Past Events
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Nov 29Historical Linguists Take to the Field: scientific encounters with “living language” in Germany, 1915-1918
University Club, Room 212
Monday Seminar: Judith Kaplan William Coleman Dissertation Fellow (2010-2011) History of Science, UW–Madison This presentation begins with a sketch of Judith’s dissertation research on the history of language sciences in Imperial Germany. It will identify factors that contributed to a shift from ancient to contemporary evidence in studies on the “life” of language. The …
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Nov 29Cruising for Impermanence
University Club, Room 212
Monday Seminar: Bretton White Dana-Allen Dissertation Fellow (2010-2011) Spanish and Portuguese, UW–Madison This talk will explore how the gay and transvestite characters in the play Chamaco (2006), by Abel González Melo, travel through and manipulate the central city spaces of Havana, most notably the Parque Central, transforming official, celebratory spaces of the nation into …
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Nov 22Photography in Sound: The Transatlantic Radio Feature 1939-1946
University Club, Room 212
Monday Seminar: Michele Hilmes Resident Fellow (2010-2011) Communication Arts, UW–Madison Radio as a sound medium rose to a height of aesthetic accomplishment in the WWII era “feature” program, as it simultaneously became a powerful instrument of propaganda for nations at war, most notably in Britain and the United States. This talk will trace some …
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Nov 15From Rags to Yichus: Scrap, Secondhand, and Surplus Dealers in American Jewish Communities
University Club, Room 212
Monday Seminar: Jonathan Z. S. Pollack Madison Area Technical College Fellow (2010-2011) History, Madison Area Technical College The seminar will present an introductory proposal for a work on the history of Jewish entrepreneurs in the scrap, surplus, and secondhand-goods industries. Beginning with the Yiddish concept of “yichus,” roughly translated as “living up to the …
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Nov 8Literature as Historiography: W.G. Sebald’s Hybrid Discourse
University Club, Room 212
Monday Seminar: Lynn Wolff Dana-Allen Dissertation Fellow (2010-2011) German, UW–Madison The discursive difference between literature and historiography as defined by Aristotle has remained an organizing principle for both discourses across the ages. In my dissertation I trace the sustained contact between literature and historiography, highlighting where they diverge and converge, and examining, in particular, …
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Nov 4The Farther Shores of Literacy: Amerindian Graphic invention and the World of Letters
Grainger Hall, 4151
2010 Burdick-Vary Symposium: New World peoples had already invented a huge range of graphic systems when Europeans brought the alphabet to America. Colonial letters interacted with Amerindian pictography, glyphs, cord-writing, and other graphic arts for centuries. This symposium brings together foremost researchers familiar with deeper and more varied meanings of “writing” in the Americas. …
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Nov 1Medieval Superstition and European Modernity
University Club, Room 212
Monday Seminar: Michael D. Bailey Solmsen Fellow (2010-2011) History, Iowa State University Concern over and condemnation of superstition (always a negative category) surged in the late Middle Ages (fourteenth and fifteenth centuries), embodied finally in the person of the learned demonologist and witch-hunting magistrate, who saw himself as opposing the worst forms of superstition …
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Oct 25The Invention of Monasticism
University Club, Room 212
Monday Seminar: Albrecht Diem Solmsen Fellow (2010-2011) History, Syracuse University Albrecht will present an outline of his research project, which focuses on the process of monastic institution forming in the late antique and early medieval west. He is especially interested in the modes of shaping monastic identities and modes of communal life through the …
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Oct 18The Other Operation Dixie: Public Employees and the Postwar Revival of Organized Labor
University Club, Room 212
Monday Seminar: William Jones Race, Ethnicity, and Indigeneity Fellow (2010-2011) History, UW–Madison The defeat of Operation Dixie, a million-dollar campaign to unionize southern manufacturing after the Second World War, has long been recognized as a critical watershed in the postwar decline of organized labor in the United States. Yet not a single book or …
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Oct 11Toypurina and the Hidden Histories of California
University Club, Room 212
Monday Seminar: Maria Lepowsky Resident Fellow (2010-2011) Anthropology, Gender and Women’s Studies, UW–Madison In 1785 a young Tongva woman named Toypurina led a revolt against the Spanish mission at San Gabriel, near a newly founded pueblo whose name was later shortened to Los Angeles. Toypurina, this research shows, was not only a recognized shaman …