Past Event Category: 2009-2010
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Jan 25We Have to Invent Him: Harley Lyrics, Hereford Maps, and the Life of Roger de Breynton, c.1290-1351
University Club, Room 212
Monday Seminar: Daniel Birkholz Solmsen Fellow (2009-2010) English, University of Texas at Austin This interdisciplinary study brings together two major documents of a forgotten period and a backwater region—the Hereford Cathedral Mappamundi [“map of the world”] (c.1305), and British Library Manuscript Harley 2253 (c.1340), a trilingual literary anthology—and reads them alongside a contemporary life …
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Jan 21In Love With Russia: U.S. Women, Sexual Revolution, and Revolutionary Tourism, 1921-1935
Helen C. White Hall, Room 7191
Jay C. and Ruth Hall Lecture: Julia Mickenberg Honorary Fellow (2009-2010) American Studies, Univ of Texas at Austin The lecture examines how the modern sexual revolutions in Russia and the U.S. inspired American women’s revolutionary tourism in the Soviet Union in the 1920s and 1930s. Using fictional and archival sources, Mickenberg shows how many …
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Dec 14Planetarity: Global Epistemologies in Modernist Studies
University Club, Room 212
Monday Seminar: Susan Stanford Friedman IRH Director English, UW–Madison This paper, written for a keynote address at the Modernist Studies Association (November, 2009), explores the “transnational turn” in modernist studies and the anxiety in the field over the expanded meanings of the categories modernism and modernity. It presents a manifesto in defense of these …
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Nov 30From Statelessness to State Sovereignty: People and Politics on an Early American Frontier
University Club, Room 212
Monday Seminar: Rob Harper ACLS Residency Fellow (2009-2010) History, UW-Stevens Point This paper reassesses the Anglo-American conquest of the trans-Appalachian west by examining the relationships between local politics, frontier violence, and state formation. It argues that the United States achieved effective sovereignty over the region less because of its inherent might than because of …
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Nov 23Real American Girls and the American Girl in the Movies in the 1910s
University Club, Room 212
Monday Seminar: Leslie Midkiff DeBauche UW System Fellow (2009-2010) Communication Arts, UW-Stevens Point In the United States in the 1910s the most popular movie stars, including Mary Pickford, Billie Burke, Irene Castle, and serial queen Pearl White (The Perils of Pauline, 1914), portrayed characters described by journalists as American Girls. These Girls, who were …
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Nov 16At the Table of the Other: Eating and Ethics in Early Modern England
University Club, Room 212
Monday Seminar David B. Goldstein Solmsen Fellow (2009-2010) English, York University This paper explores the meanings and functions of food in early modern English culture, arguing that for the Renaissance writer, the rhetoric of eating functions preeminently as a language of ethics that links or collapses the treatment of the food on one’s plate …
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Nov 9National Colors: Race, Nation, and the Census in Latin America
University Club, Room 212
Monday Seminar: Mara Loveman Resident Fellow (2009-2010) Sociology, UW–Madison Why do some states classify their populations by race in censuses while other states do not? What purpose have race queries on census forms served historically, and what purposes do they serve today? In this talk, Professor Loveman will discuss her research on the practice …
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Nov 2The Fullness of Time: Tocqueville and the Democratic Moment
University Club, Room 212
Monday Seminar: Richard Avramenko Resident Fellow (2009-2010) Political Science, UW–Madison This paper examines the concept of time in Tocqueville’s thought through the lens of the philosophy of internal time-consciousness. While Tocqueville himself offers no systematic analysis of time consciousness, his descriptive observations present a rich, comparative account. Tocqueville’s way of thinking, it will be …
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Oct 26“Martial Acts Virtuously Enacted by Women”: Gender and Violence in the French Wars of Religion
University Club, Room 212
Monday Seminar: Brian Sandberg History, Northern Illinois University Solmsen Fellow (2009-2010) This paper concerns the gendered nature of violence and political culture in early modern French history. Religious identities and animosities sharply divided France along confessional (or sectarian) boundaries between a Catholic majority and Calvinist minority in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth …
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Oct 19Roomscape: Reading Space in the British Museum
University Club, Room 212
Monday Seminar: Susan David Bernstein Resident Fellow (2009-2010) English, UW–Madison This talk examines a specific site — the Reading Room of the British Museum — as a space of imaginative and historically generative potential in relation to the emergence of modern women writers in Victorian and early twentieth-century London. Using archival documents, spatial theories, …