Last Updated: June 2, 2008
U.S. History
THE 1970s: RETHINKING RECENT AMERICAN HISTORY
Robert Johnston, University of Illinois at Chicago
October 10, 2007
Many teachers don’t even dream of covering the 1970s in their U.S. history courses; they’re lucky to get past WWII. Or perhaps you end your course with the helicopters leaving the roof of the Saigon embassy, but have time for little else. Yet there is so much more to the decade than the Vietnam war, bad hair, and disco. Indeed, one historian has argued that the 1970s was the most significant decade in all of twentieth-century American history, particularly because it represented a key transition point from liberal triumph to conservative ascendancy. We will explore these broad themes while focusing on one particular issue--the racial, and class, conflicts caused by busing and school desegregation--in order to grapple with the place of the 1970s both in American history and in the history classroom.
Seminar Resources
World History
IRAQ UNDER BRITISH AND AMERICAN OCCUPATION:
AN HISTORICAL CONTRAST
Daniel Headrick, Roosevelt University
October 11, 2007
Long before the American invasion of Iraq, there was a similar invasion and occupation, this one by Great Britain, right after World War I. Faced with a massive uprising, the British first tried to control the country with ground troops, but that proved too costly. At Winston Churchill’s urging, they then turned to air control, using RAF bombers to quell any disturbance. With the support of the RAF, the Iraqi government led by King Faysal, an Arabian prince, repressed uprisings by Shiites and Kurds until well into the 1930s. From the story of Britain’s air control of Iraq, American military strategists have drawn the lesson that insurrections can be overcome by air power, a technological solution to a political problem. It did not work in Vietnam and it is not working in Iraq today. Why did it work for the British? In this seminar, we will attempt to answer that question.
Seminar Resources
US History
FROM ASSIMILATION TO RECLAMATION:
AMERICAN INDIANS AND BOARDING SCHOOL POLICY, 1887-2007
Brian Collier, Grand Valley State University
October 17, 2007
In 1887 American Indian Boarding School Policy was "kill the Indian and save the man," 120 years later the policy of American Indian schools is largely about preserving American Indian identity, language, and culture. In this seminar we will explore the historical changes of American Indian education from a policy of assimilation to policies that strive for educational and cultural sovereignty in the schools. We will discuss the development and implementation of the boarding schools and their transitions as well as current ideas and trends in Indian School sovereignty. If time permits, we will also consider the ways the debates over American Indian cultural assimilation and reclamation compare with the experiences of other racial, ethnic, or immigrant groups in US history.
Seminar Resources
English Literature
PUTTING OTHELLO IN CONTEXT: RACE AND GENDER IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND
Susie Phillips, Northwestern University
October 30, 2007
In this seminar, we will be discussing the historical context of Othello, considering the ways in which race and gender were both understood and represented in Shakespeare’s England as well as the historical situation of women and racial others. In the years surrounding the play’s performance and publication, early modern Englishmen became deeply interested in the presence of Africans in the London courts and in the London marketplace: poems about interracial romance became a pop cultural phenomenon, African children were used as fashion accessories by aristocratic women, and African workers played an integral role in the London economy. As we consider the play against this social backdrop, we will also think about the role of women in the play and in the culture more generally: how can we explain and understand Desdemona’s transformation over the course of the play from an outspoken woman who stands before the Venetian Senate to assert her desires to a silent figure who refuses to defend herself?
Seminar Resources
World History
PEASANTS, PRIESTS, AND LÁZARO CÁRDENAS IN POST-REVOLUTIONARY MEXICO
Chris Boyer, University of Illinois at Chicago
November 6, 2007
This seminar will discuss the social, cultural, and political history of Mexico in the years following the 1910-1920 revolution. In the countryside and in the cities, working people began to organize to demand that the "promises of the revolution" be fulfilled. The result was political mobilization on a massive scale, workers’ movements, peasant radicalism, and in the late 1920s, a Catholic-inspired rebellion against the government. In many ways, the presidency of Lázaro Cárdenas (1934-1940) was the culminating moment of the cycle of post-revolutionary social change. Cárdenas massively expanded the scope of land reform and broke the back of the hacienda system. His administration promoted the massive unionization if Mexican workers and confronted the US and Britain on control of the nation’s oil reserves, which he eventually nationalized in 1938. And his administration expanded the scope of public education and the arts by promoting work of muralists like Diego Rivera and José Clemente Orozco, which helped to transform Mexican culture itself.
