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About The Institute
HUMANITIES INSTITUTE ANNUAL CONFERENCE
The conference seeks to examine the known and forgotten histories as well as the present, new forms of human trafficking in its manifold manifestations, ranging from slavery, sex traffic, forced and child labor and migration, to the recruitment of child soldiers and trading in body parts. How is human trafficking always already inscribed or presupposed in the fundamental concepts of Western forms of political and social analysis, such as gender, social contract, kinship, commodity form, racism, exchange, globalization? How do the catastrophic histories of human trafficking constitute and destroy the concepts of the human and human rights (for instance trading in body parts) by maintaining what Kevin Bales calls "disposable people"? How do the histories and the struggles against human trafficking intervene into debates about globalization, internationalism, human rights, premodern and modern power? What kind of challenge do these traumatic histories pose for ethics and the arts? How can we participate in transforming entrenched networks of social relations which define (some or most) human beings as disposable?
Many Thanks to Humanities Institute Conference Sponsors:
Baldy Center for Law & Social Policy, Center for the Study of Psychoanalysis & Culture, Dean's Office, College of Arts & Sciences, Institute for Research on Women & Gender, Departments of African American Studies, American Studies, Anthropology, Classics, Comparative Literature, English, Global Gender Studies, History, Philosophy, Romance Languages & Literatures, & the Eugenio Donato Professor of Comparative Literature and the Julian Park Chair of Comparative Literature
Conference Schedule Including Pre-Conference Lectures by Ishmeal Beah, Étienne Balibar, and Irene Zubaida Khan
Related Fall 2007/Spring 2008 Events
Pre-Conference Events
Sunday, October 14
2:00 P.M. Buffalo Museum of Sciences, 1020 Humboldt Parkway, Buffalo
in collaboration with the International Institute of Buffalo present
Can It Happen Here? Human Slavery in WNY
Amy Fleischauer, LMSW, the Coordinator of Human Trafficking Services at the International Institute of Buffalo, will present the 40-minute award-winning film Svetlana's Journey, the unflinching real-life story of a 13-year-old Bulgarian girl's sale into the international sex trade, followed by a presentation & discussion of the real-life reality of human trafficking around the world and on our doorstep in WNY. Adults only please. Content is not meant for younger audiences.
Click here for more Information
Wednesday, October 24
8:00 P.M. Alumni Arena
UB Distinguished Speakers Series presents
Ishmael Beah
Human
Rights Activist, Best-Selling Author of A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy
Soldier
Click here
for more information
Thursday, October 25
1:00 p.m. 120 Clemens Hall
Department of Comparative Literature presents
Étienne Balibar
Distinguished Professor of French & Italian, and Comparative Literature, University of California-Irvine; and Emeritus Professor of Political Philosophy, Université de Paris X, Nanterre
Justice, Equality, Difference
3:30-5;30 pm. 106 O'Brian Hall
The
Baldy Center for Law and Social Policy presents
Irene Zubaida Khan
Secretary General, Amnesty International
The Rule of Law and the Politics of Fear: Human Rights in the Twenty-first Century
Conference Schedule
Friday, October 26
All Events take place in the University at Buffalo Center for the Arts, North Campus
9:30 a.m.
Registration. Light refreshments will be available
9:50 a.m.
Welcome by Ewa Plonowska Ziarek, Director, UB Humanities Institute
10:00 a.m. -11:15 a.m.
Departments of Comparative Literature and History, Cornell University
Humans and Other Animals
Moderator: Ewa Ziarek, Department of Comparative Literature, University at Buffalo
11:30 a.m. -12:45 p.m.
Department of Sociology, University of Nottingham
New Slavery, Old Binaries
Moderator: Marieme Lo, Global Gender Studies, University at Buffalo
12:45-2:00 p.m. Lunch
2:00-3:15 p.m.
Department of History, University of Washington
'With this wet clay, you can make whatever you please': The Sale of Slaves in Ancient Rome
Moderator: Neil Coffee, Department of Classics, University at Buffalo
3:30-4:45 p.m.
