Center for the Humanities

December 2: Lea Jacobs

Towards a History of Taste: American Film in the 1920s

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.

February 3: Humanities in the 21st Century

A Panel Discussion

This panel brings together the nation's foremost experts in the humanities to discuss the direction of the Humanities in the 21st century. Moderated by UW-Madison Chancellor Carolyn 'Biddy' Martin, the panel will include comments from Jim Leach, Chair of the National Endowment for the Humanities; Don Randel, President of the Mellon Foundation; and Pauline Yu, President of the American Council of Learned Societies.

March 3: Bill Cronon

The Riddle of Sustainability: Pondering the Environmental Past to Imagine the Human Future

March 10: Catherine Malabou

Is Plasticity a New name for Freedom?

The most recent research in biology aims at putting into question the concept of genetic programming. Today, epigenetics tends to be more important than genetics itself. Three main discoveries explain this shift: the discovery of interfering RNA; the discovery of stem cells; and the discovery of neural plasticity. In this lecture, philosopher Catherine Malabou focuses on plasticity, which explains that our brain develops itself for the most part after birth and is modeled by experience, education, and learning. Malabou considers how the discovery of neural plasticity challenges philosophical and political conventions, in particular the belief that philosophy and technoscience are opposed. She explores what happens to a politics of emancipation and resistance when science no longer is the name of the enemy, and asks what is the future of philosophy in an era of plasticity and epigentics.