Mozart:
The Compositional Second Thoughts of a Master Improviser

Levin’s lecture will attempt to demonstrate that Mozart often thought abstractly while composing and in the process created passages so technically demanding he had to revise them, most likely immediately before a performance. Manuscripts of the piano concertos will be used to show that although some of Mozart’s corrections show an extraordinary refinement of melodic flow, many are designed simply to render passages less difficult. Here too, the artfulness of the revisions masks the fact that the original versions are often of equal or even higher quality. Even as he simplified, Mozart also deliberately left certain passages in schematic form to be fleshed out anew in each performance.

Levin’s performances have been acclaimed throughout the United States and Europe. His free fantasies in Mozart’s style, invented at the moment using themes written by the audience, and his improvised cadenzas have dazzled audiences and critics alike. Levin’s repertoire ranges from the Elizabethan masters to Boulez and Harbison. He has performed with such major orchestras as Berlin, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, Montreal, Minnesota, and Utah, appearing in recital in New York, London, Tokyo, and in numerous European cities.

Torah in the Mouth:
Oral Tradition and Religious Transformation in Classical Rabbinic Culture

The memorization, recitation, and criticism of orally transmitted traditions of law and lore was one of the central intellectual and religious activities of Rabbinic Judaism during its classical period (ca. 300-600 CE). Such activities transformed young Jewish men from mere Jews into “Sages.” Rabbinic oral tradition transmitted not only a body of technical knowledge, but also essential models of spiritual formation. In his lecture, Dr. Jaffee attempted to place the Rabbinic conceptions and processes of oral tradition into the broader context of rhetorical training and discipleship in late Roman and early Byzantine culture. The particular focus will be on the meaning of third-century efforts to entirely suppress the study of Rabbinic tradition from written texts, the corresponding celebration of the Sage as the sole source of authoritative religious wisdom (Torah), and the understanding of discipleship as a project of personal transformation into an embodiment of Torah.

Martin Jaffee is the Samuel and Althea Stroum Professor of Jewish St udies, Professor of Comparative Religion, and Chair of the Comparative Religion Program at the University of Washington. As a researcher in the field of classical Rabbinic Judaism, he has attempted to interpret the patterns of Rabbinic culture in light of paradigms drawn from the historical and phenomenological study of religions. His seven books include exegetical studies of classical Rabbinic writings, co-edited collections of essays on aspects of religious innovation, and textbooks for the study of Judaism and the comparative study of monotheism

Crosspolinations:
Philosophically Fruitful Interactions
between Jewish and Islamic Philosophy

Dr. Goodman’s lecture will focus on three thoughts that passed from Biblical and Qur’anic scripture and Greek philosophical dialogues, treatises, and commentaries to Muslim and Jewish philosophers: (1) that the seemingly ineffable content of religious experience can be articulated through symbols and so made a social reality, as imagery, ritual, myth and law; (2) the idea that since man is made in the image of God, people can learn about God by studying humanity; and (3) the belief that God executes justice in history by visiting upon us the consequences of our actions, individually and communally.

As a philosopher and scholar of Jewish and Islamic philosophy, Lenn E. Goodman is the author of twelve books and over 100 articles, chapters and reviews. Goodman is a graduate of Harvard University and received his doctorate from Oxford University, where he was a Marshall scholar. Before coming to Vanderbilt in 1994, Goodman taught philosophy at the University of Hawaii for 25 years.

This Book Is Alive:
On Charismatic Art

Encompassing other humanistic themes, Stephen Jaeger’s February lecture discussed a theory of representation that relates art to the charismatic presence visible in an art that idealizes aura. Citing examples as varied as Albrecht Dürer’s 1500 messianic self-portrait to movies like Forrest Gump, Jaeger showed how the technique of overlaying individuality with divinity in depiction of the human face and being can have a powerful hold over the imagination in life as in art.