Department of American Studies, University at Buffalo
Wills and Possessions
Moderator: Tim Dean, Department of English, University at Buffalo
Saturday, October 27
9:30-10:00 a.m. Coffee and refreshments
10:00-11:15 a.m.
Department of Comparative Literature, University of California, Los Angeles
"The Missing Homeland of Edward Said: Person and Place in Globalization"
Moderator: Laurelyn Whitt, Departments of Philosophy and Integrated Studies,
Utah Valley University
11:30-12:45 p.m.
Everett Fraser Professor of Law, University of Minnesota Law School, Visiting Professor University of Chicago Law School
Obscuring The Self While Disentangling The Body: The Politics of Correctness
Moderator: Keith Griffler, Department of African American Studies, University at Buffalo
12:45-2:00 p.m.
Lunch, UB Art Gallery, Center for the Arts
2:00-3:15 p.m.
Closing Roundtable Discussion with Speakers and Moderators
Moderator: David Castillo, Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, University at Buffalo
Speakers
Julia O'Connell Davidson
Professor of Sociology at the University of Nottingham , is the author of Children in the Global Sex Trade (2005); Is Trafficking in Human Beings Demand Driven? with Bridget Anderson (2003); “The sex tourist, the expatriate, his ex-wife and her ‘Other': The politics of loss, difference and desire” (Sexualities 2002); Children in the Sex Trade in China (2001); Prostitution, Power and Freedom (1998), & other major works.
Michele Goodwin
Everett Fraser Professor of Law, University of Minnesota Law School, Visiting Professor University of Chicago Law School, is a bioethicist who researches tort & property theories in the body and biotechnology. She is the author of Black Markets: The Supply and Demand of Body Parts (Cambridge Univ. Press) She is currently editing a book on Baby Markets & developing a curriculum on genetic property and the law.
Sandra R. Joshel
Associate Professor of History at the University of Washington, is the author of Work, Identity and Legal Status at Rome, “Slavery in Roman Literature” (for the Cambridge World History of Slavery), the co-editor of Women and Slaves in Greco-Roman Culture: Differential Equations (1998) and other articles and book chapters on the Roman empire, slavery, and women.
Dominick LaCapra
Bryce & Edith M. Bowmar Professor of Humanistic Studies at Cornell University, holds joint appointments in History & Comparative Literature, & is a member of the field of Romance Studies & the program in Jewish Studies. His recent books include History, Politics, & the Novel; Soundings in Critical Theory; Representing the Holocaust: History, Theory, Trauma; History & Memory after Auschwitz; History in Transit: Experience, Identity, Critical Theory; History & Reading: Tocqueville, Foucault, French Studies; & Writing History, Writing Trauma.
Aamir Mufti
Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at UCLA, is the author of Enlightenment in the Colony: The Jewish Question and Dilemmas in Postcolonial Culture ( Princeton, 2007) and co-editor of Dangerous Liaisons: Gender, Nation, and Postcolonial Perspectives (Minnesota,1997). His articles on secularism, minority cultures, blasphemy, the post-literate public sphere, the politics of form in modern Urdu literature, imperial war as spectacle, and Europe 's Islamic crisis have appeared in Social Text, Critical Inquiry, boundary 2, Theory & Event, Subaltern Studies and elsewhere. He serves on the editorial collective of boundary 2.
Kari Winter
Professor of American Studies at the University at Buffalo, is the author of Subjects of Slavery, Agents of Change: Women and Power in Gothic Novels and Slave Narratives, 1790-1865 (1992), the editor of The Blind African Slave, or Memoirs of Boyrereau Brinch, Nicknamed Jeffrey Brace (2005), and the author of numerous articles in the fields of feminist, African American, Caribbean, and American Indian cultural studies.
Conference is free and open to the public. Advanced registration is not required.
Visitor Parking:
Valid
permits must be properly displayed Monday through Friday, 7 a.m. - 3 p.m. Parking
permits are not required on Saturday.
Parking for visitors is limited to certain lots and metered areas on each campus.
