Borghesi-Mellon Workshops

Since 2000, the Center’s Workshops in the Humanities have provided an opportunity for students and faculty to work together outside of the classroom, in working groups centered on an interdisciplinary topic, broadly conceived, drawn from any period, field, or method of research in the humanities.

One of the Center’s most exciting programs, the Workshops have led to conferences, books, teaching innovations, and the creation of long-term research centers and projects. Recent and current workshops have focused on Comics, Disability Studies and Activism, Food Studies, Digital Humanities, and Critical University Studies.

From 2000 to 2015, the A. W. Mellon Foundation generously funded over 50 distinct “Mellon Workshops” through multiyear grants. In 2014, the Mellon Foundation matched an endowment gift from UW-Madison alumni Nancy Borghesi (B.A.’69, Economics, and a member of the College of Letters & Science Board of Visitors) and David Borghesi (BBA’70, Accounting), acknowledging the leadership and dedication of the Center for Humanities Director, Professor Sara Guyer. Beginning in 2015 this longstanding program was renamed the Borghesi-Mellon Workshops in the Humanities.

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Featured Workshops

Abolition and Refuge: Toward Campus-Community Conversations

This workshop bridges movements against slavery and for reparations, neo-abolition movements against prisons and policing with global Black, Asian, Indigenous, and Latinx struggles for mobility and for staying in place, aiming to document and foster abolitionist theory and practice in the realm of asylum and migration policy. Learn more.

Archives of the Americas

Around the globe, people have long struggled to shape archives, determining where they start and end, what testimonies or information will be stored, how institutions will preserve and curate materials, and how academia should engage with them. This workshop’s main goals are to examine the history and current transformations of archival work, with a focus on the Americas; to produce a vocabulary for talking about archival practices; and to create new collaborations, especially among students and specialists from different disciplines and of different geographic and linguistic regions.

Psychedelic Pasts, Presents, and Futures

The Psychedelic Pasts, Presents, and Futures workshop aims to foster conversations about psychedelics in society from outside of psychedelic clinical science and drug development as a means to generate a deeper understanding of what “psychedelic studies” might look like in the years ahead. We will investigate unresolved tensions around the contexts, consumption, commerce, and control of psychedelic and psychoactive substances in the past, present, and future. Learn more.

Hegel, Social Theory and the Problem of Recognition

This workshop introduces students and faculty to the complexities of both Hegel’s philosophy and the problem of recognition, to provide a conceptual framework that goes beyond disciplinary boundaries to discuss problems of identity, difference and social domination, to de-colonize and creolize Hegelian philosophy, so that it moves beyond enclaves in Philosophy Departments and becomes a window to problems of the humanities and social sciences in general.

Past Workshops

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2022-2023 Workshops

14.7: Inquiry Into Earth Atmospheres

Organizers: Monique Allewaert (Literary Studies), Ángel F. Adames-Corraliza (Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences), Emery Jenson (Literary Studies), Jen Rose Smith (Geography)

“Although the Atmosphere in which we live weighs on everyone with a 20,000 lb. force, do you feel it?” – Karl Marx

The standard, or near average, atmospheric pressure at sea level on the earth is 1013.25 millibars, or about 14.7 pounds per square inch.

Our workshop provides a forum for scientists, social scientists, and humanists to develop new methods, terms, and analytical frames for inquiry into Earth’s atmosphere(s).

Focusing on atmosphere brings attention to what Juliana Spahr calls “this connection of everyone with lungs,” what Christina Sharpe synthesizes as “the weather,” and what Malcom Ferdinand describes as the “colonial hurricane.” Yet, attending to atmosphere also draws things out of focus; categories such as event, history, and materiality seem to flicker and shift, like clouds on the wind. Atmosphere would seem to be an almost paradigmatic subject of Anthropocene scholarship which simultaneously resists paradigms of disciplinary understanding.

As a collective, we hope to deepen our investigation of Earth atmospheres to shed light on problems that no one of our disciplines can engage alone. We will investigate the still little-known practices by which corporate energy giants like Enron use climate data to commodify atmosphere and weather patterns. We will bring together insights of postcolonial and area studies with those of meteorology. We will engage meteorological research showing that basic atmospheric mechanisms like heating and cooling occur via different dynamics in the tropics and the poles. We will explore multiple intersecting planetary atmospheres that challenge what Kristen Simmons has called “settler atmospherics,” a monologic account of atmosphere manifest as monoculturalism.

Abolition and Refuge: Toward Campus-Community Conversations

Organizers: Cindy I-Fen Cheng (Asian American Studies And History), Kristina Huang (English), Jenna M. Loyd (Geography)

“Abolition and Refuge: Toward Campus-Community Conversations” bridges movements against slavery and for reparations, neo-abolition movements against prisons and policing with global Black, Asian, Indigenous, and Latinx struggles for mobility and for staying in place. Our framing of abolition across borders examines strategies of dismantling carcerality while raising questions of repair and transformative justice in the wake of imperial crimes, past and present.

Our collaboration aims to document and foster abolitionist theory and practice in the realm of asylum and migration policy. Specifically, we ask: What is the relationship between abolition and refuge? What abolitionist visions and strategies have been created through efforts to end detention and deportation? What reparative and other forms of justice are being forged by people who have been deported and are leading transnational campaigns for return? To answer these questions, our workshop will bring together scholars from across campus for reading and discussion. Further, we will plan events with community partners to discuss these same questions in the realm of making change.

“Freedom of Movement for All” by artist Andrea Marcos, courtesy of Marcos and Justseeds, an activist toolbox, a place to find images that speak to, and are created out of, a broad spectrum of social movements. Note that each artist maintains the copyright and manages the permissions to their work, and all images—unless otherwise stated—are protected under the Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs CC BY-NC-ND Creative Commons License (you can see exactly what that is by clicking here.)

From the artist: Cranes can sometimes be seen by the thousands on an autumn day as they migrate in paths travelled by many before them, and many to come. This print celebrates and reaches towards a world with freedom of movement for all. @drea.marcos

Hegel, Social Theory and the Problem of Recognition

Organizers: Viren Murthy (History), Jonathan Hackett (History), David M. Smith (German, Nordic and Slavic+)

This workshop introduces students and faculty to the complexities of both Hegel’s philosophy and the problem of recognition, to provide a conceptual framework that goes beyond disciplinary boundaries to discuss problems of identity, difference and social domination, to de-colonize and creolize Hegelian philosophy, so that it moves beyond enclaves in Philosophy Departments and becomes a window to problems of the humanities and social sciences in general. An examination of the various uses of the politics of recognition will open us to more fundamental questions around the critique of Eurocentrism and essentialism, which are often invoked today but without interrogating the various meanings of “essence” and “essentialism.”

“Protest” and the University

Organizers: Simon Balto (History), Brittney Edmonds (African-American Studies), Laila Amine (English), Brenda Gayle Plummer (History, African-American Studies), Lisa Washington (UW Law School), Isaac Lee (History), Taylor Bailey (African-American Studies, English), Ayanna Drakos (History)

The concept of protest animates and anchors an increasing share of scholarly output and institutional activity across the University. Faculty, staff, and students mobilize on behalf of climate divestment campaigns; they stage protests, sit-ins, and rallies to raise awareness about the inconsistent application of Title IX in sexual assault cases; they, especially in the wake of the worldwide protests catalyzed by the murder of George Floyd, identify the university as a key agent in the reproduction of racialized inequity; and they continue to issue general calls to redistribute the university’s vast resources. These varied developments coincide with broader institutional and cultural challenges to the historical character and role of humanities teaching and scholarship. As higher education austerity continues unabated and student enrollments drop in traditional humanities departments like History and English, many university stakeholders—researchers, teachers, administrators, and staff—have reimagined humanistic scholarship as a crucial site of agitation and critique in our polarized, unequal, networked, and quickly transforming society.

In this Borghesi-Mellon workshop, we aim to interrogate these broad cultural and institutional shifts. We begin with a simple question—what is “protest” in the twenty-first century?—in order investigate the twinned developments of institutional austerity and the revisioning of the humanities. We aim to critique how protest has been subsumed by neoliberal cultural logics within and without the University while highlighting practices that might cultivate more equitable scholarship, more just institutional logics, greater intellectual fellowship, and ultimately, a better world.

Psychedelic Pasts, Presents, and Futures

Organizers: Liz Birkhauser (Pharmaceutical Sciences), Gabriel Carter (English), Amanda Rose Pratt (English), Lucas Richert (School of Pharmacy)

The Psychedelic Pasts, Presents, and Futures workshop aims to foster conversations about psychedelics in society from outside of psychedelic clinical science and drug development as a means to generate a deeper understanding of what “psychedelic studies” might look like in the years ahead. We will offer a virtual and face-to-face program of events to investigate unresolved tensions around the contexts, consumption, commerce, and control of psychedelic and psychoactive substances in the past, present, and future. Through a series of lectures, workshops, roundtables, public engagement activities, and opportunities for graduate student professionalization, this Borghesi-Mellon workshop will foster inquiry around the following questions: Is it possible to reconcile psychedelics as medicines, sacraments, and dangerous drugs? Who do the compounds and plants benefit? Who has access? How are they being commodified? And what are the political and societal stakes of consciousness-shifting? This project contextualizes sociocultural and biomedical developments in psychedelic science and medicine and aims to bridge gaps between the humanities and the health sciences. Integrating the humanities into this dialogue will enhance understanding of the ethical landscape of drug development, medication outcomes, and clinical science, as well as foster dialogue about psychedelics in pharmacy, scientific, and medical settings. Recordings of workshops are available here.

Migrant Media and Artivism

Organizers: Paola Hernández (Spanish And Portuguese), Darshana Mini (Communication Arts), Sara Mckinnon (Communication Arts), Isabel Martin-Sanchez (Spanish And Portuguese), Paola Martell (Latin American, Caribbean And Iberian Studies)

Migrant communities have historically played an important role in consolidating identitarian movements and struggles for civil and political rights, yet in recent years there has been a global resurgence of right-wing movements and ideology targeting immigrant communities as parasitic outsiders. This has generated new forms of border control and regulation, raising questions about space and belongingness that merge with historical traces of coercion and violence. Examining the perspectives and experiences of different migrant subjects, including voluntary migrants, refugees and asylum-seekers, this workshop examines the connections between what Arjun Appadurai (1996) calls “mediascapes” and “ethnoscapes.” We interrogate the aesthetic, contextual and material manifestation of global flows of people, commodities and media artifacts to open new possibilities for theorizing social justice, diversity and inclusive paradigms.

2021-2022 Workshops

Alien Earth: Introduction to Planetary Humanities

Coordinators: Frédéric Neyrat (English), Keith Woodward (Geography), Doron Darnov (English), Aida Arosoaie (Anthropology)

The dawn of the Anthropocene, marked by the disastrous consequences of capitalism’s imagined “mastery” over planet Earth, has coincided with a spiked interest in humanity’s extraterrestrial futures. Yet, from President Trump’s ‘Space Force’ to privatized space colonization schemes, such as Elon Musk’s and Jeff Bezos’, and to the radical emancipatory horizons of Afrofuturism, there is a critical theoretical gap related to contemporary analyses of Anthropocene manifestations and their futures — namely, the gap of outer space itself. Aiming to address this theoretical shortcoming, this workshop critically assesses the hypothesis that our contemporary sense of environmental planetarity paradoxically depends on the vantage point of the inter-planetary. To what extent do the spacefaring fantasies of the Anthropocene emerge out of perspectives that attempt to justify or even accelerate terrestrial environmental decay? What happens when we begin to imagine that there are several Gaias in the universe? If humans begin to settle other worlds or planets, would we simply attempt to reproduce the same economic, political, national, and technological structures that mimic life on Earth? What kind of meaning emerges if we theorize Earth as a mediating ground between local experiences of human life and boundless experiences of planetary entities that gesture toward the infinite otherness of cosmic space?

Our workshop’s primary objective is to open the path for ‘planetary humanities’, a transdisciplinary field of knowledge considering planet Earth as a human, cultural, environmental reality embedded in a dark and deep interplanetary system. In line with this, we will put scholars, students and space aficionados at UW-M and beyond in conversation through the following avenues:

(1) A reading group that meets regularly to discuss academic texts and make sense of existent and developing notions of planetarity; (2) A series of guest lectures and panel discussions, titled Mapping Planetary Humanities, where invited speakers will address imperative questions and contribute critical insights related to environmental planetarity and Anthropo-genic/-centric space futures; (3) An edited volume featuring a collection of chapters from our guest speakers as well as invited collaborators, and a journal, tentatively titled Depth of Field: The Journal of Planetary Humanities, whose key purpose is to consolidate, synthesize and advance knowledge within the field of planetary humanities; (4) An online platform serving as repository for a Planetary Humanities virtual library and a multi-media digital archive.

Abolition and Refuge: Toward Campus-Community Conversations

Cindy I-Fen Cheng (Asian American Studies And History), Kristina Huang (English), Jenna M. Loyd (Geography)

“Abolition and Refuge: Toward Campus-Community Conversations” bridges movements against slavery and for reparations, neo-abolition movements against prisons and policing with global Black, Asian, Indigenous, and Latinx struggles for mobility and for staying in place. Our framing of abolition across borders examines strategies of dismantling carcerality while raising questions of repair and transformative justice in the wake of imperial crimes, past and present.

Our collaboration aims to document and foster abolitionist theory and practice in the realm of asylum and migration policy. Specifically, we ask: What is the relationship between abolition and refuge? What abolitionist visions and strategies have been created through efforts to end detention and deportation? What reparative and other forms of justice are being forged by people who have been deported and are leading transnational campaigns for return? To answer these questions, our workshop will bring together scholars from across campus for reading and discussion. Further, we will plan events with community partners to discuss these same questions in the realm of making change.

“Freedom of Movement for All” by artist Andrea Marcos, courtesy of Marcos and Justseeds, an activist toolbox, a place to find images that speak to, and are created out of, a broad spectrum of social movements. Note that each artist maintains the copyright and manages the permissions to their work, and all images—unless otherwise stated—are protected under the Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs CC BY-NC-ND Creative Commons License (you can see exactly what that is by clicking here.)

