The Humanities Friday Lunch and Lecture program offers informal opportunities to learn about the work of members of the UW-Madison humanities faculty. A buffet lunch is provided at no charge thanks to the University Club and the Bertha and Rawson J. Pickard Fund of the University of Wisconsin Foundation.
Catherine C. Kautsky
Professor of Music (Piano), UW-Madison
E.T.A. Hoffmann Through the Eyes of Robert Schumann: Hoffmann's Kappellmesiter Kreisler as He Appears in Schumann's Kreisleriana
September 23, 2005 @ 12:00 pm
Banquet Room, University Club
This event is one of the Humanities Friday Lunches events.
This lecture-recital will explore the connections between Schumann's piano cycle, Kreisleriana, and E.T.A Hoffmann's novel, Kater Murr. Hoffmann's hero, the Kappellmeister Kreisler, is a musician obsessed by madness and magic. He bears an uncanny resemblance not only to Hoffmann himself, but to Schumann as well, and this presentation will show how Schumann's music, through its use of cyclic form, non-sequitor, and harmonic ambiguity, creates a musical composition strikingly indebted to Hoffmann's literary creation.
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.
Pianist Catherine Kautsky is Professor of Music at the University of WI-Madison and chair of its piano department. She has concertized throughout the United States and abroad as a recitalist, soloist with orchestra, and chamber musician, appearing in venues such as Alice Tully Hall and Carnegie Recital Hall in New York, Jordan Hall and the Gardner Museum in Boston, the Phillips Collection in Washington D.C., and the Cultural Center in Chicago. She has soloed with the St. Louis Symphony, Milwaukee Chamber Orchestra, and Wisconsin Chamber Orchestra, performed chamber music at the Aspen, Tanglewood, and Grand Teton summer music festivals, and appeared frequently on the radio in Chicago, New York, Washington D.C., St. Louis, Pittsburgh, and Madison. Ms. Kautsky is the winner of the Passamaneck Competition in Pittsburgh, the C.D. Jackson Master Award at Tanglewood, and the Association Amicale d’Ecole Normale de Musique de Paris Prize of the French Piano Institute in Paris. Last November she was awarded the 2005 Arts Institute Creative Arts Award at UW-Madison for her work connecting music with other disciplines, particularly literature. Ms. Kautsky has traveled widely, performing frequently in France and England, and presenting concerts and classes most recently in China, Korea, and South Africa. Her articles have appeared in such journals as Clavier, American Music Teacher, and International Piano, and her CD of three pieces for piano and narrator, in which she both performs and speaks, was issued by Vox Classics.
Ms. Kautsky holds a bachelor’s degree from the New England Conservatory, a master’s degree from the Juilliard School, and a doctoral degree in performance from the State University of New York at Stony Brook, where she studied under Gilbert Kalish. Following her New York debut, the New York Times called her “ a pianist who can play Mozart and Schubert as though their sentiments and habits of speech coincided exactly with hers...She gave these pieces nuances that made them meaningful on a human everyday level. The music spoke directly to the listener, with neither obfuscation nor pretense.
Carolina Sartorio
Assistant Professor of Philosophy, UW-Madison
The Ethics of Runaway Trains
October 7, 2005 @ 12:00 pm
Banquet Room, University Club
This event is one of the Humanities Friday Lunches events.
Is it morally permissible to act so as to minimize harm? It seems that sometimes it is, and other times it isn't. This problem is known in the philosophical literature as "the trolley problem." In her Humanities Friday Lunch talk, Carolina Sartorio will discuss how runaway trolleys illustrate the problem, why it resists an easy solution, and offer a suggestion as to how we should go about solving it.
Carolina Sartorio joined the UW-Madison faculty in 2003 as Assistant Professor in the Philosophy Department. She earned her Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2003, and specializes in metaphysics, ethics, and their intersection. A native of Argentina, Sartorio earned her B.A. in Philosophy at the University of Buenos Aires. She maintains a website, including downloadable versions of several recent papers, at philosophy.wisc.edu/sartorio.
Tom Broman
Pierre Bayle and the circulation of news at the end of the 17th century
December 9, 2005 @ 12:00 pm
Banquet Room, University Club
This event is one of the Humanities Friday Lunches events.
In this presentation, Broman will discuss the time when scholarly journals first appeared, offering subscribers access to the latest developments in the Republic of Letters. News of this sort had been available before, of course, in the correspondence carried on by well placed 16th-century scholars such as Erasmus and Philipp Melancthon. But in the late 17th century, the appearance of the Journal des Sçavans, the Philosophical Transactions, the Acta Eruditorum, and the Nouvelles de la République des Lettres, the latter edited in the Netherlands by Pierre Bayle, opened up new possibilities for the circulation of knowledge. Bayle's Nouvelles introduced another novelty as well, which was his critical engagement with the materials under review, and his placement of publications in contexts defined by controversies between different authors. In this way, Bayle made literary controversy itself an item of consumer demand and an inducement to subscribe to his highly successful journal.
Quitman Eugene Phillips
Professor of Art History, East Asian Studies, and Religious Studies; Chair, Department of Art History; University of Wisconsin-Madison
The Karma Mirror in Japan
March 10, 2006 @ 12:00 pm
Banquet Room, University Club
This event is one of the Humanities Friday Lunches events.
The Karma Mirror in the court of King Enma is a major element in a complex iconography of postmortem judgment. What the deceased sees in this mirror is not his immediate reflection, but his deeds over past lives as the Karma Mirror pierces time and space to make him witness to the causes and conditions of his karmic burden. Revealing transgressions is, in fact, integral to the function of the mirror in the process of judgment as described in the apocryphal Ten Kings Sutras. This talk will explore the relationship between the Karma mirror and other strains of mirror belief in East Asia and particular developments in its imagery in Japan, which suggest attempts to address contemporary societal concerns.
