Events Archive
Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert (Vassar College), "Archipelagic Plastic: Art and Sea Currents in Caribbean Art"
January 25, 2019
Wilson Hall 142 | 2:00 PMLizabeth Paravisini-Gebert (Vassar College), "Archipelagic Plastic: Art and Sea Currents in Caribbean Art"
January 25, 2019
Wilson Hall 142 | 2:00 PMThis project addresses art projects that speak to plastic debris and rising sea levels in the Caribbean, putting them in conversation with literature from the region.
Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert works in the fields of literature, ecocriticism and environmental history, art history, and cultural studies, specializing in the multidisciplinary, comparative study of the Caribbean. Growing up in native Puerto Rico, she became fascinated by the many cultural connections between Caribbean peoples despite our different histories and languages and have made that the subject of my research and teaching. Professor Paravisini-Gebert is based in the Hispanic Studies Department at Vassar College and is a member of the Programs in Environmental Studies, Latin American Studies, International Studies, and Women’s Studies. She is currently working on The Amazon Parrots of the Caribbean: An Environmental Biography, a new book project, and on a translation of Dominican author Pedro Vergés’ 1982 novel, Solo cenizas hallarás with her friend and colleague Margarite Fernández Olmos.
Jerome McGann (UVA), “Colonial Exceptionalism on Native Grounds: American Literature before American Literature”
November 16, 2018
Wilson Hall 142 | 10:30 am - 12:00 pmJerome McGann (UVA), “Colonial Exceptionalism on Native Grounds: American Literature before American Literature”
November 16, 2018
Wilson Hall 142 | 10:30 am - 12:00 pmThe lecture collates material from the opening and closing chapters of my recently completed American Literature before American Literature. The book takes off from Constance Rourke’s insight into what she called “the roots of American culture”: that nearly all the cultural work of the British colonial period has a decisively “practical” focus. Equally decisive was the pressure point for the period’s practical issues: Contact between two radically different civilizations and their conflicted values, the one Early Modern, the other Neolithic. That “Exceptional” experience established a set of tense cultural norms and demands that prevail in American literature and culture to the present.
Bio: Jerome McGann, the John Stewart Bryan University Professor, has been working primarily in American Studies for the past six years, though his interest in Romantic and post-Romantic poetry and poetics continues. He is preparing a study of American writing from 1790 to 1945, the sequel to American Literature before American Literature.
Ken Liu, "Betrayal with Integrity: Conformance and Estrangement in Translating Chinese Science Fiction"
November 8, 2018
Nau Hall 101 | 5:00 PMKen Liu, "Betrayal with Integrity: Conformance and Estrangement in Translating Chinese Science Fiction"
November 8, 2018
Nau Hall 101 | 5:00 PMMellon Fellows Symposium (with Jarrett Zigon & Aynne Kokas)
November 2, 2018
Wilson Hall 142 | 10:30 amMellon Fellows Symposium (with Jarrett Zigon & Aynne Kokas)
November 2, 2018
Wilson Hall 142 | 10:30 amMellon Fellows Symposium
November 2
Wilson 142
10.30-11.30am
Jarrett Zigon, William & Linda Porterfield Chair in Biomedical Ethics and Professor of Anthropology
"A War on People: Dying-with and the Relational Ethics and Politics of Community"
11.30am-12.30pm
Aynne Kokas, Assistant Professor, Department of Media Studies
"The New Cybersovereigns: Power, Control, and Data Between China and the United States"
12.30-1.00pm - Lunch
Jarrett Zigon's interests include the anthropology of moralities and ethics; the intertwining of humans, worlds and situations; political activity and theory; the intersection of anthropology and philosophy; the drug war; artificial intelligence and ethics; and data ethics. These interests are taken up from the perspective of an anthropology strongly influenced by post-Heideggerian continental philosophy and critical theory, the theoretical articulation of which he names critical hermeneutics.
Aynne Kokas is an assistant professor of media studies at the University of Virginia. Kokas’ work focuses on the intersections between Chinese and US media and technology industries. Her book, Hollywood Made in China (University of California Press 2017), examines the cultural, political and economic implications of US media investment in China as it becomes the world’s largest film market. Hollywood Made in China has been profiled or cited publications in seven languages and forty-two countries. Kokas’ research on China’s media industry has also appeared or is forthcoming in publications including PLOS One, Global Media and Communication, The Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Communication, and In Media Res.
Leila Neti (Occidental College), “Global Fictions of History: Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone and the Kohinoor Diamond”
November 2, 2018
Wilson Hall 142 | 3:00 pm - 5:00 pmLeila Neti (Occidental College), “Global Fictions of History: Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone and the Kohinoor Diamond”
November 2, 2018
Wilson Hall 142 | 3:00 pm - 5:00 pmBio: Professor Leila Neti's teaching and research interests focus on postcolonial and transnational literature, theory, and film, nineteenth century British literature, and cultural studies. In particular, her courses examine film and literature with reference to the larger cultural, political, and social formations within which these works are produced and consumed.