From the artist: Cranes can sometimes be seen by the thousands on an autumn day as they migrate in paths travelled by many before them, and many to come. This print celebrates and reaches towards a world with freedom of movement for all. @drea.marcos

Black Feminisms Now

Brittney Edmonds (Afro-American Studies), Keisha Lindsay (Gender And Women’s Studies, Political Science), Cherene Sherrard-Johnson (English), Ruby Bafu (Sociology), Erika Bullock (Curriculum And Instruction), Kelly Marie Ward (Gender And Women’s Studies), Brenda Gayle Plummer (History, Afro-American Studies), Tarsha Herelle (Educational Policy Studies)

This Borghesi-Mellon workshop seeks to address institutional lacunae at UW-Madison as they relate to the intellectual training and professional development of black women scholars. We are a collective of black women—faculty and graduate students—who meet regularly to discuss the intellectual concerns of black women, as well as scholarship on, by, and about black women. Our workshop promotes professional development, mentorship development, and intellectual exchange and disciplinary skill-sharing.

Some of the questions we collectively consider are: how can black feminisms help us navigate, transform, and reimagine the university? How can black feminists harness the resources of the university to promote the study and incorporation of underrepresented populations in disciplinary curricula? How do black feminisms help us transform our respective disciplinary approaches and methods to be more attentive to the histories and intellectual concerns of understudied, dismissed, or degraded populations?

Our workshop hosts fora, external speakers, and critically engages with black women’s scholarship in open discussion. Prior to COVID-19, we planned to begin an archival project, “The Black Feminist History Project at UW-Madison” to celebrate the contributions of everyday black women to UW-Madison’s long institutional history. This project is currently on hiatus but will resume when conditions permit.

Greener Pastures: Remembering the Past and Reimagining the Future of America’s Dairyland

Anna Andrzejewski (Art History), Eric Booth (Civil And Environmental Engineering And Agronomy), Caroline Gottschalk Druschke (English), Randy Jackson (Agronomy), Laura Grotjan (Art History)

This workshop considers how perspectives from the humanities can help farmers and agricultural landowners in the Upper Mississippi River Basin envision change, while also preserving regional identity and culture associated with livestock agriculture. The consolidation of dairy farming and processing, coupled with a decline in prices, led to record state foreclosures in 2019; 53% of Wisconsin farms have folded in the last 15 years. Meanwhile, intensive annual cropping has hastened soil erosion and worsened water quality, creating a suite of negative environmental realities that are coming under increasing scrutiny (e.g. nitrate in drinking water, the “Dead Zone” in the Gulf of Mexico, and increased flood risk throughout the Mississippi River Basin). Despite these and many more changes and challenges, the livestock industry remains at the core of our region’s history, identity, and culture.

This workshop brings together students, staff, and faculty from across the humanities, biophysical sciences, and social sciences as part of an effort to radically re-consider the future of livestock agriculture in this region, while preserving aspects of the region’s identity as “America’s Dairyland.” Specifically, this workshop will collaborate with Grassland 2.0, a U.S. Department of Agriculture-funded project based at UW-Madison that focuses on the social, economic, and ecological impediments to converting the region’s agriculture from predominantly row crop (corn, soy) to perennial grassland by 2050. By considering how we might bring together scientific data with narrative, collaborative, creative approaches from the humanities, this workshop will support Grassland 2.0 to meet one of its foundational goals: to “inspire and empower change” in livestock agriculture. Our goal is to put scientists in conversation with humanities experts to give voice to farmers’ stories about the past, present, and possible futures of their livelihood.

To express interest in joining the workshop or receive readings email greenerpasturesbmw@gmail.com.

Migrant Media and Artivism

Paola Hernández (Spanish And Portuguese), Darshana Mini (Communication Arts), Sara Mckinnon (Communication Arts), Isabel Martin-Sanchez (Spanish And Portuguese), Paola Martell (Latin American, Caribbean And Iberian Studies)

Migrant communities have historically played an important role in consolidating identitarian movements and struggles for civil and political rights, yet in recent years there has been a global resurgence of right-wing movements and ideology targeting immigrant communities as parasitic outsiders. This has generated new forms of border control and regulation, raising questions about space and belongingness that merge with historical traces of coercion and violence. Examining the perspectives and experiences of different migrant subjects, including voluntary migrants, refugees and asylum-seekers, this workshop examines the connections between what Arjun Appadurai (1996) calls “mediascapes” and “ethnoscapes.” We interrogate the aesthetic, contextual and material manifestation of global flows of people, commodities and media artifacts to open new possibilities for theorizing social justice, diversity and inclusive paradigms.

2020-2021 Workshops

Alien Earth: Introduction to Planetary Humanities

Coordinators: Frédéric Neyrat (English), Keith Woodward (Geography), Doron Darnov (English), Aida Arosoaie (Anthropology)

The dawn of the Anthropocene, marked by the disastrous consequences of capitalism’s imagined “mastery” over planet Earth, has coincided with a spiked interest in humanity’s extraterrestrial futures. Yet, from President Trump’s ‘Space Force’ to privatized space colonization schemes, such as Elon Musk’s and Jeff Bezos’, and to the radical emancipatory horizons of Afrofuturism, there is a critical theoretical gap related to contemporary analyses of Anthropocene manifestations and their futures — namely, the gap of outer space itself. Aiming to address this theoretical shortcoming, this workshop critically assesses the hypothesis that our contemporary sense of environmental planetarity paradoxically depends on the vantage point of the inter-planetary. To what extent do the spacefaring fantasies of the Anthropocene emerge out of perspectives that attempt to justify or even accelerate terrestrial environmental decay? What happens when we begin to imagine that there are several Gaias in the universe? If humans begin to settle other worlds or planets, would we simply attempt to reproduce the same economic, political, national, and technological structures that mimic life on Earth? What kind of meaning emerges if we theorize Earth as a mediating ground between local experiences of human life and boundless experiences of planetary entities that gesture toward the infinite otherness of cosmic space?

Our workshop’s primary objective is to open the path for ‘planetary humanities’, a transdisciplinary field of knowledge considering planet Earth as a human, cultural, environmental reality embedded in a dark and deep interplanetary system. In line with this, we will put scholars, students and space aficionados at UW-M and beyond in conversation through the following avenues:

(1) A reading group that meets regularly to discuss academic texts and make sense of existent and developing notions of planetarity; (2) A series of guest lectures and panel discussions, titled Mapping Planetary Humanities, where invited speakers will address imperative questions and contribute critical insights related to environmental planetarity and Anthropo-genic/-centric space futures; (3) An edited volume featuring a collection of chapters from our guest speakers as well as invited collaborators, and a journal, tentatively titled Depth of Field: The Journal of Planetary Humanities, whose key purpose is to consolidate, synthesize and advance knowledge within the field of planetary humanities; (4) An online platform serving as repository for a Planetary Humanities virtual library and a multi-media digital archive.

Black Feminisms Now

Brittney Edmonds (Afro-American Studies), Keisha Lindsay (Gender And Women’s Studies, Political Science), Cherene Sherrard-Johnson (English), Ruby Bafu (Sociology), Erika Bullock (Curriculum And Instruction), Kelly Marie Ward (Gender And Women’s Studies), Brenda Gayle Plummer (History, Afro-American Studies), Tarsha Herelle (Educational Policy Studies)

This Borghesi-Mellon workshop seeks to address institutional lacunae at UW-Madison as they relate to the intellectual training and professional development of black women scholars. We are a collective of black women—faculty and graduate students—who meet regularly to discuss the intellectual concerns of black women, as well as scholarship on, by, and about black women. Our workshop promotes professional development, mentorship development, and intellectual exchange and disciplinary skill-sharing.

Some of the questions we collectively consider are: how can black feminisms help us navigate, transform, and reimagine the university? How can black feminists harness the resources of the university to promote the study and incorporation of underrepresented populations in disciplinary curricula? How do black feminisms help us transform our respective disciplinary approaches and methods to be more attentive to the histories and intellectual concerns of understudied, dismissed, or degraded populations?

Our workshop hosts fora, external speakers, and critically engages with black women’s scholarship in open discussion. Prior to COVID-19, we planned to begin an archival project, “The Black Feminist History Project at UW-Madison” to celebrate the contributions of everyday black women to UW-Madison’s long institutional history. This project is currently on hiatus but will resume when conditions permit.

Care: Politics, Performances, Practices

Christine Garlough (Gender & Women’s Studies), Annie Menzel (Gender & Women’s Studies), Michael Peterson (Art, Interdisciplinary Theatre Studies), Beatriz L. Botero (Comparative Literature And Folklore), Tia Murray (Human Ecology), Jimmy Camacho (Interdisciplinary Phd In Land Policy And Indigenous Methodologies), Agnes Phoebe Muyanga (Gender & Women’s Studies), Flint Devine (Gender & Women’s Studies)

At UW Madison, there is growing excitement about the concept of “care,” ranging from those who work on feminist progressive politics, mindfulness and self-care, disability studies, and LGBTQ issues, to individuals concerned with race, migration, citizenship and indigeneity, to folks interested in art and performance, education, environment, religion, domestic labor organizing, health care and reproductive justice. “Care” appears not as an exciting “hot” topic to be mined, but as a question that challenges the very values that underlie our work and the practices we study. The primary audience for this workshop is consciously interdisciplinary and cuts across the humanities and social sciences at UW-Madison. Together we will explore how we have come to understand “care.” What does it encompass? How can we recognize it? What is its political and social potential? What are its limitations?

Our workshop proposes to bringing together theorizations and practices of care at UW and in the community at large through:

1) a reading group that meets once every three weeks, in which we will share the new and emerging care theories and projects

2) publicly oriented speaking events (featuring leading care thinkers, transformative local organizations and practitioners), as well as hands on workshops exploring specific aspects of care

3) a network that supports future scholarly and community work in this area, including a website to promote and archive workshop experiences.

Through these activities, we hope to gain awareness of work already underway in adjacent fields of scholarship and practice and the lived understandings of care possessed by activists, organizers, and caregivers.

Greener Pastures: Remembering the Past and Reimagining the Future of America’s Dairyland

Anna Andrzejewski (Art History), Eric Booth (Civil And Environmental Engineering And Agronomy), Caroline Gottschalk Druschke (English), Randy Jackson (Agronomy), Laura Grotjan (Art History)

This workshop considers how perspectives from the humanities can help farmers and agricultural landowners in the Upper Mississippi River Basin envision change, while also preserving regional identity and culture associated with livestock agriculture. The consolidation of dairy farming and processing, coupled with a decline in prices, led to record state foreclosures in 2019; 53% of Wisconsin farms have folded in the last 15 years. Meanwhile, intensive annual cropping has hastened soil erosion and worsened water quality, creating a suite of negative environmental realities that are coming under increasing scrutiny (e.g. nitrate in drinking water, the “Dead Zone” in the Gulf of Mexico, and increased flood risk throughout the Mississippi River Basin). Despite these and many more changes and challenges, the livestock industry remains at the core of our region’s history, identity, and culture.

This workshop brings together students, staff, and faculty from across the humanities, biophysical sciences, and social sciences as part of an effort to radically re-consider the future of livestock agriculture in this region, while preserving aspects of the region’s identity as “America’s Dairyland.” Specifically, this workshop will collaborate with Grassland 2.0, a U.S. Department of Agriculture-funded project based at UW-Madison that focuses on the social, economic, and ecological impediments to converting the region’s agriculture from predominantly row crop (corn, soy) to perennial grassland by 2050. By considering how we might bring together scientific data with narrative, collaborative, creative approaches from the humanities, this workshop will support Grassland 2.0 to meet one of its foundational goals: to “inspire and empower change” in livestock agriculture. Our goal is to put scientists in conversation with humanities experts to give voice to farmers’ stories about the past, present, and possible futures of their livelihood.

To express interest in joining the workshop or receive readings email greenerpasturesbmw@gmail.com.

Jerusalem in the Medieval and Modern Imagination

Coordinators: Thomas Dale (Art History), Elizabeth Lapina (History), Anna Andrzejewski (Art History), Eric Booth (Civil And Environmental Engineering And Agronomy), Caroline Gottschalk Druschke (English), Randy Jackson (Agronomy), Laura Grotjan (Art History), Rachel Brenner (Jewish Studies), Lauralee Brott (Art History), Charles Cohen (Emeritus, History), Lisa Cooper (English), Samuel England (African Cultural Studies), Özlem Eren (Art History), Tirumular (Drew) Narayanan (Art History), Jennifer Pruitt (Art History), Ulrich S. Rosenhagen (Center For Religion And Global Citizenry)

Jerusalem is among the most contested places in the world. The city has been destroyed and rebuilt many times, its dominant religion changed periodically, and its status as capital of the modern states of Israel and Palestine remains in dispute. Marked as locus of the sacred, a site of desire and spiritual ascent for Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, Jerusalem has continually occupied a central position in the religious imagination from the Middle Ages to the present. This workshop explores how medieval historical, religious, and cultural perspectives have continued to structure the understanding of Jerusalem in the modern imagination. Rather than focusing on a single religious tradition, the workshop deliberately seeks to understand the complexity of Jerusalem in the interactions of the three Abrahamic religious traditions over time.

 

2019-2020 Workshops

Environmental Justice in Multispecies Worlds

Coordinators: Laura Perry (English), Elizabeth Hennessy (History and Nelson Institute), Caroline Gottschalk Druschke (English), Zhe Yu Lee (Geography), Katarzyna Olga Beilin (Spanish & Portuguese), Sainath Suryanarayanan (Population Health Institute), Shari Wilcox (CHE), Tony Goldberg (Pathobiological Sciences), Claudia Calderón (Horticulture), Charlie Carlin (Geography), Nicole Tu-Muang (Nelson Institute), Alex Donnelly (Art), Emma Lundberg (Nelson Institute, Environment & Resources)

“Environmental Justice in Multispecies Worlds” brings together researchers across multiple disciplines to carve out new terrain at the underexplored intersection of multispecies studies and political ecology. These fields share a broad concern about what kinds of life are able to thrive in the so-called Anthropocene, yet often speak past each other—political ecology focusing on institutional critique to promote social justice and multispecies scholars attending more to the ethics of encounters among human and nonhuman life. The workshop will build a conversation at the intersection of these two trajectories to consider the following questions: How should we and nonhuman others live together? How have entangled histories of colonial and capitalist exploitation shaped contemporary configurations among humans and other species? How do class, racial, gender, and other politics shape multispecies encounters? How can recognizing multiple forms of life reframe techno-scientific management? How might attention to multispecies ethics redefine the politics and structures of environmental justice? Environmental Justice in Multispecies Worlds is additionally supported by the Holtz Center for Science and Technology Studies.

