News

DHMS Presents Shaoling Ma

Posted on February 11, 2021June 29, 2021 by Della Zazzera, Elizabeth

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

The Digital Humanities and Media Studies Initiative presents:

What Do Media Do? The ‘Case’ of Late Qing China, 1861–1906

Shaoling Ma (Assistant Professor of Humanities, Literature, Yale-NUS College)

February 22, 2021, 6:00–7:15pm

An online webinar. Registration is required for attendance.

During the last few decades of the Manchu Qing dynasty (1644–1912), writers, intellectuals, reformers, and revolutionaries grasped what it is that media do even as they did not yet employ a distinct term for communicative media (meiti) as such. My talk, largely based on my forthcoming book, The Stone and the Wireless, Mediating China 1861-1906, asserts that media do not mediate between this and that entity before first mediating between some version of its already mediated form as discursive representations in texts and images, and the apparently unmediated technical device or process. If mediation names not just an object of inquiry but also a comparative method, then “late Qing China” refers to more than a case study. The road to an immanently media inquiry does not have to lead to China, but it might be worthwhile to begin there. My first book starts with the deceptively simple question of what it is that media do: there, the political economy or actual work of mediation only surfaces intermittently. It feels appropriate for a second project to ask why it is that digital media have particular trouble representing their modes of production. I will end my talk by briefly sketching this question in the People’s Republic of China’s hyped, digital ascent, in its cultures of platform extractivism foregrounding the low-brow, the crude, and the rural poor.

Shaoling Ma is an Assistant Professor of Humanities (Literature) at Yale-NUS College. She was born in Taiwan, grew up in Singapore, and spent ten years in the United States where she obtained her PhD (University of Southern California, Comparative Literature), and subsequently taught at Pennsylvania State University. Her research interests include literary and critical theory, media studies, and global Chinese literature, film, and art. She has published in academic journals such as Configurations, Mediations, and positions. Her first book manuscript, The Stone and the Wireless: Mediating China, 1861-1906 is forthcoming in 2021 with Duke University Press as part of the ‘Sign, Storage, Transmission’ series.

Co-sponsored by the Asian and Asian American Studies Institute

Watch now:

Fellow’s Talk: Erica Holberg on the Pleasures of Group Anger

Posted on February 9, 2021June 29, 2021 by Della Zazzera, Elizabeth

How the Pleasures of Group Anger Help Explain the Assault on the U.S. Capitol

Erica Holberg (Visiting Fellow, UCHI)

with a response by Scott Wallace

Wednesday, February 17, 2021, 4:00pm (Online—Register here)

If one thing is clear about the January 6th assault on the U. S. Capitol, it is that no one description adequately captures who the participants were, the action they committed, and the motivation for their actions. This talk will focus on an incoherence that many of the participants evinced about what they were doing, how to accomplish their aims, and to what extent their actions were justified. I will argue that we can better understand the actions of some significant portion of the participants in seeing how the logic of anger, which is grounded in how anger functions for individual angry agents, collided with practices of group anger, which is structured differently, being more like pleasurable, leisurely, angry play. Individual anger, in its normal functioning and in order to be taken seriously as anger by others, exerts practical pressure: the point of individual anger as process is to secure redress for the wrong suffered, including revenge upon the wrongdoer. But group anger as activity is different: because we are all feeling angry as a group, I do not, on my own, need to act to resolve this anger. In the assault on the Capitol the rhetorical practices of group anger as an activity joined with the practical and temporal features of individual anger as a process, with horrific results.

Erica A. Holberg is a virtue ethicist who uses the historical, ethical theories of Aristotle and Kant to examine our own virtues, vices, conception of pleasure, and account of how pleasure matters for good living. Her research sets aside the question of what pleasure is to focus instead on how pleasure functions in our lives, for better or for worse. She is the 2016 recipient of the North American Kant Society’s Wilfrid Sellars Essay Prize for the best paper on Kant by an untenured scholar, and her work has appeared in The Southern Journal of Philosophy, Kantian Review, and Polis: The Journal for Ancient Greek and Roman Political Thought. Her UCHI Fellowship project is a book about the pleasures of anger, and how the phenomenology and practical considerations differ for anger done as an individual or anger done as a group.

