Events Search and Views Navigation
September 2013
Environmental Studies in the Time of the Anthropocene
Fall 2013 Faculty Development Seminar: Rob Nixon Senior Fellow (2009-2012) English; Center for Culture, History and Environment This seminar has two goals. First, it will explore the vital role of the environmental humanities in…
Find out more »What’s the Place of “Place” in the Humanities?
Panel Discussion: Speakers: Susan D. Bernstein, English, Gender and Women's Studies, Center for Jewish Studies, UW-Madison Thomas Dale, Art History, UW-Madison Tomislav Longinović, Slavic Languages and Literature, UW-Madison Yi-Fu Tuan, Emeritus Professor of Geography, UW-Madison…
Find out more »Why Was Spinoza Excommunicated?
Monday Seminar: Steve Nadler Senior Fellow (2013-2017) William H. Hay II Professor of Philosophy, Philosophy, UW-Madison In July of 1656, the twenty-three year old Baruch de Spinoza received the harshest writ of herem (excommunication)…
Find out more »Standard Deviation: The Calculus of Normativity in Alain Robbe-Grillet’s Le Voyeur
Monday Seminar: Richard Goodkin Senior Fellow (2009-2014) French and Italian, UW-Madison What sort of narrative might result from the implausible marriage of mathematics and literature? As an example of such an unlikely union, in…
Find out more »Five Ways to Look at a Corpse: The Dead in Normandy, 1944
2013 Focus on the Humanities Distinguished Lecture: Mary Louise Roberts Professor of History and Senior Fellow, Institute for Research in the Humanities, UW-Madison We prefer to think of war as producing heroes, not…
Find out more »Zazous in Zoot Suits: Race, Jazz, and Resistance in Occupied France, 1940-1944
Monday Seminar: Kelly Jakes Dana-Allen Dissertation Fellow (2013-2014) Communication Arts, UW-Madison Derived from my dissertation project on popular music and resistance in German-Occupied France, this presentation investigates how upper-middle class Parisian youth, known as…
Find out more »October 2013
Thinking about Early Jewish Rewriting of Scripture
Monday Seminar: Molly Zahn Kingdon Fellow (2013-2014) Religious Studies, University of Kansas For most of Jewish and Christian history, "interpretation" has been regarded as secondary to "scripture," both chronologically and in terms of authority.…
Find out more »The Moth-Eaten Page: Animals and Language in Angela Rawlings’s Wide Slumber for Lepidopterists
Monday Seminar: Sarah Groeneveld Dana-Allen Dissertation Fellow (2013-2014) English, UW-Madison Angela Rawlings’s experimental long-poem Wide Slumber for Lepidopterists evokes an insect collector’s dream in which the forms of moths and butterflies become confused with…
Find out more »Was There a Reformation in India?
2013 Burdick-Vary Symposium: Speakers: Muzaffar Alam, University of Chicago Munis Faruqui, University of California, Berkeley Nile Green, University of California, Los Angeles Brendan LaRocque, Carleton College Rajeev Kinra, Northwestern University Azfar Moin, Southern Methodist University…
Find out more »A Conversation with G. Willow Wilson
G. Willow Wilson Author and journalist G. Willow Wilson is the acclaimed author of graphic novels and comics published by Vertigo, Marvel, and D.C. Comics. She spent her early and mid-twenties living in Egypt…
Find out more »The Husband’s Message and Early English Epistolarity
Monday Seminar: Jordan Zweck Resident Fellow (2013-2014) English, UW-Madison What makes early medieval English epistolarity unique is that it is not merely about letters but about what I am calling epistolary acts, the moments…
Find out more »Aquilombando: Rebellious Landscapes and Colonial Visuality
Monday Seminar Matthew Francis Rarey Dana-Allen Dissertation Fellow (2013-2014) Art History, UW-Madison Quilombos – communities of self-emancipated or fugitive slaves – were ubiquitous accompaniments to Brazil’s history of plantation slavery. Nearly every quilombo that…
Find out more »Poetics of Resistance: Women Between Aesthetics and Politics
The 2013 Germaine Brée International Symposium: Speakers: Sahar Elmougy, Cairo University Shereen Abouelnaga, Cairo University Souad Halila, University of Tunisia May Telmissany, University of Ottawa Aili Tripp, University of Wisconsin-Madison Increasing confrontations with…
Find out more »November 2013
Sovereignty, History, and Papal Monarchy: Political Theory in the Age of Innocent IV
Monday Seminar: Brett Whalen Kingdon Fellow (2013-2014) History, UNC-Chapel Hill A former canon lawyer, Pope Innocent IV (1243-1254) declared that all peoples—rulers and the ruled, believers and non-believers—came under the Roman Church’s spiritual and…
Find out more »The Worlding Work of the Cigarette: Tracking the Modern Girl Assemblage in the U.S. and China
