Since 1925, Guggenheim Fellowships have been awarded each year to accomplished individuals for the pursuit of a scholarly project in any discipline. This year, three Dartmouth professors were awarded with the fellowship: classics professor Paul Christesen, English and creative writing professor Carolyn Dever and history professor Cecilia Gaposchkin.
What inspired the projects you proposed for the Guggenheim Fellowship, and how did they take shape over time?
Paul Christesen: I have a long-standing interest in how communities in Ancient Greece cohered or disintegrated. I have, for the past decade or so, been studying the city-state of Sparta, which was famous for the degree to which its citizens formed a tightly-bonded political and social community. The Spartans were famous, both in antiquity and in the present day, for leading very austere lives, but my research led me to believe that the opposite was in fact true. As a group the Spartiatai, the full citizens of Sparta, were quite wealthy, but the material remains from the city of Sparta provide relatively little evidence for elaborate temples, tombs, etc., and many Greek writers tell us that the Spartiatai consciously chose to live simple lifestyles. In the past all this has been taken at face value, and Spartiatai have been characterized as paragons of austerity. For my Guggenheim project, I will be writing a book that seeks to show that we need to rethink the idea that the Spartiatai were models of austerity and detested luxury of all kinds. Finally, I trace how the story of Spartan austerity has been transmitted to the modern day and used to serve various political purposes.
Carolyn Dever: This project, called “Habits of Love,” is a book that is connected to my academic work from the past couple decades, in the sense that it’s focused on women, voice, representation and the imagination, but it’s very different from the academic work that I’ve undertaken previously. Instead of being a scholarly book, it’s a memoir. It’s my story. It’s a story of my relationship to my mother, who suffered from very, very serious psychosis. For many years, I was the only person who knew that she suffered from psychosis. Even as a small child, I had one foot in each world — her world and my world — and really grew up navigating those different worlds. I think that experience brought me to my academic work in the first place. I wound up understanding how to navigate in very different realities, how to immerse myself in, say, a Dickens novel or a poem and enter into the world that it sets up and then extract myself and return to the world that I knew.
Cecilia Gaposchkin: I’m a medieval historian, and in 2001 I started teaching HIST 4.01: The Crusades, and that actually led to a book that I wrote, called “Invisible Weapons,” on the ways in which the church, church ritual and church liturgy intersected with and underwrote the aims of the Crusades. It was really about how holy violence and sacral violence were both created and celebrated within the sphere of the church. The term “crusades” means Cross Wars, and as such the Cross is central to the ideology of the Crusades. The title of the book for this project is currently “Cross Invincible”, and [it] will be a history of the Cross as a weapon of war. I got quite interested in Cross relics and the way in which they were used in the Middle Ages to contain and channel divine power, particularly within the context of warfare. From there I asked: How do you get the central symbol of passion and suffering within the Christian ideological framework to become a weapon? And I started seeing it everywhere. I need to make sense of it, historicize it and figure out the different threads and implications of it.
How does receiving this fellowship change the scope of your work?
PC: I wouldn’t say that it changes the scope of my work, but it will make it much easier for me to write the book I have in mind.
CD: It’s a continuation of past research questions, absolutely, but it’s a new development for me with regard to the genre that I’ll be writing in and the voice I’ll be writing in. Instead of writing in an analytical, academic voice, the voice in this book is my voice. It’s my experience.
CG: There’s different types of work that you can do during regular terms, but to really conceive of a book project, it’s deep reading. You really just need to have large chunks of time, four or five hours a day, of uninterrupted time to read and write and work things out, where things don’t get interrupted.That's just not possible during our regular academic lives.
What are you most looking forward to from your fellowship?
PC: I’m looking forward to the time off from teaching and administrative work to just sit and think and read and write.
CD: First and foremost, this is a chance to just really dig in and engage the work. It’s like spending a year inside of your own head. It’s also an important story to tell, because people have widely diverse experiences of life that they bring with them when they come to a campus like ours. In the past decade or so, I’ve been moved and impressed by how candidly my students have addressed their issues around mental illness. In my own experience of my family, mental illness is front and center for me, and I feel a strong commitment to engaging intellectually and destigmatizing how we think and talk about different psychological states.
CG: I look forward to participating in an intellectual community of other people who are thinking deeply. It’s close to an intellectual’s paradise, where you’re working on your own thing, but you’re in constant conversation and discussion with other people who are working on their own things, which is very, very generative.
These interviews have been edited for clarity and length.
