In this Get To Know a Fellow video, 2020–2021 Dissertation Research Scholar Ashley Gangi discusses her project “May I Present Myself? Masks, Masquerades, and the Drama of Identity in Nineteenth Century American Literature.” To hear more about her project, register to attend her Fellow’s Talk on November 18, 2020 at 4:00pm.
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If you require accommodation to attend this event, please contact us at uchi@uconn.edu or by phone (860) 486-9057.
Live. Online. Registration is required.
The UConn Humanities Institute (UCHI) is offering a workshop to assist graduate students in the preparation of Dissertation Fellowship applications in the Humanities and associated disciplines. Professors Alexis Boylan (Art History & Africana Studies & UCHI Acting Director) and Yohei Igarashi (English & UCHI Acting Director of Academic Affairs) will conduct the workshop.
In advance of the upcoming election, we’ve asked members of the UCHI community to suggest a book, article, poem, painting, video, or piece of music that they think everyone should take a look at in this current moment.
Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life (1994). This book has been like a warm blanket and darkly funny, knowing friend in these days of struggling to teach, mourn, write, rage, understand, and remain hopeful.
“Desiderata,” an early 1920s prose poem by the American writer Max Ehrmann. At this moment, we might consider some famously wise words from a meatpacker in Terre Haute, Indiana (who also took grad courses in Philosophy at Harvard). Those who find this too earnest might at least get momentary comic (if corrosive) relief from current preoccupations by listening to the National Lampoon parody, Deteriorata.
Desiderata
Go placidly amid the noise and haste,
and remember what peace there may be in silence.
As far as possible without surrender
be on good terms with all persons.
Speak your truth quietly and clearly;
and listen to others,
even the dull and the ignorant;
they too have their story.
Avoid loud and aggressive persons,
they are vexations to the spirit.
If you compare yourself with others,
you may become vain and bitter;
for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself.
Enjoy your achievements as well as your plans.
Keep interested in your own career, however humble;
it is a real possession in the changing fortunes of time.
Exercise caution in your business affairs;
for the world is full of trickery.
But let this not blind you to what virtue there is;
many persons strive for high ideals;
and everywhere life is full of heroism.
Be yourself.
Especially, do not feign affection.
Neither be cynical about love;
for in the face of all aridity and disenchantment
it is as perennial as the grass.
Take kindly the counsel of the years,
gracefully surrendering the things of youth.
Nurture strength of spirit to shield you in sudden misfortune.
But do not distress yourself with dark imaginings.
Many fears are born of fatigue and loneliness.
Beyond a wholesome discipline,
be gentle with yourself.
You are a child of the universe,
no less than the trees and the stars;
you have a right to be here.
And whether or not it is clear to you,
no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should.
Therefore be at peace with God,
whatever you conceive Him to be,
and whatever your labors and aspirations,
in the noisy confusion of life keep peace with your soul.
With all its sham, drudgery, and broken dreams,
it is still a beautiful world.
Be cheerful.
Strive to be happy.
Micki McElya is Professor of History at the University of Connecticut. She received her B.A. in history from Bryn Mawr College in 1994 and a Ph.D. from New York University in 2003. Before joining the faculty of the University of Connecticut, she was an assistant professor of American Studies at the University of Alabama (2003-2008). Her recently published book, The Politics of Mourning: Death and Honor in Arlington National Cemetery was a Choice Outstanding Academic Title of 2017 and a finalist for the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction. It was a co-winner of the 2018 John Brinckerhoff Jackson Book Prize from the Foundation for Landscape Studies, winner of the inaugural Sharon Harris Book Prize from UConn’s Humanities Institute, and finalist for the 2016 Jefferson Davis Book Award from the American Civil War Museum.
Kenneth Gouwens is Professor of History at the University of Connecticut. He has published extensively on the culture of Renaissance Rome. His current research interests include Cultural history of Italy, 1494-1530; Pope Clement VII (Giulio de’Medici); and the distinctions drawn between humans and simians in the Renaissance and in our own era.
