Event Calendar | Center for the Humanities | University of Miami

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  • AUGUST 2012

    Event Co-sponsored by
    The Center for the Humanities

    Absurd Celebration:
    The First International Festival of Virgilio Piñera’s Theatre


    Click here for more information 8/17/12 - 10/22/12

    Ring Theatre
    More Info...

  • SEPTEMBER 2012

     

    Casey Klofstad
    University of Miami

    Civic Talk:
    Peers, Politics, and the Future of Democracy


    9-7-12  |  8:00 PM  |  Books & Books
    Click here for Event Photos

    Does talking about civic issues encourage civic participation? In his innovative book, Civic Talk: Peers, Politics, and the Future of Democracy, Casey Klofstad shows that our discussions about politics and current events with our friends, colleagues, and relatives — "civic talk" — has the ability to turn thought into action—from voting to volunteering in civic organizations. Klofstad’s pathbreaking research is the first to find evidence of a causal relationship between casual chatting and civic participation.

    “ ...in an era where texting, Facebook and Twitter rule, Klofstad convincingly demonstrates that ordinary talk still does matter in a digital world.”
    — Wendy Rahn, Professor of Political Science,
    University of Minnesota

    Casey Klofstad, Associate Professor of Political Science, received his Ph.D. from the Department of Government at Harvard University. His recently published articles include: “The Dating Preferences of Liberals and Conservatives,” “The Political Incorporation of Cuban Americans: Why Won’t Little Havana Turn Blue?” and “Exit and Entrance Polling: A Comparison of Election Survey Methods.”


    20% off at Books & Books Café on the day of the event,
    just mention the Center for the Humanities

    Pre-Election Event!

    Bring your questions

    Public Invited
    Directions...


    Presented by
    The University of Miami

    Invitation Only

    New Humanities Graduate Student Reception


    9-7-12 4:30 PM

    CAS Gallery
    Click Here for Photos


    Presented by
    The University of Miami

    Invitation Only

    New Humanities Faculty Reception


    9-13-12 4:30 PM

    CAS Gallery
    Click Here for Photos


     

    Mark Juergensmeyer
    University of California, Santa Barbara

    Global Rebellion:
    Religious Challenges to the Secular State,
    from Christian Militias to al Qaeda


    9-17-12 6:35 PM

    Seminar for UM Religious Studies Students

    9-18-12 3:30 PM

    Seminar for UM Religion Faculty

    9-19-12 3:30 PM

    Seminar for UM Humanities Faculty and Grad Students

    9-20-12 7:00 PM

    Public Lecture:
    Global Rebellion
    Alumni Center

    Why has the turn of the twenty-first century been rocked by a new religious rebellion? From al Qaeda to Christian militias to insurgents in Iraq, a strident new religious activism has seized the imaginations of political rebels around the world. With his new book, Global Rebellion: Religious Challenges to the Secular State, from Christian Militias to al Qæda, Mark Juergensmeyer provides an up-to-date road map through this complex new religious terrain. He has been a frequent commentator in the news media, including CNN, NBC, CBS, BBC, NPR, Fox News, ABC's Politically Incorrect, and CNBC's Dennis Miller Show.

    “Is religion the problem, or is religion the solution?
    Is religion a harm to global ethics, or does it provide a healing touch?”

    — Mark Juergensmeyer

    [ Click Here for More Information...]


    Event Co-sponsored by
    The Center for the Humanities

    Judaic Studies Speaker Series: Yair Mintzker
    The Multiple Deaths of Jew Suss: February 4, 1738


    To RSVP, email: ccjs@miami.edu 9-24-12  |  7:00 PM

    Miller Center Auditorium


  • OCTOBER 2012

    Joel Nickels
    University of Miami

    The Poetry of the Possible:
    Spontaneity, Modernism and the Multitude


    10-3-12  |  7:00 PM  |  Books & Books
    Click here for Event Photos

    The Poetry of the Possible recovers modernist literature’s utopian dimension, arguing that modernism’s abstractions and difficulties are ways of imagining powers of collective self-organization. Challenging the image of modernism as a socially detached movement, The Poetry of the Possible demonstrates how modernists’ anxieties about vanguard parties and bureaucratic centralization stimulated their interest in unofficial, decentralized political manifestations and the spontaneous political capacity of the multitude.

