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5/14/08 (Wed)

"Female Holiness in Coptic Egypt"

4:00PM
In Royce 314
A lecture by Dr. Heike Behlmer (Macquairie University).

-- submitted by Brett (cmrs@humanities.ucla.edu)

For more information, contact cmrs@humnet.ucla.edu

5/15/08 (Thur)

CMRS Sawyer Seminar, "The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus: Disputing What Hell Is"

3:30PM until 6:30PM

With Professors David Riggs (Stanford University), Michael J.B. Allen (UCLA), Debora Shuger (UCLA). One of the masterworks of the Elizabethan stage, Christopher Marlowe’s Faustus leaves its audience with an unforgettable picture of the heroic individual struggling against moral rules, religious constraints and academic conventions which were still stronger than any single person, however daring and ambitious. The low-born Faustus uses his learning, including mastery of the technique of disputation, to climb to fame and power. Dissatisfied with the ordinary rewards of success, Faustus turns to magic and overcomes time itself. The play becomes a psychomachia, a spiritual battle, between forces like the Good and Bad Angels of the play, which turns into a disputation about knowledge and the nature of hell itself.

-- submitted by Brett (cmrs@humanities.ucla.edu)

For more information, contact cmrs@humnet.ucla.edu

5/15/08 (Thur)

Professor Richard Yarborough discusses The Street by Ann Petry

4:00PM until 5:30PM
In 193 Humanities Building
UCLA Department of English Professor Richard Yarborough was featured on the PBS American Masters special “Novel Reflections on the American Dream” that showcased 20th- century authors and the novels that illuminate society's inequities, limitations and heartbreaks. Ann Petry's The Street recounts the tale of Lutie Johnson whose downfall is due to her inability to understand the reality of race in America and her belief that anyone can achieve wealth through hard work.

Professor Yarborough teaches African American literature and 19th- and 20-century American fiction. He is also a Faculty Research Associate with UCLA's Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies, which he directed for six years. The recipient of the UCLA Distinguished Teaching Award in 1987, he has been recognized as an Outstanding Faculty Member by the African Student Union in 1997 and he has received commendations from the City of Los Angeles (1990) and the County of Los Angeles (1991). He has published extensively on African American literature, and he is the Associate General Editor of the Heath Anthology of American Literature (5th ed., 2006). Since 1988 he has been the editor of The Library of Black Literature reprint series published by the University Press of New England.

-- submitted by Susan Skarzynski (susan@humanities.ucla.edu)

For more information, contact friends@english.ucla.edu

5/16/08 (Fri)

UCLA 19th Annual Southland Graduate Student Conference: Genre Matters

In Faculty Center - Sequoia Room
Panels of graduate students from across the country will consider Yale University Professor Wai Chee Dimock's observation that “far from being a neat catalog of what exists and what is to come, genres are a vexed attempt to deal with material that might or might not fit into that catalog.” This suggestion invites scrutiny into the materials that compose genres and the genres that compose materials.

Presentations will address various dimensions of the relationship between genre and materiality. UCLA Department of English Professors Lowell Gallagher and Yogita Goyal will be the keynote speakers.

-- submitted by Susan Skarzynski (susan@humanities.ucla.edu)

For more information, contact genrematters@gmail.com

5/17/08 (Sat)

Annual Shakespeare Symposium

In Royce 314
Organized by Professor Bruce Smith (USC). Complete program to be announced.

-- submitted by Brett (cmrs@humanities.ucla.edu)

For more information, contact cmrs@humnet.ucla.edu

5/20/08 (Tues)

** CANCELLED **CMRS Sawyer Seminar, "Epilogue: Heidegger, Cassirer and the Fracturing of Modern Western Philosophy"

3:30PM until 6:30PM
In Royce 306
With Professor Michael Friedman (Stanford University). After he had published Being and Time (1927) but before he joined the Nazi party and became Rector of Freiburg (1933), Martin Heidegger met Ernst Cassirer at Davos in 1929 to debate the future of philosophy after Kant. Cassirer, the first Jewish rector of any German university, was better known than Heidegger at the time, not so much for his recently completed Philosophy of Symbolic Forms as for two other accomplishments: Neo-Kantian responses to such new scientific problems as relativity; and major contributions to the history of philosophy. Observers judged Heidegger the winner of the Davos disputation, but Cassirer did not lose the attention of subsequent philosophical generations just by losing to Heidegger, the problematic patriarch of what Anglo-American philosophers call ‘continental’ philosophy – a name for what they often ignore. Although the prophets of Anglo-American analytic philosophy were Germans educated, like Cassirer, as Neo-Kantians, they largely repudiated Cassirer's preoccupation with the past and thereby lost touch with his thinking, which was well embedded in history.

-- submitted by Brett (cmrs@humanities.ucla.edu)

For more information, contact cmrs@humnet.ucla.edu

5/22/08 (Thur)

Hammer Poetry Series - Frank Bidart

7:00PM until 8:30PM
In Hammer Museum
THIS EVENT HAS BEEN CANCELED

-- submitted by Susan Skarzynski (susan@humanities.ucla.edu)

5/30/08 (Fri) through 5/31/08 (Sat)

TransNations -- Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowships in the Humanities Second Annual Conference

9:00AM
In Royce Hall 306
UCLA Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowships in the Humanities “Cultures in Transnational Perspective”

