Bauer, Sanft Honored for Research Excellence
Brooke Bauer, assistant professor of history, and Charles Sanft, professor of history, received awards for excellence in research during the 2023 College of Arts and Sciences Faculty Convocation.
Brooke Bauer, Assistant Professor
Excellence in Research & Creative Achievement Awards: Early Career
Bauer’s book, Becoming Catawba: Catawba Indian Women and Nation Building, 1500-1940, published in November 2022, won three book prizes in 2022-2023. The South Carolina Historical Society, the American Society for Ethnohistory, and the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians have all lauded its innovative interdisciplinary methodology and its deeply felt narration of Catawba women’s struggle for survival and identity.
Bauer has now embarked on an exciting research trajectory, co-authoring a book that explores how the histories of tribal nations are represented (and misrepresented) in museums and historical sites, among other projects. She has demonstrated remarkable originality and nuance in the histories she researches and writes. These traits are recognized with this Early-Career Research Award.
Charles Sanft, Department of History
New Research, Scholarly and Creative Projects in the Arts & Humanities
Sanft is working on a fascinating book project, Twenty Poems from Dunhuang. This work focuses on a unique set of ninth-century manuscripts describing the literal and metaphorical landscapes of a desert oasis town in northwestern China.
The significance of Sanft’s project is not simply bringing rare early Chinese medieval texts to a twenty-first century audience, but also his interdisciplinary approach. He examines these poems as historical sources, as literary imaginings, and as material objects. While in Dunhuang, he intends to visit places identified in the poems to gain experiential understanding of their relative locations and environmental characteristics.
Weaving these insights together in the introduction to the poems and then in his commentary on each individual poem will offer readers a remarkably textured analysis of these short, but powerful, texts.