Panel Discussion

Sep 13 2010
3:00 PM - 5:00 PM, 212 University Club Building

'Language Matters: Multilingualism, Translation, and Disciplinary Discourses in the Humanities'

Download program description

Workshop

Sep 16 2010
12:00 PM - 1:30 PM

'Lunch and Workshop for Institute Dissertation Fellows'

Seminar

Sep 20 2010
3:00 PM - 5:00 PM, 212 University Club Building

Henry Drewal
Art History and Afro-American Studies, UW-Madison


'The Senses in Understandings of Art: A Sensorium of Yoruba Peoples'

This paper will explore how artists and audiences use the senses to create and respond to the arts using an approach that I call sensiotics. While the paper focuses on the arts of Yoruba peoples in West Africa and their cultural sensorium, it argues that the senses and sensiotics have important implications for our experience and understanding of the arts universally, as suggested in recent anthropological and neurological research that documents the importance of body-knowledge in learning.

After graduating from Hamilton College, Henry Drewal joined the Peace Corps, taught French and English and organized arts camps in Nigeria. While in Nigeria he apprenticed himself to a Yoruba sculptor, an experience that was transformative (and ultimately led to his present project at IRH on art and the senses). He returned for graduate studies at Columbia University with an interdisciplinary specialization in African art history and culture, receiving two Masters degrees and a PhD in 1973. He taught at Cleveland State University (where he was chair of the Art Department), and was a Visiting Professor at UC-Santa Barbara and SUNY-Purchase. He also served as Curator of African Art at The Cleveland Museum of Art and the Neuberger Museum. Since 1990 he has been Evjue-Bascom Professor at UW-Madison and Adjunct Curator of African Art at the Chazen Museum of Art. He has received numerous awards (Fulbright, NEH, Guggenheim, AIIS, Smithsonian, and Sainsbury fellowships) and published several books, edited volumes, and many articles on African and African Diaspora arts including Yoruba: Nine Centuries of African Art and Thought (1989) and Beads, Body and Soul: Art and Light in the Yoruba Universe (1998). He recently curated and wrote the catalogue for the major traveling exhibition -- Mami Wata: Arts for Water Spirits in Africa and Its Diasporas (2008) and edited the volume Sacred Waters: Arts for Mami Wata and other Divinities in Africa and the Diaspora (2008). His latest exhibition project, Dynasty and Divinity: Ife Art in Ancient Nigeria (2009), for which he wrote the catalogue, opened in Santander, Spain in 2009, traveled to Madrid and the British Museum in 2010, and begins its US tour to several cities (Houston, Richmond, Indianapolis, and New York) beginning in September 2010.

Meeting

Sep 21 2010
1:30 PM - 3:00 PM, IRH Library

'Senior Fellows Meeting'

Seminar

Sep 27 2010
3:00 PM - 5:00 PM, 212 University Club Building

Gregory Aldrete
Humanistic Studies (Classics), University of Wisconsin-Green Bay


'Riots in Ancient Rome'

The inhabitants of ancient Rome appear to have been a riotous lot with at least 154 known episodes of unruly collective behavior between 200 BC and AD 375. As a result, Rome has often been characterized as a lawless, violent place, and its inhabitants, especially the poor, portrayed as disorderly and fickle. The reality, however, is considerably more complex with many riots being planned and instigated by elites, and with mobs often exhibiting considerable restraint and performing symbolic rather than actual acts of violence.This talk will offer an overview of these riots, and their causes, characteristics, and organization.

Gregory S. Aldrete, Solmsen Fellow at the IRH, is Professor of History and Humanistic Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay. Some of his main areas of research have included daily life in ancient cities, floods in Rome, gestures and non-verbal communication in Roman oratory, logistics of the food supply system for Rome, and most recently, the use of linen body armor in the ancient world. His books include: Gestures and Acclamation in Ancient Rome (Johns Hopkins 1999), Floods of the Tiber in Ancient Rome (Johns Hopkins 2007), Daily Life in the Roman City: Rome, Pompeii, and Ostia (Oklahoma 2009), and Greenwood Encyclopedia of Daily Life I: The Ancient World (Greenwood 2002, editor).

Seminar

Oct 4 2010
3:00 PM - 5:00 PM, 212 University Club Building

Rachel Brenner
Hebrew Studies, UW-Madison


'Ideology and Its Ethics: Maria Dąbrowska's Jewish (and Polish) Problem'

The diaries of Maria Dąbrowska (1889-1965), a prominent Polish writer and socialist left a troubling testimony of her perception of the Polish Jews, especially in the time of the Holocaust. Her insensitivity to the Jewish extermination needs to be understood in the context of her prewar ambivalent attitude toward the Jews, which reflected the writer-diarist's ideological conflict. The incompatibility of the ideologies of nationalist particularity and universal humanism informed an ethics whose capacity for self-deception made possible the denial of empathy.

