The
Joyce and Elizabeth
Hall Center for the Humanities
Spring 1999 Communiqué
Reading Group and Seminar Schedules
Increased Humanities Lecture Series funding has made it possible to attract higher profile speakers. For example, during the current academic year we have hosted or will host highly acclaimed theater director Joanne Akalaitis, pioneering specialist on African American culture John Michael Vlach, and Columbia School of Law Professor Patricia Williams. Last spring the public outreach initiatives sponsored a symposium on Hispanics in the United States (with emphasis on Hispanics in the Midwest). A lecture by University of Missouri Chancellor Manuel Pacheco opened the symposium, which fielded panel discussions on Multiculturalism and Education; Latino/a Contributions to Culture and Literature; History and Emigration; Hispanic Economic, Political and Cultural Impact in the Midwest; and Latinas in Politics. Chicana writer CherrÌe Moraga delivered the Horowitz Lecture as part of the symposium.
Under the Visiting Interdisciplinary Scholar program a variety of speakers have come to campus as part of the Hall Center's seven (now eight) on-going seminars. Under that program there will also be a seminar on Revisiting the Classics of Modernism in which Harry Liebersohn of the University of Illinois-Champaign will lead discussion on Max Weber's Science as Vocation and Politics as Vocation, and Tom Mermall of CUNY Graduate School will conduct a faculty seminar on JosÈ Ortega y Gasset's The Revolt of the Masses.
The new campaign, which has been approved by the Advisory Board, the university administration, and KUEA is seeking $300,000 to fund these enhancement programs from the year 2000 until 2004.
Roberta Johnson, Director
The final speaker in this year's HLS series is law professor, writer, and social critic Patricia Williams of the Columbia School of Law, who will deliver her lecture, "Toward a Theory of Grace," on March 15. Williams's groundbreaking first collection of essays, The Alchemy of Race and Rights: Diary of a Law Professor (1991), has been influential with leading scholars, critics, and civil rights advocates such as Dr. Henry Louis Gates. As a populist academic writer and a lawyer, Williams's interdisciplinary, daring, and highly accessible work has had wide and far-reaching importance both in academic circles and in the country at large. Williams has been named the Horowitz lecturer for 1999.
The new Poetics Seminar, organized by Jonathan Mayhew of the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, was initiated last spring to bring together members and people from the community who are interested in issues of poetry and poetics. The inaugural session featured presentations by Joe Harrington and Ken Irby of the English Department, and George Hartley, formerly of Ohio State University. Plans for the future include a visit from Professor Majorie Perloff, of Stanford University, one of the premiere scholars in the field of contemporary poetry.
This fall the Hall Center for the Humanities was named a CRINC-designated center along with the Institute for Life Span Studies, Higuchi Biosciences Center, Information and Telecommunication Technology Center, Center for Research on Learning, and Biodiversity Research Center. To become a designated center, an entity must be primarily devoted to research, involve many faculty, have large external funding relative to the disciplines it represents, be interdisciplinary and highly integrated with the academic community, and have infrastructure that relieves the Center for Research of significant administrative expense. It is important that CRINC has recognized the significance of humanities research in this way. Aside from the distinction that such a designation bestows on humanistic research, there are economic benefits as well. Researchers who work under the aegis of a "designated center" are eligible to receive higher indirect-cost returns. We are extremely pleased that CRINC has chosen to distinguish research in the humanities in this way.
In fall 1999, David M. Katzman (American Studies) and Cheryl Lester (American Studies/English) will offer a Hall Center Interdisciplinary Faculty Seminar on Migration and Displacement. The seminar is intended to bring together KU scholars working on various aspects of migration and displacement from representations of migration experiences (in narratives of all kinds including autobiographies and novels, in art, music, and folklore) or from theoretical directions (for instance, diasporic, colonial, and postcolonial theories) to the impact of migration on individuals, societies, and cultures. The seminar welcomes applications from scholars of any discipline whose research intersects with the topic of migration in any time period or any geographical area. It will provide a time and place for scholars to cross disciplinary and cultural boundaries by sharing common interests and research, reframing the questions they ask, and broadening the scope of the issues they address. Katzman and Lester focus on migration and displacement in their own scholarship and teaching; in 1996 they co-directed an NEH Summer Seminar for College Teachers on "African American Migration and American Culture." A call for applications will be sent to all faculty this spring 1999; the deadline for these applications is March 15, 1999.
Anderson's project, "Reading/ Modernity /Culture: Literate Imaginings in Mexico, 1876-1968," will complete a history of reading in Mexico that focuses on the period of modernization and revolution between 1876 and 1968. Anderson will define the influence and power exercised-or not exercised-in and through literary institutions for the construction and education of a nation, and he will explore the social history of literature in Mexico.
Hiner will work on a book project titled A Study of Children in the Life and Thought of Cotton Mather. Mather, a prominent clergyman of colonial New England, was one of the first American authors to write extensively on children and parenthood. Hiner's work will add to the growing literature on the history of children in early America, a subject about which little has been recorded or preserved.
Mayhew will examine the ways in which Spanish writers struggle to define the value and function of poetry in contemporary culture. In his book project, Spanish Poetry 1980-2000: The Twilight of Modernity, he will investigate the complex aesthetic and cultural issues that Spanish poetry raises for the contemporary reader.
Schofield will continue writing a monograph tentatively titled "Respectability: A Study of Cultural Change in America, 1870-1920." In the completed seven-chapter monograph, Schofield will contend that "respectability" has served as a barometer of economic and social differentiation in the United States, particularly at the turn of the last century.
With his Creative Work Fellowship, Michael J. Krueger will work on a project titled "Surveillance Voyeur: A Visual Study," for which he will research the proliferation of surveillance and voyeuristic behavior in contemporary culture, and create a series of video montages based on that research.
Mary Karen Dahl, Theatre and Film, received funding for her proposal, "Migrant ImagiNations: A Residency and Performance by Scholar / Performer Anita Gonzalez." Gonzalez will lead teaching workshops and a colloquium for students and faculty.
George Woodyard, Spanish and Portuguese, received funding for his proposal to invite Chilean theatre critic MarÏa de la Luz Hurtado to offer a short course on Chilean theatre while on campus next fall. She will also work with faculty and students on theatre directing and styles of acting scenography, lighting and make-up within the theatre program of the Universidad CatÛlica. Richard Eversole, Maureen Godman, Anis Bawarshi, and William J. Carpenter, all of the Department of English, received funding for their proposal, "Teaching in Large Classes: Re-Assessing Our Theories and Practice."
Surendra Bhana, History, received funding for his project, "Trans-nationalism and Transformation: Culture, Religion, and Ethnicity in the South African Indian Experience, 1860-1914," for which he will travel to India and to South Africa.
Peter C. Mancall, History, received funding for his project, "HakluytÌs Century, or the Origins of English America," for which he will travel to Italy.
Hagith Sivan, History, will travel to England and Israel to research her project, "The Fall of Jerusalem: Synagogal Poetry and Jewish-Christian Polemic."
Last fall the Hall Center invited proposals for projects that would bring eminent scholars whose work is of an interdisciplinary nature to campus for short periods of time. Jonathan Mayhew, Spanish; Ricardo Quinones, Humanities and Western Civilization; Janet Sharistanian, English; Carl Strikwerda, History; and Jim Woelfel, Humanities and Western Civilization, have proposed a series for the spring semester of 1999. The Century's End: Classics of Modernism Revisited will look back at some of the classic works of modernism and witness how they have been challenged, superseded, or reconfirmed as we reach the end of the twentieth century. These works include Max Weber's Politics as a Vocation and Science as a Vocation, JosÈ Ortega y Gasset's The Revolt of the Masses, Sigmund Freud's Civilization and its Discontents, and Alfred North Whitehead's Science and the Modern World.
The series will consist of two parts: a faculty seminar and a public lecture. The first seminar, a discussion of Weber, is scheduled for March 9, 1999, in the Malott Room of the Kansas Union from 4:00 until 6:30, and will feature KU panelists Gail Bossenga, History; Thomas Heilke, Political Science; and David Smith, Sociology. On March 16, speaker Harry Liebersohn, Professor of History at the University of Illinois, will give a public lecture on Weber's works at 7:30 p.m. in the Spencer Museum of Art Auditorium. Copies of Politics as a Vocation and Science as a Vocation will be made available to interested participants.
The second seminar, on April 8, 1998, will focus on Ortega y Gasset's, The Revolt of the Masses, featuring KU panelists Luis Corteguera, History; Benjamin Sax, History; and Robert Spires, Spanish. This seminar will also take place in the Malott Room of the Kansas Union from 4:00 to 6:30. On April 15, Thomas Mermall, Professor of Spanish at Brooklyn College and CUNY Graduate School, will give a public lecture on The Revolt of the Masses at 7:30 p.m. in the Spencer Museum of Art Auditorium. Both the seminars and the lectures are designed to address large, humanistic issues through an interdisciplinary endeavor.
The team hopes that this proposal will be the first series in an on-going program exploring how prominent works have withstood the changes in twentieth-century thought, especially in the past thirty years. The proposal team also encourages faculty and students alike to attend and to participate in the seminars and lectures.
The series will carry over its discussion into the fall semester of 1999 when lecturers will speak on Sigmund Freud's Civilization and its Discontents, as well as Alfred North Whitehead's Science and the Modern World.
The Humanities Resource Center will present two grant/fellowship development workshops for graduate students early this semester. The first will be from 6:30 to 7:30 p.m. on Wednesday, February 3. The second will be Thursday, February 11, also from 6:30 to 7:30 p.m. Both workshops will be held in the Ermal Garinger Academic Resource Center computer laboratory, 4069 Wescoe Hall. The workshops will focus on searching the WWW for funding sources and strategies for fellowship applications. We have scheduled workshops that will cover the same information on different evenings so students who may be unavailable one evening can work the other into their schedules. Because computer space is limited, interested students should contact Kathy Porsch to register: 864-7834 or kporsch@ukans.edu.