Joshua August “Gus” Skorburg (Duke University), "What Kinds of Data Science Research are Subject to Ethical Review?"
November 2, 2018
Gibson Room, Cocke Hall | 3:30 pm - 5:00 pmJoshua August “Gus” Skorburg (Duke University), "What Kinds of Data Science Research are Subject to Ethical Review?"
November 2, 2018
Gibson Room, Cocke Hall | 3:30 pm - 5:00 pmBio: Joshua August Skorburg completed his PhD in Philosophy at the University of Oregon. His research is in applied ethics (bioethics, neuroethics, data ethics), moral psychology (virtue theory and feminist ethics), and the philosophy of cognitive science. In addition to the MIDS program, he is affiliated with the Department of Philosophy and the Kenan Institute for Ethics at Duke. He is currently working on a number of theoretical and empirical projects about the nature of self and identity.
Heekyoung Cho, “Rethinking World Literature through the Relations between Russian and East Asian Literatures”
November 1, 2018
Wilson Hall 142 | 4:00 pmHeekyoung Cho, “Rethinking World Literature through the Relations between Russian and East Asian Literatures”
November 1, 2018
Wilson Hall 142 | 4:00 pmBio: Dr. Heekyoung Cho completed her Ph.D. at the University of Chicago, writing a dissertation on the translation and adaptation of Russian literature in early twentieth-century Korea. She is the author of Translation’s Forgotten History: Russian Literature, Japanese Mediation, and the Formation of Modern Korean Literature (Harvard University Asia Center, 2016). Dr. Cho's other areas of interest include translation and the formation of national literature, modern Korean literature and its historiography, and Korean-Japanese-Russian cultural relations. At the UW, Dr. Cho teaches courses in Korean literature, culture, film, and language.
Puzzles, Bots & Poems: An Interdisciplinary Symposium on Poetics, Structure, Design, and Constraint
October 26, 2018
Alderman Library 421 | 9:00 amPuzzles, Bots & Poems: An Interdisciplinary Symposium on Poetics, Structure, Design, and Constraint
October 26, 2018
Alderman Library 421 | 9:00 amPuzzles, Bots, and Poetics
A Symposium hosted by the Puzzle Poetry Group and Scholars' Lab
Friday, October 26
9 AM - Kate Compton, Generative Art Workshop
2 PM - Tony Veale, University College Dublin
"Game of Tropes II: A Clash of Symbols"
3 PM - Sarah Tindal Kareem, UCLA
"Chasing Daedalus"
4 PM - Louis Bury, CUNY Hostos
"'Rats Build Their Labyrinths': On the Psychology and Aesthetics of Puzzles"
Saturday, October 27
10 AM - Dennis Tenen, Columbia University
"Techniques of Industrial Modernism: Plot Robot"
11 AM - Whitney Sperrazza, University of Kansas
"Blazonic (Un)making: Margaret Cavendish's
Recipe Poems as Early Modern Maker Labs"
1 PM - Herbert Tucker, University of Virginia
Riddle Poems: A Discussion
2 PM - Bret Rothstein, Indiana University
"Secret Hardware Handshakes"
This event made possible by the support of the
Page-Barbour Committee and UVa's IHGC
Lisa Parks (MIT), “Vertical Mediation and the War on Terror from 9/11 to Trump”
October 18, 2018
Wilson Hall 142 | 4:30 pm - 6:00 pmLisa Parks (MIT), “Vertical Mediation and the War on Terror from 9/11 to Trump”
October 18, 2018
Wilson Hall 142 | 4:30 pm - 6:00 pmLisa Parks is a media scholar and a 2018 MacArthur Fellow whose research focuses on three areas: satellite technologies and media cultures; critical studies of media infrastructures; and media, militarization and surveillance. Parks is the author of Cultures in Orbit: Satellites and the Televisual (Duke UP, 2005), Rethinking Media Coverage: Vertical Mediation and the War on Terror (Routledge, 2018), and Mixed Signals: Media Infrastructures and Cultural Geographies (in progress). She is co-editor of: Life in the Age of Drone Warfare (Duke UP, 2017), Signal Traffic: Critical Studies of Media Infrastructures (U of Illinois, 2015), Down to Earth: Satellite Technologies, Industries and Cultures (Rutgers UP, 2012), Undead TV (Duke UP, 2007), and Planet TV: A Global Television Reader (NYU, 2003). Parks has held visiting appointments at the Institute for Advanced Study (Wissenschaftskolleg) in Berlin, McGill University, University of Southern California, and the Annenberg School of Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. She has been a PI on major research grants from the National Science Foundation and the US State Department, and has collaborated with artists and computer scientists. She is committed to exploring how greater understanding of media systems can inform and assist citizens, scholars and policymakers in the US and abroad to advance campaigns for technological literacy, creative expression, social justice, and human rights. Before joining the CMS/W faculty, Parks was Professor and former Department Chair of Film and Media Studies at UC Santa Barbara, where she also served as Director of the Center for Information Technology and Society.
