Sep 14 2009
3:00 PM - 5:00 PM, 212 University Club Building
'Globalization and the Humanities'
SeminarSep 21 2009
3:00 PM - 5:00 PM, 212 University Club Building
Andrea Westlund
Philosophy, UW-Milwaukee
'Autonomy in Relation'
In recent years feminist philosophers have offered trenchant critiques of traditional, individualistic ideals of autonomy and have developed alternative relational conceptions that highlight social dimensions of agency and the self. This work has deepened and enriched philosophical thought about the conditions of individual agency and has opened up a point of fruitful contact and exchange between feminist thought and analytic moral psychology more generally. The paper tries to develop this exchange, in part by showing how a relational conception of autonomy can help us to understand an important form of shared agency. It argues that autonomy is constitutively relational in the sense that it depends upon a dialogical disposition to hold oneself answerable to external, critical perspectives. In holding oneself answerable, one implicitly treats oneself as "one's own representative" in critical normative discourse. Though such treatment does not require the agent to hold particular substantive values or to be free from all social domination, it is nonetheless intimately tied to a capacity for what she calls symmetrically shared agency. When we engage in symmetrically shared decision-making and planning, the disposition to hold ourselves answerable to one another constitutes us not only as autonomous but also as equal participants in a shared deliberation.
Andrea Westlund is an assistant professor of philosophy and women's studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Her research and teaching interests are mainly in ethics and feminist philosophy, and her work focuses primarily on autonomy and shared agency in relationships of friendship and love. Her papers have been published (or are forthcoming) in Hypatia, The Monist, Philosophers' Imprint, The Philosophical Review, and Signs .
SeminarSep 28 2009
3:00 PM - 5:00 PM, 212 University Club Building
Mark Netzloff
English, UW-Milwaukee
'The Ambassador's Household: Sir Henry Wotton, Domesticity, and Early Modern Diplomatic Writing'
Netzloff's paper examines the social and material life of the early modern embassy. In his discussion of the career and correspondence of Sir Henry Wotton, England's resident ambassador in Venice from 1603-1621, he focuses not on the diplomatic content but, instead, on the embassy itself as a space of residence, domestic business, and social and pedagogical conduct, examining the everyday matters of the embassy: not only gossip, informal espionage, and, yes, even interior decorating, but especially the material practices and social dynamics of letter writing. The circulation of news and intelligence, one of the embassy’s primary functions, conferred a central role to a multinational staff of secretaries, retainers, and correspondents. In its anomalous, extraterritorial position -- as a national space beyond the nation and a household outside the familial structure -- Wotton's embassy reimagined "domestic" identities by elaborating alternative affective ties based on adoption, affiliation, and mentorship.
Mark Netzloff is an Associate Professor of English and Literary Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. This semester he is also a UW-System Fellow at the Institute for Research in the Humanities, where he is finishing a book manuscript entitled Beyond the State: English Stage Agents in Early Modern Europe. He is the author of England’s Internal Colonies: Class, Capital, and the Literature of Early Modern of English Colonialism (Palgrave, 2003) and the editor of John Norden’s The Surveyor’s Dialogue (1618): A Critical Edition (Ashgate, forthcoming). A specialist in Renaissance/early modern English literature and culture, his research is broadly concerned with the interconnections between state formation, nationhood, and colonialism.
SeminarOct 5 2009
3:00 PM - 5:00 PM, 212 University Club Building
Mary Beltrán
Communication Arts and Chicana/o & Latino/a Studies, UW-Madison
'Post-Race Pop? Interrogating Strategies for Ethnic Diversity in Millennial Media Culture'
This paper will focus on ethnic representation in U.S. television and media culture with respect to claims that we have entered an era of "color-blind" or "post-racial" representation, particularly as media producers aim to appeal to the shifting demographics and interests of the youth generation. The paper will contradict such claims and hone in on media industry and production strategies for increased ethnic diversity. Through case studies - the action film Fast and Furious, the television series Lost, and the tween hit series Wizards of Waverly Place - Beltrán will highlight relevant shifts and tensions in contemporary representation.
Mary Beltrán, a Race, Ethnicity, & Indigeneity Fellow at the Institute, is an Associate Professor of Communication Arts and Chicana/o and Latino/a Studies at UW-Madison. Her work is focused on the production and narration of race, ethnicity, gender, and class in U.S. entertainment media and celebrity culture, with an emphasis on Latina/o and mixed-race representation, and the ways in which media texts and media producers articulate social hierarchies and national identities.
SeminarOct 12 2009
3:00 PM - 5:00 PM, 212 University Club Building
Cindy I-Fen Cheng
History and Asian American Studies, UW-Madison
'Communist Baiting and the Politics of National Belonging'
Cindy I-Fen Cheng is an assistant professor in the Department of History and the Program in Asian American Studies at UW-Madison. Her research and teaching interest include Asian American history and culture, cold war culture, and urban studies. She is working on her first book manuscript, Locating Race in Cold War America, at the IRH.
SeminarOct 19 2009
3:00 PM - 5:00 PM, 212 University Club Building
Susan David Bernstein
English, UW-Madison
'Roomscape: Reading Space in the British Museum'
This talk examines a specific site — the Reading Room of the British Museum — as a space of imaginative and historically generative potential in relation to the emergence of modern women writers in Victorian and early twentieth-century London. Using archival documents, spatial theories, and literary sources, this presentation explores the significance of a communal space for the production of diverse forms of knowledge.
