Calendar of Events and Deadlines
IPRH Events
Memory/Memoir: Readings and Discussion by Philip Graham (English), Alma Gottlieb (Anthropology), Janice Harrington (English), and Harry Liebersohn (History)
Date: September 18, 2012
Time: 7:30 p.m.
Location: IPRH, Humanities Lecture Hall
This event is free and open to the public.
About this event:
This event features members of the U of I Creative Writing and Anthropology faculty reading from their recently published works. Professors Philip Graham, Alma Gottlieb, and Janice Harrington have published books in the past year that explore the theme of memory and memoir. Each author will spend a few minutes addressing the audience, explaining the origins of their publication, or speaking about some aspect of the work that they found especially meaningful, challenging, exciting, or creatively stimulating. Each author will then read a selection, chosen for its particular significance to the author and his or her primary creative intention(s). After the authors have finished reading, UIUC History professor Harry Liebersohn will follow with a commentary that focuses on the role of memory and memoir in the humanities more broadly. We will then open the floor for discussion with the audience. 
About the speakers:
Alma Gottlieb is the author of eight books of anthropology, most recently The Restless Anthropologist, as well as The Afterlife Is Where We Come From,A World of Babies,Blood Magic and, with Philip Graham, Parallel Worlds and Braided Worlds. She conducted fieldwork among the Beng people of Côte d'Ivoire for two decades, and is now studying Cape Verdeans with Jewish ancestry. She is a professor of Anthropology, African Studies, and Gender and Women’s Studies at UIUC.
Philip Graham is the author of seven books of fiction (including the novel How to Read an Unwritten Language and the story collection Interior Design) and nonfiction (including The Moon, Come to Earth: Dispatches from Lisbon, and, with Alma Gottlieb, Parallel Worlds and Braided Worlds). A professor in thecreative writing program at UIUC, Graham is also a co-founder and currently serves as the non-fiction editor of the UIUC literary/arts journal Ninth Letter.
Janice N. Harrington’s Even the Hollow My Body Made Is Gone won the A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize and the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. She is the winner of a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship for Poetry and a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award for emerging women writers.Her new book of poems,The Hands of Strangers: Poems from the Nursing Home, builds on her experience working her way through college as a nurses’ aid.
Harry Liebersohn is a Professor of History at the University of Illinois. His most recent book is The Return of the Gift: European History of a Global Idea (Cambridge, 2011, paperback and Chinese edition forthcoming).
Third Annual IPRH Distinguished Lecture in the Humanities: “Republican Political Theology in the Age of Hobbes” by Feisal Mohamed (English)
Date: October 3, 2012
Time: 4:00 p.m.
Location: Levis Faculty Center, Third Floor
Opening Remarks by Provost Ilesanmi Adesida.
Curtis Perry, Professor of English and Head of the English Department, will moderate.
A reception will follow the lecture.
This event is free and open to the public.
About this event:
In Carl Schmitt’s influential account of political theology, Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan (1651) is a watershed text in the early modern secularization of theological principles. This paper argues that the Roman provenance of Hobbes’ ideas qualifies their modernity, and that their foundation in determinist materialism strongly limits their theological underpinnings. We shall look instead to key figures of England’s short-lived republic to find views of sovereignty with more substantive theological engagements. From this distinctly English contribution to the republican tradition arises that quality of the modern political imaginary for which neither Hobbes nor Enlightenment thought can account: the sovereign’s embodiment of a locus of power sustained by the self-sacrifice of subjects.
About the speaker:
Feisal G. Mohamed is a professor in the English Department with affiliations in the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory and the Center for South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies. He currently serves on the Executive Committee of the Milton Society of America and is a Full Member of McGill University’s Center for Research on Religion. In addition to such journals as PMLA, Journal of the History of Ideas, Milton Studies and Milton Quarterly, his work has appeared in The New York Times and Dissent Magazine, and he maintains a blog at The Huffington Post. He has published two books: In the Anteroom of Divinity: The Reformation of the Angels from Colet to Milton (U of Toronto P, 2008), and Milton and the Post-Secular Present: Ethics, Politics, Terrorism (Stanford UP, 2011). With Mary Nyquist has co-edited the collection Milton, Historicism, and Questions of Tradition: Essays by Canadians (U of Toronto P, 2012). In 2011, he received a Mellon Foundation New Directions Fellowship, which supported his completion of an LLM in our College of Law and will support future legal training related to his current work on religious liberty in various contexts, cultural, legal, and historical.
Inside Scoop Series:
Creative Inquiry in the Humanities, a Conversation with Undergraduates
Date: October 24, 2012
Time: 5:00 p.m.
