Jason Kelly

Permanent URI for this collection

https://hdl.handle.net/1805/27195

Transdisciplinarity, Public Scholarship, and the Anthropocene

Jason Kelly is a Professor and the Chair of the History Department at IUPUI. He is also an Adjunct Professor in Africana Studies and in American Studies. And, Professor Kelly is the Director of the IUPUI Arts and Humanities Institute (IAHI). Professor Kelly is a historian of 18th century British art, science, and society.

But like many scholars, his research focus has grown from these interests especially in his role as Director of IAHI, in which he directs three community-engaged research programs. The first of these programs is the Anthropocene Household Project which looks at the lived experience of global environmental change at the household level. In collaboration with the IUPUI School of Science, a key component of this project has been providing soil, dust, and water lead testing kits to reduce lead poisoning in central Indiana. The second of these programs is the Cultural Ecologies Project which looks at how cultural interventions transform cities. IAHI works with organizations and municipal entities to create more equitable and inclusive cultural landscapes. Finally, the COVID-19 Oral History Project is currently documenting the contemporary history of COVID-19.

These projects are connected by a concern with transdisciplinary and interdisciplinary collaborations especially those that foreground the contributions of the arts and humanities. They are also connected by a concern with community-engaged scholarship. These projects not only seek to address their research topics but to create new models for university-based arts and humanities scholarship for the 21st century. Professor Kelly's translation of research is another excellent example of how IUPUI's faculty members are TRANSLATING their RESEARCH INTO PRACTICE.

