The Joyce and Elizabeth
Hall Center for the Humanities
Spring 1998 Communiqué
The University of Kansas
1998. A year full of resonances for those of us who work in Hispanic and/or American Studies. 100 years ago the Spanish-American War marked the final stage in the demise of what had once been a global power at the same time that it brought the world's attention to the ascendancy of another. For most of us, however, the year 1998 does not prompt a look backward at historical events but forward to the coming millennium. 1998 brings us psychologically closer to that mythical horizon beyond which we somehow imagine that life will or should be different. In two years, we will have to erase long habits of writing 19 . . . and retrain the hand and eye to accommodate 20 . . ..
While the year 2000 may in fact turn out to be pretty much like any other, it does provide an opportunity to think about the larger issues that confront humanity. The Hall Center's Humanities Lecture Series Committee has assumed the appreciable task of planning (in tandem with a committee from the Lied Center) some millennial programming for the university and the Kansas community. For planning purposes, the committee is working within the parameters of the spring and fall semesters of the year 2000, although it recognizes that there is controversy over whether the true millennial year is 2000 or 2001.
Thinking about the millennial program is still in the very early stages, but the committee envisions activities that will include the widest cross-section of the university and larger communities and is particularly seeking to find ways to bring town and gown together for public events and discussions. The hope is that the year 2000 at KU will (like 1898 in Cuba) have both a local and a global dimension. The Hall Center especially wishes all faculty with an interest in humanistic study to consider how they might participate in the millennial conversations. We see this year of programming as an opportunity to demonstrate that the humanities can make a significant contribution to shaping the world in the next 1000 years. In the meantime, a happy and productive 1998 to you all. We look forward to seeing you at the Hall Center during the coming year for our current schedule of events outlined in the following pages.
Roberta Johnson, Director
In this issue...
The Visiting Professor in the Humanities program was established under new initiatives of the Hall Center for the Humanities to bring to campus colleagues to provide fresh perspectives and to enhance our interdisciplinary and cross-cultural offerings.
Internationally renowned Professor Maria Eugenia Bozzoli de Wille from the Department of Anthropology at the University of Costa Rica will be the Hall Visiting Professor in the Humanities for the spring semester of 1998. She is scheduled to teach two interdisciplinary courses: an undergraduate course, "Cultural Diversity in Southern Central America," (cross-listed in Anthropology, Latin American Studies and Linguistics) and a graduate course, "Latin American Thought and Development" (cross-listed in the departments of History, Sociology, Anthropology and Latin American Studies.)
Professor Bozzoli was born in Costa Rica; she completed her B.A. and her M.A. in Anthropology at KU (1958) under the late Professor Carlyle Smith. She finished her Ph.D. in Anthropology at the University of Georgia (1975) in one year.
Dr. Bozzoli has had a distinguished career both as a teacher and researcher, as well as an administrator. She is currently the head of the Evaluation of Research Proposals Section and Director of Research Projects at the Vice Chancellor's Office of Research at the University of Costa Rica (U.C.R.), and she is also the President of the National Academy of Geography and History of Costa Rica. At present, she is an Emeritus Professor of Anthropology at U.C.R., but is still active in that department, having recently been selected as chair of the committee charged with designing the Central American Master's Degree Program in Anthropology which will be offered at U.C.R. for the first time this year.
Anita Herzfeld
In this issue...
On April 30, 1998, leading feminist Chicana, essayist and teacher, Chérrie Moraga, will deliver the fifth annual Horowitz lecture. Chérrie Moraga's widely-produced plays include Giving up the Ghost, Shadow of a Man, Heroes and Saints,and Watsonville Some Place Not Here (winner of the 1995 Fund for New American Plays Award). Her pioneering anthology The Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, edited with Gloria Anzaldira, won the Before Columbus American Book Award and has sold to date over 100,000 copies. As a well-known creative artist and ardent spokeswoman for Latina, feminist and lesbian concerns, she fulfills the purpose of the Horowitz lectures to provide a platform for minority views of American society and culture.
The Horowitz lecture is funded this year from the Sosland Foundation and the Horowitz lecture fund at KU Endowment.
