The UB Humanities Institute's annual conference will take place

October 27-28, 2006

Location:  UB Center for the Arts, North Campus

The topic is "How We Became Human: Genealogies of the Humanities"

The Fall 2006 Humanities Institute Conference will explore the nature and consequences of the emergence of the humanities, while interrogating the many uses and implications of humanistic knowledge within the intersecting trajectories of the West and its global neighbors. We seek to understand the nature and historical importance of the humanities themselves as critical practices and disciplines. We will look to formative "moments" such as (but not restricted to) early modern Europe and the related later emergence of modern hierarchies of knowledge-including the "Geisteswissenschaften" --from the late 18th through the early 20th centuries. We will examine how humanistic knowledge has been deployed, either to establish boundaries privileging Western definitions of the "human" in relation to notions such as gender, race, religion, and animality, or to question such boundaries --and, hence, the very notion of the "human" --both from within a Western perspective and through the lenses of other cultures and knowledge traditions.

Friday, October 27

9:30 a.m. – 10:00 a.m. Continental Breakfast and Welcome

10:00 a.m. – 11:00 a.m. Racializing Subjects
Hazel Carby
Departments of African American Studies and American Studies, Yale University
Moderator: Kari Winter, Department of American Studies, University at Buffalo

11:15 a.m. – 12:15 p.m. Globalization and the Inhuman
Pheng Cheah
Department of Rhetoric, University of California at Berkeley
Moderator: Terry Rowden, Department of English, The College of Wooster

12:30 p.m. – 2:00 p.m. Lunch

2:00 p.m. – 3:00 p.m. Orientalism's Bid to Join the Humanities: A Mostly German, Mostly Nineteenth-Century Story
Suzanne Marchand
Department of History, Louisiana State University
Moderator: Andreas Daum, Department of History, University at Buffalo

3:00 p.m. - 3:15 p.m. Break

3:15 p.m. – 4:15 p.m. What is a "Liberal Education" (for)? Some nineteenth-century answers.
Mary Beard
Department of Classics, Newnham College, Cambridge
Moderator: Margaret Malamud, Department of History, New Mexico State University

4:30 p.m. – 6:00 p.m.  Reception and Robert Creeley Exhibit

Rare Books Room, Capen 420

Saturday, October 28

9:30 a.m. – 10:00 a.m. Continental Breakfast and Welcome

10:00 a.m. – 11:00 a.m. Humanities and Animalities
Harriet Ritvo
Department of History, MIT
Moderator: Claire Schen, Department of History, University at Buffalo

11:15 a.m. – 12:15 p.m. Systems, Games, and the Player: Did We Manage to Become Human?
Henry Sussman
Department of Comparative Literature, University at Buffalo and Visiting Professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures, Yale University
Moderator: Graham Hammill, Department of English, University of Notre Dame

12:30 p.m. – 2:00 p.m. Lunch

2:00 p.m. – 4:00 p.m. Closing Roundtable Discussion

Conference Speakers and Moderators

Co-moderators:  David Hunter, Department of Philosophy, Ryerson University and Steven Miller, Department of English, University at Buffalo

4:00 p.m. - 6:00 p.m. Reception, Baird Hall Music Library

Baird Hall, first floor

University at Buffalo Conference Sponsors

Arethusa

Asian Studies Program
Baldy Center for Law and Social Policy
Center for the Study of Psychoanalysis and Culture

College of Arts and Sciences Dean's Office
Department of African-American Studies
Department of American Studies
Department of Anthropology
Department of English
Department of History
Department of Philosophy
Department of Romance Languages and Literatures
Department of Women’s Studies
Graduate Group for German and Austrian Studies
Institute for Research on Women and Gender
Julian Park Chair

Law School
Melodia Jones Chair
The Poetry Collection