    “The Poetry of the Possible is one of the finest pieces of scholarship I have recently read. It is an excellent model of how to read modernist works politically. . .”
    — Luke B. Carson, author of Consumption and
    Depression in Gertrude Stein, Louis Zukofsky and Ezra Pound

    By examining scenes of collective life in works by William Carlos Williams, Wyndham Lewis, Laura Riding and Wallace Stevens, The Poetry of the Possible reminds us that our own attempts to imagine leaderless networks of collective initiative are not so much breaks with modernist forms of knowledge as restagings of some of modernism’s most radical moments of political speculation. Nickels retells the story of modernism as the struggle to represent democratic capabilities that lie outside established regimes of political representation.

    Joel Nickels received his Ph. D. in English from U.C. Berkeley. As an Assistant Professor at the University of Miami, he currently focuses on modernist literature, contemporary political theory, and early twentieth-century models of internationalism and nonstate space. His second book project is entitled The Imaginary International, and examines nonstate-based forms of self-government in the works of Claude McKay, B. Traven, Lola Ridge and Melvin Tolson.


    20% off at Books & Books Café on the day of the event,
    just mention the Center for the Humanities

    Public Invited
    Directions...


    Event Co-sponsored by
    The Center for the Humanities

    Imagined Nations, 50 Years Later:
    Reflections on Independence and Federation in the Caribbean


      10/11/12 - 10/13/12

    Caribbean Literary and Cultural Studies


    Presented by
    The University of Miami

    2011 - 2012 Center for the Humanities Fellows Symposium


    10-19-12 10:30 PM

    School of Nursing
    Executive Board Room

  • NOVEMBER 2012

    Michael Miller
    University of Miami

    Europe and the Maritime World:
    A Twentieth-Century History


    11-7-12  |  8:00 PM  |  Books & Books
    Click here for Event Photos

    Europe and the Maritime World: A Twentieth-Century History offers a new framework for understanding globalization over the past century. Through a detailed analysis of ports, shipping, and trading companies whose networks spanned the world, Michael B. Miller shows how a European maritime infrastructure made modern production and consumer societies possible. He argues that the combination of overseas connections and close ties to home ports contributed to globalization.

    “ ...a challenging and audacious new perspective
    on the history of nineteenth and
    twentieth-century globalization.”

    — Geoffrey Jones, Isidor Straus Professor of Business History
    Harvard Business School

    Miller also explains how the ability to manage merchant shipping's complex logistics was central to the outcome of both world wars. He chronicles transformations in hierarchies, culture, identities, and port city space, all of which produced a new and different maritime world by the end of the century.

    Michael Miller teaches European history at the University of Miami. He has written books on the Bon Marché Department Store in Paris and the interwar milieu of intrigue and espionage in France. He has been a Guggenheim Fellow and a fellow of the National Endowment for the Humanities. While he has spent a large part of his research time in France, he has also lived in England, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Germany.


    20% off at Books & Books Café on the day of the event,
    just mention the Center for the Humanities

    Public Invited
    Directions...


    Event Co-sponsored by:
    The Center for the Humanities

    Click here for more information

    Department of History Speaker Series: Christine Leigh Heyrman


    11-15-12 3:30 PM

    Otto G. Richter Library
    3rd Floor Conference Room


    Brenna Munro
    University of Miami

    South Africa and the Dream of Love to Come:
    Queer Sexuality and the Struggle for Freedom


    11-28-12  |  8:00 PM  |  Books & Books, Coral Gables

    Click here for Event Photos

    After apartheid, South Africa established a celebrated new political order that imagined the postcolonial nation as belonging equally to the descendants of indigenous people, colonizing settlers, transported slaves, indentured laborers, and immigrants. Its constitution, adopted in 1996, was the first in the world to include gays and lesbians as full citizens. 

    “This is a smart, gutsy, and moving book.”
    — Neville Hoad, author of African Intimacies: Race, Homosexuality and Globalization

    Munro asserts that the inclusion of gay people made South Africans feel “modern”—at least for a while. As South Africa’s reentrance into the global economy has failed to bring prosperity to the majority of its citizens, homophobic violence has been on the rise. Munro reports on how contemporary queer activists and artists are declining to remain ambassadors for the “rainbow nation” and refusing to become scapegoats for the perceived failures of liberation and liberalism.

