World-renowned poet Gwendolyn
Brooks
The Joyce and ElizabethHall Center for the Humanities
Fall 1996 Communiqué
The Hall Center Communiqué is published twice a year. It circulates to humanities faculty at the University of Kansas, to other humanities centers around the country, and to agencies that fund humanities programs.
Editor: Elizabeth Barnhill. Queries, responses or submissions may be directed to the Joyce and Elizabeth Hall Center for the Humanities, 211 Watkins Home, The University of Kansas, Lawrence, KS 66045-2967; telephone (785) 864-4798; fax (785) 864-3884; hallcntr@ukans.edu.
From the Director...
I begin this semester with very mixed feelings. As many of you know, Bill Andrews has left the
University of Kansas to accept a position at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. We
certainly would be remiss if we did not acknowledge the tremendous part Bill played in the further
development of the Hall Center. Bill and Charron left with their children August 9 to begin their
life in North Carolina. We are thankful that they made their home in Lawrence these last few years
and we wish them well. They will all be missed.
We begin again, but far from the beginning. A search committee will look for a new director this Fall; the search will be internal. We hope to be able to announce a new director by January. During the interim, I have been appointed as Acting Director with Donald Worster serving as Faculty Advisor. (Does this sound familiar?) I am very pleased that Don has consented to give of his time to assist the Center in this way. I think it is just another measure of how important the Hall Center has become to all of us.
An exciting array of programs is already underway, so make sure you do not wait too long before checking the calendar! Our first major event will be Wednesday, September 4 when we present a program on "Technology, Public Debate and the Electoral Process." Paul Kirk, co- chairman of the Commission on Presidential Debates will be with us and following his remarks he will be joined by a panel of KU Faculty. Also don't miss "An Evening with Gwendolyn Brooks" on October 23. Make sure you check inside for these details and the rest of the semester.
As always, whenever the Center undertakes projects such as these, the initiation and responsibility devolve from KU Faculty with the Center in creative partnership. This fall we will join forces with Spencer Art Museum and the Lied Center of Kansas to present two events--"Ports of Entry: William S. Burroughs and the Arts" and "Nova Convention Revisited: Williams S. Burroughs and the Arts." We think these links are important and provide for very interesting programming.
We appreciate as always your input and support. Let us know how we can better serve you. Have a great semester! Janet Crow, Acting Director
These and other issues relating to public space will be addressed during the 1996 Fall Faculty Seminar under the direction of Tony Rosenthal (History). The seminar will meet on Thursdays from 3:00-5:00 pm in the Hall Center Conference Room. The organizational meeting was held August 29.
The first two meetings in September will be centered around discussion of scholarship by Reyner Banham, Mike Davis, David R. Diaz, Jeff Ferrell, David Fine, Jean Franco, David Harvey, Temma Kaplan, James Howard Kunstler, Hilda Sábato, Jennifer Schirmer, Edward Soja, Elizabeth Wilson, and Sharon Zukin. Video excerpts will also be shown from "Las Madres" and "Blade Runner."
Participants, selected in a faculty-wide competition of paper proposals last spring, are: Cynthia Annett (Systematics & Ecology), "Rivers as Public Space: Land, Water, and Private Property;" David Burress (IPPBR) "The Public Forum as Pure Public Good: The Case of the Internet;" Angel Kwolek-Folland (History), "Town and Country: Women and Economic Development in Douglas County, KS, 1850-1900;" Fiona McLaughlin (Linguistics), "Ablutions, Inscriptions, and the Configuration of an Urban Culture: The Set- Setal Movement in Dakar, 1988-1989;" Karin Pagel (Germanic Languages & Literatures), "A Woman's Place/Space: Reading 18th Century German Cookbooks;" John Pultz (Art History), "American Photography and the Production of Public Space Since 1940;" Gaylord Richardson (Architecture & Urban Design), "The American City, Problems of a Diverse Agenda;" and Kent Spreckelmeyer (Architecture), "The Electronic Workplace as Public Domain."
A guest presentation will be made on October 24 by Teresa Meade (History, Union College, NY). Professor Meade will present a paper entitled "Public Space, But Not for the Public: Rio de Janiero in the Early Twentieth Century."
