Festive Cultures Seminar

Co-sponsored by the Newberry Library Division of Research and Education & Northern Illinois University

The Center for Research in Festive Culture at Northern Illinois University fosters research about the world's past and present festive cultures by means of conferences and other communications among interested scholars or informed amateurs of festivities. Its programs are designed to answer three needs:

• To extend intellectual exchange about this subject beyond national and normal professional boundaries

• To rethink the idea of festive culture itself, broadening the usual idea of its subject-matter.

• To provide particular space for the work of younger scholars pursuing these subjects.

[Ayer-135-M5-1630,-Gerardus]

2010 Fall Seminars § Past Seminars

Current Seminars: Fall 2010

FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 17, 1:00-4:00 P.M.
Paul F. Gehl, Custodian, John M. Wing Foundation on the History of Printing: The Newberry Library, Chicago: The Variability of Festival Book Genres in Early Modern Europe, Illustrated by the Newberry Library Collections

Note that this will be a special seminar given by Paul F. Gehl, curator at the Newberry Library, and will begin at 1PM. Gehl invites all those who have used festival books at the Newberry to send him the names of books that they would like to see included in his presentation


FRIDAY, OCTOBER 22, 2:00-5:00 P.M.
Jill Ingram, Ohio University, Athens, Ohio: The Funding of Misrule; Festivity and the Forced Loan in the Production of the Gesta Grayorum and The Christian Prince.

Ted McGee, University of Waterloo, Canada: Longleat News: Elizabethan Entertainments of the French Ambassadors, 1560-1580.

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 12, 2:00-5:00 P.M.
Barry Ancelet, Univ. of Louisiana at Lafayette: The Unbearable Lightness of Begging; Strategies for Generating Carnivalesque Laughter in the Louisiana French Mardi Gras

Dorothy Noyes, Ohio State University, Columbus: Cheres Reliques, Chers Oriflans: Provincial Consciousness and Festive Invention in Seventeenth-Century Languedoc.

Past Seminars: Fall 2009

• Samuel Kinser, Northern Illinois University: Paradigm and Street: Formative Contexts of black-Indian Festive Ritual in New Orleans.
• Karen Richman, University of Notre Dame, Indiana: Congregating By Cassette: Migration and Transnational Ritual Spaces
• John Marino, University of California at San Diego: The Festival of San Giovanni in Renaissance Florence and Naples
• Matt Sakakeeny, Tulane University, New Orleans: Instruments of Violence: Brass Bands, Jazz Funerals, and the Death of Young Black Men
• Shelley Salamensky, University of California at Los Angeles: Diaspora Disney? “Jewface”, “Jewfaçade”, and “Jewish” festivals in Poland and the Russian Federation
• Emily Winerock, University of Toronto: Sacred or Sacrilegious? Conflicted Attitudes Towards Festive Dancing in Early 17th Century England
  

Fall 2008

• Hélène Bellour, Independent Researcher, Chicago, and Jeffrey Chock, Photographer, Port of Spain, Trinidad: Looking at Mas’: Evolution in the Trinidadian Carnival "Martinje: Mock Bishops, New Wine, and Liturgical Parody in Contemporary Zagrib."

• Martin Walsh, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

• Katherine Wright, Northern Illinois University, De Kalb, IL: Greek Orthodox Easter in Present-Day Greece: Rituals and Fireworks

• Kenneth Bilby, Columbia College, Chicago: Conjuring the Ghost of John Canoe: Re-imagining a “Slave Festival” in the New South and the Caribbean

• Gillian Weiss, Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland: Freedom March: Barbary Slave Processions in Early Modern Europe

Newberry Library Programs for Scholars ¦Newberry Library Center for Renaissance Studies Lectures