Congratulations to Professor Jane Bennett and doctoral candidate Mengqi (Mercy) An, who have been awarded a faculty fellowship and a graduate research fellowship, respectively, from the Alexander Grass Humanities Institute (AGHI) for the 2024-2025 academic year.

The core of the fellowships is built around biweekly Friday lunches: convivial gatherings centered on work-in-progress presentations and discussions. These gatherings offer faculty and graduate research fellows—together with IHS students—the opportunity to convey the essence and relevance of their work to and receive feedback from colleagues outside their own disciplines and beyond the traditional parameters of classrooms, departments, and institutional hierarchies.

Congratulations to Jane and Mercy!

Jane Bennett, “Data and the Non-metrical in the Environmental Humanities”

The combination of advances of, on the one hand, the social reach of artificial intelligence and data science, and, on the other hand, a political-economy based upon waste, extraction, and the devastation of social and natural ecologies, have prompted renewed interest in philosophical questions concerning intelligence, agency, and causality. What is intelligence? How does it vary across species and material forms? How, for example, do animal migrations, atmospheric rivers, and wildfires operate like and unlike human agencies? The dual acceleration of AI and climate crisis has also renewed the question of “method” in the humanities, whose source-contents are often less like fixed entities or data points than subtle, morphing forces.  How to study the efficacy of subtle processes whose elements vary in relation to other moving parts? How to do justice, for example, to the efficacy of the atmosphere induced by a novel or the subtle impact upon public mood of sound or music or poetry? What concepts and practices of thinking, what models of research and scholarship, are most adequate to these non-metrical objects?  In the context of JHU’s celebration of AI and data science, my project explores the extent to which the social, ethical, and lyrical value of the humanities is linked to its rich engagement with subtle-yet-potent sources that are non-metrical or essentially anexact, and thus are not well-described as “data.” The project seeks both to conceptualize the subtle efficacy of the vague and to identify modes of research practice (“methods”) appropriate to it. 

Mengqi (Mercy) An, “Literature and Ecologies of Manchuria: 1910s-1940”

“Literature and Ecologies of Manchuria: 1910s-1940” investigates the relationship between knowledge making and literature writing about Manchurian nature. By examining a wealth of Chinese-language and Russian-language literary works in and about the contested borderland of Manchuria, this project makes an ecocritical intervention into ways in which writers perceive, engage, and represent the natural environment.