ESSENTIAL SHAKESPEARE (SEX, VIOLENCE, AND POLITICS)
Michael Halberstam, Writers' Theater
Wednesday, October 13, 2004
No more compare-and-contrast essays! Michael Halberstam, artistic director of Writers' Theatre in Glencoe leads a seminar in how to help students find a practical way into the world of Shakespeare. Halberstam's theater experience includes over twenty productions with Writers' Theatre in various roles (director, actor, designer); two seasons as a member of the Stratford Festival acting company in Ontario, Canada; acting in productions with the Court Theatre and Chicago Shakespeare Theater; two years teaching at The Theatre School of DePaul University; and, most recently, directing Hamlet for the Illinois Shakespeare Festival.
CHINUA ACHEBE'S ARROW OF GOD AND THE PROBLEM OF COLONIAL HISTORY
Nicholas Brown, University of Illinois at Chicago
Tuesday, October 19, 2004
In this seminar, participants will discuss Chinua Achebe's work Arrow of God and how it can be used as a lens through which to view the tumultuous history of colonialism in Africa.
MEXICO AFTER THE REVOLUTION OF 1910
Michael Gonzales, Northern Illinois University
Tuesday, October 26, 2004
This seminar focuses on the effects of the 1910 revolution in Mexico. By placing these events in a historical context, participants will gain a greater understanding of the Revolution and learn ways to apply this understanding in the classroom.
MUSLIM WOMEN IN MEDIEVAL SPAIN
Olivia Constable, University of Notre Dame
Friday, October 29, 2004
This discussion will focus on the role(s) of Muslim women in Spain, including regions of the peninsula under Islamic and Christian rule, in the period 800-1500. What do we know about these women and what are our sources of information? Were the experiences of Muslim women in medieval Spain different from those of contemporary women in other areas of the Islamic world? How did the reconquista (the military and political conquest of Muslim Spain by Christians) affect the lives of Muslim women in the Iberian Peninsula?
THE FICTION OF F. SCOTT FITZGERALD: NEW APPROACHES
Chris Messenger, University of Illinois at Chicago
Wednesday, November 3, 2004
While The Great Gatsby has long been a staple of secondary school English curricula, critical and theoretical work on Fitzgerald has languished until quite recently. Now race, gender, and class theories are reviving Fitzgerald criticism as well as providing new paradigms for studying his work. This seminar will concentrate on Tender Is The Night (1934) to gauge its teaching "potential" in new formats as well as demonstrating how concepts applied to Tender might be reapplied to Gatsby as well.
FAIRY LORE
Regina Buccola, Roosevelt University
Friday, November 5, 2004
One of the principal challenges facing anyone attempting to teach any of the numerous pieces of British literature that feature fairies is that everyone thinks that they know what fairies are. Students who grew up watching Tinkerbell apply the signature twinkle to the Disney logo can now buy fairy earrings, T-shirts and temporary tattoos at the local mall. However, these highly sanitized, butterfly-winged fairies will not help them understand the various fairy heroines of Arthurian legend, or Chaucer's cheeky redaction of this tradition in "The Wife of Bath's Tale", or Spenser's Gloriana, and certainly not the range of fairy characters that inhabit Shakespeare's plays. In this workshop, we will discuss some of the most salient aspects of medieval and early modern fairy belief for the literature of the period. The fairy bride legend, changeling lore, and tales of fairy midwives and fairy queens will take center stage as we explore the significance of these stories for their cultural context, and the import that they have in the literature in which they appear.
HAYMARKET, CHICAGO, AND THE MEANINGS OF URBAN AMERICA
Carl Smith, Northwestern University
Tuesday, November 16, 2004
The infamous Haymarket meeting, bomb, trial and executions of 1886-87 - whether considered in themselves or in terms of their causes and heritage - involved a larger struggle to define the nature and direction of urbanizing American, of which Chicago was the leading example. This seminar will consider Haymarket's unfolding history in these terms.
