Programs
Guest Lecturers
"Bathing in Reeking Wounds": The Liberal Arts and the Arts of War"
Catharine R. Stimpson
Thursday, February 28, 2013
5:00 pm
The Sue and Leonard Miller Center
for Contemporary Judaic Studies
5202 University Drive
Merrick Building 105
Coral Gables, Florida 33146
Focusing on Macbeth, Professor Stimpson will discuss how the humanities are crucial in arriving at complex understandings of war in its multifarious manifestations. Wars inspire documentation, invention, and creativity; and historical and literary analysis as well as interdisciplinary and transdiscplinary work in Trauma Studies — bringing together psychoanalysis and psychology, history, law, and medicine — helps us in healing the wounds of war. With new tools of research and communication — e.g., electronic and digital — the practitioners of the liberal arts are more prepared than ever to explore, describe, and explain war, as well as to widely distribute the resulting ideas and information, enabling us to arrive at a deeper awareness of history and self-recognition through such endeavors.
Catharine R. Stimpson is University Professor and Dean Emerita of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at New York University. She is currently affiliated with the Steinhardt Institute for Higher Education Policy, as well as with the NYU Law School. She served as President of the Modern Language Association and the Association of Graduate Schools. She was the first director of the Women’s Center at Rutgers, and the founding editor of Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society. The author of a novel, Class Notes (1979, 1980), and a selection of essays on literature, culture, and education, Where the Meanings Are (1988), she has also published over 150 monographs, essays, stories, and reviews in such places as The Nation, New York Times Book Review, Critical Inquiry, and boundary 2. She was co-editor of the two-volume Library of America edition of the works of Gertrude Stein. Professor Stimpson has lectured at approximately 400 institutions in the United States and abroad. Her public service has included the chairpersonships of the New York State Council for the Humanities, the National Council for Research on Women, and the Ms. Magazine Board of Scholars; she has also served on the board of PBS.
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"Art Basel Miami Beach
and the Culture of the Art Fair"
Laura Knott
Thursday, November 29, 2012
4:30 pm
Lowe Art Museum
1301 Stanford Drive
Coral Gables, FL 33124
Pavia Parking Map...
Art Basel Miami Beach powerfully represents the phenomenal expansion of contemporary art fairs since they began in 1967. While the first of the modern fairs was a small, cooperative venture, today's international art fairs profoundly influence cultural tourism and the business of buying and selling contemporary art. "Art Basel Miami Beach and the Culture of the Art Fair" looks at the artists and the galleries as they have been, as they are at this year's ABMB, and as they are likely to be in the future.
Laura Knott develops and manages exhibitions at the MIT Museum and teaches "Money and Ethics in the Contemporary Art World" at Tufts University. She holds a Master's degree from MIT in Visual Studies. Ms. Knott's career as an artist includes presentations at the documenta exhibition, online, and on public television. She is the editor of a book about Sky Art and the author of articles about contemporary art and museum practice.
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"Out of Bounds? A critique of the new policies on hyperandrogenism in elite female athletes"
Katrina Karkazis
Friday, April 27, 2012
4:30 pm
CAS Gallery/Wesley Foundation
1210 Stanford Drive
University of Miami
Katrina Karkazis is a medical anthropologist at the Center for Biomedical Ethics at Stanford; her first book, Fixing Sex: Intersex, Medical Authority, and Lived Experience (Duke University Press, 2008), looks at the question of how to treat infants whose bodies do not fit neatly into our scientific categories of “male” or “female,” from the perspective of doctors, parents, and adults with intersex conditions themselves. She argues that by viewing intersexuality exclusively through a narrow medical lens we avoid much more difficult questions. Do gender atypical bodies require treatment? Should physicians intervene to control the “sex” of the body? Is “sex” as man-made as “gender”?
Her talk will address her new work on how the world of sports is grappling with the question of sex variance in the wake of the controversy over South African runner Caster Semenya.
