Fellows Talks

Fellows Talk: Laura Godfrey on “Astonishment in Late Medieval English Literature”

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‘Being Wholly Out of Body’: Astonishment in Late Medieval English Literature

Laura Godfrey, Ph.D. Candidate in Medieval Studies, University of Connecticut
 December 4, 2019 – 4 to 5PM (UCHI Conference Room: Babbidge Library, 4th Floor South)

This talk brings together medieval medical and literary descriptions over overwhelming bodily experiences. In medieval literature, when a subject encounters a divine figure, they lose all physical and mental faculties, and after a period of stasis, these faculties are restored, often with heightened senses of perception or newly gained insight. Middle English texts describe this as astonishment, a phenomenon described in medieval medicine as a cerebral malady similar to paralysis or epilepsy. By enmeshing themselves in this cultural rhetoric of dramatic change, medieval authors use literary descriptions to extend the pathology of astonishment and to investigate the effects of this state on the mind and soul.

UCHI Fellows Talk by Laura Godfrey on December 4, 4-5PM at the UCHI Conference Room

 

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

Fellows Talk: Jessica Strom on Adriano Lemmi and Italian Unification

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Financing Revolution: Adriano Lemmi and the Struggle for Italian Unification

Jessica Strom, Ph.D. Candidate in History, University of Connecticut
 November 20, 2019 – 4 to 5PM (UCHI Conference Room: Babbidge Library, 4th Floor South)

Jessica’s work explores Italian merchant Adriano Lemmi’s (1822–1906) position in the clandestine networks that funded radical nationalist leaders, military actions, and political newspapers during Italy’s mid-nineteenth century struggle for unification and political independence known as the Risorgimento. Lemmi played a critical role in fundraising efforts during the Risorgimento and became a key figure in the radical nationalist movement. By looking at a different type of revolutionary leader, Jessica’s project moves beyond ideals or outcomes to illuminate the everyday experiences of Italian Unification.Her talk will discuss how Lemmi helped to foster an alliance between Italian leader Giuseppe Mazzini and Hungarian nationalist Lajos Kossuth in the early 1850s. In particular she will address Lemmi’s crucial role in plans to free Kossuth from imprisonment in the Ottoman Empire and in subsequent efforts to acquire weapons from the United States to support nationalist military initiatives.

Strom Talk Poster

Fellows Talk: Hayley Stefan on Black Feminist Epistemologies and Reparative Justice

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Black Feminist Epistemologies & Reparative Justice

Hayley Stefan, Ph.D. Candidate in English, University of Connecticut
 November 13, 2019 – 4 to 5PM (UCHI Conference Room: Babbidge Library, 4th Floor South)

 

Hayley’s work examines how cultural reactions to national traumas evaluate embodied experience. In her talk, she will focus on the long refusal to recognize anti-Black oppression and violence as national tragedies. Black Feminist epistemologists such as Patricia Hill Collins, bell hooks, and Safiya Umoja Noble argue that reparative and restorative justice must value the Black body. This talk brings together legislation, literature, and digital archives to show how Black activists and scholars have used different methods to authorize Black knowledge. These artifacts suggest that reckoning with Black trauma means embracing communal knowledge and privileging the emotional and embodied effects of daily atrocities.

Stefan Talk Poster

Fellows Talk: Nathan Braccio on Indigenous and Colonial Landscapes of New England

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Parallel Landscapes: Algonquian and English Spatial Understandings of New England, 1500-1700

Nathan Braccio, Ph.D. Candidate in History, University of Connecticut
 November 6, 2019 – 4 to 5PM (UCHI Conference Room: Babbidge Library, 4th Floor South)

Nathan’s talk will explore the ways in which Algonquian knowledge of the landscape represented a powerful and persistent alternative to English surveying and mapmaking in New England. When English colonists and explorers recognized the unsuitability of their techniques for understanding New England’s unfamiliar landscape, they tried to appropriate Indigenous knowledge and maps. Algonquian sachems (community leaders), used this as an opportunity to manipulate and benefit from their new English neighbors. For both colonizers and Indigenous people, maps became a potent tool in the struggle to define New England’s landscape.

