Past Event Category: Seminar
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Mar 3Patronage and Reception of Medieval Churches in 14th-Century Cyprus
University Club, Room 212
Monday Seminar: Justine Andrews Solmsen Fellow (2013-2014) Art and Art History, University of New Mexico The modern image of the country of Cyprus is one that is fraught with banking crises, communities divided, and war. While war was ever-present in medieval Cyprus, the image of that island kingdom was drastically different. The intervening centuries …
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Feb 24The American Ways of Wisdom and Wonder: Seeking the Good Life in the 20th-Century United States
University Club, Room 212
Monday Seminar: Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen Resident Fellow (2013-2014) History, UW–Madison What would the writing of American intellectual history look like if it sought to capture the longing for wisdom and wonder shaping so much of its intellectual life? This is the question animating my book project on the history of “philosophy” (the love of wisdom) …
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Feb 17Half Century Miyamori: Performing Peace in Postwar Okinawa
University Club, Room 212
Monday Seminar: Valerie Barske UW System Fellow (2013-2014) History, UW-Stevens Point On June 30, 1959, a U.S. military jet crashed into Miyamori Elementary School killing 12 students, 6 citizens, and injuring 200 others in Okinawa, Japan. American sources including Time characterized the pilot’s actions as heroic, calling this event one of few “accidents” to …
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Feb 10Asian Fetish: Race and the Politics of Fantasy
University Club, Room 212
Monday Seminar Leslie Bow Senior REI Fellow (2013-2017) English and Asian American Studies, UW–Madison If, as psychoanalyst Robert Stoller asserted, “a fetish is a story masquerading as an object,” what is the story underlying racial fetishism? A process of idealization, fetishism illuminates the structures of a collective racial imaginary in which repressed anxiety manifests …
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Feb 3Introducing Absurd Literature: Defining without Reducing
University Club, Room 212
Monday Seminar: Michael Y. Bennett UW System Fellow (2013-2014) English, UW-Whitewater There is the common notion that while someone may not be able to define absurd literature, one clearly knows absurd literature when one reads it. It is this very issue that this book attempts to address. The main difficulty is, is it possible …
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Jan 27Discourses of Debt and Lending in Medieval Iberia
University Club, Room 212
Monday Seminar: Gregory Milton Solmsen Fellow (2013-2014) History, University of South Florida The moral language of debt in medieval Iberia delineated a wide range of activity for Christians and Jews. People and communities attempted to define their roles and relationships through a complex lens of moral, economic, and social interests situated within a highly …
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Dec 9Resentment
University Club, Room 212
Monday Seminar: Benedict Robinson Solmsen Fellow (2013-2014) English, Stony Brook University The word resentment and its cognates made their first appearance in the English language around 1600; but at that moment the word meant something strikingly different from what we usually mean by it. Far from naming a secretive and envious anger, it was …
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Dec 2Tragedy of Reason: Natural Law and Literature in Early Modernity
University Club, Room 212
Monday Seminar: Ben LaBreche Solmsen Fellow (2013-2014) English, University of Mary Washington The sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries saw a renewed interest in natural law, which offered a means of rationalizing political relations and promoting justice. The potential violence and determinism of natural law, however, also threatened to undermine justice. The seminar will show …
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Nov 25Claiming Continuity: Family Planning, Political Dynasties and Narrative Form in the Indian Emergency
University Club, Room 212
Monday Seminar: Ayelet Ben-Yishai Honorary Fellow (2013-2014) English Department, University of Haifa, Israel Imposed by India’s “Greatest Prime Minister,” from June 1975 to January 1977, the State of Emergency is usually presented as an anomaly in the annals of the world’s largest democracy. As anthropologist Emma Tarlo has noted (2010), while historians, political scientists …
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Nov 18Atreus and Thyestes in Greek and Roman Tragedy
University Club, Room 212
Monday Seminar Anne Duncan Solmsen Fellow (2013-2014) Classics and Religious Studies, University of Nebraska-Lincoln There was a saying in imperial Rome: “The worst actor plays the king.” Officially, this aphorism pointed out the tendency for stage tyrants to be played by the least prestigious actor in a troupe; unofficially, it was a subversive critique …