Location: Honors Commons Lounge, Lincoln Hall
About this event:
Curious about the work yourhumanities professors do outside the classroom? Come get the inside scoop from some of the U of I's most dynamicprofessors in a relaxed and informal setting. Join us for a conversationand learn about the thrilling discoveries that fuel creative inquiry and work in humanities research. This session offers an opportunity for all interested undergraduates, no matter their majors, to share in the excitement of the great breadth of research performed daily on our campus. Pizza and, of course, ice cream(scoops!)will be served.
About the speakers:
Jane Desmond has worked professionally as a modern dancer, a choreographer, a humanities professor, a social science professor, on a Hollywood film, and on a PBS documentary in Senegal. She has spoken, published, or conducted research in East Asia, South Asia, Eastern and Southern Africa, Latin America, and throughout Eastern, Western, and Central Europe. She has written and edited several academic books, in the areas of tourism studies, performance studies, and animal studies, and co-founded the International Forum for U.S. Studies, a center for the transnational Study of the U.S. She holds degrees from Brown, Sarah Lawrence, and Yale, and has served on the faculties of Cornell, Duke, the University of Iowa, and since 2007 has been a professor in the Anthropology and Gender and Women's Studies departments at UIUC. 
Jonathan Ebel is an associate professor in the Department of Religion specializing in the religious history of the United States. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 2004 and has been teaching at the University of Illinois since August of 2006.
Professor Ebel is the author of Faith in the Fight: Religion and the American Solider in the Great War (Princeton, 2010) and the co-editor of From Jeremiad to Jihad: Religion, Violence, and America (California, 2012). He is currently working on two books. One focuses on the place of soldiers and war in American civil religion; the other is a religious history of the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl migration. 
Tara McGovern is a senior in Sociocultural and Linguistic Anthropology with minors in Spanish and Latin American and Caribbean Studies at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign. A recipient of the Foreign Language Area Studies Fellowship (FLAS), she is entering her third year of studying Quechua, a native Andean language. She has conducted ethnographic research in El Salvador and Ecuador, as well as Maya archaeology in Belize. She has worked at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, and currently at the Spurlock Museum on campus. This past summer, she was the Web Content Intern at the Chicago Humanities Festival, and completed the manuscript of her first novel.
Lecture: “Black Cultural Politics in a Color Blind Nation” by Tricia Rose (Africana Studies, Brown University)
Date: November 1, 2012
Time: 4:00 p.m.
Location: Knight Auditorium, Spurlock Museum
Co-Sponsored by IPRH and the Spurlock Museum.
David R. Roediger, Kendrick C. Babcock Professor of History and African American Studies will moderate.
A reception will follow the lecture.
This event is free and open to the public.
About this event:
This lecture explores some facets of the strange co-existence of the idea of "color blindness" as a social ideal in the context of a social reality in which race heavily determines economic and social outcomes, racially-coded political narratives fuel national belonging, and the entertainment industry regularly profits from mass consumption of narrow visions of "blackness." What kinds of alternatives do these conditions generate?
About the speaker:
Tricia Rose was born and raised in New York City. She spent her childhood in Harlem and the Bronx. She graduated from Yale University where she received a BA in Sociology and then received her Ph.D. from Brown University in American Studies. She recently returned to Brown, where she is Professor of Africana Studies.
Professor Rose is most well-known for her ground-breaking book on the emergence of hip hop culture. Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America won several awards and is considered a defining and foundational text for the study of hip hop. She is also the co-editor of the youth music and youth culture collection: Microphone Fiends, and in 2003 published a rare history of black women’s sexual life stories, called Longing To Tell: Black Women Talk About Sexuality and Intimacy. In 2008, Professor Rose returned to hip hop with: THE HIP HOP WARS: What We Talk About When We Talk About Hip Hop—And Why It Matters.
Tricia Rose lectures and presents seminars and workshops to scholarly and general audiences on a wide range of issues relating to race in America, popular culture, gender and sexuality and art and social justice. Rose has also been featured on MSNBC, CNN, NPR and other national and local media outlets. More of her work can be found in Time, Essence, The New York Times and The Village Voice to name a few. She encourages you to connect with her on her website, www.triciarose.com, on Twitter and on Facebook.
IPRH “Revolution” Theme Lecture:
David Harvey (Distinguished Professor, The Graduate Center, CUNY and Director of the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics)
“Rebel Cities”
Date: November 8, 2012
Time: 7:30 p.m.
Location: Foellinger Auditorium
Copies of Professor Harvey’s recently published Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution (Verso, 2012) will be available for sale, and there will be a book-signing opportunity following the lecture.
Colin Flint, Professor and Associate Head of the Department of Geography and Geographic Information Science, will moderate.