Seminar Resources
World History
JAPANESE COLONIALISM IN GLOBAL CONTEXT
E. Taylor Atkins, Northern Illinois University
November 8, 2007
This seminar examines the expansion of the Japanese empire from the late nineteenth century until the Second World War, with particular attention to how Japanese colonialism conformed to and departed from colonial practices of other nation-states (e.g., Britain, Netherlands, USA, France). The seminar will briefly outline the chronology of Japanese incursions into East and Southeast Asia and the south Pacific, then proceed to discuss the empire’s peculiar ideological, political, and economic characteristics. We will then devote some time to discussing the Japanese colonial administration of Korea and its effects on subsequent developments in the history of the East Asian region. The emphasis throughout will be comparative, so that the seminar will be most useful to teachers of world history and comparative civilizations.
Seminar Resources
Geography
MAPPING FRONTIERS: CHICAGO AND THE AMERICAN WEST
Diane Dillon, Newberry Library
November 14, 2007
Maps played a crucial role in shaping the American West, literally and figuratively, from the sixteenth through the early twentieth centuries. Explorers, government officials, railroad companies, emigrants, land developers, tourists, and teachers made and used a wide variety of maps to comprehend the West’s geography and exploit its resources. Regarded together, these maps present the larger history of the West in microcosm, offering a fresh lens through which to interpret the region’s culture and its significance. Drawing on the Newberry’s special exhibition, Mapping Manifest Destiny: Chicago and the American West, this seminar will investigate frontier mapping from a variety of perspectives, including those of mapmakers, patrons, and consumers. We will pay special attention to the place of Chicago in this history, tracing its evolution from an Indian place name on early maps to the economic capital of the West and a major center of cartographic production.
Seminar Resources
US Literature
VOICING ASIAN AMERICAN “SILENCES”
Karen Su, University of Illinois at Chicago
November 27, 2007
The seminar will introduce some major concepts relevant to Asian American literature by exploring the particular power dynamics of voice and silence. How have some Asian American authors explored differing cultural notions of voice and silence? By examining the writings of well-known writers like Amy Tan and Maxine Hong Kingston, as well as other important writers, we will consider how they have addressed Asian American efforts to gain “voice.”
Seminar Resources
US History
THE NEW COLONIAL AMERICAN HISTORY: GLOBAL PERSPECTIVES ON EARLY AMERICA
Denver Brunsman, Wayne State University
November 28, 2007
In the past decade no other field in American history has grown as fast as colonial America. Today a doctoral candidate in colonial American history must not only grasp such traditional topics as Puritanism but must also show familiarity with French, Spanish, and other European settler societies, West African village cultures, Caribbean slave life, and Native American groups across the Americas. This seminar will explore the global explosion of early American studies and its implications for the high school classroom. We will use the life of the famous slave and leading eighteenth-century abolitionist Olaudah Equiano (also known as Gustavus Vassa) as a case study for the new colonial history. A generation ago most historians would not classify Equiano’s life as “American history,” but today new questions over his exact birthplace demonstrate the fascinating intersections between America, Europe, Africa, and the Caribbean in the colonial era. Finally, the seminar will take advantage of its late-November meeting time to read accounts of the first Thanksgiving and consider where, if at all, traditional narratives of Pilgrims and Indians fit in the new colonial American history.
Seminar Resources
European History
THE NAZI ECONOMY: ORIGINS, NATURE, AND RESULTS
Peter Hayes, Northwestern University
December 4, 2007
Recent research has contradicted several long-standing ways of thinking about the Nazi economy, notably that it was both dominated by German big business and remarkably chaotic and inefficient. In light of this new work, this seminar will concentrate on three questions: What exactly were the chief determinants of economic policy and practice in the Third Reich? How well did Nazi economics serve Hitler’s purposes? And, what do the answers to these questions tell us about the Nazi regime, as well as the general relationship between government and markets?
Seminar Resources
Politics, Economics, and Government (PEG)
GLOBALIZATION AND THE U.S. ECONOMY
Mark Witte, Northwestern University
December 5, 2007
The long run health of the US economy depends upon the interaction of economic forces from within and without our borders. From the effects of our high levels of borrowing and their resulting effects on world capital and labor flows, to the tenuous levels of the US dollar and hopes for agreement on limiting climate change, America’s economic future is truly a global matter. This seminar focuses on globalization’s impact, and the often conflicting views of that impact.
Seminar Resources
US History
THE WORKINGMEN’S REPUBLIC:
THE RISE AND FALL OF THE FIRST AMERICAN LABOR MOVEMENT
Daniel Graff, University of Notre Dame
December 7, 2007
In the 1820s and 1830s, organized labor protest rocked the republic. Before collapsing with the Panic of 1837, this workingmen’s revolt -- led largely by discontented craft journeymen -- transformed local and national politics. What should we make of the nation’s first labor movement, and what does it tell us about the rapidly changing economy and society of Jeffersonian and Jacksonian America? Through an exploration of the unions, newspapers, political parties, and strikes launched by these workers, we can better understand how Americans thought and fought about economic opportunity, social status, political participation, and race and gender during this critical period of early industrialization. Central to this exploration will be an attempt to clarify the complex relationship between capitalism and democracy in American history and culture more broadly.
