Author: Siavash Samei

Michael Lynch Named 2019 George Orwell Award winner

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Director of the Humanities Institute and the Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor of Philosophy, Michael Lynch, has been named winner of the 2019 George Orwell Award. This award, which has been granted annually since 1975 by the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE), recognizes distinguished contribution to honesty and clarity in public language. Michael joins the ranks of other prestigious George award winners such as linguistic and political activist Noam Chomsky (1987), comedian and host of the Daily show Jon Stewart (2005), and Michael Pollan author of Food Rules (2010). Chief among the works of Michael Lynch recognized by this award is his latest book Know-It-All Society: Truth and Arrogance in Political Culture. The book is an in-depth examination of the role that our blind political convictions play in fanning the flames of our public divisions and grounding us in our tribal affiliations.

 

 

Digital Humanities & Media Studies Launches Website, Speaker Series

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The Digital Humanities and Media Studies (DHMS) initiative of the Humanities Institute officially launched its new website last week. According to this website, “DHMS seeks to engage the UConn community in explorations and exchange about all aspects related to the digital humanities and media studies, particularly as they pertain to knowledge production in the humanities.” DHMS was founded in 2016 and began its work under the directorship of Anke Finger, professor of German Studies at the University of Connecticut (UConn).  In 2019 Yohei Igarashi, associate professor of English at UConn, became its new director. This initiative, which also offers a Graduate Certificate in Digital Humanities and Media Studies, is a unique interdisciplinary resource at UConn as it brings together faculty and students already working in either or both fields of digital humanities and media studies.

DHMS has also launched a speaker series this year beginning with three invited guests. On October 2nd, UCHI played host to Annette Vee from University of Pittsburgh for a talked entitled Algorithmic Writers and Implications for Literacy, co-sponsored by the Aetna Chair of Writing and the Neag School of Education’s Reading and Language Arts Center. DHMS is also co-sponsoring talks by Nancy Baym of Microsoft and Hal Roberts of The Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society in the Winter and Spring of 2020, respectively, 

For more information or to subscribe to the DHMS mailing list, please contact Yohei Igarashi.

DHMS speakers poster

You Should…Read: Don Brown’s “The Unwanted-Stories of Syrian Refugees” (Harry van der Hulst-Linguistics)

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Cover of the "The Unwanted" comic bookGraphic novels have for some time become an important medium for expressing trouble and human suffering in the world. Growing up in the Netherlands I became familiar with graphic novels early on. We called them ‘strips’ or ‘stripverhalen’ (‘verhalen’ means ‘stories’.) In the US, people for long called them ‘comics.’ I like reading (watching?) strips as a kid. There was a rich supply, none about superheros though. That started as an American genre in the 1930s. The strips that I read are largely unknown in the US, except for Tintin (‘Kuifje’), Asterix, and the Smurfs perhaps. For long, all these graphic narratives were thought of as stuff for kids, and perhaps not even ‘healthy’ stuff; a poor substitute for reading ‘real’ books and setting young people up for violence. (That sounds familiar doesn’t it…videogames…). Strips and comics are still a flourishing medium, but then appeared a more ‘serious’ genre, notoriously exemplified by Art Spiegelman’s Maus and works by Will Eisner, both American writers who drew and wrote stories that are clearly not aimed at children, which somewhere lead to the term ‘graphic novel.’ Recently, I read The unwanted –Stories of the Syrian Refugees by Don Brown (2018), a ‘documentary graphic novel.’ The title speaks for itself. The drawings are really good, but it is of course the subject that ‘draws’ you in. Soon, there will be a graphic novel about hundreds of children being packed into ‘detention centers’ at the border, if there isn’t one already.

– Harry van der Hulst
Professor of Linguistics
University of Connecticut

 

van dr Hulst, Harry headshotWho is Harry van der Hulst? Harry van der Hulst is a professor of linguistics and the director of undergraduate studies in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Connecticut. He received his Ph.D. from Leiden University in his native Netherlands, where he also taught linguistics before joining UConn linguistics faculty in 2000. He specializes in phonology, but has also conducted research in feature systems and segmental structure, syllable structure, word accent systems, vowel harmony, and sign language phonology, to name a few. Harry has been editor-in-chief of the international SSCI linguistics journal. He was a 2017–2018 UConn faculty fellow at the University of Connecticut Humanities Institute and he is also a Life Fellow of the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study.

