[Peace] Fwd: [Fwd: IPRH Conference - Difference]
Al Kagan
akagan at uiuc.edu
Mon Mar 28 22:04:32 CST 2005
Begin forwarded message:
> From: "Richard J. Leskosky" <rleskosk at uiuc.edu>
> Date: March 28, 2005 2:33:40 PM CST
> To: rleskosk at uiuc.edu
> Subject: [Fwd: IPRH Conference - Difference]
> Reply-To: rleskosk at uiuc.edu
>
>
>
> The Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities
>
>
> presents
>
>
> DIFFERENCE
> The Seventh Annual IPRH Conference
>
>
>
>
> March 31 - April 1, 2005
> Levis Faculty Center, Third Floor
> 919 West Illinois, Urbana
>
>
>
>
>
>
> THURSDAY, March 31 - 7:30pm
>
>
> KEYNOTE ADDRESS - SUVIR KAUL
> Professor of English, University of Pennsylvania
>
>
> "Indifference"
>
>
> Reception following lecture
>
>
>
> FRIDAY, APRIL 1 - 10:00am
>
>
> WELCOME AND INTRODUCTORY REMARKS
>
>
>
> FRIDAY, APRIL 1 - 10:15am
>
>
> PANEL: NATIONS AND THEIR DIFFERENCES
>
>
> Panelists:
> Shefali Chandra, History/Gender & Women's Studies
> Jeremy Engels, Speech Communication
> Nichole Rustin, ICR/Afro-American Studies
> Kerry Wynn, History
>
> Chair: Laura Bellows, Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow/Anthropology
>
>
>
>
> FRIDAY, APRIL 1 - 1:30pm
>
>
> PANEL: DIFFERENT ARTS
>
>
> Panelists:
> Brett Boutwell, Music
> Frances Gateward, Cinema/Afro-American Studies
> Marina Levina, ICR
> Christian Sandvig, Speech Communication
> Li-Lin Tseng, Art History
>
>
> Chair: Matti Bunzl, IPRH/Anthropology
>
>
>
>
> FRIDAY, APRIL 1 - 3:30pm
>
>
> PANEL: DIFFERENCE THROUGH BETTER LIVING
>
> Panelists:
> Becky Conekin, IPRH/History
> Dianne Harris, Landscape Architecture
> Jonathan Moore, IPRH/Religious Studies
> Dan Tracy, English
>
> Chair: Christine Catanzarite, IPRH/Cinema Studies
>
>
>
>
> All panels feature presentations by the IPRH Post-Doctoral, Faculty,
> and Graduate Student Fellows for 2004-05. For more information about
> their research projects, please see below.
>
>
>
>
> Keynote Speaker
>
>
> Suvir Kaul, a former Director of the Illinois Program for Research in
> the Humanities, is Professor of English at the University of
> Pennsylvania. He received his B. A. (Hons.), M. A., and M. Phil.
> degrees from the University of Delhi, and his Ph. D. from Cornell. He
> has taught at SGTB Khalsa College in Delhi, Stanford University, and
> the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign before moving to the
> University of Pennsylvania in 2003. He has published two monographs,
> Poems of Nation, Anthems of Empire: English Verse in the Long
> Eighteenth Century (University Press of Virginia, 2000; Delhi: Oxford
> University Press, 2001), and Thomas Gray and Literary Authority:
> Ideology and Poetics in Eighteenth-Century England (Delhi: Oxford
> University Press, 1992; Stanford University Press, 1992) and has
> recently edited a collection of essays entitled The Partitions of
> Memory: The Afterlife of the Division of India (Delhi: Permanent
> Black, 2001; London: C. Hurst, 2001; Bloomington: Indiana University
> Press, 2002). Postcolonial Studies and Beyond, a volume Kaul co-edited
> with Ania Loomba, Anoinette Burton, Jed Esty, and Matti Bunzl, will be
> published in the spring by Duke University Press.
>
>
>
>
> IPRH Fellows and their Projects
>
>
> Brett Boutwell is a Ph.D. Candidate in Musicology in the School of
> Music at UIUC.
>
>
> Receptive Dissonance: Arbitrating Artistic Meaning in the New York
> Schools of Music and Painting
> This proposed research project is an interdisciplinary study set
> within the respective "New York Schools" of experimental music and
> abstract-expressionist painting (c. 1945-65). It concerns interpretive
> differences that arose between artists and their critics, differences
> often negotiated through the publication of self-authored, persuasive
> texts by composers and painters. In print venues far removed from
> their primary, non-verbal mediums of expression, these artists
> consistently sought to establish acceptable discursive frameworks for
> the reception of their highly abstract musical and visual works,
> complicating the relationship between artist and critic and often
> stymieing differences of interpretation.
