Madison Children's Museum, in collaboration with the University of Wisconsin-Madison Center for the Humanities, presents What Pete Ate, a collection of original artwork by Maria Kalman from her beloved children's book. Join us for an opening reception Friday, April 12 and join Maira for a reading of What Pete Ate for all ages at 10 a.m. The exhibition runs through August 2013 in the museum’s Community Concourse.

Free admission to art exhibition and artist reception.
Regular museum admission applies to main exhibit galleries.

For more information contact the Madison Children's Museum, 608.256.6445.

Arundhati Roy is a novelist and political activist from India most famous for her first book The God of Small Things which won the prestigious Booker Prize in 1997. Since then, Roy has focused her efforts on political activism becoming a leading voice in movements against globalization, neoliberal policies, and the use of nuclear weapons. Roy will read selections from her new work and answer questions about writing, reading, living, and advocating for change. A book signing will follow the discussion, with select works available for purchase.

This event is cosponsored by the Center for the Humanities and the UW Madison Distinguished Lecture Series.

More information at the Distinguished Lecture Series' website.

A look at collaborations between the Humanities Research Bridge and the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery. Carrie Roy will present on several projects dealing with common basic challenges in working with complex data from the humanities to the sciences. Current tools and prototypes for data analysis and visualization will be featured. David Krakauer will also introduce open source software available for using computational techniques to approach humanities data.

Carrie Roy studied Visual and Environmental Studies at the undergraduate level at Harvard and received advanced degrees in the humanities at UW Madison. She now works as a post doctoral researcher and coordinator for a digital humanities initiative at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, the Humanities Research Bridge. The focus of her dissertation work explored the consistent manifestation of one concept, binding (in the sense of fixing, fastening, etc.), across Norse art, material culture/technology, mythology, narrative and social/legal terminology. Her recent art work explores transformations of data into objects, while her digital humanities research explores the opposite––turning complex works of human expression into numbers to enable new forms of analysis and comparison.

Registration requested, but not required. Register here.

This event is part of the Humanites Hackathon Series. Investigating computational techniques from the sciences with humanities scholars, the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery and the Center for the Humanities seek to uncover unexpected connections and intriguing patterns in music, visual art, literature and historical works. The Humanities Hackathon bridges the gap between seemingly unrelated disciplines and enriches discussions about transdisciplinary work.

Meetings consist of roughly one hour of presentations and discussion, followed by an hour of lab time, where participants can share projects, trade ideas, run programs, and receive support for software and techniques.

Learn more here.

Anne Pasternak will give the keynote lecture for the 6th Annual Conference on the Public Humanities, Making Public. This year, the conference will be focusing on the relationship between the Arts, Performance, and the Humanities. Panels will address the public orientation, political possibility, and contemporary context in which these disciplines find and redefine themselves.

Anne Pasternak joined Creative Time in the fall of 1994 as the Executive Director. Since that time, the organization, which began commissioning innovative public work in New York City in 1974, has collaborated with hundreds of artists to ignite the public’s imagination, explore ideas that shape society, and bring groundbreaking public art to millions of people around the world. Thanks to Pasternak’s vision, Creative Time recently began presenting national and global projects and initiatives, making it the only public arts organization with programs that have reached from New York to New Orleans, Haiti to Hanoi, and Dubai to Denver.

In addition to her work at Creative Time, Pasternak curates independent exhibitions, consults on urban planning initiatives, and contributes essays to cultural publications. She lectures extensively throughout the United States and Europe, and has served as a guest critic at Yale University.

UW-Madison's Center for the Humanities annual Public Humanities Conference demonstrates that the humanities have never been strictly confined to classrooms. The conference gathers scholars, community partners, and students at and around UW-Madison for a day that is dedicated to discussing the importance of literary, visual, and cultural engagement to the practice of public life. Drawing on the principles of the Wisconsin Idea, this conference seeks to promote public engagement as integral to higher education. Each year, we feature a keynote speaker who provides new ways to reconfigure the boundaries of the university and the public. The full agenda for the 2013 Conference, with keynote Anne Pasternak, is available here.

Edwidge Danticat was born in Haiti in 1969 and came to the United States when she was twelve years old. She made an auspicious debut with her first novel, Breath, Eyes, Memory, and followed it with the story collection Krik? Krak!, whose National Book Award nomination made Danticat the youngest nominee ever. She is the author of two novels, two collections of stories, two books for young adults, and two nonfiction books, one of which, Brother, I'm Dying, was a finalist for the National Book Award and winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for autobiography. In 2009, she received a MacArthur Fellowship.

