Archaeological Work at Sardis: Looking for the City of Croesus
November 3, 2006 @ 12:00 pm
Banquet Room, University Club
This event is one of the Humanities Friday Lunches events.
Sardis was the capital of the Lydian empire, the major Near Eastern power closest to the Greek cities of Asia Minor, near the border of what would become the eastern and western worlds. Recent archaeological fieldwork has profoundly changed our picture of what this city was like in the Lydian period, and in the subsequent Hellenistic and Roman eras, and the cultural links of these people to both the Greeks and the great civilizations of Assyria and Babylonia. Nick Cahill will discuss some recent developments at Sardis, and some future prospects.
Nick Cahill is professor of Art History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He has participated in archaeological fieldwork at Sardis since he was an undergraduate, and is particularly interested in ancient urbanism, city planning, and household organization. His book Household and City Organization at Olynthus (Yale University Press 2002) is also available online at stoa.org/olynthus. He studies and has published on Greek, Persian, and Anatolian art and archaeology.
Ben Singer
Associate Professor, Department of Communication Arts, UW-Madison
On the Question of Stylistic Universals
November 17, 2006 @ 6:00 pm
Banquet Room, University Club
This event is one of the Humanities Friday Lunches events.
What are the sources of style in the arts? Does it make sense, or is it fruitful, to talk about stylistic universals? If so, what accounts for broad commonalities across cultural traditions? This presentation will explore such questions by illustrating devices found in every film-making tradition, as well as aesthetic techniques that have passed into extinction in mainstream production.
Ben Singer is Associate Professor of Film in the Department of Communication Arts at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His book Melodrama and Modernity: Early Sensational Cinema and its Contexts was published by Columbia University Press in 2001. A book titled Alexander Bakshy: Modernism and the Space of Spectatorship is forthcoming from Indiana University Press. He is currently working on a book investigating the poetics of pathos in world melodrama.
Guillermina De Ferrari
Assistant Professor, Department of Spanish & Portuguese, UW-Madison
Cuba: A Curated Culture
December 1, 2006 @ 12:00 pm
Banquet Room, University Club
This event is one of the Humanities Friday Lunches events.
Using the art world as a model (curation, catalogues, international foundations), Guillermina De Ferrari studies Cuban hyperrealist art production as an aesthetic that is administered by global cultural paradigms. She proposes that the administration of Cuban contemporary culture creates an imaginary space between center and periphery, art and market, self-exotization and neo avant-garde, which reflects Cuba's active participation in a post-modern world that is fascinated by difference.
Guillermina De Ferrari teaches Latin American and Caribbean literature at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She specializes in contemporary narrative and Postcolonial theory. Her articles, which focus on contemporary Caribbean narrative and visual arts, can be found in The Latin American Literary Review, The Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies, A Contracorriente, among others. Her book Vulnerable States: Bodies of Memory in Contemporary Caribbean Fiction is forthcoming at The University of Virginia Press. She is currently working on a book on friendship and civil societies in contemporary Cuban narrative.
Sharon E. Hutchinson
Professor, Department of Anthropology, UW-Madison
Uncertain Ethics: Dilemmas of Anthropological Research in a Sudanese War Zone
January 26, 2007 @ 12:00 pm
Banquet Room, University Club
This event is one of the Humanities Friday Lunches events.
Sites of violence are especially revealing contexts for exploring the soft underbelly of ethnographic practice. Prone to wildly unpredictable upheavals, fieldwork in "unstable places" can prove harrowing, physically and emotionally. Such sites also present profound ethical and methodological challenges. In this talk, I will sketch out some of the most problematic challenges that I have faced over the past twenty years while carrying out periodic field research among war-ravaged Nuer communities of southern Sudan.
Sharon Hutchinson focuses her research on Sudan, where a brutal civil war has been raging since 1983 between an Arab Muslim majority population in the North and an African and Christian minority in the South. Fluent in Arabic and Nuer, a southern Sudanese language, Hutchinson has conducted many years of anthropological field investigations on war-provoked processes of social and economic change among the second largest ethnic group in the South. Her most recent research efforts have concentrated on the plight of displaced southern Sudanese in Khartoum and on ethnic conflict, oil development and religious change in the South. She is author of a prize-winning book entitled Nuer Dilemmas: Coping with Money, War and the State as well as numerous journal articles. In addition to her scholarly writings, Sharon Hutchinson has worked extensively with international humanitarian agencies active in the southern Sudan, including Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Doctors Without Borders and Save the Children Fund.
