Last USP Seminar of Spring 2021 Features Graduate and Professional School University Scholars’ Research
Christian Bale (Law School) “OIRA’s Older Sister: The Legislative Reference Division”
Article I of the Constitution vests “All legislative Powers” with Congress. Though only Congress may originate legislation, the president possesses two powerful legislative authorities of his own. The first, the Veto Power, is well known. The second, the Recommendation Clause, has received limited attention.
The Recommendation Clause provides the constitutional basis for what Franklin Roosevelt and other 20th Century administrations referred to as the “president’s legislative program”—a series of legislative proposals endorsed by the White House and sent to Congress for consideration. From the 1940s through the beginning of the 21st Century, the president’s program was a centerpiece of the president’s agenda. Presidents, perhaps more than any other metric, were judged by their success on Capitol Hill.
The White House Office of Management of Budget’s Legislative Reference Division (“LRD”) orchestrated the process of reviewing and sometimes even drafting the proposals that comprised the president’s program. Over the course of the 20th Century, OMB’s LRD, in addition to managing the president’s program, gained a number of other functions to aid the president in carrying out his legislative prerogatives.
Christian’s research (1) provides an overview of the president’s role in the legislative process; (2) provides an in-depth account of LRD’s role in assisting the president carry out his legislative duties; (3) attempts to outline the contours of the president’s program as it evolved over the course of the 20th Century and its decline; and (4) advocates for a return to the PALP.
Devon Carter (Music) “The Voice of the Past: Some Investigations of Operatic Voice Past and Present”
Devon’s research is on voice: both the literal history of techniques of vocal performance and the aesthetic history of what that voice meant to its listeners. In this talk, largely adapted from a paper he wrote in an independent study last semester (“An Auenturus Þyng: Medievalism in Postmodern Opera”), he attempts to relate that project to his current research on changes in vocal practice and aesthetics in the nineteenth century. He centers the talk on Julius Eastman’s “Prelude to the Holy Presence of Joan d’Arc” (1981), a short piece for unaccompanied voice that embodies the fraught relationships between a postmodern art-music context, medieval and medievalist subject matter, and a voice that seems to belong to both at once. “An Auenturus Þyng” discussed how Eastman and his successors (he examined works by Harrison Birtwistle, Kaija Saariaho, Ron Athey and Juliana Snapper, George Benjamin, and Kate Soper) turned to the Middle Ages and argued they did so to address issues that were not “realistic” in a modern context through titular “adventurous” or “marvelous things.” In this talk, however, he wishes to examine how the operatic voice itself seems to fall into this category of the “marvelous” and thus find itself banished from the present.
Jessica Covil (English) “Taking ‘Care’ Seriously: Racial Trauma, Pained Bodies, and the Responsibilities of Poetry”
Jessica’s dissertation chapter explores ethical and political questions surrounding the role of the poet/poetry in the contemporary world, especially around issues of racialized trauma. It homes in on a particular poetry performance of Kenneth Goldsmith’s, though this micro-focusing is done in an attempt to spark a broader conversation; she seeks to center care in discussions of life and art, especially in the contemporary moment. Her chapter examines public reactions to Goldsmith’s piece in news articles, online discussions, and statements by members of the poetry community, and reads these side-by-side with scholarly work. She takes up Sianne Ngai’s theory of the gimmick, Heather Love’s questions around objectification and authorial distance, and Anthony Reed’s critique of the commodification of blackness. She also employ Christina Sharpe’s praxis of “wake work,” Susan Sontag’s theories around pain and witnessing, and Saidiya Hartman’s conceptions of the afterlife of slavery and “redressing the body.”