Any KU faculty member may attend the seminar on a regular or occasional basis, and may obtain copies of the seminar papers from the Center. A complete schedule of the seminar is included in the Hall Center calendar.
"Each poet has a singular gift for the world" Gwendolyn Brooks
World-renowned poet Gwendolyn
BrooksBrooks' reading, which is free and open to the public, is cosponsored by the Humanities Lecture Series, the Hall Center for the Humanities, and the Office of Minority Affairs. Brooks is being brought to Lawrence as part of the Partnership for Adventures in Imagination (Lawrence Public Schools, the Lied Center of Kansas, and Mercantile Bank of Lawrence).
Three Hall Teaching Fund projects for 1996-97 are underway. The Western Civilization Program is instituting a Writing Fellows project in the fall to extend its present commitment to writing in the course. The Writing Fellows approach, first introduced at Brown University over ten years ago, provides an opportunity for student writers to build expertise by engaging in the writing process with peers who know the course material and who have demonstrated writing ability in the subject area. Antha C. Spreckelmeyer, organizer of the project, has announced that the Writing Fellows selected for the fall are Maria Patricia Hernandez, Corey Johnson, and Chris Sexton. These fellows, who have completed WC 114/115 (Honors), will work with faculty and students in the Program.
Cindy Pierard, Instruction Coordinator at the Watson Library Reference Department, is organizing "Teaching Research: A Workshop for Teaching Faculty & Librarians." This workshop will focus on how librarians and teaching faculty can work together as partners in this effort to equip students both with current information about the world around them as well as the skills necessary to ask and answer their own questions. Commencing late in the fall semester, the workshop will cover the rationale for undertaking course-related library research, resources available for teaching these skills and ideas for developing effective instructional materials. Teaching faculty participants will work with library staff to conceptualize, design and implement a library research component for at least one of their spring courses. Following the spring semester, a final session will be held for the purpose of evaluating these efforts. The discussion and any resulting materials will be published in a handbook for the campus teaching community. Interested KU faculty should contact Cindy Pierard for further details at 864-8990 or by e-mail at cpierard@ukans.edu
The Ermal Garinger Academic Resource Center and the Department of Slavic Languages & Literatures are coordinating a series of three lectures entitled "Emerging Technologies and Foreign Language Education," organized by John Huy and William Comer. The first presentation to be made by Mike Ledgerwood (French & Italian and Language Learning Center, University of New York, Stony Brook) on Friday, September 20, will be on "Curricular Integration and Foreign Language Electronic Resources." On Friday, October 18, Joel Goldfield (French and Language Resource Center, Fairfield University) will present "Tools or Toys? Integrating Technology into the Foreign Language Curriculum." The final lecture, "Second Language Acquisition and the Use of Technology: Theoretical and Research Issues," given by Nina Garrett (CTW Mellon Project, Connecticut College, Trinity College, and Wesleyan University), will be presented on Friday, November 8. All three lectures will be held from 2:30-3:30 in the Alderson Auditorium, Kansas Union.
Eakin will also conduct a colloquium entitled "Life Writing, Models of Identity, and Social Change" at the Hall Center on September 17 at 10:00 am. He will comment on new directions in life writing and in autobiography studies.
After receiving his undergraduate and graduate degrees at Harvard University, Professor Eakin joined the faculty at Indiana University. He has received visiting professorships as Senior Fulbright-Hays Lecturer at the Université de Paris and the University of Athens. He is the author of Touching the World: Reference in Autobiography (1992), Fictions in Autobiography: Studies in the Art of Self-Invention (1985, 1988), and The New England Girl: Cultural Ideals in Hawthorne, Stowe, Howells and James (1977).
1997 Book Award
Competition AnnouncedThe following authors have previously received the award: John T. Alexander, Catherine the Great: Life and Legend (Oxford University Press, 1988); Thomas Fox Averill, Seeing Mona Naked & Other Stories (Watermark Press, 1989); Alfred Habegger, The Father: A Life of Henry James, Sr. (Farrar, Strauss, Giroux, 1994); David M. Katzman, Seven Days a Week: Women and Domestic Service in Industrializing America (Oxford University Press, 1978); Normal E. Saul, Distant Friends: The United States and Russia, 1763-1867 (University Press of Kansas, 1991); and Sandra Zimdars-Swartz, Encountering Mary: From La Salette to Medjugorje (Princeton University Press, 1991).
