Past Event Category: Seminar
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Apr 26The City and its Fragments: Colonial Bombay, 1854-1918
University Club, Room 212
Monday Seminar: Preeti Chopra Resident Fellow (2009-2010) Languages and Cultures of Asia, UW–Madison This paper is a study of the role of native communities in the physical transformation of colonial Bombay. Exploring the impact of encounters between different groups, the paper shows that colonial Bombay was not simply the result of ideas emanating from …
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Apr 19Parallel and Interconnected Developments in the Early Modern World
University Club, Room 212
Monday Seminar: André Wink Senior Fellow (2009-2013) History, UW–Madison By today’s standard, early modernization does not always look like sweeping change. Yet there is growing consensus among historians that sixteenth-century developments in Europe – demographic expansion, the growth of territorial states and bureaucracies, commercialization, and religious reformations – have had significant parallels in at …
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Apr 12The Chinese Must Go: Immigration, Deportation, and Violence in the 19th-Century American West
University Club, Room 212
Monday Seminar: Beth Lew-Williams ACLS Fellow Resident (2009-2010) History, Stanford University This project examines the dramatic and formative moment in American history when the federal government made its first major effort to control the movement of people across its borders—and failed. The result was America’s first illegal immigrants and a grassroots uprising against them. …
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Apr 5Sentimental Literature: Directing the Flows of Sympathy in Enlightenment and Francophone Texts
University Club, Room 212
Monday Seminar: Stephanie Spadaro Dana-Allen Dissertation Fellow (2009-2010) French and Italian, UW–Madison In this presentation, I will examine the ways that certain philosophical notions of sympathy and various literary portrayals of sympathy define the human in eighteenth-century French slave narratives and contemporary Caribbean novels. I will also discuss methodological questions raised in my comparison …
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Apr 5Drinking Alfresco: The Erotics of the Pastoral Sympotic Mode
University Club, Room 212
Monday Seminar: Kristen Ehrhardt Robert J. Reinhold Dissertation Fellow (2009-2010) Classics, UW–Madison The institution of private drinking parties, symposia, played an important part in the cultural and political lives of Greek men in the archaic and classical periods, to the extent that the symposium itself became a common motif in literature and art. Later …
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Mar 22Making Sense of Bodies: Expert Imaginations and Unsafe Motherhood in Malawi
University Club, Room 212
Monday Seminar: Claire Wendland Resident Fellow (2009-2010) Departments of Anthropology, Obstetrics & Gynecology, and Medical History and Bioethics, UW–Madison In one of the poorest countries in a poor region of the world, Malawian women, their families, and those who are charged with their care in pregnancy and labor face an unexplained increase in maternal …
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Mar 15The New Woman Tries on Red: Russia in the American Feminist Imagination, 1905-1945
University Club, Room 212
Monday Seminar: Julia Mickenberg Honorary Fellow (2009-2010) American Studies, University of Texas at Austin This presentation will offer an overview of a book-in-progress that seeks to understand Russia’s place in the imagination and self-fashioning of financially independent, sexually liberated, and socially conscious American women, among them well-known suffragists, socialists, journalists, educators, authors, reformers, and …
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Mar 8Imperial India on Trial: Crime, Punishment, and Colonialism, 1880-1940
University Club, Room 212
Monday Seminar: Kate Merz Dana-Allen Dissertation Fellow (2009-2010) English, UW–Madison In the last decades of the British Raj, anti-colonial writers staged scenes of crime and punishment, trial and testimony, in order to interrogate the legitimacy of imperialism itself. This project examines questions of imperial justice in British and Indian writers of the early twentieth …
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Mar 8Queer Writing Matters: Literary Performativity in Contemporary Queer Women’s Writing in French
University Club, Room 212
Monday Seminar: Kristina Kosnick Germaine Brée Dissertation Fellow (2009-2010) French and Italian, UW–Madison This presentation will examine recent trends in queer-centered (French) literary criticism. It will also break with these trends both by foregrounding the politico-literary contributions of contemporary women writers and by advocating a critical approach that values the performative force of literary …
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Feb 22To Russia With Love: Dorothy West’s Adventures in Moscow and Other Transatlantic Challenges to the Color Line
University Club, Room 212
Monday Seminar: Cherene Sherrard-Johnson Race, Ethnicity, and Indigeneity Fellow (2009-2010) English, UW–Madison This paper draws on a chapter in a book-in-progress, Dorothy West’s Paradise: A Biography of Class and Color. It places West’s personal reflections and publications about her Soviet sojourn in conversation with Nancy Prince’s 1825 narrative of her life in imperial Russia …