Panel Discussion

September 10, 2012
3:00 P.M. - 5:00 P.M., Banquet Room, University Club Building

Linda Gordon, History, New York University
Theresa M. Kelley, English, UW-Madison
Vinay Dharwadker, Languages and Cultures of Asia/English, UW-Madison
Michele Hilmes, Communication Arts, UW-Madison
Patricia Rosenmeyer, Classics and Center for Jewish Studies, UW-Madison


'What's Your "Archive"? Formation, Collection, and Evidence across the Humanities'

Historians often describe the evidentiary basis of their work as fundamentally archival, whether drawing on collections of documents or oral histories. But what does “the archive” mean in other humanities disciplines? What are your sources and methods for finding or using them? Are your archives material, performative, ephemeral, virtual? Where are they located? How are they selected, collected, accessed, and used? What are the language issues involved in your archive? In what way are your archives an exercise in memory? In desire? What are the politics of archives and the knowledge they produce? In what sense do the archives you use provide agency for, misrepresent, or suppress what you are researching? Do you “discover” meaning in your archival data, “dialogue” with it, “interpret” it, read against its grain, or recreate it? How is the digital revolution changing the nature of archives, specifically of YOUR archives? Do you use Google as your “archive”? Amazon.com? Facebook, blogs, or other forms of digital/social media? Do archives foster or discourage generalizing, comparative, and/or theoretical thought?


Linda Gordon is University Professor of the Humanities at NYU and Vilas Distinguished Research Professor emeritus at the Univ. of Wisconsin. Her most recent books are Dorothea Lange and The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction. She won the Bancroft prize for best book in US history for both books, as well as the Los Angeles Times Book Award and the National Arts prize for writing about the arts. She will soon deliver the Trevelyan Lectures at the University of Cambridge, and has under contract (with W. W. Norton) a book on the "long women's movement," 1930 to the present. She divides her time between Madison and NYC. Having spent years in archives, she is enormously grateful for the Wisconsin State Historical Society, champion among archives.

Theresa M. Kelley is Marjorie and Lorin Tiefenthaler Professor and Chair of English at University of Wisconsin, Madison. She is the author of Wordsworth’s Revisionary Aesthetics (Cambridge University Press, 1988), Reinventing Allegory (Cambridge University Press, 1997), and Clandestine Marriage: Botany and Romantic Culture (Johns Hopkins University Press, August-September 2012), and essays on romantic poetics, aesthetics, visual culture, and philosophy. Her current research is divided between two projects: a series of essays on botanical art and color theory around 1800 and a book, provisionally titled Romantic Futures, that examines romantic efforts to narrate futurity after the Reign of Terror.

Vinay Dharwadker is Professor in the Department of Languages and Cultures of Asia, UW-Madison. In 2008 his Kabir: The Weaver’s Songs (Penguin Classics, 2003, 2005) won India’s multi-year national translation prize, and his contributions to The Greenwood Encyclopedia of World Popular Culture (2007) received the American Culture Association’s Ray and Pat Browne Award for best reference work. He is the South Asia editor of the new Norton Anthology of World Literature, 3rd ed., 6 vols. (2012). His recent essays are on “Diaspora and Cosmopolitanism” (Ashgate, 2011), “Constructions of World Literature in Colonial and Postcolonial India” (Routledge, 2012), and “Censoring the Ramayana” (PMLA, May 2012).

Michele Hilmes is Professor of Media and Cultural Studies and Chair of the Department of Communication Arts at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her work focuses on media history and historiography, particularly in the area of radio and creative soundwork. She is the author or editor of several books in this field, including Radio Voices: American Broadcasting 1922-1952 and Network Nations: A Transnational History of British and American Broadcasting. Her current project is Radio’s New Wave: Global Sound in the Digital Era, co-edited with Jason Loviglio.

Patricia A. Rosenmeyer (Ph.D. Classics and Comparative Literature, Princeton 1987) is Professor of Classics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She came to Madison in 1997 after teaching previously at Michigan and Yale. Her areas of specialization are Greek poetry (Archaic and Hellenistic), epistolary narratives, and literary reception. She is affiliated with Comparative Literature, the Center for Jewish Studies, and ILS, as well as Editor for the Series in Classicsfor the University of Wisconsin Press. She is a past recipient of ACLS and NEH awards. Her publications include The Poetics of Imitation: Anacreon and the anacreontic tradition (Cambridge 1992); Ancient Epistolary Fictions: the Letter in Greek Literature (Cambridge 2001); and Ancient Greek Literary Letters: Selections in Translation (Routledge 2006), She is currently working on two books: Singing Stones: the Inscriptions of the Memnon Colossus, the statue that inspired Shelley’s “Ozymandias”; and Reflections of Sappho, a monograph on the reception of Sappho from antiquity to the present. In addition, she is co-editing Ancient Epistolary Narratives, a volume on varieties of epistolary forms in Greek antiquity; and developing articles on the reception of Greek poetry by French (de Louÿs) and Hebrew (Tchernikovsky) authors in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Seminar

September 17, 2012
3:30 P.M. - 5:00 P.M., 212 University Club Building

Ivan Ermakoff
Sociology, UW-Madison


'Enacting State Persecution: France, 1940-1944'

This talk will be centered on the factors that shape state agents' decision to collaborate in, or subvert, the implementation of inhumane policies. A modern state cannot persecute vast groups of people without relying extensively on its civil servants. However, unless these civil servants have been specifically recruited for this purpose, persecuting others, committing acts of violence against specific groups, and, more broadly, committing inhumane acts are not part of their training, worldview and official duties. I explore the mechanisms that make this violence possible by examining the role played by the French Police in the deportation of Foreign Jews from France between 1942 and 1944.

Ivan Ermakoff is Professor of Sociology at UW-Madison. His research agenda has been centered on collective processes and outcomes in times of disruption. Along these lines, he has been studying the adoption of self-limiting norms ("Prelates and Princes," American Sociological Review, 62:405-422), collective abdications (Ruling Oneself Out, Duke University Press), the rise and fall of patrimonial structures of power ("Patrimony and collective capacity," Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 636: 182-203), shifts in epistemic beliefs ("Theory of Practice, Rational Choice and Historical Change," Theory and Society, 39: 527-553), and the implementation of state persecution ("Police et arrestations," Le Genre Humain, 52: 215-243).

Burdick-Vary Lecture Series: New Constructions of the Past in the Art History of China

September 20, 2012
6:00pm, L140 Elvehjem Building

Maggie Bickford
Art History (Emerita), Brown University


'Repossessing the Past: Refurbishing the Cultural Patrimony at the Courts of Song-Dynasty China'

Chinese emperors of the 12th and 13th centuries created a new body of masterworks to stand in for lost famous paintings by the early Great Painters of China. The measure of their success is that we still use these Song-Dynasty creations as touchstones in our history of early Chinese art. How did this happen? Professor Bickford will consider these imperial initiatives and their consequences for the History of Art in China today.

Seminar

September 24, 2012
3:30 P.M. - 5:00 P.M., 212 University Club Building

Stacy S. Klein
English; Women's and Gender Studies, Rutgers University


'The Militancy of Gender and the Making of Sexual Difference in Anglo-Saxon Literature, c.700-1100AD'

It is a long-standing truism that Old English literature rarely addresses sexual difference or erotic life, and is instead obsessed with chronicling blood feuds, heroic battle-quests, and inter-familial strife. Klein’s project examines the lexical and thematic intersections between warfare and sexual difference within literary, historical, and religious writings produced in England between approximately 700-1100 AD and provides a new conceptual framework for understanding long-occluded questions of gender and sexuality within Anglo-Saxon studies. By exploring a range of early medieval texts and traditions, from medical treatises, histories, and homilies, to heroic poems, riddles, and folk charms, The Militancy of Gender reveals the myriad forms of expression that affective relations and gender iterations may take, and contests the entrenched critical view that late medieval romance and courtly sexuality emerged as specific products of the twelfth-century literary renaissance. More broadly, the book offers a unique historical perspective on how cultural obsessions with warfare and vengeance-driven violence shape social understandings of difference.