Gene Phillips is Professor of Japanese art history, current department chair, and affiliate with Religious Studies and East Asian Studies. His early publications focus on the Kano school. His book The Practices of Painting in Japan, 1475-150 was published by Stanford University Press in 2000. Since then, he has turned his attention to late medieval Japanese religious art, especially in relation to popular concerns with the afterlife. His most recent publication is an article called, "Narrating the Salvation of the Elite: the Jofukuji Version of the Ten Kings." This year he is leading an interdisciplinary faculty workshop at UW called "Monstrosity and Alterity."
Jeremi Suri
Associate Professor, Department of History, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Henry Kissinger and the Transformation of International Society
April 7, 2006 @ 12:00 pm
Banquet Room, University Club
This event is one of the Humanities Friday Lunches events.
Henry Kissinger is one of the most controversial figures of the last century. This lecture will examine his career for the insights it offers on some of the crucial transformations in our contemporary world. In particular, the lecture will analyze how Kissinger's activities, and reactions to his activities, over the last sixty years shed important light on redefinitions of democracy, national identity, foreign policy, and "international society." This lecture will also address some of the theoretical and empirical challenges of doing international research that crosses into the experiences of various societies.
Jeremi Suri is an Associate Professor in the Department of History. He is the author of the prize-winning book, "Power and Protest: Global Revolution and the Rise of Détente" (Harvard University Press, 2003). He is also the author of numerous scholarly journal articles and a frequent contributor to various newspapers and radio programs. Professor Suri is presently completing a new book, tentatively titled Henry Kissinger and the American Century".
Judith Deutsch Kornblatt
Professor, Dept of Slavic Languages and Literature; and Associate Dean for the Arts and Humanities in the Graduate School, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Divine Wisdom and the Sophia of Vladimir Solovyov
April 21, 2006 @ 12:00 pm
Banquet Room, University Club
This event is one of the Humanities Friday Lunches events.
Vladimir Solovyov (1854-1900), the most influential religious philosopher of modern Russia, was also a poet, a dramatist, a public intellectual, and, by his own account, a visionary. This talk will explore Solovyov's three alleged visions of the Divine Sophia, and will posit visual stimuli in ancient Russian iconography from Novgorod as well as, perhaps surprisingly, the Reading Room of the British Museum on London.
Judith Deutsch Kornblatt (BA, Williams College; PhD, Columbia University) is professor of Slavic Languages and Literature and Associate Dean for the Arts and Humanities in the Graduate School, as well as member of several interdisciplinary programs, including Jewish Studies, Religious Studies, and the Center for Russia, East Europe and Central Asia. Her publications include "The Cossack Hero in Russian Literature", "Russian Religious Thought", and "Doubly Chosen: Jewish Identity, the Soviet Intelligentsia, and the Russian Orthodox Church", and numerous articles on the Russian religious philosopher, Vladimir ev. A recipient of grants from the NEH, ACLS/SSRC, IREX, and a Solov H..I. Romnes Faculty Fellowship from the UW. She has been visiting scholar at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, where she went to interview Russian Jews who were baptized into Orthodoxy. Her interests range from Gogol and Babel to Russian religious thought, and from Jews in Russian literature to the modern Russian Orthodox Church.
Susan Bernstein
Professor, Dept. of English, Women's Studies, and Jewish Studies, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Panoramic Visions: Women Writing the Reading Room of the British Museum, 1857-1929
May 5, 2006 @ 12:00 pm
Banquet Room, University Club
This event is one of the Humanities Friday Lunches events.
This talk explores the social, spatial, and textual practices of women writers using and representing the Round Reading Room of the British Museum from 1857 to 1929. As a kind of Victorian frontier of interdisciplinarity housed within the courtyard of the British Museum, the Reading Room was itself a nineteenth-century architectural achievement, its 1857 dome rivaling both St. Paul's Cathedral in London and the Pantheon in Rome. Some of the most radical thinkers of the day, such as Karl Marx who wrote Capital there, made this space synonymous with revolutionary currents. As the doors to Oxbridge colleges began to crack open for women in the 1870s and 1880s, the number of female readers rose markedly at the British Museum Reading Room as it provided an alternative, and more egalitarian, community of scholars and working writers. With its unusual accessibility, the Reading Room of the British Museum also drew many women readers engaged in political work, sometimes evident through the more experimental form or explicitly radical content of their writing. Drawing on unpublished applications for readers' tickets, architectural diagrams, cartoons, magazine articles and illustrations, fiction, and writers' notebooks and diaries, I examine the panoramic dimensions of this heterogeneous space, and how such perspectives emerge in the writing of George Eliot, Amy Levy, and later, Virginia Woolf.
Susan David Bernstein is a professor of English, Women's Studies, and Jewish Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is the author of Confessional Subjects: Revelations of Gender and Power in Victorian Literature and Culture (1997), and her two editions of Amy Levy's novels, Reuben Sachs and The Romance of a Shop, have just been published. Bernstein has published other essays on Victorian studies, including women writing natural history, sensation fiction and Darwin, and on Jewish vulgarity in Victorian fiction. In addition she has articles on Anne Frank's diary and the politics of identification, and on confessional discourse in feminist theory. Her current project on the transformation of gendered spaces of reading and writing focuses on the Reading Room of the British Museum, 1857-1929.