Parking and directions for the Overture Center for the Arts.

Friedrich Nietzsche seems an unlikely contender for philosophical prominence in the United States. After all, much of his thought directly counters some of the foundations of modern American life: Christian morality, the Enlightenment faith in reason, and the idea of human equality. And yet, his ideas have had a tremendous impact on American intellectuals, from the time they burst on American shores at the turn of the 20th century to the present. University of Wisconsin historian Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen charts this unlikely love affair, shedding new light on both Nietzsche and the American tradition he inspired.

This program is presented in partnership between the Center for the Humanities and the Institute for Research in the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the 2012 Chicago Humanities Festival.

The Civil War did not begin as a war of emancipation. But as it unfolded, African Americans transformed it through two great social movements--the Northern abolition movement, and the collective actions of the slaves themselves. Historians Stephen Kantrowitz and David Cecelski explore the achievements of these movements through the lives of the black activists who shaped them.

In honor of the 150th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, Kantrowitz (History, UW-Madison) will discuss his new book, More than Freedom: Fighting for Black Citizenship in a White Republic, 1829-1889 with Cecelski, an independent historian and author of The Fire of Freedom: Abraham Galloway and the Slaves' Civil War.

This talk is part of the Emancipations Lab series.

Parking and directions for the Overture Center for the Arts.

This meeting of the Sawyer Seminar on Biopolitics aims to set up an interdisciplinary conversation about the relationship between ecopolitics and biopolitics. Should we situate ecological thought and environmentalism within or against biopolitics? Are theories of biopolitics useful for analyzing the state management of nature? Does environmentalism participate in what Foucault called the state imperative to "make live," or does ecopolitics instead offer an alternative to biopolitics as mode of decision-making or as a theoretical approach?

More information about the seminar, including a list of visiting participants and the themes of the six seminars from the 2011-2012 academic year can be found here.

Visiting participants are Timothy Morton (English, Rice), Kim Fortun (Science and Technology Studies, Renssalaer), Becky Mansfield (Geography, Ohio State), Juliana Spahr (English, Mills), and Joshua Clover (English, UC-Davis). Two respondents from UW-Madison, Gregg Mitman (History of Science, Medical History, and Environmental Studies) and Sara Guyer (English and Center for the Humanities) will launch the afternoon discussion.

The five visiting participants each pre-circulate a brief selection of work-in-progress (about ten pages) related to the theme. On the day of the seminar meeting, each participant will discuss their work for about twenty minutes, framing their paper for an interdisciplinary conversation. The group - participants, seminar conveners, fellows, and attendees - will discuss the individual papers as well as the issues raised across and among them. Over lunch, the two respondents will share their responses to all the papers and launch a more general discussion.

This event is open to UW-Madison academic staff, faculty, fellows, and graduate students, and requires an RSVP. Please send an email to massino@wisc.edu to RSVP and to get access to the readings.

The precise schedule of the day can be found here.

Lauren Redniss is the author of Century Girl: 100 years in the Life of Doris Eaton Travis, Last Living Star of the Ziegfeld Follies and Radioactive: Marie & Pierre Curie, A Tale of Love and Fallout, a finalist for the 2011 National Book Award. Her writing and drawing has appeared in numerous publications including The New York Times, which nominated her work for the Pulitzer Prize. She was a fellow at the Cullman Center for Scholars & Writers at the New York Public Library in 2008-2009 and became a New York Institute for the Humanities fellow in 2010. She is the recipient of a 2012 Guggenheim Fellowship and is currently Artist-in-Residence at the American Museum of Natural History. She teaches at Parsons the New School for Design in New York City.

Radioactive is the 2012-2013 selection for UW-Madison's Go Big Read program.

Parking, directions, and accessibility information for Union South.

UW-Madison’s Center for the Humanities and Art Department are collaborating to host our first live streaming of the Creative Time day-long conference, which is devoted to the topics of art and performance as critical forms of engagement with increasing socio-economic inequality and as transformative political response to that problem. Along with a stellar cast of presenters assembled by Creative Time, Madison-based artist Dan Wang, UW-Madison Theatre and Drama Prof. Michael Peterson, and UW-Madison Art Department Prof. Laurie Beth Clark  will lead an afternoon discussion and performance, inviting attendees to engage more directly with the topics and questions that arise during the Summit. This afternoon event will take place at 11:55 AM.

