Each year the DePaul Humanities Center selects a few DePaul faculty members to receive a Faculty Fellowship, and this year the English Department is very happy to announce that the six Faculty Fellows selected for 2012-2013 include two of our own faculty: James Murphy and Michele Morano.

As faculty fellows, Murphy and Morano will each be researching and presenting a project. We’ve asked them both to share a little about their research, and here it is in their own words.

From Prof. James Murphy, on his project, “The Dublin Quartet: A Cultural, Intellectual, and Literary History”:

Numerous general histories of Ireland exist, so do studies of Dublin relating to individual time periods. There is no large-scale modern history of Ireland. This is an anomaly given the current trend for writing ‘biographies’ for such cities as London and Jerusalem. The project seeks to address this gap. It will be a work in four volumes, both scholarly and accessible, that will focus particularly on the cultural, intellectual and literary aspects of Dublin’s history though a weaving together of individual voices and texts from its history. It will deal sequentially with the major periods in the history of the city: when it was a remote fortress successively among the Viking, Angevin and English dominions; when it was a the capital of a new kingdom, launching pad for the Reformation and the conquest of Ireland, and the resort of the eighteenth-century landed elite; when it provided the forum for Irish nationalism in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; and when, as Ireland’s independent capital, it became the home for a third of Ireland’s population.

From Prof. Michele Morano, on her project, “Thirteen Ways of Thinking About Love: A Literary Essay”:

“Thirteen Ways of Looking at Love: A Literary Essay” will use the form of a lyric essay to explore a kind of romantic attraction that is exhilarating, risky, and often physically chaste. Drawn from research into areas as diverse and sometimes overlapping as philosophy, psychology, neurobiology, literary history, and linguistics, this essay will consider how we define and measure romantic love and will explore infatuation as an altered state that, like grief or acute illness, occasions deep reflection on who we are and how we live.

Congratulations to Professors Murphy and Morano! We wish them luck in their research and look forward to hearing more about their projects in the coming year.

If you are interested in learning more about the Faculty Fellowship program and Faculty Fellows from previous years, please visit the DePaul Humanities Center website.