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September 2016
Agency: What Does It Mean Across the Humanities?
Panel Discussion: What are the meanings of “agency” in various disciplines and interdisciplines of the humanities? To what extent is it theorized or assumed? Does agency mean the freedom to act? To think? To…
Find out more »Kawaii: Fraught Innocence in Asian (American) Commodity Culture
2016 Nellie Y. McKay Lecture in the Humanities: Christine Yano Professor of Anthropology, University of Hawaii Pink globalization, the spread of cute goods from Japan to other parts of the world, has been a…
Find out more »The Trial Nobody Expected: A Tale of Torture, Music, and Human Rights in the Americas
Monday Seminar: Steve Stern Senior Fellow (2015-2017) History, UW-Madison This is an extraordinary true-life story. It's a tale of murder, human rights, and social justice in the Americas. It's about the power of music…
Find out more »History, Time, and Mass Atrocity in Cambodia
Monday Seminar: Anne Hansen Resident Fellow (2016-2017) History, UW-Madison Buddhist prophesies about the end of our time and the dawning of a new era tied to the enlightenment of the fifth buddha in our…
Find out more »October 2016
Plato’s Phaedo: The Initiation of a Philosopher
Monday Seminar: David Ebrey Solmsen Fellow (2016-2017) Philosophy, Northwestern University Plato’s Phaedo is one of his literary and philosophical masterpieces, set on the last day of Socrates’ life. How should we understand Socrates’ reference…
Find out more »Madison’s Asian American Media Spotlight
Burdick-Vary Events, Organized by Dr. Lori Kido Lopez: Join us for a weekend celebrating brand new Asian American documentaries and filmmakers, brought to you by the Asian American Studies Program at UW-Madison. All films are…
Find out more »Book Publishing in the Humanities of Today
Publication Workshop Ken Wissoker Editorial Director, Duke University Press PLEASE NOTE: this workshop is open to graduate students, faculty, and academic staff. Registration is required: rsvp@humanities.wisc.edu. The reservation deadline is 12:00pm on Wednesday, October 5.…
Find out more »Queer Velocities: Untimely Matter in Racine’s Andromaque
Monday Seminar: Jennifer Row Solmsen Fellow (2016-2017) Romance Studies, Boston University From “one’s ticking biological clock” to “grow up, be a man,” sex and gender norms are often seamlessly intertwined with temporality in our…
Find out more »Gendered Dynamics in Hmong American New Media Cultures
Monday Seminar: Lori Lopez Race, Ethnicity, and Indigeneity Fellow (2016-2017) Communication Arts, UW-Madison For over 260,000 Hmong Americans living in the U.S., mobile media now play a key role in maintaining connections and identities.…
Find out more »Fantasy as Microaggression?: Racial Caricature, Kawaii-style, and the Anthropomorphic Asian
2016 Focus on the Humanities Distinguished Faculty Lecture: Leslie Bow Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor and Mark and Elisabeth Eccles Professor of English and Asian American Studies, UW-Madison How does the mundane object serve as…
Find out more »“Signing in the Seraglio”: Global Disability in European Spatial Representations of the Ottoman Court
Monday Seminar: Elizabeth Bearden English, UW-Madison Resident Fellow (2016-2017) Drawn from the fourth chapter of her current book project, Monstrous Kinds: Body, Space, and Narrative in Renaissance Representations of Disability, this talk analyzes European…
Find out more »How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe: An Evening with Writer Charles Yu
2016 Burdick-Vary Event: Charles Yu Author and Screenwriter What do cowboy robots, hapless yeomen, time machine repairmen, and third class superheroes have in common? They all issue from the imagination of Charles Yu. Charles Yu is…
Find out more »Playing with Buttons: Liberal Subjects at the Binary Switch
Monday Seminar: Jason Puskar UW System Fellow (2016-2017) English, UW-Milwaukee The pushbutton is one of the simplest mechanical interfaces in the modern world, and one of the most prevalent. But what accounts for its…
Find out more »November 2016
Risky Bodies: Quantification, Fungibility, and Slave Trade in the Seventeenth Century Atlantic
Monday Seminar: Pablo Gómez Resident Fellow (2016-2017) Department of Medical History and Bioethics; History of Science, UW-Madison How did early modern governments, and slave traders’ and their financiers’ quantify disease and risk? How did…
Find out more »Anglo-Saxon Maternal Bodies
Monday Seminar Dana Oswald UW System Fellow (2016-2017) English, UW-Parkside What can we know about women's bodies when the only people writing about them were men, and those men were generally monks? In a…
Find out more »Natural History and Personhood in Early America
Monday Seminar: Julia Dauer Dana-Allen Dissertation Fellow (2016-2017) English, UW-Madison How did transatlantic writers use “I” in their discourse? When did “I” become the familiar protagonist of American letters? What can first-person prose tell…
Find out more »December 2016
Passing on Texts in the Ancient World: A Case Study with the Biblical Texts from the Qumran Dead Sea Scrolls
Monday Seminar: Sidnie Crawford Kingdon Fellow (2016-2017) Classics and Religious Studies, University of Nebraska-Lincoln When we think of "the Bible" in the 21st century, we usually think of a fixed text, in an ancient…
Find out more »Limits of Racebending in the Struggle for Asian American Representation
2016 Burdick-Vary Lecture: Lori Kido Lopez Communication Arts, UW-Madison Studies of fandom and fan culture have always centered on the complex feelings of fascination and frustration that motivate audiences. When we consider the way…
Find out more »Troubling Conjugal Loyalties
Monday Seminar: Sukanya Banerjee UW System Fellow (2016-2017) English, UW-Milwaukee How is it that monogamy came to serve as one of the markers of “modern” marriage? Which nineteenth-century literary genres did it play on?…
Find out more »January 2017
The Altercatio Ganymedis et Helene – It All Comes Together in the End (?)
