Return to Humanities Calendar Archives
| Tuesday, January 21 | |
| 12:30 PM | **MYRA'S WAR CONCERT** This concert by Seattle's Contemporary Chamber Composers is part of "Myra's War: Five Perspectives," a series of events. The concert presents new music composed specifically for the Myra's War project. This event begins a week (January 21-24) of midday performance events on the UW campus. Free to the public. 12:30-1:20 pm, Brechemin Auditorium, UW School of Music. |
| 3:30 PM | Philosophy Lecture "'Rage, rage against the dying of the light': An Analysis of the Duty to Die," Dien Ho (Philosophy, City University of New York). Sponsored by the Program on Values in Society and the Department of Philosophy. 3:30 pm, Savery 239. |
| 7:30 PM | **NATIVE AMERICAN ART PANEL** "What is Innovation in Traditional Art?" a panel featuring Steve Brown (moderator), Susan Point (Musqueam artist), Stephen Jackson (Tlingit artist), and Marvin Oliver (Quinault/Isleta artist). Contemporary Northwest Coast artists discuss the juxtaposition between tradition and innovation in their work. Admission charge: $5 adults; $3 seniors, UW students, faculty, and staff; free to Burke Museum members. 7:30 pm, Kane Hall 110. |
| Wednesday, January 22 | |
| 12:00 PM | Southeast Asia Presentation "Women and Children in Cambodia," a slide presentation by author Carol Wagner about the people of Cambodia and how they rebuilt their lives following the genocide (1975 -1979) and civil war. Wagner, author of "Soul Survivors - Stories of Women and Children in Cambodia," will discuss Cambodia today, including the international tribunal, women's issues, landmine situation and Buddhist peace movement. Wagner works with women's and humanitarian organizations in Cambodia, leads educational tours to Southeast Asia, and was a UN observer in Cambodia's 1998 election. She is the former director of a center for non-violence in the San Francisco Bay Area. 12:00-1:30 pm, Smith 313. |
| 3:30 PM | Asian Languages & Literature Colloquiu "Research on Chinese Occasional Verse," Matt Carter. Sponsored by the Department of Asian Languages and Literature. 3:30-5:00 pm, Communications 226. |
| 4:00 PM | English Colloquium "English Language Learners' Perceptions of Accent," Julia Scales (English, University of Washington) and "Codeswitching by Adult Bilinguals: Contexts and Purposes," Joanna Spice (English, University of Washington). Part of the "Language and Rhetoric/Language Use and Acquisition Colloquium." Scales will report on research on the ability to recognize four different accents of English (American, British, Chinese and Mexican) by English Language Learners. She will also explore the reasons behind these perceptions and teaching implications. Spice will discuss the shift away from a limited understanding of codeswitching as a deficient form of interlanguage to its recognition as a creative and meaningful resource available to bilinguals, affirming their unique position and membership in multiple linguistic and cultural communities. The project was based on tape-recorded authentic conversations among Polish-English and German-English bilinguals. Conducted with Lorellen Nausner (not presenting). For more information about this event, contact Amy at avidali@u.washington.edu. 4:00-5:30 p.m., Thomson 119. |
| 7:00 PM | Germanics Film Screening "Seduction: The Cruel Woman," Treut/Mieksch, 1985. Part of a series on Postwar Feminism in Germany. Inspired by Sacher-Masoch, Monika Treut's film involves male and female archetypes who cross boundaries and collapse stereotypes and social taboos. Wanda, a Hamburg businesswoman and S/M dominatrix, leaves her lesbian lover (a shoe fetishist) for Justine, an innocent American who is learning the ropes of S/M. Justine must confront the illusion of passion, while behind the scenes, Wanda also deals with her husband. The world of masochism here performs the hidden desires of the characters involved through their individual searches for meaning in life. Shown in German with English subtitles. Sponsored by the Department of Germanics. 7:00 pm, Smith 205. |
| Thursday, January 23 | |
| 12:00 PM | Digital Media Lecture "Cyberactivism Panel: The Sequel," featuring Ted Coopman, Maria Garrido & Victor Pickard (graduate students in Communication, UW). 12-1:20pm, Communications 126. |
| 1:30 PM | Bioethics Lecture "Fashioning a Realistic and Rational Medical Ethic: Insights from Scheffler's Human Morality," Ben Rich (Bioethics, University of California at Davis). 1:30-2:30 PM, Health Sciences Building, Room T478. |