Rachel Feldhay Brenner is Professor of Modern Hebrew Literature in the Department of Hebrew and Semitic Studies, and Max and Frieda Weinstein-Bascom Professor of Jewish Studies. Her research focuses on Jewish Diaspora Literature, Israeli literature, and on the representations of the Holocaust in literature and in autobiographical writings. She is the author of Assimilation and Assertion: The Response to the Holocaust in Mordecai Richler's Writing (1989), and A.M. Klein, The Father of Canadian Jewish Literature: Essays in the Poetics of Humanistic Passion (1990), which won the prize of the Jewish Federation of Greater Toronto Literary Scholarship Award, Writing as Resistance: Four Women Confronting the Holocaust: Edith Stein, Simone Weil, Anne Frank, and Etty Hillesum (1997), which was translated into Spanish, Inextricably Bonded: Israeli Jewish and Arab Writers Re-Visioning Culture (2003), and The Freedom to Write: The Woman-Artist and the World in Ruth Almog's Fiction (2008) [in Hebrew]. Brenner (Hebrew University (B.A), Tel Aviv University (M.A.) York University, Toronto (Ph.D)) has received Canada Research Fellowship (Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada), Skirball Visiting Fellowship, Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies, NEH Fellowship, Research Award, Hadassah International Research Institute on Jewish Women, Brandeis University, the George Mosse Faculty Exchange Award to Hebrew University, Sosland Family Fellowship, the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, United States Holocaust Museum.

Seminar

Oct 11 2010
3:00 PM - 5:00 PM, 212 University Club Building

Maria Lepowsky
Anthropology, Gender and Women's Studies, UW-Madison


'Toypurina and the Hidden Histories of California'

In 1785 a young Tongva woman named Toypurina led a revolt against the Spanish mission at San Gabriel, near a newly founded pueblo whose name was later shortened to Los Angeles. Toypurina, this research shows, was not only a recognized shaman but an early prophet of a regional religious movement of moral renewal. Prophecies of this movement, sacred and secret, helped ignite a series of little-known indigenous revolts over multiple generations, and directly inspired the far better-known prophetic movements of the late 19th century collectively known as the Ghost Dance. Tracing Toypurina and her descendants over more than two centuries reveals hidden histories of California and the American West, from early encounters with Spanish soldiers and missionaries to present-day revitalization movements and actions by indigenous descendants and their allies in defense of sacred lands. This paper will focus on Toypurina and her cultural legacies and consider the interplay of historical and ethnographic methods, fieldwork in the archives, and the intergenerational circulation of cultural knowledge among indigenous descendants, scholarly researchers, and other Southern Californians.

Maria Lepowsky, a Resident Fellow at the Institute for Research in the Humanities, is Professor of Anthropology and Gender and Women's Studies at UW-Madison and a faculty affiliate of UW's Center for Culture, History, and Environment and the Holtz Center for Science and Technology Studies. She received her AB, MA, PhD, and MPH degrees at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research and teaching focus on gender, historical anthropology, the interplay of culture and environment, mythology and ritual, the history of anthropology, and psychological and medical anthropology. She has conducted longterm ethnographic and archival research in the Pacific Islands and California. She is the author of Fruit of the Motherland: Gender in an Egalitarian Society, the first anthropological account of one of the world's most egalitarian societies, on the small island known to its inhabitants as Vanatinai, n the Coral Sea east of New Guinea. She has written a memoir of her island research, Dreaming of Islands (forthcoming), and completed research for a book on early encounters between islanders and Europeans on the Coral Sea frontier and their cultural consequences. Her fascination with the ongoing legacies of such early intercultural encounters led her to research on the indigenous people of the Los Angeles Basin, the Tongva (Gabrielinos) and their neighbors, the Acjachemen (Juaneños), and the legacies of their catastrophic encounters with Spanish, Mexican, American, and other newcomers over multiple generations. This is the subject of her book in progress, Toypurina and the Hidden Histories of California. She has been supported in her research on California by Andrew Mellon and Huntington Library Fellowships, the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, the Haynes Foundation and Historical Society of Southern California, the Autry National Center for the Study of the American West, and the Graduate School and William F. Vilas Trust of the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

Seminar

Oct 18 2010
3:00 PM - 5:00 PM, 212 University Club Building

William Jones
History, UW-Madison


'The Other Operation Dixie: Public Employees and the Postwar Revival of Organized Labor'

The defeat of Operation Dixie, a million dollar campaign to unionize southern manufacturing after the Second World War, has long been recognized as a critical watershed in the postwar decline of organized labor in the United States. Yet not a single book or article even mentions the equally ambitious effort unionize public employees, which was launched a few days earlier and just down the Atlantic City boardwalk from the southern campaign and which laid the basis for a dramatic surge of unionization in the rapidly expanding service sector. My talk examines the reasons for this success and asks how it forces us to rethink common assumptions about class, race and the relevance of unions in the postwar era.

Will Jones is an Associate Professor of History at UW Madison. He is a specialist on the United States Since 1945, and his research focuses on the intersecting histories of race and labor. He is the author of The Tribe of Black Ulysses: African American Lumber Workers in the Jim Crow South, and his articles have appeared in journals including Labor, The Journal of Urban History and The Nation. In addition to The New Color of Class, he is writing a book on the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.

Seminar

Oct 25 2010
3:00 PM - 5:00 PM, 212 University Club Building

Albrecht Diem
History, Syracuse University


'The Invention of Monasticism'

Albrecht will present an outline of his research project, which focuses on the process of monastic institution forming in the late antique and early medieval west. He is especially interested in the modes of shaping monastic identities and modes of communal life through the construction of an institutional past. Almost every step of the formation of monastic institutions (e.g. the invention of enclosure and constitution monastic boundaries, the beginning of collective intercessory prayer and the notion of collective sanctity, the integration in political structures or the use of rules and norms) is legitimated by claims of continuing or restoring a tradition and by constructing a past that suits the present. He will try out whether it works to write a history of early monasticism on the basis of these imaginations of the past.

