Dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, University of Illinois - Chicago
Holocaust Denial and Academic Freedom
September 13, 2001 @ 6:00 pm
Wisconsin Historical Society Auditorium
This event is one of the Humanities Without Boundaries events.
Dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago, Fish is known not only for his groundbreaking writings about the role of the reader in literature but also for his controversial views on a variety political and social issues.
In the world of academia, his book, Surprised by Sin: The Reader in Paradise Lost, published in 1967, is considered a landmark of Milton scholarship. His most recent book, How Milton Works, explores the radical effect of Milton's religious beliefs on his poetry and prose.
Patricia Limerick
Professor of History, University of Colorado - Boulder; Chair of the Board and Faculty Director of the Center of the American West
Humanities Without Restraint: Using History to Calm Down the American West
October 25, 2001 @ 7:30 pm
Wisconsin Historical Society Auditorium
This event is one of the Humanities Without Boundaries events.
Patricia Limerick, Professor of History at the University of Colorado at Boulder and Chair of the Board and Faculty Director of the Center of the American West, is an authority on the New West. A recipient of a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship "genius award" in 1995, Limerick is perhaps best known for her landmark 1987 book, The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West, which has had a major impact on the field of American history. She received both praise and criticism for debunking some long-held myths about the West and for focusing attention on women, minorities and the environment. Today, Limerick's views are widely accepted.
Her talk will focus on the Center of the American West's remarkable opportunities to get involved in contentious regional public issues. Working with audiences ranging from National Park Service superintendents to Latino elected public officials, urban planners to firefighters, Limerick found these audiences to be astonishingly receptive to historical perspectives on their work, truly hungry for chance to think more deeply about their dilemmas. After a number of these experiences, the familiar lamentations about the public's unwillingness to value and support higher education and the humanities puzzle Limerick. In truth, conditions in the interior West make the opportunities for engagement between university and community vital. Says Limerick, "the occasion of speaking at the University of Wisconsin suggests that the Center of the American West may be reinventing the wheel, duplicating dimensions of the 'Wisconsin Idea' in a rather different geographical setting. This talk will use some recent examples of the Center's work to explore the current-day manifestations of the venerable idea brought to an early peak by Wisconsin."
An advocate of taking academic knowledge outside the bounds of the university, Limerick has spoken to audiences as diverse as the Bureau of Land Management Summit Conference, the Mormon History Association, the Society of American Foresters, the International High Level Radioactive Waste Conference and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration conference on the future of space exploration. She also served as an advisor to the Ken Burn's PBS series, The American West. She is the author of Something in the Soil: Field Testing the New Western History and Desert Passages: Encounters with American Desert, and contributor to the Atlas of the New West and the upcoming Handbook of the New West.
Wen C. Fong
Douglas Dillon Curator Emeritus of Asian Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art
Chinese Calligraphy: The Embodied Image
November 15, 2001 @ 7:30 pm
Chazen Museum of Art, Room L160
This event is one of the Humanities Without Boundaries events.
"The brilliant scholar Wen C. Fong," reports the New York Times, describes calligraphy as "'the embodied expression of the artist's psychic powers' and that 'the subject of a calligraphic work is the brush as an extension of the calligrapher's own body.'"
Fong's talk will focus on the formation of Chinese calligraphic practice and theory; the relationship between Chinese calligraphy and painting; and Chinese art and its modern expression.
Fong is Douglas Dillon Curator Emeritus of Asian Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and former Edwards S. Sanford Professor of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University. During his 30-year affiliation with the Met, he is credited with building the largest and most comprehensive collection of Asian art in the West, expanding and renovating its Asian art galleries, modernizing the department's conservation program and organizing dozens of acclaimed special exhibitions.
Over the last 45 years, Wen Fong has authored, edited, and co-edited 18 books and catalogues, as well as numerous articles for prestigious journals and bulletins in the Asian art field. His books and catalogues include Sung and Yuan Painting; Summer Mountains: The Timeless Landscape; Returning Home: Tao-chi's Album of Landscapes and Flowers; the best-selling and critically acclaimed Beyond Representation: Chinese Painting and Calligraphy, 8th-14th Century.