Seminar Resources
US History
MAKING SENSE OF THE VIETNAM WARS:
VIETNAMESE, AMERICAN, AND INTERNATIONAL PERSPECTIVES
Mark Bradley, University of Chicago
December 12, 2007
“Why Vietnam?” The question dominated American political life for much of the length of the Vietnam Wars. It has continued to be asked in the three decades since they ended. The question, then and now, implied a desire not just for an answer but also for a justification. For most Americans the question centered on the U.S. itself, and for many the simplest answer that both explained and justified was “the Cold War.” Such an answer, of course, begged the question but beyond that it made invisible the Vietnamese presence in the war: how northerners and southerners, men and women, soldiers and civilians, urban elites and rural peasants, radicals and conservatives in Vietnam came to understand the thirty years war as it unfolded around them. This session will explore the new ways in which historians are approaching the wars for Vietnam—not just as American Cold War history but also as Vietnamese history and as a part of the global historical processes of imperialism and decolonization in the twentieth century—and consider the implications of the return of a popular revisionist history that seeks to legitimate the American wars in both Vietnam and Iraq.
Seminar Resources
Politics, Economics, and Government (PEG)
RELIGION AND POLITICS BETWEEN EUROPE AND THE MIDDLE EAST
Elizabeth Shakman Hurd, Northwestern University
December 14, 2007
This seminar focuses on religion and politics and relations between Turkey and the European Union. Both are complicated intersections fraught with politics, history, and disagreement: the secular-religious relationship is a complex and ever-evolving historical negotiation that differs across time and space, and historical relations between the EU and Turkey may be described in much the same terms. We will use the European debate over Turkish accession to the EU as a window onto a broader set of questions involving European identity, religious pluralism, secularism and state power, variations on secular democracy, and the politics of and prospects for European enlargement.
Seminar Resources
European History
OPERA AND RENAISSANCE ITALY
Edward Muir, Northwestern University
January 29, 2008
Although a group of musical theorists came up with the idea of opera in Florence in the late sixteenth century, it was not until opera began to be commercially produced in Venice a half century later that the new art form became a huge success. Opera was the first multi-media art form: a production that incorporated song, musical accompaniment, dance, acting, stage sets, and spectacles in one kind of performance. Yet even the most artistically accomplished of these productions were subject to the demands of ticket sales and audience satisfaction. In this seminar we will explore how it was that technical Renaissance theories about how to resurrect the music of the ancient Greeks led to the creation of an entirely new artistic form, now known as opera, and why that form began flourish both artistically and commercially after the late sixteenth century in Renaissance Italy. We will investigate how the complex processes of modern musical productions have a history and how success in music was then, as it is now, so dependent on commerce and popular support.
Seminar Resources
European History
THE NAZI ECONOMY: ORIGINS, NATURE, AND RESULTS
Peter Hayes, Northwestern University
January 30, 2008
Recent research has contradicted several long-standing ways of thinking about the Nazi economy, notably that it was both dominated by German big business and remarkably chaotic and inefficient. In light of this new work, this seminar will concentrate on three questions: What exactly were the chief determinants of economic policy and practice in the Third Reich? How well did Nazi economics serve Hitler’s purposes? And, what do the answers to these questions tell us about the Nazi regime, as well as the general relationship between government and markets?
Seminar Resources
British Literature
THE VISUAL WORLD OF DICKENS’ NOVELS
James Chandler, University of Chicago
January 31, 2008
In this seminar, we will look at a few of Dickens major novels to consider the all-important of issue how this visually-oriented writer constructs a visual world. Topics will include Dickens’ mode of characterization, questions of point of view in his novels, the role of illustrations in his novels, and perhaps some consideration of Dickens’ celebrated relation to cinema. Focus will be on Great Expectations, A Tale of Two Cities, and “A Christmas Carol.”
English Literature
PUTTING OTHELLO IN CONTEXT: RACE AND GENDER IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND
Susie Phillips, Northwestern University
February 5, 2008
In this seminar, we will be discussing the historical context of Othello, considering the ways in which race and gender were both understood and represented in Shakespeare’s England as well as the historical situation of women and racial others. In the years surrounding the play’s performance and publication, early modern Englishmen became deeply interested in the presence of Africans in the London courts and in the London marketplace: poems about interracial romance became a pop cultural phenomenon, African children were used as fashion accessories by aristocratic women, and African workers played an integral role in the London economy. As we consider the play against this social backdrop, we will also think about the role of women in the play and in the culture more generally: how can we explain and understand Desdemona’s transformation over the course of the play from an outspoken woman who stands before the Venetian Senate to assert her desires to a silent figure who refuses to defend herself?