Albrecht Diem is Assistant Professor in the Department of History, Syracuse University. His research focuses on the history of monasticism in the Early Middle Ages and the history of gender and sexuality. He published a monograph, Das Monastische Experiment. Die Rolle der Keuschheit bei der Entstehung des westlichen Klosterwesens, Vita Regularis, vol. 24, Münster: LIT-Verlag 2005. His recent articles include 'A Classicising Friar at Work: John of Wales' Breviloquium de virtutibus', in: Alasdair A. MacDonald, Zweder von Martels and Jan Veenstra (eds), Christian Humanism. Essays in Honor of Arjo Vanderjagt, Studies in Medieval and Reformation Traditions, vol. 142, Leiden: Brill 2009, pp. 75-102; 'Nu suln ouch wir gesellen sîn - Über Schönheit, Freundschaft und mann-männliche Liebe im Tristan Gottfrieds von Straßburg', in: "Die sünde, der sich der tuivel schamet in der helle". Homosexualität in der Kultur des Mittelalters und der frühen Neuzeit, Stuttgart: Thorbecke Verlag 2009, pp. 91-121; 'Organisierte Keuschheit – organisierte Heiligkeit. Individuum und Institutionalisierung im frühen gallo-fränkischen Klosterwesen', in: Pavlina Rychterova, Stefan Seit and Raphalea Veit (eds), Das Charisma. Funktionen und symbolische Repräsentation, Beiträge zu den Historischen Kulturwissenschaften, vol. 2, Berlin: Akademie Verlag 2008, pp. 323-345; 'The rule of an Iro-Egyptian Monk in Gaul. Jonas of Bobbio's Vita Iohannis and the construction of a monastic identity', in: Revue Mabillon 80 (2008), pp. 5-50; 'Monks, kings and the transformation of sanctity. Jonas of Bobbio and the end of the Holy Man', in: Speculum 82 (2007), pp. 521-559. Albrecht Diem (M.A. Heinrich-Heine Universität Düsseldorf, PhD Universiteit Utrecht) taught at the universities of Groningen and Utrecht and was a post-doctoral research fellow at the Katholieke Universiteit Nijmegen and at the Institut für Mittelalterforschung, Austrian Academy of Science, Vienna. Since 2007 he is assistant professor at Syracuse University. He received a Mellon Fellowship of the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies Toronto in 2001/2002. The last three summers he spent as a guest fellow at the Institut für Mittelalterforschung, Vienna.

Seminar

Nov 1 2010
3:00 PM - 5:00 PM, 212 University Club Building

Michael Bailey



'Medieval Superstition and European Modernity'

Concern over and condemnation of superstition (always a negative category) surged in the late Middle Ages (fourteenth and fifteenth centuries), embodied finally in the person of the learned demonologist and witch-hunting magistrate, who saw himself as opposing the worst forms of superstition imaginable. Yet demonologists and witch-hunters themselves became, in later centuries, the very embodiment of an "irrational" and "superstitious" Middle Ages that modern, Enlightened European society had overcome. This presentation will explore how much of the discourse of European modernity rests a discourse of "disenchantment" and opposition to superstition while also examining the historical connections between medieval and modern conceptions of superstition as a way to call into question any supposedly sharp medieval/modern divide.

Michael D. Bailey is Associate Professor of History at Iowa State University. His research focuses on magic, superstition, and heresy, mainly in late medieval Europe. He has been a Fulbright fellow, a DAAD fellow, and an Alexander von Humboldt fellow, as well as holding a Mellon postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of three books: Battling Demons: Witchcraft, Heresy, and Reform in the Late Middle Ages (2003), Historical Dictionary of Witchcraft (2003), and Magic and Superstition in Europe: A Concise History from Antiquity to the Present (2007), translated into Italian as Magia e superstizione in Europa dall' Antichità ai giorni nostri (2008). He has also authored a dozen articles, and from 2006 through 2010 was the founding co-editor of the interdisciplinary journal Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft.

Burdick-Vary Symposium

Nov 5 2010 - Nov 6 2010
4151 Grainger Hall

'The Farther Shores of Literacy: Amerindian Graphic invention and the World of Letters'

New World peoples had already invented a huge range of graphic systems when Europeans brought the alphabet to America. Colonial letters interacted with Amerindian pictography, glyphs, cord-writing, and other graphic arts for centuries. This symposium brings together foremost researchers familiar with deeper and more varied meanings of “writing” in the Americas. How did graphic pluralism affect American arts of literacy?

Visit the conference page for the program

Seminar

Nov 8 2010
3:00 PM - 5:00 PM, 212 University Club Building

Olivia Donaldson
French and Italian, UW-Madison


'Life-on-a-Human-Hyphen: Mapping Interpersonal Migrations in Calixthe Beyala's Your Name Shall Be Tanga'

How may the study of interpersonal encounters enhance existing theories of migration and diaspora? This presentation reinterprets the migratory notion of living life-on-the-hyphen or between nations by mapping embodied hyphenization in Calixthe Beyala's West African novel Your Name Shall Be Tanga. An analysis of the protagonist's self-proclaimed existence as a “girlchild-woman” within a “human crossroads” demonstrates the significance of studying how we live in relationship to people in addition to places. This study of life-on-a-human-hyphen—how the scattered self forms through interpersonal encounters—informs the more traditional place-based notion of life-on-the-hyphen and consequentially our reading of migrant literature.