A reception will also follow the lecture.
This event is free and open to the public.
About the speaker:
David Harvey is Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY), Director of The Center for Place, Culture and Politics, and author of numerous books, which have been widely translated. A leading social theorist of international standing, he is among the top 20 most cited authors in the humanities. He has been teaching Karl Marx’s Capital for over 40 years, and offers a close reading of the text in free video lectures online: http://davidharvey.org/.
Professor Harvey, a leading theorist in the field of urban studies, whom Library Journal called “one of the most influential geographers of the later twentieth century,” earned his Ph.D. from Cambridge University, and was formerly professor of geography at Johns Hopkins, a Miliband Fellow at the London School of Economics, and Halford Mackinder Professor of Geography at Oxford. His reflections on the importance of space and place and on global capitalism have attracted considerable attention across the humanities and social sciences. His highly influential books include The Enigma of Capital and the Crises of Capitalism; Cosmopolitanism and the Geographies of Freedom; Spaces of Global Capitalism; A Brief History of Neoliberalism; The New Imperialism; Paris, Capital of Modernity; Social Justice and the City; Limits to Capital; The Urbanization of Capital; The Condition of Postmodernity; Justice, Nature, and the Geography of Difference; Spaces of Hope; and Spaces of Capital: Towards a Critical Geography. His numerous awards include the Outstanding Contributor Award of the Association of American Geographers and the 2002 Centenary Medal of the Royal Scottish Geographical Society for his “outstanding contribution to the field of geographical enquiry and to anthropology.” He holds honorary degrees from the universities of Buenos Aires, Roskilde in Denmark, Uppsala in Sweden, and Ohio State University.
Lecture: Richard Graff (Writing Studies, University of Minnesota)
"Spaces of Oratorical Performance in Ancient Greece: Reconstruction, Interpretive Visualization, and Assessment" 
Date: January 30, 2013
Time: 4:30 p.m.
Location: 1000 Lincoln Hall
Cara Finnegan, Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Communication, will moderate.
This event is free and open to the public.
About this event:
This talk will present chief findings of a long-term collaborative, interdisciplinary study of the physical settings in which ancient Greeks practiced the art of rhetoric. These include a variety spaces and structures from the late-Archaic, Classical, and Hellenistic periods (ca. 500-100 BCE) utilized throughout the Greek world as venues for the performance of formal oratory-- principally, buildings that housed meetings of city councils (bouleuteria), auditoria utilized for larger citizen assemblies, and various structures fitted for use as law courts. In addition to providing a much-needed synthesis of the archaeological, literary, and historical evidence for these spaces and structures, the study utilizes both traditional and emergent research methods to elucidate the ways in which the physical settings structured communicative (inter)action and group deliberation. 3D digital modeling and other forms of advanced visualization have been utilized to identify salient architectural-spatial and acoustical variables and to assess them in terms of the opportunities and challenges they presented to both speakers and audiences.
The talk will summarize the inventory of speaking sites considered in the study and the methods of analysis and interpretation utilized in it. It will then illustrate these methods by considering a few significant but neglected structures, and a single well-known, but enigmatic one -- the meeting place of the Athenian assembly called the Pnyx.
About the speaker:
Richard Graff (BA, UC-Berkeley; MA and PhD, Northwestern U.) is an Associate Professor of Writing Studies at the University of Minnesota. His scholarship considers technical and cultural aspects of Greco-Roman rhetoric, focusing especially on early theories of prose style and the relationship between oratorical text and speech-performance. He has also published on the reception and adaptation of classical-traditional precepts in the “new rhetorics” of Kenneth Burke and Chaïm Perelman. His articles on these subjects have appeared in Philosophy & Rhetoric, Rhetorica, Rhetoric Society Quarterly, and other venues. He is co-editor of The Viability of the Rhetorical Tradition (SUNY Press, 2005). Professor Graff has served as president of the American Society for the History of Rhetoric. At Minnesota, he is a member of the graduate faculties in Classics and Communication Studies and director of the interdisciplinary graduate minor in Literacy & Rhetorical Studies.
His work has called attention to the subtle ways in which theories and precepts from Greek technical rhetoric reflect historically specific conditions of oratorical practice. He has been especially interested, for example, in how the early accounts of distinct prose style-types attend not only to conventional expectations for different genres of oratory, but also to the different spatial contexts in which speeches were delivered. Following this line of inquiry, for almost ten years he has led or co-led a collaborative, interdisciplinary study of the physical settings of ancient Greek oratorical performance. The first major phase of the project has involved the cataloging of relevant archaeological remains. With Christopher Lyle Johnstone (Penn State U.), Professor Graff is currently completing a book manuscript that provides interpretive synthesis of the archaeological, literary, and historical evidence for these structures, and a comprehensive account of their typical forms, regional variations, and evolution over time. Meantime, the project has progressed well into a second phase, in which digital tools are being developed and employed to assess the performance characteristics of representative and especially significant structures.