>
>
>
>
> Shefali Chandra is an Assistant Professor of History and Gender and
> Women's Studies at UIUC.
>
>
> Gender and Ambivalence in the English Ecumene
> My work argues that Indian English was generated by the politics of
> gender differentiation. I propose to write two articles examining this
> relationship. The first will present my argument for the mutually
> reinforcing relationship between "English" and "vernacular" languages
> so as to address afresh the very method and purpose of "gender
> studies." The second will examine the pedagogical urge of the native
> male elite to educate their women in the "English way." Arguing that
> English as a world language emerged in and through the multifaceted
> gendered politics of colonial modernity, these articles will advocate
> the notion of an English cosmopolis - one that was sustained by the
> knowledge and power of gender difference.
>
>
>
>
> Becky Conekin is an IPRH Post-Doctoral Fellow and Visiting Professor
> of History at UIUC. She is a Lecturer at the London College of
> Fashion.
>
>
> Taste Matters: A History of the Notion of Taste in 19th and 20th
> Century Britain and the United States
> This project aims to illustrate through a combination of theoretical
> intervention and historical analysis that the term "taste" has often
> been employed in Britain and America to discuss various forms of
> difference in a way perceived to be less offensive - and, crucially,
> less political - than the direct use of terms such as class, race,
> sexuality, gender, age, etc. Taste is a notion that circulates with
> varying force in relation to those differences, along with religion,
> moral probity, national identity, "coolness" and more. The question of
> difference is central to the concept of taste and this means that
> there are inherent tensions built into the very idea. On the one hand,
> at least since the 18th century, taste has been discussed in terms of
> cultivation and education. Yet, on the other hand, it has also been
> understood as innate. And at the heart of the notion is the belief
> that the world would be a better place if everyone had good taste.
> But, if everyone had good taste, then taste would cease to function as
> a mark of distinction. This project asserts that taste is a central
> organizing concept in the complex societies in which we live, where we
> believe simultaneously in democracy and in the authority of elites.
> Unlike Pierre Bourdieu's appraisal of taste in 1960s France, this
> project does not view the story of the expanding middle class and the
> concomitant democratization of taste as a tragic phenomenon. Instead,
> it argues that these twentieth century societal changes have in fact
> created parallel taste structures. The key to understanding this
> complicated story is to recognize that there are numerous, conflicting
> and often overlapping taste hierarchies.
>
>
>
>
> Jeremy Engels is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Speech
> Communication at UIUC.
>
>
> "we can never count with certainty on its tranquil submission": Or,
> How Violence Produced and Destroyed Difference in Early America
> With elite aristocrats, chained slaves, overlooked women, rural
> farmers, blood-thirsty frontiersmen, and multiple, diverse tribes of
> indignant Native Americans all vying for space and legitimacy, America
> in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was a volatile
> powder-keg of difference. Though "democracy" emerged, good historians
> remind us that we cannot overlook the violence that was often used to
> produce and destroy difference in the formative years of the United
> States. To more fully understand how violence was used to negotiate
> difference in early America, we must look at how Americans derived
> meaning from violent events and tried to persuade each other that
> their meaning was better than someone else's.
>
>
>
>
> Frances Gateward is an Assistant Professor in the Unit for Cinema
> Studies and the Afro-American Studies and Research Program at UIUC.
>
>
> A Different Image: African American Women Film Makers
> This project focuses on the work of contemporary African American
> women film and video makers as counter-cinema, an alternative to the
> rigid formulaic structure of Classical Hollywood Narrative form and
> its ideologies. An examination of feature films, as well as the
> under-studied formats of documentary, animation, and experimental
> film, will reveal the unique ways these filmmakers use the distinct
> social codes of their respective media to construct African American
> female identity. The films will also be analyzed in relation to their
> socio-cultural contexts and to other forms of Black cultural
> expression.
>
>
>
>
> Dianne Harris is an Associate Professor in the Department of Landscape
> Architecture at UIUC.
>
>
> Constructing Identity: Race, Class, and the Ordinary Postwar House,
> 1945-60
> This book examines the ordinary postwar house - the plywood or
> stuccoed ranch house, the concrete block 2-bedroom unit built on a
> concrete slab, the split-level (to name a few types) - as a physical
> framework for racial, class, and ethnic assimilation for a large
> number of Americans between 1945 and 1960. In six chapters and an
> introduction, it illuminates the ways in which difference was both
> suppressed and formulated through everyday spatial experiences as new
> homeowners across the nation negotiated changing constructions of
> racial and class identity. Since new housing in this area was largely
> restricted to whites, the book incorporates critical race theory to
> examine the ways house and garden form and the industries attendant to
> domestic building and design became complicit in the formation of good
> Americans - which in the context of the postwar era is implicitly
> white Americans - out of every new homeowner in the nation.
