Panel DiscussionSeptember 12, 2011
3:00 P.M. - 5:00 P.M., 212 University Club Building
Lee Palmer Wandel, History, UW-Madison
Mara Loveman, Sociology, UW-Madison
Jon McKenzie, English, UW-Madison
Patricia Rosenmeyer, Classics, UW-Madison
'How? Research Methods in the Humanities'
The Institute for Research in the Humanities (IRH) will begin its year-long weekly seminars with a panel discussion on research methods in the humanities. The panel continues IRH’s broad discussions about the humanities in the effort to understand the intellectual, ethical, and political underpinnings of what brings us together as a division of knowledge.
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SeminarSeptember 19, 2011
3:00 P.M. - 5:00 P.M., 212 University Club Building
Mary Louise Roberts
History, UW-Madison
'Amerilots and Harlots: The Power of Commodities during the U.S. Military Presence in France, 1944-1946'
During the American campaign in Normandy, the Army distributed enormous quantities of cigarettes, chocolate and chewing gum, as well as soap and other toiletries to its soldiers. The French called the G.I.s “Amerilots” because they seemed to have alot of everything. As these commodities began to circulate in the black market, they became nationalized as symbols of U.S. affluence. For civilians, G.I. supply materialized American superiority and took the measure of Gallic misery. But the most important product drawing lines of privilege between the two peoples—sex—was French, not American. Prostitution became a widespread phenomenon during the years 1944-1945 because sex was one good not available at the local military PX. As a commodity, prostitution nurtured an arrogant, imperialist attitude among the G.I.s. A traditional figure of moral depravity, the prostitute who had solicited German soldiers during the war had denoted the dishonor of the Occupation. Now, even after the Liberation, the sight of a prostitute with an American soldier continued to remind civilians of their status as a conquered people.
Mary Louise Roberts is the author of two books, Civilization without Sexes: Reconstructing Gender in Postwar France, 1918-1928 (1994) and Disruptive Acts: The New Woman in Fin de Siècle France (2002). Roberts has been the recipient of grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Institute for Advanced Study, and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation. She has also received several teaching awards, most recently in 2008, the Chancellor’s Distinguished Teaching Award. Articles from her current project, entitled Liberators and Intruders: The American Presence in France, 1944-1946, have appeared (or will appear) in Le Mouvement social, Tabur: Yearbook for European History, Society, Culture and Thought (in Hebrew), French Historical Studies, and the American Historical Review. Other articles on various subjects have also recently appeared in History and Theory, French Politics, Culture & Society, Entreprises et Histoires, Clio: Histoire, Femmes, Sociétes and Journal of Women’s History.
Burdick-Vary Lecture Series: International Perspectives on the Environmental Humanities and Social SciencesSeptember 21, 2011 - September 22, 2011
Cóilín Parsons
English Literature, University of Cape Town, South Africa
'Cultures and Histories of the Environment Colloquium'
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Cóilín Parsons is an assistant professor of English Literature at the University of Cape Town, South Africa since 2009. He completed his PhD in English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. Cóilín has published on the origins of literary study in Ireland and India, Sydney Owenson’s Indian novels, Irish literature, and postcolonial theory. He is currently working on a book manuscript on the cartographic origins of Irish modernist literature.
SeminarSeptember 26, 2011
3:00 P.M. - 5:00 P.M., Banquet Room, University Club Building
Rob Nixon
English, UW-Madison
'The Future Eaters: Petro-despotism, Empire, and the Resource Curse'
Abdelrahman Munif, a Jordanian-born writer of Saudi-Iraqi parentage, gave imaginative definition to the resource wars—over oil, water, and time itself—that have afflicted the Persian Gulf. Against the backdrop of transnational hydrocarbon politics, the climate crisis, the resource curse, and the Arab uprisings, this talk will consider Munif's prescient vision of socioenvironmental time.
Rob Nixon is the Rachel Carson Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He received his Ph.D. from Columbia University and is the author of London Calling. V. S. Naipaul, Postcolonial Mandarin (Oxford); Homelands, Harlem and Hollywood. South African Culture and the World Beyond (Routledge); and Dreambirds: the Natural History of a Fantasy (Picador). His book Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor is forthcoming from Harvard University Press in spring 2011. Professor Nixon is a frequent contributor to the New York Times; his writing has also appeared in The New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, London Review of Books, Times Literary Supplement, Village Voice, The Nation, The Guardian, Outside, Chronicle of Higher Education, The Independent, Critical Inquiry, Social Text, Slate, South Atlantic Quarterly, Transition, Cultural Critique, Contemporary Literature, Journal of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies, Ariel, Modern Fiction Studies, New Formations, Black Renaissance/Renaissance Noire, and elsewhere.
Germaine Brée SymposiumSeptember 30, 2011
9:15 A.M. - 6:00 P.M., 313 Pyle Center, 702 Langdon St.
'The "Arab Spring" and the Humanities'
A long-awaited “Arab Spring” or “Arab Awakening” erupted with stunning swiftness in January of 2011. What are its roots? What are its futures? Pundits and politicians, political scientists and specialists of all kinds propose answers. What light do the humanities shed on these shattering events--so full of hope and potential, so uncertain as to their outcomes, so varied from place to place, already so tragic in some contexts? How does an understanding of the arts, literature, film, philosophy, culture, and history in regional and global perspectives contribute to understanding the prospects and challenges of the “Arab Spring”? The Germaine Brée Symposium brings three distinguished speakers to campus together with UW-Madison faculty and students for a day-long exploration of these issues. The event is open to the public.
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SeminarOctober 3, 2011
3:00 P.M. - 5:00 P.M., 212 University Club Building
Ken George
Anthropology, UW-Madison
'Companionable Objects, Companionable Conscience: Episode 1, "Two Effigies"'
My project explores crafted things and the ethical and affective ties we form with them in our everyday lifeworlds and contemporary public spheres. A simple idea leads to me write about “companionable objects” and “companionable conscience:” Things, too, are social beings—though not human beings—and as we dwell together with them we become vulnerable to them, and they to us. In that mutuality of influence between people and things there is both care and violence. An ethical realm stretches between us. And so I want to pose a question: Will we see ethics differently, will we see conscience in a new light, if we look to things as a fulcrum in ethical relationships? Using materials from ethnographic fieldwork and art historical research in Indonesia and elsewhere, I suggest that we will
Kenneth M. George is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and affiliated with its Center for Southeast Asian Studies. His ethnographic research in Indonesia has focused on the cultural politics of minority ancestral religions (1982-1992), and more recently (1994-2008), on a long-term collaboration with painter A. D. Pirous, exploring the aesthetic, ethical, and political ambitions shaping Islamic art and art publics in that country. His books include: Showing Signs of Violence: The Cultural Politics of a Twentieth-Century Headhunting Ritual (awarded the 1998 Harry J. Benda Prize for best book on Southeast Asia by the Association for Asian Studies); and Picturing Islam: Art and Ethics in a Muslim Lifeworld. He also has co-edited (with Andrew C. Willford) a volume on Spirited Politics: Religion and Public Life in Contemporary Southeast Asia. Ken has been the recipient of major postdoctoral fieldwork fellowships from the Social Science Research Council, the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, and the Aga Khan Trust for Culture. He presently holds a Kellet Mid-Career Award from UW-Madison. His fellowships for writing and study include awards from the National Endowment of the Humanities, the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, and the Institute for Advanced Study. Ken was the editor of the multidisciplinary Journal of Asian Studies from 2005-2008, the first anthropologist and the first specialist on Southeast Asia to hold that position in the course of its 70-year history.