Stacy S. Klein is an associate professor of English at Rutgers University, where she also serves as a member of the graduate faculty in the Department of Women’s and Gender Studies and a core faculty member in the Program of Medieval Studies. Her scholarly interests center on medieval literature and culture, with an emphasis on Old English language and literature, the history of gender and sexuality, feminist thought, comparative cultural studies, ideology, and aesthetics. Klein is the author of Ruling Women: Queenship and Gender in Anglo-Saxon Literature (University of Notre Dame Press, 2006), and has written numerous articles on Old English poetry, biblical translation, hagiography, and the natural world. She is also co-editor of two forthcoming interdisciplinary collections of essays: The Maritime World of the Anglo-Saxons, and The Anglo-Saxon Visual Imagination. Klein has been awarded fellowships from the ACLS, NEH, Radcliffe Institute, and AAUW, as well as a Burkhardt Fellowship for Recently Tenured Scholars. From 2007-2011, Klein served as Executive Director of the International Society of Anglo-Saxonists (ISAS), and she currently chairs the Modern Language Association’s Executive Division on Old English Language and Literature. In 2004, Klein joined forces with Anglo-Saxonist faculty at Columbia, NYU, and Princeton to found the Anglo-Saxon Studies Colloquium, an organization dedicated to advancing Anglo-Saxon Studies in and beyond the tri-state area. Klein holds a BA in English from Dartmouth College (1989), an MA in Critical Theory from the University of Sussex (1992), and a PhD in English from Ohio State University (1998). She has taught at Rutgers since 1998, and in 2011, served as Vice-Chair of the Department of English. In 2001, Klein was awarded the Sigma Phi Epsilon award for excellence in undergraduate teaching.

Seminar

October 1, 2012
3:30 P.M. - 5:00 P.M., 212 University Club Building

Theresa Kaminski
History, UW-Stevens Point


'Angels of the Underground: A World War II Story of Love, Resistance, and Survival'

This book project centers on the complex tale of two ordinary and flawed American women propelled by the extraordinary circumstances of World War II into acts of heroism. Margaret Utinsky, petite and redheaded, caustic and cautious; Claire Phillips, a willowy brunette, big-hearted, with a gift for gab. Confronted with the Japanese occupation of the Philippines, both women refused to surrender to civilian internment. Instead, they risked their lives to provide humanitarian support for American military prisoners and funneled supplies and information to guerrilla forces. Their story moves beyond the actions of two individual women; it is a larger story of how women survive in enemy-occupied territory during wartime.

Theresa Kaminski is a UW System Fellow. She holds a Ph.D. in History from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and is currently Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point where she teaches American Women's History. Her fascination with the inter-relation of gender, imperialism, and war resulted in the publication of Prisoners in Paradise: American Women in the Wartime South Pacific (University Press of Kansas, 2000) and Citizen of Empire: Ethel Thomas Herold, an American in the Philippines (University of Tennessee Press, 2011). After completing what she considers to be the final volume in her Philippines trilogy, Professor Kaminski will resume work on her biography of Dale Evans.

Seminar

October 8, 2012
3:30 P.M. - 5:00 P.M., 212 University Club Building

Laurie Beth Clark
Art, UW-Madison


'Always Already Again: Trauma Tourism and the Politics of Memory Culture'

Always Already Again: Trauma Tourism and the Politics of Memory Culture is a transnational, comparative study of the discourses that surround the production and consumption of memorials. It considers sites on five continents that have been established or are in the process of being established to commemorate a range of past violences. The primary venues in this study are concentration camps in Germany and Poland, slave forts in West Africa, peace parks at atomic bomb blast sites Nagasaki in Japan, genocide memorials in Rwanda and Cambodia, museums established to celebrate the end of apartheid in South Africa, sites being used to commemorate the American War throughout Vietnam, and former clandestine torture centers as well as purpose-built monuments to the disappeared in Chile and Argentina. Trauma tourism is a highly contested practice where competing interests comply with or resist established paradigms. This book argues that such tensions constitute trauma tourism, that trauma tourism owes its substance and richness to contestation.

UW-Madison Resident Fellow Laurie Beth Clark is Professor in the Art Department where she teaches studio courses as well as graduate seminars on topics in Visual Culture Studies. Clark has been a faculty member at the University of Wisconsin since 1985. Clark’s career merges theory and practice. Her creative projects have been shown in theatres, galleries, museums, gardens, forests, and public and private spaces in more than 150 shows in 35 countries on five continents. Extensive documentation of her creative work can be found at lbclark.net. In conjunction with her current research on trauma tourism, Clark is developing Ossuary, a compendium of bones designed by artists. Her writing has been published in journals (Performance Paradigm, Performance Research, TDR, Theatre Topics, Tourism and Transnational Studies, Visual Culture) and anthologies (Marketing Memory in Latin America-Duke, The Object Reader-Routledge, Blaze: Discourse on Art-Cambridge, A Performance Cosmology-Routledge, Place and Performance-Palgrave, Macmillan, The Art of Truthtelling After Authoritarian Rule-University of Wisconsin, Guerilla Performance and Multimedia- Continuum). She is currently working on the book manuscript Always Already Again: Trauma Tourism and the Politics of Memory Culture.

Focus on the Humanities Distinguished Lecture

October 10, 2012
5:30P.M., Conrad A. Elvehjem Building, L140

Rachel Feldhay Brenner
Max and Frieda Weinstein-Bascom Professor of Jewish Studies; Professor of Modern Hebrew Literature; Senior Fellow, Institute for Research in the Humanities (2009-2011), UW-Madison


'The Holocaust and the Ethics of Witnessing: Polish Writers Look at the Ghetto'

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, both at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her research focuses on Jewish Diaspora Literature, Israeli literature, and on representations of the Holocaust in literature and in autobiographical writings. She is the author of, most recently, 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).

Burdick-Vary Lecture Series: New Constructions of the Past in the Art History of China

October 11, 2012
6:00pm, L140 Elvehjem Building

Jerome Silbergeld
P.Y. and Kinmay W. Tang Professor of Chinese Art History, Princeton University


'The Birth of 'Literati' Painting in the Song and Yuan Dynasties: How to Think About What We Do and Do Not Know'

Every study of later Chinese painting history tends to establish two overarching categories into which all paintings are expected to fit: literati and not literati, the latter including court, ecclesiastical, and popular works. All modern viewers are charged with comprehending how this rubric of "literati painting," peculiar to China and tied to its civil service system, accounts for style. Yet the birth of literati painting has confused historians, for in its first few hundred years it exhibited a highly unstable visual identity that must prove baffling to anyone today expecting to see there a clear-cut differential between it and not-it. Why this confusion, and how should we deal with this uncertainty about such a fundamental historical issue?

Seminar

October 15, 2012
3:30 P.M. - 5:00 P.M., 212 University Club Building

Winson Chu
Modern Central European History, UW-Milwaukee


'Restoring Memory: German Legacies and Polish Politics of Commemoration in Łódź after 1989'

The search for German legacies in Poland today serves local, national, and international agendas. As a result, the German past is often deployed in ways that seem contradictory. This development is apparent in the city of Łódź, which embodies many of the ruptures in modern European history. An important industrial center in nineteenth century, Łódź quickly became the second largest city in the Polish lands. It once had a German-speaking majority and also increasingly became a center of Jewish life in Central Europe. It was occupied by Germany in both the First World War and the Second World War, when it was renamed “Litzmannstadt” and the local ghetto became a major site in the Holocaust. Since 1989, however, Poles and Germans have looked back to this multiethnic past as a guide to the European future. This paper argues that the efforts in the city to “restore” a multicultural history that includes Poles, Germans, and Jews have also conflicted with commemorations of the Holocaust and the Second World War, thereby revealing the contested nature of Polish-German memory politics.

Winson Chu (PhD, History, University of California, Berkeley, 2006) holds an IRH Honorary Fellowship. He is assistant professor of Modern Central European History at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. His doctoral dissertation won the UC Berkeley History Department's James H. Kettner Graduate Prize as well as the Fritz Stern Dissertation Prize, which the Friends of the German Historical Institute (Washington, DC) awards to the best North American dissertations in German history. He has received fellowships from the German Academic Exchange Service, the United States Department of Education, the German Historical Institute in Warsaw, the American Council on Germany, and the American Council of Learned Societies. Dr. Chu recently held a fellowship at the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. His book, The German Minority in Interwar Poland, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2012.