Visitors to the North Campus can park in the Center for Tomorrow Lot off Flint
Road, without a charge, and utilize our shuttle service. Additionally, on the
North Campus, Visitor Paid Parking is available in the Fronczak Lot. There is
an entry charge of $4.00 ($2.00 after 1:00 p.m.).
Persons invited to UB by a specific department or organization of the University
are considered guests and are eligible for guest permits (no charge). Guest
permits must be dated, and are valid in faculty/staff and student lots. One-day
guest permits are also valid in Visitor Paid Parking areas. Permits should be
obtained through the inviting department and in advance of arriving
on campus. The Visitor Information Centers may issue Guest Permits,
but only when the inviting department is reached to confirm the invitation.
Please contact Wendy McMenamin at 716.645.2711 to obtain a guest parking permit.
Printable campus maps and north campus buildings
Click here to create a personal trip planner, including directions and hotel information
Click here to to check local weather conditions
RELATED SEMINARS AND PRE-CONFERENCE EVENTS - FALL 2007/SPRING 2008
The UB Arts and Sciences Libraries will have complementary exhibits on Human Trafficking during the month of October
AMS 500 Seminar: Human Trafficking Reg. # : 459525
Professor Kari Winter will be teaching a graduate seminar, AMS 500: Human Trafficking on Thursdays, 12:30-3:10 p.m. (1004 Clemens Hall) in which students will be reading work by the many eminent scholars who will be visiting campus to address multiple aspects of the topic.
Description : Offered in conjunction with the Third Annual Humanities Institute Conference ( October 26-27, 2007 ), this seminar will consider
the problematics of memory, historiography, artistic representation, and political activism in relation to past forms of slavery as well as twenty-first-century forms of human trafficking in its manifold manifestations. Rather than treating human trafficking as an exotic disease that is external or tangential to the historical dynamics of capitalist-colonial modernization, we will contextualize human trafficking within the histories of slavery, race, gender, and empire.
We will investigate a range of culturally particular as well as geopolitical social formations that produce both quotidian practices of objectification,alienation, exploitation, and degradation and extreme instances of massive violence, e.g.,enslavement and genocide. Focusing on the 18th- and 19th-century transatlantic slave trade and on human trafficking in the current era, we will engage questions such as the following:
- How is human trafficking inscribed or presupposed in socio-political formations, such as concepts of gender, race, and class?
- In what ways are various forms of human trafficking distinct from or continuous with the forms of human commodification that are integral to globalization?
- Why does human trafficking strike many people in the 21st century as something "out of time," a remnant of the past that is uncongenial with modernity?
- In what ways do the structures of slavery, prostitution, and organ harvesting replicate "mainstream" systems of religious, ideological, and economic relations?
- How are the various academic, human rights, subaltern, governmental, and NGO discourses surrounding human trafficking invested in or subversive of the forces of capitalism as well as particular local and global mechanisms of terror?
- Whose interests are served by discourses of "rescue," "altruism," and "freedom"?
- How can we participate in transforming entrenched networks of social relations which define (some or most) human beings as disposable?
The conference and related events in the fall semester will provide us with a unique opportunity to meet and talk with most of the authors of
the texts we will be studying.
Click Here to View Required AMS 500 Readings:
LSW 461 Undergraduate Seminar: Bonded Women Reg#: 207054
Professor Lillian S. Williams will be teaching an undergraduate seminar, LSW 461: Bonded Women in Spring 2008 on Tuesdays and Thursdays, 3:30-4:50 p.m.
Bonded Women will examine the Atlantic slave trade and the evolution of slavery in the United States and the African Diaspora. This seminar will explore the visions, values, social identity (race, gender, ethnicity, sexuality, etc.), family and work of bonded women. While the major focus will be upon the United States, we also will examine bonded women in Canada and the Caribbean. We will begin by discussing their legal status and the impact of various geo-political systems. Students will read texts generated by the slaves themselves, as well as those of other chroniclers of black women’s history and slavery. They will include individuals such as Marie-Joseph Angelique of Montreal, Celia of Missouri and Mary Prince of Bermuda. Literary and popular accounts also will be used to elucidate our understanding of these women’s lives.
