Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere

Fall 2009 Calendar of Events

September 3, 7:30 pm, Flint Hall 50

John Van Engen (Notre Dame)
Free Spirits, Lay Religion, and Clerical Suspicion: Inside the Late Medieval Church

John Van Engen, Andrew V. Tackes Professor of History at the University of Notre Dame and former director of Notre Dame’s Medieval Institute (1986-1998), is a historian of religious and intellectual life in the European Middle Ages. Professor Van Engen has focused on 12th century church reform movements and on late medieval mysticism and devotional practices. His books and essays have dealt with monasticism, women’s writing, schools and universities, inquisition, canon law, notions of reform, and medieval religious culture generally. Many of his important articles have been re-published in Religion in the History of the Medieval West (2004). His most recent book, The Modern-Day Devout in the Later Middle Ages: Sisters and Brothers in Communal Life and Private Societies (2008).
Co-sponsored by the Center for Medieval and Early Modern Studies and the Rothman Endowment
Lecture free and open to the public.
Faithful Narratives: The Challenge of Religion in History. For further information about this important series organized by Nina Caputo and Andrea Sterk, please go to:
http://web.history.ufl.edu/faithful.html

September 14, 7:30 pm, Flint Hall 50

Phyllis Mack (Rutgers)
Religion and Gender in Enlightenment England: The Problem of Agency

Phyllis Mack is Professor of History at Rutgers University and a member of the core faculty of the Department of Women’s and Gender Studies. Her research focuses on European and women's history and history of religion, and she is interested in 17th-18th century popular religion and gender in England and America. Her publications include Visionary Women: Ecstatic Prophecy in Seventeenth-Century England, which won the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians Book Prize in 1993; the co-edited volume, In God's Name: Genocide and Religion in the 20th Century; and most recently, Heart Religion in the British Enlightenment: Gender and Emotion in Early Methodism (2008).
Co-sponsored by the Center for Women’s Studies and Gender Research, the Center for European Studies, and the Rothman Endowment
Lecture free and open to the public.
Faithful Narratives: The Challenge of Religion in History. For further information about this important series organized by Nina Caputo and Andrea Sterk, please go to:
http://web.history.ufl.edu/faithful.html

October 7, 4:00 pm, Ruth McQuown Room, 219 Dauer Hall

Matthew Frye Jacobson (Yale)
Rock, Race and the Social Geography of the Jimi Hendrix Experience

Matthew Frye Jacobson is Professor of American Studies, History, and African American Studies at Yale. He is the author of several books, including Roots Too: White Ethnic Revival in Post-Civil Rights America and he is currently at work on Odetta's Voice and Other Weapons: the Civil Rights Era as Cultural History.
This talk examines the cultural politics of the 1960s by focusing on the Jimi Hendrix Experience. Though not known for overt political stands, Hendrix's movements across the social terrain from 1950s Seattle, to the "chitlin circuit" of the segregated South, to the uptown/downtown cultures of Harlem and the Village, to the UK and back again nonetheless shed an unusual light on the racial dynamics of the Civil Rights era.
Inaugural event of the History Department’s Working Group for the Historical Study of Race.
Sponsored by the Humanities fund of the Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere.
Lecture free and open to the public.
For further information about this event, contact: newmanlm@gmail.com.
Download Flier (PDF)

October 20, 6:00 pm, University Auditorium

Mark Noll (Notre Dame)
The Bible and American Public Life

Mark Noll is Francis A. McAnaney Professor of History at University of Notre Dame. He is interested in race, religion, and politics as intersecting and at times intertwined modes of discourse. His publications include The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind (1994), America's God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln (2002), and The Civil War as a Theological Crisis (2006). Professor Noll’s current projects are a short book on race, religion, and American politics and a more extensive study of the Bible in North American public life.
Co-sponsored by the Richard J. Millbauer Chair in History, the Bob Graham Center for Public Service, and the Rothman Endowment
Lecture free and open to the public.
Faithful Narratives: The Challenge of Religion in History. For further information about this important series organized by Nina Caputo and Andrea Sterk, please go to:
http://web.history.ufl.edu/faithful.html

