News

Six professors from the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences have been named Conrad Humanities Scholars. They are taking advantage of the new designation to pursue a variety of projects, from studying second language acquisition and black girlhood to researching immigration politics.

The Conrad Humanities Scholar awards are funded by a gift from the late Arlys Conrad, whose estate gift shared by the College of LAS and the College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences is intended to assist and retain promising mid-career faculty.

As cinema industries around the globe adjusted to the introduction of synch-sound technology, the Soviet Union was also shifting culturally, politically, and ideologically from the heterogeneous film industry of the 1920s to the centralized industry of the 1930s, and from the avant-garde to Socialist Realism. In The Voice of Technology: Soviet Cinema’s Transition to Sound, 1928–1935, Lilya Kaganovsky explores the history, practice, technology, ideology, aesthetics, and politics of the transition to sound within the context of larger issues in Soviet media history. Industrialization and centralization of the cinema industry greatly altered the way movies in the Soviet Union were made, while the introduction of sound radically influenced the way these movies were received. Kaganovsky argues that the coming of sound changed the Soviet cinema industry by making audible, for the first time, the voice of State power, directly addressing the Soviet viewer. By exploring numerous examples of films from this transitional period, Kaganovsky demonstrates the importance of the new technology of sound in producing and imposing the "Soviet Voice."

Prof. Robert Rushing has received both the campus-level Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching Award and the LAS Dean's Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching.

Rebecca Whalen was awarded the Comparative and World Literature Award for Excellence as a senior student.

Professor Rini Bhattacharya Mehta has been awarded a fellowship by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications for a project titled "Indian Cinema in Context: Interactive Film History Archive and Tools."

Ethan Madarieta has been awarded the Gendell and Shiner Fellowship for the Fall Semester of 2019-20.

An article, "Bridging the gap between medicine and literature" about Stephanie Hilger’s new book “New Directions in Literature and Medicine Studies” is featured on the college homepage. 

Prof. Eric Calderwood has been selected as a Lincoln Excellence for Assistant Professor Scholar for the College of LAS for 2017-2019.

Comparative Literature in Historical perspective

Congratulations to SLL faculty member Prof. Lilya Kaganovsky, who is receiving the Provost's Campus Distinguished Promotion Award.  The Campus Committee on Promotion and Tenure, in forwarding her case for promotion to full professor to the Chancellor, identified her as one of a set of scholars up for promotion "whose contributions were truly exceptional in terms of quality of work and overall achievement."

Professor Robert A. Rushing’s book Descended from Hercules: Biopolitics and the Muscled Male Body On Screen just won the Film and Media Studies book prize at the AAIS (American Association for Italian Studies).

Muscles, six-pack abs, skin, and sweat fill the screen in the tawdry and tantalizing peplum films associated with epic Italian cinema of the 1950s and 1960s.Using techniques like slow motion and stopped time, these films instill the hero’s vitality with timeless admiration and immerse the hero’s body in a world that is lavishly eroticized but without sexual desire. These "sword and sandal" films represent a century-long cinematic biopolitical intervention that offers the spectator an imagined form of the male body―one free of illness, degeneracy, and the burdens of poverty―that defends goodness with brute strength and perseverance, and serves as a model of ideal citizenry.

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