Friday, September 7 and Saturday, September 8
Imagining American National Conference, Syracuse University, Syracuse New York
Keynote Speaker: James T. Campbell
Professor of American Civilization and Africana Studies at Brown University
“Navigating the Past: Reflections on Brown University’s Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice”
James T. Campbell chaired the committee appointed by Brown University President
Ruth Simmons in 2003 to investigate the university’s historical relationship
with slavery and the transatlantic slave trade. The committee was also
asked to organize public programs that would help students and interested members
of the wider community to reflect on the meaning and significance of this history
in the present, on the complex historical, political, legal, and moral questions
posed by any present-day confrontation with historical injustice. (The
committee’s final report, issued in October 2006, is available on-line
at http://www.brown.edu/slaveryjustice.)
In his address Campbell will discuss the committee’s origins, findings,
recommendations, and public reception, as well as its potential significance
for other institutions in our society.
For more conference information, travel and lodging, and on-line registration,
please go to www.imaginingamerica.org,
or contact Juliet Feibel, Associate Director, at 315.416.2929.
Thursday, September 27
12:30-2:00 pm 280 Park Hall, North Campus
University at Buffalo's Early Modern Reading Group presents
Racial Thinking and Colonial Numeracy: Gender and the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade
Jennifer Morgan
New York University
(lecture co-sponsored by the UB Gender Institute)
Friday, September 28 - Saturday, September 29
The Sixth E.T. Slamon Conference in Roman Studies, McMaster University, Hamilton Ontario Canada
Roman Slavery and Roman Material Culture
Although there is a substantial body of scholarship on many conventional sources for Roman slavery, the role of the material culture of ancient Rome – its art, artifacts, and physical remains – has yet to be addressed coherently and methodically. Recent scholarship in Roman history and culture has set a new course in slavery studies that demonstrates how material culture can elucidate Roman attitudes toward the institution of slavery and towards slaves themselves in ways that significantly augment the textual accounts.
Keynote Speakers:
Keith Bradley, University of Notre Dame
Natalie Kampen, Barnard College
Christian Laes, University of Antwerp
Speakers include:
Christer
Bruun, University of Toronto
Philip de Souza, University College Dublin
Peter Keegan, Macquarie University
Sandra Joshel, University of Washington
Noel Lenski, University of Colorado
Henrik Mouritsen, King's College, London
Click here for more information: http://www.humanities.mcmaster.ca/~roman/
Thursday, October 18
12:30-2:00 pm 280 Park Hall, North Campus
University at Buffalo's Early Modern Reading Group presents
Olaudah Equiano or Gustavas Vassa (1745?-1797), Founding Father of Abolition
Vincent Carretta
University of Maryland
Thursday, October 18
2:15 pm 1004 Clemens Hall, North Campus
Departments of American Studies and Comparative Literature present
Not for Speculation: The Value of Equiano and His Interesting Narrative of the Life
Wilfred Samuels
Departments of African American Studies and English, University of Utah
Wednesday, October 24
8:00 pm Alumni Arena
UB Distinguished Speakers Series presents
Ishmael Beah
Human
Rights Activist, Best-Selling Author of A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy
Soldier
Click here
for more information
Thursday, October 25
Locations and Times TBA
The Baldy Center for Law and Social Policy presents
Irene Zubaida Khan
Secretary General, Amnesty International
Thursday, October 25
1:00 pm 120 Clemens Hall, North Campus
Department of Comparative Literature presents
Justice, Equality, Difference
Étienne Balibar
Distinguished Professor of French & Italian, and Comparative Literature,
University of California-Irvine; and Emeritus Professor of Political Philosophy,
Université de Paris X, Nanterre
PAST CONFERENCES
Browse our Annual Conference PDFs
2006 Genealogies of the Humanities
2005 New Futures: Humanities, Theory, Arts
Visit our Humanities Calendar for a detailed listing of all humanities-related events and activities at UB
or contact: ub-humanities-institute@buffalo.edu