Jesse Molesworth is a Mellon Postdoctoral fellow in the Department of English. He received his PhD from Stanford University in British Literature in September of 2003 and since graduating has been teaching as a lecturer at McGill University in Montréal, Quebec. His work centers on British literature in the eighteenth century and while a postdoctoral Fellow at Hopkins he has completed his book entitled Against All Odds: The Sway of Chance in the Eighteenth-Century Novel. The book argues that the 18th century was witness to numerous attempts to understand, and in understanding to control and ultimately to destroy, the play of chance in everyday existence. Much early realist fiction has been seen as an agent in this process, by insisting that every action results from a logical, coherent cause. Jesse, to the contrary, argues that with the growth of the concept and calculus of probability, there arose a psychological counter-fiction that functioned to excuse the individual from the odds-bound universe. In that sense, the novel set itself against the Enlightenment in that, rather than feeding the Enlightenment’s yearning toward pure mathematical abstraction, the early realist novel tended to vindicate and find interesting the story of a single coin toss over the average of many. Hence, rather than participating in a new statistical understanding of causation (as probability theory had it) the novel promoted, instead, a narrative understanding of causation that was inherently anti-statistical. To demonstrate how this functioned in 18th-century literature, Molesworth sets forth his readings of Defoe’s Roxana, the novels of Henry Fielding, Tristram Shandy, the Gothic novella and the life and works of the Marquis de Sade. His work thus situates itself at the crossroads of 18th-century literary and cultural history, the history of science and contemporary decision theory, elegantly weaving literary, philosophical and scientific issues together.

Bibiana Obler:

Bibiana Obler is the Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of the History of Art She received her Ph.D. the University of California, Berkeley, where she was a student of Tim Clarke. Bibi’s thesis, which she is revising into a book as a Mellon fellows, “focus on important figures in Modern art from a novel perspective. Entitled “Intimate Collaborations: Kandinsky and Muenter, Taeuber and Arp,” it investigates two pairs of married artists, whose work encompasses both Expressionism and Dadaism, a marital phenomenon that, she argues, illustrates a more general trend in which women increasingly continued to pursue their professional careers despite their involvement with men. What makes this significant for the history of art, however, is the way in which she can demonstrate the centrality of the “intimate collaborations” between Kandinsky and Muenter, and Arp and Taeuber, to an understanding of the modernist avant-garde’s attempt to dissolve art into life and to forge an abstract idiom so radical as to transform the ways individuals interact within society. In this sense, she is able to demonstrate how the strictly aesthetic ambitions of high modernism proved inseparable from the intractable problem of relations between the sexes and the sexes’ assumed division of visual labor. Her work is grounded in the study of unpublished as well as published documents such as letters and reviews, as well as a refined visual and art historical approach to her materials.
As a Mellon fellow at John Hopkins, Bibi has revised her thesis and begun work on her next project: “Communitarian Aesthetics in Dada and Expressionism,” a project that clearly builds on her dissertation by expanding the scope of her investigation to include the network of collaborations that informed and shaped both of these aesthetic movements.

Viola Kolarov

Viola Kolarov completed her Ph.D. at the University of California, Santa Barbara in literature and film. Her work encompasses a wide range of fields, focusing on German Philology, Psychoanalysis and German Philosophy, with secondary specializations in English, Film and Media Studies. Her appointment IS in the German and Romance Languages department. As a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow she has devoted her time to revising her Ph.D. thesis, “Shakespeare’s Hamlet in German Letters: A Genealogy of Psychoanalysis and Film” as a book, tentatively entitled Dreamy Enlightenment a Genealogy of Psychoanalysis and Film. The work investigates the inner connection between translation and transmission – Shakespeare’s Hamlet in German letters-- as including a form of transference in the psychoanalytic as well as linguistic sense that is as signposts in a cultural genealogy of both philology and psychoanalysis. In the course of her analysis, she makes a case for the centrality of Hamlet to German letters and of the German reading of Hamlet to psychoanalysis. She traces the genealogy, thus, of an English literary figure through a German transmission from Mendelssohn to Goethe to Freud in order to argue that psychoanalysis is instituted in Germany in the service of the transmission and translation of Shakespeare, with a particular emphasis on the centrality of mourning to psychoanalytic work and to the task of translation.

In her more recent work, she has become increasingly interested in Film as a vehicle for what Benjamin calls a “mourning pageant” as well as in the way that certain contemporary figures – Brittany Spears for one—seem compelled to enact the tragic dimensions of that kind of spectacle. Here, too, she links contemporary developments to both Shakespeare and Freud by focusing on the tragic personal destinies and psychological burdens that celebrity (hence both the subject and object of spectacle) in the modern world imposes, phenomena reflected in the songs that Spears composes.

Anne Moss

Anne Moss, the newly appointed Mellon Fellow in the Humanities Center, is a specialist in Slavic Languages and Literature, a field otherwise unrepresented among the Hopkins faculty. She received her PhD. from Stanford University in 2005, where she wrote a dissertation on “Communities of Women in the Russian Imagination from High Realism to High Stalinism (Fiction, Memoir, Film).” Last year she as a Fellow at the Davis Center for Slavic Studies at Harvard.