November 9, 7:30 pm, Ustler Hall Atrium

Anthony Grafton (Princeton)
Jewish Books and Christian Readers in Early Modern Europe

Anthony Grafton, Henry Putnam University Professor of History at Princeton University. His special interests lie in the cultural history of Renaissance Europe, the history of books and readers, scholarship and education in the West from Antiquity to the 19th century, and the history of science from Antiquity to the Renaissance. His many books include Joseph Scaliger: A Study in the History of Classical Scholarship, Vol. 2 (1994) Cardano's Cosmos: The Worlds and Works of a Renaissance Astrologer (2001) Leon Battista Alberti: Master Builder of the Italian Renaissance (2002), and Christianity and the Transformation of the Book: Origen, Eusebius, and the Library of Caesarea, with Megan Williams (2006). Professor Grafton’s current project is a large-scale study of the science of chronology in 16th- and 17th-century Europe: how scholars attempted to assign dates to past events, reconstruct ancient calendars, and reconcile the Bible with competing accounts of the past.
Co-sponsored by the Andrew Grass Chair in Jewish Studies and the Rothman Endowment
Lecture free and open to the public.
Faithful Narratives: The Challenge of Religion in History. For further information about this important series organized by Nina Caputo and Andrea Sterk, please go to:
http://web.history.ufl.edu/faithful.html

November 13, 9:00 am – 5:00 pm, Chandler Auditorium, Harn Museum of Art

Recycling in African Art: Necessity, Metaphor, and Creative Expression

In many parts of Africa, recycling is both an expressive medium and a strategy for survival. Artists working in a wide range of markets, from the local to the international, transform objects and images into aesthetic expressions. This symposium will explore the aesthetics, economics, and paradoxes of recycling as an artistic practice in Africa. Presentations by art historians, anthropologists, artists, and curators will address the reuse and reanimation of objects in Africa and the African diaspora.
Participants include:
- David Doris, University of Michigan
- Suzanne Gott, University of British Columbia
- Vanessa Linganzi, Northwestern University
- Sarah Fee, Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto
- Mary Nooter Roberts, UCLA
- Fatimah Tuggar, New York-based artist
- Sonya Clark, Virginia Commonwealth University
- Victoria Rovine, University of Florida
Co-sponsored by the Yavitz Fund, the Center for African Studies and the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences
Lecture free and open to the public
Organized by Victoria L. Rovine, School of Art and Art History/ Center for African Studies. For further information about this symposium, contact vrovine@ufl.edu

November 13, 10 am - 5 pm, Ruth McQuown Room, Dauer Hall

Goodbye DDR: Memory and Visual Culture

Morning: Memory and Visual Culture

10:00 am
Elizabeth Mittman, Associate Professor (Michigan State University)
From Good Bye Lenin! to The Lives of Others: Memory and Forgetting after the Cold War
11:00 am
Tim Fangmeyer, Graduate Student in German (University of Florida)
History Written by the Winners? Post-GDR Films about the GDR
12:00
Lunch Break

Afternoon: Ghosts and Fairy Tales

2:00 pm
Claudia Schwabe, Graduate Student in German (University of Florida)
Between Socialism and Snow White: GRD Fairy Tales
3:00 pm
Brian Ladd, Research Associate (University of Albany, SUNY)
Monuments, Voids, and Other Ghosts of East Berlin
4:00
Roundtable Discussion with Franz Futterknecht, Brian Ladd, Elizabeth Mittman, Barbara Mennel
Organized by Will Hasty, Barbara Mennel, and Franz Futterknecht (German Studies and Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures)
Sponsored by the Rothman Endowment
Symposium free and open to the public

For more information about this symposium and other events that make up the “Fall of the Wall” Commemoration, see: http://www.clas.ufl.edu/events/wall/

