Three Year Awards: 2008-09, 2009-2010, 2010-2011
Beth Benedix (Associate Professor of Religious Studies) "Celebrating Blasphemy"

What is blasphemy? Is it really an act of disrespect? A kind of religious treason? Or is it, perhaps, precisely the sort of critical and/or humane thinking that pulls rigid ideologies into more livable spaces? This project will result in a booklength manuscript that considers the spirit of blasphemy in its broadest terms and celebrates thinkers who have been (or might be) accused of operating in this spirit. In this age of diminishing freedom of speech and rather disappointing lack of innovative thinking, we can learn a great deal from thinkers who refused (and refuse) to blindly accept the governing ideologies of their times. Celebrating Blasphemy will treat a variety of thinkers, both “real” and “literary”—among them Nietzsche, Freud, Rumi, Holden Caulfield and Stephen Colbert—who imagine and then inhabit worlds that subvert (and in some cases define themselves in deliberately antagonistic terms against) the status quo.

Barbara Whitehead (Professor of History) "A Study of the History of Happiness"

This fellowship will enable me to develop a new course focused on the idea of happiness as it developed over time in Western Civilization. A central assumption widely held in the West today is that there exists a “right to happiness.” Not only was no such “right” recognized in earlier ages, but the very understanding of in what happiness consists in those earlier times would be for us unrecognizable or, at the very least, unpalatable. Happiness as an idea evolved over time in different ethical, philosophical, religious, and political contexts. As such, happiness has a history. A new area of research within the field of intellectual history has arisen in order to make sense of these changes—the history of emotions. The history of emotions treats human emotions as cultural creations that vary in meanings and value over time and place. I will begin with the otherworldly conception of happiness held by the preSocratic Greeks and then trace the alterations brought to bear on that view first by Socrates and his followers, then by the medieval Christian philosophers, the humanists of the Renaissance, and finally by the philosophies of the eighteenthcentury Enlightenment who formulated what could be seen as the modern Western conception of happiness.

Three Year Awards: 2007-08, 2008-09, 2009-10
Pedar Foss (Associate Professor of Classical Studies)
“The Ethics of Combat in the Ancient Mediterranean and Samurai Japan”

This project proposes a curricular program about the ethics of combat, both on the small-scale (contesting individuals or groups), and large-scale (war) by comparative investigation of its roots in the past societies of ancient Greece, Rome, and samurai Japan.

In those worlds, martial arts roots were closely tied to philosophical and religious traditions concerned with honor-based behavior, especially during times of stress. There is a character used both in Chinese (‘bing’) and Japanese (‘uruwashi’); it means “balanced”, particularly a balance constructed across its respective component characters of “cultural” and “martial”*. This project seeks a way for students to interrogate that balance in a course program based on critical examinations and discussions of literary, philosophical, artistic accounts of combat. In a world that seems numb to violence, this program asks students to do a hard excavation into what have been, what are, and what should be the codes of conduct that govern human behavior when attempts at resolution fail and violence ensues.

*W.S. Wilson, The Lone Samurai: The Life of Miyamoto Musashi, Tokyo, 2004, pp. 100-101.

Anne Harris (Associate Professor of Art History)
“Ethics and Aesthetics in the Roman de la Rose: Images of Ovidian Myth in a Medieval Manuscript Tradition”

This project seeks to understand how images of three myths in the medieval vernacular French allegorical poem, the Roman de la Rose, affect the interpretation of the ethical dilemmas presented. The three myths, from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, are those of Narcissus, Saturn, and Pygmalion and frame turning points in the action of the poem, which features a Lover on a quest for his Rose, who meets allegorical allies (like Fair Welcoming) and enemies (like Reason) along the way to his success. Images are a vivid and principal interpretation of the myths and the poem, and thus make an art historical study of the Roman de la Rose crucial to an understanding of how the work was interpreted in the Middle Ages, and, more broadly, of how images shape the interpretation of text. Traditionally, scholarship separates analysis of text from that of images in dealing with medieval manuscripts. The text by itself can elicit a great variety of ethical issues, but the images focus the ethical dilemmas and oblige the reader/viewer to make interpretive decisions about these dilemmas. In my study, I would like to reunite the two in order to discern the ethical experience of the manuscript for the medieval viewer/reader. Looking at images re-embedded in text, and text once again enlivened by images, is a means of recreating the conditions of possibility of interpretation of the text. I aim to understand how the images and text work together to challenge the reader/viewer to arrive at his or her own interpretation of the poem, and in that way, compel the viewer/reader to articulate an ethics of interpretation. The myths of Narcissus, Saturn, and Pygmalion all elicit enduring discussions of the ethics of love and sex in vivid visual terms and give us an insight into how to negotiate ethical dilemmas.

