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2009-2010 Events

Fall 2009 Events

John Van Engen (Notre Dame)

Free Spirits, Lay Religion, and Clerical Suspicion: Inside the Late Medieval Church

  • John Van Engen, Andrew V. Tackes Professor of History at the University of Notre Dame and former director of Notre Dame’s Medieval Institute (1986-1998), is a historian of religious and intellectual life in the European Middle Ages. Professor Van Engen has focused on 12th century church reform movements and on late medieval mysticism and devotional practices. His books and essays have dealt with monasticism, women’s writing, schools and universities, inquisition, canon law, notions of reform, and medieval religious culture generally. Many of his important articles have been re-published in Religion in the History of the Medieval West (2004). His most recent book, The Modern-Day Devout in the Later Middle Ages: Sisters and Brothers in Communal Life and Private Societies (2008).
  • Co-sponsored by the Center for Medieval and Early Modern Studies and the Rothman Endowment
  • Lecture free and open to the public.

Phyllis Mack (Rutgers)

Religion and Gender in Enlightenment England: The Problem of Agency

  • Phyllis Mack is Professor of History at Rutgers University and a member of the core faculty of the Department of Women’s and Gender Studies. Her research focuses on European and women’s history and history of religion, and she is interested in 17th-18th century popular religion and gender in England and America. Her publications include Visionary Women: Ecstatic Prophecy in Seventeenth-Century England, which won the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians Book Prize in 1993; the co-edited volume, In God’s Name: Genocide and Religion in the 20th Century; and most recently, Heart Religion in the British Enlightenment: Gender and Emotion in Early Methodism (2008).
  • Co-sponsored by the Center for Women’s Studies and Gender Research, the Center for European Studies, and the Rothman Endowment
  • Lecture free and open to the public.

Matthew Frye Jacobson (Yale)

Rock, Race and the Social Geography of the Jimi Hendrix Experience

  • Matthew Frye Jacobson is Professor of American Studies, History, and African American Studies at Yale. He is the author of several books, including Roots Too: White Ethnic Revival in Post-Civil Rights America and he is currently at work on Odetta’s Voice and Other Weapons: the Civil Rights Era as Cultural History.
  • This talk examines the cultural politics of the 1960s by focusing on the Jimi Hendrix Experience. Though not known for overt political stands, Hendrix’s movements across the social terrain from 1950s Seattle, to the “chitlin circuit” of the segregated South, to the uptown/downtown cultures of Harlem and the Village, to the UK and back again nonetheless shed an unusual light on the racial dynamics of the Civil Rights era.
  • Inaugural event of the History Department’s Working Group for the Historical Study of Race.
  • Sponsored by the Humanities fund of the Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere.
  • Lecture free and open to the public.
  • For further information about this event, contact: newmanlm@gmail.com.

Mark Noll (Notre Dame)

The Bible and American Public Life

  • Mark Noll is Francis A. McAnaney Professor of History at University of Notre Dame. He is interested in race, religion, and politics as intersecting and at times intertwined modes of discourse. His publications include The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind (1994), America’s God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln (2002), and The Civil War as a Theological Crisis (2006). Professor Noll’s current projects are a short book on race, religion, and American politics and a more extensive study of the Bible in North American public life.
  • Co-sponsored by the Richard J. Millbauer Chair in History, the Bob Graham Center for Public Service, and the Rothman Endowment
  • Lecture free and open to the public.

Anthony Grafton (Princeton)

Jewish Books and Christian Readers in Early Modern Europe

  • Anthony Grafton, Henry Putnam University Professor of History at Princeton University. His special interests lie in the cultural history of Renaissance Europe, the history of books and readers, scholarship and education in the West from Antiquity to the 19th century, and the history of science from Antiquity to the Renaissance. His many books include Joseph Scaliger: A Study in the History of Classical Scholarship, Vol. 2 (1994) Cardano’s Cosmos: The Worlds and Works of a Renaissance Astrologer (2001) Leon Battista Alberti: Master Builder of the Italian Renaissance(2002), and Christianity and the Transformation of the Book: Origen, Eusebius, and the Library of Caesarea, with Megan Williams (2006). Professor Grafton’s current project is a large-scale study of the science of chronology in 16th- and 17th-century Europe: how scholars attempted to assign dates to past events, reconstruct ancient calendars, and reconcile the Bible with competing accounts of the past.
  • Co-sponsored by the Andrew Grass Chair in Jewish Studies and the Rothman Endowment
  • Lecture free and open to the public.

