Events Search and Views Navigation
October 2018
History, Memory, and Identity: A French Debate
2018 Germaine Brée Lecture: Enzo Traverso Susan and Barton Winokur Professor in the Humanities, Cornell University How many layers of French history does the highly controversial slogan Je suis Charlie conceal? Over the last…
Find out more »Musical Exoticism and the Politics of Representation in the Tagalog Zarzuela
Image: A scene from the zarzuela Filipinas para los Filipinos, which premiered in Manila in 1905. Image credit: National Commission for Culture and Arts, Phillippines, via their Flickr account. Monday Seminar: Isidora Miranda Dana-Allen Dissertation…
Find out more »November 2018
(Re)Imagining Empire-Part I
Workshop: Multiple Speakers (see below) Few themes are subject to as much cross-disciplinary inquiry as empire. From critical international relations theory on empire’s ideological dimensions to historians’ examination of the motivations and effects of…
Find out more »Watermen, Petermen, and Mermaids: Creatures of Conversion on the Early Modern Thames
Images and Image Credits: Top left image: a Waterman rescuing a child from drowning in the Thames (from a manuscript copy of John Lydgate’s Life of Saints Edmund and Fremund, 15th Century (Yates Thompson Ms.…
Find out more »Reading for the Future
2018 Focus on the Humanities Distinguished Faculty Lecture: Theresa M. Kelley Marjorie and Lorin Tiefenthaler Professor of English Emerita, UW-Madison For many thinkers, including Romantics themselves, their era was an age of prophecy—of revolution,…
Find out more »The Trump Show: Terrorism and Total Mediation
mage: Courtesy of Der Spiegel online. 6/2017. Monday Seminar: Richard A. Grusin UW System Fellow (2018-2019) Distinguished Professor, English; Director, Center for 21st Century Studies, UW-Milwaukee I want to think about how, mid-way through the…
Find out more »Race, Memory, and Monuments after Charlottesville
Image credit: Henry Shrady and Leo Lentelli (sculptors), Robert E. Lee Monument, 1924, Charlottesville, Virginia. Photograph by Bill Emory. Lecture: Louis P. Nelson Professor of Architectural History and Vice Provost for Academic Outreach, University of…
Find out more »Unlikely Muse: Re-imagining Beauty and Holiness with Saint Mary of Egypt
Image: Jusepe de Ribera, Saint Mary of Egypt in Ecstasy, c. 1640. Oil on canvas. Colección Pérez Simón, Mexico City. Image courtesy of Colección Pérez Simón. Monday Seminar: Sonia Velázquez Solmsen Fellow (2018-2019) Religious Studies;…
Find out more »December 2018
Metrical Claims and Poetic Experiences: Klopstock, Nietzsche, Grünbein
Image: Diagram courtesy of Ernst Brücke, The Physiological Basis of German Verse (1871), p.33. Monday Seminar: Hannah Vandegrift Eldridge Resident Fellow (2018-2019) German, Nordic, and Slavic, UW-Madison Why should we care about patterns of…
Find out more »(Re)Imagining Empire-Part II
Workshop: Multiple Speakers (see below) Few themes are subject to as much cross-disciplinary inquiry as empire. From critical international relations theory on empire’s ideological dimensions to historians’ examination of the motivations and effects of imperialist…
Find out more »The Office of Islamic Law: Paperwork, Politics, and Possibilities in Modern South Asia
Center for Humanities Friday Lunch Series: Elizabeth Lhost A.W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow, Center for the Humanities Legal Studies, History, Asian Languages and Cultures, UW–Madison As Anglo-Indian case law became more robust and the lines…
Find out more »A Renaissance of Imagination: On Democratic Implications of Creativity in Early Modern Political Thought
Monday Seminar: Katherine M. Robiadek Dana-Allen Dissertation Fellow 2018-2019) Political Science, UW-Madison In arguing for renewed focus on imagination, the purpose of this project is to enrich thinking about traits needed for effective democratic…
Find out more »January 2019
Music from the Ruins: Berlin after World War II
Image: Sergiu Celibidache conducting Beethoven’s Egmont overture in the ruins of the Philharmonie concert hall, 1950. Image credits: still from documentary film Ambassadors of Music (Botschafter der Musik), reproduced in Gerhard Forck, ed., Variationen mit…
Find out more »February 2019
Order and Miracles: Investigations into Duns Scotus’s Metaphysics
Image: Città del Vaticano, ms. Vat. Lat. 878, f. 1ra. Image Credit: Vatican Library; view full manuscript here: https://digi.vatlib.it/view/MSS_Vat.lat.878 Monday Seminar: Giorgio Pini Solmsen Fellow (2018-2019) Philosophy, Fordham University In the few years he…
Find out more »Feminized Convergence: Women’s Television in the Digital Age