Olivia Donaldson is a Ph.D. Candidate in French at UW-Madison. Her dissertation, Bordering Bodies, Migrating Selves: A Geo-Textual Exploration of Sex, Skin and Speech in Contemporary Francophone Life Stories, develops a theory of relational migration that expands geographical concepts of migration into the realm of the interpersonal. The corpus connects Francophone literature and film from North Africa, Sub-Saharan Africa, the Caribbean, the Middle East, and Asia. Traversing disciplinary and geographic boundaries, this project contributes to Francophone, migration/diaspora, and transnational feminist studies.

Seminar

Nov 8 2010
3:00 PM - 5:00 PM, 212 University Club Building

Lynn Wolff
German, UW-Madison


'Literature as Historiography: W.G. Sebald's Hybrid Discourse'

The discursive difference between literature and historiography as defined by Aristotle has remained an organizing principle for both discourses across the ages. In my dissertation I trace the sustained contact between literature and historiography, highlighting where they diverge and converge, and examining in particular the way in which a new hybrid discourse of literature as historiography, or what I term “literary historiography,” emerges in the works of German-language author W.G. Sebald (1944-2001). It is a primary aim of Sebald's writing to bring various fields into dialogue—often disparate ones such as the fine arts and the natural sciences, for example—while at the same time questioning these various ways of knowing. In this presentation, I will provide an overview of my dissertation and elucidate the core questions Sebald formulates in his texts regarding literature's relationship to reality and fiction's relationship to history. Together with these questions, the thematic constellations Sebald presents, such as memory, trauma, and the Holocaust, reach beyond the borders of German studies not only to the study of literature in general but to broader aesthetic and epistemological concerns shared across the humanities.

Lynn L. Wolff is a PhD Candidate in the Department of German at the University of Wisconsin, Madison with a PhD minor in French. Her research interests include: German and French literature, culture, history, and philosophy from the 18th through 21st centuries; Holocaust Studies; Gender Studies; Narratology; Photography; Translation Theory, and World Literature/s. She has authored articles on W.G. Sebald; H.G. Adler; literary and historical representations of female concentration camp guards; and the 1780 essay contest of the Prussian Royal Academy. Wolff has been a Fulbright Research Fellow, a UW-Madison Graduate School Fellow, a Deuss/Schultz Distinguished Graduate Fellow of the UW-Madison German Department, and a Dorot Graduate Student Research Assistant at the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. She has also received fellowships from the German Historical Institute and the National Archive of German Literature (Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach).

Seminar

Nov 15 2010
3:00 PM - 5:00 PM, 212 University Club Building

Jonathan Pollock
History, Madison Area Technical College


'From Rags to Yichus: Scrap, Secondhand, and Surplus Dealers in American Jewish Communities'

The seminar will present an introductory proposal for a work on the history of Jewish entrepreneurs in the scrap, surplus, and secondhand-goods industries. Beginning with the Yiddish concept of "yichus," roughly translated as "living up to the good name of one's family," the paper will examine the Jewish scrap dealer in popular culture as a background for understanding Jewish persistence in this field, and trace the history of these related industries from the late 19th century to the present. Beyond this particular case of American Jewish community life, the project will describe how ethnic-niche businesses become the foundation of ethnic communities.

Pollack is Instructor in History and Chair of the Humanities Department at Madison Area Technical College. He is also the Project Director for Life During Wartime, a professional-development program for history teachers in grades 5-12, funded by the Teaching American History initiative of the U. S. Department of Education. Pollack's publications include "'Is This We Have among Us Here a Jew': The Hillel Review and Jewish Identity at the University of Wisconsin, 1925-31," in Charles Lloyd Cohen and Paul S. Boyer, eds. Religion and the Culture of Print in Modern America (University of Wisconsin Press, 2008); The Voice of the People: Primary Sources on the History of American Labor, Industrial Relations, and Working-Class Culture (co-editor) (Harlan Davidson, 2004); and "Jewish Problems: Eastern and Western Jewish Identities in Conflict at the University of Wisconsin, 1919-1941," American Jewish History 89:2 (June, 2001). Pollack earned his M A. and Ph. D. in History at the University of Wisconsin, and his A.B. in History at the University of Michigan.

Seminar

Nov 22 2010
3:00 PM - 5:00 PM, 212 University Club Building

Michele Hilmes
Communication Arts, UW-Madison


'Photography in Sound: The Transatlantic Radio Feature 1939-1946'

Radio as a sound medium rose to a height of aesthetic accomplishment in the WWII era "feature" program, as it simultaneously became a powerful instrument of propaganda for nations at war, most notably in Britain and the United States. This talk will trace some of the tensions within which the radio feature found expressive form: between the demands of "pure radio" and the need for documentary "photography in sound;" between live and recorded production techniques; and between democratizing and authoritarian impulses tied to the problematic indexicality of sound in a visual world.

Michele Hilmes is Professor of Media and Cultural Studies and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Communication Arts. She received her Ph.D. in Cinema Studies from New York University in 1986. She is the author or editor of several books on media history, including Hollywood and Broadcasting: From Radio to Cable (1990), Radio Voices: American Broadcasting 1922-1952 (1997); Only Connect: A Cultural History of Broadcasting in the United States (3rd edition 2010); The Radio Reader: Essays in the Cultural History of Radio (ed., 2001), The Television History Book (ed., 2003), and NBC: America's Network (ed., 2007). Her forthcoming book, Network Nations: A Transnational History of British and American Broadcasting (2011) examines flows of transatlantic influence between US and British broadcasters during radio and television's formative years, and their impact on the production of global culture. She is the founder of the North American Radio Studies Network and founding editorial board member of The Radio Journal: International Studies in Broadcast and Audio Media.