    Brenna Munro, Associate Professor of English, received her Ph.D from the University of Virginia. Her research focuses on the intersection between studies of gender and sexuality, postcolonial theory, and African literature. She is the author of "Caster Semenya: Gods and Monsters," "Queer Futures: The Coming-Out Novel in South Africa," and the forthcoming "Nelson, Winnie, and the Politics of Gender” for the Cambridge Companion to Nelson Mandela, and “Gender and Sexuality in African Fiction” for the Oxford History of the Novel in English, Volume 11.


    20% off at Books & Books Café on the day of the event,
    just mention the Center for the Humanities

    Public Invited
    Directions...


    Presented by
    Presented by the Lowe Art Museum
    and the Center for the Humanities

    Laura Knott
    Curatorial Associate, MIT Museum 

    Art Basel Miami Beach and the Culture of the Art Fair


    11-29-12 4:30 PM

    Public Lecture
    Lowe Art Museum
    Parking Map...

    Art Basel Miami Beach powerfully represents the phenomenal expansion of contemporary art fairs since they began in 1967. While the first of the modern fairs was a small, cooperative venture, today's international art fairs profoundly influence cultural tourism and the business of buying and selling contemporary art. "Art Basel Miami Beach and the Culture of the Art Fair" looks at the artists and the galleries as they have been, as they are at this year's ABMB, and as they are likely to be in the future.

    Laura Knott develops and manages exhibitions at the MIT Museum and teaches "Money and Ethics in the Contemporary Art World" at Tufts University. She holds a Master's degree from MIT in Visual Studies. Ms. Knott's career as an artist includes presentations at the documenta exhibition, online, and on public television. She is the editor of a book about Sky Art and the author of articles about contemporary art and museum practice.

    Click Here for the Podcast

  • JANUARY 2013


    Temple Grandin
    Colorado State University

    Different Kinds of Minds


    1-31-13 7:00 PM

    Public Lecture:
    Different Kinds of Minds
    BankUnited Center

    2-1-13 9:30 AM

    Seminar for UM Students

    Click Here for Event Video, Photos and Podcast

    Temple Grandin is one of the world’s most accomplished and well known adults with autism. In 2010, she was named one of Time Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People of the Year. She lectures to parents and teachers throughout the U.S. on her experiences with autism.

    “Every school, large or small, with the responsibility of educating children with autism or Asperger’s
    needs the guidance this book [The Way I See It: A Personal Look at Autism and Asperger's] offers...”

    — Ruth Christ Sullivan, former president
    of the Autism Society of America

    Dr. Grandin is the author of four books, including the national bestsellers Thinking in Pictures and Animals in Translation. Her most recent book is The Way I See It: A Personal Look at Autism and Asperger’s. The 2010 HBO movie based on her life, starring Claire Danes, received seven Emmy Awards.

    [ Click Here for More Information ]

  • FEBRUARY 2013

     

    Cosponsored by
    the Department of English, Caribbean Studies and Creative Writing Programs

    Shakespeare in Miami: Delpha Charles

    A Caribbean Accent to Shakespeare's Voice


    2-7-13 5:00 PM

    Public Lecture
    A Caribbean Accent 
    CAS Gallery
    Click here for Event Photos

    A Caribbean Accent to Shakespeare’s Voice is a book of quotations, stories, “translations” of many of Shakespeare’s famous utterances and topics—from love and friendship to the supernatural—embellished by riveting Caribbean characters and scenes.

    Born in Montserrat and having grown up in Antigua, Dr. Delpha Charles coined the word AfroCaro to describe herself and Caribbean natives of African descent. She holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of Miami; she received her M.A. from NYU and her B.A. from Howard. She was a Professor of English for twenty years at Miami-Dade College and a Professor of English at Oakwood College, Huntsville.