Scott Wallace is an award-winning writer and photojournalist who covers the environment and endangered cultures. He is an Associate Professor of Journalism at the University of Connecticut since 2017 and an Affiliate Faculty member at El Instituto. Wallace is a frequent contributor to National Geographic. His work has also appeared in Harper’s, Grand Street, Smithsonian Journeys Quarterly and many others. Notable Publications: The Unconquered: In Search of the Amazon’s Last Uncontacted Tribes (Crown, 2011); “Threatened by the Outside World,” National Geographic, November 2018; “The last stand of the Amazon’s Arrow People,” New York Times, September 27, 2017.

Registration is required for the event.

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

Watch now:

DHMS Presents Allen Riddell

Posted on February 5, 2021February 10, 2021 by Della Zazzera, Elizabeth

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

The Digital Humanities and Media Studies Initiative presents:

Every Victorian Novel: Dispatches from Data-Intensive Book History

Allen Riddell (Assistant Professor of Information Science, Indiana University)

February 15, 2021, 4:00–5:15pm

An online webinar. Registration is required for attendance.

This talk reviews three recent contributions to the history of fiction publishing in the British Isles and Ireland during the 19th century. The three papers share an investment in an inclusive history of the novel and of novel-writing as a profession. They depend on, to varying degrees, the availability of machine-readable bibliographies and of digital surrogates of volumes held by legal deposit libraries (e.g., Oxford’s Bodleian, British Library).

The first article, “Reassembling the English Novel, 1789—1919,” forthcoming in Cultural Analytics, estimates annual rates of novel publication for each year between 1789 and 1919. This period—which witnessed the publication of between 40,000 and 63,000 previously-unpublished novels—merits attention because it was during this period that institutions, organizational practices, and technologies associated with the contemporary text industry emerged.

The second article, “The Class of 1838: A Social History of the First Victorian Novelists,” revisits a research question introduced by Raymond Williams in The Long Revolution (1961) (Chapter 5, “The Social History of English Writers”). This article, published last year, examines the social origins of the 81 novelists who published a novel in 1838. Replicating Williams’s research is essential because Williams’s original study was, by his own admission, preliminary and depended on a small, non-probability sample of writers.

The talk concludes with an assessment of four major digital libraries’ coverage of published Victorian novels. (The digital libraries studied are the Internet Archive, HathiTrust, Google Books, and the British Library.) While evidence suggests that a majority of Victorian novels have been digitized, multivolume novels and novels by male authors are overrepresented relative to their share of the population of published novels. This third paper also provides an occasion to reflect on the past decade of data-intensive literary history, a research field whose prospects have been linked to mass digitization of research and national libraries.

Allen Riddell is Assistant Professor of Information Science in the Luddy School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering at Indiana University Bloomington. His research explores applications of modern statistical methods in literary history and text-based media studies. He is the co-author with Folgert Karsdorp and Mike Kestemont of Humanities Data Analysis (Princeton University Press, 2021) (open-access edition in 2022). Prior to coming to Indiana, Riddell was a Neukom Fellow at the Neukom Institute for Computational Sciences and the Leslie Center for the Humanities at Dartmouth College.

The Political Theory Workshop Presents: Arash Davari

Posted on February 4, 2021February 2, 2021 by Della Zazzera, Elizabeth

THE POLITICAL THEORY WORKSHOP PRESENTS

Bandung against Bandung: Muslim Democracy as Realistic Utopia

Arash Davari, Politics, Whitman College
with commentary by Justin Theodra, Political Science, UConn
February 12th, 12:20–2:00p.m. via Zoom

At the end of the Cold War, Iranian “religious intellectuals” increasingly concerned with democratic politics and disillusioned with the revolutionary postures of an Islamic Republic rejected the third worldism long associated with the Asian-Africa Conference held in Bandung in 1955. Ali Shariati’s legacy played a prominent role in these debates. Many dismissed utopian aspirations altogether, announcing their differences with him. Others cordoned off the parts of Shariati’s oeuvre that invoked Bandung from the essence of his ideas, claiming the former expressed support for statist authoritarianism. This article draws on recent scholarship to reassesses Shariati’s utopian political theory. It shows how Shariati’s “middle doctrine” [maktab-i vāseteh] bears affinities with Plato’s arguments in favor of democracy in the Republic. The consequent utopian vision predicates democracy and realism on Islam, not against it, providing for a “Bandung spirit” equipped to answer the challenges posed by today’s positivist critics.