Seminar Resources
European History
REASON IN HISTORY?: HEGEL’S PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY
Robert Pippin, University of Chicago
February 5, 2008
Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of World History are among his most controversial texts. His critics have charged that Hegel defends a Euro-centric, pro-imperialist, racist, ludicrously optimistic, progressive view of historical progress, an amoral justification of tyrannical leaders and “a might makes right” position. Is there then anything worth taking seriously in this work? Hegel’s defenders either dispute these interpretations or claim that the morally progressive aspects of modernity (no slavery or child labor, religious toleration, liberal democratic institutions, gender equality, natural science) require some sort of account and Hegel’s is one of the best we have. Our text will be the “Introduction” Hegel wrote for these lectures and our question will be whether these criticisms match what we find in the text, and, even if they do, whether that alone justifies dismissing Hegel’s position on history.
Seminar Resources
Geography and Library Science
PTOLEMY AND RENAISSANCE MAPMAKERS
James Akerman and Robert Karrow, Newberry Library
February 6, 2008
We are accustomed to thinking of maps as simple tools that tell us how to get from one place to another or where some distant country or mountain range is. It is true that on the simplest level maps depict the geography—the general physical description and spatial organization—of our planet. But the content of maps is as much determined by culture, historical circumstances, and the ideas and interests of mapmakers and map users as it is by the geography that maps attempt to depict. The many exhibitions of cartography that will be mounted at cultural institutions throughout Chicago this fall as part of the Festival of Maps offer an extraordinary opportunity for teachers and students to develop a deeper understanding of how maps reflect and influence the contexts in which they were made. In this seminar, participants will visit and study the themes and ideas of one of these with its co-curators. We will begin our day with a visit to the Newberry Library’s exhibit, Ptolemy’s Geography and Renaissance Mapmakers. Then we will have opportunity to explore two of themes developed by the exhibit, the evolving world-view of the Renaissance and Ptolemy’s influence on modern mapmaking. Our discussions will be guided by a presentation of original materials from the Newberry’s collections and a mapmaking exercise. Copies of the catalogues of each of these exhibitions will be provided to participants in advance.
World Literature
DISSIMULATION, MEMORY, AND STORYTELLING IN HOMER’S ODYSSEY
Amelia Zurcher, Marquette University
February 12, 2008
Students new to the Odyssey sometimes find disappointing the relative absence of the kind of psychological realism we find in novels, and leave the poem with a secure sense of Odysseus’s wanderings but a suspicion that the Homeric notion of character doesn’t extend much past its famous epithets. What the poem seems to demand, however, is a different strategy for interpreting the relationship between narrative and character. In this seminar we’ll consider the Odyssey’s narrative structure – its retrospection, the contrived nature of many of its inset stories, the dissimulations of its storytellers – as a map of thought and memory, a rich and sophisticated way to get at the nature of the psyche. We’ll read excerpts from Robert Fagles’s translation of the Odyssey, with special attention to some of the narrative cruxes.
Seminar Resources
Foreign Language (French)
LES CONFLITS DE VICHY ET DE L’ALGÉRGIE: COMMENT LES METTRE EN SCÈNE
John Ireland, University of Illinois at Chicago
February 13, 2008
Les historiens tels que Henry Rousso et Benjamin Stora nous ont bien fait comprendre que les conflits de Vichy (1940-44) et de l’Algérie (1954-62) qu’on pourrait supposer résolus et entérinés dans l’histoire du vingtième siècle hantent toujours l’imaginaire français. Pourquoi ces périodes sombres de l’histoire française font-elles partie d’un « passé qui ne passe pas » pour citer Rousso ? Comme en témoignent les procès de Maurice Papon (1994) ou de Paul Aussaresses (2002), le musée de l’immigration inauguré cet automne à Paris (alors que le gouvernement de Sarkozy accélère les rafles et la déportation d’immigrés clandestins) et même les « freedom fries » à la cafétéria du Congrès américain, nous sommes loin d’avoir pris la mesure de l’étendue de ces deux conflits. Depuis quelques décennies, les romans et le cinéma ajoutent leur grain de sel aux témoignages conflictuels. Et le théâtre ? A l’aide de quelques exemples, ce séminaire propose d’évaluer sa contribution aux divers débats en cours.
