You SHOULD…Watch: “Battlestar Galactica”

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“You should… sample widely.  More on this in a second, but if I have to foreground a single recommendation it’s this: the new Battlestar Galactica (2004-2009). In some of the tightest, most compelling storytelling I’ve ever seen on film, this series asks profound questions about belief, belonging, sentience, servitude, family, survival, politics, power, responsibility, and war.  It explores an epochal confrontation between humankind and the increasingly sentient AI creatures of its own making.  It’s The Odyssey of our time crossed with Paradise Lost. It asks what is civilization, why does it matter, and what are its costs.

 

The “Humanities Lived” project is testament to the virtues of sampling, but to me this is an ethic. In this spirit here is a list: The Tales of Desperaux by Kate DiCamillo (a so-called “children’s” book); The Epic of Gilgamesh, an early story about how knowledge and narrative are connected; Claude Lelouch’s La Bonne Année, a romp of a heist film, but among the more thoughtful feminist movies to have been made in the 1970s; Hugh Anderson, Drone: Remote Control Warfare (this book covers the practicalities and ethics of a subject we should all understand better); Martin Grey’s For Those I Loved, an astonishing autobiography about endurance, love, and the Holocaust; Roberto Calasso’s The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, a haunting reconsideration of Greek Mythology; and given the times in which we live, the United States Constitution.”

-Jennifer Terni,

Associate Head, Department of Literatures, Culture and Languages,
Associate Professor, French

 

You SHOULD… Listen To: Three Soundtracks

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“I confess I have procrastinated with this assignment, though I was excited and honored to be asked. I’ve felt squeamish sharing what you “should” listen to or look at or read. I realized my reaction comes from two places. First, I typically seek recommendations rather than give them. Second, as someone with a doctorate in Counseling and Human Development, “should” statements are generally things to be avoided. So, I’d like to offer a twist on this assignment; rather than recommending “what” you should choose to bring the Humanities into your life, I’d like to suggest “how” you should do it.

 

First – multitask. I listened to three soundtracks – Immortal Beloved, Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, The Last of the Mohicans – while studying for comprehensive examinations and writing my dissertation. I could feel myself coming up for air sometimes and I’d relax into familiar melodies and percussions, breathe deeply, and dive back down into work. I read multiple books at the same time because I like the juxtaposition and can pick what I read based on my mood.

 

Second – connect with the past. History is about context and the human condition. As a history major I learned you must seek differing perspectives. I’m currently reading my second book about the history of my new hometown because place and belonging are important to me. I also love to re-read books. Beyond the cozy feeling of reconnecting with old friends, I learn how I’ve changed since the last time I read the book.

 

Third – connect with others. My favorite time of day is reading to my son at night. We are reading all of the Harry Potter books as a family. We take turns reading them aloud (we’re on Order of the Phoenix, a favorite!). We ask him how the characters feel, what words mean, and we talk about good and evil, light and dark, and the importance of magic and believing in it. We want him to be a good reader and have a good vocabulary and all those parental things. But mostly we want him to learn about himself through empathizing with others. It’s perhaps the most important thing we can teach him right now given the current state of our world.

 

My honors student self wouldn’t be fully satisfied, though, if I didn’t actually answer the question. So here you go: If it’s music – try Duruflé’s Ubi Caritas or Ralph Vaughn Williams for relaxation; Beethoven for studying and concentration; Foo Fighters or Silversun Pickups to rock out. Art? Art is what you like; go outside and find beauty in simple things. Literature – Jane Austen is always the answer. I have a mug on my desk emblazoned with Mrs. Darcy and a tiny book entitled “What Would Jane Austen Do?” Both are quite useful at work. Whatever you do, find time to engage, connect, and feed your soul with the Humanities. That’s a “should” I feel quite comfortable telling you.”

