Author: Matarazzo, Tiziana

Translation and Human Rights in Troubled Times. Celebrating the launch of UConn’s Program in Literary Translation with an evening of award-winning translators.

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Feb. 21, 2017, 6:00 PM at the University of Connecticut’s Konover Auditorium

At a time of international unrest and misunderstanding, the UConn Storrs campus will host an evening of talks by three distinguished translators of world literature to discuss how translation can protect and celebrate human rights across the boundaries of language.

Carles Torner – Executive Director PEN International, the world’s leading international literary and human rights organization – will join acclaimed translators Edith Grossman and Esther Allen on Feb. 21, 6PM at the University of Connecticut’s Konover Auditorium. Their subject: the key role that translation plays in protecting human rights through the sharing and preservation of world literature.

In her genre-defining book Why Translation Matters, Grossman writes: “Despotic governments are willing to go to extraordinary lengths in their usually successful, tragic official efforts to control, restrict, and narrow access to the spoken and written word.” Join us as we celebrate the spoken and written word, and explore the ways a new generation of translators can contribute to this important work.

This event is co-sponsored by UConn’s Humanities Institute and Human Rights Institute.

Date: Tuesday, February 21st, 6PM, with opening reception

Location: Konover Auditorium, Thomas J. Dodd Center, University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT

Participant biographies:

Carles Torner is Executive Director of PEN International; he is a literary translator and has published several books of poetry in Catalan, the most recent being La núvia d’Europa (Europe’s bride, 2009). In 1998 he was awarded the National Critic’s Award for Viure després (Life afterwards). His most

recent collection of fiction and nonfiction essays is L’arca de Babel (Babel’s arch, 2005). He has held senior positions in PEN International (1993-2004), and is at present the Head of the Literature and the Humanities Department of the Institut Ramon Llull, which aims for the international promotion and translation of Catalan literature.

Edith Grossman is a translator and critic, the recipient of awards and honors including Fulbright, Woodrow Wilson, and Guggenheim Fellowships, the PEN Ralph Manheim Medal for Translation, an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Queen Sofía Translation Prize, the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, and induction into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Grossman has brought over into English poetry, fiction, and non-fiction by major Latin American writers, including Gabriel García Márquez, Carlos Fuentes, Mario Vargas Llosa, Álvaro Mutis, Mayra Montero, and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. Peninsular works that she has translated include Don Quixote, by Miguel de Cervantes, novels by Julián Ríos, Carmen Laforet, Carlos Rojas, and Antonio Muñoz Molina, poetry of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, The Solitudes of Luis de Góngora, and the Exemplary Novels of Miguel de Cervantes.

Esther Allen is a writer and translator who teaches in the CUNY Graduate Center Ph.D. Programs in French and in Hispanic and Luso-Brazilian Literatures and Languages, and at Baruch College, CUNY. Among her many translations are works by Jorge Luis Borges, Gustave Flaubert, and Jose Marti. A two-time recipient of National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellowships, she has been a fellow at the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers and at at the Grad Center’s Leon Levy Center for Biography. She co-founded the PEN World Voices Festival in 2005, and has worked with the PEN/Heim Translation Fund since its inception in 2003 . In 2006, the French government named her a Chevalier de l’ordre des arts et des lettres and in 2012 she received the Feliks Gross Award from the CUNY Academy for the Arts and Sciences. Her most recent translation is of Antonio Di Benedetto’s 1956 classic Zama, published by New York Review Books Classics.

 

For more information, please contact:

Peter Constantine, Director, Program in Literary Translation

peter.constantine@uconn.edu

917-704-1140

 

Brian Sneeden, Graduate Assistant, Program in Literary Translation

brian.sneeden@uconn.edu

828-776-3855

 

Get to Know Our Fellows: Four Questions with Dimitris Xygalatas

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-What is your academic background and what is your current position in UCHI/at UConn/Your Home Institution?
I am an Assistant Professor at UConn’s Anthropology Department and an affiliate of the Cognitive Science Program. Those two areas also reflect my background and training, which is interdisciplinary. I have conducted a combined 4 years of ethnographic fieldwork, but I have also worked in various social scientific laboratories. This allowed me to develop a research methodology which combines field and lab approaches and affordances.
 