Monday Seminar: Nan Enstad Resident Fellow (2013-2014) History, UW-Madison In the early 20th century, consumers in China considered the cigarette a foreign import from the west, but consumers in the U.S. saw it as…
Find out more »2013 Workshop on Publication Strategies in the Humanities
Panel Discussion and Workshop: Helen Tartar, Editorial Director, Fordham University Press Gwen Walker, Editorial Director, University of Wisconsin Press Steve Stern, Alberto Flores Galindo and Hilldale Professor of History, Vice Provost for Faculty and Staff,…
Find out more »Atreus and Thyestes in Greek and Roman Tragedy
Monday Seminar Anne Duncan Solmsen Fellow (2013-2014) Classics and Religious Studies, University of Nebraska-Lincoln There was a saying in imperial Rome: "The worst actor plays the king." Officially, this aphorism pointed out the tendency…
Find out more »Claiming Continuity: Family Planning, Political Dynasties and Narrative Form in the Indian Emergency
Monday Seminar: Ayelet Ben-Yishai Honorary Fellow (2013-2014) English Department, University of Haifa, Israel Imposed by India’s “Greatest Prime Minister,” from June 1975 to January 1977, the State of Emergency is usually presented as an…
Find out more »December 2013
Tragedy of Reason: Natural Law and Literature in Early Modernity
Monday Seminar: Ben LaBreche Solmsen Fellow (2013-2014) English, University of Mary Washington The sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries saw a renewed interest in natural law, which offered a means of rationalizing political relations and…
Find out more »Resentment
Monday Seminar: Benedict Robinson Solmsen Fellow (2013-2014) English, Stony Brook University The word resentment and its cognates made their first appearance in the English language around 1600; but at that moment the word meant…
Find out more »January 2014
Machiavelli at 500
Spring 2014 Faculty Development Seminar: Kristin Phillips-Court French and Italian Daniel Kapust Political Science Machiavelli’s Prince was completed 500 years ago, and it – along with its author and his works –…
Find out more »Discourses of Debt and Lending in Medieval Iberia
Monday Seminar: Gregory Milton Solmsen Fellow (2013-2014) History, University of South Florida The moral language of debt in medieval Iberia delineated a wide range of activity for Christians and Jews. People and communities attempted…
Find out more »February 2014
Introducing Absurd Literature: Defining without Reducing
Monday Seminar: Michael Y. Bennett UW System Fellow (2013-2014) English, UW-Whitewater There is the common notion that while someone may not be able to define absurd literature, one clearly knows absurd literature when one…
Find out more »Asian Fetish: Race and the Politics of Fantasy
Monday Seminar Leslie Bow Senior REI Fellow (2013-2017) English and Asian American Studies, UW-Madison If, as psychoanalyst Robert Stoller asserted, “a fetish is a story masquerading as an object,” what is the story underlying…
Find out more »Half Century Miyamori: Performing Peace in Postwar Okinawa
Monday Seminar: Valerie Barske UW System Fellow (2013-2014) History, UW-Stevens Point On June 30, 1959, a U.S. military jet crashed into Miyamori Elementary School killing 12 students, 6 citizens, and injuring 200 others in…
Find out more »The American Ways of Wisdom and Wonder: Seeking the Good Life in the 20th-Century United States
Monday Seminar: Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen Resident Fellow (2013-2014) History, UW-Madison What would the writing of American intellectual history look like if it sought to capture the longing for wisdom and wonder shaping so much of…
Find out more »March 2014
Patronage and Reception of Medieval Churches in 14th-Century Cyprus
Monday Seminar: Justine Andrews Solmsen Fellow (2013-2014) Art and Art History, University of New Mexico The modern image of the country of Cyprus is one that is fraught with banking crises, communities divided, and…
Find out more »Re-emerging Superpowers: Turkey, Iran, India, and China in the 21st Century
2014 Focus on the Humanities Distinguished Lecture: André Wink Professor of History and Senior Fellow, Institute for Research in the Humanities, UW-Madison Turkey, Iran, India, and China are historical superpowers. All four were dramatically…
Find out more »Piecemeal Emancipation and Black Freedom in Rhode Island, 1770-1842
Monday Seminar: Christy Clark-Pujara Race, Ethnicity, and Indigeneity Fellow (2013-2014) Afro-American Studies, UW-Madison During the Revolutionary period, enslaved people throughout British North America used the rhetoric of freedom and the chaos of war to…
Find out more »The ‘New’ Sappho: A Symposium
2014 Symposium: Join us for a discussion facilitated by Patricia Rosenmeyer (Classics, UW-Madison) of two newly discovered Sappho papyri.
Find out more »