"My love affair with art"
Dr. Johnnetta Cole
Friday, March 23, 2012
4:30 pm
Lowe Art Museum
1301 Stanford Drive
Coral Gables, FL 33124
Dr. Johnnetta B. Cole was appointed the Director of the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art (NMAfA) in March, 2009. Founded as a small museum on Capitol Hill in 1964, NMAfA became a part of the Smithsonian Institution in 1979, and in 1987 it moved to its current location on the National Mall. The museum's collection of over 10,000 objects represents nearly every area of the continent of Africa and contains a variety of media and art forms. NMAfA also has an extensive education program. Since the mid-1980's, Dr. Cole has worked with a number of Smithsonian programs. She currently serves on the Scholarly Advisory Board for the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture, the construction of which will be completed on the National Mall by 2015.
Before assuming her current position, Johnnetta Cole had a long and distinguished career as an educator and humanitarian. Through her work as a college president, university professor and through her published works, speeches and community service she has consistently addressed the issues most important to her; creating racial and gender parity and redressing all other forms of inequality.
Dr. Cole served as president of Spelman College and Bennett College for Women. She is the only person to have served as president of these two historically Black colleges for women in the United States. She is also Professor Emerita of Emory University from which she retired as Presidential Distinguished Professor of Anthropology, Women's Studies and African American Studies. Johnnetta Cole has been awarded 55 honorary degrees and she is the recipient of numerous awards, including the TransAfrica Forum Global Public Service Award, the Radcliffe Medal, the Eleanor Roosevelt Val-Kill Medal, the 2001 Alexis de Tocqueville Award for Community Service from United Way of America, The Joseph Prize for Human Rights presented by the Anti-Defamation League, The Uncommon Height Award from the National Council of Negro Women, The John W. Gardner leadership Award from The Independent Sector, the Lenore and George W. Romney Citizen Volunteer Award from the Points of Light Foundation, Ebony magazines most influential 100 in 2010, George Washington Carver award 2011, Benjamin Franklin Creativity Laureate Award and Washingtonian Magazine's 100 most powerful women 2011.
Dr. Cole grew up in Jacksonville, Florida where in 1901 her maternal great-grandfather began the first insurance company in the state of Florida, an endeavor that earned him accolades as the state’s first black millionaire. She has conducted research in Africa, the Caribbean, and the United States, and she has authored and edited several books and scores of scholarly articles. Publisher’s Weekly stated, referring to Gender Talk: The Struggle for Women’s Equality in African American Communities co-authored by Cole and Beverly Guy-Sheftall, “Thoughtful, provocative, concerned and urgent, this work ignites a much-needed debate over the state of true black community and the role of women within that community.”
Of Anagrammatology:
Decoding the Renaissance Text
William Sherman
Thursday, March 29, 2012
4:30 pm
3rd Floor Conference Room
Richter Library
1300 Memorial Dr.
University of Miami
We are not used to the idea that anagrams might have anything serious to teach us: for most of us they are games we grow out of, and famous writers from Ben Jonson to Samuel Johnson, from John Dryden to T. S. Eliot, have dismissed their deployment in literature as trivial, empty, and even perverse -- a twisted art, as Dryden described it in his satirical poem MacFlecknoe, devoted to 'tortur[ing] one poor word ten thousand ways.' But Christopher Ricks has recently reminded us that Shakespeare's age was the veritable 'heyday of the anagram,' suggesting that the art of verbal recombination can be studied as 'a true assistance to art' in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In my illustrated lecture, I want to go further and suggest that anagrams may deserve a central place in a larger history, one with broader textual, cultural and intellectual dimensions. Bringing together some of the key figures in the birth of linguistics, literary criticism, psychoanalysis, cryptography and experimental art, anagrams offer a surprisingly useful lens for the processes by which modernity found itself in the hidden message of early modernity.
Florida in the XVI Century: Discovery and Conquest
María Antonia Sáinz Sastre
Tuesday, October 11, 2011
11:00 am
CAS Gallery/Wesley Foundation
1210 Stanford Dr.
University of Miami
In her extensive study Florida in the Sixteenth Century: Exploration and Colonization (MAPFRE, 2011), María Antonia Sáinz Sastre recounts the saga of hardship, loss and calamity that befell so many Europeans who attempted to settle in Florida at the time. The lengthiest part of her book is dedicated to Pedro Menéndez de Avilés, the Adelantado from Asturias whose efforts resulted in the establishment of St. Augustine, the first permanent European settlement in North America. Sáinz Sastre uses in her study unique primary sources from the archives of the Marquis of Revillagigedo, a descendant of Menéndez de Avilés who was appointed Governor of Cuba in 1734.