With generous support from the UConn Humanities Institute.

Questions? Email jane.gordon@uconn.edu

Download the poster.

The Egyptian Revolution Ten Years On: A Teach-In

Posted on February 2, 2021February 2, 2021 by Della Zazzera, Elizabeth

Fellow’s Talk: Sean Frederick Forbes on Archaeological Revival

Posted on February 1, 2021 by Della Zazzera, Elizabeth

A Poetry Reading: Archeological Revival

Sean Frederick Forbes (Assistant Professor-in-Residence of English, UConn)

with a response by Amy Meyers

Wednesday, February 10, 2021, 4:00pm (Online—Register here)

Sean Frederick Forbes will read selected poems from his work-in-progress, Archaeological Revival. He’ll discuss the genesis of his project, his artistic, cultural and literary influences, and what shapes his poetic narrative style of writing.

Sean Frederick Forbes is an Assistant Professor-in-Residence of English and the Director of the Creative Writing Program at the University of Connecticut. His poems have appeared in Chagrin River Review, Sargasso, A Journal of Caribbean Literature, Language, and Culture, Crab Orchard Review, Long River Review, and Midwest Quarterly. In 2009, he received a Woodrow Wilson Mellon Mays University Fellows Travel and Research Grant for travel to Providencia, Colombia. Providencia, his first book of poetry, was published in 2013. He has co-edited two collections of personal narratives titled What Does It Mean to be White in America? Breaking the White Code of Silence: Personal Narratives by White Americans (2016) and The Beiging of America: Being Mixed Race in the 21st Century (2017). He serves as the poetry editor for New Square, the official publication of The Sancho Panza Literary Society for which he is a founding member. In 2017, he received first place in the Nutmeg Poetry Contest from the Connecticut Poetry Society.

Amy Meyers (Yale Ph.D., American Studies, 1985) retired from the directorship of the Yale Center for British Art in June of 2019. Prior to her appointment in July of 2002, she spent much of her career at research institutes, including Dumbarton Oaks; the Center for Advanced Study in Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; and The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens, where she served as Curator of American Art from 1988 through June of 2002. Meyers also has taught the history of art at the University of Michigan, the California Institute of Technology, and Yale, where she was an affiliate of the History of Science and Medicine Program and an adjunct professor in the Department of the History of Art. Meyers has written extensively on the visual and material culture of natural history in the transatlantic world, serving as editor of Knowing Nature: Art and Science in Philadelphia, 1740 to 1840 (Yale University Press, 2011, with the assistance of Lisa Ford); with Harold Cook and Pamela Smith, Ways of Making and Knowing: The Material Culture of Empirical Knowledge (University of Michigan Press, 2011); with Therese O’Malley, The Art of Natural History: Illustrated Treatises and Botanical Paintings, 1400-1850 (National Gallery of Art, Studies in The History of Art Series, 2008); Art and Science in America: Issues of Representation (The Huntington, 1998); and, with Margaret Pritchard, Empire’s Nature: Mark Catesby’s New World Vision (University of North Carolina Press, 1998). She also has worked with colleagues to organize numerous international symposia in the field, including Curious Specimens: Enlightenment Objects, Collections, Narratives (London, 2010), Ways of Making and Knowing: The Material Culture of Empirical Knowledge (London, 2005); and ‘Curious in Our Way’: The Culture of Nature in Philadelphia, 1740 to 1840 (Philadelphia, 2004).

Registration is required for the event.

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

Publishing NOW: Humanities Journals

Posted on January 28, 2021January 28, 2021 by Della Zazzera, Elizabeth

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

The University of Connecticut Humanities Institute presents:

Publishing NOW!

Humanities Journals: Advice from Three Journal Editors.

Heather Battaly (Philosophy, UConn)
David G. Embrick (Sociology and Africana Studies, UConn)
Charles Mahoney (English and Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies, UConn)

February 10, 2021, 1:15–2:30pm

An online webinar. Event registration is required for attendance.

Heather Battaly is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Connecticut. She specializes in epistemology, ethics, and virtue theory. She is the author of Virtue (Polity 2015), editor of The Routledge Handbook of Virtue Epistemology (2018) and of Virtue and Vice, Moral and Epistemic (Blackwell 2010), and Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Philosophical Research. She has published widely on the topics of intellectual virtue and intellectual vice. Her currents projects focus on humility, closed-mindedness, and vice epistemology.

