2008-2009 Inaugural Lecture Series
Lecture Notes Lecture Series
Monday, March 9, 2009Roman Historians in the Wake of Post-Modernism
by Professor William BatstoneProfessor Batstone's talk will address the postmodern critique of history: what is it, how has it changed and not changed our practice, and why does it conclude with the manifesto, Stop Writing History. Taking Sallust as his example, he will then talk about some of the ways in which the postmodern critique of historiography can help us to understand better or at least differently Sallust's practice. Professor Batstone hopes to suggest that differently reading a different practice, neither moderrn nor post-modern, can provide new resources to help the contemporary Roman historian in the wake of post-modernism write differently.
Monday, November 3, 2008
The End of the Curriculum
by Professor Elizabeth RenkerProfessor Renker will briefly discuss what she describes as the "post-curricular university," a major turning point in the history of higher education in the United States. One of its features is the end of what she calls the “age of the professor,” a top-down knowledge model increasingly eclipsed by a new and urgent surge of bottom-up pressures arising from the changing nature of the undergraduate population. Renker will briefly talk about a recent curricular experiment of her own designed to respond to the changing nature of the college classroom.
Monday, November 17, 2008
Documenting Deaf Lives
by Brenda BrueggemannProfessor Brueggemann will focus on the nature of being deaf in America at the turn of the 20th century, a time of considerable identity and language shift for deaf people in this country. Employing blended biography and autobiography with visual and epistolary artifacts in a multi-media presentation, she will discuss in particular two (now well-known) deaf Americans at that time: Mabel Hubbard Bell, Alexander Graham Bell's wife (and the inspiration for his invention of the telephone), and James Castle, a recently "discovered" and much-celebrated (deaf) folk artist from the Boise, Idaho region who has a major national exhibit of his work featured at the Philadelphia Art Museum this fall and a new documentary film just produced about his life and art.
Monday, February 9, 2009
What People Say, What People Do: On the Dynamics Between Code and Conduct, Texts and Practice
by Professor Nina BermanProfessor Berman's talk explores the dynamics between literary and cultural textual archives (such as fiction, travel writings, and geographical and anthropological texts) and social, economic, and political practices (such as marriage, conversion, war, trade, and death). She discusses mechanisms of exclusion and inclusion operative in medieval Islamic empires and uses observations gained from this analysis to shed light on the relationship between Europe and the Middle East. She argues that only careful contextualization and comparative inquiry facilitate an understanding of the political role played by literary and other cultural discourses.