Muhsin Al-Musawi (Columbia U), "The City in the Medieval and Modern Arabic Narrative"
October 12, 2018
Wilson Hall 301 | 4:00 pm - 5:30 pmMuhsin Al-Musawi (Columbia U), "The City in the Medieval and Modern Arabic Narrative"
October 12, 2018
Wilson Hall 301 | 4:00 pm - 5:30 pmBio: Professor Muhsin al-Musawi is a literary critic and a scholar of classical and modern Arabic literature and comparative cultural studies. He taught for over two decades at universities in the Arab world before moving to Columbia University. He is the author of twenty-eight books (including four novels) and over sixty scholarly articles. He has been the editor of the Journal of Arabic Literature [ Brill Academic Publishers] since 2000.
Professor al-Musawi's teaching and research interests span several periods, trends, and genres. His books include: Scheherazade in England (1981); The Society of One Thousand and One Nights (2000); Anglo-Orient: Easterners in Textual Camps (2000); The Postcolonial Arabic Novel: Debating Ambivalence (2003); Arabic Poetry: Trajectories of Modernity and Tradition (2006); Reading Iraq: Culture and Power in Conflict (2006); The Islamic Context of the Thousand and One Nights (Columbia University Press, 2009); and Islam in the Street: The Dynamics of Arabic Literary Production (Rowman & Littlefield, 2009). He is also the editor of and a contributor to Arabic Literary Thresholds: Sites of Rhetorical Turn in Contemporary Scholarship (2009), and wrote the introduction and notes to the Barnes & Noble edition of The Thousand and One Nights, published in 2007. His most recent book is The Medieval Islamic Republic of Letters: Arabic Knowledge Construction (University of Notre Dame Press, April 2015). Professor al-Musawi was the recipient of the Owais Award in Literary Criticism in 2002.
Paul Vierthaler Workshop (University of Leiden), "Visualizing Stylometric and Intertextual Relationships in Large Textual Corpora"
October 12, 2018
Wilson Hall 142 | 12:00 pm - 1:30 pmPaul Vierthaler Workshop (University of Leiden), "Visualizing Stylometric and Intertextual Relationships in Large Textual Corpora"
October 12, 2018
Wilson Hall 142 | 12:00 pm - 1:30 pmTalk:
“Where Did All These Rumors Come From? Computationally Identifying Intertextuality and Machine-Classifying Its Source in a Late Imperial Chinese Corpus” – October 11, 4pm – 7pm -- Lecture (4 - 5:30) & DH Mixer (5:30 - 7:00) in Wilson 142
Workshop:
“Visualizing Stylometric and Intertextual Relationships in Large Textual Corpora” – October 12, 12pm-1:30pm, Wilson 142
Paul Vierthaler is a University Lecturer (Assistant Professor) of the Digital Humanities at Leiden University in the Netherlands. In his current monograph project, he analyzes how historical events are represented in “quasi-histories" written in late imperial China. In this work, he studies how information transforms in genre- and time-dependent ways across thousands of semi- to un-trustworthy texts. In order to facilitate rapid and rigorous research, Paul is interested in developing and adapting computational methods to analyze and visualize large natural language corpora. In his other work, he has been developing machine learning models to study the authorship of the famous late-Ming novel the Plum in the Golden Vase. Additionally, as a continuation of past work on quantitative bibliographic analysis, Paul is developing an extensible and mineable bibliographic database on public domain Chinese texts, which will be deployed in late 2018 or early 2019. In 2015-2016, Paul was a Visiting Assistant Professor and Postdoctoral Fellow in the Digital Humanities at Boston College. Prior to that, he was an An Wang Postdoctoral Fellow at the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies at Harvard University. In 2014, he was awarded a Ph.D. in East Asian Languages and Literatures from Yale University.
