Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere

Suvendu Ghatak (Ph.D Student, English) – “Malarial Modernity: Colonialism and the Politics of Health in Modern South Asia”

In this presentation, Suvendu Ghatak will describe how in colonial South Asia, malaria became marked as the pathology of primitivity and degeneracy. Reading across medical, administrative, and literary archives in English, Bengali, and Hindi, between 1780 and 1950, he identifies the conjunctures of medical and cultural narratives in shaping this history. He demonstrates how the symbolization of colonial rule as a deliverance out of malaria into modernity obscured the role of modern colonial policies in shaping malarial epidemics. He concludes by tracing the continuities of this colonial semantics of malaria in postcolonial polities of South Asia.

Katherine McNamara (Ph.D. Student, Environmental and Global Health) — “People, Plants, and Pandemics”

Katherine McNamara’s research in Ecuador leverages archival and anthropological methods to explore how relationships between people and medicinal plants evolve as health ecologies shift. Using two disease events as focal points — the emergence of malaria in the 17th century and the COVID-19 pandemic — she positions present-day relationships with quina (Cinchona officinalis), the endangered tree from which quinine and hydroxychloroquine are derived, within a broader history of extraction and intimacy. Her talk engages with the history of science and medicine to reveal novel insights into the environmental fallout of human crises while advancing public health commitments to the humanities writ large.

Past Synergies Events

September 12 @ 4:00 pm

Reports from Residencies and Workshops at the National Humanities Center

Please join the event through the Zoom link here.

Tace Hedrick (English) – “Sexing the Cosmic Race”

Tace Hedrick will present on her research conducted in the summer residency at the National Humanities Center. There, she wrote portions of her book about Latinx artists whose work has been grounded in the Latinx and Chicanx counterculture movements of the 1960s and 70s. They were also influenced by Latin American spiritual beliefs and practices coming out of a long transnational investment in Latin American esoteric and New Age counterculture. Her approach deepens the understanding of their work as appeals to a profoundly transnational American history that frequently used and connected together across national borders, the lexicons of esoteric spirituality, race, and sexuality.

Marina Marco (Ph.D. Student, Spanish and Portuguese Studies) – “NHC for Graduate Students”

Marina Marco will talk about her experience during the virtual Graduate Student Summer Residence at the National Humanities Center, which focused on better practices during curriculum and syllabus design, such as universal design, and graduate student mental health. Additionally, she will present available resources for teaching available from the National Humanities Center.

Hina Shaikh (Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies Research) – “Developing Responsible AI Curriculum at UF”

Hina Shaikh worked collaboratively with twelve faculty members at the National Humanities Center to develop a curriculum on the topic of responsible artificial intelligence technologies.

October 26 @ 4:00 pm

Rethinking Local Communities

Register for the event on Zoom here.

Erika Davis (Ph.D. Candidate, Education) – “Exploring Latinx Educational Advocacy and City Politics”

This talk will cover research that examines educational advocacy efforts of the Latinx community in Allentown, PA, which recently surpassed 50 percent. Specifically, it investigates 1) neoliberal reform in the city and its impact on Latinx education, 2) racialization of Latinxs through local public discourses, and 3) how Latinx community members navigate racialized city politics to advocate for educational resources. Using critical ethnographic and archival methods, data will be collected from city council and school board meetings, interviews, ethnographic field notes, and newspaper archives. The talk sheds light on strategies Latinx communities employ with little formal representation in city politics to access educational resources.

Yekatit Tsehayu (Ph.D. Candidate, Religion) – “Intersectional Agency of Contemporary Revivalist Muslim Women in Ethiopia”

With an empirical focus on revivalist Ethiopian Muslim women in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia’s capital, this talk examines Muslim women’s agency where they are cultural, religious, and ethnic minorities. In Ethiopia an association to the dominant religion, culture, and gender determines citizenship and identity rights. Yekatit Tsehayu argues that Ethiopian Muslim women’s experiences and agency are better understood through their negotiations and renegotiations in the intersection of inequalities. Her research contributes to the feminist debate of intersectionality and agency.

Belay Alem (Ph.D. Candidate, Anthropology) – “Heirs’ Property in Alachua County, Florida: Inheritance, Security, Use, and Taxation”

Belay Alem’s presentation investigates the interface between social and legal regimes of inheritance, property, and taxation on heirs’ property collectively owned by African American Communities in Alachua County, Florida. Following the death of ascendants intestate (without will), heirs’ property has been collectively inherited by the heirs of the diseased in the kinship. Intestate heirs bear dispossession of ancestral land and structures because of the precarious nature of ownership right arising from the absence of a will and last testament. Based on Community Based Participatory ethnographic research, this talk will address the factors, conditions, and processes that lead to heirs’ property titles becoming clouded and ultimately being subjected to speculation by real estate developers.

