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Book presents new perspectives on Spencer Museum’s founding collection
LAWRENCE – A new publication from the Spencer Museum of Art, “Perspectives on a Legacy Collection: Sallie Casey Thayer’s Gift to the University of Kansas,” investigates how the benefactor’s founding gift of more than 7,000 objects continues to influence KU’s art museum. Since the Kansas City merchant’s widow donated her multifarious collection in 1917, KU has preserved it, displayed it and, since 1978, housed it in the Helen Foresman Spencer Museum of Art, using it to educate and inspire generations of students and visitors alike.
Democratic accountability of US Foreign Aid eroding, article argues
LAWRENCE — The prevailing assumption is that U.S. foreign aid is a governmental function. But the reality proves much different, according to Sheyda Jahanbani, associate professor of history at the University of Kansas. Her article “New Directions or Dead Ends? Democracy and Development in the ‘Postwar’” details how foreign aid has reflected and shaped U.S. democracy since 1945.
15 students selected as the 40th class of University Scholars
LAWRENCE — The 40th class of University Scholars and their faculty mentors were recently recognized during digital receptions hosted by the University of Kansas. The University Scholars Program is designed to recognize and encourage academically talented and motivated sophomores who have demonstrated intellectual achievement and curiosity. New University Scholars include Kansas students from Butler, Crawford, Douglas, Finney, Johnson, Rush and Wyandotte counties.
Full stories below.
Contact: Rick Hellman, KU News Service, 785-864-8852, [email protected], @RickHellman
Book presents new perspectives on Spencer Museum’s founding collection
LAWRENCE – A new publication from the Spencer Museum of Art, “Perspectives on a Legacy Collection: Sallie Casey Thayer’s Gift to the University of Kansas,” investigates how the benefactor’s founding gift of more than 7,000 objects continues to influence KU’s art museum.
Since the Kansas City merchant’s widow donated her multifarious collection in 1917, KU has preserved it, displayed it and, since 1978, housed it in the Helen Foresman Spencer Museum of Art, using it to educate and inspire generations of students and visitors alike. The centenary of the gift in 2017 inspired a retrospective exhibition, an original musical and now a 450-page, richly illustrated, printed reevaluation of the collection, published by the museum itself. Copies are available at the museum and at the KU Bookstore.
The book, like all of the centennial projects, was a collaborative effort among Spencer Museum staff, university students and alumni, according to co-editor and contributor Celka Straughn, the museum’s deputy director for public practice, curatorial and research and its Andrew W. Mellon director of academic programs. Her co-editor is Kristan Hanson, who earned her doctorate in the history of art from KU and formerly served as the museum’s Andrew W. Mellon academic coordinator. Currently, she is the Plant Humanities Fellow at Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection in Washington, D.C.
Straughn explained the book’s reason for being.
“It’s more than a companion exhibition catalog,” she said. “It was intentionally conceived to build on the research that went into the exhibition and learn from it. This allowed for people to spend time with the artworks, to see what stories were told in the exhibition, and how those led to and opened up new stories and new ways of approaching the collection and understanding the collector herself.”
The book is divided into seven sections, with a total of 32 chapters and a comprehensive timeline. The headings include “Portraits of a Collector,” “Gender & Collecting” and “Politics & Perspectives.” There are chapters on each of Thayer’s main areas of collecting, including Japanese prints, American paintings, watercolors and prints, Native American art and historic and contemporary textiles from Asia, Europe and the Americas.
Straughn said that, at the time of her gift, Sallie Casey Thayer was part of a wave of museum building in America. As the widow of William Bridges Thayer, a partner in the Emery, Bird, Thayer department store, and an early supporter of the Kansas City Art Institute, she was also part of a web of connections between department stores and art institutions – think Marshall Field and the Field Museum in Chicago, where Sallie Casey Thayer lived for several years, educating herself and collecting. The collection also includes the fruits of her travels in Europe, the Middle East and Central America.
“I would say she was deeply committed to fostering artistic understanding and production,” Straughn said. “She truly wanted to cultivate the arts and artists in the Kansas City region. That was a critical part of what she was doing, and it remains a critical part of the Spencer Museum today.”
Straughn wrote a chapter about Thayer’s collection of over 200 Chinese snuff bottles, highlights of which were a favorite during the 2017 show.
“They’re really fascinating,” Straughn said. “I think there is something about the size that appeals to people, along with the exquisite craftsmanship and the incredible variety. And then they sparkle and look great in the natural light. They are very tactile. It makes you want to hold them in your hand.”
And while not everything Thayer collected has been considered top drawer by art historians over the last century, Straughn said the museum’s collection of lace is one area for which appreciation is growing in the art world.