Venus Rising:
Uses of Tahiti in the Eighteenth-Century Imagination

Antoine-Louis de Bougainville landed on Tahiti in 1768, calling it “The New Cythera” after the island on which Venus had been born. Thanks to Bougainville’s descriptions and those of Captain Cook in 1776-9, Tahiti became the image of a tropical paradise of unrestrained sensuality whose inhabitants lived out their lives wholly in accordance with the laws of nature. For those who read Bougainville and Cook, the Tahitians became a means of measuring and criticizing prevailing European views of pleasure, nature, and the place of culture in the creation of the human personality. They seemed to offer a last glimpse, before the missionaries and the settlers took over, of what mankind might once have been. They were the last, and most vivid of the “Noble Savages,” and they and their fate served to illustrate a crisis in the European moral imagination.

Why Linguists Aren’t Postmodernists

The field of linguistics in the United States has been barely touched by the postmodernist turn that has swept the humanities and social sciences. Linguists reject the extreme relativism of postmodernism and believe that science provides an ideal means of understanding how the world works. They also tend to be highly skeptical of many of the political arguments that postmodernists put forward in support of their ideas. In this talk, Newmeyer explains and defends linguists’ opposition to postmodernism and presents evidence that innately-determined structural principles lie at the heart of language.

Newmeyer has just been elected president of the Linguistic Society of America. He is the author of six books covering topics as diverse as English grammar, the neurology of language, and the history and sociology of the field of linguistics.

Medieval Platonism – Between Metaphysics and Deconstruction

The lecture will pursue two overlapping interpretations. The first will propose that a cluster of textual themes which one might label “Platonism” underlies all medieval thought, and that of particular importance within this context are the notions of ambiguity and non-ambiguity. The second will suggest that the “Platonic” cluster of themes has reappeared strikingly in modern thought, as illustrated by the important Derridean quasi-concepts of “place” and “denial.” Throughout the lecture, Gersh says, he will tackle the question, misunderstood by pro-deconstructionists and anti-deconstructionists alike, of “the ontology of presence.”

Gersh received his doctorate from Cambridge University in 1973 with double first-class honors in Classics and Philosophy and is one of the world’s foremost scholars of medieval philosophy. He is the author of many books on Neoplatonism, most recently, Concord in Discourse: Harmonics and Semiotics in Late Classical and Early Medieval Platonism (1996), and co-editor of Platonism in Late Antiquity (1992).

Dante’s Idea of Rome

This lecture will discuss Dante’s idea of the Roman Empire which not only provides an explanation for the—at first glance—surprisingly important role of the pagan Virgil in the Commedia, but is also a key concept for Dante’s theories of secular and salvation history.

Andreas Kablitz, born in 1957, studied Romance Languages at the University of Cologne with a scholarship of the renowned Studienstiftung des Deutschen Volkes. In 1981 he began to work as an Assistant at the University of (West-)Berlin, where he received his Ph.D. with a thesis on Lamartine in 1983. In 1994 he returned to Cologne, where - in addition to his professorial lecturing activities - he is now also the director of the Petrarca-Institute, member of the editorial board of the Romantistische Jahrbuch and of the academic comittee of the Fritz-Thyssen-Stiftung. In 1997 he was awarded the Leibniz-Preis of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft. Although his special research interest of late centers on Dante, his essays cover a wide range of topics from French, Italian and English Literature, featuring Petrarch, Tasso and other authors from the Italian and French Renaissance as well as Shakespeare, Thomas Mann and Oscar Wilde.

Japan’s Traditional Lifestyles: Reflections in 2001

Traditional lifestyles in the centuries preceding Japan’s industrialization were forged in the turbulent years of civil war in the 16th century, and during the peace following unification in 1600. Despite a growing population, three major famines, and limited land and resources, the economy grew, and the Japanese developed a simple and ecological lifestyle that was also aesthetic and healthful. This lecture will examine how the Japanese created this lifestyle and reflect on what we might learn from them in our own tumultuous times when we too are faced with environmental, economic, and security concerns.

