Past Events
-
Feb 25Symposium on Globalization and the Humanities: Then and Now, Here and There
Pyle Center
IRH 50th Anniversary Symposium: The Symposium will address a number of vital debates about globalization, focusing on what the humanities can contribute to understanding globalization as well as how the humanities are being reinvented as a result of globalization. The political, economic, and technological controversies about globalization often overshadow its cultural and philosophical …
-
Feb 22To Russia With Love: Dorothy West’s Adventures in Moscow and Other Transatlantic Challenges to the Color Line
University Club, Room 212
Monday Seminar: Cherene Sherrard-Johnson Race, Ethnicity, and Indigeneity Fellow (2009-2010) English, UW–Madison This paper draws on a chapter in a book-in-progress, Dorothy West’s Paradise: A Biography of Class and Color. It places West’s personal reflections and publications about her Soviet sojourn in conversation with Nancy Prince’s 1825 narrative of her life in imperial Russia …
-
Feb 15Japanese Sovereignty and Declarations of War
University Club, Room 212
Monday Seminar: Douglas Howland UW System Fellow (2009-2010) History, UW-Milwaukee The paper treats the controversy surrounding Japan’s commencement of hostilities against Russia in February 1904, and examines how that start to the Russo-Japanese War informed discussions regarding the need for declarations of war prior to hostilities: within the Institut de droit international and at …
-
Feb 8We Gotta Get Out of This Place: Music and the Experience of Vietnam Veterans
University Club, Room 212
Monday Seminar: Craig Werner Senior Fellow (2009-2013) Afro-American Studies, UW–Madison This project, a collaboration between UW Professor Craig Werner and Vietnam veteran and veteran advocate Doug Bradley, uses music as a touchstone for constructing a veteran-centered narrative of the Vietnam era. The book is grounded in over 100 interviews with Vietnam veterans: combat soldiers, …
-
Feb 1Cannibalism and Colonialism
University Club, Room 212
Monday Seminar: Florence Bernault Resident Fellow (2009-2010) History, UW–Madison This paper explores cannibalism as a central trope of colonial engagements in West Equatorial Africa (Gabon) from the late nineteenth century to the late twentieth century. The literature has thought long and hard on the ways in which cannibalism expresses dominant ideas about limits and …
-
Jan 25We Have to Invent Him: Harley Lyrics, Hereford Maps, and the Life of Roger de Breynton, c.1290-1351
University Club, Room 212
Monday Seminar: Daniel Birkholz Solmsen Fellow (2009-2010) English, University of Texas at Austin This interdisciplinary study brings together two major documents of a forgotten period and a backwater region—the Hereford Cathedral Mappamundi [“map of the world”] (c.1305), and British Library Manuscript Harley 2253 (c.1340), a trilingual literary anthology—and reads them alongside a contemporary life …
-
Jan 21In Love With Russia: U.S. Women, Sexual Revolution, and Revolutionary Tourism, 1921-1935
Helen C. White Hall, Room 7191
Jay C. and Ruth Hall Lecture: Julia Mickenberg Honorary Fellow (2009-2010) American Studies, Univ of Texas at Austin The lecture examines how the modern sexual revolutions in Russia and the U.S. inspired American women’s revolutionary tourism in the Soviet Union in the 1920s and 1930s. Using fictional and archival sources, Mickenberg shows how many …
-
Dec 14Planetarity: Global Epistemologies in Modernist Studies
University Club, Room 212
Monday Seminar: Susan Stanford Friedman IRH Director English, UW–Madison This paper, written for a keynote address at the Modernist Studies Association (November, 2009), explores the “transnational turn” in modernist studies and the anxiety in the field over the expanded meanings of the categories modernism and modernity. It presents a manifesto in defense of these …
-
Nov 30From Statelessness to State Sovereignty: People and Politics on an Early American Frontier
University Club, Room 212
Monday Seminar: Rob Harper ACLS Residency Fellow (2009-2010) History, UW-Stevens Point This paper reassesses the Anglo-American conquest of the trans-Appalachian west by examining the relationships between local politics, frontier violence, and state formation. It argues that the United States achieved effective sovereignty over the region less because of its inherent might than because of …
-
Nov 23Real American Girls and the American Girl in the Movies in the 1910s
University Club, Room 212
Monday Seminar: Leslie Midkiff DeBauche UW System Fellow (2009-2010) Communication Arts, UW-Stevens Point In the United States in the 1910s the most popular movie stars, including Mary Pickford, Billie Burke, Irene Castle, and serial queen Pearl White (The Perils of Pauline, 1914), portrayed characters described by journalists as American Girls. These Girls, who were …