Independence Lost:
The Gulf Coast and the American Revolution
Kathleen duval
Associate Professor of History & Director of Undergraduate Studies
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Thursday, October 6, 2011
4:30 pm
3rd Floor Conference Room
1300 Memorial Drive
Richter Library
Kathleen DuVal’s lecture concerns the Revolutionary War on the Gulf Coast. There, Spaniards, Britons, Creeks, Chickasaws, Choctaws, Acadians, enslaved and free African Americans, and others—but not American revolutionaries—took advantage of the war to forward their own ambitions. “Independence Lost” tells an alternative story of the American Revolution with unexpected actors, forgotten events, and surprising consequences.
The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery
Eric Foner
DeWitt Clinton Professor of History
Columbia University
Thursday, September 22, 2011
4:30 pm
Storer Auditorium
5250 University Drive
University of Miami
Winner of the 2011 Pulitzer Prize in History, the Bancroft Prize, and the Lincoln Prize: from a master historian, the story of Lincoln's-and the nation's-transformation through the crucible of slavery and emancipation.
In this landmark work of deep scholarship and insight, Eric Foner gives us the definitive history of Lincoln and the end of slavery in America. Foner begins with Lincoln's youth in Indiana and Illinois and follows the trajectory of his career across an increasingly tense and shifting political terrain from Illinois to Washington, D.C. Although “naturally anti-slavery” for as long as he can remember, Lincoln scrupulously holds to the position that the Constitution protects the institution in the original slave states. But the political landscape is transformed in 1854 when the Kansas-Nebraska Act makes the expansion of slavery a national issue.
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Night-Rule: Empires of the Nonhuman in Montaigne, Shakespeare, and Descartes
Laurie Shannon
Associate Professor of English
Wender Lewis Teaching and Research Professor
Northwestern University
Thursday April 7, 2011
4:30 pm
3rd Floor Conference Room
1300 Memorial Dr.
Richter Library
Ideas about certitude in human knowledge and about alleged differences in faculties between human and animal estate share a key historical pivot: Descartes's Discourse on Method. What does the question of species have to do with the history of skepticism -- and why? This lecture considers the underattended terms of debate between Montaigne and Descartes on the claims of animals, in order to show how Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream places species-defined limits on human authority instead of celebrating it.
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The Political Origins of the History Play in Elizabethan England
Peter Lake
University Distinguished Professor of History
Professor of the History of Christianity, Divinity School 
Vanderbilt University
Thursday March 24, 2011
4:30 pm
3rd Floor Conference Room
1300 Memorial Dr.
Richter Library
This lecture attempts to outline the political and ideological contexts out of which the history play developed; and the context in which it was written, staged, and consumed. To this end, a wide range of tract materials as well as an account of the political dynamics of Elizabeth’s reign from the late 1560s to the early 1590s will be considered. The lecture will also suggest the ways in which contemporaries may have read the history play politically.
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"NEW DIRECTIONS IN DIGITAL HUMANITIES"
KENNETH PRICE
Hillegass University Professor
of 19th Century American Literature
C0-Director, Center for Digital Research in the Humanities
University of Nebraska-Lincoln
Monday March 21, 2011 3:30 pm
3rd Floor Conference Room
Richter Library
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Kenneth M. Price is the Hillegass University Professor of 19th
Century American Literature and co-director of the Center for
Digital Research in the Humanities at the University of
Nebraska–Lincoln ( http://cdrh.unl.edu/ ). Since 1995, Price
has served as co-director of the Walt Whitman Archive, an
electronic research and teaching tool that sets out to make Whitman's work accessible to scholars, students, and general readers. The Whitman Archive has been awarded grants from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission, the U. S. Department of Education, and the Institute for Museum and Library Services. In 2005, the Whitman Archive received a "We the People" grant from the NEH to build a permanent endowment to support ongoing editorial work; and in 2008, Price received a Digital Innovation Award from American Council of Learned Societies to edit Whitman's Civil War writings. He is a contributor to A Companion to Digital Literary Studies (2008) and his article, “Edition, Project, Database, Archive, Thematic Research Collection: What’s in a Name?” appeared in the summer 2008 issue (vol. 3, no. 3) of Digital Humanities Quarterly.