SPECTERS OF TERROR: LYNCHING VIOLENCE AND ITS PLACE IN THE AFRICAN-AMERICAN LITERARY TRADITION
Natasha Barnes, University of Illinois at Chicago
Wednesday, December 1, 2004
This seminar will try to bring the history of racial violence - particularly the "Red Record" of lynching - into full conversation with the African-American literary tradition. Participants will use the images of the Allen-Littlefield Without Sanctuary collection of lynching photography to discuss the history and sociology of lynching practices and the psychic traumas this violence unleashed in the black community both North and South. The early twentieth-century literary boom known as the Harlem Renaissance is doubly burdened with the themes of possibility and doubt about African-American civic equality in the face of sadistic lynching violence. On the one hand the success of the Harlem Renaissance literary boom portended that African-American cultural achievement would bring full civic citizenship to black Americans. Yet the record of bloody race riots and lynching bees that persisted in the face of black cultural achievement made that success an attenuated achievement.
CHICAGO'S FREE SPEECH TRADITION
Frank Tobias Higbie, Newberry Library
Thursday, December 2, 2004
From the antislavery group of the 1840s, to the poetry slam movement, to protests against the war in Iraq, Chicago has always been a vibrant center of free speech and activism. This seminar will examine the fascinating particulars of the revolution of free speech and dissent in Chicago - the issues, the tactics, the ramifications - and how Chicago leads or mirrors a nation continually struggling with one of its most profound freedoms.
PURITANISM AND THE ENGLISH CIVIL WAR
Ethan Shagan, Northwestern University
Wednesday, December 8, 2004
The English Revolution of 1640-1660 is a topic of perennial interest to both historians and students, in large part because of its supposed place in the development of democratic government: it featured the first execution of a ruling monarch in European history and the first calls for popular sovereignty in the Western tradition. Yet modern scholarship has largely undermined the notion that the English Revolution now more often called the “English Civil War,” or “British Civil Wars” had anything to do with democracy as we understand it today. Parliamentarians, it turns out, did not really want to wrest control of the nation from the king. The English Republic established by Oliver Cromwell after the execution of Charles I in 1649 was closer to a theocracy or a military dictatorship than a democracy. The Restoration of the monarchy in 1660 was greeted by overwhelming popular support. This session is intended to explore how we can talk about and teach the English Revolution in a way that incorporates this newer scholarship yet acknowledges the subject as a vital part of European history. The focus will be on religion, a crucial issue to many students today, and the ways the English Revolution demonstrated both the liberating possibilities and the authoritarian potential of religious ideology in politics.
THE GOTHIC NOVEL
Sara Austin, the Newberry Library
Thursday, December 9, 2004
People have probably been scaring one another with spooky stories since the invention of the campfire. The gothic as a literary mode, though, made its debut rather belatedly at the close of the eighteenth century. Though controversial among critics from the start, it was almost immediately so popular and ubiquitous that it rapidly became the stuff of parody - perhaps most famously in Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey. We'll talk about why the gothic - initially the brainchild of a rather eccentric collector of all things medieval - resonated so powerfully with the dramatic aesthetic, social, and political struggles taking place at the close of the eighteenth century. We'll sample some early contributions to the tradition, explore influences on and responses to it, and examine some of the Newberry's gothic treasures.
MYSTIQUES OF FREEDOM AND HOME FRONT SACRIFICE IN WORLD WAR II ILLINOIS
Mark Leff, University of Illinois
Friday, December 10, 2004
The current "war on terrorism" inescapably directs our attention to collective memories of the WWII home front and the scholarly debates that have challenged - but by no means displaced - those memories. Wartime imperatives reopen essential assumptions that underlie American society and that give meaning to citizenship itself. What do Americans owe the state, their communities, their families, and the war dead? This seminar will cross boundaries of culture, politics, and social relations to pursue a number of the historical debates over the integrative and disintegrative effects of WWII on racial, class, and gender divisions, with a special focus on Illinois.
