Gould Sponsored Faculty Research

2023-2024

Professor Nicholas Buccola and RAs Asia Best, Elijah Emory-Muhammad, and Luis Mendoza

Baldwin on Love

Academic Year 2023-2024

The idea of love was at the center of James Baldwin’s philosophy. But Baldwin’s invocation of love in his essays, fiction, and activism was complex and unconventional. In my book-in- progress, tentatively called Love Letters from James Baldwin, I am exploring the idea of love in Baldwin’s life and thought by way of a series of “meditations” – reflections ranging from a paragraph to a few pages in length. Each meditation is inspired by something Baldwin said, wrote, or did over the course of his life. I weave these meditations on Baldwin with reflections on my own family’s complicated racial history. This engagement is inspired by Baldwin’s insight that we cannot love ourselves or others unless we are willing to come to terms with our history (both individually and collectively). My hope is that the book will deepen our understanding of Baldwin’s philosophy of love and help us achieve greater wisdom about how we ought to express love in the world.

Professor Esther Chung-Kim and RA Daniel Penaloza

History of Medicine and its Access

Academic Year 2023-2024

This research project examines the origins of growing access to health care in early modern Europe. Understanding how leaders in early modern Europe utilized their networks to draw on their collective medical knowledge to increase accessibility to secret recipes, home remedies, and herbal medications for the general population is an important context for the growing dissemination of medical knowledge. During the early modern period, many physicians and lay healers cited the religious imperative of caring for one’s neighbor, especially the needy ones, as the main reason for their services and the dispensing of medications. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries following the Renaissance and Reformation, medicine was much more widely popularized, both traditional, Galenic, learned medicine and the work of more radical reformers like Nicholas Culpeper who aimed to democratize medicine and provide home remedies. As literacy rates improved and printing allowed affordability of books, the publication of medical manuals and home remedy books increased significantly to match the growing interest in diseases and treatments. This study illuminates how various religious and medical leaders contributed to the growing accessibility of medicine.

Professor Yannis Evrigenis and RAs Sophie Abrams, Kendall Higgins, and Jasper Langley

The Bodin Project

Academic Year 2023-2024

The Bodin Project is aimed at a new translation and edition of Jean Bodin's Six Books on the Commonwealth, the most influential text in the history of political thought that is not currently in print and is, despite its long shadow, largely inaccessible to modern readers. This work, which gave us the modern conception of sovereignty and influenced such thinkers as Grotius, Hobbes, Locke, Montesquieu, Rousseau, Adams, and Jefferson, to name but a few, has remained beyond the reach of modern students and scholars because of its size and complex publication history. The Bodin Project's new translation, funded in part by an NEH fellowship, is based on the last Latin edition of the work to be published by Bodin's publisher, Du Puys, during the author's lifetime. Bodin's references to Greek, Roman, and Hebrew sources, as well as his use of historical and contemporary writings about politics from all over the world, make the annotation challenging but exciting. Bodin aspired to put together a comprehensive political science that would replace Aristotle's Politics. While he followed Aristotle's structure, the resulting treatise also challenged many prominent Aristotelian claims and expanded Aristotle's comparative scope by bringing together information about the diverse political institutions that human beings construct in different environments and conditions. Equally importantly, Bodin's vocabulary and conceptual framework shaped the Peace of Westphalia, and have thereby framed the way we think about politics, the state, and international relations in ways that we may not even recognize.

Professor Radhika Koul and RA Adarsh Srinivasan

Saving a Language: The Case of Kashmiri 

Spring 2023

This project outlines a significant effort to safeguard the endangered Kashmiri language, threatened by postcolonial conflict and fundamentalism. Supported by the Gould Center Fellowship in 2023-24, the initiative aims to create an innovative online learning portal for Kashmiri. Building on the success of The Koshur Fellowship, which transitioned to a digital format in 2020, the project's goal is to establish a self-paced, globally accessible platform for independent Kashmiri language and culture learning. Driven by the urgency of preserving the Kashmiri language, this initiative seeks to address a critical gap in language preservation efforts.  

Professor Jim Kreines and RAs Abhinav Ganesh and James Culler

German Idealism and the Polarizing Importance of the Idea of a Metaphysical System

Fall 2023

My larger project, Nothing Halfway: German Idealism and the Polarizing Importance of the Idea of a Metaphysical System, includes a larger book of that title, and a smaller book with material focusing on Hegel’s engagement with Spinoza, From Shapeless Abyss to Self-Developing Thought. The project this semester is finishing sending a draft of the last book to the series editors, and drafting a chapter of the former. The idea of the overarching project is this: Some during the period of German Idealism, such as Hegel, aim to build a metaphysical system, or to argue that there is an organized, systematic structure unifying everything, including all of reality and all of our knowledge (i.e., ‘system-building’). But I argue that we cannot understand such ambitions or defend their prospects without highlighting their engagement with those who distinctively agree on the importance of the idea a ‘system’, in this sense, but see the importance of the idea as largely critical. ‘System-critics’, then, do not dismiss that idea as irrelevant, but think it needed as a guide to reform and transformation of philosophy. Their work often takes the form of text bringing out the philosophical appeal of a system, alongside meta-text pointing out tensions within systematic thought. The broader period, I argue, is characterized by agreement on the importance throughout philosophy of this idea of a system, which surprisingly polarizes debate into these radically opposing kinds of projects.

Professor Adrienne Martin and RA Eva Pruitt

Intimate Relationships and Emotional Responsibilities

FALL 2023

This chapter was commissioned for the planned Oxford Handbook of Relationship Ethics, edited by Sarah Stroud and Monika Betzler. It examines the idea that intimate relationships involve the parties having emotional responsibilities to each other. For example, many intimate relationships seem to call for a degree of emotional openness between the parties. Many intimate relationships also seem to require that the parties cultivate specific emotional attitudes such as love, trust, pride, or loyalty. Such ideas are present in a substantial portion of the philosophical literature on the ethics of relationships and associations, as well as in familiar cultural tropes and norms. Emotional responsibilities entail interpersonal vulnerability and also shape personal identity. They interact in complex ways with values such as self-determination, independence, and relational equality. It is therefore a matter of potentially heavy ethical and political significance to have emotional responsibilities and to be held to them by others. It matters, therefore, where emotional responsibilities come from. This chapter examines whether they presuppose voluntary interactions between the parties, such as promising, benefiting, or harming; or whether they might instead be inherent to some relationships, regardless how we find ourselves in those relationships. It also looks at the possibility of emotional responsibilities in more impersonal, public roles—such as the purported responsibility of protectors (firefighters, police officers) to be brave, or of educators and caregivers to be patient and caring.

Professor Aseema Sinha and RA Katherine Lazalotto

Societal Memories and Institutional Memories through Time: Memory-Making During and After Pandemics

Academic Year 2023-2024

How do countries develop and build state capacity faced with complex, fast-moving public health crises? What roles do societal memorization and institutional memory play in such responses? This year-long Gould center grant will help me focus on two important and distinct concepts: Societal memory and institutional memory. I will find and collate the literature on state-building, public administration, and historical institutionalism, building on earlier analysis of collective memory. This will yield a book chapter that aims to bring together three distinct concepts that articulate and explore time-related variables: Learning through crisis (policy and public administration), policy feedback and institutional change with a focus on institutional memory (political science, and institutions), and memory-making (cultural and social roots). By discussing these diverse research traditions together, this chapter makes a direct contribution to our understanding of pandemics and historical change in health but also contribute to a theory of time and historical successes and failures.