November 14 @ 4:00pm

Carving and Examining Statues

Register for the event on Zoom here.

Velvet Yates (Classics) – “Learning to Carve and Ancient Greek Sculpture: The 3-Caliper Method”

Velvet Yates will report on her directed three-week study in Naxos under sculptor Maggie Ross on using the ancient 3-caliper method of stone-carving. Dr. Yates will present on her research into ancient sculpture methods. Learning more about the 3-caliper method complements her earlier research on ancient quarries, since smaller models and the 3-caliper method were very likely used to do preliminary carving on the large unfinished statues still lying in their quarries on Naxos. Understanding the 3-caliper method will correct errors and lacunae in handbooks on Greek art, preserve the knowledge of this millenia-old method for future generations, and question the myth of the ‘solitary genius’ in sculpture and other creative endeavors.

Rachel Polinsky (Ph.D. candidate, Art and Art History) – “Studying Style to Understand Sculpture”

Rachel Polinsky will discuss the coexistence of contemporary and “future” styles in a singular sculpture-type as indicative of style as choice that could be applied intentionally to direct the viewer’s attention towards points of significance. Korai—standing, clothed, female statues—appear in votive and funerary contexts throughout Greece during the Archaic period. She will present the need for comprehensive reconsideration of the korai’s feet/footwear because while their bodies fit the stylistic parameters of the Archaic (ca.700-480BCE), the feet/footwear more closely resemble the Classical (ca.500-323BCE). Understanding the feet/footwear as a deliberate focal point suggests they are not merely anatomical or decorative, but have significant iconographic functions.

January 18 @ 4:00 pm

Public Performance

Register for the event on Zoom here.

Abigail Lindo (Ph.D. candidate, Music) – “Sensing Azorean Autonomous Identity”

Focused on the politics of intangible Portuguese cultural heritage and belonging, Abigail Lindo will present her ethnographic research project exploring the sonic culture and lives of individuals in São Miguel, the largest of nine islands in the Portuguese autonomous region of the Azores. She argues that autonomous governance, as limiter and liberator, can be culturally understood through musical expression in various realms of Azorean life, considering religion, gender, and class. A feminist anthropological lens will aid in the analysis of how the often-androcentric dominance in musical spaces and interactions affects participants’ engagement in musical spaces and the development of musical cultures.

Macarena Deij Prado (Ph.D. candidate, Art and Art History) – “Public Performance and Display in Spanish America 1570-1630”

During the period 1570-1630, both open landscape and monastic architecture in Spanish America served for the staging of public performative events, such as the 1587 procession of painting of the Virgin Mary in Colombia. The image traveled hundreds of kilometers between Chiquinquirá and Santafé de Bogotá. Likewise, in present-day central Mexico the mortality resulting from a plague in 1576, motivated the undertaking of an extensive mural program at the Monastery of San Miguel de Huejotzingo which documented ritual performed in penitential processions. Macarena Deij Prado’s project demonstrates that both landscape and architecture were altered by being incorporated into ritual performance.
 

January 30 @ 4:00 pm

New Approaches to Material History

Register for the event on Zoom here.

Tim Blanton (Ph.D. candidate, History) – “When Main Street Met Wall Street: Bucket Shops”

How did the United States become an “investor’s democracy?” A country where owning stocks, bonds, and commodities became increasingly commonplace between 1900-1929? This talk looks to the history of bucket shops—businesses that allowed Americans of modest means from New York to California to wager on price fluctuations in securities markets without owning specific securities between the 1870s-1920s—to explain how individual gambling facilitated the creation of an investor’s democracy. Despite questionable business practices, bucket shops offered an informal arena of practice that normalized the language and mechanics of securities markets for Americans not named Jay Gould or Cornelius Vanderbilt.

Mandy Moore (Ph.D. candidate, English) – “Just Fandom Things: A New Materialist Approach”

This presentation argues that studying fan communities should involve looking at the impacts of nonhuman “things” alongside the actions of humans in order to better understand the complex systems of fandom. Mandy Moore draws from new materialist rhetorical theory, which suggests that things have agency to cause change in the world and play a fundamental role in any system. She develops a methodology to examine four fandom related things (a relationship, a hashtag, an iconic image, and a fictional object) as case studies, showing how their “lives” have important consequences on fans’ activities, conversations, and culture.

