Past Event Category: Seminar
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Dec 12Troubling Conjugal Loyalties
University Club, Room 212
Monday Seminar: Sukanya Banerjee UW System Fellow (2016-2017) English, UW-Milwaukee How is it that monogamy came to serve as one of the markers of “modern” marriage? Which nineteenth-century literary genres did it play on? What kind of a transimperiality does conjugal loyalty, as defined along a register of monogamy, engender? In addressing these questions, …
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Dec 5Passing on Texts in the Ancient World: A Case Study with the Biblical Texts from the Qumran Dead Sea Scrolls
University Club, Room 212
Monday Seminar: Sidnie Crawford Kingdon Fellow (2016-2017) Classics and Religious Studies, University of Nebraska-Lincoln When we think of “the Bible” in the 21st century, we usually think of a fixed text, in an ancient language, that is revered by one or more religious communities as “the word of God.” How did ancient Jews think …
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Nov 28Natural History and Personhood in Early America
University Club, Room 212
Monday Seminar: Julia Dauer Dana-Allen Dissertation Fellow (2016-2017) English, UW–Madison How did transatlantic writers use “I” in their discourse? When did “I” become the familiar protagonist of American letters? What can first-person prose tell us about the category of the “person”? My dissertation approaches these questions by considering the relationship between natural history, personhood, …
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Nov 14Anglo-Saxon Maternal Bodies
University Club, Room 212
Monday Seminar Dana Oswald UW System Fellow (2016-2017) English, UW-Parkside What can we know about women’s bodies when the only people writing about them were men, and those men were generally monks? In a culture that is largely silent about the lives and bodies of women, how can we understand their embodied experiences of …
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Nov 7Risky Bodies: Quantification, Fungibility, and Slave Trade in the Seventeenth Century Atlantic
University Club, Room 212
Monday Seminar: Pablo Gómez Resident Fellow (2016-2017) Department of Medical History and Bioethics; History of Science, UW–Madison How did early modern governments, and slave traders’ and their financiers’ quantify disease and risk? How did they develop tools that allowed them to trade and invest in human corporeality and its afflictions? In this presentation, coming …
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Oct 31Playing with Buttons: Liberal Subjects at the Binary Switch
University Club, Room 212
Monday Seminar: Jason Puskar UW System Fellow (2016-2017) English, UW-Milwaukee The pushbutton is one of the simplest mechanical interfaces in the modern world, and one of the most prevalent. But what accounts for its enormous appeal, and what kinds of effects does it have on the people who use it? In this talk, Jason …
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Oct 24“Signing in the Seraglio”: Global Disability in European Spatial Representations of the Ottoman Court
University Club, Room 212
Monday Seminar: Elizabeth Bearden English, UW–Madison Resident Fellow (2016-2017) Drawn from the fourth chapter of her current book project, Monstrous Kinds: Body, Space, and Narrative in Renaissance Representations of Disability, this talk analyzes European representations of the dwarfs, mutes, and eunuchs who served the Ottoman sultans. Accounts of these boon companions emphasize their relative …
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Oct 17Gendered Dynamics in Hmong American New Media Cultures
University Club, Room 212
Monday Seminar: Lori Lopez Race, Ethnicity, and Indigeneity Fellow (2016-2017) Communication Arts, UW–Madison For over 260,000 Hmong Americans living in the U.S., mobile media now play a key role in maintaining connections and identities. Yet what role are Hmong women playing in shaping the use of these digital media technologies? How are Hmong women …
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Oct 10Queer Velocities: Untimely Matter in Racine’s Andromaque
University Club, Room 212
Monday Seminar: Jennifer Row Solmsen Fellow (2016-2017) Romance Studies, Boston University From “one’s ticking biological clock” to “grow up, be a man,” sex and gender norms are often seamlessly intertwined with temporality in our modern world. But did time always impact sexuality the same way? I examine a mid-seventeenth-century moment in France when …
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Oct 4Plato’s Phaedo: The Initiation of a Philosopher
University Club, Room 212
Monday Seminar: David Ebrey Solmsen Fellow (2016-2017) Philosophy, Northwestern University Plato’s Phaedo is one of his literary and philosophical masterpieces, set on the last day of Socrates’ life. How should we understand Socrates’ reference to Pythagorean and Orphic religious views in the dialogue? Is this a separate feature of dialogue, independent of the detailed …