2008-09 Events

40th Anniversary Workshop

October 17-18, 2008
A.D. White House, Cornell University

From Earth Art to Eco Art

The occasion for this celebratory event is the confuence of this year's annual research theme at the Society for the Humanities, "Water: A Critical Concept for the Humanities," with the 40th anniversary of the Cornell exhibition, which took palce in the A.D. White House when it was the home of hte A.D. White Museum of Art.

Friday, October 17

1:30 - 2:15 p.m. Welcoming Remarks

• Timothy Murray, Director, Society for the Humanities
• Patricia Phillips, Chair, Department of Art
• Pamela Seymour Smith, Reflections by Willoughby Sharp, Curator of Earth Art
• Renate Ferro, Department of Art, An Interactive Installation

2:15 - 4:00 p.m. Celebrating Earth Art

• Moderator: Buzz Spector, Department of Art
• Marilyn Rivchin, Theatre/Film/Dance, Filming Earth Art
• Marin Sullivan, History of Art, University of Michigan, The Emergence of Earth Art: Cornell University, 1969
• Navjotika Kumar, History of Art, Kent State, Land Art as/and Cataclysm

4:30 p.m. Plenary Lecture

• Dennis Oppenheim, artist, NYC, Land Art and the Earth Art Show

Saturday, October 18

9:15 - 11:00 a.m. Fluid Geographies

• Moderator: Sam Baker, Society for the Humanities
• Patricia Phillips, Department of Art, Fluid Geographies: Public Art in Flux
• Stacy Levy, Artist, The Gristle of Nature: Celebrating What is Left in our Landscape

11:15 a.m. - 12:30 p.m. Digital Gardens

• Moderator: Andrea Hammer, Landscape Architecture
• Verena Andermatt Conley, Society for the Humanities/Harvard University, Place, Non-Place: How to Cultivate a Digital Garden
• Daniel Warner, Music, Hampshire College, Never the Same River Twice: Landscape, Soundscape and Water

2:00 - 4:00 p.m. Environmental Others

• Moderator: Maria Fernandez, History of Art
• Brandon Ballengee, Artist, NYC, Sacred Monsters: Biological Abstraction Sculpted by a Changing Environment
• Cary Peppermint and Christine Nadir, Art, Colgate University, Externalities: Wilderness and its Others
• Patricia Zimmermann, FLEFF, Ithaca College, ECO-PUBLICS

4:15 - 5:30 p.m. Panel Discussion: Timothy Murray, Patricia Phillips, Dennis Oppenheim, Verena Andermatt Conley, and Christine Marran

Sponsors: Society for the Humanities, Department of Art
Co-sponsors: The Rose Goldsen Lecture Series, Cornell Council of the Arts

Series on the Future of Publishing

Forum on Academic Publishing in the Humanities

November 7-8, 2008
A.D. White House, Cornell University

Technological, economic, and political developments of the past decade have drastically altered the means and the tempo by which cultural products of all kinds are disseminated. The news media and commercial book publishing are sites of increasing market volatility. In light of sweeping changes in the systems of information exchange in the society at large, what are the future prospects of scholarly publishing in the humanities? A recent MLA report identifies a "narrowing of publishing possibilities" in the humanities, due in part to economic pressures on the university presses that accompany a broad "corporatization of the university and the imposition of business models of efficiency and output." How might the space for critical scholarly exchange in the hmanities be preserved - even expanded - in the current environment?

Friday, November 7

2:00 p.m.

• Opening Remarks: Anne Kenney, University Librarian, Cornell, and Timothy Murray, Director, Society for the Humanities, Cornell
• Introductions: Kizer Walker, Cornell University Library

2:15 - 5:30 p.m. Panel 1: Humanities Publishing, Network Culture

• Lindsay Waters, Harvard University Press, Cognition in the Wild: Networks, Criticism, and Crisis
  Responding: William Y. Arms, Cornell; moderating: Kizer Walker, Cornell University Library
• N. Katherine Hayles, Duke University, Transforming the Humanities: Implications for Publishing
  Responding: Susan Buck-Morss, Cornell, and Maria Fernandez, Cornell; moderating: Jonathan Culler, Cornell

Saturday, November 8

9:30 a.m. - 12:30 p.m. Panel II: Publishing Crisis, Institutional Perspectives

• Moderating: Oya Rieger, Cornell University Library
• Joseph S. Meisel, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, University Presses Observed, 1929-1979
• Donald J. Waters, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Reconceptualizing Archives and Scholarly Editions
• Roundtable discussion: Peter U. Hohendahl, Cornell, Peper J. Potter, Cornell University Press, and Naoki Sacai, Cornell