  
-What is the project you’re currently working on? 
My research examines the effects of ritual participation at the individual and social level. One area of particular interest for me has been the practice of extreme rituals. I have studied some of the most intense rituals around the world, ceremonies that involve walking on fire, piercing the skin, altered states of consciousness, and other intense experiences. To do this, I often brought technological innovations into my field research, things like biometrics, cameras, motion detectors, and more. Using these quantitative methods has often raised important issues and questions. For example, as anthropologists, what are we to make of some of the discrepancies between our measurements and people’s phenomenological accounts? Say, when our quantitative observations about participants’ emotional reactions do not agree with what those participants report feeling, how do we reconcile these accounts? These are some of the questions that I am currently concerned with.
 
-How did you arrive at this topic?

I find ritual to be one of the most fascinating aspects of human conduct. It is a truly universal behavior, but we don’t think about it too much – we just do it. As an ethnographer, whenever I ask people why they perform their rituals, they typically respond along these lines: “that’s just what we do”; “we’ve always done it this way”; “this is who we are”. So, there is a sense of salience and sacredness about these practices; people agree that rituals are important to them, but more often than not they have no justification for why they are important. I find this quite puzzling, especially in the context of painful or stressful rituals, so the kinds of questions I am asking are concerned with what these costly activities offer to those who engage in them.

 

 
-What impact might your work have on a larger public understanding of your topic?
Anthropology studies some of the most meaningful aspects of human existence: the things we see as sacred or taboo, the things that unite and divide us, those that we see as worth fighting or dying for, the things that make us human. And yet, ironically, anthropologists often have a hard time reaching out to a wider public, beyond the world of academic conference rooms and obscure technical journals. In my own work, I try to keep this in mind, and to explore new ways of communicating ideas and findings, including electronic and visual media. I believe that as academics, especially those of us funded by taxpayers’ money, we have an obligation to engage with the public and make our findings available to everyone. Specifically with regards to my topic, I would like to contribute towards a realization that some of the cultural practices we might consider obsolete, superfluous, or even primitive, often play a very important role in who we are are individuals and communities, and that age-old traditions have been able to survive for so long because they are an inextricable part of our nature.

10 Projects, 1 Audacious Goal: Find Solutions to Help Cultivate Healthier Debate and Dialogue in America

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UConn’s Humility and Conviction in Public Life project announces $2 million in fellowship grants for projects that will delve into newsrooms, classrooms and the halls of Congress

Storrs, Conn. – A new $2 million fellowship grant program sponsored by the University of Connecticut’s Humanities Institute and funded by the John Templeton Foundation will support 10 innovative projects that explore the broken landscape of American discourse and create enduring strategies to spur and sustain open-minded, reasonable and well-informed debate and dialogue.
The 10 interdisciplinary research projects focus on balancing two key features of democracy: intellectual humility and conviction of belief. Carefully curated out of an applicant pool of 110, not only for their individual merits, but also because they work in complementary fashion, each project will investigate how networks and institutions meant to connect us may be pushing people apart.
“Arrogance is easy in politics; humility is hard. These projects aim to rekindle the sense that we can learn from each other, and thus to help us restore a more meaningful public discourse,” says Michael P. Lynch, director of the Humanities Institute and Principal Investigator of the Humility and Conviction in Public Life project.
The research awards, ranging from $160,000 to $225,000, provide a substantial two-year fellowship to each grantee for an ambitious project that will put cutting-edge research to work on improving and revitalizing public discourse. In aggregate, the projects will not only examine how intellectual humility does or does not manifest in public discourse, but will also promote and assess humility at the individual and institutional levels.
Here are the thorny issues and pressing questions the grantees will tackle:
Defusing Extreme Views: What makes us argue so heatedly over things we know little about?
Phillip Fernbach of the University of Colorado, Boulder, and his team will look at how we can improve public discourse not by turning laypeople into experts, but rather by making people aware of the causes of extremism and ignorance.
Encouraging Democracy in Action: How can we make communication between elected officials and their constituents more constructive and meaningful?
Ryan Kennedy of the University of Houston and his team will work with 16 congressional offices to study how an online tool that encourages deliberation might help constituents and their representatives arrive at common ground solutions.
 