    [ Click Here for More Information ]


    Cosponsored by the Departments of English, Theatre Arts and the Master of Arts in Liberal Studies Program

    Shakespeare in Miami: Gail Kern Paster
    Director Emerita, Folger Shakespeare Library

    Looking at Lear:
    Images from the Folger Picture Archive

    Air and Passion in King Lear and MacBeth


    2-13-13 4:30 PM

    Public Lecture
    Looking at Lear 
    CAS Gallery
    Click here for Event Photos

    2-14-13 4:30 PM

    Air and Passion 
    UM Students & Faculty
    Richter Library
    3rd Floor Conference Room
    Click here for Event Photos

    King Lear is replete with arresting stage tableaux: the aged king himself and his Fool, the naked body of Edgar disguised as Poor Tom of Bedlam, the mad Lear buffeted by the storm, Lear holding the dead body of Cordelia.

    The 10,000 digitized Shakespeare images of the Folger picture archive provide an illustrated history of interpretation and reception including many examples from King Lear. What these images show us, however, is that in their efforts to render a true portrait of Shakespeare's Lear, every theatrical age ends up representing itself.

    Gail Kern Paster was Director of the Folger Shakespeare Library from 2002 to 2011. The Folger houses the world’s largest collection of Shakespeare materials; as director, Paster made the Folger's materials more accessible to the public and strengthened its educational mission. She is the author of The Idea of the City and the Age of Shakespeare and Humoring the Body: Emotions and the Shakespearean Stage; she served as president of the Shakespeare Association of America and editor of Shakespeare Quarterly.

    [ Click Here for More Information ]


    Shakespeare in Miami: King Lear


      2/20/13 - 3/2/13

    Ring Theatre 
    Click here for Event Photos

    Post-performance discussions with UM Shakespeare professors, the director, and actors on Sunday, February 24 and Tuesday, February 26 (free for UM students on Tuesday, Feb 26th)


    Mary D. Garrard
    American University

    Art versus Nature:
    A Renaissance Competition in the Key of Gender 


    2-21-13 7:00 PM

    Public Lecture:
    Art vs. Nature
    CAS Gallery

    Click Here for Event Video, Photos and Podcast

    In her provocative book, Brunelleschi's Egg: Nature, Art and Gender in Renaissance Italy, Mary D. Garrard brings an art historical perspective to the transition that was underway during the Renaissance in the idea of nature —the physical universe and its operations — from an organism imbued with a mind or a soul to a "scientific" conception of the world as a machine that lacks intelligence. This transition was accompanied and assisted by the metaphorical equation of nature with the female, lending rational support to the objectification and exploitation of nature. Taking her examples from the works of the major artists of Florence, Rome, and Venice, such as Botticelli, Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Titian, Garrard shows that the elevation of male-dominated visual arts and the idea of art and culture as masculine spheres depended upon the representation of nature as a female Other to be overcome.

    Brunelleschi’s Egg is an immensely stimulating, thought-provoking book that represents a major contribution to Renaissance studies.”
    Renaissance Quarterly

    Professor Garrard is best known for her groundbreaking feminist scholarship that has illuminated art of the Italian Renaissance-Baroque period. Her publications include two books and other writings on Artemisia Gentileschi, work that pioneered modern scholarship on a major 17th-century Italian artist. With Norma Broude, she co-edited four books on feminism and art history that have become basic texts in American universities. Garrard has lectured extensively on Renaissance art and feminist issues in universities, colleges and museums across the country.

    [ Click Here for More Information ]


     

     

    Early Modern Women: New Perspectives

    February 21-23, 2013

    The Medieval, Renaissance and Baroque Symposium celebrates the first issue of Early Modern Women: An International Journal produced by the new editorial team under the auspices of the Center for the Humanities and the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Miami. This symposium is supported by the John Carter Fund, Department of Modern Languages and Literatures; the Center for the Humanities; the Departments of History, Art History, English; the Lowe Art Museum; and the Miller Center / Feldenkreis Program in Judaic Studies.

    [ Click Here for More Information ]

     

     

    Catharine R. Stimpson
    University Professor and Dean Emerita of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, New York University

    "Bathing in Reeking Wounds":
    The Liberal Arts and the Arts of War


    2-28-13 5:00 PM

    Public Lecture
    Bathing in Reeking Wounds  
    Judaic Studies — Miller Center
    Click here for Event Photos

    Focusing on Macbeth, Professor Stimpson will discuss how the humanities are crucial in arriving at complex understandings of war in its multifarious manifestations. Wars inspire documentation, invention, and creativity; and historical and literary analysis as well as interdisciplinary and transdiscplinary work in Trauma Studies — bringing together psychoanalysis and psychology, history, law, and medicine — helps us in healing the wounds of war. With new tools of research and communication — e.g., electronic and digital — the practitioners of the liberal arts are more prepared than ever to explore, describe, and explain war, as well as to widely distribute the resulting ideas and information, enabling us to arrive at a deeper awareness of history and self-recognition through such endeavors.