Seminar

Nov 29 2010
3:00 PM - 5:00 PM, 212 University Club Building

Judith Kaplan
History of Science, UW-Madison


'Historical linguists take to the field: scientific encounters with "living language" in Germany, 1915-1918'

This presentation begins with a sketch of Judith's dissertation research on the history of language sciences in Imperial Germany. It will identify factors that contributed to a shift from ancient to contemporary evidence in studies on the "life" of language. The focal point of discussion will be the Royal Prussian Phonographic Commission, which opportunistically collected a range of sonic samples from prisoners of war held in camps throughout Germany during World War I. Taking the contributions of Friedrich Carl Andreas (1846-1930) asits central case study, the paper will explore the significance of this undertaking for the integration and historiography of anthropology, linguistics, and the field sciences.

William Coleman Dissertation Fellow at the IRH, Judy Kaplan is a PhD Candidate in the Department of the History of Science at the University of Wisconsin Madison. She holds a Master of Arts degree from that program as well as a Masters of Science from the University of Illinois in Disability Studies. In addition to several internal fellowships, she was a recipient of a National Science Foundation Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant in 2009. Recently, she has presented papers at workshops organized by the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Chicago and Berlin.

Seminar

Nov 29 2010
3:00 PM - 5:00 PM, 212 University Club Building

Bretton White
Spanish and Portuguese, UW-Madison


'Cruising for Impermanence'

This talk will explore how the gay and transvestite characters in the play Chamaco (2006), by Abel González Melo, travel through and manipulate the central city spaces of Havana, most notably the Parque Central, transforming official, celebratory spaces of the nation into concealed meeting places that reveal the true, queer nature of the city. This talk shows that this play, while exposing hidden identities, is more concerned with the ethereal, ghostly qualities of what is exposed, rather than with feelings or concepts of permanence. The city space at day is dystopic, but here it is suggested that the transformative possibilities of queer sex—that in this play occur in the peripheries of the city center—can lead to queer sexual citizenship that extends beyond the city center's nighttime fringe.

Bretton White is a dissertator in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese and a Dana-Allen Dissertation Fellow at the IRH. Her research interests include Caribbean theatre and performance, queer theory, and how affective, spatial and bodily relationships can be rearticulated. She has published an article about Cuban theatre in the Latin American Theatre Review on how the possibilities of limitless intimacies push audience members to reconsider how their own bodies work with and against the state's agenda. She is currently working on an article about how Cuban performance artist Tania Bruguera manipulates dignity (and its loss). Additionally, she is organizing an after-school theatre workshop in a local bilingual school.

Seminar

Dec 6 2010
3:00 PM - 5:00 PM, 212 University Club Building

Névine El- Nossery
French and Italian, UW-Madison


'Women’s Anamnesia: Re-Membering the Forgotten Hi/story of Algerian Civil War'

Since the outbreak of violence that started in Algeria in the 90s with the rise of Islamic fundamentalism, Algerian women authors have coped with this inexorable, and yet inconceivable reality through a form of ‘urgency writing’ that resists dominant versions of official historical discourses. In order to exhume the buried memories and through a dynamic process of Anamnesia, the women writers that I chose to work on exploit a variety of counter-memories that challenge the ‘whitening’ of history by interweaving individual and collective hi/stories; past and present ‘folds’ (Deleuze); factual and fictional structures, which recall once again the complex and yet dynamic process of re-membering the past. Moreover this book-length project examines the relationship between writing and memory, literature and history, and notably women’s representation of violence in self-writing exploration. The fictional works of Assia Djebar, Malika Mokeddem, and Leila Marouan are studied in parallel with other testimonial narratives written by Leila Aslaoui, Malika Boussouf, Khalida Messaoudi, among others, aiming to discern where the boundaries between factual and fictional representation of reality tend to blur.

Névine El Nossery is Assistant Professor of Francophone Literature in the Department of French and Italian. Her research focuses on North African literature, women's writing and history, self-writing and memory. She published several articles and book chapters in international journals on Assia Djebar, Abdelkébir Khatibi, Malika Mokeddem, Amin Maalouf, Nancy Huston. El Nossery (University of Cairo (BA), University of Cairo (M.A), Université de Montreal (Ph.D.)) has translated Nancy Huston's essay, Nord perdu (Loosing the North) into Arabic and was published in 2005.

Seminar

Dec 13 2010
3:00 PM - 5:00 PM, 212 University Club Building

E. Nicole Meyer



''No, you're not to do that!': Fractured Families, Faulty Misunderstandings in Nathalie Sarraute's Enfance'

As a privileged literary site for the depiction of identity and of awareness of self, the autobiographical novel has born witness, thematically and formally, to family fractures through its intimate dramas and intersections with the wider world. Recent autobiographical texts by French-speaking women autobiographers reveal diverse fractures, be they matriarchal structures that crumble under pressure, incest, or cultural divides. Professor Meyer’s presentation focuses on how, why and with what effects these cracks extending back to childhood permeate Nathalie Sarraute’s autobiography, hidden, deep, waiting to quake. These fractures matter--whether they be simply a hurtful word, glance or action. This study suggests new ways of considering women's writing, their place in society, and their role in the larger narrative of history.

