have been testing out this last year. The course release also provided time to draft two provisional chapters and to prepare for my trip to Cardiff, Wales last spring of 2022.

      Unfortunately, I had to revise my plans for the research portion of these funds. During the fall of 2022, as the country was still in the throes of the pandemic, I was unable to visit Los Angeles, Washington, DC, and other proposed archive visits. However, I was able to spend the time meet with an archivist by Zoom at the National Archives who will be assisting me in the future. But these trips are still postponed until I am able to find support.

      Despite this setback and change of plans, the CAH has been flexible, allowing me to use the funds I would have used for these other research trips on a fall 2022 archive visit to the University of Georgia. There I was able to access the Eugene Odum collection. Odum and his colleagues will form the basis of a chapter on the emergence of radioecology at the Savannah River and Oak Ridge sites and an analysis of the Atomic Energy Commission labs and the radio ecologists who built the foundational understandings of postwar ecosystems ecology, including Stanley Auerbach and Howard and Eugene Odum, the latter whom would write the Fundamentals of Ecology based on their work with strontium 90 at AEC sites by the mid-1950s. As an added bonus, I was able to make a site visit to the grounds where Odum’s lab is and a general tour of the Savannah River site that will add richness to the story I plan to tell.

      Based on the support of the CAH grant I was able to prepare a much more robust National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship application that I am submitting this February in advance of the April deadline.

Jacqueline Wilson, Assistant Professor, School of Music

Inspired Native: Recording Works for the Bassoon by Indigenous Composers

      This project endeavors to create, for the first time, a compact disc of Classical works by American Indian and Indigenous composers for solo bassoon. Though several recording projects exist that center around Native American themes in Classical music, such projects overwhelmingly employ the pieces of non-Native composers who take inspiration in American Indian culture and melody. As a result, Native American composers are left to compile self-funded projects that feature their own works exclusively.

      The objective of this proposal was to promote Indigenous artistic sovereignty and self-representation by expanding the amount of repertoire and numbers of professional recordings of works by Native American composers for the bassoon. Native American and Indigenous composers are often overlooked in the field of Classical music performance and recording projects, as demonstrated by their lack of inclusion even amongst those who purport to be engaged in repertoire-diversifying efforts. For example, the Institute for Composer Diversity, an organization based at the State University of New York at Fredonia that provides databases of composers from underrepresented groups, includes only nine Native Americans in their collection of over 1,700 composers. Similarly, No Broken Links, a website that features instrument-specific repertoire lists highlighting composers who are womxn, transgender & gender non-conforming individuals, and/or Black, Indigenous, or persons of color, includes only three pieces by Native and Indigenous composers in their list of over 480 works for the bassoon.

      The album employs a uniquely decolonized approach that promotes Indigenous self-representation. It serves to combat monolithic portrayals of Indigeneity by presenting multi-dimensional and diverse points of view from composers of various tribal, stylistic, and aesthetic perspectives. As a Yakama bassoonist and Faculty Affiliate for the Center of Native American Research and Collaboration who centers the work of contemporary Native composers in my performances, I offer a distinct perspective and ongoing connection to these works. The project will serve as a foundation for future efforts in commissioning and premiering new works by Native composers to elevate indigenous perspectives and further the larger discussions of decolonized self-representation to include more collaborations with First Nations (Canada), Aboriginal (Australia) and Māori (New Zealand) people.

      The PI commissioned two new works for bassoon by composers Juantio Becenti and Connor Chee (both Navajo). Juantio Bencenti was commissioned to compose a work in four movements and 20 minutes in length for bassoon and piano. Connor was commissioned to compose a single movement work of no more than five minutes in length for bassoon and marimba. Juantio’s work “Four Pieces for Bassoon and Piano” and Connor’s piece “Nocturne for Bassoon and Marimba” were both recorded and released on the album Works for the Bassoon by Native American Composers, which was released on November 22nd, 2022, on WSU Recordings. These newly-commissioned works will add needed diversity and depth to the bassoon repertoire, which is lacking in substantial Native American and Indigenous representation. Indeed, these works have already begun to resonate within the field of bassoon performance, as demonstrated by Rodney Ackmann’s inclusion of Connor Chee’s “Nocturne” on his Fall 2022 Faculty Recital at the University of Oklahoma. Also commissioned were liner notes from Navajo Ethnomusicologist, Renata Yazzie, whose writings added context and deepened listener understanding of the recorded works. Finally, Yakama artist Carman Selam was commissioned to complete the album art, which is an adaption of her original digital illustration, “Future Visions.”

      The PI has pursued numerous opportunities for the promotions of this project in the form of performances, recordings, CD reviews, and other promotional ventures. Performances of four works from the album were included on Jacqueline Wilson (PI)’s Faculty Recital, “Interwoven: An Indigenous Collaborative Event” at the Elson S. Floyd Cultural Center on April 15th, 22. The album has been submitted for review in The Double Reed, the journal of the International Double Reed Society, and confirmed promotional features are forthcoming with Northwest Public Broadcasting, Classical 95.5 KHFM (New Mexico), Daybreak Star Radio (Seattle), and First American Art Magazine. Last, this project has been submitted for inclusion in the 2023 WSU Faculty Showcase.

Andra B. Chastain, Assistant Professor, Department of History, Vancouver

Chile Underground: The Santiago Metro and the Struggle for a Rational City

      The objective of this project was to facilitate research and revisions on my monograph, provisionally titled Chile Underground: The Santiago Metro and the Struggle for a Rational City (under contract with Yale University Press). This book examines the history of what is now South America’s largest metro system, an essential infrastructure system for a metropolis of six million people. It asks how and why this large-scale state-owned metro system survived political upheaval and economic turmoil across democratic and authoritarian regimes, from Christian democracy in the 1960s to democratic socialism under Salvador Allende (1970-1973) to the violent military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet (1973-1990). More broadly, this project asks how people use infrastructure for political purposes and how these projects undo or reproduce inequality. Chile Underground will be the first English-language historical monograph of any metro system in Latin America, an unexamined area of research despite the fact that Latin America is now the most urbanized region in the world and a region where urban transit policies have sparked major protests. Drawing on archival research in Chile and France, combined with oral histories in Chile, the book argues that the project survived because of steady French financing (despite political transitions in Chile), the persistence of a state-based vision of urban planning from Chilean urbanists and engineers, and because of the multiple meanings that actors within Chile gave to the project. Overall, the book demonstrates that the metro became a potent site of political and social struggle. The objective of this grant period was to research and draft Chapter 7.

      The significance of this project beyond Chile is twofold. First, it contributes to a broader understanding of the Cold War in Latin America and the role of outside actors and funders in promoting development in the region. Recent scholarship has shown that the Cold War was not simply a bipolar conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union, but a global struggle over the best path to modernization. While U.S. influence in Latin America is well known, we know less about the role of other external actors in the Latin American Cold War. My book argues that French funding and expertise were critical to the Santiago metro’s success. Chilean-French collaboration blossomed in the 1960s, as Charles de Gaulle sought to project French influence in the region and Chilean leaders looked to diversify their reliance on U.S. aid. This binational partnership remained strong during Allende’s socialist revolution, Pinochet’s counter-revolution, and the return to liberal democracy in 1990. Unlike Pinochet’s U.S.-trained economists, who pushed for privatization and deregulation of urban transportation, French engineers partnered with Chilean planners to defend the role of the state. They argued that state control over urban transportation would foster a more rational use of resources. By focusing on the economic, cultural, and political ties between Chile and France, I illustrate how France formed an alternative pole of influence that countered the power of the United States.

      Second, the project contributes to our understanding of the cultural and political significance of large infrastructure projects. Histories of large infrastructure projects, especially those targeting a general audience, often emphasize the ingenuity of engineers and politicians while overlooking the experiences of users, workers, and the broader public. Alternatively, they highlight popular perspectives to show how massive engineering projects ignore local knowledge or silence local voices. This project seeks to weave together both of these perspectives – from above and below. A key reason behind the metro’s surprising survival, I argue, is that a range of different actors continually contested its meaning and gave it a new role in Chilean society. The metro could, at one moment, become propaganda for the Pinochet dictatorship, and in the next moment become a site for everyday residents to critique the regime’s abuses. The metro became a powerful vehicle for people from all walks of life to contest the meaning of Chile’s path to modernity.

J. Philip Gruen, Associate Professor, School of Design and Construction, Pullman

The Buildings and Landscapes of Washington State University

      A Center for Arts and Humanities (CAH) Fellowship helped fund research activities for a book manuscript regarding the history and construction of the buildings and landscapes of Washington State University (WSU). The manuscript is aimed primarily at an academic audience in history and architecture yet is intended to be accessible to a wider public including prospective students, current students, and WSU alumni. I have a book contract with WSU Press contingent upon completion of the full manuscript and peer review.

      The specific objectives for the grant period were to undertake archival research (including that which would be carried out by a research assistant); to visit WSU’s urban campuses and research and extension centers; and to reserve time for the drafting of manuscript chapters. The archival work, more specifically, focused upon research in the Manuscripts, Archives, and Special Collections (MASC) of the WSU library system. The objective of the travel component was to obtain more information about WSU’s urban campuses and research and extension centers as the manuscript is to expand the scope of the WSU built environment beyond Pullman. The time reserved for writing generated drafts of chapters one and two and a detailed outline of chapter three. Closely related presentations, talks, and writing projects emerged from these objectives. These projects are discussed in more detail in Sections III and IV, below.

      This manuscript offers the first comprehensive history of buildings and landscapes at WSU. It features the physical development of the campus beginning in the late-nineteenth century, when an eclectic group of red brick and basalt buildings, drawing upon European-inspired architecture, attempted to bring refinement to the Palouse. The manuscript brings the reader into the present day, when energy-efficient, amenity-filled buildings and landscapes attract and enhance an ever-increasing population of students, scholars, and visitors to campuses across the state. Set within the dramatic topography of the state, for well over a century the built environment of Washington’s original land-grant institution has projected a captivating image that retains a powerful grip on the imagination.

      This image has been created as often as it has been built, however. What presents the WSU campus system with its characteristic sense of place is also among its greatest challenges: its landscapes and far-flung locations have made it difficult to maintain a cohesive architectural portrait. Faced with the economic vicissitudes that belie a state-funded, public institution, WSU has made and remade its buildings and landscapes to maintain its educational objectives and its appeal. Furthermore, this manuscript also demonstrates how the university— through design, photography, rhetoric, and preservation—has manufactured the image of an idyllic academic institution. Just as the manuscript provides an overview of WSU’s construction, it also tells a story about how WSU has been constructed.

      Importantly, too, the fellowship period generated a profound shift in the nature and focus of this manuscript. The grant proposal was submitted in early March of 2020—quite literally a week or two before a nationwide shutdown of the physical settings for classroom instruction. During that same month, the research of Robert Lee and Tristan Ahtone regarding “Land-Grab Universities” was published in High-Country News, revealing the sheer amount of land (and, subsequently, profit) that was dispossessed from Indigenous peoples to establish endowments for what became the nation’s public, land-grant institutions—including WSU. A couple of months later, in May of 2020, George Floyd was murdered by a Minneapolis police officer. These events, including the intensification of the Black Lives Matter movement in the months that followed, forced a national reckoning on matters of racial equity and justice (and inequity and injustice). To ensure relevancy to the present day, they also inspired me to re-examine my research on the buildings and landscapes of WSU with an eye towards issues of social justice. The grant funding was allocated to archival research, research travel, and summer salary support for writing. Most of these activities were accomplished in summer and fall of 2022 both by the PI and research assistant (Brit Murray).

L Heidenreich, Associate Professor, Department of History, Pullman

The Virgin Would Not Eat Grapes: Faith, Feminism, and the United Farm Worker’s Movement, 1965-1970

      My goal was to complete much needed research in the United Farm Workers’ digital archive: to review, code, and organize hundreds of documents.  I also sought to use some of this material to draft a conference paper and, with input from colleagues at a national conference, develop the paper into a refereed article (to be submitted either to Aztlán or to the Western Historical Quarterly).

      While volumes have been written on the history of the United Farm Workers, little attention has been paid to the role of women in the movement and the core ideologies that grounded their activism.  Yet from its founding in 1962, women, both secular and religious, played a critical role in its development.  This project stands at the intersection of labor history, Chicanx history, the history of religion, and feminist studies and so will encourage scholars in those fields to consider the manner in which ideologies and social movements as diverse as Roman Catholicism and Chicana feminism weave in and out of each other to create the past and shape the future.  Because early findings will be presented at a national conference (the Western History Association, panel pending), it will also serve to promote Washington State University as a nexus producing intersectional and cutting-edge scholarship. 

