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April 4th, 2012
LISA BANU, assistant professor of Design History, was awarded $3,000 to help support her research and book manuscript entitled, “Immigrants and Indigenous Innovation: Eliel Saarinen and Raymond Loewy Design America.” Banu is fascinated by two mid-century immigrant autobiographical/pedagogical texts about design where individual, professional and national innovation, converge. Connecting where I am, with who I am and what I make, the two narratives offer insight into the continuity of citizenship, consumerism and creativity, particularly relevant in light of contemporary occupy movements where consumerism is suspect as corrosive to citizenship. While Loewy’s two books and literature about him, celebrate his ascension as the father of Industrial design, few reference his ultimate bankruptcy and declining practice in the 1970s. The grant will allow Banu access to a fuller and more nuanced story, still rooted in his own words, albeit beyond his 1951 biography, “Never Leave Well Enough Alone.” The archives at the Hagley Museum in Delaware, houses Loewy’s office memos, letters, book notes and more. Correspondingly, the grant will also take Banu to the Cranbroook Academy of Art, in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, where Eliel Saarinen presided with his philosophy of organic design. In this case, she is interested in the archives that houses his personal and professional letters suggesting a hint of administrative or immigrant discomfort, but also the campus that testifies to his efforts to grow indigenous American Modern design. The archive material in both locations offer crucial textual evidence into their designs of Modern America that aimed to discover, to ascribe and to respond to local democratic identity.
JENNIFER L. FORAY, assistant professor of History, was awarded $5,000 to travel to two Dutch archives where she will conduct research for her manuscript project entitled “Imperial Aftershocks: the Legacies of Decolonization in the Netherlands.” This work examines the various ways in which the events of decolonization — specifically, the loss of the East Indies/Indonesia in late 1949, following a brutal two-year colonial war — have been experienced, transmitted and institutionalized in the Netherlands. Of critical importance to this book manuscript are those publications and other records generated by former Dutch colonialists after their return to Europe. After Indonesian independence, these former colonialists constituted a powerful lobbying force in Dutch society, repeatedly proclaiming that without its most precious colony, the Netherlands would lose its place in the world. Both the National Archives in The Hague and the Netherlands Institute for War Documentation (NIOD) Holocaust and Genocide Studies in Amsterdam hold numerous files devoted to these colonial returnees and their organizations. Foray will spend the fall of 2012 examining these important materials.
STACY E. HOLDEN, associate professor of History, was awarded $5,000 to travel to various cities in Morocco and Paris, France to help support her research and teaching focus on the modern Middle East and North Africa. Currently, she is researching the colonial policy of historic preservation in French Morocco during the interwar years in order to deepen our understanding of political and social interactions between colonizer and colonized. In Morocco, Holden will examine the archival material housed at the Ministry of Culture and the National Library, while also beginning to photograph extant examples of preservation projects supported by the French. In Paris, she will have access to the “Fonds Lyautey,” the unpublished papers of Morocco’s first Resident General. This research will contribute to the writing of Holden’s second monograph, “Historic Preservation in the Medinas of Colonial Morocco,” a task that she will begin in earnest during her fall sabbatical.
The Library Scholars Grant Program was established in 1985 by the 50th anniversary gift of members of the Class of 1935, and the class has been continuously supportive of this fund for the past 27 years. This program supports access to unique collections of information around the country and the world for untenured and recently tenured Purdue faculty in all disciplines, from the West Lafayette, Calumet, Fort Wayne IUPUI and North central campuses. The grants cover the expenses associated with the cost of transportation, lodging, meals and fees charged by the library or other collection owner.
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