Scholarly Life Research Articles

Papst Urban II. (1088–1099), Teil 3: Ideen, Institutionen und Praxis eines päpstlichen regimen universale by Alfons Becker (review)

Papst Urban II. (1088-1099), Teil 3: Ideen, Institutionen und Praxis eines papstlichen regimen universale. By Alfons Becker. [Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Schriften, Band 19,3.] (Hannover: Hahnsche Buchhandlung. 2012. Pp. lxxxvii, 750. euro95,00. ISBN 978-3-7752-2200-6.)This magisterial work appeared a few months after the death of its author, who had devoted most of his scholarly life to the study of Pope Urban II. It concludes a trilogy: part 1, published in 1964, dealt with the early life and career of Odo of Châtillon until his election as Urban II; part 2 followed in 1988 and addressed Urban's relationship with the Byzantine East and the crusades. On the basis of an exhaustive analysis of all of Urban's known correspondence and documents, with particular attention to recently discovered texts and canons from Urban's councils as published by Robert Somerville1 and from canonical collections such as the Collectio Sinemuriensis attributed to Reims, Becker investigates here in this third and final volume the pontificate as a whole, with a special focus on the innermost ideology of Urban and the motivation that made the former canon of Reims, monk and prior at Cluny, a very successful pedissequus of Pope Gregory VII, whose pontificate had ended in seeming failure. It was Urban II, as Becker shows convincingly, who rescued the ideals of the eleventh-century church reform and carried them forward on a sounder foundation to the threshold of the twelfth century.The volume is divided into five chapters, beginning with Urban's conception of his office and analyzing (often on the basis of arengas) the interchangeable relationships among Petrine papacy, Ecclesia Romana and Sedes Apostolica, the papal primacy, and the papal universal episcopacy. The subtle shadings and cautious judgments found here and throughout Becker's arguments are illustrated, for instance, in his brief discussion of whether the emphasis on hierarchical obedience, inherited from Gregory VII and insisted on by Urban on innumerable occasions almost as a kind of ecclesiastical constitutional principle (pp. 92/0 could be described as creating a monarchical papacy. Becker rejects this terminology despite obvious analogies to political monarchies, because we are dealing in the case of Urban with an ecclesiological concept that did not have dominium as its aim. Urban II certainly never considered himself as above the law, notwithstanding the fact that he unhesitatingly assumed the right of the papacy to issue new laws whenever necessary (p. 94). As the representative of St. Peter and his earthly vicar, the pope is at the head of a strictly ordered hierarchy, where not only priests but all clerics down to the lowly doorkeeper rank above all members of the laity, including emperors and kings, as Urban declares most clearly in his interpretation of the Gelasian statement Duo sunt (JK 632) in a letter to King Alfons VI of Castile (JL 5367; pp. 607-09).2Chapter 2 deals more concretely with the papal administration in Rome such as the connection between pope and cardinals, at a time when the cardinalate was still very fluid in its composition and its duties, the Curia, legates and vicars, and papal councils. More significant from the perspective of the particular characteristics of the pontificate of Urban II is chapter 3 with a focus on the relationship between the papacy and bishops, because it has been generally assumed that Urban strengthened the episcopate in particular. …

Franz Rosenthal’s Half an Autobiography

Franz Rosenthal (1914-2003), one of the outstanding scholars of Semitic languages, Arabic and Islamic history of the past century, has described himself as an Orientalist, whose task is “to look beyond the culture in which one is rooted to other cultures whatever their geographical location with respect to Europe, in order to learn about and understand them and to try to spread the knowledge thus acquired”. This simple-sounding approach is qualified by a vast knowledge of the appropriate literary sources and a keen sense for the truly significant topic that characterize all of Rosenthal’s works. His memoir discusses these aspects, as well as the profile and outlook of Near Eastern Studies, particularly in relation to neighboring disciplines, and the roles of philology and language teaching. What is at least as interesting as this discussion is an autobiographical account of Rosenthal’s family, his school and university years in Berlin, of his emigration to the United States, and his career up to his arrival at Yale University – a memoir which illuminates his work and his convictions and which tells a story of “cruelly turbulent times” that changed the lives of many scholars and opened up new ways of scholarship.