| 3:30 PM | **HUMANITIES LECTURE** "Psychoanalysis, Feminism, Biopower," Rey Chow (Modern Culture and Media, Brown University). A discussion of the uneasy but productive relationship between Western psychoanalytic and feminist theories of the past few decades in light of the global ramifications of biopower and biopolitics. Chow is the author of The Protestant Ethnic and the Spirit of Capitalism (2002), Ethics after Idealism: Theory - Culture - Ethnicity - Reading (1998), Primitive Passions: Visuality, Sexuality, Ehnography, and Contemporary Chinese Cinema (1995), and Woman and Chinese Modernity: The Politics of Reading Between West and East (1991). Chow's essays on critical theory, Asian film and literature, postcolonialism, and diasporic cultures have appeared in Cultural Critique, Modern Chinese Literature, Discourse, differences, camera obscura, Diaspora, diacritics, Postcolonial Studies, PMLA, and Critical Inquiry. Chow co-edits, with Masao Miyoshi and Harry Harootunian, an ongoing book series titled "Asia Pacific: Culture, Politics, Society" published by the Duke University Press. In 1992 Rey Chow was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship. This lecture is part of the Humanities on the Move" lecture series. It is co-sponsored by the Simpson Center for the Humanities, the Department of Women's Studies, and The Project for Critical Asian Studies, Forum on Trauma, History, and 'Asia'. 3:30 pm, Communications 226. Reception following. |
| 3:30 PM | China Studies Lecture "Working Until Dropping: The Economics of the Elderly in Rural China," Scott Rozelle (Agricultural and Resource Economics, University of California-Davis). 3:30 pm, Thomson 125. |
| 7:00 PM | International Studies Lecture "The Kushans: The Great 'Lost' Civilization at the Crossroads of Ancient Eurasia," Dr. Craig Benjamin (History, Macquarie University, Sydney). Dr. Benjamin is Secretary of the Australasian Society for Inner Asian Studies, a co-editor and contributor to several volumes in the Brepols _Silk Roads Studies Series_ and author of numerous articles on ancient Central Asian history. His book, _A History of the Kushans Vol. 1: the Yuezhi_, is forthcoming in the Brepols series. Created by the Yuezhi nomads from northeast Asia, the Kushan Empire occupied territory stretching from northwest India and Pakistan through Afghanistan and into Central Asia. The empire played a critical role in the early cultural and economic exchanges at the heart of the Silk Road. Sponsored by the Jackson School of International Studies; the Russian, East European, and Central Asian Studies Program; and the South Asian Studies Program. 7:00-9:00 pm, Smith Hall 211. |
| Friday, January 24 | |
| 1:30 PM | Germanics Lecture "Reframing Celan in the Painting of Anselm Kiefer," Dr. Eric Kligerman (Ph.D. Comparative Literature, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, 2000). Dr. Kligerman is a candidate for the position of Assistant Professor of German-Jewish Literature and Culture at the University of Washington. 1:30 pm, William H. Rey Library, Denny Hall 308. |
| 2:30 PM | Slavic Languages Lecture "The Wild West: The Pale of Settlement in Russian and Yiddish Drama," Barbara Henry (Northwestern University). Henry, a candidate for a faculty position in Slavic Languages and Literature, is currently a Visiting Professor at Northwestern University, where she previously held a Mellon Fellowship. She teaches courses on 19th and 20th century Russian literature, drama and theatre, East European Jewish literature and culture, Russian literature of the fantastic, comic literature, and an introductory course in Yiddish language. She received her doctoral degree from Oxford University, for a thesis on Russian dramatic and theatrical parody, which is currently being prepared for publication by Oxford University Press. She is the author of a number of articles on Russian and Yiddish theatre, and is currently working on a book entitled "The Transformation of Tradition: Jewish Writers and Russian Literature," which will examine Yiddish and Russian-Jewish writers' treatments of the classic Russian literary canon. 2:30 p.m, 309 Smith Hall. |
| 3:30 PM | Philosophy Lecture "Physician Paternalism vs. Patient Autonomy: The More Things Change the More They Stay the Same," Ben Rich (Bioethics, School of Medicine at the University of California-Davis). Sponsored by the Program on Values in Society and the Department of Philosophy. 3:30 pm, Savery 249. |
| 3:30 PM | Asian Languages Lecture "The Modernization of Japanese Literature: Subjectivity, Narrativity, Visuality," Nakagawa Shigemi (Ritsumeikan University). Sponsored by the Department of Asian Languages and Literature and the Japan Program. 3:30-5:00 p.m., Communications 202. |
| 3:30 PM | Classics Lecture "Elegy and the Origin of Epic," Professor Reyes Bertolin-Cebrin (University of Calgary). Professor Reyes Bertolin-Cebrián received her BA in Classical Philology at the University of Valencia (Spain) and wrote her MA thesis on the diction of satyrplays. She received her PhD from the University of Freiburg (Germany) in Indo-European Linguistics and published her dissertation under the title Die Verben des Denkens bei Homer (Innsbruck, 1996). Reyes has written on orality and literacy in Classical Greece as well as on Mycenaean Greek and Neo-Latin poetry. She is currently an Assistant Professor at the University of Calgary. Sponsored by the Department of Classics. 3:30 pm, Balmer Hall 416. A reception will follow in Denny Hall 215A. |