Seminar Resources
US History and US Literature
THE GILDED AND THE GRITTY: AMERICA, 1870-1912
Leon Fink, University of Illinois at Chicago
Carl Smith, Northwestern University
February 14, 2008, 9:30 am to 3:30 pm
Constructed around an online "toolbox" of texts and documents collected at the National Humanities Center (Research Triangle Park, North Carolina), participants in this seminar will explore four themes that are central to the Gilded Age: 1) City and Country (focusing on arcadian mythology, urban realism, and nostalgia, 2) Citizens and Others (esp. immigrants, African-Americans, and children), 3) Work and Leisure (esp.craft, industrialization, and consumerism), and 4) Politics and the State (party culture, populism, progressivism). Within each thematic unit, we will be searching for characteristic sensibilities of the age, as manifest in public life, literature, and/or the arts. Across our discussions, we will try to identify those documents, questions, and exercises which might best enliven our own classrooms.
Seminar Resources
British Literature
MRS. DALLOWAY AS PUBLIC ELEGY: WOMEN, WAR, AND THE ART OF MOURNING
Christine Froula, Northwestern University
February 22, 2008
In Mrs. Dalloway (1925) Virginia Woolf created a communal elegy for the Great War’s survivors no less than for the war dead. The book draws upon the deep resources of the pastoral elegy from the Greeks through Shakespeare, Shelley, and “the moderns” in its search of consolations for “this late age of the world’s experience.” Through its doubled protagonists—Clarissa Dalloway, its central elegiac consciousness, and war veteran Septimus Warren Smith—the novel explores the terrible losses suffered by “poor devils, of both sexes” and deploys the energies of mourning to critique a warmaking society that represses the reality as well as the consequences of violence. In examining Mrs. Dalloway as a modern elegy that addresses the military, civil, social, and psychic violence that had devastated Europe and still loomed in the interwar period, we will place the novel among Bloomsbury’s contributions to post-WWI debates about Europe’s future.
Seminar Resources
US History and Library Science
IT DIDN’T ALL GO UP IN FLAMES:
RESEARCHING PRE-FIRE CHICAGO AT THE NEWBERRY LIBRARY
Ginger Frere, Newberry Library
Matthew Rutherford, Newberry Library
February 26, 2008
Historians generally understand the Chicago Fire of 1871 to have been a catalyst for remaking Chicago into a preeminent American city. Knowing what Chicago was like before the Fire brings the consequences of this decisive event into focus. Fortunately for today’s researcher and student, the Fire did not completely destroy evidence of the early years of the city. The Newberry Library’s archive of materials pertaining to pre-Fire Chicago includes maps, diaries, church records, newspapers, and sheet music; a show-and-tell session will provide an opportunity to examine some of these materials up close. Along with a discussion of these primary sources, participants will learn about strategies and methods for researching early Chicago at the Library, at other institutions in the city, and on the Internet; participants will also consider ways to involve their students in exploring the early life of the city.
Seminar Resources
World History
THE HISTORY OF MUHAMMAD AND MUHAMMAD IN HISTORY
Warren Schultz, DePaul University
February 27, 2008
Muhammad occupies a central place in the Islamic faith and Muslim culture, making accounts of his life and actions of importance to Muslims and non-Muslims alike. Yet from the sheer variety of these accounts, particularly when seen in historical perspective, several different, even conflicting, versions of Muhammad appear. In the Muslim tradition Muhammad was a perfect man, the messenger of God, and the final prophet sent by God to instruct mankind. The first Muslims knew Muhammad directly, and subsequent generations yearned for knowledge about him and his life. Moreover, Muhammad was also an historical figure who died in the year 632 CE. He was the leader of a community which, after his death, rapidly expanded across much of the central lands of the eastern hemisphere. Cultures that came in contact with this community articulated their own perspectives on the prophet. In medieval Europe, for example, Muhammad was portrayed as a heretic or an agent of the devil, among other disparaging labels. Later, some Enlightenment-era authors saw him as a rational alternative to the superstition they saw in Christianity. In the twentieth century, scholars have approached Muhammad’s life through the lenses of philology, linguistic analysis, Marxism, and close source-criticism among other. In the post 9/11 era, descriptions of Muhammad as a proto-terrorist have enraged many Muslims around the world. In this seminar and through the readings assigned, participants will be learn to negotiate their way among the many perspectives which surround this important man.