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Recent Submissions

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    A Multimodal Approach to the Anthropocene
    (American Anthropologist, 2018) Kelly, Jason M.; McDonald, Fiona P.
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    Addressing Risks of Lead in Water and Soil: Using Citizen Science and a Unique Partnership with Faith Organizations
    (ENGAGE! Co-created Knowledge Serving the City, 2021-10-12) Filippelli, Gabriel; Hicks, Ivan; Druschel, Gregory; Kelly, Jason M.; Shukle, John; Strout, Spencer; Nichols, Natalie; Stroud, Dawson; Ottenweller, Megan; Ohrberg, Makayla; Longbrake, Marisa; Wood, Leah; Clark, Benjamin; Fryling, Kevin
    One of the most widespread environmental health hazards in the United States remains exposure to the harmful neurotoxin lead. So much lead remains in the urban environment that it is not unusual to find neighborhoods where more than 10% of children exhibit harmful levels of lead, compared to the national average of about 1%. To overcome this challenge, a partnership between IUPUI researchers and faith organizations in Indianapolis is taking aim at the risk of household lead contamination by providing residents the tools they need to protect against it. The community-driven science aspect of this project is intentional—not only will the individuals who participate benefit directly, but the resulting data will also play a role in keeping communities safer more broadly.
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    The Warburg Circle in the 1930s [Figure]
    (2017-01) Kelly, Jason M.
    In 1909, Aby Warburg founded a private library devoted to the study of art history. He hired Fritz Saxl as his librarian in 1913. For the next two decades, the Warburg library, based in Hamburg, would grow in importance in the European art world. Warburg’s failing health meant that by the mid 1920s Saxl held the reigns of the institute. In 1926, under his guidance the private library became a research institute — Die kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg — at the newly founded University of Hamburg. When Aby Warburg died in 1929, Fritz Saxl took formal control of Warburg’s library, but its residency in Germany was short lived. The Nazi seizure of power and its antisemitic policies prompted Saxl to move the library to London, first to Thames House and then to the Imperial Institute. It soon became a haven for Jewish refugees. With help from the Academic Assistance Council, Deputy Director Gertrud Bing helped find aid for emigrants, and the institute provided formal appointments to a number of them. In 1944, the University of London, which had provided rooms for the library, formally incorporated it as a research institute. Warburg’s approach to art was richly contextual, examining artworks in relation to the intellectual, literary, and cultural worlds within which they were created. Thus, it was a reaction to art histories which emphasized aesthetic values and formal analysis (Wölfflin and Riegl) over historical context. Warburg was one of the intellectual leaders of a new approach to art — Kulturwissenschaft — the term with which he named his institute in Hamburg. The Kulturwissenschaft approach looked at the many strands of thought that led artists to create their works. It emphasized the fact that artistic productions could not be understood outside of their contexts. Consequently, it was the job of the art historian to study philosophy and literature as well as anthropology, history, ritual, religious beliefs, and popular practices. Warburg’s approach to art history was part of a larger movement in Germany and Austria to ground the analysis of art in a more “scientific” methodology. The heart of this movement was at the the University of Vienna. Even though there was no single homogenous methodology among the university’s scholars, it is often referred to it as the Vienna School of Art History. The scholars who moved to London in the 1930s to join the Warburg Institute were part of an intellectual network that spanned central Europe. Many of them shared advisors or had studied at the same institutions. The graphic below shows their institutional and academic relationships. This is not a comprehensive list of scholars who were affiliated with the Warburg Institute, but it does include the core members of the Warburg’s circle during the 1930s. Arrows point from advisors/teachers to advisees/students. Blue lines indicate when individuals emigrated to join the Warburg Institute.
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    Sir Francis Dashwood: Connoisseur, Collector and Traveller
    (Paul Mellon Centre, 2020-11-20) Kelly, Jason M.
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    A Classical Education: Naples and the Heart of European Culture
    (Seduction and Celebrity: The Spectacular Life of Emma Hamilton, 2016) Kelly, Jason M.
    The life of Emma Hamilton in Naples
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    The COVID-19 Oral History Project: Some Preliminary Notes from the Field
    (Taylor & Francis, 2020) Kelly, Jason M.; History, School of Liberal Arts
    The COVID-19 Oral History Project (C19OH) is an oral history project focused on archiving the lived experience of the COVID-19 epidemic. The platform allows both professional researchers and the public to upload to a curated database. This essay reflects on C19OH as a rapid response oral history project – how the research team conceived and implemented it, both in the field and in the classroom, and how they continue to transform it in response to practical concerns and ethical frameworks.
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    Archive as Pedagogy: Oral History and a Journal of the Plague Year
    (SAGE Publishing, 2020-12-18) Kelly, Jason M.; Horan, John; American Studies, School of Liberal Arts
    In March 2020, the COVID-19 Oral History Project, based at Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI), teamed up with A Journal of the Plague Year: An Archive of COVID-19 (JOTPY), based at Arizona State University to create and curate a series of oral histories focused on the lived experience of the pandemic. Among the results of this collaboration has been a focus on research-based pedagogy and learning for undergraduate students, graduate students, and the public at large. This pedagogical emphasis has both shaped the archive and has been shaped by the process of developing the archive.
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    The End of Abundance: Water Infrastructure and the Culture of Cornucopianism
    (2019) Kelly, Jason M.; History, School of Liberal Arts
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    Reading the Grand Tour at a Distance: Archives and Datasets in Digital History
    (Oxford, 2017-04) Kelly, Jason M.; History, School of Liberal Arts
    This essay uses Giovanna Ceserani, Giorgio Caviglia, Nicole Coleman, Thea De Armond, Sarah Murray, and Molly Taylor-Poleskey’s essay “British Travelers in Eighteenth-Century Italy: The Grand Tour and the Profession of Architecture” as a point of departure from which to examine the limits and potentials of digital history, especially as it relates to the construction of archives and digital datasets. Through a critical reading of the sources used to create the Grand Tour Project—part of the Mapping the Republic of Letters project at Stanford University—it shows the ways in which datasets can both hide and embody hierarchies of power. Comparing the Grand Tour Project to other digital projects currently in production, such as Itinera and Legacies of British Slave-Ownership, this piece offers suggestions for alternative readings of the Grand Tour narrative. It ends by summarizing a series of challenges faced by historians as they contemplate best practices for creating and maintaining digital datasets in the twenty-first century.