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October 2015
On Being Able to Sleep: Bio-politics in Counterinsurgent Wars
Monday Seminar: Helen M. Kinsella Resident Fellow (2015-2016) Political Science, UW-Madison How does war affect every day life for those involved? I analyze the role of sleep in the United States-led counterinsurgency war in…
Find out more »November 2015
Christ on a Donkey: Palm Sunday, Triumphal Entries, Wooden Donkeys, and Blasphemous Pageants
Monday Seminar: Max Harris Solmsen Fellow (2015-2016) Independent Scholar How did Charlemagne confuse Palm Sunday processions and triumphal entries? Why was the early Quaker leader James Nayler charged with blasphemy for riding a horse…
Find out more »The Work of Sex in the Age of Digital Reproduction: Gerard & Kelly’s Kisses
2015 Gender Studies and the Humanities Lecture: Elizabeth Freeman English, University of California, Davis The lecture analyzes how Tino Sehgal's museum installation "Kiss" establishes the normative temporal scheme of contemporary heterosexual sex, and how…
Find out more »Gendered Self in the Digital Era: Digital Photography and Auto/biographic Representation
Monday Seminar: Xin Huang UW System Fellow (2015-2016) Women's and Gender Studies, UW-Milwaukee What new things can personal digital photography tell us about gendered lives? Does digital photography provide a wider range of gendered…
Find out more »A Tale of Two Fears: Lucretius, Hobbes, and the Political Psychology of Anxiety
Monday Seminar: Daniel Kapust Political Science, UW-Madison Resident Fellow (2015-2016) Fear is one of the most salient political emotions. The philosophers Hobbes and Lucretius each considered fear in their writings on civil war.…
Find out more »Ujamaa Urbanists: Street Archives and City Life in Socialist Tanzania
Monday Seminar: Emily Callaci Resident Fellow (2015-2016) History, UW-Madison Between the late 1960s and the early 1980s, after the initial euphoria of African national independence and before the era of market liberalization, hundreds of…
Find out more »Iranian Armenians and Ottoman Catholics in Venice: Extraterritoriality and Diplomacy along the 17th-century Silk Routes
Monday Seminar: Ali Humayun Akhtar Kingdon Fellow (2015-2016) History/Middle Eastern Studies, New York University; Religious Studies/Classical and Medieval Studies, Bates College How did pre-modern empires negotiate imperial boundaries while facilitating inter-imperial trade? What was the…
Find out more »December 2015
Magic Lantern Shows and the Early Cinematic Modernity in Colonial Taiwan
Monday Seminar: Laura Jo-Han Wen Dana-Allen Dissertation Fellow (2015-2016) East Asian Languages & Literature, UW-Madison What is cinema and where was cinema? How might the ontological inquiries of the cinema be unpacked in a…
Find out more »Royal Genealogy, Racial Myths, and National Discourse in Early Modern Britain
Monday Seminar: Sara Trevisan Solmsen Fellow (2015-2016) Arts and Humanities, Brunel University London What was the function of royal genealogy in the early modern period? How did royal genealogy engage with debates on the…
Find out more »January 2016
The Secret Animation of Black Music
Monday Seminar: Ronald Radano Senior Fellow (2013-2017) African Languages and Literature and Music, UW-Madison For more than 150 years, US black music has stood at the center of the American entertainment industry, frequently proclaimed…
Find out more »February 2016
AIDS Knows No Borders: AIDS Activism and the Rhetoric of Immigration
Monday Seminar: Karma Chávez Communication Arts, UW-Madison Race, Ethnicity, and Indigeneity Fellow (2015-2016) Scientific conferences are not known for their excitement, but what happens when large numbers of your constituency choose to boycott…
Find out more »Post-Reformation Poetry and the Limits of Consensus: Edmund Spenser in the Context of Habermas and Mouffe
Monday Seminar: Victor Lenthe Dana-Allen Dissertation Fellow (2015-2016) English, UW-Madison Contemporary observers of England’s burgeoning late-sixteenth century literary culture believed their country’s emerging canon of vernacular literature might help foster consensus around a collective…
Find out more »Bringers of Light: The Christianisation of Early Medieval Germany under the Carolingians
Monday Seminar John-Henry Clay Solmsen Fellow (2015-2016) History, Durham University Europe today is often described as ‘Christian’, at least in the cultural sense. But how did it get to be this way? Was the…
Find out more »From Regimen to Regime: The Social Meaning of Nutrition, 1840-1910
Monday Seminar: Molly Laas William Coleman Dissertation Fellow (2015-2016) History of Science, UW-Madison Are our bodies the sum of our (chemical) parts, or are we more than that, the products of our particular background…
Find out more »If It Were Only the Blues
2016 Nellie Y. McKay Lecture in the Humanities: Earl Lewis Historian, President of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Earl Lewis is President of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. A well-regarded social historian, he has been…