“I became very interested in lace,” Straughn said. “In part, that is the result of initial work by Annette Becker, who contributed an essay to the book and who, when she was an undergraduate at KU, did her senior honors thesis on Sallie Casey Thayer’s lace dress. She and former KU graduate student Raechel Kaleki, who also contributed an essay on Thayer’s lace, opened my eyes to the amazing lace collection in the museum.”
Various chapters examine Thayer’s collection and the ways in which it has been used through a 21st century lens, connecting to ongoing discourses in the museum field about whiteness, colonialism and racial capitalism. For instance, Straughn wrote a chapter titled “Complexities of Americanism and Race: Winslow Homer’s West India Divers.”
The watercolor, she wrote, “portrays a Bahamian man and boy of African descent harvesting conch shells and sponges, immersed in bright light and set against tropical lushness.
“Yet Homer’s works, like ‘West India Divers,’ convey ambiguous messages with regard to modernity and race. As ‘escapes,’ Homer’s images can suggest a nostalgia for a premodern vision, critiques of industrialized modernity, a masking of industrial consequences, or democratic freedoms.”
Straughn said she hopes the book provides a variety of perspectives and new understandings of Thayer’s gift today.
“I think she had a strong connection to telling particular histories, and especially histories of the United States from the lens that she saw it – contributing to what became a dominant narrative of U.S. history in the 20th century,” Straughn said.
Gender is another important lens through which to view to the collection, she said.
“Women were often associated with collecting what was considered the decorative arts, and that’s a term we unpack in various essays,” Straughn said. Thayer collected works “produced by women and produced by cultures outside of what had become the canonical fields of Euro-American art of painting and sculpture. Her large collection of Asian art and textiles fed into that. So although she was definitely fitting in with the trends of the day, she also became a very discerning and deliberate collector.”
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Contact: Jon Niccum, KU News Service, 785-864-7633, [email protected]
Democratic accountability of US Foreign Aid eroding, article argues
LAWRENCE — The prevailing assumption is that U.S. foreign aid is a governmental function. But the reality proves much different.
“The majority of foreign aid work is done by private contractors,” said Sheyda Jahanbani, associate professor of history at the University of Kansas.
“In fact, it’s implemented by a web of private contractors so wide that it’s known in Washington as ‘the development industrial complex.’”
That misconception is discussed in her article “New Directions or Dead Ends? Democracy and Development in the ‘Postwar,’” which details how foreign aid has reflected and shaped U.S. democracy since 1945. But although the program has earned more political legitimacy in the form of bipartisan congressional consent, it’s now less democratically accountable to the public.
The article is published in the latest issue of Diplomatic History.
“Part of my goal in the piece was to use historical thinking to explore this phenomenon,” Jahanbani said.
“This huge upswelling of private contractors doing the work of foreign aid starts in the 1970s for what are actually noble purposes, which are to decentralize and try to get out of that Vietnam complex. What winds up happening by the ’90s is you have all this expertise that has migrated from the public sector to the private sector. The U.S.’s mission remains the same — the expertise is still needed — and those private contractors wind up being the ones who have it. Now, without any real public accountability, you have all these private firms doing the work, and they get paid by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) to do it.”
In “New Directions or Dead Ends?,” Jahanbani argues privatization was enabled by Cold War debates about how to square America’s global power with the values and practices of democracy. As her title implies, these new directions met with resistance.
“I think it’s very much a story of dead ends,” she said.
“At the end of Vietnam, there was a real ‘come to Jesus’ moment, a real confrontation with the delusional character of postwar American empire. And not just among the lefty activists, there was a broad group in Congress from both parties who wondered, ‘Do we really need to be doing nation-building?’”
Exacerbating this situation is the public’s fundamental fallacy about what U.S. foreign aid truly denotes.
“People think it’s a huge portion of the federal budget, and it’s a very tiny portion,” she said. “This has meant policymakers have always felt like they’re on the defensive when it comes to even humanitarian assistance.”
While there are different kinds of foreign aid, the one that the majority of Americans believe is most important is marked for humanitarian assistance and crisis situations.
“Policymakers feel really defensive about just saying, ‘We’re a rich country and can afford to do this stuff, and we have a moral obligation.’ So instead, they’re constantly cloaking to the point that they even convince themselves that we need to have a national security reason to do it,” Jahanbani said.
USAID during the Trump administration did nothing to curtail these inaccuracies.
“Trump wanted to slash and burn foreign aid, befitting a sort of ‘America first’ mentality. Many of the people who wound up being in his administration were those who recycle this myth about the expense of foreign aid to the U.S. budget. So that’s not surprising at all,” she said.
What ended up surprising Jahanbani was seeing Trump’s Republican allies in Congress so unwilling to cut the foreign aid budget.