The $2,000 biennial award was established at the bequest of Kate Stephens, a former KU student and the University's first woman professor. As an undergraduate at KU, Stephens learned to love the study of Greek language and literature from Professor Byron Caldwell Smith (who at the age of 24 was the youngest member of the faculty in 1872). Stephens received her Master of Arts degree at KU and led the early struggle for women's rights and suffrage in this area. Professor Stephens taught Greek language and literature at KU from 1878 to 1885.
To nominate an author, submit a letter of nomination, three non-returnable copies of the nominee's book, and a statement regarding the nominee's eligibility to: The Hall Center, Smith Award. Self-nominations are accepted. Deadline for nominations is March 1, 1997. Presentation of the award will be made in August 1997.
The Hall Center for the Humanities and the Department of Communication Studies invite you to attend a program about "Technology, Public Debate, and the Electoral Process." The program will be held in the Spencer Museum of Art Auditorium at 7:00 pm, September 4. Special guest for the evening, Paul Kirk is one of the founders of the Commission on Presidential Debates. This Commission sponsors research and voter education programs that are unique to the political debate experience.
Kirk's lecture will be followed by a panel discussion. Panel members will include: Diana Carlin (Communication Studies), Allan Cigler (Political Science), Paul Kirk, Alice Lieberman (Social Welfare), and Lloyd Sponholtz (History).
Diana Carlin, associate professor of Communication Studies at KU, has received a $200,000 grant from the Ford Foundation for DebateWatch '96. The goal of DebateWatch '96 is to help civic organizations and individuals establish watch groups for the 1996 presidential debates. For more information on the project, call (800) 340-8109; write DebateWatch '96, P.O. Box 3467, Lawrence, KS 66046-0467; or e-mail presdeb@falcon.cc.ukans.edu.
Facutly in the Humanities who are in their first three years at KU have received invitations to these events. If you have not received an invitation and would like more information, please call the Hall Center (4-4798).
Eldredge, who is Hall Distinguished Professor of Art History, will open the series with his lecture "John Steuart Curry, Prairie Prodigal," on September 10 at 7:30 pm in Spencer Auditorium. The talk will address the artist's early work in Jefferson County, Kansas, the paradoxes of his status as a "long-distance" regionalist producing Kansas farm scenes from his studio in a bohemian, Connecticut art colony, and the eventual resolution of his ambivalence about "native ground." Eldredge, who has served as Director of the National Museum of American Art at the Smithsonian Institution, is the author of numerous books and exhibition catalogues on American painters.
Gwendolyn Brooks, the Poet Laureate for Illinois, will present an evening of poetry reading and commentary on October 23 at 8:00 pm at the Lied Center. The presentation will be followed by a book signing, also at the Center. Brooks, who in 1950 became the first African-American writer to receive the Pulitzer Prize, serves as writer-in-residence at Chicago State University, where a Distinguished Chair in Black Culture and Literature is named for her. She has been the recipient of countless other awards, including The Shelley Memorial Award of the Poetry Society of America, the National Endowment for the Humanities Jefferson Lecturer for Distinguished Intellectual Achievement in the Humanities, the National Endowment for the Arts Senior Fellowship in Literature, and the Frost Medal from the Poetry Society of America. Much of her work presents strong social commentary, and she has a long-standing commitment to youth. In her poetry reading tours around the country, for example, Brooks has often established scholarships for young people and identified youthful promising writers to whom she provides personal support.
Richard White, McClelland Professor of History at the University of Washington, will lecture on "Working in Nature" on February 20 at 7:30 pm in Woodruff Auditorium. He will examine how work, which has historically provided the way for most human beings to know nature, has now become the Achilles heel of both the environmental movement and environmental history. His colloquia will address "Nature and Hollywood" and "Native American Histories." White is widely regarded as one of the leading scholars in Native American, U.S. western, and environmental history, and is the author of four books on these topics. The most recent, The Middle Ground, is a study of Indian-white relations in the Great Lakes region and won the Francis Parkman Prize of the Society for American Historians.
