Past Lectures

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  • 2020-21

    Jeffrey Ravel:

    "Acceleration? Digital Resources and the Speed of Scholarship"

    Friday, April 23 from 10:30am to 12:15pm EST

    Via Zoom

    The massive integration of digital tools, methods, and resources into our work have made academics impatient.  Digital hardware and software allow us in principle to work much faster than we did in the days of typewriters and copying machines.  The ubiquity of information, in many shades of truth and falsehood, is only a click or two away.  Everywhere we turn, it seems, we expect acceleration. But is the promise of speed the most important contribution the Digital Humanities will make to humanistic scholarship?  During this virtual event, Professor Jeffrey Ravel will begin with a general discussion of digital resources and then proceed to the second part of the session, during which he will present his major Digital Humanities Theater initiative, the Comédie-Française Registers Project (CFRP). The project is co-funded by MIT, the French Government, The Comédie-Française, the Sorbonne, and the Université Paris-Nanterre.  Prof. Ravel will demonstrate the site and then discuss the genesis of the project, its advantages, its limitations, future directions.  Attendees may choose to attend only the dicsussion part of the session (first 30 minutes), or remain for the CFRP presentation and discussion (through 12:15pm). 

    Jeffrey S. Ravel is a Professor of History at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.  He studies the history of French and European political culture from the mid-seventeenth through the mid-nineteenth centuries.  He is the author of The Would-Be Commoner: A Tale of Deception, Murder, and Justice in Seventeenth Century France (Houghton Mifflin, 2008); and The Contested Parterre: Public Theater and French Political Culture, 1680-1791 (Cornell University Press, 1999).  He is currently working on a history of French playing cards and political regimes from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries.

    He co-directs the Comédie-Française Registers Project, a collaborative digital humanities venture between the Bibiliothèque-musée of the Comédie Française theater troupe, MIT, Harvard University, the University of Victoria, the Sorbonne, and the Université de Paris-Nanterre. Ravel has co-edited an online, open access, bilingual, volume of essays inspired by this project: Databases, Revenues, and Repertory: The French Stage Online, 1680-1793 (MIT Press, 2020).  He also directed the Visualizing Maritime History Project, a digital archive of two maritime history collections conserved by the MIT Museum.

    Ravel is the immediate Past President of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies.  From 2004-2006 he edited the Society’s annual journal, Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture He is also a past Co-President of the Society for French Historical Studies.  He organizes the Boston-Area French History group, which meets several times a year to discuss works-in-progress by local and regional scholars of the French past.  He is a Co-Director of MIT’s Beaver Press Print Shop, located in Barker Library.  Since April 2015, he has been the Faculty Lead for the MIT-Nepal Initiative.

    This event is presented by the Theatre Studies Interdisciplinary Research Group, with support from the Center for the Humanities. REGISTER HERE


    "Blackness and Anti-Blackness in American Public Life"

    Wednesday, March 31 from 4:30pm to 6:00pm EST

    Via Zoom

    REGISTER HERE

    As universities grapple with some of the wider ranging and material effects of racism, particularly anti-Blackness, three scholars engage questions about the relationship of racial identity to social movements, media production, and intelellectual property.

    Dr. Lisa M. Corrigan (Ph.D. University of Maryland) is a Professor of Communication and Director of the Gender Studies Program at the University of Arkansas.  Her first book, Prison Power: How Prison Politics Influenced the Movement for Black Liberation (University Press of Mississippi, 2016), is the recipient of the 2017 Diamond Anniversary Book Award and the 2017 African American Communication and Culture Division Outstanding Book Award, both from the National Communication Association.  Her second book was just released and is titled, Black Feelings: Race and Affect in the Long Sixties (University Press of Mississippi, 2020).  She also co-hosts a popular podcast with Laura Weiderhaft called Lean Back: Critical Feminist Conversations.

    Alfred L. Martin Jr. is a media and cultural studies scholar whose work is concerned with the complex interplay between media industry studies and audience/fandom studies as related to television and film studies, critical black studies, sexuality and gender studies.  Martin's book, The Generic Closet: Black Gayness and the Black-Cast Sitcom (Indiana University Press, 2021) argues that the black-cast sitcom is an explicit genre, and therefore its engagement with black gayness does not resemble any other contemporary genre. By examining audience reception, industrial production practices, and authorship, the project argues that representations of black gay characters are trapped into particular narrative tropes.  Martin is currently working on a solo-authored book, On the Black Hand Side: Black Fandoms and Cultural Politics, about blackness and fandom studies, a co-authored monograph on the documentary Tongues Untied (under contract with McGill-Queen’s University Press), and Rolling: Blackness and Mediated Comedy (under contract with Indiana University Press), an edited collection on Blackness, comedy and media.

    Anjali Vats is Associate Professor of Communication and African and African Diaspora Studies at Boston College and Associate Professor of Law at Boston College Law School (by courtesy). She is interested in issues related to race, law, communication, and popular culture, with particular focus on intellectual property. Her book, The Color of Creatorship: Intellectual Property, Race and the Making of Americans (Stanford University Press, 2020), examines the relationship between copyright, patent, and trademark law, race, and national identity formation. Vats has published in journals and law reviews, including the Quarterly Journal of Speech, Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, Communication, Culture & Critique, and the Cardozo Arts & Entertainment Law Journal. In 2016-2017, as an AAUW Postdoctoral Fellow, Vats taught at UC Davis School of Law. She was previously a faculty member in the Department of Communication and Culture at Indiana University, where she was affiliated with the Center for Intellectual Property Research at the Maurer School of Law. Before becoming a professor, Vats served as law clerk to the now retired Chief Justice A. William Maupin of the Supreme Court of Nevada.

    This  event is collaboratively hosted by The School of Communication, The Center for the Humanities, The Africana Studies Program and the American Studies Program.


     

    "Architects of the Archive: Oral, Visul, and Textual Records in the Global History of Cold War Columbia"

    Tuesday, March 9 at 10am EST

    Via Zoom

    REGISTER HERE

    Join the graduate student-led Fieldwork Interdisciplinary Research Grooup for a talk with guest speaker, Amanda Waterhouse, PHD Candidate with the Department of History at Indiana University.  Whaterhouse will be sharing her fieldwork experience with activists, Peace Corps volunteers, and grassroots architects in Colombia, as well as how she's been adjusting her strategies to locate interviewees, conducting digital fieldwork during the pandemic, and navigating various narratives in written and oral sources.  Register here.  

     


    Lauren Klein:

    "Digital Humanities and Data Justice: Lessons from Intersectional Feminism"

    Wednesday, March 3 from 1pm to 2:30pm EST

    Via Zoom

    REGISTER HERE

    Drawing from Klein’s recent book, Data Feminism (MIT Press), co-authored with Catherine D’Ignazio, this talk will present an approach to data justice—a field that considers how the collection, analysis, and use of data relate to issues of social justice—that is informed by the past several decades of intersectional feminist activism and critical thought. This talk will show how challenges to the male/female binary can challenge other hierarchical (and empirically wrong) classification systems; how an emphasis on emotion can expand our ideas about effective data visualization; and how the concept of “invisible labor” can expose the significant human efforts required of our automated systems, as well as of our digital humanities work. Taken together, these examples will demonstrate how feminist thinking can be operationalized into more ethical and equitable data practices in the digital humanities and beyond. 

    In preparation for this talk, attendees are encouraged to read:

     

    Dr. Lauren Klein is an Associate Professor in the Departments of English and Quantitative Theory and Methods at Emory University, where she also directs the Digital Humanities Lab. Before arriving at Emory, she taught in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication at Georgia Tech. She received her PhD in English and American Studies from the CUNY Graduate Center. She is the co-editor of Debates in the Digital Humanities (University of Minnesota Press), a hybrid print/digital publication stream that explores debates in the field as they emerge.

    This event is presented by the Digital Humanities Interdisciplinary Research Group, with support from the Center for the Humanities.  


    Matt Brim:

    "Queer-Class Counternarratives in Higher Education"

    Friday, November 6 at 2:30pm EST

    Via Zoom

    Join Professor Matt Brim for a discussion about dominant high-class narratives in queer studies. During this workshop, participants will discuss a selection of Dr. Brim’s most recent book, Poor Queer Studies: Confronting Elitism in the University (Duke UP, 2020). Attendees are encouraged to purchase Dr. Brim’s book or to access it on line through Richter Library.

    The following sections of the book will be discussed:

    • Introduction: Queer Dinners
    • Chapter 2: “‘You Can Write Your Way Out of Anywhere": The Upward Mobility Myth of Rich Queer Studies
    • Chapter 4: Poor Queer Studies Mothers

    Interested participants are also encouraged to read the introduction of Dr. Brim’s co-edited book,  Imagining Queer Methods (with Amin Ghaziani; NYU Press, 2019).

    PLEASE REGISTER HERE by Wednesday, November 4th.  Registrants will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.

     

    Matt Brim is Professor of Queer Studies in the English department at the College of Staten Island, CUNY, with a faculty appointment at the Graduate Center in the Women's and Gender Studies M.A. Program. He teaches a variety of courses in LGBTQ literature and women's studies, often with a focus on black feminist/queer studies. His most recent book, Poor Queer Studies: Confronting Elitism in the University (Duke University Press, 2020), reorients the field of queer studies away from elite institutions of higher education and toward working-class schools, students, theories, and pedagogies. His other books are the co-edited collection Imagining Queer Methods (with Amin Ghaziani; NYU Press, 2019), and James Baldwin and the Queer Imagination (University of Michigan Press, 2014). He has published in venues including the Journal of Homosexuality, the Journal of Modern Literature, and the Gay and Lesbian Review. Brim coedited the “Queer Methods” special issue of WSQ: Women’s Studies Quarterly, and he wrote an interactive online study guide for teaching the HIV/AIDS documentary film United in Anger: A History of ACT UP, directed by Jim Hubbard. He has served on the board of directors for CLAGS: The Center for LGBTQ Studies, and with Dr. David Gerstner he cofounded the Queer CUNY Faculty and Staff Working Group. For three years, Brim and Dr. Cynthia Chris coedited WSQ: Women’s Studies Quarterly, published by the Feminist Press. He is currently an associate editor for the James Baldwin Review. With Dr. Shelly Eversley, he is Academic Director of the Faculty Fellowship Publication Program, a university-wide initiative that advances CUNY’s institutional goal of supporting a diverse professoriate. In the fall 2019, Brim was a Distinguished CUNY Fellow at the Advanced Research Collaborative (ARC) at The Graduate School and University Center, The City University of New York.

