Two Brown Faculty Members Win Mellon New Directions Fellowships

Marc Perlman, Associate Professor of Music, and Susan Short, Associate Professor of Sociology, have received prestigious Mellon New Directions Fellowships. These highly selective fellowships provide support for exceptional faculty members in the humanities and humanistic social sciences who received their doctorates between five and 15 years ago, and who wish to acquire systematic training outside their own disciplines. Scholarship that crosses disciplinary boundaries holds great potential, but in practice it often requires formal substantive and methodological training in addition to the Ph.D. New Directions Fellows receive support to pursue a program that will enable them to acquire deeper knowledge of other fields. These awards benefit humanistic scholarship more generally by encouraging the highest standards in cross-disciplinary research.

MARC PERLMAN
The Cultural Imagination of Musical Ownership: Appropriation, Digital Technology, and the Bounds of Property

What does it mean to own music in the 21st century? Globalization and digital technology have challenged the social practices and legal concepts that long surrounded musical property. Fundamental questions about musical ownership (What exactly about music is ownable? Who or what can own it? How much control can music's owners exert over it, for how long?) now give rise to wide-ranging social policy debates.

These debates bring notions of cultural democracy into conflict with the politics of recognition. On one hand, third-world governments (and sympathetic Western scholars) outraged at the exploitation of the cultural heritage of indigenous communities have called for expanded property rights in music. On the other hand, activists inspired by the personal computer's promise of cultural democracy have called for a narrower understanding of musical ownership, to prevent corporate interests from smothering the Internet's potential for decentralized, participatory cultural production.

The coexistence of these two movements provides us with a natural laboratory, as it were, for the cultural study of musical ownership. Yet so far ethnomusicologists have paid only desultory visits to this laboratory. This is no doubt because the scope of the phenomenon is daunting: to grasp these developments one would need to view them both ethnographically and as they appear through the lenses of intellectual property law.

Intellectual property law is a particularly recondite branch of the law, and few if any ethnomusicologists have a broad grasp of its details, its history, its sociology, and its economics. Its complexity makes it particularly forbidding for the interdisciplinary autodidact. Fortunately, the Mellon Foundation designed its New Directions Fellowships to support interdisciplinary research of this type. Under its auspices I will spend the 2007-2008 academic year at the Washington College of Law (American University) and the Boalt Hall School of Law (University of California, Berkeley).

By bringing together legal and ethnomusicological perspectives on both arenas of conflict, I hope to demonstrate how the concept of musical ownership is becoming increasingly diagnostic of music's personal and social meanings in our interdependent, interconnected world.

SUSAN SHORT
Social Inequalities: The Intertwining of Human Difference and Environments

Whether it is women's lack of advancement in science and technology in the academy, the inter-generational transmission of poverty, or racial-ethnic differences in achievement tests, persistent inequalities shape the very fabric of our society. These same inequalities generate particularly heated public and academic debate. At the very heart of these debates is disagreement on the relative importance of group difference in individual attributes, such as the ability to think spatially, personality traits, IQ, and others, and the role of structural and institutional factors, such as gendered training programs, differential access to quality education or quality jobs, testing systems, or policies and practices that privilege one group over another.

The growing centrality of the disagreement about the relative importance of individual attributes versus structural factors was reflected recently in a National Academy of Sciences (2006) press release titled Broad National Effort Urgently Needed to Maximize Potential of Women Scientists and Engineers in Academia. The document listed three key findings. The first read, "studies have not found any significant biological differences between men and women in performing science and mathematics that can account for the lower representation of women in academic faculty and leadership positions in S&T fields" (National Academies 2006). The New York Times covered this NAS report, juxtaposing the report's conclusion that women are hindered by "bias and outmoded institutional structures" with reference to former Harvard President Lawrence Summers' suggestion last year of "innate" intellectual difference (Dean 2006). In discussion of inequality, the structural and the biological frequently emerge as competing explanations.

The role of sociologists in such discussions is usually to explain how structural or environmental conditions-be they childhood experiences, school or work environments, media exposure, neighborhoods, or social policies-create and perpetuate observed patterns of inequality. Or, to put it differently, sociologists elaborate the "nurture" side in these "nature-nurture" questions. While consensus exists that "environments" matter to most social inequalities, environmental effects are not universal; not every individual responds in the same way to similar environmental conditions. One implication is that sociologists enhance their arguments and explanations by elaborating the conditions under which given environments will be associated with the outcomes under study. Recent advances in genomic science present new opportunity in this regard. As our knowledge of systematic biological difference has grown, so too has the opportunity to explain whether and how differences in human physiology are relevant to institutional and structural explanations of inequality.

I propose, through a Mellon New Directions Fellowship, to train in genetic and molecular epidemiology at Harvard University. My immediate goal in obtaining this training is to significantly expand my work on children in poverty. Evidence is mounting that childhood experiences have implications not only for individual opportunities, but for group differences, as well. Thus, elaborating the interplay of the environmental and biological in early life is a critical component in the larger enterprise of explaining persistent inequalities.