      I was able to work through just under 300 documents from the archive.  I participated in a workshop to use excel to organize smaller pieces of data.  Meeting with our faculty fellows’ group I learned of a more efficient piece of software and am currently learning to use it.  In relation, working through copies of the UFW’s newsletter as well as reports by women religious from the 1960s I noted the role of the papal encyclicals on the activism of Catholic labor organizers, including women religious and so made time to study the encyclicals – that influence is noted and mapped in the paper that resulted from this research, “Toward a Practice of Liberation:  Feminism, Chicanismo and the Labor of Women Religious in the United Farm Worker Movement,” presented at the annual conference addressed below (title was not changed at the time the program went to print).

      As you can see from the new title of the work, research funded by your grant resulted in some unexpected findings, shifting the title of the work. I found that the majority of the activism of women religious was not in the grape boycott, but in the lettuce boycott that followed it.  In relation, I learned of the activism of women often portrayed as working behind the scenes, such as Helen Chávez, who confronted Church authorities who supported the growers.

      This research thus far has resulted in a conference paper and not an article because mid-way through the semester the editor at the University of Arizona Press approached me and my co-author of another project “A Handbook in Chicanx and Latinx Studies” requesting a book proposal.  This is a project for which I had considered proposing to the Center but decided on the UFW project so that I could get a start on it as my next monograph.  Thus, I finished writing and revising two of the chapters for the handbook so that we could include them in the proposal, the editor sent them out for review and we now have a contract for the book.

      I will return to the UFW project in the fall, the full manuscript for the handbook is due at the close of the summer.  I will also note that while the success of these two projects was immediately possible because of the CAH fellowship, I also continued with my regular writing that would be accomplished without such funding:  I completed revisions on the chapter, “Word and Deed: Dolores Huerta, Chicana Feminism and an Ethos of Faith in Action,” and returned it to the editors of a volume on Catholic women’s activism (the chapter has been accepted).

Keri E. McCarthy, Professor, School of Music, Pullman

Ambiguous Traces of Asia and Beyond

      Established in 2016, the Pan Pacific Ensemble is a collection of soloists committed to performing music from composers in Asia and the Americas. Members at the time of the Ambiguous Traces recording include 4 WSU faculty members: Sophia Tegart, Keri McCarthy, Shannon Scott, and Martin King, along with external bassoonist Michael Garza. While Dr. Scott retired from the ensemble in October 2021, the newest member, Gabby Baffoni joined in November 2021, and has been an outstanding performer and collaborator.

      The group is passionate about creating, promoting, recording, and providing experiential opportunities for audiences around the world. The Pan Pacific Ensemble has commissioned numerous works for wind quintet by composers from Asia and the United States. Recent commissions include works by P. Q. Phan (Indiana University), Narong Prangcharoen (Mahidol University), Asha Srinivasan (Lawrence University), Kenji Bunch (Portland), and Nick Omiccioli (Singapore and United States). These new works have been glowingly received by audiences across the United States, and express influences ranging from Thai traditional music to rock and roll.

      The ensemble’s third CD, Ambiguous Traces, was recorded in January 2020, and features music commissioned by the Pan Pacific Ensemble (with generous support from the 2017 Arts and Humanities Fellowship and 2017 New Faculty Seed Grant) from internationally-recognized composers, including Narong Prangchareon (Thailand), and Kenji Bunch (United States), as well as recently composed works by Chen Yi (China-United States), Kee Yong Chong (Malaysia/Singapore), Austin Yip (Hong Kong), and WSU Professor of Music, David Jarvis (United States). Works on Ambiguous Traces honor Chinese and Thai traditional musics (Chen and Prangchareon), describe the disconnect between modernity and nature (Yip), and facilitate cross-arts synthesis through the musical depictions of murals in Miami’s famed Wynwood Art District (Jarvis).

      The project objectives included the editing and release of Ambiguous Traces, distribution of albums to high-profile performers, and performances of the repertoire in Pullman and highly- visible venues in the United States.

      The CAH grant provided travel funds for the ensemble to promote music from Ambiguous Traces at two high-profile venues this summer. The ensemble performed in July 2022 at the International Double Reed Society Conference (Boulder, CO), and in August 2022 at the National Flute Association Conference (Chicago, IL).

      During the grant period, the Pan Pacific Ensemble was invited to the Artists Showcase at Chamber Music America’s annual conference. This invitation is a top honor for chamber musicians based in the US. Other wind groups invited in 2022 included the Akropolis Quintet and the Sylvan Winds, both national-level performers and recording artists in the field. This showcase provided significant visibility for the group (and their 3rd album) to concert programmers and PR agents at the national level, and allowed the group to promote Ambiguous Traces.

      The ensemble also accepted invitations to perform at both the International Double Reed Conference (Boulder, CO) and the National Flute Association Conference (Chicago, IL) in summer 2022. The ensemble received a standing ovation and accolades from the audience at the International Double Reed Society Conference in July. The NFA performance also yielded strong interest in the ensemble and the repertoire performed. The CAH grant funding provided travel for the ensemble to both conferences, and CAH’s contributions were recognized in printed programs.

      Recordings from Ambiguous Traces were submitted to the American Prize in fall 2021, and this summer the Pan Pacific ensemble was announced the winner of the 2022 American Prize in Professional Chamber Music. This prestigious award is the nation’s most comprehensive series of non-profit competitions in the musical and theater arts, unique in scope and structure, designed to recognize and reward the best performing artists, ensembles, and composers in the United States based on submitted recordings. While CAH funding was not directly applied toward this application, the release of Ambiguous Traces has coincided with the award announcement, allowing greater visibility for the ensemble, the CD, and the repertoire it promotes.

Vilma Navarro-Daniels, Professor of American Studies and Culture; School of Languages, Cultures, and Race; Pullman

A Comparative Study of the Memorial Museum of Dominican Resistance and the Museum of Memory and Human Rights (Santiago, Chile)

      Since some years, my field of study has focused on Chilean cultural products that deal with Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship (1973-1990), and the transition and consolidation of democracy afterwards. In 2017, I traveled to Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. Something that deeply called my attention was the fact that Dominican people share a common memory about Rafael Leónidas Trujillo’s government (1930-1961). The Memorial Museum of Dominican Resistance houses a huge collection of documents, pictures, videos, and artifacts related to the resistance against Trujillo. It is visited by hundreds of Dominicans from all over the country; among them, many elementary, middle, and high schoolers and their teachers. Dominicans do not doubt about the dictatorial nature of Trujillo’s rule, a memory that Chilean people have not been able to build. It is important to keep in mind that Pinochet obtained more than the 40% of the votes in the plebiscite conducted in 1988, which means that millions of Chileans saw Pinochet –and still see him— as the leader who saved Chile from communism. Although in Chile there is a Museum of Memory and Human Rights, Chilean people do not share a common memory about the Pinochet Era and the political genocide that took place in Chile during those years.

      My project seeks to answer the following research questions: How was Dominican society able to create a common historical ground about Trujillato? Why Chilean society has not been able to face the Pinochet Era after 29 years of democracy? More specifically, have memorial museums had a role in these two so distinct attitudes toward national history? Did the way these two museums were implemented, promoted, advertised, and interpreted from hegemonic centers of political power have an impact on nowadays Chilean historical denial in opposition to the well consolidated and shared memory about the atrocities committed during the Trujillo Era that can be observed in Dominican Republic?

      On October 18, 2019, Chile began an anti-government protest movement that has had a huge impact in Latin America. These protests led the country to major changes such as a plebiscite in which the people of Chile voted that a new political constitution –to replace the one inherited from Pinochet’s dictatorship— was needed in order to implement deep changes in the economic, social, and political structures of the country. The people of Chile also voted to elect the 155 members of the Constitutional Convention, namely the constituent body in charge of the writing of the new political constitution. In direct connection with my research project:The October 18 Movement was the impetus for multiple artistic expressions: graffiti, street performance, painting, sculpture, popular music, poetry, video, just to mention a few. Many of these artistic products have found a house at the Museo del Estallido Social or M.E.S. (Museum of Social Outburst). Thanks to the funds awarded by the Center for Arts and Humanities, in December 2021 I traveled to Santiago, Chile, and visited this new museum related to the topic of this research project, where I had work meetings with its coordinators. With the valuable assistance of Maria S. Previto as the photographer of the project, I count now with more than 200 pictures of the collection housed by the M.E.S. as well as audiovisual recordings. I could also gather other materials such as pop art objects and books. I will be presenting on this project in June 2022 at the MLA International Symposium that will take place at the University of Glasgow, Scotland.

      This project promotes interdisciplinary approaches to cultural artifacts, specifically museums devoted to the theme of memory, dictatorship, and human rights. my project makes progress in the theoretical understanding of museums as components of urban spaces, which are protected and managed to achieve very precise goals: Museums are texts. This project will deeply impact my teaching at both undergraduate and graduate levels since I include topics about Latin America and the Caribbean in my courses.

Raymond Sun, Associate Professor, Department of History, Pullman

Fallen Cougars

      I was awarded a 2020-21 CAH Faculty Fellowship to support and advance “Fallen Cougars,” a project dedicated to reconstructing the life stories of @250 World War II war dead from what was then Washington State College and making them available through a digital exhibit hosted by the WSU Libraries. The CAH Fellowship enabled significant progress on Fallen Cougars, even though nearly two years of the Covid-19 pandemic and the challenges of working around public health restrictions that included the shutdown of the WSU Libraries from late Spring 2020 to Fall 2021. By supporting a graduate researcher in the Summers of 2020 and 2021, providing me a course buy-out in Spring 2021, and funding extensive photographic and video documentation of the project, the CAH fellowship helped “Team Fallen Cougars” to achieve a total of @115 completed reports by December 2021, almost 50% of the total. Most importantly, we opened the digital exhibit to the public in December 2021, meeting the deadline set in my fellowship application.

      The credibility, publicity, and momentum generated by this on-time opening has made possible further, increased funding for a larger research team in Summer 2022, and we are now within reach of essentially completing the research phase of the project in Summer 2023.

      As per the project proposal, half of the $15,000 fellowship ($7500) was used to pay for two years of summer funding for a graduate researcher from the Department of History. Over two summers of research and writing (ten weeks each summer paid by the CAH fellowship, plus two-to-three additional weeks each year supported by the WSU Manuscripts, Archives, and Special Collections, or MASC) the researcher completed 31 reports. These 31 reports directly funded by the CAH Fellowship represent almost exactly one-third of the total of 91 reports produced by the three-student research team over the course of the two summers.

     The fellowship supported a course buy-out in the amount of $5000 in Spring 2021 that allowed me to devote time to editing reports written the previous summer and deepen my own vision for the project.

      The original fellowship proposal allocated $1000 toward photographing and filming the process of researching the Fallen Cougars. This amount was spent in September 2020 when an independent photographer/videographer, Kris Faulkner, met with me and the 2020 research team for a day of interviews and filming. The photos and video created in this session were included in the story about Fallen Cougars that appeared in the Winter 2020 edition of WSU Magazine.

      Between Summer 2020 and April 2022, the number of reports generated by the Fallen Cougars Project has grown by a factor of five, from @25 to @125 counting an anticipated additional ten reports from undergraduate volunteers that will arrive by mid-May. The exhibit is now open to the public, and this summer, the Fallen Cougars research team will double in size to six (6!) graduate researchers, funded by the WSU Libraries and the Department of History. I anticipate that “Team FC ‘22” will produce @75 reports, which will bring us to a total of @200 completed records. We will also devote significant time this summer to uploading a backlog of reports to the website.  This will put us in a strong position essentially to complete the project after one more summer of research in 2023.

      All of this would not have been possible without the funding provided by the CAH Faculty Fellowship. Its benefits extend far beyond the direct support of the graduate research fellow, the faculty buy-out, or even the publicity enhanced by the filmic record of the project. Receiving the CAH Faculty Fellowship lent essential credibility to Fallen Cougars, which enabled me to obtain tens of thousands of dollars of additional funding from WSU Libraries, the Department of History, and a private friend of the project who redirected their existing support to the History Department’s graduate program to support Fallen Cougars for Summer 2020 and 2021. This funding made possible the rapid expansion of our research within two short years.