     

    This event is presented by the Queer Studies Interdisciplinary Research Group, with support from the Center for the Humanities.


    Martin Tsang:

    "Beyond Scholarship, Beyond Words: Emotional and Affective Aspects of Humanities Fieldwork in the Caribbean"

    Tuesday, October 13th at 10am EST

    Via Zoom

    Join the graduate student-led Humanities Fieldwork Interdisciplinary Research Group for a discussion with Martin Tsang.  This event it open to all UM faculty and students.  

    Dr. Martin A. Tsang is the Cuban Heritage Collection Librarian and Curator of Latin American Collections. In 2015, Martin joined the University of Miami Libraries as the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) Postdoctoral Fellow. In his current role, he develops print and digital collections, teaches, curates exhibitions, provides consultative and instructional research support services and assists the Libraries in designing a new model for transformative library engagement with our research and teaching communities.
     
    Martin is an anthropologist and received his Ph.D. from Florida International University. He has previously held fellowships at the Cuban Heritage Collection, and his doctoral dissertation focuses on the Chinese in Cuba, specifically how the legacy of Chinese indentured workers have influenced Cuban culture and Afro-Cuban religion. His active research and publishing interests include contemporary issues of race, health, and religion in the Caribbean and Latin America. Prior to his appointment at UML, Martin was a postdoctoral research fellow on a National Institutes of Health-funded project investigating HIV and the tourist industry in the Dominican Republic using a "syndemics" framework. 
     
    Martin is a member of and has presented his work at the Latin American Studies Association (LASA), American Anthropological Association (AAA), the Royal Anthropological Institute (RAI), and the American Academy of Religion (AAR).

    REGISTER  HERE

  • 2019-20

    Tania Lombrozo:

    "Explanation: The Good, The Bad, and the Beautiful"

    Tuesday, February 18, 2020; 3:30-5:00

    Richter Library: Fexible Learning Space

    Like scientists, children and adults are often motivated to explain the world around them, including why people behave in particular ways, why objects have some properties rather than others, and why events unfold as they do. Moreover, people have strong and systematic intuitions about what makes something a good (or beautiful) explanation. Why are we so driven to explain? And what accounts for our explanatory preferences? In this talk I’ll present evidence that both children and adults prefer explanations that are simple and have broad scope, consistent with many accounts of explanation from philosophy of science. The good news is that a preference for simple and broad explanations can sometimes improve learning and support effective inferences. The bad news is that under some conditions, these preferences can systematically lead children and adults astray.

    This lecture is presented by the Cognitive Studies Interdisciplinary Research Group with support from the Department of Philosophy and the Center for the Humanities. 

     

    lombrozo headshotTania Lombrozo is a Professor of Psychology at Princeton University, as well as an Associate of the Department of Philosophy. She received her Ph.D. in Psychology from Harvard University in 2006 after receiving a B.S. in Symbolic Systems and a B.A. in Philosophy from Stanford University. Dr. Lombrozo’s research aims to address foundational questions about cognition using the empirical tools of cognitive psychology and the conceptual tools of analytic philosophy. Her work focuses on explanation and understanding, social cognition, causal reasoning, and folk epistemology. She is the recipient of numerous early-career awards including the Stanton Prize from the Society for Philosophy and Psychology, the Spence Award from the Association for Psychological Science, a CAREER award from the National Science Foundation, and a James S. McDonnell Foundation Scholar Award in Understanding Human Cognition. She has blogged about psychology, philosophy, and cognitive science at Psychology Today and for NPR’s 13.7: Cosmos & Culture. 


    Shalini Puri:

    "Fieldwork, Memory Studies, and the Public Humanities in the Anthropocene"

    Thursday, January 30, 2020 at 3pm

    Shalala Center, Senate Room 

     

    Academic writing on both postcoloniality and the anthropocene often focuses on tragedy. The organizing vocabulary is often that of loss, death, stasis, crisis, catastrophe. Puri's concerns diverge from these, seeking out instead narratives that honor life and live joyously in the uncertain present. Taking the Grenada Revolution as a case-study, she approaches the postcolonial anthropocene less through spectacular moments of violence or success, tragedy or triumph, than through quieter, slower, and more enduring everyday processes that involve both individual and collective practices of remembrance.

    Thinking through memorials, re-enactments, verbatim theater, landscape-as-setting, speculative and imaginative methods, Puri suggests ways that fieldwork informed by literary and performance studies can help reshape memory, action, and community. Drawing on theories of genre, affect, embodiment, social movements, and environmental justice, her central conceptual and methodological questions include: How might we strengthen the movement between Memory Studies and transformative action? How can fieldwork, suffused with the methods of the humanities, help? What silences continue to loom large and why? What are appropriate ways of approaching these silences? What forms of agency and collaboration does fieldwork in the humanities demand and enable?  And what forms of community, emotional sustenance, and joy does it offer? And finally, what might an eco-critical memory of the Grenada Revolution look like and accomplish?

     

     

    Shalini Puri is Professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh.  She works on postcolonial theory and cultural studies of the global south with a focus on the Caribbean. Her research spans memory studies, feminism, marxism, nationalism, incarceration, the arts, everyday cultural practices, fieldwork, and activism. She continues top be interested in the cultural practices, conflicts, and solidarities that have arisen out of the African and Asian diasporas set in motion by slavery and indentureship.  Her 2014 book The Grenada Revolution In the Caribbean Present: Operation Urgent Memory grows out of an interest in an interdisciplinary humanities.  Her bookThe Caribbean Postcolonial: Social Equality, Post-Nationalism, and Cultural Hybridity won the Gordon and Sybil Lewis Award for best book in Caribbean Studies in 2005.  She co-edits the Palgrave Macmillan series "New Caribbean Studies," which features  interdisciplinary and humanities-informed scholarship.  Puri is a member of Pitt’s Race, Poetics, and Empire research group. As a founding member of the recently formed Pitt Prison Education Project, she teaches Literature courses in which University of Pittsburgh students and incarcerated students studied together at a state prison. Her work in progress is on the global politics and poetics of water.   


    Kadji Amin:

    "Deidealization: A Heuristic for Politicized Fields of Study"

    Monday, October 28, 2019; 5:00-6:15pm

    Modern Languages and Literatures Conference Room (Merrick 210-01)

     

    This talk seeks to bridge contemporary debates on affect and method occurring in literary studies, on the one hand, and in women’s, queer, and trans studies, on the other. It contends that the two-step between idealization and critique, not the dominance of critique, is the overriding methodological problem for politicized fields of study. Returning to Melanie Klein, Amin considers the potential harms of idealizing reparation – an influential method in queer studies and queer of color critique. In the present, the weight of scholarly idealization in women’s, queer, and trans studies falls on marginalized Black and brown bodies, placing particular burdens on scholars of color. Against the binary of idealization and critique, Amin proposes deidealization as a minor mode of the reparative that allows scholars to hold onto their political ideals while sympathetically recognizing how objects of study inevitably fall short of them.

    This lecture is made possible by the Gender Studies Interdisciplinary Research Group, the Departmend of History, Department of Modern Languages and Literatures, the Department of English, and the Center for the Humanities.  

     

    Kadji Amin is Director fo Graduate Studies and Assistant Professor of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Emory University.  Kadji Amin was previously an Assistant Professor of Queer Studies in the Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Stony Brook University, a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in “Sex” at the University of Pennsylvania Humanities Forum (2015-16) and a Faculty Fellow at the Humanities Institute at Stony Brook (2015). He earned his Ph.D. in Romance Studies (French) with a graduate Certificate in Feminist Studies from Duke University in 2009. His research, which focuses on the disorienting effects of the queer and transgender past on politicized fields of scholarship, is published or forthcoming in GLQ, Transgender Studies QuarterlyFeminist FormationsWomen’s Studies QuarterlyFrench Studies, Études françaises, and L’Esprit créateur. He is coeditor, with Amber Jamilla Musser and Roy Pérez, of a special issue of ASAP/Journal on “Queer Form” and is the “Books in Brief” editor for GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies.  

  • 2018-19

    Bill Bulman

    Associate Professor of History & Global Studies

    Lehigh University

    The Rise of the Majority in Revolutionary England and its Empire

    Monday, February 11, 2019
    Third Floor Conference Room, Richter Library  
    Presented by the Center for the Humanities Early Modern Interdisciplinary Research Group

    Register Here

    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.

    ‌Bill Bulman writes about the political, religious, and intellectual history of Britain and its empire in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. His work examines the causes, nature, and consequences of the English Revolution, and the ways in which early moderns confronted pluralism. His first book, Anglican Enlightenment (2015), and a co-edited volume, God in the Enlightenment(2016), offered a new interpretation of the early Enlightenment, the post-revolutionary Church of England, and the religious politics of later Stuart England and its empire. His second major project locates the origins of majority rule in the representative assemblies of England and British America. He is also engaged in two related, collaborative projects aimed at re-thinking the relationship between history and the social sciences.


