Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere

The UF Synergies series features informal talks by the Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere’s Rothman Faculty Summer Fellows, Tedder Doctoral Fellows, and Rothman Doctoral Fellows. Fellows will speak for 20 minutes in length about their funded work, leaving ample time for questions and discussion. Talks are paired across disciplinary boundaries to stimulate discussions about threads and connections across research areas and allow for synergies of ideas to emerge in interdisciplinary conversations.

Dr. Rae Yan (English) “Redefining Anatomy in the Victorian Age”

Dr. Rae Yan’s talk traces the reshaping of anatomy as subject during the Victorian age. She recovers a history of collaboration between scientific and literary writers fueled by an attempt to negotiate what “anatomizing” should be following a major biomedical ethics scandal—the Burking Affair of 1828—where two men committed murder to profit from selling human remains to anatomical schools. Analyzing a series of correspondences between scientific and literary Victorian writers, Yan argues that these writers were attempting to redefine anatomy as an epistemological practice capable of ethical ends.

Meagan Frenzer (History) “Undercover & Out of Step: Monitoring and Reforming Chicago’s Dance Halls, 1920-1930”

Meagan Frenzer’s presentation focuses on Chicago’s anti-dance hall campaigns in the early twentieth century. In a 1921 article by the Illinois Vigilance Society in the Chicago Tribune claimed that urban dancehalls were catering to the “lowest elements of society” and turning Chicago into the “Devil’s Playground.” Throughout the early twentieth century, dancehalls developed as urban leisure and labor spaces that evoked both excitement and condemnation. To social reform organizations, dancehalls became the epicenter from which the perceived social disease of immorality spread. Yet, patrons and female workers found fulfillment and labor opportunities unavailable elsewhere in Chicago. Therefore, dancehalls and its diverse participants act as a lens into Chicago’s evolving political, social, and religious environment through the 1920s.