Rolena Adorno, Professor of Latin American Colonial Studies at Yale University, will speak on "The Spanish New World in the Narrative Imagination" on March 11 at 7:30 pm in Spencer Auditorium. She will examine the ways in which Spanish exploration narratives have been "read into" Anglo-American and Latino cultural traditions, ranging from the writings of Washington Irving and William Hickling Prescott to 20th-Century erudite studies and popular fictionalizations of Spanish explorers, as well as the Arte Público Press project, "Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage." Her colloquia will include "The Spanish New World in the Critical Imagination" and "Narrative and Referent: Interdisciplinary Strategies of Reading in Literature and History." Adorno is the author of several critical editions of indigenous chronicles and of Guaman Poma: Writing and Resistance in Colonial Peru, a widely acclaimed study of a Native Andean account of the colonial period.
The series was organized by the 1996-97 Humanities Lecture Series Committee, which includes Jack Bricke (Philosophy), Maggie Childs (East Asian Studies), Peter Mancall (History), Robert Rowland (Communications), Barry Shank (American Studies), and Committee Chair Vicky Unruh (Spanish and Portuguese).
These events presented by The Spencer Museum of Art, The Lied Center of Kansas, and The Hall Center for the Humanities
The KU Libraries, in partnership with the Computer Center, will install during 1996/97 a modern library and information system. This system will provide much improved access to KU's on-line library catalogs, including the holdings of the KU Law Library, the libraries of the KU Medical Center, and--for the first time--significant portions of the holdings of the Kenneth Spencer Research Library. The system also will make it possible for faculty and students to gain much easier access both to KU-based and remote networked information resources.
VTLS, the internationally active company, based in Blacksburg, Virginia, that produced the system, has named it "Virtua." We expect to select a KU-specific name soon to ease communication about the system and its features.
For the computer-savvy, the system is "open, distributed, and client-server" and will provide, among others, the following functions:
In addition, for the Lawrence campus libraries, the project includes the installation of more than 500 ethernet connections throughout the library system; several new Novell file servers to enhance the current LAN and to provide supplementary services for the new system; and more than 300 Intel-based microcomputers.
To the extent that they use and depend upon library services, the entire University of Kansas community, as well as other Kansans who use the KU Libraries, will benefit from the capabilities of the new system, as will scholars throughout the world. Remote access to KU's on-line catalog, in particular, will be improved substantially.
This advance also will benefit our sister Regents universities and libraries throughout the region and across the nation with which we have strong reciprocal agreements, both for traditional interlibrary loan and for sharing of electronic databases.
Our goal is to have the system operational by July 1, 1997. This includes the new workstations, massive amounts of data conversion, and substantial training for library staff and all users. A cautionary note: Even with this progress, many catalog records for works processed before the 1970s will be accessible only by searching card catalogs on site. "Retrospective conversion" of these records to computer-readable form is ongoing, with some 20,000 titles being changed each year.
If we had not moved forward with a modern, networked system, it is likely that the KU Libraries effectively would have been isolated from much information being provided from other libraries, many scholarly societies and publishers, and commercial and government information providers around the world. This would have risked our failing in one of what Emerson described as a university's "indispensable offices": to "gather from far every ray of various genius..., and by the concentrated fires, set the hearts of their youth on flame." [from The American Scholar, 1837] William J. Crowe, Vice Chancellor for Information Service and Dean of Libraries
Grants AwardedA travel grant competition is held twice each year‹in the fall for awards covering a six-month travel period beginning January 1, and in the spring for awards covering a six-month travel period beginning July 1.
Professor Henry's lecture is both personally and historically rooted. Though he describes himself as a "nominal Catholic," Henry writes that he was moved to write about Le Chambon- sur-Lignon because of his own interactions with Holocaust survivors as a child in Queens. However, Henry dedicates the essay to the late Philip Hallie, who was a scholar at Wesleyan University and the author of The Scar of Montaigne, which Henry describes as "the most important article on Montaigne's ethics." But Hallie was also "a Jew beaten by anti- Semites as a child in Chicago; a heavily decorated artilleryman in WWII, haunted by the fact that he had killed German youth." From these early influences, Hallie began to research the effects of human cruelty, studying them to the point of depression, and it was in his research that he first discovered the remarkable town of Le Chambon, whose residents fought to rescue French Jews during the Nazi Occupation. In Le Chambon, Hallie had found a new fascination; he wrote, "I needed this understanding in order to redeem myself‹and possibly others‹from the coercion of despair."