Braccio Talk Flyer

Fellows Talk: Kornel Chang on Land Reform in US-Occupied Korea

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Liberatory Possibilities:
Korean Peasants and the Struggle over Land Reform in U.S.-Occupied Korea

Kornel S. Chang, Associate Professor of History, Rutgers University – Newark
October 16, 2019 (UCHI Conference Room: Babbidge Library, 4th Floor North)

This talk captures a slice of Korea’s “Asian Spring,” by examining the different ways Korean peasants imagined liberation, sought to actualize their aspirations, and clashed over its meaning in the aftermath of the Second World War, when the collapse of the Japanese Empire ushered in a moment ripe with hope, idealism, and uncertainty. It also looks at how the entry of American forces complicated, and, ultimately, narrowed possibilities for agrarian reform. This touched off a struggle with Korean peasants, who, despite their differences, held more far-reaching visions of emancipation. Focusing on land rights, my talk reveals the vitality and complexity of Korea’s “Asian Spring,” by highlighting the emancipatory opportunities that inspired, mobilized, and fractured Korean peasants, while recounting the ways Americans foreclosed many of its possibilities in an effort to establish control in Korea and rebuild a postwar social order in Asia.

Chang Talk Poster

Fellows Talk: Daniel Cohen on Maria Monk’s “Awful Disclosures”

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Maria Monk’s Awful Disclosures Reconsidered:
From “Me Too” to “Fake News” in the Rise, Fall, and Resurrection of an Anti-Catholic Genre, 1845-1960

Daniel A. Cohen, Department of History, Case Western Reserve University
September 25, 2019 (UCHI Conference Room: Babbidge Library, 4th Floor)

Contrary to the conventional view of Awful Disclosures (1836) as a great triumph of antebellum U.S. nativist propaganda, Maria Monk’s bogus account of sexual abuse, torture, infanticide, and murder in a Canadian convent was actually a disaster for the anti-Catholic cause. Despite its sensationalism, Monk’s exposé struggled to match the extraordinary sales of Rebecca Reed’s earlier Six Months in a Convent (1835); and, after being utterly debunked in 1836–37 as “fake news” by that era’s “mainstream media” (reputable secular and religious newspapers), it was not reprinted again in the U.S. until 1855. More broadly, the public exposure of Maria Monk as an outright fraud largely discredited the entire convent exposé genre, dragging down Reed’s far more credible narrative with it. Only during the century after 1860, did Maria Monk (who had died in disgrace in 1849) complete her posthumous comeback. By the early 1900s, huge numbers of anti-convent narratives, including Awful Disclosures, were being churned out by specialized nativist and anti-Catholic presses based in such cultural backwaters as Aurora, Missouri, and Milan, Illinois, which catered to the tastes of rural Protestant traditionalists and other bigoted, prurient, or unsophisticated readers. These widely dispersed nativist publishers—at least one of whom also peddled stereopticons, slide shows, and even motion picture projectors—constituted a massive communications empire apart from the “mainstream media,” arguably foreshadowing the rise of right-wing talk radio, Fox News, and white nationalist websites in our own time.

Cohen Talk Poster

The Schedule of UCHI Fellows Talks for 2019–2020

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As is customary, every year each of our resident fellows delivers a talk on their ongoing research while at the University of Connecticut Humanities Institute. These talks are open to the public and take place at UCHI at the Homer Babbidge Library, 4th Floor. More details will be disseminated on social media prior to each talk.

Four Questions with Maxime Lepoutre

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  1. Tell us a bit about the project you are working on at UCHI.

Briefly put, my project aims to investigate the nature of political ignorance and the challenges such ignorance poses for democratic public life, by bringing recent work in epistemology and philosophy of language into closer dialogue with empirical political science.

Empirical social scientists have long argued that ordinary citizens tend to be highly ignorant about political matters. This result, in turn, has increasingly been used to support anti-democratic political systems (that is, rule by those who ‘know best’), or very minimal forms of democracy (that is, forms of democracy that only involve ordinary citizens in a very limited way). The problem with this research, however, is that it tends to rely on a theoretically unrefined understanding of what ignorance is. I believe this difficulty has led to unsatisfactory measurements of political ignorance, and has limited our understanding of the challenges involved in countering political ignorance.

To remedy this problem, we need a more sophisticated understanding of the nature of political ignorance. Accordingly, what I will do in this project is develop such an understanding by drawing on recent work in epistemology and philosophy of language. The first part of the project will explore what kind of epistemic state political ignorance is. Philosophers typically distinguish between having a true belief about something, and understanding that thing. Lack of political understanding, I will suggest, is what is really dangerous for democratic politics. But what social scientists measure is typically whether citizens have true or false political beliefs, not whether they have an understanding of political issues. As a result, their measurements tend to underestimate political ignorance in important respects, and overestimate it in others.