Susan David Bernstein, a UW-Madison Resident Fellow at the Institute, is Sally Mead Hands Professor of English and also a faculty affiliate with the Center for Jewish Studies and the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies. Her teaching and research interests include Victorian material and print culture, the serial novel, transatlantic studies, gender and Jewishness in Victorian literature, science and literature.
SeminarOct 26 2009
3:00 PM - 5:00 PM, 212 University Club Building
Brian Sandberg
History, Northern Illinois University
'"Martial Acts Virtuously Enacted by Women": Gender and Violence in the French Wars of Religion'
This paper concerns the gendered nature of violence and political culture in early modern French history. Religious identities and animosities sharply divided France along confessional (or sectarian) boundaries between a Catholic majority and Calvinist minority in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Gender boundaries also strongly influenced French society, defining women’s and men’s positions in religious, political, military, and cultural spheres. This study aims to bridge the gap between gender studies and the history of warfare in order to discover the ways in which violence and subjectivity were gendered in the French Wars of Religion.
Brian Sandberg, currently a Solmsen Fellow at the IRH, is an Assistant Professor of History at Northern Illinois University who is interested in the intersections of religion, violence, and political culture during the European Wars of Religion. His forthcoming monograph entitled, Warrior Pursuits: Noble Culture and Civil Conflict in Early Modern France examines provincial nobles' orchestration of civil violence in southern France in the early seventeenth century. He has published a number of articles and book chapters on religious violence, gender relations, and noble culture in early modern France, and is currently working on a new book project on Gender and Violence in the French Wars of Religion, 1562-1629.
SeminarNov 2 2009
3:00 PM - 5:00 PM, 212 University Club Building
Richard Avramenko
Political Science, UW-Madison
'The Fullness of Time: Tocqueville and the Democratic Moment'
This paper examines the concept of time in Tocqueville’s thought through the lens of the philosophy of internal time-consciousness. While Tocqueville himself offers no systematic analysis of time consciousness, his descriptive observations present a rich, comparative account. Tocqueville’s way of thinking, it will be argued, is colored by his aristocratic epistemology. His remarks on the depth and shape of democratic time-consciousness arise precisely when he is struck by real difference. His comments are thus begotten by the wonder, amusement, and dread he experiences when staring in the face of the democratic understanding of time.
Richard Avramenko, UW-Madison Resident fellow at the Institute, has taught both Political Science and Integrated Liberal Studies at the University of Wisconsin since the Fall of 2005. His main areas of interest are ancient and continental political thought, though he tends to pursue themes rather than specific thinkers or eras. Avramenko has written articles on topics such as Plato, Dostoevsky, St. Augustine, Tocqueville, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Canadian identity politics.
Nov 9 2009
3:00 PM - 5:00 PM, 212 University Club Building
Mara Loveman
Sociology, UW-Madison
'National Colors: Race, Nation and the Census in Latin America'
Why do some states classify their populations by race in censuses while other states do not? What purpose have race queries on census forms served historically, and what purposes do they serve today? In this talk, Professor Loveman will discuss her research on the practice and politics of racial classification in Latin American censuses from the colonial period to the present day. Her research takes national censuses as a site to investigate how ideas about modern nationhood and ideas about racial difference became intertwined and shaped state-building projects in Latin America, with lasting consequences. Drawing on examples of published statistical tables from nineteenth and early twentieth century censuses, this talk will highlight the active role of central statistics agencies in advancing the idea that “national progress” in the region should be defined in racial terms: to wit, the whiter the population, the better.
Mara Loveman is Associate Professor of Sociology (UW-Madison) and a Resident Fellow at the Institute for Research in the Humanities. She is a comparative and historical sociologist whose recent publications include "How Puerto Rico Became White: Boundary Dynamics and Intercensus Racial Reclassification" (American Sociological Review, 2007) and "The Race to Progress: Census-Taking and Nation-Making in Brazil (1870-1920)" (Hispanic American Historical Review, 2009). Her current research examines the political, scientific, and legal construction of racial boundaries in the Americas in comparative and historical perspective.
SeminarNov 16 2009
3:00 PM - 5:00 PM, 212 University Club Building
David Goldstein
York University
'At the Table of the Other: Eating and Ethics in Early Modern England'
This paper explores the meanings and functions of food in early modern English culture, arguing that for the Renaissance writer, the rhetoric of eating functions preeminently as a language of ethics that links or collapses the treatment of the food on one’s plate with that of other human beings. While the project focuses on early modern literature, it raises questions that are relevant across the humanities: Where do our bodies meet the world? Why are eating, speaking, and reading so intertwined? When and how do we move from eating the other to being obliged to the other? Why speak of an ethics of eating?
David B. Goldstein, Solmsen Fellow at the IRH, is Assistant Professor of English at York University in Toronto. His teaching and research interests include early modern English literature, book history and theory, food studies, and contemporary poetry. He has scholarly articles published or forthcoming on Shakespeare, Levinas, Robert Duncan, and Martha Stewart, while his food journalism has appeared in Saveur, The New York Sun, Time Out New York, and other publications.
