Judah Cohen
Fellowship Description
During my fellowship year, I hope to set up an independent website that complements my forthcoming book Jews and Music in 19th Century America. In addition to high quality scans of synagogue music publications from the era—many for the first time—the site will include detailed, cross-referenced analyses of the pieces contained therein, a trove of supporting documents from contemporary newspapers and synagogue archives, interactive maps chronicling the travels of major Jewish music figures of the time, and original recordings of the music. When completed, the full site will allow visitors to experience in detail the sound of the 19th century American synagogue.
Judah M. Cohen, Associate Professor of Musicology, Associate Professor of Jewish Studies, and the Lou and Sybil Mervis Professor of Jewish Culture, works at the meeting point of musicology, anthropology, history, global health, and Jewish studies. He has written The Making of a Reform Jewish Cantor: Musical Authority, Cultural Investment (2009); Sounding Jewish Tradition: The Music of Central Synagogue (2011); and, with Gregory Barz, he co-edited The Culture of AIDS in Africa (2011). He has also published extensively on Caribbean Jewish history, including the book Through the Sands of Time: A History of the Jewish Community of St. Thomas, US Virgin Islands (2004). Judah is currently completing a book-length project on nineteenth-century American synagogue music and making progress on a study of Holocaust-era narratives in musical theater.
Stephanie DeBoer
Fellowship Description
The Screen Ecology Project sits at the interface of digital humanities; critical practice; and digital, screen, and public art. The Project seeks to produce a collaborative platform inquiring into the ecology of public screens on the Bloomington IU campus – their uses, technologies, infrastructures, and interactions with the public life of the campus and its environs. Ultimately, it will bring together critical, technological, social, and artistic practitioners to create projects that develop the IU campus and its public screens. The aim is to create a more experimental space, one ideal for the exploration and production of public screens as sites for not simply public address but also public dialogue, engagement, interaction, and collaboration.
Stephanie DeBoer is an Associate Professor of Cinema and Media Arts/Studies in The Media School as well as in the School of Global and International Studies at Indiana University. Her current work addresses the technological, social, cultural, and artistic formations of information and commercial screens; media and video art; and public and urban spaces. Her work is multi-modal: it is critical and poetic, analog and digitally-based, singular and communal, and spans multiple locations including Bloomington, Hong Kong, and Shanghai. She has authored articles concerning these topics in the collection Framing the Global and forthcoming in the media arts journal Leonardo and The Asian Cinema Handbook, and is a co-convener of the Shanghai-based Screens Collective.
Caleb Weintraub
Fellowship Description
My studio practice straddles the line between traditional and digital painting. I am a firm believer in the value of a made thing. I also adhere to the notion that expressiveness and meaningfulness are tied more to ideas and interpretations than to material. During the period of this fellowship, I will create series of works that puts this notion to the test. By working in cycles of three works per group, each containing one work painted by hand (traditional), one model in a virtual environment (wholly digital), and one painted digitally (digital in format but made by hand using a stylus), I will highlight differences between these approaches. With the aid of the IDAH, I will construct a tool for collecting data that sheds light on how the works are perceived and how the distinctions in medium affect viewers’ relationships to notions of authorship, merit, and meaning.
Caleb Weintraub is represented by Projects Gallery in Miami Florida. Weintraub earned a BFA from Boston University and an MFA from The University of Pennsylvania. He has had eight solo shows in the past ten years including shows in New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago. His paintings and sculptures have appeared in contemporary art fairs in Miami, London, and Zurich. Caleb Weintraub has been an artist-in-residence at Redux Art Center in South Carolina and the Santa Fe Art Institute. Significant group shows include exhibitions at the Chicago Cultural Center, the Hyde Park Art Center, and Scion Art Space in Los Angeles. Two of his paintings were featured in the book, “Signs of the Apocalypse/ Rapture” published by Front Forty Press, distributed by University of Chicago Press. A Feature article on his work can be found in the September 2017 issue of Juxtapoz Magazine. Weintraub makes paintings, installations, and digital prints. In his recent work, he integrates digital processes with traditional painting techniques to evoke hypothetical realities and dreamscape interpretations of "our fragmented, puzzling, disorienting, and sometimes senseless world." You can view a selection of Caleb's work on his website, www.calebweintraub.com.