Who Owns ‘Human Nature’

‘Human nature’ used to be a prime topic of discussion among poets, novelists and political philosophers. These days, though, the only ones making authoritative pronouncements about the nature of ‘human nature’ are scientists. What should we make of this custody battle around the question of human nature? And what are its implications for the humanities?

Marjorie Garber is the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of English and the Director of the Humanities Center at Harvard University. A renowned Shakespearean scholar, Garber’s research spans dramatic theory and performance, cultural studies, psychoanalysis and literature, gender and feminist theory, media studies, and visual culture. Among her many books are Academic Instincts (2001), Sex and Real Estate (2000), Symptoms of Culture (1998), Dog Love (1996), Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety (1992), and Shakespeare’s Ghost Writers: Literature as Uncanny Casualty (1981). Garber is currently Chair of the CHCI, the international Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes.

Ethics Without Metaphysics

Since the time of Plato, philosophers have sought a metaphysical foundation for ethics, or, failing to find one, have sought to “debunk” the very idea of objective ethics. In this lecture, Putnam will describe the controversy and defends the view that objectivity of ethical judgments needs no foundation external to ethical life itself. Putnam has written extensively on the philosophy of mathematics, philosophy of natural science, philosophy of language, and the philosophy of mind. Many of his papers have been collected in three volumes of Philosophical Papers, in Realism with a Human Face, and in Words and Life. He is also the author of a number of books, including most recently Renewing Philosophy and Pragmatism.

Sins of the Father: American Culture in a Time of Terror

Throughout American history, narratives about fathers and sons have provided compelling frameworks for telling stories about who we are as Americans. Whether stories of rebellion, restoration, correction, or continuation, the relationships between fathers and sons have structured how we, as a culture, talk about continuity, change, and hope for the future. This lecture will explore what stories about fathers and sons look like in a post-September 11 environment and what those stories tell us about how collectively we understand ourselves as Americans.

Susan Jeffords is Professor of English and Women Studies at the University of Washington, where she also serves as Divisional Dean for the Social Sciences in the College of Arts and Sciences. She is the author of Hard Bodies: Hollywood Masculinity in the Reagan Era (1994) and The Remasculinization of America: Gender and the Vietnam War (1989) and the coeditor of Seeing Through the Media: The Persian Gulf War (1994). She teaches courses in American popular culture, with a particular emphasis on Hollywood film, the Vietnam War, and feminism.

Hear this lecture in QuickTime video, downloadable MP3 or iTunes Podcast format.

Yeats and Lyric Form

How did Yeats choose the specific form in which he would cast different thematic materials? Did form have ideological meaning to Yeats? Why did some forms persist through his lifetime, and others appear only in one phase? Currently working on the history of Yeats’s styles, Helen Vendler will address these and other questions in her lecture.

Helen Vendler is the A. Kingsley Porter University Professor at Harvard University, where she teaches in the Department of English and American Literature and Language. She is the author of many books on poetry, including Seamus Heaney (1998), The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets (1997) and Voices and Visions: The Poet in America (1987). Her influential essays have appeared in The New Yorker and the New York Times Book Review. Vendler has received grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Fulbright Foundation as well as seventeen honorary degrees from universities around the world.

Emotion, Feeling, and Social Behavior:
The Brain Perspective

Antonio Damasio’s trilogy, Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain (1994), The Feeling of What Happens (1999) and Looking for Spinoza (2003), inspired the theme for the 2003 UW Summer Arts Festival, Spheres. Delving into activity in the anterior portion of the cerebral hemi”spheres,” Damasio’s research “… brings us closer to understanding the delicate interaction between affect, consciousness, and memory - the processes that both keep us alive and make life worth living” (Harcourt Books).

Listen to Antonio Damioso’s full Katz Lecture in Windows Video, downloadable MP3 or iTunes Podcast format.

