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2010-11 Seminar Schedule
Last Updated: 9/1/2010
Politics, Economics, Government
The Economics of Sprawl
Nathan Anderson, University of Illinois at Chicago
October 5, 2010
A metropolitan area's defining characteristic is that its structure is always changing. Do the cities of the future feature speedy mass transportation, expanded mixed-use neighborhoods, and vibrant downtowns? Do these future cities also feature increased congestion, burdensome commutes, suffocating pollution, and sharpened segregation? This seminar predicts the future of metropolitan structure by describing the economic forces that drove changes in metropolitan structure over the last 300 years.
Literature (British)
How Hamlet Works
Bradley Greenburg, Northeastern Illinois University
October 6, 2010
Hamlet's impact has led one famous critic to credit its protagonist with "the invention of the human," his psychological depths and existential struggles a model that decisively impacts all subsequent literary creation. Margreta de Grazia, with more restraint, writes that "Hamlet remains perennially in the critical forefront as new (and newer still) explanations emerge to account for his singular interiority." This seminar will inquire into how this singular interiority is produced. Seminar participants will ask, How does this play lead readers and audiences to endlessly "account" for Hamlet's problems, desires, and motives? In the readings and discussion participants will look closely at some key scenes in order to shift our attention from figuring out Hamlet to figuring out how Hamlet works.
History (United States)
Chicago's Race Riot of 1919
David Krugler, University of Wisconsin at Platteville
October 15, 2010
The United States fought in World War I to make the world safe for democracy. After victory, African Americans carried on that mission-at home. But the defenders of white supremacy did not make way for the rights and equalities of African Americans. During 1919, white mobs lynched more than seventy-five blacks, including eleven veterans, seven cities experienced so-called race riots in which whites violently attacked blacks, and dozens of lesser, racially charged disturbances broke out across the country. Participants will consider questions like: Why was there so much racial violence in 1919? How did African Americans respond to and resist, often with arms, white attacks? What was the role of the federal government, especially the military and the Bureau of Investigation (forerunner of the FBI), in the racial violence? This seminar was offered previously in 2009-10.
History (European)
Jews, Christians, and Muslims in Medieval Spain
Ann Kuzdale, Chicago State University
October 18, 2010
Spain during the Middle Ages (c. 500-1500) represented a crossroads of religious cultures. Some historians have described this as a convivencia or period of harmonious coexistence. For others it was a time of hostile reconquista, a march toward a unified Catholic state in 1492 ending with the defeat of the Moors and expulsion of the Jews. This seminar will examine the complexity of medieval Spain as something more than either convivencia or reconquista. Using key primary and secondary texts we will analyze the changing relations and the cultural, political, and social interaction among Jews, Christians, and Muslims in shaping the legacy of medieval Spain.
American Studies
Containing Multitudes: Walt Whitman and the Origins of Leaves of Grass in the Early American Republic
Jason Stacy, Southern Illinois University Edwardsville
October 22, 2010
In the fifteen years before the publication of Leaves of Grass (1855), Walt Whitman constructed three authoritative voices by which he engaged the upheavals endemic to the Industrial Revolution. Through these public personas, found mostly in his journalism, Whitman offered remedies for American artisans who had lost their economic autonomy and status. Instead of attacking broad forces beyond worker control, Whitman blamed artisans for oppressing themselves through the temptations of consumerism and affectation. In this seminar, participants will examine Whitman's poetry through its historical context and that historical context through the poetry. In doing so, participants will trace Whitman's public voice as he wrestled intimately with the debates of his day: conspicuous consumption, nativism, slavery, and, through it all, labor and the status of the new working class.
Literature (United States)
Richard J. Daley: Man and Myth, Life and Legend
Bill Savage, Northwestern University
October 25, 2010
In this seminar, seminar participants will examine the many ways in which Richard J. Daley shaped modern Chicago, both physically (expressways, universities, public housing) and metaphysically (in terms of how Chicagoans understand and relate to each other, and create their sense of their own identities). By reading Mike Royko's Boss, excerpts from Liz Taylor and Adam Cohen's American Pharaoh, and contemporary newsmagazine coverage of Daley, participants will see how his personality, his leadership style, his ideas about politics and government, and his neighborhood helped define--for good and ill--the Chicago we live in today.