FRACTURED FAMILIES: EDUCATED ELITES IN BRITAIN AND FRANCE AND THE CHALLENGE OF THE GREAT WAR

ABSTRACTThis article examines the experiences of university elites in Britain and France during and after the First World War. It compares the elite network of the École Normale Supérieure with that of Trinity and King's Colleges in Cambridge, arguing that these communities functioned and understood themselves as families. The war, which suspended normal intellectual practice and placed mobilized university elites (as junior officers) at an increased risk of wounds or death, was seen as a threat to the very existence of the family. The article traces the responses of these groups to the outbreak of war, to the cessation of normal scholarly life, and to the shocking death rate; in so doing, it demonstrates the resilience of these networks. To date, historians have drawn on the writings of members of these families to make broader arguments about the war experience. This study is the first to examine the self-perception of these groups, and in so doing, provides a new context for scholarly activities during and after the war, bereavement, and remembrance, as well as for academic practices in the post-war period. As a Franco-British comparison, it argues for great similarities of experience between two superficially disparate university cultures

From Knowledge to Wisdom: The Arc of a Scholarly Life

Introduction to ELOPE Volume XI - Spring. Written by Volume Editors Simon Zupan and Tomaž Onič.

Off the stage, on the page: on the relationship between advocacy and scholarship

When and how should scholars of religion draw a line between advocacy and research activities? In what ways does advocacy contribute to or cut against scholarly credibility? Addressing these questions from the intersection of the academic study of religion and Indigenous Studies, this article opens by asserting that both fields are frequently hampered by deferential treatments of their subject matter, a problem that is potentially exacerbated when scholars in these fields engage in forms of political advocacy. Problematizing this narrative, the author turns to his ethnographic experiences in Hawai'i with regard to burial-protection struggles in order to describe ways his theoretical commitments and advocacy activities stand in tension and how he has attempted to navigate these competing but sometimes complementary elements of his scholarly life. In this context, a heuristic definition of advocacy is advanced in order to sketch a spectrum of forms, ranging from direct advocacy (e.g., physical action, legal testimony, or publication) to indirect advocacy (e.g., sharing documents, brainstorming about pending issues, or providing transportation to a meeting). The article concludes with reflections on advocacy and changing institutional demands upon scholars in the humanities and social sciences with reference to perceived public relevance.

Song of Liangzhou

Weaving together the narratives of ancient poets and the lives of the contemporary scholars who study them, Ge Fei blurs the boundaries of scholarship, fiction, and poetry. His prose opens numerous apertures through which we see the eternal light and inexplicable darkness poetry has long brought and continues to bring into the world.

Introduction: The Evolution of Alva Ixtlilxochitl's Scholarly Life

Don Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxochitl was many things. He was part educated Spaniard, part heir to an indigenous chieftainship. He was son and father. He was first destined for the priesthood, then a ...

The Jankovic sisters’ legacy in the National library of Serbia

Sisters Ljubica (1894-1974) and Danica (1868-1960) Jankovic were very prominent figures in the cultural and scholarly life of Belgrade, Serbia (Yugoslavia in their time). Their work, primarily ethno-coreological, was considered to be very important by experts worldwide. After the death of Ljubica (the last member of this family) in 1976 and until the present, the sisters? legacy (manuscripts, letters, fieldwork data etc.) is kept in the National library of Serbia. In addition to the materials left by the sisters, the legacy also contains manuscripts by other family members, some of whom were also prominent scholars, including their uncle, Prof. Tihomir R. Djordjevic (1868-1944), one of the founding fathers of Serbian ethnology. Unfortunately, the legacy is still not open to the public. This year, however, work on classifying this important archival material has begun, and, once completed in 2016, it will become available to the public at large. This paper briefly describes the project, and the legacy itself.

Building metadata architectures: a case for e-research

This paper describes a semi-structured approach for the development of metadata architectures to facilitate the description, dissemination and reuse of interlinked resources within a federation of open access repositories. This approach, building upon the methodology and components of the Singapore Framework for Dublin Core Application Profiles, results in rich metadata architectures that bundle together functional requirements, domain model(s), a description set profile, usage guidelines and data formats. Maximum interoperability, reuse of existing mature metadata standards, long-term quality control and extensibility for addressing further community needs constitute the main benefits of such metadata architectures. The paper details the phased implementation of the proposed approach, along with a specific case study, based on a European-wide research initiative to deploy a community-focused integrated platform for the retrieval of open content, supporting explicit models of the scholarly life cycle and the practical tasks targeted by the agricultural research domain.

Natural User Interfaces to Teach Math on Higher Education

A common and known problem among students on higher education (in general throughout the scholar life) is the difficulty of learning math. Nowadays the teaching methods for learning math remain relatively the same. Though, with the emerging of new technologies like portable devices (smart phones and tablets) and movement interaction devices (Nintendo WiiMote, Microsoft Kinect and PlayStation Move), learners and teachers have big interest on new ways of interacting through the teaching-learning process. In this sense the Natural User Interactions (NUIs) offer a great potential to facilitate new ways of computer enhanced learning, these have the potential to enhance classroom interactions, by increasing learners participation, facilitating the teachers’ presentations and creating opportunities for discussion. We present a system that combines gestural and touch interactions to support teaching math across multiple personal devices and public displays to enhance and support math education for college students. In a formative usability study, learners and teachers were positive about the interaction design and the learning possibilities for math education. Thus, this created good intentions in the users of continuing using it.

