Past Event Category: 2011-2012
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Mar 19A Philosopher’s Guide to Thinking about Miracles
University Club, Room 212
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 between belief in miracles and belief in God. According to a recent Pew poll, 80% of Americans believe in miracles. …
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Mar 15Bird on Fire: Lessons from the World’s Least Sustainable City
Pyle Center, Room 106 (At&T Lounge)
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 people look to cities for evidence that progress is being made in the fight to avert climate change. The “sustainable …
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Mar 12Unknown Political Bodies: Negative Anthropology, Political Theory, and Indigenous Societies
University Club, Room 212
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 of Foucault, Bataille, Canguilhem, Fanon, and others through analyses of interactions among state, civil society, and self-isolating indigenes highlights in …
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Mar 5“We shall be all body and ignore our souls”: The Pleasure and Pain of the Human Plant in Eighteenth-century Europe
University Club, Room 212
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 Mettrie in L’homme machine (1747). While La Mettrie continues to refer to man as a machine in subsequent publications, he …
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Feb 27Who Answers When the Landlord Calls? Interpreting Property and the ‘German Idea of Freedom,’ 1650-1800
University Club, Room 212
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 property rights in early modern Germany, specifically in the Hessian and Rhine-Main region. This study deepens our understanding of the …
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Feb 20The Devil’s Church: Or, How Evangelicals Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Movies
University Club, Room 212
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 that the biggest threat to American morals was Hollywood. One clergyman in 1940 called the film industry “perhaps the greatest …
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Feb 13One Builder: Marshall Erdman and Postwar Building and Real Estate Development in Madison, Wisconsin
University Club, Room 212
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 and real estate development in the later twentieth century. Andrzejewski seeks to show how a single builder rooted in a …
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Feb 6“Calabash Cinema”: The Fall and Rise of Francophone African Film
University Club, Room 212
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 and controversies. Early on, it sought to tell the story of newly independent nations, but while doing so, it remained …
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Feb 1Slow Violence and Environmental Story Telling
Wisconsin Institute for Discovery
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 Ph.D. from Columbia University and is the author of London Calling. V. S. Naipaul, Postcolonial Mandarin (Oxford); Homelands, Harlem and Hollywood. South African …
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Jan 30“As Rust Eats Iron”: Envy in Fourth-Century Athens
University Club, Room 212
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 attention: the defendants were all women, the charges against them included asebeia (‘impiety’) and working with pharmaka (‘spells’ or ‘drugs’). …