SeminarOctober 10, 2011
3:00 P.M. - 5:00 P.M., 212 University Club Building
John Nimis
French and Italian, UW-Madison
'Africa and the Disciplines: Congolese Music, Francophone Literature, and the Humanities'
That music is central to African societies is something of a truism. But what does this really mean in terms of how we understand Africa? This project looks at the implications of this fact with respect to the way Africa is studied and represented in the West: the way Africa is “translated” into Western epistemological terms. The music of the Congo, in particular, challenges the ways that the relationships between the oral tradition, written literature and recorded music are typically understood. By looking at this music from a literary perspective, consciously transgressing disciplinary boundaries, there are many lessons to be learned about the Congo, about written literature in Africa and the postcolonial world, as well as about the humanities today.
John Nimis received his PhD in French from New York University in 2010. His main research interest is the literature and music of Central Africa, with a focus on the Lingala language and the Democratic Republic of Congo, where he was a Fulbright scholar. He is working on his first book, tentatively titled Precarious Mastery: Literary Listening, Congolese Music and the African Imagination, which brings literary techniques to the study of music, and applies musical analysis to the study of African literature. He has taught at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and was a visiting researcher at the WISER research center in Johannesburg, South Africa. His secondary research interests include anglophone and lusophone Africa, the francophone Caribbean, and 19th century Europe.
SeminarOctober 17, 2011
3:00 P.M. - 5:00 P.M., 212 University Club Building
André Wink
History, UW-Madison
'Saints of the Indus: Islam and Politics in South Asia's Borderlands'
Much has been written about the rise and function of the cult of the saints in Latin and Greek-Orthodox Christianity. By comparison the study of a comparable phenomenon in the Muslim world is still relatively underdeveloped. This seminar will present some preliminary conclusions of ongoing research on the historical development of hereditary Sufi saints and their shrines in the Indus borderlands — a compact area (comprising today’s Pakistan, eastern Afghanistan and Kashmir) where they are exceptionally numerous and have been responsible for the conversion of nearly the entire population. Apart from conversion, particular attention will be given to their role in local politics — a role which sets them apart from their Christian counterparts and remains of key importance to this day.
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).
SeminarOctober 24, 2011
3:00 P.M. - 5:00 P.M., 212 University Club Building
Amy Powell
Art History, UW-Madison
'Temporal Subjectivities and “Locating Africa” in Postcolonial Cinema'
Engagement with Africa as a space or place is not the only way that contemporary artists and filmmakers critically interpret the condition of living in the wake of colonialism. Artworks employ time-based techniques (e.g. multiple-channel installation, simultaneity, duration, synchronization) to negotiate the temporalizing effects of modernism, the modern and the contemporary, the colonial and the postcolonial, often in relation to subjectivity and representation. This seminar will present two films that inhabit postcoloniality as a temporal condition full of unexpected identifications and intersubjective positions: Eija-Liisa Ahtila’s Where Is Where? (2009) and Zarina Bhimji’s Waiting (2007). Drawing out the temporal and cinematic possibilities for relational subjectivities from a text close to both films – Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks (1952) – I demonstrate the significant ways that Ahtila and Bhimji engage time to reveal stakes that push beyond the categorization of time in “time-based media” as simply that which passes while we watch.
Amy L. Powell, IRH Dana-Allen Dissertation Fellow, is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Art History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her research encompasses modern and contemporary art in global frameworks, particularly modern and contemporary African art and photography, African cinema, critical theory focusing on postcolonial theory and contemporary theories of representation, new media and subjectivity, transnational feminist art, the history and theory of photography, and the history and theory of museums and curatorial studies. Her essay, “Phantom Projections, Creole Cinema: Time-Images and Isaac Julien’s Fantôme Afrique” appeared in the 2009 issue of the Chicago Art Journal, and she has published exhibition and book reviews in African Arts and Invisible Culture. Her most recent co-curated exhibition, “New Media at the Charles Allis,” appeared at the Charles Allis Art Museum from June 2-September 15, 2010 in Milwaukee, WI. She is a 2011-2012 UW-Madison Chancellor's Fellow and held a 2010-2011 Smithsonian Predoctoral Fellowship at the National Museum of African Art in Washington, DC.
October 28, 2011
9:30 A.M. - 5:00 P.M., Banquet Room, University Club Building
Convener: Rachel Feldhay Brenner
Hebrew Studies, University of Wisconsin-Madison
'Holocaust Testimony and Its Reception: Cultural Transformations and Pedagogical Issues'
The Holocaust experience reaches us through testimony, and consciousness of the event has invaded the post-Holocaust cultural and educational Weltanschauung. This symposium explores the post-Holocaust reception of Holocaust testimony with special emphasis on the issue of empathy. Are responses to the Holocaust motivated by an indelible ethical need to penetrate the incomprehensible world of the Final Solution and to restore the humanity of the dehumanized victim? Or, are they shaped by a reluctance to face the horror? What do such responses tell us about the steadfastness of empathic capacities and about their limits?
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SeminarOctober 31, 2011
3:00 P.M. - 5:00 P.M., 212 University Club Building
Mathangi Krishnamurthy
Anthropology, UW-Madison
'How to do things with bits and bytes'
My project looks at the meaning of information in an age of Information Technology (IT), in order to understand and explore the kind of desires that animate workers’ participation in the Indian call center industry. I look at the Indian version of the popular game show “Who Wants to be a Millionaire” (Kaun Banega Crorepati), the movie Slumdog Millionaire, documentaries and other media coverage on Indian call centers, and interviews from call center workers in order to deconstruct the will to work in the Indian outsourcing industry. Through these sites, I ask as to the infrastructural content of the “IT” discourse. How do shiny buildings, happy people, self-help books, movies, teleserials, and swanky billboards animate the possibility of information technology? I argue that these sites function as the nuts and bolts of the aura of information, thus making desirable the prospect of call center work. The work that the idea of information performs therefore propels workers’ narratives on personal development, mobility, and the future.
Mathangi Krishnamurthy received her PhD in Anthropology and Cultural Studies from The University of Texas at Austin in 2010. She has published articles in the Anthropology of Work Review and her essay on accent and language training in the call center is part of an edited volume on the changing modalities of English language usage in India. Krishnamurthy holds degrees from Pune University, Mudra Institute of Communications, Ahmedabad, and The University of Texas at Austin. Her work has been supported by grants from the National Science Foundation, the American Association of University Women, and the South Asia Institute at the University of Texas at Austin. Her primary research interests are in the anthropology of globalization and work, urban studies, consumption, and gender. She also looks at the social life of communication technologies. Currently she is working on converting her dissertation into a book manuscript that will focus on the ways in which the call center constitutes a set of symptoms that can help read the changing modalities of the new Indian middle-class.
SeminarNovember 7, 2011
3:00 P.M. - 5:00 P.M., 212 University Club Building
Marian Halls
Comparative Literature, UW-Madison
'Re-articulating Political Community: Testimonial Narratives and the Formation of an Audience'
How and why do testimonial narratives emerge as a privileged mode of remembering times of political violence or catastrophe? As one point of departure, Dori Laub’s assertion in Felman and Laub’s Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis and History (1992), that “the listener becomes the... witness before the narrator does” underscores the way in which the possibility of listening as witness serves as a precondition for testimony to historical crisis. At stake, in other words, is the question of the audience of the testimony: to whom is the narrative told, and how does the audience condition what is heard? Laub’s analysis of the role of the listener points to the suggestion that testimony requires first the possibility of communicability – a communicability which events of massive upheaval and violence may erode. My reading of Laub’s analysis, through the specificity of three twentieth century historical contexts, poses this question: Does the possibility of testimony rely not only on communicability, but on an imagined community of listeners? Does the ability, however tenuous, to re-imagine or re-articulate a community after the crisis serve as a necessary precondition for the narrative act of bearing witness to take place? In my analysis of the factors conditioning testimonial production in Brazil’s political trials, in Guatemala’s post-war truth commissions, and in survivor testimonies given on the stand during the trial of Adolf Eichmann, I aim to push further Laub’s insight into the role of the addressee, in order to posit a critical distinction between the audience constructed to receive a testimony, and the addressee who hears it.