(Re)Imagining Empire

Coordinators: Daniel Kapust (Political Science), Nandini Pandey (Canes), Grant Nelsestuen (Canes), Karen Britland (English), Joseph Holwell (History), Nancy Rose Marshall (Art History), Katie Robiadek (Political Science), Lauren Surovi (French and Italian)

Few themes are subject to as much cross-disciplinary inquiry as empire. From critical international relations theory on empire’s ideological dimensions to historians’ examination of the motivations and effects of imperialist states, from comparative diachronic studies of empire to analyses of empires’ continuing legacy through the lenses of post-colonialism or critical race theory, empire exerts a strong pull on the contemporary humanities and humanistic social sciences. The Borghesi-Mellon Workshop, “(Re)Imagining Empire,” will bring together a cross-disciplinary group of scholars and graduate students with a focus on the diverse ways that empire has been (re)imagined in antiquity, early modernity, the 18th and 19th centuries, and the contemporary world.

“(Re)Imagining Empire” will center on three day-long conferences; each conference will feature a keynote speaker and a mix of graduate student and faculty paper presentations. The first conference, to be held on November 2, 2018, will focus on Mediterranean antiquity, with particular attention on the Roman Empire. The second conference, to be held on December 7, will center on early modern, 18th, and 19th century Europe and the Americas, and will focus in part on how Rome itself was imaginatively reinvented in that period. Harnessing the insights of transnational history and post-colonial scholarship, the third and final conference will also explore imaginings of empire from a comparative perspective, e.g. Han Dynasty China and the Ottoman Empire. A key concern for all three conferences is to explore the place of empire in shaping our own perspectives on today’s globalizing world.

Plutarch in Byzantium

Coordinators: Olivia Baquerizo (Classical and Ancient Near East Studies), Jeffrey Beneker (Classical and Ancient Near East Studies), Leonora Neville (History), Michael Promisel (Political Science), Rebecca Moorman (Classical and Ancient Near East Studies), Sarah Brown Ferrario (Greek and Latin, Catholic University of America), Noreen Humble (Classics, University of Calgary), Sophia Xenophontos (Classics, University of Glasgow)

This workshop explores the influence of the Greek author Plutarch (c. 45 – c. 125 CE) on the literature produced during the Byzantine Empire (4th century – 15th century). Since these intellectual interactions often do not function at the level of direct quotation of Plutarch by a Byzantine author, they can be most effectively discovered and studied by scholars of Plutarch and of Byzantine writing working collaboratively. Those who are intimately familiar with Plutarch’s work can help recognize his influence in Byzantine texts while those who study Byzantine culture can interpret the cultural context and significance of the intellectual engagement with Plutarch. The workshop is a unique opportunity for advancing scholarly understanding of medieval use and interpretation of classical ideas.

https://plutarchinbyzantium.wisc.edu/

Engaging Nature in Asia

Coordinators: Young Kim (Art History), Aijie Shi (History of Science), Joe Dennis (History), Teresa Goertz (Asian Languages and Cultures), Rania Huntington (Asian Languages and Cultures), Wenting Ji (Asian Languages and Cultures), Yuhang Li (Art History)

The early modern in many parts of Asia was a time when social, intellectual, and economic efflorescence coexisted with global encounters. It was a time of both unprecedented stability and dynamic change which would greatly define the unfolding of the modern era. However, in current academic practices a fissure exists between the two epochs, with early modern studies culminating in the glorious native achievements and the modern studies entangled in search for Asian modernity under Western influences. Our project premises that joining the two narratives is illuminating for both ends, by eradicating the artificial fissure and exploring the internal continuities and changes.

Among the various issues of modernity, we identify human interaction with nature as a common thread to knit the interdisciplinary and inter-regional interests represented by our group. Disciplines of art history and literature in this workshop probe the representation of nature in images and texts as a knowledge system integral to a culture’s self-understanding. The anthropological and material cultural perspectives many of our members share investigate the materiality and movement of naturally-sourced objects such as jade and silk, which had immense cultural and economic value in the global trades. These approaches intertwine with emerging studies in the history of science and environmental history on the role of natural terrains, organisms, and resources in mapping global encounters and forging imperial and national identities.

Science, Nature, and Wonder in the Middle Ages

Coordinators: Thomas Dale (Medieval Studies, Art History), Lisa H. Cooper (English), Olivia Ernst (English), Mateusz Ferens (Art History), Martin Foys (English), Max Gray (English), Elizabeth Lapina (History), Scott Mellor (Scandinavian Studies), Jennifer Pruitt (Art History), Charlotte Whatley (History)

Since Antiquity, race has conventionally been defined using biology and descent, climate and geography, physiognomy and skin color. Although it is now generally accepted that race is perceived in culturally specific ways, and embraces religion, language, customs, law, and culture, recent alt-right demonstrations in Charlottesville and elsewhere have shown that conventional stereotypes are very much alive. What is more, alt-right groups frequently sport medieval symbols and evoke imagined, racially pure, medieval nations to support their cause. This interdisciplinary workshop therefore has a particular urgency. It challenges us to think about race in both medieval and contemporary contexts, exploring intertwined aspects of migration, representation and appropriation.

2018-2019 Workshops

Environmental Justice in Multispecies Worlds

Coordinators: Laura Perry (English), Elizabeth Hennessy (History and Nelson Institute), Caroline Gottschalk Druschke (English), Zhe Yu Lee (Geography), Katarzyna Olga Beilin (Spanish & Portuguese), Sainath Suryanarayanan (Population Health Institute), Shari Wilcox (CHE), Tony Goldberg (Pathobiological Sciences), Claudia Calderón (Horticulture), Charlie Carlin (Geography), Nicole Tu-Muang (Nelson Institute), Alex Donnelly (Art), Emma Lundberg (Nelson Institute, Environment & Resources)

“Environmental Justice in Multispecies Worlds” brings together researchers across multiple disciplines to carve out new terrain at the underexplored intersection of multispecies studies and political ecology. These fields share a broad concern about what kinds of life are able to thrive in the so-called Anthropocene, yet often speak past each other—political ecology focusing on institutional critique to promote social justice and multispecies scholars attending more to the ethics of encounters among human and nonhuman life. The workshop will build a conversation at the intersection of these two trajectories to consider the following questions: How should we and nonhuman others live together? How have entangled histories of colonial and capitalist exploitation shaped contemporary configurations among humans and other species? How do class, racial, gender, and other politics shape multispecies encounters? How can recognizing multiple forms of life reframe techno-scientific management? How might attention to multispecies ethics redefine the politics and structures of environmental justice? Environmental Justice in Multispecies Worlds is additionally supported by the Holtz Center for Science and Technology Studies.

Senses and Material Culture in Early Modern Asia

Coordinators: Wenting Ji (Asian Languages and Cultures), Teresa Goertz (Asian Languages and Cultures), Rania Huntington (Asian Languages and Cultures), Kim Young (Art History), Judd Kinzley (History), Yuhang Li (Art History), Josiah Stork (Asian Languages and Cultures), Shiyi Xiang (History)

Studies of material culture tend to focus on a western and contemporary context. As for the study of the senses, due to the restriction of resources, existing scholarship mostly discusses the contemporary era when multimedia comprehensively merged into daily life and began producing studiable artifacts. Nonetheless, in early modern Asia, the training, appreciation, and employment of the senses via material objects was important and of great variety, and it is through objects and the senses that we are able to overcome the time/space gap and stay “in touch” with the early modern period. Objects as material legacies are powerful proxies connecting contemporary researchers to the early modern era, while attention to the senses, as biologically-based shared knowledge, can cross cultures to provide key insights about human experience. This workshop uses the time and setting of early modern Asian to explore more possibilities for the study of senses and material culture.

In this workshop, we hope to study senses in the early modern period not only in representation, but more importantly as a self-contained entity that holds a specific position in material practice and human experience. We want to ask the following questions: How were the senses, as an abstract concept, represented in concrete material objects? How did different senses commingle to provide the effect of synesthesia as well as occupying different hierarchical status? How did the recognition of senses influence and construct the desire for material objects? How were identities built upon the possessing of material goods and mastering of senses? And how did time and space, materialized in objects, change the concept of the senses? Through pondering these questions, we are looking for a new way of treating senses and material culture especially in early modern Asia which will lead us to a model similar or different from the established Western model and the contemporary framework.

Terra Incognita Art Series: Artists Exploring our New Ecological Epoch

Coordinators: Alexandra Lakind (Nelson Institute & School of Education), Rob Lundberg (Nelson Institute & Law School), Nicole Bennett (English), Sarah Stankey (Art), Katarzyne Olga Beilin (Spanish and Portuguese)

This artist-led workshop and event series showcases a range of expressions that explore the relationships between humans and the world they inhabit. Our mission is twofold:

  1. through the arts and humanities, to investigate environmental issues honoring the experiences, aesthetics, and struggles embedded in these topics, and
  2. bring people together with diverse, but interconnected, interests and identities.

As we face a new epoch of environmental complexity, we need to encourage multidisciplinarity, a broader approach to environmental studies and the arts, and supportive learning communities.

Science, Nature, and Wonder in the Middle Ages

Coordinators: Thomas Dale (Medieval Studies, Art History), Lisa H. Cooper (English), Olivia Ernst (English), Mateusz Ferens (Art History), Martin Foys (English), Max Gray (English), Elizabeth Lapina (History), Scott Mellor (Scandinavian Studies), Jennifer Pruitt (Art History), Charlotte Whatley (History)

Since Antiquity, race has conventionally been defined using biology and descent, climate and geography, physiognomy and skin color. Although it is now generally accepted that race is perceived in culturally specific ways, and embraces religion, language, customs, law, and culture, recent alt-right demonstrations in Charlottesville and elsewhere have shown that conventional stereotypes are very much alive. What is more, alt-right groups frequently sport medieval symbols and evoke imagined, racially pure, medieval nations to support their cause. This interdisciplinary workshop therefore has a particular urgency. It challenges us to think about race in both medieval and contemporary contexts, exploring intertwined aspects of migration, representation and appropriation.

(Re)Imagining Empire

Coordinators: Daniel Kapust (Political Science), Nandini Pandey (Canes), Grant Nelsestuen (Canes), Karen Britland (English), Josph Holwell (History), Nancy Rose Marshall (Art History), Katie Robiadek (Political Science), Lauren Surovi (French and Italian)

Few themes are subject to as much cross-disciplinary inquiry as empire. From critical international relations theory on empire’s ideological dimensions to historians’ examination of the motivations and effects of imperialist states, from comparative diachronic studies of empire to analyses of empires’ continuing legacy through the lenses of post-colonialism or critical race theory, empire exerts a strong pull on the contemporary humanities and humanistic social sciences. The Borghesi-Mellon Workshop, “(Re)Imagining Empire,” will bring together a cross-disciplinary group of scholars and graduate students with a focus on the diverse ways that empire has been (re)imagined in antiquity, early modernity, the 18th and 19th centuries, and the contemporary world.

“(Re)Imagining Empire” will center on three day-long conferences; each conference will feature a keynote speaker and a mix of graduate student and faculty paper presentations. The first conference, to be held on November 2, 2018, will focus on Mediterranean antiquity, with particular attention on the Roman Empire. The second conference, to be held on December 7, will center on early modern, 18th, and 19th century Europe and the Americas, and will focus in part on how Rome itself was imaginatively reinvented in that period. Harnessing the insights of transnational history and post-colonial scholarship, the third and final conference will also explore imaginings of empire from a comparative perspective, e.g. Han Dynasty China and the Ottoman Empire. A key concern for all three conferences is to explore the place of empire in shaping our own perspectives on today’s globalizing world.

Black Arts + Data Futures

Coordinators: Reginold Royston (iSchool, African Cultural Studies), Faisal Abdu’allah (Art, Studio-Creative Arts & Design Community), Johanna Almiron (Afro-American Studies), Malik Anderson (Communication Arts), Obasi Davis (Apparel Design), Henry Drewal (Art History), Tracy Lewis-Williams (Computer Science, iSchool), Thomas Loeser (Art), Harvey Long (iSchool)

The Black Art + Data Futures working group consists of faculty, staff, graduate students and researchers who are engaged in questions of technology and African/diasporic resilience that move beyond states of crisis. In this workshop, we attempt to map the historic and future praxis of technological adaptation in the Black diaspora, including the spiritual, material and cultural techniques of resilience and self-determination informed by such modes as Afro-Futurism and Afro-Optimism. The aim of the series is to build literacies around the notion of resilience, and technical familiarity with these tactics in arts and digital media making. In Year Two of the BADF workshop, we will explore the theme “Space, Time and Alterity,” with visiting artists and academics whose research examine Black/digital counter-publics, and whose artwork disrupt notions of modernity. There is a Diaspora focus to this year’s roster of prospective presenters, including writers and artists whose work embraces the Caribbean and Black Europe. Year One’s programming included faculty salons with artist and urban developer Theaster Gates, MacArthur genius fellow Walter Kitundu, and the feminist design collective, Hyphen-Labs. In AY2018-19, we hope to expand on this formula of bringing artists and scholars at cutting-edge of their disciplines to inspire the UW-Madison community and engage in fruitful interdisciplinary collaboration.

