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This week in the humanities Center |
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Wishing You A Relaxing Spring Break
University of Pittsburgh Spring Break is upon us!
No matter how you spend the week, all of us at the Humanities Center wish you a relaxing and enjoyable Spring Break.
We have some big events taking place in the weeks to come, so make sure to read below to stay in the loop!
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Upcoming Humanities Center Events |
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The Russian Media Scene: Beyond Kremlin Control
A Talk by Maria Lipman (Indiana University, Bloomington)
Visiting Professor, Indiana University Bloomington
Editor-in-chief of Counterpoint, Washington Post contributor, author of “Constrained or Irrelevant: The Media in Putin’s Russia,” and “Putin and the Media”
Tuesday, March 14, 2017
2:00 PM
Humanities Center, 602 Cathedral of Learning
Click here to read more.
Sponsored by: The Center for Russian and East European Studies, The Humanities Center, The Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, The Department of Communication, The Film Studies Program, and The Graduate Program for Cultural Studies.
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Lecture: Blues and Verse
Tuesday, March 14, 2017
5:30 PM
Humanities Center, 602 Cathedral of Learning
Blues and Verse focuses on the legacy of the blues in African American poetics. Two poet-scholars, Chiyuma Elliott and Derrick Harriell will open conversation about the blues that explores how this musical tradition challenges the boundaries between scholarship and art, text and sound.
With additional responses from Michael Heller (Music Department) and Lauren Russell (Center for African American Poetry and Poetics).
Chiyuma Elliott is Assistant Professor of African American Studies at Berkeley. She has been a Stegner and a Cave Canem Fellow. Elliott's first book of poems, California Winter League, was published by Unicorn Press in 2015. Her work has appeared in the African American Review, Callaloo, the Collagist, the Notre Dame Review, the PN Review, and other journals. She is the co-editor of several poetry chapbooks: African American Poetic Responses to Faulkner, Of Rivers, and a forthcoming group of poems inspired by the Gordon W. Bailey Collection.
Derrick Harriell is the author of Cotton (2010) and Ropes (2013), the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters 2014 Poetry Award Winner. His new book of poetry, Stripper in Wonderland, was just released as part of the Southern Messenger Poets series of LSU Press. He has been nominated twice for a Pushcart and is currently the head of the MFA program at the University of Mississippi.
This event is open to the public.
Co-sponsored by the Humanities Center.
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Discussion-based Colloquium with Professor Jane Ward on her Book "Not Gay"
Jane Ward (University of California, Riverside)
Sponsored by the Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies Program.
Wednesday, March 15, 2017
2:30 - 4:00 PM
Humanities Center, 602 Cathedral of Learning
For Graduate Students and Faculty
Although the U.S. media has recently been abuzz with commentary about sexual fluidity, most accounts have focused on “girls who kiss girls” for the pleasure of male spectators, or men of color “on the down low” who are presumed to be gay and in the closet. But where do white men—the dominant culture’s most normalized and idealized figures—fit in to these narratives?
In this provocative book, Jane Ward follows straight white men’s homosexual encounters across numerous sites—from biker gangs and public bathrooms to college fraternities and the United States military—illustrating the unique ways that whiteness and masculinity converge to circumvent the cultural surveillance applied to men of color. Ward shows that the homosexual contact of straight white men is hardly an accident; instead, it does a good deal of productive work for white heteromasculinity. When white men approach homosexual sex in the “right” way—when they make a show of imposing it and enduring it—it functions to bolster not only their heterosexuaAlthough the U.S. media has recently been abuzz with commentary about sexual fluidity, most accounts have focused on “girls who kiss girls” for the pleasure of male spectators, or men of color “on
the down low” who are presumed to be gay and in the closet. But where do white men—the dominant culture’s most normalized and idealized figures—fit in to these narratives?
