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Humanities professors win NEH summer stipends
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Two faculty members in Iowa State University's College of Liberal Arts
and Sciences have received National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH)
summer stipends.
Robert Baum, associate professor of philosophy and religious studies,
and John Monroe, assistant professor of history, were each awarded $5000
stipends for use in the summer of 2005. NEH summer stipends provide individuals
with an opportunity to pursue research in the humanities that contributes
to scholarly knowledge or to the public's understanding of the humanities.
Each institution of higher education may nominate two faculty members
for the award. Iowa State's Center for Excellence in the Arts and Humanities
selected Baum and Monroe as Iowa State's nominees.
Baum, who is the director of the African Studies Program in the College
of Liberal Arts and Sciences, will spend the summer working on a book
on Diola Prophetism in Senegal, Gambia and Guinea-Bissau. The Diola ethnic
group of West Africa number around 600,000 people and are a minority in
these three countries. While the region is overwhelmingly Muslim with
smaller Christian communities, the Diola are distinguished by having the
largest community of practitioners of indigenous religion in the region.
The Diola have an indigenous tradition of prophets, both men and women,
who have taught and led movements of religious reform for hundreds of
years. Many of the prophets directly challenged the authority of European
colonial governments and the types of agricultural development programs
that Europeans sought to impose.
"I will be looking at the intensification of a prophetic tradition
and its transformation along gender line,s" Baum said. "I will
also explore the connections between religion and agriculture in the prophetic
critiques of European agricultural programs that lead to underdevelopment."
Monroe will travel to Paris this summer to conduct historical research
on his own book project. The book will analyze one of the great mass-media
hoaxes of all time - a fabricated "Satanic conspiracy" invented
by a French anti-Catholic journalist named Leo Taxil in the 1890s.
"Turn-of-the-century France was caught up in a 'culture war' between
leftists and religious conservatives that makes the tensions in contemporary
America seem quite tame," Monroe said. "The larger aim of my
research is to try to understand the dynamics of this conflict, and how
it relates to the rise of extreme right-wing political ideologies during
the first half of the 20th century."
Robert Baum
John Monroe
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