Cara Finnegan is Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Communication, and she holds affiliated appointments in the Center for Writing Studies, Gender and Women's Studies, and Art History. Her research examines the role of photography as a tool for public life, while her teaching includes undergraduate and graduate courses in rhetorical criticism, rhetorical theory, American public address, and visual politics.Finnegan has worked at the University of Illinois since 1999 and was recently named a Conrad Humanities Scholar in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.
Lecture: Nicholas Mirzoeff (Media, Culture, and Communication, New York University)
"The Right to Look: Technologies of Direct Democracy"
Date: February 21, 2013
Time: 4:00 p.m.
Location: Knight Auditorium, Spurlock Museum
Co-Sponsored by IPRH and the Spurlock Museum
A reception will follow the lecture.
This event is free and open to the public.
About the event:
In this talk I will look at the analysis of visuality formed in my book The Right to Lookand how it has informed my subsequent activism in the Occupy and Strike Debt movements. I question how we might imagine a countervisuality, write a history of the anonymous and create techniques of direct democracy with reference to critical theory, digital humanities and direct action.
About the speaker:
Nicholas Mirzoeff is Professor of Media, Culture and Communication at New York University.Professor Mirzoeff's work is in the field of visual culture. In recent years it has fallen into four main areas:
First, he has been working on the genealogy of visuality, a key term in the field. Far from being a postmodern theory word, it was created to describe how Napoleonic era generals “visualized” a battlefield that they could not see. Applied to the social as a whole by Thomas Carlyle, visuality was a conservative strategy to oppose all emancipations and liberations in the name of the autocratic hero. His book The Right to Look: A Counterhistory of Visuality was published by Duke University Press (2011).
Second, he produces texts and projects that support the general development of visual culture as a field of study and a methodology. The third Visual Culture Reader was published in 2012 by Routledge, The second fully revised edition of An Introduction to Visual Culture was published in 2009 by Routledge, with color illustrations throughout and new sections of Keywords and Key Images.
Third, Professor Mirzoeff works on militant research with the global social movements that have arisen since 2011.
Finally, he is working on a new project on the cultures of climate change in conjunction with the not-for-profit Islands First.
Panel: The Future of Authorship (Brown Bag Lunch)
Date: February 22, 2013
Time: 12:00 p.m. - 2:00 p.m.
Location: IPRH, Humanities Lecture Hall
About the event:
This panel will examine recently developed forms of scholarly communication, focusing on the ways scholars now create knowledge and communicate their findings to a range of audiences using innovative digital platforms and tools for conducting research, writing, and publishing. The aim of this panel is to explore the intellectual advances afforded by new modes of authorship, peer review, and publishing. Please join us for a panel discussion featuring the following speakers:
Nicholas Mirzoeff (Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University);
Kevin Hamilton (Associate Professor of Art and Design, and IPRH Coordinator of Digital Scholarly Communication, UIUC);
Eduardo Ledesma (Assistant Professor of Spanish, UIUC)
Jodee Stanley (Editor, Ninth Letter)
Please bring your lunch. Cookies and beverages will be provided.
