Simpson Center for the Humanities at the University of Washington

Conference

Legacies of German Unification:
Twenty Years of German Unity

Thursday - Friday, November 19 - 20, 2009 Kane 225 Details

Join us for this two-day, interdisciplinary conference as leading scholars discuss the impact and historical significance of the German Wende. Twenty years ago this autumn, the Berlin Wall fell and the transformation process that led to formal German unification began. This milestone anniversary provides an exceptional opportunity to take stock of how life, politics, and culture have evolved in unified Germany and how the momentous events of 1989 continue to shape the ongoing process of European integration. Konrad Jarausch (European Civilization, UNC Chapel Hill) will deliver the keynote address, “Germany 1989: a new kind of revolution?”, on Thursday at 7pm. Jarausch has written or edited more than thirty books in modern German history. He recently has been concerned with the problem of interpreting 20th-century German history in general, the learning processes after 1945, the issue of cultural democratization, and the relationship between Honecker and Brezhnev.

Sergio de la Mora

Abjection and Violence in Contemporary Mexican Cinema

Thursday, Nov 19, 2009 - 1:30 PM Savery 138 Details eFlyer

Sergio de la Mora (Chicana & Chicano Studies, University of California, Davis) examines how the canonical Mexican directors Arturo Ripstein and Alejandro González Iñárritu, working at the cutting edge of the Mexican film industry in the 1970s and the 1990s, respectively, have approached the issues of aesthetic form, genre, and social critique. His analysis will give particular attention to gender, sexual identity, and violence, as exemplified in Ripstein’s El lugar sin límites (The Place Without Limits, 1977) and Iñárritu’s Amores perros (Love’s a Bitch, 2000). de la Mora’s talk takes place in “The History of Mexican Cinema,” taught by Cynthia Steele (Comparative Literature) and is open to the public. His lecture is presented by the Dangerous Subjects Research Cluster.

American Music Partnership of Seattle

AMPS at the Simpson Center

The American Music Partnership of Seattle (AMPS) has come to live at the Simpson Center for the Humanities!

This Paul G. Allen Family Foundation-funded grant supports collaboration among Experience Music Project, KEXP Radio, and the University of Washington, leveraging the unique assets of each institution.

AMPS emphasizes and promotes the role of music in local communities and lives, stretches the capacity of all three participating organizations, and provides each organization with a reliable network for music resources. It creates an institutional link between different modes of music education—radio programming, exhibitions, scholarship, and performance—that facilitates their integration and enhances their impact.

Learn more about AMPS projects and initiatives, including Sound Documentaries (on KEXP), the Pop Conference (at EMP), and the Seattle Fandango Project.

Hypatia’s 25th Anniversary Conference

Feminist Legacies / Feminist Futures

Participants in the panel with local feminist scholars on Friday, October 23 included Alison Wylie (Philosophy and Anthropology), Eva Cherniavsky (English), Janelle Taylor (Anthropology), Barbara Reskin (Sociology), Carolyn Allen (English), and Judy Howard (Divisional Dean of Social Sciences and Professor, Sociology)

More than 150 participants from around the country participated in Hypatia’s 25th Anniversary Conference on October 22-24. The Hypatia editors, the local editorial advisors, and the Simpson Center hosted the conference to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the journal of feminist philosophy and to explore the future as it has taken shape across a range of disciplines. Volume 25 will be published in 2010.

Science Studies Network Colloquium

Helen Longino Discusses Her Current Work

As part of her presence on campus as the Fall 2009 Walker Ames Scholar, Helen Longino (Philosophy, Stanford) presented a lecture as part of Representations, the 2009-10 Science Studies Network lecture series, and held a colloquium with faculty and graduate students. Longino discussed chapters from a forthcoming monograph in which she analyzes the evidential structures and frameworks of inquiry that inform the contemporary sciences of human behavior. Well-known for her contributions to social epistemology and feminist philosophy of science, especially her arguments for the relevance of social values to the justification of scientific knowledge as objective, Longino is a contributing co-editor of Scientific Pluralism (2006).