University of Wisconsin-Madison professors Guillermina De Ferrari and Tyrell Haberkorn have received 2020 Guggenheim Fellowships. De Ferrari is a professor of Spanish and Portuguese and Haberkorn is an associate professor of Asian Languages and Cultures. The two join a diverse group of 175 writers, scholars, artists and scientists awarded the fellowships on the basis of prior achievement and exceptional promise.
Since its establishment in 1925, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation has granted more than $375 million in fellowships to more than 18,000 individuals, among them Nobel laureates, Fields medalists, members of the national academies, and winners of the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award, as well as other honors.
Guillermina De Ferrari became fascinated with contemporary Caribbean literature while pursuing her doctorate at Columbia University. Her first book, Vulnerable States: Bodies of Memory in Contemporary Caribbean Fiction, broke new ground by offering a comparative account of postcolonial Caribbean narratives. In it, she contends that the vulnerability of the body (through illness, girlhood and other afflictions or circumstances) becomes a condition of emancipation from colonialism. The book anticipated many of the concerns and methods of the emerging field of disability studies.
Since arriving at UW-Madison in 2000, De Ferrari has focused on the Spanish Caribbean, particularly Cuba. The vibrant art scene in Cuba in the 1990s gave her an opportunity to develop a long-standing interest in photography and visual culture, which informed her next book: Community and Culture in Post-Soviet Cuba.
De Ferrari’s Guggenheim Fellowship will support her latest book project, Broken Tropics, Arts of Contingency. Here she relies on the notion of “moral luck” (how circumstances condition people’s moral choices) to analyze art and life making in situations of crisis in contemporary literature, photography, and installations from Cuba, Haiti and Puerto Rico. By foregrounding the experiential in ethical engagement, this project uncovers practical forms of the examined life, finding in Caribbean reactions to adversity the possibility of a new humanism.
Tyrell Haberkorn’s work examines the history and present of state violence, human rights and dissident cultural politics in Thailand. She has written two books on the topic—2011’s Revolution Interrupted: Farmers, Students, Law and Violence in Northern Thailand and 2018’s In Plain Sight: Impunity and Human Rights in Thailand. She is driven by questions of how the powerful engage in domination and the forms and methods of violence they use to control their victims, as well as the ways in which survivors oppose power, and the literary and cultural forms that opposition takes.
Haberkorn, who first travelled to Thailand in 1997 to participate in the feminist labor solidarity movement, came to UW-Madison in 2018 after an eight-year stint at the National University in Australia. The Guggenheim Fellowship will support a third book: Dictatorship on Trial in Thailand, a work designed to analyze the individual, social, and legal impacts of the five years of dictatorship under the National Council for Peace and Order (NCPO, 2014-2019) in Thailand and identify how they might be redressed and justice forged. Working with long-time legal and human rights colleagues, Haberkorn will trace the modes of violence used by the junta, the ways in which victims were made vulnerable rather than protected by the law, and the practical and structural mechanisms through which perpetrators evaded accountability.
For more information on the 2020 Fellows, please visit the Foundation’s website at www.gf.org.