About the speakers:
Nicholas Mirzoeff is Professor of Media, Culture and Communication at New York University. Professor Mirzoeff's First, he has been working on the genealogy of visuality, a key term in the field. Far from being a postmodern theory word, it was created to describe how Napoleonic era generals “visualized” a battlefield that they could not see. Applied to the social as a whole by Thomas Carlyle, visuality was a conservative strategy to oppose all emancipations and liberations in the name of the autocratic hero. His book The Right to Look: A Counterhistory of Visuality was published by Duke University Press (2011). Second, he produces texts and projects that support the general development of visual culture as a field of study and a methodology. The third Visual Culture Reader was published in 2012 by Routledge, The second fully revised edition of An Introduction to Visual Culture was published in 2009 by Routledge, with color illustrations throughout and new sections of Keywords and Key Images. Third, Professor Mirzoeff works on militant research with the global social movements that have arisen since 2011. Finally, he is working on a new project on the cultures of climate change in conjunction with the not-for-profit Islands First. |
Kevin Hamilton is an Associate Professor in the School of Art and Design, where he has served in the New Media |
Eduardo Ledesma is an Assistant Professor of Spanish at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he  teaches Luso-Hispanic literature, film and new media. He received his PhD in Romance Languages and Literatures from Harvard University (2012) and holds advanced degrees in both structural engineering and Hispanic literature. His research focuses on avant-garde and experimental forms across different media. Currently he is working on several projects dealing with the confluence of experimental film, poetry and digital media. |
Jodee Stanley is the editor of Ninth Letter, the award-winning literary/arts journal published by UIUC's MFA in Creative Writing Program in collaboration with the School of Art and Design. Jodee supervises the graduate literary publishing practicum and also teaches editing at the undergraduate level. She has worked in literary publishing for twenty years and has been a speaker and panelist at various conferences and festivals. In 2009, she was awarded an Academic Professional Award from the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at UIUC, and she received a 2007 Faculty Fellowship from the University of Illinois Academy for Entrepreneurial Leadership. Her fiction, essays, and book reviews have appeared in several publications including Crab Orchard Review, Mississippi Review, Hobart, Cincinnati Review, and elsewhere. She is currently co-editing an anthology of Midwest Gothic fiction. |
work is in the field of visual culture. In recent years it has fallen into four main areas:
and
Painting Programs since 2002. He also holds appointments in the Department of Media and Cinema Studies, the Center for Arms Control, Disarmament and International Security, and is co-Director of the Center for People and Infrastructures at the Coordinated Science Laboratory. Kevin’s primary research lies in historical and theoretical work on the history of interface representations in mediated violence, with a special emphasis on government-produced films related to nuclear weapons development. Kevin's work as an educator is focused on integration of practice-based and theoretical approaches to understanding technological mediation. This work includes the direction of "Learning to See Systems," a new interdisciplinary graduate study track that will begin in Fall of 2013. Kevin Hamilton will serve as the Coordinator of Digital Scholarly Communication to direct the IPRH's future involvement as a Scalar institutional partner, which will begin in Fall of 2013.
MEMORY/MEMOIR: Readings and Discussion by LeAnne Howe (English/American Indian Studies) and Audrey Petty (English), with Robert Ramirez (Theatre)
Date: February 27, 2013
Time: 7:30 p.m.
Location: IPRH, Humanities Lecture Hall
About the event:
This event features members of the U of I Creative Writing faculty reading from their soon-to-be-published works. Professor LeAnne Howe will be reading from “An American Indian in Japan,” a creative non-fiction story about her travels throughout Japan during the 1993 International Year of Indigenous People. The story is forthcoming in Choctalking on Other Realities, New and Selected Stories, Aunt Lute Books, 2013. Professor Audrey Petty will be reading from High Rise Stories, forthcoming in McSweeney’s Voice of Witness book series (summer 2013),for which she interviewed former residents of the Chicago housing projects Cabrini-Green and Robert Taylor Homes, among others, for their firsthand accounts of Chicago public housing. Each author will read a selection, chosen for its particular significance to the author and her primary creative intention(s). After the authors have finished reading, Robert Ramirez will lead a discussion of the role of memory and memoir in the humanities more broadly, and we will open the floor for discussion with the audience.
About the speakers:
LeAnne Howe writes fiction, poetry, screenplays, scholarship, and plays that deal with Native experiences. An enrolled citizen of the 
Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma, her first novel Shell Shaker, Aunt Lute Books, 2001 received an American Book Award in 2002 from the Before Columbus Foundation. The French translation Equinoxes Rouge was the 2004 finalist for Prix Medici Estranger, one of France's top literary awards. Evidence of Red, Salt Publishing, UK, 2005 won the Oklahoma Book Award for poetry in 2006. Howe’s second novel, Miko Kings: An Indian Baseball Story, Aunt Lute Books, 2007 was chosen by Hampton University in Virginia as their 2009-2010 Read-in Selection.
Her recent awards include: the 2012 USA Artists Ford Fellowship, a $50,000 grant from United States Artists, a not for profit organization. Howe joins a class of 2012 awardees that includes Annie Proulx, Coco Fusco, Guillermo Gomez-Peña, David Henry Hwang, Edgar Heap of Birds, Adrienne Kennedy, and many others. http://www.usafellows.org/fellow/leanne_howe
In 2012 she was also the winner of the 2012 Lifetime Achievement Award from the Native Writers Circle of the Americas http://www.wordcraftcircle.org/featured. In 2011 she was awarded the 2011 Tulsa Library Trust’s “American Indian Author Award” at Central Library in Tulsa, OK. http://www.tulsaworld.com/scene/article.aspx?subjectid=67&articleid=20101003_67_G4_CUTLIN997618.
Howe was a 2010-2011 J. William Fulbright Scholar at the University of Jordan, Amman. Her new novel-in-progress, Memoir of a Choctaw in the Arab Revolts 1917 & 2011 is set in Bilaad ash Sham, and Allen, Oklahoma.