In advance of the upcoming election, we’ve asked members of the UCHI community to suggest a book, article, poem, painting, video, or piece of music that they think everyone should take a look at in this current moment.
Rye Beach, New Hampshire (1863) by Martin Johnson Heade. It is the painting she is discussing with First Year Experience classes on virtual visits to the Benton this semester. Painted at the height of the American Civil War, it expresses all the turmoil, uncertainty, and ultimately hope that many of us are feeling right now.
Kara Walker: Harper’s Pictorial History of the Civil War at the New Britain Museum of American Art. Kara Walker’s pieces at New Britain Museum were spectacular. We have to keep that history in mind. You can also take a virtual tour of the exhibit.
Amanda A. Douberley is a historian of twentieth-century American sculpture and public art. She holds a Ph.D. in Art History from the University of Texas at Austin, and a B.A. in Art History, as well as English Language and Literature, from the University of Virginia. She is assistant curator/academic liaison at the University of Connecticut’s William Benton Museum of Art.
Manisha Desai is Professor of Sociology and Asian and Asian American Studies at the University of Connecticut. Committed to decolonizing knowledge and social justice, her research and teaching interests include Gender and Globalization, Transnational Feminisms and women’s movements, Human Rights movements, and Contemporary Indian Society.
If you require accommodation to attend this event, please contact us at uchi@uconn.edu or by phone (860) 486-9057.
November 9, 4:00–5:00pm
An online webinar. Registration is required for attendance.
Sarah Sharma is Director of the McLuhan Centre for Culture and Technology at the University of Toronto and Associate Professor of Media Theory at the ICCIT/Faculty of Information. Her research and teaching focuses on the relationship between technology, time and labour with a specific focus on issues related to gender, race, and class. She is the author of In the Meantime: Temporality and Cultural Politics (Duke UP, 2014). Sarah is currently at work on two projects that take up McLuhan’s media theory for feminist ends. The first is a monograph tentatively titled Broken Machine Feminism which explores the relationship between technology and patriarchal cultures of exit. This project argues for the necessity of a feminist techno-determinist stance in order to address contemporary power dynamics as they intersect with the technological. The second is an edited book collection, MsUnderstanding Media: A Feminist Medium is the Message (with Rianka Singh), which offers a feminist retrieval of McLuhan’s famous adage that the medium is the message.
This talk will outline Sarah’s work on a feminist approach to McLuhan and her argument for the new possibilities of a feminist techno-determinism.
In advance of the upcoming election, we’ve asked members of the UCHI community to suggest a book, article, poem, painting, video, or piece of music that they think everyone should take a look at in this current moment.
Hamilton: An American Musical. This (mostly) historically accurate account of one of our Founding Fathers features a hyper-diverse cast and parallels today’s controversial political atmosphere.
The Resistance Revival Chorus and Rhiannon Giddens’ cover of Woody Guthrie’s “All You Fascists Bound To Lose.”
Aaron Copland’s 1942 orchestral composition Fanfare for the Common Man. It embodies a kind of yearning for bi-partisan or non-partisan investment in the idea of the United States as a democracy that can bring the different peoples of the country together, by means of the ideals and processes of democratic society. Copland composed this in the middle of World War II, in a very “American” sense, to praise everyday people across the United States. One can hear in it a kind of solemn celebration of our democratic goals, which are ultimately achieved by voting, the machinery of democracy. This World War II vision may seem quaint or naive at this time of deep polarization in our country, but it offers a vision of how democracy might be achieved.
Nasya Al-Saidy is a Ph.D. candidate in the Economics department at the University of Connecticut. Her research focus is on Environmental Economics and Microeconomics. At the University of Massachusetts Boston, her thesis explored the cost-effectiveness of phytoremediation to reduce brownfield pollution in Boston’s low-income urban areas. Her current work seeks to extend and improve upon the game theoretic models used within the emissions permit market. She is currently serving as a financial coordinator for the University of Connecticut Humanities Institute and fiscal officer for the Humility and Conviction in Public Life Project. Nasya also serves as President of the Association of Graduate Economics Students and as a senator in the Graduate Student Senate.