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Policing and the Social Order in
Jack-the-Ripper's London
Victor BAiley
Charles W. Battey Distinguished Professor
of Modern British History
Director, Hall Center for the Humanities
University of Kansas
Wednesday February 23, 2011 4:30 pm
3rd Floor Conference Room
Richter Library
In 1888 the East End of London, where Jack-the-Ripper brutally murdered five prostitutes, was notorious as a site of poverty, crime, and immorality. Yet at the time many Victorians believed that crime had declined in the 1880s. Some historians attribute this decline to efficient, even ruthless policing. Professor Bailey will suggest that the commission and repression of crime cannot be understood outside the wider context of employment, family and neighborhood, immigration, charity and welfare, housing and local government, and the local magistrates’ courts.
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Restaurants for the Rest of Us
Robert Appelbaum 
Professor of English Literature
Uppsala University, Sweden
Head of Department, Department of English and Creative Writing, Lancaster University
Wednesday February 16, 2011 7:00 pm
CAS Gallery
Wesley House
Can restaurants serve as a vehicle for cultural democracy? Can writing about restaurants do so? We have heard about palaces with Michelin stars, which none of us can afford. And we know all about fast food joints, which kill the soul while poisoning the body. But what about restaurants for the rest of us?
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Art and Illumination Discourse: Parisian Visual Culture in the Era of Thomas Edison
S. Hollis clayson
Professor of Art History and History
Bergen Evans Professor in the Humanities
Director, Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities
Northwestern University
Thursday November 4, 2010 4:30 pm
CAS Gallery
Wesley House
The lecture will pose one central question: to what extent did the electrical revolution in artificial lighting technologies, and the intense conversation that it engendered, shape experimental forms of printmaking headquartered in Paris between 1879 and 1882? Etchings by Mary Cassatt and Edgar Degas will be emphasized.
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Food and the Senses: Pleasure, Sin and Guilt in Sixteenth-Century Italian Literature and ArT
LAURA GIANNETTI
Associate Professor of Italian
Modern Languages and Literatures Department
University of Miami
Thursday April 22, 2010 3:30 pm
CAS Gallery
Wesley House
Two separate heavens awaited the dead in Ruzante’s Dialogo facetissimo: one for those who enjoyed the sensual world of food and sex and another reserved for those who lived malinconici, fasting and praying to God. Humanists, doctors, and food writers debated whether the concern for health or the pleasures of the senses should be the guiding principle in choosing food. Perhaps in the context of the Reformation the debate was resolved in favor of a concern for health and a tighter control of the body, the senses, and appetites; yet imaginative literature and artistic representations showed an increasing fascination with food, taste, and sensual pleasure. This paper will address how a discourse of food found in prescriptive literature was translated into and changed to empower the senses in the realm of the literary imagination.
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The Rise of A Superpower China
Edward friedman
Professor of Political Science
University of Wisconsin-Madison
Friday February 12, 2010 3:30 pm
CAS Gallery
Wesley House
Some well-informed analysts see China dominating the world in the years ahead and re-shaping politics in a direction favorable to authoritarianism rather than human rights and democracy. Others see China as a bubble economy that will inevitably burst. Yet others fear for a war between the present superpower, America, and the rising superpower, China. The Chinese Communist Party government, in contrast to each and all of these future projections, insists that China's rise will facilitate peace and prosperity. China therefore should be seen as a global moral pole. This talk will probe what lies behind these clashing perspectives on the future. Whatever lies ahead, no one should doubt that the rise of China is a world-changing event perhaps as significant as the rise of Europe which started around 1500.