In this provocative book, Jane Ward follows straight white men’s homosexual encounters across numerous sites—from biker gangs and public bathrooms to college fraternities and the United States military—illustrating the unique ways that whiteness and masculinity converge to circumvent the cultural surveillance applied to men of color. Ward shows that the homosexual contact of straight white men is hardly an accident; instead, it does a good deal of productive work for white heteromasculinity. When white men approach homosexual sex in the “right” way—when they make a show of imposing it and enduring it—it functions to bolster not only their heterosexuality, but also their masculinity and whiteness. By taking sex between straight white men as its point of departure, Not Gay
offers a new way to think about heterosexuality—not as the opposite or absence of homosexuality, but as its own unique mode of engaging homosexual sex, a mode characterized by pretense, disidentification and racialized heteronormative investments.lity, but also their masculinity and whiteness. By taking sex between straight white men as its point of departure, Not Gay offers a new way to think about heterosexuality—not as the opposite or absence of homosexuality, but as its own unique mode of engaging homosexual sex, a mode characterized by pretense, disidentification and racialized heteronormative investments.
Co-sponsored by the Humanities Center and the Year of Diversity.
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Allen MacDuffie Colloquium: "Seriality and Sustainability in Breaking Bad"
Allen MacDuffie (University of Texas at Austin)
Thusday, March 16, 2017
12:30 - 2:00 PM
Humanities Center, 602 Cathedral of Learning
Allen MacDuffie is an assistant professor in the English Department. He received his Ph.D. from Harvard in 2007. His first book, Victorian Literature, Energy, and the Ecological Imagination, won the 2014 Sonya Rudikoff Prize. His work appears or will appear in PMLA, Representations, and ELH. He is currently at work on two book projects, one on Lamarckian evolutionary tropes in nineteenth-century British literature, the other on the eco-politics of contemporary serial fiction. In 2013 he received the UT System Regents' Outstanding Teaching Award.
With response by Brent Malin (Humanities Center Associate Director and Department of Communication, University of Pittsburgh)
Colloquium reading available here.
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Lecture by Jane Ward: "The Tragedy of Heterosexuality"
Jane Ward (University of California, Riverside)
Sponsored by the Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies Program.
Thusday, March 16, 2017
4:00 - 5:30 PM
Humanities Center, 602 Cathedral of Learning
In this work in progress, Jane Ward revisits early lesbian feminist theory to interrogate one of the basic premises of the gay rights movement—that heterosexuality is easier than queerness. Ward asks: for whom, and under what conditions, is straightness easier? Mapping the 20th century emergence of the “heterosexual repair industry”, she illuminates the seemingly obvious but unrelentingly ignored possibility that while being straight is largely beneficial for men, the same is often not true for women, for whom the institution of heterosexuality has been a site of violence, control, diminishment, and disappointment. Evoking rage as a queer methodology, Ward unmasks straightness as an institution that is erotically uninspired, given shape by the most predictable and punishing gender roles, emotionally scripted by decades of inane media, and outright
illogical as a set of intimate relations anchored in a complaint-ridden swirl of desire and misogyny.
Co-sponsored by the Humanities Center and the Year of Diversity.
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The Jewish Studies Program, University of Pittsburgh Presents DENNIS B. KLEIN
Professor of History, Kean University
Director of the Jewish Studies Program and the Master of Arts in Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Kean University
SUNDAY, MARCH 19, 2017 from 10:00 am - 12:00 noon
Lecture: Did Holocaust Survivors Forgive?
Dor Hadash Congregation (5898 Wilkins Ave, Squirrel Hill, Pittsburgh, PA 15217)
For more information visit dorhadash.net
MONDAY, MARCH 20, 2017 from 12:00 noon - 2:00 pm
Jewish Studies Brown-Bag Colloquium: Abandonment: The Refugee Crisis, 1938/2017
William Pitt Union (Dining Room B)
Dr. Dennis B. Klein is Kean University Professor of History and director of the Jewish Studies Program and the Master of Arts in Holocaust and Genocide Studies. He is author or editor of five books, including Jewish Origins of the Psychoanalytic Movement (University of Chicago Press, 1985), Hidden History of the Kovno Ghetto (Little, Brown in cooperation with the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, 1997), The Genocidal Mind (Paragon, 2005), and The Second Liberation: Moral Survival After Atrocity (forthcoming, Rowman & Littlefield). He is founding editor in chief of Dimensions: A Journal of Holocaust Studies
and founding director of the Anti-Defamation League’s Braun Center for Holocaust Studies. In 2006 he was a Research Fellow at the University College London and Resident Fellow at Oxford University. He was appointed a Visiting Scholar at Columbia University in 2014. His current work on post-atrocity testimonies and forgiveness theory is anthologized in Memory, Narrative, and Forgiveness (Cambridge Scholars Press), the 10th anniversary Truth and Reconciliation Commission conference volume, and Jean Améry and the Philosophy of Torture (Lexington Books). He guest-edited a special issue of Historical Reflections/Reflexions Historiques
on witnesses’ accounts of violence and violations, to which he contributed an article on the local theater of the destruction process, and published articles on narratives of betrayal in The Annual of Psychoanalysis.
