Events Archive

José Torres-Tama, "Performance Art & Social Change: The Artist as Provocateur"

September 14, 2020

Live art lecture on José Torres-Tama's documentary theater process for empowering and chronicling the voices of undocumented immigrant communities and marginalized communities of color.
 

Registration link

This event is part of the following series:

CYBER RESIDENCY ON PERFORMANCE ART AND SOCIAL CHANGE
with José Torres-Tama
online September 14-19, 2020
presented by the University of Virginia Department of Drama with support from the IHGC Lab in Performance Cultures & Embodied Creative Practices
 
A weeklong series of online work sessions and performances with award-winning Torres-Tama, who uses visual and performance art to explore the effects of mass media on race relations, the “North American Dream” mythology, and anti-immigrant hysteria.

Humanities Informatics Lab Final Showcase: Human and Machine Intelligence

September 9, 2020

The Human and Machine Intelligence Group was formed three years ago with a few interested participants. It now has over 100 members with a mixture of faculty, graduate students, undergraduate students, and external members, drawn from nine of UVA's twelve schools. It has hosted more than 65 speakers from 16 universities and research institutes. The Showcase panel features three or our members discussing their HMI related research ranging from Law, through Statistics to Economics. The talks are aimed at a broad audience.

Panel:

Ashley Deeks, The E. James Kelly, Jr. Class of 1965 Research Professor of Law: “Predicting Enemies” 
Anton Korinek, Associate Professor of Economics: “AI and the Future of Work” 
Dan Spitzner, Associate Professor of Statistics: “Socially-Inclusive Foundations of Statistics” 
Jack Chen, Associate Professor of Chinese Literature, moderator

Humanities Informatics - Symposium and Exhibition

April 3, 2020

CANCELLED: Sarah Nuttall, "Pluvial Time and the Novel Form"

March 16, 2020

Sarah Nuttall is Professor of Literary and Cultural Studies and Director of WiSER (Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research) in Johannesburg, South Africa. She is the author of Entanglement: Literary and Cultural Reflections on Postapartheid, editor of Beautiful/Ugly: African and Diaspora Aesthetics, and co-editor of many books including Negotiating the Past: The Making of Memory in South Africa; Senses of Culture; Johannesburg: The Elusive Metropolis and Loadshedding: Writing On and Over the Edge of South Africa. Recent essays include ‘Mandela’s Mortality’; ‘Secrecy’s Softwares’; ‘Surface, Depth and the Autobiographical Act’; ‘The Redistributed University’; and ‘The Earth as a Prison?’ She has given more than thirty keynote addresses around the world, and published more than sixty journal articles and book chapters. Her work is widely cited across many disciplines. She has taught at Yale and Duke Universities and in 2016 she was an Oppenheimer Fellow at the DuBois Institute at Harvard University. For seven years she has directed WiSER, the largest and most established Humanities Institute across the Global South.

Deborah Baker, Seminar & Workshop on "Narrative in the Age of Political Extremism"

March 16, 2020

Spring Seminar with IHGC Distinguished Writer-in-Residence, Deborah Baker

 “Narrative in the Age of Political Extremism”

March 16 (Mon), March 23 (Mon),

March 30 (Mon) and April 6 (Mon)

Time: 3.00-5.00pm

Venue: Wilson 142

(except for March 16 - Wilson 117)

We are living in a time of rising extremism and increasing polarization around the world.  This trend has been accompanied by acts of millenarian terror, generally committed by men who believe themselves and their identities and beliefs to be facing an existential threat.  What narrative strategies can be used to dramatize the conflict between those who want to destroy civil society, replacing civic norms with ones in which they are the unquestioned arbiters, and those who seek to protect the status quo? In this seminar we will look at works of fiction and narrative non-fiction that have captured this struggle in all its moral, political, and historical dimensions.

Reading list:

The Convert by Deborah Baker (narrative non-fiction)

One of Us: The Story of a Massacre in Norway by Asne Sierstad  (narrative non-fiction)

American War by Omar el Akkad (futurist fiction)

The Plot Against America by Philip Roth (speculative fiction)

Defying Hitler by Sebastien Haffner  (posthumous memoir)

The seminar will be capped at 20 participants, and the books will be provided to all, either as digital copies or in print, by the end of February 2020. The call will close on February 24.

