PrintEarlier this year, The Eye profiled a few members of the Columbia community who received the well-respected Guggenheim Fellowship in 2009. The grants awarded by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation fund the future projects of established professionals who have already garnered attention in their fields. Last time, we interviewed professors and researchers making strides in the fields of mathematics and history; this time, we turn to the literary realm.
Joseph Slaughter
Can’t decide between two majors? Columbia literature professor Joseph Slaughter was caught in the same predicament during graduate school, trying to balance his studies in comparative literature and international human rights law. Interested in “seeing what happens when we put two forms or systems of thought and human creativity together,” he decided to “try both at once” and look at international human rights law from the viewpoint of world literature. The results of this odd but ingenious coupling produced substantial insight into how storytelling “informs our laws and social organization.” His most recent work analyzes how the Bildungsroman (the coming-of-age novel) naturalizes and reinforces some of the assumptions present in international human rights law—for better and for worse. He was recently awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and will be taking leave to work on “New Word Orders: Plagiarism, Postcolonialism, and the Globalization of the Novel,” a book that examines how intellectual piracy—the engine of globalization, he claims—has shaped the development of the novel. Along the way, he raises questions about authorship, originality, and intellectual property, concerns that are also relevant in international trade agreements and human rights law. Despite his broad, international scope, Slaughter asserts that he does not have a generalized, “easy equation between literature and cultural attitudes or societal institutions.” Nevertheless, it is clear that he believes it doesn’t do “literary studies any good to think of itself as somehow disconnected from practical questions of justice.”
Wadda Ríos-Font
Barnard professor Wadda Ríos-Font talks about 18th-century Spanish literature with the enthusiasm of an eager freshman talking about the newest episode of “Gossip Girl,” an attitude appropriate for the chair of the department of Spanish and Latin American Cultures. Ríos-Font dates her interest in the subject to her college days, saying she knew she wanted “to do something that had to do about writing and creativity in some way,” but that it was really her professors who encouraged her to pursue her interests. “I was initially an advertising major,” Ríos-Font says, but “when I got to Hopkins, most of the people in my major were humanities students who were really into their stuff, and all of us ended up going into academia.” With degrees from Johns Hopkins and Harvard in tow, Ríos-Font pursued a study of “cultural history,” analyzing different pieces of literature, including Spanish melodramas, to get a sense of how people lived in 18th-century Spain. With the grant from the Guggenheim Foundation, she plans to work on her third book, titled “Quasimodo’s Bell: Puerto Rican National Culture and the Spanish Empire, 1808-1898.” The book is about Puerto Rican national identity in the 19th century in the face of Napoleon and Latin-American independence movements, and why Puerto Rico did not have a similar independence movement of its own. Ríos-Font sees her work as especially relevant to today’s students, who often leave her classes with “different ways of thinking, analyzing, and reexamining their own beliefs.”