Marian Halls, a Dana-Allen Dissertation Fellow, is a Ph.D. candidate in Comparative Literature at UW-Madison. Her research develops a comparative framework for understanding the emergence and development of testimonial narratives across distinct political and cultural contexts. In support of this project, she received a George Mosse Exchange Fellowship to conduct research at the archives of the Yad Vashem Research Center in Jerusalem, Israel. Halls is also the recipient of the UW Mellon Dissertation Fellowship, the UW-Madison Nave Award, and the University Prize Fellowship. Her essay, "The Bone that Writes: Desaparecidos and the Disappearance of Literature" is forthcoming in the book, Provocation and Negotiation: Essays in Comparative Criticism (ed. Tim Mathews). She received a dual B.A. in Ethnomusicology and Comparative Literature from the University of California at Los Angeles.
Focus on the Humanities Distinguished LectureNovember 9, 2011
5:30P.M., Chazen Museum (Elvehjem Building), L140
Julia Murray
Professor of Art History and Senior Fellow, Institute for Research in the Humanities (2009-2011), UW-Madison
'Venerating the Sage: The Rise and Fall of a Shrine to Confucius'
Recognized throughout the world as a symbol of Chinese civilization, Confucius (551-479 BCE) is venerated as ancient philosopher, statesman, and teacher. Less familiar is his role in a religious cult supported over the centuries by Chinese emperors, officials, and scholars. After his death, a memorial shrine to Confucius in his hometown of Qufu, Shandong, gradually evolved into a large and magnificent temple. From the seventh century onward, schools throughout China also had temples for official worship. The focus of Julia Murray's talk, however, is a shrine near Shanghai, whose 17th-century patrons claimed it marked the place where his robe and cap had been buried 1000 years after his death. Using these unseen relics as a pretext, they build a ritual complex where scholarly pilgrims could offer sacrifices to the ancient sage and experience his beneficent presence. Like many sites associated with Confucius, it was destroyed during the Cultural Revolution, but unlike others, it has not been rebuilt--yet. In presenting the history of the shrine, Murray will explore several ways that material forms of Chinese religious expression shaped its architectural and artistic features and speculate on its prospects for future revival.
Julia K. Murray is Professor of Art History, East Asian Studies, and Religious Studies at the University of Wisconsin. She received her Ph. D. from Princeton University in a joint program of East Asian Studies and Art & Archaeology. Before moving to Madison in 1989, she worked in curatorial positions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Freer Gallery of Art, and the Harvard University Art Museums. Her publications include Mirror of Morality: Chinese Narrative Illustration and Confucian Ideology (2007); Ma Hezhi and the Illustration of the Book of Odes (1993); Last of the Mandarins (1987); A Decade of Discovery (1979), and numerous articles on Chinese art. She guest-curated the exhibition 'Confucius: His Life and Legacy in Art' at the China Institute Gallery in New York.
SeminarNovember 14, 2011
3:00 P.M. - 5:00 P.M., 212 University Club Building
Jessica Keating
Art History, UW-Madison
'Hapsburg-Ottoman Diplomatic Machinery: Automata and the Türkenvererhrung'
This paper concerns the history of the long-distance circulation of objects in the early modern world. When recounting the history of intercontinental movement of objects scholars of the early modern world have tended view it through the lens of a growing global commercial market that was driven by a European proto-colonial or colonial presence in America, Asia, and Africa, with little attention paid diplomatic ventures in which questions of power and territorial integrity were far from clear. This paper examines such an instance. It documents the role precious and elaborately crafted automata—self-propelled mimetic objects—played in an annual tribute offering Ottoman Sultans exacted from Holy Roman Emperors from 1547-1593. We shall see that the automata cannot been seen as mere luxury goods that maintained the status quo, but objects whose movement and content permitted Hapsburg rulers to subtly negotiate their empire’s position vis à vis the Ottoman Empire.
Jessica Keating is a Solmsen Fellow with the Institute for Research in the Humanities. She received her Ph.D. in Art History from Northwestern University in 2010 with the support of the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, the Fulbright Commission, and the DAAD Commission. She is the co-editor and contributor to a special issue of the Journal of the History of Collections entitled Captured Objects: Inventories of Early Modern Collections.
SeminarNovember 21, 2011
3:00 P.M. - 5:00 P.M., 212 University Club Building
Erin Lambert
History, UW-Madison
'Resurrection and Devotional Identities in Sixteenth-Century Europe'
The resurrection of the dead, wrote a sixteenth-century German preacher, was the most debated article of the Creed. While Lutherans, for example, described the reassembly of the body, Anabaptists argued that one’s resurrection took place as one became a baptized member of the community. Through Lutheran, Anabaptist, Reformed, and Catholic songs and images of resurrection, my dissertation asks how devotional practices constructed such differences in communities in sixteenth-century Germany and the Netherlands. The project draws together a broad range of sources, including hymnals, sermons, martyrologies, and trial records. Through them, I examine practices of singing, seeing, and listening—actions which integrate the body into religious identity—and argue that divisions between Christians were deeper and more complex than narratives of political division and social control have anticipated. In their practices of piety, each group rendered differently the body’s rebirth and the community’s reconstitution, revealing divergent conceptions of personhood and communal identity.
Erin Lambert is a Ph.D. candidate in early modern European history at UW-Madison. Her research employs the methods of cultural history, musicology, and visual studies to explore the interplay of devotional practices and religious identities in sixteenth-century Germany and the Netherlands. Her dissertation research has been supported by a Council on Library and Information Resources Mellon Fellowship for Dissertation Research, the UW-Madison Department of History, and the Social Science Research Council’s Dissertation Proposal Development Fellowship. She holds undergraduate degrees in history and music performance from the Robert E. Cook Honors College at Indiana University of Pennsylvania and an MA in early modern history from UW-Madison.
SeminarNovember 28, 2011
3:00 P.M. - 5:00 P.M., 212 University Club Building
Julie Gibbings
History, UW-Madison
'We are the Improved Race: Guatemala, Mestizaje and the Age of Fascism, 1930-1948'
How do we understand the postcolonial in Latin America? Many scholars have eschewed the use of postcolonial criticism in Latin America on the basis that there is a lack of fit between theoretical perspectives derived from Asia and African experiences of colonialism and interpretations of Latin American history. To explore this theme, this talk will explore how European settler colonialism in post-independence Guatemala gave rise to an unusual national mestizaje (racial mixing) project by the 1930s and 40s. Unlike mestizaje projects that proliferated across Latin America during this time, Guatemala’s mestizaje project found its romantic origins not in sixteenth-century conquests and colonialism, but in this nineteenth-century settler colonization and was symbolized by the rise of coffee production, the expansion of railroads and a union between a Maya women and a German man. By the time Guatemala’s October revolution swept the nation in 1944, however, the improved race had disappeared from the national imagination. Charting the emergence and then disappearance of the “improved race” highlights contradictory tensions between transnational events and regional and national politics, Eurocentric imaginations of history, time and space and Latin American nation-building efforts. These tensions point towards a theorization of diverse, contingent moments and historical contexts of postcolonialism.
