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Alexander Heffner, PBS. “Picking Up the Pieces”

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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”

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“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

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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

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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

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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.

“The finest rule of life we have”

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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

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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

“Humility In Politics” Event Kicks Off UConn’s Public Discourse Research Project

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Humility and vulnerability are no longer values that are rewarded in the political arena, and it’s up to individuals, and their relationships, to begin a sea change that could “trickle up” into political leadership.

That was the message Tuesday evening as prominent political figures, journalists, educators, academics and nonprofit leaders came together for a public forum, titled “Humility in Politics,” in Washington, D.C.

Panelists and moderators from the Humility in Politics forum at the Folger Shakespeare Theater was held on Tuesday, September 20, 2016 in Washington, DC Photos by GH Studios. © Garrett Hubbard 2016

The event, sponsored by UConn’s Humanities Institute and a $5.75 million investment in UConn by the John Templeton Foundation, kicked off a three-year research initiative, aptly named The Humility and Conviction in Public Life project.

The project aims to investigate how intellectual humility – through being aware of our own innate biases and responses to new evidence – can overcome current political divisiveness.

“This is an unprecedented attempt to apply humanities and social science research to solve problems in the political sphere,” said Michael Lynch, professor of philosophy and director of the Humanities Institute, in his opening remarks.

continue here

 

The Humanities Institute is pleased to announce the appointment of Alexis L. Boylan as New Associate Director

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Alexis L. Boylan, Associate Professor, (Art & Art History and Women’s, Gender, & Sexuality Studies).

Professor Boylan’s research focus is on American art from the colonial to the contemporary periods, with particular emphasis on race and gender. She is succeeding Brendan Kane, Associate Professor (History) who is completing his term as Associate Director.

 

 

 

Congratulations to UCHI’s Communications Coordinator Tiziana Matarazzo, on her recent book

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Micromorphological Analysis of Activity Areas Sealed by Vesuvius’ Avellino Eruption: The Early Bronze Age Village of Afragola in Southern Italy

Tiziana Matarazzo headshotThe remarkable preservation of the Early Bronze Age village of Afragola on the Campania Plain of Southern Italy is unmatched in Europe. The site was buried under nearly a meter of volcanic ash deposited by the Avellino eruption of Vesuvius ca. 3945+10 cal. BP. The site boasts a large number of well-preserved structures, built features and organic materials and thus provides a laboratory-type setting in which to investigate variability in artifact distribution and activity areas across a single village. This research utilizes micromorphological analysis of thin sections of undisturbed sediment collected at the site to understand how people used living spaces, organized daily activities and, when possible, to connect village life to broad issues related to the emergence of social complexity on the Campanian Plain. In particular, micromorphology is used to identify the type and range of human activities, the function of features and buildings, and the intensity of site occupation. The micromorphological analysis at Afragola provides a unique example of a briefly occupied agricultural village with what appears to be minimally stratified social organization during the Early Bronze Age of southern Italy.

Tiziana Matarazzo recently completed a Ph.D. in Anthropology at the University of Connecticut. Presently she is the Communications Coordinator and webmaster at the Humanities Institute.  She is also a research scientist affiliated with the Department of Anthropology at Uconn, where she continues her earlier research on the Micromorphology of archaeological sites in Southern Italy.