2024 UChicago-Sussex IJRA Project Descriptions
In order to submit your UChicago-USussex IJRA Scholar program application, please identify which research project/mentor you would like to work with from the projects listed below. If you are interested and qualified for more than one, please rank your top choice, followed by your second and third in your application.
[CLOSED TO FURTHER APPLICATIONS] Research Project #1: "Anna Mendelssohn & Feminist Vanguardism": Focused upon the life narrative and archive of British-born writer, artist, and activist Anna Mendelssohn (1948-2009), this project, the recipient of research fellowship funding, aims to challenge the presentation of women within male-defined discourses on avant-garde artistry and leftist militancy. Mendelssohn was affiliated with the British Poetry Revival, a post-Fordist group of New Leftist, experimental poets. Repeatedly anthologised, she authored 15 poetry collections and filled 800 notebooks with life writing, literature, and art. Influenced by international avant-gardes, reflecting often on her Northern, working-class, Jewish roots, Mendelssohn’s focus remained feminism and female artists. Two legal battles parenthesize Mendelssohn’s adulthood. The first was the Stoke Newington Eight criminal trial of 1972, then the lengthiest in British history. A student radical, Mendelssohn appeared in Jean-Luc Godard’s British Sounds (1969) before joining The Angry Brigade, Britain’s contribution to a late-1960s transnational wave of urban guerrilla groups. Still lacking the comprehensive histories devoted to their counterparts – America’s Weatherman, Germany’s Red Army Faction – The Angry Brigade shared their anti-imperialism and less lethal methods, prioritising Irish reunification, social equality, and autonomism. Pleading innocent, Mendelssohn was sentenced to ten years for conspiracy to cause explosions. A literacy tutor in prison, she was paroled in 1976. In the 1980s, she changed her name to Grace Lake, had three children, and began an English degree at Cambridge University. Unwell and parenting alone, she was supported by a family who ultimately initiated proceedings with the Family Division of Britain’s High Court. This second judicial conflict ended in 1988 when, under duress, Mendelssohn’s children were made wards of the state, and went to live with the family who became their permanent guardians. Mendelssohn’s peers, Jewish-American urban guerrillas Susan Stern and Jane Alpert, published confessional, fluid autobiographies that appeal to reader sympathy. By contrast, Mendelssohn’s life narrative is feminist, polemical, fictionalised, epistolary, and poetic. It remains unpublished, excepting a portion that the project leader, Sara Crangle, edited for the PMLA in 2018. The successful applicant will assist in preparing the unpublished portions of this 400+ page text with a book in view. Full description downloadable here.
Research Mentor: Dr Sara Crangle, English Literature, University of Sussex
[CLOSED TO FURTHER APPLICATIONS] Research Project #2: "Mapping Global De-Extinction Actors, Networks, and Materials": De-extinction, or the process of recreating extinct species through biotechnology, is advancing rapidly amid considerable global debate within and beyond the scientific community. Proponents of de-extinction claim that it can restore lost biodiversity, combat climate change, and strengthen human-animal symbiosis (Adams 2017; DeSalle and Amato 2017). Critics argue that it diverts resources from conservation efforts while exploiting the regions that once served as its target species’ natural habitats (ICUN 2016; Genovesia and Simberloff 2020). Despite growing financial backing and heightened public and media interest, there is still a significant knowledge gap in the systematic, multi-disciplinary study of the key actors, stakeholders, geographic areas, technologies, and materials associated with de-extinction. This research aims to address this gap in the field by evaluating three prominent contemporary de-extinction projects: the woolly mammoth, the thylacine, and the northern white rhino. This IJRA project operates as part of a broader project to conduct a systemic network and ethnographic analysis of de-extinction research. During this programme, we will concentrate on the network analysis, prioritising the establishment and development a collaborative, comprehensive, and user-oriented database of the actors, networks, locations, technologies, and materials involved in global de-extinction initiatives beginning with the three aforementioned candidate species. The network analysis comprises four main activities: (1) web scraping data sources to identify the key actors and entities involved in de-extinction research in each context; (2) building and analysing a database of relational data on the ties and connections among these actors and entities; (3) representing and visualizing these data using network graphs and metrics; and (4) creating and publishing an interactive online map to show the geographical connections among the data. During the IJRA programme, we will focus on the first two activities with the opportunity to lead into the second two activities. Full description downloadable here.
Research Mentor(s): Dr S. L. Nelson and Professor K. O’Riordan, University of Sussex, UK
Research Project #3: "Digital Holocaust Memory Innovation Lab IJRA Scheme": The newly launched Digital Holocaust Memory Innovation Lab at the University of Sussex is offering an opportunity for junior researchers to explore the data collated to form its ‘living database’. The database contains walkthroughs of digital projects created by Holocaust memorials and museums across Europe, the US and Australia, complemented by interviews with those involved in creating them. The database sheds light on the practical, ethical and financial challenges and opportunities that inform the rapidly developing digital Holocaust memoryscape. Once launched, it will offer rich opportunities for analysis and learning from practice to address the urgent issue of the sustainability of Holocaust memory in the digital future. The Lab offers the opportunity for junior researchers to explore the existing data from either a humanities or computer sciences perspective and to develop original research, with the support of a supervisor, based on a research question of their choosing. This is a unique opportunity to participate as part of a research team at the beginning of their inquiry into a new dataset, contributing to groundbreaking research in the field of digital Holocaust memory studies. Full description downloadable here.
Research Mentor(s): Dr Victoria Grace Walden, School of Media, Arts and Humanities