In Ten Senses:
Some Sentences About Art’s Senses and Intents

“Wonderful fluency and happy skepticism, the world beautifully seen and sung, the word relished and suspected. Lots of impulse and energy, sprezzatura, bravura.”
—Seamus Heaney, Nobel Prize-winning poet, on the work of Heather McHugh

Heather McHugh is the Milliman Distinguished Writer-in-Residence at the University of Washington. Her books of poetry include Eyeshot (2003) and The Father of the Predicaments (1999). Hinge & Sign: Poems 1968-1993 (1994) won both the Boston Book Review’s Bingham Poetry Prize and the Pollack-Harvard Review Prize, was a Finalist for the National Book Award, and was named a “Notable Book of the Year” by the New York Times Book Review. McHugh is also the author of a volume of literary essays, Broken English: Poetry and Partiality (1993), and several books of poetry in translation including Glottal Stop: 101 Poems by Paul Celan (2000). Her honors include two grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Voelcker Poetry Award from PEN, and a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship.

Listen in downloadable MP3 format.

Reflections on Architecture and the Public Realm:
The World Trade Center 1964-2004

Vidler is a specialist in the history, theory, and criticism of modern architecture and urbanism. He has published several works, including, most recently, Warped Space: Architecture and Anxiety in Modern Culture (2002).

The Aura of Modernism

Perloff, one of America’s most prominent critics of contemporary poetry, is renowned for her study of the avant-garde. She is the author of many books and essays on poetry, among them her most recent publication, 21st Century Modernism: The “New” Poetics (2002), Wittgenstein’s Ladder: Poetic Language and the Strangeness of the Ordinary (1996), Radical Artifice: Writing Poetry in the Age of Media (1992), her best-known work, and The Poetics of Indeterminacy: Rimbaud to Cage (1981), winner of the Phi Kappa Phi Book Award. She has held many prominent positions, including the Presidency of the American Comparative Literature Association from 1993 to 1995, and is currently Sadie Dernham Patek Professor Emerita of Humanities at Stanford University.

Hear this lecture in downloadable MP3 or iTunes Podcast format.

The Right Side of the Tracks, from
As If: An Autobiography

In this lecture, taken from his memoirs, Herbert Blau plumbs his beginnings in the mean and ugly Brooklyn streets and the unlikely connections that informed his subsequent life as a director, an educator, and a writer.

An innovative director and theoretician of performance, Herbert Blau is the Byron W. and Alice L. Lockwood Professor in the Humanities at the University of Washington. As co-founder of The Actor’s s Workshop in San Francisco (1952-1965) and co-director of the Repertory Theater of Lincoln Center in New York (1965-68), Blau introduced American audiences to avant-garde drama in some of this country’s s very first productions of Beckett, Genet, and Pinter. He extended the challenges of such cutting-edge work as artistic director of the experimental group KRAKEN (1968-1981). The two books that emerged from that work — Take Up the Bodies: Theater at the Vanishing Point (1982) and Blooded Thought: Occasions of Theater (1982)— received the George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism and became seminal books in the developing field of performance theory. Blau’s s most recent book is The Dubious Spectacle: Extremities of Theater (2002). His first is The Impossible Theater: A Manifesto (1964). In addition to the theater, Blau’s vital critical intelligence has taken up the subjects of literature, visual arts, fashion, postmodern culture and politics.

Listen to Herbert Blau’s full Katz Lecture in RealVideo, downloadable MP3 or iTunes Podcast format.

A public lecture in association with The Architect’s Studio exhibition.

Santiago Calatrava’s architecture was on spectacular view at his Athens Olympic Sports Complex this summer, and he won acclaim for his evocative design for the PATH transportation terminal at the World Trade Center. He discusses these and other projects in conjunction with the exhibition Santiago Calatrava: The Architect’s Studio at the Henry Art Gallery.