MODERNITY AND MODERNIZATION IN LATIN AMERICA: TEXTS AND CONTEXTS
Jorge Coronado, Northwestern University
Wednesday, January 19, 2005
This seminar explores the historical appearance of modernization in Latin America and the concomitant rise of cultural modernity in the region. After a brief definition of useful terms, we will address the various and peculiar expressions that regional artists and intellectuals have used to represent the modern experience. In studying the ramifications of these representations, we will consider the inflections that race, non-European traditions, and autochthony have imparted to the different representational strategies.
TEACHING HISTORICAL GEOGRAPHY WITH OLD MAPS
Jim Akerman, the Newberry Library
Thursday, February 3, 2005
This seminar will explore the uses of antiquarian maps to teach American history and geography. Participants will study maps associated with European exploration and colonization of North America, American Indian responses to these developments, and the role of transportation technologies and systems in the development of a transcontinental nation.
WHEN THE BREWERS RULED CHICAGO: NEW PERSPECTIVES ON THE GILDED AGE
Harold Platt, Loyola University
Thursday, February 10, 2005
This seminar will focus on recent trends in the history of the Gilded Age using the brewing industry of Chicago as a case study about the creation of highly mechanized and scientifically controlled methods of mass production. Key themes of the era such as the emergence of big business, the incorporation of science and technology in the mechanization of industry, the transformation of work, and the environmental links between town and country involved in the production of this perishable food product will form the basis of this presentation. In addition, participants will discuss how the alcohol question became the pivotal symbolic issue of the era's gender, class, and ethnocultural conflicts the rise of the industrial city in Gilded Age America.
WILLIAM FAULKNER
David Krause, Columbia College
Friday, February 11, 2005
Why and how should we teach Faulkner's difficult and disturbing stories and novels to high school students in the twenty-first century? Given that even some of Faulkner's most influential works - The Sound and the Fury (1929); As I Lay Dying (1930); Light in August (1932); Absalom, Absalom! (1936) - have been frequently described as un-readable and un-teachable, why challenge our students to read them and ourselves to teach them? What's at stake when we try to make Faulkner readable and teachable in 2005? These are the kinds of questions we will explore together in this seminar. During the first half of the seminar, the emphasis will be on several scenes of reading and instruction embedded in Faulkner's fictions. This will allow us to question some of Faulkner's assumptions (and our own) about literacy and learning, about how and why we read and how and why we learn (and teach). Then, during the second half of the seminar, we will look at a few passages through which Faulkner forces us to question our cultural assumptions-about gender, sexuality, race, class, family, place, politics, history, religion, art, and storytelling - in order to risk seeing ourselves and the communities we inhabit in new and more authentic ways.
GENEOLOGY AND FAMILY HISTORY AT THE NEWBERRY LIBRARY
Jack Simpson, Newberry Library
Tuesday, February 15, 2005
Jack Simpson, Curator of Local and Family History at the Newberry Library, will give an overview of genealogy research techniques with a case study of one Chicago family. Sources covered will include the U.S. census, vital records and internet resources. The seminar will also include a discussion of using genealogy in the classroom - its virtues and potential pitfalls.
MEMORIES OF THE BOXER UPRISING
Peter Carroll, Northwestern University
Thursday, February 17, 2005
The trauma of the 1900 Boxer Uprising and its aftermath has served as a touchstone for Chinese nationalist politics and foreign suspicions of Chinese nationalism. Beginning as a local anti-Christian, anti-foreign vigilante group in northeastern Shandong Province, the Boxers United in Righteousness soon spread throughout northern China. Their siege of the foreign legations in Beijing provoked a brutal response by an Eight Nation military force which occupied and looted Beijing, Tianjin, and much of northern China. In this seminar, we will discuss the Boxer Uprising and the effects of its retelling in Chinese and American politics and popular cultures.