Recycling in African Art: Necessity, Metaphor, and Creative Expression

  • In many parts of Africa, recycling is both an expressive medium and a strategy for survival. Artists working in a wide range of markets, from the local to the international, transform objects and images into aesthetic expressions. This symposium will explore the aesthetics, economics, and paradoxes of recycling as an artistic practice in Africa. Presentations by art historians, anthropologists, artists, and curators will address the reuse and reanimation of objects in Africa and the African diaspora.
  • Participants include:
    • David Doris, University of Michigan
    • Suzanne Gott, University of British Columbia
    • Vanessa Linganzi, Northwestern University
    • Sarah Fee, Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto
    • Mary Nooter Roberts, UCLA
    • Fatimah Tuggar, New York-based artist
    • Sonya Clark, Virginia Commonwealth University
    • Victoria Rovine, University of Florida
  • Co-sponsored by the Yavitz Fund, the Center for African Studies and the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences
  • Lecture free and open to the public
  • Organized by Victoria L. Rovine, School of Art and Art History/ Center for African Studies. For further information about this symposium, contact vrovine@ufl.edu

Goodbye DDR: Memory and Visual Culture

Morning: Memory and Visual Culture
  • 10:00 am
    Elizabeth Mittman, Associate Professor (Michigan State University)
    From Good Bye Lenin! to The Lives of Others: Memory and Forgetting after the Cold War
  • 11:00 am
    Tim Fangmeyer, Graduate Student in German (University of Florida)
    History Written by the Winners? Post-GDR Films about the GDR
  • 12:00
    Lunch Break
Afternoon: Ghosts and Fairy Tales
  • 2:00 pm
    Claudia Schwabe, Graduate Student in German (University of Florida)
    Between Socialism and Snow White: GRD Fairy Tales
  • 3:00 pm
    Brian Ladd, Research Associate (University of Albany, SUNY)
    Monuments, Voids, and Other Ghosts of East Berlin
  • 4:00
    Roundtable Discussion with Franz Futterknecht, Brian Ladd, Elizabeth Mittman, Barbara Mennel
  • Organized by Will Hasty, Barbara Mennel, and Franz Futterknecht (German Studies and Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures)
  • Sponsored by the Rothman Endowment
  • Symposium free and open to the public

Dominick LaCapra (Cornell)

Coetzee, Sebald, and the Narrative of Trauma

Since 1969, Dominick LaCapra has taught in the History Department at Cornell, where he is currently the Bryce and Edith M. Bowmar Professor of Humanistic Studies. He also holds a joint appointment in the Department of Comparative Literature and is a member of the graduate field of Romance Studies and the program in Jewish Studies. He served for ten years as director of Cornell’s Society for the Humanities and for four years as Associate Director and for eight years as director of the School of Criticism and Theory. In the course of his career, LaCapra’s own principal contributions have been to intellectual and cultural history and to critical theory, which he sees as closely related fields of inquiry. His teaching interests range widely in the areas of modern European intellectual and cultural history, historiography, trauma studies, history and literature, and critical theory. His publications include thirteen individually authored books and two edited or co-edited volumes, among which are History & Criticism (1985); Representing the Holocaust: History, Theory, Trauma (1994); and most recently, History and Its Limits: Human, Animal, Violence (2009).

  • Keynote Address of the English Graduate Organization’s 9th annual conference: Home/sickness: Decay, Desire, and the Seduction of Nostalgia.
  • Co-sponsored by the English Graduate Organization, English Department, and Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere (Yavitz Fund)
  • Lecture is free and open to the public
  • For further information contact ego09atuf@gmail.com

Fear in the Ancient World

  • Gregory Nagy (Harvard University and the Center for Hellenic Studies, Washington, DC)
    The Subjectivity of Fear as Reflected in Ancient Greek Wording and Syntax
  • Andrew Riggsby (University of Texas-Austin)
    The Lexicon of Fear
  • Bruce Lincoln (University of Chicago)
    The Ambiguity of Fear in the Achaemenian Imperial Imaginary
  • Fear has been almost completely removed from modern political discourse since President Roosevelt spoke briefly on the subject during the Great Depression. The ancient discourse on fear is by contrast varied and complex. From Homer through Late Antiquity, ancient authors have acknowledged the impact that fear has on decision making and have come to a wide range of conclusions on how best to manage this emotion. While recent studies have contributed extensively to our understanding on how the ancients conceptualized anger, shame, pity, and envy, less attention has been given to fear. By bringing together foremost scholars of ancient Greece, Rome, and the Near East, this conference seeks to promote an archaeology of fear comparable to that of the other emotions.
  • Organized by: Andrew Wolpert, Department of Classics, and Victoria Pagan, Department of Classics
  • Sponsored by the Yavitz Fund
  • Free and Open to the Public
  • Fear in the Ancient World Website