     

    Julia Serano

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

    Making Feminist and Queer Movements More Inclusive

    Wednesday, October 3, 2018 at 4.30pm

    South Activities Room, Shalala Student Center

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

    Exclusivity is a daunting problem within feminism and queer (i.e., LGBTQIA+) activism. Some feminists vocally condemn other feminists because of their manner of dress, interests, or for the sexual partners or practices they take up. There is a long history of lesbian and gay activists who outright dismiss bisexuals, transgender people, and other gender and sexual minorities. In general, these and other instances of exclusion arise when we prioritize one or a few forms of sexism and marginalization over all others - this inevitably results in far smaller movements with far more narrow and distorted agendas.

    In this talk, Julia discusses numerous strategies that she forwards in her recent book Excluded: Making Feminist and Queer Movements More Inclusive that empower us to challenge all forms of sexism and marginalization, even those that we may be unaware of or less familiar with. These strategies include recognizing natural variation in sex, gender, and sexuality, and that people are fundamentally heterogeneous; moving beyond fixed views of sexism and marginalization that deny many individual’s unique situations, experiences, and perspectives; and learning to more generally recognize double standards, double-binds, and methods of invalidation that are routinely used to undermine minorities and marginalized groups.‌‌

    Julia Serano is an Oakland-based writer, performer, biologist, and activist. She is the author of three books, Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity (now in second edition), Excluded: Making Feminist and Queer Movements More Inclusive, and Outspoken: A Decade of Transgender Activism and Trans Feminism. Julia’s other writings have appeared in over a dozen anthologies, and in news and media outlets such as TIME, The Guardian, Salon, The Daily Beast, Alternet.org, Ms., Out, and The Advocate. Her writings have been used as teaching materials in college courses across North America.

     

     


    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

    Thursday, November 15, 2018 at 4.30pm

    Third Floor Conference Room, Richter Library 

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

    In 1971, the Martinican writer Édouard Glissant created the avant-garde, educational play Histoire de nègre (Tale of Black Histories) with a group of Caribbean schoolteachers, and it toured throughout Martinique, reaching over 2,000 working-class spectators. In the following decades, however, the play and Glissant’s grassroots theatrical activism would remain virtually untouched by critics and artists, despite Glissant’s blossoming international reputation, both as a commentator of Caribbean culture and as a theorist of transnational, diasporic modes of belonging. Over the past four years, in collaboration with colleagues in the U.S. and Caribbean, I have been working as dramaturg, scholar, and co-translator to document and renew the play’s anti-racist, consciousness-raising mission. In this talk, I draw from my theorization of “creolization” as a performance-based process of reinventing meaning and resisting the status-quo to explore our ongoing efforts to restage—and transform—Glissant’s theatrical activism.

    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.

  • 2017-18

      

    "The Work of the Dead" by Thomas W. LaqueurThomas W. Laqueur

    Helen Fawcett Professor of History
    University of California, Berkeley

    Why Do We Care for the Dead?

    Monday, February 5, 2018 at 4:30pm

     

    Shalala Student Center, Third Floor, Activities Room North
    Free & Open to the Public  |  Registration Required 

    Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar
    Sponsored by the Department of History's Speakers Series

    REGISTER Why do the living need the dead? And why do they care for their bodies? This lecture examines the deep historical anthropology of the care for the dead and how it figures in the origin stories of many civilizations; it will explore the question of the discovery of death.Thomas Laqueur, Phi Beta Kappa Lecturer
    Thomas W. Laqueur is the Helen Fawcett Professor of History at the University of California, Berkeley. His research interests range from the cultural history of the body to the history of humanitarianism and of popular religion and literacy. Professor Laqueur’s scholarship has earned him numerous honors, including fellowships from the National Humanities Center, the Guggenheim and Rockefeller foundations, and the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. In 2007 he received the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation’s Distinguished Achievement Award, one of the nation’s highest scholarly honors for significant contribution to the humanities. Professor Laqueur was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1999 and a Member of the American Philosophical Society in 2015. His books include The Making of the Modern Body: Sexuality and Society in the Nineteenth Century co-edited with Catherine Gallagher (California, 1987); Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Harvard, 1990), which has been translated into more than a dozen languages; and most recently, The Work of the Dead: A Cultural History of Mortal Remains (Princeton, 2013). He writes for the London Review of Books and was a founding editor of the journal Representations.

    Alan Mikhail

    Professor of History
    Yale University

    Live Stocks: Animals and Economic Transformation in Ottoman Egypt

    Thursday, February 22, 2018

     

    Otto G. Richter Library, Third Floor Conference Room
    Free & Open to the Public  |  Registration Required

    REGISTER

    Presented by the Animal Studies & Environmental Humanities Interdisciplinary Research Group 

    This talk offers a template for understanding how rural economies based both on animal wealth and the shared labor of humans and animals changed at the end of the eighteenth century to effect the global transition of early modern rural societies from subsistence to commercialized agriculture. Sidelining the roles of animals as agricultural laborers, means of transport, and sources of food, this transition led to the formation of large landed estates in which human labor came to dominate and represented a fundamental change in the energy regime of Ottoman Egypt—from animal power to human power—that set Egypt on a wholly new political and economic course in the early nineteenth century. Combining the literatures of human-animal relations, early modern agriculture, and Ottoman economic and social history, this talk argues for the importance of nonhuman histories in understanding global economic, energetic, and political transformations.
    Alan Mikhail is Professor of History at Yale University. He is a historian of the early modern Muslim world, the Ottoman Empire, and Egypt, whose research and teaching focus mostly on the history of empires and environments. He has received many accolades for his scholarship, including the Roger Owen Award of the Middle East Studies Association, the Alice Hamilton Prize of the American Society for Environmental History, the Wayne D. Rasmussen Award of the Agricultural History Society, the Ömer Lütfi Barkan Prize of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association, and Yale’s Gustav Ranis and Samuel and Ronnie Heyman Prizes. Professor Mikhail is the author of Under Osman’s Tree: The Ottoman Empire, Egypt and Environmental History (Chicago, 2017); The Animal in Ottoman Egypt (Oxford, 2014); and Nature and Empire in Ottoman Egypt: An Environmental History (Cambridge, 2011). He is also the editor of Water on Sand: Environmental Histories of the Middle East and North Africa (Oxford, 2013). He currently serves on the editorial boards of Cambridge Studies in Islamic Civilization and the Palgrave Macmillan Series in World Environmental History, as well as the International Journal of Turkish Studies and Environmental History

    Gimena del Rio Riande

    Professor of Medieval Studies
    University of Buenos Aires

    Refounding the Digital Humanities from the South

    Wednesday, March 28th at 4pm

    School of Nursing, Executive Board Room


    This talk will focus on a “think global, act local” approach to digital humanities, through the perspectives of North-South, Western-Eastern, Canon-Corpus, and Center-Periphery, with the aim of reflecting upon the trajectory of the discipline. Case studies on epistemological diversity from the global South will enable an understanding of the global effects of its institutionalization. An emphasis on some Humanidades Digitales projects and initiatives from Latin America and the Caribbean will demonstrate how concepts such as the commons have been reshaped, significantly advancing the rethinking of Open Access and Open Science.

    Gimena del Rio Riande is Professor of Medieval Studies at the University of Buenos Aires and Researcher at the Instituto de Investigaciones Bibliográficas y Crítica Textual of the National Scientific and Technical Research Council, Buenos Aires. Her scholarship focuses on the use and methodologies of scholarly digital tools as “situated practices.” She is the cofounder of the Laboratorio de Innovación en Humanidades Digitales, Madrid, and of Revista de Humanidades Digitales, the first Spanish digital humanities journal; she is also vice president of the Asociación Argentina de Humanidades Digitales.

     

    Joshua Knobe

    Professor of Cognitive Science and Philosophy
    Yale University

    IRG Cognitive Studies Lecture: "Norms and Normality"

    Friday April 6th at 3:30pm to 5.30pm

    Third Floor Conference Room, Richter Library


    People ordinarily distinguish between ways of behaving that are "normal" and those that are "abnormal." But how exactly is this distinction to be understood? This talk will discuss a series of experimental studies designed to explore people's ordinary notion of normality. The key result is that people's ordinary notion of normality is not a purely statistical one (e.g., the type of behavior that is most frequent) or a purely prescriptive one (e.g., the type of behavior that is ideal). Instead, our ordinary notion of normality appears to mix together statistical and prescriptive considerations. I discuss implications of these findings for a variety of questions in cognitive science.
    Joshua Knobe is a professor at Yale University, appointed both in the program in cognitive science and in the department of philosophy. Most of his research is in the field of experimental philosophy.

     


     

    William Germano

    Professor of English,
    The Cooper Union

    Archive of Information, Archive of Ideas

    Monday, April 30th at 4:30pm

    School of Nursing, Executive Board Room


    How should a scholar organize research and present it on the page? That’s the fundamental question underlying academic publishing, and a perennial challenge for us as scholars. In this talk, William Germano draws upon his extensive experience in scholarly publishing – as publisher, editor, teacher, and author – to examine ways in which scholars can work most effectively to produce books that will be published -- and not only published but read.
    William Germano is author of Getting It Published: a Guide for Scholars and Anyone Else Serious about Serious Books (University of Chicago Press, 3/e 2016) and From Dissertation to Book (University of Chicago Press, 2/e 2013). He writes a biweekly blog for the Chronicle of Higher Education’s Lingua Franca blog; he has also published essays on writing and publishing in the Chronicle and elsewhere. Other books: The Tales of Hoffmann (BFI Film Classics, 2013), on Powell and Pressburger’s 1951 opera-film, and Eye Chart (Bloomsbury, 2017), a short cultural history of visual measurement. During a first career as a scholarly publisher, he worked as editor-in-chief of Columbia University Press and as vice-president and publishing director at Routledge, a position he held for nineteen years.

