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English prof awarded two fellowships
Described by Yates as a book that explores the ways in which things shape humans' sense of the world, Renaissance Organics will loosely pick up where Yates' last book, Error, Misuse, Failure (University of Minnesota Press, 2003) left off in its exploration of material culture from unusual angles. Instead of examining man's interaction with faulty objects and ghosts in the machine, however, Yates said Renaissance Organics will examine three animate objects' perspectives on the world. “I'm very much interested in material culture and in how people use and interact with everyday objects,” Yates said. “And I'm interested in how things that we take for granted shape our lives in such a way that we only notice them when they don't work. What happens when things go wrong with objects was a question I asked in my last book. “Renaissance Organics is devoted to three animate objects--things that are alive, though when we use them they may no longer be alive. These three things are oranges, sheep and bread, and the question I'm asking is, 'What does an account of Renaissance England look like from the point of view of an orange or a sheep or yeast?'” Yates said that while the Renaissance setting for his book is arbitrary, it will most likely lead readers to make connections between the world then and the world now, which is one of his goals. “In Renaissance Organics I want to ask which things shape our sense of the world, and I chose things that everyone could relate to, for that experiential aspect,” Yates said. “There [should be] an argument about the changes in relationships between people and things that occurred in the Renaissance, and, in fact, one of my aims with the book is to see how questions of ecology might lead us to want to think about history and chronology differently,” he said. “The chronology of what counts as an event for an orange is radically different from what counts as an event for a person, as most of our history is reckoned in terms of the dates of political leaders and governments. So I'm interested in this different sense of time that's generated by the environment.” Yates, who only could claim one of the long-term NEH fellowships he received, due to a rule on deferrals, will begin the first part of his research starting in September, under the 10-month NEH fellowship from the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C. In June 2007, he will then head west to San Marino, Calif., where he will work for one month under the Francis Bacon Foundation Fellowship at the Huntington Library. Yates earned his bachelor's degree from St. Anne's College at Oxford University in England and his doctoral degree from the University of California at Los Angeles. He joined UD's Department of English in 1996, and, in addition to Error, Misuse, Failure, has published several articles and essays on medieval mysticism and a range of other literary topics. He has been a regional fellow of the Penn Humanities Forum Seminar and teaches UD undergraduate and graduate courses in medieval renaissance literature, Shakespeare, literary theory and cultural studies. Article by Becca Hutchinson |
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