Past Events
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Feb 13Machiavelli’s Tragic Geography
University Club, Room 212
Monday Seminar: Kristin Phillips-Court Resident Fellow (2016-2017) Italian and Art History, UW–Madison Machiavelli’s writings substantiate more than their distillation into a political theory that stripped morality from politics. This seminar focuses on Machiavelli’s frequent recourse to images of the Italian terrain as a means of communicating knowledge in The Prince and his other literary …
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Feb 6Recovering the New Thought Novel
University Club, Room 212
Monday Seminar: Anne Stiles Kingdon Fellow (2016-2017) Department of English, Saint Louis University Did you know that many well-loved children’s classics contain hidden Christian Science and New Thought messages? My book shows how classic children’s fiction written around 1900 – works such as Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden (1911), L.M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green …
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Feb 3Show and Tell: Evidence, Erotics, and Embodiment in the Premodern World
University Club, Room 212
Lunchtime Roundtable Discussion with: Tina Chronopoulos, SUNY-Binghamton, Classics/IRH Ari Friedlander, University of Mississippi, English Dana Oswald, UW-Parkside, English/IRH Jennifer Row, Boston University, French/IRH When researching the history of sexuality, or thinking about past desires, erotics, and intimacies, what counts as evidence? What methods are crucial for some fields, and forgotten by others? Four scholars …
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Feb 2Desiring History and Historicizing Desire
University Club, Room 212
Graduate Seminar (Part of “Show and Tell: Evidence, Erotics, and Embodiment in the Premodern World” events): Ari Friedlander University of Mississippi, English Ari Friedlander, assistant professor of English (University of Mississippi) and editor of the Journal of Early Modern Cultural Studies (JEMCS) special issue “Desiring History and Historicizing Desire” will lead a special …
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Jan 30Is Love All You Need? Household Labor and Marriage Vows (1870-1920)
University Club, Room 212
Monday Seminar: Kimberley Reilly UW System Fellow (2016-2017) Democracy and Justice Studies; History Department; Women’s and Gender Studies Department, UW-Green Bay How did a wife earn her keep? This was a question a wide range of American reformers and jurists asked in the late nineteenth century. As middle-class women agitated for a greater political voice …
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Jan 23The Altercatio Ganymedis et Helene – It All Comes Together in the End (?)
University Club, Room 212
Monday Seminar: Tina Chronopoulos Solmsen Fellow (2016-2017) Classics and Medieval Studies, University of Binghamton, State University of New York Have you always wondered what a discussion about the pros and cons of same-sex versus opposite-sex sex might have looked like in 12th-century France? In today’s talk I focus on just such a discussion which …
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Dec 12Troubling Conjugal Loyalties
University Club, Room 212
Monday Seminar: Sukanya Banerjee UW System Fellow (2016-2017) English, UW-Milwaukee How is it that monogamy came to serve as one of the markers of “modern” marriage? Which nineteenth-century literary genres did it play on? What kind of a transimperiality does conjugal loyalty, as defined along a register of monogamy, engender? In addressing these questions, …
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Dec 8Limits of Racebending in the Struggle for Asian American Representation
Helen C. White Hall, Room 6191
2016 Burdick-Vary Lecture: Lori Kido Lopez Communication Arts, UW–Madison Studies of fandom and fan culture have always centered on the complex feelings of fascination and frustration that motivate audiences. When we consider the way that race is represented in beloved texts, there are clearly political consequences to these emotional connections. But what about texts …
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Dec 5Passing on Texts in the Ancient World: A Case Study with the Biblical Texts from the Qumran Dead Sea Scrolls
University Club, Room 212
Monday Seminar: Sidnie Crawford Kingdon Fellow (2016-2017) Classics and Religious Studies, University of Nebraska-Lincoln When we think of “the Bible” in the 21st century, we usually think of a fixed text, in an ancient language, that is revered by one or more religious communities as “the word of God.” How did ancient Jews think …
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Nov 28Natural History and Personhood in Early America
University Club, Room 212
Monday Seminar: Julia Dauer Dana-Allen Dissertation Fellow (2016-2017) English, UW–Madison How did transatlantic writers use “I” in their discourse? When did “I” become the familiar protagonist of American letters? What can first-person prose tell us about the category of the “person”? My dissertation approaches these questions by considering the relationship between natural history, personhood, …