LeAnne Howe’s forthcoming books are Seeing Red, Pixeled Skins: American Indians and Film, MSUP Press, March 2013, co-authored with Harvey Markowitz and Denise Cummings; and she will be reading from “An American Indian in Japan,” a creative non-fiction story about her travels throughout Japan during the 1993 International Year of Indigenous People. The story is forthcoming in Choctalking on Other Realities, New and Selected Stories, Aunt Lute Books, 2013. 
Audrey Petty is a native Chicagoan. Her stories have appeared in such publications as StoryQuarterly, Callaloo, The Louisville Review, The Massachusetts Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, Nimrod and African American Review. They have also been anthologized in Gumbo: A Celebration of African American Writing and Black Writing from Chicago. Her essays have been featured in The Oxford American, Saveur, ColorLines, The Southern Review, Gravy, Callaloo, Cornbread Nation 4 and Best Food Writing 2006 anthology. Her poems have been published in Crab Orchard Review and Cimarron Review. She is the editor of High-Rise Stories, an oral history of Chicago public housing communities, due from Voice of Witness Press in the summer of 2013.
Audrey has been awarded a residency at the Hedgebrook Colony, the Richard Soref Scholarship from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and the Tennessee Williams Fellowship from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. Her fiction has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and she’s received fellowships and grants from the Ford Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, the Illinois Arts Council and the Hewlett Foundation. She is an Associate Professor of English at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Robert Ramirez serves on the faculty of the Theatre Department where he teaches voice, speech, dialects and text work
. He has performed with the New York, Utah, Illinois, Alabama, Baltimore and Wisconsin Shakespeare Festivals as well as numerous theaters in the New York City Area. He has also been seen on the Krannert Center Stages in Hamlet, Three Sisters and most recently, Our Town. He has been an award-winning Voice Artist and narrator of audio books for the past seventeen years and is a long-time member of the Recorded Books Repertory Company. Robert received his M.F.A. from the PTTP at the University of Delaware and prior to his move to Champaign-Urbana, served on the voice and speech faculties at Marymount Manhattan College and the American Musical and Dramatic Academy in New York City. Last year he was Voice and Text Coach for American Players Theatre in Spring Green, Wisconsin and he looks forward to returning there this summer.
Event Grant recipient:
Lecture: Timothy Snyder (Housum Professor of History, Yale University)
“Brotherlands: A Family History of the European Nations"
Date: March 5, 2013
Time: 7:30 p.m.
Location: Knight Auditorium, Spurlock Museum
Time: 7:30 p.m.
Location: Knight Auditorium, Spurlock Museum
About this event:
In this CAS/MillerComm lecture, Timothy Snyder calls into question not only ethnic definitions of the nation, but also sociological accounts that focus on the state. In this presentation, he outlines a new theory of nationalism, one that incorporates the personal into the impersonal, and helps to explain not only the rise of the nation but also (perhaps just as important) why we have the particular nations we do, and not others.
Presented by The Program in Jewish Culture and Society, this lecture will serve as the keynote address for the international symposium, “The Micropolitics of Small-Town Life in Eastern Europe," co-organized by Yvonne Kleinmann (Leipzig University) and Eugene Avrutin (History/JCS). See event details below.
More information about this lecture can be found here:
http://cas.illinois.edu/events/ViewPublicEvent.aspx?Guid=A5199E48-B5EB-4D6F-8569-06C4EEBB76FF
Symposium: "The Micropolitics of Small-Town Life in Eastern Europe"
Date: March 5-6, 2013
Location: Levis Faculty Center
About the event:
Research in urban history of Eastern Europe – as anywhere else in the world – focuses on cities, namely the metropolis. Yet until the beginning of the twentieth century, small urban communities were the principal habitat of the vast majority of people in Eastern Europe. Surprisingly little is known about the political and social universe of small towns. Without privileging a single national history or question, the symposium examines, on a microscopic scale, power dynamics, values, belief systems, and everyday interactions from the early modern period until the beginning of the twentieth century. From this perspective, we hope to challenge established grand narratives of historical development and organization. The papers explore the mentalities, communal structures and organization, and the functions and dysfunctions of small town life in a comparative framework.
Full details about this event can be found here:http://www.reeec.illinois.edu/events/conferences/micropoliticsConf.html
Conference Schedule:http://www.reeec.illinois.edu/events/conferences/micropoliticsConf_schedule.html
IPRH “Revolution” Theme Lecture:
Richard Pithouse (George A. Miller Visiting Professor of History, and Political and International Studies, Rhodes University)
“Thought Amidst Waste: Politics in Shack Settlements in South Africa"
Date: March 7, 2013
Time: 4:00 p.m.