Seminar Resources
European History
MEDICINE IN RENAISSANCE ENGLAND
Celeste Chamberland, Roosevelt University
February 28, 2008
This seminar will address the social and cultural dimensions of illness and medical care in sixteenth-century England. With an emphasis on the anatomical renaissance, the advent of medical professionalization, and the response to epidemics, this session will explore the ways in which theories of disease intersected with prevailing physiological knowledge, forms of medical practice, and the experience of the ill and infirm. Reading materials will include an introduction to the context of early modern medical practice, excerpts from the surgical treatise of Queen Elizabeth’s surgeon, William Clowes, and the anatomical illustrations of Andreas Vesalius.
Seminar Resources
World History
THE HISTORY OF MUHAMMAD AND MUHAMMAD IN HISTORY
Warren Schultz, DePaul University
March 4, 2008
Muhammad occupies a central place in the Islamic faith and Muslim culture, making accounts of his life and actions of importance to Muslims and non-Muslims alike. Yet from the sheer variety of these accounts, particularly when seen in historical perspective, several different, even conflicting, versions of Muhammad appear. In the Muslim tradition Muhammad was a perfect man, the messenger of God, and the final prophet sent by God to instruct mankind. The first Muslims knew Muhammad directly, and subsequent generations yearned for knowledge about him and his life. Moreover, Muhammad was also an historical figure who died in the year 632 CE. He was the leader of a community which, after his death, rapidly expanded across much of the central lands of the eastern hemisphere. Cultures that came in contact with this community articulated their own perspectives on the prophet. In medieval Europe, for example, Muhammad was portrayed as a heretic or an agent of the devil, among other disparaging labels. Later, some Enlightenment-era authors saw him as a rational alternative to the superstition they saw in Christianity. In the twentieth century, scholars have approached Muhammad’s life through the lenses of philology, linguistic analysis, Marxism, and close source-criticism among other. In the post 9/11 era, descriptions of Muhammad as a proto-terrorist have enraged many Muslims around the world. In this seminar and through the readings assigned, participants will be learn to negotiate their way among the many perspectives which surround this important man.
Seminar Resources
US Literature
DIFFICULT MEMORY: LATE TWENTIETH-CENTURY AMERICAN POETRY ON THE HOLOCAUST, SLAVERY/RACISM, AND AIDS
R. Clifton Spargo, Marquette University
March 5, 2008
One of the challenges in teaching poetry is to draw students to an appreciation of apparent difficulties in syntax, diction, and form that prove absolutely necessary to a poem’s meaning. In this seminar, we will consider the intersection between poetry’s relative formal difficulty and the social terrain of atrocity and suffering, with all of its attendant moral, psychic, and political difficulties. The poems we will consider here as American responses to the Holocaust, racial oppression (lynching), and the AIDS epidemic might be categorized as part of the poetry of mourning, or emanations of traumatic experience, or exemplary cases of a literature of witness. We will consider such generic categories and other terminology from literary criticism as part of our effort to reflect on the moral challenge presented by a poetry asking us to encounter, if only imaginatively, extreme injustice. What does such poetry tell us about the place our concentrated attention to injustice ought to have in formulating notions of political justice?
Seminar Resources
US History
NEW APPROACHES TO THE HISTORY OF SLAVERY AND ABOLITION
Amy Stanley, University of Chicago
April 9, 2008
In this seminar, participants will discuss new approaches to the history of slavery and abolition. In particular they will focus on three key issues: the link between the slave trade and forced plantation labor, the agency and resistance of slaves, and the link between the abolition of slavery and women's rights. Along with discussing the primary documents, participants will look at contemporary lithographs and drawings that portray the themes at stake. The secondary readings offer context for the discussion of these three central themes.
US Literature
TEACHING URBAN AMERICA: CHICAGO STORIES OF JAMES T. FARRELL
Charles Fanning, Southern Illinois University
April 10, 2007
This seminar will explore a selection of James T. Farrell's short stories as defining literary documents for understanding American urban life. Better known for his "Studs Lonigan" trilogy of novels, Farrell also wrote short fiction as a realist committed to the creation of a great variety of characters and situations placed firmly on Chicago's South Side: children, corner gangs, high school and college students, working class and middle class wage-earners and families, nuns and priests. These stories are direct, accessible, and teachable.
US History
JAPANESE INTERNMENT AND CHICAGO RESETTLEMENT
William Yoshino, Japanese American Citizens League
Kevin Kumashiro, University of Illinois at Chicago
Jean Fujiu, Japanese American Service Committee
Debbie Mieko Burns, JASC Legacy Center
April 16, 2008, 9:30am to 12:30pm (with optional tour after lunch, lasting till 2:00pm)
This seminar provides a multi-faceted opportunity to learn about Japanese American history and community development. The primary focus is the history of internment during WW II with a special emphasis on the resettlement of Japanese Americans in the Chicago metropolitan area after leaving the camps. A tour of the Japanese American Service Committee (JASC) featuring the exhibit “Origins of Now: Rebuilding Community,” as well as a community mural and the archival material of the JASC Legacy Center, will provide a contemporary perspective of how that history still shapes communities today. Seminar participants will also engage with the theoretical concerns involved more broadly with curricular inclusion of the histories and experiences of Asian Americans.
