Past Event Category: Seminar
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Nov 11The Worlding Work of the Cigarette: Tracking the Modern Girl Assemblage in the U.S. and China
University Club, Banquet Hall (lower level)
Monday Seminar: Nan Enstad Resident Fellow (2013-2014) History, UW–Madison In the early 20th century, consumers in China considered the cigarette a foreign import from the west, but consumers in the U.S. saw it as a foreign import from the east. Because of entrenched models of globalization that assume “modern” commodities followed a west-to-east trajectory, …
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Nov 4Sovereignty, History, and Papal Monarchy: Political Theory in the Age of Innocent IV
University Club, Room 212
Monday Seminar: Brett Whalen Kingdon Fellow (2013-2014) History, UNC-Chapel Hill A former canon lawyer, Pope Innocent IV (1243-1254) declared that all peoples—rulers and the ruled, believers and non-believers—came under the Roman Church’s spiritual and ultimately temporal jurisdiction due to the pope’s status as the successor to Saint Peter and, through that apostle, to Jesus …
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Oct 28Aquilombando: Rebellious Landscapes and Colonial Visuality
University Club, Room 212
Monday Seminar Matthew Francis Rarey Dana-Allen Dissertation Fellow (2013-2014) Art History, UW–Madison Quilombos – communities of self-emancipated or fugitive slaves – were ubiquitous accompaniments to Brazil’s history of plantation slavery. Nearly every quilombo that existed in Brazil during the colonial period met its end through invasion and razing at the hands of the Portuguese. …
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Oct 21The Husband’s Message and Early English EpistolarityThe Husband’s Message and Early English Epistolarity
University Club, Room 212
Monday Seminar: Jordan Zweck Resident Fellow (2013-2014) English, UW–Madison What makes early medieval English epistolarity unique is that it is not merely about letters but about what I am calling epistolary acts, the moments when authors represent or embed letters within vernacular texts, attempting to adapt a Latin epistolary tradition to Germanic or Anglo-Saxon …
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Oct 14The Moth-Eaten Page: Animals and Language in Angela Rawlings’s Wide Slumber for Lepidopterists
University Club, Room 212
Monday Seminar: Sarah Groeneveld Dana-Allen Dissertation Fellow (2013-2014) English, UW–Madison Angela Rawlings’s experimental long-poem Wide Slumber for Lepidopterists evokes an insect collector’s dream in which the forms of moths and butterflies become confused with the form of the text itself. While exploring this connection between bodily and literary form, Rawlings asks questions about the …
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Oct 7Thinking about Early Jewish Rewriting of Scripture
University Club, Room 212
Monday Seminar: Molly Zahn Kingdon Fellow (2013-2014) Religious Studies, University of Kansas For most of Jewish and Christian history, “interpretation” has been regarded as secondary to “scripture,” both chronologically and in terms of authority. In Judaism prior to approximately 100 CE, however, interpretation was not kept separate from scripture. Instead, interpretation largely took place …
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Sep 30Zazous in Zoot Suits: Race, Jazz, and Resistance in Occupied France, 1940-1944
University Club, Room 212
Monday Seminar: Kelly Jakes Dana-Allen Dissertation Fellow (2013-2014) Communication Arts, UW–Madison Derived from my dissertation project on popular music and resistance in German-Occupied France, this presentation investigates how upper-middle class Parisian youth, known as “zazous,” mobilized jazz music to fashion a subversive identity that expressed their refusal to serve as national scapegoats and their …
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Sep 23Standard Deviation: The Calculus of Normativity in Alain Robbe-Grillet’s Le Voyeur
University Club, Room 212
Monday Seminar: Richard Goodkin Senior Fellow (2009-2014) French and Italian, UW–Madison What sort of narrative might result from the implausible marriage of mathematics and literature? As an example of such an unlikely union, in this seminar, I will discuss Alain Robbe-Grillet’s Le Voyeur (1955), whose hero, a watch-salesman named Mathias (“Math” for short), spends …
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Sep 16Why Was Spinoza Excommunicated?
University Club, Room 212
Monday Seminar: Steve Nadler Senior Fellow (2013-2017) William H. Hay II Professor of Philosophy, Philosophy, UW–Madison In July of 1656, the twenty-three year old Baruch de Spinoza received the harshest writ of herem (excommunication) ever issued by the Amsterdam Portuguese-Jewish congregation. Full of vitriol and curses, the ban was final; Spinoza never reconciled with …
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Apr 29Medieval Riverlogues: Crossing and Contestations along the Oxus Borderland
University Club, Room 212
Monday Seminar: Manu P. Sobti UW System Fellow (2012-2013) School of Architecture & Urban Planning, UW-Milwaukee Manu Sobti shall present an extract from his forthcoming book with Brill Press entitled The Sliver of the Oxus Borderland: Medieval Cultural Encounters between the Arabs and Persians. Positioned within the context of the Arab invasions on Central …