Plutarch in Byzantium

Coordinators: Olivia Baquerizo (Classical and Ancient Near East Studies), Jeffrey Beneker (Classical and Ancient Near East Studies), Leonora Neville (History), Michael Promise (Political Science), Rebecca Moorman (Classical and Ancient Near East Studies), Sarah Brown Ferrario (Greek and Latin, Catholic University of America), Noreen Humble (Classics, University of Calgary), Sophia Xenophontos (Classics, University of Glasgow)

This workshop explores the influence of the Greek author Plutarch (c. 45 – c. 125 CE) on the literature produced during the Byzantine Empire (4th century – 15th century). Since these intellectual interactions often do not function at the level of direct quotation of Plutarch by a Byzantine author, they can be most effectively discovered and studied by scholars of Plutarch and of Byzantine writing working collaboratively. Those who are intimately familiar with Plutarch’s work can help recognize his influence in Byzantine texts while those who study Byzantine culture can interpret the cultural context and significance of the intellectual engagement with Plutarch. The workshop is a unique opportunity for advancing scholarly understanding of medieval use and interpretation of classical ideas.

https://plutarchinbyzantium.wisc.edu/

Traditions in Dialogue: Nordic-American Communities and their Arts in Local and Transnational Contexts

Coordinators: Marcus Cederström (German, Nordic, and Slavic), Thomas A. DuBois (German, Nordic, and Slavic), Nathan Gibson (Mills Music Library), Robert Glenn Howard (Communication Arts; Designlab), Mirva Johnson (German, Nordic, and Slavic), Troy Reeves (UW-Madison Oral History Program), Anna Rue (Center for the Study of Upper Midwestern Cultures), Joseph Salmons (Center for the Study of Upper Midwestern Cultures), Jeanette Casey (Mills Music Library), Scott Carter (Mayrent Institute for Yiddish Culture)

Life in the Upper Midwest brims with reminders of Nordic mass migrations to North America, events that transformed the Nordic countries as well as the United States. Join us for a series of lectures and how-to workshops regarding the significant impact that private collections and archives can have on the community-at-large. Lectures will focus on how individual collectors contribute to our collective understanding of the region and revitalization of cultural traditions, while workshops will share tips and best practices for documenting and archiving your private and/or community collections.

2017-2018 Workshops

Applied Comics Kitchen!

Coordinators: KC Councilor (Communication Arts [Rhetoric, Politics, and Culture]), Liz Anna Kozik (Nelson Institute), Katie Zaman (Sociology), Jason Kartez (Art), Lynda Barry (Art [Interdisciplinary Creativity]), Jenell Johnson (Communication Arts [Rhetoric, Politics, and Culture] and Disability Studies Initiative), Hannah Stern (Environmental Scientist), Heather Rosenfeld (Geography), Ife Williams (Human Development and Family Studies), Kadin Henningson (University of Illinois-Urbana Champaign, English), Laissa Rodriguez Moreno (Lycoming College, Modern Language Studies), and Dr. Ebony Flowers (Comic Artist, Writer)

Applied Comics Kitchen aims to create an open, practice-based dialogue for educators and researchers from any discipline.
Website: appliedcomicskitchen.wordpress.com

Food Studies Network

Coordinators: Laurie Beth Clark (Art Department), Michael Peterson (Art Department), Grazia Menechella (French and Italian), Meg Mitchell (Art), Steve Ventura (Soil Science), Sigrid Peterson (Journalism & Mass Communication; School of Library & Information Studies), Michelle Miller (Center for Integrated Agricultural Systems), Hannah Bennett (Design Studies), Linda Hogle (Medical History & Bioethics), Brad Vowels (Landscape Architecture), Megan Marsh-McGlone (Interdisciplinary Theatre Studies), Jordan Rosenblum (Center for Jewish Studies)

Food is among the most transdisciplinary of themes. It can be studied from biological, sociological, phenomenological and culinary perspectives. It is analyzed by anthropologists, nutritionists, political scientists, ethicists, and physiologists, as well as cooks and critics. Food discourses run the gamut from high-minded to pedestrian. We’ll look at food gastronomically and phenomenologically. We’ll consider “the ways that individuals, communities, and societies relate to and represent food.” Emphasizing the culture in agriculture, we’ll look at the sourcing of food and its delivery, particularly on the local level, by looking at farming and cooking. In wide-ranging conversations, we’ll think about aesthetics and ethics, marketing and technology, hunger and excess, anorexia and obesity, cooking and eating, justice and regulation, nutrition and safety.

This workshop will bring together faculty, staff, graduate and undergraduate students, and community members whose research and teaching involves food. Over the course of the year, our activities will include sharing research, discussion of readings, guest speakers, and meals. We will host thematically organized presentations of faculty and graduate student research that will be well publicized and open to the general public. As much as we expect this seminar to be serious, we also want it to be fun. We hope to eat as a group, to meet with local chefs and with local food producers, and maybe host a popular food writer. And we also want it to be productive. We’d like to encourage participants to consider developing a food studies anthology.

Terra Incognita Art Series: Artists Exploring our New Ecological Epoch

Coordinators: Alexandra Lakind (Nelson Institute & School of Education), Rob Lundberg (Nelson Institute & Law School), Emili Earhart (School of Music), Gail Simpson (Art Department)

In this era of ecological complexities, the fields of Public Humanities, Art, and Environmental Studies overlap in myriad ways. This artist led workshop and event series will illuminate intersections, showcasing a range of expressions that explore the relationships between humans and the world they inhabit. Our mission is twofold: 1) through the arts and humanities, to investigate environmental issues honoring the experiences, aesthetics, and struggles embedded in these topics, and 2) bring people together with diverse, but interconnected, interests and identities. As we face a new epoch of environmental complexity, we need to encourage interdisciplinarity, a broader approach to environmental studies, innovation in the arts, and supportive learning communities.

Science, Nature, and Wonder in the Middle Ages

Coordinators: Thomas Dale (Art History; Director of Medieval Studies), Lisa Cooper (English), Peter Bovenmyer (Art History), Florence Hsia (History of Science), Karl Shoemaker (History, Law), Pablo Gomez (Medical History and Bioethics), Shira Brisman (Art History), Martin Foys (English), Elizabeth Lapina (History), Jennifer Pruitt (Art History), Mike Shank (Emiritus, History of Science), Jordan Rosenblum (Religious Studies), Heather Wacha (iSchool; Medieval Studies)

The popular conception of the medieval world is often one of insularity and isolation, but nothing could be further from the truth. Pilgrims, princes, crusaders, doctors, merchants, monks, and artists—all these knew that the world they lived in was a vast and far-flung network of persons, places and things. Traces of frequent and ongoing cross-cultural encounter in the Middle Ages abound: in encyclopedias, chronicles, and universal histories; in treatises of science and medicine; in literary texts; in works of art and architecture; and of course in maps and travel narratives of many kinds. Indeed, even as we speak with increasing frequency about our current moment as an era of globalization, the Middle Ages—roughly the thousand years between c. 500–1500—have themselves never seemed more urgently global. England to Egypt, Rome to Russia, Constantinople to China, Iceland to India, Jerusalem to Jakarta, Paris to Persia: scholars of the period have for the last decade and more increasingly turned their attention to the ways international communication, commercial exchange, religious mission, and military conquest created deep connections as well as equally deep fissures throughout the era, in ways that continue to shape political and social structures around the world today. Where literary scholars have brought postcolonial theory to bear on wide range of medieval texts, especially those produced in the wake of the conquest of England in 1066 and during the several centuries of the Crusades, art historians have explored the shared visual culture linking European Christian, Islamic and Byzantine courts, producing a new field of study in what is now regularly referred to as the “global Mediterranean,” while historians of science have uncovered the complex and extensive reception of Greek and Islamic science and medicine in western Europe (and these are just a few examples among many).

Without losing sight of the particularities of human experience in lands separated by very different systems of language, politics, culture, and religious belief, this workshop seeks to join this ongoing conversation, and explore what it means to think the medieval as/in a global context, and to ask how doing so may (and also may not) add to the current global turn in the humanities and social sciences.

Global Music and Sound Studies

Coordinators: Jeremy Morris (Communication Arts), Jerome Camal (Anthropology), Ron Radano (African Cultural Studies), River Bullock (Art History and Visual Studies), Craig Eley (CHCI), Ellen Hebden (Anthropology and Ethnomusicology)

This workshop aims to develop a working campus community dedicated to the critical, historical, and ethnographic analysis of sound and global musical traditions. Events, workshops, and performances will explore how connections between global-music scholars and sound-studies scholars can highlight the importance of audibility/audition in everyday cultural life and can foster new forms of critical listening that pay attention to the diversity and differences in our sonic landscapes.

Black Arts + Data Futures

Coordinators: Reginold Royston (iSchool, African Cultural Studies), Faisal Abdu’allah (Art, Studio-Creative Arts & Design Community), Johanna Almiron (Afro-American Studies), Malik Anderson (Communication Arts), Obasi Davis (Apparel Design), Henry Drewal (Art History), Tracy Lewis-Williams (Computer Science, iSchool), Thomas Loeser (Art), Harvey Long (iSchool)

Theorist Fred Moten introduced the notion of “fugitivity” (Harney and Moten, 2013, The Undercommons) to describe the tactics of cultural and material resiliency by black subjects, seemingly foreclosed from the mainstream of neoliberalism. Black fugitivity is an ethos of adaptation to an otherwise racialized political economy of exile, diaspora, incarceration and assimilation. In this workshop, we attempt to map the historic and future praxis of technological adaptation in the Black diaspora, including the spiritual, material and cultural tactics of resilience and self-determination informed by such modes as Afro-Futurism and Afro-Optimism.

Reading and Writing Space: New Approaches to the Study of Epigraphic Landscapes

Coordinators: Jeremy M. Hutton (Canes), Alice Mandell (Canes), Sarah Clayton (Anthropology), Nathaniel E. Greene (Canes), J. Mark Kenoyer (Anthropology)

Ancient inscriptions are normally studied as linguistic and scribal artifacts, providing insight into a language’s grammar, rendering feasible the study of spelling conventions and scribal habitus, and serving as indices of socio-political complexity. More broadly, epigraphic study is used to create totalizing narratives about history, religion, or languages. Yet, with the removal of these ancient writings from their larger natural and built environments—and now contained behind the glass of the museum case—these ancient writings have been irrevocably stripped from those spaces that initially infused them with significance and which they in turn imbued with meaning. Although the workshop will engage with the usual linguistic and grammatical content inherent to these ancient texts, we will consider additional aspects of epigraphs’ communicative modes. In the past decade, studies of visual media and literacy have increasingly considered the ways in which texts communicated in ways that are not purely linguistic. Thus, our workshop will curate analysis that considers not only the linguistic message of inscribed texts, but the spaces in and around the text as well. This line of inquiry necessarily extends the study of texts beyond their linguistic content and considers the ways in which inscriptions were embedded into natural or built environments.

This workshop seeks to facilitate interdisciplinary exchange and collaboration centered on new approaches to the study of pre-modern inscriptions. The corpora to be examined extend in geography and chronology from the ancient Near East and Indus River Valley, to the Classical and Late Antique Mediterranean and Africa, to the pre-colonial Americas. Our aim is to shift the study of ancient inscriptions from a focus on the text as a linguistic fossil or artifact to a broader analysis of the ways in which inscriptions were embedded in cityscapes and natural spaces and the social functions they acquired in those spaces. The homes, workshops, markets, gateways, temples, tombs, and rock cliffs where these texts were placed interacted with the texts themselves to create embodied, socialized meaning for ancient audiences, regardless of their level(s) of literacy. We will also examine the private and hidden use of inscriptions that reflect a very different set of variables from what is seen in public display.

Space-Relations

Coordinators: Lei Zheng (Curriculum and Instruction), Lu Liu (Asian Languages and Cultures), Robert Kaiser (Geography), Steve Ridgely (Asian Languages and Cultures), Sam Timinsky (History)

The Space-Relations workshop starts with two central questions that rethink space from a relational perspective:

  • How do we think of space not as a container but a conductor of relations?
  • How do we think of space not merely as a form of relations but also as a method that forms relations?

The workshop works upon/within/through space as mattering—disconnecting and reconnecting relations among ideas, technologies, non/human bodies, places, time, etc. By doing so, we attempt to investigate how the material and symbolic ways in which we configure space also generate relations immanent to the making of space.

The workshop hopes to bring together faculty, students, and non-UW scholars whose research potentially destabilizes a static understanding of space and broadly conceives space as a transdisciplinary method. We attempt to examine themes of nonetheless interrelated productions of arts and literature, teaching and learning, everyday life, security, revolution, futurity, spirituality, and tradition and modernity.

Traditions in Dialogue: Nordic-American Communities and their Arts in Local and Transnational Contexts

Coordinators: Marcus Cederström (German, Nordic, and Slavic), Thomas A. DuBois (German, Nordic, and Slavic), Nathan Gibson (Mills Music Library), Robert Glenn Howard (Communication Arts; Designlab), Mirva Johnson (German, Nordic, and Slavic), Troy Reeves (UW-Madison Oral History Program), Anna Rue (Center for the Study of Upper Midwestern Cultures), Joseph Salmons (Center for the Study of Upper Midwestern Cultures), Jeanette Casey (Mills Music Library), Scott Carter (Mayrent Institute for Yiddish Culture)

Life in the Upper Midwest brims with reminders of Nordic mass migrations to North America, events that transformed the Nordic countries as well as the United States. Join us for a series of lectures and how-to workshops regarding the significant impact that private collections and archives can have on the community-at-large. Lectures will focus on how individual collectors contribute to our collective understanding of the region and revitalization of cultural traditions, while workshops will share tips and best practices for documenting and archiving your private and/or community collections.

2016-2017 Workshops

Applied Comics Kitchen!

Coordinators: KC Councilor (Communication Arts [Rhetoric, Politics, and Culture]), Liz Anna Kozik (Nelson Institute), Katie Zaman (Sociology), Jason Kartez (Art), Lynda Barry (Art [Interdisciplinary Creativity]), Jenell Johnson (Communication Arts [Rhetoric, Politics, and Culture] and Disability Studies Initiative), Hannah Stern (Environmental Scientist), Heather Rosenfeld (Geography), Ife Williams (Human Development and Family Studies), Kadin Henningson (University of Illinois-Urbana Champaign, English), Laissa Rodriguez Moreno (Lyoming College, Modern Language Studies), and Dr. Ebony Flowers (Comics Artist, Writer)

Food Studies Network

Coordinators: Laurie Beth Clark (Art Department), Michael Peterson (Art Department), Grazia Menechella (French and Italian), Meg Mitchell (Art), Steve Ventura (Soil Science), Sigrid Peterson (Journalism & Mass Communication; School of Library & Information Studies), Michelle Miller (Center for Integrated Agricultural Systems), Hannah Bennett (Design Studies), Linda Hogle (Medical History & Bioethics), Brad Vowels (Landscape Architecture), Megan Marsh-McGlone (Interdisciplinary Theatre Studies), Jordan Rosenblum (Center for Jewish Studies)

Food is among the most transdisciplinary of themes. It can be studied from biological, sociological, phenomenological and culinary perspectives. It is analyzed by anthropologists, nutritionists, political scientists, ethicists, and physiologists, as well as cooks and critics. Food discourses run the gamut from high-minded to pedestrian. We’ll look at food gastronomically and phenomenologically. We’ll consider “the ways that individuals, communities, and societies relate to and represent food.” Emphasizing the culture in agriculture, we’ll look at the sourcing of food and its delivery, particularly on the local level, by looking at farming and cooking. In wide-ranging conversations, we’ll think about aesthetics and ethics, marketing and technology, hunger and excess, anorexia and obesity, cooking and eating, justice and regulation, nutrition and safety.

