Programs
Spring 2012
FLORIDA AT THE CROSSROADS: FIVE HUNDRED YEARS OF ENCOUNTERS, CONFLICTS, AND EXCHANGES
Thursday-Saturday February 9-11, 2012
CAS Gallery
On the occasion of the quincentenary of the year in which a name in Spanish signifying beauty and salvation was imposed on this region, "Florida at the Crossroads: Five Hundred Years of Encounters, Conflicts, and Exchanges" will offer an intellectual dialogue revisiting the past, heeding the present, and envisioning the future of Florida as a crossroads of peoples, quests, and exchanges. Under this encompassing theme participants will discuss the state from multiple perspectives that evince its complex, foundational history: Florida as the invaded homeland of its native peoples; as a buffer zone of cultural encounters and difficult coexistences; as the frontier where Spain and other European colonial superpowers played their conflicts out; as a haven for populations seeking freedom. These multiple perspectives will allow us to rethink our state as a global borderland exemplifying the difficult emergence of the multicultural, multiracial nation that the United States is today.
Spring 2011
IMAGINING CULTURE(S), Rethinking disciplines:
A Conference on anthropology and the humanities
Friday-Saturday april 1-2, 2011
Lowe Art Museum
The concept of culture has become a vexed issue for the social science disciplines and the humanities. The “literary turn” in anthropology has focused attention on the conventions and politics of ethnographic representations, even as novelists and historians have been exploring ethnographic approaches in their writings, and claimed a share in the production of knowledge about peoples. Moreover, “culture” has been conceptualized in different ways across diverse disciplines and in different social-political contexts. In an age of globalization, non-Western and non-academic concepts of culture challenge the Eurocentrism of the traditional human sciences. This conference encourages examination of the ways that an international perspective on the idea of culture unsettles the borders and status of disciplinary formations.
symposium in honor of sandra paquet:
The present future of caribbean literary and cultural studies
friday march 4, 2011
CAS Gallery
humanities through classics:
what does the future hold?
friday february 25, 2011
CAS Gallery
UM Faculty Panel, “Haiti: One Year After the Earthquake”
Wednesday— January 26, 2011 4:30 pm
CAS Gallery
Panel members will discuss the impact of the 2010 earthquake and the local, national, and international efforts launched to support Haiti in the past year, as well as what can be done to help in the future.
Spring 2010
Trans Global/Global Trans
Friday April 2, 2010
This symposium will bring together three interdisciplinary scholars who work on queer studies in different cultural contexts around the world, to speak about queer formations of gender. How is gender regulated, and what gender rebellions are being imagined, invented, and lived, in the US, the Maghreb, Spain, and Southern Africa today? How do transgender identities and queer sexualities intersect and diverge in these contexts? How might these emerging transformations speak to one another? How do the globalization of culture and the politics of postcoloniality affect these developments? By bringing scholars from several continents and diverse intellectual traditions together with UM scholars currently working within English, French, Latin American and North American Queer theoretical currents this symposium aims to open up global dialogues about and present challenges to hegemonic ways of studying gender and sexual identity.
Atlantic Narratives
Thursday – Friday, February 4-5, 2010
This symposium will examine the production of narratives in and about
the Atlantic world in the period up to the mid-nineteenth century.
Bringing together an interdisciplinary group of scholars who work on the Anglophone, Francophone, and Iberian Atlantic worlds, this symposium seeks to promote a discussion about the subjects, practices, and theories that inform the writing of Atlantic narratives. What narrative trajectories have constructed our understanding of the Atlantic world and what are the inadequacies of these movements and stories? Does the Atlantic world require new narrative forms? Does it distinctively modify existing ones? Who produced these narratives and specifically, to what extent are the indigenous peoples of the Americas and Africa participants in, and producers of, Atlantic routes and narratives? In the end we hope that this conversation will help to elucidate the powerful possibilities of Atlantic narratives—then and now.
Spring 2009
Milton Alive at 400: Samson Agonistes and
Religious Violence”
February 26-27, 2009
“Milton Alive at 400: Samson Agonistes and Religious Violence,” a two day symposium, was presented by Florida International University and the University of Miami on Thursday, February 26 and Friday, February 27, 2009. Renowned scholars from around the country joined noted faculty members from the two regional universities to hold panel discussions on the complex subject of religion, politics and violence. Joining in the worldwide quadricentennary celebration of Milton’s birth, they used his closet drama, Samson Agonistes, as a springboard for these discussions. The symposium was organized by Professors Jeffrey Shoulson, University of Miami and Andrew Strycharski, Florida International University.