Scottish Orientalists and India: The Muir Brothers, Religion, Education and Empire, by Avril A. Powell

Scottish Orientalists and India: The Muir Brothers, Religion, Education and Empire, by Avril A. Powell. Worlds of the East India Company series. Rochester, New York, Boydell Press, 2010. xviii, 318 pp. $125.00 US (cloth). In this richly contextualised double biography of two very different men from nineteenth-century Scotland, both Orientalist scholars and employees of the English East India Company and then the British Raj in India, Avril Powell has returned to examine characters who were bit-players in her first book Muslims and Missionaries in Pre-Mutiny India (Richmond, Surrey, 1993). By reconstructing the common origins, connected if divergent careers and interests, and the strikingly different personalities and opinions of the Sanskritist John Muir and the Arabist and Islamist William Muir, Powell makes an empirically substantiated argument regarding the complexity of Orientalist scholarship and its fraught relationship with the power dynamics of imperialism. In continuity with her lifelong interest in inter-cultural and inter-religious contact, especially between evangelically-minded British Christians and Urdu-speaking Muslim elites of north India, the book connects these two scholar-administrators with their Scottish intellectual heritage on one side, and their Indian interlocutors on the other, thus also making a significant new contribution to the much-studied field of Islamic modernism in India, and its best-known exponent, Sir Saiyid Ahmad Khan. The book begins with a reconstruction of the Muir brothers' origins in the dense networks of familial relations, patronage, globalized commercial links and imperial rule, and their education within the Scottish Academy and University systems, where the traditions of Enlightenment scholarship lingered into the nineteenth century. The book then proceeds to trace the origins of their Orientalist interests through a deft reconstruction of the linguistic training provided at the Haileybury College for East India Company recruits. The story then moves to India where the distinct interests and personalities of the brothers emerge. While both brothers articulated a religious commitment to the moral improvement of India, and both asserted the need for the acculturation of pedagogic schemes and material, John Muir emerged as the reclusive Sanskritist with a distaste for inter-cultural denunciation, while the more careerist, combative but also sociable William Muir became the Evangelical Arabist, using his specialist knowledge to engage in public debates over the relative values of Christianity and Islam. In their respective mid-nineteenth-century magnum opus, each scholar-administrator is shown to have expressed his fully-developed social vision--John Muir rejecting, on the basis of linguistic theories popularised in the eighteenth century, the biological racism of the mid-nineteenth, and William Muir expressing the doctrinally rigid view that Islam was a false religion preached by a deluded, if historical man whose increasing personal degeneration set the pattern for the institutionalisation of an irredeemably socially damaging set of religious values. Their lives and careers diverged more widely around the time of the rebellion of 1857, with John retired and already ensconced in a life of scholarship in Edinburgh, while William remained to observe and comment on one of the biggest challenges to British rule and India, and formulate educational and social policies in post-pacification northern India. …

Does Boyer’s Integrated Scholarships Model Work on the Ground? An Adaption of Boyer’s Model for Scholarly Professional Development

Boyer’s model of four scholarships as an integrated system engaging and integrating the scholarships of discovery, integration, application, and teaching is being increasingly adopted both by individual scholars and institutions. Here I reflect on my own adoption of this approach almost a decade ago, and I describe one application, its use in defining my professional academic profile. While this does not directly address issues of pedagogy, it provides a sound basis for improved pedagogical practice in higher education. I assess my adoption of Boyer’s model against several benchmarks grounded in the social life of academe: success of promotion; mentoring peers into their own professional development and promotion cycles; the development of a integrating research program; and as a basis for curriculum review and development. Drawing on this reflection, I conclude that Boyer’s model offers both promise and applicability across many domains of university scholarly life, and thus provides a sound basis for enhanced university teaching and learning.

