Past Event Category: Seminar
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Nov 15From Rags to Yichus: Scrap, Secondhand, and Surplus Dealers in American Jewish Communities
University Club, Room 212
Monday Seminar: Jonathan Z. S. Pollack Madison Area Technical College Fellow (2010-2011) History, Madison Area Technical College The seminar will present an introductory proposal for a work on the history of Jewish entrepreneurs in the scrap, surplus, and secondhand-goods industries. Beginning with the Yiddish concept of “yichus,” roughly translated as “living up to the …
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Nov 8Literature as Historiography: W.G. Sebald’s Hybrid Discourse
University Club, Room 212
Monday Seminar: Lynn Wolff Dana-Allen Dissertation Fellow (2010-2011) German, UW–Madison The discursive difference between literature and historiography as defined by Aristotle has remained an organizing principle for both discourses across the ages. In my dissertation I trace the sustained contact between literature and historiography, highlighting where they diverge and converge, and examining, in particular, …
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Nov 1Medieval Superstition and European Modernity
University Club, Room 212
Monday Seminar: Michael D. Bailey Solmsen Fellow (2010-2011) History, Iowa State University Concern over and condemnation of superstition (always a negative category) surged in the late Middle Ages (fourteenth and fifteenth centuries), embodied finally in the person of the learned demonologist and witch-hunting magistrate, who saw himself as opposing the worst forms of superstition …
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Oct 25The Invention of Monasticism
University Club, Room 212
Monday Seminar: Albrecht Diem Solmsen Fellow (2010-2011) History, Syracuse University Albrecht will present an outline of his research project, which focuses on the process of monastic institution forming in the late antique and early medieval west. He is especially interested in the modes of shaping monastic identities and modes of communal life through the …
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Oct 18The Other Operation Dixie: Public Employees and the Postwar Revival of Organized Labor
University Club, Room 212
Monday Seminar: William Jones Race, Ethnicity, and Indigeneity Fellow (2010-2011) History, UW–Madison The defeat of Operation Dixie, a million-dollar campaign to unionize southern manufacturing after the Second World War, has long been recognized as a critical watershed in the postwar decline of organized labor in the United States. Yet not a single book or …
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Oct 11Toypurina and the Hidden Histories of California
University Club, Room 212
Monday Seminar: Maria Lepowsky Resident Fellow (2010-2011) Anthropology, Gender and Women’s Studies, UW–Madison In 1785 a young Tongva woman named Toypurina led a revolt against the Spanish mission at San Gabriel, near a newly founded pueblo whose name was later shortened to Los Angeles. Toypurina, this research shows, was not only a recognized shaman …
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Oct 4Ideology and Its Ethics: Maria Dąbrowska’s Jewish (and Polish) Problem
University Club, Room 212
Monday Seminar: Rachel Feldhay Brenner Senior Fellow (2008-2013) Hebrew Studies, UW–Madison The diaries of Maria Dąbrowska (1889-1965), a prominent Polish writer and socialist left a troubling testimony of her perception of the Polish Jews, especially in the time of the Holocaust. Her insensitivity to the Jewish extermination needs to be understood in the context …
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Sep 27Riots in Ancient Rome
University Club, Room 212
Monday Seminar: Gregory Aldrete Solmsen Fellow (2010-2011) Humanistic Studies (Classics), University of Wisconsin-Green Bay The inhabitants of ancient Rome appear to have been a riotous lot with at least 154 known episodes of unruly collective behavior between 200 BC and AD 375. As a result, Rome has often been characterized as a lawless, violent …
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Sep 20The Senses in Understandings of Art: A “Sensorium” of Yoruba Peoples
University Club, Room 212
Monday Seminar: Henry Drewal Senior Fellow (2010-2014) Art History and Afro-American Studies, UW–Madison This paper will explore how artists and audiences use the senses to create and respond to the arts using an approach that I call sensiotics. While the paper focuses on the arts of Yoruba peoples in West Africa and their cultural …
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May 3The Making of a Philosopher-Martyr
University Club, Room 212
Monday Seminar: Costica Bradatan Solmsen Fellow (2009-2010) Philosophy, Texas Tech University This paper explores the “conditions of possibility” of philosophical martyrdom. Becoming a martyr can be an extremely difficult process as dying is only half of the job. It is only through a complex social, political and cultural process that a dead body becomes …