This workshop will bring together faculty, staff and graduate students whose research and teaching involves food. Over the course of the year, our activities will include sharing research, discussion of readings, guest speakers, and meals. We will host thematically organized presentations of faculty and graduate student research that will be well publicized and open to the general public. As much as we expect this seminar to be serious, we also want it to be fun. We hope to eat as a group, to meet with local chefs and with local food producers, and maybe host a popular food writer. And we also want it to be productive. We’d like to encourage participants to consider developing a food studies anthology.

Terra Incognita Art Series: Artists Exploring our New Ecological Epoch

Coordinators: Alexandra Lakind (Nelson Institute & School of Education), Rob Lundberg (Nelson Institute & Law School), Emili Earhart (School of Music), Gail Simpson (Art Department)

In this era of ecological complexities, the fields of Public Humanities, Art, and Environmental Studies overlap in myriad ways. This artist led workshop and event series will illuminate intersections, showcasing a range of expressions that explore the relationships between humans and the world they inhabit. Our mission is twofold: 1) through the arts and humanities, to investigate environmental issues honoring the experiences, aesthetics, and struggles embedded in these topics, and 2) bring people together with diverse, but interconnected, interests and identities. As we face a new epoch of environmental complexity, we need to encourage interdisciplinarity, a broader approach to environmental studies, innovation in the arts, and supportive learning communities.

Science, Nature, and Wonder in the Middle Ages

Coordinators: Thomas Dale (Art History; Director of Medieval Studies), Lisa Cooper (English), Peter Bovenmyer (Art History), Florence Hsia (History of Science), Nick Jacobson (History of Science), Walton Schalik (Orthoepedics), karl Shoemaker (History; Law), Pablo Gomez (Medical History and Bioethics), Shira Brisman (Art History), Martin Foys (English), Elizabeth Lapina (History), Jennifer Pruitt (Art History), Mike Shank (Emeritus, History of Science), Jordan Rosenblum (Religious Studies), Heather Wacha (iSchool; Medieval Studies)

The popular conception of the medieval world is often one of insularity and isolation, but nothing could be further from the truth. Pilgrims, princes, crusaders, doctors, merchants, monks, and artists—all these knew that the world they lived in was a vast and far-flung network of persons, places and things. Traces of frequent and ongoing cross-cultural encounter in the Middle Ages abound: in encyclopedias, chronicles, and universal histories; in treatises of science and medicine; in literary texts; in works of art and architecture; and of course in maps and travel narratives of many kinds. Indeed, even as we speak with increasing frequency about our current moment as an era of globalization, the Middle Ages—roughly the thousand years between c. 500–1500—have themselves never seemed more urgently global. England to Egypt, Rome to Russia, Constantinople to China, Iceland to India, Jerusalem to Jakarta, Paris to Persia: scholars of the period have for the last decade and more increasingly turned their attention to the ways international communication, commercial exchange, religious mission, and military conquest created deep connections as well as equally deep fissures throughout the era, in ways that continue to shape political and social structures around the world today. Where literary scholars have brought postcolonial theory to bear on wide range of medieval texts, especially those produced in the wake of the conquest of England in 1066 and during the several centuries of the Crusades, art historians have explored the shared visual culture linking European Christian, Islamic and Byzantine courts, producing a new field of study in what is now regularly referred to as the “global Mediterranean,” while historians of science have uncovered the complex and extensive reception of Greek and Islamic science and medicine in western Europe (and these are just a few examples among many).

Without losing sight of the particularities of human experience in lands separated by very different systems of language, politics, culture, and religious belief, this workshop seeks to join this ongoing conversation, and explore what it means to think the medieval as/in a global context, and to ask how doing so may (and also may not) add to the current global turn in the humanities and social sciences.

Sound Studies

Coordinators: Jeremy Morris (Communication Arts), Craig Eley (Center for the Humanities), River Bullock (Art History), Joseph Koykkar (Dance), Troy Reeves (Oral History Archive), Jordan Zweck (English)

In recent years, sound studies has not-so-quietly emerged as a vibrant interdisciplinary field providing innovative analytical tools and conceptual frameworks for dealing with and studying sound across a broad array of academic disciplines and contexts. From public problems such as noise pollution and environmental soundscape preservation to the cognitive and perceptual ways sound shapes and transforms human experience, sound and music are part of the fabric of everyday life. Tuning our attention to sound opens up new ways of doing history, understanding media, conceptualizing performance/identity, and analyzing contemporary social, political, and artistic processes.

Given the transdisciplinary “sonic turn” taking place in the humanities, our SoundStudies@UW workshop is meant to help build infrastructure at UW-Madison for connecting researchers, teachers, archivists, and other community members interested in the study of sound. Our workshop holds monthly gatherings to share current research, pedagogy and technical skills around sound studies, as well as features prominent, public-oriented talks by sound studies academics and practitioners. Ultimately, we aim to provide a kind of signal tower for the creation and dissemination of sound ideas, resources, and practices on campus and beyond.

2015-2016 Workshops

Art and Scholarship Collaboratory

Coordinators: Katie Schaag (English), Andrew Salyer (Art/Theatre), Jon McKenzie (English), Jill H. Casid (Art History)

Inspired by artist-scholars such as Anne Carson, Ann Hamilton, Fred Moten, Adrian Piper, and Avital Ronell, the Art and Scholarship Borghesi-Mellon Workshop is committed to investigating, inventing, and paying attention to unexpected possibilities in the praxis of scholarly research and artistic production. At the heart of our intellectual inquiry is creative experimentation—sensory perception, visual rhetoric, performative scholarship, serious play. When and how is knowledge-production a creative act? How can art theorize? What intersections do we notice between creative writing and scholarly writing? We are captivated by the conceptual and aesthetic force of such hybrid forms as autoethnography, photo essays, artist books, experimental theory, montage, and conceptual art. View a selection of texts and objects that operate at the interstices of art and scholarship here.

Drawing upon the talents and expertise of our workshop participants – from Literary Studies, Creative Writing, Theatre, Visual Cultures, Art, Design Studies, Library and Information Studies, DesignLab, Cartography Lab, and Wisconsin Institute for Discovery – we plan to curate a series of “Collaboratory” workshops. Facilitating conversations between experimental scholarship, creative writing, performance, new media, digital text, and visualization studies, these Collaboratories will engage a richly interdisciplinary nexus of questions, practices, and possibilities for unsettling generic and medium-specific boundaries. Collaboratories will provide opportunities to engage in collective exploration of playful, creative scholarship through such practices as performance-making, sensory awareness, embodied meditation, freewriting, visualization, text collage, digital remediation, public discourse, and relational aesthetics. We hope to collaboratively produce new conceptual and aesthetic possibilities, acknowledging disciplinary constraints and expectations while conversing about the ways that our research might take on new shapes, reveal assumptions, and prompt unexpected questions.

Maintaining our commitment to the public humanities, we also plan to continue our partnership with The Bubbler at Madison Public Library as well as with Madison Performance Philosophy Collective. Additionally, in the spring semester, we propose to host another open call symposium building upon the model of our Spring 2013 event MAD THEORY. This symposium will provide the workshop participants and the Madison community at large with a dynamic time and space to showcase and discuss a wide range of practices and forms of performative scholarship, artistic research, and critical-creative collaboration.

For more information, visit http://artandscholarship.wordpress.com/ and https://www.facebook.com/MellonWorkshopArtScholarship

Digital Humanities Research Network

Coordinators: Briana Marshall (UW-Madison Libraries), Jonathan Senchyne (School of Library and Information Sciences), Eric Alexander (Computer Science), Mattie Burkert (English), Cid Freitag (DoIT Academic Technology)

Our group aims to fulfill the need for a centralized digital humanities community on campus by meeting regularly and establishing a shared workspace. In our meetings, we will focus on the processes involved in digitizing, quantifying, and visualizing different types of humanities objects turned data (including printed books, manuscripts, historical records, art, music, films). In addition to opening up new research questions, our group will provide an opportunity for a sustained conversation about the computational and analytical aspects of the digital humanities. Our group will consider the current theories underlying digital methodologies and also discuss, brainstorm, and workshop specific projects at various stages. The overarching questions structuring these meetings are:

  1. What do we mean by “digital humanities”?
  2. What are the implications of these methodologies? More specifically, why should we undertake computational humanities projects, and how do they how alter the cultural artifacts they engage?
  3. How do we implement these approaches into our research and teaching?

Our theme for 2015-16 is “Sustaining Digital Humanities,” which we hope will structure an ongoing conversation about ways to maintain a vibrant DH community on the UW-Madison campus.

Disability Studies, Disability Activism

Coordinators: Jill Casid (Art History), Jessica Cooley (Art History), Rachel Herzl-Betz (English), Paige Hoffman (Gender & Women’s Studies), Jenell Johnson (Communication Arts), Elisabeth Miller (English), Kate Moran (Madison Disability Pride), Ellen Samuels (Gender & Women’s Studies and English)

2015 marks the 25th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act, vital legislation designed to ensure the civil rights of persons with disabilities through access to public accommodations, employment, transportation, and more. This past year, at the 25-year marker of this important milestone, we first organized, the Disability Studies, Disability Activism Borghesi-Mellon Workshop calling on academics and activists to take stock of both gains to disability rights and the significant challenges we continue to face.

For the 2015-2016 year we seek to build upon our workshop’s many successes as we shift our focus from community building to new directions in disability work in the humanities, specifically disability justice and transnational work in disability. Community will remain at the center of our mission, but with an added emphasis on coalition and innovation toward common goals, as we interrogate what “justice” means in terms of disability on a local and transnational scale.

Image Credit: The Accessible Icon is owned by Triangle, Inc. and was created by Sara Hendren & Brian Glenney. More info available at http://www.accessibleicon.org

Imagines Mundi: The Global Middle Ages

Coordinators: Ashley Cook (Art History), Lisa Cooper (English), Tom Dale (Art History), Samuel England (African Languages and Literature), Elizabeth Lapina (History), Jennifer Pruitt (Art History), Jelena Todorovic (Italian), Marion Vuagnoux (French), André Wink (History), Jordan Zweck (English)

The popular conception of the medieval world is often one of insularity and isolation, but nothing could be further from the truth. Pilgrims, princes, crusaders, doctors, merchants, monks, and artists—all these knew that the world they lived in was a vast and far-flung network of persons, places and things. Traces of frequent and ongoing cross-cultural encounter in the Middle Ages abound: in encyclopedias, chronicles, and universal histories; in treatises of science and medicine; in literary texts; in works of art and architecture; and of course in maps and travel narratives of many kinds. Indeed, even as we speak with increasing frequency about our current moment as an era of globalization, the Middle Ages—roughly the thousand years between c. 500–1500—have themselves never seemed more urgently global. England to Egypt, Rome to Russia, Constantinople to China, Iceland to India, Jerusalem to Jakarta, Paris to Persia: scholars of the period have for the last decade and more increasingly turned their attention to the ways international communication, commercial exchange, religious mission, and military conquest created deep connections as well as equally deep fissures throughout the era, in ways that continue to shape political and social structures around the world today. Where literary scholars have brought postcolonial theory to bear on wide range of medieval texts, especially those produced in the wake of the conquest of England in 1066 and during the several centuries of the Crusades, art historians have explored the shared visual culture linking European Christian, Islamic and Byzantine courts, producing a new field of study in what is now regularly referred to as the “global Mediterranean,” while historians of science have uncovered the complex and extensive reception of Greek and Islamic science and medicine in western Europe (and these are just a few examples among many).

Without losing sight of the particularities of human experience in lands separated by very different systems of language, politics, culture, and religious belief, this workshop seeks to join this ongoing conversation, and explore what it means to think the medieval as/in a global context, and to ask how doing so may (and also may not) add to the current global turn in the humanities and social sciences.

Perception & Cognition

Coordinators: Gary Lupyan (Psychology), Farid Masrour (Philosophy), Gregory Nirshberg (Philosophy), Ashley Wendorf (Psychology)

Many scientists and philosophers assume a sharp dichotomy between perception on the one hand and cognition on the other hand. A popular model is that perceptual capacities are simple capacities that we share with animals. Upon perceptual contact with the world, these capacities give rise to perceptual processes that are inherently bottom-up and happen in modules that are largely encapsulated from cognitive influence. Cognition, on the other hand, is often equated with a rational mental activity whose manifestations include belief formation, reasoning, and problem solving. The modularist view stands in opposition to a rival view according to which perception emerges at the level of the interplay between top-down cognitive and bottom-up sensory factors. Proponents of this view argue that a complete understanding of perception requires understanding how it interacts with knowledge, expectations and context.

The debate between modularists and their rivals has played a significant role in shaping scientific and philosophical theorizing about perception. Despite this significant role however, the debates in these disciplines have proceeded in a relatively isolated fashion. The main goal of the Borghesi-Mellon Workshop on Perception and Cognition is to jumpstart this dialogue by creating an extended interdisciplinary workshop that brings faculty, post-docs, and graduate students in the Departments of Psychology and Philosophy together, along with invited researchers outside of UW-Madison with influential work on the topic.

Post-colonial Consciousness: Representations of China in Africa

Coordinators: Allen Xiao (Geography), Edward Friedman (Political Science), Kevin Wamalwa (African Languages and Literature), Yingxin Gao (English), Christa Berce (History)

The “China in Africa” Workshop seeks to arouse public concerns on current African development and demystify the rise of Chinese global power. By inviting a wide range of speakers across the globe, we succeeded to shed light on how the discourses of “China in Africa” are differently represented by academics, media, and politicians and in deconstructing what lies behind these representations as they relate to post-colonial consciousness and neo-colonial agendas. Moreover, extensive interactions between the guest speakers and UW faculties and students enhance UW’s engagements with the frontier of emerging China-Africa studies.

