alice kaplan institute for the humanities 2013-2014 annual brochure

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Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities 2013-2014 Annual Brochure

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Page 1: Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities 2013-2014 Annual Brochure

philosophyimaginationenvironment

readingperformance

historyart

rhetoricmind

justice

20132014

Page 2: Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities 2013-2014 Annual Brochure

he Kaplan Institute for the Humanities, founded in 1992, is dedicated to fostering a broad, innovative, and cross-disciplinary exploration of human thought and culture. We provide the site where brainstorming across humanities disciplines occurs at Northwestern. World-renowned scholars and artists traveled though the Institute this year, exploring topics that stretched from the ancient to the digital age.

I’m excited to announce that we have developed two new programs for 2014-15: Initiatives in the Public Humanities (IPH), which will nurture research endeavors that include outreach to public organizations and partners; and a new Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship in “The Environmental Humanities.” We also have welcomed a new Assistant Director for the Institute, Tom Burke.

I look forward to 2014-15, where we will host scholars who will think about “The Humanities in the Age of Ecological Catastrophe” and “Crossing Borders.”

Wendy WallDirector, Alice Kaplan Institute for the HumanitiesAvalon Professor of the Humanities

Institute Staff: Wendy Wall, Tom Burke, Megan Skord-Campbell, and Beverly Zeldin-Palmer T

Please consider making a contribution.

humanities.northwestern.edu

Page 3: Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities 2013-2014 Annual Brochure

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“ The true college will ever have one goal—not to earn meat, but to know the end and aim of that life which meat nourishes.”

W.E.B. DuBois

Why the Humanities?Studying the humanities permits us to know ourselves and to investigate what it means to be human—here and now as well as elsewhere and in the past. The humanities pose the big questions about the meaning of life. They foster a knowledgeable and critical perspective on all aspects of human culture and human artifacts. And they teach students to think, speak, and write in a clear and cogent manner.

The Humanities

What We’ve Done This Year

~ co-sponsored over 70 events

~ welcomed 3 Artists in Residence

~ supported 7Fellows and 16 Affi liates in their cutting-edge research projects

~ introduced 6 new humanities faculty through New Faculty Chats

~ sponsored 5 research workshops

~ encouraged 45 Kaplan Scholars Honors students to develop into active learners and thinkers

~ offered13 courses on topics such as literature and grief, justice for the Holocaust, media theory, science and sexuality, dance and politics, fi lm and digital world, and modeling choices (taught by President Morty Schapiro and Saul Morson)

Morry Kaplan and Dolores Kohl Kaplan—the visionaries who helped found the Kaplan Institute.

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Page 4: Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities 2013-2014 Annual Brochure

Jose Reynoso2012-2014 Andrew Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Dance StudiesJose will join the faculty at UC Riverside in fall 2014.

Supporting Research

Riverside in fall 2014.

Doris Garraway and Katharine Breen

Wendy Pearlman and John Schafer

Prof. Wendy Pearlman received the 2013-2014 Weinberg College Distinguished Teaching Award.

FellowshipsEnabling Northwestern faculty to pursue independent research in the humanities within an interdisciplinary community

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Here are just some of the provocative questions that our Fellows made us consider this year:

~ When do people submit to unjust authority and when do they protest? How can the case of the lived experience of Syrian refugees give us insight into this issue?

~ How can the literary device called allegory be considered an “engine of thought” stretching from medieval writing to modern car consumer research?

~ How might the videography used in Jamaican dance halls shed light on the politics and performance of visibility, broadly construed, surrounding the African diaspora?

~ How might a king’s reign in post-revolutionary Haiti challenge and reshape ideas of sovereignty?

~ What was the status of African traditional medicine in The World Health Organization during the Cold War?

• Katharine Breen Associate Professor, Department of English “Engines of Thought: Experimental Allegory in the Middle Ages”

• Doris Garraway Associate Professor, Department of French and Italian“Performing Sovereignty: Power, Print, and Performance in the Haitian Kingdom of Henry Christophe”

• Scott Krafft Library Fellow“Little Things: Charlotte Moorman’s Archive”

• Wendy Pearlman Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science“Breaking Down the Barrier of Fear: Understanding Participation in the Syrian Uprising”

• John Schafer Assistant Professor, Department of Classics“Alone Together: A study of Seneca’s Letters”

• Krista Thompson Associate Professor, Department of Art History“Bling and Bixels: The Camera, Performance, and the Visual Economy of Light in African American Diasporic Aesthetic Practice”

• Helen Tilley Associate Professor, Department of History“The Wisdom of the Peoples: African Decolonization, Global Governance, and Cold War Constructions of Traditional Medicine”

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Affi liates

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“ Faced with a globalizing economy over which they have little direct control, French municipal governments and private developers increasingly convert derelict industrial buildings into cultural sites to attract tourists and capital.”

David Calder, Graduate Affi liate

Faculty Affi liates• Nick Davis, Associate Professor, Department of English

• Hannah J. Feldman, Associate Professor, Department of Art History

• Beth Lew-Williams, Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of History; Asian American Studies Program

• Nasrin Qader, Associate Professor, Department of French and Italian

• Emily Rohrbach, Assistant Professor, Department of English

Graduate Affi liates• David Calder,

Department of Theatre and Drama

• Zachary Campbell, Screen Culture Program; Department of Radio, TV & Film

• Meghan Daly-Costa, Department of English

• Katie Hartsock, Program in Comparative Literary Studies; Department of Classics; Department of English

• Kareem Khubchandani, Performance Studies

• Raashi Rastogi, Department of English

Kareem Khubchandani, Meghan Daly Costa, Katie Hartsock, Zachary Campbell, David Calder, and Raashi Rastogi

Undergraduate Affi liates• Mary Bradford • Susie Neilson • Mark Silberg • Larry Svabek • Amy Zhou

Larry Svabek, Mary Bradford, and Amy Zhou

AKIH Research Workshops are interdisciplinary groups brought together by shared interests.

~ The After-Life of Phenomenology

~ Classical Receptions~ Comparative Modernisms~ Northwestern University

Digital Humanities Laboratory

~ Colloquium on Indigeneity & Native American Studies

The Arthur Vining Davis Digital Humanities Summer Faculty Workshop at Northwestern UniversityThis two-week workshop facilitated the implementation of the digital humanities into undergraduate courses.

Page 6: Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities 2013-2014 Annual Brochure

Public HumanitiesEvanston Northwestern Humanities Lecture Series Partnering with the Evanston Public LibraryMembers of the Northwestern faculty share and discuss innovative research at the Evanston Public Library. This year, ENHLS honored African American contributions to the American landscape.

“ What does it mean to be “Black?” If Blackness has no biological basis (there is no such thing as a Black gene, Black DNA nor, despite the claims of pharmaceutical companies, do all Black people possess a distinct biology that makes them more or less vulnerable to certain conditions than other racial groups), what do we mean when we claim it for ourselves or for others?”

Michelle Wright Blackness When You Least Expect It: Understanding Racial Diversity in the 21st CenturyOctober 8, 2013

“ How have black women been represented visually? How have they represented themselves? And how have those images shaped our understanding of what, in fact, constitutes representation?”

Huey Copeland In the Arms of the NegressMarch 13, 2014

“ Beginning in the 1930s and lasting into the 1950s, black Chicago experienced a cultural renaissance that rivaled and, some argue, exceeded the cultural outpouring in Harlem.”

Darlene Clark Hine The Black Chicago RenaissanceApril 24, 2014

Humanities Without Walls Partnering with public institutions across the MidwestThe Kaplan Institute is part of a 15 school consortium that has been awarded $3,000,000 by the Mellon Foundation to execute The Global Midwest Initiative. This is the fi rst initiative of its kind to experiment at this large scale with cross-institutional collaboration.

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Page 7: Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities 2013-2014 Annual Brochure

Chicago Humanities FestivalMorry and Dolores Kohl Kaplan Northwestern DayOctober 13, 2013

Co-presented by the Offi ce of the President, the Offi ce of the Provost, and the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences at Northwestern University.

Highlights of the 2013 program featured events with Junot Diaz, Julia Kristeva, and Delia Ephron, among others, including the following Northwestern University faculty members: Deborah Cohen, Jules Law, Susan Pearson, Susie Phillips, and Indira Raman.

