Julia Serano

Author of Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity

Making Feminist and Queer Movements More Inclusive

Presented by the Center for the Humanities Queer Studies Interdisciplinary Research Group, SpectrUM, and the Women & Gender Studies Program

Herns Marcellin ‌

Associate Professor of Anthropology
University of Miami

Toni Cela 

Affiliated Faculty
University of Miami

Les jeunes Haïtiens dans les Amériques/ Haitian Youth in the Americas

Haitian Youths in the Americas examines the contexts in which Haitian youth and young people of Haitian descent negotiate their socio-cultural conditions in Haiti and in different societies across the Americas. This book provides unique insights into the complexity of identity processes as well as the ambivalence of the modes of belonging and engagement of young people of Haitian descent in Haiti and other societies in which they live or circulate.

Stacy Hartman

Project Manager, Modern Language Association

Articulating Humanities Expertise to Broad Audiences

How do we as humanists talk about our own forms of expertise? Indeed, how do we ourselves perceive those forms of expertise from the inside? How might we better articulate them to a broader public that includes prospective employers from outside the academic humanities? This workshop is designed to underscore the value of advanced study in the humanities to the wider world of work and the interested public. It will begin with an exercise to prompt participants to think capaciously about the forms of expertise they are developing as graduate students in the humanities. Based on this work, participants will then consider ways to describe these forms of expertise in a number of professional genres, including: "elevator pitches," LinkedIn, cover letters, résumés, and job interviews.

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Session 1 : 9:00am - 10:00am
• "Usurpers, Encroachers, Malefactors and Thieves: Narratives of Violence in Twelfth-Century Local Monastic Chronicles," Stephanie Skenyon (History)
• "Prevailing Trifles: Theresa Cornwallis West, Young Ireland, and the Irish Famine, 1846," Catherine Judd (English) 

Session 2 : 10:15am - 11:15am
• "'You have set yourself to Music:” Writing voice in The Picture of Dorian Gray," Sarah Cash (English)
• "The Hermeneutics of Disaster," Lindsay Thomas (English)

Session 3 : 11:30am - 12:30pm
• "Film Music and Embodied Cognition," Juan Chattah (Musicology)
• "A Dictator's Image: François Duvalier and Expo '67," Hadassah St Hubert (History)

Session 4 : 1:30pm - 2:30pm
• "Colonial Indigeneities across the Global South," Tracy Devine Gúzman (MLL)
• "Philosophy and Autobiography: A Certain Gesture: Evnine’s Batman Meme Project and Its Parerga!," Simon Evnine (Philosophy) 

Session 5 : 2:45pm - 3:45pm
• "Contemporary Nigerian Queer Poetics: Romeo Oriogun," Brenna Munro (English)
• TBA, Dominique Reill (History)

Caleb Everett 

Professor of Anthropology
University of Miami

Numbers and the Making of Us:
Counting and the Course of Human Cultures

Numbers and the Making of Us is a sweeping account of how numbers radically enhanced our species’ cognitive capabilities and sparked a revolution in human culture. Number concepts are a human invention—a tool, much like the wheel, developed and refined over millennia. Everett examines the various types of numbers that have developed in different societies and details fascinating work with indigenous Amazonians who demonstrate that, unlike language, numbers are not a universal human endowment.

Presented by the Center for the Humanities Theatre & Performance Studies Interdisciplinary Research Group

Emily Sahakian

Associate Professor of Theatre and French, University of Georgia

Restaging Édouard Glissant’s Histoire de nègre (Tale of Black Histories): Consciousness-Raising Theatre Under Construction

Emily Sahakian (Ph.D., Northwestern University and the École des hautes études en sciences sociales) is Associate Professor of Theatre and French at the University of Georgia. Her first book, Staging Creolization: Women’s Theater and Performance from the French Caribbean (2017), explores the works of a pioneering generation of late twentieth-century female playwrights from Martinique and Guadeloupe, and reconstructs these plays’ international production and reception histories, in the Caribbean, in France, and in English-translation in the United States. With Andrew Daily, she is preparing a translation and bilingual, critical edition of Histoire de nègre (Tale of Black Histories), a Martinican avant-garde play devised collaboratively by Caribbean schoolteachers under Edouard Glissant’s direction in 1971, and she is working with the Compagnie SIYAJ from Guadeloupe to restage the play and renew its potential for dialogic education and anti-racist activism.

