The Humanities Project Events for October 2007
Helena María Viramontes is the author of two key books in the Chicana literary canon: The Moths and Other Stories (1985) and Under the Feet of Jesus (1995), a novel. Her new novel, Their Dogs Came with Them, from which she will be giving a reading, focuses on the dispossessed, the working poor, the homeless, and the undocumented of East Los Angeles, where Viramontes was born and raised. Like all of her writing, this monumental book strives to recreate the visceral sense of a world virtually unknown to mainstream letters and to transform readers through relentlessly compassionate storytelling.
Viramontes' work has been included in almost every major anthology of American literature published in the last ten years, including, most recently, The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women. She is the recipient of numerous awards including the John Dos Passos Prize for Literature, a Sundance Institute Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and the Luis Leal Award. A teacher and mentor to countless young writers, she is currently Professor of Creative Writing in the Department of English at Cornell University.
This talk is additionally supported by the Department of Modern Languages and Cultures and the Department of English.
Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (BA, University of Rochester; PhD, Harvard University) is Professor and the Chair of the Department of English at George Washington University.
About the talk: According to the historian William of Newburgh (c.1196), two young children, a boy and a girl, suddenly emerged from the ground in East Anglia. They spoke no English, and the green hue of their skin betrayed an otherworldly origin. Baptized and then instructed in the local customs, dialect, and way of life, the two children met very different fates. Although she retained a memory of the mysterious land from which she came, the girl grew up and eventually married a man from a nearby town. Her brother, however, did not assimilate so well. Although his consumption of English food began to make the green tinge fade from his skin, his body refused to adapt fully to his adopted life and he died.
This episode serves as William's meditation on two facts that obstruct his otherwise triumphant narration of the English nation: the Norman conquest, an event that had rendered the English a subject people; and the lingering presence in Britain of the people the English had displaced when they colonized its lands. William is haunted by the challenge both these facts pose to English historical continuity. The story offers a kind of postcolonial fiction, and along with it the possibility of viewing English history off center, through the eyes of those whom William's troubled narrative excludes and monsterizes.
Curt Smith is an acclaimed author, radio/television host, columnist, and former presidential speechwriter. Says NBC broadcaster Bob Costas: "Curt Smith stands up for the beauty of words." Adds former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, "I have admired his marvelously professional work."
Smith hosts the weekly syndicated Perspectives from Rochester, New York's National Public Radio affiliate WXXI AM. The series, distributed to other NPR stations in New York State, features well-known local and national guests. Among Smith's past guests are: Fred Barnes, Christine Brennan, George H. W. Bush, Tucker Carlson, Dick Enberg, Emeril Lagasse, Michelle Malkin, George Mitchell, Dan Rather, George Will, and John Zogby.
Participants:
- John Watson (Colonial Williamsburg Foundation)
- George Taylor (Taylor and Boody)
- Lawrence Libin (Metropolitan Museum of Art)
- Joel Speerstra (Göteborg Organ Art Center)
Allen Dwight Callahan is professor of New Testament at the Seminário Teológico Batista do Nordeste in Bahia, Brazil. He holds a BA in Religion from Princeton University and MA and Ph.D. degrees from Harvard University in the Study of Religion specializing in New Testament and the history and literature of early Christianity.
Dr. Callahan has published over twenty-five scholarly articles and is the author of four books: The Embassy of Onesimus (Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International, 1997); with Richard A. Horsley, and Abraham Smith, Semeia 83/84: Slavery in Text and Interpretation (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 1998); A Love Supreme: A History of Johannine Tradition (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2005); The Talking Book: The Bible and African Americans (New Haven: Yale University, 2006).
About the talk: Callahan's The Talking Book casts the Bible as the central character in a vivid portrait of black America, tracing the origins of African-American culture from slavery's secluded forest prayer meetings to the bright lights and bold style of today's hip-hop artists. Callahan's talk will discuss the various ways in which African Americans have used the bible historically for liberation, education, and as a cultural tool for empowerment.