Writing the history of geography: what we have learnt – and where to go next

Abstract. When writing the history of geography the subject is, customarily, one's own national geography. Moreover, until the 1960s, the discipline's history was generally told by recollecting the life and works of eminent scholars. Since then, the subject has been internationalised, owing a great deal to the IGU's commission on ''History of Geographical Thought''. It has also been broadened and aligned with the emerging sociology of science and later the ''cultural turn''; so biographical narratives lost ground in favour of thematic studies. Nevertheless, most kept to their own national geography tradition as a frame of reference – whose development they now analysed in non-scientific contexts as well. Due to the expansion of its scope, writing the history of geography lost its exclusivity and became part of our everyday practice. Loosely following Jörn Rüsen (1982), we can distinguish three types of narration that have been employed in writing the history of geography: traditional, exemplary and critical narratives. In different ways, all three reacted to changes within geography. Changes were often perceived as crises and thus brought about attempts to stabilise identity claims through history. Currently we see a new research setting emerging that strives to overcome methodological nationalisms by means of comparative studies and analysing transfer processes. Reflecting upon one's own position is key to this concept. It results in a historiography that studies transnational patterns of the discipline's development. In doing so, it does not only find dense international networks of historical exchange relationships but also sees the researchers themselves as agents in the deconstruction of national stereotypes.

Medieval Habit, Modern Sensation:

[H]abit is an immensely powerful agent for regulating, even creating, the acuity of sentience. Just as one may regulate the amount of light by opening and closing one’s eyelids or by turning and tilting one’s head through hundreds of angles and planes, so habit acts to set in place countless gateways that either open and allow the world to rush toward one or instead close it to keep it wholly at bay. —elaine scarry1

Symposium: What Is College English?

This symposium explores the role(s) College English has (or has not) had in the scholarly work of four scholars. Lynn Bloom explores the many ways College English influenced her work and the work of others throughout their scholarly lives. Edward M. White examines four articles he has published in College English and draws connections between these and the development of college English over the past fifty years. Jessica Enoch studies College English as an archive whose meaning is developed both on and off its pages. And, finally, Byron Hawk troubles the ideas raised in previous essays, drawing attention to how a flagship journal such as College English can operate within the broader network of scholars in the field. Taken together, these perspectives draw attention to how College English connects to the field at large and how authors and readers may see the potential role(s) the journal plays in scholarly publishing in English studies today.

American Studies as Accompaniment

The future of American studies requires scholars to know the work we want our work to do ; to frame our scholarly relations not as competition but as accompaniment; to insist that we infuse our ideas and activism with moral judgment and wisdom; to clarify the significance of different aspects of our scholarly lives; to acknowledge that our work speaks for us but also for others; and to recognize the dialogic and dialectically related nature of our views of American society. The success of American studies depends not only on what scholars know but also on how we go about knowing .

David Barron: a life in software, 1935–2012

David Barron: a life in software, 1935–2012

Paula Hyman and the Engendering of Modern Jewish History: A Defining Scholarly Life

MARION A. KAPLAN AND DEBORAH DASH MOORE, EDS. Gender and Jewish History. The Modern Jewish Experience. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010. Pp. viii + 416.HASIA R. DINER, SHIRA KOHN, AND RACHEL KRANSON, EDS. A Jewish Feminine Mystique? Jewish Women in Postwar America. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2010. Pp. xi + 269.RIV- ELLEN PRELL, ED. Women Remaking American Judaism. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2007. Pp. xii + 331.In 1976, TWO GRADUATE STUDENTS and a returning B.A. student published The Jewish Woman in America. } The book was a call to activism that reverberated through the halls of academe and the pews of synagogue life. As Paula Hyman, Charlotte Baum, and Sonya Michel knew, theirs was not the first book about Jewish women, but was the first to weave together critical scholarship and feminist scholarship. Today, when I scan my bookshelf, I can see the impact of The Jewish Woman in America in monographs and anthologies that address women, gender, and modern Jewish history. Indeed, over the last five years, four of the most prominent scholars on modern Jewish life have edited volumes on the topic: Deborah Dash Moore, Marion Kaplan, Hasia Diner (along with Shira Kohn and Rachel Kranson, Diner's graduate students at the time), and Riv-Ellen Prell. in this historical moment do we find ourselves with such a wealth of scholarship about Jewish women and gender? And what can these three books tell us about the contours of the fields of gender studies and Jewish studies, how they have changed since 1976, and where they might be going? (For the sake of full disclosure, an essay of mine appears in Gender and Jewish History, and I have published a review of A Jewish Feminist Mystique? elsewhere.2)In significant ways, these three anthologies have very different aims. Prell 's Women Remaking Judaism examines the intersection of Judaism and feminism and asks, as Prell writes in her lucid introduction, Why Jewish women who embraced Jewish feminism stayed within a system that they believed oppressed them to transform rather than leave it (p. 4). Weaving together literary studies, anthropology, theology, history, and ritual studies, the book argues that the power of feminism came less from its radical break with tradition and more from its ability to work from within tradition and use new interpretations of history to validate feminist claims.Discussions about Judaism may filter into the other two volumes, Gender and Jewish History and A Jewish Feminine Mystique?, but these books ground themselves in politics and culture. Even so, their aims diverge. Gender and Jewish History documents the accomplishments within a field of study. The editors argue that concomitant with the acceptance of Jewish history in the academy was an investment in chronicling women's experiences, sexuality, and gender relations. The volume travels through time and space to show just how powerfully gender scholarship has shaped the field of Jewish history. In contrast, A Jewish Feminine Mystique? is an attempt to create a new field of analysis. In their provocative introduction, Diner, Kohn, and Kranson write that the standard interpretation of the postwar period in the United States as one of a return to patriarchal gender norms and a period of cultural and political complacency is woefully incomplete. The point of the volume, then, is to bring a new historical interpretation to light through a series of essays, all concentrated on the same time period and same country.When comparing the table of contents, A Jewish Feminine Mystique? includes a greater proportion of newer scholars and one gets from this book a sense of freshness and, in the case of a few essays, rawness. Gender and Jewish History includes essays from the most prominent Jewish historians, many of whom are revisiting topics they have studied in earlier works or taking the opportunity to ask broad historiographie questions, such as the role that gender plays in Holocaust studies. …

