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September 2011
How? Research Methods in the Humanities
Panel Discussion: Lee Palmer Wandel, History, UW-Madison Mara Loveman, Sociology, UW-Madison Jon McKenzie, English, UW-Madison Patricia Rosenmeyer, Classics, UW-Madison The Institute for Research in the Humanities (IRH) will begin its year-long weekly seminars with…
Find out more »Amerilots and Harlots: The Power of Commodities during the U.S. Military Presence in France, 1944-1946
Monday Seminar Mary Louise Roberts Senior Fellow (2010-2014) History, UW-Madison During the American campaign in Normandy, the Army distributed enormous quantities of cigarettes, chocolate and chewing gum, as well as soap and other toiletries…
Find out more »Cultures and Histories of the Environment Colloquium
Part of the Burdick-Vary Lecture Series: "International Perspectives on the Environmental Humanities and Social Sciences": Cóilín Parsons English Literature, University of Cape Town, South Africa Cóilín Parsons is an assistant professor of English Literature at…
Find out more »The Future Eaters: Petro-despotism, Empire, and the Resource Curse
Monday Seminar: Rob Nixon Senior Fellow (2009-2012) Rachel Carson Professor of English, UW-Madison 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…
Find out more »The “Arab Spring” and the Humanities
2011 Germaine Brée Symposium: 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…
Find out more »October 2011
Companionable Objects, Companionable Conscience: Episode 1, “Two Effigies”
Monday Seminar: Kenneth George Senior Fellow (2011-2015) Anthropology, UW-Madison 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…
Find out more »Africa and the Disciplines: Congolese Music, Francophone Literature, and the Humanities
Monday Seminar: John Nimis French and Italian, UW-Madison A.W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow (2010-2012) That music is central to African societies is something of a truism. But what does this really mean in terms…
Find out more »Saints of the Indus: Islam and Politics in South Asia’s Borderlands
Monday Seminar: André Wink Senior Fellow (2009-2013) History, UW-Madison 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…
Find out more »Temporal Subjectivities and “Locating Africa” in Postcolonial Cinema
Monday Seminar: Amy Powell Dana-Allen Dissertation Fellow (2011-2012) Art History, UW-Madison Engagement with Africa as a space or place is not the only way that contemporary artists and filmmakers critically interpret the condition of…
Find out more »Holocaust Testimony and Its Reception: Cultural Transformations and Pedagogical Issues
2011 Burdick-Vary Symposium: Convener: Rachel Feldhay Brenner Hebrew Studies, University of Wisconsin-Madison The Holocaust experience reaches us through testimony, and consciousness of the event has invaded the post-Holocaust cultural and educational Weltanschauung. This…
Find out more »How to do things with bits and bytes
Monday Seminar: Mathangi Krishnamurthy A.W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow (2010-2012) Anthropology, UW-Madison My project looks at the meaning of information in an age of Information Technology (IT), in order to understand and explore the kind…
Find out more »November 2011
Re-articulating Political Community: Testimonial Narratives and the Formation of an Audience
Monday Seminar: Marian Halls Dana-Allen Dissertation Fellow (2011-2012) Comparative Literature, UW-Madison How and why do testimonial narratives emerge as a privileged mode of remembering times of political violence or catastrophe? As one point of…
Find out more »Venerating the Sage: The Rise and Fall of a Shrine to Confucius
2011 Focus on the Humanities Distinguished Faculty Lecture: Julia Murray Professor of Art History and Senior Fellow, Institute for Research in the Humanities (2009-2011), UW-Madison Recognized throughout the world as a symbol of Chinese…
Find out more »Hapsburg-Ottoman Diplomatic Machinery: Automata and the Türkenvererhrung
Monday Seminar: Jessica Keating Solmsen Fellow (2011-2012) Art History, UW-Madison 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…
Find out more »Resurrection and Devotional Identities in Sixteenth-Century Europe
Monday Seminar: Erin Lambert A.W. Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Fellow (2011-2012) History, UW-Madison The resurrection of the dead, wrote a sixteenth-century German preacher, was the most debated article of the Creed. While Lutherans, for example, described…
Find out more »We Are the Improved Race: Guatemala, Mestizaje, and the Age of Fascism, 1930-1948