Julie Gibbings, a Dana-Allen Disseration Fellow, is a Ph.D. Candidate in Latin American History at UW-Madison. Her research explores themes of race, nation and postcolonialism in modern Latin American. Gibbings has a chapter in Negotiating Identities in Latin America, and a book review in Revista de Historia Iberoamericana. She received a B.A. in International Studies and an M.A. in History from the University of Saskatchewan, Canada. Among her honors and awards are a UW-Madison Chancellor's Fellowship, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Doctoral Fellowship, Humanities and Fine Arts Thesis Award (MA & PhD), Vilas International Travel Award, and Helen Firstbrook Franklin Fellowship.
SeminarDecember 5, 2011
3:00 P.M. - 5:00 P.M., 212 University Club Building
J.K. Barret
English, University of Texas at Austin
'Shakespeare's Second Future'
In William Shakespeare’s Cymbeline, Jupiter himself hands down a prophetic text to quell concerns about the future. Though this cameo doesn’t actually provide much resolution, it does highlight a central concern in a play notorious for its dizzying profusion of plots. In this talk, I consider the play’s privileging of certainty and future outcomes by tracing articulations in which characters look forward to looking back. Why might the present moment be consumed by characters’ plans for future narrative? I turn to early modern grammatical texts to account for this novel approach to temporality, and argue that in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England, literature becomes a crucial locus for an emerging temporal consciousness, one that operates by investigating and reformulating categories and conceptions of time. By dramatizing temporal overlap and the renovation of categorical boundaries, Renaissance writers embrace a motivating uncertainty that offers unique access to the future.
J.K. Barret, Solmsen Fellow, is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Texas at Austin. She focuses on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century literature. She received her Ph.D. from Princeton University and her B.A. from the University of Pennsylvania. She has been awarded fellowship support from sources including UCLA’s Clark Library, the University of Texas at Austin, the Whiting Foundation, the Josephine de Kármán Foundation, and the Huntington Library, and has also received funding to participate in seminars at the National Humanities Center and the Folger Shakespeare Library. In addition to time and the future, her research and teaching interests include poetry and poetics, drama, literature and the visual arts, early modern legal theory, antiquity in the Renaissance, pastoral, romance, translation studies and narrative theory.
SeminarDecember 12, 2011
3:00 P.M. - 5:00 P.M., 212 University Club Building
Denice Fett
History, University of North Florida
'The Politics of News: Information and Communication in Reformation Diplomacy'
This paper explores the questions and complications of accessing and disseminating information in early modern international negotiations. All states engaged in diplomatic discourse sought to gain access to, control the dissemination of, and utilize information and intelligence in order to succeed in relations. Successful international relations largely depended on managing information, intelligence and news both at home and abroad; however, all states experienced limitations and complications in their efforts at management because of shared logistical considerations. This paper explores the ramifications of these logistical limitations and the efforts made to overcome them in order for early modern governments to manage their relations successfully.
Denice Fett, Solmsen Fellow, is Assistant Professor of History at the University of North Florida in Jacksonville, Florida. She completed her PhD at the Ohio State University in 2010. Although her current project focuses on diplomatic communications and information networks in Reformation diplomacy, her broader research interests include diplomatic culture, information and intelligence, the transmission of news, and the impact of time and space on early modern international communications.
SeminarJanuary 23, 2012
3:00 P.M. - 5:00 P.M., 212 University Club Building
Irina Shevelenko
Slavic Languages and Literatures, UW-Madison
'“Suzdal’ God-daubers,” “Novgorodian quattrocento,” and the Russian Avant-Garde'
At this seminar, I will present one of the case studies from my book-length project Modernism as Archaism: Nationalism and the Quest for a Modernist Aesthetic in Russia. I will explore what is arguably the most prominent example of the modernist “invention of tradition” in Russia: the discovery of old Russian icon painting and the politics of its appropriation by artistic culture of 1910s. I will outline the dramatic story of reevaluation of the tradition of icon painting, from its perception as an aesthetically negligible branch of popular industry to its construction as a foundation of Russian “high culture.” I will argue that, in particular, the politics of rhetorical and artistic appropriation of this tradition by experimental art was a culminating point in the project of reimagining the national tradition in late imperial Russia – the project in which Russian cultural elites sought to establish their traditions as independent of the “westernized” legacy of the imperial period, whose formative impact on modern Russian culture became a source of tension in the “age of nationalism.”
Irina Shevelenko (BA/MA, University of Tartu, Estonia; MA, PhD, Stanford University) is Assistant Professor of Russian Literature at UW-Madison. Her primary area of research is Russian Modernism. She is the author of a book on a major twentieth-century Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva, Tsvetaeva’s Literary Path: Author’s Ideology, Poetics, and Identity in the Context of Epoch (2002, in Russian; new, revised, edition forthcoming in 2012) and a scholarly editor of several critical editions of archival sources, among which are Tsvetaeva’s notebooks (1997) and her correspondence with Boris Pasternak (2004); the latter edition earned a diploma of the Russian State Agency for Archives. Shevelenko’s initial research for her current project was generously funded in 2005-2007 by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, Germany; she has published several articles related to it, and she currently works on the book manuscript.
SeminarJanuary 30, 2012
3:00 P.M. - 5:00 P.M., 212 University Club Building
Esther Eidinow
Ancient Greek History, University of Nottingham, United Kingdom
'"As Rust Eats Iron": Envy in Fourth-century Athens'
In Athens during the fourth century BCE a number of surprising trials took place that have received little scholarly attention: the defendants were all women, the charges against them included asebeia (‘impiety’) and working with pharmaka (‘spells’ or ‘drugs’). If the Athenian law-courts were an arena for (male) political competition, then why bring these women to trial? If practising ‘magic’ was not illegal, then why condemn these women to death? This paper examines some of the social processes that may help us to understand why and how these trials occurred and their outcome. In particular, drawing on comparative material from other times and places, it focuses on the possible role played by phthonos (‘envy’) in these events, and the developing significance of this emotion for ancient Greek society.
Esther Eidinow is Lecturer in Ancient Greek History at the University of Nottingham. Her research focuses on magic and religion in the ancient Greek world, using an interdisciplinary approach. She is the author of Oracles, Curses, and Risk in the Ancient Greek World (Oxford University Press, 2007) and Luck, Fate and Fortune: Antiquity and Its Legacy (I. B. Tauris, 2011), and has published articles in Past and Present and Classical Quarterly. She is the assistant editor of the fourth edition of the Oxford Classical Dictionary (eds. S. Hornblower and A. J. S. Spawforth; Oxford University Press, forthcoming) and is also co-editing the Oxford Handbook to Greek Religion for Oxford University Press.
Focus on the Humanities Distinguished LectureFebruary 1, 2012
5:30 P.M., Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery, 330 North Orchard St.
Rob Nixon
Rachel Carson Professor of English, UW-Madison
'Slow Violence and Environmental Story Telling'
Rob Nixon is the Rachel Carson Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He received his Ph.D. from Columbia University and is the author of London Calling. V. S. Naipaul, Postcolonial Mandarin (Oxford); Homelands, Harlem and Hollywood. South African Culture and the World Beyond (Routledge); and Dreambirds: the Natural History of a Fantasy (Picador). His book Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor is forthcoming from Harvard University Press in spring 2011. Professor Nixon is a frequent contributor to the New York Times; his writing has also appeared in The New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, London Review of Books, Times Literary Supplement, Village Voice, The Nation, The Guardian, Outside, Chronicle of Higher Education, The Independent, Critical Inquiry, Social Text, Slate, South Atlantic Quarterly, Transition, Cultural Critique, Contemporary Literature, Journal of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies, Ariel, Modern Fiction Studies, New Formations, Black Renaissance/Renaissance Noire, and elsewhere.