– Jennifer Lease Butts,
Assistant Vice Provost,
Enrichment Programs and Director, Honors Program

Encountering Alchemy

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On October 28, 2017, several members of the UConn Early Modern Studies community participated in “Encounters: Alchemy & Science” at the Hartford History Center sponsored by the Humility and Conviction in Public Life project at UConn in partnership with the Amistad Center for Art and Culture, the Hartford History Center, the Hartford Public Library, and the Wadsworth Atheneum. Debapriya Sarkar (English) and Walt Woodward (History) served on a panel of faculty experts for the event. Below is a wrap-up written for us by Debapriya Sarkar:

The public humanities event on “Encounters: Alchemy & Science” convened at the Hartford History Center centered around the relationships among science, alchemy, religion, and politics. The discussion aimed to use the art—or science, or esoteric practice—of alchemy to test the boundaries between modernity and pre-modernity. In order to facilitate a common starting point, participants (who ranged from members of the local community to students and faculty from UConn) began the session by reading short excerpts from Albertus Magnus’s writings on alchemy (13th century), Fama Fraternitus (c. 1610-1614), and a “Letter from Jonathan Brewster to John Winthrop, Jr.” (January 31, 1656) (available here: http://hhc.hplct.org/encounters-alchemy-science/). These texts immediately exposed all attendees to some of the main issues of alchemy: the relation of art to nature, the importance of secret knowledge, the idea of perfection as it pertains to both religious and epistemological contexts, and contemporary disagreements about the usefulness of alchemy.

It was striking how quickly the common texts provoked a wide range of questions: what are the boundaries between “scientific knowledge” and “alchemical knowledge”? Who gets to be designated an “alchemist”? How does the practice of alchemy test the boundaries between “science” and “belief”? In a culture where alchemy was often related to fraud, were there avenues for policing or censoring it? How successful was alchemy in its goals? How do we reconcile the contradictory views, that alchemy was both the precursor to modern chemistry and a useless form of practical knowledge? How did alchemy become vital to discussions of perfection in the New World? What is the status of alchemy today, or—are there living alchemists? As our ensuing discussions made evident, the answers to these questions were often multifaceted. For instance, it is not always clear what the “success” of alchemy means—while alchemists might not have attained their final aim of transforming base metals into gold, they achieved enough changes in chemical reactions of entities to convince themselves that the translation of metals was possible.

While a significant portion of the discussion was devoted to the status of alchemy in the pre-modern period, one of the abiding concerns of the group centered around the relationship of the past to the present, or more specifically, how could our understanding of alchemy as a practice, or even as a way of being, shape our comprehension of our current social, political, and intellectual moment? To this end, we discussed topics like the centrality of religion or religious discourse in science—while pre-modern alchemists claimed that the alchemical perfection would mirror or fulfill God’s perfect creation, modern science explicitly distances itself from religious discussion. We also encountered how our concerns about changes in nature (for example, on the topic of climate change) forces us to grapple with competing points of view about knowledge and belief, in ways similar to those found in alchemical discourse. Thus, the discussion enabled us to see what while the specific problems faced by alchemists might not seem relevant, the larger questions of expertise, knowledge, faith, belief, and power that were central to the lives of alchemical practitioners resonate in surprising ways with our own understandings of intellectual, religious, and intellectual life.

UConn at the Northeast Conference on British Studies

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This year’s Northeast Conference on British Studies (NECBS), held at Endicott College, was well attended by members of UCONN’s Early Modern Studies Working Group. Graduate students and faculty from both the History Department and English Department presented at the conference. This included a panel with three participants from UCONN (find a full list of UCONN participants and panel/paper titles below titles below). Professor Brendan Kane (UCONN) organized the program for the conference, which took place on October 13th and 14th. During the proceedings, the NECBS confirmed him as the new organization president. Around fifty or sixty people attended, resulting in a very collegial atmosphere. While a full schedule can be found online, the conference featured a wide variety of panels with Early Modern Topics, including a panel on Early Modern West Africa chaired by John Thornton, and a panel on Dutch/British exchanges in the Late Tudor and Early Stuart periods.

Shannon McSheffrey (Concordia University) gave the keynote presentation on her new book, Seeking Sanctuary: Crime, Mercy and Politics in English Courts, 1400-1550. McSheffrey’s talk explored how people accused of crimes in England used church land as santuary. The accused would often live in exile until family members could garner them a pardon. Members of the nobility, engaged in a violent honor culture, regularly took advantage of sanctuary. Much of McSheffrey’s presentation focused on the importance of the Knights Hospitaller in the process of granting sanctuary. Due to their association with mercy in English life, criminals regularly sought out members of the order for sanctuary.