Russ Castronovo
Professor, Departments of English and American Studies, UW-Madison
Beautiful Democracy: Aesthetics and Anarchy in a Global Era
February 2, 2007 @ 12:00 pm
Banquet Room, University Club
This event is one of the Humanities Friday Lunches events.
This talk will examine the rise of a broad commentary on sensation, beauty, and mass culture across novels, university research, urban photography, and motion pictures in the US from 1877-1936. As a topic of academic philosophy, aesthetics unexpectedly converged with popular social claims that art could democratize culture by addressing the urban poor, ethnic minorities, and the distracted masses. Alternately described as a specialized discourse about art and as the general processes through which people respond to sensation and form judgments, aesthetics have been notoriously difficult to define. Such elusiveness is prime territory for conflict in the period that this talk explores, marking aesthetics as a site that not only registers violence but also produces it in the form of urban crime, racial victimization, and economic antagonism. Nor do these conflicts remain confined to US shores. As a discourse wrapped up with the universal, aesthetics fuse violence to early episodes of global thinking, whether as internationalism, worldwide community, or Americanization.
Russ Castronovo is a professor of English and American Studies at the UW-Madison. His recent publications include: Beautiful Democracy: Aesthetics and Anarchy in a Global Era (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, forthcoming 2007); Necro Citizenship: Death, Eroticism, and the Public Sphere in the Nineteenth-Century United States (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001); and Fathering the Nation: American Genealogies of Slavery and Freedom (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995).
Pamela Potter
Professor, School of Music, UW-Madison
The Arts in Nazi Germany: Dismantling a Dystopia
February 9, 2007 @ 12:00 pm
Banquet Room, University Club
This event is one of the Humanities Friday Lunches events.
In the twelve years of the Third Reich, there was no shortage of pomp, terror, hyperbole, and vitriol in the representation of the function of the arts in the new state. Scathing attacks on "racially inferior" and "degenerate" arts were contrasted against the virtues of German cultural achievements, leaving post-war cultural historians with a mandate to determine just how the National Socialists devised aesthetic guidelines and enforced them. However, this talk will explore how and why these historians have struggled with this task, mainly because assumptions about a totalitarian Nazi cultural policy have run up against conflicting evidence that reveals considerable degrees of artistic freedom at work in the Third Reich.
Pamela M. Potter is Professor of Music at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She has written extensively on music and politics in twentieth-century Germany and is best known for her work on the history of German musicology (Most German of the Arts: Musicology and Society from the Weimar Republic to the End of Hitler's Reich, Yale UP, 1998; German ed.: Klett-Cotta, 2000) and on the connections between music and identity (Music and German National Identity, co-edited with Celia Applegate, Chicago UP, 2002). Her current projects include a history of musical life in twentieth-century Berlin and a book on Nazi aesthetics in the visual and performing arts.
B. Venkat Mani
Assistant Professor, Department of German, UW-Madison
Classes, Nations, Aspirations: Globalization and Anxieties of the "Instead"
March 30, 2007 @ 12:00 pm
Banquet Room, University Club
This event is one of the Humanities Friday Lunches events.
This talk begins with a discussion of a short-lived controversy in Germany against bringing in Indian software engineers and moves to a critique of nation, class, and middle-class "aspiration" in the context of globalization in two recent US publications: Thomas L. Friedman's The World is Flat (2005) and Lou Dobbs' War on the Middle Class (2006). The talk demonstrates a specifically 21st century exaltation of the middle-class-previously also known as the bourgeoisie-and its aspirations in discussions of globalization and outsourcing.
Ann Smart Martin
Assistant Professor, Department of Art History, UW-Madison
Banish the Darkness: Illumination and Reflection in Early Modern England and America
April 13, 2007 @ 12:00 pm
Banquet Room, University Club
This event is one of the Humanities Friday Lunches events.
Early modern people marvelled at brightness, gleam, and shimmer in decorative arts and domestic interiors as light was manipulated, augmented, and ultimately transformed in Britain and America between 1750 and 1850. Night became social time, brightness equated wealth, and new technologies changed the experience of seeing. This new project investigates how reflection and illumination changed daily life and evoked human wonder in the Age of Enlightenment.
Ann Smart Martin teaches material culture, decorative arts, and exhibition practice in the Art History Department and is the current director of the interdisciplinary material culture program. Her publications include a special material culture issue of The William and Mary Quarterly, the co-edited volume, American Material Culture: "The Shape of the Field and the forthcoming Buying into the World of Goods: Early Consumers in the Virginia Backcountry." She has curated several major exhibitions at the Elvehjem Museum of Art. The catalog for Makers and Users is available online at chipstone.org and Reflections: Furniture, Silver, and Paintings in Early America is a basis for her next book project on lighting and reflection.
