Past Fellows at the Institute of International Studies

Alan Sharlin Memorial Award Fellows, 2005-2006

Lisa Kaborycha, History: Copying Culture: 15th Century Florentines and their Zibaldoni. This dissertation examines hundreds of manuscripts known as "zibaldoni" copied by everyday Florentine citizens: merchants, artisans, humanists, priests, housewives and nuns. These vernacular personal anthologies contain selections of Seneca, Ovid, Jerome, Dante, Boccaccio, Alberti, Bruni, etc., juxtaposed with legends of saints‚ lives, medical treatises, poems, sermons, romances and carnival songs. The Quattrocento reader who picked and chose from among the most heterogeneous texts and laboriously copied choice passages by hand was deliberately transmitting material he or she considered of moral, religious and civic value. Study of these collections reveals there was not a stark division between "high" humanist and "low" popular culture in the Quattrocento; the kinds of texts copied did not vary much according to the copyist's social station, sex, or education. Standard literary categories break down when we examine how various texts functioned in Florentine society; philosophical texts could be read for advice on manners, legends of saints‚ lives as marriage manuals, and so on. The materials Florentines selected to include reveal deeply held cultural beliefs regarding civility, health care, child rearing, marriage and sexuality that do not appear in traditional sources, shedding new light on social attitudes in Quattrocento Florence.

Deborah Yalen, History: Face to the Shtetl! The Sovietization of the Jewish Pale of Settlement, 1917-1939. The shtetl (Yiddish for the small market town of Eastern Europe) has long been the object of both idealization and disenchantment in Ashkenazic Jewish culture. With increased international migration, urbanization and assimilation among Jews in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the image of the East European Jewish shtetl became a common touchstone of Jewish identity across continents. In post-Holocaust memory, the shtetl has evolved into an almost exclusively idealized symbol of the lost world of traditional Jewish East European culture. Popular images of the shtetl in American culture, moreover, typically omit any reference to the experience of Soviet Jewish shtetl communities. Indeed, much of the Cold War-era Western historiography stresses that Jewish shtetl communities on Soviet territory were culturally annihilated well before the Holocaust, as a result of the Bolshevik regime's anti-religious campaigns of the 1920s. Despite scholarly attempts over the last few decades to "demythologize" the Jewish shtetl, little of the abundant sociological data about the shtetl produced by Soviet observers during the interwar period informs our understanding of this cultural icon. In her research, Ms. Yalen examines a broad range of Soviet narratives that addressed the Soviet "shtetl problem" during the interwar period: political memoranda, social scientific research, journalistic accounts and popular fiction. Her dissertation focuses on the Soviet state's employment of sociological, demographic and economic data collection within shtetl communities as a tool of policy-making during the interwar period, particularly in terms of how the Jewish shtetl and its inhabitants could be "productivized" and integrated into the evolving Soviet economic system. By and large, this scholarship consciously identified itself with the project of Soviet state building. Nonetheless, she examines conflicting views that emerged within these studies, and juxtaposes them with contemporaneous Yiddish scholarship written from a non-Soviet or explicitly anti-Soviet point of view. She also contextualizes the production of this Soviet-sponsored scholarship within a longer tradition of Russian Jewish social scientific writing from the mid-late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

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