In collaboration with the Institute for Research in the Humanities, the Center presents the work of outstanding members of the UW-Madison humanities faculty to the broader Madison community.

Funded through the generous support of the Anonymous Fund and in partnership with the University of Wisconsin-Madison Institute for Research in the Humanities.

• Make Room for Daddy: Men and Childbirth in Mid-Twentieth Century America
• Judith Leavitt
• Rupple Bascom and Ruth Bleier Professor of Medical History, History of Science, and Women's Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison
• In this talk I examine how expectant fathers fared during American hospitalized childbirth in the middle years of the twentieth century. I argue that men are crucial to understanding this period in the history of childbirth. Fathers-to-be found their place in hospital childbirth in four chronologically sequential spaces - the waiting room, the labor room, the delivery room, and the birthing room - and these significantly shaped and held the men's experiences and influence the organization of this talk. These rooms - the geography of labor and delivery - illustrate the expanding scope as well as the limits and boundaries of the men's participation at different points in time. In addition to the changing spaces in which men's activity took place and the changing meanings of those spaces, the talk follows two thematic developments: growing lay power, and class and race privilege.
• Judith Walzer Leavitt, Ph.D., is the Rupple Bascom and Ruth Bleier Professor of Medical History, History of Science, and Women's Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she has taught since 1975. She has written or edited seven books, including The Healthiest City: Milwaukee and the Politics of Health Reform; Brought to Bed: Childbearing in America 1750-1950; and Typhoid Mary: Captive to the Public's Health.
• November 19, 2008 @ 5:00 pm
• Pyle Center

• Imagined Biographies and Unwritten Readings:Authors and Texts in India's Literatures
• Velcheru Narayana Rao
• Krishnadevaraya Professor of Languages and Cultures of Asia, Senior Fellow at the Institute for Research in the Humanities
• Ever since the impact of the Western ideas of texts and authors through colonial education, there has been a major, but uncritically accepted notion in India that authors, individually identifiable preferably with a place and a date of birth write texts, which form the basis of literary history. Postmodern concepts of text and author significantly unsettled these notions, but not much work was done to go back to the indigenous concepts of authors and texts in India.
  
  This presentation aims at presenting evidence from precolonial literary cultures of India to argue for an Indian theory of texts and authors.
• Professor Narayana Rao is the author of several books on Telugu Literature and South Indian history. His publications include Girls for Sale: Kanyasulkam. A Play from colonial India(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007), God On the Hill: Temple songs from Tirupati, With David Shulman. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005)Textures of Time : Writing History in South India co-authored with Sanjay Subrahmanyam and David Shulman, ( New York: The Other Press, 2003), and Hibiscus on the Lake: Twentieth Century Telugu Poetry from India, (University of Wisconsin Press, 2003).
• December 3, 2008 @ 5:00 pm
• Pyle Center

• Chancellor Biddy Martin
• February 11, 2009 @ 5:00 pm
• Pyle Center

• War and the Containment of Violence in Anglo-Saxon England: A Problem in Mentalities
• John D. Niles
• Frederic G. Cassidy Professor of Humanities, Senior Fellow at the Institute for Research in the Humanities
• How did the people of England in its earliest recorded period think about war, peace, and the perennial issue of the containment of violence? Approaching this question as a problem in mentalities, this lecture will attempt to come to grips with key terms in the Old English language that were used for conflict and its resolution, taking into account the assumptions that these terms presuppose — assumptions that differ markedly from ones that are generally accepted today.
• John D. Niles is the Frederic G. Cassidy Professor of Humanities in the Department of English at the UW – Madison, where he is also affiliated with the programs in Medieval Studies, Religious Studies, Folklore, and Celtic Studies. Presently the First Vice President of the International Society of Anglo-Saxonists, he has authored, edited, or co-edited ten books relating to the language and literature of Anglo-Saxon England, among other publications. He has taught at UW – Madison since 2001.
• February 18, 2009 @ 5:00 pm
• Pyle Center

• Who Owns Black Music? Reflections on Cultural Property, Ownership, and Value
• Ronald Radano
• Professor of Musicology and Ethnomusicology
• March 4, 2009 @ 5:00 pm
• Pyle Center

• Catechisms and the Construction of Religion in the Reformation
• Lee Palmer Wandel
• Professor of History, Senior Fellow at the Institute for Research in the Humanities
• April 22, 2009 @ 5:00 pm