The Joyce and ElizabethHall Center for the Humanities
Spring 1997 Communiqué
A bibliography of publications which have been supported by Center funds will be added to the Hall Center homepage by the end of January. We are pleased to provide this for your information. If we have omitted an entry, we would appreciate your notifying our webmaster, Elizabeth Barnhill, so our information will be as complete as possible.
This spring will feature three lectures and a faculty mini-course. We are looking forward to Richard White's visit to campus as part of the Humanities Lecture Series. White is the author of five important books in the area of American Indian, western, and environmental history. The Popular Culture mini-course specially designed for faculty has already received an enrollment of 50 faculty from 31 departments and promises to be an interesting time together. Rolena Adorno will complete the Lecture Series this year in March. Adorno specifically focuses on issues of race, ethnicity, and the construction of individual and social identity in new World populations. April will bring our fourth annual Horowitz Lecturer to campus. Grace Paley will share with us her thoughts on "The Teller and The Listener." We are appreciative of the Sosland Foundation's financial support for this series.
Plans for fall include our 1997 Fall Faculty Seminar, "Professions and Professional Ethics." The Dean of the KU Law School, Michael Hoeflich, and James Brundage, the Ahmanson-Murphy Chair in History, will co-direct the seminar. This series should produce some very lively discussions. Also on tap for next year is the 50th Anniversary of the Humanities Lecture Series. The committee has been busy making plans for next year's celebration.
Please note on your calendar the dates of these events and keep them in mind when planning events for your departments or organizations. May 1997 be a very productive and peaceful year for you.
Janet S. Crow, Acting Director
Roberta Johnson received her Ph.D. in Hispanic Language and Literature from the University of California at Los Angeles in 1971. She came to the University of Kansas as Professor of Spanish in 1990, and presided as Department Chairperson from 1992 to 1996. She has authored three books of criticism, Carmen Laforet (1981), El ser y la palabra en Gabriel Miré (1985) and Crossfire: Philosophy and the Novel in Spain 1900-1934 (1993), and a major bibliographic study, as well as numerous articles. Johnson has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Spanish government's commission on U.S.-Spanish cultural exchange. She is currently writing a book on women in modern Spanish fiction with the support of a John Simon Guggenheim fellowship. Johnson is nationally and internationally recognized for her innovative work on the relationship of fiction and philosophy in Spain and has been very active in conferences and professional organizations. She is currently a member of the PMLA Editorial Board and the Executive Committee of the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages.
"The approach of the millenium offers us a wonderful opportunity to reassess and reaffirm the role of the humanities in the university, in our lives as academics, and as citizens of Kansas and of the larger world," commented Johnson. "The Hall Center should play a key role in this exciting time of reassessment and reaffirmation. I look forward to working with all humanities faculty at the University of Kansas and throughout the state in this common endeavor."
The Center staff enthusiastically welcomes Roberta Johnson and is looking forward to working with her.
The first Visiting Professor, Livia Monnet (Comparative Literature, University of Montreal), will be teaching two seminars this spring.
"Postmodernisms," a graduate seminar, will study a selection of postmodernist texts in various media and genres. "Post/Modern Ethno-graphic Discourse," Monnet's under-graduate seminar, will examine the politics and poetics of ethnography, as well as ethnographic discourses and modes of representation in fiction, autobiography and film.
Monnet has a book forthcoming with Stanford University Press titled Gender and the Performance of Culture: Reading Contemporary Japanese Fiction.
Writing Consulting: Faculty Resources (formerly the Writing Center) received funding for the proposal, "A Virtual Writing Resource to Support Teaching." In the absence of a full-service writing laboratory for students, this project aims to develop a virtual writing resource center on the World Wide Web for faculty to use with their students.
The Freshman-Sophomore English Program will initiate a training program for GTA teacher mentors who will be chosen to assist new GTAs in becoming acquainted with the methods of teaching Freshman Composition (English 101). This training program will equip the mentor GTAs to act as teachers of teachers so they can perform their mentoring role more effectively.
These grants are provided to KU faculty members for research and scholarly consultation that cannot be accomplished in any way other than by travel to locations where materials and collaborators reside. Applications for travel during the July 1 through December 31, 1997 award period are due at the Hall Center by March 15, 1997.