  • 2016-17

    Peter Holland

    McMeel Family Professor in Shakespeare Studies
    University of Notre Dame

    Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies

    Thursday, March 23, 2017 at 4:30pm

    United Wesley Gallery
    1210 Stanford Drive, Coral Gables, FL 33146
    Free & Open to the Public

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    This lecture is presented with the support of the ACCAC Distinguished Lecturers Program

     

    The book we know as the First Folio wasn’t given that title by the two Shakespeare colleagues who posthumously published his plays in 1623. Its formal name, Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies, is more functional, laying out genres for the 36 collected plays – like a TV channel offering varying types of movies.

    Peter Holland, one of the world’s foremost authorities on Shakespeare, examines the choice and significance of the volume’s title. What was behind it? How does thinking about genre help us understand how the plays work?

    Peter Holland, Professor and McMeel Family Chair in Shakespeare Studies, University of Notre DamePeter Holland is McMeel Family Professor in Shakespeare Studies in the Department of Film, Television, and Theatre as well as Associate Dean for the arts at the University of Notre Dame’s College of Arts and Letters. Previously, Holland was the Judith E. Wilson Reader in Drama and Theatre at the University of Cambridge (1996-1997) and Director of the Shakespeare Institute and Professor of Shakespeare Studies at the University of Birmingham (1997-2002). His work has concentrated on Shakespeare in performance and on editing Shakespeare’s plays. He is editor of Shakespeare Survey, general editor with Stanley Wells of the Oxford Shakespeare Topics series, associate general editor of the Oxford Drama Library, and series editor of Redefining British Theatre History. His article on ‘"William Shakespeare" is the longest entry in the new Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. He is a past president of the Shakespeare Association of America and an elected fellow of the Shakespeare Institute and of Trinity Hall, University of Cambridge.


    Vladimir Kulić bookVladimir Kulić

    Associate Professor, Florida Atlantic University School of Architecture

    Spaces of Non-Alignment:
    Urban Planning and the Global Cold War in Socialist Yugoslavia

    Friday, April 14, 2017 at 3:30pm

    Otto G. Richter Library, Third Floor Conference Room
    Registration Required

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    Presented by the Center for the Humanities Modernities Interdisciplinary Research Group
    Cosponsored by the Department of History and the School of Architecture

     

    Vladimir Kulić's talk will address issues of architecture and non-alignment in Yugoslavia during the Cold War. In addition to discussing historical concerns and aesthetic methodologies, his research tackles today’s greatly problematic reception of the avant-garde heritage of Yugoslav socialism. The theme of this presentation is additionally related to Dr. Kulić's work on a forthcoming exhibition about architecture in socialist Yugoslavia, which he is co-curating at MOMA. The show is scheduled to open in the summer of 2018.

    Vladimir Kulić is a design historian at Florida Atlantic University. He specializes in architecture after World War II, as well as global exchanges of architectural culture and contemporary criticism. He is the author of Modernism In-Between: The Mediatory Architectures of Socialist Yugoslavia (with Maroje Mrduljaš and Wolfgang Thaler, 2012). He has won a number of international fellowships and accolades, including the 2007 Trustees Merit Citation from the Graham Foundation, and the 2009 Bruno Zevi Prize for a Historical/Critical Essay in Architecture. He was the 2012-13 FAU Scholar of the Year, and a 2013 Fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies.


    ‌‌Dickinson Manuscript

    Martha Nell Smith

    Professor of English, Founding Director of the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities, University of Maryland

    Diversity is Not a Luxury in DH: New Challenges Post-2016

    Thursday, April 20, 2017 at 4:30pm

    Otto G. Richter Library, Third Floor Conference Room
    Registration Required

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    Presented by the Center for the Humanities Digital Humanities
    Interdisciplinary Research Group
    Cosponsored by the University of Miami Libraries, and the Departments of English
    and Modern Languages and Literatures

     Issues of authoritative and authoritarian, issues of access, mediation, and remediation, and issues of visibility and exclusion will be central to Martha Nell Smith's presentation and exchange with the audience. At a time when feminist, critical race, sexuality, and class critical inquiries have had such a profound effect (and for decades) in the humanities, the configurations of mainstream grant-funded digital humanities are often similar to the politics of exclusion and occlusion we have worked so long to transform so that one emerging feminist scholar imagines that queer worlds must be built in the “digital margins.” What are the consequences of such frozen social orders when they are made to seem objective features of intellectual life? Of course merely noting the pervasive problem is not enough, and in this presentation Professor Smith will pursue some answers for transforming the digital humanities so that innovations are sociological and not only technical. The frozen social relations of old orders can and should be thawed in order to enable real sociological innovations, new kinds of synergies for knowledge production.

    Martha Nell Smith (bio photo)Founder and Executive Editor of the Dickinson Electronic Archives (DEA), Founding Director of the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH), Martha Nell Smith is Distinguished Scholar-Teacher and Professor of English at the University of Maryland College Park. Author or coeditor of five books on Emily Dickinson, she is at work on three other books, including Everywoman Her Own Theology, a collection of essays on Alicia Suskin Ostriker, and several exhibitions for the DEA.

     

  • 2015-16

    The Seating Chart: The Ritual Life of Sovereignty in Africa's Cold War

    Friday, March 18, 2016 at 2:00pm

    Otto G. Richter Library
    Third Floor Conference Room

    Free & Open to the Public

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     Cosponsored by the Department of History

    As part of a larger effort by historians in many fields of reconsidering the history of the global Cold War in light of new evidence and new paradigms, Professor Burke’s current research examines how global superpowers and newly independent African sovereigns simultaneously tutored each other in the etiquette and performance of their respective roles within the post-1945 interstate system, and how the Cold War was lived within various cultural and ritual contexts in official and civic institutions. This talk will concentrate in particular on how gifts, condolences, thank-yous, state dinners, and other ceremonial forms within the interstate system were scripted, enacted, and subverted within new African states and in the circulation of African leaders, officials, and delegates in the United States and United Kingdom.

    Tim Burke is Professor and Chair of History at Swarthmore College. His main field of specialty is modern African history, specifically southern Africa, but he has also worked on U.S. popular culture and on computer games. Professor Burke teaches a wide variety of courses at Swarthmore, including surveys of African history, the environmental history of Africa, the social history of consumption, history of leisure and play, and a cultural history of the idea of the future. He is the author of Lifebuoy Men, Lux Women: Commodification, Consumption, and Cleanliness in Modern Zimbabwe (1996) and the co-author of Saturday Morning Fever: Growing Up With Cartoon Culture (1999). He is currently completing a book on individual experience and agency in twentieth-century Zimbabwe.

     


     

    Tim Burke

    Professor and Chair of History
    Swarthmore College

    The Present Future of the University and the Humanities:
    Designing the Liberal Arts for Uncertainty

    Thursday, March 17, 2016 at 4:30pm

    Otto G. Richter Library
    Third Floor Conference Room
    Free & Open to the Public

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    One of the most common strategies for defending liberal arts education is to argue that in a fast-changing world, the only way to prepare today's students for the careers and lives they will pursue is through a liberal arts curriculum. It's a common strategy because it's true, in both banal and profound ways. The economist John Kay has pointed out that most of what human beings aspire to in life is best obtained indirectly, that seeking the shortest distance between where we are and where we want to be often paradoxically ensures we will never approach our desired goals. Most existing liberal arts curricula only address unpredictability in the most vague and accidental ways; but what would the structure of liberal arts learning look like if it was centrally aimed at understanding and dealing with contingency and uncertainty?


     

    Generations and Contemporary American Fiction ‌

    Friday, February 26, 2016 at 4:00pm

    Otto G. Richter Library, Third Floor Conference Room
    Free & Open to the Public

    Cosponsored by the Department of English

    We've all heard about the "sixties generation," the cohort that remade music and other aspects of American culture. However, that generation has had less influence on fiction, and in fact the two subsequent generations, Generation Jones and Generation X, have had far more. This talk studies the waves of contemporary fiction from those generations–writers from Jonathan Franzen and Lorrie Moore to Chang-Rae Lee and Colson Whitehead–and makes a case for studying generations, which provide one dimension of cultural formation and identity that we have neglected in literary and cultural studies.

    Reading for Lecture:

     "Generation Jones and Contemporary US Fiction"

    PDF is password protected. Password will be provided after registering for the event.

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    Jeffrey J. Williams

    Professor of English
    Carnegie Mellon University

    "How To Be An Intellectual" by Jeffrey J. Williams

    The Present Future of the University and the Humanities: Brave New University

    Thursday, February 25, 2016 at 4:30pm

    Otto G. Richter Library, Third Floor Conference Room
    Free & Open to the Public

    ‌American higher education is going to hell in a handbasket, and this talk will tell you why. In particular, many current policies have disbanded the fundamental aim of equality, instituted in Jefferson's plans for Virginia through the Truman Commission, replacing it with "freedom of choice" and "personal responsibility." The talk will present cases–such as student debt–where this is not an abstraction but has real consequences for students and other citizens, and will suggest policies that will enhance this ideal of the university. 
      

    Jeffrey Williams is Professor of English and Literary and Cultural Studies at Carnegie Mellon University. He has published widely on the history of the novel, contemporary American fiction, the history of criticism, and the American university. He regularly publishes in magazines such as Dissent and The Chronicle of Higher Education, as well as academic journals. His books include PC Wars: Politics and Theory in the Academy (1994); The Institution of Literature (2001); Critics at Work: Interviews (2004); Theory and the Novel: Narrative Reflexivity in the English Tradition (2009); and How to Be an Intellectual: Essays on Criticism, Culture, and Politics (2014). He is one of the editors of The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism (2001; 2nd ed. 2010), and also served as editor of the Minnesota Review from 1992 to 2010.

    Reading for Lecture:

    "Innovation for What? The Politics of Inequality in Higher Education"

    PDF is password protected. Password will be provided after registering for the event.