Location: Knight Auditorium, Spurlock Museum
Co-sponsored by IPRH and the Spurlock Museum.
A reception will follow the lecture.
This event is free and open to the public.
About the event:
The shack settlement has often become a site of acute political intensity in post-apartheid South Africa. There were also moments when this was the case during and before apartheid. This paper gives a broad outline of the political history of the shack settlement in South Africa and seeks to bring this history, as well the experience of contemporary shack dwellers’ struggles, into dialogue with an international debate about the prospects for an emancipatory politics in the shack settlement. It argues that the shack settlement needs to be understood as a site in which people inhabit a particular situation and not, as is frequently the case, a site inhabited by a set of people with particular ontological characteristics. It also makes some remarks about the political possibilities, dangers and limits arising from some aspects of that situation.
About the speaker:
Richard Pithouse is a scholar, lecturer, journalist and activist, who currently holds an academic position as Lecturer in Politics and International Relations at Rhodes University in Grahamstown, South Africa. He serves as well as a columnist for the South African Civil Society Information Service. He holds a BA (Hons) in Philosophy from University of Natal, 1992, an MA in Philosophy, Summa Cum Laude, University of Kwa-Zulu-Natal, for which he completed a thesis on Frantz Fanon. He is currently completing a Ph.D. with a dissertation on the history of shack dwellers in Durban, South Africa, which is also a book manuscript slated for completion in 2012. He is widely published with over 30 journal articles and book chapters and scores of newspaper and magazine pieces on issues relating to and addressed by poor people’s movements local and global, in addition to three edited books. He was also the recipient of a Mellon Prestigious Fellowship (2008 and 2009). Like many South African academics, he has a varied and highly socially engaged portfolio of teaching and writing and has pursued the Ph.D. while employed in a series of research and teaching positions. These include several years as a Research Fellow with the Centre for Civil Society with the University of KwaZulu-Natal, as a researcher and writer for the Association for Rural Advancement and the Centre on Housing Rights and Evictions, and as a lecturer and course coordinator for the KZN (KwaZulu-Natal) Workers’ College, and an institution that provides training and workshops for trade unionists and community activists from within South Africa and the African continent. Previously he held a position as Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Durban-Westville.
ACLS Fellowship Information Session with Nicole A. Stahlmann (Director, Fellowship Programs, American Council of Learned Societies)
Date: April 16, 2013
Time: 10:00 a.m.
Location: Levis Faculty Center, 3rd floor (919 W Illinois St., Urbana, IL 61801)
About this event:
Dr. Nicole Stahlmann, Director of Fellowship Programs at the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), will host an information session. The presentation will provide an overview of ACLS funding opportunities for faculty and advanced graduate students, and provide information on research proposal preparation and ACLS’s peer-review process.The presentation will conclude with an opportunity for Q&A.
The American Council of Learned Societies offers research support to faculty and advanced graduate students in the humanities and related social sciences through more than a dozen fellowship programs. With over $15 million in annual fellowship stipends to be awarded in the current 2012-13 competition, ACLS is one of the largest supporters of scholars in the humanities.
About the presenter:
Nicole A. Stahlmann is the director of fellowship programs of the American Council of Learned Societies. She oversees a large portfolio of initiatives to support individual and collaborative research in the humanities and humanistic social sciences, including the innovative New Faculty Fellows and Public Fellows programs. Prior to joining ACLS in 2008, Stahlmann was Program Director of the International Dissertation Research Fellowships (IDRF) Program and Director of the Fellowships Office at the Social Science Research Council for seven years.
Before receiving her Ph.D. in American studies from the Johannes Gutenberg University-Mainz (Germany), she was a graduate fellow at Columbia University, a teaching fellow at Bowdoin College, and an Erasmus scholar at the Rijksuniversiteit, Gent (Belgium). Stahlmann's research interests include theories of transnationalism, transculturation, and migration, with a specific focus on the Caribbean diaspora. Stahlmann is an adjunct associate professor in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University.
Event Grants recipient:
Lecture - Sidney Tarrow (Emeritus Maxwell M. Upson Professor of Government, Cornell University)
“The Dark Side of Internationalism: Transnational Terrorism and the Internationalization of Repression”
Date: April 18, 2013
Time: 7:30 p.m.
Location: Lincoln Hall Auditorium 1000 (702 S Wright St, Urbana)
Sponsored by: the Center for Advanced Studies, the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities, the Gorecki Seminar, the Transnational Seminar, the Department of Sociology; the Department of Geography; the Department of History; the Department of Political Science; the Center for Global Studies; the School of Law and its Center for Law and Globalization; and the cross-campus Initiative for Transnational Futures (ITF).
