Tita Chico Awarded Research and Scholarship Award (RASA)

Professor Tita Chico has been awarded a Research and Scholarship Award (RASA) from the Graduate School for the academic year 2019-2020.

This semester-long award will allow Professor Chico to make significant progress on her third single-authored monograph, “Technologies of Wonder in the Age of Enlightenment,” a study of the place of wonder in Enlightenment thought, broadly, and the role wonder played in early modern scientific epistemology, particularly.  The Enlightenment has long been associated with reason and rationality.  Yet, as Professor Chico’s new book aims to show, in the eighteenth century, wonder underwrote rational, scientific inquiry. By mining the similarities of the literary and the scientific modes at the moment they begin to split into two distinct cultures, Professor Chico’s research introduces new and urgent questions about the legacy of disciplinarity that continues to inform the organization of knowledge today. 

In addition, Professor Chico will lead a research methods workshop for graduate students interested in archival work. She will bring students to the Folger Shakespeare Library to work with primary materials, and she will guide students in developing proposals to submit for fellowships and grants at research libraries and archives.