SeminarFebruary 6, 2012
3:00 P.M. - 5:00 P.M., 212 University Club Building
Aliko Songolo
French and Italian, African Languages and Literature, UW-Madison
'“Calabash Cinema”: The Fall and Rise of Francophone African Film'
Since its inception a half century ago, Francophone African cinema has been fraught with contradictions and controversies. Early on, it sought to tell the story of newly independent nations, but while doing so, it remained moored to the vision and resources of the colonial power, France, which long attempted to deter its existence in the first place. Now in the midst of a greatly changed cinematic landscape on a continental scale, a younger generation of filmmakers has called those earlier films “Calabash Cinema” because of perceived misrepresentations of the indigene that were reminiscent of stereotypical and demeaning Western images of Africa and Africans. Eschewing grand narratives of the Nation and of nation building, the new generation of films strives to turn a more intimate gaze on the African subject in negotiation with the traps and trappings of globalization nearly as much as with forces of “tradition.” The subject in question, sometimes urban/urbane, sometimes rural/traditional is depicted in any case as far more complex than in earlier films. Yet, while claiming greater artistic independence, the new filmmakers remain reliant on the erstwhile colonial power, albeit no longer exclusively. The seminar will propose a reading of several films to examine the pursuit of new genres and forms produced despite of—and sometimes because of—the paradoxes and controversies, and the gradual waning of cultural nationalism.
Aliko Songolo is Halverson-Bascom Professor of French and Professor of African Languages and Literature at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His research and teaching interests lie primarily in Francophone literatures of Africa and the Caribbean, and Francophone cinemas of Africa and Québec. He has published a monograph (Aimé Césaire: une poétique de la découverte, 1985), two co-edited volumes (Twenty-five Years After Dakar and Fourah Bay: The Growth of African Literature, 1998, and Atlantic Cross-Currents/Transatlantiques, 2001), and was Associate Editor of the highly acclaimed five-volume New Encyclopedia of Africa (2008). He also edited special issues of two eminent journals in his field, French Review (1982) and Présence Francophone (2003), and published numerous articles. His current research projects investigate the question of national cinema in Québec and Francophone Africa, and postcoloniality in the wake of the Négritude movement. He was named Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Palmes Académiques (Knight in the Order of Academic Palms) by the French Ministry of National Education in 2008. He has served as Chair of the Department of French & Italian, as Director of the African Studies Program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and as Associate Vice-Chancellor of Academic Affairs at the University of California-Irvine before his move to Wisconsin.
SeminarFebruary 13, 2012
3:00 P.M. - 5:00 P.M., 212 University Club Building
Anna Andrzejewski
Art History, UW-Madison
'One Builder: Marshall Erdman and Postwar Building and Real Estate Development in Madison, Wisconsin'
One Builder takes the career of Madison-based builder/developer Marshall Erdman as an instructive case study to tell the closely intertwined history of architecture, building and real estate development in the later twentieth century. Andrzejewski seeks to show how a single builder rooted in a particular place responded to economic trends, land use and property development, architectural styles, governmental regulations, and trends in building and studio practice. Her research draws on evidence from the Erdman archives, zoning ordinances and land development theory, newspaper articles, and extant structures in order to broaden understanding of building practices in the postwar United States. In exploring how one builder responded to local as well as national trends, Andrzejewski’s book transcends conventional biographical studies and monographs on architectural style to offer an alternative model that could be applied to the interpretation of other modern builders. At the Institute, she will complete the research and write the third and fourth chapters of this book that examines Erdman’s pioneering efforts in crafting one of the earliest “design/build” firms during the 1960s and his move from contractor to real estate developer in the 1970s and 1980s.
Anna Andrzejewski is a Resident Fellow at the IRH during the spring semester. Andrzejewski is Associate Professor in the Department of Art History and Co-Director of the Buildings-Landscapes-Cultures Ph.D. Program. Her first book, Building Power: Architecture and the Ideology of Surveillance in Victorian America, was published by the University of Tennessee Press in 2008. Andrzejewski’s current research examines post World War II building, particularly in the middle-class suburbs. In addition to her book project on Marshall Erdman, she is working on a co-authored volume on interpreting suburbia (for the Vernacular Architecture Forum’s Special Series) as well as co-authoring a book with Prof. Arnold Alanen on the buildings and landscapes of southwestern Wisconsin’s driftless region.
SeminarFebruary 20, 2012
3:00 P.M. - 5:00 P.M., 212 University Club Building
Shanny Luft
Religious Studies, University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point
'The Devil’s Church: Or, How Evangelicals Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Movies'
Although Evangelicalism today is often identified with conservative politics and “culture war” issues, many conservative Protestants in the early-twentieth century argued that the biggest threat to American morals was Hollywood. One clergyman in 1940 called the film industry “perhaps the greatest religious menace of this generation.” This hostile reaction led many conservative Protestants to conclude that movie theaters were anathema to their religious identity, and many scrupulously avoided setting foot inside a movie theater until the 1960s.
Shanny Luft received his M.A. in Religion and Culture from Boston University and his Ph.D. in Religion in America from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He taught a variety of classes in Religious Studies at UNC-Chapel Hill, Meredith College, and the College of Wooster before coming to UWSP in 2009 with his wife and two children. His research interests include religion and popular culture, new religious movements, and American evangelicalism and fundamentalism. He is currently writing a book about evangelical and fundamentalist rhetoric toward Hollywood during the first half of the twentieth century.
SeminarFebruary 27, 2012
3:00 P.M. - 5:00 P.M., 212 University Club Building
Colin Wilder
'Who Answers When the Landlord Calls? Interpreting Property and the 'German Idea of Freedom,' 1650-1800'
Using small case studies in Germany in the period under study, the project traces relationships between abstract theories of human freedom and specific conflicts over property rights in early modern Germany, specifically in the Hessian and Rhine-Main region. This study deepens our understanding of the foundations of market society and liberalism in Europe. The book's intellectual sketch is based on numerous court, academic and ministerial documents, while the social narrative will be plotted on the basis of social network analysis of the thousands of small actors and writers. Relationships among statesmen, lawyers and professors will be measured specifically for clustering, bridging and node-centrality.
Colin Wilder is a Solmsen Fellow at the Institute for Research in the Humanities. Colin finished his PhD in History at the University of Chicago in 2010. In 2010-2011, he taught courses at Brown University on"The Emergence of Capitalism in Early Modern Europe" and "Prosperity and Poverty: The History, Ethics and Economics of the Wealth of Nations." Colin's article, "Teaching Old Dogs New Tricks: Four Motifs of Legal Change from Early Modern Europe," will appear in the February 2012 issue of History and Theory. His essay, "The Importance of Beginning, Over and Over," was published in Intersections, Vol. 25 (Leiden: Brill Publishers, 2011), and a related essay, “Zu unterschiedlichen Formen der Historizität in der deutschen Rechtsgeschichte des 18. Jahrhunderts” will appear later this year in the volume Geschichtskulturen um 1700, edited by Thomas Wallnig (DeGruyter). He is also developing a large database of jurists and other authors of the German Enlightenment entitled "The Republic of Literature" (see link below). Colin's research interests include the development of commercial society; liberal legal and economic systems; natural law and rights theories; and the problems of history and theory.
