Congratulations to these faculty members, who each received a competitive $3,500 CHR research grant to carry out humanities research this summer!
Anu Aneja is Professor, Women and Gender Studies, at George Mason University. She has research interests in transnational feminist theory, affect and aesthetics particularly in their intersections with South Asian perspectives, and in interdisciplinary motherhood discourses in literature and culture. Besides several essays in peer reviewed journals, her published works include Feminist Theory and the Aesthetics Within: A perspective from South Asia (2022), Women’s and Gender Studies in India: Crossings, ed. (2019), and Embodying Motherhood: Perspectives from Contemporary India (2016, co-authored with Shubhangi Vaidya). She teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in feminist theory and transnational feminisms.
Project - Working title: Embodying Motherhood: Indian and transnational perspectives. A revised edition of my co-authored book, Embodying Motherhood: Perspectives from Contemporary India (Aneja & Vaidya, 2016, Yoda-Sage) will be published by Routledge India under a new title. The book examines the place occupied by the maternal body in the context of prevailing motherhood ideologies in India viewed through the interdisciplinary lenses of ancient myth and religious iconography, literature, Bollywood cinema, psychoanalysis and disability studies. The new edition seeks to reach a wider international readership by updating chapters and adding new material from a transnational perspective. The summer CHR funding will support my travel to India to collaborate with my co-author, Dr. Shubhangi Vaidya, on a new final chapter and to discuss revisions to existing material. The new chapter/epilogue, tentatively titled "Reimagining motherhood: Indian and transnational perspectives" is envisioned as a transnational dialogue that will extend the discursive mapping of the maternal metaphor across the globe.
Jianfei Chen (Instructional Associate Professor in the Department of Modern & Classical Languages) began her career teaching Chinese as a foreign language in the Department of East Asian Studies at Princeton University before joining George Mason in 2017 as a Term Assistant Professor. Recognized for her contributions to language education, she was promoted to the position of instructional associate professor and coordinator of Chinese program in 2023. Professor Chen’s research spans Chinese linguistics, pedagogy, and the intersections of theater and poetry in Chinese literary traditions. Her work advances both language instruction and cultural studies, fostering a deeper understanding of Chinese language and culture.
Project- "Advancing Pragmatic Competence in Chinese through Theatrical Texts: A Practitioner Inquiry on 'The Thunderstorm'." The study tackles advanced Chinese learners’ difficulties in deriving contextual inferences from literary texts, often resulting in culturally shallow interpretations. Focusing on The Thunderstorm by Cao Yu, it merges pragmatic inferential strategies with pedagogy to unite literary analysis and language learning. Through practitioner inquiry (Lytle & Cochran-Smith, 1992), the project analyzes Spring 2025 classroom data (student reflections, discussions) alongside archives from four prior semesters. It aims to create a framework for teaching implicit meaning in high-context dialogues, illustrating how dramatic texts foster culturally nuanced communication. By bridging literary pragmatics and classroom practice, the study advances L2 pedagogy for advanced learners.
Sayed Elsisi (Assistant Professor, Arabic) is a specialist in Arabic literature, culture, and cinema. His present research endeavors to explore the overlooked genres within the realm of Arabic criticism, while also critically examining the established Poetics in the discourse of Arabic criticism. The latest scholarly undertaking he is engaged in involves the authoring of a monograph that delves into a fresh Sufi perspective on the theme of eroticism as depicted in The Arabian Nights.
Project- "The Heroine with a Thousand Faces: Rethinking the Interpretations of 'The Arabian Nights'" is a chapter in a book project that presents a comprehensive scholarly examination of The Arabian Nights through innovative perspectives that challenge conventional readings. The project delves into the feminization of heroism, mystical dimensions of seemingly erotic narratives, comparative journey motifs across cultures, and the influence of the text's narrative structure on modern adaptations. Through meticulous textual analysis and interdisciplinary approaches, this research will provide valuable insights into one of world literature's most significant works, offering both academic rigor and cultural relevance for contemporary audiences. The examination of feminized heroism in The Arabian Nights offers a counternarrative to traditional Western heroic archetypes, highlighting how intelligence, storytelling, and moral education function as forms of heroism that challenge and transform patriarchal power structures. This analysis contributes to feminist literary criticism while illuminating often overlooked dimensions of female agency in classical texts.
Jessica Hurley (Associate Professor, Department of English) works at the intersection of literary and cultural studies, science and technology studies, and the environmental humanities with a particular focus on how race, gender, sexuality, and colonialism shape our built and imagined worlds. She is the author of Infrastructures of Apocalypse: American Literature and the Nuclear Complex, which won the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment book prize and was a finalist for the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present book prize. She has also co-edited special issues on the topics of Apocalypse and The Infrastructure of Emergency. In 2021-22 she was a fellow at the National Humanities Center.
Project- "Radioactive Worldmaking in the Nuclear Contact Zone." This is the introductory chapter of my book project Nuclear Decolonizations, which analyzes the global manifestations of the U.S. nuclear complex – from power plants to uranium mines to testing sites – as contact zones between American nuclearism and Indigenous communities, revealing a complex and multidirectional relationship in which the U.S. is reshaped by its nuclear experiences abroad even as sites in India, South Africa, the Marshall Islands, and Native North America are transformed by their contact with American nuclear technologies. Using worldmaking as an analytic that spans the conjoined material and aesthetic transformations of the nuclear age, I show how narrative and cultural production became key sites where nuclearization would be both imposed and contested.
May 27, 2025