Theme

Power and Place, 2010-2012

We find history in unexpected as well as expected places: Auschwitz, the White House, Machu Picchu, Maya Lin’s Vietnam memorial, lunch counters, slave ships, mosques, battlefields, department stores, laboratories, and rainforests. Each of these has meaning as a place that, in ways both instant and profound, evokes historical developments of the greatest importance. In exploring the relationships between “power and place,” we aim to map how places shaped the ways power has been exerted as well as to trace how power has shaped and transformed particular places.

In an era of accelerating globalization, both power and place remain central to the work of historians, and we seek to understand them as broadly defined and imagined concepts. Specific relationships of power, however broad, have been mapped, asserted, negotiated and contested in, through, and around particular places. Place can take many forms (nation-state, cities, institutions, architectural forms, or environments to name but a few), and provide spaces of exploitation, liberation, and conflict, sometimes simultaneously. Nations, institutions, communities, and peoples have confronted, been defined by, or instigated struggles over power, place, and, even placeless-ness. For the Institute's 2010-2012 theme, Power and Place, we seek proposals that analyze the complex interplay between power, place and history.

We invite applications for resident fellows at all ranks.

Global Borders, 2008-2010

From the dawn of history, we humans have defined ourselves with borders and boundaries: markers in space, time, identity, aspiration, imagination, and as many other realms as our hopes and fears have conjured or devised. We are who we are because of the lines we draw; and we always have been.

Drawing inspiration from Texas’s location along America’s southern edge, we seek to understand how borders that are intended to separate peoples, places, and categories also function as sites of crossing and mixing. Many other communities are shaped both by the borders that define them and by border crossings that sometimes pass through and that sometimes sink deep roots. Borders are often places of contested ownership but they can also nurture the interaction and mixing of disparate cultures and peoples. They can serve as potent reminders of how much the human race holds in common and that much about this world cannot be delimited by lines drawn on maps. We are interested in global border dynamics, whether of the Pacific world, Old and New Europe, North and South, or settler and indigenous communities in Africa, to name but a few.

We also seek to understand borders as conceptual, ideological, and often porous divides that maintain systems of difference and inequality. Borders frame social and cultural spaces where different intellectual concepts, artistic styles, aesthetic movements, academic disciplines, or mass media genres encounter one another and negotiate their differences. Broadly imagined borders are functions of environments, religion, mobility, markets, citizenship, and warfare. Crossing borders can illuminate the construction of nations, communities, and intellectual categories and suggest how differing histories might be conceived.