History (European)
The History, Philosophy and Psychology of Monsters in the European Imagination
Stephen Asma, Columbia College
October 29, 2010
Real or imagined, literal or metaphorical, monsters have exerted a dread fascination on the human mind for many centuries. They attract and repel us, intrigue and terrify us, and in the process reveal something deeply important about the darker recesses of our collective psyche. In this seminar, participants will focus on the ways in which monsters embodied anxieties and vulnerabilities, but also symbolized the mysterious and incoherent territory just beyond the safe enclosures of rational thought in European history and philosophy. Exploring philosophical treatises, theological tracts, newspapers, pamphlets, films, scientific notebooks, and novels, participants will unpack traditional monster stories for the clues they offer about the inner logic of a culture's fears and fascinations.
History (United States)
The United States and the Global Human Rights Imagination
Mark Bradley, University of Chicago
November 3, 2010
The twentieth century saw the rise of a revolutionary global human rights culture in which the emergence of transnational norms, movements and institutions held out the promise of more fully realizing human dignity and welfare in a space that transcended the local and the national. Beginning at the turn of the century, and accelerating after 1945, rights talk exploded as states and peoples from a range of geographical, cultural and gendered perspectives sought to articulate and realize far-reaching transnational norms for individual and collective political, economic, social and cultural well-being. In this seminar participants will focus on the ambiguous place of the United States during three central moments in twentieth century human rights history: the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, the rise of non-state human rights actors like Amnesty International in the 1970s, and the use of global rights norms in American courts more recently in such cases as the celebrated gay rights case Lawrence v. Texas (2003).
History (United States)
United States in an Age of Empire (1890-1920)
Kristin Hoganson, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
November 5, 2010
Celebratory accounts of U.S. history have shied from the word "empire", the one exception being the tendency to hold up the years around 1898 as an aberration in the longer sweep of events. More critical accounts, however, have not hesitated to use the term in reference to the United States, and indeed, recent scholarship has emphasized that the 1898 moment fit into a larger continuum, stretching back at least as far as the origins of the republic and extending forward to our own time. With these debates as its backdrop, this workshop will focus on the United States in world context around the turn of the twentieth century. More specifically, seminar participants will explore how the imperial turn in U.S. history writing has affected understandings of the United States at the beginning of its ascent to great power status. Going beyond traditional diplomatic and military history approaches to the Spanish-Cuban-American and Philippine-American Wars (and other U.S. military interventions), participants will consider topics such as "informal empire," racial ideologies, gender politics, and consumer culture. The seminar will end with some reflections on American exceptionalism (or lack thereof), anticolonial nationalism, postcolonial legacies, and the connections between this imperial age and the present. This seminar was offered previously in 2009-10.
History (World)
Women's Participation in the Iranian Uprisings (tentative title)
Guity Nashat, University of Illinois at Chicago
November 17, 2010
Description to come.
History (United States)
Remember the Ladies: Gender and Citizenship in Post-Revolutionary America
Hana Layson, Independent Scholar
November 18, 2010
"Remember the Ladies," Abigail Adams famously implored her husband, John, at the start of the American Revolution. "Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the Husbands. Remember all Men would be tyrants if they could." Her appeal raises the question, what did the national founding mean for women? How did the principles of liberty and equality among citizens impact the more intimate relations of husband and wife or parent and child? How did Revolutionary ideals lead writers to interrogate-or defend-the exclusion of women from many of the privileges of citizenship, such as voting and owning property? In this seminar, particiapnts will discuss a bestselling novel of 1797; a slave's petition; a pedagogical essay; and brief excerpts from recent scholarship. All of these texts explore the possibilities and risks of extending to women the principles of freedom and self-rule.
History (European)
The Paris Peace Conference, the Treaty of Versailles, and the Search for Order
Eugene Beiriger, DePaul University
December 1, 2010
The 1919 peace conference and treaty with Germany were controversial with contemporaries, reviled in the thirties, and disdained by many historians since. One school of thought is that the end of the first world war (and the subsequent peace) led inexorably to the beginning of the second world war. The peacemakers have been viewed as naive idealists or cynical realists, either too far-sighted or too short-sighted to negotiate a workable treaty. However, recent research has indicated some intriguing new interpretations. Seminar participants will examine a number of historical questions and discuss some of the new ideas concerning the "peace to end all peace."
History (United States)
The Making of a "Good War": American Thought During WWII
Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen, University of Wisconsin at Madison
December 2, 2010
This seminar will examine the varieties of American intellectual responses to WWII in the 1940s and 50s. Seminar participants will explore how American commentators made sense of the war, justified American involvement, and likewise how the war set new terms for American self-understanding. By looking at developments in American political thought, moral philosophy, cultural criticism, and popular theology, participants will see how America's wartime experiences dramatically transformed American intellectual life at midcentury. The seminar also will reflect on how elements of those mid-century understandings have gone on to shape American debates about war ever since.