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Thursday
11-15-18
4:30pm

Third Floor Conference Room, Otto G. Richter Library

Christopher de Hamel

Fellow
Corpus Christi College, Cambridge University

The Library of Saint Thomas Becket (Public Lecture)

On de Hamel's Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts:
“De Hamel is a man of extraordinary erudition and easy charm; his book asks many questions of the past, and invokes many mysteries…” 
— The New Yorker
 
“Full of delights...”
— Tom Stoppard

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Scott Heerman 

Assistant Professor of History
University of Miami

The Alchemy of Slavery:
Human Bondage and Emancipation in the Illinois Country, 1730-1865

Catherine Hall

Emerita Professor of History
Chair of the Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slave-Ownership
University College London (UCL)

Edward Long and the Making of "Race" Across the Black/White Atlantic (Public Lecture)

“Professor Hall’s research has transformed our understanding of race, gender, class and empire within modern Britain…”
— Modern British Studies (Birmingham)

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Tim Watson 

Associate Professor of English
University of Miami

Culture Writing:
Literature and Anthropology in the Midcentury Atlantic World

Focusing on the 1950s and early 1960s, Culture Writing explores the dynamic exchanges between literary writers and anthropologists on both sides of the Atlantic. Culture Writing shows that the "literary turn" in anthropology took place earlier than has conventionally been assumed, in the 1950s rather than the 1970s and 80s, and occurred in the context of decolonization. Simultaneously, some literary writers reacted to the end of the period of modernist experimentation by turning to ethnographic methods for representing the people and cultural practices of Britain, France, and the United States.

Bill Bulman

Associate Professor of History & Global Studies, Lehigh University

The Rise of the Majority in Revolutionary England and its Empire

The majority vote is the foundational element of representative assemblies, party politics, and democracy in today's world. While nearly all academics and the public at large have come to see this way of making decisions as natural to the political realm, it is actually an historical accident. The prevalence of the majority vote today is due to the fact that it suddenly became the practice of the English House of Commons and the North American colonial assemblies when Britain's empire first took shape. Yet this process has never been narrated or explained. Bulman's current project aims to do both, using traditional and digital tools.

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Jim Grossman

Executive Director, American Historical Association

Lunch Seminar:

Preparing Humanities PhD’s for the Future Instead of the Past

Slightly less than half of all history Ph.D's end up in tenured or tenure-track positions in colleges and universities. Approximately one-third of those are in research universities. In language and literature, the other discipline for which there are good data, the landscape looks about the same, perhaps even a bit thinner. Are our Ph.D programs preparing students for the careers they are likely to have, whether as faculty in the broad context of higher education or beyond the professoriate? Jim Grossman, executive director of the American Historical Association will discuss the AHA's inquiries into whether and how graduate preparation in history and other humanities disciplines might adapt to this changing landscape. The conversation will consider how our programs can help our Ph.D students broaden their career horizons and better prepare them for that wider terrain. The workshop is directed both towards faculty and graduate students.

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Rudolf Dekker

Autobiographical Writing and History Research Group Director
Huizinga Institute - Research School for Cultural History at the University of Amsterdam

The Secret Diary of Constantijn Huygens, Jr. (1628-1697): Society, Politics, and Culture in the Late Seventeenth Century (Public Lecture)

“Dekker has had a keen eye for popular culture and eyewitness accounts of history throughout his career. Having published on, among other things, popular risings, cross-dressing, humor, childhood, and education in the early modern period, Dekker now presents us with an introduction to an extraordinary and extensive seventeenth-century diary, written by Constantijn Huygens...”
— Willemijn Ruberg, Biography

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Justin Ritzinger 

Assistant Professor of Religious Studies
University of Miami

Anarchy in the Pure Land:
Reinventing the Cult of Maitreya in Modern Chinese Buddhism

Jerry Singerman

Senior Humanities Editor, University of Pennsylvania Press

Lunch Seminar:

Proposal to Book: The Nuts-and-Bolts of Scholarly Publishing

Francois Recanati

Research fellow at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) in Paris, France

Imagination and the Self (Public Lecture)

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Viviana Diaz-Balsera ‌

Professor of Spanish
University of Miami

Guardians of Idolatry:
Gods, Demons, and Priests in Hernando Ruiz de Alarcón’s Treatise on the Heathen Superstitions

In 1629, Catholic priest Hernando Ruiz de Alarcón produced a treatise designed to aid the church in its abolishment of native Nahua religious practices. The bilingual Nahuatl-Spanish work collected diverse incantations, or nahualtocaitl, used to conjure Mesoamerican deities for daily sustenance and medical activities. Guardians of Idolatry offers readers a rare, in-depth look at the nahualtocaitl and the native cosmogonies, beliefs, and medical practices they reveal. It tells a compelling story of the robust presence of a unique form of Postclassic Mesoamerican ritual knowledge, fully operative one hundred years after the incursion of Christianity in south Central Mexico, and shows the disparate ways in which both colonizers and resilient indigenous agents contributed to the conservation of Mesoamerican teachings.