Paul Vierthaler (University of Leiden), “Where Did All These Rumors Come From? Computationally Identifying Intertextuality and Machine-Classifying Its Source in a Late Imperial Chinese Corpus”
October 11, 2018
Brooks Hall Commons | 4:00 pmPaul Vierthaler (University of Leiden), “Where Did All These Rumors Come From? Computationally Identifying Intertextuality and Machine-Classifying Its Source in a Late Imperial Chinese Corpus”
October 11, 2018
Brooks Hall Commons | 4:00 pm“Where Did All These Rumors Come From? Computationally Identifying Intertextuality and Machine-Classifying Its Source in a Late Imperial Chinese Corpus” – October 11, 4pm – 7pm -- Lecture (4 - 5:30) & DH Mixer (5:30 - 7:00) in Wilson 142
Paul Vierthaler is a University Lecturer (Assistant Professor) of the Digital Humanities at Leiden University in the Netherlands. In his current monograph project, he analyzes how historical events are represented in “quasi-histories" written in late imperial China. In this work, he studies how information transforms in genre- and time-dependent ways across thousands of semi- to un-trustworthy texts. In order to facilitate rapid and rigorous research, Paul is interested in developing and adapting computational methods to analyze and visualize large natural language corpora. In his other work, he has been developing machine learning models to study the authorship of the famous late-Ming novel the Plum in the Golden Vase. Additionally, as a continuation of past work on quantitative bibliographic analysis, Paul is developing an extensible and mineable bibliographic database on public domain Chinese texts, which will be deployed in late 2018 or early 2019. In 2015-2016, Paul was a Visiting Assistant Professor and Postdoctoral Fellow in the Digital Humanities at Boston College. Prior to that, he was an An Wang Postdoctoral Fellow at the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies at Harvard University. In 2014, he was awarded a Ph.D. in East Asian Languages and Literatures from Yale University.
Poetry and Race Symposium
October 5, 2018
Wilson Hall 142 | 10:00 am - 5:00 pmPoetry and Race Symposium
October 5, 2018
Wilson Hall 142 | 10:00 am - 5:00 pmPoetry has long been a crucial space for constructing and deconstructing racial identities. What can we learn about race from poetry, and poetry from race? How do national and transnational conversations about poetry and race intersect and diverge? Representing a variety of specializations, distinguished poets and scholars including Lorna Goodison, the Poet Laureate of Jamaica, will compare insights into these and other questions.
"POETRY AND RACE"
Friday, October 5, 2018
Wilson Hall, Room 142
10am-5pm
Featured speakers include:
-J. Edward Chamberlin: http://www.english.utoronto.
-Lorna Goodison: https://www.poetryfoundation.
-Tsitsi Jaji: https://english.duke.edu/
-Urayoán Noel: http://urayoannoel.com/
-Josephine Park: https://www.english.upenn.edu/
-Evie Shockley: https://www.poetryfoundation.
-Nathan Suhr-Sytsma: http://www.english.emory.edu/
For more information, go to http://poetryandpoetics.as.
Please join us for the talks, discussion, and reception afterwards.
Alexa Joubin, “Can World Literature Go Beyond the Nation State? The Case of Global Shakespeare”
October 1, 2018
Wilson Hall 142 | 3:00 pmAlexa Joubin, “Can World Literature Go Beyond the Nation State? The Case of Global Shakespeare”
October 1, 2018
Wilson Hall 142 | 3:00 pmWhile postcolonial and world literature critics commonly privilege works that critique the role of Western hegemony, the meanings of Shakespeare in such places as South Africa, Brazil, and India are not always determined by colonial frames of reference. To further our understanding of Shakespeare in a post-national era, it is important to engage with hybrid cultural themes that inform many films and productions. Touring and intercultural Shakespeare thrive in a post-national space, particularly at international festivals in London, Craiova, Edinburgh, New York, Shanghai, Singapore, and other newly emerging and traditional metropolitan centers.Contradictory myths are the foundation to many conversations about Shakespeare today. Supporting global performances are liberal political ideologies that work against bardolatry and yet condone other aspects of the Shakespeare myth.Two approaches are particularly conspicuous in the application of the global as a myth to Shakespearean performances: the construction of Shakespeare as a cosmopolitan brand and as an aggregate of overlapping localities—the notion that Shakespeare is everywhere in all localities. Site-specific epistemologies inform both approaches. In the process of myth making, multiple localities are brought together to create a deceivingly harmonious image of Shakespeare. The local is not always the antithesis to the global or an antidote to the hegemonic domination that has been stereotypically associated with the West. As such, Shakespearean myths are repositioned beyond national boundaries and traditionally understood colonial authority.
"Cultural Constructicography": Daniel Shore (Georgetown U) Lecture, Workshop, and DH Mixer
September 27, 2018
Wilson Hall 142 | 2:30 pm - 4:30 pm"Cultural Constructicography": Daniel Shore (Georgetown U) Lecture, Workshop, and DH Mixer
September 27, 2018
Wilson Hall 142 | 2:30 pm - 4:30 pm"Cultural Constructicography," a discussion and workshop with Daniel Shore
Thursday, September 27, 2:30 - 4:30pm in Wilson 142
Workshop description: Come learn how digital archives and advanced search tools can help us revise our understanding of the history of language, the nature of the sign, and the "structure" of Structuralism. The session will begin with a short talk about the arguments of the recent book, Cyberformalism: Histories of Linguistic Forms in the Digital Archive, move to a demonstration of corpus-based research methods, and end with a workshop format where students can try out corpus methods on their own research topics and get coaching.