Please register here:

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSeTmkTo-rUiQnqu39exnL9O1-U-qM_S0u3QelZ1joJTrD2CVw/viewform

Bio: Deborah Baker was born in Charlottesville and grew up in Virginia, Puerto Rico and New England.  She attended the University of Virginia and the University of Cambridge.  Her first biography, written in college, was Making a Farm: The Life of Robert Bly, published by Beacon Press in 1982. After working a number of years as a book editor and publisher, in 1990 she moved to Calcutta where she wrote In Extremis; The Life of Laura Riding.  Published by Grove Press and Hamish Hamilton in the UK, it was shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize in Biography in 1994.  Her third book, A Blue Hand: The Beats in India was published by Penguin Press USA and Penguin India in 2008. In 2008–2009 she was a Fellow at the Dorothy and Lewis C. Cullman Center for Writers and Scholars at The New York Public Library.  There she researched and wrote The Convert: A Tale of Exile and Extremism, a narrative account of the life of an American convert to Islam, drawn on letters on deposit in the library’s manuscript division. The Convert, published by Graywolf and Penguin India, was a finalist for the 2011 National Book Award in Non-Fiction. In August 2018, Baker published her fifth work of non-fiction, The Last Englishmen: Love, War and the End of Empire. She has two children and is married to the writer Amitav Ghosh. They divide their time between Brooklyn and Goa.

Caroline Elkins, "The ‘Moral Effect’ of Legalized Lawlessness in the British Empire" (convened by Erik Linstrum)

February 27, 2020

Professor Elkins's first book, Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain's Gulag in Kenya, was awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction. It was also selected as one of the Economist's best history books for 2005, was a New York Times editor's choice, and was a finalist for the Lionel Gelber Award. She and her research were also the subjects of a 2002 BBC documentary titled, Kenya: White Terror, which was awarded the International Committee of the Red Cross Award at the Monte Carlos Film Festival. Professor Elkins is a contributor to The New York Times Book Review, The Atlantic, and The New Republic. She has also appeared on numerous radio and television programs including NPR's All Things Considered, BBC's The World, and PBS's Charlie Rose. Professor Elkins's current research interests include colonial violence and post-conflict reconciliation in Africa, and violence and the decline of the British Empire. She is currently working on two projects: one examining the effects of violence and amnesia on local communities and nation-building in post-independent Kenya; the other analyzing British counter-insurgency operations after the Second World War, with case studies including Palestine, Malaya, Kenya, Cyprus, and Nyasaland. Professor Elkins teaches courses on modern Africa, protest in East Africa, human rights in Africa, and British colonial violence in the 20th century.

Mellon Fellows Seminar - Katelyn Hale Wood, "Listening Backwards: Archiving Laughter and Queer Sonic Intimacies"

February 7, 2020

Katelyn Hale Wood is a performance studies scholar and theatre historian whose research engages the intersections of critical race and queer theory, gender studies, and 20th/21st century comedic performance. Her first book project, tentatively titled Modalities of Freedom: Black Feminist Comedic Performance in 20th and 21st Century USA, argues how the work of Black feminist stand-up comedians have played vital roles in queer, feminist, and anti-racist community building. Her work has been published in Theatre Topics, QED: A Journal in GLTBQ Worldmaking, and Departures in Critical Qualitative Research, and has also been supported by the American Society for Theatre Research and the National Center for Institutional Diversity. 

Wood received her Ph.D. in Theatre History and Criticism with an emphasis in African American Studies from the University of Texas at Austin (2014). Prior to joining the faculty at UVA, she taught in the Theatre History and Theory program at Miami University. Alongside her scholarship, Wood is also a dramaturge. 

At UVA, Wood teaches courses in theatre history, performance theory, as well as interdisciplinary topics, such as race and performance in the Americas, queer and feminist performance in the U.S., and comedy as protest.

Joan Wallach Scott, "Accounting for History: The Movements for Reparations for Slavery in the U.S."

January 30, 2020

Reviewing the long history of demands for reparations and looking closely at the current movements, Joan Scott will argue that although material compensation is certainly part of the effort, the demand for reparations is best understood as a critique of the conventional writing of American history.  It is an example of a critical politics that takes its aim at the way history represents the past.

