The Virtue of Uncertainty

Elvehjem Building, Room L140, 800 University Ave.
@ 5:00 pm - 6:30 pm

A Focus on the Humanities Lecture with Jordan Ellenberg Mathematics is often thought of as a source of certain knowledge, the domain in which we know precisely what things are and which statements are true. …

Focus on the Humanities: Russ Shafer-Landau

Elvehjem Building, Room L150, 800 University Ave.
@ 5:30 pm - 7:00 pm

The Source of Morality Some say that morality is created by and for human beings—its origins and authority are relative to the culture we live in. Others are squeamish about moral relativism and instead try …

Focus on the Humanities: Finn Enke

Elvehjem Building, Room L160, 800 University Avenue
@ 5:00 pm - 6:15 pm

Of Doubtful Nature: Archive of an Amphibious Childhood in a Nuclear Age Focus on the Humanities lectures are a collaboration between the Center for the Humanities and the Institute for Research in the Humanities. This …

Focus on the Humanities: Mario Ortiz-Robles

Elvehjem Building, Room L140, 800 University Avenue
@ 5:30 pm

Rewilding the Zoo: Animal Captivity and the Future of Extinction This event is presented in partnership with the Institute for Research in the Humanities. How do zoos, historically developed in the nineteenth century as public …

Focus on the Humanities: Francine Hirsch

Elvehjem Building, Room L160, 800 University Avenue
@ 5:00 pm - 6:30 pm

Family Ties: An Entangled History of Russia, America, and Germany in the 20th Century How can the history of one family from Ukraine shed new light on the history of the Russian Revolution, Soviet internationalism, …

Focus on the Humanities: Ramzi Fawaz

Elvehjem Building, Room L140, 800 University Avenue
@ 6:00 pm - 7:30 pm

Webbed Attachments: Psychedelic Lessons from the Multiverse This Focus on the Humanities talk explores how the fundamental qualities of the psychedelic experience—including heightened affective intensity, the dissolution of the ego, and a sense of cosmic interconnectedness …

Jo Handelsman

A World Without Soil: The Past, Present, and Precarious Future of the Earth Beneath Our Feet
@ 5:45 pm - 7:00 pm

Director, Wisconsin Institute for Discovery and Vilas Research Professor and Howard Hughes Medical Institute Professor, Department of Plant Pathology, UW-Madison Humans depend on soil for 95% of global food production, yet we let it erode …

Laura McClure

Elvehjem Building, Room L140, 800 University Avenue
@ 5:45 pm - 7:00 pm

Phryne was the most famous hetaera (“female companion”) in classical Athens and yet we know very little about her. What we do know of her comes from scattered references across a wide variety of Greek …

Stephen Kantrowitz

Wisconsin Historical Society, 816 State Street
@ 5:00 pm

Despite the invasion and seizure of their homeland by the United States during the early nineteenth century, the Ho-Chunk people remained—and remain today. They developed knowledge about the United States, its settlers, and its citizenship …

Steven Hutchinson

Conrad A. Elvehjem Building, Room L140 800, University Avenue
@ 5:30 pm

This Focus on the Humanities talk reflects on Leo Africanus’s geographical, cultural, and religious cosmopolitanism, and on the techniques he developed to write both urban and rural ethnography within the larger framework of a geography always inflected …