Associate Professor of Art History Susan Jarosi and Assistant Professor of Anthropology Mariam Durrani were recently selected for National Humanities Center summer residencies. The four-week program will take place in June and is designed to give participants an opportunity to work on research — either for a project in progress or a new endeavor.
Jarosi said she will work on a project exploring the implications of the history and ideology of vitrines to better understand how they shape the theorization, access, and reception of artworks in our contemporary moment.
With the working title Inside the Glass Cube: The Ideology of Vitrines, Jarosi describes the project as “a book-length study of the ways in which vitrines produce highly mediated, habituated, and ideologically-driven engagements with artworks, regardless of whether we encounter them in major historical museums such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art or in contemporary art exhibitions such as Documenta.”
Durrani plans to use the residency time to continue work on her book project, Unruly Mobility: Muslim Youth Come of Age in the 21st Century.
She said that “broadly, the project examines the category of ‘Muslim youth’ and the processes of ‘Muslim youth’ subject formation through an ethnographic study of migration, mobility, and aspiration among Pakistani-origin Muslim college students. The book argues for how the aspiration for mobility acquires semiotic significance for contemporary Muslim youth subject-making processes, focusing on communicative processes among students on campus and on social media.
Founded in 1978, the National Humanities Center is located in Research Park Triangle, N.C. According to its website, the center is “one of the most prestigious independent research institutes in the world” and is “dedicated to supporting, stimulating, and disseminating the very best scholarship in the humanities.”