Seminar

October 22, 2012
3:30 P.M. - 5:00 P.M., 212 University Club Building

Janet Downie
Classics, Princeton University


'Myth in the Landscape: Ancient Heroes and Hellenic Culture in Imperial Asia Minor'

The purpose of my current book project is to understand the role of landscape in the articulation of Hellenism in Imperial Asia Minor. In this presentation I will focus on a particular feature of the mythic landscape of the region: large mounds that dotted the region of the Troad and were believed (sometimes rightly) to be the burial places of ancient epic heroes. For the third century CE writer Philostratus, these tumuli provided a literary trope for the persistence of the Hellenic past in the present. Sources of different kinds offer a wider context for exploring the sorts of landscape – physical and mental – formed by commemorating and creating heroic burials.

Janet Downie has been assistant professor of Classics at Princeton University since 2008. She received her PhD in Classics from the University of Chicago and her BA from the University of Victoria, Canada. Her research focuses on Greek literature of the Roman Imperial era and she is interested broadly in the history of rhetoric and oratory, authorship and issues of literary self-presentation, and ancient medical writers, including Galen. Her first book, At the Limits of Art: A Literary Study of Aelius Aristides’ Hieroi Logoi will be published by Oxford University Press.

Seminar

October 29, 2012
3:30 P.M. - 5:00 P.M., 212 University Club Building

Matthew Brown
African Languages and Literature, UW-Madison


'At the Threshold of New Political Communities: The Nollywood Epic'

Many of the most popular genres of Nigeria’s “Nollywood” video film industry have histories that predate the advent of video filmmaking. The “epic” genre, in particular, draws on expectations generated by the Nigerian state television bureaucracy, which itself draws on expectations generated in literary and oral epic narratives. While some Nollywood epics fulfill these expectations, others substantially subvert them, especially in terms of setting and costume. I argue that, because epic narratives are fundamentally narratives about the establishment of political communities, Nollywood epics offer visions of Nigerian nationhood that, depending on the film in question, fulfill or subvert the ideological trajectory of the Nigerian state.

Matthew H. Brown, IRH Dana-Allen Dissertation Fellow, is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of African Languages and Literature at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he also earned a Master’s Degree. He researches and teaches African literature and popular culture, regularly employing methods and discourses from history, political science, anthropology, and other disciplines in the pursuit of robust forms of literary and cultural analysis. His dissertation research has been supported by a Fulbright-Hays Fellowship and an Ebrahim Hussein Fellowship. He has published widely on African cinema and literature, Nollywood, and Nigerian popular music and he is currently guest-editing an issue of the Journal of African Cinemas about Nollywood’s audiences across the African continent. Brown is also coordinating a Mellon Workshop at UW-Madison on “New Media and Mass/Popular Culture in the Global South.”

Burdick-Vary Lecture Series: New Constructions of the Past in the Art History of China

November 1, 2012
6:00pm, L140 Elvehjem Building

Kathleen Ryor
Professor of Art History and Director of Asian Studies, Carleton College


'Martial Arts: Cultural Interactions between the Civil and Military in Ming China'

Scholarship on art collecting, art production and the broader world of elite cultural practices during the Ming dynasty has focused on the role that wealth and social status has played in the formation of taste and style, and the ways that anxieties about fluidity in social boundaries in the late Ming led to more vocal attempts to distinguish those who possessed "genuine" aesthetic sensitivity and cultural refinement. Much of this discussion has centered on various strata of the educated elite, which include landholders and government officials with degrees, and merchants. Conspicuously absent from such examinations of social position and its relationship to art and material culture is any discussion of the elite members of the hereditary military class. Yet, during the sixteenth century, Ming China was engaged in several military campaigns of enormous importance to the empire. Not surprisingly, military generals and commanders formed social as well as political relationships with civil officials and other members of the educated civil-degree-holding literati. This lecture will show that military men often participated broadly in activities typically closely associated with educated elites who engaged in civil-service examination culture, in areas such as scholarship, poetry-writing, painting, calligraphy, and collecting antique artifacts. Furthermore, it will be argued that this phenomenon is not merely another example of a one-way flow of cultural influence from the elite arbiters of taste in civil society. On the contrary, high-ranking or influential civil literati who were seriously involved in military matters often engaged actively in pursuits commonly associated with men from hereditary military families, such as archery, swordsmanship and other martial arts, the study of the military classics, writing of military strategy and the collecting of swords.

Seminar

November 5, 2012
3:30 P.M. - 5:00 P.M., 212 University Club Building

Pernille Ipsen
Gender & Women's Studies/History, UW-Madison


'A Peculiar Custom: Euro-African Marriage in an Atlantic Slave Trading Town'

My project is a history of marriages between African women and European men who participated in the slave trade on the Gold Coast in the eighteenth century. I argue that these interracial marriages took place in a field of tension between the local practicalities of the slave trade and the larger Atlantic structures of racial slavery and colonialism. In that larger Atlantic world, marriages between black and white were neither socially acceptable nor economically necessary. Amid the difficulties of the slave trade on the Gold Coast, however, Euro-African marriages were from the very beginning central in creating strong cross-cultural ties and stable trading relations. My book follows five generations of Euro-African families in the small town of Osu (now part of Accra). It shows how these families responded to both opportunities and pressures from the intense social climate created by the Atlantic slave trade, in the process building a cultural world specifically adapted to it.

Pernille Ipsen holds a REI fellowship at the Institute in the Fall of 2012. She will spend this time completing the manuscript of her first book, which is under contract with the University of Pennsylvania Press. She has promised to send them the manuscript by December 2012, and four months on leave from teaching will make it possible to reach this goal! She was born and raised in Denmark, where she received her degrees, and where she and her family spend much of the summer. She is in her third year as Assistant Professor in the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies and also has an appointment in the Department of History.

Seminar

November 12, 2012
3:30 P.M. - 5:00 P.M., 212 University Club Building

Jeffrey Steele
English, UW-Madison


'The Visible and Invisible City: Antebellum Authors and the Literary Construction of New York City'

My project explores the ways in which a generation of American writers conceptualized a new phenomenon, the emerging metropolis. While nature writing has been widely studied in recent years, we still lack a taxonomy of urban literary forms or a discussion of the most important literary strategies used by city writers. One of the reasons for this critical neglect lies in the connection between New York authors and the history of journalism (which has received little critical attention from literary scholars). With the exception of Herman Melville, all of the writers in my study (including George Foster and Fanny Fern) worked as journalists; five of them (Lydia Maria Child, Margaret Fuller, Edgar Allan Poe, Walt Whitman, and George Lippard) also served as editors. As I examine these authors’ literary construction of New York, I will be paying special attention to their conceptions of urban space, which for most of them contains important non-visual elements and is often discontinuous or folded. One of the primary goals of this project is to move beyond models of nineteenth-century urban writing based upon the flâneur–the strolling journalist who emphasized visual impressions of the city, often at the expense of ‘invisible’ factors such as class and ideological divisions. In this regard, I am following in the footsteps of Marxist and postmodern geographers like Henri Lefebvre and Edward Soja who challenge the mystification of space into a visible plane excluding class or political divisions.

Jeffrey Steele, Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, specializes in nineteenth-century American studies, American women’s writing (especially the writing of Margaret Fuller), and literary and spatial theory. He is the author of The Representation of the Self in the American Renaissance (1987), The Essential Margaret Fuller (1992, Choice “Outstanding Academic Book”), and Transfiguring America: Myth, Ideology, and Mourning in Margaret Fuller’s Writing (2001). He has published numerous articles on Margaret Fuller and her contemporaries, as well as essays on the politics of mourning and nineteenth-century racial stereotypes. Steele is a past President and Current Executive Officer of the Margaret Fuller Society. He also served on the Advisory Board of the Society for the Study of American Women Writers. He is the recipient of a University of Wisconsin System-wide teaching award. In addition to his current project on nineteenth-century urban writing, he continues his research on Margaret Fuller, as well as on representations of gender and race in nineteenth-century advertising.

