Past Event Category: Focus on the Humanities Distinguished Faculty Lecture
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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 …
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Feb 21The Great Disruption: Biologists, Revolutions, and the Values of Science ca. 1848
Conrad A. Elvehjem Building, Room L140
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 the political revolutions of 1848-49 are best known, the life sciences were undergoing their own revolutions, marked by radical new …
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Feb 22Rethinking Empire in the Twentieth Century: Lessons from Imperial and Post-Imperial Japan
Conrad A. Elvehjem Building, Room L140
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 imperium under the American cold war umbrella. What are the lessons that imperial Japan can teach us about the global …
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Oct 19Fantasy as Microaggression?: Racial Caricature, Kawaii-style, and the Anthropomorphic Asian
Conrad A. Elvehjem Building, Room L140
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 a catalyst for exploring the relationship between aesthetics and political injury? Is race always bound to the circulation of negative …
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Apr 6Come to Your Senses! – Sensiotics and Understandings of Art, Culture, and History
Conrad A. Elvehjem Building, Room L140
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 sensiotics. While Drewal focuses on the Yoruba peoples of West Africa and their cultural sensorium, he argues that sensing is …
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Mar 9STEMming the Tide: Balzac and Statistical Humanity
Conrad A. Elvehjem Building, Room L140
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 struggle between quantitative fields of inquiry like physics and mathematics and qualitative fields like art and literature. In his monumental …
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Feb 18Enchantings: On Modernity, Culture, and the State in Africa
Conrad A. Elvehjem Building, Room L140
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 history of African politics, and a political history of African culture that re-frames our understanding of the modern state, and …
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Dec 3For What It’s Worth: Toward a New History of the Sixties
Conrad A. Elvehjem Building, Room L140
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 of the nineteen sixties, a mythologized decade that is too often reduced to a set of contradictory ideological tropes. This …
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Mar 5Re-emerging Superpowers: Turkey, Iran, India, and China in the 21st Century
Conrad A. Elvehjem Building, Room L140
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 eclipsed by European imperialism and industrial progress in the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries. Today, in the early years of …
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Sep 25Five Ways to Look at a Corpse: The Dead in Normandy, 1944
Conrad A. Elvehjem Building, Room L140
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 corpses. Perhaps for this reason, military historians have rarely focused on the dead. In the Normandy invasion of 1944, the …