The UConn Humanities Institute in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences will celebrate 72 books, written by 63 UConn scholars and fellows, in its biennial Celebration of Humanities Authors this week.

The books range in topics across the humanities and interdisciplinary studies, from the philosophical virtues of happiness to accounts of strangers in colonial Boston, fascism in modern American politics, how photos of black children advance social justice, the diaries of a Cold War diplomat, and why detective fiction is so popular.

“These books represent some of the best work by some of the best scholars in the world on their respective topics,” says Michael Lynch, professor of philosophy and director of the Humanities Institute. “And they illustrate the sheer range of scholarship going on at UConn, from work on Africana philosophy to a history of Native American whalers.”

The Humanities Institute’s mission is to enhance research and creativity in the humanities, broadly defined. By enabling UConn scholars and students to explore the full range of humanistic inquiry and methodologies, the Institute calls attention to the many ways that humanities scholarship enriches general understanding of the human condition.

“These books, the product of years of study and writing by faculty from a wide range of disciplines, are an impressive contribution to our understanding of our culture and society,” says Jeremy Teitelbaum, dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. more

Peter Constantine and Mohammed Kadalah have teamed together to translate into Arabic a series of Modern Greek poems by Jazra Khaleed, a poet of Chechen and Greek origin living in Athens. Constantine and Kadalah’s first translations have now appeared in Europe’s Lyrikline, published by the Literaturwerkstatt Berlin.

Jazra Khaleed is one of the most important new voices in European poetry. He lives in Athens’ ravaged inner city where tens of thousands of immigrants are now stranded while Greece itself is facing the harsh reality of its devastating economic crisis. Peter Constantine, who was one of the editors of The Greek Poets: Homer to the Present (W.W. Norton), says: “Jazra Khaleed was the first Greek poet to respond to a new Greek reality and reflect the harshness of a country in deep crisis. What Mohammed Kadalah and I find particularly interesting as translators is Khaleed’s stylistic inventiveness and originality. Despite his voice as a disenfranchised immigrant, his prowess in using the Greek language and its three millennia of linguistic heritage are part of what make him one of Greece’s most compelling poetic voices.”

Lyrikline is a literary meeting place of poets and translators with a worldwide audience, one of the foremost poetic arenas in the world. Each of the over six thousand poems that Lyrikline has published over the past two decades is also available as a recording on the Lyrikline website. “What personally draws me to Lyrikline is its finger-tip distance from readers all over the world,” Mohammed Kadalah says. ” In the most remote village in Syria, if you have Internet, you can read the poetry. I think Jazra Khaleed’s poems speak to the Arab world. He is inventive and interesting, pushing Greek, and in our case, Arabic into new directions with rap rhythms, internal rhymes, and daring words.”

 

Links to the Interview and other translations
http://www.worldliteraturetoday.org/conversation-jazra-khaleed-peter-constantine
http://www.lyrikline.org/en/poems/woerter-7703#.VjANCLxiN0s
http://www.wordswithoutborders.org/article/black-lips

The laboratory of UConn anthropologist Natalie Munro is a treasure trove of animal bones. She has assembled the collection for teaching students how to identify everything from the species and age of the animal to how it died.

Diversity of specimens is critical for that education, and Munro has been creative about amassing a rich collection.

Interspersed between the bleached remains of animals tens of thousands of years old from distant digs are newer specimens from closer to home – roadkill both collected and donated.

read more

 

 

The 2015 Martel Lecture by Peter Levine titled
“Leadership for Civic Renewal: Reinvigorating America’s Civic Life”.

Peter Levine is the Associate Dean for Research and Lincoln Filene Professor of Citizenship & Public Affairs at the Jonathan M. Tisch College of Citizenship and Public Service at Tufts University.

Coming to UConn on September 2-25, 2016

Macbeth, Julius Caesar, Twelfth Night. These famous plays and 15 others by
Shakespeare would probably have been lost to us without the First Folio. Published in 1623, the First Folio is the first collected edition of Shakespeare’s plays, and only 233 copies are known today. Next year, to mark the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death, the Folger Shakespeare Library is sending a First Folio to every state in the United States, and we have been selected for Connecticut. Join us in 2016 in celebrating the greatest playwright of the English language with this exhibit from the world’s largest Shakespeare collection.

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Play Your Part – Information Session and Call for Programmatic Proposals

When: Wednesday September 30, 12pm or 5pm (you only need to attend one)
Where: Humanities Institute, Austin Building, Room 300-312
What:  Programmatic proposals to coincide with the national tour of the Folger Shakespeare Library’s tour of the First Folio: The Book That Brought Us Shakespeare, on exhibition at the Benton Museum from September 2-25, 2016.