David G. Embrick holds a joint position as Associate Professor in the Sociology Department and the Africana Studies Institute at the University of Connecticut. Embrick’s research has centered largely on the impact of contemporary forms of racism on people of color. While most of his research is on what he has labeled “diversity ideology” and inequalities in the business world, he has published on race and education, racial microaggressions, the impact of schools-welfare-and prisons on people of color, and issues of sex discrimination. He serves as the founding co-editor of Sociology of Race and Ethnicity, founding book series editor of “Sociology of Diversity” with Bristol University Press, and founding book series co-editor of “Sociology of Race and Ethnicity” with University of Georgia Press.

Charles Mahoney, Professor of English and Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies at the University of Connecticut, specializes in British Romantic literature and culture. The author and editor of various books and articles on Romantic poetry and non-fiction prose, he is currently completing work on an edition of Coleridge’s writings on Shakespeare for Princeton University Press. Since 2020, he has served as the editor of The Wordsworth Circle.

Fellow’s Talk: Amanda J. Crawford on Misinformation & the Media

Posted on January 20, 2021June 29, 2021 by Della Zazzera, Elizabeth

Misinformation & the Media: Lessons from the Sandy Hook Shooting

Amanda J. Crawford (Assistant Professor of Journalism, UConn)

with a response by Ashley Gangi (Ph.D. Candidate, English, UConn)

Wednesday, February 3, 2021, 4:00pm (Online—Register here)

After the 2012 mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School, the international media descended on the small town of Newtown, Connecticut. Though errors may be inevitable in breaking news coverage, the mistakes made by journalists in the first 24 hours fueled doubts about the shooting that linger today. Other coverage decisions exposed private individuals to years of harassment, fed “trolls,” and helped denialism to spread. As conspiracy theories roil public discourse, the lessons from Sandy Hook reveal points of caution for journalists and local governments and help illustrate the challenges in combatting misinformation.

Amanda J. Crawford is an assistant professor of journalism at the University of Connecticut, where she teaches reporting, journalism ethics and media law. A former reporter for Bloomberg News, The Arizona Republic and The Baltimore Sun, Crawford has covered elections and government across the U.S. and written extensively about gun policy, criminal justice, immigration, health care, reproductive rights and sexual assault. Her writing has been widely published in other major media outlets and literary journals including Businessweek, People, National Geographic, Ms. Magazine, Phoenix Magazine, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and Creative Nonfiction. Before coming to UConn, she held faculty appointments at Western Kentucky University and Arizona State University. Her UCHI fellowship project is a narrative nonfiction book that follows the fight against misinformation in the years since the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School.

Ashley Gangi is a fifth-year Ph.D. student in the English department at the University of Connecticut. Her research interests include nineteenth-century American literature, maritime literature, and literature of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era having to do with finance. Her dissertation, “May I Present Myself? Masks, Masquerades, and the Drama of Identity in Nineteenth-Century American Literature” explores the relationship between confidence men and women and conceptions of value in nineteenth-century America. She has been published in Studies in American Naturalism and has a piece forthcoming in the “Extracts” section of Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies.

Registration is required for the event.

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

Watch now:

Fellow’s Talk: Elizabeth Athens on William Bartram’s Vision of the Natural World

Posted on January 12, 2021January 12, 2021 by Della Zazzera, Elizabeth

An Essay Towards a Natural History of William Bartram’s Drawings

Elizabeth Athens (Assistant Professor of Art History)

with a response by Helen M. Rozwadowski (Professor of History, UConn)

Wednesday, January 27, 2021, 4:00pm (Online—Register here)

The act of drawing or “figuring” provided the American naturalist William Bartram (1739–1823) a model for understanding the natural world. Bartram saw figuring as a series of reciprocal interactions among natural world, artist, and audience, a view that coincided with his belief in a dynamic, responsive cosmos. Though the term ecology is of nineteenth-century origin, the study of the natural world’s relationships emerges in the eighteenth, and this presentation examines the affinity between Bartram’s graphic work and an interconnected natural world. In particular it considers how his drawings—by calling attention to their construction through visual quotations, jostling perspectives, and unusual flourishes—presented a new mode of natural history representation, one in which they function as extensions of the natural world’s own organic processes and patterns.

