Past Event Category: Seminar
-
Sep 26The Future Eaters: Petro-despotism, Empire, and the Resource Curse
University Club, Banquet Hall (lower level)
Monday Seminar: Rob Nixon Senior Fellow (2009-2012) Rachel Carson Professor of English, UW–Madison Abdelrahman Munif, a Jordanian-born writer of Saudi-Iraqi parentage, gave imaginative definition to the resource wars—over oil, water, and time itself—that have afflicted the Persian Gulf. Against the backdrop of transnational hydrocarbon politics, the climate crisis, the resource curse, and the Arab …
-
Sep 19Amerilots and Harlots: The Power of Commodities during the U.S. Military Presence in France, 1944-1946
University Club, Room 212
Monday Seminar Mary Louise Roberts Senior Fellow (2010-2014) History, UW–Madison During the American campaign in Normandy, the Army distributed enormous quantities of cigarettes, chocolate and chewing gum, as well as soap and other toiletries to its soldiers. The French called the G.I.s “Amerilots” because they seemed to have alot of everything. As these commodities …
-
May 2Workers Unite, Workers Create: Coal Miners, Cultural Workers, and Radical Unions in 1930s Appalachia, South Wales, and the American Southwest
University Club, Room 212
Monday Seminar: Camille Guérin-Gonzales Race, Ethnicity, and Indigeneity Fellow (2010-2011) History and Chican@ and Latin@ Studies, UW–Madison This seminar focuses on part of a larger project that explores the production of social space in coal mining communities in three regions, the Appalachian South and the American Southwest in the U.S., and South Wales in …
-
Apr 25Women’s Hospital Work in Renaissance Italy: Reassessing Knowledge and Practice
University Club, Room 212
Monday Seminar: Sharon Strocchia Solmsen Fellow (2010-2011) History, Emory University This presentation examines women’s nursing activities in the hospitals of sixteenth-century Italy in light of changing disease environments and new charitable initiatives associated with the Catholic Reformation. The appearance of syphilis after 1500 posed a massive public health challenge to Renaissance cities, prompting the …
-
Apr 18Mormons or Muslims, They’re Not Us. But Who are We? Religious Difference as a Prism for Cultural Identity in Denmark
University Club, Room 212
Monday Seminar: Julie K. Allen Resident Fellow (2010-2011) Scandinavian Studies, UW–Madison In the aftermath of the Mohammed cartoon crisis of 2005, Danish society was often painted as intolerant and racist. A closer look at the cartoons in question, however, reveals that their depiction of Mohammed is incidental; their real focus is questioning Danish cultural …
-
Apr 11Voice and Presence: Performance Aspects of Turkic Oral Epics
University Club, Room 212
Monday Seminar: Karl Reichl Honorary Fellow (2010-2011) Turkic Studies, University of Bonn Based on my field-work in the Turkic-speaking areas of Central Asia, I will explore and illustrate some of the elements that characterize the live performance of an oral epic. The singer is present as narrator, musician, actor, entertainer, tribal historian, and the …
-
Apr 4Margins of Belief: Renegades as frontier Protagonists in the Early Modern Mediterranean
University Club, Room 212
Monday Seminar: Steven Hutchinson Race, Ethnicity, and Indigeneity Fellow (2010-2011) Spanish and Portuguese Corsair activity, i.e., state-sponsored piracy carried out in the name of both Christian and Muslim lands, was largely responsible for the presence of millions of captives/slaves in the early modern Mediterranean. During this period some three hundred thousand men, women, and …
-
Mar 28Proust’s Calculus of Personality
University Club, Room 212
Monday Seminar: Richard Goodkin Senior Fellow (2009-2014) French and Italian, UW–Madison Calculus, invented in the seventeenth century by Leibniz and Newton and perfected over the next two hundred years, is not only the foundation of higher mathematics but also an indispensable tool for a broad spectrum of intellectual and practical endeavors that entail quantification …
-
Mar 21Notes Toward a Theory of Resistance
University Club, Room 212
Monday Seminar: Len Kaplan Honorary Fellow (2008-2011) Law, UW–Madison Weimar’s weak liberal state folded into Fascism. In the US since the 1970’s critics have warned about “fascism with a friendly face” and more recently a US form of fascism (Hedges) or Inverted Fascism (Wolin). What do these dire predictions represent? What lessons from Weimar …
-
Mar 7Beasts and Monsters
University Club, Room 212
Monday Seminar Mario Ortiz-Robles Resident Fellow (2010-2011) English, UW–Madison This seminar will focus on the animality of the monsters that appear in late-Victorian gothic fiction. It will explore how evolutionary dynamics inform the narrative representation of figures such as Dracula, Jekyll-and-Hyde, and Dorian Gray and consider the extent to which these rhetorical effects help …