Linda Patrik has received an ASIANetwork Freeman Foundation Student-Faculty Research Fellowship for joint summer research in Japan. Patrik and two students, Emily Brunelle ’10 and Jasmine Maldonado ’09, will research how gender is performed in Japan’s arts and popular culture. Patrik will focus on actresses performing in traditional Noh theater. Brunelle will study Japanese rock groups that emphasize gender bending, while Maldonado will look at Japanese street fashion and how gender is exaggerated or “acted out.” They will conduct their research in Kyoto and Tokyo for three weeks in August, with plans to develop a Web site and present their findings at the 2009 ASIANetwork conference in Chicago.
Lorraine Morales Cox, assistant professor of Contemporary Art & Theory, has had an essay published in n.paradoxa: international feminist art journal. Volume 21 (January 2008), a special issue on violence, was supported by a grant from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. Cox’s piece, “Transformed Bodies, Colonial Wounds and Ethnographic Tropes: Wangechi Mutu,” shows how the collages of Kenyan born, Brooklyn-based artist Mutu “reveal important figurative and conceptual strategies to invoke reflection on the articulation of power, the construction of femininity and societal racialization that inscribes and constructs the acculturated body.” Now in its 11th year, n.paradoxa is the only international feminist art journal dedicated to contemporary women artists and feminist theory around the world.
Robert Sharlet, the Chauncey Winters Research Professor of Political Science, has published his latest book, “Russia and its Constitution: Promise and Political Reality” (Martinus Nijhoff/Brill, 2007). Sharlet is co-editor of and contributor to a retrospective volume on the first decade of the post-Soviet Russian Constitution (1993-2003). The contributors, law professors and political scientists specializing in law, cover a range of topics, including the Constitutional Court, the judiciary, federal prosecutor, criminal procedure and jury trial.