Jennifer Thigpen, Associate Professor, Department of History, Pullman

Marriage and the Making of the American West

      I write first to express my thanks to the Center of Arts and Humanities at WSU for its initial support of my research and for graciously granting an extension of these funds to allow me to visit archives once they were safe to re-open following COVID-era closures. This fellowship offered crucial support for my book-length project, titled “Marriage and the Making of the American West.” During the fellowship period, I sought to consult archives vital to the development of a book-length project.

      This project grew out of questions I developed while finishing earlier studies. As a scholar of American women’s and gender history, my research has explored how American missionary women in a variety of locations and contexts have negotiated the distance between their expected roles and the ones they crafted for themselves. My research found that they often did so in unexpected ways and with unexpected consequences. My book, Island Queens and Mission Wives: How Gender and Empire Remade Hawai‘i’s Pacific World (published by the University of North Carolina Press), argues that though the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions had very particular ideas about the duties that women could—and should—fulfill, mission wives often challenged, expanded, and altered their roles. In the Hawaiian context, powerful native women compelled mission wives to participate in mission activities, drawing women—American and Hawaiian alike— into the very center of Hawai‘i’s mission drama. Thus, mission wives’ duties brought them into contact with native peoples who often had different—if not competing—ideas about gender. Regretfully, such participation too often came at the expense of the women the missionaries had come to “save.” By focusing on the specific function women fulfilled as wives in a rapidly growing region, “Marriage and the Making of the American West” will allow readers to better understand the central role women played in American expansion in the nineteenth century.

      Taken together, the sources I have consulted begin to tell a story of deliberate race making. Whether scrutinizing marital matches, creating legal structures to make inter-racial marriages illegal, erasing marriages among men and women who were determined to be racially dissimilar, or creating “emigration societies” aimed at providing racially suitable matches, Euro-American settlers to the west—beginning as early as the 1830s—demonstrated a particular, racial vision for what would become the American West.

      “Marriage and the Making of the American West” promises to contribute to a robust and growing literature that takes seriously the intersections between the “public sphere” and the intimate domains of love, marriage, and sexuality. Yet, few scholars have critically examined the shifting marriage patterns in the American west during the nineteenth century. The extant literature has most frequently insisted that the movement of white women into the west met a need created by a gender imbalance. Only a handful have considered the relationship between a growing—and perceptible—concern about race and the regulation of the most intimate of relations—marriage and family. “Marriage and the Making of the American West” will demonstrate the ways in which the state –– through both law and custom—prioritized certain types of relationships and penalized others. My research will allow me to trace the formation of the region along racial lines, and to illustrate the ways in which policies on race and marriage and the strategies that emigrants developed over time determined how the West developed and evolved over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in ways that reverberate today.

      During my fellowship year, I presented my findings on Montana marriage patterns and strategies to erase inter-racial marriages in official census data to the cohort of CAH fellows. I benefitted greatly from their feedback and insights; many of their helpful comments are reflected in this report. In the coming months, I plan to locate and consult additional materials related to Eliza Farnham’s planned “brideship,” and to dig more deeply into the many matrimonial matchmaking papers now available through the WSU libraries.

Chris Dickey, Assistant Professor of Tuba and Euphonium, School of Music, Pullman

Music from the Margins

      I will perform and discuss music written by women, LGBTQ+ individuals, and people of color to audiences at prominent music schools in the Midwest. There is an alarming lack of diversity in today’s music programming. One sees this in the programming of solo recitals, chamber music concerts, and with some of the country’s leading orchestras. For example, last year two of the world’s leading orchestras—Chicago Symphony Orchestra and the Philadelphia Orchestra—announced their upcoming season’s programs, both of which lacked a single piece written by a woman. I, a classically trained tuba player, note a lack of diverse programming in the International Tuba-Euphonium Association Recital Database. Editions BIM, one of the largest publishers of tuba music, contains only one piece in its catalog written by a woman. I have constructed an inclusive recital program containing a variety of music, some of which is composed by individuals holding marginalized identities. Performing this music shows audiences its artistic merit. Discussing inclusive, thoughtful programming with aspiring educators, composers, conductors, and performers is an effective way to change the conversation in the realm of classical music. Addressing music from underrepresented populations does not diminish the music written by those of the dominant identity; instead, this project helps people understand how rich the music profession truly is when one makes an effort to be more inclusive.

      Music selected for this recital tour and lecture series includes Sonatina for Tuba and Piano by Jennifer Glass, Romance for Tuba and Piano by Elizabeth Raum, Possession by Ethel Smyth, Triptych by Clifford Weeks, Tuba Suite by Gordon Jacob, Fantasia by Vartan Adjemian, and Sonata for Tuba and Piano by James Stabile.

      This project addresses a large-scale problem in classical music by understanding gender, gender identity/expression, race, sexual orientation, and culture through the lens of music performance. Music is a shared cultural experience, one capable of expressing a group’s values and traditions. Composers selected for this project represent groups with an artistic voice the world needs to hear. Since the realm of tuba repertoire is dominated by white, heterosexual, cisgender men, bringing these underrepresented composers into the conversation can stimulate more interest and understanding of what those groups represent in a global society. These composers will be highlighted with live performances and lectures on their musical merit. This project’s proposed activities assert Washington State University’s artistic presence nationally and its commitment to expanding individual opportunity and equity.

      My artistic endeavor is already in motion. Prominent universities and conservatories in the Midwest have indicated their desire to host me for live performances and lectures on this music. The University of Wisconsin-Madison, Lawrence Conservatory, and Ball State University are eager to host me during the 2019-2020 academic year.

      Individuals holding marginalized identities are underrepresented in classical music. While these groups exist in the global music community, their music is not routinely performed or recorded. Standard music heard on recital programs and professional recordings comprises music written by American and European men. Efforts by various artists have indeed bolstered the presence of women, LGBTQ+ individuals, and people of color in the tuba community, but there is still tremendous work to be done.

      Advocating a composer’s music from an underrepresented population is a critical step in the promotion of someone’s musical voice. This project is intended to elicit more performances and interest in music by women, LGBTQ+ individuals, and people of color. I believe music from these populations can garner a most deserving place in the field of classical music.

      The final outcome of this project includes a recital and lecture tour to large music programs in the Midwest. The endeavor will foster an interest in this music, the composers, and increase awareness of equality issues in music performance, music programming, and composition. On a larger scale, this project aims to feature the artistic and creative endeavors of the Arts and Humanities faculty at Washington State University and allows me to serve as an ambassador for the university community.

Joe Hedges, Associate Professor of Painting, Department of Art, Pullman

Hypercombines: Solo Exhibitions

      The Arts and Humanities Fellowship enabled me to achieve my goal of making exhibitions excellent experiences for three distinct communities, positioning me to win further grants and exhibition opportunities, and advancing the arts and humanities at WSU and beyond.

      The works I make seek to draw attention to the complicated relationship humans have with technology. Today, according to the market research group Neilsen, the average American spends eleven hours a day interacting with media—most of our waking lives. Understanding the relatively recent phenomenon of a screen-anchored human existence is among the most pressing issues of our time. To explore this phenomenon, I layer different modes of painting and image-making with screens in order to reflect on how the use of specific media technologies influences daily life. Some of my works contain screens or electronics that are affixed to the surface of paintings or are installed in front of the paintings. Other works have windows cut in panels, windows which are the exact size of smartphones and tablets to be mounted within the pieces so that the screens are flush with the surface of painted panels. In all of these pieces, the viewer confronts two or more distinct image-making technologies and reflects on the conceptual import of these disparate modes of creation.

      Within the fine arts, the creative significance of my work is the way it combines two fields that are frequently presented as separate. There are many national and international showcases of new media art, and many exhibitions that feature painting exclusively. There are, however, far fewer artists that are actively working to combine these particular modes of creating. Among artists exploring this hybrid territory, Rachel Rossin is experimenting with augmented reality paintings that can be seen through goggles while artists like Wade Guyton are exploring alternative image-making processes such as inkjet printing on canvas. The uniqueness of my work, however, hinges on both my somewhat traditional but distinctive rendering ability with paint, and a contemplative but playful approach to digital elements that together create unorthodox situations that straddle two worlds. Conceptually, in a time of diminishing faith in images and in contemporary media, these works acknowledge the disorientation of the moment by evoking past and present at once. By obfuscating the physical and conceptual boundaries between media I invite viewers to consider the role of representation in defining reality.

      After and during completion of this body of work I will aggressively apply for national and international exhibitions and external support. As these works constitute a unique synthesis of skills and ideas, the photographs and descriptions of these finished works, as well as the catalogues, advertisements, and press produced by these upcoming exhibitions will put me in a strong position to apply for and receive external funding. Washington-based non-profit Artist Trust offers a Grants for Artist Projects. I will apply for this opportunity and describe the upcoming exhibitions. I will apply for the Pollock-Krasner foundation in August just after photographing all the new works in the Fine Arts Building Gallery 2. The Rome Prize application is due on November 1st, and again, I will use installation photographs of this body of work in these galleries to apply for this prize. Because I have in the last year secured many more solo exhibition opportunities than in previous years I am confident I am on the right track with this work. I am hopeful that the Arts & Humanities Fellowship will put me in the very best position to win large external grants in 2020 and 2021. I am hopeful that one of these grants, such as the Pollock-Krasner, Fulbright or the Rome Prize, will enable me to work abroad and exhibit in China or Italy during some portion of 2021-2022 and reach a larger international audience. At the same time, I will continue to pursue exhibitions in regional museums and quality galleries such as the Boise Art Museum in Boise, ID, the Weston Gallery in Cincinnati, OH and Upfor Gallery in Portland, OR.

Claudia Leeb, Associate Professor, School of Politics, Philosophy, & Public Affairs, Pullman

Analyzing the Far Right: A Psychoanalytic Critical Theory Perspective

      The objective of the project was to write the book, titled “Analyzing the Far Right: A Psychoanalytic Critical Theory Perspective”. In this book project, I draw on critical and psychoanalytic theory to explain the ways in which economic factors interact with psychological factors in the rise of the far and extremist right in the United States and Europe today. In particular, I explore the psychoanalytic mechanism of ego-ideal replacement and the ways it is connected to introjection, narcissistic love, idealization, the lifting of moral restrictions, projection, and displacement, to grasp why millions of people responded to the negative effects of neo-liberal capitalism—alienation, exploitation, and isolation—by supporting right-wing leaders or by joining right extremist movements. I ground the theoretical framework with an analysis of published interviews and writings of far and extremist right leaders and followers, as well as characters in literature.

      In its current form, the book manuscript is composed of seven chapters, excluding the introduction and the conclusion. Chapters One and Two set up the theoretical framework. Chapter Three analyzes Kazua Ishiguro’s novel The Remains of the Day. Chapter Four analyzes the rise of Trump as an example of far right politics in the United States. Chapter Five discusses the growing attraction of Alt-Right (Alternative-Right) movement as an example of the extremist right in the United States. Chapter Six examines the Freedom Party as an example of far right politics in Europe. Chapter Seven examines the writings of one of the leaders of the growing Identitarian Movement as an example of extremist right politics in Europe.

      This book project is of significant value to the discipline and can make a potential contribution to Arts & Humanities at WSU, because it draws on psychoanalytic and critical theory to explain the rise of the far-right, which is currently either dismissed or only marginally present in the literature on the far-right. It also draws on further humanities disciplines, including literature and history. My novel approach, which draws on critical and psychoanalytic theory, explains how economic factors interact with psychological factors in the rise of the far-right today, and thereby sheds fresh light on this topic, as current scholarship on the far-right either dismisses economic factors and social-psychological explanations in their theoretical frameworks or discusses these factors in isolation from each other. This book project is also of significant value, because it outlines the (dis-)connections between the far and extremist right, which are in the current literature discussed apart form each other. Furthermore, it is of value because it outlines the (dis-)connections between the far and extremist right in the United States and Europe, which also tend to be discussed in isolation from each other in the current literature. The project will benefit Washington State University as I will use the book as a basis for teaching political theory courses, to make it accessible to students, both in political science and in philosophy. This project also fits into WSU’s grand challenge concerning Opportunity and Equity, as it both promotes an informed and equitable society, and advances social justice.

