Four Questions with William McMillan

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  1. Tell us a bit about the project you are working on at UCHI.
    My project leverages my research on a theologically conservative but culturally flexible church in Manhattan to think through the limits, tension points, challenges, and opportunities for evangelical Christianity (in conversation with other religious traditions) in the contemporary era of advanced modernity.
  2. What drew you to this topic and what exciting developments are you anticipating?
    The training that I received in a particular theological tradition before transitioning to sociology actually helped broaden my perspective and provided me with greater flexibility and nuance in appropriating a particular set of religious commitments as an analytic or grid through which to make sense of the world. This paradox of pursuing a more robust set of convictions and arriving at a more capacious view of the world intrigued me and set me on the path to think through the adaptability and flexibility that is often entailed in a given religious tradition. One exciting development that I am anticipating is clarifying and substantiating ways that evangelical Christianity and other religious traditions are conversing with and/or positively articulating more immanent conceptual frames in response to today’s increasingly secular cultural climate.
  3. What are you looking forward to in regard to this year at UCHI?
    I am looking forward to rich conversations with other scholars, as well as genuine interdisciplinary exchange. It is a privilege to be part of such a talented and diverse academic community and to think through and dialogue about such weighty, relevant, and important issues.
  4. Many people wonder what value the humanities and humanities research has in today’s world. What are your thoughts on what humanities scholarship “brings to table?”
    Humanities scholarship brings to the fore questions of meaning, purpose, aspiration, value, and telos. Answers to these questions are existentially unavoidable, though they are sadly and far too frequently ignored. The power and promise of various technologies and societal changes are touted, as science elaborates more and more a detached description of the world—the world of things. While all well and good, these tools and descriptions only go so far. Important questions inevitably emerge, such as: How can one discern between better and worse uses of a given technology? Is bigger, faster, and more efficient always the best course of action when it comes to human beings? How might the tools and techniques of science help human communities over the long term? Such questions fall in the sweet spot of humanities research, which at the end of the day concerns wisdom and deep reflection on what it means to live a noble, honorable, and worthwhile human life.

Four Questions with Richard Frieder

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  1. Tell us a bit about the project you are working on at UCHI.
    This project has allowed me to learn a great deal about Asian maritime history and has taught me how little I know. My initial interest in Asian sailors who came to the U.S. but did not become immigrants has opened up a broad inquiry across the Indian Ocean, the archipelagos of southeast Asia and the coastal regions of the South China Sea going back to the seventeenth century.
  2. What drew you to this topic and what exciting developments are you anticipating?
    I was very much seduced by the concept of sailors as being estranged from the national and international order, but sailors are difficult to study because they do not leave many records. More importantly, I have found sailors and the maritime world not all together separate from terrestrial and continental histories, but deeply intertwined but often shadowed from each other.
  3. What are you looking forward to in regard to this year at UCHI?
    I’m looking forward to finding out how wrong I was about my maritime subject. With a great deal of new research from India, UK, China, Singapore, New Zealand, and the Middle East, I know my earlier conceptions will be altered and that is exciting.
  4. Many people wonder what value the humanities and humanities research has in today’s world. What are your thoughts on what humanities scholarship “brings to table?”
    One thing this project has taught me is how regionally diverse, complex, and interlinked seemingly mundane lives can be when put together comparatively. This realization underscores, for me, the enormous value of exploring subjectivity, cultural production, and epistemology in power relations. Not only because it is important to understand the dynamics between the hegemon and subaltern but also to account for, acknowledge, and ward against the erasure of ways of being, ways of signifying, and ways of knowing by those who struggle to be recognized.

You SHOULD…See: Moonlight

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“So intimate is moonlight reflected on still water that this spare, deeply moving film appropriately bears the name. Moonlight won a Golden Globe for Best Picture, an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor, and was the second lowest-grossing film in history to win an Oscar for Best Picture, its all-black, mostly unknown cast beating out favored La La Land starring Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone. So why is this particular coming-of-age story so worth seeing? In a word: hope. Told in three parts, the film portrays black lives that are at once complex, flawed, loving, and healthy [finally!]. Moonlight  follows from boy to man the life of black and gay Chiron. Front-and-center in the film are hyper masculinity, economic depression, and drugs, yet these situational factors are not depicted as the inherent dysfunction of blackness. Unexpectedly, we admire and care about the 40-something drug dealer whose performative masculinity slips easily from his shoulders to tenderly parent semi-orphaned Chiron. We are both crushed and empathetic when Kevin, Chiron’s childhood playmate, as a teenager and to avoid his own beating by schoolyard bullies repeatedly knocks down and draws blood from his shy unsinkable friend, Chiron. And we feel Chiron’s interiority, the ebb and flow of his self-possession, his tenuous yet durable embrace of himself. As Chiron sorts through his gay black worth, stretching toward fulfillment despite domestic abuse and betrayal, we the viewers also internalize the power of honest connection and self-acceptance. For Moonlight, both black aggression (pariah) and self-erasure (hapless victim) indeed are myths. Chiron returns again and again to his gayness, blackness, and vulnerabilities, choosing to love rather than deny himself. As we watch, the desire to engage the best of our own lives and communities is overwhelming. Moonlight is a must see.”

 

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

 

 

You SHOULD…Hear: Songs in the Key of Life

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“You should hear Songs in the Key of Life, by Stevie Wonder. In 1975, Wonder had considered leaving the music industry, moving to Ghana and working with children with disabilities. At only 25 years old, he had already released 17 albums, sold millions, and won dozens of awards, including Grammys for Album of the Year (1974 and 1975).  After some prodding from friends, family, fans (and the biggest record contract for any artist in history), he returned to the studio to record. In the midst of the dominance of the carefree hedonism of disco, the double LP, was released in September 1976 to critical acclaim. Like his previous work, this LP proved to be a beautifully discursive exploration of the human condition. Wonder assembled a group of artists from different genres and filled the album with an aural style and literary brilliance that was organically balanced with social commentary and festive jaunts about mistakes of our youth. “Isn’t She Lovely” is as infectious and fun as songs get. “Sir Duke” is classic Wonder. With more hit singles than any Wonder LP ever, it’s a challenge to justify focus on one song, but Wonder’s highpoint is one of the best love songs ever, “As.”

