A.W. Mellon Workshops
Now in their thirteenth year, the Center’s A.W. Mellon Foundation workshops are interdisciplinary study/discussion groups centered on a broadly conceived theme. The workshops are designed and led by members of the UW-Madison faculty and/or academic staff and have freedom to define the nature of their activities. Many of the range of activities and programs presented by each workshop are open to UW-Madison faculty, staff, and students. Many larger events are open to the general public.
In 2009, the Mellon Foundation awarded the Center for the Humanities a $125,000 grant to continue these interdisciplinary workshops in the humanities for five more years beginning in 2010-2011. The A.W. Mellon workshops are one of the Center’s most exciting programs, and have led to conferences, books, and teaching innovations.
The Center for the Humanities is pleased to announce the 2013-14 Mellon Workshop lineup, which features three new and three returning workshops. Applications are now closed for 2013-2014 academic year.
2013-2014 Mellon Workshops Announced
The Center for the Humanities is pleased to announce the 2013-14 Mellon Workshop lineup, which features three new (Art and Scholarship, in Theory and in Practice; Comics; and Guilt) and three returning (Labor and the University in Crisis; New Media and the Global South; and T3: Translation and Transformation: Transfer Processes across Languages, Media, and Cultures) workshops.
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Art and Scholarship, in Theory and Practice
This workshop focuses on artistic production and scholarly research as sites of potential rejuvenation for scholarship in the humanities. Taking cues from a range of artists and theorists, this workshop takes up “making things” broadly, and wants to gather others to think through what practices go into creation: the creation of research projects, paintings, lectures, performances, dissertations, dances, and lives.
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Comics
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.
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Guilt
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.
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Immaterial Labor and the University in Crisis
This workshop explores emerging currents within scholarship and political organizing that call into question the neoliberalization of the university and explore its alternatives. Our aim is to engage contemporary theoretical interventions alongside the voices from popular struggle. We seek a cross-campus conversation that is mindful , for example, of the perspectives of the students involved in the 2010-11 University of Puerto Rico strikes, who, recalling the work of Jacques Derrida, sought a Universidad sin condición (“university without condition”) and who further remind us that universities are sites where ‘high’ theory and grassroots praxis inform each other regularly.
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New Media and Mass/Popular Culture in the Global South
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.
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Translation and Transformation: Transfer Processes across Languages, Media, and Culture
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.
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Accessing the Intersections: Disability, Race, + Gender
This workshop 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.
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Animal Studies
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.
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Lived Inquiry: Anthropologies of the Intellect
This workshop seeks 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.
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World Literature/s Research
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.
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