Foreign Language (Spanish)
How do Spaces, Color and Paper Form Poetic Meaning in Octavio Paz's Blanco? (in Spanish)
Kelly Austin, University of Chicago
December 3, 2010
Blanco is a poem and an artifact that sparks a discussion oabout how form can influence the possibilities of how poets write. Published in 1967, it reveals its ties to the scroll as much as to Pop Art. We will explore the limits and freedoms of book, font, color and paper in poetry. This seminar will be conducted in Spanish.
Politics, Economics, Government
The Impossibility of Governing: Poltical Polarization and the Permanent Campaign
Alan Gitelson, Loyola University
January 26, 2011
Why did Congress and the President struggle to cooperate across party lines during the 110th Congress (2009-2011) and why is it unlikely that things will change in the 111th Congress (2011-2013)? This seminar focuses on those conditions that have, in recent years, heightened the level of partisan bickering in Washington DC and contributed to what some have describe as a dysfunctional climate in the nation's capitol. Through an examination of polls, scholarly articles, and the popular press seminar participants will explore the causes for this polarization and their likely impact on public policy over the next several years.
History (World)
The Mexican Revolution in Memory and Myth
Chris Boyer, University of Illinois at Chicago
January 27, 2011
This seminar will provide an overview of the main events and historical actors of the 1910-1920 Mexican revolution, whose official centennial will be marked in 2010. Participants will discuss the causes behind the major rebellions and their political and social consequences. Other questions to be considered include: How some of the key players and famous events of the revolution has been commemorated, idealized, and in some cases distorted. How can we explain this mythification? What political and cultural uses do these myths fulfill? The second half of the seminar will make a historical excavation of the myths of the revolution -- not so much to debunk them as to understand why they have become so powerful.
Library Science
Understanding the U.S. Census
Geoff Swindells, Northwestern University
January 31, 2011
In this seminar, participants will eview the U.S. Census from its constitutional origins to its present day status as an essential tool of government social policy, and academic social science. Topics include: the decennial census, the specialized censuses, such as the Census of Agriculture, that grew out of this count, and the recent replacement of the "long form" with the American Community Survey. Along the way, the seminar will cover census questionnaires, census records (a primary source for historical and genealogical research), and the variety of statistical products produced by the Census Bureau. Participants will also get hands-on practice working with census data.
American Studies
Fashion: The Politics of Style in American Culture
Marjorie Jolles, Roosevelt University
February 2, 2011
Fashion is a powerful symbolic language for saying who we are, what we do, and what we value. Like all languages, fashion has a history, and therefore requires that we play by rules that we inherit as much as we invent. As a result, fashion exists at the intersection of tradition and modernity, and can be used to both defend and critique the status quo. This is especially true of the role fashion plays in maintaining and transforming gender, racial, class, and sexual identities in American culture, where style has been an important tool for both enforcing social hierarchies and mounting resistance to them. One need only think of feminists' struggles over laws against women wearing pants; or the strong feelings aroused by the Afro; or the political impact of hippie fashion; or the debates within the gay rights movement over assimilation and "passing." Drawing on scholarship in American studies and fashion theory, this seminar will explore various American political and ideological battles between mainstream and subcultural groups as they are waged through fashion and style.
American Studies
Gender and Culture during the Cold War
Kate Baldwin, Northwestern Univeristy
February 3, 2011
The Cold War was arguably the longest modern conflict between competing nations and ideologies. Much of the combat was communicated through media and related speculation about life on the other side. New definitions of masculinity and femininity emerged as gender became a particularly scrutinized means of measuring differences between East and West. On both sides of the wall, texts, images, and other modes of performance contributed to these nations' defining terms of gender. Using the famous "Kitchen Debate" of 1959 as a critical launching pad, this seminar will introduce the importance of gender to the Cold War. Through a variety of texts, including literature, advertisements, cartoons, public service films, and popular media, seminar participants will investigate the communicative practices that both divided and linked the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. along gender lines during the early decades of this era.
Literature (World)
Languages of Empire and Community in Instan by Cecilia Vicu¤a
Kelly Austin, University of Chicago
February 4, 2011
Over the past quarter-century, an almost old story has come again into being concerning cross-border traffic of inter-American literary exchange. The grammar of cross-, inter- and trans- have overtaken the discourse of pan-, now more than a century old, that marked the imperialist forays of the United States into Latin America as well as the possibility, yes, smaller of hemispheric solidarity. The critical discourse surrounding hemispheric American relations has evolved more rapidly than the relations themselves. This, Vicu¤a sees, is only part of the story. She fashions her poem using languages of empire: Spanish, English , Latin, Quechua, French and Portuguese. What happens, she asks, when languages meet over border battles, through migration, while scholars study, and she composes her book. Instan excavates the contradictions of empire.