Tackling Caustic News Site Comments: Can online news comments sections be designed to promote intellectually humble discourse?
Graham Smith of the University of Westminster, UK, and his research team will look for technical solutions that make comments sections more conducive to intellectually humble discourse. The researchers will test the potential of the solutions by recruiting people who usually read online news and randomly assigning them to different types of comments forums.
Dismantling Echo Chambers: Which online platforms best foster public discourse, and how can we improve them?
Mark Alfano of Delft University of Technology, Netherlands, and his research team will study how content flows in online communication networks and the interpersonal dynamics that influence online conversations about fraught issues.
Leaving ‘Expert Opinion’ to the Experts: Can people become more receptive to expert opinion?
David Dunning of the University of Michigan, Nathan Ballantyne of Fordham University, and team will look at how people interact with expert opinion and work to make people more receptive to it.
 
How Faith and Humility Can Coexist: Are religious convictions incompatible with intellectual humility?
Elizabeth Krumrei Mancuso and her team will examine whether people of strong religious faith can be intellectually humble, and if not, will assess what biblical and non-biblical evidence might be effective in boosting their intellectual humility in public discourse.
Groupthink and Humility: How can groups and institutions become more humble and open to dialogue?
Benjamin R. Meagher of Franklin & Marshall College and Wade C. Rowatt of Baylor University will investigate how intellectual humility influences group performance and how groups can act with intellectual humility.
 
Humility on Campus: Can we teach students to engage in more productive dialogue?
John Sarrouf of Boston nonprofit Essential Partners and his team will develop new teaching strategies for promoting intellectual humility and constructively engaging differences in academia.
 
A Healthier Q&A: Can asking the right questions make political discussion more productive?
Walter Sinnott-Armstrong of Duke University and his team will work to determine which questions, and which contexts, produce humility and civility in public discourse and which produce polarization and inflexibility, with the ultimate goal of finding ways to promote a culture of democratically engaged inquiry.
 
Eliminating the Shouting Match: How can we discourage arrogance in politics and public discourse?
Alessandra Tanesini of Cardiff University and her team will design and test practical interventions designed to combat the growth of pugilistic behaviors in public discussions, such as shouting, mocking, dismissing and rudely interrupting others.
The Humility and Conviction in Public Life project supports interdisciplinary research and outreach on the nature of productive dialogue about morality, science and religion. Detailed information on each grantee can be found at https://humilityandconviction.uconn.edu. For media inquiries, please contact Justine Morgan, morgan@teamsubjectmatter.com.

From the community Hartford Public Library, UConn and Atheneum Launch Encounters, A New Discussion Series, Feb. 4

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What’s in a name? The creation of the United States of America made us a democracy and a republic. That creation story and the players in it are very much with us. “Hamilton,” is one of the biggest Broadway hits and presents founders Alexander Hamilton, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr as flesh and blood men. With their flashes of brilliance and crippling personal deficits they invent a new government.
Politics has occupied public attention for the past year as we elected a new U.S. president. So a deeper dive into documents created by our founders is especially timely.
The Hartford History Center at Hartford Public Library, Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, and the University of Connecticut’s Humanities Institute, are launching a community engagement partnership with a new discussion series called Encounters. The partners will provide discussion leaders to engage in topics aimed at strengthening our ability to know ourselves and one another through respectful and challenging dialogue. This February and March, Encounters will focus on the fundamental documents that define our democracy.

go to the full article

Tuesday February 7th, 2017 Nancy Fraser.

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THE CRISIS OF CARE

NANCY FRASER, THE NEW SCHOOL

PAPER WORKSHOP, 2.7.17, 1:30-3:00 PM

BABBIDGE LIBRARY 4th FLOOR ROOM 4/209

CONTACT FRED.LEE@UCONN.EDU FOR A COPY OF THE PAPER

 

 

FROM EXPLOITATION TO EXPROPRIATION:

ON RACIAL OPPRESSION IN CAPITALIST SOCIETY

NANCY FRASER, THE NEW SCHOOL

PUBLIC LECTURE, 2.7.17, 3:30-5:00 pm

BABBIDGE LIBRARY CLASS OF 1947 ROOM

Exploitation-centered conceptions of capitalism cannot explain its persistent entanglement with racial oppression. In their place, I suggest an expanded conception that also encompasses an ongoing but disavowed moment of expropriation; in so doing, I disclose (1) the crucial role played in capital accumulation by unfree, dependent labor and (2) the equally indispensable role of politically enforced status distinctions between free, exploitable citizen-workers and dependent, expropriable subjects. Treating such political distinctions as constitutive of capitalist society and as correlated with the “color line,” I demonstrate that the racialized subjection of those whom capital expropriates is a condition of possibility for the freedom of those whom it exploits.