Bio: Daniel Shore, Provost's Distinguished Associate Professor of English at Georgetown University, is the author of Cyberformalism: Histories of Linguistic Forms in the Digital Archive (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018) and Milton and the Art of Rhetoric (Cambridge University Press, 2012), and of articles in journals including PMLA, Critical Inquiry, Modern Philology, Shakespeare Quarterly, Milton Studies and others. His research has been supported by the American Council of Learned Societies, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the Folger Shakespeare Library, and he is the co-founder of the Six Degrees of Francis Bacon project.
Supriya Gandhi (Yale U), "A Tale of Two Translations: The Sirr-i akbar and its afterlives in South Asia"
September 20, 2018
Wilson Hall 142 | 4:00 pmSupriya Gandhi (Yale U), "A Tale of Two Translations: The Sirr-i akbar and its afterlives in South Asia"
September 20, 2018
Wilson Hall 142 | 4:00 pmIn 1867, the Hindu reformist, Kanhaiya Lal Alakhdhari, completed an Urdu translation of fifty Upanishads. Alakhdhari, who later played a key role in establishing the Arya Samaj in the Punjab, expressed a concern that Hindus, unlike Muslims and Christians, were unfamiliar with their sacred texts. His translation was based on the Sirr-i akbar, an earlier Persian translation produced by the Mughal prince, Dara Shikoh, in 1657. Dara Shikoh argued that the Upanishads constituted a divinely revealed scripture, which held the key to the Quran’s mysteries. How did a seventeenth-century gesture of cross-cultural translation within an Islamic interpretive frame come to inform a sectarian Hindu project in the nineteenth-century? This talk examines these two moments of translation as a lens for exploring issues of scripture and language during the emergence of modern Hinduism.
Supriya Gandhi works on the interface of Islam and Indic traditions in South Asia. She completed her doctorate at Harvard University, and has also studied in Delhi, Tehran, London and Damascus. She teaches in the department of Religious Studies at Yale University.
Digital Humanities Workshop with Giles Bergel (Oxford U) with DH@UVA
September 19, 2018
Wilson Hall 142 | 10:00 am - 12:00 pmDigital Humanities Workshop with Giles Bergel (Oxford U) with DH@UVA
September 19, 2018
Wilson Hall 142 | 10:00 am - 12:00 pm
"Computer Vision for DH," a workshop with Giles Bergel
Wednesday, September 19, 10am – 12pm in Wilson 142
Workshop description: Computer vision has made rapid progress in recent years. Computers can now reliably match the same image, find differences in similar images, and classify content within multiple images. Recently (and controversially) computers have also begun to be routinely used to identify people and places. This hands-on session will demonstrate how to install and use state-of-the-art open source software from the University of Oxford’s Visual Geometry Group<http://www.robots.ox.ac.
Requirements: a relatively recent laptop (not a tablet or phone), ideally one capable of running Docker<https://www.docker.com> (please install in advance). Online demos will be provided for those unable to install software. Demonstration data will be provided, but participants are encouraged to bring along (1) pairs of images exhibiting small differences, such as variant printings, restruck coins or altered photographs and (2) collections of images containing identical features, such as multiple images of buildings, duplicate photographs, or other printed images.
Bio: Giles Bergel<http://printing-
Mellon Fellows Symposium | Samhita Sunya & Paul Dobryden
September 14, 2018
Wilson Hall 142 | 10:30 amMellon Fellows Symposium | Samhita Sunya & Paul Dobryden
September 14, 2018
Wilson Hall 142 | 10:30 amMellon Fellows Symposium
September 14
Wilson 142
10.30-11.30am
Samhita Sunya, Assistant Professor of Cinema, Department of Middle Easter & South Asian Languages & Cultures
"South by South/West Asia: Transregional Histories of Middle East/South Asia Cinemas"
11.30am-12.30pm
Paul Dobryden, Assistant Professor, Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures
"Hygiene on Screen: The Visual Rhetoric of Health in Weimar Cinema"
12.30-1.00pm - Lunch
Samhita Sunya completed her PhD at Rice University in 2014 and joined the American University of Beirut as an Assistant Professor of Visual Culture. Her location in Lebanon for two years (2014 - 2016) complemented her earlier fieldwork at the National Film Archive of India, enabling her to further probe postwar circulation histories of Hindi film/songs across the Middle East. Professor Sunya has been working on a manuscript titled Sirens of Modernity: World Cinema Via Bombay, which historicizes the emergence of “world cinema” as a category in the politics of the Cold War, and the manner in which Hindi film/songs negotiated this category. Her interests span world film history; South / West Asian cinemas; intersections of audio-visual media and literature; and sound studies. She also has a curatorial background in the collaborative administration of film series and festivals. Professor Sunya teaches survey courses and specialized seminars in Middle East - South Asia film histories, in addition to Middle East - South Asia-focused thematic courses on topics such as cinephilia, adaptation, and genre; methods courses in areas such as film programming, sound studies, and film festival studies; among so many other possibilities that lie ahead!
