Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere

The UF Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere was officially established in 2009. Prior to that time, the nascent Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere supported the following events:

2008-2009

• Nina Caputo and Andrea Sterk, Department of History
  “Faithful Narratives: The Challenge of Religion in History”
• Susanna Elm (University of California at Berkeley)
  “Pagan Challenge and Christian Response: Towards a New Rome”
• Carlos Eire (Yale University)
  “When Miracles Ceased: The Protestant Reformation and the Disenchantment of the World”
• David Nirenberg (University of Chicago)
  “Sibling Rivalries: Judaism, Christianity, Islam”
• David Ruderman (University of Pennsylvania)
  “The People and the Book: The Invention of Print and the Transformation of Jewish Culture”
• Peter Brown (Princeton University)
  “Between Syria and Egypt: Alms, Work and the Origins of Christian Monasticism”
• Susannah Heschel (Dartmouth)
  “Scholars and Converts: European Jews Embrace Islam”
• Lamin Sanneh (Yale University)
  “The Return of Religion in Africa”
• William Link, Department of History
  “Creating Citizenship in the 19th Century South and Beyond: An International Symposium”
• H. Wind Cowles, Department of Linguistics;
  Edith Kaan, Department of Linguistics; and
  Lori Altmann, Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders
  “Lecture Series on Written Language Comprehension”
• Charles Perfetti (University of Pittsburgh)
  “Word Learning Episodes (and their Consequences for Word Knowledge and Reading Skill)”
• Susan Garnsey (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)
  “The contributions of lexical bias, plausibility, and prosody to the resolution of temporary ambiguity in English sentences”
• Akintunde Akinyemi, Center for African Studies
  “African Creative Expressions: Mother Tongue and Other Tongues”
• Michael Gorham, Department of Germanic and Slavic Studies
  “Up From the Ashes: National Revival and Imperial Aspirations in Putin-era Russia”
• Tania Darlington, Department of English
  “Convergences: Comics, Culture and Globalization”
• Luise White, Department of History
  “Decolonization and the Franchise”

2007-2008

• Kirk Ludwig & Michael Jubien, Department of Philosophy
  “The Epistemology & Ontology of Necessity & Possibility”
• Anna Peterson, Department of Religion;
  Les Thiele, Department of Political Science
  “Rethinking Environment Values, Consumption, and Desire”
• Florin Curta, Department of History
  “History, Legacy & Heritage:  A Panel on Heritage Tourism in Spain & Slovenia”
• Drs Anita Anantharam, Women’s Studies;
  Whitney Sanford, Department of Religion
  “Eating Cultures: Gender, Globalization, & the Politics of Consumption in South Asia”
• Donald Ault, Department of English
  “ImageSexT: Intersections of Sex, Gender, and Sexuality”
• Amy Bard, AALL
  “An Ocean of Devotion: South Asian Regional Worship Traditions”
• K. Kapparis and J. Rea, Department of Classics
  “Paradigms of Power & Sexuality:  Exploring Diversity in Antiquity”
• Virginia LoCastro, Department of Linguistics
  “Contemporary Issues in Second Language Acquisition”
• Louise Newman, Department of History
  Symposium: The Historical Study of Race
• Mario Poceski, Department of Religion
  “Remembering the Past & Reshaping the Future:  The Roles of Historical Memory & Narration in Chinese Buddhism”
• Phillip Wegner, Department of English
  “On Culture: Theories, Practices, Histories, and Futures of the Social”
  10th Annual Conference of the Marxist Reading Group

2006-2007

• Dragan Kujundzic, Department of Germanic-Slavic Languages:
  “’Who?’ or ‘What?’—Jacques Derrida”
• Nina Caputo & Andrea Sterk, Department of History:
  “Europe & the Middle East”
• Barbara Mennel, Department of Germanic & Slavic Studies:
  “German Cinema: From National Cinema to Transnational Cinematic Practices”
• Vasudha Narayanan, Center for the Study of Hindu Traditions, Department of Religion
  An Andal evening: “Text, Ritual Context, and Embodied Knowledge”
• Eric Potsdam, Department of Linguistics
  “Lecture Series in Linguistics – African Linguistics”
• Gregory Ulmer and Kate Casey-Sawicki, Department of English
  “Imaging Place”
• La Monda Horton-Stallings and Amy Ongiri, Department of English
  “African Diasporic Cultural Interventions into Gender and Sexuality Studies (Past, Present, and Future)”
• Elka Shortsleeve, Department of Philosophy
  Southeast Graduate Philosophy Conference

2005-2006

• Bron Taylor, Religion and Nature: Convening a New Field, Religion
• Robert Ray, Colloquium on Film Scenes, English and Film and Media Studies

2004-2005

• Bob Hatch, Between Renaissance & Enlightenment:  Scientific Revolution / early modern science, History
• David Hackett, Conference on New Directions in Religious Studies, Religion

