Archive | Program Lectures

  • A Panel Discussion of the 2005 Wisconsin Book Festival

  • The History of the History of Jazz: From Primitivism to Formalism to New Criticism

  • October 15, 2005
  • Overture Center
  • This event is one of the Special Events events.
  • Scott Deveaux, University of Virginia Eric Porter, University of California, Santa Cruz Ronald Radano, University of Wisconsin-Madison Gunther Schuller, Composer, Musician, Writer, Critic This specially organized panel discussion will reveal that the history of jazz is not as simple as it seems. Like the music itself, historical and critical approaches to jazz have changed over time, with each shift adding a new layer to the way we understand the music. The panel will include four major writers who have made very different contributions to our understanding of jazz.

    Gunther Schuller is a major American composer, conductor, musician, and writer whose two histories of Jazz, Early Jazz and The Swing Era, are key texts in the history of the music. Scott Deveaux is the author of The Birth of BeBop and numerous other books and essays. Eric Porter is the author of What is this Thing Called Jazz? African American Musicians as Artists, Activists, and Critics, a book which draws attention to the role of musicians as caretakers and critics of their traditions. The panel will be moderated by Ronald Radano, Professor of Music at the UW-Madison and author of Lying Up a Nation: Race and Black Music.

    The History of the History of Jazz is presented with the UW-Madison Arts Institute as a part of the fall, 2005 residency of Gunther Schuller, the 2005 Wisconsin Book Festival, and the Overture Center for the Arts' presentation of Sonny Rollins in concert on the evening of Saturday, October 15. The performance by Sonny Rollins is by ticket only (available at the Overture Center box office). The History of the History of Jazz is free and open to the public.

  • Ramie Targoff
  • Associate Professor of English, Brandeis University

  • Traducing the Soul: Donne's Anniversaries

  • October 21, 2005
  • 6191 Helen C. White
  • This event is one of the Special Events events.
  • Scholar Ramie Targoff delivers the keynote lecture for a half-day colloquium organized by the Center for the Humanities, Center for Early Modern Studies. The Colloquium on Religion and Early Modern Culture is presented by the Center for the Humanities, Center for Early Modern Studies, and the English Department Renaissance Colloquium

  • James E. Young
  • Professor of English and Judaic Studies, University of Massachusetts at Amherst

  • Memory, Absence, and the End of the Monument in Berlin and New York

  • November 17, 2005
  • Chazen Museum of Art, Room L160
  • This event is one of the Special Events events.
  • In this slide-illustrated lecture, James E. Young explores the memorial processes surrounding international design competitions for Germany 's national Holocaust memorial in Berlin and the World Trade Center site memorial in New York City . As cultural historian of memorials and as a juror in both design competitions, Young will compare the ways two very different communities have turned to similar post-Holocaust architectural forms and themes in their attempts to formalize public memory of these two very different destructions. James E. Young is Professor of English and Judaic Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where he has taught since 1988, and currently Chair of the Department of Judaic and Near Eastern Studies. He has also taught at New York University as a Dorot Professor of English and Hebrew/Judaic Studies (1984-88), at Bryn Mawr College in the History of Religion, and at the University of Washington, Harvard University, and Princeton University as a visiting professor. He received his Ph.D. from the University of California in 1983. He is the author of Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust (1988), and The Texture of Memory (1993), which won the National Jewish Book Award in 1994, among many other books, articles, and reviews. In 2000, he was appointed as Editor-in-Chief of the Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization, a ten-volume anthology of primary sources, documents, texts, and images, forthcoming with Yale University Press. At present, he is completing an insider’s story of the World Trade Center Memorial, entitled Memory at Ground Zero: A Juror’s Report on the World Trade Center Site Memorial. James Young's lecture is a part of the symposium, Violent Texts/Violent Textiles

  • Violent Texts/Violent Textiles

  • Memory, Absence, and the End of the Monument in Berlin and New York

  • November 18, 2005
  • School of Human Ecology, Room 21
  • This event is one of the Special Events events.
  • A Symposium Organized with the UW-Madison Legacies of Violence Research Circle and the UW-Madison Design Gallery at the School of Human Ecology

    How do political violence, war, genocide, and exodus find their way into folkloric forms of expression? In the exhibition Weavings of War: Fabrics of Memory, the UW-Madison Gallery of Design will explore this question through narrative textiles documenting violence and war in Asia, the Middle East, and Central and South America. Building on the issues and objects in the exhibition, the Center for the Humanities and the Legacies of Violence Research Circle will present Violent Texts, Violent Textiles, a one-day symposium on representations of authoritarian violence. Confirmed participants include James E. Young, Professor of English and Judaic Studies at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst; Leigh Payne, Associate Professor of Political Science at the UW-Madison; and Jo Ellen Fair, Professor of Journalism and Mass Communication, UW-Madison. More participants will be announced in October. The Weavings of War: Fabrics of Memory is a project of City Lore, the Michigan State University Museum, and the Vermont Folklife Center. The accompanying catalogue includes essays by curator Ariel Zeitlin Cooke, James E. Young, and others.