Elizabeth Athens is Assistant Professor of Art History at the University of Connecticut, where she teaches courses on museum studies, histories of collecting, and material culture. She previously served as part of the research team for the History of Early American Landscape Design database at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts in Washington, D.C., and as the American art curator of the Worcester Art Museum. Her current research centers on the work of the American artist-naturalist William Bartram (1739–1823), whose efforts helped redirect the taxonomic focus of eighteenth-century natural history to the study of lived relationships. This project examines Bartram’s unusual graphic practice and how his natural history drawings helped articulate such a shift.

Founder of the University of Connecticut’s Maritime Studies program, Helen M. Rozwadowski teaches history of science and environmental history as well as interdisciplinary and experiential maritime-related courses. She has spent her career encouraging scholars and students to join in writing the history of interconnections between oceans and people. Her book on the 19th-century scientific and cultural discovery of the depths, Fathoming the Ocean: The Discovery and Exploration of the Deep Sea, won the History of Science Society’s Davis Prize for best book directed to a wide public audience. In The Sea Knows No Boundaries she explores the history of 20th-century marine sciences that support international fisheries and marine environmental management. Recently she has co-edited Soundings and Crossings: Doing Science at Sea 1800-1970, one of several volumes that have established the field of history of oceanography. Her recent book, Vast Expanses: A History of the Oceans (Reaktion Books, 2018), which won the Sharon Harris Book Award from UCHI in 2019, has come out in a Korean edition in 2019 and a Chinese edition in 2020.

Registration is required for the event.

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

Statement Condemning the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol

Posted on January 7, 2021January 26, 2021 by Della Zazzera, Elizabeth

Truth matters. As yesterday’s horrifying events illustrate, this is not an abstract principle, but a core practical commitment of democratic governance. When we ignore reality, dismiss the evidence, or simply encourage those who do so, we eat away at the foundations of our republic.

The value of truth in a democracy consists, most fundamentally, in the value of its pursuit through inquiry—the pursuit of the political facts, historical and literary context, and the basic principles of ethics—and through the different forms of knowledge and artistic expression cultivated in the humanities. In better times we often leave these things unsaid; but in times of crisis, they must be said, with fortitude and clarity.

We at the UConn Humanities Institute proudly reaffirm our commitment to these values—to justice, to democracy, to truth.

Michael P. Lynch
Director, UConn Humanities Institute

The Digital Humanities and Media Studies Initiative presents:

What Do Media Do? The ‘Case’ of Late Qing China, 1861–1906

Shaoling Ma (Assistant Professor of Humanities, Literature, Yale-NUS College)

How the Pleasures of Group Anger Help Explain the Assault on the U.S. Capitol

Erica Holberg (Visiting Fellow, UCHI)

with a response by Scott Wallace

Wednesday, February 17, 2021, 4:00pm (Online—Register here)

The Digital Humanities and Media Studies Initiative presents:

Every Victorian Novel: Dispatches from Data-Intensive Book History

Allen Riddell (Assistant Professor of Information Science, Indiana University)

THE POLITICAL THEORY WORKSHOP PRESENTS

Bandung against Bandung: Muslim Democracy as Realistic Utopia

Friday February 26, 2021

Saturday February 27, 2021

A Poetry Reading: Archeological Revival

Sean Frederick Forbes (Assistant Professor-in-Residence of English, UConn)

with a response by Amy Meyers

Wednesday, February 10, 2021, 4:00pm (Online—Register here)

The University of Connecticut Humanities Institute presents:

Publishing NOW!

Humanities Journals: Advice from Three Journal Editors.

Misinformation & the Media: Lessons from the Sandy Hook Shooting

Amanda J. Crawford (Assistant Professor of Journalism, UConn)

with a response by Ashley Gangi (Ph.D. Candidate, English, UConn)

Wednesday, February 3, 2021, 4:00pm (Online—Register here)

An Essay Towards a Natural History of William Bartram’s Drawings

Elizabeth Athens (Assistant Professor of Art History)

with a response by Helen M. Rozwadowski (Professor of History, UConn)

Wednesday, January 27, 2021, 4:00pm (Online—Register here)

Subscribe to our newsletter

Related Links

Upcoming Events