Past Events
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Oct 4Plato’s Phaedo: The Initiation of a Philosopher
University Club, Room 212
Monday Seminar: David Ebrey Solmsen Fellow (2016-2017) Philosophy, Northwestern University Plato’s Phaedo is one of his literary and philosophical masterpieces, set on the last day of Socrates’ life. How should we understand Socrates’ reference to Pythagorean and Orphic religious views in the dialogue? Is this a separate feature of dialogue, independent of the detailed …
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Sep 26History, Time, and Mass Atrocity in Cambodia
University Club, Room 212
Monday Seminar: Anne Hansen Resident Fellow (2016-2017) History, UW–Madison Buddhist prophesies about the end of our time and the dawning of a new era tied to the enlightenment of the fifth buddha in our kalpa or “epoch” have circulated widely across the Buddhist world for nearly two millennia. In Cambodia, these millenarian prophesies have …
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Sep 19The Trial Nobody Expected: A Tale of Torture, Music, and Human Rights in the Americas
University Club, Room 212
Monday Seminar: Steve Stern Senior Fellow (2015-2017) History, UW–Madison This is an extraordinary true-life story. It’s a tale of murder, human rights, and social justice in the Americas. It’s about the power of music in tumultuous times – and also, the power of historical knowledge and the humanities in the wake of atrocity. This …
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Sep 14Kawaii: Fraught Innocence in Asian (American) Commodity Culture
Conrad A. Elvehjem Building, Room L140
2016 Nellie Y. McKay Lecture in the Humanities: Christine Yano Professor of Anthropology, University of Hawaii Pink globalization, the spread of cute goods from Japan to other parts of the world, has been a stronghold of consumption in various parts of the industrial world in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, particularly with …
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Sep 12Agency: What Does It Mean Across the Humanities?
University Club, Banquet Hall (lower level)
Panel Discussion: What are the meanings of “agency” in various disciplines and interdisciplines of the humanities? To what extent is it theorized or assumed? Does agency mean the freedom to act? To think? To feel? Is agency individual or collective? Does agency imply autonomy? How does agency relate to structure? Institutions? Oppression? Political Activism? …
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May 6Global Reformations: Religion and the Making of the Modern World
University Club, Room 212
Religion is omnipresent in modernity, and in spite of twentieth-century theorists who saw secularization as intrinsic to the process of modernization, shows no signs of disappearing. After discarding secularization as a plausible historical model, how do we understand the changes in religion that made way for the experience of modernity around the globe? From India …
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Apr 25The Novelistic Individual in the Age of Microeconomics (1871-2008)
University Club, Room 212
Monday Seminar: Annie McClanahan UW System Fellow (2015-2016) English, UW-Milwaukee What does microeconomics—the study of small-scale consumer decisions—have to do with the modern novel? Microeconomics seems to have more to do with mathematical formalism than with literary form, and yet its emphasis on the desires and pleasures of the individual shares much with the …
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Apr 18The Translation of Foreign Religion in Herodotus
University Club, Room 212
Monday Seminar: Andreas Schwab Solmsen Fellow (2015-2016) Classics, Ruprecht-Karls-University of Heidelberg In his famous second book on Egypt, Herodotus (ca. 484-425 BCE), the so-called “father of history” and ethnographic writer from Halicarnassus (present-day Bodrum in southwestern Turkey), emphasizes that of all peoples, the Egyptians are “the most exceedingly religious/pious.” Yet what did the concept …
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Apr 15The Book that Made Philosophy Modern: the World of Descartes’s Treatise on Man
University Club, Room 212
2016 Burdick-Vary Symposium: Participants: Daniel Garber, Stuart Professor of Philosophy, Department of Philosophy, Princeton University Tad Schmaltz, Professor Department of Philosophy, University of Michigan Gideon Manning, Assistant Professor of Philosophy and History of Science, California Institute of Technology Harold Cook, Professor of History, Brown University Susanna Berger, Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts, …
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Apr 11Part for the Whole or Whole for the Parts: Body Parts in Twentieth-Century Women’s Writing
University Club, Room 212
Monday Seminar: Devaleena Das Honorary Fellow (2016-2017) University of Wisconsin at Whitewater, Department of Women’s and Gender Studies As Margaret Atwood writes, the female body has always seen as a “hot topic” in cultures across the globe. Thus regions throughout the world have employed standardized systems of mapping and dissecting the female body, and …