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September 2018
Abusing Science: The Case of Free Will
Monday Seminar: Lawrence Shapiro Senior Fellow (2017-2021) Philosophy, UW-Madison The tension between science and religion has increased in recent years with the rise of the so-called “New Atheists” and, as well, with the enthusiasm…
Find out more »The Long, Glorious, and Unfortunate Life of Pompey the Great
Monday Seminar: Jeffrey Beneker Resident Fellow (2018-2019) Classical and Ancient Near Eastern Studies, UW-Madison Young Pompey was “great” in the way that mattered most to the Romans: on the battlefield. He earned his title…
Find out more »Getting by on Music: Re-scaling to New Circumstances in Recife’s Music Scene
Photo credit: Falina Enriquez. Photo depicts graffiti on a residential building. Spray painted message reads (in Portuguese): "Un-valorized art is misunderstood art." Monday Seminar: Falina Enriquez Race, Ethnicity, and Indigeneity (REI) Fellow (2018-2019) Anthropology; Latin…
Find out more »October 2018
A History of Black Women in Higher Education from 1954-2014
Monday Seminar: Rachelle Winkle-Wagner Race, Ethnicity, and Indigeneity Fellow (2018-2019) Educational Leadership and Policy Analysis, UW-Madison This seminar will preview a portion of my book manuscript which is a historiographical project about how Black…
Find out more »The African HipHop Movement: Youth Culture and Democracy in Senegal
Image: Professor D and members of Grand Yoff’s Activist Mob visit G-HipHop’s new community gardening project. Image Credit: Damon Chandru Sajnani. Monday Seminar: Damon Chandru Sajnani Race, Ethnicity, and Indigeneity Fellow (2018-2019) African Cultural Studies,…
Find out more »The Insular-Real: Islands, Archipelagoes, and Questions of Scale
2018 Nellie Y. McKay Lecture in the Humanities: Michelle Stephens Professor of English and Latino and Caribbean Studies and Dean of the Humanities, Rutgers University The question of scale has always been central to…
Find out more »On Human Nature: Machiavelli’s “Mandrake” at 500
Symposium: Multiple Speakers (see below) Niccolò Machiavelli’s political treatise The Prince (1513) casts its shadow far and wide across the humanities and social sciences. Often eclipsed by the scandalous, utilitarian ethics of the treatise…
Find out more »Biographing Social Change: Dick Gregory in Recent American History
Image: Satirical image of Gregory in front of smiling southern sheriffs and a Klansman. Image is from cover of his 1965 book What's Happening?. Photo credit: The Dick Gregory Foundation (original image credited to Dick…
Find out more »The Phantom Stockpile and Other Pernicious American Myths About China in World War II
Image: Chinese Supply Depot, Zahedan, Iran 1943. Credit: China Defense Supply Collection (Hoover Institution Archive, Palo Alto, CA). Monday Seminar: Judd C. Kinzley Resident Fellow (2018-2019) History, UW-Madison The successful Japanese invasion of Burma…
Find out more »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…
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