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Programming
New Faculty Seminar Series
Join us for the New Faculty Seminar Series where we will feature the work of new colleagues in the Humanities at UB. By bringing together scholars from a variety of fields, we hope that these seminars will initiate and encourage the development of interdisciplinary conversations.
The seminars are free and open to the public; light refreshments will be served.
Spring 2013 Schedule
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Victoria Wolcott History March 5, 3:30PM 830 Clemens Hall |
“Radical Nonviolence, Interracial Utopias, and the Long Civil Rights Movement” Historians have long recognized that utopian communities in antebellum America played key roles in emerging abolitionist and women’s rights movements. A largely unrecognized parallel utopian movement occurred in the middle of the twentieth century, when white pacifists and black activists formed interracial communities in cities, suburbs, and rural areas. Participants in these communities pioneered distinctly American forms of Gandhian nonviolence to further the cause of racial equality. This paper examines a range of urban interracial communities during and after World War II that challenged spatial segregation and put forth a radical vision of equality and economic justice. The paper is available on online reserve under HIS000. |
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Fall 2012 Schedule
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Marion Werner Geography Wednesday, October 24, 3:30PM 830 Clemens Hall |
"Reproducing Difference, Reproducing Capital: New geographies of export production in the Dominican Republic and Haiti" In recent years, rising global competition has provoked the retrenchment of This paper will be precirculated through UB's Online Course Reserve system under HIS000-SEE. |
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Walter Hakala English/Asian Studies
Tuesday, November 27, 4:00PM 830 Clemens Hall |
A Sultan in the Realm of Passion: Coffee in Eighteenth-Century Delhi It is naught save the beloved of the noble It is always irked by the companionship of the low In whatever place has ‘Hatim’ two breaths of life, Here will be a sip of coffee, there a puff at the huqqah Thus concludes a poetic encomium to coffee composed by the eighteenth-century Urdu poet, Shah ‘Hatim’ (1699-1783), who enjoyed a long career, interacting with multiple generations of Urdu poets in Delhi and observing firsthand the massive economic and cultural upheavals that accompanied the rapid political decline of the Mughal empire. He is remembered today primarily for his claim, made some twenty years after he composed this poem, to have purged his earlier collections of poetry of verses that contained “unliterary” vocabulary and outdated puns. This poem’s survival in his revised divan helps to answer questions about broader efforts by professional poets of Urdu to document emerging modalities of urban connoisseurship for new audiences and patrons in regional centers. This paper will be precirculated through UB's Online Course Reserve system under HIS000-SEE. |
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Spring 2012 Schedule
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"Imaging Berlin. Urban Demolition in Berlin Photographs 1871 – 1918" Miriam Paeslack Arts Management March 21, 3:30PM 830 Clemens Hall Download pre-circulated paper here: This paper interprets the city of Berlin as a palimpsest, as an urban space that contains traces of demolition and rebuilding during Wilhelmine Berlin, the era between 1871 and 1918 when Germany was first united and governed as a constitutional monarchy. It looks at the kinship between photographs and paintings of ruins and destruction to explore how history was invoked in pictorial representations of the city. This paper explores the connection between historical memory and identity and its relation to Germany’s unification. |
Fall 2011 Schedule
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"Lucid Cameras: Imaging Haiti After the Earthquake of 2010" Toni Pressley-Sanon African and African American Studies October 12, 3:30 PM 830 Clemens Hall
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"The Souls of Black Comix: The Secret Origins of Representation as Resistance in the Black Age of American Comics" John Jennings Visual Studies November 16, 3:30 PM 830 Clemens Hall
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PAST LECTURES
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"Traumautism: Recovering (from) Bruno Bettelheim's Legacy" Joseph Valente Professor, English March 23, 2011, 3:30 PM 830 Clemens Hall
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As part of the UB Humanities Institute’s New Faculty Seminar Series, Joe Valente, Professor of English, will speak on: “Traumatism: Recovering (from) the Legacy of Bruno Bettelheim.” The lecture will take place tomorrow on Wednesday, March 23rd at 3:30pm in 830 Clemens. Professor Valente, who recently joined the UB faculty from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, is an internationally renowned scholar of Joyce, Irish literature and Modernism. The author of several books, Professor Valente’s most recent book is The Myth of Manliness in Irish National Culture, 1880-1922 (University of Illinois Press, 2011).
Professor Valente’s forthcoming talk is on his new work on autism studies, which revisits Bruno Bettelheim’s psychogenic theory of autism, which has been discredited and even demonized. What is the reason behind these now gratuitous assaults? As untenable as Bettelheim’s study The Empty Fortress is, it speaks to features of infant development and sociality that contemporary autism studies has had to exclude to constitute itself as a coherent scientific field—features, accordingly, that continue to threaten that coherence.
