DHMS Presents Sarah Sharma

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Sarah Sharma How to MsUnderstand Media poster. Poster includes a headshot of Sharma and the following text: The Digital Humanities and Media Studies Initiative Presents How to MsUnderstand Media, A Message from the Broken Machine. Associated Professor of Media Theory, University of Toronto, Sarah Sharma. Live, Online, Registration required, November 9, 2020, 4:00pm.

If you require accommodation to attend this event, please contact us at uchi@uconn.edu or by phone (860) 486-9057.

The Digital Humanities and Media Studies Initiative presents:

How to MsUnderstand Media: A Message from the Broken Machine

Sarah Sharma (Associate Professor of Media Theory, University of Toronto)

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.

You Should…Pre-election Edition. Part I.

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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.

Nasya Al-Saidy says you should watch…

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.

Promotional poster for Hamilton

Jane Gordon says you should listen to…

The Resistance Revival Chorus and Rhiannon Giddens’ cover of Woody Guthrie’s “All You Fascists Bound To Lose.”

A black and white photo of Woodie Guthrie playing the guitar. On his guitar a sticker reads "This Machine Kills Fascists."
Woody Guthrie, 1943. Photograph by Al Aumuller. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.

John Bell says you should listen to…

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.

A black and white photograph of Aaron Copland seated at a piano, writing on sheet music with a pencil.
Aaron Copland, 1962. CBS Television, Wikimedia Commons.

Contributors

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.

Publishing NOW: Matt McAdam of JHU Press

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Publishing NOW UConn Humanities Institute, October 23, 2020 11:00am–12:00pm, Johns Hopkins University Press. Beside the text oare images of several books covers, including the titles On Time, In Search of Sexual Health, Gamer Nation, Mapping An Atlantic World, Movable Markets, and Inscriptions of Nature.

If you require accommodation to attend this event, please contact us at uchi@uconn.edu or by phone (860) 486-9057.

The University of Connecticut Humanities Institute presents:

Publishing NOW!

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.

Get To Know a Fellow: Kerry Carnahan

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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.

UCHI Presents André Leon Talley

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Poster for André Leon Talley talk. A picture of Talley in a red sweater and straw boater hat. The text beside the image reads: UCHI and the Africana Studies Institute present fashion critic/scholar, activist, and author of the recently published The Chiffon Trenches, André Leon Talley, in conversation with Alexis L. Boylan and Melina Pappademos. Live, online, registration required. November 12, 2020, 6:00pm.

Fashion journalist and former Vogue editor-at-large

André Leon Talley

in conversation with Alexis L. Boylan and Melina Pappademos

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.

Fellow’s Talk: Kerry Carnahan on the Song of Songs

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Poster for Kerry Carnahan's talk—Song of Song: An Erotic and an Amulet. October 28, 2020 at 4:00 pm. With a response by David Samuels. Beside the words a painting depicts two elephants facing each other over a narrow stream, their trunks raised.

Song of Songs: An Erotic and An Amulet

Kerry Carnahan (Ph.D. Candidate, English)

with a response by David Samuels (Associate Professor of Music, New York University)

Wednesday, October 28, 2020, 4:00pm (Online—Register here)

 

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:

Political Theory Workshop Presents: Nina Hagel

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The Political Theory Workshop presents:

The Stakes of Authenticity Claims

Nina Hagel, Wesleyan University
October 20th, 11:00 am–1:00 pm

Nina Hagel HeadshotFrom transgender persons seeking to become the gender they truly are to religious business owners seeking exemption from anti-discrimination laws, a wide range of political claims are cast in terms of authenticity. Despite the ubiquity of these claims, it is not always clear what is at stake and whether we should understand these stakes as political. Part of the difficultly is that our most prevalent ways of framing the stakes of authenticity claims—what Hagel calls the ethical frame and the recognition frame—downplay their political character. In this paper, Hagel articulates a third way, found in the work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. For Rousseau, what is at stake in becoming authentic is our individual well-being, the character of our social world, and our possibilities for freedom and equality. In this chapter, Hagel draws out this last set of stakes in Rousseau’s work, articulating them as the democratic frame. According to it, what makes authenticity so crucial is the way it secures our freedom and equality. Even when Rousseau articulates the stakes of authenticity in terms of a more ethical or recognitional reading, we can read him against himself to see how this democratic framing remains implicit. Hagel concludes by showing that understanding the stakes of authenticity in terms of freedom and equality is promising in three ways: it helps us grasp the causes and consequences of becoming authentic better than alternative frames; it avoids some of the problems of essentialism and paternalism that arise in the other two frames; and it offers us a promising new way of thinking about authenticity—in which one is authentic when one develops oneself in a way that enhances, rather than corrodes, one’s possibilities for freedom.

Commentary by Altan Atamer, PhD student, Political Science

All PTW events are generously co-sponsored by the UCONN Humanities Institute

Questions? Contact jane.gordon@uconn.edu

Fellow’s Talk: Nicole Breault on Boston Policing, 1768–1775

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Poster for Nicole Breault's Talk. Image of hand written archival documents, constables reports from 1768. Beside the image the text reads "Times is Not Now as they Have Been": Contests over the Power to Police in Boston, 1768-1775. Draper Dissertation Fellow Nicole Breault with a response by Sarah Willen. Live. Online. Registration Required. October 14, 2020, 4:00 pm.