      To support the book project, the WSU Humanities fellowship funded two activities: First, it funded a visit to Das Unbehagen: A Free Association for Psychoanalysis, and the Institute for Psychoanalytic Training and Research (IPTAR), in New York City to collaborate with Prof. Jamieson Webster and other members working on psychoanalysis and politics. During my 6 weeks stay in New York City I worked predominantly with Prof. Jamieson Webster and received valuable feedback which assisted to strengthen the theoretical framework of the book. Second, it funded a research visit at the University of Vienna, at the Institute for History for collaboration with Prof. Karl Fallend and others working in the field of politics and psychoanalyses, as well as the far right. During my six weeks stay at the University of Vienna, I had several helpful meetings with Prof. Fallend to discuss the content and progress of my research project.

Melissa Parkhurst, Associate Professor, School of Music, Pullman

Field Recordings of Nez Perce Native Singers, 2019-2020

      This project aimed to fund recordings of the eldest and most capable Nez Perce singers living today. Some of the recordings will be included as part of a book project, Nimiipuum We’nipt: Songs of the People, currently being compiled for WSU Press. The book project and accompanying field recordings were approved by the Nez Perce Tribal Executive Council and were given research permit status to move forward. These song recordings and accompanying oration constitute a landmark contribution to the field of ethnomusicology and support WSU’s mission as a land grant institution and a leader in indigenous studies.

      As a land grant university, WSU has a mission to address community needs, and it has long been a leader in partnering with tribes. For over twenty years, WSU’s Plateau Center, now known as the Center for Native American Research and Collaboration (CNRC), has been dedicated to community-based research that is embedded in tribal sovereignty, values, and knowledge systems. This includes the protection of traditional indigenous knowledge in the form of songs and stories.

      The project is a continuation of work begun at WSU in 1965 by William Elmendorf, an anthropology professor whose students worked with Nez Perce elders to record and preserve stories and songs. These songs were also used educationally to help create a new course, Native Music of North America, which is still offered today as MUS 265 / CES 271 [UCORE: Humanities]—this was in 1975, when there were no precedents for such a course at other colleges or universities. The songs were included in several pioneering works with WSU Press, in the “Music and Dance” essay for the Smithsonian’s Handbook of North American Indians (Plateau volume), and they provided key groundwork for the repatriation of over 60 wax cylinder recordings, made by Nez Perce leader Sam Morris in 1909-1912, from an auction house back to the Nez Perce Tribe and the Library of Congress.

      Today, our project of song recordings continues this legacy of preservation, while also introducing high-quality recording technology, academic innovation, and intentional relevance to the community. As we are compiling a song anthology for WSU Press, these recordings fill a gap in the area of songs that are still remembered today. Many of the singers are older and the bodies of songs they know and the songs constitute inestimable cultural treasures. The songs contain extensive history, teachings, and traditional knowledge, regarding everything from how to gather traditional Plateau foods to the experiences of Chief Joseph’s band during the 1877 war and his passionate resistance to his tribe’s forced removal. Preserving this music enables Nez Perce tribal members to bring the songs back into the life of their community. The songs can be integrated into social gatherings, language classes, worship, and ceremonies. Young people can hear the voices of their grandparents and know that their culture is alive and thriving today within the Nez Perce Reservation and beyond.

      Since June 2019, our project team has recorded singers at Talmaks Camp near Craigmont, Idaho; in tribal members’ homes; at the Nez Perce Elders’ Circle; at WSU’s Bryan Hall; and here in the recording studio at the WSU School of Music. Singers choose which songs they wish to record, how their recordings will be used, and where the recordings will be archived.

      Following our time at Talmaks, I was invited to attend meetings of the Nez Perce Elders Circle in Lapwai, Idaho. I described our recording project and received the support of the elders there. Some invited me for subsequent visits and interviews at their homes. These I attended solo and made audio recordings.      

      In October 2019, we were fortunate to have elder Johnny Moses accept our invitation to visit the WSU campus. A Tulalip culture bearer, Johnny Moses is fluent in Nimiipuu Timt (the Nez Perce language) and knows a large body of significant songs. In February 2020, we were delighted to host André Picard, Jr. André is a Nez Perce singer, storyteller, emcee, and flute- and drum-player.

Ayad Rahmani, Associate Professor of Architecture, School of Design and Construction, Pullman

Frank Lloyd Wright and Ralph Waldo Emerson: Truth Against the World

      The objective of the project was to support research and writing on a manuscript examining the work and philosophies of Frank Lloyd Wright through the lens of Ralph Waldo Emerson. These two giants of American culture never met but did share a common concern, namely that America, by the mid to late nineteenth century, was headed in the wrong direction and required alignment. The country may have triumphed economically and politically but it lagged culturally and indeed spiritually. Industrial capitalism was in large part to blame, biasing the few at the expense of the many, not to mention creating work environments that were dark and unhealthy, perhaps best illustrated in novels by Upton Sinclair and Theodore Dreiser, such as The Jungle and Sister Carrie. To close the cultural gap, architects had to act quickly, erecting in facades and interiors worlds that could match in aesthetic sophistication that which had been accomplished elsewhere in culture, in say, engineering and finance. The results were cheap imitations imported from Europe, in some cases no more than cut and paste techniques meant to make out of New York and Chicago a London or a Paris. One need not go beyond the Chicago Columbian World Exposition of 1893 to see evidence of that, a strange blend of ancient Rome and eighteenth-century Versailles, featuring imperial planning strategies and ornate building designs. To the extent that one could repress agency and voice, it was a pleasant sight to look at. Otherwise, it was awful and contrary to the promise of America as the land of freedom and the innovation.

      Wright hated it and used it as the background against which to wage a war of culture. Through Emerson he knew that the problem required a special effort to not only produce a more attractive world but one that could induce a transformation in consciousness. Whatever designs he was going to produce as an architect it had to be more than functional and pleasant to look at. Emerson had advocated a departure from history, an almost willful effort to forget the past and remember the future, which sounds odd but precisely so in the sense of driving home the idea that it is we who design our future not some foreign version of us. Precedent here is out in favor of lifting a board and a hammer and building something: a chair, a table, and if possible a whole cabin and using that, Thoreau-like, to gather around one’s self one’s own story. Wright took heed and went on to build a career and an architecture that would dial in a new world order, and one that put the American in a position of having to trip over, so to speak, his or her own place in the world and as such remain aware of it. How Wright went about doing that is the subject of the book, starting with an introduction, not unlike the one above, followed by six chapters.

      Ask any Wright scholar about the role Emerson played in shaping the intellectual identity of the architect and all will recognize it. And yet very few have gone on to say much about it. This is perhaps understandable given the fact that Wright lived a long and controversial life, producing more than one thousand designs, almost half of which built. There is no shortage of subjects to write about, and more than one building type to cover. But the fact remains that if there is one hole remaining in the scholarship on Wright it is the contribution that Emerson made to the architect’s thinking. This project answers that call, relying on biographical notes but necessarily connecting dots and offering commentaries that go beyond biographies. Through it, several important notes on American culture begin to surface, not least a special understanding of domesticity, history, modernity, and more. Students of architecture, literature, philosophy, American studies, and other areas of the humanities should come to benefit from it.    

Clif Stratton, Associate Professor, Department of History, Pullman

Race and the Atlanta Braves from Summerhill from Cobb County

      Race and the Atlanta Braves is a historical analysis of the consequences of the arrival and departure of the Braves baseball franchise to and from its downtown Atlanta site from the late Civil Rights era to the present. In it, I argue that the arrival of professional sports in “the city too busy to hate,” as former mayor William B. Hartsfield once dubbed Atlanta, proved far more than a benign entertainment spectacle meant to strengthen community bonds, elevate civic pride, and court business and tourism. The Braves did, or at least had the potential at times, to contribute to the achievement of these noble aims. But professional baseball’s descent on this New South city also exposed and exacerbated the deep-seated racial, economic, and spatial divisions that defined the city’s history in the second half of the 20th century and continue to do so well into the 21st. Atlanta became a model for other American cities hoping to attract finance capital and cheap labor rather than alleviate the precarity that many urban workers and residents have faced for at least three generations.

      This project is more than a history of a baseball franchise, a stadium, and the working-class black neighborhood caught in the crosshairs of big-time sports expansion. It is a history of the central role of race and racism in the transformation of the urban South into what historians call the Sunbelt South, the centerpiece of which was and is a corporate-driven, publicly subsidized model of capitalism that has come to dominate urban planning and policy, residential living patterns, and metropolitan social relations. This became a national phenomenon pioneered after World War II in cities across the Sunbelt, including San Diego, Phoenix, Austin, Charlotte, and Atlanta.

      To date, few scholars — Charles Rutheiser, Maurice Hobson, and Matthew Lassiter excepting — have explored Atlanta’s Sunbelt-style development from the late Civil Rights era to the present. Rutheiser’s sociological study Imagineering Atlanta, focused primarily on the city’s international Olympic ambitions in the 1990s, is almost a quarter-century old. Fewer still have connected the city to any of its sports franchises except in passing, despite the enduring place of rightful home run champion and Civil Rights icon Henry Aaron (with the franchise formally and informally from 1952-1974 and 1977–present) and a national profile under TV magnate Ted Turner’s ownership (1977–1996). Likewise, the historical literature on the racial politics of stadium construction in the US is also thin (for an exception, see Podair, City of Dreams, 2017). Thus, Race and the Atlanta Braves provides a much needed analysis of how professional sports and all of the attendant stadium construction, (often segregated) urban spatial reconfiguration, contingent seasonal employment, and, in the case of the Braves, egregious ritual use of demeaning Native American caricatures, belie Mayor Hartsfield’s rosy image of Atlanta as a bastion of racial tolerance.

      The CAH fellowship funded two course section buyouts ($10,000) of History 105 in order to focus 50% of my contracted time on this project during Spring 2020 semester (I also have a 50% administrative service appointment in the Office of the Provost). Spring 2020 was preceded by three one-week long archival research trips to Atlanta (August 2018, July-August 2019, September-October 2019), where I accessed collections at Auburn Avenue Research Library (4 collections), Emory University’s Stuart Rose Library (4 collections), and Atlanta History Center’s Kenan Research Center (City of Atlanta records), Atlanta University Center (4 collections), the Breman Museum (2 collections), as well as 1 oral history interview.

      During the funding period (Spring 2020), my primary focus was analyzing primary sources and producing requisite word count for that analysis based on the thousands of scanned pages I accumulated on the aforementioned archival trips. Word count reached 43,426 during this period, or about 62% of my intended total word count projection for the manuscript (70,000 words, including references). In this sense, I ended up ahead of my fellowship period goal of three chapters (approximately 10,000-12,000 words each).

Greg Yasinitsky, Regents Professor, School of Music, Pullman

Creation of New Orchestrations and Recordings for International Release

      The creation of orchestrations scored for little big band instrumentation was my Professional Leave project for the fall of 2018. Three new settings of his pieces were created: Blues for a King, Synergetic and G.P. which were premiered by the YAZZ Band at my Faculty Artist Series concert in January of 2019, and these pieces have been accepted for publication by Walrus Music. I hope to build on this momentum by writing five more orchestrations scored for little big band and having all eight pieces recorded, mixed, and mastered professionally. Basic tracks would be recorded in the WSU Recording Studio, a process which would take three and a half days and require hiring musicians for the recording sessions. Mixing, which is quite time-consuming and may take a number of weeks, involves setting the volume levels for each instrument so that they blend together properly. Mastering, which requires a specialized, mastering engineer, prepares the tracks for release by matching volume levels between each track and matching the equalization (overall sound) from track to track. Then, these completed recordings would be distributed for online downloads and steaming internationally, and would also be released on compact disc. Online distribution and CD sales would be facilitated by CDBaby.

      There is a demonstrated need for new repertoire scored for little big bands. My extensive experience as a composer and arranger of big band jazz makes me uniquely qualified to create new literature to address this need. My new works will be shared internationally as print publications, and recordings of these new pieces—as performed by me and his acclaimed YAZZ Band—will also be shared world-wide on download and streaming sites, and made available as physical compact discs. YAZZ Band members include myself, saxophone, composition and orchestration, and School of Music faculty members Horace Alexander Young, saxophone; Brian Ward, piano; F. David Snider, bass; and David Jarvis, drums. As these new musical works are shared internationally with the jazz community, the artistic and creative contributions of mine and other faculty members from the School of Music will be shared widely.

      These recordings will also be used to apply for possible programming consideration for the YAZZ Band at prestigious conferences including those of the Jazz Education Network. Additionally, the recordings will be made available to Walrus Music to post on their website (ejazzlines.com) as audio examples of the pieces from this project which they will publish. The recordings will also be useful to include in proposals for external grants.

