Jean Wall Bennet Professor of English and American Studies, UW-Madison
Esperanto of the Eye: Democracy, Aesthetics, and Moving Pictures
September 26, 2007 @ 5:00 pm
Wisconsin Historical Society Auditorium
This event is one of the Focus on the Humanities events.
This talk explores the failed promise of motion pictures as universal art. Heralded as the "Esperanto of the eye," film echoes turn-of-the-century movements to create an international language, an idea that anarchists and socialists as well as businessmen and diplomats found enticing. But the example of Chaplin and early academic studies of film spectatorship invites the following question: does the utopian prospect of international language and global understanding also echo the language of commodity culture?
Russ Castronovo is Jean Wall Bennett Professor of English and American Studies. His research explores the relationship between literature and politics. His books include Fathering the Nation: American Genealogies of Slavery and Freedom (1995), Necro Citizenship: Death, Eroticism, and the Public Sphere in the Nineteenth-Century United States (2001), and Beautiful Democracy: Aesthetics and Anarchy in a Global Era (2007).
Thongchai Winichakul
Professor of History, UW-Madison
Moments of Silence: The Unforgetting of the 1976 Massacre in Bangkok
November 28, 2007 @ 5:00 pm
Wisconsin Historical Society Auditorium
This event is one of the Focus on the Humanities events.
Thongchai Winichakul joined UW faculty in 1991 and is currently Professor of Southeast Asian history. His book, Siam Mapped: a history of the geo-body of a nation, was awarded the Harry Benda Prize by the Association for Asian Studies in 1995 and the Grand Prize for the Asia Pacific Book Award from the Asian Affairs Research Council, Japan, in 2004. He has received several awards including the Guggenheim and the SSRC Fellowship, and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2003. Born and educated in Bangkok before doing his graduate degrees in Sydney, Australia, Thongchai witnessed the 1976 massacre, which is the subject of his lecture, while he was a college student.
Claudia Card
Emma Goldman Professor of Philosophy, UW-Madison
Evil and Inexcusable Wrongs
January 30, 2008 @ 5:00 pm
Wisconsin Historical Society Auditorium
This event is one of the Focus on the Humanities events.
Two background concerns guide my construction of the theory of
evils that I call "the atrocity paradigm" or "the atrocity theory." One
is to specify what distinguishes evils from less serious wrongs. The
other is to avoid demonizing perpetrators. The atrocity theory attempts
both by taking the focus off perpetrator culpability and putting it more
on harms done to victims. Applying the theory to torture, terrorism, and
genocide in my current project, I have been led to revisions that
threaten to compromise those two background concerns. I am now defending
(1) the theory that evils are reasonably foreseeable intolerable harms
produced by not just culpable but inexcusable wrongdoing and (2) the
view that evils need not be extraordinary. One challenge is to show that
this theory does not demonize perpetrators. The other is to show that
this view still distinguishes evils from less serious wrongs.
David Loewenstein
Marjorie and Lorin Tiefenthaler Professor of English, UW-Madison
Heresy, Persecution, and Fear in Early Modern English
March 12, 2008 @ 5:00 pm
Wisconsin Historical Society Auditorium
This event is one of the Focus on the Humanities events.
How did perceptions and fears of heresy and heretics fuel bitter cultural conflicts, religious persecution and instability, and powerful anxieties during the early modern period? This talk will focus on religious fear and the literary imagination, and the multiple ways they intersected in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. It will use the example of the great English martyrologist John Foxe (1516-87) to explore issues of religious demonization, hatred, fear, and polarization, as well as the violent consequences of religious extremism.
Kirin Narayan
Professor of Anthropology, UW-Madison
Twin Muses: Ethnography and Fiction
April 30, 2008 @ 5:00 pm
Wisconsin Historical Society Auditorium
This event is one of the Focus on the Humanities events.
Ethnography finds its identity in uneasy relationship to other practices of describing the world through writing. As ethnography emerged as a distinctive writing practice for anthropologists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, travel writing, missionary accounts, scientific monographs, and realist novels provided important counterpoints. Yet from as early as 1890, certain ethnographers have found some insights best expressed through fiction. Today, the practice of ethnography has spread across many disciplines, and the cultural perspectives gleaned through ethnography continue to occasionally spill into fiction. I explore the work of anthropologists who have openly moved between ethnography and fiction to address larger issues of scholarly representation, readability, and the use of suspense.
Kirin Narayan is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Wisconsin--Madison. She is author of Storytellers, Saints and Scoundrels: Folk Narrative in Hindu Religious Teaching (which won the 1990 Victor Turner Prize for Ethnographic Writing and was Co-winner of the 1990 Elsie Clews Parsons Prize for Folklore); Mondays on the Dark Night of the Moon: Himalayan Foothill Folktales (in collaboration with Urmila Devi Sood); Love Stars and All That (a novel); and My Family and Other Saints (a memoir).
