Burdick-Vary SymposiumMarch 8, 2013
9:00 A.M. - 4:30 P.M., Banquet Room, University Club (803 State Street)
'Keep Your Eyes on the Prize: Black Christianity and the Unfinished Quest for Emancipation'
"Keep Your Eyes on the Prize: Black Christianity and the Unfinished Quest for Emancipation" is the culminating event of the year-long series of events focusing on the 150th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation. Rather than viewing this as an event which took place in the past, the Symposium begins with the premise that Emancipation is on ongoing process and explores the historical and contemporary relationships between African American Christianity and political activism. Bringing together leading scholars of African American religion, literature and history, the Symposium asks how the theological, cultural and institutional resources of the Black Church help us understand the relationship between slavery, segregation, and contemporary problems such as mass incarceration, and the erosion of Fourth Ammendment rights. Consisting of two panels and a closing discussion, the Symposium is being held in conjunction with the Nellie Y. McKay Lecture by Eddie Glaude, Jr., and the Wisconsin Union Directorate's Distinguished Lecture by Michelle Alexander, author of "The New Jim Crow." Participants include Barbara Savage, Paul Harvey, Ed Pavlic, Missy Dehn Kubitschek, Josef Sorett and Matthew Z. Harper. See the symposium page for more information.
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Burdick-Vary Lecture Series: New Constructions of the Past in the Art History of ChinaNovember 1, 2012
6:00pm, L140 Elvehjem Building
Kathleen Ryor
Professor of Art History and Director of Asian Studies, Carleton College
'Martial Arts: Cultural Interactions between the Civil and Military in Ming China'
Scholarship on art collecting, art production and the broader world of elite cultural practices during the Ming dynasty has focused on the role that wealth and social status has played in the formation of taste and style, and the ways that anxieties about fluidity in social boundaries in the late Ming led to more vocal attempts to distinguish those who possessed "genuine" aesthetic sensitivity and cultural refinement. Much of this discussion has centered on various strata of the educated elite, which include landholders and government officials with degrees, and merchants. Conspicuously absent from such examinations of social position and its relationship to art and material culture is any discussion of the elite members of the hereditary military class. Yet, during the sixteenth century, Ming China was engaged in several military campaigns of enormous importance to the empire. Not surprisingly, military generals and commanders formed social as well as political relationships with civil officials and other members of the educated civil-degree-holding literati. This lecture will show that military men often participated broadly in activities typically closely associated with educated elites who engaged in civil-service examination culture, in areas such as scholarship, poetry-writing, painting, calligraphy, and collecting antique artifacts. Furthermore, it will be argued that this phenomenon is not merely another example of a one-way flow of cultural influence from the elite arbiters of taste in civil society. On the contrary, high-ranking or influential civil literati who were seriously involved in military matters often engaged actively in pursuits commonly associated with men from hereditary military families, such as archery, swordsmanship and other martial arts, the study of the military classics, writing of military strategy and the collecting of swords.
Burdick-Vary Lecture Series: New Constructions of the Past in the Art History of ChinaOctober 11, 2012
6:00pm, L140 Elvehjem Building
Jerome Silbergeld
P.Y. and Kinmay W. Tang Professor of Chinese Art History, Princeton University
'The Birth of 'Literati' Painting in the Song and Yuan Dynasties: How to Think About What We Do and Do Not Know'
Every study of later Chinese painting history tends to establish two overarching categories into which all paintings are expected to fit: literati and not literati, the latter including court, ecclesiastical, and popular works. All modern viewers are charged with comprehending how this rubric of "literati painting," peculiar to China and tied to its civil service system, accounts for style. Yet the birth of literati painting has confused historians, for in its first few hundred years it exhibited a highly unstable visual identity that must prove baffling to anyone today expecting to see there a clear-cut differential between it and not-it. Why this confusion, and how should we deal with this uncertainty about such a fundamental historical issue?
Burdick-Vary Lecture Series: New Constructions of the Past in the Art History of ChinaSeptember 20, 2012
6:00pm, L140 Elvehjem Building
Maggie Bickford
Art History (Emerita), Brown University
'Repossessing the Past: Refurbishing the Cultural Patrimony at the Courts of Song-Dynasty China'
Chinese emperors of the 12th and 13th centuries created a new body of masterworks to stand in for lost famous paintings by the early Great Painters of China. The measure of their success is that we still use these Song-Dynasty creations as touchstones in our history of early Chinese art. How did this happen? Professor Bickford will consider these imperial initiatives and their consequences for the History of Art in China today.