Resident Fellow at the IRH, E. Nicole Meyer is Professor of French, Humanistic Studies and Women's and Gender Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay. Professor Meyer is author of numerous articles and book chapters on Flaubert, French and Francophone women’s autobiography, twentieth-century French literature, Descartes and Business French. Her book The Questioning of Origins and Authority in Flaubert's Bouvard et Pécuchet (Editions Rodopi B. V.) will appear in 2011.

Welcome Lunch

Jan 18 2011
12:00 PM - 1:30 PM, The Banquet Room, University Club

All 2010-2011 IRH Fellows are invited to lunch, informal conversations, and introductions. Many new fellows are joining us for the “spring” term. Fellows whose terms are ending in December are very welcome to remain involved in formal and informal IRH exchanges, seminars, and other events throughout the year. To foster ongoing conversations among all 2010-2011 fellows, the lunch will feature fellows making a brief statement about their IRH projects. Please come prepared to make a very brief statement about your project: All fellows: What your project is about (2-3 sentences); Fall fellows: What you accomplished in the fall on your project (2-3 sentences); Spring fellows: what you hope to accomplish in the spring on your project (2-3 sentences). RSVP by Monday, Dec. 20, to rsvp@irh.wisc.edu.

Seminar

Jan 24 2011
3:00 PM - 5:00 PM, 212 University Club Building

Tejumola Olaniyan
African Languages and Literature; English, UW-Madison


'Enchantings: A Cultural Biography of the Postcolonial African State'

The seminar is an inquiry into the relations between the postcolonial African state and selected cultural forms, practices, and institutions its peculiar constitutive features engendered. It will also explore how the forms and practices generate and circulate a certain image of the state, and impact the state’s self-understanding and performance. The “engendering” is bi-directional, no less, may be more My goals are to account for the sociopolitical underpinning of postcolonial African cultural forms, and to construct a “cultural biography” of the postcolonial African state in order to advance the epistemological process of understanding it.

Tejumola Olaniyan, IRH Senior Fellow, is the Louise Durham Mead Professor of English and African Languages at the University Wisconsin-Madison. He is founding chair of the African Diaspora and the Atlantic World Research Circle (2003-2010), and currently co-chairs the Music, Race, and Empire Research Circle. His research interests include African, African diaspora, and postcolonial literature and cultural studies. He has published widely in these areas, including Arrest the Music!: Fela and His Rebel Art and Politics (2004, 2009; nominated for Best Research in World Music by the Association for Recorded Sound Collections in 2005), Scars of Conquest/Masks of Resistance: The Invention of Cultural Identities in African, African American and Caribbean Drama (1995), and co-editor of African Literature: An Anthology of Criticism and Theory (2007, with Ato Quayson), African Drama and Performance (2004, with John Conteh-Morgan), and African Diaspora and the Disciplines (2010, with James H. Sweet). One of his current projects is a book, Political Cartooning in Africa, forthcoming from Indiana University Press, and an online encyclopedia of African political cartoonists.

Seminar

Jan 31 2011
3:00 PM - 5:00 PM, 212 University Club Building

Steve Nadler
Philosophy, UW-Madison


'Maimonides on Divine Providence and Moral Luck'

A look at the way in which the medieval Jewish philosopher Maimonides explains the workings of divine providence, and especially how the virtuous person might be able to escape the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. We will focus on a particularly troublesome passage that has baffled commentators since the 12th century.

Steven Nadler is the William H. Hay II/WARF Professor of Philosophy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he has been teaching since 1988. He is also a faculty member of the Mosse/Weinstein Center for Jewish Studies (and a former holder of the Max and Frieda Weinstein/Bascom Professorship of Jewish Studies), and the editor of the Journal of the History of Philosophy. A specialist in the history of early modern philosophy and in medieval and early modern Jewish philosophy, his books include Arnauld and the Cartesian Philosophy of Ideas (Princeton University Press, 1989), Malebranche and Ideas (Oxford University Press, 1992), Spinoza: A Life (Cambridge University Press, 1999, winner of the 2000 Koret Jewish Book Award for biography, and now translated into ten languages), Spinoza's Heresy: Immortality and the Jewish Mind (Oxford University Press, 2002), Rembrandt's Jews (University of Chicago Press, 2003, named a finalist for the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction), Spinoza's Ethics: An Introduction (Cambridge University Press, 2006), The Best of All Possible Worlds: A Story of Philosophers, God and Evil (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2008; paperback, Princeton University Press, 2010), and Occasionalism: Causation Among the Cartesians (Oxford University Press, forthcoming). He is also the co-editor of the Cambridge History of Jewish Philosophy: From Antiquity through the Seventeenth Century (2008), among other volumes. He has been a visiting professor at Stanford University, the University of Chicago, and the Ecole des hautes etudes en sciences sociales (Paris), and the holder of the Spinoza Chair at the University of Amsterdam.

Seminar

Feb 7 2011
3:00 PM - 5:00 PM, 212 University Club Building

Susan Lape
Classics, University of Southern California


'Demosthenes and Fourth-Century Athens: Biography, History, and Politics'

This paper is an overview of a larger biographical and historical study of the Athenian orator Demosthenes (384-322BCE). It discusses Demosthenes' inheritance dispute, his political theory, and his role in shaping Athenian resistance to Philip II of Macedon. Throughout, it considers the value of the biographical approach for historical research in the specific case of fourth-century Athens.

