Past Event Category: Seminar
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Nov 9Gendered Self in the Digital Era: Digital Photography and Auto/biographic Representation
University Club, Room 212
Monday Seminar: Xin Huang UW System Fellow (2015-2016) Women’s and Gender Studies, UW-Milwaukee What new things can personal digital photography tell us about gendered lives? Does digital photography provide a wider range of gendered activities and gendered images? What can we learn about women’s lives and senses of self as “photographers”? How to process …
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Nov 2Christ on a Donkey: Palm Sunday, Triumphal Entries, Wooden Donkeys, and Blasphemous Pageants
University Club, Room 212
Monday Seminar: Max Harris Solmsen Fellow (2015-2016) Independent Scholar How did Charlemagne confuse Palm Sunday processions and triumphal entries? Why was the early Quaker leader James Nayler charged with blasphemy for riding a horse into Bristol? Was he imitating Christ or mocking Oliver Cromwell? Why were life-size processional images of Jesus on a donkey …
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Oct 26On Being Able to Sleep: Bio-politics in Counterinsurgent Wars
University Club, Room 212
Monday Seminar: Helen M. Kinsella Resident Fellow (2015-2016) Political Science, UW–Madison How does war affect every day life for those involved? I analyze the role of sleep in the United States-led counterinsurgency war in Afghanistan and Pakistan from 2001, which was part of the larger U.S.-led overseas contingency operations. Nowhere more than in the …
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Oct 19Incarcerated Writers and the Justice of Incarceration
University Club, Room 212
Monday Seminar: Vincent Lloyd Kingdon Fellow (2015-2016) Religion, Syracuse University It is not only activists and public intellectuals who are concerned about the injustice of mass incarceration in the United States. Incarcerated men and women have examined the “justice” of the American criminal justice system as well, often through memoir. Incarcerated writers do intellectual …
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Oct 12Contemporary Drift: Genre, Historicism, and the Problem of the Present
University Club, Room 212
Monday Seminar: Theodore Martin UW System Fellow (2015-2016) English, UW-Milwaukee What do we mean when we call something—art, culture, history—”contemporary”? While scholars tend to refer to the contemporary as if it were the name for a clearly demarcated historical period, the contemporary isn’t really like other historical periods—for the simple reason that, as something …
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Oct 5From Content to Context: Rethinking Relationships between Folklore and Literature in Nineteenth-Century France
University Club, Room 212
Monday Seminar: Jennifer Gipson Resident Fellow (2015-2016) French and Italian, UW–Madison What does folklore have to do with literature? The usual answer would involve shared content: writers borrowing song, stories, or motifs from traditional materials. However, the history of folklore study or discourses surrounding it—what people thought folklore was and why it mattered—can be …
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Sep 28Roads as Spaces of Consumption: The Making of Tibetan Highways
University Club, Room 212
Monday Seminar: Yongming Zhou Senior Fellow (2014-2018) Anthropology, UW–Madison What are the functions of roads, both “materially” and “symbolically”? Since 1950, several highways have been built to connect Tibet with the rest of China. These roads’ meanings are subject to constant construction and reinterpretation, being understood variously as heroic, monumental, liberating, mysterious, exotic, purifying, …
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Sep 21From the Roman Mediterranean to India: The Early Movement of Christianity through the Afro-Eurasian World System
University Club, Room 212
Monday Seminar: Nathanael Andrade Solmsen Fellow (2015-2016) History, University of Oregon Can we trace the social pathways that ancient Christianity followed as it traveled from the Roman Mediterranean to India? Evidence of these pathways is laden with epistemic baggage. Likewise, numerous societies have produced their own testimonies for Christianity’s movement, but it is often …
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Apr 27On Not Defending Poetry: The Economics of Sidney’s Golden World
Monday Seminar: Catherine Bates Solmsen Fellow (2014-2015) English and Comparative Literature, University of Warwick One of the foundational texts of early modern poetics, Philip Sidney’s Defence of Poetry (1595) makes the case that poetry profits both the individual and the state to which he or she belongs by promoting ethical ideals of heroic love …
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Apr 20Queering Pan-Americanism: Sexuality, Politics, and Performance in Tulio Carella’s Recife Diaries, 1960-1961
University Club, Room 212
Monday Seminar: Severino Albuquerque Resident Fellow (2014-2015) Spanish & Portuguese, UW–Madison This presentation focuses on the diary Argentine playwright and theater professor Tulio Carella (1912-1979) wrote during an 18-month stay in Recife, Brazil, in the politically charged period leading up to the 1964 coup. The apprehension of the manuscript (published a few years later …