The Hall Fund for the Improvement of Teaching, an annual competition established to support projects that promise a broad and/or sustained impact on teaching and student learning in the humanities at the University of Kansas, has funded two proposals for 1998-99.
Fred Rodriguez, Center for Teaching Excellence, and Carl Strikwerda, European Studies, received funding for their proposal, "Interdisciplinary Teaching: Creating and Maintaining a Dialogue Among Disciplines."
Valerie Mendoza, History, and Tony Rosenthal, History, received funding for their proposal, "Creating a Model for Urban Studies."
The Hall Center Travel Grants selection committee has awarded funds to Professor Elizabeth Kuznesof, History, for travel to Mexico to do research for her project, "The Significance of Marriage: Bigamous Women in Colonial Mexico."
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, 1998 award period are due at the Hall Center by March 16, 1998.
"Performance: Cultural/Theatrical/Historical/Political"--a Hall Center panel--will convene on Monday, February 9, from 3:30-5:00 in the Malott Room, Kansas Union. Panelists include Kathryn Conrad, English; Mary Karen Dahl, Theatre and Film; Bartholomew Dean, Anthropology; and Barry Shank, American Studies. Iris Smith, English, and Vicky Unruh, Spanish & Portuguese, will moderate.
Panelists will explore points of contact and divergence in how their disciplines use concepts of performance or performativity to address issues of cultural (including artistic) and social change. Questions shaping their discussion will include:
Is there a difference between conscious and unconscious performance? Can one destabilize identity through performance or does the very deliberate and visible nature of the performance undercut its disruptive effect? If performance can undermine representations of class, gender, race, and sexuality, what risks and responsibilities are involved?
As an analytic category, how does "cultural performance" help us understand how "communities" are both imagined and contested? What role does "performance" play in the origin and spread of nationalism? Do states perform? Is a dramaturgical approach to social life compatible with the post-modernist emphasis on society as fragmentary and as founded on fictions more than on facts of social continuity?
Can theories of performance help us unpack historical events? Or do performative theories of identity constrain us to a contemporary focus on cultural issues? Can concepts like performativity help us to link group identities and politics to personal experience over time? Or should we think of them as metaphorical guides to cultural historical analysis?
The panelists' brief presentations will lead into discussion with the audience. A reception will follow the exchange.
Iris Smith, English, and Vicky Unruh, Spanish & Portuguese, will co-direct the Hall Center Fall 1998 Faculty Seminar, "Performances: Cultural, Theatrical, Historical."
The seminar is designed to explore how various disciplines use performance or performativity as analytical tools to address issues of cultural (including artistic) and social change. The seminar will meet on Thursday afternoons in the Fall semester from 3:00-5:00. If you are interested in participating in the seminar, please adjust your Fall teaching schedule accordingly. A call for applications will go out in February for submission by mid-March.
Research Fellowships for 1998-99 have been awarded to Victor Bailey, History; Anthony Corbeill, Classics; Elizabeth Kuznesof, History; and Barry Shank, American Studies. The Creative Fellowship for 1998-99 has been awarded to Stan Lombardo, Classics.
Victor Bailey will work on a book project titled, "The Rise and Demise of Rehabilitation: Punishment, Culture and Society in Modern Britain." It will examine the political and cultural influences upon sentencing and penal policy in Britain between 1890 and the present day. This project will be the author's culmination of many years invested in the study of historical punishment.
Tony Corbeill will continue ongoing work with his manuscript for a book on gesture in Ancient Rome. His goal for this project is to provide a practical model for studying gesture that will prove valuable for the field of Classical Studies and for any scholar concerned with understanding physical movement.
Elizabeth Kuznesof will work on a book, "The Significance of Marriage: Bigamous Women in Colonial Mexico." The resulting volume will be a kind of prosopography to elucidate the lives of common people, and especially to examine gender relations and ethnicity within the colonial context.
Barry Shank will complete three chapters of his current manuscript, "A Token of My Affection: A Cultural History of American Greeting Cards." This project grows out of his career-long theoretical and empirical search for the means whereby Americans can forge meaningful structures of identity and community in a world saturated by market-driven, mass-produced, yet privately consumed popular culture.
