The Humanities Research Center awards teaching-release fellowships to Rice faculty each academic year, and to date has awarded a total of seventy-three. The fellowships facilitate the completion of a single-author, book-length project or the initiation of a new project, in order to assist faculty in the development of their careers. Fellows are released from teaching for one semester to pursue their research projects. The fellows also participate in the intellectual life of the center by sharing research activities through active participation in a yearlong brown-bag series with other HRC Fellows.

2011-12 Individual Research Fellows

Sarah Ellenzweig, Associate Professor of English
Fictions of Motion: Literature and Materialism from Milton to Sterne
If the self is not a sovereign actor in the ways we have thought, how do we rethink the relations linking intention and action in Enlightenment narratives? Ellenzweig's project seeks to argue that this failure of the acting self grows out of the clash between a traditional Christian humanism that sees human beings as volitional, and therefore moral, units, and a secular materialism that reduces human acts to necessary moments in a continuous mechanistic chain.

Anne Klein, Professor of Religious Studies
Jigme Lingpa: Buddhist Reflections on Mind
Jigme Linpa is a noted Tibetan visionary, poet, philosopher and mediation master (1729-1798). A prolific writer, he is especially famous for his writings describing visionary and meditative experience of heightened immediacy that transcends thought. He is also known for his precise and detailed scholarship. The spectrum of his work crystallizes a question central to Buddhist thought from the time of its origins. Does conceptual knowledge contribute to or obstruct such immediacy? This question was especially important in Tibet, where efforts to clarify each side gave rise to a rich literature on the phenomenology of mind and personhood. Klein's project is to further look into Jigme Lingpa’s writing, most of it previously untranslated, and to see how it is foreshadowed by earlier writers, and how it relates to conversations still significant today.

Alexander Regier, Associate Professor of English
Romantic Theories of Language
Alexander Regier will be working on his book Romantic Theories of Language. The volume is a study of unorthodox yet important linguistic theories, with a particular focus on William Blake, William Wordsworth, J.G. Hamann, and Walter Benjamin.

2012-13 Individual Research Fellows

	Gwen Bradford The Nature and Value of Achievement Achievement and failure are significant valuation points in human life. Bradford’s research investigates the common elements of achievements, and why achievements can make life worth living and be worthy of sacrifice. Through her novel development of a school of thought called “perfectionism,” a theory of value that holds that the development and exercise of fundamental human capacities is intrinsically valuable, Bradford will analyze difficulty and its centrality to characterizing achievement. This investigation into achievement also engages with philosophical studies into epistemology, positive psychology, and wellbeing.
	April DeConick The Ancient New Age: Gnostic Spirituality and the Birth of Christianity In antiquity, Gnostic spirituality was a metaphysical or ‘New Age’ movement that was not a late “alternative” to Christianity but an innate radical impulse embedded within the Christian tradition from its earliest formations. DeConick tells the story of Christianity’s radical native beginnings and shrewd tamings as the religion was domesticated and secularized by the leaders of the Apostolic churches into an orthodoxy that would sustain mass conversation across the Mediterranean world. While the word "gnostic" has become polemical and almost taboo in scholarly circles, DeConick argues for an obligation to explain the development of Gnosticism and Gnostic religious movements in the third century as a surviving religious tradition that bridges early Christianity and appears in the modern New Age.
	Kathryn de Luna Collecting Food, Cultivating People: Wild Resource Use in Central African Farming Communities, 1000 B.C.E. – 1900 C.E. The familiar Neolithic Revolution narrative suggests that sedentism and food surplus supported the rise of centralized political organization, but elides the contribution of wild resource use to political change in farming communities. De Luna traces the 3000 year history of hunting, fishing, and foraging by central African farmers, highlighting the contingent process by which these farmers distinguished food collection from farming centuries after the adoption of agriculture in order to support a novel, decentralized politics.. The bulk of the historical data comprising de Luna’s research stems from reconstructed word histories and comparative historical linguistics.
	Uwe Steiner Walter Benjamin’s Concept of the Political in its Philosophical Context The Selected Writings, the near to complete translation of his works into English, attest to the outstanding intellectual significance that Walter Benjamin enjoys in academe. Available in today’s academic lingua franca, his writings will attract an even growing number of scholars worldwide. But, as Steiner observes, they also become more and more detached from the historical, cultural and intellectual context of their origin. To be sure, in allocating Benjamin’s political philosophy in the philosophical discourse of his days, he takes a diametrically opposed approach. As a Benjamin scholar, however, he knows that translation and criticism form part of what Benjamin called the “afterlife” of the original in which it unfolds and thus discloses hitherto unperceived features of its nature. Therefore, Steiner concludes, the HRC‘s fellowship program provides a close to perfect intellectual environment for studying Benjamin – which he does preferably in the German original.