While the conference was obviously focused on the British Isles, the panels reflected a transnational and transatlantic approach to Early Modern history. As an Early Americanist, I was particularly excited to find panels and papers dealing with Africa, the West Indies, North America, and mainland Europe. I would recommend to the conference to any Early Americanist seeking to broaden their geographic scope or interested in taking a transatlantic approach. Next year, NECBS will be hosting the North American Conference on British Studies in Providence.

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UCONN Participants:

Hilary Bogert-Winkler (PhD. Candidate, History): “‘Too like the sons of Israel’: Royalism, Exile, and Israel during the Interregnum”

Nathan Braccio (PhD Candidate, History): “Willing exile: The choice to move to the spatial/social periphery in 17th-century New England”

Clare Costley King’oo (English): “Henry VIII, Joan Fish, and A Supplicacyon for the Beggers (1528/29)”

Edward Guimont (PhD Candidate, History): “Indian political leverage in the Commonwealth of Nations, 1947-64”

Robert Howe (PhD Candidate, History): “We may have of them whatsoever we will desire”: The Sovereign’s Stripping of the Abbeys in Scotland

Brendan Kane (History): “Léamh: Learn Early Modern Irish – a digital guide to reading and paleography, c. 1200-1650”

by Nathan Braccio (PhD Candidate, History)

 

 

 

You SHOULD…Read:The Outermost House

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“People should read, or re-read, Henry Beston’s 1928 classic, The Outermost House. Set among the dunes of outer Cape Cod, Beston’s essay traces a year of changing seasons, visiting coastal species, and mild reflections on modern life. Since its publication, the book has emerged as a principle contribution to the canon of American nature writing.
With Americans at each others throats, and vandals disassembling the pillars of American civilization for their own private gains, why should anyone read this ninety-year-old book?

Well, I see a few reasons. First and foremost, its beautifully written, and we need beauty now more than ever. Beston was born to a French Canadian mother and Irish father who met, married, and settled down in the US. He grew up fluent in both French and English, and after volunteering to fight in World War I, spent a few years kicking around France and teaching at the Sorbonne. During that time, Beston began developing a writing style that wove into his prose the cadences and tonalities of verse. When applied to the rhythms of surf, sand, sea, and sky, his style musically brings out the cyclicality and beauty of non-human life.

Which raises the second reason people should read it. If ever there was a time when we need to step out of the chaos of human concerns, this is it. Contemporary nature writing has a reputation—earned or not—for self-indulgence. In the worst instances, the non-human world provides merely a foil for authors’ lyrical flourishes and introspections that, frankly, I can’t stand. Beston has none of that. His focus is the world around him, not thoughts within him. His relationship to his coastal environs emerges clearly in his writing, to be sure. But he is most concerned with the natural cycles that humans don’t follow, the environmental changes we rarely see, and the calmness that living according to those clocks brings.
Indeed, in re-reading this book this term, I found that Beston removed the noise of modern life. In it’s place, he highlighted the sounds that keep us connected to the real world. He reminded me that American-ness is more defined through our relationship to our non-human world, than through the inanities of day to day distractions, diversions, and diatribes. From the cacophony he brought out the symphony—and it’s a sound we all could use more of.”

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00CNTTEV2/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1

http://www.henrybeston.com/outermost.html

-Matthew McKenzie
Associate Professor, History, American Studies, and Maritime Studies

Get to Know Our Fellows: Four Questions with Rebecca Gould

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-What is your academic background and what is your current position in UCHI/at UConn/Your Home Institution?

I have a BA from the University of California Berkeley in Comparative and Slavic Literatures (double major). After I received my degree, I spent two years living in Tbilisi, Georgia, during when I embarked on the research that went into my first book Writers and Rebels: The Literature of Insurgency in the Caucasus (Yale University Press, 2016), which examines anticolonial poetry and prose during the tsarist and Soviet periods. My PhD dissertation (Columbia University, 2013) deals a literary genre from a much earlier period: the medieval Persian prison poem. I am very lucky to have recently joined the University of Birmingham, where, as a Professor of Islamic World and Comparative Literature, I am able to bring together my wide-ranging interests in the Islamic Studies and Comparative Literature, from the medieval period to the postcolonial present.