Find out more »Publishing in the Humanities: Projects, Proposals, Pragmatics
Join us for a discussion of the state of academic publishing in the humanities and the process of working with a university press--from project to proposal to publication. The workshop will include brief presentations from Eric…
Find out more »Toward a Natural History of the Book: Poetry on Plants in Renaissance England
Monday Seminar: Joshua Calhoun Resident Fellow (2015-2016) English, UW-Madison Eating, we know, is both necessary for our survival and ecologically consequential: agriculture has profoundly altered our planet. Writing and reading, too, have human advantages…
Find out more »March 2016
Conflicted: Tracing Industry Influence in Federal Pharmaceuticals Policy
Monday Seminar: S. Scott Graham UW System Fellow (2015-2016) English, UW-Milwaukee The Food and Drug Administration’s number one job is to protect public health by ensuring the safety and efficacy of consumable products. And…
Find out more »STEMming the Tide: Balzac and Statistical Humanity
2016 Focus on the Humanities Distinguished Faculty Lecture: Richard Goodkin French, UW-Madison The recent trend toward favoring the STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) disciplines over the humanities is a manifestation of a centuries-long…
Find out more »Race, Property, and Debt
Co-Sponsored Conference: In the six years since the nadir of the Great Recession, debt has attracted scholarly attention across the humanities. Debt names not only student loans, underwater mortgages, and consumer credit but also, more…
Find out more »Building Place and People in the 13th Century AD: Architecture, Cosmology, and Multi-Ethnic Community Formation at Jonathan Creek, Kentucky
Monday Seminar Sissel Schroeder Race, Ethnicity, and Indigeneity Fellow (2015-2016) Anthropology, UW-Madison How can we begin to understand multi-ethnic community formation in contexts where there are no written records and only the faintest material…
Find out more »Angels and Archaeopteryx: Victorian Paleontology and the Moral Hierarchy of Deep Time
Monday Seminar Caitlin Silberman Dana-Allen Dissertation Fellow (2015-2016) Art History, UW-Madison Narratives in which leather-winged demons or dragons face off against bird-winged angels and heroes have millennia of history behind them. In the nineteenth…
Find out more »Le Président: Africa for the Future
2016 Germaine Brée Lecture: Jean-Pierre Bekolo Filmmaker and Activist Jean-Pierre Bekolo (1966, Yaounde) is an avant-garde filmmaker and socio-cultural activist whose imaginative work overturns stereotypes of Africa and African cinema. His entertaining films operate…
Find out more »April 2016
Forgotten Women in Forgotten Places: The Joan Little Rape-Murder Case and Prison Organizing in the 1970s
Monday Seminar: Christina Greene Resident Fellow (2015-2016) Afro-American Studies, UW-Madison In 1974, Joan Little, a young, impoverished, African American woman killed her white guard in a Southern jail after he sexually assaulted her. Indicted…
Find out more »Come to Your Senses! – Sensiotics and Understandings of Art, Culture, and History
Focus on the Humanities Distinguished Faculty Lecture: Henry Drewal Senior Fellow (2010-2014) Art History and Afro-American Studies, UW-Madison In this talk, Drewal explores the vital role of the senses with an approach he calls…
Find out more »Part for the Whole or Whole for the Parts: Body Parts in Twentieth-Century Women’s Writing
Monday Seminar: Devaleena Das Honorary Fellow (2016-2017) University of Wisconsin at Whitewater, Department of Women's and Gender Studies As Margaret Atwood writes, the female body has always seen as a “hot topic” in cultures…
Find out more »The Book that Made Philosophy Modern: the World of Descartes’s Treatise on Man
2016 Burdick-Vary Symposium: Participants: Daniel Garber, Stuart Professor of Philosophy, Department of Philosophy, Princeton University Tad Schmaltz, Professor Department of Philosophy, University of Michigan Gideon Manning, Assistant Professor of Philosophy and History of Science,…
Find out more »The Translation of Foreign Religion in Herodotus
Monday Seminar: Andreas Schwab Solmsen Fellow (2015-2016) Classics, Ruprecht-Karls-University of Heidelberg In his famous second book on Egypt, Herodotus (ca. 484-425 BCE), the so-called “father of history” and ethnographic writer from Halicarnassus (present-day Bodrum…
Find out more »The Novelistic Individual in the Age of Microeconomics (1871-2008)
Monday Seminar: Annie McClanahan UW System Fellow (2015-2016) English, UW-Milwaukee What does microeconomics—the study of small-scale consumer decisions—have to do with the modern novel? Microeconomics seems to have more to do with mathematical formalism…
Find out more »May 2016
Global Reformations: Religion and the Making of the Modern World
Religion is omnipresent in modernity, and in spite of twentieth-century theorists who saw secularization as intrinsic to the process of modernization, shows no signs of disappearing. After discarding secularization as a plausible historical model, how…
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