Seminar

November 19, 2012
3:30 P.M. - 5:00 P.M., 212 University Club Building

James Sweet
History, UW-Madison


'Rethinking Early American Slavery from an International Perspective, 1450-1640'

Many are aware that the first “20. and odd” Africans arrived in British North America in 1619. Historians of early America often treat this episode as an exceptional moment in which British colonists, unfamiliar with chattel slavery, integrated culturally pliable “Atlantic Creole” Africans into early Chesapeake society as indentured servants. Moving away from emphases on US historical “beginnings,” I argue that the British, and even Virginia’s first colonists, were intimately familiar with slavery and the slave trade. Moreover, the Angolans that arrived in Virginia in the early 1600s were not “Atlantic Creoles.” Rather, they were like the hundreds of thousands of other Central Africans distributed across the Americas in the first decades of the seventeenth century. Ultimately, there was nothing exceptional about the landing of the first “20. and odd” Africans in Virginia. On the contrary, their arrival was a predictable outcome of historical processes that began as early as the fifteenth century on the Iberian Peninsula, culminating in the variable, overlapping patterns of slaving that characterized the seventeenth-century circum-Caribbean and Atlantic world.

James H. Sweet is Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His research interests range widely across the history of Africa and the African diaspora. He is the author of two prize-winning books, Recreating Africa: Culture, Kinship, and Religion in the African-Portuguese World, 1441-1770 (2003) and Domingos Álvares, African Healing, and the Intellectual History of the Atlantic World (2011). In addition to Diaspora’s Democracy, he is currently working on two other projects, one on a pirated slave ship in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world, and another on the politics of interracial intimacy in twentieth-century South Africa.

Seminar

November 26, 2012
3:30 P.M. - 5:00 P.M., 212 University Club Building

Lisa Woodson
Slavic Languages and Literature, UW-Madison


'The Rise of the Legend of the City of Kitezh in Russian Literature'

Little known outside of Russia, the Legend of the City of Kitezh describes an ideal city hidden from the profane world around it. In some versions of legend, the city became invisible to protect it from invading infidel armies; in others, it sank to the bottom of a lake or was hidden underground. According to the legend, only a select few from the profane world are ever counted worthy enough to glimpse this city as it becomes momentarily visible, or better yet, to leave the world behind and enter Kitezh forever. The legend, which claims to date to the 13th century, was virtually unknown in Russian culture before its "discovery" in communities of a persecuted religious sect in the mid-1800s. Within 70 years, the legend attained immense popularity in Russian culture, appearing widely in literature, music, and painting. One of the remarkable features of the appropriation of the legend was the great flexibility with which different writers used it to illustrate variety of ideological, artistic, and philosophical positions. This talk will focus on how the legend went from unilaterally negative to largely positive interpretations between 1860-1910, paving the way for the explosion of excitement about the Kitezh legend in the next decade.

Lisa Woodson, a Dana-Allen Dissertation Fellow, is a graduate student in Slavic Languages and Literature at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She has taught Russian language, literature, and intellectual history at the University of Wisconsin and the University of Missouri. A Madison native, Lisa returned to Madison for graduate school after living abroad in Russia and Canada for several years, where she continued her studies and worked in the Russian environmental movement. She also holds a master's degree in spiritual theology from Regent College in Vancouver, Canada, and a bachelor's degree in Russian Area Studies from Wellesley College in Massachusetts.

Germaine Brée Lectures

November 29, 2012
5:00 P.M., French House, 633 N. Frances Street

Azouz Begag
Writer, CNRS Researcher, Equal Opportunity Minister (2005-2007)


'Créer dans les marges. Azouz Begag: du gone au ministre, en passant par l'écrivain'

Azouz Begag, an internationally acclaimed French writer, has published more than twenty books, most of which are subject to various problems faced by the youth of North African origin, caught between two cultures as well as between tradition and modernism: poverty, racism, unemployment, self-destruction, and despair. Originally Algerian, Azouz Begag was born in the suburbs of Lyon in France in 1957. He holds a PhD in Economics from the University Lyon 2 and leads from the front three careers: novelist, sociologist and politician. Researcher at the CNRS and the House of Social and Human Sciences in Lyon since 1980, he is a specialist in socio-urban economy: his work is largely on the mobility of immigrant populations in urban areas.

Germaine Brée Lectures

November 30, 2012
5:00 P.M., L140 Conrad A. Elvehjem Building

Azouz Begag
Writer, CNRS Researcher, Equal Opportunity Minister (2005-2007)


'Education and Identity Among the Children of Minorities in the French Republic'

This talk will be followed by a screening of Le gone du Chaâba.

Azouz Begag, an internationally acclaimed French writer, has published more than twenty books, most of which are subject to various problems faced by the youth of North African origin, caught between two cultures as well as between tradition and modernism: poverty, racism, unemployment, self-destruction, and despair. Originally Algerian, Azouz Begag was born in the suburbs of Lyon in France in 1957. He holds a PhD in Economics from the University Lyon 2 and leads from the front three careers: novelist, sociologist and politician. Researcher at the CNRS and the House of Social and Human Sciences in Lyon since 1980, he is a specialist in socio-urban economy: his work is largely on the mobility of immigrant populations in urban areas.

Seminar

December 3, 2012
3:30 P.M. - 5:00 P.M., 212 University Club Building

Bradley Moore
History and History of Science, Medicine, and Technology, UW-Madison


'Conflict in the Construction of Socialism: Public Health, Rapid Industrialization, and the Communist Modern in Czechoslovakia'

This paper explores the development of public health services in communist Czechoslovakia, and in turn, the early attempts of state hygienists to improve the living and working environment, enhance the biophysical condition of the proletariat, and halt the consequences of rapid industrialization. Through the efforts and activities of the hygiene services, I trace the converging influences of social humanism, disciplinary ambition, Marxist-Leninist ideology, and progressive critiques of Western medicine. What arose from this constellation of imperatives was a vision of communist modernity that sought to prioritize population health and physiological well-being as the highest aims of state, and furthermore, reform traditional understandings of both preventative medicine and its role in an industrial society. But this idealistic perspective quickly encountered a competing imagination of the socialist modern, one that saw rapid and extensive industrial development as the primary foundation of any social and economic progress. As this confrontation between ideals played out in the 1950s, the attempt to place salubrity and prophylaxis over the demands of socialist economic efficiency ultimately failed, and entrenched attitudes towards medical practice, industrialization, and environmental health risks remained largely unchanged.

Bradley Moore, a William Coleman Dissertation Fellow, is a doctoral candidate in the Joint PhD Program in History and the History of Science, Medicine, and Technology at UW-Madison. His interests are in the history of modern central Europe, the social and cultural history of communism, and the history of medicine and public health. He received a B.A. from St. Lawrence University, an A.M. from the University of Chicago, and an M.A. from the University of Wisconsin. Among his honors and awards are a J. William Fulbright Scholarship, a Dissertation Fellowship from a John E. Sawyer Seminar on the Comparative Study of Cultures, a UW Mellon Dissertation Fellowship, a Travel Award from the Holtz Center for Science and Technology Studies, and a Theodore J. Oesau Dissertation Fellowship in History.

Seminar

December 10, 2012
3:30 P.M. - 5:00 P.M., 212 University Club Building

John Hall
History, UW-Madison


'Dishonorable Duty: The U.S. Army and the Removal of the Southeastern Indians'

Dishonorable Duty: The U.S. Army and the Removal of the Southeastern Indians will examine the American military’s role in the ethnic cleansing of the American Southeast in the 1830s and 1840s. By examining the host of Indian and white perceptions of the army’s role in Indian Removal—as well as the ways in which various groups have remembered or forgotten it—I hope to fuse a fractured historiography and to complicate comfortable-but-flawed conceptions of ethnic and racial identity during the “Age of Jackson. “ As the agency charged with executing federal Indian removal policy, the army was a lightening rod for controversy—one capable of illuminating grave disagreements about the nature and future of American society. Nominally, criticism of the army reflected entrenched views about the justice of the removal policy itself, but attacks on the army bespoke deeper schisms over the locus of sovereignty, the meaning of national honor, the sources of republican virtue, and the currency of class and race as measures of human worth. Painted in the stark colors of race, memories of removal obscure the equally (and sometimes more) powerful antagonism between Jacksonian-localist populism and the nationalist elitism of the Whig party. Ironically, the army wielded by Andrew Jackson represented everything his supporters abhorred—military elitism, the superiority of federal authority, and hierarchy based on class rather than race. These tensions were not lost on the Indians, who neither looked upon Anglo-Americans as a monolithic people nor were unified within their own communities.