“Times is Not Now as They Have Been”: Contests over the Power to Police in Boston, 1768–1775

Nicole Breault (Ph.D. Candidate, History)

with a response by Sarah Winter (Professor of English)

Wednesday, October 14, 2020, 4:00pm (Online—Register here)

 

In the fall and winter of 1768, the arrival of four regiments in Boston sparked questions over jurisdiction in the town. Exchanges between watchmen and officers and soldiers threatened the authority of local institutions and quickly escalated to violence. This talk considers a series of violent and verbal altercations between Boston’s town watch and members of the King’s forces, framing the encounters as a dialogue over the power to police. Centered on the reports, complaints, and depositions written by the town watch, it asks how night constables and watchmen used these incidents to negotiate jurisdictional gray areas in the first months of occupation and to participate in a larger contest of empire.

Nicole Breault is a fifth-year doctoral candidate in the Department of History. Her research interests are in early American legal and social history with an emphasis on urban governance, institutions, gender, and space. She earned a B.A. from the University of Vermont and an M.A. from the University of Massachusetts Boston. Her research has been awarded fellowships at the Massachusetts Historical Society, New England Regional Fellowship Consortium, the Boston Athenæum, and the Huntington Library, as well as a Littleton-Griswold Grant by the American Historical Association. Currently, Nicole is the Draper Dissertation Fellow at the UConn Humanities Institute working on her dissertation “The Night Watch of Boston: Law and Governance in Eighteenth-Century British America.”

Sarah Winter is Professor of English and Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies at the University of Connecticut, Storrs and Director of the Research Program on Humanitarianism at the UConn Human Rights Institute. An interdisciplinary scholar of British literature of the long nineteenth century and the history of the modern disciplines, she has published most recently a co-edited collection, From Political Economy to Economics through Nineteenth-Century Literature: Reclaiming the Social (2019). Her previous books are The Pleasures of Memory: Learning to Read with Charles Dickens (2010) and  Freud and the Institution of Psychoanalytic Knowledge (1999). Her articles have appeared in journals such as Victorian Studies,  NOVEL, and  Representations, and she has contributed chapters to a wide range of edited collections on law and literature, the history of legal and political thought, and human rights and literature.

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.

Fellow’s Talk: Nu-Anh Tran on How Democratic Should Vietnam Be?

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Poster for talk How Democratic Should Vietnam Be? by Nu-Anh Tran. Text on blue background, with a political cartoon showing protesters and a man paying what appears to be a bribe.

How Democratic Should Vietnam Be? The Debate on Democracy in Saigon in 1955

Nu-Anh Tran (Assistant Professor of History and Asian and Asian American Studies)

with a response by Kornel Chang (Assistant Professor of History and American Studies, Rutgers—Newark)

Wednesday, October 21, 2020, 2:00pm (Online—Register here)

 

The political factionalism in the Republic of Vietnam (RVN, or South Vietnam) often puzzled contemporary western observers, and most accounts attributed the infighting between anticommunists to personality politics and the ongoing struggle for power. In contrast, Nu-Anh Tran argues that the factionalism reflected substantive differences in ideas. Specifically, this presentation will examine the debate between Ngô Đình Diệm’s faction and his rivals in the summer and fall of 1955. Virtually all anticommunists favored democracy, but they defined democracy in starkly different ways, disagreed on the degree of democracy that was suitable given the communist threat, and debated the range of parties and individuals that had a legitimate place in politics. Diệm and his followers were the most illiberal elements in the debate, and their victory over other anticommunists placed on the RVN on the path to hardline authoritarianism.

Nu-Anh Tran is Assistant Professor at the University of Connecticut with a joint appointment in the Department of History and the Asian and Asian American Studies Institute. She is the author of the forthcoming book, tentatively entitled, Disunion: Anticommunist Nationalism and the Making of the Republic of Vietnam, published by the University of Hawaii Press. Her research is focused on the Republic of Vietnam (South Vietnam).

Kornel Chang is Associate Professor of History and American Studies at Rutgers University-Newark. His research and teaching interests include Asian American history, the United States in the Pacific world, and race, migration, and labor in the Americas. His current book project, tentatively titled Occupying Knowledge: Expertise, Technocracy, and De-Colonization in the U.S. Occupation of Korea, examines the role of technocrats and expert knowledge in the U.S. Occupation of Korea.

Registration is required for this event.

If you require accommodation to attend this event, please contact us at uchi@uconn.edu or by phone (860) 486-9057.

Call For Applications: Humanities Without Walls

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Humanities Without Walls (HWW) is a consortium of humanities centers and institutes at 16 major research universities throughout the Midwest and beyond. In summer 2021, HWW is holding its first online, national, virtual summer workshop for doctoral students interested in learning about careers outside of the academy and/or the tenure track system. Through a series of workshops, talks, and virtual field trips, participants learn how to leverage their skills and training towards careers in the private sector, the non-profit world, arts administration, public media and many other fields. All aspects of the workshop will be remote, virtual, and online in nature. Follow this link for more information about the program and applications.

UConn, through UCHI and the Graduate School, invites applications from doctoral students pursuing degree in the humanities and humanistic social sciences to participate in this three-week, virtual summer workshop. This is a limited-submission application. Eligible doctoral students must be nominated for this fellowship by their home institutions, and only one nomination may be made to HWW by each university.

To be considered, interested doctoral students must submit their applications to UCHI: uchi@uconn.edu by NOON, October 31st, 2020. Please do not submit your applications directly to HWW. Application requirements can be found on the HWW website.