Kenneth Mills (Toronto)

‘Tantos Milagros’: Miraculous Transmission in the Early Modern Spanish World

  • J Kenneth Mills is Professor of History and Director of Latin American Studies at the University of Toronto. A specialist in the history of colonial Latin America and the early modern Spanish world, his work focuses on religious change and the proliferation of local Christianities in Spanish South America. His publications include An Evil Lost to View? (1994) and Idolatry and Its Enemies: Extirpation and Colonial Andean Religion, 1640-1750 (1997). With Anthony Grafton he has co-edited the collections Conversion: Old Worlds and New and Conversion in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages: Seeing and Believing (both 2003). Professor Mills is currently writing a book around the transatlantic journey of a Castilian image-maker and alms-gatherer, Diego de Ocana (c. 1570-1608).
  • Co-sponsored by the Center for Latin American Studies and the Rothman Endowment
  • Lecture free and open to the public

Spring 2010 Events

Why Not Work Together? Collaborative Funding Opportunities in and related to the Humanities

  • A roundtable discussion for anyone thinking about applying for interdisciplinary and/or collaborative grants. Featured panelists:
    • Sobha Jaishankar (Office of Research) – Support for collaborative grant applications at UF
    • Leo Villalon (African Studies and Political Science) – Department of Education and Fulbright grants
    • Carol West (Economics, College of Business Administration) – State of Florida, US Department of Labor, and National Science Foundation grants
    • Manuel Vásquez (Religion and Latin American Studies) – Ford Foundation and Social Science Research Council grants
  • Sponsored by the Rothman Endowment.
  • For further information on this roundtable discussion, contact Bonnie Effros (Humanities Center) at beffros@ufl.edu.
  • Discussion open to the public.

 

Ann Grodzins Gold
Why Sacred Groves Matter: Post-Romantic Claims

  • Professor Ann Grodzins Gold is Professor in the Departments of Religion and Anthropology at Syracuse University. Gold’s research in North India has focused on religious practices, gender oral traditions, and oral histories of ecological change. Her publications include numerous articles and four books: Fruitful Journeys: The Ways of Rajasthani Pilgrims; A Carnival of Parting: The Tales of King Bharthari and King Gopi Chand; Listen to the Heron’s Words: Reimagining Gender and Kinship in North India (co-authored with Gloria Raheja); and In the Time of Trees and Sorrows: Nature, Power and Memory in Rajasthan (co-authored with Bhoju Ram Gujar) which in 2004 was awarded the Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy Book Prize from the Association for Asian Studies. Gold’s recent work has concerned origin tales and miracle tales at rural shrines to regional deities whose healing powers are linked to protected landscapes and natural beauty. Her newest project, for which she holds a senior fellowship for 2010-11 from the American Institute of Indian Studies, will look at neighborhood, commerce and religious pluralism in a small market town.
  • In diverse regions of India exist thousands of mostly small forested areas surrounding built shrines or understood as spaces inhabited by gods or spirits. These spaces harbor complex worlds of meaning, where greenery is integral to pilgrimage practices focused on everyday devotion and a quest for extraordinary healing miracles.
  • Sponsored by the Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere with support from the Jerome A. Yavitz Fund, the Department of Religion, and the Center for the Study of Hindu Traditions (ChiTra).
  • This event is free and open to the public.
  • For further information about this event, contact Prof. Vasudha Narayanan (Department of Religion) at vasu@ufl.edu
  • On Tuesday 9 February, Professor Gold will also be conducting a seminar for faculty and graduate students on the subject of “Food Values: Sketches from Rajasthan”. Time and Place TBA.
  • Professor Gold would like participants in the graduate student/ faculty seminar to read the draft of her essay prior to the discussion. Please email Anne Newman at annen1@ufl.edu if you are interested in attending the seminar.

Patrick Wolfe

Race and the Trace of History

  • Patrick Wolfe is the Charles La Trobe Research Fellow in the History Program at La Trobe University, Australia and this year he is a Fellow at the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History at Harvard University. Wolfe has taught and lectured around the world on race, colonialism, Aboriginal history, genocide, and the history of anthropology. He is currently working on two books: a comparative history of racial regimes that Europeans have sought to impose on colonized peoples in Australia, Brazil, Palestine, and the USA; and a history of settler colonialism in the nineteenth-century US.
  • In this wide-ranging lecture, Patrick Wolfe will explore the various ways that race reproduces unequal historical relationships between Europeans and colonized peoples throughout the modern world. Just as, for Emile Durkheim, religion was society speaking, so, Wolfe will argue, race is colonialism speaking, in idioms whose diversity reflects the variety of unequal relationships into which Europeans have coopted alien populations. The lecture will discuss the different ways in which Indians and Black people have been racialised in the United States, as well as consider the racialisation of Australian Aboriginal people, Afro-Brazilians, and Palestinians in the contemporary era.
  • Second lecture of the History Department’s Working Group for the Historical Study of Race.
  • Sponsored by the Humanities Fund of the Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere.
  • For further information about this event, contact Prof. Louise Newman (Department of History) at newmanlm@gmail.com.
  • Lecture free and open to the public.