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    Bio photo for Robin FlemingRobin Fleming

    Professor of History
    Boston College

    Living with the Fall of Rome: Britain in the "Dark Ages"

    Friday, February 5, 2016 at 4:30pm

    Otto G. Richter Library
    Third Floor Conference Room
    Free & Open to the Public

    This lecture is presented with the support of the ACCAC Distinguished Lecturers Program

    "Britain After Rome" book cover by Robin Fleming

    The lecture examines six different communities in post-Roman Britain engaged in recycling old Roman ceramics and glass. We will learn something about each of these groups–the kinds of people they were, the recent histories of the places in which they lived, the strategies they developed for procuring old Roman pots and glass, and then about the ways they chose to use this material. We will thereby broaden the story of the transition from Roman to not-Roman to include not just politics, but the lived experience of people who were having to figure out how to be in a period of radical material loss.

    Professor Fleming is a Professor of History at Boston College, and a 2013 MacArthur Fellow. Her books include Britain After Rome: The Fall and Rise, 400-1070 (2011), Kings and Lords in Conquest England (2004), and Domesday Book and the Law: Society and Legal Custom in Early Medieval England (2003). She has received grants or fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities; the Harvard Society of Fellows; the Bunting Institute; the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton; the Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Studies at Harvard University; and the Guggenheim Foundation. She is a fellow of the Massachusetts Historical Society, the Royal Historical Society, and the London Society of Antiquaries.


    Jon Meacham bio photoJon Meacham

    Presidential Historian

    The Art of Leadership: Lessons from the American Presidency

    Tuesday, January 26, 2016 at 7:00pm

    Maurice Gusman Concert Hall
    1314 Miller Drive, Coral Gables, FL 33146
    Free & Open to the Public

    Click here for more information & directions >>


     

    David Konstan

    Professor of Classics
    New York University

    Of Love and Loyalty: The View from Classical Antiquity

    Thursday, January 21, 2016 at 4:30pm

    CAS Gallery / Wesley Foundation
    Free & Open to the Public

    Presented by the Center for the Humanities Antiquities Interdisciplinary Research Group
    Cosponsored by the Department of Classics and the Department of Religious Studies

      Click here to listen to the podcast

     

    Bio photo for David Konstan (NYU) for Antiquities LectureThe German sociologist Georg Simmel asked: “If love continues to exist in a relationship between persons, why does it need faithfulness?” Love alone should be enough. Is loyalty a distinct kind of bond, more durable than love? If so, are the reasons for being faithful different from those for loving? In Professor Konstan's talk, he will suggest that in classical Greece and Rome, love and loyalty were in fact more closely associated than they are today. Examples will be drawn from texts by Aristotle, Cicero, Euripides, and Edward Albee.

    David Konstan is Professor of Classics at New York University; he previously taught at Brown University and Wesleyan University. His research focuses on ancient Greek and Latin literature, especially comedy and the novel, and classical philosophy. In recent years, he has investigated the emotions and value concepts of classical Greece and Rome, and has written books on friendship, pity, the emotions, and forgiveness. He has also written on ancient physics and atomic theory, and on literary theory, and is currently working on a book on the ancient Greek conception of beauty, and on a verse translation of the two Senecan tragedies about Hercules. He has been President of the American Philological Association, and is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.


    Sabine Hake

    Professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures
    University of Texas, Austin

    Ferdinand Lassalle, the First Socialist Celebrity

    Tuesday, January 19, 2016 at 4:30pm

    Otto G. Richter Library
    Third Floor Conference Room
    Free & Open to the Public

    Presented by the Center for the Humanities Modernities Interdisciplinary Research Group

     Listen to the Podcast



    ‌‌“I believe in Ferdinand Lassalle, the Messiah of the nineteenth century…” thus begins a socialist version of the Apostles’ Creed popular among his followers. Today he is best remembered as one of the founding fathers of German Social Democracy. But at the time, Lassalle was also the object of intense emotional attachments and fantasy productions. As part of an emerging socialist mythology, his celebrity status attests to an unusually personal engagement with political questions made possible by new literary genres and forms of political engagement. At first glance, the public fascination with his personal life seems far removed from the realities of working-class life and antithetical to the socialist ethos of community. But as this talk will demonstrate, the socialist movement in fact relied heavily on the products of the culture industry to strengthen socialist commitments and forge proletarian identifications. This point is important not only for a better understanding of the history of socialism but also for a historical perspective on the merging of political culture and celebrity culture today.

    Sabine Hake bio photoSabine Hake holds the Texas Chair of German Literature and Culture at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research on Weimar and Third Reich culture and German cinema focuses on the relationship between cultural practices and aesthetic sensibilities, on the one hand, and social movements and political ideologies, on the other. She is currently working on two book projects: a reassessment of German cinema from the perspective of media convergence and a study on the German proletariat as an imaginary subject in literature, art, film, and political theory.


     

    Abena Busia bio photo

    Abena Busia

    Professor and Chair, Department of Women's and Gender Studies
    Rutgers University

    Locating the Politics of Feminist Knowledge:
    The "Women Writing Africa" Project

    Thursday, September 10, 2015 at 3:30pm

    Otto G. Richter Library
    Third Floor Conference Room
    Free & Open to the Public
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    Professor Busia will share lessons learned from almost two decades of working on "Women Writing Africa," a four-volume publishing project of cultural restoration that aims to restore African women’s voices to the public sphere. It is often in women’s everyday popular culture, the culture we take for granted, that feminist knowledge is produced. Women’s knowledge is often hidden knowledge; and African ways of knowing discredited knowledge. Seeing through women’s eyes, we can locate the fault lines of memory, and thereby change prevailing assumptions about African knowledge, culture, and history.

      



    Poetry Reading

    Negotiating Diasporas: Poems Old and New

    Friday, September 11, 2015 at 12:30pm

    College of Arts & Sciences Gallery / Wesley Foundation
      1210 Stanford Drive, Coral Gables, FL 33146
    Free & Open to the Public
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    Abena Busia is Professor and Chair, Department of Women's and Gender Studies at Rutgers University. She is the co-director and co-editor of the groundbreaking Women Writing Africa Project, a multi-volume anthology published by the Feminist Press at CUNY. She is also the author of two poetry collections, Testimonies of Exile (1990) and Traces of a Life (2008). She is the current board Chair of the AWDF-USA, a sister organization to the African Women's Development Fund, which is the first and only pan-African funding source for women-centered programs and organizations. She teaches courses on African American and African diaspora literature, colonial discourse, and black feminism.

  • 2014-15

    "The Comic Image in British Print Culture 1820-1850" - Brian Maidment

    Brian Maidment

    Professor of the History of Print
    Liverpool John Moores University

    The Comic Image in British Print Cultures, 1820-1850

    Tuesday, September 16, 2014 — 4:30pm

    Otto G. Richter Library
    Third Floor Conference Room
    Free & Open to the Public

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    This extensively illustrated lecture seeks to re-evaluate the years between 1820 and 1850, the period between the gradual demise of the great tradition of political caricature represented by Gillray and Rowlandson and the flowering of black-and-white illustration in the novels and mass circulation magazines of the early Victorian period. Professor Maidment will suggest that during this period, the widespread use of wood engraving and lithography, combined with an emergent mass market for print culture, energized and popularized the comic image. Across a wide range of print genres — song-books, play-texts, Christmas gift books and annuals, and, especially, periodicals — comic art was developing both new modes and forms and creating a new relationship between image and text. This volatile, experimental and frenetic phase within the history of comic art both democratized and transformed the ways in which humor was produced and consumed.

    Brian Maidment is Professor of the History of Print in the English Department at the Liverpool John Moores University in Liverpool, England. He also holds Visiting Professorships at the University of Ghent and at the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University, where he has taught a week-long graduate seminar on the history of prints since 2002. He has published widely on nineteenth-century print culture, especially Ruskin, writing by laboring class writers, early Victorian periodicals, and mass circulation publishing. More recent work has centered on prints and visual culture, especially early nineteenth-century caricature and comic illustration. His publications include Reading Popular Prints 1780–1870 (1997) and Dusty Bob—A Cultural History of Dustmen 1790–1870 (2007), and Comedy, Caricature and the Social Order 1820–1850 (2012).


     

    Elephants without Borders: Exhibition, Art, and Science

    Thursday, January 29, 2015 — 4:30pm

    Animal Studies and Environmental Humanities Lecture

    Otto G. Richter Library
    Third Floor Conference Room
    1300 Memorial Drive

    This talk focuses on two elephants brought as war booty in 1798 to the Paris menagerie at the Jardin des Plantes. Traveling across colonial, national, and continental borders, they became objects of public amusement and subjects of artistic and scientific study. Against questions of “the animal” and “the human” in republican science and art, Professor Landes will consider how the least delicate of animals was perceived to be among the most sensitive and intelligent of beasts: along with man, one of nature’s most elevated creatures.

    Joan B. Landes

    Walter L. and Helen Ferree
    Professor of History
    Pennsylvania State University


    Professor Landes's wide-ranging interests include European gender, cultural, intellectual, and political history, with a focus on eighteenth-century France; interdisciplinary eighteenth-century studies; the history of modern feminist theory and feminist movements; the history of Enlightenment science and medicine; visual imagery; and French colonialism. Her most recent publication is Gorgeous Beasts: Animal Bodies in Historical Perspective (2012). She is the author of Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution (1988) and Visualizing the Nation: Gender, Representation, and Revolution in Eighteenth-Century France (2001). She has also edited Feminism, the Public and the Private (1998), and coedited Monstrous Bodies/Political Monstrocities in Early Modern Europe (2004). She has served as President of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies and has been awarded fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Getty Research Institute, the NEH, the Bunting Institute of Radcliffe College, among others.