As both an architect and engineer, Santiago Calatrava creates works that emphasize structural design and create unusual sculptural surfaces. After earning a degree in architecture in his native Valencia, Calatrava pursued post-graduate studies in civil engineering in Zurich, where he established his first office. In 1984, he designed and built the Bach de Roda Bridge for the Olympic Games in Barcelona, beginning a series of notable bridge projects. Calatrava opened a second office in Paris and a third in Valencia to facilitate his increasingly complex public projects, including the Lyon Airport (1989-1994), and the City of Arts and Sciences in Valencia (ongoing). Among his recent projects are the Milwaukee Art Museum (2001), Tenerife Opera House (2003), and commissions for the Christ the Light Cathedral in Oakland, California, and Symphony Center in Atlanta, Georgia. Calatrava has also exhibited his sculpture in galleries and museums, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York (1993), and the Palazzo Strozzi in Florence, Italy (2000-2001).

Listen to Santiago Calatrava’s full Katz Lecture inRealVideo format.

Islam and Modernity: The Problem with Paradise
“Britain’s own Muslim polymath” —The Independent (London)

Listen to Ziauddin Sardar’s full Katz Lecture in RealVideo, downloadable MP3 or iTunes Podcast format.

Interpretations of Early Indian History

“An historian who is indefatigable in the pursuit of knowledge and prolific in its publication, and who, is above all a devoted partisan of the truth.”— citation presented by Oxford University while conferring on her an honorary doctorate of letters, 2002

Dr. Romila Thapar is one of the world’s foremost experts on ancient Indian history. Thapar received her doctoral degree from London University in 1960 and returned to a newly independent India to pursue her teaching and scholarship. Her research on ancient India has evolved new ways of reading evidence from archaeology, mythology, literature, philosophy, ritual texts, folklore, and other sources. The results have yielded illuminating perspectives on contemporary India as well as new comparative and conceptual insights for historical studies more broadly. First published in 1966, Thapar’s History of India, Vol.1, has been in print ever since. Thapar’s subsequent books—and there are many—have secured her reputation as one of the most distinguished and productive scholars in her field. Her most recent book, Somanatha: The Many Voices of a History (2004), provides a new frame for understanding a pivotal moment in Indian history. In 2004 the U.S. Library of Congress appointed her as the first holder of the Kluge Chair in Countries and Cultures of the South.

Romila Thapar was the Katz Distinguished Visiting Professor in the Humanities Spring Quarter 2005. While in residence, Boreth Ly, a 2004-2005 Rockefeller Residential Fellow in Critical Asian Studies at the Simpson Center, and Miriam Bartha, the Simpson Center’s Assistant Director, took the opportunity to speak with Professor Thapar informally on themes relevant to interdisciplinary and humanistic study. Click here to read an excerpt of the interview. You may listen or view Thapar’s Katz lecture by choosing an option below.

Listen to Romila Thapar’s full Katz Lecture in RealVideo, downloadable MP3 or iTunes Podcast format.

“Only in the Contemplation of Beauty Is Human Life Worth Living”
(Plato, Symposium 211d)

“I am an aesthete; that is the one ‘sin’ I confess to. If I do have a public message, it is that aesthetic facts—beauty, style and elegance, grace and connectedness—are crucial to life.”

— Alexander Nehamas in an interview with David Carrier in Bomb Magazine, 1998

Alexander Nehamas is an internationally known philosopher whose broad range of scholarly interests include classical Greek philosophy, aesthetics, and literary theory. Recently he has addressed the question of why beauty has been discredited as a philosophical notion and has championed aesthetic values. He is author of Virtues of Authenticity: Essays on Plato and Socrates (1999) and Nietzsche: Life as Literature (1985), which is considered a classic, as well as translator of Plato’s Symposium (1989) and Phaedrus (1995). Nehamas is particularly interested in Nietzsche’s integration of life and philosophy in the creation of self, which he calls the “art of living.” He links this philosophical practice to a model that comes from classical Greece, and in his book The Art of Living: Socratic Reflections from Plato to Foucault (1998) he examines the influence of this Socratic tradition on later philosophers, including Montaigne, Nietzsche, and Foucault.

