Past Event Category: 2013-2014
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Oct 17Was There a Reformation in India?
Concourse Hotel, Senate Room AB
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 Ramya Sreenivasan, University of Pennsylvania Scholars have begun to recognize that the early modern transformations of religion in India …
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Oct 14The Moth-Eaten Page: Animals and Language in Angela Rawlings’s Wide Slumber for Lepidopterists
University Club, Room 212
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 the form of the text itself. While exploring this connection between bodily and literary form, Rawlings asks questions about the …
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Oct 7Thinking about Early Jewish Rewriting of Scripture
University Club, Room 212
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. In Judaism prior to approximately 100 CE, however, interpretation was not kept separate from scripture. Instead, interpretation largely took place …
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Sep 30Zazous in Zoot Suits: Race, Jazz, and Resistance in Occupied France, 1940-1944
University Club, Room 212
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 “zazous,” mobilized jazz music to fashion a subversive identity that expressed their refusal to serve as national scapegoats and their …
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Sep 25Five Ways to Look at a Corpse: The Dead in Normandy, 1944
Conrad A. Elvehjem Building, Room L140
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 corpses. Perhaps for this reason, military historians have rarely focused on the dead. In the Normandy invasion of 1944, the …
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Sep 23Standard Deviation: The Calculus of Normativity in Alain Robbe-Grillet’s Le Voyeur
University Club, Room 212
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 this seminar, I will discuss Alain Robbe-Grillet’s Le Voyeur (1955), whose hero, a watch-salesman named Mathias (“Math” for short), spends …
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Sep 16Why Was Spinoza Excommunicated?
University Club, Room 212
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) ever issued by the Amsterdam Portuguese-Jewish congregation. Full of vitriol and curses, the ban was final; Spinoza never reconciled with …
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Sep 9What’s the Place of “Place” in the Humanities?
University Club, Banquet Hall (lower level)
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 Louise Young, History, UW–Madison Michel Foucault predicted in 1967 that the coming age would be “an epoch of space” …
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Sep 9Environmental Studies in the Time of the Anthropocene
University Club, Room 212
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 reimaging the intellectual priorities of environmental studies. Compared to forty years ago, when scientists dominated America’s first environmental studies programs, …