2:00 - 5:30 p.m. Panel III: Reading Practices, Digital Objects

• Milad Doueihi, University of Glasgow, Digital Objecthood and Scholarly Publishing
  Responding: Philip Lewis, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and Timothy Murray, Cornell; moderating: Neil Saccamano, Cornell
• John Guillory, New York University, How Scholars Read
  Responding: Jenny Mann, Cornell, and Brett de Bary, Cornell; moderating: Laura Brown, Cornell

Sponsors: Cornell University Library, Society for the Humanities, The Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation, Office of the Provost, and Office of the Dead of Arts & Sciences

Senior Scholar in Residence: Verena Andermatt Conley

Wednesday, November 12, 4:30 p.m.
Guerlac Room, A.D. White House 

Verena Andermatt Conley
Senior Scholar in Residence, Society for the Humanities; Professor of Comparative Literature and Romance Languages & Literatures, Harvard University

Spatial Fictions

Reading: David Ferry

November 20, 4:20 p.m.
Guerlac Room, A.D. White House

David Ferry
Reading from his poems and translations

David Ferry has published translations of the Odes and of the Epistles of Horace, the Eclogues and the Georgics of Vergil and a verse rendition of the Babylonian Gilgamesh epic. He is working on a translation of the Aeneid of Virgil and of the Satires of Horace. His translations are published by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. His most recent book of poems, Of No Country I Know: New and Selected Poems (University of Chicago Press) won the Lenore Mashall prize, Academy of American Poets and the Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry, The Library of Congress. He is completing a new book of poems, to be called In the Reading Room. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Sponsored by the Department of English and Society for the Humanities

Public Lecture: Peter Caws

Wednesday, March 11, 4:30 p.m.
Guerlac Room, A.D. White House

Peter Caws
University Professor of Philosophy, Professor of Human Sciences, George Washington University

The Lekton and the Lifeworld

Drawing on his recent work in the philosophy of the human sciences (as distinguished from the natural sciences by ontological rather than methodological considerations), Caws revisits some issues in the theory of literature, stressing the role of the individual reader, who incorporates into his or her own lifeworld the material evoked by the text. It challenges the largely unspoken assumption that there exists a common domain (a sort of Popperian World III) populated by signs and meanings, authors and works, memes or rhizomes or influences and other like objects. The domains in which these things do have their being are idiosyncratic and only partially overlapping, needing to be created afresh (like literary works themselves) in repeated episodes of reading and thinking. This has consequences for the understanding and teaching of literature and culture generally.

Peter Caws's research interests include contemporary continental philosophy, social and political philosophy, existentialism and phenomenology, and philosophy and technology. He is author of Sartre, Structuralism: The Art of the Intelligible and Yorick's World: Science and the Knowing.

Annual Invitational Lecture

Wednesday, March 25, 4:30 p.m.
Hollis E. Cornell Auditorium, Goldwin Smith Hall

Salah Hassan
Goldwin Smith Professor and Director of the Africana Studies and Research Center, Professor of History of Art, Cornell University

Contemporary "Islamic" Art and the Global War on Terror

Public Lecture: Gregg Lambert

Wednesday, April 1, 4:30 p.m.
Guerlac Room, A.D. White House

Gregg Lambert
Dean's Professor of Humanities, Founding Director, Syracuse University Humanities Center

Globalatinization and Bio-Politics: On the Double-Horizon of the Death of God

Senior Scholar in Residence: Marcus Rediker

Wednesday, April 15, 4:30 p.m.
Guerlac Room, A.D. White House

Marcus Rediker
Senior Scholar in Residence, Society for the Humanities; History, Univeristy of Pittsburgh

Rethinking the Amistad Rebellion

Annual Fellows' Workshop

Friday, April 10, 2009
A.D. White House​

Water: A Workshop Across the Disciplines

1:00 p.m. Water Science: Ecological Practice and Public Policy

• Sara Pritchard, Science & Technology Studies, Cornell
• Nelson Hairston, Ecology & Evolutionary Biology, Cornell
• Clifford Kraft, Natural Resources, Cornell
• Barbara Bedford, Natural Resources, Cornell

2:30 p.m. Aquatic Media: Water in the Air

• Christine Marran, Asian Languages & Literatures, University of Minnesota
• Monique Allewaert, English, Emory University
• Timothy Murray, Director, Society for the Humanities
• Rederic Neyrat, Philosophy, Lycee Claude Bernard - Ville de France/Saone

4:30 p.m. History at Sea: Maritime Methods

• Marcus Rediker, Senior Scholar in Residence; History, University of Pittsburgh
• Richard Guy, Mellon Graduate Fellow; History of Architecture, Cornell
• Jennifer Gaynor, History, University of Buffalo, SUNY
• Samuel Baker, English, University of Texas at Austin

Out of the Water: Concluding Panel

• Verena Andermatt Conley, Literature and Romance Studies, Harvard