| 3:30 PM | Linguistics Colloquium "Assessing the brain dynamics of second-language learning," Lee Osterhout and Judith McLaughlin (UW, Psychology). It is almost universally believed that learning a language later in life is more difficult than learning one earlier in life. Explanations for this "age-of-acquisition" effect have come in two varieties: those that implicate maturation of the brain, and those that implicate the effects of experience with a first language. Both explanations implicate the same underlying cause for the age-of-acquisition effect, namely, a reduction in neural plasticity resulting from maturation or experience. However, there is surprisingly little direct evidence to support this claim. We will describe a series of studies in which we measured changes in brain activity that accompany the earliest stages of second-language learning. Contrary to what would be expected given conventional beliefs about language learning, we report dramatic changes in brain activity that occur with minimal linguistic input. These changes are not random but instead quickly begin to approximate native-like responses, and become increasingly native-like with increasing exposure to the language. 3:30 pm, Thompson 101. |
| 7:00 PM | Danz Lecture "Far Away, From Home: The Comma Between", Trinh Minh-ha (Film Maker and Professor of Women Studies, UC Berkeley). Part of the Jessie & John Danz Lecture Series of the Graduate School. Trinh joined the Women's Studies Department at the University of California at Berkeley in 1994; she has also taught at Harvard, Smith, San Francisco State University, the University of Illinois and the National Conservatory of Music in Senegal. She is a documentary feminist filmmaker and expert on avant-garde and third world post-colonial film theory. Admission is Free. Ticket required. 7 pm, Kane Hall 130. |
| 8:00 PM | **MYRA'S WAR CONCERT** This piano recital features selections from Myra Hess's repertoire. Part of a series of events "Myra's War: Five Perspectives" (January 21-24, 2003). Free and open to the public. 8 pm, Brechemin Auditorium, School of Music. |
| 8:00 PM | **PHOTOGRAPHY LECTURE** "Photographs and Videos," Amir Zaki (Digital Media, UC Riverside). Part of the Society for Photographic Education NW Regional Conference. Amir Zaki's work explores both the urban and suburban landscape through photography, video and sound. Using both public and private spaces as subjects, Zaki investigates the physical realities and banality of the landscape, as well as the mechanics of representation. Seemingly 'natural' visual observation is complicated by the specific use of light (or lack thereof) and digital technologies to reveal / create qualities in images that hopefully cause viewers to question the documentary nature of what they are observing. Zaki received his MFA from UCLA and is currently Assistant Professor of Digital Media at UC Riverside. His work is widely shown and collected. Zaki's work is featured during the conference at James Harris Gallery, 309A 3rd Ave S, Downtown Seattle. (January 2 - February 2.) For complete conference information (Jan 23-26) see the conference website. Sponsored by the UW School of Art Photography Program and the Simpson Center for the Humanities. 8 PM, Art Building, Room 003. |
| Saturday, January 25 | |
| 6:00 PM | Community Dance Conversation "Community Conversation with Carla Maxwell (Artistic Director, Limon Dance Company). Maxwell presents a comprehensive video/slide presentation discussing the remounting of "Psalm", an often overlooked masterpiece in the Limón canon. In creating "Psalm" Jose Limon drew upon a tenet of ancient Jewish belief that all the sorrows of the world rest upon 36 men, the bearers of all burdens. Conceived as an abstract ritual of rhythm and song, "Psalm" is a testament to the inherent strength of the human spirit in the face of adversity. Maxwell's re-staged version features a newly commissioned score by Jon Magnussen and premiered to rave reviews at the 2002 Salt Lake City Winter Olympic Arts Festival. Sponsored by the UW World Series at Meany Hall and the UW Dance Program. 6-7:30 PM, Kane Hall 220. |
| 8:00 PM | Photography Lecture "Flashes of Light - The Images of Harold Edgerton," Bob Edgerton. Part of the Society for Photographic Education NW Regional Conference. In honor of the 100th anniversary of Harold Edgerton's birthday (1903-1990), Bob Edgerton will present a lecture on his father's work - and demonstrate the stroboscopic devices used in his impressive career. MIT Professor Harold Edgerton, a prolific inventor and the master of ultra high-speed strobe photography, revealed views of frozen motion that are amongst the most beautiful and profound in the history of photography. Bob Edgerton was closely involved with his father's studies - from being the young subject of flash experiments to assisting on projects such as Harold Edgerton and Jacques Costeau's 1953 deep-sea photographic explorations. Bob pursued an academic and research career in optical physics. He and his wife Elizabeth moved to Seattle in 1995. For full conference listings (Jan. 23-26) refer to the conference website. Sponsored by the UW School of Art Photography Program. 8 PM, Seattle Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1100 12th Ave, Seattle. |