Made possible by the Sittsamer Fund for Holocaust Studies.
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Humanities Center Visiting Fellow: Ta-Nehisi Coates
Ta-Nehisi Coates is the author of The Beautiful Struggle and Between the World and Me, which won the 2015 National Book Award, the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay, and was a finalist for the Book Critics Circle Award. A former writer for the Village Voice and a National Correspondent for The Atlantic, Coates has been awarded the Hillman Prize for Opinion and Analysis Journalism and the George Polk Award for his 2012 article “The Case for Reparations." He is the recipient of a 2015 MacArthur Fellowship, and was named one of TIME Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People in 2016. He recently wrote eleven issues of Marvel Comics's Black Panther series, which when it first appeared in the 1960s was the first comic book to feature a black superhero.
COLLOQUIUM: “Mythic Register: Political Contradictions and the Battle Between Good and Evil in Ta-Nehisi Coates' Black Panther”
Monday, March 20, 2017
3:00 PM
Humanities Center, 602 Cathedral of Learning
With responses by: Yona Harvey (Department of English, University of Pittsburgh) and Tony Norman (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette)
As there is very limited space in the Humanities Center, at this time, this colloquium is only for invited guests. If additional space becomes available, we will open up RSVP's to the university and public on a first come, first serve basis. If you would like to add your name to the wait list, please email humctr@pitt.edu.
LECTURE: "Pittsburgh Contemporary Writers Series Presents: Ta-Nehisi Coates"'
Monday, March 20, 2017
6:30 PM
William Pitt Assembly Room
This event is free and open to the public. No tickets, reservations or RSVPs are needed. For more information, click here.
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Humanities Center Visiting Fellow: Dana Gioia
Dana Gioia (Poet Laureate of California)
Dana Gioia is an internationally acclaimed and award-winning poet. Former Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, Gioia is a native Californian of Italian and Mexican descent. He received a B.A. and a M.B.A. from Stanford University and an M.A. in Comparative Literature from Harvard University. Gioia currently serves as the Poet Laureate of California. (Gioia is pronounced JOY-uh.)
Gioia has published five full-length collections of poetry, most recently 99 Poems: New & Selected. His poetry collection, Interrogations at Noon, won the 2002 American Book Award. An influential critic as well, Gioia’s 1991 volume Can Poetry Matter?, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle award, is credited with helping to revive the role of poetry in American public culture. In 2014 he won the Aiken-Taylor Award for lifetime achievement in American poetry.
Gioia’s many literary anthologies include Twentieth-Century American Poetry, 100 Great Poets of the English Language, The Longman Anthology of Short Fiction, Literature: An Introduction to Fiction, Poetry, Drama, and Writing, and Literature for Life. His poems, translations, essays, and reviews have appeared in many magazines including The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Washington Post Book World, The New York Times Book Review, Slate, and The Hudson Review. Gioia has written three opera libretti and is an active translator of poetry from Latin, Italian, and German.
