Phil Stern has been awarded a New Directions Fellowship from the Mellon Foundation for his project, “Visualizing Sovereignty in the Colonial World.”
The Mellon New Directions Fellowship is designed to assist scholars in the humanities to acquire training outside their own areas of specialty, in order to support interdisciplinary work and a long-term research agenda. Phil's research, which involves various projects in geography, urban studies, and data and text visualization and digital mapping, seeks to develop techniques to visualize the hybrid and fragmented foundations for colonial law, authority, and power, and to try to visualize and capture the spatial geographies of legal and political pluralism that are all too often only discussed in metaphorical terms: "layered," "overlapping," and "uneven."
Beginning with his current work on the jurisdictional boundaries of the colonial city, such new approaches will seek in the end to develop a variety of ways to understand, and ultimately see, something as diffuse, abstract, and elusive as inter and intra-imperial claims to sovereignty in the early modern world.
History
