This spring, three members of the class of 2018 who are completing certificates in European Cultural Studies were awarded Fulbright grants to pursue research in Europe after graduation.
Allison Fleming, a German major, will spend the 2018-19 academic year in Vienna, Austria, conducting research on the Austrian legal theorist Albert Ehrenzweig, who was a contemporary of Sigmund Freud and wrote a book called Psychoanalysis and Jurisprudence after fleeing from the Nazis in 1939. Allison will be auditing law classes as well as working as an English teaching assistant at two high schools in Vienna. In fall 2019, Fleming will begin her studies as a Dean’s Scholar at the University of Michigan Law School in Ann Arbor. Drawing on case studies from Freud, a short story by Franz Kafka, and the memoirs of a World War One soldier, Fleming’s senior thesis, “Mediated Bodies: Technologies of Communication and the Human Form Around 1900,” examines how media technologies interacted with the human body, both physically and culturally, in early twentieth-century Europe.
Carolyn Beard, a comparative literature major, will spend 2018-19 in Germany, conducting research at the Edith Stein Archive and working with faculty at the University of Cologne. Beard first established connections with archivists, scholars, and professors at the Edith Stein Archive and the University of Cologne during a summer research trip in 2017, with support from ECS. Beard’s thesis, “Edith Stein: The Life and Legacy of the Holocaust Martyr,” is a literary-critical biography of the Stein, a German-Jewish philosopher who converted to Catholicism, became a Carmelite nun, died in the Auschwitz concentration camp, and was eventually canonized as a St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross. Exploring the interactions between Stein’s life and writings in order to study how she navigated her conflicting identities during her lifetime, the thesis aims to offer a more nuanced understanding of Stein’s life and work than has been provided to date in hagiographic accounts.
Miranda Rosen, a history major, will spend the 2018-19 academic year at the University of Sussex, where she plans to complete a master’s degree in contemporary history with a focus on women’s rights issues in North America and Europe. Rosen’s thesis, “Nothing More, Nothing Less: Suffragists’ Failure to Protect Black Women from 1919-1922,” explores the breakdown of the coalition between white and black women suffragists following the passage of the 19th Amendment in August 1920. Addressing questions about how the actions, and intentional inactions, of leaders of the National Woman’s Party (NWP) and the League of Women Voters (LWV) in the two years following the passage of the 19th Amendment failed to protect the ability of African-American women to exercise their right to vote on equal terms with white women, the thesis reveals that the NWP and LWV neglected the needs of black women in order to increase their own political strength on other women’s issues moving forward.