The second part of my project will focus on why it is difficult to counter political ignorance through democratic public speech.  Here, I will explore two obstacles that stand in the way of deliberative attempts at eliminating ignorance. To begin, political ignorance can be rational: in ethically divided societies, there can be good reasons for people not to heed the insights or testimony of others. Secondly, political ignorance can be sticky: conversational norms can be ‘asymmetrically pliable, so that it is easier to introduce ignorant views into public discourse than it is to remove them from public discourse. Exploring these issues should yield a deeper understanding of the rational and linguistic obstacles that prevent democratic public discourse from fostering knowledge.

2. What drew you to this topic and what exciting developments are you anticipating?

I first became interested in the issue of political ignorance when I was writing my doctoral dissertation, entitled ‘Democratic Speech in Divided Times’. There, I explored the positive functions that public deliberation can play in divided settings: how it can be used to share knowledge, and to hold political decision-makers accountable. I was especially interested in how features of public discourse which are symptomatic of division and injustice—such as public expressions of anger—can actually play a crucial role in exposing and eliminating those injustices.

But the problem I encountered time and again during this project was that most of these positive powers of political speech could be subverted and turned to bad ends in conditions of political ignorance. Take the case of anger. When citizens who endure injustices know little about the true causes of those injustices, demagogues can exploit their legitimate anger and direct it, misleadingly, at vulnerable minorities. In such cases, expressions of anger create ignorance, not knowledge.

The upshot is that political ignorance is a serious obstacle for democratic politics. Accordingly, it seems to me that we will not be in a position to put public deliberation to positive use until we understand the nature of political ignorance better. The most exciting development of my current research project, then, is that it will bring us closer to addressing this significant problem. Not only will it help us measure political ignorance more accurately, but it will also shed light on what kinds of political speech are better suited to countering political ignorance, and when they might be capable of doing so.

2.What are you looking forward to in regard to this year at UCHI?

The University of Connecticut Humanities Institute will be an ideal place to carry out this research. This is, first and foremost, because of the institute’s strong emphasis on interdisciplinary research: in many ways, the point of my research project is to suggest that there has been too strong and too artificial a division between social scientific approaches to ignorance, and philosophical approaches to ignorance. This, in turn, has had a deleterious effect on our understanding of political ignorance. So I am really enthusiastic at the prospect of working in an environment that actively encourages multidisciplinary work. I’m also looking forward to my residency at UCHI because it is such a strong and innovative centre for the study of language and knowledge. For example, I’ve learned a huge amount from Lynne Tirrell’s research on hate speech and Michael Lynch’s work on understanding in a digital era—and I’m eager to learn a lot more next spring!

3. 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?”

The humanities perform foundational research that is indispensable to understanding and addressing contemporary political challenges. To see this, consider that empirical research concerning social and political phenomena—for instance, the effects of hate speech or the rise of inequality—necessarily depends on theoretical research. When social scientists go about gathering data, they do not do so randomly. Instead, their research is guided by theoretical hypotheses. And the conceptual insights of philosophy and of the humanities more generally is directly relevant to generating these theoretical hypotheses.

Consider again the example of hate speech. When social scientists try to measure the harmful effects of hate speech, they operate with some background hypotheses regarding how hate speech might harm its targets. Now, philosophers of language—speech act theorists in particular—have deeply enriched those hypotheses, by exploring how speech can not only say things but also do things. Another important example is the measurement of inequality. Seemingly abstract debates in political philosophy concerning the so-called ‘currency of equality’—that is, concerning what kinds of goods or resources should be equalised—have revolutionised the way in which we now measure equality. Indeed, those debates gave birth to Amartya Sen’s famous capabilities approach, which in turn played a key role in developing the Human Development Index. The result has been a far more robust way of measuring and understanding one of the most important social phenomena of the past few decades: the drastic rise in global inequality.

Importantly, the research I intend to pursue at the UCHI models itself on these influential instances of humanities research. As I explained above, I hope to use philosophical insights concerning knowledge, understanding, and language, to enrich the theoretical hypotheses that guide social scientific investigations of political ignorance. And understanding political ignorance, how extensive it is and how it can be countered, is a first step towards more fruitful public deliberation.

 

Four Questions with Lani Watson

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  1. Tell us a bit about the project you are working on at UCHI.

    The primary aim of this project is to examine the relationship between questioning and intellectual humility. I take questioning to be a powerful expression of intellectual humility; one that is familiar across cultural and political boundaries, and accessible from an early age. Yet the role and significance of questioning is often overlooked or undermined by our social, cultural, and political institutions, and in education. I aim to examine questioning as a form of intellectual humility and investigate the factors that prevent people from expressing this form of intellectual humility, particularly in education.

