Two University of Rochester faculty members will be in India next fall, and a third will be in London after receiving Fulbright Scholar awards for 2018-19.
Llerena Searle, assistant professor of anthropology, will conduct ethnographic research for a book she is working on, examining how an influx of goods and media has restructured home-making practices among India’s middle- and upper-classes in Delhi.
Joshua Enck, an adjunct instructor in art and art history, will create sculptures that pay homage to the lotas, katoris, and other metal vessels of everyday life in India, to help document an industry that has received little scholarly attention.
And Steven Rozenski, assistant professor of English, will work on his book project, Wisdom’s Journey: Continental Mysticism and Popular Devotion in Trans-Reformation England, at Queen Mary University of London.
The Fulbright Scholars award program is the flagship United States academic exchange effort, administered by Council for International Exchange of Scholars on behalf of the US Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs.
Rozenski’s monograph is an inquiry into the transformations of Continental spiritual literature in England across a 300-year period. It examines the English translation and adaptation of the works of Henry Suso, Catherine of Siena, and Thomas a Kempis in order “to change our understanding of English devotional and mystical literature and its wider European context across the reformations of the sixteenth century,” Rozenski writes. “Ongoing popularization of theology in the vernacular shaped non-clerical readers’ religious experiences even more profoundly than did the better-known history of Biblical translation.” He will also begin work with his sponsor Julia Boffey and an international team of textual critics on a new edition of Chaucer’s complete works.
Enck, a sculptor who works with metal, says he draws inspiration from the “visual language of obsolescence.” He was fascinated by the traditional metal vessels used in everyday life that he encountered while living in India in 2007. “The forms of such ubiquitous objects have been honed over years of production to fit their function,” he writes. “They are intimate in scale, and relate to the body, as a lota rests on a woman’s hip or head. They continue to be made with limited mechanization today.” He will combine the role of artist and teacher at the Sushant School of Design at Ansal University, Gurgaon.
Searle’s project, “Home Inc.: Globalizing Domesticity in India,” examines how the material culture of Indian homes “has enabled Indian elites to reinforce social distinctions as they align themselves with global forms of living, and distance themselves from the Nehruvian project of national uplift,” Searle writes. “My research will trace the ways in which domestic spaces become linked to social identities among both consumers and producers and thus become tools in the interactions through which class, gender, and caste inequalities are negotiated and reproduced.”