      The working title of the CD was “YAZZ Band: Fun Sized Edition.” About half of the tracks were recorded and mixed in the WSU Recording Studio, but then the COVID-19 pandemic struck, making it impossible to continue in the Studio. I waited with the hope that things would improve, but it became clear that the pandemic was to be with us for some time.

      I decided to move forward with the completion of the project “virtually,” by having the musicians record their parts individually, our “new normal”; so, the title for the CD was updated to YAZZ Band: New Normal. Most of the musicians, including me, recorded in their homes. A number of musicians from the School of Music are featured on the album including Horace Alexander Young, Gabe Condon, Jake Svendsen, F. David Snider, David Bjur and David Jarvis, who recently retired and is now a professor emeritus. Recording remotely also allowed me to include musicians from around the world including Teo Ciavarella from Bologna, Italy; Willis Delony from Baton Rouge, Louisiana; and Francisco Torres from Los Angeles, California.

      I created eight new orchestrations for this project: some of new compositions, some of older pieces. The individual audio tracks were assembled and mixed with the assistance of David Bjur, WSU Recording Studio Engineer. Much of the mixing was done remotely. The mixed tracks were mastered by Raúl Blanco, a composer, pianist and bandleader, and recent WSU MA graduate.

Ashley Wright, Associate Professor, Department of History, Pullman

Difficult Cases: Governing Marginal Women in Colonial India and Burma, 1858-1915

      I applied for an Arts and Humanities Fellowship to support writing my second monograph, Difficult Cases: Governing Marginal Women in Colonial India and Burma, 1858-1915. Archival research for the project is almost entirely complete. The specific objective of the fellowship was to make significant progress in writing up the manuscript.

      The nineteenth-century expansion of European colonial power changed the world in ways that historians are still trying to understand. In recent years, scholars have focused on gender and the intimate domain to reveal how imperial power shaped people’s lives. Historians of empire have also analyzed colonial legal systems to shed light on the ways that empires exercised power. The expansion of European empires created new circuits of migration. When women travelled along these circuits their social identities often changed, but scholars of empire have not given much attention to these mobile imperial subjects. In particular, their place in colonial regulatory regimes has been mostly unexplored. Leaving the women that imperial mobility made marginal out of the social history of nineteenth-century European imperialism in Asia has limited our understanding of how imperial powers remade South and Southeast Asian societies and governed these new social worlds. Overlooking these women also narrows our understanding of how ordinary people navigated the constraints of empire.

      Difficult Cases fills this gap by bringing women located on the edges of the British empire in Asia to the center of its analysis. I draw on British and Indian archives to analyze a series of legal conflicts involving the imperial regime and women who could, in different ways, be described as marginal: an orphan from an Irish Catholic military family in North India, a Bengali indentured laborer in Assam, ‘European’ barmaids working in Rangoon and Calcutta at the turn of the century, a Malay Muslim mother and daughter in Burma, and a Burmese woman married to a Chinese man in colonial Rangoon. I analyze these cases to uncover what each reveals about the social world of the woman at its center and what each reveals about the character of imperial power. Difficult Cases starts from the premise that control over bodies was central to the empire. Following this premise, the central argument is twofold: firstly, legal conflicts involving marginal women are essential to understanding empire because each conflict determined how far the imperial regime could control its subjects’ bodies. A different dimension of this control is visible in each case, ranging from employment, to violence, to familial relations. Secondly, I argue that we cannot fully understand how empire transformed the social worlds of India and Burma without understanding how movement along imperial circuits changed women’s lives. Thus, Difficult Cases employs social and legal history to reimagine the history of the British empire in India and Burma through the stories of the women whose lives were shaped by empire.

      The Arts and Humanities Fellowship funded work on the Difficult Cases manuscript, by providing for one course release in the fall 2019 semester. Facilitated by the course release provided by this fellowship, I was able to write a complete draft of Chapter One, refine the scheme of organization, and begin a draft of the book’s introduction, and begin revising already written material for subsequent manuscript chapters. The fellowship also gave me the opportunity to present the material of Chapter One to the other fellowship recipients and receive helpful comments on the work. The fellowship has thus allowed me to make significant progress towards the completion of the manuscript.

      To contextualize the work that I completed during the fellowship, the book is organized as follows: the framework consists of five conflicts over five kinds of marginal women, each of whom found herself on the empire’s fringe for different reasons. The manuscript consists of five chapters in addition to an introduction and conclusion. Each chapter examines a particular case study to reveal different dimensions of marginality and imperial power.

Troy Bennefield, Assistant Professor, School of Music, Pullman

Feeling Black Into the Sky: A commissioned work for wind quintet and wind ensemble by Danial Bernard Roumain, including composer residency

      In an effort to produce a piece important to the neglected repertoire of works for band and wind quintet, and to encourage the commissioning of more composers of color, this fellowship commissioned an 18-minute concerto for wind quintet and wind ensemble by nationally-recognized composer Daniel Bernard Roumain. This grant also funded his residency.

      To promote the WSU Grand Challenge theme of improving opportunity and equity, we undertook this commissioning project to address two disparities within the wind band genre; the lack of commissions featuring composers of color and the lack of literature for woodwind quintet and larger wind ensemble.  Although most detailed studies regarding the lack of commissioning or performing of works by minority composers relate mainly to female composers, the difficulties facing composers of color is recognized as an important issue for ensemble directors.  A recent British study found that 6% of local commissions went to composers of color.  In 2017, a Boston Globe article lamented the fact that of the 73 pieces to be performed by the Boston Symphony orchestra in the 2017-2018 season, one piece was by a female and the remaining 72 works were by white men.  Of the nearly 40 composers played during the centennial celebration season for the Cleveland Orchestra, not one was a minority.  Last year’s season featured only one composers of color.  In 2014 the New York Times interviewed Dr. T.J. Anderson concerning the importance of including minority voices in classical music.  In this article, Dr. Anderson discusses the hardships encountered by minority composers.

      “At 85, Dr. Anderson is an elder statesman among black composers, and his forceful emphasis on visibility emanates from a career-long experience of exclusion. “It’s inevitable, once you are identified — and you always are identified because of race — there’s a certain different expectation,” he said. “You know that you’re not going to be commissioned by the major artistic institutions like the New York Philharmonic and the Metropolitan Opera.”

      The composer Daniel Bernard Roumain (also known as DBR) is a composer of considerable talent and dexterity.  He has been commissioned by the Boston Pops Orchestra, Carnegie Hall, the Library of Congress, the Stuttgart Symphony, and a host of other orchestras and academic institutions.  His recent chamber opera We Shall Not Be Moved, co-commissioned by Opera Philadelphia and the Apollo Theater, was called “The Best Classical Performance of 2017” by the New York Times.  Combining modern influences with classical technique, DBR’s collaborations range from Philip Glass to Lady Gaga and DJ Spooky.  In 2007 the Washington Post wrote that “Roumain’s compositions are as much an amalgam of musical styles as they are a blend of culture and history.”  Commissioning someone as versatile as Dr. Roumain was well-timed as hip-hop artist Kendrick Lamar’s receipt of the 2018 Pulitzer Prize in Music has renewed the conversation in academia (and elsewhere) as to what can be considered serious music, and artists such as DBR have long pushed the boundaries of traditional classical forms. 

      The woodwind quintet remains one of the more popular genres of chamber music, but due to the difficulty of scoring, it has been underrepresented in band compositions.  Searching through available repertoire lists suggests there are currently only two pieces that feature a woodwind quintet with wind ensemble accompaniment.

      This project aimed to add a significant work to the repertoire while promoting a composer that is not only highly qualified and produces groundbreaking music but represents an underrepresented segment of the composing population.  Dr. Roumain’s residency was designed to allow WSU students the opportunity to learn more about several different musical skills and will allow the performers to collaborate on how best to perform this new piece.  Through performance, publicity, recordings, and publication, WSU’s involvement in this project will continue to be exhibited to many areas of the country and world, further promoting the institution’s commitment to the arts through opportunity and equity.

Julia Cassaniti, Assistant Professor, Department of Anthropology, Pullman

The Phenomenology of Meaning: Frequency and the Training of Attention

      This project was an exploratory study designed to investigate a proposed link between attention strategies and a cognitive illusion called the ‘frequency bias’, a quirk of perception whereby a newly attended-to phenomenon seems to appear everywhere. I was interested in the degree to which particular meditation strategies (such as samatha (concentration) meditation, or vipassana (awareness) meditation) commonly practiced in Thailand might inform different degrees of experiencing the phenomenon, as well as learning about other possible relevant factors. The frequency bias is thought to represent a universal cognitive ‘quirk’, but how universal is it, really? By investigating this question, I wanted to better understand not just the bias itself but the role of cultural training in perception.

      This research is important for the study of cultural training in cognitive processes of perception, which in turn has implications for the processing of information at a broader scale. In our current era of Facebook and fake news, there is an increasing recognition that what we attend to is as significant as what’s “actually out there;” at the same time, there is also an increasingly global interest in practices related to meditation and mindfulness, which carry with them particular approaches to the training of attention and assumptions about how we can train to see the world “as it really is.” Together, scholarly research of the kind I have carried out for this project on subjective experience is increasingly appreciating that the relationship between how we attend to our environment and the meanings we make in it matters (Amer and Hasher 2017, Eppler and Mengis 2004). Combining the attention to perception with the importance of meditation strategies in cultivating attention techniques, this cross-cultural study enables us to better understand that what we see is partly due to what we expect to see, and how we orient our attention to it. The project stands to make a significant impact on our understanding of subjectivity, perception, information processing, and personal well-being.

      In this project, I gathered and analyzed subjective experiences with attention training and frequency biases in the United States (in Pullman) and in Asia (in Chiang Mai, Thailand (and also potentially in Kyoto, Japan), and combining these experiences with philosophy of science and Buddhist studies literature analyses on perception and attention, this project helped us to better understand how traditions of attention training are related to how people interpret their own subjective experiences. I was especially motivated to study cultural practices not in a cognition lab but in the context of cultural life; I conducted in-person ethnographic interviews with friends and informants in Thailand that I have been working with for the past fifteen years, as an anthropologist of Buddhism in Thailand. I created, translated, and disseminated interviews to Thai students, farmers, and other rural villagers in the area in and around Chiang Mai, and later translated and analyzed them with the help of research assistants.

      I found that the frequency bias does seem to be a common experience for people in Thailand, and a possible (though still preliminary) connection to meditation techniques. Those engaging in samatha (concentration) meditation may be more likely to experience the frequency bias than those who do not meditate, while those engaging in vipassana (awareness) meditation may be less likely. Even more than meditation, however, the data suggest that the phenomenon of the frequency bias may be due to a kind of consumer-based connection to desired goods: particular cars, watches, and bodily products. In my comparative work doing similar interviews with people in Pullman and other areas of the United States and England, I found similar kinds of connections to desired goods.  Although preliminary, I have been able to show that particular kinds of attention practices (that are a) developed more in some meditation traditions than others and b) oriented to consumer desire) are related to how often one experiences the tendency of seeing things more often once they have become interested in them.

Michael Goldsby & Samantha Noll, Assistant Professors of Philosophy,
School of Politics, Philosophy, and Public Affairs; Pullman

Broader Impacts Guidance Suite Project:​ ​Bringing Expertise from the Humanities to​ ​Help Scientists Navigate Ethical, Cultural, and Social Challenges

      Our pilot applied humanities project was the Broader Impacts Ethical Compass (BIEC), as part of the Broader Impacts Guidance System (BIGS). The purpose of BIEC is to provide tools and guidance to scientists and outreach experts that will help them to implement their solutions while protecting them from spurious ethical arguments. BIEC includes 1) a training suite or “toolbox” designed to promote the cross-disciplinary contribution (between the humanities and sciences) necessary for addressing ethical challenges that could arise during application, and 2) a dialogue-based “ethical workshop” to help scientists realize their broader impact goals while working towards solutions to wicked problems. The guiding idea is to utilize humanities expertise to help give scientists the confidence to advocate solutions before louder and potentially misleading voices muddy the ethical waters. BIEC will provide clarity. In the future, BIGS will be expanded to include further knowledge from the humanities (outside of philosophy) to deal with cultural and social issues.

