2023-2024 Faculty Fellows

U. Melissa Anyiwo
History
“(De)Romanticizing the Past: Search for Quadroon Balls in The New Orleans Bee”
The system of plaçage, or concubinage, was a strange and highly ritualized social convention that existed exclusively in New Orleans and Charleston. This form of socially prescribed interracial sex allowed for the development of a third race that traversed the conventions of the strict American racial caste system. The gens de couleur libre or cordon bleus were the wealthiest and most powerful class of nonwhites in Louisiana and South Carolina, creating a vibrant and exclusive society. Still, because of the unalterable one-drop rule, they were not, nor could they ever be, white. As a result, the cordon bleus were forced to navigate through a social minefield of racial conventions that on the one hand elevated, but on the other degraded, them.
This system was apparently begun at the famed Quadroon Balls of New Orleans, one of the most interesting and romanticized aspects of antebellum life. In this first stage of a wider monograph project, I will explore advertisements for quadroon balls in New Orleans' oldest running newspaper, The New Orleans Bee, in its earliest surviving issues from1827-1860. By doing a content analysis of complete years to find visual cues in these advertising bibles, we can make arguments about the existence, knowledge, and popularity of these infamous spectacles that pulls them further from the persistent romantic image. With the objectivity of statistics, I can then begin to explore the next stage focused on the diaries and journals of black women living within this system. This new picture will challenge existing knowledge about the intricacies of race, gender, marriage, infidelity, and social conventions in one nineteenth century community overshadowed by slavery and the one-drop rule.  

Will Cohen
Theology
“Catholicism and Liberalism: Retrieving John Courtney Murray, S.J. for the 21st Century” 
The American John Courtney Murray, S.J. (1904-1967) was a principal architect of Vatican II’s Dignitatis Humanae, which marked a dramatic development in the relationship of the Catholic Church to political Liberalism. Murray sought to show that Catholicism can be freely itself within the Liberal political order, notwithstanding the Church’s anti-modernist stance of the late 19th. century. Today, as the foundations of liberal democratic politics are shaken around the world, some Catholic thinkers again portray political Liberalism as fundamentally flawed, inimical to Catholic faith and human flourishing. To the intellectual challenge that these postliberal Catholic thinkers pose, Murray’s thought provides key ingredients for an effective response, grounded in the millennia-old Catholic vision of politics.  In this context, my faculty fellowship project aims to do three things. In a first, broadly contextualizing chapter, it will make the case that the moment has arrived for a creative retrieval of Murray. In a second chapter, my project will engage critics of Murray from the pacifist Christian left, the school of thought often identified as “radical orthodoxy.” Finally, in a third chapter, my project will engage integralists – i.e., those who argue Liberalism should be dethroned and that Catholicism’s authority should be restored to a place of primacy in law and society - directly.  

Susan Poulson
History
"Insanity: Murder and Madness in the Gilded Age"

My project is a book-length manuscript on gender in American jurisprudence that describes the evolution of the insanity plea from its initial success in the Sickles case of 1859 to its failure in the defense of the man who assassinated President James Garfield in 1881. I will study two high-profile murders – the murder of Albert Richardson in 1869 and the murder of Alexander Crittenden in 1870 - and their divergent outcomes that reveal how jurors used gendered criteria to determine what would drive a person into "temporary insanity."