Susan Lape is an Associate Professor of Classics at the University of Southern California. Her research interests include ancient drama, law, and cultural history. She is the author of Reproducing Athens: Menander's Comedy, Democratic Culture, and the Hellenistic City, (2004), and Race and Citizen Identity in the Classical Athenian Democracy (2010). Lape has received a Junior Faculty Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Studies, a Laurance S. Rockefeller Visiting Fellowship from the University Center for Human Values, Princeton University, a Junior Faculty Fellowship from the Society of Scholars, Walter Chapin Simpson Center for the Humanities, University of Washington and the Solmsen Fellowship at the Institute for Research in the Humanities, University of Wisconsin.

Seminar

Feb 14 2011
3:00 PM - 5:00 PM, 212 University Club Building

David Krugler
History, UW-Platteville


'If We Must Die: African Americans' Fight in the Race of War of 1919'

If We Must Die is a book in progress about the widespread antiblack collective violence (race riots and lynchings) which engulfed the United States following World War I. It examines these race riots and lynchings from the perspective of African Americans, with special attention to their self-defense measures and armed resistance to white mob attacks. I’m especially interested in how black veterans contributed to this resistance and helped build the "New Negro" identity of the interwar period.

David Krugler is Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin--Platteville, where he has taught since completing his Ph.D. at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1997. A historian of the modern United States, his research interests include Cold War propaganda, civil defense and continuity of government, and race relations. He is the author of The Voice of America and the Domestic Propaganda Battles, 1945-1953 (University of Missouri Press, 2000) and This Is Only a Test: How Washington, D.C., Prepared for Nuclear War (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). Currently he is writing a book on racial conflict in the United States in 1919. Krugler frequently serves as a faculty leader for teacher education programs at the Newberry Library in Chicago, Illinois. He is the past recipient of research grants and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Organization of American Historians, the White House Historical Association, and the UW System Institute on Race and Ethnicity.

Seminar

Feb 21 2011
3:00 PM - 5:00 PM, 212 University Club Building

Sandhya Ganapathy
Anthropology, UW-Stevens Point


' Imagining Alaska: Translocal Processes and the Formation of Place.'

This presentation is drawn from a chapter in my book project, Partial Alliances: Environmentalism, Development and Indigeneity in Alaska. The book presents an ethnographically grounded analysis of contemporary environmental contestation in Alaska, with particular attention to relationships that exist between Alaskan Native communities and environmental NGOs. In this presentation, I explore the role that place (specifically “Alaska”) plays in shaping these environmental contestations, which are themselves often translocal in nature. I consider the ways that “Alaska” and other iconic landscapes become constituted in the spatial imaginations of geographically dispersed publics and what that portends for more grounded engagements with and struggles over place.

Sandhya Ganapathy joined the faculty at UW-Stevens Point in 2008 as an Assistant Professor of Anthropology. She finished her doctorate in anthropology from Temple University (2008) and is completing a book manuscript based on her dissertation fieldwork. She has published her work in the journal Social Analysis and in Anthropology News. She received support for her research from the Wenner Gren Foudation, Temple University and the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point.

Workshop

Feb 23 2011
12:00 PM - 1:30 PM, 212 University Club Building

Paul Boyer, Merle Curti Professor Emeritus of History, Editor, UW-Press Series, Studies in American Thought and Culture; Editor-in-Chief, The Oxford Companion to United States History. Former director of the Institute, 1993-2001.
Nancy Marshall, Associate Professor of Art History; author of Painting Victorian London: City of Gold and Mud, Yale University Press, 2010. Resident Fellow at the Institute, 2008.
Gwen Walker, Acquisitions Editor, University of Wisconsin Press
Susan Stanford Friedman, Director, Institute for Research in the Humanities and Co-Editor of Contemporary Women’s Writing, Oxford University Press Journal, 2007--.



'Workshop on Publication Strategies in the Humanities'

Format: 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.

Download complete announcement here.

Lunch: A catered lunch will be available for those who RSVPed for lunch, at 11:45am. RSVP to rsvp@irh.wisc.edu by Wednesday, February 16, 4:00pm, sooner if possible. All are welcome, whether or not you come for lunch (you can also bring your own). Coffee, tea, and beverages will be available.

Seminar

Feb 28 2011
3:00 PM - 5:00 PM, 212 University Club Building

Max Harris



'Composing Music for the Feast of Fools: The Case of the Kyrie Asini'

Over the past thirty years, the Kyrie Asini (Kyrie of the Ass) has become an established part of the repertoire of medieval music supposedly having its origins in the Feast of Fools. Musicologists and historians now confidently describe it as “traditional,” “thirteenth century,” and “French.” I will argue that it is a much more recent composition, inspired by the longstanding myth of a disorderly Feast of Fools.

Max Harris is the author of five books, including Sacred Folly: A New History of the Feast of Fools (Cornell University Press, 2011) and Aztecs, Moors, and Christians: Festivals of Reconquest in Mexico and Spain (University of Texas Press, 2000). He has taught at Yale University and the University of Virginia, and served as executive director of the Wisconsin Humanities Council.

