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Faculty-Work-in-Progress: Trash, Place, and Chinese Ecocinema: On Wang Jiuliang’s Eco-Documentaries

What does ecocinema mean for Chinese cinema? In his talk, Haomin Gong, Assistant Professor in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures, takes two documentaries, Beijing Besieged by Waste and Plastic China, made by the Chinese filmmaker Wang Jiuliang as examples, and investigates the issues of place and displacement in the forming of the discourse of trash in contemporary China.  

Poetry Reading with Dan Beachy-Quick

Dan Beachy-Quick, a Monfort Professor teaching in the MFA Creative Writing Program at Colorado State University, joins the English Department’s colloquium for a poetry reading. He is the author of several books of poetry including North True South Bright (2003), Spell (2004), Mulberry (2006), This Nest, Swift Passerine (2009), Circle’s Apprentice (2011, Winner of the Colorado Book Award in Poetry) and gentlessness (2015). He is also the author of a book of interlinked meditations on Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, titled A Whaler’s Dictionary (2008) and a collection of essays, meditations, and fairy tales, Wonderful Investigations (2012).

Edge of Disaster–Vaccines and Epidemics

The recent outbreak of Ebola in parts of Africa–and the frightened posts and live-tweets that accompanied two infected health workers as they returned to the US–give us a glimpse not only of an epidemic’s power but of our private terrors. Self-preservation, fear of the unknown, and a desire to protect the boundaries of nations, persons, bodies and cells brings out the best and worst in us. History History provides both sides; the uninfected locked up with the infected in 14th century plague houses, left to starve and suffer in the dark–or doctors like Cleveland’s Horace Ackley, who personally combated and contained an outbreak of Asiatic cholera in Sandusky in 1849.

Humanities@Case

Panelists will discuss the resources available specifically to undergraduate humanities students at Case Western Reserve University and answer questions from the audience. Panelists include:

Elizabeth Banks, Director of the Center for Civic Engagement and Learning, will discuss the opportunities for community service and active learning.

Autumn Beechler Stebing, Assistant Director of Education Abroad in the �ǿմ�ý Center for International Affairs, will discuss the opportunities and process for studying abroad.

Exceptional Measures: The Human Sciences in STEM Worlds

In this lecture, Jerome McGann, John Stewart Bryan Professor at the University of Virginia, discusses the idea that Humanist studies focus primarily on phenomena that is singular, idiosyncratic, and – in a word – personal. As such, they can appear to lack the procedural rigor that we rightly associate with STEM disciplines: Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics. But the rigor of humanist studies is not STEM-deficient, it is just STEM-different. We can see the difference most clearly if we seek a philological rather than a philosophical view of the humanities, and if we look at some salient American examples.

Faculty-Work-in-Progress – Invisible Women: Gabon’s ‘Empty Canon’

Gabon is unique in that its women writers have historically been predominate in creating its national literature. Despite its many milestones in this area, however, this tiny nation has not received the critical attention that other African neighbors have enjoyed. In her talk, Cheryl Toman, Associate Professor of French, examines the “herstory” of Gabon’s literature which may explain why.

Pre-lecture reception begins at 4:15 pm in Clark Hall Room 206.

Free and open to the public. 

Humanities@Work:Law

Panelists discuss how studying the humanities influenced their careers.

Panelists include:

Joel Levin (University of Chicago ’82) majored in history and philosophy. As a lawyer at Levin & Associates Co., LPA, he represents victims against wayward banks, financial institutions, lawyers, accountants, police, sheriffs’ offices and prison officials. He has also founded two software development startups.

Graduate Student Work-in-Progress – A Comedy in Five Acts: A Gamified Pedagogical Approach to Shakespeare

Michelle Lyons-McFarland, a PhD candidate in the Department of English, will explore what it means to take plot, trope, and narrative and turn them into game rules, in effect highlighting them for players/students and audiences. What are the consequences of including social games in the classroom? How can you turn a classic work of literature into a game, either for personal amusement or pedagogical purposes?

The Joseph and Violet Magyar Lecture in Hungarian Studies: Hungarian Foreign Policy – Renewed and Adjusted to Today’s Challenges

THIS EVENT HAS BEEN CANCELLED DUE TO THE AMBASSADOR’S REQUIRED TRAVEL TO THE HOME OFFICE.  WE HOPE TO RESCHEDULE SOON.  PLEASE WATCH THE WEBSITE FOR UPDATES.

H.E. Dr. Réka Szemerkényi, the Ambassador of Hungary to the United States, will discuss current developments in the foreign policy of her country in light of recent events that have unsettled Europe and the international community.

Faculty-Work-in-Progress – From Translation and its Aftermath: The Soviet Legacy in a Post–Socialist Cuba

In her lecture, Damaris Punales-Alpizar, Assistant Professor of Spanish, proposes an approach to the socialist literature in Spanish that was consumed in Cuba from the sixties to the nineties and, following the theories of translation of Itamar Evan-Zohar, attempts to elucidate the peripheral and central role that such literature had in the formation of a Cuban literary polysystem. 

Pre-lecture Reception begins at 4:15 pm in Clark Hall Room 206.

Free and open to the public.