Hall Center awards Humanities Research Fellowships for 2002-03

LAWRENCE -- The Hall Center for the Humanities has awarded its annual research fellowships for the 2002-2003 school year. These awards are made possible through the 1983 National Endowment for the Humanities Challenge Grant. The College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and the School of Fine Arts also support the fellowships.

The fellows are Walter Clark, associate professor of music and dance; Thomas Heilke, associate professor of political science; Fiona McLaughlin, assistant professor of linguistics and African-American studies; and Daniel Stevenson, associate professor of religious studies. May Tveit, assistant professor of design, is the Creative Work Fellow.

Walter Clark will work on his book "Enrique Granados: A Life in Music," to be published by Oxford University Press. The biography will emphasize Granados' central place in Spanish culture from the 1890s to the 1910s. This is a companion piece to Clark's biography of Isaac Albeniz. Granados and Albeniz were the giants of Spanish romanticism around 1900, and their operas, songs and piano works established a school of national music in Spain that maintains enormous popularity with concert audiences and performers and that determined the future development of composition in that country.

Thomas Heilke will use the fellowship to complete his book project on "The Political Thought of John Howard Yoder." Yoder is among the foremost theologians of the 20th century. His thinking has influenced contemporary peace movements, churches and religious historians.

Fiona McLaughlin will complete her book, "The Phonology and Morphology of Seereer-Siin." Seereer-Siin is an Atlantic language of the Niger-Congo family and is spoken in Senegal. The language's survival is threatened by the spread of Wolof as the Senegalese lingua franca. The complex sound patterns and word structure of Seereer-Siin present a unique challenge to linguistic theory.

Daniel Stevenson will use the fellowship to complete a book-length study of the Pure Land cult, one of the most popular forms of Buddhist piety in pre-modern China. The study will advance the understanding of an aspect of Chinese Buddhist history that Western scholars have largely marginalized. By the Song Dynasty (960-1279), Pure Land chapels littered the Chinese landscape; its followers ranged from educated Buddhist clergy to the lowest commoner.

May Tveit will use the Creative Work Fellowship to create a video documentary, "Manus Factura/Spinning America." The project will document the demise of the industrial artisan in the American workplace. It will focus on the United Metal Spinning Company, a company based in Kansas City, Mo., that uses metal spinning, one of the oldest techniques for the production of circular hollow metal parts. It is a method of manufacturing that is becoming a lost art due to the advance of technology, foreign competition and the shifting role of the skilled artisan.