FLEXFest 2010

Featuring Jacqueline Goss, Helga Fanderl, Michael Gitlin, and Johan Grimonprez in person.

  • Sponsored by the Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere with the support of the Rothman Endowment, with additional support from RISK Cinema at the Harn Museum of Art and the Department of English.
  • For further information about these events, contact. Prof. Roger Beebe (Department of English), at rogerbb@ufl.edu.

Saturday, 20 February, 7:00 PM and 9:00 PM, The Top Secret Space (22 N. Main St.)
Jacqueline Goss

  • Jacqueline Goss makes movies and web-based works that explore how political, cultural, and scientific systems change the ways we think about ourselves. For the last few years she has used 2D digital animation techniques to work within the genre of the animated documentary. Her most recent videos are “How To Fix The World”—a look at Soviet-sponsored literacy programs in 1930’s Central Asia and “Stranger Comes To Town”—an animated documentary about the identity-tracking of immigrants and travelers coming into the United States. A native of New Hampshire, Goss attended Brown University and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. She teaches in the Film and Electronic Arts Department at Bard College in New York. She is a 2008 recipient of both a Creative Capital Grant and the Tribeca Film Institute Media Arts Fellowship as well as the 2007 Herb Alpert Award in Film and Video.
  • Event begins at 7:00 pm with a showcase of the filmmaker’s work, followed at 9:00 pm by a show of work that influenced it.
  • Admission: $5 per show | Festival passes for all screenings plus Saturday night after-party $20

Sunday, 21 February, 7:00 PM and 9:00 PM, Chandler Auditorium, Harn Museum of Art
Helga Fanderl

  • Working exclusively in the small-gauge super 8mm film format and editing entirely in camera, Helga Fanderl has directed more than 400 short films over the last several decades ranging from observational documentary portraits to more abstract, poetic works. Born in Ingolstadt in 1947 and turning to celluloid only later in her life (in 1990), Fanderl studied German and Romance Languages and Literature in Munich, Paris and Frankfurt/Main (1967-1973) before attending the Art School (Städelschule) in Frankfurt/Main (1987-1992) and Cooper Union in New York City (1992-1993). Since 1990 her work has been presented in major film museums, museums of modern and contemporary art, galleries, and other locations. Among these venues are the Deutsches Filmmuseum, Frankfurt/Main.; Arsenal, Berlin; Museum für Zeitgenössische Kunst, Basel; Österreichisches Filmmuseum, Wien; Anthology Film Archives, New York; Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt/Main.; Galerie Agathe Gaillard, Paris; Kino im Kunstmuseum, Bern; Cineteca di Bologna; The New York Public Library, New York; Centre Culturel Suisse, Paris. Her films are in the permanent collections of many museums including Hans Bodenmann, Basel; Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt/Main; and the Auditorium du Louvre, Paris. She has been the recipient of numerous awards, including the 1992 Coutts Contemporary Art Award; the 1998 German Film Critics Award / category experimental film; a 1999-2000 Scholarship Hessische Kulturstiftung in Paris; and the 2000 Hessischer Kulturpreis. She has recently been the subject of retrospectives of her works at several major festivals including Views from the Avant Garde at the New York Film Festival.
  • Event begins at 7:00 pm with a showcase of the filmmaker’s work, followed at 9:00 pm by a show of work that influenced it.
  • Admission (for each show): Students: $3 | General Public: $4 | Members: Free

Monday, 22 February, 7:00 PM and 9:00 PM, Hippodrome Theatre
Michael Gitlin

  • Michael Gitlin’s work has been screened at numerous venues, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Toronto International Film Festival, the Full Frame Documentary Festival, the New York Video Festival at Lincoln Center and the 1997 Whitney Biennial. He is the recipient of a 2006 Guggenheim Fellowship. His work has also been supported by the Jerome Foundation, the New York State Council on the Arts, and the New York Foundation for the Arts. Gitlin received an M.F.A. from Bard College. He teaches at Hunter College in New York City.
  • Event begins at 7:00 pm with a showcase of the filmmaker’s work, followed at 9:00 pm by a show of work that influenced it.
  • Admission: $5 per show

