Meet the HISB 2021-2022 Faculty Fellows
Shirley Jenifer Lim, History Department
Project: “Anna May Wong: Brilliant Sunny Days and Starry Nights”
This project builds upon the critical success of and major media attention paid to Lim's previous book, Anna May Wong: Performing the Modern(Temple University Press, 2019). That scholarly book analyzed the Chinese American actress’ early career (1928-1939) through academic arguments about transnational racial modernity and orientalism. A sequel written for a general audience, “Brilliant Sunny Days” tells the story of the “mature” Wong (1940-1961) through the emotional and artistic perspectives provided by her letters. In her previous two academic books, she only touched upon five percent of her missives. By delving deeply into her writings, she shows how Wong's gorgeous expressive phrasing evokes her artistic milieu and historical era. Woven into the layers of Wong’s oeuvre—film, theatrical, and television performances; publicity tours; photography sessions; beauty lecture series; USO camp shows—her letters provide a lens through which to examine American cultural history, specifically race, gender, ageing, technological change, and artistic endeavor.
Zoom Lecture: “Anna May Wong”
Anna May Wong reveals the personal triumphs, professional heartaches, and giddy social whirl of “The World’s Most Beautiful Chinese” American woman.
Shirley Jennifer Lim is Professor of History and affiliate in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Asian and Asian American Studies, and Africana Studies at SUNY Stony Brook. She is currently working on a biography on Anna May Wong for a popular audience. The author of A Feeling of Belonging: Asian American Women’s Public Culture, 1930-1960 (NYU Press 2006), her second book, Anna May Wong: Performing the Modern (Temple University Press 2019), was a finalist for the Organization of American Historians’.
Her work has been featured in The New York Times (October 2022) and on NPR’s Morning Edition (October 2022). You can watch her discussing Anna May Wong on news programs such as C-NBC, Inside Edition, and CBS-2 NYC 9am Morning New; while co-hosting on Turner Classic Movies (May 2022); two PBS documentaries Asian Americans (May 2020) and Unladylike 2020 (April 2020); and hear her on two one million-subscriber podcasts History This Week (History Channel May 2022) and Mobituaries (January 2020).
Kristina Lucenko, Program in Writing and Rhetoric
Project: “Civility, Women, and Politics in Early Modern England”
This project offers an analysis of civility as a social, linguistic, and political practice used by diverse women writers during the English Civil War and Restoration (1650s-1670s). In a series of case studies of women who span categorical boundaries of class, ideology, and genre—Quaker missionaries Lydia Fell and Alice Curwen, republican poet and religious Independent Lucy Hutchinson, Royalist writer and natural philosopher Margaret Cavendish, and Restoration wit and notorious German Princess Mary Carleton—Lucenko highlights the increased political participation by women and the role of gender and race in emerging theories of civil subject rights. She also expose continuities and disparities in women’s rhetorical agency facilitated by interconnected social, legal, and cultural systems such as marriage and family, religious doctrine and practice, and the newly emergent public sphere of print, debate, and protest. These case studies of early modern women writers comprise the focus of my book’s chapters, after my introduction and a conclusion that offers pathways to teaching histories and critical contexts of civility discourse.
Lecture: "Civil Agents: Women Writing Race in Seventeenth-Century England"
Women writing in early modern England contributed to the development of English white supremacy in the second half of the seventeenth century, a critical moment for discourses of civility related to nation and empire, and therefore class and race. This talk explores how racial thinking and in particular emerging ideologies of white privilege enabled women’s entree into print in the form of cultural ideas about feminine bodily comportment and speech, interpersonal conduct, and property ownership.
Kristina Lucenko is an Assistant Professor in the Program in Writing and Rhetoric. Her research and teaching interests include women’s and feminist rhetorics, premodern critical race studies, life writing, and writing pedagogy. Her work has appeared in Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal, Peitho, and English Journal, and her book manuscript is under contract with Routledge.
Peggy Spitzer, Program in Writing and Rhetoric
Project: “Mirroring Hope: Women’s Oral Histories in Climate Change Adaptation in Asia”
This project, based on research and field interviews, details how rural farmers adapt to severe weather events brought on by climate change, including recurring floods and drought. This included field research in Gujarat, India to determine how farmers’ living conditions had changed as a result of the introduction of an innovative irrigation technology, Bhungroo, which had been designed for and by women. Traditionally, rural women of Gujarat are not allowed to own land and, with their husbands and other male family members migrating to urban areas to find work, women had been left to manage the farms without the power to make decisions. Bhungroo gave women rights to the irrigation technology and empowered them to have control over their lives. Her research, which included interviews with 48 rural farmers in Gujarat, aimed to determine whether women’s participation increased their social status.
Lecture: "Female Empowerment and Climate Change: Oral Histories from around the World"
In this talk, Spitzer presents several features of female empowerment in climate change – with unique transnational and translational relationships – from Central America, Southeast Asia, Europe, and Africa. She discusses the reasons collecting and disseminating reflexive oral histories is important in promoting human rights and gender justice.
Peggy Spitzer is a research professor in the Program for Writing and Rhetoric. She has co-authored several research studies, two of which won awards, on the social and cultural aspects of female empowerment and climate change. In addition, Peg served as a program consultant for the Kluge Center for International Scholars (Library of Congress), Freer and Sackler Gallery (Smithsonian), Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and the East-West Center. Her forthcoming book, Empowering Female Climate Change Activists in the Global South: The Path Toward Environmental Social Justice, will be published by Emerald Press in 2023.