Upcoming IASH Events for Spring 2019

 IASH Fellows' Speaker Series

February

Wednesday, February 6, 2019, Noon, IASH Conference Room (LN 1106)

IASH Graduate Public Humanities Fellows Kayla Hardy-Butler from English and Julia Devin from history will be presenting a Workshop "Submitting projects and proposals to become a NY Humanities fellow."

Wednesday, February 13, 2019, Noon, IASH Conference Room (LN 1106)

Leslie Gates from Sociology presents: "Anticapitalist Populism and Populist Capitalists: The Politics of Oil and Neoliberalism in Mexico and Venezuela (1935-2000)"

Mexico and Venezuela have much in common: in both populist presidencies ended decades of rule by parties once hailed as exemplars of radical populism. Yet, Venezuela swung left while Mexico hewed to the right. Their divergence confounds existing theories. Mexico belies the expectations of a leftward "countermovement" to neoliberalism, while Venezuela contradicts the neo-institutional notion that centrist multiclass parties would contain social unrest. This study re-interprets their divergence by bringing capitalism and capitalists back in. It reveals how these surprising populist victories are "cumulating processes" of earlier political struggles unleashed by their incorporation into world oil markets.

Wednesday, February 20, 2019, Noon, IASH Conference Room (LN 1106)

Sinan Oruc from Philosophy presents: "'Promises, Practices and the Force of Language: Rawls, Cavell, Wittgenstei"

This presentation argues that a large number of the philosophical studies on promises miss the ordinary meaning and use of the word "promise." This causes a lot of mystification and theory, which has ultimately led to attributing too much power and importance to promissory commitments while underestimating the importance of non-explicit commitments diffused in almost any speech situation. Following Cavell's Wittgenstein influenced criticism of Rawls' theory of promising, I show that "I promise" is an expression in ordinary language like any other, typically used to emphasize those implicit commitments we already share by being part of a community of speakers.

Wednesday, February 27, 2019, Noon, IASH Conference Room (LN 1106)

Birgit Brander Rasmussen from English presents: "American Beowulf: Native American Literature 901 AD"

While the alphabet is relatively new in the literacy repertoire of North America, pictography is ancient. The colonial era ushered in a period of great change in the literary landscape of the continent, as alphabetic writing was assimilated and brought into dialogue with existing literary practices, genres, mediascapes, and narrative structures. This talk will analyze a wintercount created by Battiste Good, demonstrating how he uses Dakota pictography, alphabetic letters, and roman numerals to bring distinct systems of literacy into dialogue on the page and to position himself as a scholar and intellectual. I argue that this narrative, and the entire manuscript, issues a dramatic challenge to current scholarship on the book, writing, and literary history. Potentially recasting our understanding of Native American, North American, and even World literature, Good argues that the Great Sioux Nation's literary history begins as early as 901 A.D. – almost a century before Beowulf.

March

Wednesday, March 13, 2019, Noon, IASH Conference Room (LN 1106)

Alexandra Moore from English presents: "Ghost Detainees and State Power Across the Thresholds of Detectability"

This project examines Edmund Clark and Debi Cornwall's photographic works on the war on terror for the ways in which they play upon the state's surveillance technologies to expose the violence of the US Rendition, Interrogation, Detention (RDI) program. Building on the techniques for recognizing infrastructures of violence developed by Eyal Weizman and the Forensic Architecture team, Moore argues that the photographic projects turn our attention to both rhetorical and material structures of harm. In doing so, these photographers reformulate the terms of spectatorship commonly employed to verify evidence of abuse as well as the spectator's safe distance from that abuse.

Wednesday, March 27, 2019, Noon, IASH Conference Room (LN 1106)

Addie Gordon from Art History presents: "The Cidade Da Cultura de Galicia and the New Camino Experience"

Peter Eisenman's Cidade da Cultura de Galicia (1999–present) in Santiago de Compostela, Spain, stands as a physical embodiment of the continuing revitalization of the city's medieval pilgrimage route. However, the way in which this architectural complex contributes to and deviates from the city's persistent visual vocabulary, particularly as it relates to the production of pilgrim experiences, has been significantly lacking from scholarly discourse surrounding Compostela. This paper seeks to reinsert the CCG in that discourse by rejecting its dismissal as "starchitecture" and asserting that its use of pre-existing symbolic forms offers a new mediated visual experience of Compostelan pilgrimage's late twentieth-century institutional turn towards broad spirituality.

April

Wednesday, April 3, 2019, Noon, IASH Conference Room (LN 1106)

John Cheng from AAAS presents: "Unnatural Citizens: The Precarity and Persistence of Asian American Racial Formation"

Beginning in the late 19th century and for most of the 20th century, race ordered and organized American society through legally sanctioned difference – through different forms of "racial citizenship." For Asian Americans and their families, this difference was defined, paradoxically, by their ineligibility for citizenship, specifically their ineligibility to gain naturalized citizenship. Its consequences, however, extended beyond its legal definition to its application in actual practice; in that sense, Asian American racial citizenship was precarious and persistent in its broader social implication. Racial requirements posed not only barriers against Asian immigrants acquiring citizenship, for several decades, they also formed the basis for broader loss of citizenship through processes of denaturalization and expatriation – losses that involved native-born citizens and non-Asian women who married Asian immigrants and left some stateless. While legal racial and marriage requirements for citizenship were reformed and eventually abolished in the mid-20th century, recovering lost citizenship required additional individual action, formally applying for re-naturalization and repatriation – which some expatriated Asian American women delayed for decades into the 1960s, 70s, and even 80s.