Burdick-Vary SymposiumApril 26, 2012 - April 28, 2012
1255 Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery
'Enchantings: Modernity, Culture, and the State in Postcolonial Africa'
The symposium aims to bring into close systematic interaction three composite entities that traditionally are the objects of different study areas and therefore are studied together most often casually or rarely: contemporary African cultural and social forms and practices, the postcolonial African political state, and the larger modern context that subtend the two. The goal is to help us better understand in a multi-sided way (1) the sociopolitical underpinnings of African cultural and social forms and practices; (2) the cultural and social determinations on the character and performance of the African state as a genre, and (3) the modern context that is the generative canvas of the interactions.
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Burdick-Vary Lecture Series: International Perspectives on the Environmental Humanities and Social SciencesMarch 26, 2012
4:00 P.M. - 5:30 P.M., 7191 Helen C. White Building
Libby Robin
Fenner School of Environment and Society, Australian National University
'Documenting the Anthropocene: Historical Reflections on Global Change'
The idea of the Anthropocene, the geological era where the actions of people have affected every biophysical system on earth, poses a particular challenge to the humanities. It is an idea coming from global change science, but it has political implications and depends on a deeply historical understanding of what constitutes 'environment'. If people have affected the planetary system, how have they done it? When did the actions of people start to overwhelm ‘normal’ change in environmental systems? When, some ask, did people become a ‘plague species’ on Earth?
This project seeks to ‘document’ the Anthropocene, literally, to explore some of the documents that shape our present understanding of the environment. In a world where measurement is a pre-eminent element of prediction and numbers have become a global language for science (and increasingly for policy), the question what counts as planetary change is political and ethical, as well as scientific. Critical scrutiny of ideas that underpin numbers and frame planning for the future of the planet is an urgent and deeply humanistic task. Our documents are just some of the possible ones, but I will speak about why we chose them and how they might serve to offer ways into debates about global change, ways that start from the human dimensions, rather than treating them as late additions to a program already fully defined by experts from elsewhere.
Libby Robin is an environmental historian and historian of ideas at the Australian National University and at the National Museum of Australia, Canberra. She is Guest Professor at the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH), Stockholm. Her books include How a Continent Created a Nation (2007), The Flight of the Emu (2001) and Ecology and Empire: Environmental History of Settler Societies (1998, co-edited with Tom Griffiths). The Future of Nature: Documents of Global Change, an anthology of the literature of global change, co-edited with Sverker Sörlin and Paul Warde, is forthcoming with Yale University Press.
Burdick-Vary Lecture Series: International Perspectives on the Environmental Humanities and Social SciencesMarch 22, 2012
4:00 P.M. - 5:30 P.M., 6191 Helen C. White Building
Pablo Mukherjee
English and Comparative Literary Studies, University of Warwick, UK
'Tropical Medical Discourse and Victorian Imperialism: Rudyard Kipling and Cholera'
The Victorian period saw the growth and consolidation of the science of tropical medicine. Driven by the imperative of maintaining and restoring the health of European settlers, the language of tropical medicine offered a vision of the tropics as a zone of proliferating and contaminating diseases, as well as the possibilities of containing and defeating these. Thus, against the tropics as a zone of contagion grew the idea of palliative empire – empire as a force of medicine, science and restorative care. Particularly important here was the role played by a group of English doctors whose texts formed the core of the first tropical medical canon. Unsurprisingly, such ideologically charged language of contagion, infection, medical care and palliative empire crossed disciplinary boundaries and became a part of popular Victorian ‘commonsense”. Writers concerned with representing the reality of Britain’s global empire found this language of diseased tropicality to be rich and suggestive. This paper will look at how one such writer, Rudyard Kipling, used the ideas of disease and medicine in his shorter fiction to explore the possibilities and limits of empire.
Upamanyu Pablo Mukherjee is an Associate Professor (Reader) at the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies at Warwick University, U.K. He was born in Kolkata, India and educated there, and went on to do further degrees in Oxford and Cambridge. He has taught at Newcastle and Warwick Universities in the U.K., and is the author of the books Crime and Empire (2003) and Postcolonial Environments (2010). Dr Mukherjee is currently working on a number of research projects, including a monograph provisionally titled 'Fevers and Famines: Natural Disasters and Victorian Empire' and with a Warwick Research Collective on 'Aesthetics of Peripheral Modernity'. Dr Mukherjee's other interests and specialisms include contemporary film and media, sports, travel, and popular music.