SeminarNov 23 2009
3:00 PM - 5:00 PM, 212 University Club Building
Leslie DeBauche
Communication Arts, UW-Stevens Point
'Real American Girls and the American Girl in the Movies in the 1910s'
In the United States in the 1910s the most popular movie stars, including Mary Pickford, Billie Burke, Irene Castle, and serial queen Pearl White (The Perils of Pauline, 1914), portrayed characters described by journalists as American Girls. These Girls, who were descendents of literary characters including Jo and Amy March (Little Women, 1868-1869), shared a set of traits. They were independent, brash, opinionated, unmarried, and white. Significantly, one of the characteristics that set the American Girl apart from other fictional American females or males was her sense of justice founded on a belief in the permeability of social boundaries regardless of how they were drawn. Championing fair play and egalitarianism, film’s American Girl conveyed the image of democracy at home and abroad. She also became its commercial ambassador. My goal is to document the role that movies, movie stars, and this character—the American Girl—(whose traits were manifested in fashion and tapped by advertisers) played in the lives of American teenage girls during and immediately after World War I.
A UW-System fellow at the Institute, Leslie Midkiff DeBauche is a professor in the Division of Communication at the UW-Stevens Point. A film historian, she focuses on American film and American culture in the 1910s and 1920s. DeBauche is the author of Reel Patriotism, the U.S. Film Industry and WWI and currently she is researching and writing about a character type in movies of the 1910s called The American Girl. This work is interdisciplinary, and, so far, has woven fashion and advertising with movies and movie stars. DeBauche has received research grants from UWSP, the Schlesinger Library, and the John W. Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising and Marketing History at Duke University.
Nov 30 2009
3:00 PM - 5:00 PM, 212 University Club Building
Rob Harper
History, UW-Stevens Point
'From Statelessness to State Sovereignty: People and Politics on an Early American Frontier'
This paper reassesses the Anglo-American conquest of the trans-Appalachian west by examining the relationships between local politics, frontier violence, and state formation. It argues that the United States achieved effective sovereignty over the region less because of its inherent might than because of revolutions in the politics of the region’s American Indian and white settler communities. This paper illustrates these political transformations by discussing the work of political brokers who sought to link Ohio Valley inhabitants and colonial states in tenuous coalitions. These coalitions arose and thrived because of the weakness of formal political institutions, but they ultimately formed the foundation of state authority.
Rob Harper is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point and an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation/ACLS Recent Doctoral Recipients Fellow for 2009-2010 at the Institute for Research in the Humanities. In 2008, he completed his PhD at UW-Madison under the direction of the late Jeanne Boydston. His work has appeared in the William and Mary Quarterly and the Journal for Genocide Research. His book-in-progress is tentatively entitled Revolution and Conquest: Violence and State Formation in the Ohio Valley.
SeminarDec 7 2009
3:00 PM - 5:00 PM, 212 University Club Building
Shannon Withycombe
History of Science, UW-Madison
'All Was Going Wrong: Pregnancy Loss in Nineteenth-Century America'
This paper aims to explore the much-neglected field of the history of pregnancy loss. It will investigate both how physicians described the phenomenon and how they understood their own place in its prevention, treatment, and documentation. To complete the picture, the paper will explore personal papers to attain women's descriptions of their own pregnancy loss experiences or those of friends and family.
Shannon Withycombe, a Coleman Dissertation Fellow at the Institute, is a graduate student in the History of Science Department at UW-Madison. Her areas of interest include the history of women's health, sex and sexuality, nineteenth-century women's history and the creation of medical knowledge. She has also spent much of her time at Wisconsin teaching in the History of Science, Medical History and Bioethics, and Gender and Women's Studies departments. Besides the the William Coleman Dissertation Fellowship, she has received the Maurice L. Richardson Fellowship in the History of Medicine, the Countway Library Fellowship in the History of Medicine, and the Bain Scholar-in-Residence Fellowship at the Sophia Smith Archives. She is currently finishing her dissertation on the history of pregnancy loss.
SeminarDec 14 2009
3:00 PM - 5:00 PM, 212 University Club Building
Susan Friedman
English, UW-Madison
'Planetarity: Global Epistemologies in Modernist Studies'
This paper, written for a keynote address at the Modernist Studies Association (November, 2009), explores the “transnational turn” in modernist studies and the anxiety in the field over the expanded meanings of the categories modernism and modernity. It presents a manifesto in defense of these expansions, examining a range of concepts central to a planetary modernist studies, from engagements with multiple and polycentric modernities, colonialism, and the longue durée, to critical strategies for a globalized modernist studies.
Susan Stanford Friedman is the Director of the Institute and the Virginia Woolf Professor of English and Women’s Studies and the Sally Mead Hands Bascom Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She works in the fields of modernist studies, migration and diaspora studies, cultural and feminist theory, narrative theory, and psychoanalysis. She was awarded the Wayne C. Booth Lifetime Achievement in Narrative Studies (2009) and is the author of Mappings: Feminism and the Cultural Geographies of Encounter (winner of the Perkins Prize for Best Book in Narrative Studies), Penelope’s Web: Gender, Modernity, and H.D.’s Fiction, Psyche Reborn: The Emergence of H.D. She edited Joyce: The Return of the Repressed and Analyzing Freud: Letters of H.D., Bryher, and Their Circle. She co-edits Contemporary Women’s Writing and is at work on a book entitled Planetary Modernism: The Modernities of Empire, Nation, and Diaspora.