龍山 時節 金邁淳의 日常과 學問 -李憲明의 『西淵聞見錄』를 중심으로-

龍山 時節 金邁淳의 日常과 學問 -李憲明의 『西淵聞見錄』를 중심으로-

Cultivate Your Look of Astonished Disdain: Seven Mentoring Lessons from Frances Smith Foster

Cultivate Your Look of Astonished Disdain:Seven Mentoring Lessons from Frances Smith Foster Elizabeth Engelhardt When I received my doctorate from Emory University in 1999, I walked across campus with my dissertation chair and mentor, Dr. Foster. As we crossed the quad, she said to me, "Well, you may as well learn to call me Frances now, doctor." Having been part of a 1990s-era graduate program in which we addressed almost all professors by first name, I realized how natural it had been to make an exception for and to give a formal title to this person who had been so influential to my graduate career. It took a while, but over time I made the transition to calling her Frances; our fundamental relationship did not so much change as it broadened and deepened. Now, more than ten years later, she remains my mentor and sounding board. Others in this issue speak to the scholarship Frances inspired and the research lessons she instilled. I would not at all be the scholar I am today without having benefited from Frances as a teacher and model scholar. Every day in my scholarly life, I ask questions, notice absences, and search for sources that will help me lift my research to meet the high standards she modeled. Yet that is not all that Frances's mentoring entailed. Writing about her as a mentor strikes me as a deeply personal assignment, so I am going to approach it on that level. Here are seven (among many) lessons that Frances taught me, specifically. Those of you for whom she has also served as a mentor and adviser—and I know there are many of you—may recognize one or two of the following. Yet it is also possible that she advised completely different, even opposing, strategies. In fact, some of what follows is itself contradictory or multiple. But that is Lesson #1: Individualize your mentoring. What distinguishes mentoring from teaching is, in part, the responsibility to respond to the person in front of [End Page 232] you—in the particular time and place and with the particular degree of kindness and toughness for the situation. Over the years, Frances's advice to me has changed. What she advised for me is not always what I heard her say to others, and what I took from the advice was often as much a matter of spirit as it was strategy. However, when I turn to her with a hard question, I am absolutely certain she is answering me—not generically, not universally, but specifically. As a result, simply put, I take her advice. Even when I do not necessarily want to. It is just part of the contract, to my mind. Relatedly, Lesson #2: Make them ask twice. Of course, for such a contract to work, both parties have to understand not only each other but also themselves. As a second-year graduate student, I presented myself to Frances during her office hours and asked if she would direct my comprehensive exams and future dissertation. She looked at me for a hard minute, turned back to her desk full of papers, books, and archival manuscripts, and said firmly, "No." Taken aback, I thanked her, left her office, and wandered out into that same quadrangle we would later walk across in mutual doctoral regalia. By the following week, I had gotten my back up. I went again to her office hours and said something along the lines of, "No, really. Here is why I want to work with you. My project needs the following from you. My approach to this career would benefit from you in these ways. I would like to learn these types of things from you one-on-one. And I propose the following calendar of goals and deadlines for myself." Frances looked at me, smiled, and said, "That's better. Yes, I'll work with you." From that point forward, Frances was a committed, kind, and generous presence throughout my scholarly life. I am not sure that Frances made everyone ask twice, and she certainly did not do that for every request. However, that day's message to me—the implication that...