Babson College - Arts & Humanities, History and Society

Welcome
News
Faculty
Research
Curriculum
Special Events

Research

Arts and Humanities Faculty Research
History and Society Faculty Research
Arts and Humanities Recent Publications
History and Society Recent Publications

ARTS & HUMANITIES FACULTY RESEARCH

Excerpts from BFRF March 2008 Newsletter

BFRF Final Products Accepted
Mary O'Donoghue, Arts and Humanities, Aquitania: A Poetry Collection Aquitania is a book of poetry in three parts -- Wrecks, Transports, and The Ship Beautiful --, each part situated in sea-faring. Part I, Wrecks, focuses on shipwrecks ranging from the Spanish Armada off the coast of County Clare to the Kursk submarine in the Barents Sea. Part II, Transports, is based on the conveyance of convicts from Ireland and England to Australia in the 18th and 19th centuries, with particular attention to female convicts. Part III, The Ship Beautiful, is a long narrative poem detailing the end of a relationship during a transatlantic crossing aboard the Cunard liner Aquitania (also known as 'The Ship Beautiful') in the early 20th century.

Excerpts from BFRF January 2008 Newsletter

BFRF Spring 2008 Course Releases
Elizabeth Goldberg, Arts and Humanities, "Living in the Awakened Dark: Race, Poverty, and Genocide in Edwidge Danticat's The Farming of Bones" Goldberg uses the novel as a site of exploration of converging strains of intellectual and political work in literary studies, human rights, and critical race theory.

Lydia Moland, Arts and Humanities "Aesthetic Reflection: Hegel, Art and the Citizen's Disposition" This essay will connect Hegel's aesthetic and political theory through analyzing Hegels Aesthetics and the literature he discusses.

Excerpts from BFRF September 2007 Newsletter

Faculty News
"Sweetchat", by Mary O'Donoghue, Arts and Humanities, has been accepted for publication by the journal Literary Imagination. It is part of the Oxford Journals - Humanities series. The short story was written as part of her 2006 summer BFRF project, Small Home Truths.

BFRF Final Products Accepted
Lisa Colletta, Arts and Humanities, "Forest Lawn, Hollywood, and America" explores the British fascination with the theme-park-like cemetery, Forest Lawn. The cemetery features prominently in the diaries, letters, and novels of various British writers, including Evelyn Waugh, Aldous Husley, and Christopher Isherwood. It represented for most writers the search for perpetual youth and for immortality associated with the movie business and life in southern California generally. Promising "eternal happiness for all its inmates" not based on spiritual salvation but offered "at an inclusive charge as part of the undertaking service," Forest Lawn embodies all that appears wrong with Hollywood and American values. As Waugh writes in "In Love with Easeful Death," anyone who gives in to the siren song of easy salvation is lost.

Excerpts from BFRF May 2007 Newsletter

Faculty News
Mary O’Donoghue, Arts and Humanities, has yet another book to her credit. Her newest poetry collection, Among These Winters, was published in May by Dedalus Press. UNESCO.org calls Dedalus Press “One of the most outward-looking poetry presses in Ireland and the UK." James Silas Rogers, Editor, New Hibernia Review, says of the collection: “Among These Winters opens with an epigraph from Rilke on the heartbreak of parting, and stays mindful of this theme... There are also poems that send you scurrying to the OED—only to be astonished by her gift for the perfect and surprising word. O’Donoghue takes a polymath’s delight in language that calls to mind Mahon, Muldoon and, especially, Auden, as she imaginatively claims the idioms of medicine, geology, myth, and science as her own—as in the chilling ‘Dauernarkose’ that uses mathematical terms to pity the “cure” of a schizophrenic woman. Yet a striking good humor suffuses the collection, and nowhere more so than in poems like ‘The Stylist’ and ‘Leading the Apes in Hell’, where she displays that distinctly Irish gift of setting out a comic proposition and letting it run its antic course.”

In addition, one of O’Donoghue’s one of the stories from the Small Home Truths manuscript: will appear in the literary journal Salamander 12.2 (May 2007). And, two poems will appear in Journal of International Women’s Studies 8.4 (May 2007).

BFRF 2007 Sumer Stipends
Elizabeth Goldberg, Arts and Humanities “Cross-Currents/Emerging Paradigms,” Chapter 16: Cambridge History of African American Literature. The Cambridge History of African American Literature will present both a chronological description of African American literature in the United States (1600-2006), and an explanation of the convergence of oral and printed literary traditions in its development. This chapter will specifically address experimental literature that revises existing historical and literary tropes; that brings together various genres in one literary text; and that extends the borders of African American literature to emphasize connections among literatures of the African diaspora.

Stipend for Summer 2007, part of 2007-2008 BFRF major award package
Mary O’Donoghue, Arts and Humanities O’Donoghue will begin work on Aquitania, a book of poetry in three parts – Wrecks, Transports and The Ship Beautiful – each part situated in sea-faring.