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"The Sexuality of Abstraction: Agnes Martin" Jonathan Katz Associate professor, Visual Studies October 6, 2010, 3:30 PM 538 Clemens Hall
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The first speaker of the fall semester is Jonathan Katz, Associate Professor, Visual Studies. Jonathan's lecture is entitled "The Sexuality of Abstraction: Agnes Martin". The palpable disconnect between the rigidly formal terms of Agnes Martin’s art and her metaphysical pronouncements about it have generally been met with an embarrassed silence. She made her rigorous grids the occasion of some the most high-flown rhetoric ever uttered by a post war artist, a period already celebrated for its art of numinous intensity. While some have sought to recuperate her metaphysics in art historical terms through an equally mystical phenomenological account of the work (e.g., Rosalind Krauss), few have sought to historicize and contextualize Martin’s deployment of mysticism. A broader social-historical accounting is clearly called for, and queer studies offers a powerful new tool for understanding the utility of the spiritual in Martin’s oeuvre. This paper marries phenomenology, Zen Buddhism, Gertrude Stein, Freud and Nietzsche towards explicating how Martin's lesbianism structured her turn, late in life, toward an art of geometric abstraction.
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"Italian Futurism: Performances in Intermedial Spaces" Laura Chiesa Assistant Professor, Romance Languages and Literatures November 17, 2010, 3:30 PM 830 Clemens Hall
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The second speaker of the fall semester is Laura Chiesa, Assistant Professor, Romance Languages and Literatures. In her lecture "Italian Futurism: Performances in Intermedial Spaces, Dr. Chiesa will present her work in progress on the intermedial spatial theatricality of Italian Futurism. The architectural space of the Italian Futurists is known principally for Sant’Elia ground-breaking manifesto and drawings, which have been considered to be the real roots of unrealized modernism (Banham) or, more recently, as a totally new way of understanding the complex modernist space (Kwinter). During the inter-war years, Italian Futurism didn’t embrace modernist functional or rationalist architecture. Instead, it experimented in the space of theater bringing to the stage abstract, ephemeral and invisible constructions with a dynamic marked by interruptions, jumps and distortions. In the late ’70s, artists (i.e. Goldberg) and experimental architects (i.e. Tschumi) reconsidered this performative aspect of Italian Futurism. The presentation will be dedicated to the analysis of theatricality at play in these Futurist experimentations. While such theatricality always dwells in-between medias and experiments in an interdisciplinary way, it uncannily stretches between extremes: from abstract, or even utopian, intermedial spaces to fascist and propagandistic spaces. This link is for one of Chiesa's recently published articles which is an in depth analysis of an artist/writer work between1928-1930. The paper will be discussed and expanded upon in relation to Chiesa's work on spatial/architectural performance in Futurism.
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"From Exile to Odyssey: A Cuban insurgent's journey home in the circum-Caribbean" Dalia Muller Assistant Professor of History February 23, 2010, 3:30 PM :: 830 Clemens Hall
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"Building Socialist Modernity: Politics and Urban Design in Chile, 1970-1973" Camilo Trumper Assistant Professor of American Studies March 16, 2010, 3:30 PM :: 830 Clemens Hall
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"Technospectacular Poetics: From Mallarmé to Bernstein" Jean-Jacques Thomas Melodia E. Jones Professor of French October 7, 2009, 3:30 PM :: 830 Clemens Hall
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Jean-Jacques Thomas, the Melodia E. Jones Professor of French, specializes in poetry and poetics, nineteenth and twentieth-century French literature and culture, as well as Quebec and Canadian Studies. He has taught at the Université de Paris-VIII, the University of Michigan, Columbia University and Duke University. He has published several books on poetics and contemporary French literature, most recently Poeticized Language with Steven Winspur. He has two forthcoming books, one on the Haitian-Quebecois poet Joël Des Rosiers and the other on Jacques Roubaud, a French poet and mathematician.
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“Jewish Translation: Philosophy, History, and the Space In-Between” Aaron Hughes History November 18, 2009, 3:30 PM :: 830 Clemens Hall
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Aaron Hughes, Associate Professor of History and the Gordon and Gretchen Gross Professor of Jewish Studies, specializes in medieval Jewish and Islamic Neo-Platonists, comparative religions, and more recently, the Jewish intellectual history of the Italian Renaissance. Professor Hughes arrived from the University of Calgary, where he spent the previous eight years. He is the author of The Art of Dialogue in Jewish Philosophy (Indiana 2008), Situating Islam: The Past and Future of an Academic Discipline (London: Equinox 2008); Jewish Philosophy, A-Z (Palgrave 2005); The Texture of the Divine: Imagination in Medieval Islamic and Jewish Thought ( Indiana 2004). He also has two edited collections forthcoming this year: New Directions in Jewish Philosophy with Elliot R. Wolfson (Indiana 2009) and Defining Judaism: A Reader (Equinox 2009).
Past Seminars
Fall 2008 Schedule
November 12 1:00 PM 830 Clemens Hall
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"Democracy in Ancient Greece" David Teegarden, Classics University at Buffalo The text for the discussion is available on request. Humanities Institute New Faculty Seminar Series |
October 15 1:00 PM 830 Clemens Hall
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"The Queer Pleasure and Frustrations of Chang and Eng's Autopsy" Cynthia Wu, American Studies University at Buffalo The text for the discussion is available on request. Humanities Institute New Faculty Seminar Series |
Spring 2009 Schedule
March 4 1:00 PM 830 Clemens Hall
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"'The Excellent Habit of Thrift': Wall Street and the Technology of Imperialism" Peter Hudson, African-American Studies University at Buffalo New Faculty Seminar Series |
April 8 1:00 PM 830 Clemens Hall
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"'I want to be a Cowboy's Sweetheart': Patsy Montana and the Freedoms of the West" Stephanie Vander Wel, Music University at Buffalo New Faculty Seminar Series |