ISM Fellows for 2014-2015 Announced

April 14, 2014

The Yale Institute of Sacred Music (ISM) is pleased to announce that six new fellows will be joining its interdisciplinary community for the 2014-2015 year.

The ISM Fellows in Sacred Music, Worship, and the Arts are established scholars, religious leaders, or artists whose work is in or is turning toward the fields of sacred music, liturgical/ritual studies, or religion and the arts. The Fellows have numerous opportunities to share their work with the community and to teach, as well as to work on their individual projects using Yale’s vast resources. Following in the footsteps of previous cohorts of ISM fellows, the 2014-2015 fellows represent a cross-section of cultures and disciplines.

 

Paul F. Bradshaw is a specialist in the early history of Christian liturgy and is Professor Emeritus of Liturgy at the University of Notre Dame. He has written or edited over twenty books and has contributed more than one hundred articles or essays. For eighteen years he was chief editor of the international journal, Studia Liturgica, and he is also a former President both of Societas Liturgica and of the North American Academy of Liturgy. His book, The Search for the Origins of Christian Liturgy, has become a standard textbook for liturgical studies, and has been translated into French, Italian, and Japanese, with Polish and Russian translations forthcoming.  While in New Haven, his research will focus on a reappraisal of core texts that comprise the ancient church orders, such as the Didache, the Didascalia Apostolorum, and the Apostolic Tradition of Hippolytus of Rome, to see how each of these orders relate to one another and the canonical collections in which they are found.

 

Daniel K.L. Chua is a professor of music at the University of Hong Kong.  Although mostly known as a Beethoven scholar, Chua’s research is diverse, ranging from Monteverdi to Stravinsky. It is, however, consistent in as much as it focuses on music’s social and ideological meaning.  During his fellowship year, he will complete work on a manuscript entitled Beethoven and Human Freedom, which explores notions of freedom associated with Beethoven’s music. In collaboration with Yale faculty, he will also be working toward a larger, multi-institutional project on music and theology.  His forthcoming book will articulate a more human and fragile concept of freedom found in Beethoven’s music that has less to do with the autonomy of the will than with question of human relation, gift (grace), and an openness to alterity.  He hopes to show how the ideas of thinkers such as Levinas, Marion, and Zizioulas can resonate with the music of Beethoven through close readings of his works including Fidelio, the late piano sonatas, ‘Pastoral’ Symphony, and the Missa solemnis.  The project should challenge the current image of Beethoven and will suggest a way of hearing a different freedom that may speak ethically to the twenty-first century. 

Sitarist Rabindra Narayan Goswami has been a professional musician and teacher for over 40 years and is recognized as a senior artist in Uttar Pradesh, India.  His project proposal, entitled The Christian Rāga: Making Connections between Hindustani and Western Sacred Music, is aimed at looking at the effects of Western music on listeners in ceremonial contexts through the system of Indian aesthetics that forms the basis of Hindustani music, in order to facilitate an exchange of ideas between Hindu and Christian music.  Hindustani music and Western classical music as performed in Christian contexts share a very important similarity: their performance is centered on effects that are projected through the performer into the gathering.  What makes religious music religious is that it has religious effects; this is a core doctrine of the Hindustani tradition.  The goal of a rāga is to instill a “mood” (bhāva) in an audience, and these moods— though they may range from the contemplative to the ecstatic—are invariably religious in nature.  Goswami will spend his fellowship semester researching and listening to Western sacred music in order to understand the mood of the sacred soundscape.  He will then create new compositions that cultivate this bhāva to create new compositions—Christian rāgas.  He will also be working with a large cross-section of Yale students on playing and understanding sacred Hindustani music. 

Cécile Guillaume-Pey obtained her Ph.D. in social anthropology from EHESS (Toulouse, France). Her dissertation focused on the ritual practices of the Sora, a tribal group from Odisha-Andhra Pradesh border (Central Eastern India). She was recently based in Ireland as a Foundation Fyssen postdoctoral research fellow at Queen’s University Belfast and University College Cork. At Yale, her project, entitled From Ritual Images to Animated Movies: The Transformative Journey of Sora Paintings, investigates the creation and the transformation of Sora murals in front of which sacrifices are performed.  These images are a dwelling for the gods whose presence is thus materialized in the domestic space.  Their design is part of a complex ritual performance that requires close collaboration between a painter and religious specialists who, through songs, invite the gods to inhabit the images.  Nowadays, these “altar-paintings” are sometimes disconnected from their original ritual use, exhibited in museums, sold in markets, or exported abroad as animated films.  This anthropological research will focus on the status and function of these images imbued with different agencies.   

Monique M. Ingalls is finishing a teaching fellowship at the University of Cambridge, where she has served as the Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Popular Music and Culture since 2011. In fall 2014 she begins an appointment as assistant professor at Baylor University. Her project, entitled Made to Worship: Performing Evangelical Protestantism through Praise and Worship Music is a critical ethnographic study that examines how the musical performance of praise and worship enables evangelical Protestants variously to erect, maintain, and challenge their religious community’s boundaries. The book positions itself within ethnomusicology but interacts with popular music studies, media studies, and social science approaches to religion.  Since the late 1960s, evangelical Protestant congregational singing has undergone a rapid transformation as local churches have incorporated the mass-mediated pop-rock congregational song genre known as “praise and worship music.” Cutting across the distinctions between popular music, folk music, and liturgical music, praise and worship music has become the musical lingua franca for churches in the Anglophone world and increasingly across the globe.  The book will draw upon five years of ethnographic fieldwork at strategically chosen sites in the US and UK. 

Cécile Fromont is assistant professor of art history and the College at the University of Chicago. She earned a Ph.D. in history of art and architecture from Harvard University, specializing in the field of African and Latin American art and architecture. Her primary research focuses on the cross-cultural encounter between European Christianity and the art and religion of the Kingdom of Kongo from the 15th to the 18th century. During her fellowship term she will continue work on her manuscript Nature, Culture, and Faith in Translation: Capuchin Images and Cross-Cultural Knowledge of Kongo and Angola, 1650–1750, an analysis of an unpublished corpus of watercolors created by Capuchin missionaries to Kongo and Angola during those years. In this book-length study, she will explore the role that visuality played in the construction of early modern scientific and ethnographic knowledge, the function of visual translation in the formulation and reception of Christian doctrine across cultures, and, more broadly, the status of images in the molding of cross-cultural epistemologies.  

 

The Institute will also welcome a post-doctoral associate in liturgical studies to its community for the 2014-15 academic year.  Hugo Mendez completed his Ph.D. in linguistics at the University of Georgia, with a specialization in early Christian Indo-European languages (including Greek, Latin, Gothic, Classical Armenian, and Old Church Slavic), and also holds an M.A. in religion.  In his research, he applies his philological expertise to a variety of problems in comparative and historical liturgics. His publications have appeared in top-tier religion journals such as the Journal of Biblical Literature and Vigiliae Christianae, as well as leading liturgical journals (Studia Liturgica, Ecclesia Orans). His dissertation explores the poetics of four early Christian canticles in translation, and has received one publication offer to date. While at Yale, he will complete a full-length study of the organization of early Christian calendars with special attention to the phenomenon of the liturgical New Year.