Past Events
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Sep 25Reproducing a Bodhisattva: Women’s Artistic Devotion in Late Imperial China
University Club, Room 212
Monday Seminar: Yuhang Li Resident Fellow (2017-2018) Art History, UW–Madison What did lay Buddhist women actually do in order to forge a connection with the bodhisattva Guanyin after he underwent a sex-change and became a female deity during late imperial China? How did a shared gender identity between the worshipper and worshipped enable practitioners …
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Sep 18The Benefits of Failure: From the Gnostics to Cioran
University Club, Room 212
Monday Seminar: Costica Bradatan Solmsen Fellow (2017-2018) Humanities, Texas Tech University Because of our culture’s obsession with success, we miss something important about what it means to be human and deny ourselves access to a deeper, more meaningful layer of our humanity. A sense of what we are in the grand scheme of things, …
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Sep 11Relevance
University Club, Room 212
Opening Panel Discussion: Must the humanities be “relevant”? To what, or to whom? How have perspectives on these questions evolved since the heated debates of the 1960s and 1970s? Can research be “irrelevant,” and if so, can it still be worth pursuing? Or, on the other hand, is all research in the humanities in …
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May 11Imprisonment, Encampment, Incarceration: Prison Studies in a Global Frame
University Club, Banquet Hall (lower level)
Speakers: A. Naomi Paik (Keynote) J. Daniel Elam Toussaint Losier Michael Farquhar Golnar Nikpour A.J. Yumi Lee Anthony Fontes Never before in history have as many people around the world been confined in carceral sites — penitentiaries, prisons, interrogation centers, supermax facilities, military detention camps, labor camps, and more — as they are today. …
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May 8Research in the Humanities: Past, Present, and Future
University Club, Banquet Hall (lower level)
Panel Discussion and Table Talks: Panelists are invited to reflect on the following questions; please come and share your ideas and memories on these as well: How might your discipline or interdisciplinary research area contribute to the future direction of the Humanities? How has your discipline’s relationship to the Humanities changed over the last …
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May 1Modernism, Theatre, and the Axis of Language in India
University Club, Room 212
Monday Seminar: Aparna Dharwadker Resident Fellow (2016-2017) English and Interdisciplinary Theatre Studies, UW–Madison The global turn in modernist studies has offered scholars of India the first significant opportunity to position modern Indian literature and theatre in the new time-space of modernism. However, the long premodern history of these cultural forms, and their embeddedness in …
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Apr 24Exploring the Real: New Modes of Documentary Theatre in Contemporary Mexico
University Club, Room 212
Monday Seminar: Paola Hernández Resident Fellow (2016-2017) Spanish & Portuguese, UW–Madison Why do we see a renaissance of documentary practices in contemporary theatre? Where and how does the idea of the affective of a staged biography or the autobiographical enter the scene? And what is the place that this genre of documentary fictions take …
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Apr 17Calculating Conversion: The Role of Mathematical Deliberation in Arabic Language Schools of Iberia and North Africa, ca. 1240-1300
University Club, Room 212
Monday Seminar Nicholas Jacobson William Coleman Dissertation Fellow (2016-2017) History of Science, Medicine, and Technology, UW–Madison In the middle decades of the thirteenth century, Dominican and Franciscan missionaries established schools devoted to the study of “oriental” languages in the Christian-occupied regions of Arabic Iberia and North Africa. At these sites friars studied Arabic and …
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Apr 10Corruption and Forensic Experts in British India
University Club, Room 212
Monday Seminar: Mitra Sharafi Resident Fellow (2016-2017) Law and Legal Studies, UW–Madison History Corrupt British forensic experts undermined race-based narratives about truth-telling and corruption in colonial India, as well as ideological claims made for western science and the rule of law. This talk examines two such cases circa 1900 that threatened credibility claims made …
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Apr 3Encounters in Qraiyeh: Imperial Ideology and French Industry in a Lebanese Village, 1900-1930
University Club, Room 212
Monday Seminar: John Boonstra Dana-Allen Dissertation Fellow (2016-2017) History, UW–Madison The history of European imperialism in the Middle East tends to follow a familiar script: competing powers developed “spheres of influence” within the late-stage Ottoman Empire, furthering economic interests and building on national traditions of religious alliance and cultural association, before establishing formal colonial …