Bienvenue aux Post-doctorants 2024 sélectionnés dans le cadre du programme "International Excellence in the Humanities Fellowships" GATES

Project at the MaCI

Philosophy

September 2024 - September 2026

This project aims to investigate transformations of memory in cultural bereavement—grief at being culturally uprooted and losing one’s home country. Cultural bereavement, as resulting from immigration or refugee settlement, generates ruptures in collective and personal memories that bear on the formation of one’s self-identity and the progression of one’s grieving process. This project investigates the transformation of collective and personal memories in cultural bereavement, including how cultural bereavement and the ensuing changes to one’s self-identity affect the transmission of collective memories and how embodied memories serve as a form of first-personal access to cultural loss. This project employs an interdisciplinary approach combining philosophy—specifically, cognitive science, phenomenology, and moral psychology—with creative approaches including embodied writing and performance art.

The project has two components: (i) examining collective memories in immigrant and diaspora communities, and how their transmission intersects with changes to one’s self-identity that occur in cultural bereavement and (ii) looking to embodied and “Rilkean” memories as means of understanding ambiguous experiences of cultural loss. The outputs of the project include philosophical articles on the ethics of collective memory and embodied memory, a workshop on emotional memory, and a performance piece on grief and place developed in collaboration with the Performance Lab.
 

Jelena will be affiliated to the Centre for Philosophy of Memory (CPM), part of the Institut de Philosophie de Grenoble (IPhiG). She will work with Kourken Michaelian and Denis Perrin of the CPM. Jelena will also be affiliated with the Performance Lab, working with co-director Gretchen Schiller (Litt&Arts).

 

Project at the MaCI

Visual arts

October 2024 - September 2026

In the context of the migrant crisis and the renewed interest in migrants' objects, Eugenia Reznik’s project is a research and creation work at the intersection of social sciences and contemporary art. The project focuses on invisible objects in migrant households. Brought from countries of origin and stored in boxes or basements, out of sight of family members, these invisible objects are remnants of the past and carry mnemonic memories. The aim of this research and creation is to explore the roles that invisible fabrics like old clothing, handmade embroideries, placemats, and ritual cloths play through the transmission of memories and stories. The artist intends to question the ways the creative process may bring them "back to life" and serve as a catalyst for the visibility of narratives and fabrics.

Through a call for participation, Eugenia will organize embroidery workshops to collect oral histories of fabrics from participants. She will also explore the remnants of the flax plant in the linen fabrics of her Ukrainian family based on scientific tests conducted during a creation residency she previously carried out at Washington State University. Materials collected during the workshops and tests will be used to create multidisciplinary art works that will include video, light devices, photographs, drawings, embroideries, and stories.

The project aims to activate the visibility and transmission of fabrics from migrant households, revealing them to the audience through narratives, embroidery and multimedia art installations that will be created and exhibited at MACI. The project seeks to foster strong integration within the local scientific and citizen community and promote international collaboration with Washington State University and Université du Québec à Montréal.
 

Eugenia will be affiliated to the laboratory ILCEA4 and will be working closely with Marie Mianowski. She will integrate the research axis ‘Création et Territoires,’ where Pr. Mianowski co-leads the IRGA 2023 SEEDS project (Sensory Ecologies and Environmental Dialogues) with Pr Valérie Morisson (Université de Montpellier). This project focuses on the links between botany, gardening and agricultural practices as well as artistic practices in the context of plant migrations and ecological change, with a methodology based on collecting oral archives, written productions and visual art.

 

Project at the MaCI

Musicology

December 2024 - November 2026
 

This project will be a musicotheatrical work, which investigates the intimately intertwined history of the veil and Iranian women, told through a series of interconnected vignettes. The work will explore poetry, prose, and posts from anonymous women in the prominent آزادی‌یواشکی# Āzādī Yevāshakī (#MyStealthyFreedom) movement of Iran, historical edicts from political officials, traditional poetry referencing head coverings, and field work on the ground in Iran, consisting of personal interviews with women participating in protest movements. Through this dual anthropological and musical research, I will be creating a theatrical & dramatic work that unpacks and investigates notions of the Iranian conception of protest in sound, art, politics, and culture, giving voice and space to the individual and collective experiences that Iranian women have navigated on the persistent journey to freedom of expression.

Though just a simple head covering, the hijab has held great weight in Iran for centuries: with a period of mandatory unveiling under Reza Shah (1936-1940)—the kashf-e hijab—to the current status of mandatory veiling enforced by the Basij, the various forms of the veil have remained at the forefront of Iranian political, social, and moral discourse. This new monodrama investigates the intimately intertwined history of the veil and the women of Iran, focusing on experiential extremes of public performance, united by the singing string players and solo vocalist: an exploration of identity, both joint and singular. The work explores this dense history in a series of interconnected vignettes, tracing the mandatory veiling and unveiling laws of Iran, the moral and cultural detritus accumulating from statutes & sociopolitical dogmas, and the toll that policing bodies and minds takes on a populous over centuries

Outside of music and interdisciplinary projects, Daniel also translates Persian poetry.
 

Daniel will be affiliated to the laboratory LUHCIE and will be working closely with Elise Petit, director of UGA Musicology department. Her research focuses on the links between politics and music in twentieth-century in Germany. She is interested in the place of music under the Third Reich and in concentration camps.
 

Fellows 2024

Funded by the French government's Programme d'Investissement Avenir and implemented by ANR France 2030