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2015-2016

  • A Tale of Two Plantations: a Comparative Approach to Caribbean and U.S. Slavery

    Wed, Sep 9 2015, 5:00 PM

    Richard Dunn, Roy F. and Jeannette P. Nichols Professor Emeritus of American History at the University of Pennsylvania and winner of a 2015 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, has reconstructed the individual lives and collective experiences of two thousand slaves who lived on Mesopotamia sugar estate in western Jamaica and Mount Airy plantation in Tidewater Virginia.  He compares slave life on the two plantations in order to demonstrate the huge demographic difference between the British Caribbean and the U.S.

  • 9/11 Chronomania: Terror and the Temporal Imagination

    Fri, Sep 11 2015, 3:00 PM

    For billions around the world, the events of 9/11 were experienced as a rupture, a periodizing event that cast the world into a new period of danger and uncertainty. Whether it signaled the end of a brief era of optimistic globalism or a bold retaliation against an ungodly global hegemon, understood as a deeply historical event or an apocalypse outside ordinary time, one of 9/11’s most salient effects has proved to be temporal in nature. The experience of temporal disorientation and unsettlement has been of paramount importance to the narratives that address the attacks and contend with their unfolding legacy in the subsequent decade.

  • Navigating Pathways of Support: A Panel for Graduate Students on Research Resources at ǿմý

    Thu, Sep 17 2015, 12:00 PM

    Digital humanities initiatives around campus are up and running, meaning that we are ready to help you build, develop, collaborate on and fund digital scholarship! Have an idea for a project? Bring it along and our panelists will help you find the support you need! Want more training? We will discuss our ongoing workshops.

  • Unrepentant Traveler, Accidental Diplomat: Gabriela Mistral, Latin America’s First Nobel Laureate and Feminist Icon

    Fri, Sep 18 2015, 4:30 PM

    How did a mixed-race woman, born into poverty in the remote Andes, whose formal education ended with primary school become a literary celebrity? Biographer Elizabeth Horan will point to the challenges and rewards of researching a figure whose vast network, achieved through travel, correspondence and published writings, made her the most powerful woman in the Spanish-speaking world. She became the confidante of Senators and Presidents. This lecture will reveal the surprising range and secrets of her influence as a symbol of the Americas.

  • The Soul of Cleveland

    Mon, Sep 21 2015, 5:30 PM

    Hear about the street named for a poet, an Idea Garage, our forgotten entrepreneurs passionate about our waterways and from the audience. The Soul of Cleveland project derives from a celebration in discussion form. From January to June, a book store owner, naturalist, award-winning Cleveland writer, art historian and owner of a bakery, educators and architects met to determine how we “feel” about this city? What lifts our spirits, gives us hope, moves us to community action?

  • Humanities@Work: Medicine

    Mon, Sep 21 2015, 6:00 PM

    During this event planned for undergraduate students, panelists discuss how studying the humanities influenced their careers.

  • Graduate Student Work-in-Progress: From the Street to the Stage: Popular Song and the Construction of Parisian Spectacle, 1648-1713

    Tue, Sep 29 2015, 4:30 PM

    As a Fulbright scholar in Paris for the 2014-2015 academic year, John Romey,a graduate student in the Department of Music, undertook an enormous archival project that catalogued and analyzed manuscript chansonniers and print sources documenting song texts that circulated in street culture. This talk will aim to use broad strokes to present the types of songs that were performed in the streets and on the Pont Neuf in Paris, and to outline how these song practices functioned within early modern communication networks.

  • Book Publishing in the Humanities

    Mon, Oct 5 2015, 12:00 PM

    The publishing process for scholars in the humanities is often a confusing one, especially for first-time authors. Today’s shifting landscape of scholarly publishing, with new formats and media for disseminating and promoting scholarship, confronts a would-be author with numerous choices.  This lecture is meant to serve an introduction to academic book publishing, with an emphasis on the humanities.

  • Graduate Student Work-in-Progress: Illustrating Little Manhood & Erasing Black Boyhood in African American Picture Books

    Thu, Oct 8 2015, 4:30 PM

    Cara Byrne, a graduate student in the Department of English, will examine the complexities of visualizing black male identity, especially for and about young black boys. There is a long legacy of picture books that teach young African American boys to become “little men,” leaving behind childish ways to demonstrate rigid maturity and asexual masculinity. This project ultimately contends that many African American picture books not only respond to generations of hate crimes and discrimination but also that black authors and illustrators use the genre as a way to protect the youngest generation and seek social justice. By analyzing the African American picture book genre, which has gone simultaneously critically ignored and popularly embraced, one can see a long lineage of this theme. 

  • The 2015 Inamori Ethics Prize Ceremony and Lecture: Human Development and the Capabilities Approach in Global Ethics

    Thu, Oct 15 2015, 6:00 PM

    The 2015 Inamori Ethics Prize will be awarded to celebrated philosopher and scholar Martha Nussbaum, the Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Ethics at the University of Chicago. As part of the prize ceremony, Professor Nussbaum will present a lecture on her signature work that has been at the forefront of the principal contemporary ethical issues. Along with economist Amartya Sen, Nussbaum has reoriented conversations of international welfare efforts away from exclusive focus on GDP and toward the capabilities of a nation’s individuals.