With his Creative Work Fellowship, Stan Lombardo will work towards completing a translation of Homer's Odyssey. He has received excellent reviews for his new translation of the Iliad, to which the Odyssey is the sequel.
Under the auspices of the Hall Center, Juan Velasco, Latin American and American Studies, and John Augusto, Office of Graduate Studies, are organizing a symposium on "Latinos/as in the U.S.: Past, Present, and Future" scheduled for May 1-2, 1998. This conference will revisit the historical events and cultural-political consequences of the Wars of 1848 and 1898 in the development of more than 150 years of Hispanic and Latino experience in the United States.
1998 is a crucial year not only because it approaches the end of the millennium, but because it commemorates important historical moments in the process that led to the incorporation of Hispanic or Latino communities into the U.S. population. The symposium will examine not only the impact that the Mexican-American War and the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1948) had on U.S.-Latino history, but also the repercussions of the Spanish American War and the Treaty of Paris (1898), which annexed Cuba, the Philippines, and Puerto Rico to the United States. As such, 1998 presents an opportunity to reevaluate the past experiences of Hispanics/Latinos in the U.S., the more relevant problems of the present economic and social situation, and the impact that current policies will have in the near future and in the next century.
Manuel Pacheco, president of the University of Missouri, will deliver a keynote speech on Friday, May 1. Pacheco, in addition to his impressive academic accomplishments, has been named one of the most influential Hispanics of 1997 in the United States. Renowned author ChÈrrie Moraga will give the Horowitz lecture on Thursday, April 30 as part of the symposium. Moraga will speak about race and culture as well as her experiences as a Chicana writer in the U.S., and then present a selection of readings from some of her works.
A series of workshops on Saturday, May 2 will address the impact of U.S.-Latino literature, arts, and music in mainstream culture, current trends in Latino/a education, business, migration/immigration, and economic development, as well as the ongoing efforts to build an understanding for increasing diversity of cultures and languages in our society.
The panel discussions will be led by well-known experts on U.S. Latinos from KU and other universities. We encourage everyone to participate in the symposium; it is open to all and designed for the non-academic as well as the academic audience.
The Humanities Lecture Series officially began on October 7, 1947, when T. V. Smith, a philosopher from the University of Chicago, became the first speaker invited by the College. His lecture, entitled, "The Humanities and Modern Life," was delivered to more than 800 people in Fraser Theater. Since that time, in the fifty-year history of the Humanities Lecture Series, more than 150 visiting scholars from around the world have participated in the program.
This spring will feature three lecturers. I. Michael Heyman, the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, will lecture on "Exhibition Dilemmas," February 5 at 8:00 p.m. at the Lied Center; the Honorable Nancy Kassebaum Baker, former United States Senator for the state of Kansas, will speak March 2 at 8:00 pm at the Free State High School Auditorium; and Chancellor Robert Hemenway will speak on "Humanities and American Politics" April 7, 1998 at 8:00 p.m., also at the Lied Center.
Professor Robin W. Winks, Chair of the History Department at Yale University, will speak on "America's National Parks: The Best Idea We've Ever Had" on March 31 at 8:00 pm in the Spencer Art Museum Auditorium. Professor Winks has lectured widely in the U.S. and abroad and was designated as one of the Top Ten Lecturers in the U.S. by the International Platform Association. His many books include Slavery: A Comparative Perspective, Western Civilization, Detective Fiction, and Cloak and Gown: Scholars in the Secret War. He was a Pulitzer Prize nominee in 1971 and 1987 and was named Conservationist of the Year by the U.S. Department of the Interior in 1988. Professor Winks is well-known for his work on national parks and is currently writing a book titled, The Rise of the National Park Ethic. This visit to KU is being jointly sponsored by the Hall Center for the Humanities and the Office of the Chancellor.
One of the highest priorities of the University Libraries over the past year has been to improve access to locally-mounted databases. In particular, we want you to be able to access key databases--primarily of citations and/or abstracts, but increasingly full-text--from your home, office, and even when you're away from the Lawrence area. Last summer, the Libraries moved nineteen databases from our Local Area Network to a new and faster Internet-accessible server known as ERL (Electronic Reference Library). Subsequently, four additional databases have been moved to this server.
