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.
Due to restrictions built into the funding source for this program, the Humanities Friday Lunch series is open only to members of the UW-Madison faculty, graduate students, and academic staff, including library staff. Additionally, visiting scholars, fellows, or guests with academic or staff affiliations at other universities are also welcome to attend. All other members of the University community who are interested in being invited to a particular Friday lunch are welcome, and should contact the Center for the Humanities to let us know so that we can include your name on the invited list.
Attendance is by reservation only, and space is limited. To reserve space at one of the following programs, please send an email including your UW-Madison affiliation and daytime phone number to info@humanities.wisc.edu. The reservation deadline for each program is NOON on the Tuesday prior to the event.
- Anja Wanner
- Professor of English Language and Linguistics
- The Rise and Fall of the Passive in Academic Writing
- December 4, 2009 @ 12:00 pm
- Fireside Room, University Club
- This event is one of the What is Human? Friday Lunches events.
The language of academia is known to be impersonal. However, our conception of the scientist/researcher has changed from someone who "discovers the truth" to someone who actively engages in a process of "shaping knowledge." I will discuss the linguistic implications of this shift, with an emphasis on the use of the passive and other seemingly agentless constructions.
- Jenny Saffran
- Professor of Psychology
- February 12, 2010 @ 12:00 pm
- Banquet Room, University Club
- This event is one of the What is Human? Friday Lunches events.
- Jean-Michel Ane
- Professor of Agronomy
- March 5, 2010 @ 12:00 pm
- Banquet Room, University Club
- This event is one of the What is Human? Friday Lunches events.
- Laura Schwendinger
- Associate Professor of Composition
- April 16, 2010 @ 12:00 pm
- Banquet Room, University Club
- This event is one of the Humanities Friday Lunches events.
Previously
- Robert Streiffer
- Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Bioethics
- Human/Animal Chimeras: Being Human, Being Animal, and Everything in Between
- November 13, 2009 @ 12:00 pm
- Banquet Room, University Club
- This event is one of the Humanities Friday Lunches events.
The introduction of human stem cells into developing animals is an impoortant research tool, but has stirred up considerable public controversy. This talk explores the ethical issues raised by creating individuals that are part animal and part human.
- Neil Kodesh
- Assistant Professor of History
- Clanship and Public Healing in Buganda, East Africa
- October 23, 2009 @ 12:00 pm
- Banquet Room, University Club
- This event is one of the Humanities Friday Lunches events.
- This lecture explores the relationship between the domains of politics and public healing in Buganda, a kingdom located on the northwest shores of Lake Victoria in present-day Uganda, from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries. Drawing on insights from a variety of disciplines - history, historical linguistics, archaeology, and anthropology - as well as extensive fieldwork, I examine how efforts to ensure collective prosperity lay at the heart of community-building processes in Buganda. In so doing, I seek to offer a novel approach to the use of oral sources and to open up new possibilities for researching and writing histories of more distant periods in Africa's past.Neil Kodesh is a historian of precolonial East Africa. His research interests focus on health and healing, political complexity, and the use of oral sources for writing early African history. His first book, Beyond the Royal Gaze: Clanship and Public Healing in Buganda, will be published by The University of Virginia Press in Spring 2010.
- Michael Bernard-Donals
- Professor of English and Jewish Studies
- Deterritorialized Rhetoric, or, What Happens When We Forget We are Exiles
- May 1, 2009 @ 12:00 pm
- Banquet Room, University Club
- This event is one of the Humanities Friday Lunches events.
A few years ago, a sister-city proposal partnering Madison with Rafah in Gaza created a perfect example of a dysfunctional public sphere. In part the discourse was so fraught because the discussion was framed as a communitarian one: how might one community forge a relationship with another. With the Rafah sister city discussion as my point of departure, I want to lay the groundwork for a rhetoric that depends less upon notions of belonging and rootedness than it does upon the idea that one will always be at least in part a stranger in one’s home. This exilic sensibility – that when one writes, one speaks both one’s identity and location, but also one’s placelessness and otherness – has become more pronounced, ironically, since the establishment of Israel, a ‘Jewish homeland,’ since that home was established in the face of the near-destruction of the Jewish people in Europe and through the displacement of many of the region’s non-Jewish residents. In my discussion I’ll hazard some guesses about what might happen if we start discussions of the Israel-Palestine conflict not with questions of community, or inclusion, or filiation, but rather with questions of exile, non-belonging, and ethical engagement with others. My hypothesis is that another kind of rhetorical engagement, another kind of writing can change the terms of the conflict, and might make for a more productive (though not necessarily less fraught) discussion not just of Israel-Palestine, but also conflict more generally.
- Richard Goodkin
- Professor of French and Italian, UW-Madison
- Inventing the Invention of Molière: The Magnificent Lies of Madeleine Béjart
- April 10, 2009 @ 12:00 pm
- Banquet Room, University Club
- This event is one of the Humanities Friday Lunches events.
A presentation of the questions arising from writing a fictional version of the lives of Molière and his mistress, the actress Madeleine Béjart, followed by a reading from the manuscript of the novel.
- Jean Lee
- Professor of History and Senior Research Fellow, Institute for Research in the Humanities
- The Art and Science of Remembering the American Revolution
- April 3, 2009 @ 12:00 pm
- Banquet Room, University Club
- This event is one of the Humanities Friday Lunches events.
Between the Battles of Lexington and Concord (1775) and the centennial of Independence (1876), Americans created multiple narratives--individual, regional, and national--depicting the nature and meaning of the Revolution. In a nation created with the stroke of a quill pen in 1776, these narratives significantly fostered national identity, yet also played into antebellum sectional divisions and the outbreak of the Civil War. The fullness and complexity of this process is revealed in texts, material culture, and music. In addition, current understandings of the neurophysiology of memory offer humanities scholars understandings with which to assess memories of eighteenth-century political upheaval and war.
