George More (English) Dissertation Fellow Research Talk.
Time: 4:00 pm Location: Babbidge Library 4th floor room 4/209 meeting.
“Animating Idolatry: Iconoclasm and Unruly Matter in English Renaissance Literature”
#SheffMovement Design Challenge
The Sheff Movement, in collaboration with UCHI, UConn’s Thomas J. Dodd Research Center, Hartford Public Library, The Hartford Foundation, The Sillerman Center, Achieve Hartford, Hartford Parent University and CREC, hosted a Design Challenge to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the Sheff v. O’Neill decision.
The event aimed to promote meaningful public discourse and engagement that will ultimately strengthen Greater Hartford’s ongoing efforts to address racial and socioeconomic isolation and related inequities.
The Design Challenge brought together educators, researchers, students, parents, and other community members to work collaboratively to
- Co-create a vision for achieving quality integrated education for all Hartford’s children;
- Reinvigorate the court-mandated process of providing all Hartford’s children a quality integrated education;
- Generate fresh new ideas, and outline strategies to meaningfully advance the goal of quality integrated education over the next three to five years.
We thank all of our partners for what was a lively and generative event, and invite you to watch this space for follow-ups from the Design Challenge and on other UCHI-Public Humanities community partnerships!
Alexander Heffner, PBS. “Picking Up the Pieces”
A conversation with Alexander Heffner of PBS and UConn’s own Michael Lynch, Micki McElya, and Evenlyn Simean. The theme of the evening will be,
“Picking up the pieces”: Can we move on from this historically divisive election to rebuild some meaningful public discourse?
What will politics look like in the United States after the tumultuous 2016 election? On November 10, 2016, Humility and Conviction in Public Life will host Alexander Heffner, Host of PBS’s The Open Mind and a discussion on “Picking up the Pieces” of U.S. political discourse. “Humility and conviction are indeed the path forward if we are going to break through the cycle of incivility in American politics that has defined our 2016 presidential campaign, I am delighted to join the UCONN community just days after we vote…to reflect on this unprecedented election, and to consider a vision for more civil American democracy.”
Heffner will be joined by UConn professor of political science Evelyn Simien and UConn professor of history, Micki McElya. Professor Simien’s most recent book Historic Firsts: How Symbolic Empowerment Changes U.S. Politics, was published by Oxford University Press in 2015 and considers the historic firsts in American politics, including President Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. Published earlier this year by Harvard University Press, Professor McElya’s most recent book, The Politics of Mourning: Death and Honor in Arlington National Cemetery, examines the larger political and cultural implications of the history of Arlington National Cemetery. The discussion will be hosted by Michael Lynch, a professor of philosophy, the director of the UConn Humanities Institute, and the Principal Investigator of Humility and Conviction in Public Life, the recent recipient of $6 million in grant funding from the John Templeton Foundation. He is the author of the recent book, The Internet of Us: Knowing More and Understanding Less in the Age of Big Data.
Alexander Heffner was a special correspondent for PBS’s Need to Know chronicling the Millennial vote in 2012. He founded and edited SCOOP08 and SCOOP44, the first-ever national student newspapers covering the 2008 campaign and the Obama administration, and taught a civic education/journalism seminar in New York City public school classrooms.
His writing has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, The Philadelphia Inquirer, USA Today, Newsday and RealClearPolitics, among other leading newspapers and magazines. He has been interviewed about politics, education and stories in the news by PBS, C-SPAN, CNN and the BBC, among other national and local broadcast venues. He was political director and correspondent for WHRB 95.3 FM and host and managing editor of The Political Arena, a Sunday afternoon public affairs broadcast.
Heffner has given talks and moderated panels at major universities and colleges, including the University of California-Irvine, the College of Journalism and Mass Communications at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, the School of Politics and Economics at Claremont Graduate University, the Harris School of Public Policy at the University of Chicago, the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, the Graduate School of Political Management at George Washington University, Long Island University and Bryn Mawr College.
He is a graduate of Andover and Harvard.
Junior Faculty Forum, “Getting It Done: Strategies for Writing and Productivity”
“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
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
Deva 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.
October 18, Peter Zarrow: UConn Political Theory Workshop
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.
Fabiana Viglione, UCHI Dissertation Fellow Research Talk
October 26: Dissertation Fellow Research Talk.
Time: 4:00 pm
Location: Babbidge Library 4th floor room 4/209 meeting
Fabiana Viglione ‘Patterns of (Mis)Perception: Orientalism, Philhellenism and Italian National Identity in the Early 19th Century’
Melanie Meinzer, UCHI Dissertation Fellow Research Talk
October 19: Dissertation Fellow Research Talk.
Time: 4:00 pm
Location: Babbidge Library 4th floor room 4/209 meeting
Melanie Meinzer ‘Contested Consciousness: Foreign Aid and Palestinian Education in the West Bank’