November 13, 7 - 8:30 pm, Ustler Atrium

Dominick LaCapra (Cornell)
Coetzee, Sebald, and the Narrative of Trauma

Since 1969, Dominick LaCapra has taught in the History Department at Cornell, where he is currently the Bryce and Edith M. Bowmar Professor of Humanistic Studies. He also holds a joint appointment in the Department of Comparative Literature and is a member of the graduate field of Romance Studies and the program in Jewish Studies. He served for ten years as director of Cornell’s Society for the Humanities and for four years as Associate Director and for eight years as director of the School of Criticism and Theory. In the course of his career, LaCapra's own principal contributions have been to intellectual and cultural history and to critical theory, which he sees as closely related fields of inquiry. His teaching interests range widely in the areas of modern European intellectual and cultural history, historiography, trauma studies, history and literature, and critical theory. His publications include thirteen individually authored books and two edited or co-edited volumes, among which are History & Criticism (1985); Representing the Holocaust: History, Theory, Trauma (1994); and most recently, History and Its Limits: Human, Animal, Violence (2009).

Keynote Address of the English Graduate Organization's 9th annual conference: Home/sickness: Decay, Desire, and the Seduction of Nostalgia.
For more information on the conference: http://www.english.ufl.edu/ego/conference09/index.html
Co-sponsored by the English Graduate Organization, English Department, and Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere (Yavitz Fund)
Lecture is free and open to the public
For further information contact ego09atuf@gmail.com

November 14, 10:00 am - 5:00 pm, University Auditorium, Friends of Music Room

Fear in the Ancient World

Gregory Nagy (Harvard University and the Center for Hellenic Studies, Washington, DC)
The Subjectivity of Fear as Reflected in Ancient Greek Wording and Syntax

Andrew Riggsby (University of Texas-Austin)
The Lexicon of Fear

Bruce Lincoln (University of Chicago)
The Ambiguity of Fear in the Achaemenian Imperial Imaginary

Fear has been almost completely removed from modern political discourse since President Roosevelt spoke briefly on the subject during the Great Depression. The ancient discourse on fear is by contrast varied and complex. From Homer through Late Antiquity, ancient authors have acknowledged the impact that fear has on decision making and have come to a wide range of conclusions on how best to manage this emotion. While recent studies have contributed extensively to our understanding on how the ancients conceptualized anger, shame, pity, and envy, less attention has been given to fear. By bringing together foremost scholars of ancient Greece, Rome, and the Near East, this conference seeks to promote an archaeology of fear comparable to that of the other emotions.
Organized by: Andrew Wolpert, Department of Classics, and Andrea Pagan, Department of Classics
Sponsored by the Yavitz Fund
Free and Open to the Public
Fear in the Ancient World Website

December 2, 7:30 pm, Ocora in Pugh Hall

Kenneth Mills (Toronto)
'Tantos Milagros': Miraculous Transmission in the Early Modern Spanish World

J Kenneth Mills is Professor of History and Director of Latin American Studies at the University of Toronto. A specialist in the history of colonial Latin America and the early modern Spanish world, his work focuses on religious change and the proliferation of local Christianities in Spanish South America. His publications include An Evil Lost to View? (1994) and Idolatry and Its Enemies: Extirpation and Colonial Andean Religion, 1640-1750 (1997). With Anthony Grafton he has co-edited the collections Conversion: Old Worlds and New and Conversion in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages: Seeing and Believing (both 2003). Professor Mills is currently writing a book around the transatlantic journey of a Castilian image-maker and alms-gatherer, Diego de Ocana (c. 1570-1608).
Co-sponsored by the Center for Latin American Studies and the Rothman Endowment
Lecture free and open to the public
Faithful Narratives: The Challenge of Religion in History. For further information about this important series organized by Nina Caputo and Andrea Sterk, please go to:
http://web.history.ufl.edu/faithful.html

College Events

The Center would also like to draw your attention to additional events related to the humanities on the College website.