COLLOQUIUM: “Poetry Reading and Conversation with Dana Gioia”
Thursday, March 23, 2017
12:30 - 2:00 PM
Humanities Center, 602 Cathedral of Learning
LECTURE: "Dana Gioia at the 2nd Pittsburgh Humanities Festival"
Saturday, March 25, 2017
Trust Arts Education Center in Downtown Pittsburgh
For more information: www.trustarts.org/pct_home/events/festivals/humanities/
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Vaughn Rasberry Lecture & Book Reading
Vaughn Rasberry (Stanford University)
Tuesday, March 28, 2017
5:00 - 7:00 PM
Humanities Center, 602 Cathedral of Learning
Vaughn Rasberry studies African American literature, global Cold War culture, postcolonial theory, and philosophical theories of modernity. As a Fulbright scholar in 2008-09, he taught in the American Studies department at the Humboldt University Berlin and lectured on African American literature throughout Germany. His new book, Race and the Totalitarian Century: Geopolitics in the Black Literary Imagination
(Harvard University Press) questions the notion that desegregation prompted African American writers and activists to acquiesce in the normative claims of postwar liberalism. Challenging accounts that portray black cultural workers in various postures of reaction to larger forces--namely U.S. liberalism or Soviet communism--his project argues instead that many writers were involved in a complex national and global dialogue with totalitarianism, a defining geopolitical discourse of the twentieth century.
Vaughn Rasberry will be discussing and reading portions of his book Race and the Totalitarian Century: Geopolitics in the Black Literary Imagination during this public lecture.
This lecture is free and open to the public with a reception to follow. Copies of Race and the Totalitarian Century: Geopolitics in the Black Literary Imagination will be available for purchase and signing.
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Lisa Wakamiya Lecture: "Philology and Mimicry: Vladimir Nabokov’s The Song of Igor’s Campaign"
Lisa Wakamiya (Florida State University)
Thursday, March 30, 2017
4:00 PM
Humanities Center, 602 Cathedral of Learning
This presentation treats the “philologization” of Nabokov’s practice of translation. Drawing on new manuscript collations and findings in the Roman Jakobson Papers at MIT, the Vladimir Nabokov Papers at the Library of Congress and the Berg Collection at the NYPL, it examines the early variant manuscripts of Nabokov’s translation of The Song of Igor’s Campaign, the anonymous Old Rus epic whose antiquity remains the subject of scholarly debate. Nabokov’s decade-long collaboration with Roman Jakobson was intended to produce a scholarly edition of the “Song.” Instead, it resulted in an acrimonious ideologized rift: Nabokov went on to publish his translation of the “Song” with his own commentary; Jakobson’s book was never finished.
Where Jakobson sought to eliminate all doubts concerning the “Song” and its twelfth-century provenance, Nabokov sidestepped the authenticity debate to define the epic (whatever its origin) as a work of Great Art. Despite these fundamental differences, Nabokov’s published translation of the “Song” advances a text and a model of scholarly activity that owes much to Jakobson. If Nabokov’s earliest drafts adapt translation to philology in a performance that is at once “reverent” and “ironic,” terms that might also metatextually describe Nabokov’s relationship to his then mentor, his published edition reveals not the displacement of Jakobson’s work by his own, but a condensation of the two in which philological discourse cannot be distinguished from a performance of it.
Sponsored by the Humanities Center, Russian and Eastern European Studies, Cultural Studies, Medieval and Renaissance Studies, the Department of English, and Slavic Languages and Literature.
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Aaron Cowan Lecture: "History Happened Here: Heritage Tourism and Modernist Renewal in Postwar Pittsburgh"
Aaron Cowan (Slippery Rock University)
Wednesday, April 5, 2017
4:00 PM
Humanities Center, 602 Cathedral of Learning
A native of southwest Virginia, Aaron Cowan
has been teaching at Slippery Rock University since 2008. His research and teaching interests include urban, environmental and public history. He is author of A Nice Place to Visit: Tourism and Urban Revitalization in the Postwar Rustbelt, published in 2016 by Temple University Press. The book examines the rise of tourism as a revitalization strategy in struggling "Rustbelt" cities, and the effects that development on cities' political, economic, and social dynamics. Dr. Cowan is also founder and co-coordinator of Slippery Rock University's Stone House Center for Public Humanities, an initiative that seeks to build partnerships between university and community that expand appreciation of the humanities.
This lecture is free and open to the public. Reception to follow.
Co-sponsored by the Urban Studies Program.
