2015-16 Events

September 14-16
Cornell University

Korean Arts and Culture

Monday, September 14, 4:30 p.m., Guerlac Room, A.D. White House
Youngmin Kim, Director, Institute for Trans Media and World Literatures, Dongguk University
Travelling Poetry, Travelling Theory, and the Humanities

Tuesday, September 15, 4:30 p.m., Room 110, A.D. White House
Workshop: Perspectives on the Humanities and Arts in South Korea
With Timothy Murray, Director, Society for the Humanities, Cornell, Youngmin Kim, and Alex Taek-Gwang Lee

Wednesday, September 16, 4:30 p.m., Guerlac Room, A.D. White House
Alex Taek-Gwang Lee, Associate Professor, British & American Cultural Studies, Kyung Hee University
Humanities and Plastic Surgery: The Logic of Human Capital in South Korea 

October 23-24, 2015
A.D. White House

Time, on the Critical Edge

1:00 - 2:45 p.m. Society@50 Celebratory Lecture

• Sara Guyer (Director, Center for the Humanities, University of Wisconsin-Madison), Anthropomorphism, Anthropocene

3:00 - 4:30 p.m. Times of Difference

• Viranjini P. Munasinghe (Faculty Fellow; Associate Professor of Anthropology, Cornell University), History, Hypercolonialism and the Caribbean Exception
• Carina Ray (Society Fellow; Associate Professor of African and Afro-American Studies, Brandeis University), Time and the Paradox of Blackness
• Rebecca Wanzo (Society Fellow; Associate Director, Center for the Humanities, Washington University), The Temporal Fictions of Ferguson

5:00 p.m. Taylor Family Directorship Naming Lecture, Hollis E. Cornell Auditorium, Goldwin Smith Hall

• Host: Dean Gretchen Ritter (College of Arts and Sciences, Cornell University)
• Tejumola Olaniyan (Society Senior Scholar in Residence; Louise Durham Mead Professor of English and African Languages and Literature, University of Wisconsin-Madison), Enchantings: Modernity and The Time of the State in Africa

9:30 – 11:00 a.m. Histories of Time

• Rayna Kalas (Faculty Fellow; Associate Professor of English, Cornell University), Constitutional Time
• Kelly Grotke (Society Fellow; The Erik Castrén Institute, University of Helsinki), Universal Histories and World Citizens: Interpreting the 19th c. European Temporal Imagination
• Craig Campbell (Society Fellow; Associate Professor of Anthropology, University of Texas at Austin), Thinking Towards Catastrophe: A Preliminary Typology of Events

11:15 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. Featured Lecture

• Skawennati (Partnership Coordinator, Initiative for Indigenous Futures; Co-Director, Aboriginal Territories in Cyberspace), Past, Present and Future in TimeTraveller™

2:00 – 3:00 p.m. Creative Time

Jonathan Strauss (Society Fellow; Professor of French and Italian, Miami University), The Elegiac Present in Guillaume Apollinaire’s Rain Calligrams

Miguel Ángel Hernández Navarro (Society Fellow; Associate Professor of Art History, University of Murcia), Twisted Time: Anachronism and History in Fernando Bryce’s Work

3:00 – 4:00 p.m. Time’s Performatives

Steve Potter (Society Fellow; Associate Lecturer at Goldsmiths, University of London), Pleasure and Protest in ‘Jazz’ and ‘Classical’ Avant-Gardes of the 1950s

Arnika Fuhrmann (Faculty Fellow; Assistant Professor of Southeast Asian Studies, Cornell University), Ghostly Desires: Queer Longings and Buddhist Temporalities in Independent Thai Cinema

4:30 – 6:00 p.m. Concluding Lecture

• Premesh Lalu (Director, Centre for Humanities Research, University of the Western Cape), The Trojan Horse and the Becoming Technical of the Human

Wednesday, November 18, 4:30 p.m.
Hollis E. Cornell Auditorium, Goldwin Smith Hall

Jonathan Culler
Class of 1916 Professor of English, Cornell University

Literary Theory Today

Acknowledging the Society for the Humanities’ legacy of promoting the value of critical theory, we are happy to announce the Annual Culler Lecture in Critical Theory. The inaugural lecture, on “Literary Theory Today,” will be offered by Jonathan Culler, who served as the Director of the Society for the Humanities from 1984 to 1993. Professor Culler positioned the Society as an international center of critical theory, a distinction it has held over the years since.