From September 2-25, 2016 UConn will host the Folger Shakespeare Library’s tour of Shakespeare’s First Folio at the Benton Museum. We invite proposals for free programming that is open to the University and general public, connecting Shakespeare, his work and his world to your discipline. We especially invite programs that engage children and families.

The First Folio Tour is free and open to the public, and all activities are intended to encourage broad participation and engagement with the public, especially children and families. Activities should be conducted during the time period of September 2-25, 2016.

Attendance not required to submit a proposal.

DOWNLOAD APPLICATION

Applications are due no later than October 23, 2015. Completed applications can be submitted electronically to emma.romano@uconn.edu or via campus mail to Emma Romano, U-1127.

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Steering Committee

In order to ensure the success of this exhibition, a steering committee with representation from various departments at UConn has been formed.

John Bell, Director, Ballard Institute and Museum of Puppetry
Kenneth Best, University Communications
Pamela Brown, Associate Professor, English
Lindsay Cummings, Assistant Professor of Theatre Studies, Dramatic Arts
Elizabeth Hart, Associate Professor, English
Brendan Kane, Associate Director of the Humanities Institute, Associate Professor, History
Clare King’oo, Associate Professor, Honors Program Director, English
Frank Mack, Associate Professor, Arts Administration
Jean Nihoul, Assistant Curator & Academic Project Coordinator, Benton Museum of Art
Matthew J. Pugliese, Managing Director, Connecticut Repertory Theatre
Emma Romano, Graduate Assistant, MFA Arts Administration
Dale AJ Rose, Director of Performance Studies Program, Dramatic Arts
Gregory Semenza, Associate Professor, English
Nancy Stula, Executive Director, Benton Museum of Art
Kristin Wold, Assistant Professor in Residence, Performance, Dramatic Arts

 

http://crt.uconn.edu/uncommon-sense-series/firstfolio/

 

CFA: Political Violence Workshop

 

Where: University of Connecticut

Dates: December 4-6, 2015

Deadline: October 16, 2015

The Injustice League and the Public Discourse Project at the University of Connecticut are pleased to announce a workshop on Political Violence. While we invite contributions from a wide range of topics (see: below), we are especially interested in work that engages with institutionalized and racialized violence in the U.S., and with the Black Lives Matter movement in particular. The workshop will also aim to make progress on foundational questions such as what differentiates ‘political’ violence from other forms of violence, its uses and legitimacy, and what the appropriate response to political violence should be.

 

Keynotes will include Kathryn T. Gines (Penn State), with more to be announced. In addition to keynote presentations, we aim to accept roughly 10 participants through the submission process. We are open to a variety of methodological and interdisciplinary approaches. Abstracts should be between 750-1000 words in length, and should be prepared for anonymous review. Please send abstracts to uconn.pvw@gmail.com. The deadline for consideration is Friday, October 16, with notifications intended for the following week. Funds are available to assist with travel costs for participants with limited funding.

This event is modeled on our 2014 Dominating Speech Workshop. As with last year, we welcome volunteers to chair sessions, and warmly encourage interested parties at other institutions to attend and participate during Q&A. There is no registration fee.

A couple months after the workshop, interested participants will be invited to submit full drafts of their papers to the workshop organizers for consideration in a possible Journal of Political Philosophy symposium.  We will make the initial selection with an eye toward quality and representation.  The five or six papers chosen through this process will then be forwarded to JPP, where they will undergo the journal’s normal review process. Please note that paper acceptance is not guaranteed.

For more information, visit http://injustice.philosophy.uconn.edu/. If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to email Daniel Silvermint at daniel.silvermint@uconn.edu.

 

Additional details:

This workshop adopts intersectionality as a framework, so while we are most interested in issues surrounding Black Lives Matter, we are also interested in how political violence manifests at the margins of race, gender, sexuality, class, disability, and indigenous, immigrant, and linguistic communities. In addition to these specific topics, a variety of other issues relating to political violence are welcome. Some non-exhaustive examples include:

 

• Violence as a tool or consequence of state power. Subtopics include: authority and oppression, the militarization of the police, racialized violence in law enforcement and the criminal justice system, solitary confinement, community disruption, enemy combatant status, and torture.

 

• Individuals as the agents of political violence, and the ethics of taking violence into one’s own hands.  Subtopics include: violent political change and civilian unrest, acts of resistance and retaliation, rage and violence as alternatives to (or forms of) public discourse, vigilantism (e.g. in the context of unilateral border enforcement), politically motivated assassination, death threats and other forms of silencing, and hate crimes.

 

The status of innocents as both collateral damage and deliberate targets.  Subtopics include: insurgencies and civil war, civilian displacement and refuge vulnerability, war rape, terrorism, international intervention, private military contractors, and drone warfare.