In a world where almost 20% of those asked in a recent poll if the Holocaust really happened responded "probably" or that it "did not happen," Henry's lecture is not only a remembrance of his friend and colleague Hallie, but an imperative message of courage and hope in the midst of hopelessness. As Henry claims, "As a teacher of the humanities...in the 1990s, I have little choice other than to remember and to reintegrate my own history to the history [of the Holocaust]."
Professor Henry has received many honors and awards, including the Paul Garrett Award for Teaching and Scholarship, the Burlington Northern Foundation Faculty Achievement Award for Teaching and Research, and he was recently a Camargo Foundation Resident Fellow. He is also currently on the Executive Committee of the Division of Sixteenth-Century French Literature for the Modern Language Association of America.
The author of a large body of work, including articles, book chapters, book reviews, stories and other pieces, Professor Henry has been highly praised for his four books of literary criticism: Voltaire and Camus: The Limits of Reason and the Awareness of Absurdity (1975), Montaigne in Dialogue: Censorship and Defensive Writing, Architecture and Friendship. The Self and the Other (1987), An Inimitable Example: The Case for The Princesse de Clèves (1992), and Approaches to Teaching Montaigne's "Essays" (1993).
Professor Phillip S. Paludan (Visiting Professor of History, Rutgers University) will return to KU next summer to direct "Society, Slavery and Civil War." In this seminar school teachers will consider how slavery was entwined in the fabric of American culture and society.
Professor Janet Sharistanian (English) will direct "American Women as Writers: Wharton and Cather." The school teachers in this seminar will consider novels by these two modern American women, contributors to the development of realist American fiction and a specifically female literary tradition.
"These grants offer intellectual sustenance and inspiration for school teachers and higher education faculty throughout the nation," said NEH Chairman Sheldon Hackney.
David Shepard with Eleanor Keaton (Buster Keaton's widow) at the Keaton Festival,
1995, Iola, Kansas (photo credit: John Tibbetts)On September 25-26, 1996, the renowned film preservationist David Shepard will be on campus to conclude the Hall Center for the Humanities series of presentations (co-sponsored by the Department of Theatre and Film) marking 1996 as the Centenary year of the birth of the movies.
The Los Angeles-based award-winning scholar and preservationist--his series of Buster Keaton video restorations won the 1995 "Video of the Year Award" from Entertainment Weekly--will meet with students at the Department of Theatre and Film and present a public lecture/film program on campus Thursday, September 26. The topic is: "The Cine-Century: History Lost and Found." By means of film clips, slides, and video, Shepard will recount his more than twenty-five years seeking out and saving the priceless films of the past.
It is disturbing to realize that in its first hundred years, the film medium, once thought to be an imperishable record of our age, has proven to be all too fragile. The death toll of American movies is staggering. More than half of the 21,000 features and shorts made before 1950 have either disappeared or crumbled into dust. From the silent period (roughly 1894-1929), specifically, the losses have been estimated at an incredible 80 percent. Moreover, if the more than 150 million feet of deteriorating, uncopied nitrate film that still exists in archives around the world were allowed to vanish, the loss to this century's cultural record would be irreparable. "So many terrible things happen to movies as they go out into the world," says Shepard. "They deteriorate with age, they are destroyed by fire, they languish neglected in vaults, basements, and trash bins. The materials that haven't fallen to dust are revised for television and video and altered in the crossing of cultural barriers. The degree of textual sophistication that scholars take for granted in the other arts is still essentially unknown in film studies."