  2. What drew you to this topic and what exciting developments are you anticipating?

    My primary philosophical interest is in the practice of questioning. As an epistemologist, I am especially interested in how we use questions in order to gather information and come to know things. For the most part, we are living in a world that values knowing things highly. ‘Knowledge is power’, as Francis Bacon’s (1597) famous Enlightenment adage boldly states. This means that questions are a powerful tool for acquiring something that we value. I am interested in examining how this value system impacts upon our willingness and ability to ask questions.In situations where there exists a real or perceived expectation that one already knows something, one’s ability and/or willingness to ask questions will plausibly be inhibited. I think this is important in a classroom setting where students often feel under pressure to have the right answers at their immediate disposal. I am interested in examining how barriers to questioning manifest in education. Why would a student be either unable or unwilling to engage in questioning in the classroom? What features of our education systems generate, maintain, and schematize barriers to student questioning in schools? And what can teachers, administrators, or policy-makers do to address a lack of student questioning?

    I am excited to be collaborating with the Right Question Institute, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, as part of this project and investigating their sustained efforts to teach questioning to students via the Question Formulation Technique (QFT), developed by Dr Dan Rothstein and Luz Santana. I will focus on the role that this technique plays in generating open-minded and intellectually humble classroom dialogue. Ultimately I aim to defend the claim that educating for good questioning offers an effective and resourceful means of providing students with valuable opportunities to exhibit, practice, and refine the virtue of intellectual humility.

  3. What are you looking forward to in regard to this year at UCHI?

    I am very much looking forward to visiting UCHI and working with fellow researchers as part of the Humility and Conviction in Public Life project. It will be great to be part of a group of researchers with common interests in the public expression of intellectual character, which I believe to be an important and timely area of research in philosophy, as well as across the range of disciplines represented by the project and UCHI. Coming from the UK, I am looking forward to working in the US and having the opportunity to learn more about the US education system, through collaborating with the Right Question Institute. Having recently spent time in the US as a post-doctoral fellow at the Institute for the Study of Human Flourishing, at the University of Oklahoma, I can also say that I am greatly looking forward to once again enjoying the delights of the ‘Twinkie’ back on US soil.

  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?”

    As a researcher (and human) I am deeply invested in finding ways in which I can contribute to a better world. What that world can and should look like are questions that can be articulated and explored through the humanities. Without asking questions about the value or meaning of our choices and actions as a society or a species, it is unclear to me what progress in our intellectual or practical endeavours, or indeed in any other domain, would look like. Perhaps most importantly, I believe firmly that a diversity of perspectives must contribute to human thought and progress. Humanities research allows for this diversity through its departure from any single method, approach, or value system.

Four Questions with Dexter Gabriel

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Headshot of Dexter Gabriel

1. Tell us a bit about the project you are working on at UCHI.

My current project, Jubilee’s Experiment: The British West Indies and American Abolitionism, examines the ways in which the emancipated British Caribbean colonies entered into the debates over abolition and African-American citizenship in the United States from the 1830s through the 1860s. It analyzes this discourse as both propaganda and rhetoric, created by abolitionists, black and white, and African-Americans more generally, in antebellum America.

2.What drew you to this topic and what exciting developments are you anticipating?

This was a public discourse, taking place in newspapers, pamphlets, manuscripts, speeches, and even public spectacles. The most prominent of these were annual memorials of British Emancipation. These were held every August 1, primarily in the Northeast. It was coming across a poster for one of these events that first drew me to the topic, as I wanted to know why thousands of American abolitionists and reformers were celebrating the end of slavery in the British West Indies. What did it mean to them? Why did they think it important? What were they hoping to accomplish? As part of my project, I’m working on digitally mapping these August First commemorations as they took place throughout New England. It will be interesting to see what information they provide about attendants, mass mobilization, and social movements in the nineteenth-century.

3. What are you looking forward to in regard to this year at UCHI?

First, I’m looking forward to getting work done on the manuscript. I’m grateful that the fellowship will allow me the space and time needed towards that goal. I’m also looking forward to engaging with the other scholars in residence, and the chance to work, dialogue, share and exchange ideas within a vibrant intellectual community.

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?”

The humanities remain a fundamental part of a liberal arts education. It helps us explore the human experience and provides a better understanding of both our own society and the world we live in. Within my own work, research into the history of slavery and emancipation helps us understand how people in the past grappled with the immense moral issues of their day—and perhaps offer some insight into how we might do the same in our time.