Politics, Economics, Government
Innovation and Entrepreneurship in Japan in the 21st Century: Ancient Meets Modern
Kathryn Ibata-Arens, DePaul University
February 8, 2011
In August 2010, China surpassed Japan to take the number two spot(after the United States) as the world's second largest economy. Will Japan be able to keep up with economic growth in China and India? Japan has the technological and scientific capacity to be a leading economic power, but the aging of society and a low birth rate has posed a number of challenges to the Japanese economy and society. This seminar will explore the ancient cultural and economic sources of Japan's high growth in the 20th Century, while at the same time exploring the socio-political hierarchies that have prevented Japan from building a more entrepreneurial and democratic society. The seminar will also include a discussion of trends in high growth sectors including biotech and green technology.
History (United States)
Migration and Labor in the Atlantic World (tentative title)
Erik Gellman, Roosevelt University
February 9, 2011
Description to come.
History (United States)
Abraham Lincoln's America, 1809-1865
Daniel Graff, University of Notre Dame
February 11, 2011
In this seminar participants will use the life of the republic's most celebrated president as a window to explore the transformations and continuities in American politics, cultures, economics, ideologies, and social life during the half-century ending in the cataclysmic Civil War. Using Lincoln's own experiences as a starting point - his poor, rural upbringing; his family's frequent moves across the sectional borderlands; his self-motivation, professional ambition, and evolving class identity; his embrace of mass politics; and his rapid ascent to national leadership during the republic's greatest crisis - participants will probe and problematize important, though often unexplored, themes in Lincoln's life. This seminar will also reflect on the usefulness of biography to the larger historical project as well as the importance of memory and myth in the ways Americans repeatedly remember and reconstruct the past.
Literature (United States)
Visual Literacy, Visual Rhetoric
Spencer Schaffner, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
February 11, 2011
In this seminar, participants will explore several approaches to reading andresponding to visually complex texts. Color, image, style, movement --these are all features of a sophisticated visual rhetoric. Studentsconsume visual culture every day, yet much of what they are asked toproduce in school is not multi-modal. Nevertheless, it is important to engage students to get them to think critically and strategically to visual culture and rhetoric. Seminar participants will examine examples of image manipulationin print and electronic culture will be discussed. There will be short demonstrations of image-manipulation technologies, including what getscalled "Photoshopping" and the creation of kinetic (moving) images. Seminar participants will also refelct on the larger significance of what is called "visual culture."
Literature (United States)
Teaching Film and Literature
Nicholas Davis, Northwestern University
February 16, 2011
This seminar aims to practice and discuss several means of encouraging students to engage with narrative cinema at the level of detail and intensity that they apply when close-reading works of literature, to include strategies for working across film and literature as a way of developing student insights into the poetics and structures of both forms. Seminar participants will begin with an illustrated crash-course in the techniques and terminologies for analyzing images, editing, and sound in narrative film, followed by a presentation of sample assignments by which students can practice watching, writing, and thinking from these perspectives. From there, the seminar will examine short scenes and assignments by which book-to-film adaptations can teach students to think about prose and cinema in more nuanced ways, above and beyond questions of which plot points and characters survive from the page to the screen.
History (World)
Reform and the Fate of Communism in China (tentative title)
Peter Carroll, Northwestern University
February 17, 2011
Description to come.
Literature (World)
Bollywood on Bollywood: Examining Hindi Films about Filmmaking
Catherine Becker, University of Illinois at Chicago
February 25, 2011
What is Bollywood? How have the producers of Hindi-language films envisioned their industry? By examining a selection of Hindi films that take filmmaking as a major theme, participants will consider not only the historical and cultural circumstances in which Indian film industries have emerged and participated, but also some of the conventions and genres associated with "Bollywood."
History (European)
Relgious Wars in Early Modern Europe (tentative title)
Brian Sandberg, Northern Illinois University
March 2, 2011
Description to come.
History (United States)
The History of Your Students' Lifetimes
Robert Johnston, University of Illinois at Chicago
March 3, 2011
Students love, and arguablydeserve, having their own lifetimes placed in historical context. Andwhile some call such attempts to place the current moment in historicalcontext mere journalism, scholars have already done quite sophisticatedwork on events such as the election of 2000, 9-11, Katrina, the financial crisis, and the Tea Party. In this seminar, participants will explore some of this work, and some ofthese contemporary issues, as well as try to figure out how these issues fit into an already over-burdened curriculum.