HITLER AND STALIN: THE RISE AND FALL OF THE TOTALITARIANS
Eugene Beiriger, DePaul University
Friday, February 18, 2005
This seminar will examine the careers of the two most notorious dictators of the twentieth century. Between them, their regimes were responsible for the greatest number of civilian deaths on the European continent. We will examine the two men and the social contexts in which they operated. After some background, we will discuss the different interpretive lenses used by historians to better understand the issues raised by these regimes. We will examine debates concerning "intentionalism" and "functionalism" (whether the dictators' intent determined their states' actions or the dictators' actions were determined by structural constraints within their states); "Sonderweg" and "totalitarianism" (whether both regimes grew of unique national circumstances or were fundamentally similar in nature); and ideology and geopolitics (whether the regimes were motivated by their ideologies or by realistic assessments of their states' interests.
WOMEN, WAR, AND THE MEDIA
Gretchen Soderlund, University of Chicago
Wednesday, February 23, 2005
From "Security Moms" and Jessica Lynch to the veiled women of Afghanistan, women play multiple and ambiguous roles in war. In recent years, U.S. military leaders and politicians have cited the protection and emancipation of women as a primary rationale for waging war. This seminar looks at current journalistic representations of gender and violence in the U.S. and invaded countries. Rather than assuming news reports simply transmit facts about events, we will consider how the perspective from which stories are told affects our interpretation of world events. In addition to analyzing coverage of Iraq and Afghanistan, we will focus on media and politicians' treatment of women during the 2004 general election and the ways in which women have used the media to convey their opposition to war from the 1960s to the present.
SLAVERY AND EMANCIPATION
Dylan Penningroth, Northwestern University
Thusday, February 24, 2005
This seminar will consider how we can talk about and teach the history of slaves, slavery, and emancipation; including ways to incorporate the newer scholarship on slave life. After considering some of the major issues in the history of North American slavery and emancipation and the ways that some historians have engaged those issues, our main focus will be on themes of family, community, and property. An in-depth examination of the paradoxical phenomenon of property ownership by slaves is intended to provide a useful example for examining the problem of agency within the larger experience of an oppressive system.
ETHNICITY, SEGREGATION, AND SOUTH AFRICAN CITIES
Darell Kruger, Illinois State University
Wednesday, March 2, 2005
This presentation focuses on the role of ethnic classification in shaping South African cities, including a discussion of salient apartheid laws that shaped their residential structure. Particular emphasis is placed on District Six in Cape Town, a mixed race area a so-called “Black Spot” that flew in the face of the ethnically-based apartheid model of city-building.
THE CASE OF TYPHOID MARY: AN INVESTIGATION INTO PROGESSIVE ERA SOCIAL REGULATION
Jennifer Koslow, Newberry Library
Friday, March 4, 2005
In 1907, the New York City health department determined that a thirty-seven-year-old Irish cook named Mary Mallon had infected more than twenty people with typhoid fever and was, consequently, a public health menace. She disagreed, but was nevertheless forced to spend the rest of her life incarcerated at Riverside Hospital on North Brother Island, New York. Why was this curtailment of individual liberty deemed acceptable? In this seminar, we will explore how Mallon's sex, ethnicity, occupation, and unwillingness to concede that her body might harbor dangerous microbes, prompted the city to take this drastic action. We will also examine how the case of Typhoid Mary fits into the history of social regulation regarding work, housing, and public safety as well as the general context of Progressive Era reforms.
IMMIGRANTS TO AMERICA - THE ECONOMICS BEHIND THE STORY
Barry Chiswick, University of Illinois at Chicago
Wednesday, March 9, 2005
This seminar will discuss the recent flux of immigrants to the United States. Among the questions that will be addressed are: Where do immigrants come from? Why do immigrants come to the United States? How do these immigrants adjust to the US economy? What is their impact on the American economy and its implications for policy?