      The humanities has plenty of expertise analyzing and addressing cultural, ethical, and social issues that is under-utilized when addressing wicked problems. Each discipline explores cultures as subjects of meaning, in all their complexity, rather than from a position that prioritizes empirical observation and description. One problem for utilizing knowledge from the humanities in solving wicked problems is that the humanities are criminally underfunded. However, the sciences are not as underfunded. One aim of this project is to show science practitioners that they can get help implementing their solutions from the humanities. Every NSF grant calls for “broader impacts” statements, and if the sciences availed themselves of the expertise found in the humanities, it would make their grant applications that much more competitive. Marshaling both the sciences and the humanities to develop innovative solutions will more deeply situate WSU as a leader in interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary research.

      As an example, consider food security. How do we feed a world of 7.6 billion people (and rising) on ever shrinking land reserves? Part of the solution to this important issue may well involve another green revolution or the application of breakthroughs in biotechnology. Yet, the current foodscape is fraught with various interest groups, from local food advocates to anti-GMO lobbying groups. Addressing food related problems on the ground often involves navigating these tricky ethical and cultural waters.

      While there are legitimate concerns that need to be discussed, Pamela Ronald argues that consumers are pushing back against biotechnology primarily for the following three reasons: 1) General distrust of corporations, 2) tribalism, and 3) scientific illiteracy (Ronald 2017). Scientists are trained in addressing scientific illiteracy but may face unforeseen hurdles when trying to mitigate the ethical and social aspects of the consumer uptake of biotechnology products. At the same time, how can scientists address consumer fears and these ethical issues before societal backlash occurs? It’s complicated and both sides make ethical and social arguments. Scientists can no longer afford to shy away from such issues, but as the current political situation with the pandemic has shown, engagement must be done with care. There is expertise in the humanities can help them navigate these tricky waters. Our long-term project is to marshal WSU expertise to provide a suite of services from the humanities to the sciences for addressing wicked problems.

      To take a concrete example here at WSU, consider the Columbia River FEW project. Scientists in this project are exploring ways to increase food-energy-water security in response to a changing climate through innovations in storage. As part of NSF funding, the project had to submit a broader impact statement and commit to some outreach. As part of that outreach, they discovered that implementations of these innovations had to appeal to shared values – specifically cultural, ethical, and social values. They are now beginning to recognize the value that the humanities might bring to their project, particularly with their StAR calculator.

Hallie G. Meredith, Assistant Professor, Department of Art, Pullman

Incomplete Erasure: Tracing Process in Visual Art

      I requested funding in order to pursue three related objectives. The first goal was local, and the second and third have the potential to present a WSU connection to diverse audiences in two international forms:

• To research and synthesize bibliography as a new graduate seminar on process
• To complete an article on process for submission to a peer-reviewed journal
  To further a book proposal on process, solicited by a University Press

      The first part of this research involves the WSU community directly. Part of the local foundation for the project will incorporate material from WSU’s Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art. The Museum has two works by the internationally renowned artist Eva Hesse (1936-70), Sans I and Stratum. Images of both artworks were included in national publications about this artist’s oeuvre. Each of these pieces is in a different state of decomposition, highlighting the continual importance of process throughout the metaphorical lifecycle of any work of art. This is in large part the focus of the proposed research: processes inherent in the production of a work of visual art, before, during, and after creation.

      The focus of this seminar is expressions of changed states over time in the following iterations: in-process, unfinished, incomplete, un-making, re-making, erasure, palimpsests, and reuse. In this course, we will focus on each in turn. Our approach will be cross-temporal, comparing and contrasting contemporary art with earlier visual culture. Therefore, our source material is comparative from ancient through to contemporary art. As we will see, the present often reveals a spectrum of continuities with the past. By investigating both present and past in tandem, we gain a greater understanding of each.

      The second phase of this project targets international audiences via a journal article. This involves completing an article for an international top-tier, peer-reviewed journal on one aspect of the material to be included in my Autumn 2018 graduate seminar, by this I mean erasure. I presented a version of this paper at a conference at Brown University, Providence RI in autumn of 2017. I also presented a version of this research at the 2018 Academic Showcase. I enjoy presenting work-in-progress and would seek to continue doing so at the monthly Fellows seminars and at the 2019 Academic Showcase.

      The third phase of this project targets international audiences via a book proposal. This entails finalizing a book proposal on this material. I presented a paper at a national conference in 2016 and an Associate Editor at a University Press invited me to submit a book proposal on related material. The provisional title for this single-author book is Incomplete Erasure: Tracing Process in Visual Art.

      At the core of this monograph are a range of artistic processes involving the creation and re-creation of visual culture, in particular when there is a pause or extended interruption in the otherwise seamless sequence of production. The main focus is on classical and late Antique visual art from the imperial period to the fourth century A.D. The evidential base, however, is cross-temporal prioritizing thematic content over chronology. This is in order to concentrate on the following iterations of making: in-process, unfinished, incomplete, un-made, re-made, and erased visual art.

      This project connected research integral to developing a graduate seminar on process in visual art with two international venues for dissemination. This project, therefore, envisioned as related articles and public presentations and a book will help me: (1) to highlight the significance of local artworks to people beyond the WSU community, and (2) to foster and participate in an international conversation about the often debated subject of process in visual art in three iterations – as a journal article, public presentations and, in the future, as a single-author monograph – with diverse international audiences.

Sue Peabody, Meyer Distinguished Professor of History, Department of History, Vancouver

Gender and Colonialism Humanities Symposium

      The one-day invited interdisciplinary symposium highlighted the synergistic research and graduate mentoring capacity of the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies (WGSS), History, and English faculty at Washington State University to colleges and universities in the U.S. West.

      In a globalized world, heir to two centuries of unprecedented economic, social, political, environmental, and cultural transformation, few changes have been as radical as anti-colonial and feminist challenges to patriarchal gender and sexuality conventions. WSU faculty in the Arts and Humanities are internationally recognized for their work in these fields. The symposium was timed to build synergy and productive research networks between WSU Arts and Humanities faculty immediately following the absorption of new faculty Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies into their respective home departments of English and History.

      The CAH Gender and Colonialism Symposium, planned via monthly meetings of all WSU team members in Fall 2018 and Spring 2019, and held on Sunday, April 28, 2019, was a greater-than-imagined success. The program yielded a rich and well-integrated forum. Each of the ten “host” members of the project faculty team selected a “guest” faculty member from another university whose research synergizes with their own, aiming for, but not exclusively: faculty at the assistant/associate levels from underrepresented minorities from West Coast schools that offer terminal MA degrees in our disciplines. The goal was to foreground WSU’s support of under-represented minority faculty and graduate students in these fields, and these programs’ capacity to mentor PhD students. WSU team members commented upon the papers presented. The “host/guest” format meant that each attendee had a specific connection with a WSU faculty member whose work connected in important ways.

      The intellectual quality of and synergy between the papers exceeded expectations. The initial panel, dedicated to “decolonizing history/historiographies” set the bar high, with three superb papers, each examining how the academe privileges certain discourses while excluding others and reinterpreting gendered themes like motherhood and family from the perspectives of activism, agency, and desire. The second, on “dissonant/unruly bodies,” offered four deeply nuanced interpretations of how enslaved Jamaican women perceived their own mothering practices, contemporary mythologies of orientalized bellydancing in Latin America, a memoir and investigation of queer/trans spaces in Los Angeles, and a tightly historical investigation of the healthy women assigned to do the laundry of people suffering from leprosy in Molakai. The final panel was more historical, less interdisciplinary, and focused on ideologies of gender in three specific sites. The animated discussion brought back the morning’s calls to “decolonization of the academe” to consider the political implications of the ways that some historical arguments framed their inquiries.

      Several results signaled that the symposium was a tremendous success. Turnout was high, thanks to efforts of the organizing committee, especially Pavithra Narayanan, who arranged for live-streaming of the presentations and invited faculty, students, and others from Vancouver and Pullman to attend. About 45 people attended the symposium in person, including, Center for the Humanities Director Todd Butler, Vancouver Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs, Renny Christopher, Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies Chair Pamela Thoma, and the English Department Chair, Donna Potts, with perhaps another 15 attendees online. Quite a few guests and WSU participants asked whether WSU could do this annually. Others asked to hear WSU faculty present their own research. There was real joy and camaraderie in the room. The symposium did an excellent job enhancing WSU’s visibility in these fields and laid the groundwork for a future reprise, perhaps on the Pullman campus.

      We wish that we had thought to publicize the links to the teleconferencing more widely (including the History Department), so that more colleagues and grad students could have tuned in for particular papers. The ultimate goal: of connecting across the disciplines and the campuses, and enhancing WSU Humanities’ visibility in the region, was definitely achieved.

Carol Siegel, Professor, Department of English, Vancouver

Sexed, Raced, and Erased: Jews in Contemporary Visual Media

      I aimed to complete a draft of my sixth monograph, “Sexed, Raced, and Erased: Jews in Contemporary Visual Media,” which focuses on the ways films, and some television series, use depictions of genders and sexualities as part of Jewish racialization. The book concentrates on late twentieth and early twenty-first century films and television series in which Jewishness is constructed as a racial identity in relation to American sex and gender systems. It discusses in depth a wide range of examples from cinema and television in relation to other media images brought in for context. The book draws on theory in intersectionality studies, a field that brings together critical race studies and gender/sexuality studies.  I contend that any understanding of how visual entertainment media depict Jews is incomplete unless it brings together depictions of Jews as both racialized and sexualized subjects. Yet so far a study focused on this topic does not exist.

      In support of my contention that American Jews are racialized subjects, I look at the ways Jews are frequently discussed as people who are inherently different sexually from mainstream Americans. Members of minoritized groups are typically stereotyped as a sexual threat to mainstream white people, as rapists, seducers, carriers of sexual diseases, and white slavers.  However, the situation of Jews has been somewhat different due to their leadership role in sexuality and gender studies from Freud to Judith Butler.  Disproportionately Jews have developed the theories that inform psychological therapies, academic discussions, and sometimes laws.  This role in shaping culture has led to a theory, increasingly frequently circulated in extreme right-wing media, that Jews are deliberately undermining traditional Christian family values as part of an effort to control the world’s economies. My book examines how this anti-Semitic vision is both promulgated and resisted in visual entertainment media.

      This study is timely given the documented sharp rise in anti-Semitic activities in recent years, both in the USA and abroad, and in addition the ongoing debates among Jews and gentiles alike over whether or not Jews should be considered a racial group. (A central text in the controversy is The Pew Research Center’s 2013 report, A Portrait of Jewish America, which designates non-religious Jews as merely “nominally Jewish,” a designation which enrages many.)  This study contributes not only to scholarship in Jewish Studies, but also to all visual media studies addressing the representation of race, sexuality, and gender.

     Because of my family financial responsibilities, I ordinarily must seek additional paid employment after I finish teaching my first summer session.  But thanks to the grant money paid out to me that was not necessary, and instead, I spent the time between mid-June and the beginning of fall semester 2018 drafting versions of all the chapters and writing the introduction and prospectus for my monograph, “Raced, Sexed, and Erased, Jews in Contemporary Visual Entertainment” (I changed the title slightly after receiving the grant). In December, after reviewing the prospectus and sample chapters, Indiana University Press, which published four of my five previous monographs, informed me that they are very interested in the project and asked for exclusive review rights for the final version of the book, which they want no later than December 2019.  When I get a final contract, which in English Studies always asks for some revision, I plan to apply for external grants, as well as internal grants to support my completion of the last stages of the book, including proof and indexing. In addition to giving me time to write, the grant provided me with the funding to attend two conferences crucial to the project’s success. Having more time at the conferences than I would have otherwise been able to afford allowed me to make connections that have already enhanced the book immeasurably. And I must also mention that I found the meetings with the other fellows extremely intellectually stimulating.

Peter Chilson, Professor, Department of English, Pullman

The Refugee (nonfiction book project)

     I wrapped up my Arts and Humanities Award in Spring 2019, with the help of a no-cost post-award extension. The original grant involved funding travel and research for a creative nonfiction book project during my 2017-18 professional leave year. The proposed book, The Refugee, focused on the work and life of Djimet Dogo, who heads Africa House, a Portland, Oregon non-profit that supports African refugees. I proposed to immerse myself in Djimet’s life and work and in the lives of communities he works in that are impacted by the immigration debate. What attracted me first to Djimet’s work was the challenge he faced in settling Muslim Somali refugees in rural eastern Oregon, where the population is overwhelmingly white and Christian. The national conflicts that have arisen over immigration highlight not only cultural differences between local residents and refugees in rural Oregon, but also local residents’ perceptions of Islam.