Jane Anna Gordon is Professor of Political Science with affiliations in American Studies, El Instituto, Global Affairs, Philosophy, and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. She is a specialist in political theory, with a focus on modern and contemporary political theory, Africana political thought, theories of enslavement, political theories of education, and methodologies in the social sciences. Gordon is, most recently, author of Statelessness and Contemporary Enslavement (Routledge 2020) and Creolizing Political Theory: Reading Rousseau through Frantz Fanon (Fordham University Press 2014).
John Bell is a puppeteer and theater historian who began working in puppetry with Bread and Puppet Theater in the 1970s, and continued as a company member for over a decade. He is the director of the University of Connecticut’s Ballard Institute and Museum of Puppetry. He studied theater history at Columbia University, and has since taught at New York University, Rhode Island School of Design, Emerson College and other institutions. He is a founding member of the Brooklyn-based theater company Great Small Works, and the author of many books and articles about puppetry, including “Puppets, Masks, and Performing Objects,” “Strings, Hands, Shadows: A Modern Puppet History,” and “ American Puppet Modernism.” His wife Trudi Cohen is also a puppeteer and member of Great Small Works. Their son Isaac is studying at Massachusetts College of Art and Design.
If you require accommodation to attend this event, please contact us at uchi@uconn.edu or by phone (860) 486-9057.
With Matt McAdam of JHU Press.
October 23, 11:00am–12:00pm
An online webinar. Event registration is required for attendance.
Matt McAdam is a Senior Editor at Johns Hopkins University Press, where he acquires books in the history of science, technology, and medicine, bioethics, and the humanities more generally. He started in publishing as an editor in philosophy and communications at Lexington Books after getting his PhD in philosophy at Georgetown University.
Co-sponsored by the Digital Humanities and Media Studies Initiative.
In our first Get To Know a Fellow video, 2020–2021 Dissertation Research Scholar Kerry Carnahan discusses her project—a new translation and commentary of the Song of Songs. To hear more about her project, register to attend her Fellow’s Talk on October 28, 2020 at 4:00pm.
To see all UCHI videos, subscribe to our YouTube channel.
Thursday, November 12, 2020 at 6:00 pm (Online—Register here).
Cosponsored by the Africana Studies Institute.
André Leon Talley is a fashion critic/scholar, activist, and the author of the recently published memoir The Chiffon Trenches.
Registration is required for the event.
If you require accommodation to attend this event, please contact us at uchi@uconn.edu or by phone (860) 486-9057.
Kerry Carnahan will read from her work-in-progress, a new translation and edition of the Song of Songs, concluding with an offering of protection and guidance. With a response by David Samuels, Associate Professor of Music at New York University.
Kerry Carnahan was born and raised in Kansas. Currently she pursues doctoral work in English at the University of Connecticut, where she teaches composition and creative writing. Her doctoral work specializes in poetry and poetics, focusing on dynamics of gender, sexuality, race, class, and empire. She also studies religion and the Hebrew Bible. kerrycarnahan.com
David Samuels is Associate Professor and current Chair of the Music Department at New York University. He is a linguistic anthropologist, folklorist, and ethnomusicologist. His book, Putting A Song On Top of It: Music and Identity on the San Carlos Apache Reservation, was perhaps the first book-length monograph exploring popular music’s place in the formation of contemporary Indigenous identities. He has published on a wide variety of topics including popular music, science fiction, language revitalization, historical imagination, missionary encounters, and vernacular modernities.
Registration is required for the event.
If you require accommodation to attend this event, please contact us at uchi@uconn.edu or by phone (860) 486-9057.
Watch now:
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