Tuesday, 23 February, 7:00 PM and 9:00 PM, Chandler Auditorium, Harn Museum of Art
Johan Grimonprez

  • Johan Grimonprez studied at the School of Visual Arts and attended the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program in New York. He achieved international acclaim with his film essay, Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y, which premiered at the Centre Pompidou and Documenta X in Kassel in 1997. Grimonprez’s Looking for Alfred (2005) won the International Media Award (ZKM, Germany) in 2005 as well as the European Media Award in 2006. Grimonprez’s productions have traveled the main festival circuit from Telluride, Los Angeles, Rio de Janeiro, to Tokyo and Berlin. Curatorial projects were hosted at major exhibitions and museums worldwide such as the Whitney Museum in New York, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich and the Tate Modern in London. Grimonprez’s work is included in numerous collections such as the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, the Kanazawa Art Museum, Japan, the National Gallery, Berlin, and the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Denmark. Grimonprez is currently a faculty member at the School of Visual Arts (New York).
  • Event begins at 7:00 pm with a showcase of the filmmaker’s work, followed at 9:00 pm by a show of work that influenced it.
  • Admission (for each show): Students: $3 | General Public: $4 | Members: Free

 

Sufia M. Uddin

Speaking the Same Language: The Bengali Muslims and Hindus Who Venerate Bonbibi of the Sundarbans

  • Professor Sufia Uddin is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Connecticut College. Her research interests focus on constructions of Bengali-Muslim religious community from the colonial to the contemporary period. Her work examines the many Bengali expressions of Islam. Her research also covers shared sacred space and religious elements common to both Bengali Hindus and Muslims. Professor Uddin’s book, Constructing Bangladesh: Religion, Ethnicity, and Language in an Islamic Nation, was published by UNC Press in 2006. Some of her other publications include: “Mystical Journey or Misogynist Assault?: Al-Qushayri’s Interpretation of Zulaikha’s Attempted Seduction of Yusuf” in the Journal of Islamic Studies; “In the Company of Pirs: Making Vows, Seeking Favors at Bangladeshi Sufi Shrines” in Dealing with Deities: The Ritual Vow in South Asia, edited by William Harman and Selva Raj; and “Beyond National Borders and Religious Boundaries” forthcoming in Engaging South Asian Religions: Boundaries, Appropriations, and Resistances, edited by Peter Gottschalk and Matthew Schmalz. Professor Uddin has been a recipient of numerous teaching and research grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Council of American Overseas Research Centres, American Institute of Bangladesh Studies, American Institute of Indian Studies, and the Wabash Center for Teaching and Learning in Theology and Religion. She also serves on the editorial board of Culture and Religion published by Routledge Press. In 2005-2006, Professor Uddin was a Fulbright Scholar conducting research in Bangladesh and West Bengal, India. Her current research project takes her frequently to the remote mangrove forests of Bangladesh and West Bengal, India known as the Sundarbans, where she studies Muslim and Hindu veneration of Bonbibi.
  • Muslims and Hindus who live in West Bengal and Bangladesh, on the edge of the Sundarbans, rely upon the bounty of this forest for their livelihood. Men venture into the forest to fish, collect wood, honey, and wax. With each trip into the forest, the men and women wonder if the men will return. The Bengal tiger, also residing in the forest, is the most aggressive hunter of humans in the world and so it is to Bonbibi that these men and women pray in hopes that Bonbibi will bring the men home safely. Venerators of Bonbibi say she was the daughter of a Meccan man named Ibrahim. She was born in the forest and after visiting the grave of the Prophet Muhammad was commanded by Allah to return to the forest to provide protection to the people. Before venturing into the forest, men and women pray seeking protection from Bonbibi. This paper will explore the spaces of convergence of religious life in the mangrove forest. Each community attempts to create meaning and function that is in line with their own worldview (Hindu and Islamic) and their common natural environment of the mangrove forest. In Hindu villages there are shrines dedicated to Bonbibi. Hindus create elaborate images of Bonbibi in village shrines and both Muslims and Hindus bestow gifts on her. Muslims also visit these shrines at the annual festival. Both Muslims and Hindus ritually recite the Jaharnama, the epic poem of Bonbibi forever memorialized in print by Muhammad Khater in the 1800s. The Muslims and Hindus share ritual specialists known as fakirs and gunins who keep men safe in the forest with their Arabic mantras associated with Bonbibi. This paper challenges longstanding theories of religious difference that do not reflect the transcending nature of regional culture.
  • Sponsored by the Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere with support from the Jerome A. Yavitz Fund, the Department of Religion, the Center for the Study of Hindu Traditions (ChiTra), and the Center for Women’s Studies and Gender Research.
  • This event is free and open to the public.
  • For further information about this event, contact Prof. Vasudha Narayanan (Department of Religion) at vasu@ufl.edu
  • During her visit, Prof. Uddin will also be conducting a Faculty and Graduate Seminar on the subject of “Marking the Presence of the Bonbibi.” This will be held in 117 Anderson Hall at 1:45pm on 4 March. This is a presentation of a work in progress. In this presentation and discussion I would like to explore the meaning of Bonbibi veneration among Hindus as evidenced in material culture. Scholarship on material culture suggests that the production and use of material artifacts are embedded in political, historical, and cultural life. The notion of Bonbibi as a “Muslim goddess,” as referred to by Hindu devotees infers complex cultural meaning. My discussion will focus on the annual production and installation of clay images in shrines and pujas performed before people venture into the forest. How is this idea of Bonbibi as a “Muslim goddess” affirmed in religious objects and interaction with these objects? Another important factor I want to explore is the connection between the location of Bonbibi shrines and the natural environment in which Bonbibi veneration is so closely tied.
  • Please email Anne Newman at annen1@ufl.edu if you are interested in attending the seminar.