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Cosmopolitanism, Women, and War: From Virginia Woolf's Three Guineas To Marjane sAtrapi's persepolis
Susan Stanford Friedman
Virginia Woolf Professor of English & Women's Studies
Sally Mead Hands Bascom Professor of English
University of Wisconsin-Madison
Thursday February 11, 2010 3:30 pm
CAS Gallery
Wesley House
What happens to the cosmopolitan dream of world citizenship during a time of war? What is women’s relationship to patriotism when the nation denies them full citizenship and uses the language of protection against violence to justify its circumscription of women’s rights? Virginia Woolf’s polemical essay on war Three Guineas (1938) and Marjane Satrapi’s bestselling memoir Persepolis (2000) explore these questions about gender, war, and world citizenship from their different standpoints in time and location. The lecture explores Three Guineas and Persepolis in the context of current debates about cosmopolitanism “from below” and argues that both women advocate a cosmofeminism “from the side” that refuses loyalty to nation-states at war that do violence to their own citizens while claiming to protect them.
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ALL IN THE CUBAN AMERICAN/SIT-COM FAMILY: 'QUE PASA USA?' (1975-1980)
YEIDY RIVERO
Associate Professor of American Culture,
Screen Arts and Culture
University of Michigan
Friday January 29, 2010 4:30 pm
Roberto C. Goizueta Pavilion
2nd Floor Richter Library
¿Qué Pasa, USA? is America's first bilingual situation comedy. The program explores the trials and tribulations faced by the Peña family of Miami as they struggle to cope with a new country and a new language. The series focuses on the identity crisis of the members of the family as they are pulled in one direction by their elders - who want to maintain Cuban values and traditions - and pulled in other directions by the pressures of living in a predominantly Anglo society. Professor Rivero will examine how national and transnational cultural identities are constructed and negotiated through media discourses about race, ethnicity, nationality, and gender. Her current research explores the ways in which television in 1950s Cuba was utilized as a commercial-national medium to re-articulate discourses of modernity.
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ANIMAL PASSIONS AND WILD JUSTICE: THE EMOTIONAL AND MORAL LIVES OF ANIMALS AND WHY THEY MATTER
Marc Bekoff
Professor Emeritus of Ecology, Evolutionary Biology
University of Colorado-Boulder
Tuesday January 26, 2010 3:30 pm
CAS Gallery at Wesley House
There is much research clearly showing animals as emotional and empathic beings and displaying moral intelligence. In his talk, Bekoff will present numerous examples on
the emotional lives of animals and make his case about animal morality, or what he calls “wild justice." He will focus on the details of social play behavior, or the many ways in which animals play cooperatively and fairly.
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The Argonautic Expedition: From Folktale to Myth
James J. Clauss
Professor of Classics
Director of the University Honors Program
University of Washington
Wednesday, April 1st 2009
Professor Clauss will trace the evolution of the famed Argonautic expedition from a tale of personal growth to a myth that accounts for, perhaps even justifies, Greek expansion in the East and in North Africa, as well as hints at the origins of the long-standing conflict with the Persian Empire.
Smith the Critic: Mimesis, Sympathy, and Satisfaction
James Chandler
Franke Distinguished Professor
Director, Franke Institute for the Humanities
University of Chicago
Thursday, March 26th 2009
Though not best known for his work in criticism and aesthetics, Smith thought and wrote a great deal about such matters. He spent much of his later life on a major treatise on the “imitative arts,” which may have included the “Essay on the Imitative Arts,” posthumously published in 1795. Wordsworth, for one, had no use for Smith as a critic, or for any of the Scottish Enlightenment writers on literature and the arts. But Robert Burns was deeply influenced by Smith’s writing and so were other leading literary figures. Moreover, Smith was certainly one of the leading moral theorists of the eighteenth century, and his critical arguments are closely imbricated with the sorts of arguments he makes in the Theory of Moral Sentiments. To understand Smith’s complex challenge to the work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, for example, it is necessary to see why Smith quarreled with Rousseau’s account of the imitative arts.