Burdick-Vary Lecture Series: International Perspectives on the Environmental Humanities and Social SciencesMarch 15, 2012
4:00 P.M. - 5:30 P.M., AT&T Lounge, 106 Pyle Center
Andrew Ross
Department of Social and Cultural Analysis, New York University
'Bird on Fire: Lessons from the World's Least Sustainable City'
Thoughtful people look to cities for evidence that progress is being made in the fight to avert climate change. The “sustainable cities” movement is thriving all across the world, and mayors compete for the title of “greenest city in America.” In this lecture, drawing on his own research in the metro Phoenix area, Andrew Ross shows that the key solutions are more social than technical in nature. Marketing a green lifestyle to affluent residents will create showpiece sustainable enclaves, but will not alter the patterns of “eco-apartheid” that afflicts most large U.S. cities. Ross’s book, Bird In Fire, based on extensive interviews in the region, looks at some of Phoenix’s biggest challenges–water management, urban growth, immigration policy, pollution, energy supply, and downtown revitalization–in light of his arguments for policies that promote environmental justice.
Andrew Ross is Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis at NYU. He is the author of twelve books, including Nice Work if You Can Get It: Life and Labor in Precarious Times, Fast Boat to China--Lessons from Shanghai, Low Pay, High Profile: The Global Push for Fair Labor, No-Collar: The Humane Workplace and its Hidden Costs, and The Celebration Chronicles: Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Property Value in Disney’s New Town. He has also edited six collections, including No Sweat: Fashion, Free Trade, and the Rights of Garment Workers, Anti-Americanism, and The University Against Itself: The NYU Strike and the Future of the Academic Workplace. His most recent book is Bird On Fire: Lessons from the World’s Least Sustainable City. Professor Ross is a contributor to the Nation, the Village Voice, and Artforum.
October 28, 2011
9:30 A.M. - 5:00 P.M., Banquet Room, University Club Building
Convener: Rachel Feldhay Brenner
Hebrew Studies, University of Wisconsin-Madison
'Holocaust Testimony and Its Reception: Cultural Transformations and Pedagogical Issues'
The Holocaust experience reaches us through testimony, and consciousness of the event has invaded the post-Holocaust cultural and educational Weltanschauung. This symposium explores the post-Holocaust reception of Holocaust testimony with special emphasis on the issue of empathy. Are responses to the Holocaust motivated by an indelible ethical need to penetrate the incomprehensible world of the Final Solution and to restore the humanity of the dehumanized victim? Or, are they shaped by a reluctance to face the horror? What do such responses tell us about the steadfastness of empathic capacities and about their limits?
Visit the conference page for the program
Burdick-Vary Lecture Series: International Perspectives on the Environmental Humanities and Social SciencesSeptember 21, 2011 - September 22, 2011
Cóilín Parsons
English Literature, University of Cape Town, South Africa
'Cultures and Histories of the Environment Colloquium'
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Cóilín Parsons is an assistant professor of English Literature at the University of Cape Town, South Africa since 2009. He completed his PhD in English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. Cóilín has published on the origins of literary study in Ireland and India, Sydney Owenson’s Indian novels, Irish literature, and postcolonial theory. He is currently working on a book manuscript on the cartographic origins of Irish modernist literature.
Burdick-Vary SymposiumNov 5 2010 - Nov 6 2010
4151 Grainger Hall
'The Farther Shores of Literacy: Amerindian Graphic invention and the World of Letters'
New World peoples had already invented a huge range of graphic systems when Europeans brought the alphabet to America. Colonial letters interacted with Amerindian pictography, glyphs, cord-writing, and other graphic arts for centuries. This symposium brings together foremost researchers familiar with deeper and more varied meanings of �writing� in the Americas. How did graphic pluralism affect American arts of literacy?
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Burdick-Vary SymposiumApr 9 2010 - Apr 10 2010
The Lowell Center
'The Mongol Empire and its World'
Burdick-Vary SymposiumApr 17 2009 - Apr 18 2009
Pyle Center
Organizer: John Niles
'Other People's Thinking: Language and Mentality in England before the Conquest'
The effort to understand the inherited ideas that are operative in a society other than one's own can require a historian's patience, a linguist's precision, a philosopher's finesse, and an anthropologist's tact. How did the people of the earliest period of English history and culture (the Anglo-Saxon period, ca. 500-1100 ad) conceive of their place in the world that they inhabited? To what extent do the textual records from that era reflect underlying assumptions that may have no exact equivalents today, and that require explication if those records, and hence this historical era in general, are not to be misunderstood? And what evidence from non-textual sources, or from other times and places, can help to promote this inquiry?Visit the conference page for schedule and abstracts.