Jay C. and Ruth Hall lectureJan 21 2010
4:00 PM, 7191 Helen C. White Hall
Julia Mickenberg
American Studies, Univ of Texas at Austin
'In Love With Russia: U.S. Women, Sexual Revolution, and Revolutionary Tourism, 1921-1935'
The lecture examines how the modern sexual revolutions in Russia and the U.S. inspired American women's revolutionary tourism in the Soviet Union in the 1920s and 1930s. Using fictional and archival sources, Mickenberg shows how many "new woman" in the U.S. made the "new Russia" a context for intermingled political and sexual desire that impacted the dynamics of U.S.-Russia relations.
Julia Mickenberg is Associate Professor of American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. She is the author of Learning from the Left: Children’s Literature, the Cold War, and Radical Politics in the United States (Oxford UP, 2006), which won four prizes, from the Children’s Literature Association, the Society for the History of Childhood and Youth, the Pacific Coast Branch of the American Historical Association, and the Texas Cooperative Society. She co-edited Tales for Little Rebels: A Collection of Radical Children’s Literature (NYU Press, 2008), and The Oxford Handbook of Children’s Literature (forthcoming, 2010). In 2009-10 she is at the University of Wisconsin as the Jay C. and Ruth Hall Visiting Scholar and an Honorary Fellow in the Institute for Research in the Humanities.
SeminarJan 25 2010
3:00 PM - 5:00 PM, 212 University Club Building
Daniel Birkholz
English, University of Texas at Austin
'We Have to Invent Him: Harley Lyrics, Hereford Maps, and the Life of Roger de Breynton, c.1290-1351'
This interdisciplinary study brings together two major documents of a forgotten period and a backwater region—the Hereford Cathedral Mappamundi ["map of the world"] (c.1305), and British Library Manuscript Harley 2253 (c.1340), a trilingual literary anthology—and reads them alongside a contemporary life that has been reassembled from archival traces. This paper takes as its historical vantage point a mobile and well-connected but now obscure Hereford clerk who knew both map and manuscript well; he appears to have had a custodial relationship to each. His biographical particulars and institutional milieus will be used to animate critical readings of the map and the anthology.
Daniel Birkholz is Associate Professor of English at the University of Texas at Austin, where he received the President's Associates Award for Teaching Excellence in 2008. In 2002 he received Pomona College (Claremont, CA)’s Wig Distinguished Professorship Award. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota, his M.A. from the University of Toronto, and his B.A. from Carleton College (Northfield, MN). His first book, The King’s Two Maps: Cartography and Culture in Thirteenth-Century England (Routledge, 2004), was awarded the Nebenzahl Prize from the Newberrry Library (Chicago)’s Hermon Dunlap Smith Center for the History of Cartography. His essays on cartography and medieval literary history have appeared in New Medieval Literatures, The Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, Imago Mundi, Studies in the Age of Chaucer, and The Post Historical Middle Ages (Palgrave Macmillan).
SeminarFeb 1 2010
3:00 PM - 5:00 PM, 212 University Club Building
Florence Bernault
History, UW-Madison
'Cannibalism and Colonialism'
This paper explores cannibalism as a central trope of colonial engagements in West equatorial Africa (Gabon) from the late nineteenth century to the late twentieth century. The literature has thought long and hard on the ways in which cannibalism expresses dominant ideas about limits and engagements: how the social body is divided, how power relationships should conform to specific boundaries and restrictions. While countless analyses have described the sexual meanings of cannibal images, few have traced their links to kinship norms (Hulme 1998). Working from archival and field research, Prof. Bernault combines these ideas to reflect on how practical engagements about cannibalism in colonial Gabon delineated important prescriptions about social and symbolic reproduction. More than a lore about power, more than a wisdom about transgression and limits, cannibal stories described the fate of colonial society, the future of the coexistence between races, and the doom of colonial hegemony.
A Resident fellow at the IRH, Florence Bernault is a professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her most recent work looks into the political, intellectual and cultural history of Equatorial Africa, and French colonialism. She has been awarded a J. S. Simon Guggenheim Fellowship for her research on witchcraft. She is serving on the editorial board of the American Historical Review, and on the advisory board of the Journal of African History. She is the author of Démocraties ambigües en Afrique centrale (Paris, Karthala, 1996), the editor of A History of Prisons and Confinement in Africa (Portsmouth, NJ., 2003), and Enfermement, prison et châtiments en Afrique du XIXe siècle à nos jours (Paris: Karthala, 1999), and the co-editor, together with Nicolas Bancel, Ahmed Boubeker, Achille Mbembe and Françoise Vergès, of Ruptures postcoloniales. Les nouveaux visages de la société française (Paris, La Découverte, 2010). Her articles have been published in the Journal of African History, Africa Today, Politique africaine, Cahiers d’études africaines, and Vingtième siècle. She has also guest-edited several issues for scholarly journals inAfrican Studies. The book she is currently completing is entitled Struggles For the Sacred: Colonialism, Witchcraft and Power in Equatorial Africa.
