Wednesday, September 22nd 4:30PM Humanities 1006

Elaine Pagels, Harrington Spear Paine Professor of Religion, Princeton The Cultural Impact of the Book of Revelation

Elaine Pagels is the Harrington Spear Paine Professor of Religion at Princeton University and a prolific author. The Gnostic Gospels (1979), an analysis of early Christian manuscripts unearthed in Egypt, won the National Book Critics Circle Award and the National Book Award and was chosen by The Modern Library as one of the 100 best books of the 20th century. The Origin of Satan (1995) followed two tragic events in Pagels' life, the death of her 6-year-old son to a respiratory disease and the death of her husband in a rock-climbing accident. Reading Judas: The Gospel of Judas and the Shaping of Christianity (2007), co-authored with Karen King, is the first book to illustrate how the newly discovered Gospel of Judas sheds light on how Jesus' followers understood his death.

Wednesday, October 20th 4:30PM Humanities 1008

Dr. Elizabeth Pillsbury, ACLS Visiting Fellow
American Bouillabaisse: The Ecology, Politics and Economics of Fishing the Atlantic Coast, 1870-present

In the late nineteenth century, political and class divisions emerged between sportsmen and small-scale market fisherman around the coastal areas of New York. These divisions, coupled with the transformation of sport and commercial fishing, prevented the enactment of regulatory policies to protect fish populations from overfishing and habitat loss. This talk investigates how New York coastal fishing communities and ecologies lost out.

Thursday, October 28th 4:30PM Humanities 1008

Dr. Ludovic Cortade, New York University
Thinking Cinema Across Fault Lines: Adre Bazin and the Influence of the French School of Geography on Film Theory
This talk examines how Andre Bazin, one of the most influential film theorists and co-founder of Cahiers du Cinema, the world's longest running film journal, was influenced by the French school of Geography. Taking as a starting point the 2600 texts Bazin wrote, Professor Cortade will discuss Bazin's relationship to maps and how these shaped his conception of the ontology of the film image and realism.

Wednesday, November 4th 3PM (HUM 1008) and 7PM Huntington Cinema Arts Center (Admission $13 for non members)

Working from the 1998 novel of the same name by French psychoanalyst Francoise Davoine, filmmakers Mieke Bal & Michelle Williams Gamaker have woven a playful, challenging cinematic exploration of how society views and treats madness. This moving drama begins with a simple but haunting question: If your mentally ill patient dies, are you to blame? For Dr Francoise Davoine, Parisian psychoanalyst, this formerly hypothetical issue becomes disturbingly real. However, Bal and Gamaker are uninterested in creating realistic drama and in a bold twist Dr. Davoine is abducted and put on trial by mediaeval fools and through the course of one hellish night - across several centuries and countries - must argue her case for exoneration. As the journey forces Dr. Davoine to question her own life, via a mix of fiction, documentary and theory, Crazy Mother (Mere Folle) takes the viewer on a one-of-a-kind journey into the minds of the 'mad' and those designated to cure them. France, 2009, 120 min, French with English subtitles Mieke Bal, a cultural theorist and critic, is Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences Professor (KNAW). She is based at the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA), University of Amsterdam. Her areas of interest range from biblical and classical antiquity to 17th century and contemporary art and modern literature, feminism and migratory culture. Her thirty books include A Mieke Bal Reader (2006), Travelling Concepts in the Humanities (2002) and Narratology (3d edition 2009). Mieke Bal is also a video-artist, her experimental documentaries on migration include A Thousand and One Days; Colony and the installation Nothing is Missing. Her work is exhibited internationally.

Thursday, November 18th 4:30PM HUM 1008

Dr. Paula Findlen
Stanford University
One of the most important contributions to the debates about fossils in the seventeenth century came from a Sicilian painter. Agostino Scilla's Vain Speculation Undeceived by Sense (1670) combined his skills as an artist, observer, and scholar to present a new theory of fossil formation in words and images. This talk reconstructs the genesis of Scilla's project as a case study in the relations between art and science in seventeenth-century Italy.
Bio
Paula Findlen is the Ubaldo Pierotti Professor of Italian History and Chair of the History Department at Stanford University. Her books include Possessing Nature: Museums, Collecting, and Scientific Culture in Early Modern Italy (1994), Athanasius Kircher: The Last Man Who Knew Everything (2003), and In the Shadow of Newton: Laura Bassi and Her World (2009).