February 7 @ 4:00 pm

Reproduction and Colonialism in Latin America

Register for the event on Zoom here.

Paola Uparela (Spanish and Portuguese Studies) – “Well-Being Policies for the (Re)production of the Indigenous Population: Las Casas’s Remedies (1516) in Guaman Poma’s Good Government (1615)”

In 1615, Felipe Guaman Poma proposed a series of policies in which the sovereign would stop abuses, illicit impregnation, and miscegenation and guarantee the multiplication of the Indigenous population. In 1516, a century earlier, prominent intellectual Bartolome de Las Casas proposed a series of remedies to preserve the Indians’ lives, health, and well-being and to protect such individuals from labor exploitation and death. Las Casas’s proposal never became a state policy, and as Guaman Poma claimed, the abuses continued. This talk examines how Guaman Poma would have had access to Las Casas’s 1516 Memorial and the connections between two projects that proposed to the king remedies of “not allowing the Indians to die” but also, policies of multiplying them through the administration of their sexual and (re)productive lives.

Fernanda Bretones Lanes (History) – “Shores of Asylum: Fugitivity, Empire, and Slavery in the Colonial Caribbean”

This presentation contributes a historical perspective on issues directly relevant to our contemporary society: immigration and asylum. It examines the making and unmaking of Spain’s religious sanctuary, an imperial policy that existed in the Caribbean during the 17th and 18th centuries that conferred asylum—and potentially freedom—to fugitive slaves who sought religious protection in Spanish colonies. Teasing out the reasons why the Spanish Empire designed this policy as well as the forces that came together for its dismantling reveals much about the causes and effects of, and responses to, waves of human migration and immigration across time and space.

March 6 @ 4:00 pm 

Space and Place

Register for the event on Zoom here.

Zheyuan Deng (Ph.D. candidate, Religion) – “The Spatial Histories of Ahmadiyya in Nigeria”

Ahmadiyya is a minority group of Islam originated in British India and was frequently accused of treating its founder Ghulam Ahmad as a prophet after Muhammad and subsequently subjected to persecution in many places in the contemporary world. However, it thrived in Nigeria since the 1920s and has been contributing to the construction of urban spaces in Lagos. Based on archives, newspapers, Ahmadi internal documents, oral interviews, and participant observations, Zheyuan Deng examines how spaces have been constructed, contested, and lived by Ahmadi Muslims in Lagos, and argues that space is essential to understand Muslims’ everyday life in the broader social contexts.

Rachel Gordan (Religion) – “Becoming The Y: The Story of the 92nd Street Young Men’s Hebrew Association”

By the mid-twentieth century, the 92nd Street Y, founded in 1874, was transitioning from a Jewish institution resembling a settlement house assisting immigrants, into one of New York’s premier cultural centers. This oldest, largest, and most renowned of North America’s Young Men’s Hebrew Associations is famous for many cultural benchmarks: it was where Dylan Thomas introduced his play, “Under Milk Wood,” Truman Capote first read aloud his creative non-fiction, and cellist Yo-Yo Ma first performed in New York City, to name a few. The talk tells the story of this important, but surprisingly understudied American cultural institution—beginning in the late nineteenth century and extending into the present day—that has played a unique role in weaving together two important strands of New York history: the city as both a cultural capital and a Jewish capital.

April 3 @ 4:00PM

Knowledge and History

Register for the event on Zoom here.

Anton Matytsin (History) – “A History of History: The Academie des Inscriptions and the Remaking of the Past”

In this presentation, Anton Matytsin explores the origins of the modern discipline of history and the emergence of Enlightenment cosmopolitanism by examining the Académie des inscriptions et belles-lettres—a learned society in Old Regime France. The central paradox with which his project grapples is how historical research sponsored by the French crown for state building subverted the political and religious fabric of the Old Regime. His research explains how the academicians rethought the development of civilizations, moving away from biblical chronology and incorporating non-European cultures. It also examines how new understandings of the past shaped prognostications of humanity’s future.

Rodrigo Borges (Philosophy) – “Knowledge After Gettier: The Place of Knowledge in Contemporary Philosophy”

It is an item of conventional philosophical wisdom that the examples introduced into the philosophical imagination by Edmund Gettier in 1963 shattered the ancient Platonic definition of knowledge as justified true belief. This has been recently challenged by a wave of philosophical research suggesting an important mistake lays at the heart of the Platonic understanding of the place and significance of knowledge after Gettier. This talk critically accesses this dispute and uncovers the true place of knowledge after Gettier in contemporary philosophy.