Distinguished Faculty Lectures
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.
- Bill Cronon
- Frederick Jackson Turner and Vilas Research Professor of History, Geography, and Environmental Studies
- The Riddle of Sustainability: Pondering the Environmental Past to Imagine the Human Future
- March 3, 2010 @ 5:30 pm
- Chazen Museum of Art, L160 (Elvehjem Building)
- This event is one of the Focus on the Humanities events.
- William Cronon studies American environmental history and the history of the American West. His research seeks to understand the history of human interactions with the natural world: how we depend on the ecosystems around us to sustain our material lives, how we modify the landscapes in which we live and work, and how our ideas of nature shape our relationships with the world around us.
- Frank Salomon
- John V. Murra Professor of Anthropology
- The Farther Shores of Literacy: New World Ethnography and the Question of What Writing Is
- April 7, 2010 @ 5:30 pm
- Chazen Museum of Art, L160 (Elvehjem Building)
- This event is one of the Focus on the Humanities events.
- Frank Salomon's current project is a detailed study of Rapaz, a community at 4000 meters over sea level, which guards some 263 khipus in a house of traditional ritual from which villagers serve the deified mountains. The project combines close study of these khipus with archaeological, ethnographic, and architectural study of their context. Khipu research bears on questions of "proto-writing," the origin and demise of scripts, and relations between semiosis (sign action) and social complexity.
- Lea Jacobs
- Professor of Film and Communication Arts
- Towards a History of Taste: American Film in the 1920s
- December 2, 2009 @ 5:30 pm
- Chazen Museum of Art, Room L140 (Elvehjem Building)
- This event is one of the Focus on the Humanities events.
The Hollywood cinema is often said to have altered in the decade following World War I. Historians frequently characterize the period in terms of the development of new feminine stereotypes—the flapper epitomized by the stars Clara Bow and Colleen Moore—and of a new sexual permissiveness both reflected within films and, perhaps, reinforced by them. Others have explained the new representations of sexuality seen in the films with reference to the emergence of a culture of consumption. But these by now standard interpretations of the period do not account for the nature or full extent of the cinema’s transformation. The lecture describes a decisive shift in taste that was manifested in critical discourse, in filmmaking technique and narrative. It will contrast what came to be identified as sophisticated taste, films deemed on the edge of what censors or more conservative viewers would tolerate, with naïve taste, films dismissed as cloying, overly melodramatic, or simply old fashioned.
Please join us for a "Humanities Happy Hour" before the lecture. The University Club will open a cash bar from 4:30-5:30 that afternoon.
- Lea Jacobs is Professor in the Department of Communication Arts at the University of Wisconsin-Madison where she teaches film history and criticism. She is the author of The Decline of Sentiment: American Film in the 1920s (University of California Press, 2008), The Wages of Sin: Censorship and the Fallen Woman Film (University of Wisconsin Press, 1991) and, with Ben Brewster, Theatre to Cinema (Oxford University Press, 1997).
- David O. Morgan
- Professor of History and Religious Studies
- Iran's Mongol Experience
- October 28, 2009 @ 5:30 pm
- Chazen Museum of Art, Room L140 (Elvehjem Building)
- This event is one of the Focus on the Humanities events.
Iran was invaded by the Mongol armies of Genghis Khan in 1219-23, and again by his grandson in the 1250s. The Mongol kingdom that was set up at that time lasted until the 1330s. The lecture will explore the nature of the Mongol impact on Iran. Was it wholly destructive, as traditionally believed, or are there positive elements that historians, without minimising the death and destruction that the Mongols brought with them, ought also to consider?
David Morgan is professor of History and Religious Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is the author of Medieval Persia 1040-1797, "History of the Near East" (Longman, 1988) and The Mongols, "Peoples of Europe" (Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1986).
Please join us for a “Humanities Happy Hour” before the lecture, The University Club will open a cash bar from 4pm-5.30 that afternoon.
