• Feb 15
    Japanese Sovereignty and Declarations of War

    University Club, Room 212

    Monday Seminar: Douglas Howland UW System Fellow (2009-2010) History, UW-Milwaukee   The paper treats the controversy surrounding Japan’s commencement of hostilities against Russia in February 1904, and examines how that start to the Russo-Japanese War informed discussions regarding the need for declarations of war prior to hostilities: within the Institut de droit international and at …

  • Feb 8
    We Gotta Get Out of This Place: Music and the Experience of Vietnam Veterans

    University Club, Room 212

    Monday Seminar: Craig Werner Senior Fellow (2009-2013) Afro-American Studies, UW–Madison   This project, a collaboration between UW Professor Craig Werner and Vietnam veteran and veteran advocate Doug Bradley, uses music as a touchstone for constructing a veteran-centered narrative of the Vietnam era. The book is grounded in over 100 interviews with Vietnam veterans: combat soldiers, …

  • Feb 1
    Cannibalism and Colonialism

    University Club, Room 212

    Monday Seminar: Florence Bernault Resident Fellow (2009-2010) History, UW–Madison   This paper explores cannibalism as a central trope of colonial engagements in West Equatorial Africa (Gabon) from the late nineteenth century to the late twentieth century. The literature has thought long and hard on the ways in which cannibalism expresses dominant ideas about limits and …

  • Jan 25
    We Have to Invent Him: Harley Lyrics, Hereford Maps, and the Life of Roger de Breynton, c.1290-1351

    University Club, Room 212

    Monday Seminar: Daniel Birkholz Solmsen Fellow (2009-2010) English, University of Texas at Austin   This interdisciplinary study brings together two major documents of a forgotten period and a backwater region—the Hereford Cathedral Mappamundi [“map of the world”] (c.1305), and British Library Manuscript Harley 2253 (c.1340), a trilingual literary anthology—and reads them alongside a contemporary life …

  • Dec 14
    Planetarity: Global Epistemologies in Modernist Studies

    University Club, Room 212

    Monday Seminar: Susan Stanford Friedman IRH Director English, UW–Madison   This paper, written for a keynote address at the Modernist Studies Association (November, 2009), explores the “transnational turn” in modernist studies and the anxiety in the field over the expanded meanings of the categories modernism and modernity. It presents a manifesto in defense of these …

  • Nov 30
    From Statelessness to State Sovereignty: People and Politics on an Early American Frontier

    University Club, Room 212

    Monday Seminar: Rob Harper ACLS Residency Fellow (2009-2010) History, UW-Stevens Point   This paper reassesses the Anglo-American conquest of the trans-Appalachian west by examining the relationships between local politics, frontier violence, and state formation. It argues that the United States achieved effective sovereignty over the region less because of its inherent might than because of …

  • Nov 23
    Real American Girls and the American Girl in the Movies in the 1910s

    University Club, Room 212

    Monday Seminar: Leslie Midkiff DeBauche UW System Fellow (2009-2010) Communication Arts, UW-Stevens Point   In the United States in the 1910s the most popular movie stars, including Mary Pickford, Billie Burke, Irene Castle, and serial queen Pearl White (The Perils of Pauline, 1914), portrayed characters described by journalists as American Girls. These Girls, who were …

  • Nov 16
    At the Table of the Other: Eating and Ethics in Early Modern England

    University Club, Room 212

    Monday Seminar David B. Goldstein Solmsen Fellow (2009-2010) English, York University   This paper explores the meanings and functions of food in early modern English culture, arguing that for the Renaissance writer, the rhetoric of eating functions preeminently as a language of ethics that links or collapses the treatment of the food on one’s plate …

  • Nov 9
    National Colors: Race, Nation, and the Census in Latin America

    University Club, Room 212

    Monday Seminar: Mara Loveman Resident Fellow (2009-2010) Sociology, UW–Madison   Why do some states classify their populations by race in censuses while other states do not? What purpose have race queries on census forms served historically, and what purposes do they serve today? In this talk, Professor Loveman will discuss her research on the practice …

  • Nov 2
    The Fullness of Time: Tocqueville and the Democratic Moment

    University Club, Room 212

    Monday Seminar: Richard Avramenko Resident Fellow (2009-2010) Political Science, UW–Madison   This paper examines the concept of time in Tocqueville’s thought through the lens of the philosophy of internal time-consciousness. While Tocqueville himself offers no systematic analysis of time consciousness, his descriptive observations present a rich, comparative account. Tocqueville’s way of thinking, it will be …