Those events even stimulated controversy over the moral obligations that taxpayers might owe to those who invested their savings in public bonds and other financial instruments. Accounting practices likewise have emerged as matters of ethical controversy. How far must an auditor pursue suspicions about the honesty of the financial records of a company that employs him, for example, and how much should he be obliged to disclose to the public? The overseers of accounting standards, the American Institute of Certified Public Accounts, have recently been debating these issues and have revised their code of professional conduct to require fuller scrutiny of corporate finance, although not a great deal more in the way of public disclosure. Have they struck the right balance between the competing interests of corporate management and the public? Opinions differ. This seminar, co-directed by James A. Brundage (History and Law) and Michael H. Hoeflich (Law and History), will deal with problems such as these.
Open to scholars from all disciplines who are working on topics that involve issues concerning the professions and professional ethics, the seminar will meet from 3:00 to 5:00 on Thursday afternoons throughout the fall semester. Faculty members will receive application forms in February 1997, and completed applications will be accepted until March 15, 1997. Applications should be addressed to 1997 Faculty Seminar, Hall Center. Presenters in the seminar must agree to attend all meetings, to discuss common readings, to present original papers, and to provide helpful criticisms and suggestions to their colleagues in the seminar. Faculty seminars are limited to eight presenters. Each presenter will receive a faculty research grant of $500. All faculty are invited to attend the sessions.
David Bergeron (English) will begin work on a book project entitled Patronage and English Dramatic Texts, 1558-1642, which will examine prefatory material in dramatic texts printed during the richest period of English theater history. The book will provide new insights into the cultural practices of patronage, and will assess where drama fits both into well-established patterns of patronage and the newly emerging systems of this period.
Lisa Bitel (Women's Studies, History) will further the writing of her monograph already in progress, Women in Medieval Europe, 300-1500. Her aim for this book is to provide a short narrative of women's lives and experiences during the European Middle Ages, a conscientious, up-to-date rewriting of medieval history that includes issues of women and gender, and a vivid, elegantly written story of women in medieval Europe.
Carl Strikwerda (History) will finish research in Europe and continue the writing of his book, The World at the Crossroads: The Great War and the Re-Making of Modern History. This book explores the origins and impact of World War I.
Vicky Unruh (Spanish & Portuguese) will address the literary work and cultural criticism of selected Latin American women writers of the 1920s and 30s from major urban centers with her project, Performing Women/Inquiring Acts: Literary and Intellectual Women in Latin America, 1920s-1930s.
With his Creative Work Fellowship, Michael Johnson (English) will write a book-length collection of poetry titled From Hell to Jackson Hole: A Poetic Portrait Gallery of the American West.
The daughter of Russian immigrants who arrived in New York around the turn of the century, Paley was born in the Bronx in 1922. Raised in a bilingual home (her parents spoke Yiddish and English), Paley matured in the midst of sharp contrasts between old world Russia and new world America. She attended public schools in New York and studied at Hunter College and New York University, where she developed her distinctive literary style; her short stories are marked by her Russian/Jewish heritage as well as her perceptions of New York street life. Susan Sontag has written about her: "She is that rare kind of writer, a natural with a voice like no one else's: funny, sad, lean, modest, energetic, acute. Like the great modern Russian writers she demonstrates a possible unity of the art of consciousness and the naturalness of conscience."
Grace Paley's short stories have appeared in The New Yorker and The Atlantic Monthly, among other publications. Her highly acclaimed collections of stories include: The Little Disturbances of Man (1959), Enormous Changes at the Last Minute (1974), and Later the Same Day (1985). Paley's The Collected Stories, with an introduction by the author, was published on April 12, 1994. Michael Wood, of the New York Review of Books has described Paley's stories as "a whole small country of damaged, fragile, haunted citizens." Rather than action, Paley relies on conversation to establish character, reproducing Jewish, Black, Irish, and other dialects with accuracy.
Paley has taught at Columbia University, Sarah Lawrence, Dartmouth, and City College, and is a popular lecturer and workshop leader at colleges and universities. Included among her awards and honors are: the 1994 Jewish Cultural Achievement Award, Literary Arts (given by The National Endowment for Jewish Culture); and the Edith Wharton Award. In 1989, she was also honored at a ceremony in Albany by Governor Mario Cuomo, who declared her the first official New York State Writer. An ardent feminist, Paley claims she is frequently distracted from writing due to political causes and thus, has never finished a novel: "Art is too long and life is too short. There is a lot more to do in life than just writing." Ms. Paley now divides her time between New York City and Thetford Hill, Vermont.