     The project quickly evolved to focus on one community, the eastern Oregon farming town of Ontario, which sits in Malheur County on the middle reaches of the Snake River bordering southwestern Idaho. In 2017, during the first weeks that I followed Djimet Dogo and his work with Somalian refugees in Ontario, I discovered the town had a deep and unusual history with immigration. As a result, the project’s working title also changed.

     A Town on the Misfortune River: Immigration and Survival in One American Town is about Ontario, Oregon and its experience as the United States transitions from majority white Euro-centered culture to one far more ethnically diverse. Ontario’s history dates to the Oregon Trail. For most of the 19^th century, half a million people, overwhelmingly white, came West over the trail from the eastern U.S, the mid-west, and abroad. The book’s governing narrative operates in the present, following stories from Ontario’s immigrant communities. These communities include refugees from the Middle East and Africa, Latino migrants, ranchers of European descent, and Japanese Americans. Their stories unfold against the background of a complex history that starts with native tribes such as the Paiute, Nez Perce, Cayuse, Walla Walla, and Umatilla, whose traditional lands cover much of eastern Oregon and southern Idaho. Today this land is worked by farmers and ranchers descended from Oregon Trail pioneers who encountered the tribes in the 1830s. Moreover, Latino families—who have been in the region since before the Mexican American War and Latino migrant workers—have settled and built large farms. Japanese American farmers also have deep pre-World War II roots in the region, and their history is complicated by the wartime internment and labor camps constructed in eastern Oregon and southern Idaho in 1942 to house internees of Japanese descent. Two were built outside Ontario. I found survivors still living nearby.

     The book follows a narrative reportage format, reminiscent George Packer’s book, The Unwinding, Timothy Egan’s The Last Worst Time, and Dan Barry’s, The Boys in the Bunkhouse. The story centers on two people whose experiences help illustrate and guide the story. They are Djimet Dogo, a community organizer and new American citizen from West Africa, and Renee Cummings, a retired rancher born on a ranch on the Snake River. They founded Ontario’s Newcomer Welcoming Center to assist refugees from Somalia, Sudan, Iraq and Syria. As the center grows, it wrestles with money problems, local resentments and misperceptions, threats of violence, and competition for resources with the Latino population, Ontario’s fastest growing ethnic group. Umatilla leaders and Japanese Americans offer help and watch uneasily as Ontario and the country drift toward anger over immigrants and a changing population. This is a story of conflict and resolution, of darkness and hope in a town and country undergoing profound cultural and demographic change.

Luz María Gordillo, Associate Professor, Department of History, Vancouver

Patients, Pedagogues, Philanthropists, and Field Workers: The Hidden History of Women’s Cross-Cultural Scientific and Social Networks in the Age of Eugenics, 1906-1939

      My chapter two will take on the period of 1920 to 1929 when the fieldworkers cemented strong professional and personal networks. This decade also affected thousands of poor rural women and women of color who were being experimented on. I have made significant progress in writing chapter two, which I have tentatively titled: “Work and Leisure: Life at Cold Spring Harbor and its Surroundings, 1910-1924. I have chosen 1924 to close the chapter given that it was the last summer class that the laboratory offered for training fieldworkers. The first two decades of the 20^th century are very important in the history of Eugenics, during these years: it cemented the thorough training of hundreds of fieldworkers who then affected the lives of thousands of people whom they deemed to be defective, it garnered major popularity among privileged whites but also white rural and working-class citizenry, and it became the leading science moving forward and promoting the study and application of genetics and heredity in two ways, in plants and animals on the one hand, and in humans on the other. Mary Harriman, who financially supported the Eugenic project, also became more involved in the management and planning of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. It is this last part of the chapter where I have, not been able to move forward given the illegibility of Mrs. Harriman and her daughter Mary’s handwriting that has posited a challenge. I have transcribed over 30 letters but need to transcribe plenty more. I underestimated the time that these letters would take to transcribe and thus my petition for an extension; at the same time, I have to visit NY one more time to finish collecting some information that is important to the completion of this chapter.

      During the grant period, I have made progress on Chapter Two, which will give a personal insight on who some of the fieldworkers were, what were their backgrounds and professional training, and how they related to the study of science and human behavior. This chapter also tackles some of the patients who were, at the same time, incarcerated in different institutions along the Hudson River in Upstate New York. I am using primary documents, for the fieldworkers, mainly personal correspondence between Charles Davenport and the young women who wrote letters asking for summer positions at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and who typically would create a lasting bond with the laboratory. One such example was Blanche Allen who, On February 24, 1925, young Blanche Allen from Norlina High School in North Carolina wrote a letter to Charles B. Davenport, director of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, asking for a summer job at Cold Spring Harbor, “use me in any of your work, my services will be available from that date,” to which Davenport efficiently and timely responded on March 2, “Dear Miss Allen: I am not quite sure what appointments we shall make for the summer. […] I will file your letter until a little latter…” On May 16^th he wrote, “Dear Miss Allen, we should be glad to have you work here this summer for such a time as you can give at the rate of $16 (two more dollars than he had initially planned) a week to do statistical wok. Sincerely yours.” Allen worked two more summers at Cold Spring Laboratory and in 1929, years after she had worked for the Davenports, Charles Davenport received a reference query for Allen who was applying for a job at the Life Extension Institute, Inc. asking about, “her association with your office, interest and application, attitude toward co-workers and what your judge her special ability to be?” Allen, exemplifies the opportunities that opened up for young Euroamerican women working with the Davenports and Cold Spring Harbor, even though Allen’s experience with the laboratory was only for three summers.

Kevin Haas, Professor, Department of Art, Pullman

Rocky Mountain Printmaking Alliance 4th Biennial Symposium

      I applied to the Arts & Humanities Grant Program to assist with funding for the Rocky Mountain Printmaking Alliance 4th Biennial Symposium that was hosted by the WSU Department of Fine Arts, in conjunction with Art + Design at the University of Idaho, April 19-21, 2018. The funding provided was for two projects. The primary project was bringing the artist Lari Gibbons to WSU during the week of the symposium to work on a print project with students utilizing the digital fabrication equipment that was recently installed in the Department of Fine Arts. The second project, titled ‘The Exquisite Administrator’, is based on drawing games developed by surrealist artists in the early 20th century, and is meant to engage a variety of administrators at WSU with the visual arts.

      Bringing the RMPA conference to the Palouse and the Inland Northwest marked an important moment in connecting the art programs at WSU and U of I with the larger Rocky Mountain and Northwest regions. The conference highlighted the opening of the new Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art at WSU, the success of Terrain Spokane in supporting the arts and the revitalization of Spokane, and a fluidity between community, technology and the arts in the region. Lari Gibbons began her project in the WSU printmaking studios several days before the symposium started, and it continued throughout the events so attendees could see it evolve during their time here.

      The Exquisite Administrator project was imagined to build community, raise awareness of the arts, and to educate administrators and others about some of the activities and art-making process that are taught at WSU.

      Lari Gibbons, worked with 14 students, faculty, and staff at WSU to produce her print. She worked closely with our sculpture technician JJ Harty to carve her printing blocks with the CNC router, allowing JJ to learn firsthand the different details and settings particular to producing blocks for relief printing. The students who assisted her had varying levels of experience in print, but none of them had had the opportunity to work directly on a project like this before, where traditional relief printing methods were combined with digital fabrication. The majority of the printing was completed by Lari with the assistance of our students during her weeklong visit. The final layer was printed after she left, by myself, with the assistance of BFA student Megan Rowe, based on Lari’s instructions. The edition of approximately 28 prints will be split between Lari, WSU, and those who assisted with the project. Her visit culminated with a presentation about her artwork, her working methods, and her role as director of PRINT Press at the University of North Texas, that was held at Paradise Creek Brewery on the closing night of the RMPA Symposium. There were approximately 90 attendees from the Rocky Mountain region with presenters coming from as far north as Calgary, AB, and as far south as Albuquerque, NM, as well as contingents from Portland and Seattle.

      Lari Gibbons completed prints were sent to her to curate and sign, and are still in her possession. The edition of prints will be divided between her, WSU, and those who assisted her with the project. She will be sending WSU’s share of the prints back to us in the new year. One of the prints will be offered as a donation to the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art to add to their growing collection of prints.

Xinmin Liu, Associate Professor of Chinese and Comparative Literatures, School of Languages, Cultures, and Race; Pullman

Revitalizing Rural Environment in East China

      I received the WSU 2018 Arts and Humanities Grant in May 2917, and as I had planned in my application, I completed the various field-trip study of the three sites in northern Zhejiang, China during the summer 2018; due to sudden changes in rules and policies in foreign currency exchange in China caused by the trade war between China and the US, I had to postpone the reimbursement of my travel expenditure, so I applied for an extension of the grant and was approved: it has been extended to January 3, 2019. I hereby submit my final report on the WSU Arts and Humanities Grant for 2018.

      My primary objective is to continue my investigation and data-collecting on revitalizing the cultural heritages in rural China in order to demonstrate and reinforce the key aspects in my theoretical thesis on the role of cognitive affect in environmental humanism. To further my research, I will be able to make a few presentations at upcoming conferences (including the Academic Showcases at WSU), gather feedback from fellow panelists and then publish my research findings by way of journal essays and book chapters in the near future.

      I was to conduct field-trip investigation of three rural sites in Zhejiang, East China, carry out interviews with local officials and professionals, collect data relevant to my research, and use the processed data in my writings, which are to be presented at major academic conferences and published in reputable journals and books in the near future.

      Upon receiving the WSU 2018 Arts and Humanities Grant in May 2917, I traveled to Zhejiang, East China and conducted a field study of the three sites of rural revitalization from July 15 to August 2. I first visited Wen Cun in Fuyang, a hilltop village where the award-winning Chinese architect, Wang Shu, has renovated a number of age-old, vernacular farmhouses, turning them into low-carbon, low-cost rural dwellings, thereby setting the trend for rural revitalization across China of late. Towards the end of July, I revisited the She ethnic village deep in the mountains where most of the ethnic-flavored cultural facilities, family houses and ecotour inns had been completed and opened for sightseeing and business since 2012 (the year I first visited the site). Early August, I visited the renowned “Naked Retreats”—the noted area where old harm houses have been purchased and renovated by city-weary foreign entrepreneurs from Shanghai-based corporate offices who had been cycling to these dwellings as weekend retreats for restorative stayovers. Each in its own fashion, all three sites have showcased the most illustrious examples for

      China’s recent strategic shift from the coastal regions to small cities and rural towns in central and western regions. In the light of my theoretical argument, the changes reflected through the achievements at these sites help me prove that China needs to revive and reinvigorate its homegrown cultural heritages, not only as a wake-up call to address the prevalent tendencies to over-develop and risk damaging the natural environment and depleting natural resources permanently but also as a timely corrective to its wrongheaded policies of industrial and urban development.

      Since my return to Pullman in mid-August 2017, some of these research findings have been incorporated in my new research and been presented through my participation at recent events across the WSU Pullman campus. A case in point is my contribution to the interdisciplinary research on revitalizing rural environment, which has provided me with a threading thematic for my focused and continuous research during the academic year 2017-2018.

Danh T. Pham, Assistant Professor, School of Music, Pullman

Concerto for Jazz Piano and Wind Ensemble: Bringing Jazz Music to Asia

      In 2017, I was awarded an Arts and Humanities Grant to support a western art form to be transported and performed in the Far East. With enthusiasm, I encouraged an official transcription (artistic transformation) of Greg Yasinitsky’s Jazz Concerto for Piano and Orchestra into a version for Wind Ensemble. This new version would receive its premiere in Hubei, China, at Huazhong Agricultural University, with Dr. Wilis Delony on piano, accompanied by Greg Yasinitsky, Dave Jarvis, and David Snider. These artists would be fully supported financially by the awarded grant. As it turns out, politics got in the way of art, and this project could not go on as planned.

      By the spring of 2017, tensions began rising between the Chinese government and the Executive Branch of the United States of America. President Donald Trump began a trade war against the Chinese government, imposing tariffs on several goods not subject to tariffs before. This escalation of economic tension would reek havoc on my original Arts and Humanities Grant, as the Hubei Provincial government and Huazhong Agricultural University officials informed me that a premiere of Yasinitsky’s uniquely American work was no longer possible. In the words of Yi Yang (conductor of the Huazhong Agricultural University Symphonic Band), the Chinese were no longer interested in a product that would shine a prominent light on such a project originating from the west, specifically the United States. Everything grant-related concerning the Jazz Concerto for Piano and Wind Ensemble was official cancelled for 2017. Thus, a new approach to the Arts and Humanities Grant was needed.