Paul Dobryden is Assistant Professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures.
"Humanities Informatics," CHCI Annual Conference
June 13, 2018
University of Virginia |"Humanities Informatics," CHCI Annual Conference
June 13, 2018
University of Virginia |2018 Annual Meeting
Humanities Informatics
Institute of the Humanities and Global Cultures
University of Virginia
Charlottesville, Virginia
June 13-17, 2018
Big data is now ubiquitous across myriad domains: politics, war, security, environment, health, media, art, culture and finance. New frontiers in information sciences have expanded our understanding of the human through advances in genetics and artificial intelligence (AI). Google and Facebook are at the forefront of research on AI. Historically linked to the rise of cybernetics in the 1950s, the penetration of big data and machine learning in our lives through advances in social media, cloud computing, robotics, epigenetics and cyber surveillance, have transformed our understanding of social belonging, political agency, knowledge production, privacy and autonomy.
Humanities Informatics is emerging as a new field in response to these developments. There are clear connections here to the work done in digital humanities, including the manipulation and visualization of data. But humanities informatics is less concerned with the actual computation of data than it is with the ways in which data structures and algorithms inform political economy, humanistic cultural production, human scientific endeavors, and studies of the evolution of human life itself.
Is new media technology making democratic politics impossible? What are the implications for the university of knowledge and information explosion unleashed by large corporations such as Google? How has social life been transformed by new media technologies? What transformations have emerged in art and performative cultures with the impact of interactive media technologies? Should we view the digital as a step-change in the technologies of communication and in epistemology? As the equivalent of the invention of the printing press? When algorithms make decisions, is there any room for discretion? How has our understanding of the ‘human’ been transformed by advances in genetic engineering and artificial intelligence?
A CHCI conference on Humanities Informatics will showcase the power of the humanities to address these urgent questions about the ‘human’ in our information age.
A special panel entitled, ‘#Charlottesville: August 11 & 12’ will focus on the eruption of neo-fascist violence in contemporary America. Charlottesville, the location of the conference, is also the site of neo-Nazi and white supremacist violence that shook the United States in the summer of 2017 and garnered global media attention. The panel will revisit the legacies of slavery, the civil war, the history of confederate monuments, and white supremacist movements in Virginia, a historic region that exists on the fault-line of a deep racial division that was foundational to the establishment of the United States as a nation. Speakers include Kirt Von Daacke, Chair of the UVA Presidential Commission on Slavery, and Deborah McDowell, Director, The Carter Woodson Institute of African and African-American Studies.
Visit the CHCI website for more information.
Irrationality and the Contemporary
May 4, 2018
Wilson Hall 142 | 9:00 amIrrationality and the Contemporary
May 4, 2018
Wilson Hall 142 | 9:00 am
"Irrationality & the Contemporary" is a one-day symposium, scheduled for Friday, May 4, 2018, in Wilson Hall 142. In light of the ongoing climate of skepticism and other signs of the retreat of liberalism around the world, our panels and keynote presentation will consider the play between rationality and irrationality in the post-1945 period and especially in our public discourse, bringing together scholars from diverse disciplines to reflect on forms of irrationality that appear in our politics, new media, the university, and neoliberal institutions. Professor Wendy Chun (Modern Culture and Media, Brown University) will deliver our keynote lecture. Cumulatively, the symposium strives to illuminate conditions constitutive of the contemporary moment, as well as historical forces that may be contributing to the incremental dissolution of infrastructures that support liberal democracy.
This event is made possible by generous support from the Buckner W. Clay Endowment, the Institute of the Humanities and Global Cultures, New Literary History, the Department of Politics, the Department of English, and the Food, Fuels, and Forests Working Group.
Tentative Lineup:
Wendy Chun, Modern Culture and Media, Brown
Jonathan Flatley, English, Wayne State
Deborah Lawrence, Environmental Science, University of Virginia
Jennifer Fleissner, English, Indiana University
Bradley Pasanak, English, University of Virginia
Elizabeth Losh, English and American Studies, William & Mary
Lisa Friedman, Reporter, The New York Times
Austin Hetrick, English (PhD Candidate, event organizer), University of Virginia
Jap-Nanak Makkar, English (PhD Candidate, event organizer), University of Virginia
Amitav Ghosh in Conversation with Roy Scranton
April 27, 2018
Robertson Hall 120 | 4:30 pm - 6:00 pmAmitav Ghosh in Conversation with Roy Scranton
April 27, 2018
Robertson Hall 120 | 4:30 pm - 6:00 pm
Friday, April 27 | 4:30 - 6:00 p.m, Robertson Hall 120: Amitav Ghosh will be in conversation with Roy Scranton, author of Learning to Die in the Anthropocene.