Shepard's message, however, is full of hope. Through the efforts of his company, Film Preservation Associates, as well as institutions like the L.A. Film and Television Archives, the Library of Congress, and Eastman House, thousands of movies, newsreels, and industrial films are being rescued for future generations of viewers and scholars. He himself is responsible for saving classic titles like The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919), and Nanook of the North (1922), and many films by Buster Keaton, Charles Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks, and D. W. Griffith. John C. Tibbetts, Department of Theatre and Film
American
Migration and American Culture" 1996 NEH Summer Seminar for College TeachersSeveral participants responded when asked how the seminar had impacted their own teaching and learning experiences.
"This has been my second NEH Summer Seminar at the Hall Center. Both have provided a rich foundation for innovative and new directions in my teaching and for further research. Making new friends among the seminar participants is another highlight of this experience as is the privilege of interacting with scholars who are prominent in their fields. This seminar has been like an intellectual, multicultural, multidisciplinary smorgasbord--everything has been delicious, and it has required some discipline to focus on those 'dishes' which have been pertinent to my particular areas of interest." Marilyn D. Button, English, Lincoln University, Pennsylvania
"As a participant from another culture, the NEH Summer Seminar on African-American Great Migration offers me a great opportunity to learn a lot of things that I otherwise would not be able to learn back home in China. The readings we have been doing for the seminar, while overwhelming for a foreigner, have been of great help for my understanding of African-American history in this particular period of time. It is certain to help me interpret modern and contemporary US history in a more balanced way in my lecture course at my school in China.
"The reading
project I have been doing has been very enlightening as well. It clarifies many issues that I had
only vague ideas about before I came to this seminar. For instance, I once was quite harsh on
Booker T. Washington and Martin Luther King, Jr., for their accommodation and nonviolence
philosophy on the race issue. But, after some reading of recent scholarship on black leadership in
the civil rights movement, I find myself more sympathetic towards them, for their ideologies and
tactics. Above all, I enjoy the free flow of ideas at the seminar and strongly believe that I have
benefited a lot from this interaction of ideas." Enming Wang, American Studies Center,
Shanghai International Studies University, China
1996 NEH Seminar Participants with co-directors Katzman and Lester (photo credit: Wally Emerson)
"The seminar opened another area of discussion in American (US) history as well as African American history and culture--migration of peoples within the United States; how they informed history and literature and the extent to which, after race relations, it has had the most significant impact on the country. Migration/immigration also inform contemporary discussions on multiculturalism and diversity. This becomes particularly palpable with Quindaro, Kansas City, Kansas, and the community we met there and worked with exposing the waves of migration/immigration and the waves of culture that make Quindaro such a unique place. 'Migration' and 'Quindaro' will be the basis of much future published work and of many lectures within and without the academy." Nancy-Elizabeth Fitch, English and History, College of New Rochelle, New York
Hall Center Deadlines:
The Fall 1996 Communiqué Calendar will serve as a reminder of the events you may wish to attend. For further information about specific events, please call the Hall Center at 864-4798 by e-mail at hallcntr@ukans.edu, or watch for updated information on our WWW/Internet homepage.
Executive Committee: Stephen Goddard, Art History; John Gronbeck-Tedesco, Theatre & Film; Allan Hanson, Anthropology; Roberta Johnson, Spanish & Portuguese; Elizabeth Kuznesof, Latin American Studies; Cheryl Lester, English; Lee Mann, Design; Donald Worster, History. Ex-officio: Robert Zerwekh, Assoc. Vice Chancellor--RPS; Peter Casagrande, Assoc. Dean--Liberal Arts; Peter Thompson, Dean--Fine Arts; Vicky Unruh, Spanish & Portuguese--Chair, 1995-97 Humanities Lecture Committee.
Advisory Board: Charles Battey--Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, KN Energy, Inc.; Robert P. Cobb--Professor Emeritus, University of Kansas; Michael Fields--William T. Kemper Foundation; John Laney--The Hall Family Foundations; Connie Menninger--Kansas State Historical Society; Tom Murray--Barber, Emerson, Springer, Zinn & Murray; Estelle Sosland--A Civic Volunteer; John H. Stauffer--Stauffer Communications, Inc.; Deanell Reece Tacha--Circuit Judge, U.S. Court of Appeals.
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The Hall Center web pages are created and maintained by Elizabeth Barnhill. Please send comments or suggestions to hallcntr@ukans.edu.
Updated July 23, 1997