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Odyssey ProjectPartnering with the Illinois Humanities CouncilThis program offers a college-level course in philosophy, literature, art history, and history for men and women living below the poverty level.

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Reaching the Community

Wendy Wall, Morton Schapiro, Dolores Kohl Kaplan, and Sarah Mangelsdorf

Junot Diaz

Nina S

ubin

Announcing Our New Initiatives In Public Humanities (IPH) These new programs will combine academic research in the humanities with an intensive public outreach program. Next year’s initiatives are:

Poetry and Poetics Colloquium—Poetry in the Schools—The Voice Within UsPoetry and Poetics Colloquium, Evanston Township High School and Y.O.U. (Youth Organizations Umbrella, Inc.) created a program that grants high school students the unique opportunity to interact with Northwestern undergraduates and faculty, and to explore the art of writing poetry as a vital means of creative expression, imaginative inquiry, and verbal experiment.

Classical ReceptionsThis research group sponsors the Classicizing Chicago Project, an investigation of the scattered traces of a changing, sometimes antagonistic, but always keen relationship with the Greek and Roman past evident in Chicago history. The Classicizing Chicago Project is building a digital archive of examples of this cultural mingling across time and space, and a collection of interpretative materials of interest to scholars, students, teachers and the general public.

Page 8: Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities 2013-2014 Annual Brochure

Distinguished Harris LectureAncient Philosophy as a Way of Life: SocratesJohn Cooper, (Princeton)November 12, 2013For many ancient thinkers, philosophy was not just to be studied or even used to solve particular practical problems; rather, philosophy—not just ethics but even logic and physical theory—was literally to be lived. Yet there was great disagreement about how to live philosophically: philosophy was not one but many, mutually opposed, ways of life.

The Dialogue Series The DIALOGUE series brings nationally prominent scholars together to offer different perspectives on a topic.

“ Given debates about whether the internet democratizes or consolidates forms of inequality, we might pose a set of new questions: might the virtual university introduce radically new forms of knowledge formation? Or render certain modes of knowing—or of memory—obsolete? Does our conception of knowledge change with digital technology? Or might it be more productive to ask whether life in the datasphere exposes the existence of multiple and co-existing conceptions of “knowledge” itself?”

Knowing in the Age of the Virtual UniversityVinay Lal (UCLA) and Michael Lynch (UConn)February 18, 2014

Hot Off The PressThe world is getting faster. This sentiment is proclaimed so often that it is taken for granted, rarely questioned or examined by those who celebrate the notion of an accelerated culture or by those who decry it.

In the Meantime: Temporality and Cultural PoliticsSarah Sharma (UNC Chapel Hill)May 1, 2014For Hot Off The Press, a cohort of graduate students received a copy of the book and met in advance of the event to discuss its content; the event itself is part lecture and part workshop on the dissertation-to-book process.

Ideas in ConversationMade possible in part by the support of the Harris Lecture Funds

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Michael Lynch and Vinay Lal

Daniel Elam and Sarah Sharma

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Artist in Residence

Fall 2013 Jean Gimbel Lane Artist in ResidenceVisual Artist John Neff, co-sponsored by Art History and Art Theory and Practice

Winter 2014 Pick-Laudati Artist in ResidenceDocumentary Filmmaker S. Leo Chiang, co-sponsored by Asian American Studies

Spring 2014 Jean Gimbel Lane Artist in ResidenceArtist and writer Christopher Cozier (Trinidad), co-sponsored by the Department of Art History, the Department of Communication Studies, the Center for Global Culture and Communication, and the Latin American and Caribbean Studies Program.

Research and Conversation in the ClassroomOur 2013-14 courses included:

~ Health, Biomedicine, Culture, and Society

~ Arts, Dance, Politics, and Corporeality in the U.S. and Mexico

~ Justice for the Holocaust? Prosecuting Nazi War Criminals

~ Race, Gender, and Sexuality in Modern Science

~ The Literature of Grief

In Media Theory, an exciting new course taught by Professor Jim Hodge, students asked: “What is the nature of media and the role of technology in modern and contemporary culture from a humanistic perspective? How can we analyze works of art, literature, and fi lm in order to catalyze, test, and expand our sense of different approaches to media?