Fellows Talk: Kornel Chang on Land Reform in US-Occupied Korea

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Liberatory Possibilities:
Korean Peasants and the Struggle over Land Reform in U.S.-Occupied Korea

Kornel S. Chang, Associate Professor of History, Rutgers University – Newark
October 16, 2019 (UCHI Conference Room: Babbidge Library, 4th Floor North)

This talk captures a slice of Korea’s “Asian Spring,” by examining the different ways Korean peasants imagined liberation, sought to actualize their aspirations, and clashed over its meaning in the aftermath of the Second World War, when the collapse of the Japanese Empire ushered in a moment ripe with hope, idealism, and uncertainty. It also looks at how the entry of American forces complicated, and, ultimately, narrowed possibilities for agrarian reform. This touched off a struggle with Korean peasants, who, despite their differences, held more far-reaching visions of emancipation. Focusing on land rights, my talk reveals the vitality and complexity of Korea’s “Asian Spring,” by highlighting the emancipatory opportunities that inspired, mobilized, and fractured Korean peasants, while recounting the ways Americans foreclosed many of its possibilities in an effort to establish control in Korea and rebuild a postwar social order in Asia.

Chang Talk Poster

Michael Lynch’s NYT Op-Ed Explores the Emotional & Philosophical Roots of Fake News

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Michael Lynch, The University of Connecticut Humanities Institute (UCHI) director and UConn Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor of Philosophy is author of a recent Op-Ed in the New York Times in which he explores the psychological and philosophical reasons why the concept of “Fake News,” despite having lost its original function through incessant use and abuse, remains such an effective social phenomenon.

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Word Poetry Books Becomes UConn’s First Major Publishing Initiative

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Consider what your bookshelf might look like if you were to remove every book that has been translated—every Homer, Sappho, Rumi, Li Po, Szymborska, Neruda, or the Bible. Imagine removing every book by an author whose work has been influenced and shaped by a translation. Exceptional literature needs exceptional translators to bring it to life in a new language.

The University of Connecticut Humanities Institute (UCHI) is proud to announce World Poetry Books (WPB) as a new collaborative initiative with Dr. Peter Constantine, professor of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages at the University of Connecticut (UConn). Based at UConn, WPB is the only publisher in the United States dedicated solely to publishing books of international poetry in English translation. As a press, our goal is to champion poets and translators from all stages of their careers by creating new communities of readers both inside and outside of the university. We believe every language has its Walt Whitman, its C.P. Cavafy, or Anne Carson, yet most world poetry—especially poetry from underrepresented languages—remains under-published and undiscovered. Our mission is to publish and promote books of vital world poetry from languages other than English. We invite our readers to celebrate the art of translation, so essential to the vibrant circulation of words and ideas. To find out more, and to purchase books, please visit us at: www.worldpoetrybooks.com

“Unprogramming Asian American Studies” Conference at UConn

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University of Connecticut Humanities Institute (UCHI) is co-sponsor of the 2019 “Unprogramming Asian American Studies” Conference on October 5-6 at UConn Hartford (Harford Times Building, Room 145). The conference is focused on “rethinking the futures of Asian American studies within and without programed home. Click here for further information and detailed conference program.

Unprogramming Asian American Studies Conference

Book Launch and Discussion to Celebrate Former Fellow’s New Book

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Current Professor of Anthropology at the University of Connecticut and former Humanities Institute (UCHI) faculty fellow (2013–2014), Sarah S. Willen, has a new book out entitled Fighting for Dignity: Immigrant Lives at Israel’s Margins (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019). UCHI is joining UConn Human Rights Institute and the Center for Judaic Studies and Contemporary Jewish Life to host a book launch and discussion with migration studies scholars Tally Amir of Harvard University, Heide Castañeda at University of South Florida, and Jennifer S. Hirsch at Columbia University. The Launch is free and open to the public and will take place on Thursday, October 17, 2019 from 4–5:30PM in the Babbidge Library Heritage Room (4th floor).

