In collaboration with the Institute for Research in the Humanities, the Center presents the work of outstanding members of the UW-Madison humanities faculty to the broader Madison community.

Funded through the generous support of the Anonymous Fund and in partnership with the University of Wisconsin-Madison Institute for Research in the Humanities.

Upcoming Events

Past Events

• Twin Muses: Ethnography and Fiction
• Kirin Narayan
• Professor of Anthropology, UW-Madison
• Ethnography finds its identity in uneasy relationship to other practices of describing the world through writing. As ethnography emerged as a distinctive writing practice for anthropologists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, travel writing, missionary accounts, scientific monographs, and realist novels provided important counterpoints. Yet from as early as 1890, certain ethnographers have found some insights best expressed through fiction. Today, the practice of ethnography has spread across many disciplines, and the cultural perspectives gleaned through ethnography continue to occasionally spill into fiction. I explore the work of anthropologists who have openly moved between ethnography and fiction to address larger issues of scholarly representation, readability, and the use of suspense.
  
  Kirin Narayan is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Wisconsin--Madison. She is author of Storytellers, Saints and Scoundrels: Folk Narrative in Hindu Religious Teaching (which won the 1990 Victor Turner Prize for Ethnographic Writing and was Co-winner of the 1990 Elsie Clews Parsons Prize for Folklore); Mondays on the Dark Night of the Moon: Himalayan Foothill Folktales (in collaboration with Urmila Devi Sood); Love Stars and All That (a novel); and My Family and Other Saints (a memoir).
• April 30, 2008 @ 5:00 pm
• Wisconsin Historical Society Auditorium
• As part of Focus on the Humanities Lectures
• Back to Top

• Evil and Inexcusable Wrongs
• Claudia Card
• Emma Goldman Professor of Philosophy, UW-Madison
• Two background concerns guide my construction of the theory of
  evils that I call "the atrocity paradigm" or "the atrocity theory." One
  is to specify what distinguishes evils from less serious wrongs. The
  other is to avoid demonizing perpetrators. The atrocity theory attempts
  both by taking the focus off perpetrator culpability and putting it more
  on harms done to victims. Applying the theory to torture, terrorism, and
  genocide in my current project, I have been led to revisions that
  threaten to compromise those two background concerns. I am now defending
  (1) the theory that evils are reasonably foreseeable intolerable harms
  produced by not just culpable but inexcusable wrongdoing and (2) the
  view that evils need not be extraordinary. One challenge is to show that
  this theory does not demonize perpetrators. The other is to show that
  this view still distinguishes evils from less serious wrongs.
• January 30, 2008 @ 5:00 pm
• Wisconsin Historical Society Auditorium
• As part of Focus on the Humanities Lectures
• Back to Top

• Moments of Silence: The Unforgetting of the 1976 Massacre in Bangkok
• Thongchai Winichakul
• Professor of History, UW-Madison
• Thongchai Winichakul joined UW faculty in 1991 and is currently Professor of Southeast Asian history. His book, Siam Mapped: a history of the geo-body of a nation, was awarded the Harry Benda Prize by the Association for Asian Studies in 1995 and the Grand Prize for the Asia Pacific Book Award from the Asian Affairs Research Council, Japan, in 2004. He has received several awards including the Guggenheim and the SSRC Fellowship, and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2003. Born and educated in Bangkok before doing his graduate degrees in Sydney, Australia, Thongchai witnessed the 1976 massacre, which is the subject of his lecture, while he was a college student.
• November 28, 2007 @ 5:00 pm
• Wisconsin Historical Society Auditorium
• As part of Focus on the Humanities Lectures
• Back to Top

• Esperanto of the Eye: Democracy, Aesthetics, and Moving Pictures
• Russ Castronovo
• Jean Wall Bennet Professor of English and American Studies, UW-Madison
• This talk explores the failed promise of motion pictures as universal art. Heralded as the "Esperanto of the eye," film echoes turn-of-the-century movements to create an international language, an idea that anarchists and socialists as well as businessmen and diplomats found enticing. But the example of Chaplin and early academic studies of film spectatorship invites the following question: does the utopian prospect of international language and global understanding also echo the language of commodity culture?
  
  Russ Castronovo is Jean Wall Bennett Professor of English and American Studies. His research explores the relationship between literature and politics. His books include Fathering the Nation: American Genealogies of Slavery and Freedom (1995), Necro Citizenship: Death, Eroticism, and the Public Sphere in the Nineteenth-Century United States (2001), and Beautiful Democracy: Aesthetics and Anarchy in a Global Era (2007).
• September 26, 2007 @ 5:00 pm
• Wisconsin Historical Society Auditorium
• As part of Focus on the Humanities Lectures
• Back to Top