Select Fridays at 4pm

 Muse Restaurant,

 Albright Knox Art Gallery

 1285 Elmwood Avenue

 Free and open to the public

 Limited seating

 Scholars at Muse continues through

 April 2010.

Select Fridays between now and April 2010 the Muse Restaurant of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery becomes an intellectual salon. That's when Riverrun and the UB Humanities Institute run the second year of "Scholars at Muse"—eight unusual, award winning lectures in the humanities, presented in the social setting of the restaurant and its bar.

“This will be a lot of fun," said Patrick Martin, President of Riverrun. "There is a Buffalo intellectual tradition, reflected in these lectures, that is perfect for this setting. It's the reason the UB Departments of English and Comparative Literature, for example, are famous and have drawn such great talent over the years. It's an avant-garde tradition, rigorous and off-kilter, that likes to make things hard for itself—to find the profound in the popular and the compelling in the obscure. It's a tradition that is very entertaining, surprising, and challenging. If you haven't experienced it, you're missing something exhilarating. The social setting of Muse, the opportunity to continue the discussion with old and new friends, wherever it goes, over wine, over dinner, is perfert. There's nothing quite like it in Buffalo at the moment."

All seven lectures are by UB Humanities Institute Research Fellows and take advantage of the restaurant's newly renovated digital resources. Tim Dean, professor in the UB Department of English and director of the Humanities Institute, noted, "The 2009-2010 Fellows were selected from a record number of applicants and a great range of disciplines. They form an outstanding group of interdisciplinary scholars who will contribute to the intellectual life of the entire community. An important part of the mission of the Humanities Institute is to create a vibrant intellectual community among UB students, faculty and citizens of the greater Buffalo area and Scholars at Muse is helping us achieve that. We are delighted to join with dynamic partners like the Albright-Knox Art Gallery and Riverrun in this series."

All lectures are free and open to the public.

Click here to listen to a recent WBFO Interview with Carrie Bramen and Sarah Bay-Cheng

Click here to download the Scholars at Muse poster for fall 2009 (PDF format)

Friday, September 18, 2009

Carla Mazzio

Associate Professor of English

"Shakespeare's Math"

Calculating Minds: Literature and Mathematics in the Renaissance 

This book project explores the irrational dimensions of mathematical theory and practice as they informed literary and aesthetic innovation in the Renaissance. Mazzio aims to complicate the long-standing link between the development of mathematics and the "rise of rationalism" in England and Europe and argue instead for the irrational and affective dimensions of various processes and discourses of calculation.

Carla Mazzio specializes in Renaissance literature and culture and has special interests in literature and the history of science and medicine. Her published work has focused on literature and the history of the human body, the history of the book, and the cultural as well as aesthetic history of the inarticulate person or community. She received her M.A. and Ph.D. from Harvard University.

Friday, October 16, 2009

Jason Young

Associate Professor of History; African and African American Studies

"'To Make the Slave Anew': Art, History, and the Politics of Authenticity "

"To Make the Slave Anew": Art, History, and the Politics of Authenticity  

This project focuses on an intriguing program of racial uplift and racial representation taken up by both blacks and whites in the early decades of the twentieth century. In describing and documenting the presumed quaint peculiarity of black rural culture in the South, a host of academics, including anthropologists, historians, linguists, ethnographers and others sought not only to capture the history of slaves before the eldest survivors of the system died, but also to recapture the vestiges of "authentic" African elements in black culture at its presumed demise before the onslaught of modernity. In this way, many rural blacks living at the turn of the century came to stand in as surrogates for antebellum slaves while around them raged a virtual culture war about the meaning of race, slavery and representation at the dawn of a new age.

Jason Young specializes in 19th Century U.S. history and slavery. His current research interests focus on the Black Atlantic; U.S. Slave culture and religion; pre-colonial Kongo. He received his Ph.D from University of California, Riverside.

Friday, October 30, 2009

Rachel Ablow

Associate Professor of English

"The (Victorian) Truth of Torture"

Painful Persuasions: Belief and the Body in Victorian Literature and Culture

This project examines the idea of psychic violence in Victorian England. Specifically, it argues that the massive expansion of pluralism taking place during this period raised a host of questions about the origin and nature of belief -- questions that were often addressed through figurations of interiority as coterminous with the body. Such figurations could make beliefs seem as natural and constitutive of self as any other parts of one's body. They could also make persuasion, education, and conversion seem like acts of violence.  This project seeks to illuminate the significant continuities between Victorian concerns about belief and the body and recent debates about issues as apparently disparate as the legalization of torture, the definition and consequences of hate speech, and the relationship between trauma and experience.

Rachel Ablow teaches and publishes in the areas of Victorian literature and culture; history of the novel; gender and sexuality; history of the emotions. She received her M.A. and Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University.

Friday, November 13, 2009

Damien Keane

Assistant Professor of English

"Ireland and the Problem of Information "

Ireland and the Problem of Information

From its symbolically formative moments in 1890s, the field of modern Irish writing has been structured by debates over literary autonomy and political commitment, over the ideal virtues of art and the practical effects of direct social engagement. “Ireland and the Problem of Information” argues that these ideal virtues and practical effects are less a matter of political ends and means or disciplinary style and taste than one of continual misrecognition of the stakes of Ireland’s modernization. The project closely attends to a series of institutional and classificatory exchanges in the middle decades of the twentieth century, particularly as they are materialized in the interplay of emergent sound reproduction technologies and the written word, in order to understand an historically specific instance of a much wider issue now confronting the Humanities, namely the administration of information. Posing urgent questions about conditions of access, the works of Joyce are fundamental to this undertaking.

Damien Keane teaches and published in the areas of nineteenth and twentieth-century Irish writing and transnational late modernism. He received his M.A. from Queen's University, Belfast, and his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania.