[Tuesday, February 14, 3:00pm, Macky 202] CHA Faculty Fellowship Work in Progress, featuring John Slater, Department of Spanish & Portuguese, “Dissidence in the Republic of Letters: Cienfuegos’ Attack on Early Modern Naturalism.” Abstract: During the second half of the 1620’s, Bernardo de Cienfuegos prepared a seven-thousand page manuscript on Iberian natural history, which included over a thousand illustrations. The manuscript was never published, but for a peculiar reason: Cienfuegos did not trust the printing press. Hundreds of times in the course of his work, Cienfuegos ridicules the work of published naturalists, enumerating their errors, pointing out instances in which illustrators made mistakes, misattributions were made, or unreliable sources were cited. We are accustomed to thinking of the Republic of Letters—and particularly the exchange of information, observations, plant samples, and life histories—as a triumph of early modern scientific life. But Cienfuegos suggests that these circles of correspondence institutionalized ignorance about Spain and the American colonies. For further information, please contact Paula Anderson.
[Friday, February 17, 4:00pm, British Studies (5th floor of Norlin Library)] CHA's 5th Annual Eaton Lecture, featuring Eric Sundquist, "The Historian's Anvil, the Novelist's Crucible: The Place of History in Holocaust Literature." Professor Sundquist is the Andrew W. Mellon Professor of the Humanities at Johns Hopkins University. He has taught at UCLA, Berkeley, Vanderbilt, and Northwestern, where he was also Dean of the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences. He is the author or editor of twelve books, including King’s Dream (2009); Strangers in the Land: Blacks, Jews, Post-Holocaust America (2005), which received the Weinberg Judaic Studies Institute Book Award; and To Wake theNations: Race in the Making of American Literature (1992), which received the Christian Gauss Award from Phi Beta Kappa and the James Russell Lowell Award from the Modern Language Association. In 1997 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and currently serves on its Council. In 2007 he was named a recipient of a Distinguished Achievement Award from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, which supported a three-year program of research and teaching activities at UCLA related to the role of the Holocaust in American and modern culture. This lecture is sponsored by CHA with endowed funds from Leslie and Woody Eaton. For further information, please contact Paula Anderson.
[Thursday, February 23, 5:00pm, Old Main Chapel] CHA's Spring 2012 Cox Family Visiting Scholar, hosted by the Comparative Literature Graduate Program, Fredric Jameson, will present a free lecture entitled "The Aesthetics of Singularity." One of the foremost contemporary Marxist literary and cultural critics, Professor Jameson is the William A. Lane Jr. Professor of Comparative Literature and Romance Studies at Duke University. His courses specialize in the modern French novel and cinema, and on critical theory with particular emphasis on Sartre, Marx, Freud and the Frankfurt School. Among his best-known works are The Political Unconscious, Postmodernism, or, the Logic of Late Capitalism, and his most recent The Hegel Variations. In January of this year, he was awarded the Modern Language Association's sixth Award for Lifetime Scholarly Achievement. For further information, please contact Patricia Paige or Ricardo Landeira.
[Friday, February 24, 12:00-1:00pm, British Studies (5th floor of Norlin Library)] Performance Friday! featuring Department of Dance assistant professor Michelle Ellsworth. Doors open at 11:30 for free lunch. Sponsored by CHA. For further information, please contact Paula Anderson, 303-492-1423.
[Tuesday, February 28, 3:00pm, Macky 202] CHA Faculty Fellowship Work in Progress, featuring Karen Jacobs, Department of English, "Tracing Sebald’s Postmodern Cartographies." Abstract: Trace Atlas: Itineraries of Postmodern Literary Space investigates a selection of recent theoretical works and post-1980 novels that imagine post-Cartesian engagements with space, mapping, and the atlas form, often against the backdrop of what is imagined to be a shattered or ungraspable global space. For further information, please contact Paula Anderson.
[Tuesday, March 6, 3:00pm, Macky 202] CHA Faculty Fellowship Work in Progress, featuring Lucy Chester, Department of History. Title and Abstract are forthcoming. For further information, please contact Paula Anderson.
[Friday, March 9, 12:00-1:00pm, British Studies (5th floor of Norlin Library)] Performance Friday! featuring excerpts from Department of Theatre and Dance's production of Antigone. Doors open at 11:30 for free lunch. Sponsored by CHA. For further information, please contact Paula Anderson, 303-492-1423.
[Tuesday, March 20, 3:00pm, Macky 202] CHA Faculty Fellowship Work in Progress, featuring Beth Dusinberre, Department of Classics, "The Art of Empire in Ancient Persia." Abstract: The Persepolis Fortification Archive is a group of about 20,000 government receipts, dating to the years around 500 BCE that was excavated at the Persian capital city of Persepolis better known for its palaces with soaring columns and glorious relief sculptures. The Fortification Archive uses multiple languages and formats to record disbursements made in food and beverages to people engaged in imperial business at and around Persepolis during the reign of Darius the Great. It consists of clay tablets of various shapes and sizes, most of them bearing the impression of sealstones used by offices and individuals. Beth Dusinberre has spent her CHA fellowship time drawing the seal impressions on the 750+ tablets of the archive written in Aramaic. Her drawings illuminate the imagery of these ancient artifacts and allow them to be folded into scholarly discussion of such issues as Achaemenid Persian imperial propaganda and resistance to that pressure, religious expression, stylistic developments and iconographic issues, regional/local variations and a kind of imperial koine that grew up in the Achaemenid empire, the degree of personal choice people exercised in selecting the images on their seals, and even idiosyncratic or personal methods and practices of impressing a seal on a tablet. The Persepolis Fortification Aramaic Tablet Seals demonstrate the tremendous cohesiveness and flexibility that characterized the Fortification Archive and Achaemenid administrative practices as a whole. For further information, please contact Paula Anderson.
[Tuesday, April 3, 3:00pm, Macky 202] CHA Faculty Fellowship Work in Progress, featuring Janice Ho, Department of English. "Democratic Friends in E.M. Forster's Early Novels." This talk looks at the early novels of E.M. Forster--The Longest Journey (1907) and Howards End (1911)--to argue that Forster deploys friendship as a trope for democratic citizenship, a figurative vehicle for imagining more egalitarian social and gender relations in the wake of early twentieth-century working class and women's movements for socio-political equality. The talk is drawn from a larger book project titled Liberal Citizenship, National Belonging, and the Twentieth-Century British Novel, which examines how different historical struggles redefined citizenship and national forms in twentieth-century Britain. For further information, please contact Paula Anderson.
[Tuesday, April 10, 3:00pm, Macky 202] CHA Faculty Fellowship Work in Progress, featuring Jill Heydt-Stevenson, Department of English. Title and Abstract are forthcoming. For further information, please contact Paula Anderson.
[Tuesday, April 17, 3:00pm, Macky 202] CHA Faculty Fellowship Work in Progress, featuring Mithi Mukherjee, Department of History. Title and Abstract are forthcoming. For further information, please contact Paula Anderson.
[Friday, April 20, 12:00-1:00pm, British Studies (5th floor of Norlin Library)] Performance Friday! featuring excerpts from CU Opera's production of Rossini's La Cambiale di Matrimonio. Doors open at 11:30 for free lunch. Sponsored by CHA. For further information, please contact Paula Anderson, 303-492-1423.