SeminarFeb 8 2010
3:00 PM - 5:00 PM, 212 University Club Building
Craig Werner
Afro-American Studies, UW-Madison
'We Gotta Get Out of This Place: Music and the Experience of Vietnam Veterans'
This project, a collaboration between UW Professor Craig Werner and Vietnam veteran and veteran advocate Doug Bradley, uses music as a touchstone for constructing a veteran-centered narrative of the Vietnam era. The book is grounded in over 100 interviews with Vietnam veterans: combat soldiers, the support troops known as REMFS, officers, engineers, pilots, and nurses; white, black, Chicano, Native American.
A Senior Fellow in Race, Ethnicity and Indigeneity at the Institute for Research in the Humanities, Craig Werner is a member of the faculty of the Departments of Afro-American Studies and English and the Integrated Liberal Studies at the University of Wisconsin. The author of seven books (including Paradoxical Resolutions: American Fiction since James Joyce; Playing the Changes: From Afro-Modernism to the Jazz Impulse; Adrienne Rich: The Poet and Her Critics; and A Change Is Gonna Come: Music, Race & the Soul of America) he is actively involved in building bridges between academia and non-academic audiences, via his work with the Odyssey Program for low income adults; the veteran-centered writing group, the Deadly Writers Patrol; Lincoln Center's Black Music Celebration series; and the Nominating Committee of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. He is currently completing work on Love & Happiness: Eros According to Dante, Shakespeare, Jane Austen and the Reverend Al Green (written in collaboration with the Reverend Rhonda Lee of St. Joseph's Episcopal Church in Durham, North Carolina); and embarking on a new project focusing on the role of theology in the Civil Rights, Black Power and Red Power movements.
Feb 15 2010
3:00 PM - 5:00 PM, 212 University Club Building
Douglas Howland
History, UW-Milwaukee
'Japanese Sovereignty and Declarations of War'
The paper treats the controversy surrounding Japan's commencement of hostilities against Russia in February 1904, and examines how that start to the Russo-Japanese War informed discussions regarding the need for declarations of war prior to hostilities: within the Institut de droit international and at the second Hague Peace Conference in 1907. Japan's aggressive assertion of sovereignty led to a change in the international laws of war.
Douglas Howland is the David D. Buck Professor of Chinese History at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. He is the author, most recently, of Personal Liberty and Public Good: The Introduction of John Stuart Mill to Japan and China (2005) and the co-editor (with Luise White) of The State of Sovereignty: Laws, Territories, Populations (2009).
SeminarFeb 22 2010
3:00 PM - 5:00 PM, 212 University Club Building
Cherene Sherrard-Johnson
English, UW-Madison
'To Russia With Love: Dorothy West’s Adventures in Moscow and Other Transatlantic Challenges to the Color Line'
This paper draws on a chapter in a book-in-progress, Dorothy West’s Paradise: A Biography of Class and Color. It places West’s personal reflections and publications about her Soviet sojourn in conversation with Nancy Prince’s 1825 narrative of her life in imperial Russia and Andrea Lee’s cold war memoir Russian Journal (1979). Considering West’s experiences and writings within a nearly 200-year literary tradition of black women’s travel writing, the paper explores Russia as a privileged, utopic site of personal and political transformation in the African Diaspora.
Cherene Sherrard-Johnson is Associate Professor of English at UW-Madison. She is the author of Portraits of the New Negro Woman: Visual and Literary Culture in the Harlem Renaissance (Rutgers UP, 2007) and the editor of a new edition of Jessie Fauset's last novel: Comedy: American Style (Rutgers UP, 2009). She is a Race, Ethnicity and Indigeneity Fellow at the Institute for Research in the Humanities where she is working on a biography of Harlem Renaissance writer Dorothy West.
SymposiumFeb 25 2010 - Feb 27 2010
'Symposium on Globalization and the Humanities: Then and Now, Here and There'
The Symposium will address a number of vital debates about globalization, focusing on what the humanities can contribute to understanding globalization as well as how the humanities are being reinvented as a result of globalization. The political, economic, and technological controversies about globalization often overshadow its cultural and philosophical dimensions. Social science debates typically focus on the pros and cons of globalization in the context of conflictual relations between the "West" and the rest of the world in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. The humanities have much to learn from these debates but also much to contribute.
Visit the conference home page
Mar 1 2010
SeminarMar 8 2010
3:00 PM - 5:00 PM, 212 University Club Building
Kristina Kosnick
French and Italian, UW-Madison
'Queer Writing Matters: Literary Performativity in Contemporary Queer Women's Writing in French.'
This presentation will examine recent trends in queer-centered (French) literary criticism. It will also break with these trends both by foregrounding the politico-literary contributions of contemporary women writers and by advocating a critical approach that values the performative force of literary texts over their mimetic capacities. Although it isn't uncommon for a reader to announce that a book changed her life, do some literary works have the potential to alter the reader’s relationship to language itself such that her ways of conceptualizing "identity," "difference" and agency in the world are transformed?
Kristina Kosnick is a doctoral candidate in French at the University of Wisconsin-Madison with a PhD minor in Gender and Women’s Studies. Her interests include contemporary women’s writing (especially self-identified lesbian and queer women’s writing), experimental literature, feminisms, queer theory, literary theory, lesbian cultural productions, LGBTQ activism and issues of social justice—not to mention her love of 17th-century French theater. Kristina is also currently a Humanities Exposed (HEX) public scholar and facilitates a workshop entitled Reading, Writing and Relating LGBTQ Narratives—a project she is implementing in collaboration with OutReach, Madison’s LGBT Community Center, and with support from UW-Madison’s Center for the Humanities.