J. Hillis Miller

Critical Climate Change: Why Is There a Crisis in the Humanities?

  • Hillis Miller is distinguished research professor emeritus in English and Comparative Literature at University of California at Irvine, and holds honorary degrees as Doctor of Letters from the University of Florida, Doctor of Humane Letters at Bucknell University, and Doctor Honoris Cause at the University of Zaragoza. He is also Honorary Professor of Peking University and past president of the Modern Language Association. Before coming to Irvine, Miller taught at The Johns Hopkins University and Yale University. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a member of the American Philosophical Society. His research interests are in the areas of Victorian literature, modern English and American literature of the nineteenth-and twentieth-centuries, comparative literature, and literary theory. He has published many essays and reviews and is an editor of various literary journals. Among Miller’s books are Charles Dickens: The World of His Novels; The Disappearance of God; Poets of Reality; The Form of Victorian Fiction; Fiction and Repetition; The Linguistic Moment; The Ethics of Reading; Hawthorne and History; Ariadne’s Thread; Illustration; Victorian Subjects; Tropes, Parables, Performatives; Theory Now and Then; New Starts; Topographies; Reading Narrative; Black Holes; Speech Acts in Literature; Others; and Literature as Conduct: Speech Acts in Henry James. His father, J. Hillis Miller, served as president of University of Florida from 1947 until his untimely death in 1953.
  • Sponsored by the Yavitz Fund at the Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere.
  • For further information on this lecture, contact Bonnie Effros (Humanities Center) at beffros@ufl.edu.
  • Lecture free and open to the public.

Southern Conference on Slavic Studies: Plenary Roundtable

On Gas Wars, Colored Revolutions, and Virtual Politics in Russia and the “Near Abroad”: A Post election Assessment

  • In the wake of Ukrainian presidential elections and the continued grip of economic instability in Russia and Europe alike, leading scholars of Russian and Ukrainian politics gather to assess the state of and prospects for relations between Russia, Europe, and the Russian “Near Abroad.” The term itself emerged in the aftermath of the collapse of the USSR to denote the former non-Russian Soviet republics and is used primarily by Russians to imply the continued existence of a Russian sphere of influence (partly legitimized by the significant presence of ethnic Russians in many of the neighbors in question). Contested or not, the relations continue to evolve and show little sign of diminishing in their impact on European stability in general. How are we to understand the recent history, current events and future prospects for this volatile region? What mechanisms might better help us understand the likely trajectory of the relationship in coming years? These and other issues will be at the center of debate at this year’s plenary roundtable of the Southern Conference on Slavic Studies.
  • Roundtable participants include:
    • Paul D’Anieri, Professor of Political Science and Dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at University of Florida
    • Zachary Selden, Deputy Secretary General for Policy, NATO Parliamentary Assembly
    • Lucan Way, Assistant Professor of Political Science at University of Toronto
    • Andrew Wilson, Senior Lecturer in Ukrainian Studies at the University College London School of Slavonic and East European Studies and Senior Policy Fellow for the European Council on Foreign Relations
  • Sponsored by the Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere with support from the Rothman Endowment. Co-sponsored by the Center for European Studies and UF Departments of History, Political Science, and Languages, Literatures, and Cultures.
  • Organized by Michael Gorham, LLC. For more information on this event, contact mgorham@ufl.edu.