Monday Seminar: Tina Chronopoulos Solmsen Fellow (2016-2017) Classics and Medieval Studies, University of Binghamton, State University of New York Have you always wondered what a discussion about the pros and cons of same-sex versus…
Find out more »Is Love All You Need? Household Labor and Marriage Vows (1870-1920)
Monday Seminar: Kimberley Reilly UW System Fellow (2016-2017) Democracy and Justice Studies; History Department; Women's and Gender Studies Department, UW-Green Bay How did a wife earn her keep? This was a question a wide range…
Find out more »February 2017
Desiring History and Historicizing Desire
Graduate Seminar (Part of "Show and Tell: Evidence, Erotics, and Embodiment in the Premodern World" events): Ari Friedlander University of Mississippi, English Ari Friedlander, assistant professor of English (University of Mississippi) and editor…
Find out more »Show and Tell: Evidence, Erotics, and Embodiment in the Premodern World
Lunchtime Roundtable Discussion with: Tina Chronopoulos, SUNY-Binghamton, Classics/IRH Ari Friedlander, University of Mississippi, English Dana Oswald, UW-Parkside, English/IRH Jennifer Row, Boston University, French/IRH When researching the history of sexuality, or thinking about past desires,…
Find out more »Recovering the New Thought Novel
Monday Seminar: Anne Stiles Kingdon Fellow (2016-2017) Department of English, Saint Louis University Did you know that many well-loved children’s classics contain hidden Christian Science and New Thought messages? My book shows how classic children's…
Find out more »Machiavelli’s Tragic Geography
Monday Seminar: Kristin Phillips-Court Resident Fellow (2016-2017) Italian and Art History, UW-Madison Machiavelli’s writings substantiate more than their distillation into a political theory that stripped morality from politics. This seminar focuses on Machiavelli’s frequent…
Find out more »Networks of Shared Imagination: Medieval Legends and the Construction of History
Monday Seminar: Samantha Herrick Solmsen Fellow (2016-2017) History, Syracuse University What can we learn about the past from sources long dismissed as worthless? Medieval legends recount a version of early Christian history starkly at…
Find out more »Rethinking Empire in the Twentieth Century: Lessons from Imperial and Post-Imperial Japan
2017 Focus on the Humanities Distinguished Faculty Lecture: Louise Young Professor of Japanese History, UW-Madison Japan built a wartime empire in Asia in the 1930s, and after losing that empire in 1945 created trading…
Find out more »Anishinaabewaki and the “mixed bloods, belonging to the Chippewas of Lake Superior”
Monday Seminar Larry Nesper Race, Ethnicity, and Indigeneity Fellow (2016-2017) Anthropology, UW-Madison This project began as an effort to problematize the legal permitting process by muddying up the chain of title to the Penokees…
Find out more »March 2017
New Illuminations: Art-NATURE-History
2017 Burdick-Vary Symposium In conjunction with: “Martha Glowacki’s Natural History, Observations and Reflections” (Chazen Museum of Art) “Natural History : Natural Philosophy: An Exhibit in Special Collections” (Memorial Library, Room 984) This symposium brings…
Find out more »Weaponizing Identity: Doxing as Cultural Practice and Political Tool
Monday Seminar: Andrew Zolides Dana-Allen Dissertation Fellow (2016-2017) Communication Arts, UW-Madison Doxing - the publicizing of private, identifying information about an individual without consent - is a fascinating cultural practice that has emerged in…
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