About Amitav Ghosh
Amitav Ghosh was born in Calcutta and grew up in India, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. He studied in Delhi, Oxford and Alexandria and is the author of The Circle of Reason, The Shadow Lines, In An Antique Land, Dancing in Cambodia, The Calcutta Chromosome, The Glass Palace, The Hungry Tide, and the three volumes of The Ibis Trilogy; Sea of Poppies, River of Smoke and Flood of Fire.The Circle of Reason was awarded France’s Prix Médicis in 1990, and The Shadow Lines won two prestigious Indian prizes the same year, the Sahitya Akademi Award and the Ananda Puraskar. The Calcutta Chromosome won the Arthur C. Clarke award for 1997 and The Glass Palace won the International e-Book Award at the Frankfurt book fair in 2001. In January 2005 The Hungry Tide was awarded the Crossword Book Prize, a major Indian award. His novel, Sea of Poppies (2008) was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, 2008 and was awarded the Crossword Book Prize and the India Plaza Golden Quill Award.
Amitav Ghosh’s work has been translated into more than twenty languages and he has served on the Jury of the Locarno Film Festival (Switzerland) and the Venice Film Festival (2001). Amitav Ghosh’s essays have been published in The New Yorker, The New Republic and The New York Times. His essays have been published by Penguin India (The Imam and the Indian) and Houghton Mifflin USA (Incendiary Circumstances). He has taught in many universities in India and the USA, including Delhi University, Columbia, Queens College and Harvard. In January 2007 he was awarded the Padma Shri, one of India’s highest honors, by the President of India. In 2010, Amitav Ghosh was awarded honorary doctorates by Queens College, New York, and the Sorbonne, Paris. Along with Margaret Atwood, he was also a joint winner of a Dan David Award for 2010. In 2011 he was awarded the International Grand Prix of the Blue Metropolis Festival in Montreal. |
The future of literary history: Mass-digitized collections, literary data, and American fiction in the Antipodes
April 24, 2018
Brooks Hall Commons (Anthropology Building) | 4:00 - 5:30pm followed by a DH Mixer from 5:30 - 7pmThe future of literary history: Mass-digitized collections, literary data, and American fiction in the Antipodes
April 24, 2018
Brooks Hall Commons (Anthropology Building) | 4:00 - 5:30pm followed by a DH Mixer from 5:30 - 7pmBackground
In the 19th century, newspapers were the main publishers of fiction in Australia; in the 21st century, the National Library of Australia’s Trove database represents the largest collection of mass-digitized historical newspapers internationally. These conditions present an opportunity to explore the capacity of mass-digitized collections to transform how we approach and understand literary history. Analyzing Trove uncovered more than 21,000 novels, novellas, and short stories published in Australian newspapers between 1865 and 1914. This fiction encompasses canonical works, alongside many hundreds of previously unrecorded titles, and represents titles from around the world, with extensive publication of British, Australian, and American stories, significant amounts of French and German literature in translation, as well as fiction from as far afield as Austria, Canada, Holland, Japan, South Africa, Sweden, Russia, and beyond.
Bode’s research considers the new insights into past literary cultures, as well as the new practices for present and future literary history, that mass-digitized collections enable. She first explores how these discoveries expand the transnational history of American literature, by investigating the publication and reception of American fiction in 19th-century Australia. Bode then suggests new research practices that mass-digitized collections necessitate and enable for literary history. In her lecture, she will focus on the approaches to data required of literary history in the digital age, as well as the new collaborations and publics for literary history that data-rich research makes possible.
About Katherine Bode
Katherine Bode is Associate Professor of Literary and Textual Studies in the School of Literature, Languages, and Linguistics at the Australian National University in Canberra. She has published extensively in literary studies, digital humanities, and book history, and her latest monograph, A World of Fiction: Digital Collections and the Future of Literary History, is forthcoming with University of Michigan Press in July 2018.
All are welcome to attend both the talk and DH Mixer following, with or without registering here. We ask you to register so we can get a rough count for the caterer. Thank you!
Amitav Ghosh, "The Great Uprooting: Migration and Movement in the Age of Climate Change"
April 23, 2018
Nau Hall 101 | 5:30 pm - 7:00 pmAmitav Ghosh, "The Great Uprooting: Migration and Movement in the Age of Climate Change"
April 23, 2018
Nau Hall 101 | 5:30 pm - 7:00 pm
About Amitav Ghosh
Amitav Ghosh was born in Calcutta and grew up in India, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. He studied in Delhi, Oxford and Alexandria and is the author of The Circle of Reason, The Shadow Lines, In An Antique Land, Dancing in Cambodia, The Calcutta Chromosome, The Glass Palace, The Hungry Tide, and the three volumes of The Ibis Trilogy; Sea of Poppies, River of Smoke and Flood of Fire.The Circle of Reason was awarded France’s Prix Médicis in 1990, and The Shadow Lines won two prestigious Indian prizes the same year, the Sahitya Akademi Award and the Ananda Puraskar. The Calcutta Chromosome won the Arthur C. Clarke award for 1997 and The Glass Palace won the International e-Book Award at the Frankfurt book fair in 2001. In January 2005 The Hungry Tide was awarded the Crossword Book Prize, a major Indian award. His novel, Sea of Poppies (2008) was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, 2008 and was awarded the Crossword Book Prize and the India Plaza Golden Quill Award.