World Literature
JHUMPA LAHIRI'S "TWO LIVES": THE POLITICS AND AESTHETICS OF DIASPORIC WRITING
Harveen Mann, Loyola University
April 23, 2008
The Indian-American author Jhumpa Lahiri has received popular and critical acclaim. Winner of the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for her first collection of short stories, Interpreter of Maladies, Lahiri was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2002 and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and has been named one of the twenty best young writers in America by The New Yorker. This seminar will focus on her body of work, with particular attention paid to her 2003 novel, The Namesake. The novel is in many ways a classic American story about immigration. Yet Lahiri also introduces such contemporary issues as multiculturalism, postcolonial discourse, diaspora, and globalization, at the same time that she raises important questions about race, class/caste, religion, gender, and nationality, both in America and India. In addition to engaging with the novel, participants will discuss its film adaptation by Mira Nair, listen to interviews with Lahiri, and familiarize themselves with Lahiri’s latest collection of short stories, Unaccustomed Earth (in pre-publication form).
World Literature
BUFFY AND THE BEAST: ALLEGORIES OF THE PSYCHE IN LITERATURE AND POPULAR CULTURE
Kasey Evans, Northwestern University
April 30, 2008
Various artists in the Western tradition have used allegory as a way to represent the dynamics of the human psyche, suggesting that, in the words of one Renaissance critic, allegorical landscapes “evolve from the projection of inscape.” Using the first five cantos of Dante Alighieri's Inferno, William Golding's novel Lord of the Flies, and a 1999 episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer entitled "Hush," we will discuss the ways in which this seemingly unrealistic mode of representation can, in some cases, come closer to approximating psychological plausibility than does mimetic realism. We will discuss the variety of allegorized minds represented by these texts--fourteenth-century Catholic heretic; post-war Freudian psychic apparatus; and Y2K-era teenage angst--and consider the tensions between historical specificity (how is allegory adapted for each work's specific context?) and generic continuity (what remains constant in this centuries-old mode of representation?).
Politics, Economics, and Government (PEG)
ELECTING THE PRESIDENT: ISSUES FOR DEMOCRACY, POWER, AND GOVERNANCE
Michael Mezey and Wayne Steger, DePaul University
May 6, 2008
This seminar will focus on the state of current political science research on presidential elections and their outcomes. Participants will consider the following topics: 1) who votes, who doesn’t, and whether it matters; 2) explaining the vote choices that individuals make; 3) a discussion of the relative importance of factors that can influence election outcomes, such as economic factors, war, policy issues, and the media.
US Literature
THE GRAPES OF WRATH: ENVIRONMENT, ECONOMY, AND THE AMERICAN IDEA
Bill Savage, Northwestern University
May 7, 2008
In this seminar, we will explore John Steinbeck’s epic 1939 novel The Grapes of Wrath in a broad cultural context, to explore the intersection of environment, economics, and history in the novel’s representation of the Dust Bowl and the experience of his representative Okalahoma family, the Joads. The novel’s success, along with that of the film by John Ford, has made the Joad family into American icons, and all icons are subject to reinterpretation. Differences between the film and the novel--especially, but not exclusively, the conclusions and the parallel narratives of the novel--highlight different ways for artists to grapple with broad cultural conflicts. We will discuss the novel, the film, contemporary songs by Woodie Guthrie, documentary photography of the period, and Bruce Springsteen’s album, The Ghost of Tom Joad.
U.S. History
THE 1970s: RETHINKING RECENT AMERICAN HISTORY
Robert Johnston, University of Illinois at Chicago
May 8, 2008
Many teachers don’t even dream of covering the 1970s in their U.S. history courses; they’re lucky to get past WWII. Or perhaps you end your course with the helicopters leaving the roof of the Saigon embassy, but have time for little else. Yet there is so much more to the decade than the Vietnam war, bad hair, and disco. Indeed, one historian has argued that the 1970s was the most significant decade in all of twentieth-century American history, particularly because it represented a key transition point from liberal triumph to conservative ascendancy. We will explore these broad themes while focusing on one particular issue--the racial, and class, conflicts caused by busing and school desegregation--in order to grapple with the place of the 1970s both in American history and in the history classroom.
