Thursday, April 9, 2015

Jorgensen Center for the Performing Arts

Free Admission

Presented in collaboration with Community Outreach, the Humanities Institute, and the School of Fine Arts.

Sackler Distinguished Lecture featuring Kerry Kennedy

4:00p.m.  – Reception

Co-sponsored by Community Outreach 20th Anniversary Commemoration

5:00p.m.  –  Performance

Dramatic reading of excerpts from the play Speak Truth To Power: Voice from Beyond the Dark by Ariel Dorfman based on the book by Kerry Kennedy with photographs by Eddie Adams.

Co-sponsored by the Humanities Institute in collaboration with the School of Fine Arts.  Directed by Vincent J. Cardinal, Chair of the Department of Dramatic Arts and Creative Director of Connecticut Repertory Theatre.

5:45p.m.  –  Sackler Distinguished Lecture

“Speak Truth To Power”

Kerry Kennedy

6:30p.m.  –  Audience Questions

Kerry Kennedy, Director Vincent J. Cardinal and actors

The Thomas J. Dodd Research Center is proud to present the 2015 Raymond and Beverly Sackler Distinguished Lecture by Kerry Kennedy, President of Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights.

Ms. Kennedy’s established RFK Human Rights in 1986 as the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights, and has devoted her life to the vindication of equal justice, to the promotion and protection of basic rights, and to the preservation of the rule of law. She has worked on diverse human rights issues such as children’s rights, child labor, disappearances, indigenous land rights, judicial independence, freedom of expression, ethnic violence, impunity, and the environment. She has concentrated specifically on women’s rights, exposing injustices and educating audiences about women’s issues, particularly honor killings, sexual slavery, domestic violence, workplace discrimination, sexual assault, abuse of prisoners, and more. She has worked in over 60 countries and led hundreds of human rights delegations. At a time of diminished idealism and growing cynicism about public service, her life and lectures are testaments to the commitment to the basic values of human rights.

In addition to the talk by Kerry Kennedy, this year’s Sackler Lecture features a dramatic reading of excerpts from the play Speak Truth To Power: Voices from Beyond the Dark by Ariel Dorfman based on the book by Kerry Kennedy with photographs by Eddie Adams.

Speak Truth to Power: Voices from Beyond the Dark, premiered at the Kennedy Center for Performing Arts in Washington D.C. in the year 2000, and broadcast as part of PBS’s The Kennedy Center Presents. The play chronicles the true-story accounts of heroic people withstanding horrific human rights abuses across the globe. It has been produced across the United States and performed around the world.

The dramatic reading is sponsored by the Humanities Institute in collaboration with the School of Fine Arts. Directed by Vincent J. Cardinal, Chair of the Department of Dramatic Arts and Creative Director of Connecticut Repertory Theatre.

APRIL 16, 2015

4:00 PM Laurel Hall, Room 302, Please contact uchi@uconn.edu or 486-9057 to reserve a seat

SHE-HULK and THE CITY

by ROY T. COOK

Unlike DC Comics’ superheroes like Superman and Batman, who live in, and fight crime within, fictional cities such as Metropolis and Gotham, the superheroes of Marvel comics are not only city-dwellers, but inhabitants of a real city: New York.  The use of New York (and, in fact, for the most part Manhattan) as the setting for the vast majority of Marvel’s superhero stories does not merely add a sense of realism to these comics by locating these fantastic adventures in a real-life setting, in addition, the fact that these characters live in New York adds a substantial metafictional aspect to a great many of their stories. New York is not only a real city, but it is the very city within which Marvel comics are published. Marvel Comics has used a number of metafictional strategies including inserting both the company, its well-known creators and editors, and other New York luminaries into their stories.  This significantly complicates the relationship between what is fictionally true of these superheroic characters and what is actually true of their producers and consumers. In this talk Cook will look at a character and comic that is particularly rich and fruitful in this regard: John Byrne’s early 1990’s run on Sensational She-Hulk.  He will detail how the subtle interactions between the fictional world that the She-Hulk inhabits, the actual city within which these comics are produced, and the very real and very intentional overlap between the two, complicates and enriches our understanding of how fiction works within serialized narrative art.

Roy T. Cook is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Minnesota – Twin Cities and Resident Fellow of the Minnesota Center for Philosophy of Science. He has published over fifty articles and book chapters on logic, the philosophy of mathematics and the philosophy of art (especially popular art). He co-edited The Art of Comics: A Philosophical Approach (Wiley-Blackwell 2012) with Aaron Meskin, and is the author of The Yablo Paradox: An Essay on Circularity (Oxford University Press 2014) and Paradoxes (Polity 2013). He is also a co-founder of the interdisciplinary comics studies blog PencilPanelPage and hopes to someday write a book about the Sensational She-Hulk. He lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota with his wife, their cat Mr. Prickley, and approximately 2.5 million LEGO bricks.

April 14, 2015  2:00 PM –

CLAS/AUSTIN, Stern Room  217

In this talk, Neustadt describes the extraordinary field trips to the Arizona/Mexico border he has been taking with students since 2010.  He discusses the environmental, financial, political and humanitarian costs of the border Wall. He also touches on how the pedagogy of field trips—experiential education—brings down walls that separate professors from students as well as students from other students. Finally, he will talk about the discursive wall that separates “us” from “them” (US citizens from undocumented migrants), a wall that silences the undocumented and obscures the humanitarian crisis on the border from most people’s view.

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Robert A. Neustadt, Professor of Spanish and Director of Latin American Studies at Northern Arizona University, has published two books on performance and experimental  art. Since 2010 he has been taking classes on field trips to the U.S. / Mexico border where students experience, first hand, the human, environmental and political dimensions of immigration. He co-produced, Border Songs, a double
cd of music and spoken word about the border and immigration.