BFRF Final Products Accepted
Julie Levinson, Arts and Humanities, “Success Reassessed: Ambitious Women/Midlife Men” This chapter focuses on work and professional achievement as the cornerstones of success. It investigates gender in Hollywood movies in relation to American ideologies about work and success. The first part of the chapter surveys both the representation of professional/managerial women in films from the 1930s to the present as well as the theoretical discourse that has formed around those films. The second part is a close analysis of seven recent films centered on midlife men, in which the cinema’s defining tropes of masculinity are questioned and complicated. Considered together, these movies dealing with professionally ambitious women and professionally disaffected men point to a crack in the consensus about what constitutes success and how gender, work, and success are intertwined.

BFRF Awards for 2008-2009

The BFRF anounced awards for the 2008-2009 academic year including the following to A&H faculty:

2008 Summer Stipends
Lisa Colletta
Jon Dietrick
Elizabeth Goldberg

2008-2009 Course Releases
Elizabeth Goldberg
Lydia Moland

2008-2009 Major Awards
Mary O'Donoghue

HISTORY & SOCIETY FACULTY RESEARCH

Excerpts from BFRF January 2008 Newsletter

BFRF Final Products Accepted
Mary Godwyn, History and Society, “The New Faces of Entrepreneurship: Narratives and Images of Minority Women Entrepreneurs” This book represents an integration of entrepreneurship studies and sociological theory. It is an ethnographic exploration of atypical business owners and an analysis of their businesses. Our objective is to provide visibility to minority women entrepreneurs that reflects their burgeoning numbers and redresses their lack of representation in the literature on entrepreneurship. We apply a multi-dimensional and integrated analysis that addresses the challenges, dilemmas and opportunities experienced by minority women business owners, and also incorporates sociological theory to investigate how race, gender, ethnicity and other minority status pertain to these challenges and their possible solutions. We examine minority women entrepreneurs not merely as generic business owners, but also as individuals with social status characteristics which, under the existing frame of reference, render them non-traditional and atypical – in other words, deviant rather than normative. Our goal is to disseminate the experiences of minority women entrepreneurs in order to challenge, and change, the current archetype of an entrepreneur.

Excerpts from BFRF May 2007 Newsletter

BFRF 2007 Summer Stipend Part of their 2007-2008 BFRF major award package
Mary Godwyn, History and Society, In preparation for next year's work on her book manuscript, Narratives and Images of Minority Women Entrepreneurs, Godwyn will be conducting in-depth phone and/or face-to-face interviews throughtout the summer. the interview data and work-in-progress will be presented at the American Sociological ASsociation conference in August 2007.

BFRF Final Products Accepted
Marjorie, Feld, History and Society, Lillian Wald: Ethnic Progressive
A second-generation German Jewish American, Lillian Wald (1867-1940) won international acclaim for her pivotal role in the creative of a more pluralist society and the American Social welfare state. This study challenges conventional views of Wald and of the Progressive reform movement. Her innovative work on behalf of immigrants and industrial laborers was rooted in Jewish cultural identity, yet it expressed a universal vision at odds with the enthnic particularism with which she is now identified. By recovering Wald's neglected legacy, Ethnic Progressive contributes to historical--and contemporary--understanding of such major issues as feminism, Zionism, immigration, and ethnic identity.

BRFR Awards for 2008-2009

The BFRF announced awards for the 2008-2009 academic year including the following H&S faculty:

2008 Summer Stipends
Rohit Chopra
Stephen Deets
Lisa DiCarlo

2008-2009 Major Awards
Rohit Chopra

ARTS AND HUMANITIES RECENT PUBLICATIONS

Professor Elizabeth Goldberg

"Review: Through Your Eyes." Dir. Eva Urrutia and Guillermina Buzios. The Americas: A Quarterly Review of Inter-American Cultural History. Fall, 2004.

With Danna Greenberg. "What's a Cultural Studies Curriculum Doing at a College Like This?" Liberal Education. Journal of the American Association of Colleges and Universities. September, 2004.

"Who was Afraid of Patrice Lumumba? Terror and the Ethical Imagination in Lumumba: La Mort du Prophet." Terror, Media, and Liberation. Ed. J. David Slocum. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, Depth of Field Series, 2005.

HISTORY AND SOCIETY RECENT PUBLICATIONS

Professor Kevin Bruyneel

The Colonizer Demands its 'Fair Share' and More: Contemporary American Anti-Tribalism from Arnold Schwarzenegger to the Extreme Right.” New Political Science, Vol. 28, #3, September 2006.

Review of Race and Racism in Modern Philosophy edited by Andrew Valls, in Perspectives on Politics. Vol. 4, #3, September 2006.