Monday Seminar: Jacquelyn Arcy UW System Fellow (2018-2019) Communication, UW-Parkside Much of the research on media convergence considers new media as a democratizing force or an exploitative system. But how do gendered assumptions affect…
Find out more »Late Antique Jews and Christians in the Balearic Islands (4th to 7th centuries CE): The Material World of Samuel Bar-Haggai
Image: Manuel de Assas (1877): "Mosaico descubierto en Mallorca en 1833" Museo Español de Antigüedades, VIII. Plate without number, based on a drawing by A. Sureda, 1833. Monday Seminar: Alexander Bar-Magen Numhauser Kingdon Fellow (2018-2019)…
Find out more »Absolutist Absurdities
Image: Anonymous engraving of Sans Parangon and Belle Gloire from the opening page of “Sans Parangon,” Le Cabinet des fées: Contenant tous leurs Ouvrages, 8 vols. (Amsterdam: Estienne Roger, 1717), 2:151. Image courtesy of Cotsen…
Find out more »March 2019
Assemblage Writing: Posthuman Rhetoric and the Onto-Silencing of Class
Monday Seminar: Rob Wilkie UW System Fellow (2018-2019) English, UW-La Crosse Confronting the humanities today is the question of how to talk about increasing precarity at a time of economic, environmental, and social crises.…
Find out more »Melanchthon and the “Corpus Reformatorum,” or Protestantism and Progress in Nineteenth-Century Germany
Image: Copperplate with Melanchthon portrait, Albrecht Dürer, 1526 (Schlossmuseum Gotha, Inv.-Nr.8, 24a). Monday Seminar: Zachary Purvis Kingdon Fellow (2018-2019) School of Divinity, University of Edinburgh In shaping modern Protestantism and the study of the Reformation,…
Find out more »Writing the Museum: Pictorial Imagination in Baroque Fiction of the Spanish Empire
Image credit: Mercedes Alcalá-Galán, “Self-portrait” (detail), painting. Monday Seminar: Mercedes Alcalá-Galán Resident Fellow (2018-2019) Spanish and Portuguese, UW-Madison In 1660 David Teniers published the extraordinary Theatrum Pictorium, the first illustrated catalogue ever of a collection…
Find out more »Workshop with Professor Celia Applegate
Workshop: Celia Applegate William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of History and Affiliate Faculty of Musicology and Ethnomusicology, Vanderbilt University Professor Applegate will be presenting a segment of a chapter that is part of a…
Find out more »April 2019
Writing Algiers
Image: A watercolor "map" depicting the Spanish shore, islands, and the Mediterranean with the city of Algiers (“Argel”) shown at the lower right corner. Created by a former Spanish captive, probably a “renegade,” the map…
Find out more »The Migrant Crypt: Cultural Translation Across Europe
2019 Focus on the Humanities Distinguished Faculty Lecture: Tomislav Z. Longinović Professor of German, Nordic, and Slavic, UW-Madison The influx of hundreds of thousands of refugees from the Middle East into Europe has challenged…
Find out more »Europe in Translation: Multilingualism in Theory and Practice
2019 Burdick-Vary Symposium
Find out more »God and Taxes in the Medieval Roman Empire
Image: Mosaic from the church Kahrié-Djami in Istanbul. Scene depicting census to collect taxes before Kyrenios (Quirinius). 1315-1320. Meister der Kahriye-Cami-Kirche in Istanbul. Former Chora Monastery Church, commissioned by Théodor Metochite, mosaic program on apocryphal…
Find out more »Grace Among Gamblers: The Curious Case of a Rogue’s Conversion in Cervantes’ “El Rufián dichoso”
Image: Caravaggio (Michelangelo Merisi). The Cardsharps. c. 1594. Oil on Canvas. Image courtesy of: Kimball Art Museum (AP 1987.06). Public Lecture: Sonia Velázquez Solmsen Fellow (2018-2019) Religious Studies; Comparative Literature, Indiana University-Bloomington The early…
Find out more »Bacterial Imaginations: Regime of the Microscope in the 1950s People’s Republic of China
Image: Poster created as part of an inoculation campaign, designer unknown, 1951-1952, titled: "Resolutely cut off the bloody and criminal hand of the American aggressor that spreads germs!." Image credits: Chineseposter.net. Text on the hilt…
Find out more »(Re)Imagining Empire-Part III
Workshop: Multiple Speakers (see below).
Find out more »Transfers and Mutations: Gestalt in Interwar France
Image: "Sky and Water I." M.C. Escher, Woodcut, June 1938. Image courtesy of the official M.C. Escher website. Monday Seminar: Florence Vatan Resident Fellow (2018-2019) French and Italian, UW-Madison Which reconfigurations do concepts undergo…
Find out more »Peace and Justice. Remonstrances as a Means of Negotiation and Resistance during the French Civil Wars (1550-1600)
Image: (Painting) Omiros Hriso, Life of Jesus Christ, 1982. Image courtesy of Paul-Alexis Mellet. Monday Seminar: Paul-Alexis Mellet Solmsen Fellow (2018-2019) History, University of Geneva; Institute for the History of Reformation Remonstrances were texts…
Find out more »