Junior Faculty Forum, “Getting It Done: Strategies for Writing and Productivity”

Posted on by

“Getting It Done: Strategies for Writing and Productivity”

Monday, November 14, 12:30 to 1:30 pm

UConn Humanities Institute, Homer Babbidge Library, Fourth Floor


The Junior Faculty Forum welcomes its members to our Fall 2016 professionalization event: a panel on finding the time, and the strategies, to continue research and writing amid the many obligations academics face, especially teaching, service, and familial responsibilities. Our panelists will include:
  • Liz Holzer, Associate Professor of Sociology and Human Rights, on making the most of a teaching release,
  • Diane Lillo-Martin, Professor of Linguistics, on the challenges of writing book-length scholarship, and
  • Sarah Willen, Assistant Professor of Anthropology, on balancing productivity and family obligations.

The session will open with brief comments from each of our panelists. This will be followed by discussion and Q&A, as well as an opportunity for interested participants to form writing groups.

 
Lunch will be provided. Please RSVP to Victoria Ford Smith (victoria.f.smith@uconn.edu) no later than Friday, October 28.

 

October 31, ‘Reading Tyndale’s Obedience in Whole and in Part’ by Clare Costley King’oo

Posted on by

Early Modern Works in Progress Discussion:

English, University of Connecticut

Monday, Oct. 31, 2-4 p.m., Humanities Institute, Fourth Floor, Babbidge Library

UConn English Associate Professor Clare Costley King’oo is co-editing a scholarly edition of William Tyndale’s Obedience of a Christian Man (1528) with Susan Felch of Calvin College. They are putting the edition together as part of the Tyndale Project, which has recently been awarded a Scholarly Editions and Translations Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). The project promises to offer new ways of thinking about Tyndale, an influential Protestant reformer and Bible translator.

On Monday, Oct. 31 (Halloween and Reformation Day), King’oo will discuss “Reading Tyndale’s Obedience in Whole and in Part,” an article she co-authored with Felch. Forthcoming in Reformation, the article examines the early reception history of Tyndale’s Obedience. King’oo will discuss the article, the broader NEH project, and the future of Tyndale studies.

The article will be pre-circulated. Please contact George Moore at George.p.moore@uconn.edu for a copy if you plan to attend the discussion.

Deva Woodly, The Public Discourse Project seminar series

Posted on by

devaDeva Woodly

Date: 10/25.

Time: 4:00 - 5:30 pm.

Location: Babbidge Library 4th floor room   4/209 meeting.

The Pragmatism of Social Movements

We often think of Social Movements as ideal enterprises; activities undertaken by passionate idealists who eschew the corruption of the status quo for the purity of an imagined better world. While the passion and idealism of social movement participants is certainly real, I argue that if we look at movements through the theoretical lens of American pragmatism, we find that they are an utterly practical, functionally necessary, and immanently effective apart of democratic politics. Taking the contemporary example of the Movement for Black Lives, we will explore the pragmatic imagination, organization, articulation, and political participation of this country's ascendant 21st century movement.

upcoming speakers

 

 

October 18, Peter Zarrow: UConn Political Theory Workshop

Posted on by

Peter Zarrow

10/18

Babbidge Library, 4th Floor, Room 4/209

From Trotskyism to Proletarian Democracy: China, 1930s
This paper explores the trajectory of the political thought of Chen Duxiu (1879-1942) through the 1930s.  Chen’s ideas changed dramatically over his lifetime but a utopian vision of true democracy was central to his thought.  He is best known as a co-founder and first general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, and he dismissed democracy as regressive “bourgeois democracy” during the time of his membership in the Party from 1921 to 1929.  However, Chen was a leading advocate of democracy both before the 1911 Revolution and especially in its wake in the 1910s.  And again he returned to the theme of democracy in the 1930s.  This paper focuses on how Chen “returned” to democratic thinking over the course of the 1930s.  I argue that Chen’s conversion to Trotskyism allowed him to make sense of the CCP’s defeat (1927-1928) and stimulated him to rethink revolutionary goals as well as strategies.  Though he eventually abandoned Trotskyism, he did not precisely return to either the liberal or communitarian democracy he had earlier advocated, but rather developed the notion of proletarian democracy.  In Chen’s understanding, democracy was a kind of universal force unfolding through history and realized through class struggle.

Blog: UConn Early Modern Studies Working Group

Posted on by

Prof. Kenneth Gouwens (UConn History) writing about his research trip to the Folger Shakespeare Library


It’s always a rich opportunity to visit the Folger. At the peak of the August heat wave, I spent the two days in air-conditioned comfort working through rare books that I’d identified on an earlier trip as meriting more attention. Seated in the beautiful older wing, I first returned to Hieronymus Fabricius ab Aquapendente, one of the foremost anatomists in the initial generations after Vesalius’s On the Fabric of the Human Body (1543). As part of a larger project on the simian/human boundary in the Renaissance, I’ve analyzed just how Vesalius criticized the ancient physician Galen for dissecting barbary apes in lieu of human cadavers. Following the lead of Aristotle, Fabricius devoted attention not just to the human but to a variety of animals to assess how they propel themselves, to what extent they are capable of vocalizing, etc. My interest had been piqued by his pointing out how both Galen and Vesalius had erred, the latter, for example, in describing the musculature of the feet: clearly Fabricius was not one to shy away from going toe-to-toe with the greats. It turns out, though, that he invokes simians little if at all in his corrections of Vesalius. In short, my hunch didn’t pan out, but I was able to find that out efficiently and now know better how Fabricius fits into the story I’m telling.

