2009-10 Events

Rose Goldsen Lecture Series: Kaja Silverman

Wednesday, September 23, 4:30 p.m.
Guerlac Room, A.D. White House

Kaja Silverman
Class of 1940 Professor of Rhetoric and Film, University of California, Berkeley

The Twilight of Posterity

Co-sponsored by the Mellon Central New York Humanities Corridor

Dominick LaCapra Conference

September 25-26, 2009
A.D. White House

Repetition with Change: The Intellectual Legacies of Dominick LaCapra

For almost four decades, Dominick LaCapra has challenged the disciplinary and normative assumptions of scholars throughout the humanities. He helped to inaugurate and interpret the "linguistic turn" in the historical profession, exploring the relevance of literary theory for historical inquiry, while simultaneously making a case for careful historical study within literary and critical theory.

This conference will gather together LaCapra's former students and intellectual interlocutors who have taken up in their own work one or more of the theoretical challenges he has posed over the years. Papers will be grouped according to some of LaCapra's chief preoccupations that have persisted through the decades: historiography and critical theory, secularization, trauma and repetition, excess and normative limits, and animal-human relations. Together the papers will illustrate the vast range of work that LaCapra's theoretical reflections have inspired in intellectual history and beyond.

Friday, September 25

1:00 p.m. Opening Remarks

Timothy Murray and Jonathan Culler

1:30 p.m. Trauma and Affect

Chair: Jeremy Varon, The New School
Federico Finchelstein, The New School, The Holocaust as Ideology: Borges, Trauma and the Fascist Unconscious
Anna Parkinson, Northwestern University, What a Difference Repetition Makes: Recent Fantasies of the Silver Screen
Tracie Matysik, University of Texas at Austin, Blumenberg, Spinoza, and Self-Preservation

3:30 p.m. Sacred and Secular

Chair: Peter Gilgen, Cornell University
Samuel Moyn, Columba University, Bearing Witness: Theological Sources of a Secular Moral Imperative
Harold Mah, Queen's University, The Sacralization of the Secular: Barthes's Mythologies
Ethan Kleinberg, Wesleyan University, In/fintite Time: Tracing Transcendence to Emmanuel Levinas's Talmudic Lectures

Saturday, September, 26

9:30 a.m. History and Psychoanalysis

Chair: Carolyn Dean, Brown University
Scott Spector, University of Michigan, Two Cultures: Freud Between German-Jewish Science and Humanism
Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg, Brown University, Little Hans and Dogs
Camille Robcis, Cornell University, French Psychoanalysis and Names-of-the-Father

11:30 a.m. Violence, Law, Memory

Chair: Isabel Hull, Cornell University
Ben Bower, University of Texas at Austin, Conceptions of War in Colonial Algeria: Just War, Jihad, and the "Good War"
Judith Surkis, Harvard University, Hymenal Politics: Marriage, Secularism, and Sovereignty
Gary Wilder, CUNY, From Historical Memory to the History of Time

2:00 p.m. Historiography

Chair: Michael Steinberg, Brown University
Jeremy Telman, Valparaiso University, Originalism and Its Discontents
Rebecca Spang, Indiana University, Bloomington, On the Use and Abuse of Historiography for Life
Jonathan Judaken, University of Memphis, A New Synthesis? Toward the Cultural History of Ideas

4:00 p.m. Roundtable

Kate Horning, Taran Kang, Peter Staudenmeier, Emma Willoughby, Franz Hofer
Comments by Lloyd Kramer, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Funding provided by Society for the Humanities, Institute for German Cultural Studies, French Studies, History, English, Government, German Studies, Theatre, Film & Dance, Dean's Office of the College of Arts & Sciences

Annual Conference

October 23-24, 2009
A.D. White House

Spatialized Networks & Artistic Mobilizations: A Critical Workshop on Thought and Practice

Friday, October 23

1:45 p.m. Introduction

Tim Murray, Director, Society for the Humanities

2:00 p.m. Panel I

Convener: Milton Curry, Architecture, Cornell
Teddy Cruz, Visual Arts, University of California, San Diego, Adaptive Architecture

3:00 p.m. Panel II

Convener: Mary Jacobus, Society for the Humanities; CRASSH, Cambridge University
Keller Easterling, Society for the Humanities; Architecture, Yale, Disposition

4:30 p.m. Conversation

Dagmar Richter, Chair of Architecture, Cornell, with Teddy Cruz and Keller Easterling