Thursday, December 2nd
4:00PM 1008 Humanities
Dr. April Masten (History) Dr. Peter Manning (English) Dr. Susan Scheckel (English)

This In Dialogue event joins faculty from the Departments of English and History to look at the currents of transatlantic exchange from the eighteenth century through the twentieth, moving from high culture to popular culture, from medical discourse through dance to literature and music. Susan Scheckel will consider the migration of medical discourse from Britain to the United States, and the concurrent migration of analytic terminology as the same symptoms generated different diagnoses as they crossed the racial divide. April Masten's examination of the vernacular dances of African, Irish, and Native Americans suggests that people?s cultural identities depended on currents of transatlantic exchange. Popular dance in Antebellum America was the product of migration and trade. Dancing steps, patterns, and music embodied the aesthetic and global movement of peoples. Peter Manning will look at the career of the composer Samuel Coleridge Taylor, the son of a black African doctor and a white British woman, whose setting of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's Hiawatha became an international success and brought him to the United States and into the orbit of Paul Laurence Dunbar, Booker T. Washington, and W E B DuBois even as it became a staple of British musical life. We hope that the overlaps and differences in our brief presentations will provoke a range of questions from those attending.

Tuesday, December 7th 4:30PM 1008 Humanities

Dr. Joseph Monteyne
Stony Brook Department of Art
Dr. Monteyne's interests range from early modern art and print culture to the historiography and methodology of art history. His first book, 'The Printed Image in Early Modern London: Urban Space, Visual Representation, and Social Exchange', was published by Ashgate in 2007. Dr. Monteyne has been the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, including fellowships from the Paul Mellon Center for Studies in British Art, the Social Sciences and Humanities Council of Canada, the Huntington Library, and the Yale Center for British Art in New Haven. His talk is adapted from his second book project entitled 'From Still-life to the Screen: Print Culture and Display in Eighteenth-Century London'.
Abstract
This talk examines a number of graphic satires produced in London during the second half of the eighteenth century depicting spectators gathered at the city's print shop windows. A common theme of this genre is the realization by spectators that they see their own images in the array of prints displayed in the glass, and this causes them to react with pleasure, shame, or anger. The satires are ambiguous as to whether the beholder is captured by a caricaturist's gaze or they have in fact fashioned themselves after an image in the window. The print shop windows are therefore viewed as an early form of screen, as a cultural repertoire of representations through which identity is formed or resisted.

Thursday, February 24th

4:30PM Humanities 1006Coastlines

In the Belly of the Beast: Scientific Study of Whales and Dolphins in the 20th Century
Graham Burnett Princeton University

Abstract In the aftermath of World War I, an international effort to bring rational regulations to the whaling industry led to an explosion of global research and regulations that, while well-meaning, were quashed, or widely flouted, by whaling nations, a battle that continues to this day. Burnett offers a look at the remarkable shift in public attitudes toward whales that began in the 1960s, as environmental concerns and new discoveries about whale behavior combined to make whales an object of sentimental concern and public adulation.
Bio
Graham Burnett is a Professor of the History of Science at Princeton University and recently held the Christian Gauss Fund University Preceptorship. His most recent book, Trying Leviathan: The Nineteenth-Century New York Court Case That Put the Whale on Trial and Challenged the Order of Nature (2007) won the 2007 Hermalyn Prize in Urban History and the New York City Book Award in 2008. His current research examines the intersections between science and visual arts.

Thursday, March 10th 4PM 1008 Humanities
Coastlines
Fish Tales, Oyster Stories: Historical Precedents and the Management of Marine Resources

Dr. Christine Keiner and Matthew McKenzie
Abstract
Using examples from the contentious history of oyster management in the Maryland Chesapeake Bay (a region in which scientists and entrepreneurs long sought to replicate the success of Long Island oyster growers), I plan to discuss the importance of integrating approaches from the history of science and environmental history so as to advance both the scholarship of marine environmental history and the process of environmental policymaking, especially with respect to estuarine and marine resource use.
Bio
Christine Keiner earned a B.A. in biology from McDaniel College and a Ph.D. in the history of science from Johns Hopkins University, and now teaches as an associate professor in the Science, Technology, and Society/Public Policy Department at Rochester Institute of Technology.

Moral Geographies: The Strait of Magellan in the Early 17th Century
Paul Firbas
Stony Brook University
Humanities Institute at Stony Brook
abstract In this talk, Professor Firbas examines Spanish, English and Dutch printed narratives and maps of the confines of South America. He analyzes the discourses and technologies employed in the production of a colonial territory that was imagined in the seventeenth century as both a friendly passage and as a barbaric border.
bio

Paul Firbas is an Associate Professor in the Department of Hispanic Languages and Literature at Stony Brook University. He published a study and a critical edition of Armas antarticas, an epic poem written by Juan de Miramontes Zuazola and is the editor of a volume of essays on Ibero-American epic texts in the colonial world. His forthcoming projects include a book on the moral geography of the Strait of Magellan; an edition of Lima news-sheets from the early eighteenth century; and a series of essays on memory and excavation in the Andes.