Page 10: Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities 2013-2014 Annual Brochure

Kaplan Humanities Scholars ProgramAn exciting, intensive, team-taught four-course program in the humanities for first-year students

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In a world dominated by technological fixes, quantitative models and the rhetoric of “problem-solving,” the Kaplan Humanities Scholars Program challenges first-year students to formulate sophisticated questions for which there are no simple or empirical answers. “What distinguishes the human?” “Can fiction be a form of knowing?” “Is imagination structured like a language?” “What is the role of the arts in an ideal society?” These are deep and abiding questions that have attracted some of the world’s greatest and most rigorous thinkers, from Homer to Freud, from Shakespeare to Hannah Arendt.

Fall 2013: Global OrientsProfessors: Hannah Feldman (Art History), Rebecca Johnson (English), and Jessica Winegar (Anthropology)

The Orient. The word conjures images of mystery, attraction, and danger—exotic belly dancers and hookah pipes, men with swords on horses on sand dunes, magic carpets and genies in a lamp. It also designates a broad and extraordinarily diverse swath of the world, extending from Morocco to Japan. In this exciting course, an art historian, an anthropologist and a literary scholar come together to explore where and when such images emerged. How and where have our images of and narratives about the Orient circulated, and how have they gained such durable power?

Winter 2014: Moral Drama, Melodrama: The Origins of Popular CultureProfessors: Susie Phillips (English), Sarah Maza (History), and Julia Stern (English)

On the screen, on the stage, in the sports arena, heroes and villains enjoy almost instant recognition, whether because of their costumes, their exaggerated gestures and facial expressions, or the tell-tale musical phrases that accompany them. And while those visual and aural cues are far from the halos and white steeds or twirled mustaches and black hats of the past, they are immediately identifiable nonetheless. Popular culture defines and is defined by moral polarities, as good and evil repeatedly battle one another in all manner of popular entertainment. But what are the origins of these exaggerated representations of good and evil? And what do they convey about a society’s attitudes toward justice, patriotism, gender difference, racial inequity, class conflict, and political dissent?

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What they are saying:

“ Whether going to see an operetta in Chicago or participating in the 24 Hours of Plays, Kaplan forced all of us to explore new frontiers and to discover something new about ourselves. The fellow students I met in the program are some of the brightest and most interesting people that I have ever had the pleasure to know. Kaplan represents pushing boundaries, and I benefi tted greatly from the experience.”

Joel Rabinowitz (Class of ‘14):

“ The decision to participate in the Kaplan Humanities Program is by far one of the best decisions I have made in my college career.”

Vicki Sun (Class of ‘12):

“ Deciding to apply for Kaplan was easily the best choice I made in my freshman year. Not only is it a truly remarkable community that fosters wonderful friendships, but it challenges you in every possible way to learn to the fullest.”

Ciara McCarthy (Class of ’15):

Big ideas.Great

teachers.Vital

questions.The Kaplan Institute received 219 applications for the 2014-2015 Kaplan Humanities Scholars Program!

2014-2015 Courses: Fall The Measure of All Things: Numbers, Space, and the Humanities

Winter Crossing Borders

Congratulations to the 2013-2014 class of Kaplan Humanities Scholars!

Kaplan Scholars Director Jules Law is stepping down after six years of building and shaping this truly dynamic program. We thank him sincerely for his leadership and hard work over the years. And we welcome our longtime friend of the Institute Kasey Evans as incoming director of the program.

Our students have pursued majors in over twenty departments at the university, from chemistry to art history. They’ve interned with businesses, museums, and relief organizations all over the world, from Ghana to Tokyo. They’ve gone on to careers in medicine, science, law, business, the arts, and, yes, the humanities! They’ve started tech companies and fi lmed documentaries. They’ve garnered some of the most prestigious academic awards at the university and in the country, including the Beinecke Fellowship. What can you do after the Kaplan Humanities Scholars Program? Anything!

KHSP Prof. Susie Phillips (English) was named the 2014 Alumnae of Northwestern Teaching Professor.

Aaron Loh, Hayley Landman, Naomi Johnson, Sarah Maza, and Wendy Wall

Page 12: Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities 2013-2014 Annual Brochure

1880 Campus Drive, #2-360Evanston, IL 60208

Kaplan Humanities Scholars Program

Kaplan Scholars Class of 2014