“That fascinated me. This weird moment has converged where we actually have enormous consensus on foreign aid to the point that even a very loyal Republican Party is not willing to buck the president. Instead, Republican senators try to capitalize on his famously short attention span,” she said.
In January, President Joe Biden named Samantha Power, the former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, as his choice to lead USAID, calling her “a leader in marshaling the world to resolve long-running conflicts, respond to humanitarian emergencies, defend human dignity and strengthen the rule of law and democracy.”
“Power being nominated to head USAID is a huge signal that the current president wants a very aggressive form of development policy,” Jahanbani said.
But the professor is less convinced Biden’s approach will fundamentally alter how Washington handles such aid.
“The theory and principles will change, but in the practice, it won’t really change,” she said.
A Pasadena native who has been at KU since 2007, Jahanbani researches U.S. foreign relations in the Cold War. Next year will see the publication of her latest book, “The Poverty of the World: Discovering the Poor at Home and Abroad, 1935-1973” (Oxford University Press).
“In the 1970s, the foreign aid program goes through this massive confrontation with its own limitations and its own hypocrisy, and then it survives to live another day and basically makes the same arguments for its own existence,” she said.
“It’s a deeply tragic story.”
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Contact: Jaime Netzer, University Honors Program, [email protected]
15 students selected as the 40th class of University Scholars
LAWRENCE — The 40th class of University Scholars and their faculty mentors were recently recognized during digital receptions hosted by the University of Kansas. The University Scholars Program is designed to recognize and encourage academically talented and motivated sophomores who have demonstrated intellectual achievement and curiosity.
Competitively selected from KU’s sophomore class, University Scholars receive a $1,500 scholarship and are assigned a faculty mentor to support the development of their academic interests and engagement with research. The close and continuing working relationships between professors and University Scholars, as well as the seminar’s role as a vehicle for interdisciplinary exchange on a topic of contemporary interest, provides a rich and challenging environment for all participants. The University Scholars program prepares students for academic excellence now, while at KU, and in leadership roles once they have graduated.
This spring, Giselle Anatol is teaching the interdisciplinary University Scholars seminar, titled “Marginalized Bodies & ‘Medicine’ in Literature,” which will interrogate why diseases like COVID-19 rage through low-income and communities of color and affect low-income populations so disproportionately.
“I have always been fascinated by literary representations of doctors, patients and traditional medicine, as well as alternative healing practices,” said Anatol, KU professor of English, who noted that she started her own college career as an undergraduate studying biology and pre-medicine. “This [literature] became all the more timely when COVID-19 hit, and statistics became available about disparities in death rates among different communities.”
The 2021 University Scholars are listed below alphabetically by hometown, major, and faculty mentor.
Leena Abdelmoity: Overland Park; majoring in political science and global & international studies; mentored by Hannah Britton, associate professor of political science and women, gender & sexuality studies.
Krishna Bhadu: Bolivar, Missouri; majoring in microbiology and psychology; mentored by Ludwin Molina, associate professor of psychology.
Johnny Dinh Phan: Overland Park; majoring in biochemistry and dance; mentored by Brandon Dekosky, assistant professor of pharmaceutical chemistry and chemical engineering.
Kamiyah Hicks: Kansas City, Kansas; majoring in human biology, pre-med; mentored by Folashade Benette Agusto, assistant professor of ecology & evolutionary biology.
Ximena Ibarra: Pittsburg; majoring in political science and American studies; mentored by Ben Chappell, associate professor of American studies.
Abeer Sami Iqbal: Urbandale, Iowa; majoring in behavioral neuroscience; mentored by Katie Batza, associate professor of women, gender & sexuality studies.
Sonia Kandalkar: Olathe; majoring in math; mentored by Jide Wintoki, Capitol Federal Professor of Business.
Elena Lemke: Garden City; majoring in biology; mentored by Aimee Wilson, assistant professor of humanities.
Maxwell Lillich: Lawrence; majoring in political science; mentored by Lourdes Gouveia, adjunct assistant professor of sociology.
Christina Nguyen: Overland Park; majoring in pharmacy; mentored by Phillip Drake, assistant professor of English.
Carlos Schwindt: La Crosse; majoring in biology; mentored by David Slusky, De-Min and Chin-Sha Wu Associate Professor of Economics.
Hunter Smith: Overland Park; majoring in microbiology; mentored by Doug Crawford-Parker, senior lecturer in English.
Oluwanifemi Sofowoke: Lawrence; majoring in biochemistry; mentored by Teruna Siahaan, Aya and Takeru Higuchi Distinguished Professor of Pharmaceutical Chemistry.
Ladazhia Taylor: Kansas City, Kansas; majoring in journalism; mentored by Nicole Hodges Persley, associate professor of American studies and African & African-American studies.
Sadie Williams: Augusta; majoring in economics and English; mentored by Misty Schieberle, associate professor of English.
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