2003-2004

• Donald Ault, Professor of English
  American “Underground Comix”, English
• Maureen Turim, Professor of English and Film and Media Studies
  Cities of Women: The Filmic Portrayal of Urban Female Struggles, English
• Dan Kaufmann, Department of Philosophy in collaboration with Center for Women’s Studies
  Women Philosophers of the Early Modern Period, Philosophy
• Alvaro Bolanos, Associate Professor of Spanish
  Hispanism, Hispanic Communities, and U.S. Academia: Changing the Hispanic Subject in the Era of Globalization, RLL

2002-2003

• “The Non-Ending Avant-garde”
• “Literature of the Diaspora”
• “Race, Gender, and Sexuality in Alice Walker”
• “Theorizing Transnational Religion and Globalization”
• Aida Bamia, Professor of Arabic, and Todd Hasak-Lowy, Center for African Studies
  Representations of Urban Space, AALL
• Carlos Rojas, Assistant Professor of African and Asian Languages ad Literatures
  Edward Yang and Modern Taiwan Cinema, AALL
• Karelisa Hartigan, Director of Greek Studies
  Voices in Public Performance: Singing to Ancient and Modern Audiences, Classics
• Susan Hegeman, Associate Professor of English
  MRG Fifth Annual Conference, English
• John Cech and Center for Children’s Literature, and Institute for Children and Families Studies
  Children, Culture, and Violence, English
• Nora Alter, Professor of Germanic and Slavic Languages and Literatures
  Beyond/After the Screen: The Vicissitudes of Film in the New Millennium, German & Slavic
• Mark Thurner, Professor of History
  American Empire? A Forum for Our Times, History
• Kirk Ludwig, Professor of Philosophy
  Self-Knowledge, Philosophy
• In the Wake of Carnevale: Ritual Wandering as a Prelude to Paradise, RLL
• Sheryl Kroen, Associate Professor of History
  Gender and the Eighteenth Century: An Interdisciplinary Symposium, History
• Galia Hatav, Program in Linguistics
  Semitic Linguistics, Linguistics

2001-2002

• Frederick Gregory and Stephen McKnight, Conference on Cultures of Science: Unifying Nature Past and Present, History
• “Remembering Booker T. Washington: 100th Anniversary of Up From Slavery”
• “Globalization and its Discontents”
• Julian Wolfreys, Conference on Rethinking Deconstruction, English
• Donald Ault, Professor of English
  “Will Eisner Symposium: Conference on Comics and Graphic Novels”
• “Circulations: ‘America’ and Globalization”
• “Film Scenes” (continuing into Fall 2002)

State and Future of the Humanities Lecture Series

• John D’Arms. “The State of the Humanities.” February 2001
• Sander Gilman. “The New Future for the Humanities in the next Decade.” September 2001
• John Guillory. “The Undisciplined Humanities.” 29 November 2001

Humanities Term Lecturers

• Jacques Derrida, Director of Ecole des Hautes Etudes de Sciences Sociales, Ecole Normale Superieure, and Professor of Philosophy and French Literature, University of California, Irvine. Spring 2001 (April 12-14)
• Jerry Fodor, Fall 2001 (October 29-November 2)

2000-2001

• Mary Watt, Conferences on Carnival/ Carnevale, Italian
• “Acts of Laughter in Antiquity”
• “Almost Always Deceived: Revolutionary Praxis and Reinventions of Need”
• “Vergil’s Epic Then and Now”

Initial Consultants on Center

(also included lecturers in the “State and Future of the Humanities” series)

• Keith Baker, J. E. Wallace Sterling Professor of Humanities, Stanford University, and past Director of Stanford Humanities Center (January 2001)
• W. Robert Connor, Director of the National Humanities Center (September 2000)

Distinguished External Speakers (since 2001)

• John D’Arms
  President of the American Council of Learned Societies.
• Brian Dolan
  History of Science & Medicine, University of California San Francisco
• Jerry Fodor
  State of New Jersey Professor of Philosophy, Rutgers University.
• Kirk Freudenburg
  Professor of Classics, Ohio State University.
• Sander Gilman
  Director of Humanities Laboratory, University of Illinois Chicago.
• Rita Gross
  Professor Emeritus of Religion, University of Wisconsin.
• Michael Hardt
  Associate Professor of Literature, Duke University.
• Rob Iliffe
  History of Science, Imperial College, London
• Rosemary Hennessy
  Professor of English, University of Albany.
• Frederic Jameson
  William A. Lane, Jr., Professor of Comparative Literature and Professor of Romance Studies (French), Duke University.
• Peggy Kamuf
  Marion Frances Chevalier Professor of French and Comparative Literature, University of Southern California.
• William Labov
  Professor of Linguistics, University of Pennsylvania.
• Carolyn Merchant
  Chancellor’s professor of Environmental History, University of California Berkeley
• J. Hillis Miller
  UCI Distinguished Professor, University of California Irvine.
• Tim Moore
  Professor of Classics, University of Texas.
• Douglas Olson
  Professor of Classics, University of Minnesota.
• Elaine Pagels
  Professor of Religion, Princeton University.
• Paul Julian Smith
  Head, Department of Spanish and Portuguese, Cambridge University.
• Robert Weisbuch
  President of Woodrow Wilson Foundation, Princeton.