Past Event Category: 2013-2014
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Mar 10Piecemeal Emancipation and Black Freedom in Rhode Island, 1770-1842
University Club, Room 212
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 challenge their enslavement. In Rhode Island, the destruction of slavery spanned seven decades; it began with an increase in slave …
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Mar 5Re-emerging Superpowers: Turkey, Iran, India, and China in the 21st Century
Conrad A. Elvehjem Building, Room L140
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 eclipsed by European imperialism and industrial progress in the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries. Today, in the early years of …
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Mar 3Patronage and Reception of Medieval Churches in 14th-Century Cyprus
University Club, Room 212
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 war. While war was ever-present in medieval Cyprus, the image of that island kingdom was drastically different. The intervening centuries …
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Feb 24The American Ways of Wisdom and Wonder: Seeking the Good Life in the 20th-Century United States
University Club, Room 212
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 its intellectual life? This is the question animating my book project on the history of “philosophy” (the love of wisdom) …
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Feb 17Half Century Miyamori: Performing Peace in Postwar Okinawa
University Club, Room 212
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 Okinawa, Japan. American sources including Time characterized the pilot’s actions as heroic, calling this event one of few “accidents” to …
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Feb 10Asian Fetish: Race and the Politics of Fantasy
University Club, Room 212
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 racial fetishism? A process of idealization, fetishism illuminates the structures of a collective racial imaginary in which repressed anxiety manifests …
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Feb 3Introducing Absurd Literature: Defining without Reducing
University Club, Room 212
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 reads it. It is this very issue that this book attempts to address. The main difficulty is, is it possible …
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Jan 27Discourses of Debt and Lending in Medieval Iberia
University Club, Room 212
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 to define their roles and relationships through a complex lens of moral, economic, and social interests situated within a highly …
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Jan 21Machiavelli at 500
University Club, Room 212
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 – has been the subject of controversy ever since. The project of the seminar is a study of Machiavelli’s major writings, …
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Dec 9Resentment
University Club, Room 212
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 something strikingly different from what we usually mean by it. Far from naming a secretive and envious anger, it was …