Saturday, October 24

9:15 a.m. HASTAC Networked

Richard Guy, History of Architecture
Claudia Costa Pederson, History of Art
Seth Perlow, English
Ryan Platt, Theatre Arts

10:00 a.m. Panel III

Convener: Brett de Bary, Asian Studies, Cornell
Machiko Kusahara, Media Art, Waseda University, Japan, Vanishing Borders: Media Art, Design, and Popular Culture in Japan

11:15 a.m. Panel IV

Convener: Kevin Ernste, Music, Cornell
Kevin Hamilton, New Media, University of Illinois, From Legs to Fingers: Relational Mobilities at the Interface

1:45 p.m. Panel V

Convener: Pheobe Sengers, Information Science and Science & Technology Studies, Cornell
Geert Lovink, New Media, University of Amsterdam, Network Culture

2:45 p.m. Panel VI

Convener: Stephanie Owens, Art, Cornell
Paul Vanouse, Art University of Buffalo, Active Stimulation Feedback Platform

4:00 p.m. Thinking Networked Practice

Timothy Murray, Maria Fernandez, Timothy Campbell, Renate Ferro, Prita Meier

Co-sponsored by the Rose Goldsen Lecture Series

New Socialist Climax

An ARTiSIMPLE Production
Produced by Jian Yi, Yale World Fellow
Directed by Jian Yi and Xiao Xiping (Douglas)
Edited by Song Ling (Eva)
2009, Chinese dialogue, English subtitles
80-minute draft edition

Monday, November 23, 4:30 p.m.
A.D. White House

Jian Yi discusses excerpts from his new documentary

Tuesday, November 24, 4:30 p.m.
Kaufmann Auditorium, Goldwin Smith hall

Screening of complete documentary

New Socialist Climax is a film by the independent documentary maker Jian Yi. The Film examines China's recent state-sponsored Red Tourism, a national campaign that brings tourists to the old Communist revolutionary bases. The film explores the different levels of reality involved - for both tourists and local population - at Mr. Jingganshan, cradle of the Chinese Communist revolution led by Mao Zedong. The Subject of Red Tourism epitomizes the changing and often confusing realities of China today, with its mingling of capitalism, rural economic stimulus and state-sponsored ideology. Documenting some underlying tensions, the film leaves viewers to make their own judgments.

Digital Humanities @ the Society

Monday, February 8, 4:30 p.m.
Guerlac Room, A.D. White House

Digital Humanities Meet Digital Arts

A public dialogue between:

Mary Flanagan, Sherman Fairchild Distinguished Professor in Digital Humanities, Dartmouth College

Tim Murray, Director, Society for the Humanities

Kent Kleinman, Dean of Architecture, Art & Planning

With added participation of Cornell contributors to the Cornell-Toronto Digital Humanities Consortium and Cornell's HASTAC Scholars

Sponsored by Society for the Humanities and the Mellon Central New York Humanities Corridor

Annual Invitational Lecture

Wednesday, February 24, 4:30 p.m.
Hollis E. Cornell Auditorium, Goldwin Smith Hall

Brett de Bary
Professor, Asian Studies and Comparative Literature, Cornell

Traveling, and Translating, the Distance: Tawada Yoko and the Thought of World Literature

Rose Goldsen Lecture Series: Scott deLahunta

Monday, March 15, 4:30 p.m.
Guerlac Room, A.D. White House

Scott deLahunta
Research Fellow, Amsterdam School of the Arts

Choreographic Thinking Tools and Related Projects

Annual Future of the Humanities Lecture

Wednesday, March 31, 4:30 p.m.
Hollis E. Cornell Auditorium, Goldwin Smith Hall

Don Randel
President, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation

What About the Humanities?

Randel served for 32 years as a member of Cornell's faculty, where e was also department chair, vice-provost, and associate dean and then dead of the College of Arts & Sciences. He became provost of Cornell University in 1995. After leaving Cornell, Randel served as President of the University of Chicago, where he led efforts to strengthen the humanities and the arts on campus. He became President of the Mellon Foundation in 2006.

Randel is a musicologist whose scholarly specialty is the music of the Middle Ages and Renaissance in Spain and France. As a music historian, Mr. Randel is widely published and has written on such varied topics as medieval liturgical chant, Arabic music theory, Latin American popular music, and 15th-century French music and poetry.