Hear this lecture in Windows Audio, Real Video, RealAudio, downloadable MP3 or iTunes Podcast format.

In Search of the Words of the Buddha

Richard Salomon has earned international recognition for his identification of the earliest surviving Buddhist texts, whose importance for Buddhist culture is comparable to that of the Dead Sea Scrolls for Judaism and early Christianity. Salomon also directs the Early Buddhist Manuscript Project, a groundbreaking collaboration between The British Library and the University of Washington dedicated to providing access—in book and digital form—to the unprecedented insights contained in these important texts. Acquired by the British Library in 1994, these fragile birch-bark scrolls were buried in clay pots in ancient Gandhara (now northern Pakistan and eastern Afghanistan) almost 2,000 years ago. Salomon’s work on the Gandharan texts includes A Gandhari Version of the Rhinoceros Sutra (2000) and Ancient Buddhist Scrolls from Gandhara (1999), which are part of a series Salomon edits for University of Washington Press. Salomon earned his Ph.D. in Sanskrit from University of Pennsylvania and has published over 150 books and articles, among them Indian Epigraphy: A Guide to the Study of Inscriptions in Sanskrit, Prakrit, and the Other Indo-Aryan Languages (1998), which is considered the standard reference work on the subject.

Hear this lecture in Windows Video, Real Video, downloadable MP3 or iTunes Podcast format.

Politics, Democracy and Philosophy:
An Obscure Knot
A lecture in conjunction with the UW workshop, “Is a History of the Cultural Revolution Possible?”

Alain Badiou is a poet, playwright, critic, screenwriter, aesthetician, and political activist; he is also among the most innovating philosophers of our time. Born in Rabat, Morocco in 1937, he has taught at the University of Paris VIII (Vincennes-Saint Denis) and the École Normale Supérieure. Known for his re-thinking of core ideas in European philosophy such as event, aesthetics, love and truth, Badiou was trained as a mathematician before engaging philosophy as such. Badiou’s partition of scholarship into four fields—politics, science, art, and love—and his inventive writing on thinkers ranging from Plato, St. Paul, and Samuel Beckett to Mao Zedong, Jacques Lacan, and Heidegger offers a demonstration of philosophy’s powers and its importance. Among Badiou’s recently published works in English translation are Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism (2003), Handbook of Inaesthetics (2004), Think Again: Alain Badiou and the Future of Philosophy (2005), and Alain Badiou and Cultural Revolution, a special issue of the journal positions: east asia cultures critique (2005).

Hear this lecture in Windows Audio, Real Video, downloadable MP3 or iTunes Podcast format.

Click here to read an interview with Alain Badiou by Diana George and Nic Veroli.

Special thanks to Terry Schenold and the Blooded by Thought project for the audio recording of this lecture.

Shame and Courage at the Collapse of Civilization

Jonathan Lear is the John U. Nef Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago, where he is a member of the Committee on Social Thought and the Department of Philosophy. Professor Lear is a philosopher, psychoanalyst, and an internationally known speaker. He is the author of Therapeutic Action: An Earnest Plea for Irony (2003), Happiness, Death, and the Remainder of Life (2000), Open Minded: Working Out the Logic of the Soul (1998), Love and its Place in Nature: A Philosophical Interpretation of Freudian Psychoanalysis (1990), and other works.

Vanishing Points:
Law, Violence and Exception in the Global War Prison

As one of the preeminent scholars in the areas of human and cultural geography, Derek Gregory has been widely influential across numerous fields in the humanities. Since 9/11 much of his work has focused on the long history of British and American involvement in the Middle East. In particular he traces how centuries of imperial and colonial practice continue to shape global imbalances of power and perception in the region.

Gregory’s lecture will examine how these imbalances of power are currently playing out in the “war on terror” with a focus on the imprisonment and interrogation practices used in the global war prison. His talk will explore the strategic geographical sites of the global war prison including Bagram, Guantánamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, and the so-called ‘Black Sites,’ showing how they are produced through constantly shifting folds between law and violence.