Sound Studies

Coordinators: Andrew Bottomley (Communication Arts), Craig Eley (Wisconsin Public Radio), Lisa Hollenbach (English), Joseph Koykkar (Dance), Jeremy Morris (Communication Arts), Erica Zhang (English)

While sound has sometimes taken a secondary role to the “visual paradigm” that has dominated the humanities, sound studies has not­-so-­quietly emerged as a vibrant field providing innovative analytical tools and conceptual frameworks for dealing with and studying sound. From public problems such as noise pollution and environmental soundscape preservation to the cognitive and perceptual ways sound shapes and transforms human experience, sound and music are part of the fabric of everyday life. Tuning our attention to sound opens up new ways of doing history, understanding media, conceptualizing performance/identity, and analyzing contemporary social, political, and artistic processes. Like sound itself, the study of sound respects no boundaries and transgresses academic divisions and theoretical paradigms.

Not limited to the academy, sound studies has explicitly welcomed the work of musicians, radio producers, conceptual artists, scientists, and technologists working with and through sound. Given the transdisciplinary “sonic turn” taking place in the humanities, this timely workshop serves to connect the disparate work on sound taking place at UW and beyond, providing a kind of signal tower for the creation, collection, and dissemination of sound ideas, resources and practices.

2014-2015 Workshops

Ancient Republics: An International Workshop

Coordinators: Emily Fletcher (Philosophy), Adrienne Hagen (Classics), Daniel Kapust (Political Science), Grant Nelsestuen (Classics)

“Republicanism” has become an increasingly important area of inquiry for a variety of academic fields, but what do we exactly mean when we speak of the ancient “republic”? This series of international workshops seeks to establish a basis for investigation into this question by pursuing ancient republics of the Mediterranean and Near Eastern worlds, republicanism, and the “political sphere” (res publica) from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, including classics, history, material culture, philosophy, and political theory. It seeks (a) to understand the broader historical contexts for the ancient republic, including the relationship with other related ancient forms of civic governance and regimes; (b) to develop the institutional frameworks of ancient republics (imagined and real), including the roles that education, offices and magistracies, assemblies, law, and the courts played in their design and expression; and (c) to provide an account of the significance of ancient republics for early modern and modern approaches to philosophy, political theory, and ethics, especially in so-called “republicanism” as developed by Skinner and Pettit and “civic humanism” as formulated by Arendt and Rahe.

The workshop at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, which is the second of three installments and will be held in late Spring of 2015, focuses on the Roman Republic, the modalities of its jurisprudence, and its theoretical, intellectual, and cultural underpinnings . The first installment will be held at Durham University, Durham, UK (in November 2014) and will focus on republics and related forms of government in ancient Greece and the Near East, while the third will take place at the University of California-San Diego (projected for late 2015-early 2016) and will consider the value of the previous discussions for modern philosophical and theoretical approaches to “republicanism” and “humanism.” The workshop will itself benefit from a mixed constitution, with a portion devoted to individual presentations related to the assigned topics, and another portion devoted to group reading and discussion of selected ancient Greek and Roman texts, including some not often discussed in the context of republics and republicanism.

Art and Scholarship, in Theory and Practice

Coordinators: Katie Schaag (English), Andrew Salyer (Art/Theatre), Jon McKenzie (English), Jill H. Casid (Art History)

Inspired by artist-scholars such as Anne Carson, Ann Hamilton, Fred Moten, Adrian Piper, and Avital Ronell, the Art and Scholarship Borghesi-Mellon Workshop is committed to investigating, inventing, and paying attention to unexpected possibilities in the praxis of scholarly research and artistic production. At the heart of our intellectual inquiry is creative experimentation—sensory perception, visual rhetoric, performative scholarship, serious play. When and how is knowledge-production a creative act? How can art theorize? What intersections do we notice between creative writing and scholarly writing? We are captivated by the conceptual and aesthetic force of such hybrid forms as autoethnography, photo essays, artist books, experimental theory, montage, and conceptual art. View a selection of texts and objects that operate at the interstices of art and scholarship here.

Drawing upon the talents and expertise of our workshop participants – from Literary Studies, Creative Writing, Theatre, Visual Cultures, Art, Design Studies, Library and Information Studies, DesignLab, Cartography Lab, and Wisconsin Institute for Discovery – we plan to curate a series of “Collaboratory” workshops. Facilitating conversations between experimental scholarship, creative writing, performance, new media, digital text, and visualization studies, these Collaboratories will engage a richly interdisciplinary nexus of questions, practices, and possibilities for unsettling generic and medium-specific boundaries. Collaboratories will provide opportunities to engage in collective exploration of playful, creative scholarship through such practices as performance-making, sensory awareness, embodied meditation, freewriting, visualization, text collage, digital remediation, public discourse, and relational aesthetics. We hope to collaboratively produce new conceptual and aesthetic possibilities, acknowledging disciplinary constraints and expectations while conversing about the ways that our research might take on new shapes, reveal assumptions, and prompt unexpected questions.

Maintaining our commitment to the public humanities, we also plan to continue our partnership with The Bubbler at Madison Public Library as well as with Madison Performance Philosophy Collective. Additionally, in the spring semester, we propose to host another open call symposium building upon the model of our Spring 2013 event MAD THEORY. This symposium will provide the workshop participants and the Madison community at large with a dynamic time and space to showcase and discuss a wide range of practices and forms of performative scholarship, artistic research, and critical-creative collaboration.

Disciplining Comics

Coordinators: James Danky (Journalism and Mass Communication), Vanessa Lauber (English), Adam L. Kern (East Asian Languages and Literature), Jon McKenzie (English), Leah Misemer (English)

The Mellon Comics Workshop provides the community of students, scholars, artists, and other interested parties with a shared intellectual space to explore questions about comics broadly defined (bande dessinée, comic books, comic strips, graphic novels, manga, political and editorial cartoons, underground comix, web comics, and myriad other forms of visual-verbal narrative). The primary goal of the workshop is to engage this community in a meaningful dialogue about the intellectual, institutional, and disciplinary challenges confronting the emerging field of Comics Studies in order to evaluate the exciting possibility of launching such a program at UW-Madison.

The central questions for the workshop thus revolve around the challenge of how Comics Studies might best be disciplined: How might Comics Studies avoid the pitfalls encountered by other genre- or media-specific fields in their early stages? How might interconnections with animation, film, literature, and computer games be explored and stimulated? How have such interconnections—particularly in the age of web comics—changed the very notion of comics? Does it make any difference how comics are defined and by whom? How can we map a disciplinary field that is emerging only now? How do comics work within, apart from, and against established literary and artistic canons and academic disciplines? How can the real pedagogical potential of comics (not unlike computer games) be more fully realized? How might educational comics, infographics, and the like be used to communicate with a general audience, to reach at-risk youths, to disseminate important information about public health and safety? How can creating one’s own comics not only provide an expressive voice but augment an intellectual understanding of these issues?

Digital Humanities Research Network

Coordinators: Danielle Albers (Computer Science), Eric Alexander (Computer Science), Joshua Armstrong (French & Italian), Mattie Burkert (English), Catherine Derose (English), Brandee Easter (English), Molly Wright Steenson (Journalism and Mass Communication), Jesse Stommel (Liberal Studies & the Arts), Mark Vareschi (English)

Our group aims to fulfill the need for a centralized digital humanities community on campus by meeting regularly and establishing a shared workspace. In our meetings, we will focus on the processes involved in digitizing, quantifying, and visualizing different types of humanities objects turned data (including printed books, manuscripts, historical records, art, music, films). In addition to opening up new research questions, our group will provide an opportunity for a sustained conversation about the computational and analytical aspects of the digital humanities. Our group will consider the current theories underlying digital methodologies and also discuss, brainstorm, and workshop specific projects at various stages. The overarching questions structuring these meetings are:

  1. What do we mean by “digital humanities”?
  2. What are the implications of these methodologies? More specifically, why should we undertake computational humanities projects, and how do they how alter the cultural artifacts they engage?
  3. How do we implement these approaches into our research and teaching?

Financial Stability and the Public Good University in the 21st Century

Coordinators: Greg Downey (Journalism & Mass Communication and SLIS), Daniel Kleinman (Community and Environmental Sociology), Adam Nelson (Education Policy Studies), Sigrid Peterson (Geography)

The aim of this initiative is to provide a group of current University of Wisconsin-Madison faculty, staff, and graduate students an opportunity to think through the issues at stake as public higher education institutions seek simultaneously to advance a market-oriented income-generation agenda and maintain an institutional profile consistent with a commitment to the public good. This workshop will not only allow a group of members of the UW-Madison community an opportunity to read relevant scholarship and topical material from a wide array of fields and discuss it with colleagues, but also to build a network of people on campus who have considered the issues at stake for the future of public higher education and are positioned to provide informed input in discussions about the future of the UW-Madison.

Imagines Mundi: The Global Middle Ages

Coordinators: Ashley Cook (Art History), Lisa Cooper (English), Elizabeth Lapina (History), Jennifer Pruitt (Art History), Jelena Todorovic (Italian), Marion Vuagnoux (French), André Wink (History), Jordan Zweck (English)

The popular conception of the medieval world is often one of insularity and isolation, but nothing could be further from the truth. Pilgrims, princes, crusaders, doctors, merchants, monks, and artists—all these knew that the world they lived in was a vast and far-flung network of persons, places and things. Traces of frequent and ongoing cross-cultural encounter in the Middle Ages abound: in encyclopedias, chronicles, and universal histories; in treatises of science and medicine; in literary texts; in works of art and architecture; and of course in maps and travel narratives of many kinds. Indeed, even as we speak with increasing frequency about our current moment as an era of globalization, the Middle Ages—roughly the thousand years between c. 500–1500—have themselves never seemed more urgently global. England to Egypt, Rome to Russia, Constantinople to China, Iceland to India, Jerusalem to Jakarta, Paris to Persia: scholars of the period have for the last decade and more increasingly turned their attention to the ways international communication, commercial exchange, religious mission, and military conquest created deep connections as well as equally deep fissures throughout the era, in ways that continue to shape political and social structures around the world today. Where literary scholars have brought postcolonial theory to bear on wide range of medieval texts, especially those produced in the wake of the conquest of England in 1066 and during the several centuries of the Crusades, art historians have explored the shared visual culture linking European Christian, Islamic and Byzantine courts, producing a new field of study in what is now regularly referred to as the “global Mediterranean,” while historians of science have uncovered the complex and extensive reception of Greek and Islamic science and medicine in western Europe (and these are just a few examples among many).

Immaterial Labor and the University in Crisis

Coordinators: Lenora Hanson (English), Megan Massino (English), Elsa Noterman (Geography), Jonathan Senchyne (School of Library and Information Studies), Keith Woodward (Geography)

The Immaterial Labor workshop continues to explore emerging currents within scholarship and political organizing that respond to the university within the context of neoliberalism, or through the lens of what Sheila Slaughter and Gary Rhoades have termed “academic capitalism.” We seek a cross-campus conversation that is attentive to the broad consequences of recent political and social transformations that have been crystallized in struggles over higher education: financial crises and austerity cuts, new forms of political protest, the economic value of immaterial labor within and beyond campus, and the increasing privatization of public goods.

The workshop will seek to better understand how the university of today increasingly insures its future through similar speculative financial practices that proved so destructive in the most recent economic crisis. This year the workshop will be convened as a collaborative research project that analyzes the university’s relationship to economic crisis through the lens of financialization. We turn our focus to understanding and mapping our university’s speculative practices and its impact on the larger community of Madison and the Midwest, asking how these practices influence decisions about resource distribution and austerity measures at our own institution. We will ask how this trend has materialized in high-cost construction projects that are subsidized by skyrocketing tuition increases and student debt, as well as inquire into the escalation of administrative bloat and attempts to make technology transfer to the private market faster and more profitable. What are the costs to university workers, students and families, and the racial, sexual, and class diversity of public universities when they increasingly pursue privatized funding and a corporate model of wage distribution and property rights? And how does their greater reliance on private funds shape the way that university’s allocate, invest, and also imagine their resources?

2013-2014 Workshops

Art and Scholarship, in Theory and Practice

Coordinators: Katie Schaag (English), Andrew Salyer (Art/Theatre), Jon McKenzie (English), Jill H. Casid (Art History)

Inspired by artist-scholars such as Anne Carson, Ann Hamilton, Fred Moten, Adrian Piper, and Avital Ronell, the Art and Scholarship Borghesi-Mellon Workshop is committed to investigating, inventing, and paying attention to unexpected possibilities in the praxis of scholarly research and artistic production. At the heart of our intellectual inquiry is creative experimentation—sensory perception, visual rhetoric, performative scholarship, serious play. When and how is knowledge-production a creative act? How can art theorize? What intersections do we notice between creative writing and scholarly writing? We are captivated by the conceptual and aesthetic force of such hybrid forms as autoethnography, photo essays, artist books, experimental theory, montage, and conceptual art. View a selection of texts and objects that operate at the interstices of art and scholarship here.

Drawing upon the talents and expertise of our workshop participants – from Literary Studies, Creative Writing, Theatre, Visual Cultures, Art, Design Studies, Library and Information Studies, DesignLab, Cartography Lab, and Wisconsin Institute for Discovery – we plan to curate a series of “Collaboratory” workshops. Facilitating conversations between experimental scholarship, creative writing, performance, new media, digital text, and visualization studies, these Collaboratories will engage a richly interdisciplinary nexus of questions, practices, and possibilities for unsettling generic and medium-specific boundaries. Collaboratories will provide opportunities to engage in collective exploration of playful, creative scholarship through such practices as performance-making, sensory awareness, embodied meditation, freewriting, visualization, text collage, digital remediation, public discourse, and relational aesthetics. We hope to collaboratively produce new conceptual and aesthetic possibilities, acknowledging disciplinary constraints and expectations while conversing about the ways that our research might take on new shapes, reveal assumptions, and prompt unexpected questions.

Maintaining our commitment to the public humanities, we also plan to continue our partnership with The Bubbler at Madison Public Library as well as with Madison Performance Philosophy Collective. Additionally, in the spring semester, we propose to host another open call symposium building upon the model of our Spring 2013 event MAD THEORY. This symposium will provide the workshop participants and the Madison community at large with a dynamic time and space to showcase and discuss a wide range of practices and forms of performative scholarship, artistic research, and critical-creative collaboration.

