Humanities Day 2015 - Session 1

Poetic Associations - 9:30 a.m. guided tour

maskinner — Tue, 18 Aug 2015 18:32:28 +0000

Presenter:

Join co-curator Eric Powell for a guided tour of Poetic Associations, the fall exhibition at UChicago's Special Collections Research Center.

In the period between the French Revolution and the start of World War I, often called “the long nineteenth century,” English poetry enjoyed enormous popularity and respect. The Romantics and the Victorians, as we know them today, were celebrities and, often, close friends, part of a literary community that influenced their professional and personal lives. Dr. Gerald N. Wachs (1937–2013), working closely with his friend, bookseller Stephen Weissman of Ximenes Rare Books, collected their works, using as their guidebook the Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature (CBEL), the standard primary bibliography of English literature. They sought the finest copies, whenever possible ones that were presented by the author to other writers, friends, or family members. The resulting collection of nearly 900 titles, on deposit from the Estate of Gerald Wachs at the University of Chicago Library, illuminates the life and works of these enduring poets.

Innovation and Repetition in the Art of Chichen Itza

jsjoyce — Mon, 17 Aug 2015 18:17:51 +0000

Presenter:

Claudia Brittenham

Session 1

What is the relationship between innovation and repetition? Are the two diametrically opposed or intimately related? This presentation will consider these questions through the lens of the art and architecture of Chichen Itza, one of ancient Mexico’s most cosmopolitan and creative cities.

Behind-the-Scenes of the Campus Art Collection: A Walking Tour of Art on Campus

jsjoyce — Mon, 17 Aug 2015 18:03:40 +0000

Presenter:

Anna Weiss

Monica Welke

Session 1

The University of Chicago’s vast Campus Art Collection includes outdoor and indoor sculpture, paintings, prints, and more. During this tour, we will visit various sites on campus and discuss issues of campus history, conservation, and art historical significance. Key works include Henry Moore’s Nuclear Energy, Lorado Taft’s Shaler Memorial Angel, and Ruth Duckworth’s Earth, Water, Sky.

Descartes’ Meditative Turn

jsjoyce — Mon, 17 Aug 2015 17:49:49 +0000

Presenter:

Christopher Wild

Session 1

Rene Descartes remains best known as the founder of modern philosophy and science who broke decisively with his Scholastic and, thus, religious predecessors. This talk challenges this conventional view by taking seriously the title of his opus magnum Meditations on First Philosophy and examining the role of meditative thought and practice in his philosophy. By tracing his debt to the long tradition of spiritual exercises, which reaches back to ancient philosophy, it paints an image of Descartes that is decidedly less modern and secular, but more fitting with his cultural environment and his lifelong preoccupation with the exercise of thought.

Knowing and Doing: Text and Labor in Asian Handwork

jsjoyce — Mon, 17 Aug 2015 17:31:14 +0000

Presenter:

Jacob Eyferth

Donald Harper

Session 1

Our Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society project concerns Asian cultures and how the knowledge of those who perform labor and produce goods is formed and transmitted among them. We use the concept of text as “patterns and conventions that fix the processes by which work is accomplished” to explore how their knowledge is communicated in sensual, gestural, visual, verbal, and written forms. This presentation will explore the example of Chinese agriculture in antiquity and in modern times.

Intimacy and Liberty: Two Reasons Why We Are (Still) the Ancients

jsjoyce — Mon, 17 Aug 2015 17:24:21 +0000

Presenter:

Boris Maslov

Rocco Rubini

Session 1

Much has been said about the legacy of Graeco-Roman antiquity in the modern world. In architecture, literature, philosophy, and (arguably) politics, the role of the Renaissance in mediating such influence was paramount. In our presentation, we focus on two concepts that are central to the modern thought-world and that can be traced back to the early modern engagement with the classical past.

Recent Work: Rose’s Inclination, Door Hinges, and Assisted

maskinner — Thu, 06 Aug 2015 17:39:35 +0000

Presenter:

Jessica Stockholder

Session 1

Jessica Stockholder is an artist whose work bridges painting, sculpture, and installation. She will present and discuss her recent work currently on view at the Smart Museum at the University of Chicago, and at Kavi Gupta Gallery in the West Loop, 219 N. Elizabeth Street, Chicago. She will dwell on the range of different kinds of work presented in the solo exhibition Door Hinges, the installation Rose's Inclination, and Assisted, an exhibition she curated at the Kavi Gupta Gallery.

Chinese Ideas About Translating from (Approximately) the Fall of Rome to the Coolidge Administration

maskinner — Thu, 06 Aug 2015 17:35:01 +0000

Presenter:

Haun Saussy

Session 1

As Liang Qichao observed in 1920, the first “age of translation” in China occurred with the introduction of Buddhism in the third and fourth centuries of our era; the next such “age” had to wait until the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. What did translation mean to Chinese during the long interval between the two “ages”? What was its value, how and by whom was it performed? What are the consequences of living in an “age of translation,” as opposed to an age when this art is deemed secondary or insignificant?

Darwin's Nausea: Disgust and the Descent of Man

maskinner — Thu, 06 Aug 2015 17:34:28 +0000

Presenter:

Zachary Samalin

Session 1

Since the Enlightenment, thinkers, writers, and artists have been preoccupied with the emotion of disgust, asking whether our expressions of revulsion are learned cultural responses or rather signs of an innate animal nature. Are emotional reactions—and disgust in particular—distinct from the capacity to reason, or do they form the basis for it? Taking Charles Darwin’s idiosyncratic theory of disgust in his 1872 work The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, as our point of departure, this talk will focus on the ways in which knowledge and nausea, belly and brain, have historically been intertwined in modern thought.

How To Write Around the World (And Which Ways Are Best)

maskinner — Thu, 06 Aug 2015 17:32:38 +0000

Presenter:

Jason Merchant

Session 1

From Sumeria, Egypt, Phoenicia, and Greece to China and the Mayan empire, writing has been central to civilization and has been invented several times independently around the world, using just four basic models. In this class, we explore the four types of writing and their histories, and discuss the advantages and disadvantages for particular languages and age groups, as well as the challenges for learners and the prospects for orthographic reform and degradation in English.