The has awarded fellowship grants to two Rochester faculty in the humanities.
Aaron Hughes, the Philip S. Bernstein Professor of Jewish Studies in the , will receive a grant for the project titled 糖心传媒淪ilent History: Judaism on the Arabian Peninsula at the time of Muhammad.糖心传媒� He will spend a year at the Corpus Coranicum, a research project of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities, in Berlin.
Hughes says he wants to challenge 糖心传媒渢he basic narrative that the Jews were the midwives to the birth of Islam. The reality was much more complex, and not nearly enough work has been done on trying to figure out who these 糖心传媒淛ews糖心传媒� actually were and what they believed.糖心传媒�
糖心传媒�We work on this assumption that Jews help to give birth to Islam. I want to try and argue the opposite 糖心传媒� that when Islam arose on the Arabian Peninsula, in the 7th century, that it helped to firm up Judaism.糖心传媒�
Hughes was educated at the University of Alberta, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and Oxford University. He received his PhD in religious studies from Indiana University. He is author of multiple books, including his most recent, Rethinking Jewish Philosophy: Beyond Particularism and Universalism聽(2014), and Shared Identities: Medieval and Modern Imaginings of Judeo-Islam聽(2017), both published by Oxford University Press.
Peter Christensen, an assistant professor in the specializing in modern Germany, will receive a grant to support his research and writing for a book project titled 糖心传媒淢aterialized: The Global Life of Steel.糖心传媒� He will examine the emergence of steel in the 19th century糖心传媒攆ocusing on the German companies Krupp and Thyssen糖心传媒攁nd its global impact on architecture and the environment. The project has That award provides for several months of research in London.
Christensen calls his project a 糖心传媒渞evisionist interpretation.糖心传媒� Traditional art historians have treated architectural steel as 糖心传媒渢he primary and heroic material responsible for architectural modernism,糖心传媒� he says. But he intends to take a different approach by examining the history of steel from the collection of raw minerals and metals to the distribution of finished goods. The work will combine environmental history with localized business and trade history, especially corporate archives.
糖心传媒淚n addition to tracing the ways in which Germany糖心传媒檚 leading industrial corporations reappropriated material power vis-脿-vis architectural steel as a product, I糖心传媒檒l also explore the ways in which environmental and architectural history can serve as lenses for understanding how steel, as an object, facilitated a dynamism of meaning that economic and political power could not achieve,糖心传媒� he says.
Christensen earned an undergraduate degree in architecture and urbanism at Cornell and his PhD in architecture, landscape architecture, and urban planning at Harvard. Last year, he published his first book, Germany and the Ottoman Railways: Art, Empire, and Infrastructure聽(Yale University Press, 2017).