John W. Hall is the inaugural holder of the Ambrose-Hesseltine Chair in U.S. Military History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His historical research focuses on early American irregular warfare, with a particular emphasis on intercultural conflict between European and Native American societies. He is the author of Uncommon Defense: Indian Allies in the Black Hawk War (Harvard, 2009) and several essays on early American warfare. He is currently working on a military history of Indian Removal, tentatively titled Dishonorably Duty: The U.S. Army and the Removal of the Southeastern Indians. He is a graduate of the United States Military Academy at West Point and earned his Ph.D. in History from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.

Seminar

January 28, 2013
3:30 P.M. - 5:00 P.M., 212 University Club Building

Russ Castronovo
Dorothy Draheim Professor of English and American Studies, UW-Madison


'Propaganda 1776'

Long a pejorative word since its associations with the flag-waving and jingoism surrounding U.S. participation in World War I, “propaganda” would hardly seem a useful concept for understanding democracy. After all, spreading false information, manipulating facts, and other propaganda techniques are preferred by totalitarian states, not democratic ones. This book project questions such conventional wisdom by examining how popular consent and public opinion in early America relied on the spirited dissemination of rumor, forgery, and invective. Propaganda 1776 considers the extent to which the dispersal and circulation—indeed, the propagation—of information and opinion across the various media of 18th-century print culture helped speed the flow of transatlantic republicanism. The spread of revolutionary material in the form of newspapers, pamphlets, broadsides, letters, songs, and poems across British North America (and later the United States) created multiple networks that spawned new and often radical ideas about political communication.

Russ Castronovo is Dorothy Draheim Professor of English and American Studies. He has written widely on American literature and culture on topics ranging from eighteenth-century communications to Wikileaks. His books include Beautiful Democracy (Chicago, 2007), Necro Citizenship (Duke, 2001), and Fathering the Nation (Berkeley 1995). He has also edited several volumes on American studies, democracy, and U.S. literary history, and has served on the editorial boards of American Literature and American Quarterly.

Seminar

February 4, 2013
3:30 P.M. - 5:00 P.M., 212 University Club Building

Katie Jarvis
European History, UW-Madison


'"I are citizens of the Halles": Forging Citizenship in the Marketplace during the French Revolution'

Historians, political scientists, and philosophers rightly emphasize how the French Revolution created a foundation for democracy in Europe. However, some scholars point to the Revolution’s potentially dark underbelly – the revolutionaries legally cast citizenship as male by denying women the right to vote and banishing them from political clubs. However, if we only consider the institutional attributes of citizenship, we project our current definitions on the revolutionary model. In doing so, we miss the opportunity to probe the myriad ways revolutionaries conceptualized citizenship in its embryonic stages, many of which belied its legal gendered divisions.

This paper takes the Dames des Halles, Parisian market women, as a case study. From the outset of the Revolution, the Parisian marketplace and the female merchants who worked there drove politics in new directions. While they are best known for their leading role in bringing the king to Paris during the October Days, the Dames des Halles continually demonstrated in the streets, boldly intervened in the assembly halls, and asserted their vision of a regenerated nation.This paper argues that the Dames remained unfazed by the gendered visions of legal citizenship specifically because they did not view their sovereignty primarily through gendered markers. Rather, the Dames frequently referenced how their commerce benefited public utility and how their autonomous work supported the social body. The Dames linked themselves to the nation as citizen-workers. They imagined that they earned citizenship through societal engagement. For them, legitimacy did not stem from an a priori right. The Dames portrayed their commercial endeavors, political interventions, and familial obligations as civic work that granted them political membership. The Dames' attitudes towards their work can nuance our understanding of nascent citizenship at the cusp of modern democracy.

Katie Jarvis is an ACLS Residency Fellow and a Ph.D. Candidate in European History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her research focuses on popular politics, broadly conceived, during the French Revolution. She is especially interested in the intersection of social and cultural history, as well as gender history. Her dissertation research has been funded by a Mellon/American Council of Learned Societies Dissertation Completion Fellowship, a Fulbright Grant, a Council for European Studies/Mellon Foundation Pre-Dissertation Research Fellowship, the Society for French Historical Studies, L’Institut Français d’Amérique, La Société des Professeurs Français et Francophones d'Amérique, the Western Association of Women Historians, Phi Alpha Theta, and the UW Department of History. She also collaborates on the international work group “Genre et Classes Populaires” to foster dialogue across national and disciplinary boundaries. She received a B.A. in History from Boston College and a M.A. in European History from UW-Madison.

Seminar

February 11, 2013
3:30 P.M. - 5:00 P.M., 212 University Club Building

Meridith Beck Sayre
History of Science, UW-Madison


'The Process of Conversion: A Biography of the Jesuit Relations'

In August of 1632 Father Paul Le Jeune penned the first installment of the Jesuit Relations “from the midst of a forest more than 800 leagues in extent, at Kebec.” The Relations were yearly reports written by members of the Society of Jesus who worked to christianize New France during the seventeenth century. Sent back to Paris for publication every year between 1632 to 1673, the texts formed a forty-one volume book series that was popular among the Parisian elite. They are now widely considered to be one of the most important historical sources for understanding the colonial encounter between Europeans and the indigenous peoples of North America. My dissertation presents a biography of the Relations, in which I chart how these religious texts gained scientific authority in the modern social sciences and humanities. By exposing the print history and textual practices that transformed these texts into a tool of scientific inquiry, my work reveals the fundamental role the Relations have played in the history of race in North America. Furthermore, I argue that the print culture surrounding the Relations—namely their transmission and reception in the late nineteenth-century—has significantly influenced the modern reading of the texts as ethnographic documents.

Meridith Beck Sayre is a Dana-Allen Dissertation Fellow and a PhD Candidate in the Department of the History of Science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her research draws on the fields of print culture studies, the Atlantic World approach, and the history of the social sciences. Her work puts three traditionally separate historiographies—French-Canadian, Anglo-Canadian, and American—into dialogue and integrates both French and English primary sources, thereby contributing to a more transnational perspective of North American history.

Focus on the Humanities Distinguished Lecture

February 13, 2013
5:30 P.M., Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery, 330 North Orchard Street

Gregg Mitman
Vilas Research and William Coleman Professor of History of Science, Medical History, and Environmental Studies, UW-Madison


'Ecological Imperialism Revisited: Entanglements of Disease, Commerce, and Knowledge in a Global World'

Forty years ago, in The Columbian Exchange, and a few years later, in Plagues and Peoples, Alfred Crosby and William McNeill advanced grand historical narratives on a global scale driven by the movement of plants, people, and parasites across space and time. The appearance of disease as an agent of empire in the writing of global environmental histories is deeply entangled with ecological and evolutionary understandings of disease that emerged in the service of capital in the early twentieth century. In his talk, Mitman examines how American military and industrial expansion overseas—witnessed firsthand by doctors in the American occupation of the Philippines, on the coffee plantations of the United Fruit Company, in the trenches of the Great War, and on the rubber plantations of Firestone in Liberia—helped bring into being new views of nature and nation that would, in turn, become the scientific foundation upon which later historical narratives of ecological imperialism relied.

Gregg Mitman's teaching and writing interests span the history of ecology, nature, and health in American culture, and are informed by a commitment and hope to build a more equitable and just environment. Reaching across the fields of environmental history, the history of science and medicine, and the visual culture of science, his research seeks to understand the ways in which political economy, cultural values and beliefs, and scientific knowledge intersect in shaping the interactions between people and environments over time. He served as the founding director of the Nelson Institute’s Center for Culture, History and Environment, and is also curator of Madison’s popular environmental film festival, Tales from Planet Earth. His current research explores the role of science and medicine in America’s changing relationship to the tropical world through the lens of the Firestone Plantations Company in Liberia.