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Spring Faculty Seminar with Humanities Center Visiting Fellow: John Durham Peters
John Durham Peters (Yale University)
"Atmospheres and Inscriptions"
May 1 - 5, 2017
11:00 AM - 1:00 PM
Humanities Center, 602 Cathedral of Learning
This year’s visiting fellow and seminar leader, John Durham Peters, who will began a position as Professor of Film and Media Studies at
Yale University in January of 2017, is A. Craig Baird Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at the University of Iowa, where he has taught for the past 30 years. An intellectual historian and philosopher of media and communication, Professor Peters has published books and essays on such varied topics as the history of communication research, the philosophy of technology, pragmatism, the public sphere, and media and religion. His first book, Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication
was published by the University of Chicago Press in 1999. The winner of the James A. Winans-Herbert A. Wichelns Memorial Award for Distinguished Scholarship in Rhetoric and Public Address from the National Communication Association, Speaking into the Air has been translated into eight different languages and earned Professor Peters wide recognition as an intellectual and cultural historian. His second book, Courting the Abyss: Free Speech and the Liberal Tradition, was published by University of Chicago Press in 2005. His most recent book, The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media, which explores a range of media infrastructures—from television transmitters to the sun—was published by the University of Chicago Press in 2015.
If you are interested in participating in this seminar, please RSVP to the Humanities Center to confirm. Although all are welcome, these seminars have filled in the past, so an early confirmation is recommended to help guarantee your space in the seminar. We will hold a series of preparatory discussions through the spring term to begin conversation on its topics. Please address questions about the seminar
to Brent Malin, the center’s Associate Director.
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APPLICATION OPPORTUNITIES |
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Public Humanities Fellows Program
Application materials are due by Friday March 31, 2017
Please click here for a full description of this new opportunity for Pitt PhD students beginning in the summer term, 2017.
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more EVENTS |
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UNIVERSITY & COMMUNITY EVENTS
Do you have an event that you'd like featured?
Email the Humanities Center by Friday at 12pm for your chance for the event to appear in next week's edition!
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Conference Announcement — Neoliberalism, Its Ontology and Genealogy: The Work and Context of Philip Mirowski
boundary 2: an international journal of literature and culture is pleased to present NEOLIBERALISM, ITS ONTOLOGY AND GENEALOGY: THE WORK AND CONTEXT OF PHILIP MIROWSKI, a conference taking place on March 17-18, 2017.
Professor Mirowski's keynote lecture, Hell is Truth Seen Too Late, is at 4:30pm on March 17 in Cathedral of Learning 501.
Critics and analysts of neoliberalism seem to miss one of its key tenets: that markets are better than people when it comes to thinking. This talk explores the consequences of this blind spot for modern Marxists, for ‘fake news’, and for the utopia of ‘open science.’
Click here to learn more and view the full schedule.
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’At One Point We All Rebelled’: Hip Hop Graffiti Grrlz and the Performance of Feminist Masculinity
Speaker: Jessica N. Pabón, SUNY New Paltz
Friday, March 24, 2017
3:00 - 5:00 PM
Room 208-A Cathedral of Learning
Hip Hop masculinity has been theorized almost exclusively in relation to cisgendered men and shaped by the question: what does the performance of mainstream Hip Hop masculinity do to girls and women? Frequently focused on toxic hypermasculinities, the question predetermines the answer: girls and women in Hip Hop experience low self-esteem, low social status, and exploitation (in terms of sex and labor). In short, they are always already victims. Instead of asking what Hip Hop masculinity does to them, Dr. Jessica Pabón asks what graffiti grrlz do with masculine gender performance. In this talk, Pabón offers a critical re-imagining of gender performance in Hip Hop culture by examining the aesthetics, politics, and embodiment of graffiti grrlz from the USA, South Africa, Canada, and Australia. Analyzing masculinity with graffiti grrlz at the center reveals a gender performance that
empowers rather than subjugates, one that allows for and values a complex enactment of gender within Hip Hop culture; this is what Pabón calls a “feminist masculinity.” Feminist masculinity attends to graffiti grrlz’ everyday experiences as cisgendered women who came into adulthood as part of the Hip Hop generation, an era increasingly marked by the neoliberal promise of “girl power” fueled by postfeminism. Rather than reproducing oppressive masculinity, hegemonic feminism, or a politically sterilized postfeminism, graffiti grrlz rebel—they take risks, deviate from norms, and play with the bold, brash, and brazen traits of masculinity to demand their visibility and belonging.
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