This event is one of the Humanities Without Boundaries events.
Wollheim, the author of Art and Its Objects and Painting as an Art, will discuss how philosophy can throw light on the major issues of art: What is art? What is the value of art? And, how do we interpret individual works of art? He will use the art of painting to illustrate these topics.
"Richard Wollheim is a philosopher who has contributed to virtually every debate in his discipline," says UW - Madison philosophy professor Noel Carroll. "He's one of the leading aestheticians in the English-speaking world and is a renowned commentator on the discourse of psychoanalysis."
Wollheim is a professor of philosophy at University of California - Berkeley. His most recent book is On the Emotions published by Yale University Press. Wollheim is also the author of Freud; On Art and the Mind; The Thread of Life and The Mind and Its Depths.
Patricia Williams
Professor of Law, Columbia University
Obstacle Illusions: Profiling and the Politics of Racial Identity
October 16, 2000 @ 7:30 pm
Wisconsin Historical Society Auditorium
This event is one of the Humanities Without Boundaries events.
A former faculty member of the UW-Madison Law School and winner of a 2000 MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, Williams, in addition to her legal scholarship, is noted for her work and commentary on social justice issues. She contributes the column "Diary of a Mad Law Professor" for the The Nation and has written numerous articles for scholarly journals and popular magazines and newspapers such as the New York Times, USA Today, Ms., New Yorker and the Village Voice. Her book, The Alchemy of Race and Rights, has been hailed as one of the "feminist classics of the last twenty years" that "literally changed women's lives" and was chosen as one of the ten best non-fiction books of the decade by Amazon.com. Her other books include The Rooster's Egg and Seeing a Color-Blind Future: The Paradox of Race.
Williams has also appeared on a variety of television and radio shows, including Today (NBC), Newshour with Jim Lehrer (PBS) and Fresh Air with Terri Gross (NPR).
Before entering academia, she practiced law as a consumer advocate and Deputy City Attorney for the City of Los Angeles, and as a staff attorney for the Western Center on Law and Poverty.
Natalie Zemon Davis
Noted author and historian
Jews, Africans, and Philosophes: The Suriname Stories of David Cohen Nassy
November 29, 2000 @ 7:30 pm
Wisconsin Historical Society Auditorium
This event is one of the Humanities Without Boundaries events.
"Natalie Zemon Davis is one of the world's most distinguished historians of early modern Europe," says Robert Kingdon, UW - Madison Professor Emeritus, in History. "She is a brilliant lecturer, many of her lectures have become prize-winning articles and been published in books. Her lecture in Madison is a part of her ambitious current project studying selected people who crossed borders, including racial, religious, and geographical borders, in both the early modern world and the twentieth century."
Davis is the Henry Charles Lea Professor of History Emeritus at Princeton University and currently Adjunct Professor of History and Senior Fellow in Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto. She is best known as the author of 1983 biography, The Return of Martin Guerre, her exploration of mistaken identity in a sixteenth-century French village. She also collaborated on the movie adaptation starring Gerard Depardieu.
In her highly regarded book, Society and Culture in Early Modern France, and in numerous essays, Davis looks at early trade unions, women's work, carnivals, religious riots, religious symbolism, the impact of printing and the uses of proverbs and popular forms of autobiography. Her other books include Women on the Margins: Three Seventeenth-Century Lives; The Gift in Sixteenth-Century France, newly published by UW Press; Slaves on Screen: Film and Historical Vision; and a new project, Braided Histories, a study of cultural mixture in sixteenth, eighteenth and twentieth centuries.
In her lecture, Davis will discuss David Nassy, a man of letters, a physician, slaveowner, and Jewish leader in the Dutch colony of Suriname in the late 18th century. She will address how he moved between the world of the Enlightenment and the ferment of colonial thought; how he viewed slavery; and what his relations were with the Africans and Indians of Suriname, especially with those Africans drawn into the Jewish religion.
William Gass
Award-winning novelist, essayist and teacher
Rilke and the Requiem
February 14, 2001 @ 7:30 pm
Wisconsin Historical Society Auditorium
This event is one of the Humanities Without Boundaries events.
Gass will discuss writer and poet Rainer Maria Rilke (1875 - 1926), considered one of the greatest lyric poets of modern Germany. Gass describes Rilke's "Requiem," the subject of his talk, as one of poetry's eternal triumphs. The poem, "Requiem for a Friend," is believed to have been composed for the artist Paula Becker.
Gass's recent book, Reading Rilke: Reflections on the Problems of Translation, was praised by the New York Times as "a rich, ambitious, densely interconnected set of musings on the life and work of the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke."
This past year Gass received the first PEN/Nabokov award for his accomplishments as an author "whose body of work represents achievement in a variety of literary genres, and is of enduring originality and consummate craftsmanship." He is also a two-time winner of the National Book Critics Circle for literary criticism.
Gass is the David May Distinguished University Professor Emeritus in the Humanities and former Director of the International Writers Center at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. He is the author of the novels Omensetter's Luck; Willie Masters' Lonesome Wife and The Tunnel. His collections of short stories include In the Heart of the Heart of the Country and Cartesian Sonata. Gass has also written numerous essays, translations and poems. His many awards include the Lannan Lifetime Achievement Award (1997), American Book Award (1996) and several Pushcart Prizes.
Sander L. Gilman
Professor of the Liberal Arts and Medicine at University of Illinois-Chicago, Director of the Humanities Laboratory
What Makes a Jew? Jewish Identity and Communism—the Case of Jurek Becker
April 18, 2001 @ 7:30 pm
Wisconsin Historical Society Auditorium
This event is one of the Humanities Without Boundaries events.
Gilman is a distinguished professor of the Liberal Arts and Medicine at the University of Illinois in Chicago and the director of the Humanities Laboratory. He is a cultural and literary historian and the author or editor of over fifty books, including Written on the Body: A Cultural History of Aesthetic Surgery; Love + Marriage = Death; The Fortunes of the Humanities: Thoughts for After the Year 2000; and Creating Beauty to Cure the Soul. He is the author of the basic study of the visual stereotyping of the mentally ill, Seeing the Insane, as well as the standard study, Jewish Self-Hatred.
Gilman is currently working on a biography of Jurek Becker (1937-1997), the subject of his talk. Becker, a close friend of Gilman, is the author of Jacob the Liar, one of the first major novels about the Holocaust written by someone living in Germany. Like Gilman, Becker was the son of Polish Jews, but his family stayed in Poland during World War II until they were separated. After Becker's mother died in a Nazi death camp, his father found him in a Red Cross orphanage and then raised him as a member of the Communist Party in East Germany. Becker published Jacob the Liar in 1968 and was eventually exiled to West Germany for his opposition to Communism. There he became a popular screen and television writer and voice in the quest for Jewish identity. He died in 1997.