The databases are: Art Index; Biological Abstracts; Books in Print; EconLit; ERIC; Exceptional Child Education Resources; GeoRef; HealthSTAR; International Pharmaceutical Index; MathSci; Medline Express; Mental Measurements Yearbook; Modern Language Association International Bibliography; NASW Clinical Registry; NTIS; Peterson's Gradline; PsycINFO; Publishers, Distributors, and Wholesalers of the U.S.; Social Work Abstracts; Sociofile; SportDiscus; Ulrich's International Periodicals Directory; and Zoological Abstracts.
Obviously, some of these databases are specific to a particular discipline, but several (e.g., ERIC, MLA, PsycINFO) are interdisciplinary and some (e.g., Books in Print, Ulrich's ) may prove to be useful for anyone selecting course readings, for example, or verifying the address of a journal or publisher.
For the short period for which data is available, it is evident that Web-based access to databases is popular and increasing. For example, although overall usage of the MLA Bibliography increased 30% between September and October, Web access increased 77%. Access to GeoRef from ERL increased 261% between the same months.
ERL databases are accessible from all systems within the KU Internet domain (ukans.edu) such as the KU terminal server, falcon, lark, eagle, raven, kuhub, etc., or micro-computers with IP addresses in the KU domain.
There are three ways to access the ERL server: 1) WWW browser (open the URL http://www.lib.ukans.edu/wwwerlÝ); 2)Ýtelnet (www.lib.ukans.edu; login as vt100erl; no password); or 3) Lynx, the character-based browser (telnet to www.lib.ukans.edu; login as lynxerl; no password). Handouts providing detailed information on remote access to the Libraries' catalogs and databases are available at all public service desks. For technical assistance with ERL databases, contact Nicholas Eshelman at 864-5530 or eshelman@ukans.edu.
The ERL databases are a component of the Libraries' evolving network of electronic resources, which we have named KUILS: KU Interactive Library Systems. You will be reading more about KUILS, particularly the new online catalog which will be introduced later this year, in future issues of CommuniquÈ and in the library's own forthcoming newsletter.
Rob Melton, Publications Coordinator, University Libraries
In this issue...
Hall Center Deadlines:
The Spring 1998 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 (785) 864-4798 or by e-mail at hallcntr@ukans.edu.
In this issue...
The Joyce & Elizabeth Hall Center for the Humanities
The Executive Committee serves in an advisory capacity to the Center's Director. The members are drawn from among Humanities faculty at the University. The Center reports to the Vice-Chancellor for Research and Public Service. It is located in Watkins Home, south of Watson Library on Sunflower Road on the KU campus.
Staff
Roberta Johnson, Director
Janet S. Crow, Executive Director
Allan Hanson, Chair, Executive Committee
Pamela McElroy, Secretary
Susan E. Pauls, Secretary
Executive Committee: Chair-Allan Hanson, Anthropology; Marie Aquilino, Art History; Jack Bricke, Philosophy; John Gronbeck-Tedesco, Theatre & Film; Elizabeth Kuznesof, Latin American Studies; Cheryl Lester, English; Lee Mann, Design; Allan Pasco, French & Italian; Joey Sprague, Sociology. Ex-officio: Robert Zerwekh, Assoc, Vice Chancellor-RPS; Peter Casagrande, Assoc. Dean-Liberal Arts; Phil Hofstra, Art & Design.
Advisory Board: Charles Battey--Chairman, KN Energy, Inc.; Robert Creighton--Brown, Creighton & Peckham; Jill Docking--Vice President-Investments, A.G. Edwards; Michael Fields--William T. Kemper Foundation; John Laney--The Hall Family Foundations; Connie Menninger--Kansas State Historical Society; Robert Mueller--retired, Arthur Young & Company; Tom Murray--Barber, Emerson, Springer, Zinn & Murray; Lynwood Smith--retired, Mayo Clinic; Estelle Sosland--A Civic Volunteer; John H. Stauffer--Stauffer Communications, Inc.; Deanell Reece Tacha--Circuit Judge, U.S. Court of Appeals.
In this issue...
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The Hall Center web pages are maintained by Pamela McElroy. Please send comments or suggestions to hallcntr@ukans.edu.
Updated February 6, 1998