D. N. Israel — Page 2

The Punkah Project

May 22, 2018

In many elite Southern homes, punkahs, ceiling-mounted fans manipulated by enslaved workers, were an integral part of the architecture of the dining room in the antebellum United States. Paralleling their relationship to American slavery was their use in British India, where the fans had a long history of being powered by low-caste workers. Pushing past the fans’ decorative and utilitarian qualities, this essay examines the devices’ shifting relationship to slavery and freedom through an examination of their operation within the spaces of elite homes. Both planters and their workers benefited, albeit differently, from their interactions with the fans. Elite planters enjoyed the fans’ cooling breezes, insect-free mealtimes, and the opportunity to display their wealth and refinement. Even though they were consigned to labor at the fans, enslaved workers likely used their proximity to elite whites to learn “genteel” codes of behavior, while gleaning information about the plantation world and beyond. The end of slavery did not mark the end of punkahs; rather, the fans were used to celebrate the “noble” history of the Old South while eliding any reference of slavery.

Site: The Punkah Project

Bowdoin Marine Laboratory

March 31, 2017

The Bowdoin Marine Laboratory is the scientific component of Bowdoin’s Coastal Studies Center. We are geographically centered a former farm, consisting of 118 acres of coastal spruce-pine forest with a few acres of old field habitat. Our accessible location on Harpswell Sound, and diversity of natural habitats opens up a wide range of marine, estuarine, and terrestrial research and teaching possibilities.

Bowdoin Marine Laboratory is located on Orr’s Island, Harpswell Sound

Site: research.bowdoin.edu/marine-laboratory

Mary Rothbart’s Temperament Questionnaires

November 14, 2016

In 1981, Dr. Rothbart introduced the Infant Behavior Questionnaire, a parent- report instrument based in her definition of temperament as “constitutionally based individual differences in reactivity and regulation.” Over the past quarter-century, this instrument has become one of the most widely employed measures of infant temperament. During the past 45 years, she has collaborated with several graduate students and post-doctoral fellows to develop and refine a battery of questionnaires to assess finely-differentiated aspects of temperament across the life span.

In 2000, a website was established at the University of Oregon to facilitate the dissemination of these instruments. In 2006, the site was moved to its current location at Bowdoin College. Although Sam Putnam and his Bowdoin students manage the day-to-day operations, this site is a collaborative effort coordinating the expertise of the individuals who developed the measures with Mary, including Lesa Ellis and Jennifer Simonds (Westminster College), Masha Gartstein (Washington State University), and David Evans (H. Lee Moffitt Cancer Center & Research Institute).

Site: research.bowdoin.edu/rothbart-temperament-questionnaires

Digital and Computational Studies Initiative Blog

November 11, 2013

New and emerging technologies are transforming the production and dissemination of knowledge. Digital and computational methods and analysis are creating the ability and opportunity to address new questions and data sets, and adding new perspectives to the core questions that have always concerned the humanities, social sciences, and natural & physical sciences.

But these technological transformations are not solely a one-way street. The liberal arts, broadly speaking, also have the power – perhaps the responsibility – to participate in and shape the development, use and interpretative capabilities of these tools. Bowdoin’s “Digital and Computational Studies Initiative” invites faculty across the College to work together to integrate new technologies, methodologies and forms of knowledge production into our curriculum and our scholarship.

Site: research.bowdoin.edu/digital-computational-studies/

Dante Today – Citings & Sightings of Dante’s Works in Contemporary Culture

May 23, 2013

This experimental website, inspired by students of Arielle Saiber’s “Dante’s Divine Comedy” course, has been built to archive occurrences of Dante and his works in popular and contemporary culture of the twentieth century and beyond. The site catalogs a wide range of Dante “sightings”: from the cursory to the extensive, and from a place of superficial knowledge of Dante and his works to deep familiarity with them. We leave to the readers the opportunity to judge the nature of each citing, and note the frequency of certain themes over others. The goals are twofold: 1) to provide a central access point for said references; and 2) to offer data that students and scholars of Dante can use to think about the Nachleben (“afterlife”) of Dante’s works in relation to reception theory, resonance, and cultural studies.

Site: Dante Today – Citings & Sightings of Dante’s Works in Contemporary Culture