Literature (United States)
City of the Big Shoulders": Chicago Poetry in the Twentieth Century
Liesl Olson, Independent Scholar
March 8, 2011
By the 1920s, the city of Chicago was a hub for the production and circulation of modernist art, music, and literature. The centrality of Chicago and the mobility of its inhabitants generated an aesthetic of openness and experiment that was particularly hospitable to the major writers and artists of the era. This seminar will focus primarily on poetry in Chicago by contextualizing it within larger cultural movements here and further abroad. Seminar participants will read and discuss writings by Carl Sandberg, Vachel Lindsay, Willa Cather, Edgar Lee Masters, Harriet Monroe, Fanny Butcher and H.L. Mencken.
History (World)
Culture and Politics in the Latin American "Long Sixties"
Valeria Manzano, University of Chicago
April 6, 2011
From Ernesto "Che" Guevara's victory alongside Fidel Castro in Cuba in 1959 to the military coup d'‚tat against President Salvador Allende in Chile in 1973, the Latin American "long sixties" were suffused by a feeling of imminence, of "change about to happen". Participants in this seminar will explore how cultural and political change was imagined and shaped, especially as it related to revolutionary (and counterrevolutionary) projects. Using a diverse collection of secondary and primary sources-including songs, film clippings, and posters-this seminar will examine the themes of guerrilla insurgency, student protest, youth counterculture, military repression, and US interventionism during this transformative era.
Literature (United States)
Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
Ben Goluboff, Roosevelt University
April 8, 2011
Ken Kesey's One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest was a seminal novel for the 1960s counterculture, as well as an important American inheritor of European ideas of Existentialism and the absurd. It is also a novel highly conscious of its place in an American tradition of frontier narrative that connects Cooper's Leatherstocking saga with the modern Western. This seminar will discuss these dimensions of the novel, and consider the novel's value as a classroom text.
History (United States)
Placing 19th century Women's Activism in Global Perspective
Jennifer Brier, University of Illinois at Chicago
May 17, 2011
Description to come.
Literature (British)
Interpreting the Hidden Self: The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
Jules Law, Northwestern University
May 19, 2011
In this perennially popular, short, and sensational (i.e., teachable!) book, we are confronted with one of literature's most enduring and chilling tales of a hidden or repressed self. Just what is the relation of Stevenson's hideous Mr. Hyde to the urbane Dr. Jekyll? Like many other nineteenth-century monsters (Frankenstein or Dracula, for instance), we may feel like we know this tale even before we read it for the first time. Many of our students will already have encountered popular-cultural allusions to the story. But what exactly does the hideous Mr. Hyde stand for? And where do we get our clues and our cues for this once we sit down with the book? Stevenson's book has been interpreted as being about unconscious desire, or some aspect of human culture that the nineteenth century feared, like homosexuality. Participants will consider the implications and challenges of teaching the novella through these conflicting and competing interpreations.
Geography
Geographies of Financial Crises
Maureen Sioh, DePaul University
May 24, 2011
The current US financial crisis that began in 2008 has been depicted in the media as the first great financial crisis since the advent of the Great Depression in 1929. Yet, several prominent economists, including two Nobel Prize Winners, argue that the current crisis is only the most recent one in a series of financial crises that has buffeted the world economy in the last 30 years. Economists also have tended to look at the financial crisis as one that is viewed in the same terms universally. While it is true that unemployment and currency depreciation would be viewed negatively everywhere, the solutions taken, and more significantly, the solutions sanctioned by international financial institutions, are very different depending on where the crisis occurs. The seminar will review three models for explaining the occurrence of a financial crisis before turning to an examination of how the notion of financial crisis is played out geographically -- the similarities but also the differences in how the regional crises were treated.
History (United States)
America's Response to the Holocaust
Daniel Greene, Newberry Library
May 26, 2011
Although there is widespread agreement that American authorities knew of Hitler's plan to annihilate Europe's Jews by 1942, there is no consensus about the nature and effectiveness of America's response to the Holocaust. In this seminar, participants will read a number of primary documents (from newspaper ads to political cartoons to speeches) to historicize the question of what Americans knew about the Holocaust and when they knew it. The task will not be to moralize about what America should have done during World War II, but instead to carefully consider these primary sources in historical context. By the seminar's end, participants will gain a greater appreciation of the fraught questions surrounding America's response to the Holocaust.