Past Event Category: Seminar
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Dec 5Shakespeare’s Second Future
University Club, Room 212
Monday Seminar: J.K. Barret Solmsen Fellow (2011-2012) English, University of Texas at Austin In William Shakespeare’s Cymbeline, Jupiter himself hands down a prophetic text to quell concerns about the future. Though this cameo doesn’t actually provide much resolution, it does highlight a central concern in a play notorious for its dizzying profusion of plots. …
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Nov 28We Are the Improved Race: Guatemala, Mestizaje, and the Age of Fascism, 1930-1948
University Club, Room 212
Monday Seminar: Julie Gibbings Dana-Allen Dissertation Fellow (2011-2012) History, UW–Madison How do we understand the postcolonial in Latin America? Many scholars have eschewed the use of postcolonial criticism in Latin America on the basis that there is a lack of fit between theoretical perspectives derived from Asia and African experiences of colonialism and interpretations …
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Nov 21Resurrection and Devotional Identities in Sixteenth-Century Europe
University Club, Room 212
Monday Seminar: Erin Lambert A.W. Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Fellow (2011-2012) History, UW–Madison The resurrection of the dead, wrote a sixteenth-century German preacher, was the most debated article of the Creed. While Lutherans, for example, described the reassembly of the body, Anabaptists argued that one’s resurrection took place as one became a baptized member of the …
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Nov 14Hapsburg-Ottoman Diplomatic Machinery: Automata and the Türkenvererhrung
University Club, Room 212
Monday Seminar: Jessica Keating Solmsen Fellow (2011-2012) Art History, UW–Madison This paper concerns the history of the long-distance circulation of objects in the early modern world. When recounting the history of intercontinental movement of objects scholars of the early modern world have tended view it through the lens of a growing global commercial market …
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Nov 7Re-articulating Political Community: Testimonial Narratives and the Formation of an Audience
University Club, Room 212
Monday Seminar: Marian Halls Dana-Allen Dissertation Fellow (2011-2012) Comparative Literature, UW–Madison How and why do testimonial narratives emerge as a privileged mode of remembering times of political violence or catastrophe? As one point of departure, Dori Laub’s assertion in Felman and Laub’s Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis and History (1992), that “the …
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Oct 31How to do things with bits and bytes
University Club, Room 212
Monday Seminar: Mathangi Krishnamurthy A.W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow (2010-2012) Anthropology, UW–Madison My project looks at the meaning of information in an age of Information Technology (IT), in order to understand and explore the kind of desires that animate workers’ participation in the Indian call center industry. I look at the Indian version of the …
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Oct 24Temporal Subjectivities and “Locating Africa” in Postcolonial Cinema
University Club, Room 212
Monday Seminar: Amy Powell Dana-Allen Dissertation Fellow (2011-2012) Art History, UW–Madison Engagement with Africa as a space or place is not the only way that contemporary artists and filmmakers critically interpret the condition of living in the wake of colonialism. Artworks employ time-based techniques (e.g. multiple-channel installation, simultaneity, duration, synchronization) to negotiate the temporalizing …
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Oct 17Saints of the Indus: Islam and Politics in South Asia’s Borderlands
University Club, Room 212
Monday Seminar: André Wink Senior Fellow (2009-2013) History, UW–Madison Much has been written about the rise and function of the cult of the saints in Latin and Greek-Orthodox Christianity. By comparison the study of a comparable phenomenon in the Muslim world is still relatively underdeveloped. This seminar will present some preliminary conclusions of ongoing …
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Oct 10Africa and the Disciplines: Congolese Music, Francophone Literature, and the Humanities
University Club, Room 212
Monday Seminar: John Nimis French and Italian, UW–Madison A.W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow (2010-2012) That music is central to African societies is something of a truism. But what does this really mean in terms of how we understand Africa? This project looks at the implications of this fact with respect to the way Africa …
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Oct 3Companionable Objects, Companionable Conscience: Episode 1, “Two Effigies”
University Club, Room 212
Monday Seminar: Kenneth George Senior Fellow (2011-2015) Anthropology, UW–Madison My project explores crafted things and the ethical and affective ties we form with them in our everyday lifeworlds and contemporary public spheres. A simple idea leads to me write about “companionable objects” and “companionable conscience:” Things, too, are social beings—though not human beings—and as …