March 5, 2012
3:00 P.M. - 5:00 P.M., 212 University Club Building
Lynnette Regouby
History of Science, UW-Madison
' "We shall be all body and ignore our souls": The pleasure and pain of the human plant in eighteenth century Europe'
Eighteenth century materialism is often characterized by the analogy between man and machine, a productive image proposed by Julien Offray de La Mettrie in L'homme machine (1747). While La Mettrie continues to refer to man as a machine in subsequent publications, he follows L'homme machine with L'homme plante (1748), introducing the figure of the human plant as another argument for embodied experience. This paper explores the parameters of the human-plant analogy in La Mettrie's moral philosophy and connects it to broader discourses of plant and human bodies in art, literature, and science. If, as he argues in his Anti-Seneca (1748), "we shall be all body," precisely what kind of body did he imagine?
Lynnette Regouby, William R. Coleman Fellow, is a PhD Candidate in History of Science at University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her research investigates how scientific, literary and visual representations of plant and human bodies inform eighteenth century concepts of the body and the influence of climate upon them. Ms Regouby completed a minor in History at UW-Madison, received her M.A. in History of Science from University of Oklahoma and obtained a dual degree from the same institution in Letters and French Language and Literature.
SeminarMarch 12, 2012
3:00 P.M. - 5:00 P.M., 212 University Club Building
Jimmy Klausen
Political Science, UW-Madison
'Unknown Political Bodies: Negative Anthropology, Political Theory, and Indigenous Societies'
This project juxtaposes twentieth-century French critical philosophy and cases of self-isolating indigenous societies to two ends. First, reading the philosophical work of Foucault, Bataille, Canguilhem, Fanon, and others through analyses of interactions among state, civil society, and self-isolating indigenes highlights in new ways some of the explicitly political features of post-WWII French thinkers’ disavowal of an essential human nature. Second, the emphasis on variable practices of living that emerges from dialogue between French philosophy and indigenous cases can facilitate a regrounding of debates on minority cultural communities away from the liberal focus on rights or multiculturalist recognition. Corollary to both objectives is an explication of the “biopolitical” consequences of securing or refusing to secure territorial reserves for indigenous isolates.
Jimmy Casas Klausen is an IRH Race, Indigeneity, and Ethnicity Fellow and recipient of a grant from the American Council of Learned Societies. Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science, Klausen teaches modern and contemporary political theory in a global frame. His research brings together critical anthropological theory, the history of political thought, and concepts and arguments from postcolonial analysis and poststructural philosophy. He has coedited (with James Martel) How Not to Be Governed: Readings and Interpretations from a Critical Anarchist Left (2010) and has recently completed “Fugitive Rousseau,” a book-length study of liberty, social fission, evasion, and flight in the political writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
Burdick-Vary Lecture Series: International Perspectives on the Environmental Humanities and Social SciencesMarch 15, 2012
4:00 P.M. - 5:30 P.M., AT&T Lounge, 106 Pyle Center
Andrew Ross
Department of Social and Cultural Analysis, New York University
'Bird on Fire: Lessons from the World's Least Sustainable City'
Thoughtful people look to cities for evidence that progress is being made in the fight to avert climate change. The “sustainable cities” movement is thriving all across the world, and mayors compete for the title of “greenest city in America.” In this lecture, drawing on his own research in the metro Phoenix area, Andrew Ross shows that the key solutions are more social than technical in nature. Marketing a green lifestyle to affluent residents will create showpiece sustainable enclaves, but will not alter the patterns of “eco-apartheid” that afflicts most large U.S. cities. Ross’s book, Bird In Fire, based on extensive interviews in the region, looks at some of Phoenix’s biggest challenges–water management, urban growth, immigration policy, pollution, energy supply, and downtown revitalization–in light of his arguments for policies that promote environmental justice.
Andrew Ross is Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis at NYU. He is the author of twelve books, including Nice Work if You Can Get It: Life and Labor in Precarious Times, Fast Boat to China--Lessons from Shanghai, Low Pay, High Profile: The Global Push for Fair Labor, No-Collar: The Humane Workplace and its Hidden Costs, and The Celebration Chronicles: Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Property Value in Disney’s New Town. He has also edited six collections, including No Sweat: Fashion, Free Trade, and the Rights of Garment Workers, Anti-Americanism, and The University Against Itself: The NYU Strike and the Future of the Academic Workplace. His most recent book is Bird On Fire: Lessons from the World’s Least Sustainable City. Professor Ross is a contributor to the Nation, the Village Voice, and Artforum.
SeminarMarch 19, 2012
3:00 P.M. - 5:00 P.M., 212 University Club Building
Lawrence Shapiro
Philosophy, UW-Madison
'A Philosopher’s Guide to Thinking about Miracles'
Shapiro will use his time at the Institute to work on a book about the metaphysics and epistemology of miracles as well as the relationship between belief in miracles and belief in God. According to a recent Pew poll, 80% of Americans believe in miracles. But what is a miracle? An extremely unlikely event? A supernatural occurrence? And what justifies belief in miracles? Most believers have never seen a miracle themselves, and so they rely on testimony, but how should the reliability of testimony be evaluated. Finally, what is the relationship between belief in miracles and belief in God? Is belief in one necessary for belief in the other?
Larry Shapiro is a Professor in the Dept. of Philosophy, where he has spent his entire career since migrating from Philadelphia in 1993. He has written widely on topics in philosophy of mind, philosophy of psychology, and cognitive science, publishing books with MIT Press (The Mind Incarnate, 2004) and Routledge Press (Arguing About the Mind, co-edited with Brie Gertler, 2007; and Embodied Cognition, 2011). He’s also a dedicated runner and author of Zen and the Art of Running (Adams Media) in 2009.
Burdick-Vary Lecture Series: International Perspectives on the Environmental Humanities and Social SciencesMarch 22, 2012
4:00 P.M. - 5:30 P.M., 6191 Helen C. White Building
Pablo Mukherjee
English and Comparative Literary Studies, University of Warwick, UK
'Tropical Medical Discourse and Victorian Imperialism: Rudyard Kipling and Cholera'
The Victorian period saw the growth and consolidation of the science of tropical medicine. Driven by the imperative of maintaining and restoring the health of European settlers, the language of tropical medicine offered a vision of the tropics as a zone of proliferating and contaminating diseases, as well as the possibilities of containing and defeating these. Thus, against the tropics as a zone of contagion grew the idea of palliative empire – empire as a force of medicine, science and restorative care. Particularly important here was the role played by a group of English doctors whose texts formed the core of the first tropical medical canon. Unsurprisingly, such ideologically charged language of contagion, infection, medical care and palliative empire crossed disciplinary boundaries and became a part of popular Victorian ‘commonsense”. Writers concerned with representing the reality of Britain’s global empire found this language of diseased tropicality to be rich and suggestive. This paper will look at how one such writer, Rudyard Kipling, used the ideas of disease and medicine in his shorter fiction to explore the possibilities and limits of empire.
Upamanyu Pablo Mukherjee is an Associate Professor (Reader) at the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies at Warwick University, U.K. He was born in Kolkata, India and educated there, and went on to do further degrees in Oxford and Cambridge. He has taught at Newcastle and Warwick Universities in the U.K., and is the author of the books Crime and Empire (2003) and Postcolonial Environments (2010). Dr Mukherjee is currently working on a number of research projects, including a monograph provisionally titled 'Fevers and Famines: Natural Disasters and Victorian Empire' and with a Warwick Research Collective on 'Aesthetics of Peripheral Modernity'. Dr Mukherjee's other interests and specialisms include contemporary film and media, sports, travel, and popular music.