More productive was directly comparing two books on prodigies: one by the Alsatian humanist Conrad Lycosthenes and the other by the English cleric Stephan Batman. Only when going through my notes and photos (for study purposes) of images had I noticed how closely Batman’s English resembled the Latin of Lycosthenes’s text (I’d looked at them months apart, two years ago). Sure enough,
Batman’s The Doome warning all men to Iudgemente (1581), which he had “gathered out of sundrie approved authors,” turns out to be mostly a close translation of Lycosthenes’ Prodigiorum ac ostentorum chronicon (1557). Examining the books side by side enabled me to see just how closely the illustrations in Batman’s book also mimicked those of its antecedent. For example, there’s a strong family resemblance between their portrayals of a baboon (pauyon), a hairy animal of India that enjoys fruit and lusts after human females. In both cases we are told about a specimen of this beast on display in Germany in 1551.

Batman’s image of the tailed ape (cercopithecus), by contras   t, is modeled more loosely upon that in Lycosthenes — which in turn is obviously based on the highly influential image in Breydenbach’s 1486 Latin book on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. So, in a brief time at the Folger, I was able to see the distinctions and similarities, both literary and artistic, in how knowledge was being transmitted among these authors.

Rare books were of course central to the trip, but I’d be remiss not to mention afternoon tea in the Folger’s basement. Rather like the coffee bar at the Vatican Library, it provides a locus for shop-talk with others working in the collection. I highly recommend to all researchers that they carve out time for the tea. In fact, that’s where I got some key tips on questions to ask about my favorite image in the Folger, an engraving of a monkey wearing a ruff. But that’s a subject for another time. Warm thanks to UConn’s Folger Committee for making this trip possible!

“The finest rule of life we have”

Posted on by

The Injustice League lecture series brings together philosophers and political theorists working on issues of injustice. We focus on inviting junior faculty who aren’t typically given this kind of forum.

Amy Shuster (Visiting Assistant Professor of Philosophy The Ohio State University)

Date: 10/14

“The finest rule of life we have” on the value of ambiguity for democratic praxis

Danielle Allen’s Our Declaration (2015) revitalized interest in the U.S. Declaration of Independence among those committed to equality as a foundational American ideal—especially feminists, anti-racists, and anti-colonialists.  But the meaning of the document has a checkered history in the United States and abroad.  While some—like David Walker, Justice Taney, and Malcolm X—point to the civil and political subordination of women, slaves, freed persons, the poor, American-Indians, and the indigenous people in other parts of the world at the founding (and in various forms to this day) as reason to think that the document is merely political cover for domination, others—like Abraham Lincoln, Anita Whitney, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Ho Chi Minh—have found in it a promise of equality for future generations, regardless of nationality.  What are the principles of interpretation that lie behind such a diverse set of readings, especially of the document’s distinctive phrases like “all men are created equal”?  Are all of them equally defensible upon reflection?  I aim to weaken both the starry-eyed disposition to find too much in the Declaration and the hard-nosed determination to find too little.  In the end, I vindicate its meaning for democrats who are committed to a principle of equal inclusion in an on-going political community characterized by a variety of differences among its members.

Today: Micki McElya Book Presentation, at the UConn Barnes & Noble at Storrs Center on Wednesday, Sept. 28 at 5:30 p.m

Posted on by

MickiUConn History Professor Micki McElya presents her new book, The Politics of Mourning: Death and Honor in Arlington National Cemetery

at the UConn Barnes & Noble at Storrs Center on Wednesday, Sept. 28 at 5:30 p.m.

Arlington National Cemetery is America’s most sacred shrine, a destination for four million visitors who each year tour its grounds and honor those buried there. For many, Arlington’s symbolic importance places it beyond politics. Yet as Micki McElya shows, no site in the United States plays a more political role in shaping national identity.

Arlington commemorates sacrifices made in the nation’s wars and armed conflicts. Yet it has always been a place of struggle over the boundaries of citizenship and the meaning of honor and love of country. A plantation built by slave labor overlooking Washington, D.C., Arlington was occupied by Union f…orces early in the Civil War. A portion was designated a federal cemetery in 1864. A camp for the formerly enslaved, Freedman’s Village, had already been established there in 1863, and remained for three decades.

The cemetery was seen primarily as a memorial to the white Civil War dead until its most famous monument was erected in 1921: the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, symbolizing universal military sacrifice through the interment of a single World War I Unknown. As a century of wars abroad secured Arlington’s centrality in the American imagination and more Unknowns joined the first at the tomb, inclusion within its gates became a prerequisite for broader claims to national belonging. In revealing how Arlington encompasses the most inspiring and the most shameful aspects of American history, McElya enriches the story of this landscape, demonstrating that remembering the past and reckoning with it must go hand in hand.

Micki McElya is Associate Professor of History at the University of Connecticut.

For more information, contact: UConn Bookstore at 860-486-8525

http://dailydigest.uconn.edu/publicEmailSingleStoryView.php?id=62892&cid=24&iid=2046