Steven Pinker
Peter de Florez Professor, Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences; MacVicar Faculty Fellow, MIT
The Blank Slate
March 5, 2002 @ 7:30 pm
Wisconsin Historical Society Auditorium
This event is one of the Humanities Without Boundaries events.
Research findings from evolution, genetics, brain science, and artificial intelligence have been denounced both by the political right and the political left. Pinker will trace the sources of this fear and loathing, and try to show how they may be addressed. The lecture will preview the book The Blank Slate to be published this fall.
Pinker is currently Peter de Florez Professor in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and a MacVicar Faculty Fellow at MIT. His research has focused on visual cognition and the psychology of language, culminating in three books and many journal articles. He has won numerous awards and honors, including the Troland Award from the National Academy of Sciences and two prizes from the American Psychological Association. He is the author of the critically acclaimed The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language, described by the New York Times as a "brilliant, witty, and altogether satisfying book;" as well as How the Mind Works and Words and Rules: The Ingredients of Language. He is the editor of Cognition and serves on many professional panels, including the usage panel of the American Heritage Dictionary and the Scientific Advisory Panel of an eight-hour NOVA television series on evolution. Pinker also writes frequently in the popular press, including The New York Times, Time, The New Yorker and Technology Review.
Kwame Anthony Appiah
Professor of Afro-American Studies and Philosophy, Harvard
Race, Gender and Individuality
April 4, 2002 @ 7:30 pm
Memorial Union
This event is one of the Humanities Without Boundaries events.
Appiah will explore how liberalism, as described in John Stuart Mill's "On Liberty," has long celebrated individuality-self-creation, self-definition and the management of one's own life. Appiah says that who we are is also a reflection of other people's view of us and our memberships in certain groups that can be defined by race, gender, religion, sexual orientation or nationality, for instance. How should we think about the trade off between self-direction and fitting into patterns made and sustained by other people, asks Appiah, and what are the political consequences?
Raised in Ghana and educated at Cambridge in England, Appiah began his academic career as a philosopher specializing in semantics and logic. His work in African-American Studies began when he was visiting Yale as a graduate student in the late 70s and he has since published widely in African and African-American literary and cultural studies. He is the author of the award-winning book, In My Father's House, which deals with the role of African and African-American intellectuals in shaping contemporary African cultural life. He also co-authored Color Conscious, which discusses political morality and race.
He has published three novels, Avenging Angel, Nobody Likes Letitia, and Another Death in Venice, and writes regularly for the New York Review of Books. His most recent major publication is a CD-ROM encyclopedia of Africa and her diaspora entitled Encarta Africana and its companion print encyclopedia.
Arthur Danto
Art critic, The Nation; Emeritus Johnsonian Professor of Philosophy, Columbia University
The Body in Philosophy, Art and Life
May 2, 2002 @ 7:30 pm
Chazen Museum of Art, Room L160
This event is one of the Humanities Without Boundaries events.
Danto, art critic for The Nation and Emeritus Johnsonian Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University, will talk about the differences between the way the human body is represented in philosophy and in art. Danto has been influential in the discussion of the classic problem of how one decides whether or not something is a work of art, and made waves 25 years ago by declaring that art came to an end in the sixties.
Danto is the author of numerous books, including Nietzsche as Philosopher, Mysticism and Morality, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace, Narration and Knowledge, Connections to the World: The Basic Concepts of Philosophy, and Encounters and Reflections: Art in the Historical Present, a collection of art criticism which won the National Book Critics Circle Prize for Criticism, 1990. His recent books are Embodied Meanings: Critical Essays and Aesthetic Meditations; Madonna of the Future: Critical Essays in a Pluralistic Art World; After the End of Art; Beyond the Brillo Box: The Visual Arts in Post-Historical Perspective; and The Body/Body Problem: Selected Essays.