Joan Scott is Professor Emerita in the School of Social Science in the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ. Her groundbreaking work has challenged the foundations of conventional historical practice, including the nature of historical evidence and historical experience and the role of narrative in the writing of history. She is the author of numerous books that have been important for numerous disciplines and debates. These include Gender and the Politics of History (1988), Only Paradoxes to Offer: French Feminists and the Rights of Man (1996), Parité: Sexual Equality and the Crisis of French Universalism (2005), The Politics of the Veil (2007), The Fantasy of Feminist History (2011), Sex and Secularism (2017), and Knowledge, Power, and Academic Freedom (2018).

Prof. Scott’s visit is co-sponsored by the Institute for Humanities and Global Cultures, Political Theory: An International Journal of Political Philosophy, the Departments of Politics and of Women, Gender, and Sexuality, The Virginia Center for the Study of Religion, and the Power, Violence, and Inequality Collective.

Pluralizing Political Thought: Introducing The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Political Theory: Murad Idris, Leigh K. Jenco, and Megan C. Thomas in conversation with Ian Baucom, Roxanne L. Euben, and Lawrie Balfour

January 16, 2020

On January 16, the Asian Cosmopolitanisms Lab are hosting 'Pluralizing Political Thought: Introducing The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Political Theory: Murad Idris, Leigh K. Jenco, and Megan C. Thomas in conversation with Ian Baucom, Roxanne L. Euben, and Lawrie Balfour' in the Harrison Small Auditorium. The event will take place at 4pm, and will be followed by a reception. 

Mellon Fellows Seminar - Ahmed al-Rahim, "Mobility and Knowledge in the Mongol Empire: The “Peripatetic School” (Madrasa-ye Sayyārā) of the Ilḫān Ūlǧāytū (r. 1304-16 A.D.)""

November 15, 2019

Ahmed H. al-Rahim works on Arabo-Islamic intellectual and religious history from Muhammad to Avicenna to Abū-Bakr al-Baghdādī. His research and teaching cut across the centuries, spanning the Arabic reception history of Avicennan philosophy during Islam’s so-called “dark ages,” from the eleventh to the fourteenth century, the development of Islamic ethics in the Middle Ages, and the ideologies of political Islam, also known as Islamism, in the Middle East in the early nineteenth to twenty-first century. Professor al-Rahim is currently working on a history of etiquette literature and manuals of practical virtue ethics (ādāb) in Islamicate civilization, and on a short introduction to modern Islamist ideologies. His publications include: Islamic Ethics: An Introduction to the Classical Tradition, New Islamic Surveys (Edinburgh University Press, Forthcoming); The Creation of Philosophical Tradition: Biography and the Reception of Avicenna’s Philosophy from the Eleventh to the Fourteenth Century A.D., Diskurse der Arabistik; XXI (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2018); and Before and After Avicenna: Proceedings of the First Conference of the Avicenna Study Group, co-edited with D.C. Reisman, Islamic Philosophy, Theology and Science. Texts and Studies, LII (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 2003).

Lucy Neave, "Environment Crisis, De-colonization and Signification in Alexis Wright’s The Swan Book

November 7, 2019

Alexis Wright’s The Swan Book focuses on an Australian Aboriginal woman character named Oblivia, who emerges after a ten-year period of a trauma-induced ‘sleep’ in the ‘deep underground bowel of a giant eucalyptus tree’ where she writes ‘stanzas in ancient symbols’ (7). The setting of the novel is an imagined future of cataclysmic climate change, as well as an unresolved and ongoing settler past and present, in which First Nations people experience pervasive mental and affective colonization. Oblivia and other occupants of the polluted Northern Australian swamp where she lives, desire survival and connection with their ancestral lands.The novel’s narrative is inextricably bound up with images and texts pertaining to colonial pasts and also indigenous forms of storytelling. The swans who come to the swamp as refugees of climate change, exist as intertextual entities. This talk examines the extent to which the swans in the novel and Oblivia’s relationship with them dramatize questions around the ravages of settler colonialism and environmental crisis.

Biographical Note
Lucy Neave is conducting research for a book: Crisis, Kinship and the Animal in Twenty-First Century Literature (working title). She is the author of a series of papers on the representation of animals in contemporary literature, and a novel, Who We Were (Text Publishing, Melbourne, 2013), as well as short fiction. In spring 2019, she is a visiting scholar in the New York University department of English and Comparative Literature. She teaches creative writing and literary studies at the Australian National University.

Virginia Film Festival: Middle Eastern & South Asian Sidebar

October 23, 2019

Link for viewing trailers, descriptions, and screening information, and for reserving tickets -https://virginiafilmfestival.org/filmcategory/middle-eastern-south-asian-sidebar/