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News Release

Last modified: Wednesday, May 4, 2011

National Humanities Center names three IU scholars as 2011-12 fellows

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
May 4, 2011

BLOOMINGTON, Ind. -- Three faculty members in the College of Arts and Sciences at Indiana University have been selected as fellows at the National Humanities Center for the 2011-12 academic year.

They are among 32 leading scholars from 21 colleges and universities who were chosen to spend the year working on research projects at the center in Research Triangle Park, N.C. Aside from Duke University and the University of North Carolina, IU is the only university with more than one fellow.

The IU Bloomington fellows and their projects include:

• Jennifer L. Fleissner, associate professor in the Department of English, "Maladies of the Will: Literature as a Symptomatology of Modernity"
• Paul E. Losensky, associate professor in the departments of Central Eurasian Studies and Comparative Literature, "Sa'eb Tabrizi and the Poetics of Effulgence"
• Jutta Schickore, associate professor in the Department of History and Philosophy Science, "Hazardous Operations: Experiments with Snake Venom, 1660-1960"

"Since 1978, IU Bloomington has had 15 faculty members selected to receive National Humanities Center fellowships," said David Zaret, interim dean of the IU College of Arts and Sciences. "To have three selected in a single year is unprecedented, and is a great testament to the strength and scholarship of the humanities faculty across the College. I give my warmest congratulations to Professors Schickore, Losenky and Fleissner, and I wish them all a very productive fellowship year."

Fleissner teaches in the fields of 19th- and 20th-century American literature and culture. Her current project resituates current debates over the humanities' relation to neuroscience by returning to debates over the similarly materialist psychology of the 19th century, in which questions concerning the status of human will were framed as part of a broader inquiry into the meaning of personhood in the modern era. She is the author of Women, Compulsion, Modernity: The Moment of American Naturalism and many articles.

Losensky's scholarship focuses on Persian literature and literary history, in particular the literature of the 16th and 17th centuries in Iran, India and Central Asia. He is particularly interested in how the Fresh Style of this period might be compared to the Baroque and Modernism and how it is related to architecture and other arts. He is the author of Welcoming Fighânî: Imitation and Poetic Individuality in the Safavid-Mughal Ghazal and, most recently, In the Bazaar of Love: Selected Poems of Amir Khusrau (with Sunil Sharma).

Schickore's research interests include historical and philosophical aspects of experimental methods; authorship, peer reviewing, and publication bias; the problem of error in science, and the relation between history and philosophy of science. She held a Wellcome research fellowship at Cambridge, UK, as well as postdoctoral fellowships at the Dibner Institute in Cambridge, Mass., and the Max Planck Institute in Berlin, and was a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J. Her recent publications include Going Amiss in Experimental Research and The Microscope and the Eye: A History of Reflections, 1740-1870.

Chosen from 404 applicants, the National Humanities Center fellows they represent more than 11 fields of humanistic scholarship. They constitute the center's 34th fourth class of resident scholars.

The National Humanities Center is a privately incorporated independent institute for advanced study in the humanities. Since 1978 it has awarded fellowships to more than 1,200 scholars in the humanities, whose work at the center has resulted in the publication of more than 1,300 books. The center also sponsors programs to strengthen the teaching of the humanities in secondary and higher education.

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