Each year, the American Academy in Berlin, a private research and cultural institution, awards residential fellowships to a small group of scholars, writers and artists from the United States. They spend a semester conversing with and learning from each other in the heart of Germany’s most cosmopolitan city.
This year, two of the awardees are UW-Madison scholars.
Nandini Pandey, an associate professor of classics, and Laila Amine, an assistant professor of English, both received the 2020-21 Berlin Prize. Each will spend four months at the Hans Arnhold Center in Berlin—Amine in fall 2020 and Pandey in spring 2021. Both will use the opportunity to hone current projects through discussion and research.
Amine looks forward to meeting her cohort of fellows and working on her current book-in progress: Return Literature, Affect, and the Black Diaspora, a comparative study that examines the motif of return in black Anglophone literature since 1945.
“In this study, I combine archives and theories of travel, migration and exile to rethink mobility in contemporary black Anglophone literatures,” Amine explains. “By ‘return literature,’ I refer to literary archives and critical discourses that have heretofore been cordoned off: the return travel of the African diaspora to an ancestral home, the return of immigrants or their descendants to a family’s home, and the return visit of exiles.”
Amine’s work zooms in on contemporary writers such as Teju Cole, Marita Golden and James Baldwin, but she’ll also use her time in Berlin to study African American writers William G. Smith and Audre Lorde, whose work engages with individuals of African descent in Berlin.
“Their capacious cross-cultural approach reveals an array of ideologies associated with dislocation, relocation, and repatriation that urges us to attend to the politics of black mobility relationally and globally,” Amine says.
Amine is also the recipient of a Mellon Fellowship, which will allow her to spend an additional week in Berlin following her Berlin Prize stint, to exchange works-in-progress with other experts in migration studies.
Pandey’s project focuses on a different part of the world, and the plurality of an ancient empire. An expert on the culture and politics of the Roman Empire, Pandey will work on her second book, Diversity and Difference in Ancient Rome. In it, she looks to explode myths about the whiteness of Rome, suggesting instead that Rome valued and managed ethnic diversity in ways that can instruct and challenge modern nation-states.
“This fellowship gives me the chance to engage in intense interaction with other scholars outside my field,” Pandey says. “I hope the experience will shape the ways the book will be in conversation with modern topics like social justice and inequality. Talking to the other prize winners will help me angle this project outward and reach a wider audience.”
In Germany, Pandey will make continued progress on a book begun thanks to fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies and UW’s Institute for Research in the Humanities. Pandey is also looking forward to exploring the collections at Berlin’s Pergamon and Neues Museums both of which house items relevant to her research, including evidence of Rome’s global trade routes during the height of its reign.
Other UW-Madison faculty have been awarded the Berlin Prize in previous years, including Aili Tripp, Chair of the Department of Women and Gender Studies (2014) Ron Radano, professor of African Cultural Studies (2019), and Laura Schwendinger, professor of composition with the Mead Witter School of Music (2000).