Seminar

February 18, 2013
3:30 P.M. - 5:00 P.M., 212 University Club Building

Ellen Samuels
Gender & Women's Studies and English, UW-Madison


'Double Meanings: Representing Conjoined Twins'

Double Meanings: Representing Conjoined Twins analyzes cultural representations of conjoined twins in literature, film, media, and popular culture. The guiding principle for this project is to reverse the sensationalism usually attached to public discussions of conjoinment by turning the lens of fascination back onto the cultural meanings attached to representations of such twins. Double Meanings asks what representations of conjoinment can tell us about the workings of power in different cultural settings, especially as conjoinment intersects with more familiar identities of race, class, gender, and sexuality. Unlike previous scholarly works, this project turns away from broad philosophical questions to explore such historically-located areas of inquiry as colonialism, slavery, sexual science, modern consumerism, and globalization, all of which shape the representation of conjoined twins from the nineteenth through twenty-first centuries.

Ellen Samuels is Assistant Professor of English and Gender & Women’s Studies at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, and Director of UW Disability Studies. Her critical writing on disability, gender, and race has been published in numerous journals and anthologies, including Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, The Oxford Handbook of Nineteenth-Century American Literature, Feminist Disability Studies, GLQ: Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literatures of the United States, NWSA Journal, and Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies. Her awards include a 2012 American Association of University Women Publication Grant, the 2011 Catherine Stimpson Prize for Outstanding Feminist Scholarship, two Lambda Literary Awards, and the Ed Roberts Postdoctoral Fellowship in Disability Studies at the University of California at Berkeley. She received her B.A from Oberlin College, her M.F.A. in creative writing from Cornell University, and her Ph.D. in English from the University of California at Berkeley. Her first book, Self Evident: Disability and Bodily Identity, is forthcoming from NYU Press, and she is now working on a new book, Double Meanings: Representing Conjoined Twins.

Seminar

February 25, 2013
3:30 P.M. - 5:00 P.M., 212 University Club Building

Damián Fernández
History, Northern Illinois University


'An Invisible Class in a Silent Land. Aristocracy and Settlement Transformation in Atlantic Iberia during Late Antiquity (300-600)'

This project investigates the transformations of aristocracies during Late Antiquity in an obscure corner of the Roman World: Atlantic Iberia. The project addresses the following question: a powerful and wealthy aristocracy dominated the Iberian Peninsula during the late Roman Empire; what happened to these aristocrats after Rome “fell”? The fate of Iberian aristocracies after the so-called fall of the Roman Empire lies at the center of the quest to understand the formation of Medieval Spain. By focusing on one area of the peninsula (Atlantic Iberia), Damián Fernández contends that a mosaic of local aristocracies with different economic and social strategies dominated local societies in the mid-sixth century, in contrast to the uniformity that had prevailed among the late-Roman elites in Iberia. Thus, the fate of the regional Roman aristocracy was not simply a “decline” or a “fall.” Nor does “continuity” provide a better paradigm. Rather, local aristocracies changed the basic meaning of what it meant to be an aristocrat, with responses varying from region to region.

Damián Fernández has been an assistant professor at Northern Illinois University’s History Department since 2010. Prior to that appointment, he was a visiting research scholar at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World (New York University). He received his PhD in History from Princeton University and his BA from the University of Buenos Aires. He is interested in the social and economic history of Late Antiquity and in comparative studies of state and society in pre-modern contexts. He has published in Antiquité Tardive and is currently working on his book manuscript and three other articles on late-antique Iberia.

Seminar

March 4, 2013
3:30 P.M. - 5:00 P.M., 212 University Club Building

Kerry Lefebvre
Classics, UW-Madison


'What Not to Wear: Cultus and Elegy in Rome'

In the fourth book of Propertius’ poetry, we encounter a statue of Vertumnus, who explains to passersby that, given the right clothing and accessories, he can take on any number of identities and occupations, even changing from an elegiac puella (mistress or girlfriend) to a Roman man who wears the toga (Prop. 4.2.21-28).

Like Vertumnus, Ancient Rome was a performance and appearance based culture, where one enacted and revealed one’s gender and social status through outward appearance, so this appearance, clothing, and adornment, which the Romans denoted by the word cultus, remained an important part of ancient life. Because cultus reveals information about ancient Roman culture, I believe it can also act as an interpretive tool for a particularly complex and elusive genre of poetry, namely Latin elegy.

Previous scholarship on elegy has argued that this poetry comprises a “counter-cultural” genre that undermines normative gender roles in Roman society during the rule of Augustus, primarily through the figures of the male lover-poet and the puella (or even Vertumnus). However, as I argue, an investigation into the role of cultus in the poetry of Tibullus, Propertius, and Ovid resolves some persistent questions in scholarship on elegy, as they relate to the role of the puella, her identity, the effeminacy of the male lover-poet, and the metapoetic value of (primarily the puella’s) cultus. The cultus of the puella and the lover-poet acts as an interpretive lens through which we can interpret elegy’s gendered discourse and commentary on poetry, and I argue that the elegists use cultus to create and destabilize boundaries in ways that ultimately reinforce normative gender roles and male control in general, and that of the lover-poet over the puella in particular. In other words, my analysis of cultus attempts to redefine an important strand of elegiac scholarship: elegy is less “counter-cultural” and more normative than scholarship has previously argued.

Kerry Lefebvre, a Robert J. Reinhold Dissertation Fellow, is a Ph.D. candidate in Classics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her research examines the dynamics of gender in Latin elegy through its descriptions of female and male cultus, or outward appearance. In support of this project, Lefebvre received a 2011-2012 Chancellor’s Fellowship. She has also received the Classical Association of the Middle West and South’s Award for Outstanding Accomplishment in Classical Studies and has presented her research at a variety of domestic and international conferences. Lefebvre was also involved with UW-Madison’s Center for the Humanities’ Great World Texts program during 2011-2012 and prepared the teachers’ guide for that year’s great text, the Antigone.

Nellie Y. McKay Lecture in the Humanities

March 7, 2013
4:30 P.M., L140 Conrad A. Elvehjem Building

Eddie Glaude, Jr.
William S. Tod Professor of Religion and African American Studies, Department of Religion, and Chair, Center for African American Studies, Princeton University


'Democracy in Black: Identity Politics in a Post-Soul Era'

In his lecture, Glaude explores how "whiteness" continues to distort American democracy, disfiguring our precious ideals into unsightly and dangerous justification for ugly practices that ultimately cast away democratic principles, and eventually, people. This distortion requires a response, specifically from those who are disproportionately affected by the unseemly machinations of whiteness in our politics. Those who suffer injury, in part because they are not white, must give voice to the distinctiveness of their experiences in order to expand democratic possibility. Black politics, at its best, has done precisely this. No matter the specific demands of the black freedom struggle throughout our history, the one constant has been a complete and unequivocal rejection of the oxymoronic idea of "white democracy." But the public expression of black suffering has become increasingly difficult today, because "white democracy" trades in the language of color-blindness and the political idea of Black America has collapsed in the face of internal differences unleashed in what can be called a post-soul era.

Galude confronts a possible paradox: that the current expression of "white democracy" requires a response in the form of black identity politics, but the political idea of Black America has collapsed in the face of fragmenting black communities, where the once powerful ideal of black solidarity crumbles under the weight of internal class and generational differences. Glaude answers the paradox with a call for a more robust form of black identity politics attuned to the differences within black communities and rooted in a grassroots democratic ethos that exposes the continued political and moral work of "whiteness" in America.

Professor Eddie Glaude's research interests include American pragmatism, specifically the work of John Dewey, and African American religious history and its place in American public life. He is the recipient of numerous fellowships and awards, including the 2002 Modern Language Association William Sanders Scarborough Prize for his book Exodus! (2000). He has also co-edited, with Cornel West, African-American Religious Thought: An Anthology (2004).

Seminar

March 11, 2013
3:30 P.M. - 5:00 P.M., 212 University Club Building

Mary Agnes Edsall



'Barbarian Affectivities'

Late medieval affective piety was a style of highly emotional devotion to the humanity of Jesus, particularly in his infancy and his death, and to the joys and sorrows of the Virgin Mary. Most accounts of affective piety have located its beginnings in the twelfth century and trace it as it developed in Cistercian and Franciscan spirituality; but scholars have recently begun to question this narrative. My research takes this questioning a step further and suggests that affective speech and texts were part of Western philosophical and, then, Christian traditions from the earliest centuries on.

