In February, the Center for the Study of Europe at Brigham Young University awarded grants to 10 BYU faculty members for their research on European-related topics. The recipients and a brief summary of their research topics are:
Christian Asplund and Douglas Bush of the School of Music will be composing and performing a new work for the organ at the St. Jakobus Church in the historic city of Miltenberg, Germany. The concert is scheduled for July 24, 2005, coinciding with the feast of the church's patron saint. Asplund is writing the work, and Bush will give the premiere performance of it in the church.
Gary Burlingame, professor of psychology, will conduct research to validate the Group Selection Questionnaire (GSQ) in Germany. The GSQ is used to screen potential patients for group therapy, providing information on client's expectations for the outcome of therapy, ability to interact well with others and tendency to show dysfunctional and inadequate interpersonal interactions. The GSQ was developed for use after the Bosnian civil wars.
Eric Dursteler, assistant professor of history, will use the grant to continue research on gender and boundaries, specifically renegade Christian women, in the early modern Mediterranean world. Since women's experiences appear infrequently in inquisitorial records, there is a need for viable documentary sources that treat the full range of women's experiences. Dursteler will travel to Europe this summer to complete research in Venice's archives.
David Hatch, associate professor of English, is working to reexamine Samuel Beckett's "Three Dialogues" with George Duthuit in the context of the postwar Parisian aesthetic debate and Beckett's emerging postmodernism. Hatch will travel to Paris to visit archives at the three galleries Beckett wrote about in the essays. There he will reconstruct the exhibition catalogues to evaluate the ways the works change our reading of the dialogues and position the discussion within the international art debates occurring in Paris after WWII.
Paul Kerry, associate professor of history, will organize a symposium on "Friedrich Schiller and European Identity" to be held at Cambridge University. The symposium will result in the publication of a volume of essays on Schiller with Kerry as editor. Schiller, known as the "poet of freedom," is the author of "Mary Stuart," "Wilhelm Tell" and "Walenstein."
Nathaniel Kramer, assistant professor of humanities, will conduct research focusing on Danish modernism in Danish literary and cultural history. Kramer will analyze the works of Villy Sørensen, the Danish author, culture critic and analyst, essayist, editor and translator, using the Royal Library in Copenhagen to view house archives of Danish newspapers from 1955 to 1963.
David Laraway, assistant professor of Hispanic literature, will study the poetry of Basque poet Bitoriano Gandiaga. Laraway argues that the rhetoric of the countryside has played a prominent role in the discourse of contemporary Basque nationalism. He will use the grant to travel to the Bitoriano Gandiage Liburutegia in Mendata, Spain, to study relevant primary and secondary source materials.
Robert McFarland, assistant professor of German, will travel to Vienna to complete archival research about Austrian writer Bertha von Suttner, the first woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize. Von Suttner is considered a national hero for her work "Die Waffen nieder (Lay Down Your Arms)." Influenced by American pacifists, Suttner developed a plan for the political unification of the countries of Europe and envisioned the evolution of a pan-European government that resembled the American model of politically united independent states.
Mark Wrathall, associate professor of philosophy, will explain, consolidate and expand on the insights of the phenomenological movement into the nature of our perceptual experience of the world. Using the insights of European phenomenologists Martin Heidegger and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Wrathall's findings will explain and demystify European phenomenology for an American audience. He hopes to demonstrate how European movements in art need to be understood as phenomenologies in their own right.
For more information on the Center for the Study of Europe or other events they sponsor, visit the CSE web site at europe.byu.edu.
Writer: Allyso Rice