Amitav Ghosh’s work has been translated into more than twenty languages and he has served on the Jury of the Locarno Film Festival (Switzerland) and the Venice Film Festival (2001). Amitav Ghosh’s essays have been published in The New Yorker, The New Republic and The New York Times. His essays have been published by Penguin India (The Imam and the Indian) and Houghton Mifflin USA (Incendiary Circumstances). He has taught in many universities in India and the USA, including Delhi University, Columbia, Queens College and Harvard. In January 2007 he was awarded the Padma Shri, one of India’s highest honors, by the President of India. In 2010, Amitav Ghosh was awarded honorary doctorates by Queens College, New York, and the Sorbonne, Paris. Along with Margaret Atwood, he was also a joint winner of a Dan David Award for 2010. In 2011 he was awarded the International Grand Prix of the Blue Metropolis Festival in Montreal. |
Mellon Fellows Symposium (with Charlotte Rogers, Christopher Krentz, William Hitchcock)
April 20, 2018
Wilson 142 | 9:30 am - 1:30 pmMellon Fellows Symposium (with Charlotte Rogers, Christopher Krentz, William Hitchcock)
April 20, 2018
Wilson 142 | 9:30 am - 1:30 pmMellon Fellows Symposium
April 20
Wilson 142
9.30-10.30am
Charlotte Rogers. Department of Spanish, Italian and Portuguese
El ciclón: An Ecocritical Approach to the Hurricane in Gabriel García Márquez’s The Autumn of the Patriarch.
10.30-11.30am
William Hitchcock, Corcoran Department of History
“Constructing Refugees:The Hungarians of 1956.”
11.30am-12.30pm
Christopher Krentz, Department of English
“War, Neoliberalism, and Disability Human Rights in Two Chris Abani Novels”
12.30-1.00pm - Lunch
Romanticism, Now and Then
April 20, 2018
Wilson 142 | 9:00 amRomanticism, Now and Then
April 20, 2018
Wilson 142 | 9:00 amRomanticism, Now and Then:
A New Literary History Workshop
April 20-21, 2018
University of Virginia
This intensive two-day workshop will bring together literary historians, musicologists, and art historians to reflect on the present, past, and future of Romanticism, as an interpretive project and a field of interdisciplinary inquiry. Hosted by New Literary History and the Institute of the Humanities & Global Culture at the University of Virginia, the workshop begins with opening remarks on Friday, April 20 at 1:00, and concludes with a discussion on Saturday, April 21, from 5:00-5:30. The event is free and open to the public. How has the Romanticist interpretive project developed in recent decades, particularly in dialogue with literary theory and historiography? In this bicentennial era of the Romantic period, what connections and modes of remembering obtain, and to what ends? In what senses does Romanticism imply a method, a form, a politics? What are the abiding keywords, concepts, and challenges of Romanticism within and across disciplines, and what questions or arenas of thought have ceased to be central? What futures do you see for Romanticism as a conceptual and/or professional field?
Friday April 20
Institute of the Humanities & Global Culture
Wilson Hall Room 142
1:00-1:15
Opening remarks
Bruce Holsinger and Andrew Stauffer
New Literary History and Department of English, University of Virginia
1:15-2:15
“Romantic Difficulty”
Anahid Nersessian
Department of English, UCLA
2:30-3:30
“Le romantisme en Haïti: History, Historiography, Form”
Marlene Daut
Program in American Studies & Carter G. Woodson Institute for
African-American and African Studies, University of Virginia
3:45-4:45
“The Question of Sensibility”
James Chandler
Department of English, University of Chicago
Saturday April 21
Institute of the Humanities & Global Culture
Wilson Hall Room 142
9:30-10:30
“The Arabesque from Kant to Comics”
Cordula Grewe
Department of Art History, Indiana University
10:45-11:45
“Romantic Musical Aesthetics and the Transmigration of Soul”
Holly Watkins
Department of Musicology, Eastman School of Music and
University of Rochester
1:30-2:30
“Romantic Subjects and Iambic Laws:
Episodes in the Early History of Contract Negotiations”
Jerome McGann
Department of English, University of Virginia
2:45-3:45
“Kindred Spirits: Transatlantic Romantic Poetics”
Virginia Jackson
Departments of English and
Comparative Literature, UC-Irvine
4:00-5:00
“Romanticism and the Avowal of Coevalness”
Tristram Wolff
Departments of English and Comparative
Literature, Northwestern University
5:00-5:30
Closing discussion