African Studies: Over 400 volumes in the fields of francophone literature, Senegalese maps, out-of-print reference books, and publications of the Institut Fondamentale d'Afrique Noire.
American History: Letters Received By the Attorney General, 1809-1870: Western Law and Order, ed. by Frederick S. Calhoun, a microfilm collection; and Documentary History of the Truman Presidency, ed. by Dennis Merrill of UMKC, of which the first twenty of a planned thirty-volume set are not available.
Art History: A collection of over 2000 items, principally in Medieval Spanish art, was received in the fall of 1997 from the estate of R. Steven Janke; The Craftsman (1901-1916) on eight CD-ROMS; and fourteen additional volumes of Corpus Vitrearum Medii Aevi (medieval glass) were acquired in 1998. In addition, catalogues raissonnÈs of van Bijlert, Botta, Giorgione, Leger, Lipchitz, Matisse, Mondrian, Oldenburg, de Stael, and Twombly were recently acquired.
British History and Literature: Modern British Utopias, 1700-1850, ed. by Gregory Claeys, an eight-volume set; The Early Modern English-Woman: Printed Writings, 1500-1640, Part I, a ten-volume set; and The Novels and Selected Works of Mary Shelley, an eight-volume set of new editions.
East Asian Studies: Top Secret Sources of 15 Years of World War (31 vols.) and Series of Important Documents of 15 Years of World War (21 vols.), both gifts from Kanagawa University; Series of Modern Art and Literature Studies: Literature (23 vols.) and Performing Arts (40 vols.); Collection of Classified Elementary Textbooks for Young Women, 32 reels of microfilm; a 106-volume reprint of the earliest Chinese edition of the Tripitaka; and a collection of over 100 East Asian multimedia materials, funded by the Kansas Library Network Interlibrary Loan Development Program.
Music: A four-volume color facsimile of Beethoven's personal copy of the Eroica Symphony along with a contemporary set of orchestral parts, and a color facsimile of the Codex Calixtinus, a twelfth-century French manuscript that is one of the earliest sources of polyphony.
Religious Studies: A compact-disc version of The Encyclopedia Judaica, and electronic (CD) texts of Christianity, Islam, and Judaism.
Slavic Studies: The Stenographic Records of the Sessions of Verhovna Rada [Ukrainian Parliament], 1900-1997 and Short-Run Ukrainian Newspapers, 1989-1993. Consult the Libraries' Online Catalog for the locations of these resources.
--Ken Lohrentz, CRL Access Coordinator, University Libraries
The spring 1999 session of The University in the Art Museum will be February 5. The day-long session will acquaint faculty with the art museum and its collections and help them integrate this content into established curricula. Faculty from all disciplines are welcome to attend. For further information or to register, contact Pat Villeneuve, curator of education, Spencer Museum of Art, 864-0138 or by e-mail: patv@falcon.cc.ukans.edu.
Friday, April 9, 10:00 a.m.-12:30 p.m.
Spencer Museum of Art Kress Gallery
Cindy Sherman, photographer, director, and performance artist was born in 1954 in New York and grew up in Long Island. She attended the University of Buffalo where she studied photography and graduated in 1976. She uses her own body to reenact the social roles that women play in carefully designed settings. She is concerned not with a sociological investigation of the actual roles, but with how these roles are presented in the media, especially film and glossy magazines. Her earliest work, from the late 1970s, simulated the look of film stills from black-and-white movies. These Untitled Film Stills, and the roles Sherman created for herself in them--the young ingenue, the starlet, the housewife--evoke films of the 1950s that presented women as vulnerable, weak, and even mad. In the early 1980s, Sherman changed to color and to prints proportioned to suggest cinemascope movies and Playboy centerfolds. Unlike the exterior spaces of the black-and-white still photographs, these first works in color brought Sherman's women into interior, private, domestic spaces, spaces culturally defined as feminine. By 1983, Sherman had left the bittersweet fantasies of the 1950s and began making photographs of the female body that became increasingly dark, grotesque, and fragmented. For some of these, which comment on the ways in which women were presented in the visual culture of past generations, Sherman reenacted well-known paintings, sometimes changing the gender of the protagonists from male to female. In another series from the late 1980s, she reduced the female body to its physical by-products. The loss of a coherent, recognizable body begun in this work continued into the early 1990s, in work for which Sherman armored her body with real and fabricated prostheses. These plastic body parts literalize the fetishism of the male gaze.
About the Colloquium: The first hour will include a tour of the exhibition by John Pultz, SMA curator of photography, and short presentations by faculty members. Following a break, there will be a discussion of Sherman's photography, especially as it relates to issues of performance and gender. Faculty who would like to make short presentations should contact John Pultz (pultz@falcon.cc.ukans.edu 864-0127). Preregistration requested. The colloquium, held in conjunction with Spencer Museum exhibitions of Sherman's work, is cosponsored by the Museum and the Hall Center for the Humanities.
Hall Center Deadlines:
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.
Return to:
The Hall Center web pages are maintained by Pamela McElroy. Please send comments or suggestions to hallcntr@ukans.edu.
Created January 12, 1999
