2019 Research

For the 2019-2020 academic year, the Indiana Studies team has elected to focus on "The Secret/Lost History of Indiana".

Headed up by Associate Professor Rasul Mowatt, the team will research parts of Indiana's history that might be unknown even to people who have lived their entire lives in the Hoosier state.

Consider the words secret, lost, invisible. Secret can mean playful or shameful. Lost can mean misplaced or stolen. Invisible can mean vanished or overlooked. In truth, all of these meanings can be applied to the history of Indiana. So much here is missing and fragmented, forgotten and then the act of forgetting is erased, leaving only an uneasiness in its wake.

Consider Indiana itself. A flyover state, a hidden state, to many, an unseen state. Within the state, what is hidden, and what is buried willfully? What about places that are simply overlooked, or too remote to be seen? Someone is obviously seeing those places. There is much to uncover here.

Consider agency. If something is lost, by whom has it been lost? To whom does it remain lost? How did it get lost in the first place? Is something truly lost if we know we can reclaim it?

Indiana Studies Research Focus

Our team members have diverse backgrounds in race theory, gender and sexuality studies, religious studies, labor studies, literature, folklore, cultural heritage, anthropology, archeology, public health, and archival history. They work in a multitude of creative traditions and are eager to focus their research on Indiana Studies. Together, they have committed to the goal of amplifying new and underrepresented Hoosier voices and stories, in order to generate more accurate and dynamic representations of the state’s past, present, and future.

Using both critical and creative methods, the team hopes to engage the state and its people in a series of self-reflective activities accessible to the population at large. With an intensive series of place-­based endeavors combining heritage, history, demographics, social critique, politics, economics, law, and geography, the team will establish a more dynamic set of frameworks and a better vocabulary for understanding and addressing regional issues. Throughout, research will be attuned to the evolving dynamics of place and space, maintaining a perspective that accounts for the often complex interplay between the rural and the urban, the local and the global, and the traditional and the modern.

At its core, the Indiana Studies team is dedicated to answering the question, “What role can a major Midwestern research institute with significant strengths in the arts and humanities play in the progressive development of its state as a whole?”