Past Event Category: Seminar
-
Mar 19A Philosopher’s Guide to Thinking about Miracles
University Club, Room 212
Monday Seminar: Lawrence Shapiro Philosophy, UW–Madison Resident Fellow (2011-2012) Shapiro will use his time at the Institute to work on a book about the metaphysics and epistemology of miracles as well as the relationship between belief in miracles and belief in God. According to a recent Pew poll, 80% of Americans believe in miracles. …
-
Mar 12Unknown Political Bodies: Negative Anthropology, Political Theory, and Indigenous Societies
University Club, Room 212
Monday Seminar: Jimmy Klausen Race, Ethnicity, and Indigeneity Fellow (2011-2012) Political Science, UW–Madison This project juxtaposes twentieth-century French critical philosophy and cases of self-isolating indigenous societies to two ends. First, reading the philosophical work of Foucault, Bataille, Canguilhem, Fanon, and others through analyses of interactions among state, civil society, and self-isolating indigenes highlights in …
-
Mar 5“We shall be all body and ignore our souls”: The Pleasure and Pain of the Human Plant in Eighteenth-century Europe
University Club, Room 212
Monday Seminar: Lynnette Regouby History of Science, UW–Madison William Coleman Dissertation Fellow (2011-2012) Eighteenth-century materialism is often characterized by the analogy between man and machine, a productive image proposed by Julien Offray de La Mettrie in L’homme machine (1747). While La Mettrie continues to refer to man as a machine in subsequent publications, he …
-
Feb 27Who Answers When the Landlord Calls? Interpreting Property and the ‘German Idea of Freedom,’ 1650-1800
University Club, Room 212
Monday Seminar: Colin Wilder Solmsen Fellow (2011-2012) Independent Researcher Using small case studies in Germany in the period under study, the project traces relationships between abstract theories of human freedom and specific conflicts over property rights in early modern Germany, specifically in the Hessian and Rhine-Main region. This study deepens our understanding of the …
-
Feb 20The Devil’s Church: Or, How Evangelicals Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Movies
University Club, Room 212
Monday Seminar: Shanny Luft UW System Fellow (2011-2012) Religious Studies, University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point Although Evangelicalism today is often identified with conservative politics and “culture war” issues, many conservative Protestants in the early-twentieth-century argued that the biggest threat to American morals was Hollywood. One clergyman in 1940 called the film industry “perhaps the greatest …
-
Feb 13One Builder: Marshall Erdman and Postwar Building and Real Estate Development in Madison, Wisconsin
University Club, Room 212
Monday Seminar: Anna Andrzejewski Resident Fellow (2011-2012) Art History, UW–Madison One Builder takes the career of Madison-based builder/developer Marshall Erdman as an instructive case study to tell the closely intertwined history of architecture, building and real estate development in the later twentieth century. Andrzejewski seeks to show how a single builder rooted in a …
-
Feb 6“Calabash Cinema”: The Fall and Rise of Francophone African Film
University Club, Room 212
Monday Seminar: Aliko Songolo French and Italian, African Languages and Literature, UW–Madison Race, Ethnicity, and Indigeneity Fellow (2011-2012) Since its inception a half century ago, Francophone African cinema has been fraught with contradictions and controversies. Early on, it sought to tell the story of newly independent nations, but while doing so, it remained …
-
Jan 30“As Rust Eats Iron”: Envy in Fourth-Century Athens
University Club, Room 212
Monday Seminar: Esther Eidinow Ancient Greek History, University of Nottingham, United Kingdom Solmsen Fellow (2011-2012) In Athens during the fourth century BCE a number of surprising trials took place that have received little scholarly attention: the defendants were all women, the charges against them included asebeia (‘impiety’) and working with pharmaka (‘spells’ or ‘drugs’). …
-
Jan 23“Suzdal’ God-daubers,” “Novgorodian quattrocento,” and the Russian Avant-Garde
University Club, Room 212
Monday Seminar: Irina Shevelenko Slavic Languages and Literatures, UW–Madison Resident Fellow (2011-2012) At this seminar, I will present one of the case studies from my book-length project Modernism as Archaism: Nationalism and the Quest for a Modernist Aesthetic in Russia. I will explore what is arguably the most prominent example of the modernist “invention …
-
Dec 12The Politics of News: Information and Communication in Reformation Diplomacy
University Club, Room 212
Monday Seminar: Denice Fett Solmsen Fellow (2011-2012) History, University of North Florida This paper explores the questions and complications of accessing and disseminating information in early modern international negotiations. All states engaged in diplomatic discourse sought to gain access to, control the dissemination of, and utilize information and intelligence in order to succeed in …