Anne’s research interests are in the fields of Russian Realism and Socialist Realism; gender and national identity in Russian and Yiddish Literature; Russian and Yiddish cinema, intersections of sociology and literature and narrative theory. While at Hopkins she hopes to complete the process of revising her thesis into a book. Her thesis – and book project -- is both original in conception and broad in scope, encompassing almost a century of Russian literature and cultures, including belles letters along with poster art and film. She focuses on the intersection of cultural imagination and social thought, ideology and utopia, literary and other forms of aesthetic implements of social reality. In the thesis, she argues that an idealized notion of women’s community – a utopian women’s sphere ostensibly free from the taint of money, sex or self-interest – played a key role in molding aesthetic traditions, shaping visions of a good society, and articulating the complexities of modern experience in the Russian Empire from the mid-nineteenth century to the post-Soviet period. Representations of communities of women, thus, provide a litmus test for an ideological orientation of her subjects as well as an entry into the imagined world that is implied by their art. The thesis covers material as diverse as Tolstoy’s epic novel, Chernyshevsky’s utopian novel, prison memoirs of a former Okhrana spy, and a Soviet film about politically correct female collective farmers, while the images of women’s collective communities analyzed in the thesis range from the brothel as the diseased prototype for all women’s communities (Chekov) to the Soviet Realist depiction of women as free, healthy, athletic, erotic (in a positive sense) and productive laboring bodies.

Prita Meier

Prita Meier, Mellon fellow in the History of Art, completed her PhD thesis in the Department of the History of Art and Architecture at Harvard University in June. Her areas of specialization are Sub-Saharan African Sculpture, architecture and contemporary art; Islamic African art; Indian Ocean visual culture and representations of Africa in the West. The topic of her thesis, which she will spend part of her time while at Hopkins revising, is “Local Cityscapes and Transcultural Imaginaries: Competing Architectures of Mombasa.” Although she just finished her degree, she has already published seven articles on various aspects of African art and architecture, based on research conducted, in part, while she enjoyed a Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Fellowship. Ancillary research, which she has undertaken, included fieldwork in India with the Ford Foundation Crossing Borders Program. She is fluent in Arabic and Swahili, as well as the usual Western European languages.

Prita’s work fits into the new concern with transnationalism and cultural interchange that is sweeping the humanities at the moment. Her dissertation examines religious, civic and domestic buildings as sites of social contestation, where the production of a coastal Muslim identity is closely related to peoples’ negotiation of their colonial past. Most of her fieldwork was conducted in Mombasa Old Town, augmented by shorter research trips to Zanzibar city, since one of her arguments in the thesis is that Mombasa served as a site of resistance to the ascendancy of the Zanzabari Sultanate in the region.

While at Hopkins, she plans to broaden the scope of the research done to take in the Swahili cities of East Africa, which have long served as nodes of cultural convergence and diaspora, connecting Africa and the Indian Ocean cultural complex. During the 19th century, as colonial regimes implanted themselves in the region, the architectural spaces of coastal city life were completely transformed and reshaped, as places such as Zanzibar City became sites of contestation. As an historian of art and architecture, Ms. Meier will study the ways in which the multidirectional circulation of international aesthetic forms and architectural technologies implanted themselves and were reconstituted in east Africa, thus highlighting the diverse and even contrary spectacles and practices manifested in the “modern” (i.e. 19th-century) architecture of Zanzibar and other globally connected and rapidly changing cities. These findings, in turn, will serve as a springboard for her to rethink the logic embedded in some art historical narratives that tend to categorize African visual culture as “traditional, “authentic”, “modern” or cultural”. As her research demonstrates, the architectures of the Swahili coast defies categorization into, and indeed fissures, the structure and meaning of these categories.

Peter Shulman

The sixth member of the current group of Mellon Fellows is Peter Shulman, who represents the heretofore-absent field of the History of Science and Technology. Peter completed his PhD in MIT’S History, Anthropology and STS program, his thesis, entitled “Empires of Energy: War, Environment, and Geopolitics before the Age of Oil,” constitutes a foray into the developing field of environmental studies. It seeks to understand how the United States materially built its global empire, which in the century between 1840 and 1930 involved the establishment of a network of naval bases and coaling stations. By focusing on energy -- and coal, rather than oil – his thesis reconceptualizes the American overseas empire as neither inevitable nor geographically predetermined. In it, he traces the ways in which the pursuit of coal shaped U.S. expansion; how this expansion influenced ideas about national security; and how these security concerns affected the global environment. In so doing, he is able to uncover continuities in American foreign relations that link overseas expansion to responses to the introduction of steam power into ocean travel. Steam required coal, and concerns about this crucial supply of fuel drove the Navy to progressively assemble the now familiar contours of America’s global reach.

The thesis demonstrates that policy makers before the Civil War initiated geological investigations, diplomatic arrangements, and commercial agreements in places like Borneo, Japan, and the Pacific Islands, well before engaging in military coercion. Between the Civil War and the end of the nineteenth century, these approaches gradually gave way to efforts on the part of the Navy to control strategic ports around the world. So important was coal to Naval concerns that coaling strategy and technology came to form an essential part of the education of elite officers and shaped their planning for future wars. Thus, he shows how coal linked mine labor (in West Virginia, Alaska and the Panama Canal), professional geologists, naval officers, steam engineers, and advocates of U.S. expansion to the construction of a recognizably modern United States. Once the thesis is revised for publication, Peter plans to turn his attention away from the global stage of naval strategies and fuel economies to a political, scientific and environmental history of the Chesapeake Bay in the twentieth century, a topic of obvious interest and relevance for those of us at Johns Hopkins. Focusing on the Chesapeake Bay, he hopes to examine how global environmental changes, from over-fishing to climate change to suburban sprawl, are felt and studied in a local context. This work will offer important links to programs in the natural sciences here, while remaining resolutely historical in focus.