     

    [ Click Here for More Information ]

  • MARCH 2013

    Amitav Ghosh
    Award-Winning Author

    China and the Making of Modern India

    Speaking of Babel:
    The Risks and Rewards of Writing About Polyglot Worlds


    3-19-13

    4:30 PM

    Public Lecture:
    China and India
    CAS Gallery

    3-21-13

    7:00 PM

    Public Lecture:
    Speaking of Babel
    CAS Gallery

    Click Here for Event Video, Photos and Podcast

    Amitav Ghosh is one of India's best-known writers. Born in Calcutta, he studied in Delhi, Alexandria, and Oxford, where he earned a doctorate in Anthropology. Ghosh’s books include The Circle of Reason, The Shadow Lines, In An Antique Land, Dancing in Cambodia, The Calcutta Chromosome, The Glass Palace, Incendiary Circumstances, The Hungry Tide, as well as Sea of Poppies and The River of Smoke which are the first two volumes of the Ibis trilogy.

    Among the awards that Amitav Ghosh’s books have received are India’s Sahitya Akademi Award, the Ananda Puraskar, the IndiaPlaza Golden Quill Award, and the Crossword Book Award, Britain’s Arthur C. Clarke Award as well as France’s Prix Médicis.

    “...a writer with a historical awareness and an appetite for polyphony that are equal to the immense demands of the material he seeks to illuminate...”
    — Chandrahas Choudhury,
    The New York Times Book Review

    Amitav Ghosh’s work has been translated into more than twenty languages. His essays have been published in The New Yorker, The New Republic and The New York Times. He has taught in many universities in India and the USA, including Delhi University, Columbia, Harvard, and Queens College. He was the recipient of a Dan David Award for 2010, which recognizes achievements that shape and enrich society today.

    [ Click Here for More Information ]


     

    Language & Democracy Conference

    March 21-22, 2013

    Click here to watch Closing Discussion video

    This conference, organized and funded by the University of Miami School of Law and the College of Arts and Sciences Center for the Humanities, and co-sponsored by the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures and the Program in American Studies, aims to explore existing and possible relations between linguistic pluralism and democratic governance from a variety of scholarly perspectives, and in diverse geographic, national, and historical contexts.

    [ Click Here for More Information ]

     

    CANCELLED

    Anthony Grafton
    Princeton University

    How Jesus Celebrated Passover:
    The Renaissance Discovery of the Jewish Origins of Christianity

    Apocalypse in the Stacks:
    The Transformation of Books, Libraries, and Reading


    4-9-13

    4:30 PM

    Public Lecture:
    How Jesus Celebrated Passover
    CAS Gallery

    4-11-13

    7:00 PM

    Public Lecture:
    Apocalypse in the Stacks
    Storer Auditorium

    4-12-13

    4:30 PM

    Seminar on
    Professionalization for UM Humanities Faculty
    + Graduate Students

    Anthony Grafton is Henry Putnam University Professor of History at Princeton University. His special interests lie in the cultural history of Renaissance Europe, the history of books and readers, the history of scholarship and education in the West from antiquity to the 19th century, and the history of science from antiquity to the Renaissance.

    “...Anthony Grafton is the acknowledged master
    of his craft. We look to him to set standards for
    the rest of us to follow.”

    — Keith Thomas, The New York Review of Books

    Professor Grafton is the author of ten books and the coauthor, editor, coeditor, or translator of nine others. He has been the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship (1989), the Los Angeles Times Book Prize (1993), the Balzan Prize for History of Humanities (2002), and the Mellon Foundation’s Distinguished Achievement Award (2003), and is a member of the American Philosophical Society and the British Academy. In 2011 he served as President of the American Historical Association.


    Presented by
    The University of Miami

    "Foundation Fundraising: Opportunities, Resources, and Strategies"
    Humanities Faculty Workshop


    4-18-13 3:30 PM

    Humanities Faculty Only
    3rd Floor Conference Room
    Click Here for Event Photos

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