SeminarMar 8 2010
3:00 PM - 5:00 PM, 212 University Club Building
Kate Merz
English, UW-Madison
'Imperial India on Trial: Crime, Punishment, and Colonialism, 1880-1940'
In the last decades of the British Raj, anti-colonial writers staged scenes of crime and punishment, trial and testimony, in order to interrogate the legitimacy of imperialism itself. This project examines questions of imperial justice in British and Indian writers of the early twentieth century—from E.M. Forster, George Orwell, and Virginia Woolf, to Rabindranath Tagore and Mulk Raj Anand. Far from hegemonic, the arena of legal discipline was a contested space of encounter between the "Anglo" and the "Indian" subject, custom, and law. For even as modern discipline would forge a docile, efficient, self-monitoring subject, anti-imperialists and modernists alike work to challenge, evade, or disrupt a disciplinary gaze.
Kate Merz is a doctoral candidate in English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her research interests are in British modernism, postcolonial studies (especially the South Asian diaspora), and the law, science, and material culture of empire. Her interdisciplinary minor (in Colonial and Postcolonial Studies) includes courses in Anthropology, History of Medicine, Art History, and Film. She has taught a variety of courses, ranging from Shakespeare to postcolonial literature; was named a University Fellow and department writing prize winner; and is a member of the Modernisms/Modernities Colloquium.
SeminarMar 15 2010
3:00 PM - 5:00 PM, 212 University Club Building
Julia Mickenberg
American Studies, University of Texas at Austin
'The New Woman Tries on Red: Russia in the American Feminist Imagination, 1905-1945.'
This presentation will offer an overview of a book-in-progress that seeks to understand Russia's place in the imagination and self-fashioning of financially independent, sexually liberated, and socially conscious American women, among them well-known suffragists, socialists, journalists, educators, authors, reformers, and artists. More than simply an interesting episode in women’s history, the largely forgotten "Russian chapter" in American feminism highlights themes basic to the development of Western feminist thought, ideas about love, work, citizenship, motherhood, creativity, childrearing, sex, and friendship, and also about class, justice, and the ideal society.
Julia Mickenberg is Associate Professor of American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin and an affiliate of the Center for Women and Gender Studies, the Center for Russian and Eastern European Studies, and the Center for European Studies. She is the author of Learning from the Left: Children's Literature, the Cold War, and Radical Politics in the United States (Oxford, 2006), which won several awards, and co-editor (with Philip Nel) of Tales for Little Rebels: A Collection of Radical Children's Literature (NYU: 2008). In addition to the IRH project, she is currently co-editing the Oxford Handbook of Children's Literature with Lynne Vallone. Mickenberg teaches courses on the 1960s, the 1930s, the Cold War, children's literature, childhood studies, women's history, and radicalism in the United States.
Mar 19 2010 - Mar 20 2010
Memorial Union
'Early Modern Humanism and the Humanities'
SeminarMar 22 2010
3:00 PM - 5:00 PM, 212 University Club Building
Claire Wendland
Departments of Anthropology, Obstetrics & Gynecology, and Medical History and Bioethics, UW-Madison
'Making Sense of Bodies: Expert Imaginations and Unsafe Motherhood in Malawi'
In one of the poorest countries in a poor region of the world, Malawian women, their families, and those who are charged with their care in pregnancy and labor face an unexplained increase in maternal deaths. The ambiguities that attend nearly all individual deaths leave room for a range of diagnoses and possible interventions, proposed by a range of practitioners: traditional birth attendants and healers, nurse-midwives, herbalists, and doctors. These experts’ descriptions and prescriptions reveal how they write upon dead mothers’ bodies their experiences of a rapidly changing social context and their beliefs about the perils and potentials of women’s “empowerment,” fertility, poverty, and modernity.
Claire Wendland, who is an anthropologist and an obstetrician, is an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison with appointments in the Departments of Anthropology, Obstetrics & Gynecology, and Medical History & Bioethics. Her areas of active research and teaching center on the anthropology of reproduction, sexuality and the body, and the impact of contemporary global health movements in Africa. Her first book (in press, U. of Chicago) is A Heart for the Work: Journeys Through an African Medical School. At the IRH she will be working on her second book manuscript.
Conversation with Niklaus LargierMar 22 2010
12:00 PM - 1:15, 212 University Club Building
Niklaus Largier
German, University of California-Berkeley
Lunch provided, PLEASE RSVP by FRIDAY, March 19, noon to Loretta Freiling
Niklaus Largier will also give a lecture on “Bodies in Prayer: Sense, Sensation, and the Art of Desire” on Monday, March 22, 5:30pm, in 7191 Helen C. White Hall
Niklaus Largier is currently Chair of the German Department at the University of California-Berkeley. His recent work explores the relation among bodily ascetic practices, eroticism, and the literary imagination. His book Lob der Peitsche: Eine Kulturgeschichte der Erregung (2001) -its American translation was entitled: In Praise of the Whip: A Cultural History of Arousal (ZONE, 2007) - explores the role of flagellation in early religious practice as well as its later associations with modern S/M. A more recent book, Die Kunst des Begehrens: Dekadenz, Sinnlichkeit und Askese (2007) traces the fascination of decadent literature with such religious practices. His current projects include the history of fantasy and the emotions from the Middle Ages to the Baroque era; the history of the senses, of sense experience, and of the stimulation of the senses-especially taste and touch-in medieval, early modern, and modern cultures.