This presentation is part of a chapter that asks if there was any discernable “affective piety” between the fifth and the eleventh centuries. By the end of the patristic period theories of conversion and catechesis had been consolidated and affective rhetorics of Christian pedagogy had been developed. The monasteries would preserve these through the long centuries during which the western Roman Empire slowly turned into medieval Europe. Another story runs alongside this, however: the story of appeals to the emotions in the evangelization and ongoing Christianization of sub-Roman populations and of the barbarians from east of the Rhine who settled in formerly Roman colonies. Drawing on current work in the fields of psychology, history of the emotions, and medieval history, this presentation will speculate on the effects on character and emotions of the “culture of violence” of tribal Europe, effects including desensitization to violence, lack of compassion, and paranoia that fueled irascibility. In it, I will explore how earlier affective Christian rhetorics may have been adapted to persuade the people of these “cultures of violence” to take on different ways of being and feeling—beyond just offering “emotional refuges,” places where alternative ways of feeling and living were learned.

Mary Agnes Edsall, Solmsen Fellow, has recently held positions at University of Massachusetts Boston (visiting) and at Bowdoin College. Her interdisciplinary scholarship focuses on the literatures and practices of Christian catechesis and devotion of the European Middle Ages, with attention to memory (personal and cultural), mnemonics, rhetorical theory, and the role of images and the emotions. She has recently published on early copies of Anselm of Canterbury’s Prayers and Meditations as exemplars of practice that drew their power from the way that they reproduced the charismatic presence of their author. Forthcoming articles address the patristic prehistory of medieval Arma Christi imagery and the connections between monastic anthologies for novice formation and household devotional anthologies of late medieval England. Her research interests also include Hugh of Fouilloy, an under-studied writer whose works were widely read in his time (mid-twelfth century) and beyond.

Seminar

March 18, 2013
3:30 P.M. - 5:00 P.M., 212 University Club Building

Robert Asen
Communication Arts, UW-Madison


'Ideology, Counterpublicity, and the Gay Straight Alliance'

This presentation examines a controversy that arose in West Bend, WI, over the local school board’s resistance to students’ efforts to gain official recognition for a local chapter of the Gay Straight Alliance, a national network of student groups dedicated to creating welcoming environments for students of all sexual orientations and background. Faced with an application for official recognition in spring 2011, the school board initially rejected the group, then reversed its decision after lawyers for the GSA filed a discrimination suit in federal court. In my analysis, I argue that the GSA controversy pressed a tension in the ideology of school-board members between their fiscal and social conservatism. The threat of losing the lawsuit and having to pay their attorneys’ fees as well as the fees of the GSA’s attorneys challenged their fiscal conservatism, especially when two sets of attorneys advised the board that the GSA likely would prevail in court. The GSA’s composition and mission threatened the social and religious conservatism as well as the heteronormative notions of family and society held by many board members. GSA advocates and allies enacted a counterpublicity—a contesting mode of engagement—that pressed this tension, exposing its faults and calling some members of the board and community on their homophobia and discriminatory policies. Their counterpublicity engaged the prevailing ideology articulated by many board members, refiguring it and opening spaces for critical reflection. In doing so, GSA advocates achieved recognition for their members and others.

Robert Asen is a resident fellow at the Institute for Research in the Humanities and a professor in the Department of Communication Arts at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Asen conducts research and teaches in the areas of public policy debate, public sphere studies, and rhetoric and critical theory. His research explores relationships between social and economic inequality and public deliberation as well as issues that arise in theorizing a post bourgeois public sphere. Asen is the author of Invoking the Visible Hand (Michigan State University Press, 2009) and Visions of Poverty (Michigan State University Press, 2002). Asen has also co-edited two books (with Daniel C. Brouwer), Public Modalities (University of Alabama Press, 2009) and Counterpublics and the State (SUNY Press, 2001).

Seminar

April 1, 2013
3:30 P.M. - 5:00 P.M., 212 University Club Building

Todd W. Reeser
French and Women's Studies, University of Pittsburgh


'Setting Plato Straight: Translating Ancient Sexuality in the Renaissance'

As fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Humanists read, digested, and translated Plato, they found themselves faced with a fundamental problem. On the one hand, the rebirth of the Ancients implied a “fidelity” to the words and the sense of Greek texts. On the other hand, many Humanists refused to translate faithfully, and thus to propagate, the institution of pederasty or the other homoerotic elements in the Platonic corpus. This recurring tension in Christian-Humanism could not be avoided because of the blatant homoerotics in Plato, particularly in the Symposium, the Phaedrus, and the Lysis. In this talk, I present an overview of the critical questions around this tension, with a focus on translation and hermeneutics, in translations, commentaries, and literary texts from Italy, France, and Germany. This presentation is drawn from my book in progress, a comparative and comprehensive study of the reception of Platonic sexuality from the first Renaissance translations of Plato’s erotic dialogues in the early fifteenth century (by Leonardo Bruni) to Michel de Montaigne’s skeptical commentary on translation in the late sixteenth century, with many stops in between.

A Solmsen Fellow for AY 2012-13 at the University of Wisconsin, Todd Reeser is Professor of French, with a secondary appointment in Women’s Studies, in the Department of French and Italian at the University of Pittsburgh. He just completed a year as acting director of the Humanities Center at the University of Pittsburgh. His research interests lie largely in the areas of gender and sexuality broadly conceived, especially in the early modern period. His first book Moderating Masculinity in Early Modern Culture (2006) studies ways in which masculinity often aligns itself with the virtue of moderation as it positions its various "others" (e.g. women, the sodomite, the Amerindian) as excess and lack. In 2010, Reeser published Masculinities in Theory, a monograph that provides a series of theoretical models to analyze masculinity from a literary/cultural perspective, especially as inflected by post-structuralist thought. He has also coedited Approaches to Teaching the Works of François Rabelais (2011) and “Entre hommes”: French and Francophone Masculinities in Theory and Culture (2008), and he is currently editing a collection of essays on the topic “Transgender France.”

Seminar

April 8, 2013
3:30 P.M. - 5:00 P.M., 212 University Club Building

Lou Roberts
History, UW-Madison


'Five Ways to Look at a Corpse: The Dead in Normandy, 1944'

We prefer to think of war as producing heroes, not corpses. Perhaps for this reason, military historians have rarely focused on the dead. In the Normandy invasion of 1944, the bodies of American G.I.s were often not visible. This is because, in an effort to maintain the morale of the troops, the U.S. military quickly removed corpses from the battlefield and kept them out of sight. At the same time, however, much can be learned about the war’s meaning for its combattants by exploring how corpses were perceived by American and German soldiers, military officials, French civilians and the American public.

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.

Workshop

April 10, 2013
Noon - 1:30 P.M., 212 University Building

Brian Sandberg
History, Northern Illinois University


'New Digital Humanities Approaches to Renaissance Studies: Manuscript Imaging and Research Outsourcing in the Florentine Archives using the Bía Platform'

The Bía Platform of the Medici Archive Project offers Renaissance scholars new approaches to digital humanities research. This online platform presents high-resolution digitized manuscript documents and a searchable interface to the massive Mediceo del Principato collection at the Archivio di Stato di Firenze. The Bía platform functions as a search engine to the papers of the Medici family and their princely state of Ducal and Granducal Tuscany. This presentation will introduce scholars and graduate students to the new possibilities of digital humanities research in Renaissance studies, focusing on ways of using the Bía platform and participating in the Medici Archive Project’s new crowd sourcing approach to collaborative research.

Brian Sandberg is an Associate Professor of History at Northern Illinois University who is interested in the intersections of religion, violence, and political culture during the European Wars of Religion. His monograph entitled, Warrior Pursuits: Noble Culture and Civil Conflict in Early Modern France (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), examines provincial nobles’ orchestration of civil violence in southern France in the early seventeenth century. He has served as a Solmsen Fellow at the Institute for Research in the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow at the Medici Archive Project, and a Jean Monnet Fellow at the European University Institute. Sandberg has published a number of articles and essays on religious violence, gender relations, and noble culture in early modern France, and is currently working on a new book project on A Virile Courage: Gender and Violence in the French Wars of Religion, 1562-1629.