Willen Book Launch Poster

You Should…Read: Jonathan White’s Tides (Alain Frogley-School of Fine Arts Associate Dean)

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Tides Book CoverWhether it’s beach season, the fiftieth anniversary of the first moon landing, or our daily proximity in Connecticut to vast bodies of water in only partly predictable motion, there are plenty of reasons right now why you should read Tides: The Science and Spirit of the Ocean by Jonathan White (San Antonio, TX: Trinity University Press, 2017). But the most important is that it’s a wonderful book. White offers an all-too-rare example of a narrative that brings together science, art, and the humanities in a way that is much more than the sum of their parts (and never less). The art is mostly in the writing. Unpretentiously beautiful, it effortlessly weaves together complex science, cultural history, ecology, and even the engineering and economics of generating electric power, with compelling vignettes of the author’s close encounters with his subject, and the lives of those who rely upon it for their survival. Which is, ultimately, all of us; but White is particularly sensitive to the experience of indigenous peoples across the globe, who are frequently both custodians of ancient oceanic knowledge and the first casualties of climate change. He brings to bear decades of experience as a sailor, surfer, and conservationist, to offer a vision that is passionate but never preachy. So read it now, before all too soon you’ll have time only to think about grading papers and shoveling snow.

 

– Alain Frogley, DPhil
Associate Dean, School of Fine Arts & Professor of Music History
University of Connecticut

Alain FrogleyWho is Alain Frogley? Alain Frogley is a native of Great Britain and holds degrees from Oxford University and the University of California at Berkeley. He has taught at Oxford and Lancaster universities and in 1994 was appointed to the faculty of the University of Connecticut. He is a specialist in the music of the late-19th and 20th centuries, particularly that of Britain and America, but he has also worked on the cultural contexts of musical nationalism. His most recent work includes research into the reception of British music in Nazi Germany and racial Anglo-Saxonism in music. In 2005–2006 he was a fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies.

Fellows Talk: Daniel Cohen on Maria Monk’s “Awful Disclosures”

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Maria Monk’s Awful Disclosures Reconsidered:
From “Me Too” to “Fake News” in the Rise, Fall, and Resurrection of an Anti-Catholic Genre, 1845-1960

Daniel A. Cohen, Department of History, Case Western Reserve University
September 25, 2019 (UCHI Conference Room: Babbidge Library, 4th Floor)

Contrary to the conventional view of Awful Disclosures (1836) as a great triumph of antebellum U.S. nativist propaganda, Maria Monk’s bogus account of sexual abuse, torture, infanticide, and murder in a Canadian convent was actually a disaster for the anti-Catholic cause. Despite its sensationalism, Monk’s exposé struggled to match the extraordinary sales of Rebecca Reed’s earlier Six Months in a Convent (1835); and, after being utterly debunked in 1836–37 as “fake news” by that era’s “mainstream media” (reputable secular and religious newspapers), it was not reprinted again in the U.S. until 1855. More broadly, the public exposure of Maria Monk as an outright fraud largely discredited the entire convent exposé genre, dragging down Reed’s far more credible narrative with it. Only during the century after 1860, did Maria Monk (who had died in disgrace in 1849) complete her posthumous comeback. By the early 1900s, huge numbers of anti-convent narratives, including Awful Disclosures, were being churned out by specialized nativist and anti-Catholic presses based in such cultural backwaters as Aurora, Missouri, and Milan, Illinois, which catered to the tastes of rural Protestant traditionalists and other bigoted, prurient, or unsophisticated readers. These widely dispersed nativist publishers—at least one of whom also peddled stereopticons, slide shows, and even motion picture projectors—constituted a massive communications empire apart from the “mainstream media,” arguably foreshadowing the rise of right-wing talk radio, Fox News, and white nationalist websites in our own time.

Cohen Talk Poster