Nancy Fraser is Henry A. and Louise Loeb Professor at the New School for Social Research and is Vice-President and President-Elect of the American Philosophical Association, Eastern Division. She is also Professor II at the Centre for Gender Research at the University of Oslo and holds the Chair in «Global Justice» at the Collège d’études mondiales, Paris. Her most recent books are Domination et anticipation: pour un renouveau de la critique, with Luc Boltanski (2014); Transnationalizing the Public Sphere: Nancy Fraser debates her Critics (2014); and Fortunes of Feminism: From State-Managed Capitalism to Neoliberal Crisis (2013).

Sponsored by the Political Theory Workshop, Women’s Gender and Sexuality Studies, Asian/Asian American Studies, Political Science, Philosophy, Sociology, THE UNIVERSITY OF CONNECTICUT HUMANITIES INSTITUTE.

 

 

 

NEH and NEA cuts, UCHI engagement

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Dear UConn community,
 
As reported in the national media recently, the NEH and NEA are in danger of being eliminated or gravely cut.  We write to remind all that at UCHI we are committed to producing knowledge, critical dialogue, and facilitating access to ideas, all principles fundamental to the study of the humanities and arts. Our own programming attempts to reflect the broad scope and diversity of ideas in conversation at UConn. We are also open to suggestions about strengthening and promoting dialogues about the importance of the arts and humanities on campus and beyond.
 
In that vein, we would also encourage all to contact your elected officials and show support for the NEH and NEA. All of our scholarship and institutions are stronger for the opportunities these institutions provide. Their loss would be devastating, and potentially permanent. Here is one such link: http://p2a.co/qgIhfKy
 
Many thanks.
 
Cheers,
Michael Lynch, Director, UCHI
and
Alexis Boylan, Associate Director, UCHI

 

Postponed due to inclement weather, What’s at Stake? U.S. Rights and Responsibilities during Political Conflict

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Tonight’s event – “What’s at Stake?” – will be postponed due to inclement weather; a new date will be announced soon.

As Donald Trump begins his presidency, please join students and scholars for a thoughtful exchange on this unique moment in American political history. “What’s at Stake?” is a space for reflection, contemplation, and conversation that is respectful of diverse viewpoints.

This event is free and open to the public.

PROGRAM:

7:00 p.m. The Stakes of U.S. Politics, Law, and Citizenship

– Bethany Berger, Wallace Stevens Professor of Law

– R. Kent Newmyer, Professor of Law and Emeritus Professor of History

– Douglas Spencer, Associate Professor of Law and Public Policy

– David Yalof, Professor and Head of Political Science

– Moderated by Jeffrey Shoulson, Professor and Director, Center for Judaic Studies and Contemporary Jewish Life

7:45 p.m. The Stakes of American Media, Culture, and Race

– Maureen Croteau, Professor and Head of Journalism

– Melina Pappademos, Associate Professor of History and Director of Africana Studies

– Cathy Schlund-Vials, Professor of English and Director of Asian and Asian American Studies

– Christopher Vials, Associate Professor of English and Director of American Studies

– Moderated by Davita Silfen Glasberg, Interim Dean, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences

8:30 p.m. Student-Led Discussion

—

This event will be Sign Language interpreted.

Laurel Hall is accessible to persons with disabilities and persons who are wheelchair users. Assistive listening devices (ALD) are available upon advance request.

For individuals requiring an ALD or other accommodations, please contact Maryann Markowski at (860)486­‐3639 or Maryann.Markowski@uconn.edu, by Thursday, January 26 to help us to ensure availability. Please understand that failure to provide adequate notice may result in accommodations not being available.

We encourage you to visit the Center for Students with Disabilities website to review accessible parking and building (entrances, elevators, restrooms) information.

Live stream the event at: https://mediasite.dl.uconn.edu/Mediasite/Play/250f813baaaf4e619af4de638515c2ea1d

Contact:

maryann.markowski@uconn.edu

College of Liberal Arts and Sciences (primary), Africana Studies Institute, American Studies, Asian American Studies Institute, Communication Department, Judaic Studies, UConn Master Calendar