Dec 5 2008 - Dec 6 2008
226 Pyle Center
'Meanings of Modern: South Asia Before and After Colonialism'
Organizer: V. Narayana Rao. You can download a PDF of the conference program here.
October 2007
'Respond to Atrocities'
Organizer: Claudia Card, Philosophy
March 2007
'Early Modern Eyes'
Organizer: Lee Palmer Wandel, History
April 2005
'Narrating Native Histories in the Americas'
Organizer: Florencia Mallon, History
September 2004
'Renaissance Esthetics/Contemporary Esthetics'
Organizer: Ullrich Langer, French and Italian
April 2003
'What’s New in American Poetry?'
Organizer: Lynn Keller, English
April 2002
'Art, Philosophy, and Politics'
Organizer: Noel Carroll, Philosophy
September 2001
'An Historian’s Legacy. George L. Mosse and Recent Research on Fascism, Society, and Culture'
Organizer: Paul Boyer, History
April 2001
'Wrestling with Nature: From Omens to Science'
Organizer: Ronald L. Numbers, History of Medicine
April 2000
'Cartography in the European Renaissance'
Organizer: David Woodward, Cartography
February 2000
'At the Frontiers of the Reformation: Robert Kingdon’s Legacy of Graduate Education'
Organizer: Lee Palmer Wandel, History
February 1999
'Popular Cinema. The Very Idea. Understanding Film as Entertainment'
Organizer: David Bordwell, Communication Arts
February 1998
'Transnationalism, Travel and Desire'
Organizer: Susan Stanford Friedman, English and Women’s Studies (with Border Studies Research Circle)
March 1997
'Contact and Power: Transgressions in the Borderlands of Intercultural and Interdisciplinary Encounter'
Organizer: Susan Stanford Friedman, English and Women’s Studies
October 1995
'The Medieval Opus. Imitation, Authorship, Rewriting in French and Other Texts'
Organizer: Douglas Kelly, French and Italian
October 1993
'The German Jewish Dialogue–Two Centuries of a Non-Event?'
Organizer: Klaus Berghahn, German
April 1993
'Science and Theology in Medieval Islam, Judaism, and Christendom. Burdick-Vary Symposium'
Organizer: David Lindberg, History of Science
October 1991
'The Origins and Meaning of Medieval Nominalism'
Organizer: William Courtenay, History
April 1991
'New Historicism'
Organizer: Paul Boyer, History and Klaus Berghahn, German
September 1990
'Women and Creativity'
Organizer: Birute Ciplijauskaite, Spanish and Portuguese
April 1990
'Critical Theories of Quentin Skinner'
Organizer: Robert M. Kingdon, History
October 1989
'Polykleitos, the Doryphoros and its Influence. Celebrating the Centennial of the Madison Society-Archaeological Institute of America'
March 1989
'Epidemics and Their Social Impact'
In memory of William Coleman, History of Science
April 1988
'Meaning in Byzantine Art'
Organizer: Anthony Cutler, Pennsylvania State University
April 1988
'Problems in Decipherment. Conference for Retirement of Emmett L. Bennett, IRH Fellow'
February 1988
'Nature, Knowledge, and Virtue. Conference in memory of Joan Kung, IRH Fellow'
April 1987
'Utopian Vision, Technological Innovation and Poetic Imagination. Conference for Max Baeumer Retirement, IRH Fellow'
February 1987
'Images in Fifteenth Century Manuscripts'
Organizer: John Friedman, History, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
March 1986
'Temple in Society'
Organizer: Menahem Haran, Biblical Studies, Hebrew, University of Jerusalem
March 1985
'Popular Religion in Counter-Reformation Europe'
Organizer: Henry Kamen, Spanish, University of Warwick
March 1984
'Preludes to Modernism: Literature, Art, Music and Thought in the Period 1870-1914'
Organizer: James McFarlane, Scandinavian Studies, University of East Anglia, Norwich, England
October-November 1983
'Commemoration of the 500th Anniversary of Luther’s Birth. The Popular Impact of Luther’s Reformation'
April 1982
'The Emergence of National Languages'
Organizer: Aldo Scaglione, Comparative Literature, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
April 1981
'Ancient Greek Art and Iconography'
Organizer: Warren Moon, Art History
March 1981
'Calderon in Context'
April 1980
'The Formation of States in History and Theory'
Organizer: Edward Thompson, Ancient History, University of Nottingham
March 1979
'Religious Ecstasy in Renaissance Europe'
Organizer: Michael Screech, French, University College London