Comics

Coordinators: James Danky (Journalism and Mass Communication), Jessica Gross (Comparative Literature), Adam L. Kern (East Asian Languages and Literature), Vanessa Lauber (English), Jon McKenzie (English), Leah Misemer (English), Tejumola Olaniyan (African Languages & Literature)

Comics have long been an important part of popular culture in many areas of the world, and over the last few decades they have become increasingly important in academia as well. The A. W. Mellon Comics Workshop takes a transdisciplinary approach to the study of comics and its aim is to yield rich, new understandings of comics. Our meetings center around shared primary and theoretical readings about comics (posted on our website) and around talks given by comics artists, political cartoonists, industry experts, and researchers and scholars who study comics. We welcome all interested members of the UW-Madison and Madison communities to take part in these conversations.

Following are central questions for the workshop:

  • What are comics? Does it make any difference how they are defined, and by whom?
  • How do comics work as a hybrid form (words and images) differently from other narrative forms? How does the medium (e.g. digital vs. print) affect the production and reception of comics as well as access?
  • How do comics work within, apart from, and against established literary and artistic canons and academic disciplines? In what ways are these relationships shifting in our present moment?
  • How can the pedagogical potential of comics (like video games) be more fully realized?
  • How do comics not only treat but also affect the collective understanding of grave issues such as war, genocide, death, memory, and history?
  • What is the relationship between individualism and collaboration in comics by single and collaborative creators?
  • How do graphic and narrative conventions of comics differ among cultures and genres (for example, Japanese manga, Franco-Belge bande dessinée, and American superhero comics)?
  • How can creating our own comics by hand or by any number of on-line programs augment our intellectual understanding of these issues?

New Media and Mass/Popular Culture in the Global South

Coordinators: Matthew H. Brown (African Languages & Literature), Victor Goldgel-Carballo (Spanish & Portuguese), Paola Hernandez (Spanish & Portuguese), Darien Lamen (Music), Viren Murthy (History), John Nimis (African Languages & Literature), Fernanda Villarroel (Cultural Anthropology)

Forms of mass popular culture shape the daily lives of the majority of the world’s citizens. Television, popular music, video and film, and the Internet are powerful forces of cultural cohesion, sources of local narratives of identity, subjectivity, and community, and enable connections across national boundaries and between continents. This research group will focus on the many cultural forms that are produced in parts of the world that are often considered “peripheral” in dominant narratives of globalization and post-modernity, and the ways they imagine themselves as part of a larger global community and political economy, especially through modern technological platforms.

Key questions include these: How do various cultures in the global south conceptualize, speak to, and speak about the “world”? How do historical differences in political and economic structures lead groups to use media differently? How do historical similarities produce affinities? How does circulation, especially direct south-south connections that leave the putative global “centers” in the North out of the conversation, influence different cultures? How is new media used to dispel the idea that they are passive recipients of cultural imperialism emanating from the Global North? How are concepts such as “media,” “the new,” or “popular” conceived in the Global South?

World Literature/s Research

Coordinators: B. Venkat Mani (German), Ellen W. Sapega (Spanish & Portuguese), Ernesto Livorni (French & Italian), Caroline Levine (English), Karolina May-Chu (German)

The World Literature/s Research Workshop aims to identify and explore the distinctions, implications, and the tensions underlying the conceptualization of “World Literature/s” – in singularity and plurality. Along with promoting new research in the field through a dialogue across departments of literature, the workshop seeks to facilitate pedagogical innovations in both graduate and undergraduate curricula at UW-Madison.

Immaterial Labor and the University in Crisis

Coordinators: Lenora Hanson (English), Megan Massino (English), Elsa Noterman (Geography), Jonathan Senchyne (School of Library and Information Studies), Keith Woodward (Geography)

The Immaterial Labor workshop continues to explore emerging currents within scholarship and political organizing that respond to the university within the context of neoliberalism, or through the lens of what Sheila Slaughter and Gary Rhoades have termed “academic capitalism.” We seek a cross-campus conversation that is attentive to the broad consequences of recent political and social transformations that have been crystallized in struggles over higher education: financial crises and austerity cuts, new forms of political protest, the economic value of immaterial labor within and beyond campus, and the increasing privatization of public goods.

The workshop will seek to better understand how the university of today increasingly insures its future through similar speculative financial practices that proved so destructive in the most recent economic crisis. This year the workshop will be convened as a collaborative research project that analyzes the university’s relationship to economic crisis through the lens of financialization. We turn our focus to understanding and mapping our university’s speculative practices and its impact on the larger community of Madison and the Midwest, asking how these practices influence decisions about resource distribution and austerity measures at our own institution. We will ask how this trend has materialized in high-cost construction projects that are subsidized by skyrocketing tuition increases and student debt, as well as inquire into the escalation of administrative bloat and attempts to make technology transfer to the private market faster and more profitable. What are the costs to university workers, students and families, and the racial, sexual, and class diversity of public universities when they increasingly pursue privatized funding and a corporate model of wage distribution and property rights? And how does their greater reliance on private funds shape the way that university’s allocate, invest, and also imagine their resources?

Translation and Transformation: Transfer Processes across Languages, Media, and Culture

Coordinators: Jack Davis (German), Sabine Gross (German), Ana Lincoln (English), Ernesto Livorni (French and Italian, Comparative Literature), Lynn Nyhart (History of Science)

Translation – Transposition – Transfer – Transformation: these terms overlap without being synonymous, and the relationships among them provide a substratum for the individual meetings of this workshop. They designate processes among languages, discourses, forms of knowledge, cultures, and media that collectively help shape and define such broad concepts as transnationality and globalism, but also artistic and sensory forms of intermediality. Not least, they can crucially determine the “fine grain” of textual form.

Workshop sessions will have a different balance of general/theoretical and specific/hands-on components depending on the individual topic, texts, or guests,and emphases will include linguistic, medial, semiotic, and sensory-perceptual forms of transfer. The outer horizon included in our discussions will be intranslatability and the limits of transferability.

The Workshop will be a forum for faculty and graduate students across the humanities with an interest in translation, broadly defined, both in the area of language/literature/culture and extending to the visual and performing arts and media. In general, meetings will include theoretical and methodological reflection, but also have a strong focus on concrete analysis and “nuts and bolts” discussion of a variety of specific texts (broadly defined as written/visual/multi-sensory/medial artifacts) and examples.

Guilt

Coordinators: Claudia Card (Philosophy), Ralph Grünewald (Comparative Literature), Anne Helke (Comparative Literature and Folklore Studies), Mike Koenigs (Psychiatry)

What is guilt? Although we usually think of guilt as a legal phenomenon, it has many multidisciplinary connotations. Guilt is variously discussed as a philosophical, ethical, or social question, and differently addressed in literary, psychological, or religious contexts. Guilt is an emotion humans experience and a topic that is at the core of many fact-based or fictitious narratives of human agency. In this workshop faculty, staff, and students from the humanities and the sciences will assess and dismantle the concept of guilt and its theoretical foundations. We will look at the validity of the conventional understanding of mens rea (blameworthiness, a “guilty mind”) and review the status of the free will discussion. We also plan to address the philosophical and religious side of guilt and ask whether something like “natural evil” or natural or inherited guilt exists and how, for example, societies deal with collective guilt (as with the Holocaust). But we will also look at guilt as a concept that changes over time and explore guilt in light of current developments in neurosciences, wrongful convictions, and social media.

Over the last decade, with new insights from the sciences, our understanding of guilt has changed dramatically. Through brain imaging we know better than ever before to which degree and if at all “free will” exists in human behavior. Through DNA, now a standard tool in forensic science, hundreds of wrongfully convicted persons could be freed from prison. At the same time we realize that spheres like social media are not free of “guilt” in the sense that the cyberspace has become an instrument to commit deviant acts (e.g. “Cyberbullying”) but is also a way to participate in deviance without much personal involvement. What implications do these modern developments have on our understanding of guilt in the (criminal) justice system? Where do we move from this changed understanding of accountability in general? Maybe guilt itself is not as important as what it is used for–initiating forgiveness or reintegration, as a foundation for punishment, or as a cornerstone for building new communities. The speakers that confirmed their involvement in the workshop are all leading scholars and scientists in their fields and will be able to address many of the issues that are mentioned above. This workshop is inclusive of all disciplines because the organizers believe that only through an open and interdisciplinary discussion and investigation will we be able to develop a contemporary and comprehensive understanding of guilt and its implications.

2012-2013 Workshops

Accessing the Intersections: Disability, Race, + Gender

Coordinators: Ellen Samuels (English, Gender & Women’s Studies), Jenell Johnson (Communication Arts), Cathy Trueba (McBurney Disability Resource Center), Elisabeth Miller (English), Anna Vitale (English)

“….How do we make the space to talk honestly and wrenchingly about all the multi-layered systems of injustice that target some of us and privilege others for who we are? The layers are so tangled: gender folds into disability, disability wraps around class, class strains against race, race snarls into sexuality, sexuality hangs onto gender, all of it finally piling into our bodies.” – Eli Clare, “Digging Deep: Thinking About Privilege”

Accessing the Intersections: disability, race + gender brings together major scholars and artists from the field of disability studies to the UW-Madison campus to present new research and creative works addressing the intersections between dis/ability, race, gender, sexuality and nationhood. Such intersections are increasingly being understood as central to conversations about such broad issues as globalization, human rights, education, reproductive justice, health promotion, economic development, and the environment. Since the adoption of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of People with Disabilities in 2006, which has now been signed by 147 nations and ratified by nearly 100, disability has emerged as a central concern on the global stage. The UN estimates that there are 650 million persons living with disabilities in the world today, and many studies show that women and girls with disabilities face significantly more difficulties in accessing housing, health, education, vocational training and employment, as well as being more likely to be institutionalized and to experience violence. By bringing together perspectives from many different sides of disability experience, locations in the university, and organizations in the community, Accessing the Intersections will position the University of Wisconsin as a leading voice in a vibrant and expanding conversation about disability rights, representations, and directions for the future.

Animal Studies

Coordinators: Mario Ortiz-Robles (English), Jennifer Conrad (English)

The purpose of the A.W. Mellon Workshop in Animal Studies is to engage faculty, graduate and undergraduate students in the rapidly emerging field of inquiry, to foster a re-conceptualization of the humanities, and to contribute to scholarly exchange across traditionally separate knowledge domains. The focus on the animal as an object of study raises important theoretical and methodological questions that pertain to the humanities as a whole and their role in higher education as well as in the broader context of knowledge production. Whether the aim is to expose the exploitation of animals by humans, to advocate for their welfare, to determine the philosophical status of the animal, or to trace the historical emergence of biopolitics to the animality of the human, animal studies asks us to reflect on the intellectual, ethical, and political implications of our inevitable anthropocentrism. In addressing questions of social agency and the moral, political, and institutional status of the animal, the workshop thus seeks to become a site for reflection and engagement on such topics as: a) animal-human representations; b) animal rights and animal welfare; c) evolution and its social applications; d) environmental history; and e) biopolitics. By directing our critical attention to the study of non-human animals, we will seek to re-evaluate the humanism of the humanities and thus to pave the way for new forms of collaboration and interdisciplinary inquiry within the university.

Lived Inquiry: Anthropologies of the Intellect

Coordinators: Hunter Martin (History), Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen (History), Richard Staley (History of Science), with Florence Hsia (History of Science) and Claire Wendland (Anthropology)

We wish to renew the engagement between history, literature, anthropology and other disciplines by developing a research collective in which we think about thinking. Our pursuit is organized around three independent but interrelated themes that are widely accessible to diverse groups around campus, but that collectively will help orient the new research of a core group of scholars who engage all three themes related to “lived inquiry” in historical, literary/artistic, and anthropological perspective:

Intellectual History (Fall 2010) The mind in motion, to be led by an artist’s creative scholarship (Spring 2011) Knowledge and performance, to be directed by anthropological inquiry (Fall 2011) Lines and lives, a day long symposium (Spring 2012)

Each will be pursued separately over an entire semester, through a program of readings and a public lecture open to a broad audience. Explored over consecutive semesters, these themes will also build common ground for discussion and workshop participation amongst those members of the campus community who can see ways of developing some aspect of their own research in creative conversation with the overarching topic. (Do you have an idea you would like to pursue, a paper, dissertation chapter, or project that engages these themes?) A workshop in Spring 2012 will draw together the work carried out, and may provide the basis for a collected volume.

New Media and Mass/Popular Culture in the Global South

Coordinators: Matthew H. Brown (African Languages & Literature), Victor Goldgel-Carballo (Spanish & Portuguese), Paola Hernandez (Spanish & Portuguese), Darien Lamen (Music), Viren Murthy (History), John Nimis (African Languages & Literature), Fernanda Villarroel (Cultural Anthropology)

Forms of mass popular culture shape the daily lives of the majority of the world’s citizens. Television, popular music, video and film, and the Internet are powerful forces of cultural cohesion, sources of local narratives of identity, subjectivity, and community, and enable connections across national boundaries and between continents. This research group will focus on the many cultural forms that are produced in parts of the world that are often considered “peripheral” in dominant narratives of globalization and post-modernity, and the ways they imagine themselves as part of a larger global community and political economy, especially through modern technological platforms.

Key questions include these: How do various cultures in the global south conceptualize, speak to, and speak about the “world”? How do historical differences in political and economic structures lead groups to use media differently? How do historical similarities produce affinities? How does circulation, especially direct south-south connections that leave the putative global “centers” in the North out of the conversation, influence different cultures? How is new media used to dispel the idea that they are passive recipients of cultural imperialism emanating from the Global North? How are concepts such as “media,” “the new,” or “popular” conceived in the Global South?

World Literature/s Research

Coordinators: B. Venkat Mani (German), Ellen W. Sapega (Spanish & Portuguese), Ernesto Livorni (French & Italian), Caroline Levine (English), Karolina May-Chu (German)

The World Literature/s Research Workshop aims to identify and explore the distinctions, implications, and the tensions underlying the conceptualization of “World Literature/s” – in singularity and plurality. Along with promoting new research in the field through a dialogue across departments of literature, the workshop seeks to facilitate pedagogical innovations in both graduate and undergraduate curricula at UW-Madison.

Immaterial Labor and the University in Crisis

Coordinators: Lenora Hanson (English), Megan Massino (English), Elsa Noterman (Geography), Jonathan Senchyne (School of Library and Information Studies), Keith Woodward (Geography)

Now in its third year, the Immaterial Labor workshop continues to explore emerging currents within scholarship and political organizing that respond to the university within the context of neoliberalism, or through the lens of what Sheila Slaughter and Gary Rhoades have termed “academic capitalism.” We seek a cross-campus conversation that is attentive to the broad consequences of recent political and social transformations that have been crystallized in struggles over higher education: financial crises and austerity cuts, new forms of political protest, the economic value of immaterial labor within and beyond campus, and the increasing privatization of public goods.