    Headshot/profile photo of Wilmot JamesWilmot James

    Member of Parliament, South Africa

    Nelson Mandela and the Making of Modern South Africa

    Tuesday, March 31, 2015 — 4:30pm

    Otto G. Richter Library
    Third Floor Conference Room

    Free & Open to the Public

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    Drawing on his Moments with Mandela, Dr. Wilmot James will tell the story of Nelson Mandela's efforts at building a nation from a divided past and improving the lives of the least well-off, efforts that resonate with the philosophy of John Rawls that the distribution of goods and services must always benefit the least advantaged the most. Twenty years after the birth of democracy, some aspects of Mandela's legacy are enduring and others not. Dr. James will present an analysis of why the modern history of South Africa turned out the way it did.

    Dr. James is South Africa's Shadow Minister for Health and is the Federal Chairperson of the Democratic Alliance Party. He received his Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and is an Honorary Professor of Sociology at the University of Pretoria and in the Division of Human Genetics at the University of Cape Town.

  • 2013-14

    Arthur Marotti

    Distinguished Professor Emeritus of English
    Wayne State University

    Thursday, October 10, 2013 - 4:30pm

    Otto G. Richter Library
    3rd Floor Conference Room 
    1300 Memorial Drive  

    ‌‌‌‌‌Arthur F. Marotti is Distinguished Professor of English Emeritus at Wayne State University. He is the author of John Donne, Coterie Poet (1986); Manuscript, Print and the English Renaissance Lyric (1995); and Religious Ideology and Cultural Fantasy: Catholic and Anti-Catholic Discourses in Early Modern England (2005). He has also edited or co-edited ten collections of scholarly essays. Professor Marotti served as the editor of the journal Criticism (1986-96) and is a member of the editorial board of English Manuscript Studies 1100-1700, Studies in English Literature 1500-1900, Literature Compass, and JNL: Journal of the Northern Renaissance

     

    The Verse Nobody Knows: Rare or Unique Poems in Early Modern English Manuscript Collections

    Thursday, October 10, 2013 - 4:30pm

    Otto G. Richter Library
    3rd Floor Conference Room
    1300 Memorial Drive

    English Manuscript

    This will be a workshop on reading English secretary, mixed, and italic hands from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. We will look at about a dozen (pre-circulated) examples and, with the help of paleography essays by Muriel St.Clare-Byrne and R.W. McKerrow (copies to be sent in advance), we will examine and decipher as a group a number of poems written in easy to very difficult scripts. Although there is no quick way of becoming skilled in reading old scripts and although one has to learn the quirks and features of each scribe's hand, this exercise should encourage participants to use archival manuscript materials that can yield great benefits to their research.

     

      ‌


      

    The Geography of Ginseng and the Alchemy of Needs

    Thursday, November 14, 2013 — 4:30 pm

    Otto G. Richter Library
    3rd Floor Conference Room
    1300 Memorial Drive

         ‌ Listen to the podcast

    Of all the plants in the pharmacopoeia of traditional Chinese medicine, none was more treasured than ginseng. For most of the past, the plant was found only in Korea and Manchuria. Starting in the early eighteenth century, however, the geography of ginseng underwent a dramatic expansion—both through transplantation and new discovery. Professor Kuriyama's talk will start with the story of this expansion, and then pursue the surprising web of consequences that followed from the plant’s spread. The modern history of ginseng, he will show, is a global tale that entwines the histories of different Asian countries not only with each other, but also with Europe and North America. It is also a tale of the strange alchemy of needs, which ultimately brings together the fates of substances as disparate as tea and opium, kombu, salt, and MSG.



    Shigehisa Kuriyama

    Reischauer Institute Professor of Cultural History
    Professor and Chair, Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations 
    Professor, Department of the History of Science
    Harvard University

    ‌Professor Kuriyama is the author of The Expressiveness of the Body and the Divergence of Greek and Chinese Medicine (1999), a study of the different views of health and medicine held by the ancient western and eastern civilizations, which was awarded the William H. Welch Medal of the American Association for the History of Medicine. His research explores broad philosophical issues through the lens of specific topics in comparative medical history (Japan, China, and Europe). At Harvard,  he has also been actively engaged in expanding the horizons of teaching and scholarly communication through the creative use of digital technologies. He was a pioneer in the development of course trailers at Harvard, founded the Harvard Shorts competition for scholarly clips, and has held workshops on multimedia presentations of research for faculty and students at many universities around the world. He currently serves on the FAS Standing Committee on IT, the Advisory Committee for the secondary Ph.D. field in Critical Media Practice, and is a Senior Researcher at Harvard’s metaLAB.

     

     

    ‌  


      

  • 2012-13

    SHAKESPEARE IN MIAMI

    A Caribbean Accent to Shakespeare's Voice

    Delpha Charles 

    Thursday  February 7, 2013
    at 5:00pm

    CAS Gallery
    Wesley Foundation
    1210 Stanford Drive 
    Coral Gables, FL 33146

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

    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.

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     Looking at Lear:
    Images from the Folger Picture Archive

    Gail Kern Paster

    Director Emerita
    Folger Shakespeare Library

    Wednesday, February 13, 2013
    at 4:30pm

    CAS Gallery
    1210 Stanford Drive 
    Coral Gables, FL 33146

    Cosponsored by the Departments 
    of English and Theatre Arts

    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.

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    The Passions of the Air in King Lear and Macbeth

    Gail Kern Paster

    Director Emerita
    Folger Shakespeare Library

    Thursday February 14, 2013 
    at 4:30pm

    Otto G. Richter Library
    1300 Memorial Drive
    3rd Floor Conference Room
    Coral Gables, FL 33146

     

     


    Because of the early modern belief in the connections between the body and the cosmos – microcosm and macrocosm – comparisons of the winds and tides to human passions are commonplace in the period's bodily discourses. "The Egyptians fought against the Egyptians,  the East wind riseth often against the West, the South against the North, the Winde against the tyde, & one Passion fighteth with another," writes Thomas Wright in The Passions of the Mind in General (1604).

    Scholarly interest in these meteorological comparisons has tended to focus on the body rather than the weather, yet historicist investigation of the "ecology of the passions" requires attention to the transaction between the porous body of Galenic humoralism and its environment. This is especially true for the early modern period when "weather" was construed anthropocentrically, signifying an unpredictable, perhaps God-given set of calamitous local events and prodigies – storms, earthquakes, bloody rains, or battles in the sky.

    Shakespeare capitalizes on the fear and wonder associated with violent weather at key moments in the drama – the thunder and lightning at the opening of Macbeth, the storm at the center of King Lear. This paper will take a new look at Shakespeare's weather and the macrocosm-microcosm analogy which gives it psychological import.

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    Performance: King Lear

    February 20 - March 2, 2013

    Jerry Herman Ring Theatre
    1312 Miller Drive
    Coral Gables, FL 33146
    305-284-3355

     

    For more information and tickets, please visit:

    www.as.miami.edu/theatrearts/ring.html

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    Post-performance discussions with UM Shakespeare professors, the director, and actors on Sunday, February 24th (Anthony Barthelemy and Eugene Clasby), and Tuesday, February 26th(Pamela Hammons and Mihoko Suzuki). 


    "BATHING IN REEKING WOUNDS: THE LIBERAL ARTS AND THE ARTS OF WAR"

    Catharine R. Stimpson

    Thursday, February 28, 2013
    5:00 pm

    The Sue and Leonard Miller Center
    for Contemporary Judaic Studies
    5202 University Drive
    Merrick Building 105
    Coral Gables, Florida 33146

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    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.

    Catharine R. Stimpson is University Professor and Dean Emerita of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at New York University. She is currently affiliated with the Steinhardt Institute for Higher Education Policy, as well as with the NYU Law School. She served as President of the Modern Language Association and the Association of Graduate Schools. She was the first director of the Women’s Center at Rutgers, and the founding editor of Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society. The author of a novel, Class Notes (1979, 1980), and a selection of essays on literature, culture, and education, Where the Meanings Are (1988), she has also published over 150 monographs, essays, stories, and reviews in such places as The Nation, New York Times Book Review, Critical Inquiry, and boundary 2. She was co-editor of the two-volume Library of America edition of the works of Gertrude Stein. Professor Stimpson has lectured at approximately 400 institutions in the United States and abroad. Her public service has included the chairpersonships of the New York State Council for the Humanities, the National Council for Research on Women, and the Ms. Magazine Board of Scholars; she has also served on the board of PBS. 

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    "ART BASEL MIAMI BEACH AND THE CULTURE OF THE ART FAIR"

    Laura Knott‌

    Thursday, November 29, 2012
    4:30 pm

    Lowe Art Museum
    1301 Stanford Drive
    Coral Gables, FL 33124

    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.

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  • 2011-12

    ‌‌"OUT OF BOUNDS? A CRITIQUE OF THE NEW POLICIES ON HYPERANDROGENISM IN ELITE FEMALE ATHLETES"

    Katrina Karkazis

    Friday, April 27, 2012
    4:30 pm

    CAS Gallery/Wesley Foundation
    1210 Stanford Drive
    University of Miami

     

    Katrina Karkazis is a medical anthropologist at the Center for Biomedical Ethics at Stanford; her first book, Fixing Sex: Intersex, Medical Authority, and Lived Experience (Duke University Press, 2008), looks at the question of how to treat infants whose bodies do not fit neatly into our scientific categories of “male” or “female,” from the perspective of doctors, parents, and adults with intersex conditions themselves.  She argues that by viewing intersexuality exclusively through a narrow medical lens we avoid much more difficult questions. Do gender atypical bodies require treatment? Should physicians intervene to control the “sex” of the body? Is “sex” as man-made as “gender”? Her talk will address her new work on how the world of sports is grappling with the question of sex variance in the wake of the controversy over South African runner Caster Semenya.‌ ‌ ‌ 

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    ‌"MY LOVE AFFAIR WITH ART"

    Dr. Johnnetta Cole

    Friday, March 23, 2012
    4:30 pm

    Lowe Art Museum
    1301 Stanford Drive
    Coral Gables, FL 33124

    Dr. Johnnetta B. Cole was appointed the Director of the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art (NMAfA) in March, 2009. Founded as a small museum on Capitol Hill in 1964, NMAfA became a part of the Smithsonian Institution in 1979, and in 1987 it moved to its current location on the National Mall. The museum's collection of over 10,000 objects represents nearly every area of the continent of Africa and contains a variety of media and art forms. NMAfA also has an extensive education program. Since the mid-1980's, Dr. Cole has worked with a number of Smithsonian programs. She currently serves on the Scholarly Advisory Board for the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture, the construction of which will be completed on the National Mall by 2015.