2010 UF Conference on Comics and Graphic Novels – “ImageNext: Visions Past and Future”

  • Guest speakers will include David Kunzle (The History of the Comic Strip, Father of the Comic Strip: Rodolphe Töpffer), John Porcellino (King Cat), Molly Kiely (Diary of a Dominatrix, That Kind of Girl), and University of Iowa’s Corey Creekmur (Director of the Institute for Cinema and Culture).
  • This year’s conference will focus on “comics” in their broadest sense, including animation, manga, anime, graphic novels, webcomics, political cartoons, and even some “fine art” – that explore human history and alternate histories.
  • Co-sponsored by the Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere with support of the Yavitz Fund.
  • Lectures free and open to the public.
  • Organized by Katherine Shaeffer, Graduate Comic Organization, Department of English. For more information, contact penchanter@ufl.edu.

Activists Among Us: the Gainesville Women’s Movement Across Generations

  • A public history program sponsored by the Samuel Proctor Oral History Program at the University of Florida.
  • The panel discussion will bring together local activists from the 1950s through the present to discuss the ongoing struggle for social justice, gender equality, and human rights. The panel will also serve as a springboard for the collection and preservation of historical materials on the history of women’s activism in Gainesville.
  • Moderated by Dr. Patricia Hilliard-Nunn, this event will include members from Gainesville Women for Equal Rights, an interracial organization of women whose active work for civil and human rights changed the course of history in Gainesville. It will also include Gainesville activists in the pivotal women’s liberation movement of the 1960s. Serving as one of the main centers of feminist activity nationwide, Gainesville feminists posed radical challenges to male authority, and ushered in a new era of social change and opportunity for women.
  • Co-sponsors include: the University of Florida Department of History,the UF Center for Women’s Studies and Gender Research, George Smathers Libraries, The Gainesville Women’s Commission, the Women’s Studies Graduate Student Association, the History Graduate Society, and the Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere (Yavitz Fund).
  • For more information please call the Samuel Proctor Oral History Program at 352-392-7168 or email portiz@ufl.edu
  • Lecture free and open to the public.

Symposium: Art and Democracy

  • This event is organized by Kerry Oliver-Smith (Harn Museum) and Alex Alberro (Department of Art History).
  • In conjunction with “Project Europa: Imagining the (Im)Possible”, an exhibition at the Harn Museum of Art, 7 February – 9 May 2010.
  • Co-sponsored by the Harn Eminent Scholar Chair in Art and Art History, School of Art and Art History; Center for European Studies; Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere Yavitz Fund, and the France/Florida Research Center, University of Florida
  • For further information, contact: kos@ufl.edu.
  • Lectures free and open to the public.
Keynote Speaker
  • Catherine David is the chief curator at the Direction des Musées de France (Board of French Museums). She directed Documenta 10 in Kassel from 1994 – 1997 and the Witte de With Centre for Contemporary Art in Rotterdam from 2002 – 2004. She also has served as a curator at the Centre Pompidou and the Jeu de Paume. Since 1998 she has been in charge of the “Représentations Arabes Contemporaines” project.
Speakers
  • Maria Hlavajova is the curator and artistic director of BAK, basis voor actuele kunst in Utrecht, the Netherlands, and the program director of Tranzit, an initiative in Bratislava, Slovakia; Budapest, Hungary; Prague and Vienna. Hlvajova organized a three-part project, Citizens and Subjects, for the Dutch Pavilion at the 52nd Venice Biennale and numerous projects at BAK. She was the co-curator of Manifesta 3, Ljubljana (2000), and director of the Soros Center for Contemporary Arts in Bratislava from 1994 – 1999.
  • Clair Bishop, Associate Professor of Art History in the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, is an internationally acknowledged scholar of contemporary art. She is the author of Installation Art: A Critical History (Tate, 2005), “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics” (October no.110, 2004), “The Social Turn: Collaboration and its Discontents” (Artforum, 2006), and the edited anthology Documents of Contemporary Art: Participation (Whitechapel/MIT, 2006).
  • T.J. Demos is a lecturer in the Department of History of Art at University College London. His writing has appeared in journals that include Grey Room and October, Artforum, Texte zur Kunst, and Art Press. He is on the editorial board of Art Journal. His publications include Vitamin Ph: New Perspectives in Photography (Phaidon Press, 2006) and The Exiles of Marcel Duchamp (MIT Press, 2007). His present book project is provisionally titled Migrations: Contemporary Art and Globalization.
  • Tim Griffin became the editor–in-chief of Artforum in 2006, having previously served as senior editor and United States reviews editor. He was the art editor at Time Out New York from 2000 – 2002. Griffin is the author of Contamination, a collection of essays on art, architecture, design, technology and fashion. He is also a founding staff member of ArtByte: The Magazine of Digital Culture and a former senior editor of Art on Paper.
  • Alex Alberro is the Virginia Bloedel Wright Associate Professor of Art History at Barnard College. He is the author of Conceptual Art and the Politics of Publicity (The MIT Press, 2003). He has also edited and co-edited a number volumes, including Museum Highlights (MIT Press 2005), Recording Conceptual Art (University of California Press 2001), Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology (The MIT Press, 2000), and Two-Way Mirror Power (MIT Press, 1999).
  • Nora Alter is a professor of German, Film and Media Studies at the University of Florida. She has authored Vietnam Protest Theatre: the Television War on Stage (1996), Projecting History: Non-Fiction German Film (2002), and Chris Marker (2006). She has contributed essays to Camera Obscura, Cultural Critique, New German Critique, The Germanic Revie, and Film Quarterly. She has been awarded fellowships from the NEH, the Howard Foundation and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. In 2005 she was awarded the DAAD Prize for Distinguished Scholarship in German and European Studies.
  • Shepherd Steiner is a visiting assistant professor in modern and contemporary art at Emery University. He recently published essays in Fundacio Tapies, InTensions, Journal of Visual Culture, in Becoming Dutch, Eindhoven, Filip 9, Flash Art and the book Formalist Literary Theory in America, Oxford, 2008. He co-edited Cork Caucus: on art, possibility, and democracy (Frankfurt, 2007) and is currently finishing a book of close readings in Modernist painting, sculpture and criticism in America in 1950s and 1960s.