Lunch will be served at 11:45 A.M. in room 201. Please RSVP at rsvp@irh.wisc.edu.

Seminar

April 15, 2013
3:30 P.M. - 5:00 P.M., Banquet Room, University Club Building

Henry Drewal and Faisal Abdu'Allah
Art History; Afro-American Studies, UW-Madison


'Practicing Theory: FauHaus and Sensiotics'

The theory and method called sensiotics, coined in 2003 by Henry Drewal, explores how the senses are engaged in the creation and reception of the arts, and the making of culture. Sight, hearing, touch, smell, taste, and motion continually participate, though we may often be unconscious of them, in the ways we literally make sense of the world, and art. Seeing (hearing, tasting, etc.) is thinking, sensing is theorizing, because in the beginning, there was no word, only sensations.

FauHaus (F = Faisal, H = Henry, Haus = WI), a riff on the BauHaus concept of interdisciplinary arts and born out of the theory of sensiotics, is an arts laboratory that demonstrates the poetic dalliance between theory and practice. Thinking, making and dissemination are integrated and reconciled to insure the clarity and longevity of artistic ideas.

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 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 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) that won the 2011 Arnold Rubin Distinguished Publication Award from ACASA. 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 before its 2011-12 US tour to Houston, Richmond, and Indianapolis. He co-curated with Sarah K. Khan Soulful Stitching: Patchwork Quilts by Africans (Siddis) in India, a traveling exhibition shown at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, NY and the Museum of the African Diaspora, San Francisco, both in 2011. He is currently preparing with colleagues another major traveling exhibition entitled Striking Iron: The Art of African Blacksmiths. In Spring 2013, he will be hosting the Arts Institute Artist-in-Residence Faisal Abdu’Allah and co-teaching a seminar on “bodies, minds, senses and the arts.”

The work of Faisal Abdu’Allah repositions ideologies relating to representation and memory through the interface of photography, printmaking, moving images and performative installation. Since his acclaimed graduation show at the Royal College of Art he has won numerous prizes including the first prize at the Tallinn Print Triennial 2010 and The Mayors prize for Sustainability for his film 'Double Pendulum'. He has exhibited extensively in the UK, Tate Modern and Serpentine Gallery. Recently his first retrospective 'Art of Dislocation' was shown at the CAAM, Spain. CAAM published his second monologue for which he was awarded a doctorate. He is represented by Magnolia Editions, California, USA and Autograph ABP, London.

Seminar

April 22, 2013
3:30 P.M. - 5:00 P.M., 212 University Club Building

Greg Aldrete
History and Humanistic Studies, UW-Green Bay


'Education, Entertainment, and Exploitation: Adventures in Attempting to Promote an Appreciation for the Humanities Among the General Public'

In an era when a "business model" is dominant in higher education and there are increasing demands by the public and politicians to steer students towards majors that supposedly lead directly to jobs, it is vital for humanists to articulate to the general public the value of the humanities. However, the audience directly reached by most academics is limited to their own students in their classes and fellow academics who read their research. The principal way that the general public is exposed to humanities disciplines is usually through various forms of media, which are often more interested in sensationalism, entertainment, and making money than in providing accurate or responsible information. Academics who work with the media must constantly negotiate between the desire to reach and influence a larger audience and media distortion and exploitation of one's discipline. This talk will explore this tension, using as examples my own recent experiences with different methods of reaching the general public, including documentaries, TV and internet news stories, public lectures, popular books, and video courses.

Gregory S. Aldrete (Princeton B.A, 1988.; Univ. of Michigan M.A. and Ph.D. 1995) is the Frankenthal Professor of History and Humanistic Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay. His books include: Linen Armor in Ancient World: The Linothorax Mystery (2013 with S. Bartell and A. Aldrete), The Long Shadow of Antiquity: What Have the Greeks and Romans Have Done For Us? (with A. Aldrete), Gestures and Acclamation in Ancient Rome, Floods of the Tiber in Ancient Rome, Daily Life in the Roman City: Rome, Pompeii, and Ostia, and the Greenwood Encyclopedia of Daily Life I: The Ancient World (editor). Aldrete was awarded NEH Humanities Fellowships for 2004/5 and 2012/13, was a member of two NEH seminars held at the American Academy in Rome, was a Visiting Scholar at the American Academy in Rome, received the Award for Excellence in Teaching at the College Level from the American Philological Association, is a National Lecturer for the Archaeological Institute of America, was a Wisconsin System Teaching Fellow and a UWGB Teaching Scholar, and was chosen as a recipient of both the Founders Association Award for Excellence in Teaching and the Founders Association Award for Excellence in Scholarship, the highest awards given by his university.

Seminar

April 29, 2013
3:30 P.M. - 5:00 P.M., 212 University Club Building

Manu P. Sobti
School of Architecture & Urban Planning, UW-Milwaukee


'Medieval Riverlogues: Crossing & Contestations along the Oxus Borderland'

Manu Sobti shall present an extract from his forthcoming book with Brill Press entitled The Sliver of the Oxus Borderland: Medieval Cultural Encounters between the Arabs and Persians. Positioned within the context of the Arab invasions on Central Asia, he examines the medieval borderlands that witnessed passage, journey and abandonment along the Oxus or Amu Darya -­ the region’s most significant river. Through the course of these invasions, and within the river’s critical role as a liminal zone between two distinct cultural realms -­ the Arab versus the Persian -­ the Amu Darya served as the selectively permeable, border/boundary condition for the large Arab armies moving across Khorasan. They forded the river at two crossing points along its length, both of which have retained this significant role through time. In re-visiting these crossing points, Sobti lends voice to the river’s tumultuous history and to the seemingly ‘inconsequential’ cultural landscape on both sides, re-formulating its engaging role as the only geographic truism in Eurasia, and in marked contrast to the region’s arbitrary Soviet era, state boundaries. His research archive and fieldwork combine interpretations of critical Arab and Persian texts that document these ‘journeys’, alongside introspective fieldwork, and a plethora of re-drawn maps and animations.

Dr. Manu P. Sobti shall be a fellow at the IRH in Spring 2013. He is an Islamic architecture and urban historian, associate professor at the School of Architecture & Urban Planning (SARUP), University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee USA. His ongoing research focuses on the urban history of early-medieval Islamic cities along the Silk Road and in the Indian Subcontinent, with particular reference to the complex ‘borderland geographies’ created by riverine landscapes. Within the purview of a comparative, trans-disciplinary research project on the Mississippi, Danube, Ganges and Amu Darya Rivers, he is currently completing a manuscript entitled The Sliver of the Oxus Borderland: Medieval Cultural Encounters between the Arabs and Persians for Brill Publications (Leiden, Netherlands) – a comprehensive work that collates his noteworthy fieldwork in libraries, repositories and archives across Central Asia. His work has received several prestigious awards, including the Trans-disciplinary Research Collaborative Award from the Center for 21st Century Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (2011–13), the Global Studies Research Fellowship at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (2010-11), the Hamid Bin Khalifa Research and Travel Fellowship for Islamic Architecture and Culture (2009), the Center for 21st Century Studies Fellowship at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (2009-10), the Aga Khan Graduate Fellowship at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology-Cambridge (1993-95), and grants from the National Council for East European and Eurasian Research in Seattle (2009-10), the Graham Foundation of the Arts in Chicago (2008-09), the French Institute for Central Asian Studies in Tashkent (2003), and the Architectural Association in London (2001). He has also received multiple teaching and course development awards, including the BP-AMOCO Teaching Excellence Award at the Georgia Institute of Technology (2001), and the Distinguished Undergraduate Teaching Award at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (2011). Sobti has published widely and presented his research at more than 60 national and international venues. He coordinates the Buildings-Landscapes-Cultures (blc) Research Program at UWM, directs the SARUP India Program, and conducts Urban Design Studios in Ahmedabad, Chandigarh and New Orleans in partnership with local schools of architecture.