Three Year Awards: 2006-07, 2007-08, 2008-09
Rebecca Bordt (Associate Professor of Sociology and Anthropology) – research:
“The Ethics of Punishment: What Prisoners Say About Their Prison Experiences”

Based on a quantitative analysis of prison narratives published in the United States (1964-2004), this project makes two substantive contributions to our understanding of contemporary punishment. First, what do those who experience prison have to say about this form of punishment? Contrary to popular belief, not all prisoners feign innocence and unilaterally deride incarceration. Convicts, through published prison narratives, offer us a nuanced and complex analysis of their experiences. Their insight, I argue, has the potential to change the nature of the debate about prison. Second, what ethical issues are raised by the experiences of those in prison? Social scientists studying prison are very comfortable measuring, for example, effectiveness and legal due process. We have shied away from asking, what are the normative principles guiding our daily treatment of prisoners? What are the ethical implications of the way we punish? The goal of this fellowship is to complete a book-length manuscript on these matters.

Jeff Kenney (Associate Professor of Religious Studies) – to develop three courses: “Integrating the Study of Ethics into the Study of Religion and Conflict”

In this Faculty Fellowship project, I plan to investigate and develop ways of integrating ethical themes and ideas into three courses: Women in Islam; Religion, Conflict and Social Change; and Religion, Modernity and Globalization. Such a project will not entail simply creating modules that fit neatly into the courses. Rather, I intend to design the courses from the ground up, emphasizing both the ethical concerns that infuse the topics we study and the ethical questions that inform the very study of the topics. All three courses will be taught in Religious Studies and cross-listed in Conflict Studies. Through an exploration of the subject matter in these courses, I want to help students learn how complicated making ethical decisions can be, not in order to advocate relativism, but rather to show that there are consequences to taking sides. Above all, I hope to provide students with the necessary tools to make informed decisions. Taken together, these courses represent an attempt to triangulate the intellectual and programmatic interests of Religious Studies, Conflict Studies and the recently-established Institute for Ethics.

Rebecca Schindler (Associate Professor of Classical Studies) – to develop curricular materials: “How Do We Let The Past Lie? The Ethics of Cultural History”

Every time an archaeologist sticks a shovel in the ground he or she is confronted with a myriad of ethical questions, whether they realize it or not. Archaeology is a process of destruction; the experiment cannot be redone. The archaeologist has an ethical responsibility to account for the discovery, preservation, analysis, publication, and public presentation of cultural artifacts. This situation is even more complicated by the fact that there are thousands of cultural artifacts in museums and private collections that have no archaeological context because they were illegally excavated and removed from their source country: what is our responsibility to that material? Thousands more artifacts and sites are now threatened by looting; the potential loss of historical information is astounding. The world’s cultural heritage is at stake. One way to combat these issues is through education. Yet discussions of ethics and cultural history are rarely incorporated into mainstream archaeological curricula.

Thus, this project aims to develop curricular materials that address ethical issues related to the study of cultural history. I currently teach a 100-level course on Mediterranean archaeology in which we spend one segment of the course on ethics in archaeology. The topics we discuss range from the archaeologist’s professional responsibility, to the ethics of collecting cultural property, to archaeology and war. I plan to revise this section of the course with updated readings and series of written assignments based on case studies. The second part of my project involves developing a new upper-level course on ethics and cultural history. This course will examine in more depth the range of ethical issues relating to the study, preservation and display of cultural artifacts, from excavation and conservation to museums and archaeological parks. For both parts of this project, I will spend some time expanding my bibliographic resources on ethics and cultural history.

Three Year Awards: 2005-06, 2006-07, 2007-08

Marcia McKelligan (Professor of Philosophy) – to develop two courses: “Applied Ethics”

When is war just? Is it morally permissible to destroy human embryos for medical research? Should homosexual couples be allowed to marry? Should the death penalty be abolished? Are CEOs overpaid? How pernicious are the effects of sex and violence in the media? I don’t remember another time when the public was as passionately interested as it is now in such a large number of serious and complex moral questions.

Yet the quality of the public debate on these issues is dreadful: simplistic, driven by slogans, and often remarkably uninformed. Since a sophisticated understanding of these issues is vital in a democratic society, a complete undergraduate education should include attention to them, and indeed, virtually all departments offer courses that address pressing social problems. The moral philosopher can make a unique and especially valuable contribution to this enterprise. Ethics courses help sensitize students to the moral dimensions of social issues, heighten their awareness of the moral complexity of these issues, give students the analytical tools they need to make sound moral judgments, and, perhaps most important of all, promote respect for rationality and objectivity of judgment.

In this project I will develop two courses in applied ethics: Biomedical Ethics and Contemporary Moral Controversies. Biomedical Ethics is one of the philosophy department’s most sought-after courses. Because of my interest in the subject matter and its connection with other things I teach, I have volunteered to prepare to teach the course. My course will cover such topics as euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide, assisted reproduction and surrogate motherhood, abortion, research on human subjects, genetic testing, and allocation of medical resources. Contemporary Moral Controversies would be new to the philosophy curriculum and would deal with a wide range of issues, which might include but would not be limited to such topics as war, media ethics, embryonic stem cell research, sexual ethics, animal rights, and affirmative action.