The 2014-15 workshop will seek to better understand how the university of today increasingly insures its future through similar speculative financial practices that proved so destructive in the most recent economic crisis. This year the workshop will be convened as a collaborative research project that analyzes the university’s relationship to economic crisis through the lens of financialization. We turn our focus to understanding and mapping our university’s speculative practices and its impact on the larger community of Madison and the Midwest, asking how these practices influence decisions about resource distribution and austerity measures at our own institution. We will ask how this trend has materialized in high-cost construction projects that are subsidized by skyrocketing tuition increases and student debt, as well as inquire into the escalation of administrative bloat and attempts to make technology transfer to the private market faster and more profitable. What are the costs to university workers, students and families, and the racial, sexual, and class diversity of public universities when they increasingly pursue privatized funding and a corporate model of wage distribution and property rights? And how does their greater reliance on private funds shape the way that university’s allocate, invest, and also imagine their resources?

Translation and Transformation: Transfer Processes across Languages, Media, and Culture

Coordinators: Jack Davis (German), Sabine Gross (German), Ana Lincoln (English), Ernesto Livorni (French and Italian, Comparative Literature), Lynn Nyhart (History of Science)

Translation – Transposition – Transfer – Transformation: these terms overlap without being synonymous, and the relationships among them provide a substratum for the individual meetings of this workshop. They designate processes among languages, discourses, forms of knowledge, cultures, and media that collectively help shape and define such broad concepts as transnationality and globalism, but also artistic and sensory forms of intermediality. Not least, they can crucially determine the “fine grain” of textual form.

Workshop sessions will have a different balance of general/theoretical and specific/hands-on components depending on the individual topic, texts, or guests,and emphases will include linguistic, medial, semiotic, and sensory-perceptual forms of transfer. The outer horizon included in our discussions will be intranslatability and the limits of transferability.

The Workshop will be a forum for faculty and graduate students across the humanities with an interest in translation, broadly defined, both in the area of language/literature/culture and extending to the visual and performing arts and media. In general, meetings will include theoretical and methodological reflection, but also have a strong focus on concrete analysis and “nuts and bolts” discussion of a variety of specific texts (broadly defined as written/visual/multi-sensory/medial artifacts) and examples.

2011-2012 Workshops

Accessing the Intersections: Disability, Race, + Gender

Coordinators: Ellen Samuels (English, Gender & Women’s Studies), Jenell Johnson (Communication Arts), Cathy Trueba (McBurney Disability Resource Center), Elisabeth Miller (English), Anna Vitale (English)

“….How do we make the space to talk honestly and wrenchingly about all the multi-layered systems of injustice that target some of us and privilege others for who we are? The layers are so tangled: gender folds into disability, disability wraps around class, class strains against race, race snarls into sexuality, sexuality hangs onto gender, all of it finally piling into our bodies.” – Eli Clare, “Digging Deep: Thinking About Privilege”

Accessing the Intersections: disability, race + gender brings together major scholars and artists from the field of disability studies to the UW-Madison campus to present new research and creative works addressing the intersections between dis/ability, race, gender, sexuality and nationhood. Such intersections are increasingly being understood as central to conversations about such broad issues as globalization, human rights, education, reproductive justice, health promotion, economic development, and the environment. Since the adoption of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of People with Disabilities in 2006, which has now been signed by 147 nations and ratified by nearly 100, disability has emerged as a central concern on the global stage. The UN estimates that there are 650 million persons living with disabilities in the world today, and many studies show that women and girls with disabilities face significantly more difficulties in accessing housing, health, education, vocational training and employment, as well as being more likely to be institutionalized and to experience violence. By bringing together perspectives from many different sides of disability experience, locations in the university, and organizations in the community, Accessing the Intersections will position the University of Wisconsin as a leading voice in a vibrant and expanding conversation about disability rights, representations, and directions for the future.

Aesthetic Relations

Coordinators: Laurie Beth Clark (Art) and Michael Peterson (Theatre and Drama)

The Aesthetic Relations Mellon Workshop explores the kinds of relations that occur around aesthetic objects or in aesthetic contexts–or rather, it explores the ways the humanities have described, critiqued and proscribed aesthetic relations. The “exchange values” in contemporary relationships between creative artists and those who engage with their work are multiplicitous and hardly confined to commerce. While “cultural capital” often has financial value, its acquisition is almost always part of an ensemble of aesthetic relations. “Aesthetic relations” incorporates all the phenomenal experiences and bio-political encounters that form around human creativity.

Animal Studies

Coordinators: Mario Ortiz-Robles (English), Jennifer Conrad (English)

The purpose of the A.W. Mellon Workshop in Animal Studies is to engage faculty, graduate and undergraduate students in the rapidly emerging field of inquiry, to foster a re-conceptualization of the humanities, and to contribute to scholarly exchange across traditionally separate knowledge domains. The focus on the animal as an object of study raises important theoretical and methodological questions that pertain to the humanities as a whole and their role in higher education as well as in the broader context of knowledge production. Whether the aim is to expose the exploitation of animals by humans, to advocate for their welfare, to determine the philosophical status of the animal, or to trace the historical emergence of biopolitics to the animality of the human, animal studies asks us to reflect on the intellectual, ethical, and political implications of our inevitable anthropocentrism. In addressing questions of social agency and the moral, political, and institutional status of the animal, the workshop thus seeks to become a site for reflection and engagement on such topics as: a) animal-human representations; b) animal rights and animal welfare; c) evolution and its social applications; d) environmental history; and e) biopolitics. By directing our critical attention to the study of non-human animals, we will seek to re-evaluate the humanism of the humanities and thus to pave the way for new forms of collaboration and interdisciplinary inquiry within the university.

Comparative Religious Law

Coordinators: Don Davis (Languages & Cultures of Asia) and Jordan Rosenblum (Hebrew & Semitic Studies)

It would seem that law and religion would encompass a very large set of interdisciplinary questions and problems in the humanities. In practice, this subfield has more limited focal points that either reduce broader complexities of law and religion to Church-State issues, assume that our world is fully disenchanted and demythologized, or, by contrast, concentrate on safeguarding religious freedom in legal contexts. Lost in most of this scholarship are the sophisticated and historically significant traditions of religious law that have shaped most legal systems around the world. More specifically, law and religion assumes two stable human institutions and tries to study their connections. Religious law, by contrast, assumes a near indistinguishability of these separated entities and begins from conceptual foundations that challenge “natural” categories such as religion, law, ethics, time, state, and rights by focusing instead on revelation, ritual, eternity, community, and obligation. Still, the very idea of comparative religious law is, therefore, almost wholly unheard of.

The faculty and students in this workshop represent major traditions of religious law that cover the globe and span the historical record. We consider religious law to be an important and neglected area of the wider field of law and religion – one that has a unique integrity and that begs for comparative research in order to illuminate both the thematic and the historical connections between traditions. In particular, the significance of religious law for the humanities must be underscored. Politicians, policymakers, and lawyers often write religious law off as hopelessly backward, always in need of reform, restriction, and rejection. Our workshop is not intended at all as some sort of advocacy group, but we would contend that the history of law and religion is inescapably bound up with religious law and that modern legal systems suffer from certain blind-spots precisely because of their structural and pscyhological commitments to deny their historical and continuing connections to religious laws. At the same time, we recognize and intend to explore ways in which religious law has been and can be used for exploitative and oppressive purposes.

Among the questions that a study of religious law enables are: How can sustainable disagreement be a desirable mode of reason and a telos of hermeneutics? Why is the metaphor of ritual still a useful one to understand the place of law in ordinary life? How do we understand normativity and authority outside the institutions and imaginings of the nation-state? How does law serve as a thisworldly theology that provides meaning for human action? What is law’s power in the domain of ethical self-formation and how do we safeguard against law’s totalizing tendencies? Can comparative religious law help to develop legal structures that do not depend on the structural violence of state law? On top of these questions, there are, of course, a host of important issues raised by the continuing and contemporary presence of religious laws both as part of and in competition with state-based laws. How have new media affected the communication of and interpretations of religious law? What are the advantages, but also the limits, of religious law for the preservation of identity and the development of a thriving, but not chaotic, pluralism in the public sphere? How are governments positively incorporating religious laws into state legal structures or, conversely, manipulating religious law authority systems for political ends?

Corpus: Premodern Books and Bodies

Coordinators: Kellie Robertson (English) and Lisa Cooper (English)

The body is a thing among things. -Maurice Merleau-Ponty

This workshop seeks to reassess the twin legacies of body studies and materialism as they have shaped and reshaped disciplinary boundaries in medieval and early modern studies over the past two decades, as well as to think about where work on premodern bodies may go from here. In returning to the “premodern” not as a static originary point against which the modern body can be read, but as a construction based on a different understanding of the human-nature divide, this workshop asks where an interdisciplinary approach can take us after three decades of work on the body that has been based primarily inside the categories of gender and sexuality. Our point of departure will be the semantic range of the medieval Latin term corpus, a word whose double valence—physical body and textual collection—presages recent critical concern with the thin line between body and representation. Recent work in disability studies, book history, the history of medicine, legal studies, as well as art and architectural history have suggested that other focalizers may offer new perspectives upon what it means to textualize the body or to embody texts in daily praxis. The goal of the workshop will be to bring in speakers whose work on the premodern body seeks new understandings of how bodily boundaries relate to ethical boundaries as well as to publicize the large amount of work in this vein currently being undertaken by UW-Madison faculty and graduate students across many disciplines.

Lived Inquiry: Anthropologies of the Intellect

Coordinators: Hunter Martin (History), Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen (History), Richard Staley (History of Science), with Florence Hsia (History of Science) and Claire Wendland (Anthropology)

We wish to renew the engagement between history, literature, anthropology and other disciplines by developing a research collective in which we think about thinking. Our pursuit is organized around three independent but interrelated themes that are widely accessible to diverse groups around campus, but that collectively will help orient the new research of a core group of scholars who engage all three themes related to “lived inquiry” in historical, literary/artistic, and anthropological perspective:

Intellectual History (Fall 2010) The mind in motion, to be led by an artist’s creative scholarship (Spring 2011) Knowledge and performance, to be directed by anthropological inquiry (Fall 2011) Lines and lives, a day long symposium (Spring 2012)

Each will be pursued separately over an entire semester, through a program of readings and a public lecture open to a broad audience. Explored over consecutive semesters, these themes will also build common ground for discussion and workshop participation amongst those members of the campus community who can see ways of developing some aspect of their own research in creative conversation with the overarching topic. (Do you have an idea you would like to pursue, a paper, dissertation chapter, or project that engages these themes?) A workshop in Spring 2012 will draw together the work carried out, and may provide the basis for a collected volume.

Science and Print Culture

Both coeval with and perhaps essential to the development of modern science, the history of print culture offers a significant humanist perspective on the history of scientific practices and provides an important context for examining the historical relations between C.P. Snow’s ‘two cultures’. This workshop will pursue related themes in the area of science and print culture from the early to the middle modern era, with an emphasis on exploring practices of producing and reading scientific texts in print, as well as on kinds of scientific publication, especially the scientific periodical and other forms of serialized publication. As a forum for promoting interdisciplinary conversation among graduate students, faculty, and other scholars of literature, history, history of science, history of medicine, communications, and information access, our monthly meetings will include guest lecturers and discussion of pre-circulated readings.

2010-2011 Workshops

  • Athens and Jerusalem
  • Comparative Religious Law
  • Corpus: Premodern Books and Bodies
  • Lived Inquiry: Anthropologies of the Intellect
  • Science and Print Culture
  • Visualities Beyond Ocularcentrism
  • World Literature/s Research

2009-2010 Workshops

  • African Diaspora, Genetics and Genealogy
  • Athens and Jerusalem
  • Corpus: Premodern Books and Bodies
  • Science and Print Culture
  • Visualities Beyond Ocularcentrism

2008-2009 Workshops

  • Line Breaks in the Humanities
  • Science and Print Culture
  • What is the Posthuman?

2007-2008 Workshops

  • Audio Culture in the Visual Era
  • Bodies and the Production of Perversity
  • Freedom and Responsibility
  • Globalization and Human Security
  • On Lyric: Politics Theory & Practice
  • The Time, Poetics, and Ethics of Testimony
  • Trauma Tourism

2006-2007 Workshops

  • Bodies and the Production of Perversity
  • Captives and Castaways
  • The Confucius Seminar
  • Cosmopolitan Cultures/Cosmopolitan Histories
  • Globalization and Human Security Workshop
  • The Good Childhood
  • In the Name of Difficult Words: The Time, Poetics, and Ethics of Testimony
  • Monstrosity and Alterity
  • Powers and Machines in the Early Modern Period
  • Transitions and Transformations in the U.S. Imperial State

2005-2006 Workshops

  • Chernobyl and its Consequences
  • Cosmopolitan Cultures, Cosmopolitan Histories
  • Monstrosity and Alterity
  • Power and Machines in the Early Modern Period

2004-2005 Workshops

  • Adorno and Late Philosophical Modernity
  • Africa in the African Diaspora
  • Chernobyl and its Consequences
  • Empire in Transition
  • Transnational Gender History

2003-2004 Workshops

  • Africa in the African Diaspora
  • Byzantium and the West
  • Empire in Transition: A Cultural and Historical Case Study
  • The Subject of Electronica
  • Transnational Gender History

2002-2003 Workshops

  • Conflicting Cultures: Invention of Modernity in Africa
  • Disability Studies in the Humanities
  • Holocaust and Humanity in the 21st Century
  • Language and the Mind
  • Material Culture: The Ritual(s) of Everyday Life

2001-2002 Workshops

  • Early Modern Studies
  • Holocaust and Humanities in the 21st Century
  • Language and the Mind
  • Museum Worlds
  • The Rituals of Everyday Life: A Material Culture Workshop

2000-2001 Workshops

  • Conflicting Cultures and the Invention of Modernity in Africa
  • Disability Studies in the Humanities
  • The Early Modern Study Group
  • The Ritual(s) of Everyday Life: A Material Culture Workshop
  • Visual Culture Studies