Nellie Y. McKay Lecture in the HumanitiesMarch 22, 2012
7:30 P.M., Chazen Museum of Art, Room L160
Thadious Davis
Geraldine R. Segal Professor of American Social Thought and Professor of English, University of Pennsylvania
'Chaining: Theorizing African American Representations of Person and Past'
In this talk, I am using a term, chaining, to signify the tight links, but open spaces in conceptualizing and articulating person and in recollecting and representing past in a grouping of African American texts, such as Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Jacobs, Cane by Jean Toomer, Jazz by Toni Morrison, Magic City by Yusef Komunyakaa, and The Intuitionist by Colson Whitehead. Chaining is an active way of constructing the working of space in the African American imaginary. The links form connective tissue carrying ideas both forward and backward along a time-space continuum, and the open space within each link forms the contained and shaped ideas that are pushed or pulled along with the motion of the links, or that remain static when the links are unmoving and stable. Within the structure of the chain, within the openings between the metal pieces functioning as fastenings and as restrictive bondage, there is what I am calling “black space,” encircled and partly determined in terms of referential shape by being enclosed, yet at the same time open and operative. This encircled opening is the part of the chain that is overlooked, ignored, obscured, because like air it is essential, crucial, and necessary, but unobtrusive and unseen. I derive black space from conceptualizing chaining and its three dimensionality as organic to a mechanism that touches the body, that is intimate and portable, moving with the body and reverberating with a multiplicity of bodies and bodily experiences, both material and psychological, and that carries through the tangible representation of the public past a wider or broader access to the multiple and vexed aspects of black life in the United States.
Davis's teaching areas include African American literature and Southern literature with an emphasis on issue of race, region, and gender. Her research interests are interdisciplinary: geography and African American writers; photography and Southern women; film and literary modernism; visual culture and the Harlem Renaissance; civil rights law and narrative fiction. Active in American Studies and Southern Studies, she has taught and lectured in Europe and Asia; most recently, she delivered papers in Tokyo, Japan, at Chuo University and at International Faulkner Symposium, sponsored by the Faulkner Society of Japan. As the Walt Whitman Chair in American Civilization, a Fulbright Distinguished Chair, at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands, she participated in American Studies programs throughout Western and Central Europe. She has also held tenured professorships at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, Brown University, and Vanderbilt University where she was the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of English. Invested in contemporary archival work, she has been a fellow at the Newberry Library in Chicago, the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, and the Huntington Library in California where she held the R. Stanton Avery Distinguished Fellowship.
SeminarMarch 26, 2012
3:00 P.M. - 5:00 P.M., 212 University Club Building
Katarzyna Beilin
Department of Spanish and Portuguese, UW-Madison
'Bulls, Apes, Genes and Clouds: New Ethics of Life in Contemporary Spain'
The debates on bullfighting, which culminated in the abolition of tauromaquia in Catalonia in 2011, have reopened reflections on Spanish national identity. Those who see bullfighting as a symbolic enactment of Spanish cultural essence, conceive of a Spaniard as violently opposed to an animal, and as destructor of nature. The anti-bullfighting movement, motivated by empathy towards animals, is by default opposed to this concept of Spanishness. Thus, an interpretation of the Catalonian abolition as an anti-Spanish manifestation is correct to the extent that it manifests itself against cultural practices that celebrate human destruction of vulnerable forms of nature (consumption and other uses of animals, but also conquests, violence against women, etc). Animal rights activists call for reconsidering divisions between human and non-human forms of life. The desire to blur the human/animal divide culminated in the request to the Government to adopt the principles stated in the Great Ape Project. The request was voted in the affirmative, but it was not finally enacted as law by the Spanish Parliament. In the process of the Parliamentary debates, however, the project stimulated fascinating discussions on genetic similarities between all hominids, which may condition our not-so-different life practices, and which may lie at the basis of our various rules of law and ethics. This brought the realization that the partiality of our ethics, wherein we naturally privilege our family, clan, race and species over others, and eat them, is a remnant from hundreds of thousands of years ago, when we were closer to our ancestral hominid stage. This partiality, which may have been adaptive then, is no longer so at our current stage of development. Today it amounts to poisoning and destroying of what is left of our natural environment, by constant wars, and extermination of other species. Some Spanish thinkers ask if ethics has in fact any claim to truth except as a system of rules serving adaptation of our species, and if so, do these rules, as they are now, really serve our species well enough. For example, an ethics of individual freedom, as opposed to one that would favor social cooperation, may be responsible for social problems that range from excessive economic inequalities to climate change. Philosophers of science ask if this could be perhaps changed through so called “human enhancement,” a modification of human genetic material or hormonal therapy to reduce our violent tendencies and egoism. But, even if these ideas may seem far-fetched, an understanding that a change in ethics of life is urgently needed has spread considerably.
Katarzyna Olga Beilin specializes in narrative, film and culture of contemporary Spain. She is an author of three books Conversaciones literarias con novelistas contemporáneos (Literary Conversations with Contemporary Novelists, Tamesis, 2004), Meteory (Metheors, a novel, Agawa 2005), Del infierno al cuerpo: otredad en la narrativa y cine peninsular contemporáneo (From Hell to Flesh: Otherness in Spanish Contemporary Narrative and Film, Libertarias, 2007). This last book focuses on otherness in Spanish contemporary literature and film and its meanings in ethics and epistemology of the last two centuries. Thus it connects to the current project, where the other takes form of a non-human animal. Katarzyna is also finishing her second novel, Aquarius, which inquires about the multiple meanings and forms of the end of the world.
Burdick-Vary Lecture Series: International Perspectives on the Environmental Humanities and Social SciencesMarch 26, 2012
4:00 P.M. - 5:30 P.M., 7191 Helen C. White Building
Libby Robin
Fenner School of Environment and Society, Australian National University
'Documenting the Anthropocene: Historical Reflections on Global Change'
The idea of the Anthropocene, the geological era where the actions of people have affected every biophysical system on earth, poses a particular challenge to the humanities. It is an idea coming from global change science, but it has political implications and depends on a deeply historical understanding of what constitutes 'environment'. If people have affected the planetary system, how have they done it? When did the actions of people start to overwhelm ‘normal’ change in environmental systems? When, some ask, did people become a ‘plague species’ on Earth?
This project seeks to ‘document’ the Anthropocene, literally, to explore some of the documents that shape our present understanding of the environment. In a world where measurement is a pre-eminent element of prediction and numbers have become a global language for science (and increasingly for policy), the question what counts as planetary change is political and ethical, as well as scientific. Critical scrutiny of ideas that underpin numbers and frame planning for the future of the planet is an urgent and deeply humanistic task. Our documents are just some of the possible ones, but I will speak about why we chose them and how they might serve to offer ways into debates about global change, ways that start from the human dimensions, rather than treating them as late additions to a program already fully defined by experts from elsewhere.
Libby Robin is an environmental historian and historian of ideas at the Australian National University and at the National Museum of Australia, Canberra. She is Guest Professor at the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH), Stockholm. Her books include How a Continent Created a Nation (2007), The Flight of the Emu (2001) and Ecology and Empire: Environmental History of Settler Societies (1998, co-edited with Tom Griffiths). The Future of Nature: Documents of Global Change, an anthology of the literature of global change, co-edited with Sverker Sörlin and Paul Warde, is forthcoming with Yale University Press.