Get to Know Our Fellows: Four Questions with Daniel Silvermint

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What is your academic background and what is your current position in UCHI/at UConn/Your Home Institution?
I received my Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Arizona in 2012, with a dissertation that developed a theory of oppressive burdens, and asked whether victims owed it to themselves to resist.  Although my background was in political science and political philosophy, struggling with the agency and obligations of victims made a feminist philosopher out of me.  After Arizona, I was a GRIPP/RGCS postdoctoral research fellow at McGill University from 2012-2013.  I then joined the University of Connecticut in 2013 as an assistant professor, jointly appointed in Philosophy and the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies program.
What is the project you’re currently working on?
The project is called Complicit Identities: The Ethics of Looking Out For Yourself.  While my earlier work focused on the obligation to resist oppression, this project investigates cases where victims stray into complicity simply because of who they are or what they aim to do in life.  None of these choices are inherently wrong, but they end up contributing to oppression because of the prior existence of stereotypes, unfair burdens, and other background pressures.  An example of a complicit identity is when a gay man or a person of color ‘passes’ as straight or white in order to escape oppressive treatment, but only escapes that treatment in virtue of participating in the very system that constraints them and others like them.  What should we say about such passing?  Is it wrong because it’s a form of deception or inauthenticity?  Does it reinforce stereotypes by removing counterexamples from the public’s view, or harm one’s fellow victims by opting one out of the fight against oppression?  These are the most common judgments you hear about passing, and I think they all miss the mark.On my view, passing and more traditional forms of resistance actually share an aim: they’re both attempts to improve one’s life or circumstances in the face of oppression.  But whereas resisting victims attempt to improve their well-being by undermining, changing, or escaping the oppressive system that constrains their well-being, passing victims keep those constraints in place, and make the most advantageous trade-off they can under the circumstances.  Passing might allow a person to advance her plans and projects, or to cultivate worthwhile connections, or to gain access to valuable goods, but at the expense of her security as she worries about discovery, or her sense of belonging as relationships with family and community fray, or her self-respect as she struggles with how she obtained those goods.  The trade-offs vary, but the strategy depends on making such a trade-off: giving up what you can live without to have the life you want.  Passing victims are thus complicit in their own oppression, benefiting from a system that’s still ultimately harmful to them.  But while that makes passing a limited strategy for improving one’s life, it doesn’t necessarily make it wrong.  These victims aren’t failing themselves.  They’re looking out for themselves in circumstances they shouldn’t even be in, and more often than not, they’re successful.  If we want to engage seriously with questions of victim agency, then we have to move beyond simple dichotomies of good resistance and bad complicity.  We need a new ethics of looking out for yourself.

How did you arrive at this topic?
Honestly, it was the realization I described in the last question.  Victim agency was more complicated than I was appreciating — maybe even too complicated for the straightforward principles and clean verdicts of academic philosophy.  I began my research talking about obligations to self, and why resistance was important for victims.  But the more I examined these cases, the more I understood that we don’t actually get very far by talking about resistance.  Of course it’s good.  The problem is that, for victims, complicity can also be good.  It can often unlock all the same benefits as resistance, and do so with diminished risk and fewer potential costs.  So we can’t just dismiss complicity as mere selfishness or an insensitivity to the demands of justice.  It’s a strategy for dealing with oppressive burdens, not a way to avoid dealing with them.

As you can imagine, I gradually stopped writing about resistance, and the focus of my research changed.  And while I was coming to this realization, ‘passing’ was the example I kept coming back to.  Partly because it presents a fascinating, messy, real-world dilemma for ethical systems.  Partly because it’s so timely, with many recent cases receiving national attention.  Partly because there are so many applications, like understanding so-called ‘reverse passing’ and the possibility of trans-race identities, reaching careful conclusions about how to navigate daily life with an ‘inauthentic’ identity, and making sense of invisible disabilities like mental illness.  And partly because, well, navigating the pros and cons of passing is personal for me.  (You should never 100% trust an academic whose research focus is passing.)

What impact might your work have on a larger public understanding of your topic?
We badly need an ethics of looking out for yourself.  The trick is, the phrase ‘looking out for yourself’ has both negative and positive connotations.  It can be a term of reproach for individuals that shirk their obligations or opt out of a shared struggle against oppression.  But it can also be a term of praise for people that take care of themselves in circumstances that threaten their well-being, and for those who strive to live the life they want despite the burdens they face.  Complicit Identity cases are challenging because these individuals ‘look out for themselves’ in both senses of the phrase, upending simple verdicts about the importance of resistance and the impermissibility of complicity.  So while my project presents a framework for understanding victimhood and passing that moves beyond familiar, misguided debates about deception and authenticity, I hope it can also say something about a dilemma we all face: how to balance what we owe ourselves with what we owe others in times of injustice.