    Before assuming her current position, Johnnetta Cole had a long and distinguished career as an educator and humanitarian. Through her work as a college president, university professor and through her published works, speeches and community service she has consistently addressed the issues most important to her; creating racial and gender parity and redressing all other forms of inequality.

    Dr. Cole served as president of Spelman College and Bennett College for Women. She is the only person to have served as president of these two historically Black colleges for women in the United States. She is also Professor Emerita of Emory University from which she retired as Presidential Distinguished Professor of Anthropology, Women's Studies and African American Studies.  Johnnetta Cole has been awarded 55 honorary degrees and she is the recipient of numerous awards, including the TransAfrica Forum Global Public Service Award, the Radcliffe Medal, the Eleanor Roosevelt Val-Kill Medal, the 2001 Alexis de Tocqueville Award for Community Service from United Way of America, The Joseph Prize for Human Rights presented by the Anti-Defamation League, The Uncommon Height Award from the National Council of Negro Women, The John W. Gardner leadership Award from The Independent Sector, the Lenore and George W. Romney Citizen Volunteer Award from the Points of Light Foundation, Ebony magazines most influential 100 in 2010, George Washington Carver award 2011, Benjamin Franklin Creativity Laureate Award and Washingtonian Magazine's 100 most powerful women 2011.

    Dr. Cole grew up in Jacksonville, Florida where in 1901 her maternal great-grandfather began the first insurance company in the state of Florida, an endeavor that earned him accolades as the state’s first black millionaire. She has conducted research in Africa, the Caribbean, and the United States, and she has authored and edited several books and scores of scholarly articles. Publisher’s Weekly stated, referring to Gender Talk: The Struggle for Women’s Equality in African American Communities co-authored by Cole and Beverly Guy-Sheftall, “Thoughtful, provocative, concerned and urgent, this work ignites a much-needed debate over the state of true black community and the role of women within that community.”

     

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    OF ANNAGRAMMATOLOGY:
    DECODING THE RENAISSANCE TEXT

    ‌William Sherman

    Thursday, March 29, 2012‌
    4:30 pm

    3rd Floor Conference Room
    Richter Library
    1300 Memorial Dr.
    University of Miami

    We are not used to the idea that anagrams might have anything serious to teach us: for most of us they are games we grow out of, and famous writers from Ben Jonson to Samuel Johnson, from John Dryden to T. S. Eliot, have dismissed their deployment in literature as trivial, empty, and even perverse -- a twisted art, as Dryden described it in his satirical poem MacFlecknoe, devoted to 'tortur[ing] one poor word ten thousand ways.' But Christopher Ricks has recently reminded us that Shakespeare's age was the veritable 'heyday of the anagram,' suggesting that the art of verbal recombination can be studied as 'a true assistance to art' in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In my illustrated lecture, I want to go further and suggest that anagrams may deserve a central place in a larger history, one with broader textual, cultural and intellectual dimensions. Bringing together some of the key figures in the birth of linguistics, literary criticism, psychoanalysis, cryptography and experimental art, anagrams offer a surprisingly useful lens for the processes by which modernity found itself in the hidden message of early modernity.

     

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    Florida in the XVI Century: Discovery and Conquest

    María Antonia Sáinz Sastre

    Tuesday, October 11, 2011
    11:00 am

    CAS Gallery/Wesley Foundation
    1210 Stanford Dr.
    University of Miami

    In her extensive study Florida in the Sixteenth Century: Exploration and Colonization (MAPFRE, 2011), María Antonia Sáinz Sastre recounts the saga of hardship, loss and calamity that befell so many Europeans who attempted to settle in Florida at the time. The lengthiest part of her book is dedicated to Pedro Menéndez de Avilés, the Adelantado from Asturias whose efforts resulted in the establishment of St. Augustine, the first permanent European settlement in North America. Sáinz Sastre uses in her study unique primary sources from the archives of the Marquis of Revillagigedo, a descendant of Menéndez de Avilés who was appointed Governor of Cuba in 1734.


    INDEPENDENCE LOST:
    THE GULF COAST AND THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION

    Kathleen Duval

    Associate Professor of History & Director of Undergraduate Studies
    University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

    Thursday, October 6, 2011
    4:30 pm

    3rd Floor Conference Room
    1300 Memorial Drive
    Richter Library

    Kathleen DuVal’s lecture concerns the Revolutionary War on the Gulf Coast. There, Spaniards, Britons, Creeks, Chickasaws, Choctaws, Acadians, enslaved and free African Americans, and others—but not American revolutionaries—took advantage of the war to forward their own ambitions. “Independence Lost” tells an alternative story of the American Revolution with unexpected actors, forgotten events, and surprising consequences.

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    THE FIERY TRIAL: ABRAHAM LINCOLN AND AMERICAN SLAVERY

    Eric Foner

    ‌DeWitt Clinton Professor of History
    Columbia University

    Thursday, September 22, 2011
    4:30 pm

    Storer Auditorium
    5250 University Drive
    University of Miami

    Winner of the 2011 Pulitzer Prize in History, the Bancroft Prize, and the Lincoln Prize: from a master historian, the story of Lincoln's-and the nation's-transformation through the crucible of slavery and emancipation.

    In this landmark work of deep scholarship and insight, Eric Foner gives us the definitive history of Lincoln and the end of slavery in America. Foner begins with Lincoln's youth in Indiana and Illinois and follows the trajectory of his career across an increasingly tense and shifting political terrain from Illinois to Washington, D.C. Although “naturally anti-slavery” for as long as he can remember, Lincoln scrupulously holds to the position that the Constitution protects the institution in the original slave states. But the political landscape is transformed in 1854 when the Kansas-Nebraska Act makes the expansion of slavery a national issue. 

       

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  • 2010-11

    NIGHT-RULE: EMPIRES OF THE NONHUMAN IN MONTAIGNE, SHAKESPEARE, AND DESCARTES
    Laurie Shannon

    Associate Professor of English
    Wender Lewis Teaching and Research Professor
    Northwestern University


    Thursday April 7, 2011
    4:30 pm


    3rd Floor Conference Room
    1300 Memorial Dr.
    Richter Library

    Ideas about certitude in human knowledge and about alleged differences in faculties between human and animal estate share a key historical pivot: Descartes's Discourse on Method. What does the question of species have to do with the history of skepticism -- and why? This lecture considers the underattended terms of debate between Montaigne and Descartes on the claims of animals, in order to show how Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream places species-defined limits on human authority instead of celebrating it.

     

       

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    THE POLITICAL ORIGINS OF THE HISTORY PLAY IN ELIZABETHAN ENGLAND

    Peter Lake

    University Distinguished Professor of History
    Professor of the History of Christianity, Divinity School
    Vanderbilt University

    Thursday March 24, 2011
    4:30 pm


    3rd Floor Conference Room
    1300 Memorial Dr.
    Richter Library

    This lecture attempts to outline the political and ideological contexts out of which the history play developed; and the context in which it was written, staged, and consumed. To this end, a wide range of tract materials as well as an account of the political dynamics of Elizabeth’s reign from the late 1560s to the early 1590s will be considered. The lecture will also suggest the ways in which contemporaries may have read the history play politically.

     

      

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    "NEW DIRECTIONS IN DIGITAL HUMANITIES"

    Kenneth Price

    Hillegass University Professor
    of 19th Century American Literature
    C0-Director, Center for Digital Research in the Humanities
    University of Nebraska-Lincoln

    Monday March 21, 2011  3:30 pm
    3rd Floor Conference Room
    Richter Library

     

    ‌Kenneth M. Price is the Hillegass University Professor of 19th  Century American Literature and co-director of the Center for  Digital Research in the Humanities at the University of  Nebraska–Lincoln ( http://cdrh.unl.edu/ ). Since 1995, Price  has served as co-director of the Walt Whitman Archive, an  electronic research and teaching tool that sets out to make Whitman's work accessible to scholars, students, and general readers. The Whitman Archive has been awarded grants from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission, the U. S. Department of Education, and the Institute for Museum and Library Services. In 2005, the Whitman Archive received a "We the People" grant from the NEH to build a permanent endowment to support ongoing editorial work; and in 2008, Price received a Digital Innovation Award from American Council of Learned Societies to edit Whitman's Civil War writings. He is a contributor to A Companion to Digital Literary Studies (2008) and his article, “Edition, Project, Database, Archive, Thematic Research Collection: What’s in a Name?” appeared in the summer 2008 issue (vol. 3, no. 3) of Digital Humanities Quarterly.

     

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    POLICING AND THE SOCIAL ORDER IN JACK-THE-RIPPER'S LONDON

    ‌Victor Bailey

    Charles W. Battey Distinguished Professor
    of Modern British History
    Director, Hall Center for the Humanities
    University of Kansas

    Wednesday February 23, 2011  4:30 pm
    3rd Floor Conference Room
    Richter Library

    In 1888 the East End of London, where Jack-the-Ripper brutally murdered five prostitutes, was notorious as a site of poverty, crime, and immorality. Yet at the time many Victorians believed that crime had declined in the 1880s. Some historians attribute this decline to efficient, even ruthless policing. Professor Bailey will suggest that the commission and repression of crime cannot be understood outside the wider context of employment, family and neighborhood, immigration, charity and welfare, housing and local government, and the local magistrates’ courts.  

