Past Events
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Mar 7Beasts and Monsters
University Club, Room 212
Monday Seminar Mario Ortiz-Robles Resident Fellow (2010-2011) English, UW–Madison This seminar will focus on the animality of the monsters that appear in late-Victorian gothic fiction. It will explore how evolutionary dynamics inform the narrative representation of figures such as Dracula, Jekyll-and-Hyde, and Dorian Gray and consider the extent to which these rhetorical effects help …
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Feb 28Composing Music for the Feast of Fools: The Case of the Kyrie Asini
University Club, Room 212
Monday Seminar: Max Harris Independent Researcher Over the past thirty years, the Kyrie Asini (Kyrie of the Ass) has become an established part of the repertoire of medieval music supposedly having its origins in the Feast of Fools. Musicologists and historians now confidently describe it as “traditional,” “thirteenth century,” and “French.” I will argue …
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Feb 232011 Workshop on Publication Strategies in the Humanities
University Club, Room 212
Workshop and Panel Discussion: Paul Boyer, Merle Curti Professor Emeritus of History, Editor, UW-Press Series, Studies in American Thought and Culture; Editor-in-Chief, The Oxford Companion to United States History. Former director of the Institute, 1993-2001. Nancy Marshall, Associate Professor of Art History; author of Painting Victorian London: City of Gold and Mud, Yale University Press, …
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Feb 21Imagining Alaska: Translocal Processes and the Formation of Place
University Club, Room 212
Monday Seminar: Sandhya Ganapathy UW System Fellow (2010-2011) Anthropology, UW-Stevens Point This presentation is drawn from a chapter in my book project, Partial Alliances: Environmentalism, Development, and Indigeneity in Alaska. The book presents an ethnographically grounded analysis of contemporary environmental contestation in Alaska, with particular attention to relationships that exist between Alaskan Native communities …
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Feb 14If We Must Die: African Americans’ Fight in the Race of War of 1919
University Club, Room 212
Monday Seminar: David Krugler UW System Fellow (2010-2011) History, UW-Platteville If We Must Die is a book in progress about the widespread antiblack collective violence (race riots and lynchings) which engulfed the United States following World War I. It examines these race riots and lynchings from the perspective of African Americans, with special attention …
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Feb 7Demosthenes and Fourth-Century Athens: Biography, History, and Politics
University Club, Room 212
Monday Seminar: Susan Lape Solmsen Fellow (2010-2011) Classics, University of Southern California This paper is an overview of a larger biographical and historical study of the Athenian orator Demosthenes (384-322BCE). It discusses Demosthenes’ inheritance dispute, his political theory, and his role in shaping Athenian resistance to Philip II of Macedon. Throughout, it considers the …
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Jan 31Maimonides on Divine Providence and Moral Luck
Monday Seminar: Steven Nadler Resident Fellow (2010-2011) Philosophy, UW–Madison A look at the way in which the medieval Jewish philosopher Maimonides explains the workings of divine providence, and especially how the virtuous person might be able to escape the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. We will focus on a particularly troublesome passage that …
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Jan 24Enchantings: A Cultural Biography of the Postcolonial African State
University Club, Room 212
Monday Seminar: Tejumola Olaniyan Senior Fellow (2007-2011; 2012-2013) African Languages and Literature; English, UW–Madison The seminar is an inquiry into the relations between the postcolonial African state and selected cultural forms, practices, and institutions its peculiar constitutive features engendered. It will also explore how the forms and practices generate and circulate a certain image …
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Dec 13“No, you’re not to do that!”: Fractured Families, Faulty Misunderstandings in Nathalie Sarraute’s ‘Enfance’
University Club, Room 212
Monday Seminar: E. Nicole Meyer French, UW-Green Bay UW System Fellow (2010-2011) As a privileged literary site for the depiction of identity and of awareness of self, the autobiographical novel has born witness, thematically and formally, to family fractures through its intimate dramas and intersections with the wider world. Recent autobiographical texts by …
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Dec 6Women’s Anamnesia: Re-Membering the Forgotten Hi/story of Algerian Civil War
University Club, Room 212
Monday Seminar: Névine El- Nossery Resident Fellow (2010-2011) French and Italian, UW–Madison Since the outbreak of violence that started in Algeria in the 90s with the rise of Islamic fundamentalism, Algerian women authors have coped with this inexorable, and yet inconceivable reality through a form of ‘urgency writing’ that resists dominant versions of official …