2013 summer research grants

2013 Application

Past Summer Research Grant Recipients

2012 Recipients

Robert Clines

Bio and Research Proposal

Robert Clines is a doctoral candidate in the Department of History. After completing a BA at John Carroll University and an MA at Miami University, Rob came to Syracuse in 2009. His dissertation, ‘Provincializing Jesuits: Confessional Politics and the Jesuit Experience in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire,’ investigates the cultural experience of Jesuit missionaries in the Ottoman Empire between 1550 and 1650. For this project, Rob was recently awarded a J. William Fulbright U.S. Student Scholarship to spend the 2012-2013 academic year in Italy. His summer project, for which he was awarded a Center for European Studies Student Summer Research Grant, is entitled ‘The Jesuit Experience in Ottoman Aleppo, 1630-1645.’ Rob will spend the summer in Rome, Italy, working in the Archivum Romanum Societatis Iesu, the central archive of the Society of Jesus, to investigate the Jesuit residence established under Father General Mutio Vitelleschi as an integral part of the urban fabric of early modern Aleppo.

Research Report

In his two-month stay in Rome, he has successfully worked in the Jesuit Archive and continued work on his dissertation. He has conducted further research on approximately 200 pages of manuscripts pertaining to the Jesuit residence in Aleppo, Syria. This residence was from 1630 to 1645. He is almost finished researching this mission, which will become part of the final chapter of the dissertation, tentatively entitled “Mutio Vitelleschi and the Christian Orient, 1615-1645.” This chapter will explore how Vitelleschi, the father general of the Jesuits, dealt with increasing pressures to missionize in the Middle East yet  faced heightened political tensions from the Ottomans as well. The goal of this short summer project, to explore how the Jesuits dealt with life in the city of Aleppo, illuminated important aspects of the Aleppo residence, including how they financed the residence, their activities with instructing Greeks and Arabs in Latin, and their efforts to convert local Christian populations to Catholicism. While their efforts were largely unsuccessful, nonetheless the missionary reports reflect many frustrations, reflections, and concerns with how to conduct the mission as well as evaluations of the Christians they worked with. They also discussed their fellow Europeans, as well as the Muslims and Jews with whom they shared Aleppo.

Charles Goldberg

Bio and Research Proposal

Charles Goldberg is entering his third year as a graduate student in the History Department. He studies political culture and citizenship in ancient Rome and is in the beginning stages of research for his dissertation, which will focus on changing conceptions of masculinity from the Roman Republic to the Early Roman Empire. This May, the Center for European Studies Student Summer Research Grant will allow him to travel to Rome to study funerary inscriptions of the Middle and Late Roman Republic. He is hopeful that these sources will allow him to shed light on the intersections of elite and non-elite culture in a way not afforded by the traditional emphasis on aristocratic literary works.

Research Report

After his research this past May, study of the funerary inscriptions in the tomb of the Scipios, an aristocratic family during the Roman Republic, has allowed him key insights for his project. Some of the inscriptions provide a long summary of the many political honors won by individual members of the family. While these are no-doubt fascinating, the commemorative inscription of a less successful member of the family, Publius Cornelius Scipio, the sickly son of the immensely successful Scipio Africanus, is particularly interesting though overlooked. It is noted that had Publius lived longer he surely would have equaled and surpassed the achievements of his ancestors. Most interestingly, the inscription notes that Publius was flamen dialis, a priest with high cultural honors but severe political limitations. After further research on other holders of this priesthood, Goldberg now postulates that elite families viewed it as a respectable position for family members who otherwise would have been political failures; in other words, it was a position for the family’s black sheep. While scholars of political competition in ancient Rome typically emphasize the struggle for the highest honors, Goldberg believes that study of men like Publius is just as valuable, as their careers reveal that those without political prospects could still play a part in the strategy of elite Roman families for gaining prestige.

Ayse Ozcan

Bio and Research Proposal

Ayse Ozcan is a PhD student at the Anthropology Department of Syracuse University. She holds an MA degree in English Literature. Her areas of interest include Muslims in Europe, identity formations, migration, and discourse analysis.  This summer, she plans to conduct her preliminary research in France as a continuation of her project. She intends to visit some of the mosque communities of North African origins in the Paris suburbs. Their partner churches will also be her research sites as part of their interfaith dialogue project. She will refresh her previous contacts within the mosques, and churches as well as with the local authorities. Ayse will pay particular attention to the multicultural, secular, inter/religious and cultural discourses that are circulated among the mosque congregants. She will also observe their discursive practices within the mosque space. 

Research Report

The eight-week preliminary fieldwork in Paris allowed her to conduct further participant observation and interviews at the two North African mosques that are the focus of this research. Religious organizations such as mosques have been a driving force behind identity politics of European Muslims in the past thirty years. As a result, mosques have become sites where religion, construed and imagined as a private “invisible” affair; and state-secularism, assigned to the “visible” public domain, are negotiated on a daily basis. This project will thus explore the construction of new citizen-regimes in the unique space of mosques, which by becoming both public and private, allows for the formation of modern Muslim citizen-subjects in France. This dissertation research connects the two ideas of space and religion by investigating on the one hand the politics of place-making, and on the other hand the negotiation of religion and secularization within the public sphere. Ozcan argues that understanding how young Muslims maintain such a two-fold identity as different from the elderly cannot be fully captured without understanding their place-making mechanism. She argues this because young French Muslims have been claiming and negotiating their religious particularities with a secular life through spatial belongings and practices in Islamic institutions at an increasing degree.