 

-What is the project you’re currently working on?

My current book project is tentatively entitled Narrating Catastrophe: Forced Migration from Colonialism to Postcoloniality. This work tells of an aspect of the colonial encounter in the Caucasus that Writers and Rebels ignores. Both this and my first book were inspired by the experience of living in Tbilisi, Georgia, from 2004-6, among Georgian intellectuals and Chechen refugees. When I engaged with the history of the peoples I was living with and learning from, I began to notice two ways in which the past was remembered. The first way, of glorifying and sanctifying anticolonial violence, became the focus of Writers and Rebels. The second approach to the past that I noticed involved memorializing narratives of forced migration from the Caucasus to Ottoman lands (during the tsarist period) and Central Asia (during the Soviet period), such that forced migration became a recurring trope within popular culture. This repeated story of forced migration that dominates the literatures of the Caucasus is the subject of Narrating Catastrophe.  The term for this story, hijra, refers to the migration of the prophet Muhammad from Mecca to Medina as well as to subsequent migrations, both forced and voluntary, within Islamic history.

 

 

-How did you arrive at this topic?

In Narrating Catastrophe, I explore the many meanings of forced migrations across the Islamic world, with a particular focus on the Caucasus. The more immersed I became in Caucasus narratives of displacement, the more clearly I saw that these narratives intersect with other narratives from elsewhere in the Islamic world, including the nakba (catastrophe) among Palestinians and the expulsion of Spanish Muslims during the Reconquista, which is also referred to as hijra. Although these events are obviously distinct, they are united by their narrative connection to early Islam. Needless to say, the connection I refer to is more narratival than historical, but as a scholar of Comparative Literature, it is precisely the imaginative links that extend across continents and which have persisted across centuries that I find fascinating.

 

-What impact might your work have on a larger public understanding of your topic?

To start with the most obvious: as a scholar of the Islamic world, I believe that the world I work on has a special contribution to make to policy debates. By viewing Islamic history through the prism of hijra—rather than through more violent idioms, such as that of jihad—I offer readers a means to engage with core Islamic narratives outside the polarizations that circulate in the media accounts that are the primary source for popular understanding of Islam. Another area in which this project stands to make an impact is on how we understand migration. Generally, migration is viewed from the perspective of the interests and norms of the host country. What would migration looked like if viewed from the perspective of the migrant? Narrating Catastrophe offers one answer to this question. Like Thomas Nail, whose recent book The Figure of the Migrant (Stanford, 2015), reveals how the migrant condition applies to all of us, my use of the hijra narrative showcases the general relevance of this concept and its attendant histories across the Islamic world. Rather than offer an historical account, I am developing a political theory around Islamic migration, based primarily on literary narratives from the Caucasus. The final area of impact is to do with the Caucasus itself. To my mind, the Caucasus is one of the most understudied, yet most fascinating regions of the world. It combines Muslim, Christian, and other religions traditions in close proximity to each other and is unsurpassed in terms of its linguistic and cultural diversity. Throughout my work, I have developed the idea of the Caucasus as a marginalised crossroads, meaning a geography that nearly always finds itself on edges of power and yet which maintains a kind of centrality to European and Islamic culture. By immersing my readers in an intertextual tradition that they surely will not have encountered before, I hope to enable them to think differently about migration and mobility, and from perspectives they have not contemplated before.

Publishing Now! – Ray Ryan

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Ray Ryan, Senior Commissioning Editor of English and American Literature at Cambridge University Press, will be speaking about publishing and new shifts and changes in the industry. He is author of Ireland and Scotland: Literature and Culture, State and Nation, editor of Writing in the Irish Republic: Literature, Culture, Politics, 1949-1999, and co-editor of Ireland and Scotland:
Culture and Society, 1700-2000 and The Good of the Novel.

This talk is generously co-sponsored by UCHI, the English Department, Asian and Asian American Studies Institute, and the CLAS Dean’s Office.