US History
THE EMERGENCE OF THE AMERICAN ‘NEW WOMAN’: GENDER AND MODERNITY AT THE TURN OF THE CENTURY
Alice Fahs, University of California at Irvine
May 13, 2008
The rise of the “New Woman” was one of the most-discussed phenomena of American social and cultural life between 1890 and 1914. Pictured in hundreds of articles and illustrations as independent, confident, self-reliant, and athletic, the New Woman captured the imagination of American commentators everywhere, who portrayed New Women as an important part of an emerging modern culture. This seminar will consider the rise of the New Woman at the turn of the century in order to think more broadly about changes in women’s lives. Who exactly were the “bachelor girls” commentators worried over? Why were they so controversial? How did race and class intersect in the making of New Women? We will examine images of New Women in photographs and paintings, as well as read a variety of brief texts by New Women themselves.
US History
THE NEW DEAL AND THE NEW POLITICAL HISTORY
James Sparrow, University of Chicago
May 14, 2008
Over the course of seven decades historians have exhaustively researched and analyzed the New Deal, encouraging recent scholars to focus on other, less manifest aspects of the “great earthquake” that transformed the American polity in those years. Where once historians studied the formation of the “New Deal coalition” or the policies that formed the modern welfare state, they have now largely moved on to examine new areas of interest—consumption, race relations, gender and sexuality, urban and suburban politics—that reflect broader historiographic trends, and are no longer centered on the 1930s as a foundational pivot of modern chronology. This seminar seeks to bring new methods and thematic interests to old questions about New Deal policies and politics and the origins of the modern state. In addition to a presentation on the state of research on the New Deal, the seminar will discuss two sets of readings that reflect the challenge of teaching the politics of this period in a more broadly conceptualized way.
Foreign Language (Spanish)
NACTIONALISMO Y MÚSICA POPULAR EN AMÉRICA LATINA
Alejandro Madrid, University of Illinois at Chicago
May 15, 2008
Este seminario busca estudiar el papel de la música popular en el desarrollo de diversos discursos nacionalistas en América Latina a finales del siglo 19 y principios del siglo 20. Se dará un énfasis en los procesos de transculturación que dieron como resultado prácticas bailables híbridas (habanera, danzón, tango, choro, maxixe, samba) en las que lo local y lo global se entremezclan y cuyo valor social fue determinado individual y colectivamente de acuerdo a circunstancias históricas y políticas específicas.
World Literature
DISSIMULATION, MEMORY, AND STORYTELLING IN HOMER’S ODYSSEY
Amelia Zurcher, Marquette University
May 20, 2008
Students new to the Odyssey sometimes find disappointing the relative absence of the kind of psychological realism we find in novels, and leave the poem with a secure sense of Odysseus’s wanderings but a suspicion that the Homeric notion of character doesn’t extend much past its famous epithets. What the poem seems to demand, however, is a different strategy for interpreting the relationship between narrative and character. In this seminar we’ll consider the Odyssey’s narrative structure – its retrospection, the contrived nature of many of its inset stories, the dissimulations of its storytellers – as a map of thought and memory, a rich and sophisticated way to get at the nature of the psyche. We’ll read excerpts from Robert Fagles’s translation of the Odyssey, with special attention to some of the narrative cruxes.
Geography
GREEN INFRASTRUCTURE: CURRENT STRATEGIES FOR URBAN SUSTAINABILITY
Maureen Sioh, Depaul University
May 21, 2008
In the United States urban growth management and conservation have taken place separately with the former prioritized over the latter. Conservation tends to be viewed as an amenity rather than a necessity, and its implementation tends to be site specific and narrowly focused. Green infrastructure—as opposed to gray infrastructure like roads and drains—goes beyond these conventional conservation efforts by promoting conservation through a network of open spaces that takes place at different spatial scales throughout urban and rural environments. This seminar introduces participants to the concepts of green infrastructure and a review of case studies around the United States. Seminar participants also will experiment with creating the basis of green infrastructure in Chicago, that is, designing a network out of existing open spaces and green corridors as well as prioritizing lands to be set aside in future.
US History
ORIGINS OF THE COLD WAR: WHAT DO WE NOW KNOW?
David Krugler, University of Wisconsin at Platteville
May 23, 2008
Almost twenty years have elapsed since the end of the Cold War. The mostly peaceful liquidation of communist states in Europe opened up previously closed archives to scholars eager to verify, modify, update, or even replace prevailing interpretations about the causes and course of the Cold War. Ongoing declassification of U.S. government documents greatly added to this archival base. In this seminar, we will assess some of the new findings about Soviet wartime and postwar actions and discuss how this evidence changes or confirms our understanding of how the Cold War began. Participants will also be introduced to internet resources for the new Cold War history. Throughout the seminar, participants will grapple with the question of “what we now know”—and consider why this is not a simple question to answer.