The Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation (HFGF): an application toward an application...

The HFGF (if I may)--
is of some considerable interest to me as both an educator and a peace-lover; the foundation recognizes critical work from both the natural and social sciences and humanities which, and I quote:

promise to increase understanding of the causes, manifestations, and control of violence, aggression, and dominance

I will be applying for their dissertation fellowship award of $15,000 (US) in order to complete my doctoral thesis from Purdue University. I am comfortable, and my body is not at rest, as I am armed with the following works (in no particular order, but in a particular theme/pattern):

--Reinhold Niebuhr's Moral Man and Immoral Society (New York: Scribener's Sons, 1960).
--Hent de Vries' Religion and Violence: Philosophical Perspectives from Kant to Derrida (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002).
--Rene Girard's Des Choses caches depuis la fondation du monde (Paris: Editions Grasset & Fasquelle, 1978).
--Rene Girard's La Violence et le sacre (Paris: Editions Bernard Grasset, 1972).
--Valentin Groebner's Defaced: The Visual Culture of Violence in the Middle Ages (New York: Zone Books, 2004).
--Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno's Gesammelte Schriften: Dialektik der Aufklarung und Schriften 1940-1950 (S. Fischer Verlag GmbH, Frankfurt am Main, 1987).

Collectively, these texts should provide me with a scaffold toward a genesis of violence and a theory toward its dissolution and containment but not its resolution; again, violence is ever-always with us and will not be erased any more than adipose cells can be eradicated. As the (medical) scientist is aware these cells, like memes of violence, can ONLY be decreased to a given capacity.

My location is a nice holding cell right across the new Dali Museum where I am also a research fellow; The Campus Grind is a fantastic site--though not quite the Widener--it remains a quaint and quiet enough interstitial s/p(l)ace. And now, let us get to it...