You SHOULD…Read: The Adivasi Will Not Dance

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“You must read The Adivasi Will Not Dance, a collection of ten short stories by Hansda Sowendra Shekhar, winner of the Sahitya Akademi Yuva Puraskar, 2015 (The National India Academy of Letters Award, 2015). Shekhar collected stories of Santhal tribes (scheduled tribes of India are pre-nation state indigenous communities) while working as a medical officer in a remote part of the Jharkhand state, a newly formed state in India with large Santhal population. Each story reveals the territorial interstices of Santhali life in India. The third story November is the Month of Migrations is a brutal, raw, and harsh description of how Talami (a young Santhal girl) had to exchange sexual favors with a police officer in return of two cold breads and Rs 50.00 (90 cents). Santhali community members called the story pornographic and burnt effigies of Sowendra Shekhar. In response to the protests, the Jharkhand government has banned the book. As I sat in the early September warm breeze in my Storrs-Masfield backyard and leafed through the bright turquoise blue covers, Sowendra’s writing transposed me into the forests of West-Bengal and Jharkhand (where I grew up & often traveled on winter vacations to the Santhal areas). The stories narrate struggles of Mangla Murmu the troupe-master of a performing group who would not dance for the President of India and is brutally beaten down on the ground, while another one narrates the story of Bikram-Kumang who is asked to hide his Santhali roots by his Hindu upper-caste landlord. The book will take you on a journey of indigenous communities in India, and reveals how generations of Indian tribes live with the ravages of colonization.”

-Debanuj Dasgupta,
Assistant Professor, Department of Geography and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies

Get to Know Our Fellows: Four Questions With Laura Wright

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wrights

What is your academic background and what is your current position in UCHI/at UConn/Your Home Institution?

I earned a BA in theatre and a BA in English at the University of Montana and completed my MA at UConn.  I am currently a PhD candidate in the English Department at the University of Connecticut and a Draper Dissertation fellow at UCHI.

 

What is the project you’re currently working on?

I am completing my dissertation, “Prizing Difference: PEN Awards and Multiculturalist Politics in American Fiction.” In this project, I examine the Poets, Essayists, Novelists (PEN) organization and map the contested national and international politics of book prizes. In particular, awards such as the PEN/Faulkner have determined the scope of what has become an identifiable twentieth- and twenty-first century American literary canon. Focused on Latinx, African American, Asian American, and Jewish American writers “Prizing Difference” considers multiple hierarchies of power, the material factors of publishing, and the evolving politics of “multiculturalism” in the US academy.

 

How did you arrive at this topic?

There were two moments that really launched my thinking on this topic. I have had a long-standing interest in canon formation (adjudicating what “counts” and what doesn’t in American Literature) and my committee asked me a question specifically on this topic in my PhD exams.  In attempting to answer the question, I struggled to define “canon.”  There were too many variables in play to settle on a stable definition that scholars, teachers, students, and readers could agree upon.  Is Toni Morrison a great African American novelist or a great American novelist?  What are the political and cultural consequences of these different designations?  Book prizes helped me negotiate this difficulty by offering a fixed list of winners that constitute a particular idea of the American novel as determined by the prize committee.

 

The idea that book prizes can form canons was reinforced the next time I took a trip to my public library.  In browsing the shelves, I noticed that the library has stickers that help identify the genre of a novel.  For instance, a space ship sticker helps readers readily locate science fiction while a sticker of a magnifying glass indicates detective fiction.  One of these stickers, to my surprise, used a blue ribbon to categorize books as “Prize Winners.”  This suggested that prize-winning novels might have significant commonalities between texts, forming a new genre of their own.

 

What impact might your work have on a larger public understanding of your topic?

Book prizes offer a way of discerning “what counts” as American Literature historically, but also as recently as this year.  Without the vantage of a lengthy publication history or repeated encounters with a particular work in a classroom setting, book prizes help us identify significant cultural texts.  Additionally, these prizes form a critical link between the public and the university.  People (myself included) often select reading material based on the endorsements of a particular prize.  I argue that by thinking through the engagement between prizes and politics, we can gain a better understanding of our cultural values, particularly around racial identity.