Monday Seminar: Julie Gibbings Dana-Allen Dissertation Fellow (2011-2012) History, UW-Madison How do we understand the postcolonial in Latin America? Many scholars have eschewed the use of postcolonial criticism in Latin America on the basis…
Find out more »December 2011
Shakespeare’s Second Future
Monday Seminar: J.K. Barret Solmsen Fellow (2011-2012) English, University of Texas at Austin In William Shakespeare’s Cymbeline, Jupiter himself hands down a prophetic text to quell concerns about the future. Though this cameo doesn’t…
Find out more »The Politics of News: Information and Communication in Reformation Diplomacy
Monday Seminar: Denice Fett Solmsen Fellow (2011-2012) History, University of North Florida This paper explores the questions and complications of accessing and disseminating information in early modern international negotiations. All states engaged in diplomatic…
Find out more »January 2012
“Suzdal’ God-daubers,” “Novgorodian quattrocento,” and the Russian Avant-Garde
Monday Seminar: Irina Shevelenko Slavic Languages and Literatures, UW-Madison Resident Fellow (2011-2012) At this seminar, I will present one of the case studies from my book-length project Modernism as Archaism: Nationalism and the Quest…
Find out more »“As Rust Eats Iron”: Envy in Fourth-Century Athens
Monday Seminar: Esther Eidinow Ancient Greek History, University of Nottingham, United Kingdom Solmsen Fellow (2011-2012) In Athens during the fourth century BCE a number of surprising trials took place that have received little scholarly…
Find out more »February 2012
Slow Violence and Environmental Story Telling
2012 Focus on the Humanities Distinguished Faculty Lecture: Rob Nixon Rachel Carson Professor of English, UW-Madison Rob Nixon is the Rachel Carson Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He received his…
Find out more »“Calabash Cinema”: The Fall and Rise of Francophone African Film
Monday Seminar: Aliko Songolo French and Italian, African Languages and Literature, UW-Madison Race, Ethnicity, and Indigeneity Fellow (2011-2012) Since its inception a half century ago, Francophone African cinema has been fraught with contradictions…
Find out more »One Builder: Marshall Erdman and Postwar Building and Real Estate Development in Madison, Wisconsin
Monday Seminar: Anna Andrzejewski Resident Fellow (2011-2012) Art History, UW-Madison 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…
Find out more »The Devil’s Church: Or, How Evangelicals Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Movies
Monday Seminar: Shanny Luft UW System Fellow (2011-2012) Religious Studies, University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point Although Evangelicalism today is often identified with conservative politics and “culture war” issues, many conservative Protestants in the early-twentieth-century argued…
Find out more »Who Answers When the Landlord Calls? Interpreting Property and the ‘German Idea of Freedom,’ 1650-1800
Monday Seminar: Colin Wilder Solmsen Fellow (2011-2012) Independent Researcher 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…
Find out more »March 2012
“We shall be all body and ignore our souls”: The Pleasure and Pain of the Human Plant in Eighteenth-century Europe
Monday Seminar: Lynnette Regouby History of Science, UW-Madison William Coleman Dissertation Fellow (2011-2012) Eighteenth-century materialism is often characterized by the analogy between man and machine, a productive image proposed by Julien Offray de La…
Find out more »Unknown Political Bodies: Negative Anthropology, Political Theory, and Indigenous Societies
Monday Seminar: Jimmy Klausen Race, Ethnicity, and Indigeneity Fellow (2011-2012) Political Science, UW-Madison This project juxtaposes twentieth-century French critical philosophy and cases of self-isolating indigenous societies to two ends. First, reading the philosophical work…
Find out more »Bird on Fire: Lessons from the World’s Least Sustainable City
2012 Burdick-Vary Symposium (Part of the Burdick-Vary Lecture Series: International Perspectives on the Environmental Humanities and Social Sciences) Andrew Ross Professor Of Social And Cultural Analysis, Director of American Studies, New York University Thoughtful…
Find out more »A Philosopher’s Guide to Thinking about Miracles
Monday Seminar: Lawrence Shapiro Philosophy, UW-Madison Resident Fellow (2011-2012) 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…
Find out more »Tropical Medical Discourse and Victorian Imperialism: Rudyard Kipling and Cholera
2012 Burdick-Vary Event. Part of Lecture Series: "International Perspectives on the Environmental Humanities and Social Sciences" Pablo Mukherjee English and Comparative Literary Studies, University of Warwick, UK The Victorian period saw the growth and…
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