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    RESTAURANTS FOR THE REST OF US

    ‌‌Robert Appelbaum 

    Professor of English Literature
    Uppsala University, Sweden
    Head of Department, Department of English and Creative Writing, Lancaster University

    Wednesday February 16, 2011  7:00 pm
    CAS Gallery
    Wesley House

    Can restaurants serve as a vehicle for cultural democracy? Can writing about restaurants do so? We have heard about palaces with Michelin stars, which none of us can afford. And we know all about fast food joints, which kill the soul while poisoning the body. But what about restaurants for the rest of us?

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    ART AND ILLUMINATION DISCOURSE: PARISIAN VISUAL CULTURE IN THE ERA OF THOMAS EDISON

    S. Hollis Clayson

    ‌Professor of Art History and History
    Bergen Evans Professor in the Humanities
    Director, Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities
    Northwestern University


    Thursday November 4, 2010 4:30 pm
    CAS Gallery
    Wesley House


    The lecture will pose one central question: to what extent did the electrical revolution in artificial lighting technologies, and the intense conversation that it engendered, shape experimental forms of printmaking headquartered in Paris between 1879 and 1882?  Etchings by Mary Cassatt and Edgar Degas will be emphasized.  

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  • 2009-10

    FOOD AND THE SENSES: PLEASURE, SIN AND GUILT IN SIXTEENTH CENTURY ITALIAN LITERATURE AND ART

    Laura Giannetti

    Associate Professor of Italian
    Modern Languages and Literatures Department
    University of Miami

    Thursday April 22, 2010 3:30 pm
    CAS Gallery
    Wesley House

    Two separate heavens awaited the dead in Ruzante’s Dialogo facetissimo: one for those who enjoyed the sensual world of food and sex and another reserved for those who lived malinconici, fasting and praying to God. Humanists, doctors, and food writers debated whether the concern for health or the pleasures of the senses should be the guiding principle in choosing food. Perhaps in the context of the Reformation the debate was resolved in favor of a concern for health and a tighter control of the body, the senses, and appetites; yet imaginative literature and artistic representations showed an increasing fascination with food, taste, and sensual pleasure. This paper will address how a discourse of food found in prescriptive literature was translated into and changed to empower the senses in the realm of the literary imagination.  

    FOOD AND THE SENSES: PLEASURE, SIN AND GUILT IN SIXTEENTH CENTURY ITALIAN LITERATURE AND ART FOOD AND THE SENSES: PLEASURE, SIN AND GUILT IN SIXTEENTH CENTURY ITALIAN LITERATURE AND ART

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    THE RISE OF A SUPERPOWER CHINA

    THE RISE OF A SUPERPOWER CHINAEdward Friedman

    Professor of Political Science
    University of Wisconsin-Madison

    Friday February 12, 2010 3:30 pm
    CAS Gallery
    Wesley House

    Some well-informed analysts see China dominating the world in the years ahead and re-shaping politics in a direction favorable to authoritarianism rather than human rights and democracy. Others see China as a bubble economy that will inevitably burst. Yet others fear for a war between the present superpower, America, and the rising superpower, China. The Chinese Communist Party government, in contrast to each and all of these future projections, insists that China's rise will facilitate peace and prosperity. China therefore should be seen as a global moral pole.  This talk will probe what lies behind these clashing perspectives on the future. Whatever lies ahead, no one should doubt that the rise of China is a world-changing event perhaps as significant as the rise of Europe which started around 1500. 

    THE RISE OF A SUPERPOWER CHINA

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    COSMOPOLITANISM, WOMEN, AND WAR: FROM VIRGINIA WOOLF'S THREE GUINEAS TO MARJANE SATRAPI'S PERSEPOLIS

    COSMOPOLITANISM, WOMEN, AND WAR FROM VIRGINIA WOOLF'S THREE GUINEAS TO MARJANE SATRAPI'S PERSEPOLISSusan Stanford Friedman

    Virginia Woolf Professor of English & Women's Studies
    Sally Mead Hands Bascom Professor of English
    University of Wisconsin-Madison

    Thursday February 11, 2010 3:30 pm
    CAS Gallery
    Wesley House

    What happens to the cosmopolitan dream of world citizenship during a time of war? What is women’s relationship to patriotism when the nation denies them full citizenship and uses the language of protection against violence to justify its circumscription of women’s rights? Virginia Woolf’s polemical essay on war Three Guineas (1938) and Marjane Satrapi’s bestselling memoir Persepolis (2000) explore these questions about gender, war, and world citizenship from their different standpoints in time and location. The lecture explores Three Guineas and Persepolis in the context of current debates about cosmopolitanism “from below” and argues that both women advocate a cosmofeminism “from the side”  that refuses loyalty to nation-states at war that do violence to their own citizens while claiming to protect them.  

    COSMOPOLITANISM, WOMEN, AND WAR: FROM VIRGINIA WOOLF'S THREE GUINEAS TO MARJANE SATRAPI'S PERSEPOLIS COSMOPOLITANISM, WOMEN, AND WAR: FROM VIRGINIA WOOLF'S THREE GUINEAS TO MARJANE SATRAPI'S PERSEPOLIS COSMOPOLITANISM, WOMEN, AND WAR: FROM VIRGINIA WOOLF'S THREE GUINEAS TO MARJANE SATRAPI'S PERSEPOLIS

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    ALL IN THE CUBAN AMERICAN/SIT-COM FAMILY: 'QUE PASA USA?' (1975-1980)

    Yeidy Rivero

    Associate Professor of American Culture,
    Screen Arts and Culture
    University of Michigan

    Friday January 29, 2010 4:30 pm
    Roberto C. Goizueta Pavilion
    2nd Floor Richter Library


    ¿Qué Pasa, USA? is America's first bilingual situation comedy. The program explores the trials and tribulations faced by the Peña family of Miami as they struggle to cope with a new country and a new language. The series focuses on the identity crisis of the  members of the family as they are pulled in one direction by their elders - who want to maintain Cuban values and traditions - and pulled in other directions by the pressures of living in a predominantly Anglo society.  Professor Rivero will examine how national and transnational cultural identities are constructed and negotiated through media discourses about race, ethnicity, nationality, and gender.  Her current research explores the ways in which television in 1950s Cuba was utilized as a commercial-national medium to re-articulate discourses of modernity.

    ALL IN THE CUBAN AMERICAN/SIT-COM FAMILY: 'QUE PASA USA?' (1975-1980) ALL IN THE CUBAN AMERICAN/SIT-COM FAMILY: 'QUE PASA USA?' (1975-1980) ALL IN THE CUBAN AMERICAN/SIT-COM FAMILY: 'QUE PASA USA?' (1975-1980)

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    ANIMAL PASSIONS AND WILD JUSTICE: THE EMOTIONAL AND MORAL LIVES OF ANIMALS AND WHY THEY MATTER

    ANIMAL PASSIONS AND WILD JUSTICE: THE EMOTIONAL AND MORAL LIVES OF ANIMALS AND WHY THEY MATTERMarc Bekoff

    ‌Professor Emeritus of Ecology, Evolutionary Biology
    University of Colorado-Boulder

    Tuesday January 26, 2010 3:30 pm
    CAS Gallery at Wesley House

    There is much research clearly showing animals as emotional and empathic beings and displaying moral intelligence. In his talk, Bekoff will present numerous examples on the emotional lives of animals and make his case about animal morality, or what he calls “wild justice." He will focus on the details of social play behavior, or the many ways in which animals play cooperatively and fairly.  ‌ 

    ANIMAL PASSIONS AND WILD JUSTICE: THE EMOTIONAL AND MORAL LIVES OF ANIMALS AND WHY THEY MATTER ANIMAL PASSIONS AND WILD JUSTICE: THE EMOTIONAL AND MORAL LIVES OF ANIMALS AND WHY THEY MATTER

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  • 2008-09

    THE ARGONAUTIC EXPEDITION: FROM FOLKTALE TO MYTH

    THE ARGONAUTIC EXPEDITION: FROM FOLKTALE TO MYTHJames J. Clauss

    ‌Professor of Classics
    Director of the University Honors Program
    University of Washington

    Wednesday, April 1st 2009

    Professor Clauss will trace the evolution of the famed Argonautic expedition from a tale of personal growth to a myth that accounts for, perhaps even justifies, Greek expansion in the East and in North Africa, as well as hints at the origins of the long-standing conflict with the Persian Empire.

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    SMITH THE CRITIC: MIMESIS, SYMPATHY, AND SATISFACTION

    SMITH THE CRITIC: MIMESIS, SYMPATHY, AND SATISFACTION

    James Chandler

    ‌Franke Distinguished Professor
    Director, Franke Institute for the Humanities
    University of Chicago

    Thursday, March 26th 2009

    Though not best known for his work in criticism and aesthetics, Smith thought and wrote a great deal about such matters. He spent much of his later life on a major treatise on the “imitative arts,” which may have included the “Essay on the Imitative Arts,” posthumously published in 1795. Wordsworth, for one, had no use for Smith as a critic, or for any of the Scottish Enlightenment writers on literature and the arts. But Robert Burns was deeply influenced by Smith’s writing and so were other leading literary figures. Moreover, Smith was certainly one of the leading moral theorists of the eighteenth century, and his critical arguments are closely imbricated with the sorts of arguments he makes in the Theory of Moral Sentiments. To understand Smith’s complex challenge to the work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, for example, it is necessary to see why Smith quarreled with Rousseau’s account of the imitative arts.

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