Thursday, November 19, 4:30 p.m.
Room 201, A.D. White House

Yang Geng
Assistant Professor of Media Arts, Dalian University of Technology, Dalian, China

The time phenomenon of Chinese Zen and early video art in China

The Society for the Humanities and the Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art are pleased to welcome Professor Yang Geng back to Cornell for a presentation of her important analysis of Chinese video art. Based on her research in Cornell’s Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art, while in residence at the Society for the Humanities, Spring 2015, Professor Geng will discuss the exceptional production of video art in China since the late 1980s (much of it held in the Rose Goldsen Archive). Most important for contemporary Asian and visual studies is her creative blend of Chinese philosophy and Western theory in understanding the influential explosion of video art in China.

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

Sharon Daniel
Professor of Film and Digital Media, University of California, Santa Cruz

On Politics and Aesthetics

Daniel’s talk will be an in-depth theorized discussion of a series of database-driven new media documentaries as case-studies of hybrid forms at the intersection of art, scholarship, and political activism. The talk will address the tensions and contradictions that emerge between the goals of theory and aesthetics and those of advocacy and activism.

Co-sponsored by the Society for the Humanities, Central New York Humanities Corridor, from an award by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and Mellon Collaborative Studies in Architecture, Urbanism, and the Humanities.

Monday, November 30, 5:00 p.m.
157 E Sibley Hall

Keller Easterling
Professor of Architecture, Yale University

Extrastatecraft

Architect/urbanist/writer Keller Easterling will discuss how some of the world’s most radical changes are being written in the language of the infrastructural matrix of spatial products and free zone cities. Infrastructure space is itself an information system—a spatial operating system for shaping the city. This space can bring to art a new relevance, as well as additional aesthetic pleasures and political capacities.

Co-sponsored by Mellon Collaborative Studies in Architecture, Urbanism, and the Humanities

Thursday, February 11, 4:30 p.m.
Lewis Auditorium, Goldwin Smith Hall

Elizabeth A. Povinelli
Franz Boas Professor of Anthropology, Columbia University

Toxic Sovereignties in Geontopower 

^{View: Senior Scholar in Residence video}

Wednesday, November 24, 4:30 p.m.
Klarman Hall Auditorium

William D. Adams
Chairman, National Endowment for the Humanities

The Common Good and NEH at 50

A joint celebration of the Society for the Humanities and National Endowment for the Humanities 50th Anniversaries

^{View: Future of the Humanities video}

Tuesday, March 1, 4:30 p.m.
Guerlac Room, A.D. White House

Jentery Sayers
Assistant Professor, English and Cultural, Social, and Political Thought, University of Victoria

Prototyping Absence, Remaking Old Media

When conducting archival research, historians of media and technology frequently encounter devices that no longer work or existed only as illustrations, fictions, or one-offs. Rather than studying such uncertainty at a remove, this talk outlines ways to prototype absences in the historical record. It draws from examples of remaking old media to demonstrate how prototyping the past affords unique approaches to examining the contingent relations between matter and meaning, without fetishizing exact reproductions of historical artifacts.

Wednesday, March 2, 4:30 p.m.
Hollis E. Cornell Auditorium, Goldwin Smith Hall

Gerard Aching
Director, Africana Studies & Research Center and Professor of Africana and Romance Studies, Cornell University

'Oh my body, always make me a man who questions': The Apostrophized Black Body in Fanon and Coates

^{View: Invitational Lecture video}