Past Event Category: 2018-2019
-
Dec 7(Re)Imagining Empire-Part II
Memorial Union
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 states, from comparative diachronic studies of empire to analyses of empires’ continuing legacy through the lenses of post-colonialism or critical …
-
Dec 3Metrical Claims and Poetic Experiences: Klopstock, Nietzsche, Grünbein
University Club, Room 212
Monday Seminar: Hannah Vandegrift Eldridge Resident Fellow (2018-2019) German, Nordic, and Slavic, UW–Madison Why should we care about patterns of syllables in poems—that is, about meter? Is there any reason to study the rules that poets, theorists, philosophers, and critics have given for making such patterns, or their arguments about what meter can do? …
-
Nov 26Unlikely Muse: Re-imagining Beauty and Holiness with Saint Mary of Egypt
University Club, Room 212
Monday Seminar: Sonia Velázquez Solmsen Fellow (2018-2019) Religious Studies; Comparative Literature, Indiana University-Bloomington For contemporary critics “beauty is really as obvious as blue: one does not have to work at seeing it when it is there” (Danto). This is true even for those whose interpretative energies extend back to the early modern period. Writing …
-
Nov 15Race, Memory, and Monuments after Charlottesville
Conrad A. Elvehjem Building, Room L140
Lecture: Louis P. Nelson Professor of Architectural History and Vice Provost for Academic Outreach, University of Virginia Louis P. Nelson is Professor of Architectural History and the Vice Provost for Academic Outreach in the Office of the Provost. He is a specialist in the built environments of the early modern Atlantic world, with published …
-
Nov 12The Trump Show: Terrorism and Total Mediation
University Club, Room 212
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 Trump presidency, media and mediation function as everyday acts of terrorism. Put most polemically, I will argue that in the Trump era the greatest terrorist threat to …
-
Nov 7Reading for the Future
Conrad A. Elvehjem Building, Room L140
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, radical change, new beginnings, perhaps even new worlds. Yet the Romantic writing that we identify as prophecy is strangely unable …
-
Nov 5Watermen, Petermen, and Mermaids: Creatures of Conversion on the Early Modern Thames
University Club, Room 212
Monday Seminar: Sarah Crover Solmsen Fellow (2018-2019) English, University of British Columbia Thames’ “mermaids” (the prostitutes who inhabited its banks), “petermen” (the fishermen who clogged the river with illegal and dangerous nets), and watermen (the necessary but notoriously dishonest ferrymen of the river) were cast in early modern Londoners’ popular imagination as agents of …
-
Nov 2(Re)Imagining Empire-Part I
Union South
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 states, from comparative diachronic studies of empire to analyses of empires’ continuing legacy through the lenses of post-colonialism or …
-
Oct 29Musical Exoticism and the Politics of Representation in the Tagalog Zarzuela
University Club, Room 212
Monday Seminar: Isidora Miranda Dana-Allen Dissertation Fellow (2018-2019) Mead Witter School of Music, UW–Madison Studies on music-theatrical representation have often considered sites and examples found on the Western stage, and the different ways such works projected a musical imaginary of a colonial other for its European (and American) audience. But what if the stage …
-
Oct 25History, Memory, and Identity: A French Debate
Conrad A. Elvehjem Building, Room L140
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 three decades, the French national past has been put into question: Vichy, the Holocaust, the Algerian War, and finally May …