About the event:
Sidney Tarrow’s talk is based on his new book project in which he traces in a series of historical and internationally comparative chapters the complex effects of war and social movements on state building and rights from the French Revolution to the present. While England’s Glorious Revolution yielded parliamentary supremacy and the American revolutionary war created a liberal republic, the Revolution in France gave way to a dismantling of rights in a domestic reign of terror and military campaigns abroad. The American Civil War imposed military order, suspended individual rights, yet also led to the abolition of slavery, but Reconstruction left the South in the hands of the former slaveholders against whom that war had been fought. In Italy, the liberal state (1861-1922) allowed the expansion of suffrage but also gave rise to postwar social conflict and to fascist militarism. Finally, the War on Terror, launched in response to a radical Islamist movement, led to an enormous expansion of the American national security state and to serious intrusions on the rights of citizens, immigrants, and prisoners. Tarrow’s comparative inquiry is motivated not only by intellectual considerations but also by an acute political concern about whether the first decade of our century represented “a critical juncture in the history of American liberalism or was simply a new turn in this country’s long and tangled cycles of war, rights and contention”.
About the speaker:
Sidney Tarrow is a leading scholar in the field of social movements and contentious politics and is currently working on a book tentatively titled “War, States, and Contention”. Tarrow (PhD, Berkeley, 1965) is the Emeritus Maxwell M. Upson Professor of Government at Cornell University. Tarrow has his BA from Syracuse, his MA from Columbia, and his PhD from Berkeley. His work has covered a variety of interests, beginning with his book Peasant Communism in Southern Italy (Yale, 1967), then shifting to the comparative study of Communism in Italy and France (Princeton 1972, ed., with Donald L.M. Blackmer). In the 1970s he compared local politics (Between Center and Periphery, Yale 1978), before, in the 1980s, turning to a quantitative and qualitative reconstruction of the Italian protest cycle of the late 1960’s and early 1970’s, in Democracy and Disorder (Oxford, 1989), which received the prize for the best book in Collective Behavior and Social Movements from the American Sociological Association. A fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Tarrow has served as Program co-Chair of the American Political Science Association Annual Convention and as President of the APSA Section on Comparative Politics. His most recent books are Power in Movement (Cambridge, 2011), Dynamics of Contention (with Doug McAdam and Charles Tilly, Cambridge, 2001), Contentious Europeans (with Doug Imig, Rowman and Littlefield 2001), Transnational Protest and Global Activism (with Donatella della Porta, Rowman and Littlefield, 2004), The New Transnational Activism (Cambridge, 2005), Contentious Politics (with Charles Tilly, Paradigm, 2006), and Strangers at the Gates: States and Movements in Contentious Politics (Cambridge, 2012). He has recently completed The Language of Contention, 1688-2012 for Cambridge.
Inside Scoop Series:
The Spurlock Unlocked - Explore the Museum with Professor Norman Whitten
Date: Sunday, April 21, 2013
Time: 11:00 a.m. - 1:00 p.m.
Location: Spurlock Museum
About this event:
Get
the inside scoop on the South American Gallery at the Spurlock Museum
from the professor whose research shapes it. Explore the gallery in
discussion with curator Norman Whitten,
as he shares his exciting discoveries and highlights what makes the
gallery unique. This event offers an opportunity for all interested
undergraduates, no matter their majors, to share in the great breadth of
research performed daily on our campus. Pizza and, of course, ice cream
(scoops!) will be served.
About the speaker:
Norman E. Whitten, Jr. took his MA and PhD at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill,
in 1961and 1964. His first research in Latin America took place with
Afro-Ecuadorians in 1961, followed by more research with them in 1963
and 64-65, during which time he also worked for 13 months with
Afro-Colombians and various indigenous people in Amazonia. In 1968 after
research with Afro-Canadians and again with Afro-Ecuadorians, he and
his late wife (Dorothea [Sibby] Scott Whitten) began exploratory
research in Amazonian Ecuador, visiting Shuar, Achuar, Canelos, Napo
Runa, Siona, Secoya, and Cofán indigenous peoples. The settled on the
Canelos Quichua indigenous people in 1969 and visited them every year
since, making a number of museum-quality collections, and publishing
many books and articles. Norm taught at Washington University, St. Louis
and UCLA before coming to Illinois in 1970. At Illinois, he has served
as Head of the Department of Anthropology, Director of the Center for
Latin American and Caribbean Studies, and Chair of the Fellowship Board
of the graduate College. He became a Curator of the Spurlock Museum in
1992 and is now Professor Emeritus of Anthropology and Latin American
Studies, Curator of the Spurlock Museum, Senior University Scholar and
editor of the book series “Interpretations of Culture in the New
Millennium,” published by the University of Illinois Press since 2003.