      Despite Greg Yasinitsky’s work never being performed in China, it nonetheless received great artistic acceptance as the project was envisioned, except now, within the United States. Since receiving its premiere at WSU, Jazz Concerto for Piano and Wind Ensemble has been performed at Louisiana State University, the University of Texas, and eventually in April 2020 with the Emmy-Award nominated group, the Dallas Winds.

      The Chinese government was no longer interested in promoting a product such as the Yasinitsky work with so little “benefit” (as they put it) to their own institution, financially. (This is despite the minimal cost incurred by them due to the amount of the original award given for this project). Instead, I decided a new premise should be explored that could bring more attention to the Chinese, and their artistic ventures, while serving the original intent of bringing more western music to China. As a result, “West Meets East” was born. Instead of just bringing a piece of music to the East, I wanted to offer something more lasting than one performance. I wanted to bring western musical pedagogy and performance practice to the East, while allowing for Chinese artists to come to the United States to share their expertise with our students in a true cultural exchange that would place a brighter spotlight on the Arts and Humanities Grant program. As a result, the West Meets East project existed in several phases featuring cultural teaching and artistic residencies that featured WSU music faculty traveling to China, and Chinese university officials teaching on our Pullman campus.

      Despite the premise of the original grant proposal needing to be changed due to politics beyond our unit’s control, Washington State University proudly put forth artistic collaborations with Chinese and Korean music institutions that promoted high levels of performance and meaningful teaching residencies. New relationships with the Wuhan Conservatory of Music, Huazhong Agricultural University, JCLink Music Publications (Hong Kong), and the Jeju Island International Wind Ensemble Festival, have all been developed because of collaborations made possible by this Arts and Humanities Grant. This means, the future is bright for more collaborations between our School of Music and Danh Pham, with these universities and professional musicians in Asia.

Linda Russo, Scholarly Associate Professor, Department of English, Pullman

EcoArts on the Palouse (was Biome Writing/ Ecology & Literature on the Palouse)

      Offering a unique blend of the local, ecological, and literary, this project is significant to the discipline in its innovative and interactive approach to the methods and questions of environmental literature, ecopoetics, and ecological studies. Specifically, its biome-based approach is a new twist on a familiar topic, the state of the environment. It will open up conversations in ecopoetics by emphasizing the power and meaningfulness of bioregional thinking. This is a concept that emerged during the modern environmental movement in the late 1960s but has lost popularity; it emphasizes a location-based approach to creating sustainable communities. The concept of a bioregion or “life place” asks us to consider any place as composed of aspects that are necessary to sustaining one’s own life while also providing the resources to sustain biological life more broadly. The concept of bioregion places human needs and rewards alongside those of other neighboring species and thus suggests that inhabitants of a healthy bioregion benefit from and include a variety of species and plants.

      The concept of a bioregion also asks that we think of one’s own daily practices (walking, consuming food, creating trash, etc.) as embedded within life-sustaining systems. Ecopoetics projects tend to focus on another’s experience – on a specific endangered species, on the author’s epic travels to encounter an effect of climate change “up close” – and the emphasis is often on the destructive practices and their quantifiable effects. These projects are valuable because they awaken us correlations between human activities and environmental change; they often provide examples of destruction we wish to avoid. At the same time, thinking about environmental issues becomes a spectator sport and one can feel immobilized by discouraging data: if there is so much pollution, so many endangered species, how can I have a positive impact? Or even: what does this have to do with me? With this in mind, this project emphasizes one’s own over another’s without effacing the significance of myriad others: in bioregional thinking, one’s own life place is also another’s life place, and the quality of life more generally is bound up in the relationships between many ‘others’ that sustain a place as a site of biodiversity.

      This project emphasizes the value of local environmental affiliations as way toward comprehending the significance of troubling facts that seem “far away”; if any place is a bioregion, and the health of many bioregions are threatened, the health and value of one’s own bioregion is also of significant interest. If one can grasp this significance of plant and animal species dynamics in their local river, say, they can more readily empathize with dangers faced by inhabitants in far away places that are at greater risk due to the effects of climate change. The combining of one’s own plus another’s environmental needs is an approach that is a unique facet of this project. In this project, direct experiences and the immediacy of felt experiences are fostered, conveyed, and encouraged. Further, as a collaborative project, it motivates myriad points of connection, emphasizing in another way the fact that that one’s own experience is always connected with another’s experience.

      Over the grant-funded period this project

• Served 7 undergraduate students through Internships and Independent Studies, providing exposure to reading/discussing ecoliterary and other texts, interdisciplinary collaboration, visual arts, website design, and writing, a total of 11 credit hours
• Provided community service for 2 SOE graduate students
• provided valuable professional exposure by featuring 2 undergraduate works of creative writing and 1 undergraduate collaborative creative project
• Involved collaboration with 6 local artists, one English (BA) alumnus and one Fine Arts (MFA) alumnus, the Phoenix Conservancy, and countless other individuals
• generated two CAS Undergraduate Summer Minigrants applications submitted by undergraduate intern and wildlife ecology major Emily Heston (2018 & 2019)

Shannon Scott, Assistant Professor of Clarinet and Music History, School of Music, Pullman

Rough Wind/Smooth Wind

      The Scott/Garrison Duo will present performances nationwide, commission a new work for flute and clarinet, and record a fourth CD of repertoire either previously unrecorded or not easily available in the United States. The project will create new repertoire through the commissioning of a new composition, support recently composed repertoire through concerts and a CD, and increase the visibility of Washington State University through presentations and concerts at regional and national conferences and colleges and universities in Ohio, Georgia, Washington, Idaho and other states, with a CD released on a major label specializing in contemporary American music, and reviews of that CD in journals American Record Guide, The Clarinet, Fanfare Magazine, Flute Talk, The Flute View, The Flutist Quarterly, Gramophone (UK), The Instrumentalist, Pan: The Journal of the British Flute Society. This project enhances and extends the PI’s research focus of commissioning, performing, and recording recently composed music. With the support of this grant and a CLASS grant from the University of Idaho, the goals and objectives of the project were met.

      Commission: Composer Eric Mandat wrote Togetherness, a duet for flute/piccolo and clarinet/E-flat clarinet. The work is in three movements. The first movement, titled “Profound”, is an exploration of mixed timbres utilizing multiphonics, which are split tones containing several pitches. The second movement, “Quirky”, is scored for piccolo and E-flat clarinet, the highest-pitched members of the flute and clarinet family. This unusual combination, along with Mandat’s sense of humor, provides a charming and unusual addition to the flute/clarinet duo repertoire. “Driving”, the third movement, is a twisting, fast-paced, and very technically challenging tour de force for the performers.

      Performances: The Scott/Garrison Duo performed music drawn from the recording repertoire in recitals at the University of Idaho (January 30, 2018), Washington State University (February 6, 2018), the University of Arkansas-Fayetteville (February 23, 2018), Missouri State University- Springfield (February 24, 2018) and the University of Tulsa (February 26, 2018).

      While Stuart Gerber was in Pullman to perform in the University of Idaho recital and record the Elliott Carter Esprit rude/Esprit doux, the Scott/Garrison Duo and Stuart Gerber gave a studio performance of the work for the WSU Percussion Studio. Additionally, Mr. Gerber gave a masterclass and supervised a rehearsal of the WSU Percussion Ensemble.

      National Conference: The Scott/Garrison Duo performed Mandat’s Togetherness at the National Association of College Wind and Percussion Instructors, held concurrently with the National College Music Society national conference, in Vancouver, British Columbia on October 11, 2018. As our work schedules permit, we will continue to present this work at conferences.

      Recording: Recording was done in WSU’s state-of-the-art recording studio with the outstanding assistance of Dave Bjur, WSU’s recording engineer and faculty. Sessions took place in early February and mid-March. Editing was completed in May 2018 and involved the performers and the living composers. The CD, titled Rough Wind/Smooth Wind (Albany Records Troy 1742), was released in July 2018. The planned repertoire for the recording has to be adjusted, as the Valerie Coleman work Portraits of Langston and the Guillaume Connesson work Techno-Parade were recorded and released in summer 2017. In order to retain the goal of recording works that either had not yet been recorded or which needed a better or more widely available recording, we chose Four Constellations for flute and clarinet by Meyer Kupferman and Bric-a-brac for flute, clarinet, and piano. Both of these works had not been recorded before.

      Reviews: The CD has been submitted to all the journals listed in the goals and objectives. An interview and positive reviews have already been published by Fanfare Magazine and American Record Guide. We have been informed that a review is forthcoming from The Flutist Quarterly.

Sophia Tegart, Assistant Professor of Flute, School of Music, Pullman

Asian Musical Traditions within the Wind Quintet Repertoire

      The objective of this proposal was to promote wind quintets by Asian and Asian-American composers as well as add to the repertoire. This part of the wind quintet repertoire is underrepresented in both recordings and repertoire compilations. International Opus, a publisher specializing in musical diversity, lists only two wind quintet works under the Asian category. There are very few professional recordings of the major wind quintet compositions by Asian and Asian-American composers Chen Yi (China, United States), Toshio Hosokawa (Japan) and Narong Prangcharoen (Thailand). The extensive wind quintet database maintained by Central Michigan University School of Music lists 560 works, but lists only one work associated with Asia, by Korean composer Isang Yung (1917-1995), his Movement 1 and II (1991).

      Asian and Asian-American composers are not yet well represented in the standard wind quintet repertoire, and their music is not regularly programmed or recorded by professional ensembles. The current standard wind quintet repertoire comprises of music by European and American composers spanning the Classical period to the present. Recent commissions have broadened the repertoire with compositions by Latin American, South American, and African American composers, but a significant body of work by Asian or Asian-American composers is still missing. Universities, colleges, and conservatories maintain professional and graduate-level wind quintets as creative, teaching, and outreach ensembles: The Juilliard School, Manhattan School of Music, University of Wisconsin-Madison, University of Louisville, and Washington State University. Examples of independent quintets include The Imani Winds, The Dorian Wind Quintet, and The Borealis Wind Quintet. These and other ensembles continuously seek interesting new works. CD recordings of new or lesser-known wind quintet repertoire and reviews of those works and recordings in peer-reviewed journals are essential tools for researching new repertoire.

      The newly commissioned, recorded, and soon-to-be-premiered works by Kenji Bunch and Nick Omiccioli will significantly increase the repertoire of wind quintets by Asian-American composers. The two works have been recorded, with Omiccioli’s work set to be released on Pan Pacific Ensemble’s second CD in 2019 and Kenji Bunch’s piece to be released on the third CD in 2020. The Pan Pacific Ensemble, comprised of the PI and collaborators (Keri McCarthy, Shannon Scott, Martin King, and Michael Garza), performed at the Thailand International Composers Festival in August 2017. Because of the international profile of the Pan Pacific Ensemble, the commissioned and recorded repertoire will be heard throughout Asia on the Pan Pacific Ensemble’s next Asian tour (2019/2020), stimulating interest in compositions for the wind quintet. Furthermore, performances of this repertoire in North America will increase international appreciation for these Asian and Asian-American composers, ultimately resulting in the integration of Asian musical traditions within the wind quintet repertoire. This will enhance prospects for future performances of these works and new commissions for Asian and Asian-American composers. The recording reviews and articles describing the new compositions will add to scholarship on Asian and Asian- American composers, and increase visibility and interest in this growing area of the wind quintet repertoire.

      The PI commissioned two new works for wind quintet by composers Kenji Bunch and Nick Omiccioli. Kenji Bunch is an Asian-American composer living in the United States and Nick Omiccioli is an American composer living and working in Singapore. Each composer was commissioned to compose a work seven minutes in length for wind quintet (flute, oboe, clarinet, horn, bassoon). Omiccioli’s work “ironhorses” and Bunch’s work “Bliss Point” have both been recorded and will be released on CDs No. 2 (“ironhorses”) and No. 3 (title TBD) respectively by the Pan Pacific Ensemble on Albany Records.

      These newly-commissioned works will add new styles and depth to the wind quintet repertoire, which is lacking substantial Asian and Asian-American representation. “Bliss Point” and “ironhorses” are in the process of being promoted and have received very positive feedback from musicians outside of the Pan Pacific Ensemble. These musicians have plans to perform the new works which will help promote them as well. The CD releases will continue this wave of interest over the course of the next two years and establish these new works as part of the mainstream repertoire of wind quintets.