2014-15 Events

Wednesday, September 24, 4:30 p.m.
HEC Auditorium, Goldwin Smith Hall

Philip E. Lewis
Vice President, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation

Paradigms for the Public Humanities?

Wednesday, October 1, 4:30 p.m.
HEC Auditorium, Goldwin Smith Hall

Xu Bing
Artist; Vice President, Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing

Xu Bing: Recent Works

October 31 - November 1, 2014
A.D. White House

Sensational Humanities

Friday, October 31

1:00 - 1:15 p.m. Welcome

• Timothy Murray, Director, Society for the Humanities

1:15 - 2:45 p.m. History & Culture of Publics

• Tsitsi Ella Jaji, University of Pennsylvania
• Saida Hodzic, Society for the Humanities / Cornell University
• Bruce Robbins, Columbia University

3:00 - 4:30 p.m. Queering Affect 

• Amy Villarejo, Cornell University
• Dana Luciano, Society for the Humanities / Georgetown University
• Ann Cvetkovich, Society for the Humanities / University of Texas at Austin

4:45 p.m. Plenary Lecture, HEC Auditorium, Goldwin Smith Hall

• Lauren Berlant, SHC Senior Scholar in Residence; University of Chicago, Living in Ellipsis: Biopolitics and the Attachment to Life

Saturday, November 1

9:00 - 10:45 a.m. Materialisms 

• Verity Platt, Society for the Humanities / Cornell University
• Annette Richards, Society for the Humanities / Cornell University
• Amanda Jo Goldstein, Society for the Humanities / Cornell University
• Verena Andermatt Conley, Harvard University

11:00 a.m. - 12:20 p.m. Postcolonial Legacies

• Suvir Kaul, University of Pennsylvania
• Brett de Bary, Cornell University
• Anthony Reed, Yale University

12:30 - 1:15 p.m. Chroreographic Performance 

• Erin Colleen Johnson, University of West Georgia
• Ashley Ferro-Murray, University of California, Berkeley

2:30 - 4:00 p.m. Theory 

• Peggy Kamuf, University of Southern California
• Jonathan Culler, Cornell University
• Ranjana Khanna, Duke University

4:15 - 5:45 p.m. Screen Cultures

• Tom Conley, Harvard University
• D. N. Rodowick, University of Chicago
• Constance Penley, University of California, Santa Barbara

^{View: Sesquicentennial Conference video}

Wednesday, November 5, 4:30 p.m.
Guerlac Room, A.D. White House

Hoyt Long
Assistant Professor of Japanese Literature, Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations, University of Chicago

Literary Pattern Recognition: A Machine Reading of Modernist Form

What can computers bring to the study of literary form? How might computational methods, like machine learning, help us study these forms at different scales? This talk addresses such questions by way of the Japanese haiku. At the turn of the 20th century, the haiku embarked on a global journey that took it to France, England, Latin America, and the United States. Its influence on Anglo-American modernists is well documented, but the form enjoyed a much wider popularity, saturating the US poetry field by the 1920s. Large-scale text analysis offers a means to read this diffusion at a scale other than that of the individual text, or the literary coterie. First by helping to detect formal and linguistic patterns across large numbers of texts. Second by revealing internal differences within these patterns across time and across different corpora. In learning to read these patterns, we can better understand what it means to subject literary texts to the principled logic of the machine, but also what it is to read the machine back into histories of literary form.

Tuesday, January 27, 12:30 p.m.
Room 110, A.D. White House

Youngmin Kim
Director, Institute for Transnational Media and World Literature, Dongguk University

Transnationalism and the Humanities

Co-sponsored by the East Asia Program and the National Research Foundation of Korea

Thursday, January 29, 4:30 p.m.
Room 2B48 Kroch Library

Asian Contemporary and New Media Art in the Rose Golden Archive

Timothy Murray and Madeleine Casad, Rose Goldsen Archive Curators
Youngmin Kim, Director, Institute for Transnational Media and World Literature, Dongguk University, Seoul

Sponsored by Society for the Humanities, Rose Goldsen Archive, Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell Library, and National Research Foundation of Korea

Wednesday, February 4, 4:30 p.m.
HEC Auditorium, Goldwin Smith Hall

Durba Ghosh
Department of History, Cornell University

Gandhi and the Terrorists: The Politics of Violence and Anticolonial Protest

^{View: Invitational Lecture video}

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

Rosi Braidotti
Distinguished University Professor and Director, Centre for the Humanities, Utrecht University

Posthuman Humanities

“I want to defend the argument that the Humanities can and will survive their present crises and even prosper, to the extent that they will show the ability and willingness to undergo a major process of transformation in the direction of the posthuman.”

