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Volume 40, No. 12 |
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The Flood of '93 |
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Recruits' spouses and partners not alone in job hunt |
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Biomass for the masses: An innovative oat-hull project at the UI Power Plant energizes campus |
Rabinovitz honored with humanities prizeLauren Rabinovitz, professor of American studies, is the recipient of the 2003-04 May Brodbeck Humanities Fellowship, a competitive award designed to encourage and support the study of language, linguistics, literature, philosophy, history, jurisprudence, criticism, and theory of the arts, as well as humanistic aspects of the natural and social sciences.
Rabinovitz will complete a book on the Hale’s Tours and Scenes of the World amusement park ride and its legacy. In the early 20th century, Hale’s Tours and other amusement park “movie rides” coordinated sounds, motion pictures, and mechanical movement to reproduce the realism of train travel and to present a new sense of being in the modern world grounded in bodily perceptions. These popular phantom train rides depicted the range of perceptions, social relations, expectations, and fears connected with the experience of travel. Although Hale’s Tours disappeared before 1915, its legacy continues to affect the history of movies and moviegoing, especially in such movie variants as Cinerama, IMAX, motion simulators, and virtual realities. Rabinovitz asserts that the model of Hale’s Tours necessitates a redefinition of the moviegoer’s standard experience as merely a visual relationship to a distant screen.
Rabinovitz also plans to curate a film show for the annual International Silent Cinema Festival and deliver a keynote address on the subject at the Women and Silent Screen Conference.
The Brodbeck fellowship is alternately awarded with the James Van Allen Natural Sciences Fellowship. The fellowship provides $15,000 for use in promoting research.