Seminar

Mar 7 2011
3:00 PM - 5:00 PM, 212 University Club Building

Mario Ortiz-Robles
English, UW-Madison


'Beasts and Monsters'

This seminar will focus on the animality of the monsters that appear in late-Victorian gothic fiction. It will explore how evolutionary dynamics inform the narrative representation of figures such as Dracula, Jekyll-and-Hyde, and Dorian Gray and consider the extent to which these rhetorical effects help install a new biopolitical order in post-Darwinian Britain.

Mario Ortiz-Robles is Associate Professor of English. His work to date has focused on the nineteenth-century realist novel, the first truly global literary phenomenon of our modernity, and has availed itself of a reading methodology that situates itself at the intersection of close textual analysis, deconstructive approaches to literary language, and ideology critique. His first book, The Novel as Event (University of Michigan Press, 2010), is an attempt to re-assess the historical claims made about the instrumental efficacy of the realist novel within the complex social processes of subject formation by looking at the role of performative speech acts in a series of canonical works by Dickens, Thackeray, Eliot, Brontë, and Collins. Together with Caroline Levine, he has edited Narrative Middles: Navigating the Victorian Novel (Ohio University Press, forthcoming), a volume of essays that focus on the formal and historical significance of the expansive middle of the long nineteenth-century novel. His work has appeared in Comparative Literature, ELH, and Textual Practice.

Seminar

Mar 21 2011
3:00 PM - 5:00 PM, 212 University Club Building

Len Kaplan
Law, UW-Madison


'Notes Toward a Theory of Resistance'

Weimar's weak liberal state folded into Fascism. In the US since the 1970's critics have warned about "fascism with a friendly face" and more recently a US form of fascism (Hedges) or Inverted Fascism (Wolin). What do these dire prediction represent? What lessons from Weimar thinkers, Schmitt, Arendt, Strauss on the "political"? More particularly, what did and does psychoanalysis from Fromm to recent theorists (Badiou, Summers) add to any conjectural therory of political resistence and where is law in this set of issues.

Professor Leonard Kaplan received his undergraduate and law degrees from Temple University in 1962 and 1965, and an LL.M from Yale Law School in 1966. He received a Ph.D. in Psychology from the University of Chicago in 1977, and he was a Research Fellow at the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis. He taught at the University of Nebraska Law School from 1966 to 1968, and served as a Staff Attorney in the office of Community Legal Counsel in Chicago from 1971 to 1974, when he joined the University of Wisconsin Law School faculty. Professor Kaplan has co-edited six books and written over thirty articles. He was a co-founder and co-editor-in-chief of a journal, Graven Images: Studies in Culture, Law and the Sacred, now a book series with Lexington Books (Rowman Littlefield). He is the director of the Law School's Project for Law and the Humanities. He also has been a member of the Editorial Board of the International Journal of Law and Psychiatry since 1977. He has served on the organizing committee for International Congresses on Law and Psychiatry through the 1990s to date. Professor Kaplan was First Vice President, and a member of the Executive Board of Directors of the International Academy of Law and Mental Health since 1992. In 2009 he became President-elect of the organization. In 2002, Professor Kaplan received the Academy's Michael Zeegers Lifetime Achievement Award for distinction in the pursuit of Scholarship, Pedagogy, and Human Rights Initiatives in the field of Law and Mental Health.

Seminar

Mar 28 2011
3:00 PM - 5:00 PM, 212 University Club Building

Richard Goodkin
French and Italian, UW-Madison


'Proust’s Calculus of Personality'

Calculus, invented in the seventeenth century by Leibniz and Newton and perfected over the next two hundred years, is not only the foundation of higher mathematics but also an indispensable tool for a broad spectrum of intellectual and practical endeavors that entail quantification of various sorts, both in the physical sciences and in the social sciences, including psychology. Although it allows for the measurement of phenomena ranging from the area and volume of non-linear figures to demographic changes in large populations, the broad philosophical and literary question it circumvents on a purely practical level—what are the implications of quantifying phenomena that are not, in some sense, quantifiable?—has continued to haunt philosophers and literary figures to this day. This seminar will suggest that the development of calculus has important implications for the humanities as well as the physical and social sciences, focusing on evolving conceptions of personality in literature and psychology. Particular attention will be paid to the works of the French literary giant of the early twentieth century, Marcel Proust (1871-1922), whose monumental cycle of novels, In Search of Lost Time (aka Remembrance of Things Past), presents a particularly intriguing illustration of the calculus of personality.

Richard Goodkin, a Senior Fellow at the Institute for Research in the Humanities, has taught in the Department of French and Italian at the University of Wisconsin-Madison since 1989; he has also taught at Yale University. He is a specialist of seventeenth-century French theater but has written on nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature as well, and he has also worked on other areas ranging from ancient Greek tragedy to French cinema. He is the author of two books on French tragedy, The Tragic Middle: Racine, Aristotle, Euripides (1991) and Birth Marks: The Tragedy of Primogeniture in Pierre Corneille, Thomas Corneille, and Jean Racine (2000), a book on Marcel Proust, Around Proust (1991), and a volume on French Symbolist poetry, The Symbolist Home and the Tragic Home: Mallarmé and Oedipus (1984). He is the editor of an issue of Yale French Studies entitled Autour de Racine: Studies in Intertextuality (1989) and of a volume of essays, In Memory of Elaine Marks: Life Writing, Writing Death (2007). In addition to working on his present book project, “The Calculus of Personality,” he is completing a book on the relations between theater and narrative in seventeenth-century France, a project for which he received a Guggenheim Fellowship.