Presents its 2007-2008 Annual Conference

TransNation

May 30-31, 2008

UCLA

This conference considers the transnational encounters of groups situated in asymmetric relations of power throughout the twentieth century, especially across the colonial divide between societies, and across the race and gender divides within societies. It explores the ways in which affiliations of writers, artists, film-makers and musicians within uneven global spaces reshape "national" canons of literature, art and music. The conference analyzes how the aural, literary, and visual production of subordinated groups has actually transformed the dominant categories of nation, center, periphery, and "minority" in unexpected ways. Among the questions we will address are the following: How do we better understand the identity formation of groups historically marginalized due to ethnicity, gender, or even moral or aesthetic commitment, within transnational and transcolonial contexts of shifting borders of space and culture? How have notions of cultural authenticity been either deployed, erased or critiqued by the thinkers and artists who represented marginalized groups? What does the agency inherent in translational and interpretative acts reveal about the relation between minority or "othered" cultures and the "nation," or the centers of hegemonic power? What is the relationship between aesthetics and transnational contact, and what are the implications of the historical study of this relationship for post-colonial and transnational theory?

Thursday, May 29, 2008, Royce Hall 314

6:30 pm Opening Reception

7:00 pm Introduction, Alessandra Di Maio, Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow

7:05 pm Reading by Nuruddin Farah

8:00 pm Audience Q&A

Nuruddin Farah, one of the world’s most eminent writers, has been exiled from his native Somalia since 1976. His works have investigated questions of social justice, subalternity, racism, neo-imperialistic power, gender relations and the subjugation of women in patriarchal society. A prolific author, he has lived in various nations across many continents, remaining faithful to his lifelong literary project: keeping his country alive by writing about it. The recipient of the 1998 Neustadt International Prize for Literature, his latest novel, Knots, was published in 2007.

Friday, May 30, 2008, Royce Hall 306

9:00 am Welcome, Royce Hall 306

Françoise Lionnet and Shu-mei Shih, co-directors, UCLA Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowships in the Humanities

9:15 am Introduction

9:30 am to 12:00 pm -- PANEL: Translating Blackness

Robin Kelley (USC)

“The African Invasion: Musical Encounters in the Age of Decolonization”

Fatima El-Tayeb, Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow (UCLA)

“Black Europe: Queering the Diaspora from the Margins?”

Alessandra Di Maio, Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow (UCLA)

“Global Somali Literature”

Discussant: Dominic Thomas (UCLA, Departments of French and Italian)

12:00 pm to 1:30 pm Lunch Break

1:30 pm to 4:00 pm -- PANEL: "Vernacularism and Colonial Modernity"

Dilip Gaonkar (Northwestern University)

"The Rushdie Apology: Six Texts in Search of a Character"

Kris Manjapra, Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow (UCLA)

“Crossroads of Crisis: Bengali and German discourses of secular redemption in the 1920s”

Babli Sinha, Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow (UCLA)

“Who was that masked woman?”: “Modernist tropes of female agency in G.P. Pawar’s Gallant Hearts and Shyam Agarwal’s Fall of Slavery”

Discussant: Aamir Mufti (UCLA, Department of Comparative Literature)

4:00 pm to 4:30 pm Coffee Break

4:30 pm to 6:00 pm: Keynote Speech, Royce Hall 306

Nuruddin Farah

"Catching up with Tomorrow"

Introduction: Alessandra Di Maio

Saturday, May 31, Royce Hall 306

9:30 am to 12:00 pm -- PANEL: Transnational Feminisms

Inderpal Grewal (UC Irvine)

“Culture, Nations, Transnations”

Eulàlia Moles, Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow (UCLA)

"Histories of Gendered Colonized Women Subjectivities in a Transnational Perspective."

Elsa Chen, Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow (UCLA)

“Transnational Feminist Relations in Contemporary Art: Global Feminisms Considered”

Discussant: Grace Hong (UCLA, Departments of Asian American Studies and Women’s Studies)

12:00 pm -1:30 pm: Lunch break

1:30 pm to 4:00 pm -- PANEL: Translation, Migration, and the Avant-Garde

Jeffrey Sacks (UC Riverside)

"Idioms in Translation: Literature, Language, and the Colonial Situation"

Sarah Valentine, Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow (UCLA)

“Unlikely Lineage: Translation and Recognition in Contemporary Avant-Garde Poetry”

Sonali Pahwa, Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow (UCLA)

“Claiming Recognition: Translation and Feminist Narrative in Egypt’s Avant-Garde Theatre”

Discussant: Ali Behdad (UCLA, Departments of English and Comparative Literature)

4:00 pm: Closing Reception

This event is sponsored by the Dean, College of Letters and Sciences, the Department of French and Francophone Studies, and the Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowships in the Humanities at UCLA.

This program is free and open to the public, however, seating is limited. Parking will be available for $8 on the UCLA campus. Please go to the kiosk on Sunset and Westwood Plaza to purchase a pass for the nearest available lot.

For further information, please contact Laura Clennon at clennon@humnet.ucla.edu

-- submitted by Laura Clennon (clennon@humnet.ucla.edu@humanities.ucla.edu)

For more information, contact clennon@humnet.ucla.edu

5/31/08 (Sat)

California Medieval History Seminar

9:30AM until 4:00PM

The California Medieval History Seminar meets at the Huntington Library to discuss pre-distributed research papers. Participants are expected to have read the papers in advance and come prepared to discuss them. The California Medieval History Seminar is supported by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, as well as the CMRS, the Huntington Library, and the Caltech Huntington Committee for the Humanities.

Place: Overseer's Room, the Huntington Library, San Marino CA

Advance registration is required.

-- submitted by Brett (cmrs@humanities.ucla.edu)

For more information, contact cmrs@humnet.ucla.edu

 
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