Songs became Wonder’s best-selling album of all time. It won Grammy Album of the Year among three other Grammys. Auteurs from Prince to George Michael have praised it as the best album ever made. The list of awards and honors is too long to put here. When you hear it, know that it offers us many ways for its consumption. Focus on the sonic, and isolate the various instruments and vocals from Herbie Hancock or Minnie Riperton. Concentrate on the enthusiastic flow of Wonder on some songs, the playful laugh, improvisation, or prattle on another. Appreciate the jazz inflections on R&B vocals. Listen to tales of love, God, struggle and joy. It is a lush, incredible example of exceptional talent and a reminder of how important it is to encourage the creation of wonderous art. ”

– Jeffrey O.G. Ogbar
Director of the Center for the Study of Popular Music
Professor of History

You SHOULD…Read and Listen: Teaching Community

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“You should have a reading and listening jam session, engaging bell hooks’ Paulo Freirean-inspired critiques of structures and systems of power in Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope (2003) while absorbing the liberatory sounds of the Wynton Marsalis Quintet’s “Free to Be” (2004). In ensemble, these two works offer at once intensely personal and collaborative learning frameworks for creative action. In Teaching Community hooks interrogates how our gendered, sexualized and racialized bodies intersect and operate in the context of historically segregated educational institutions. Yet, she insists that when working in solidarity with and in diverse communities beyond the university, “democratic educators” can foster a pedagogy of hope. Similarly, as a cultural form born from resistance to oppression and as an expression of freedom, jazz music –as exquisitely interpreted by Marsalis in “Free to Be”– functions through three interconnected elements. It grounds us in the historical pain and blues of inequality and discrimination; it celebrates individual creativity and strength in improvisation; and it promises that, if we intentionally and empathetically listen to and collaborate with each other, the music and experience will swing!”

 

–Mark Overmyer-Velázquez,
Professor of History and Latino & Latin American Studies
University of Connecticut – Hartford

Report on the Annual Meeting of the North American Conference on British Studies

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Today’s post is brought to us by Edward Guimont, a PhD candidate in the History Department.

On October 25-28, 2018, the annual meeting of the North American Conference on British Studies (NACBS) was held in Providence, Rhode Island. NACBS is the umbrella organization of historians of Britain resident in Canada and the United States, and consists of six regional affiliate groups. The annual meeting is hosted by a different regional affiliate every year, on a rotating basis. In 2018, the affiliate hosting was the North East Conference on British Studies (NECBS), whose current president is UCHI faculty member Brendan Kane. Due to its location, a number of UConn History Department doctoral candidates attended NACBS, participating in a variety of panels.

Brendan chaired and commented on the panel “Everything Old is New Again: Refugees, Climate Change, and Rebuilding in Early Modern Britain and Ireland,” while History Department associate professor Janet Watson commented on the panel “Historicising Selfhood.” Hilary Bogert-Winkler, History Department doctoral candidate, presented her paper, “What’s in a Name? Identifying Members of the Church of England, 1640-1662,” as part of the workshop panel “Populations: Counting, Classifying, Moving, and Managing Groups of People.” I presented my paper “Colonialism from the Cretaceous: Living Fossils as Imperial Justification” as part of the panel “Journey to the Liminal State: Travel Abroad and the Interpretation of Mythic History,” a panel which I also organized.

This was the first conference in which I organized a panel of my own. In the past, applying to conference as an individual had resulted in me sometimes being placed into panels which could be described as thematically dissonant. Creating my own panel, however, allowed me to choose historians whose work not only fit my own, but who I already admired and whose work I knew would complement my own research. As such, their comments would be particularly useful when revising the chapter from my dissertation that I drew my paper from.

In addition, Brendan, Hilary, fellow History Department candidates Robert Howe and Kristen Vitale, and myself all worked on the local arrangements committee. This gave me newfound appreciation for the amount of labor which goes into a conference such as this to enable the presentations to take place without a hitch. This included, but was far from limited to, manning the registration table to handling last-minute registrations, finding room numbers, printing additional programs, and handling tech support. I would encourage all who participate in conferences to work the tables (metaphorically as well as literally) at least once in order to gain a full appreciation of the labor involved in conferences by the support staff. I feel this is as important to becoming a rounded academic as organizing a panel.

On the topic of panels, NACBS offered an extremely diverse range of subjects. My area of expertise is modern Britain, with a focus on the British Empire in approximately the first half of the twentieth century. I found plenty of presenters who shared my general area of focus, but many more who went beyond it – from a queer interpretation of James Bond, to a nineteenth century search for Alexander the Great’s relics in Central Asia, to paranoid pre-World War I fantasies of German invasion of Britain. Even though these panels were completely outside of my area of focus, each one I attended – in addition to being of great interest – gave me ideas, big and small, to incorporate into my own work, whether my dissertation or plans for future research. This is the greatest benefit of a major conference like NACBS – by being exposed to work from your field, outside of your individual focus, you can gain insights into conceptual arenas you did not even know you were ignorant of beforehand.

It is precisely this aspect that exposes the fallacy of comparing conferences and higher education in general to a marketplace of ideas. It is the exact opposite: information is freely exchanged in an environment where all participants, from tenured professors to first-semester students, are on an equal setting, and all benefit as a result.