The Center's flagship public lecture series brings to Madison world-renowned scholars whose work represents the best of the humanities and of scholarship that crosses traditional disciplinary boundaries.
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Previously
Imagining Color in Proust and Murasaki
Elaine Scarry
Professor of English and American Literature and Language, Walter M. Cabot Professor of Aesthetics and the General Theory of Value at Harvard University
The act of imagining-making a mental picture when no actual sensory content is present- is a key part of our human lives. But how exactly are such mental pictures made? How, for example, is color made in the mind? Two great colorists, Proust and Lady Murasaki, (as well as recent work in neuroscience and philosophy) will provide a starting point for solving this mystery.
Lawrence A. Kimpton Distinguished Service Professor of History, South Asian Languages and Civilizations and the College, University of Chicago
This lecture will serve as the keynote address for the Border and Transcultural Studies Research Circle Conference: Empire and Knowledge, Feb. 29-March 1 2008
Freedom's Journal's "Love Ditties" and Other Writings of Courtship and Marriage in Early African America
Frances Smith Foster
Charles Howard Candler Professor of English & Women's Studies and Associated Faculty in African American Studies and in American Studies, Emory University
Would it surprise you to learn that "Dear Abby" has an African American ancestor; that Freedom's Journal was the earliest African American newspaper but it was not an abolitionist newspaper; or that love, marriage and sexual morality were regular topics in the Antebellum Afro-Protestant Press? Foster will discuss these themes.
Among Frances Foster's most recent publications are Love and Marriage in Early African America; Race, Region and the Politics of Slavery's Memory; African Americans, Literature, and the Nineteenth Century Afro-Protestant Press; Written By Herself; and Literary Production by African American Women, 1746-1892. She has co-edited Norton Critical Edition of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (with Nellie Y. McKay), Norton Anthology of African American Literature (with Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Nellie Y. McKay, et al), and Oxford Companion to African American Literature (with William L. Andrews and Trudier Harris).
Why did this civilization crumble? How different would Europe and South America have been if al-Andalus had remained a world of three cultures. An exploration of this counter-factual might be of some use in today's world.
Four novels of Tariq Ali's planned "Islam Quintet" have already been published by Verso. Clash of Fundamentalisms: Crusades, Jihads and Modernity, his response to 9/11, has been translated into fifteen languages.
Tariq Ali's talk is also part of the Center's "Legacies of Al Andalus: Islam, Judaism, & the West" festival.
God of War: American Power in a World of ReligionMichael Sells
Michael Sells
John Henry Barrows Professor of the History and Religion of Islam, University of Chicago
The end of the Cold War saw a revival of religious militancy across the world. American power, within and without the fault lines of its global presence, has become a front in the competition among militant versions of religion. This talk examines the development of such conflict-identities in the Abrahamic religions in particular, and the danger that militants are helping make their prophecies self-fulfilling.
Michael Sells is author of eight books on the topics of the Qur'an; Islamic mysticism; Arabic poetry; medieval mystical movement in Judaism; Christianity and Islam; religion and genocide in Bosnia; and Religious versions of civilizational clash and cosmic war.
Michael Sells talk is also part of the Center's "Legacies of Al Andalus: Islam, Judaism, & the West" festival.
William Lampson Professor of English & American Studies, Yale University
Using Islam as the connecting fabric, this talk proposes an alternative context for American and British literature, casting Carlyle, Emerson, and Irving in a new light, and linking religion to general conditions of belief as well as questions of historical casualties.
Wai Chee Dimock experiments with close readings across different widths of space, and across a range of time-scales. Her new book, Through Other Continents, invokes the duration and extension of the planet to anchor American literature, reading it as part of the world’s fabric, an effect of “deep time.” This is also the orientation of a co-edited volume, Shades of the Planet: American Literature as World Literature. She is at work now on a textbook, Transnational American Literature, and a book on genre, A Map of Kin and Kind: Epic, Lyric, Novel.