SeminarApril 9, 2012
3:00 P.M. - 5:00 P.M., 212 University Club Building
Caroline Boswell
Humanistic Studies and European History, University of Wisconsin-Green Bay
'Locating Dissent: Power and Resistance in Interregnum England'
This project investigates how English men and women negotiated the social, cultural, and political changes that accompanied devastating civil wars and the execution of their king. Moving away from the dichotomy that classifies people's reactions as either "conventional" or "radical" based on their political allegiances, Locating Dissent examines how the values, customs and actions of ordinary people became central subjects of political contestation. Court records, manuscript accounts, and printed pamphlets reveal the complexity of the methods, rituals, and spaces that defined political dissent at this pivotal time. Although disaffection cannot simply be equated with popular royalism, the fact remains that the restoration of the monarchy was largely welcomed throughout the nation. I argue that royalist propagandists redefined people's animosity toward the Interregnum state as evidence of their loyalty to the Stuart monarchy, particularly in the months leading up to the Restoration of Charles II. In their rhetoric, royalists not only embraced traditional cultural practices, they also connected their continuation with the survival of monarchy. Analyzing the politics surrounding popular dissent and the micro-politics of popular dissent reveals that people's discontent played a significant role in creating fertile soil for the Restoration.
Caroline Boswell, a UW-System Fellow, is an Assistant Professor of Humanistic Studies and European History at the University of Wisconsin - Green Bay. In 2008 she earned her PhD in early modern British history at Brown University. Her research interests include political culture and the social history of politics. More particularly, Caroline's recent scholarship explores the interplay between print culture, popular politics, and transformations in governance during times of political and social crisis.
SeminarApril 16, 2012
3:00 P.M. - 5:00 P.M., 212 University Club Building
Lee Willis
History, UW-Stevens Point
'Gulf Coast Slave Smuggling: The Clandestine Slave Trade, circa 1830s-1850s'
In 1808, Congress forbade the importation of foreign slaves into the United States and the interstate (or domestic) slave trade became the only legal method of buying and selling human chattel before the Civil War. Yet historians believe that traders continually violated the international ban in a clandestine slave trade. Conservative estimates hold that smugglers introduced approximately 54,000 enslaved people into the United States, roughly 1,000 people per year, between 1808 and 1865. Though the interstate slave trade has been researched extensively and deservedly so, the details of the U.S. clandestine slave trade are largely unknown. This presentation will explore several failed slaving expeditions in the Gulf of Mexico as a means to understand the international conspiracies behind these ventures as well as how the trade changed over time.
Lee Willis, UW System Fellow, is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin- Stevens Point. His research interests include the Atlantic Slave Trade and the African Diaspora as well as race and reform in the American South. His first book, Southern Prohibition: Race, Reform, and Public Life in Middle Florida, 1821-1920 will be published by the University of Georgia Press in October, 2011. Willis earned a B.A. in History from the University of the South and his M.A. and Ph.D. from Florida State University.
SeminarApril 23, 2012
3:00 P.M. - 5:00 P.M., 212 University Club Building
Kathryn Sanchez
Spanish and Portuguese, UW-Madison
'Racial Cannibalism: Carmen Miranda and the Performance of White ‘Negritude’ on the Brazilian Stage of the 1930s'
This project explores race and its representation in the performing arts as central to the modern concept of Brazilianness in the decades following the pivotal week of Modern Art held in São Paulo, Brazil in 1922. In this presentation I will explore the racial discourse of Brazil’s most iconic white performer of all times, Carmen Miranda (1909-1955), whose signature look embodied the racially-charged ‘baiana’ or Afro-Brazilian street vendor who would typically carry large baskets of fruit and food on top of their turbans. Set against the racial politics of the time, and in particular the widespread current of Brazil as a racial democracy, I engage Carmen Miranda’s whitening of the Afro-Brazilian image with the ideological manifestation of a Brazilian racial hegemony through which operates a culturalist commodification of Afro-Brazilianness for a white, elite and often foreign audience. I aim to discuss the literal and figurative black masks that were used, politically and culturally, to project an ‘authentic’ race-blind Brazilian culture and that go countercurrent to the widely proclaimed racial democracy.
Kathryn Sanchez is Associate Professor of Portuguese and works with Portuguese literature of the 19th and 20th Century, Brazilian film and popular culture, and the representation of Brazil and Brazilians in the United States. She frequently teaches Portuguese and Brazilian literature and culture, an introductory course to Latin America, and courses on race, gender and sexual difference in relation to the Portuguese-speaking world. Her current research project is a book length study that re-evaluates Carmen Miranda as an icon of tropical otherness in the United States. Her first book, Utopias Desmascaradas [Unmasked Utopias], was published by the Portuguese National Press INCM, in 2008 and explored otherness in the context of Portuguese Romanticism. She has published articles in Portuguese Studies, Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, Quadrant, Santa Barbara Portuguese Studies, World Literature and Its Time, Queirosiana and Portuguese Literary and Cultural Studies. She served as the President of the American Portuguese Studies Association (2008-2010).
Burdick-Vary SymposiumApril 26, 2012 - April 28, 2012
1255 Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery
'Enchantings: Modernity, Culture, and the State in Postcolonial Africa'
The symposium aims to bring into close systematic interaction three composite entities that traditionally are the objects of different study areas and therefore are studied together most often casually or rarely: contemporary African cultural and social forms and practices, the postcolonial African political state, and the larger modern context that subtend the two. The goal is to help us better understand in a multi-sided way (1) the sociopolitical underpinnings of African cultural and social forms and practices; (2) the cultural and social determinations on the character and performance of the African state as a genre, and (3) the modern context that is the generative canvas of the interactions.
Visit the conference page for the program
SeminarApril 30, 2012
3:00 P.M. - 5:00 P.M., 212 University Club Building
Matt Waters
Classics and Ancient History, UW-Eau Claire
'Of Lies and Bizarre Tales: Ctesias and the Persian Empire'
The Achaemenid Persian Empire (c. 550-330 BC) at its height stretched from the Danube to the Indus and from the Himalayas to the Sahara. The Greek Ctesias served as a doctor to the Persian king Artaxerxes II (reigned 404-358 BC) and wrote an extensive history of the Persian Empire, the Persica, to his time. Only fragments of this work survive, scattered in various ancient authors and in a severely-truncated epitome by the Byzantine patriarch and scholar Photius (9th century AD). Ctesias’ work has been largely marginalized in light of the fundamental problems of reliability with the extant account. As recent work has emphasized, however, such criticism often stems from a misguided approach to what his work may offer us. This seminar will discuss some preliminary observations based on analysis of Near Eastern influences on Ctesias’ work.
Matt Waters is a UW-System fellow, Professor of Classics and Ancient History at UW-Eau Claire. He received his Ph.D. in Ancient History (Near Eastern and Greek) from the University of Pennsylvania. His main research interests are Achaemenid history and Greek historiography. He was the winner of the Greenfield Prize from the American Oriental Society in 2006 and has been awarded fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies as well as Harvard University’s Center for Hellenic Studies and Loeb Classical Library Foundation. Recent published work includes numerous articles on various aspects of first millennium BC history, especially Greek-Persian relations. Other works in preparation include a survey of Achaemenid Persian history (Cambridge U Press).
Panel DiscussionMay 7, 2012
3:00 P.M. - 5:00 P.M., 212 University Club Building
Chair: Craig Werner, Afro-American Studies, UW-Madison
Caroline Boswell, Humanistic Studies and European History, UW-Green Bay
Esther Eidinow, Ancient Greek History, University of Nottingham
Richard Goodkin, French and Italian, UW-Madison
Erin Lambert, History, UW-Madison
Mary Louise Roberts, History, UW-Madison
'REPRISE: How? Research Methods in the Humanities'
The Institute for Research in the Humanities (IRH) will end its year-long weekly seminars with a reprise of its opening seminar on research methods in the humanities. The panel continues IRH’s broad discussions about the humanities in the effort to understand the intellectual, ethical, and political underpinnings of what brings us together as a division of knowledge.
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