Yair Dalal Concert

  • Yair Dalal is an internationally renowned Israeli composer, violinist, player and singer. His music is inspired by his Iraqi-Jewish descent, and combines his diverse musical education including classical Arab music, classical European music, as well as Indian music and Jazz. He has also been active in attempts to enhance understanding and communication between Arabs and Jews. In 1994 Dalal performed at the Nobel Peace Prize gala concert in Oslo. Dalal will be accompanied by the leading percussionist Erez Mounk.
  • Sponsored by the Center for Jewish Studies.
  • Made possible by the Mikki & Morris Futernick Visiting Professorship, Kahn Visiting Scholar Endowment, and Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere (Yavitz Fund).
  • Free and open to the public.

The Ins and Outs of the Publication Process

  • Christopher Grasso earned a BA in journalism and an MA in English at Southern Connecticut State University, studied in the Graduate Liberal Studies Program at Wesleyan University, and received his PhD from Yale in 1992. He taught for seven years at St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota, becoming an associate professor in 1998. His book, A Speaking Aristocracy: Transforming Public Discourse in Eighteenth-Century Connecticut was published by the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture and the University of North Carolina Press in 1999. He is currently editor of the William & Mary Quarterly and is working on a book about American religious skepticism. His specialization is early American religious and intellectual history.
  • Karin Wulf earned her PhD from Johns Hopkins in 1993. She is currently Associate Professor of History and American Studies as well as Book Review Editor of The William & Mary Quarterly. Before coming to William & Mary, she taught for ten years at American University. Wulf has produced two collaborative editions, Milcah Martha Moore’s Book: A Commonplace Book from Revolutionary America (with Catherine Blecki, published by Penn State in 1997) and The Diary of Hannah Callender, 1758-1788 (with Susan Klepp, forthcoming). Her book, Not All Wives: Women of Colonial Philadelphia was published by Cornell University Press in 2000, and issued in paper by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 2005. She is currently at work on a study of the relationship between genealogical practices and political culture: “Lineage: The Politics and Poetics of Genealogy in British America, 1680-1820.”
  • Lecture free and open to the public.
  • Organized by the History Graduate Society with co-sponsorship of the Board of College Councils, Department of History, and the Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere (Yavitz Fund)
  • For further information about this event, please contact: ezavitz@ufl.edu.

Tianlong Jiao (Bishop Museum & University of Hawaii)

Toward a New Understanding of the Prehistory Of Southeast China

  • New archaeological investigations in Southeast China over the past decade have demonstrated that the prehistoric cultures in this region underwent tremendous changes over time. The new archaeological materials allow researchers to rethink issues such as the transformation of economy and material cultures, population migrations and the social changes in prehistoric Southeast China. Maritime adaptation became increasingly intensified. The improvements of seafaring skills allowed people move and interact with each other in a much broader space. Population movements lead to a series of social and cultural transformations. These new finds not only provide evidence for a different understanding of the prehistory of southeast China, they also carry significant implications for understanding many key issues in the prehistory of Southeast Asia.
  • Sponsored by the Asian Studies Program, the International Center, the Department of Anthropology, and the Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere and the Rothman Endowment.
  • Lecture is free and open to the public.
  • For more information on this event, please contact: krigbaum@ufl.edu