Past Event Category: 2015-2016
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Mar 11Race, Property, and Debt
Fluno Center for Executive Education
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 significantly, a form of life molded by debt: the everyday practices, desires, virtues, and vices of the indebted. In other …
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Mar 9STEMming the Tide: Balzac and Statistical Humanity
Conrad A. Elvehjem Building, Room L140
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 struggle between quantitative fields of inquiry like physics and mathematics and qualitative fields like art and literature. In his monumental …
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Mar 7Conflicted: Tracing Industry Influence in Federal Pharmaceuticals Policy
University Club, Room 212
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 yet, pervasive financial relationships with industry often raise questions as to just how effectively the FDA safeguards the public. Accordingly, …
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Feb 29Toward a Natural History of the Book: Poetry on Plants in Renaissance England
University Club, Room 212
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 and ecological consequences—and on a scale that we have not yet honestly admitted in our stories about the history of …
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Feb 24Publishing in the Humanities: Projects, Proposals, Pragmatics
University Club, Banquet Hall (lower level)
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 Zinner (NYU Press) and UW–Madison faculty members Ron Radano and Pernille Ipsen. Moderated by Susan Stanford Friedman. Refreshments available by 2:45 pm. Space is …
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Feb 23If It Were Only the Blues
Conrad A. Elvehjem Building, Room L140
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 a champion of the importance of diversifying the academy, enhancing graduate education, re-visioning the liberal arts, exploring the role of …
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Feb 22From Regimen to Regime: The Social Meaning of Nutrition, 1840-1910
University Club, Room 212
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 and culture? This talk delves into the question by examining a debate between chemistry and medicine about how to provision …
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Feb 15Bringers of Light: The Christianisation of Early Medieval Germany under the Carolingians
University Club, Room 212
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 slow tide of Christianity that swamped indigenous European paganism ultimately irresistible, as medieval sources seem to present it? A starting …
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Feb 8Post-Reformation Poetry and the Limits of Consensus: Edmund Spenser in the Context of Habermas and Mouffe
University Club, Room 212
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 cultural and political identity. But were they right? My talk relates this literary-historical question to a modern theoretical debate between …
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Feb 1AIDS Knows No Borders: AIDS Activism and the Rhetoric of Immigration
University Club, Room 212
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 your meeting? And further, what can transpire when rowdy AIDS activists use your meeting as a stage to air their …