Sponsored by the Mellon Workshop on Corpus: Premodern Books and Bodies, Center for the Humanities, and the Institute for Research in the Humanities
Click here to download the introduction from Prof. Largier's book In Praise of the Whip
SeminarApr 5 2010
3:00 PM - 5:00 PM, 212 University Club Building
Kristen Ehrhardt
Classics, UW-Madison
'Drinking Alfresco: The Erotics of the Pastoral Sympotic Mode'
The institution of private drinking parties, symposia, played an important part in the cultural and political lives of Greek men in the archaic and classical periods, to the extent that the symposium itself became a common motif in literature and art. Later Greek and Roman artists and poets combined this motif with that of pastoral, setting sympotic drinking in a locus amoenus. This paper explores how artists played with this mixed mode: what happens when the menacing eroticism that lurks in pastoral seeps into the (arguably) safer world of the symposium?
Kristen Ehrhardt is a doctoral candidate in Classics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, with a Ph.D. minor in Art History. Her research interests include Greek and Latin poetry, the interplay between art and text, and representations of symposia from the eastern influences on early Greek symposia to later Roman adaptations of feast scenes.
SeminarApr 5 2010
3:00 PM - 5:00 PM, 212 University Club Building
Stephanie Spadaro
French and Italian, UW-Madison
'Sentimental Literature: Directing the Flows of Sympathy in Enlightenment and Francophone Texts'
In this presentation, I will examine the ways that certain philosophical notions of sympathy and various literary portrayals of sympathy define the human in eighteenth-century French slave narratives and contemporary Caribbean novels. I will also discuss methodological questions raised in my comparison of the two periods: Is a sympathetic approach appropriate to the study of postcolonial literature? On what grounds can one draw scholarly conclusions when comparing literary works that arise from radically different epistemological traditions?
Stephanie Spadaro is a graduate student in the French department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her research interests include Enlightenment philosophy and literature, Caribbean studies, cosmopolitanism, theories of language and pain, and narratology. Stephanie graduated summa cum laude from Northwestern University in 2003 with a BA in comparative literature.
Burdick-Vary SymposiumApr 9 2010 - Apr 10 2010
The Lowell Center
'The Mongol Empire and its World'
SeminarApr 12 2010
3:00 PM - 5:00 PM, 212 University Club Building
Beth Lew-Williams
History, Stanford University
'The Chinese Must Go: Immigration, Deportation, and Violence in the 19th-Century American West'
This project examines the dramatic and formative moment in American history when the federal government made its first major effort to control the movement of people across its borders—and failed. The result was America’s first illegal immigrants and a grassroots uprising against them. In 1882, the Chinese Restriction Act barred Chinese laborers from immigrating to the U.S., but implementing this policy proved impossible. When the federal government failed to stop illegal immigration across the U.S.-Canada border, white locals reacted violently, systematically expelling their Chinese neighbors. I trace this story of exclusion and expulsion: how immigration policy instigated racial violence and how racial violence transformed immigration policy. I argue that Chinese Exclusion was not a top-down policy; rather, it was a tortured process, in which federal failures became local problems and local crises had national and international ramifications.
Beth Lew-Williams is a doctoral candidate in the department of History at Stanford University. Her interests include Asian American history, ethnic studies, and the American West. She has received fellowships from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, American Council for Learned Societies, the Stanford Humanities Center, and the George P. Shultz Fund in Canadian Studies.
SeminarApr 19 2010
3:00 PM - 5:00 PM, 212 University Club Building
André Wink
History, UW-Madison
'Parallel and Interconnected Developments in the Early Modern World'
By today's standard, early modernization does not always look like sweeping change. Yet there is growing consensus among historians that sixteenth-century developments in Europe - demographic expansion, the growth of territorial states and bureaucracies, commercialization, and religious reformations - have had significant parallels in at least some other parts of the world. Such findings put into question long-held notions of European exceptionalism and an entire literature that regarded early modernity as the product of a 'European miracle.' This lecture first takes stock of a new historiography that lends support to the view that early modernity is a world-wide and interconnected phenomenon. Subsequently, it will focus on the descendants of the medieval Eurasian nomads (Afghans, Turks, and Mongols) and argue that their role was critical in the transformation of the early modern world at large. To demonstrate the scope of this transformation, and to bring the human element back into world history, it will conclude by critically examining the life and career of the third Mughal emperor Akbar ( r. 1556-1605).
André Wink is Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He obtained his PhD in Indian history from the University of Leiden. Apart from Indian and Islamic history, his teaching and research interests also include medieval and modern world history. His most recent work includes Akbar (Oxford, 2009), two essays for the forthcoming Harvard New History of the World and Oxford Handbook of World History, as well as a history of the Afghans forthcoming in a special issue of Cracow Indological Studies (2009).
WorkshopApr 21 2010
12:00 PM - 1:30 PM, 212 University Club Building
Susan Stanford Friedman, Director, Institute for Research in the Humanities and Co-Editor of Contemporary Women's Writing, Oxford University Press Journal, 2007 -.