In 1968, Shirley Chisholm became the first black woman elected to Congress. Four years later she ran for President, a campaign chronicled in this revealing documentary. Chisholm's unprecedented run for the Presidency galvanized the African American community while also engendering visceral opposition. Along with extensive interviews from prominent activists, writers and politicians, this documentary analyzes the hostility Chisholm faced from both the political establishment and the media.
Read more about the film on the Internet Movie Database.
Schedule:
- Jonathan Ambrosino, consultant, Boston, Massachusetts
Groton School Skinner Restoration, Historic Organ Citation for Aeolian-Skinner Opus 953 (1937) - Jonathan Ortloff, student, Eastman School of Music
Preliminary Documentation of the Aeolian-Skinner Opus 953 and video tour - Bruce Shull, Taylor and Boody Organbuilders, Staunton, Virginia
Documenting the 1800 Tannenberg Organ in Winston-Salem - Scot Huntington, S L Huntington and Co, Stonigton, Connecticut
OHS Guidelines for Documentation and Conservation
Participants:
- Carl-Johan Begsten (Göteborg Organ Art Center)
- Annika Niklasson (Chalmers University of Technology)
- Matthias Scholtz (Chalmers University of Technology)
- Susan Tattershall
Jennifer L. Roberts (Curriculumm Vitae) is Gardner Cowles Associate Professor of History of Art and Architecture at Harvard University, where she specializes in American art, contemporary art, and material culture theory.
About Roberts' talk: Although John James Audubon's work has often been equated with the lightness and grace of its avian subject matter, his stacks of actual-size bird drawings and "double elephant" prints were in fact massive, cumbersome cargoes that had to be hauled around the Trans-Appalachian West by flatboat, foot, and horseback. Audubon's pictures of birds, in other words, had a much more difficult time navigating through the early American landscape than did the birds themselves. Exploring this paradox, this paper will examine The Birds of America as part of a broader period struggle with the ineluctable thingness of pictures.
Jason Weems (Curriculum Vitae) is an Assistant Professor in the Art History program in the Department of Humanities, at the University of Michigan, Dearborn. He specializes in American art, with particular interests in the history of vision and visuality, landscape, and vernacular culture in the context of modernity.
About Weems' talk: Replete with pillowed hillsides, embroidered fence lines, and patterned fields, the landscapes of Regionalist artist Grant Wood evoke comparisons to Midwestern quilts. Such resemblance is not merely accidental, but instead articulates a localized lexicon of expression and experience shared by artist and quilt-maker alike. This paper will argue that each type of representation embodies a struggle by each of its makers to stitch together a new image for their region amidst the shifting terrain of technological and cultural modernization.
Note: a lunch will be provided; if you would like to partake please RSVP to Vicky Pass ().
This student-designed program examines the evolving role of media in the electoral process. The program includes Charles SteelFisher '96, Director of New Media for Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick, Research and Media Director for Young Voter Strategies; and Marc Morgenstern, Executive Director of DeclareYourself.com. The panel will be moderated by Richard Niemi, Professor of Political Science.
Sponsored by R' World R' Vote. No charge.
Bill Brown, is Chair and the Edward Carson Waller Distinguished Service Professor, of the Department of English at the University of Chicago.
About the talk: How do we mediate our understanding of others through objects? And how does the otherness of objects mediate our understanding of otherness as such? In an argument that develops two related concepts—"object culture" and the "meta-object"—Bill Brown will focus on the relation between ethnographic and aesthetic artefacts, taking the art of the Pacific Northwest as his example. In particular, he will examine the recent work of the First Nation artist Brian Jungen, whose work asks us to confront different object cultures, material histories, and materialities, just as it asks us to think through the unhuman history of the object world we inhabit.
There will be a reception following the talk.
Kathryn Lofton (Ph.D., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) is an assistant professor in the Department of Religious Studies and the Program in American Studies at Indiana University, Bloomington.
