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November 2008
Catechisms and the Construction of the Reformation
Focus on the Humanities Distinguished Faculty Lecture: Lee Palmer Wandel Senior Fellow (2004-2009) History, UW-Madison In the sixteenth century, the world as Europeans knew it spun apart. Christian divided from Christian, sundering families, towns,…
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Venerating the Sage: The Rise and Fall of a Shrine to Confucius
2011 Focus on the Humanities Distinguished Faculty Lecture: Julia Murray Professor of Art History and Senior Fellow, Institute for Research in the Humanities (2009-2011), UW-Madison Recognized throughout the world as a symbol of Chinese…
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Slow Violence and Environmental Story Telling
2012 Focus on the Humanities Distinguished Faculty Lecture: Rob Nixon Rachel Carson Professor of English, UW-Madison Rob Nixon is the Rachel Carson Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He received his…
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The Holocaust and the Ethics of Witnessing: Polish Writers Look at the Ghetto
2012 Focus on the Humanities Distinguished Faculty Lecture: Rachel Feldhay Brenner Max and Frieda Weinstein-Bascom Professor of Jewish Studies; Professor of Modern Hebrew Literature; Senior Fellow, Institute for Research in the Humanities (2009-2011), UW-Madison …
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Ecological Imperialism Revisited: Entanglements of Disease, Commerce, and Knowledge in a Global World
2013 Focus on the Humanities Distinguished Faculty Lecture: Gregg Mitman Vilas Research and William Coleman Professor of History of Science, Medical History, and Environmental Studies, UW-Madison Forty years ago, in The Columbian Exchange, and…
Find out more »September 2013
Five Ways to Look at a Corpse: The Dead in Normandy, 1944
2013 Focus on the Humanities Distinguished Lecture: Mary Louise Roberts Professor of History and Senior Fellow, Institute for Research in the Humanities, UW-Madison We prefer to think of war as producing heroes, not…
Find out more »March 2014
Re-emerging Superpowers: Turkey, Iran, India, and China in the 21st Century
2014 Focus on the Humanities Distinguished Lecture: André Wink Professor of History and Senior Fellow, Institute for Research in the Humanities, UW-Madison Turkey, Iran, India, and China are historical superpowers. All four were dramatically…
Find out more »December 2014
For What It’s Worth: Toward a New History of the Sixties
2014 Focus on the Humanities Distinguished Faculty Lecture: Craig Werner Afro-American Studies, UW-Madison A scholar of literature, music, and cultural history, Craig Werner lays out a set of guiding principles for a new history…
Find out more »February 2015
Enchantings: On Modernity, Culture, and the State in Africa
2015 Focus on the Humanities Distinguished Faculty Lecture: Tejumola Olaniyan English and African Languages & Literature, UW-Madison Tejumola Olaniyan will look at literature, popular culture, and social and political practices to tell a cultural…
Find out more »March 2016
STEMming the Tide: Balzac and Statistical Humanity
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…
Find out more »April 2016
Come to Your Senses! – Sensiotics and Understandings of Art, Culture, and History
Focus on the Humanities Distinguished Faculty Lecture: Henry Drewal Senior Fellow (2010-2014) Art History and Afro-American Studies, UW-Madison In this talk, Drewal explores the vital role of the senses with an approach he calls…
Find out more »October 2016
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 »February 2017
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…
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The Great Disruption: Biologists, Revolutions, and the Values of Science ca. 1848
2018 Focus on the Humanities Distinguished Faculty Lecture: Lynn K. Nyhart Vilas-Bablitch-Kelch Distinguished Achievement Professor History of Science, UW-Madison In the German-speaking states of the 1840s and 50s, revolution was in the air. While…
Find out more »November 2018
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 »April 2019
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…
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Building Paradise in a Tropical Swamp: Retirement Housing and Communities in South Florida after World War II
Focus on the Humanities Distinguished Faculty Lecture: Anna Andrzejewski
Find out more »March 2020
Ultimate Questions, Incomplete Answers: Or, the Hunger for the Unknowable in the 20th-Century
Focus on the Humanities Distinguished Faculty Lecture: Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen
Find out more »April 2022
The Significance of the Ho-Chunk in American History
Focus on the Humanities Lecture: Stephen Kantrowitz "The Significance of the Frontier Ho-Chunk in American History" Despite the invasion and seizure of their homeland by the United States during the early nineteenth century, the Ho-Chunk…
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