University of Wisconsin-Madison professors Aparna Dharwadker and Patrick Iber have received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). Dharwadker, a professor of English and interdisciplinary theatre studies and Iber, an associate professor of history, are among 213 recipients of NEH grants nationwide.
Dharwadker’s fellowship will support her latest book project, “Contested Modernities and the Modernization of Urban Theatre in India.” The book traces the processes of modernization that began under Anglo-European influences in the mid-19th century, when Victorian-style theaters were first constructed in colonial cities like Calcutta (now Kolkata) and Bombay (now Mumbai). Transformative changes included a re-evaluation of classical theatre traditions, a new emphasis on authorship and print culture, the large-scale translation of Western plays, a rejection of commercialism, competition with media such as film and television, and the emergence of a radically new “national canon” after 1950. Modern urban theatre has also been inherently multilingual, being practiced in as many as sixteen different Indian languages. Dharwadker, who left India for doctoral studies in the US when she was 24, is fluent in three of them.
“India is a culture with a 3,000-year history, but it was changed fundamentally by British colonialism and then by the achievement of political independence in 1947,” Dharwadker says. “My book considers the effects of these transitions on theatre, and will be the culmination of ideas I have been developing for a decade.”
Iber is using his year-long fellowship, funded through the Ford Foundation, to work on writing “Social Science and the Politics of Poverty and Inequality in Latin America during the Cold War.” The author of a 2015 book on the cultural Cold War in Latin America, Iber was inspired by what he saw as a glaring gap in the modern policy discussion surrounding global inequality.
“Since the 19th century, Latin America has been the most unequal part of the world, with countries like Brazil and Guatemala topping the lists,” he says. “It struck me, as a scholar of Latin America, that there was a striking absence of Latin American studies in this discussion. As an intellectual historian, a good way to get at those questions would be to look at the politics and economies in some of these countries.”
Iber will scour the archives of the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations for his source materials. He plans to devote each chapter of the book to a particular interpretive framework. For instance, dependency theory, which holds that resources flow from poorer countries to richer ones based on who controls the primary means of production, and modernization theory, which tries to identify the social factors that lead to poverty and/or modernization, as exemplified by anthropologist Oscar Lewis’ 1969 study of Mexico.
“How do we create situations where economic development could occur easily?” Iber asks. “I should be able to say some things about the effects of these frameworks, and the ways we think about poverty and inequality.”