Senses of Belonging: The Synaesthetics of Citizenship in Nineteenth-Century America (Fellowship am Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies von Dr. Erica Fretwell) Initiative: Postdoctoral Fellowships in den Geisteswissenschaften an Universitäten und Forschungsinstituten in Deutschland und den USA Ausschreibung: Postdoctoral Fellowships in den Geisteswissenschaften an Universitäten und Forschungsinstituten in Deutschland Bewilligung: 23.03.2016 Laufzeit: 9 Monate This project on the affective dimensions of citizenship treats the sensorium as a central category of analysis. It draws from phenomenology, the history of science, and affect studies to explore the overlooked connection between the nation and bodily sensation. The specific focus is on how American literature, from the Civil War to World War I, limned a radical transformation of the sensorium. After emancipation, public interest in how the senses could be racially coded intersected with new accounts of sense perception produced by the empirical sciences. Deeply engaged in philosophical inquiries into, physiological research on, and popular debates about the five senses, a constellation of writers - including Emily Dickinson, Henry James, and Helen Keller - constituted citizenship as a sensory configuration. Thus, postbellum aesthetic practices compel scholars to approach the embodied senses as a site for examining and as a strategy for representing the emotional vicissitudes of national belonging. Based on readings that range from cookbooks and philosophical treatises to spirit photographs and the realist novel, this project shows that the sensorium is a framework that helps understand the history of the body and the articulation of aesthetic forms. This framework emerges from a historical fact: Francis Galton identified synaesthesia - what neuroscientists call the "anomalous biding" of two senses - in his book advocating eugenics, a Jim Crow-era program that outlawed "anomalous bindings" across race and class. These imbricated anxieties about social and sensory commingling illuminate a synaesthetics of citizenship: the bodily sensations that formally "bind" subjects to each other and to the nation. Throughout this project, synaesthesia is both an object of humanistic study and a 1 means by which to perform it: a collaborative practice of inquiry attendant to the sensations that body forth affective citizenship, as well as enliven categories of formal, cultural, and conceptual analysis. Projektbeteiligte Dr. Carsten Dose Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies (FRIAS) Freiburg Dr. Erica Fretwell University at Albany State University of New York Department of English, Humanities 333 Albany USA Es werden die Institutionen genannt, an denen das Vorhaben durchgeführt wurde, und nicht die aktuelle Adresse. 29.08.2016 2
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