Derek Gregory is Distinguished University Scholar and Professor of Geography at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. He is the author of The Colonial Present: Afghanistan, Palestine, Iraq (2004) and Geographical Imaginations (1993).

Kane Hall 120
Reception to follow in the Walker-Ames Room.

Listen to Derek Gregory’s full Katz Lecture in Windows Video, QuickTime, downloadable MP3 or iTunes Podcast format.

Whole Sight:
The Intersection of Culture, Faith, and the Imagination

“Among the most brilliant writers in America, Charles Johnson possesses a complex vision of art, spirituality, culture, and race that is expressed most powerfully, no doubt, in his wonderful novels and short stories.” - Arnold Rampersad, Stanford University

From his creative beginnings as a political cartoonist and journalist to his success as a novelist, essayist, short story writer, screen-and-teleplay writer, and university professor, Charles Johnson is a model of an interdisciplinary life.

Charles Johnson is the S. Wilson and Grace M. Pollock Professor of English at the University of Washington. A 1998 MacArthur Fellow, Dr. Johnson received the 1990 National Book Award for his novel Middle Passage (1990) and was a 2002 recipient of the Academy Award for Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He has published collections of short fiction, screenplays, critical essays on literature and Buddhism, and has written numerous articles on writing, education, and other contemporary issues. Recent publications include Dr. King’s Refrigerator and Other Bedtime Stories (2005), Turning the Wheel: Essays on Buddhism and Writing (2003), and Africans in America: America’s Journey through Slavery (1998), the companion book for the PBS series co-authored with Patricia Smith.

Kane Hall 120
Reception to follow in the Walker-Ames Room.

Download a transcript of the lecture, watch in QuickTime, Windows Video or listen in downloadable MP3 or iTunes Podcast format. You can also listen to an introduction by Professor Shawn Wong (English) in MP3 format here.

Climate and Catastrophe:
The World Crisis of the 17th Century

Geoffrey Parker, Andreas Dorpalen Professor of History at Ohio State University, is a renowned scholar of early modern European social, political, and military history. A Fellow of the British Academy (the highest honor bestowed on a scholar of the humanities in Great Britain), he is the author of many books, including The Military Revolution: Military Innovation and the Rise of the West, 1500-1800 (1988) and The Grand Strategy of Philip II (1998). In 1992 the King of Spain named him Knight Grand Cross of the Order of Isabella for his contributions to Spanish history. Parker has also received two Guggenheim Fellowships to support research on his forthcoming book, Climate and Catastrophe: The World Crisis of the 17th Century (Oxford 2007).

Climate and Catastrophe will bring new global and environmental perspectives to bear on the history of early modern Europe. Parker analyses the historical records and traces the ways in which dramatic climate changes of the 1640s precipitated a cascading series of violent social, economic, and political crises around the globe—from China to Europe to the New World colonies. Acutely relevant to current concerns about the human, economic, and political consequences of global warming, Parker’s research brings historical perspective to bear on current discussions and debates about environmental policies, international politics, and globalization. In his Katz Lecture, Parker will recount this history and probe its meaning for the present.

Kane Hall 110
Reception to follow in the Walker-Ames Room.

In conjunction with his Katz Lecture, Parker will teach a 4-day micro-seminar for graduate students on how to write history. Details

Watch the lecture in QuickTime or listen in downloadable MP3 or iTunes Podcast format.

Reading and Responsibility

“At its most valuable, literature challenges us to reconfigure the frameworks by which we understand the world…” — Derek Attridge in an interview with Mark Thwaite for ReadySteadyBook.com, 2004

Derek Attridge is Leverhulme Research Professor and Chair of English at the University of York. A scholar of remarkable range and sensitivity, Attridge is known as a leading interpreter of James Joyce, J.M.Coetzee, and Jacques Derrida as well as a brilliant theorist of poetic form and literary language. He is the author of nine books, including How to Read Joyce (2007), Poetic Rhythm: An Introduction (1995), and The Singularity of Literature (2004), winner of the 2006 European Society for the Study of English Book Award.

