Past Events
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Feb 10Asian Fetish: Race and the Politics of Fantasy
University Club, Room 212
Monday Seminar Leslie Bow Senior REI Fellow (2013-2017) English and Asian American Studies, UW–Madison If, as psychoanalyst Robert Stoller asserted, “a fetish is a story masquerading as an object,” what is the story underlying racial fetishism? A process of idealization, fetishism illuminates the structures of a collective racial imaginary in which repressed anxiety manifests …
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Feb 3Introducing Absurd Literature: Defining without Reducing
University Club, Room 212
Monday Seminar: Michael Y. Bennett UW System Fellow (2013-2014) English, UW-Whitewater There is the common notion that while someone may not be able to define absurd literature, one clearly knows absurd literature when one reads it. It is this very issue that this book attempts to address. The main difficulty is, is it possible …
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Jan 27Discourses of Debt and Lending in Medieval Iberia
University Club, Room 212
Monday Seminar: Gregory Milton Solmsen Fellow (2013-2014) History, University of South Florida The moral language of debt in medieval Iberia delineated a wide range of activity for Christians and Jews. People and communities attempted to define their roles and relationships through a complex lens of moral, economic, and social interests situated within a highly …
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Jan 21Machiavelli at 500
University Club, Room 212
Spring 2014 Faculty Development Seminar: Kristin Phillips-Court French and Italian Daniel Kapust Political Science Machiavelli’s Prince was completed 500 years ago, and it – along with its author and his works – has been the subject of controversy ever since. The project of the seminar is a study of Machiavelli’s major writings, …
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Dec 9Resentment
University Club, Room 212
Monday Seminar: Benedict Robinson Solmsen Fellow (2013-2014) English, Stony Brook University The word resentment and its cognates made their first appearance in the English language around 1600; but at that moment the word meant something strikingly different from what we usually mean by it. Far from naming a secretive and envious anger, it was …
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Dec 2Tragedy of Reason: Natural Law and Literature in Early Modernity
University Club, Room 212
Monday Seminar: Ben LaBreche Solmsen Fellow (2013-2014) English, University of Mary Washington The sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries saw a renewed interest in natural law, which offered a means of rationalizing political relations and promoting justice. The potential violence and determinism of natural law, however, also threatened to undermine justice. The seminar will show …
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Nov 25Claiming Continuity: Family Planning, Political Dynasties and Narrative Form in the Indian Emergency
University Club, Room 212
Monday Seminar: Ayelet Ben-Yishai Honorary Fellow (2013-2014) English Department, University of Haifa, Israel Imposed by India’s “Greatest Prime Minister,” from June 1975 to January 1977, the State of Emergency is usually presented as an anomaly in the annals of the world’s largest democracy. As anthropologist Emma Tarlo has noted (2010), while historians, political scientists …
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Nov 18Atreus and Thyestes in Greek and Roman Tragedy
University Club, Room 212
Monday Seminar Anne Duncan Solmsen Fellow (2013-2014) Classics and Religious Studies, University of Nebraska-Lincoln There was a saying in imperial Rome: “The worst actor plays the king.” Officially, this aphorism pointed out the tendency for stage tyrants to be played by the least prestigious actor in a troupe; unofficially, it was a subversive critique …
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Nov 142013 Workshop on Publication Strategies in the Humanities
University Club, Banquet Hall (lower level)
Panel Discussion and Workshop: Helen Tartar, Editorial Director, Fordham University Press Gwen Walker, Editorial Director, University of Wisconsin Press Steve Stern, Alberto Flores Galindo and Hilldale Professor of History, Vice Provost for Faculty and Staff, and co-editor of the book series “Critical Human Rights” through the University of Wisconsin Press Preeti Chopra, Associate Professor, Art …
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Nov 11The Worlding Work of the Cigarette: Tracking the Modern Girl Assemblage in the U.S. and China
University Club, Banquet Hall (lower level)
Monday Seminar: Nan Enstad Resident Fellow (2013-2014) History, UW–Madison In the early 20th century, consumers in China considered the cigarette a foreign import from the west, but consumers in the U.S. saw it as a foreign import from the east. Because of entrenched models of globalization that assume “modern” commodities followed a west-to-east trajectory, …