In addition to streaming the Summit for viewers to watch, Spatula&Barcode (the collaborative team of Laurie Beth Clark and Michael Peterson) are collaborating with us to directly engage the audience through an interactive performance event as well. During some of the sessions, they will invite attendees to document their own reactions and responses to the session live as it is taking place by making drawings/mappings or through live blogging/discussion on an online forum. (Drawing materials will be provided on-site.  If you're interested in being part of the online forum, please bring a laptop.)

Every year at the Creative Time Summit, the most innovative artists, activists, critics, writers, and curators come together in New York to engage with one another, and a global audience, about how they are attempting to change our world in unprecedented ways. Participants range from art world luminaries and rural community organizers to international activists—from Swiss artist Thomas Hirschhorn and hip-hop DJs-turned-prison reform advocates in Appalachia to the notorious custodians of women’s reproductive rights, Women on Waves.

Called “visionary” by the New York Times, the Creative Time Summit is the only conference of its kind, devoted to exploring the intersection of art-making and social justice. It is a forum for the expanding global network of people who believe in the power of artists to make real social change. Since its inception in 2009, the Summit has engaged 4,000 live audience members and a remote Livestream audience of over 30,000.

More information about the Summit, speakers, and the schedule can be located here. If you have questions about attending and participating, please contact Lenora Hanson at: hex@humanities.wisc.edu.

Dan S Wang is a writer, organizer, and artist who lives in Madison, Wisconsin. His texts about art and politics have appeared in many places, including in catalogs for the Smart Museum of Art, the Milwaukee Art Museum, Documenta 12, and in books such as 3 Years: Arrow Factory, Space (Re)Solutions, and The Essential New Art Examiner. His print media art work circulates as gifts, functional design, mail art, grassroots agitators, and gallery installations. Dan occasionally teaches in the A&D Department at Columbia College and was a co-founder of Mess Hall, an experimental cultural space in Chicago. You can find Dan’s blog here.

Michael Peterson is Assistant Professor of Theatre and Drama. His research and creative interests center on the politics of performance, particularly in the interplay between experimental theatre/performance art and popular performance. He is the author of the book Straight White Male Performance Art Monologues, a study of identity privilege in performance, and is currently writing about new performance in the "New Las Vegas." He completed his PhD at Wisconsin in 1993 and taught for five years at Millikin University in Illinois. A life-long practitioner, he earned a BFA in acting from Ohio University and has directed plays by Aphra Behn, Caryl Churchill, Christopher Durang, William Shakespeare and Naomi Wallace, as well as numerous collaborative original performance events.

Laurie Beth Clark is Professor in the Art Department where she teaches studio courses as well as graduate seminars on topics in Visual Culture Studies. Her creative projects have been shown in theatres, galleries, museums, gardens, forests, and public and private spaces in more than 150 shows in 35 countries on five continents. Extensive documentation of her creative work can be found at lbclark.net. Her writing has been published in journals (Performance Paradigm, Performance Research, TDR, Theatre Topics, Tourism and Transnational Studies, Visual Culture) and anthologies (Marketing Memory in Latin America-Duke, The Object Reader-Routledge, Blaze: Discourse on Art-Cambridge, A Performance Cosmology-Routledge, Place and Performance-Palgrave, Macmillan, The Art of Truthtelling After Authoritarian Rule-University of Wisconsin, Guerilla Performance and Multimedia- Continuum). She is currently working on the book manuscript Always Already Again: Trauma Tourism and the Politics of Memory Culture.

Eli Clare is author of the award-winning Exile and Pride: Disability, Queerness, and Liberation. He will be at UW as a Brittingham Visiting Scholar for the week of Oct. 8-12.

This event is sponsored in part by the Center for the Humanties' Accessing the Intersections: Disability, Race, + Gender Mellon workshop. For more details on this and other events featuring Eli Clare this week, please visit the workshop's event page.

Join psychoanalyst Adam Phillips and mathematician Jordan Ellenberg for a discussion about the challenges and pleasures of writing about complex concepts--whether the impassivity of poetics, the perplexities of individual motivation and behavior, or the complexities of pure mathematics. Both thinkers write extensively in the public press about such topics and more, offering unique insight on communicating to--and charming--audiences beyond academia.

Adam Phillips has written many well-known books, including On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored, On Balance, and most recently, Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life. He writes and interviews widely in publications such as The New York Times and The London Review of Books.

Jordan Ellenberg, beyond being a professor of Mathematics at UW-Madison, has written a novel, The Grasshopper King, and regularly contributes articles on mathematical topics to Slate, Wired, The Washington Post, and others. His forthcoming book with Penguin Press is titled How Not to Be Wrong.

Parking and directions for the UW Hillel Foundation building.

This Center for the Humanities event is part of the 2012 Wisconsin Science Festival.