HITLER AND STALIN: THE RISE AND FALL OF THE TOTALITARIANS
Eugene Beiriger, DePaul University
Friday, March 11, 2005
This seminar will examine the careers of the two most notorious dictators of the twentieth century. Between them, their regimes were responsible for the greatest number of civilian deaths on the European continent. We will examine the two men and the social contexts in which they operated. After some background, we will discuss the different interpretive lenses used by historians to better understand the issues raised by these regimes. We will examine debates concerning "intentionalism" and "functionalism" (whether the dictators' intent determined their states' actions or the dictators' actions were determined by structural constraints within their states); "Sonderweg" and "totalitarianism" (whether both regimes grew of unique national circumstances or were fundamentally similar in nature); and ideology and geopolitics (whether the regimes were motivated by their ideologies or by realistic assessments of their states' interests.
THE SECOND WAVE OF AMERICAN FEMINISM
Nancy MacLean, Northwestern University
Wednesday, May 18, 2005
One of the most influential social movements of the twentieth century, second-wave feminism fundamentally changed the way millions of Americans live their lives and how institutions work. Living in a very different era, today's students have trouble understanding how social and cultural change on this scale occurs. What made so many women so receptive to the new movement's message in the late 1960s? Why did the movement arise then and not before? How did a minority manage to persuade the majority that significant reforms were needed, and convince Congress, the courts, and several presidents to act? How have the reforms activists won and the changes in culture they initiated affected others, including young people growing up today? How can we analyze gender without losing sight of race and class? This seminar will introduce new scholarship on modern feminism as it also reaches back to ground the recent movement in the history and historiography of first-wave feminism, and acquaints participants with resources in Newberry Library collections.
FROM DRAKE TO "DRAQUE": THE SPANISH PERSPECTIVE ON FRANCIS DRAKE, PRIVATEERS, AND THE CONFLICT WITH ENGLAND (1587-1598)
Elizabeth Wright, University of Georgia
Thursday, May 19, 2005
Francis Drake, according to Harry Kelsey's 1998 biography, began his life as a hero, not in Elizabethan England but in the realms of the Spanish Habsburgs. Indeed, from Madrid to Mexico, the figure of Drake became a focal point for a national soul-searching among intellectuals and officials of Habsburg Spain. Together, we will discuss how the cult of an "arch-enemy" took shape around the Elizabethan privateer. To do so, we will discuss different kinds of documents from the late sixteenth century, including letters of the Spanish ambassador, the dispatches of naval scouts, royal chronicles, and even a ten-canto epic about Francis Drake's fateful last journey. So doing, I hope we can also have a conversation about how different kinds of primary sources can shape classroom discussion and encourage students to rethink questions of international relations.
OLD TALES MADE NEW: GENERIC TRANSFORMATION IN SHAKESPEARE'S KING LEAR AND THE WINTER'S TALE
Amelia Zurcher, Marquette University
Wednesday, May 25, 2005
At the end of his career, Shakespeare moved from subtly reworking generic boundaries to violating them openly, in ways that puzzled and sometimes outraged contemporaries. In this seminar we will make what might seem an unlikely pairing between King Lear and The Winter's Tale to consider why the characteristic themes of the late plays -- love between parents and children and the responsibilities of each to the other, death and redemption, the powers and limitations of art -- seem to lend themselves to formal innovation and how the plays understand the complex and often antagonistic, but also generative, relation between old and new. Participants should have recently read and be familiar with King Lear and The Winter's Tale.
CHICAGO TEXTS - VIADUCTS AND DRAGONFLIES: NATURE AND ART IN THE CITY
Bill Savage, Northwestern University
Thursday, May 26, 2005
In this consortium, we will closely read several short stories and poems by Stuart Dybek in order to grapple with two key issues in Chicago literature and in our understanding of ourselves and the city. First, the dynamic tension between the artificial city and the natural world, and how that tension is negotiated. Second, the role of art in overcoming the divisions built into urban spaces and identity politics. Our readings will be from The Coast of Chicago and Streets in Their Own Ink.