Friday, February 20, 2015
Guerlac Room, A.D. White House

Affect and Politics

9:30 a.m. Amia Srinivasan (Philosophy, Oxford University), The Aptness of Anger
Commentator: Lisa Rivera (Philosophy, University of Massachusetts Boston)

11:30 a.m. Eric Mandelbaum (Philosophy and Cognitive Science, CUNY), Affect and Political Reasoning 

2:00 p.m. Kristie Dotson (Philosophy, Michigan State University), Political Expediency Ex Nihilo?: Affectibility Imbalances and Narratives of Political Action

4:00 p.m. Susanna Siegel (Senior Invited Fellow, Society for the Humanities; Edgar Pierce Professor of Philosophy, Harvard University), Feeling and Believing

Monday, March 2, 4:30 p.m.
Guerlac Room, A.D. White House

Dana Luciano
Atkinson Center for a Sustainable Future Fellow, Society for the Humanities; Associate Professor, Department of English, Georgetown University

Romancing the Trace: Edward Hitchcock’s Speculative Ichnology

Presented with the Atkinson Center for a Sustainable Future

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

Katie Walter
Co-director, Centre for Early Modern and Medieval Studies Lecturer in Medieval English Literature, University of Sussex

Images, the (Absent) Friend and the Sense of Touch

Friday, April 10, 2015
A.D. White House

Critical Sensations

10:00 a.m. Welcome

• Timothy Murray, Director, Society for the Humanities

10:15 - 11:45 a.m. Affect & Aesthetics

• Johannes Wankhammer, Mellon Graduate Fellow; German Studies, Cornell University, Senses in the Making: Art and Perception in Alexander Baumgarten’s Aesthetica
• Andrew McGonigal, Society Fellow; Philosophy, University of Leeds, Erysichthonic Tragedy, or, A Puzzle in Profundity
• Benjamin Parris, Society Fellow, Slackness and Sleep in Milton’s Paradise Lost
• Respondent: Amanda Jo Goldstein, Faculty Fellow; English, Cornell University

1:00 - 2:30 p.m. Political Sensations

• Maria Flood, Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow; Romance Studies, Cornell University, Documentary Aesthetics and October 17, 1961
• Munia Bhaumik, Society Fellow; Comparative Literature, Emory University, Sense and Statelessness
• Christine Bacareza Balance, Society Fellow; Asian American Studies, University of California, Irvine, Making Sense of Martial Law Philippines
• Ida Dominijanni, Society Fellow; Women Philosophers Community “Diotima,” University of Verona, Sensory power, sensory subjects: for a politics of sensations
• Respondent: Ann Cvetkovich, Society Fellow; English, University of Texas at Austin

2:30 - 4:00 p.m. Objects of Sensation

• Rebecca Kosick, Mellon Graduate Fellow; Comparative Literature, Cornell University, Book Unbound: Juan Luis Martínez and La nueva novela
• Paul Miller, Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow; Music, Cornell University, Expression, Emotion and Performance in Stockhausen’s Music
• Erin Obodiac, Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow; Comparative Literature, Cornell University, On Touching--The Transhuman
• Respondent: Timothy Murray, Director

4:15 p.m. Concluding Roundtable

• Chair: Verity Platt, Faculty Fellow; Classics, Cornell University

Thursday, April 16, 12:00 p.m.
Room 201, A.D. White House

Public Humanities: A colloquium with the Cornell University Graduate Student Public Humanities Fellows

Emily Hong, Anthropology
The Making of Nobel, Nok, Dah: Refugee Subjectivity Through Sensory Ethnography & Feminist Oral History

Peregrine Gerard-Little, Archaeology
Archaeology and the Two-Row Wampum: Public Engagement with 17th Century Human-Landscape Relations in Iroquoia

Christine Yao, English
Collage and Collaboration: Remembering the 19th Century Through Public Humanities

Wednesday, April 29, 4:30 p.m.
Guerlac Room, A.D. White House

Sustaining the Humanities: Epistemology, Methodology, Infrastructure

Karlie Fox-Knudtsen, Anthropology
Sustainable Futures? Epistemology and Mining Development in Rural Western Odisha

Sophie Hochhäusl, History of Architecture and Urban Development
On Media and Methodology: Reconstructing Everyday Architecture and Landscapes in the Modern Siedlung

Monica Salas Landa, Anthropology
Crude Toxicity: The workings of Failing Oil Infrastructure in Poza Rica, Veracruz, Mexico

Panelists are recipients of Sustainability Research Grants awarded by the Society for the Humanities Initiative on Sustainability via the Humanities and the Arts, which is the sponsor of this event, with support from the Atkinson Center for a Sustainable Future