Gwen Walker, Acquisitions Editor, University of Wisconsin Press
David Morgan, Senior Fellow, Professor of History, Editor of the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, 1987-1999; Series Editor, Cambridge Studies in Islamic Civilization, 1991-;Chair, UW Press Board, 2002-2005
Venkat Mani, Associate Professor of German, Coordinator, World Literature/s Workshop, author of Cosmopolitan Claims: Turkish-German Literatures from Nadolny to Pamuk.
'Workshop on Publication Strategies in the Humanities'
Panelists will make brief presentations (about 7-10 minutes) on publication issues most related to their work as editors and/or mentors. Presentations should take about 40 minutes. The remainder of the seminar will be discussion, with all attendees encouraged to bring questions, ideas, concerns, strategies, and issues for group discussion.See event page for more details
Apr 23 2010
4:00 PM, Pyle Center Auditorium
Walter Mignolo
Spanish, Duke University
'Globalization and the Geopolitics of Knowing: A Decolonial View on the Humanities'
SeminarApr 26 2010
3:00 PM - 5:00 PM, 212 University Club Building
Preeti Chopra
Languages and Cultures of Asia, UW-Madison
'The City and its Fragments: Colonial Bombay, 1854-1918'
This paper is a study of the role of native communities in the physical transformation of colonial Bombay. Exploring the impact of encounters between different groups, the paper shows that colonial Bombay was not simply the result of ideas emanating from Britain. Instead, it was the product of a cultural encounter between Indians and the British colonial regime. Here, the city was shaped by the spatial interventions of a variety of groups in a context of unequal power relations. This project foregrounds everyday life and informal processes by which various communities and groups constructed and remade the city in their interaction with the colonial state. The city was both fragmented (spatially by race, religion, and community) and yet came together from time to time as an intellectual idea and as a spatial arena. The paper argues that these processes of coming together contributed to a sense of a singular city that different communities felt they had a stake in, thus suggesting the existence of a common ground at the urban level.
Preeti Chopra is Assistant Professor of Visual Culture Studies in the Department of Languages & Cultures of Asia and Design Studies Department. Her research concentrates on architecture and urbanism in South Asia, with a focus on western and more recently, northern India in the colonial and postcolonial context. Chopra’s work has addressed such diverse themes as the practices of naming, charity and philanthropy, the place of religion in the secular public realm, architectural style and its meaning, and the heritage movement in postcolonial Bombay. Chopra teaches classes on taste, colonial spaces, the visual cultures of South Asia, and the cities of Asia. Her forthcoming publications include A Joint Enterprise: The Indian Making of British Bombay, 1854-1918 (University of Minnesota Press, in press). At the IRH she is working on her second book manuscript The City and its Fragments: Colonial Bombay, 1854-1918.
SeminarMay 3 2010
3:00 PM - 5:00 PM, 212 University Club Building
Costica Bradatan
Philosophy, Texas Tech University
'The Making of a Philosopher-Martyr'
This paper explores the "conditions of possibility" of philosophical martyrdom. Becoming a martyr can be an extremely difficult process as dying is only half of the job. It is only through a complex social, political and cultural process that a dead body becomes a “martyred body,” and an executed criminal becomes someone worthy of others’ admiration. Right after Socrates’ execution, what his close disciples could see in his prison cell was not Socrates (Socrates as we know him, that is), but just another dead body. It took, among other things, Plato’s unique genius, many centuries of intellectual labor and a particularly perceptive audience to turn that cold thing into Socrates as we know him: the “philosopher-martyr.” As I will show in my paper, the various conditions of possibility of martyrdom could be grouped under three large categories: 1) The performance of the martyrdom (the actual historical event that triggers the process). 2) The story-telling. Martyrdom is as much the deed of the one who performs it as it is the product of those who put the deed into a story. 3) The audience. Martyrdom is relational: a martyr is a martyr for someone. Both as an actual performance and as a story, martyrdom always presupposes the existence of an engaging public.
Costica Bradatan is Assistant Professor of Honors at Texas Tech University. He has also taught at Cornell University, Miami University, as well as at several universities in Europe (England, Germany, Hungary and Romania). In June 2010 he will teach a graduate seminar on the political uses of the body at the University of Pune (India). Bradatan has held research fellowships at, among others, University of Wisconsin-Madison, University of California Los Angeles, and the Newberry Library in Chicago. His research interests include Continental philosophy, history of philosophy, East-European philosophy, and philosophy of literature. Bradatan’s most recent book The Other Bishop Berkeley: An Exercise in Reenchantment was published with Fordham University Press in 2006. He is also the author of two other books (in Romanian): An Introduction to the History of Romanian Philosophy in the 20th Century (Bucharest, 2000) and Isaac Bernstein’s Diary (Bucharest, 2001). He has co-edited (with Serguei Alex. Oushakine) In Marx’s Shadow: Knowledge, Power and Intellectuals in Eastern Europe and Russia (Lexington Books, 2010) and guest-edited two special journal issues: one on "Philosophy as Literature" for The European Legacy (Summer 2009) and another on “Philosophy in Eastern Europe” for Angelaki (forthcoming).
May 10 2010
3:00 PM - 5:00 PM, 212 University Club Building