Past Event Category: 2012-2013
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Nov 29Créer dans les marges. Azouz Begag: du gone au ministre, en passant par l’écrivain
French House
2012 Germaine Brée Lecture: Azouz Begag Writer, CNRS Researcher, Equal Opportunity Minister (2005-2007) 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, …
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Nov 26The Rise of the Legend of the City of Kitezh in Russian Literature
University Club, Room 212
Monday Seminar: Lisa Woodson Dana-Allen Dissertation Fellow (2012-2013) Slavic Languages and Literature, UW–Madison 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 the legend, the city became invisible to protect it from invading infidel armies; in …
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Nov 19Rethinking Early American Slavery from an International Perspective, 1450-1640
University Club, Room 212
Monday Seminar: James H. Sweet Resident Fellow (2012-2013) History, UW–Madison 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 …
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Nov 12The Visible and Invisible City: Antebellum Authors and the Literary Construction of New York City
University Club, Room 212
Monday Seminar: Jeffrey Steele Resident Fellow (2012-2013) English, UW–Madison 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 …
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Nov 5A Peculiar Custom: Euro-African Marriage in an Atlantic Slave Trading Town
University Club, Room 212
Monday Seminar: Pernille Ipsen Gender & Women’s Studies/History, UW–Madison Race, Ethnicity, and Indigeneity Fellow (2012-2013) 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 …
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Nov 1Martial Arts: Cultural Interactions between the Civil and Military in Ming China
Conrad A. Elvehjem Building, Room L140
2012 Burdick-Vary Symposium: Kathleen Ryor Professor of Art History and Director of Asian Studies, Carleton College 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 …
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Oct 29At the Threshold of New Political Communities: The Nollywood Epic
University Club, Room 212
Monday Seminar Matthew Brown Dana-Allen Dissertation Fellow (2012-2013) African Languages and Literature, UW–Madison 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 …
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Oct 22Myth in the Landscape: Ancient Heroes and Hellenic Culture in Imperial Asia Minor
University Club, Room 212
Monday Seminar: Janet Downie Solmsen Fellow (2012-2013) Classics, Princeton University 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 …
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Oct 15Restoring Memory: German Legacies and Polish Politics of Commemoration in Łódź after 1989
University Club, Room 212
Monday Seminar: Winson W. Chu Honorary Fellow (2012-2013) Modern Central European History, UW-Milwaukee 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 …
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Oct 10The Birth of ‘Literati’ Painting in the Song and Yuan Dynasties: How to Think About What We Do and Do Not Know
Conrad A. Elvehjem Building, Room L140
2012 Burdick-Vary Event: Jerome Silbergeld P.Y. and Kinmay W. Tang Professor of Chinese Art History, Princeton University 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 …