The Horowitz Lecture series is dedicated to exploring issues affecting our contemporary multiethnic society. The 1996-97 Horowitz Lecture is funded by the Sosland Foundation. Previous Horowitz lecturers have been Gordon Parks, Cornel West, and Letty Cottin Pogrebin.
Richard White, McClelland Professor of History at the University of Washington, will lecture on "Working in Nature" on February 20 at 7:30pm in Woodruff Auditorium. White 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. He will conduct two colloquia on February 21: "Native American Histories" at 10:30am (preregistration required), and "Nature and Hollywood" held in conjunction with the Nature & Culture Colloquium at 4:00pm. He 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.
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 7:30pm in Spencer Auditorium. She will examine the ways in which Spanish exploration narratives have been "read into" Anglo-American and Latino cultural traditions. Her colloquia will include "The Spanish New World in the Critical Imagination," March 10 at 1:00pm, and "Narrative and Referent: Interdisciplinary Strategies of Reading in Literature and History," March 11 at 10:00am. Preregistration is required for both colloquia. This series was organized by the 1996-97 HLS Committee.
The newly appointed 1998-2000 HLS committee has been appointed and includes: Ann Cudd (Philosophy), Linda Stone-Ferrier (Art History), Burdett Loomis (Political Science), Elizabeth Schultz (English), Joey Sprague (Sociology), and Ted Wilson (History). Nominations for speakers may be sent to Janet Crow at the Hall Center. A formal request for nominations for the 1998-1999 and 1999-2000 series will be forthcoming.
The mission of the research library is a dual one. First, it attempts to provide access to information in a wide variety of formats. Second, it participates in an increasingly coordinated collective endeavor to preserve the record of human knowledge.
Preservation of knowledge depends on the stability of the physical material on which that knowledge was recorded. Although new technologies are creating new preservation challenges for libraries, the principal threat to loss of knowledge of the past two centuries remains the chemical instability of most paper.
In August 1995, Dean of Libraries William Crowe established a Preservation Task Force charged with conducting multiple surveys of the physical conditions of the Libraries' circulating collections. Chaired by Brian Baird, Preservation Librarian, the task force concluded its work in July 1996.
Its findings were that KU's collections are in relatively good condition when compared to those of many other research libraries. However, there are clear causes for very serious concern. Among these are:
To address this challenge, the University and its Libraries must act on several fronts:
Overall, the task force recommends an increase in preservation funding to a level of 5% of the Libraries' overall budget. In addition, the Libraries are currently conducting a national search to hire KU's first full-time Conservator, who will assist the Preservation Department in implementing these initiatives.
We ask faculty to assist us by helping to educate students in the proper use of library materials and by bringing to the staff's attention items in immediate need of preservation treatment.
--Rob Melton, Library Publications Coordinator, with assistance from Brian Baird, Preservation Librarian; Marilu Goodyear, Associate Dean of Libraries; and William J. Crowe, Vice-Chancellor for Information Services and Dean of Libraries.
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 other agencies which fund humanities programs.
Editor: Elizabeth Barnhill. Queries or responses 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; or e-mail hallcntr@ukans.edu.
The Spring 1997 Communiqué Calendar will serve as a reminder of the events you may wish to attend. Please clip this calendar and post it to refer to throughout the semester. For further information about specific events, please contact the Hall Center by phone at (785) 864-4798, by e-mail at hallcntr@ukans.edu, or watch for updated information on our WWW/Internet homepage at http://www.ukans.edu/~hallcntr.
Janet S. Crow, Acting Director
Allan Pasco, Faculty Advisor
Allan Hanson, Chair, Executive Committee
Elizabeth A. Barnhill, Secretary
Susan E. Pauls, Secretary
Executive Committee: Stephen Goddard, Art History; John Gronbeck-Tedesco, Theatre & Film; Roberta Johnson, Spanish & Portuguese; Elizabeth Kuznesof, Latin American Studies; Cheryl Lester, English; Donald Worster, History. Ex-officio: Robert Zerwekh, Assoc. Vice Chancellor--RPS; Peter Casagrande, Assoc. Dean--Liberal Arts; Carole Ross, Assoc. 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