Balto, Stern receive prestigious NEH Fellowships

January 22, 2020

Two University of Iowa professors have earned highly competitive, prestigious National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Fellowships to enable them to pursue their research.

Simon Balto, Assistant Professor of History and African American Studies, and David G. Stern, Professor of Philosophy, are among just 99 NEH Fellowship recipients nationwide for the 2020-21 cycle, and the only two from the state of Iowa.

NEH Fellowships are granted to individual scholars pursuing projects that embody exceptional research, rigorous analysis, and clear writing. The fellowships provide $60,000 to give the recipients time to conduct research or to produce books, monographs, peer-reviewed articles, e-books, digital materials, translations with annotations or a critical apparatus, or critical editions resulting from previous research.

Simon Balto: Racial Framing: Blackfaced Criminals in Jim Crow America

Balto's project is titled, "Racial Framing: Blackfaced Criminals in Jim Crow America," a book on the practice and implications of Jim Crow-era criminal minstrelsy, or white criminals donning blackface before committing crimes. Balto describes his research:

"The controversy over early-2019 revelations that Virginia politicians had donned blackface in their college years has generated a resurgence of interest in the history and currency of blackface minstrelsy in the United States. In op-ed pages like the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, nighttime news reports on MSNBC and CNN, and podcasts such as BackStory and NPR’s Codeswitch, scholars, journalists, and other commentators have tried to make sense of this phenomenon and its place in American life. At the root of these discussions has been a recognition of blackface as a complex and disturbing practice—steeped in racist mythology, beloved by white audiences, despised by black publics, stubbornly present in nineteenth- and twentieth-century American culture, and still informing American culture and racial perceptions to this day.

"And yet there is a whole other layer to the history of blackface that has been overlooked both in contemporary conversations about blackface and in all of the established literature on it. During the late nineteenth century and persisting well into the middle of the twentieth, at least hundreds (more likely, thousands) of white criminals drew from the blackface traditions that stage actors, composers, playwrights, and cultural marketers had forged, donning blackface before going out to commit crimes and, in the process, framing black people for them. They made use of a range of items from the blackface minstrels’ visual toolbox, including burnt cork, greasepaint, and field hand overalls. Some of them used gum, cotton, and other materials that could be used to widen the appearance of noses, enlarge cheeks, or make lips more prominent. In this process, they labored to present themselves as black criminals to divert attention from their own white crimes, which included all manner of offense, from murder to robbery to rape, and transcended region across the country. 

"Racial Framing: Blackfaced Criminals in Jim Crow America, explores this history in detail for the first time. It is a crucial history that reveals a great deal about culture, race, crime, and violence in America."

Balto teaches, researches, and writes about African American history in the United States. His first book, Occupied Territory: Policing Black Chicago from Red Summer to Black Power (University of North Carolina Press, 2019), explores the development of a police system in Chicago’s Black neighborhoods that over the course of the mid-twentieth century became simultaneously brutally repressive and neglectful. His writing has also appeared in TIME magazine, The Washington Post, The Progressive, the Journal of African American History, Labor, and numerous other popular and scholarly outlets.

David G. Stern: The First Complete Translation of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus

Stern's project, "The First Complete Translation of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus," will lead to publication of a complete English-language edition of Ludwig Wittgenstein's Tractatus (1921). Wittgenstein was an Austrian philosopher who lived from 1889–1951. Stern's project includes continuing work on the University of Iowa Tractatus map, a collaboration with the UI Libraries' Digital Studio that presents the structure of Wittgenstein's book in the form of a subway-style map. Stern describes his research:

"Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, first published in German in 1922, is a foundational work of early analytic philosophy and a modernist literary masterpiece. Two short books will provide the first consistent, accurate, and complete translation of Tractatus and its sources. It will be the first translation of the book’s 526 numbered remarks to use the tree-structured order used to write it, as well as the numerical order in which it was published. This new arrangement will give experts a fresh way of looking at how the book was written. Beginning readers will find it considerably less difficult to read. The new edition will include the first translation of three successive drafts of Tractatus from 1915, 1916, and 1917, and of ten thousand words of wartime diaries."

David G. Stern's research interests include the works of Ludwig, Wittgenstein, history of analytic philosophy, philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, philosophy of science, philosophy and computing, and digital humanities. He is the author of two books on Wittgenstein, and editor of three compilations of that philosopher's work and investigations into his ideas. 

ABOUT THE NATIONAL ENDOWMENT FOR THE HUMANITIES

Created in 1965 as an independent federal agency, the National Endowment for the Humanities supports research and learning in history, literature, philosophy, and other areas of the humanities by funding selected, peer-reviewed proposals from around the nation. Additional information about the National Endowment for the Humanities and its grant programs is available at: www.neh.gov.