A specialist in nineteenth- and twentieth-century American religious history, she has published articles on the evangelical preacher, theological modernism, civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer, masculinity in religious research, and the ritual practices of Oprah Winfrey's multimedia empire. She is currently working on her first monograph, The Modernity in Mr. Shaw: Modernisms and Fundamentalisms in American Culture, which offers a microhistory of conservative American Protestantism through the life of one Presbyterian fundamentalist, John Balcom Shaw. She is also co-editor, with Laurie Maffly-Kipp, of Women's Work: An Anthology of African-American Women's Historical Writings, 1832-1920.
Professor Claudia Schaefer of the Department of Modern Languages and Cultures will introduce the film.
The Milagro Beanfield War is an Oscar-winning 1988 American film drama based on the John Nichols novel of the same name. It was directed by Robert Redford and the screenplay was by Nichols and David S. Ward.
Filmed on location in Truchas, New Mexico, the film is set in the fictional rural Northern New Mexico town of Milagro, population 426. As with a good part of the rural American Southwest, Milagro is a predominantly Hispanic and Catholic town, comprised of a largely interrelated population. The picture tells of one man's quixotic struggle as he defends his small beanfield and his community against much larger business and New Mexico state political interests [excerpt from Wikipedia].
Read more about the film on the Internet Movie Database.
The Cluster on Pre-modern Studies will sponsor a mini-symposium with two invited speakers:
R. Barton Palmer is the Calhoun Lemon Professor of Literature and the Director of Film Studies at Clemson University. He has published on a remarkably wide range of literary and cinematic subjects, from the Middle Ages to the present. He is the editor and translator of six separate volumes of Guillaume de Machaut's poetry, published by Garland and Routledge from 1984 through 2002. He has edited Chaucer's French Contemporaries: the Poetry / Poetics of Self and Tradition (1999), and co-edited An Anthology of Medieval Love-Debate Poetry (2006) and Jean Froissart: An Anthology of Narrative and Lyric Poetry (2001). He has also published an impressive cluster of books on film, including Narrative in Film (1983), Hollywood's Dark Cinema: The American Film Noir (1994), and Joel and Ethan Cohen (2004). The Cinematic Text: Methods and Approaches (1989) has remained an influential source for film students, and he has edited the collections Joseph L. Mankiewicz (2001) and After Hitchcock: Influence, Imitation, and Intertextuality (2006). He currently serves as the General Editor of Traditions in World Cinema (Edinburgh) and of the Routledge Medieval Texts Series. His magisterial surveys, Nineteenth-Century American Fiction on Screen and Twentieth-Century American Fiction on Screen appeared this year in US editions from Cambridge University Press.
The title of Professor Palmer's talk is "What Chaucer may have Learned from Machaut". His talk in Rochester clearly draws upon his work as the world expert on Machaut, but will no doubt reflect the interests he's pursued in his other publications.
Helen Phillips has taught at the Universities of Nottingham and Glamorgan, and is currently Professor in the School of English at the University of Cardiff, Wales. She has edited Chaucer's Book of the Duchess (1982) and the romance of The Awntyrs off Arthure (1988), as well as Chaucer's Dream Poetry (1997), with long introductions and commentary. Her book, An Introduction to the Canterbury Tales: Reading, Fiction, Context (2000) provides a fresh and deeply learned account of Chaucer's poetry. She also co-edited the collection, Langland, the Mystics, and the Medieval English Religious Tradition (1990). She has served as a founding member of the International Association for Robin Hood Studies, and organized conferences at Nottingham (1999) and Gregynog (2007). She has recently brought together two volumes of essays on the outlaw hero, Robin Hood: Medieval and Post-Medieval (2005), and British Outlaw Traditions (2007).
Professor Phillips will give a talk entitled "Chaucer's Cleopatra and the Politics of the 1380s," which will address Chaucer's portrayal of the Egyptian queen and its broader cultural contexts.
There will be a light reception between talks and a chance for continuing discussion after both.
Although Rachel Boynton's "Our Brand Is Crisis" focuses on the 2002 Presidential election in Bolivia, it offers an insider view of how associates of James Carville's consultancy firm GCS manage the campaign of Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada. The tactics of GCS and their careful manipulation of media images highlight troubling relationships between truth, political strategy, money and the American approach to presidential campaigns.
See the trailer and read more about the film on the Internet Movie Database.