Current Research Projects
Alexander Doty is currently working on two star studies (Marlene Dietrich and Elizabeth Taylor), on an article on "Brokeback Mountain" and melodrama, and on a project on the monstrous and the medieval with IU English professor Patricia Ingham.
Jane Goodman is currently in Algeria at work on a new ethnographic project entitled "Theater, Ideology, and Civic Life in Algeria." Her research is funded by Fulbright-Hays, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Social Science Research Council, and the American Institute for Maghreb Studies.
Mary L. Gray is currently examining how the convergence of U.S. gay marriage debates and cyberactivism contribute to social theories of grassroots organizing; her next book-length ethnographic project traces how neoliberal impulses embedded in cyberinfrastructures of university research ethics and compliance produce norms of vulnerability and risk in human subjects social scientific research.
Professor Hawkins' research continues to focus on gender and sexuality. She is particularly interested in the intersection between low body genres and high culture and in the way theory travels into art culture. She is currently working on a book on Downtown Film and Video Culture, 1975-2001.
She is also compiling a Beat cookbook.
Professor Ivie's title of his current book project, coauthored with Oscar Giner, is “Hunt the Devil: The Resurrection of American Democracy in an Age of Terror.” Initial products of this genealogical study of myth and ritual in contemporary U.S. political culture are reflected in a number of our recently published and forthcoming articles. These works examine the role of demonology in presidential rhetoric, work out an approach to rhetorical genealogy that reaches back to McCarthyism and its forerunner in the Salem witch trials, and explore the rhetoric of democratic exceptionalism in Obama’s campaign for the presidency. The book proceeds from the premise that the figure of the devil, and corresponding images of evil, haunt American political culture. This devil is a dark and unholy presence in the nation’s political religion, a figure that tests the nation’s devotion to its special calling, taunts the self-conceit of a chosen people, and must be repeatedly exorcised from the body politic by redemptive acts of violence. The question we address is whether and how American democracy might be rhetorically resurrected to serve as a motive and model for building a culture of peace that embraces diversity rather than damns it as deviance. It is a study of cultural transition, or the potential thereof.
Barbara Klinger's current research projects involve two books in progress:
Becoming Classic: Hollywood Cinema, Television Exhibition, and the Popular Canon and
Reenactment: Fans Performing Movies, from Theater to Youtube.
Phaedra Pezzullo is continuing her rhetoric and public culture research on: tours and disasters (including Katrina Tours in New Orleans and more broadly);everyday life, toxic environmental pollution (PCBs, nuclear, etc.), and embodied practices of resistance; and social movements in an age of ecological crises.
In addition to continuing her research into the intersections of community and identity at farmers’ markets,
Jennifer Robinson is currently primary investigator for the
Indiana University Collegium on Inquiry in Action, a program funded by the Teagle Foundation to bring faculty and graduate students together into learning communities that explore effective teaching practices.
Prof. Seizer's current ethnographic research is about road comics, those professional comedians who earn their livelihood playing U.S. stand-up comedy club circuits. The project, entitled "Road Comics: Big Work on Small Stages," has both book and documentary film components.
Jon Simons is beginning an interdisciplinary study of images of peace promoted by the Israeli peace movement that assesses the productivity of those images in promoting peace. Images of peace are treated as abstract, complex condensations at work in the minds of Israeli publics. These images are manifested through the activities of the various peace groups as performances and enactments of style, and through visual and other media. Potentially, such imagery could operate as critical concepts in relation to dominant discourses such as “security” and “the Jewish nature of the State of Israel”, playing a role in a future public culture of peace. A research trip to Israel in the summer of 2009 is supported by an Indiana University New Frontiers in the Arts and Humanities Exploration Travelling Fellowship.
Ted Striphas' research focuses on the history of media, with a particular emphasis on the past, present, and possible futures of book publishing.
Robert Terrill continues to explore exemplars of public discourse, however mediated, as resources for rhetorical invention; he has become especially interested, most recently, in discourses of "duplicity" that foster a doubled attitude as a productive manner of engaging critically with contemporary democratic public culture."
Gregory A. Waller is working on a history of 16mm and traveling film exhibition in the 1930s-1940s and on Japan-in-America: The Turn of the Twentieth Century, a study of the varied representations of Japan that circulated in the United States, 1890-1915 (http://www.indiana.edu/~jia1915/).