Through his work, Attridge attends to reading and writing as creative acts and ethical engagements that make a difference in the world, and to the specific force of the literary to effect strange and potent communication across time and space. Attridge addresses in his work the question of what we might learn—of receptivity, of otherness, of responsibility—by way of reading.

Hear this lecture in QuickTime Video, downloadable MP3 or iTunes Podcast format.

History
University of Washington

Translation in Wartime

Room 120
UW Kane Hall

“Translation looks two ways. It opens up a passage, drawing near what at the same time will always remain afar. ” — Vicente L. Rafael, “Translation in Wartime”

Vicente L. Rafael is Professor of History and Southeast Asian Studies at the University of Washington. Renowned for the reach, breadth, and robust cosmopolitanism of his scholarship, Rafael works across three languages and three centuries of modern empire. The author of numerous books, including The Promise of the Foreign (2005), White Love and Other Events in Filipino History (2000), and Contracting Colonialism (1993), Rafael focuses on modernity, nationalism, colonialism, and post-colonialism in global history and for the global present.

Rafael’s lecture will inquire into the historical, political, and pragmatic relationship between translation and empire. Drawing attention to the complex ethics of translation practices, he examines how iterations of translation consolidate and confound imperial projects. Through a consideration of the language initiatives and policies attending the so-called War on Terror, Rafael probes the ways in which the demand for translation induces and intensifies the war of meanings, the confusion of address, and the crisis of identities in U.S.–occupied Iraq.

Hear this lecture in downloadable MP3 or Streaming Quicktime format.

Political Science
University of California, Berkeley

Porous Sovereignty, Walled Democracy

Room 120
UW Kane Hall
7 PM

Wendy Brown is Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of numerous influential books, including Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Empire and Identity (2006), Politics Out of History (2001), and States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity (1995). Known for her subtle and sophisticated interpretations of political theory and practice, her work elucidates the contemporary knots tying subordination and freedom, exclusion and equality, markets and democracy, state institutions and social movements.

In her Katz lecture, Brown will address the curious phenomenon that finds nation-states building physical walls at their borders. In an ostensibly connected global world, such walls raise a series of questions. What is the relationship between these walls and the erosion of national sovereignty by transnational forces? Do the walls assert sovereignty or confess its failures? What is the relationship of economy and security at the site of walls? And what transformation in democracy do the new walls herald?

Hear this lecture in downloadable MP3 or Streaming QuickTime format.

Who Will Build the Ark? The Architectural Imagination in an Age of Catastrophic Convergence

From history and geography to environmental studies and urban planning, Mike Davis’ work combines archival knowledge with analytical rigor to comprise a genuinely distinctive critical voice. A writer, academic, activist, and public intellectual, Davis is the author of numerous books, including Buda’s Wagon: A Brief History of the Car Bomb (2008), In Praise of Barbarians: Essays Against Empire (2007), Planet of Slums (2006), and City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (1990).

A distinguished scholar of twentieth-century French literature, intellectual history, and film, Ungar is the author of six books on French culture and theory, including Scandal and Aftereffect: Blanchot and France Since 1930 (1995), and Popular Front Paris and the Poetics of Culture (2005; co-authored with Dudley Andrew). Ungar’s current research project, entitled Making Waves: French Documentary Film 1945-1967 is a book-length analysis of fifteen pivotal films from the postwar period that contributed to the New Wave movement in France.

How to View a Mountain in Medieval China

David R. Knechtges is the author of over one hundred articles and nine books on classical and medieval Chinese literature. He is the editor and translator of three volumes of Wen-xuan or Selections of Refined Literature. Knechtges’ most recent work includes Studies in Early Medieval Chinese Literature and Cultural History (2003; co-edited with Paul Kroll), and Rhetoric and the Discourses of Power in Court Culture, East and West (2005; co-edited with Eugene Vance). Knechtges is a recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship and is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.