Past Event Category: Seminar
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Apr 13For Blood or for Glory: A History of Cuban Boxing, 1898-1962
University Club, Room 212
Monday Seminar: Anju Reejhsinghani UW System Fellow (2014-2015) History, UW-Stevens Point As the first sustained examination of boxing’s rise and popularization within Cuba and its diaspora, Anju Reejhsinghani’s project should prove relevant not only to cultural historians, but also to scholars of diaspora, gender, race, and transnationalism. In the wake of the Spanish-Cuban-American War, …
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Apr 6Ectoplasmic Modernities: Materialization Photography at the Turn of the Century
University Club, Room 212
Monday Seminar: Lucy Traverse Dana-Allen Dissertation Fellow (2014-2015) Art History, UW–Madison This project explores the trans-Atlantic interest in psychical research at the fin-de-siècle, focusing on the textual and photographic archives of “ectoplasmic” materializations. Though seemingly an eccentric and marginal practice, I argue that parapsychology research and imagery intervened in larger cultural debates concerning the …
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Mar 23Passing as Open Secret: Race and Fictions of Identity in Nineteenth-Century Cuba
University Club, Room 212
Monday Seminar: Víctor Goldgel-Carballo Resident Fellow (2014-2015) Spanish & Portuguese, UW–Madison Passing is often understood as a divergence between the private and the public identities of a given subject — with the public identity perceived as fraudulent or as a simulacrum that aims at keeping the private one secret. The study of late-nineteenth-century Cuba, …
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Mar 16The Ptolemaic Empire (323-30 BCE)
University Club, Room 212
Monday Seminar: Christelle Fischer-Bovet Solmsen Fellow (2014-2015) Classics, University of Southern California Christelle Fischer-Bovet is working on a book that aims at developing a better understanding of state formation and imperialism in Egypt after the conquest of Alexander down to the inclusion of Egypt into the Roman Empire (332-30 BCE). It provides a critical …
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Mar 9Borderlands: Intercultural Encounters in the Medieval French Pastourelle
University Club, Room 212
Monday Seminar Eliza Zingesser Solmsen Fellow (2014-2015) French and Romance Philology, Columbia University This project shows how pastoral literature—especially pastourelle poetry—became a privileged site for French explorations of cultural and linguistic difference in the Middle Ages. The generic framework of the pastourelle poem—in which an errant knight encounters, and subsequently often rapes, a shepherdess—entangles …
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Mar 2Oracular Romance: Heliodoran Fiction and Suspended Providence in Early Modern English Literature
University Club, Room 212
Monday Seminar: Brian Knight Madeleine Doran Dissertation Fellow (2014-2015) English, UW–Madison Classical oracles were denounced in the Renaissance as either shams staged by charlatans or as engines of deceit run by demons. In Renaissance literature, though, oracles escaped these official interpretations. Why did early modern writers include oracles in their fictions, and what work …
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Feb 23The Best Land
University Club, Room 212
Monday Seminar: Susan Brewer UW System Fellow (2014-2015) History, UW-Stevens Point Susan Brewer’s project investigates the controversy over Oneida Indian land claims in central New York by tracing the history of one piece of property and the people—the Oneida families and her own—who have lived on it over the past 250 years. This story …
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Feb 16The Complex Relationship between Indigeneity and Class in Southeast Asia
University Club, Room 212
Monday Seminar: Ian Baird Race, Ethnicity, and Indigeneity Fellow (2014-2015) Geography, UW–Madison The relationship between ethnicity and class has been long, complex and at times contradictory. Between the 1940s and 1980s, various militant communist revolutionary movements in Southeast Asia and elsewhere in the world targeted upland ethnic minorities because of the racialized discrimination minorities …
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Feb 9Feudal Remnants and the Idea of Class in Modern Japan
University Club, Room 212
Monday Seminar: Louise Young Senior Fellow (2013-2017) History, UW–Madison Class talk is a ubiquitous part of contemporary political debate in Japan, with harsh words for the pernicious impact of the “income gap society” and a sense of urgency to protect a vanishing “middle class.” The unraveling of the Japanese dream of middle class consumerism …
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Feb 2Commentaries in Context: Fatḥallāh al-Shirwānī and Post-Classical Islamic Science
University Club, Room 212
Monday Seminar: Scott Trigg William Coleman Dissertation Fellow (2014-2015) History of Science, UW–Madison Scott Trigg’s dissertation evaluates the intellectual career of Fatḥallāh al-Shirwānī, a 15th-century Islamic astronomer, theologian, and teacher whose writings are critical for understanding the transmission of science from Central Asia to Constantinople, and potentially to Europe. Shirwānī’s work addresses three key …