>
>
>
>
> Marina Levina is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Institute of Communications
> Research at UIUC.
>
>
> Re-imagining the Genetic Body: Human Genome Project and the Narratives
> of Difference in Popular and Scientific Discourses
> This project will study how the Human Genome Project affects the
> construction and management of difference within and between bodies in
> the scientific and popular discourses. I will focus on the popular
> culture's reconstructions of the genomic research, and, specifically,
> on how these images and metaphors re-imagine the boundaries of human
> identities and bodies, as well as the role that scientists play in the
> creation of these popular narratives and fantasies. I will argue that
> at the heart of the narratives that come out of the Human Genome
> Project lie in the problems of drawing distinctions between normal and
> abnormal, human and monstrous, self and other.
>
>
>
>
> R. Jonathan Moore is an IPRH Post-Doctoral Fellow and Visiting
> Assistant Professor in the Program for the Study of Religion at UIUC.
>
>
> The Devil Went Down to Hoopeston: Pagans, Cornjerkers, and American
> Identity
> Like many Midwestern towns, Hoopeston, Illinois, has seen better days.
> Still proudly proclaiming to be the "Sweet Corn Capital of the World,"
> once-thriving industries have disappeared and vacant buildings and
> empty lots litter the downtown business district. Two years ago, the
> Chicago-based "WitchSchool.com" offered a local resident $40,000 for a
> downtown property which had long languished on the market. Attracted
> by the low cost of living, Reverent Ed Hubbard and his WitchSchool
> planned to establish a Wiccan educational campus in this predominantly
> Christian town of six thousand. News spread quickly that the pagans
> were coming to town and, when Hubbard temporarily withdrew from the
> contract, one local Christian minister thanked the Holy Spirit for
> answering his prayers. But in July 2003, Hubbard purchased the
> building and soon had his pagan operation up and running, leaving the
> community in the midst of a fascinating and informative crisis. In
> this project, I will examine the community's grappling with difference
> and identity. Outsiders had already begun to alter Hoopeston's
> character long before the pagans arrived. Wal-Mart drove many local
> merchants out of business, factory jobs moved overseas, and migrant
> workers now harvest local crops. The high school's enrollment has
> declined, and now pagans live among the natives. Relying primarily
> upon media coverage and personal interviews, I will write a book which
> explores several interrelated questions. How do communities negotiate
> the dilemma posed by economic decline? What happens when religious
> difference is injected into an already combustible situation? What are
> the residents willing to relinquish to ensure the community's
> survival, and to what values and attitudes are they most willing to
> cling no matter the ultimate cost? Notions of identity and difference
> symbiotically inform one another, and more fully understanding the
> story of the Wiccans coming to Hoopeston, Illinois, can help explain
> just how this happens.
>
>
>
> Nichole T. Rustin is an Assistant Professor in the Institute of
> Communications Research and the Afro-American Studies and Research
> Program at UIUC.
>
>
> Beyond Category: Jazz, Masculine Difference, Race, and the Emotions in
> 1950s America
> Beyond Category is a history of black intellectual labor and the
> relationship between that labor and the broader social and political
> attempts to define democracy in the mid-twentieth century. The book
> explores how black jazz musicians and jazz culture became increasingly
> identified with America's democratic strivings and also examines
> processes of defining race and masculinity within jazz culture. The
> project studies the deployment of the language of emotions in jazz
> culture to question how meaning was made around aesthetics (especially
> regarding ideas of authenticity, genre, and originality) and social
> identities (along lines of nation, race, class, and gender).
>
>
>
>
> Christian Sandvig is an Assistant Professsor in the Department of
> Speech Communication at UIUC.
>
>
> Within and Without Wireless Internet: Visual Narratives of an Activist
> Subculture
> An IPRH fellowship will enable me to collaborate with a documentary
> photographer to produce and interpret a visual record of wireless
> Internet activist subculture. I am currently studying this subculture
> in a multiple-year research project, but an interdisciplinary visual
> approach is required to understand four representational practices:
> (1) the reconfiguration of everyday objects, (2) mapping invisible
> radio signals, (3) visualizing the logical arrangement of network
> components, and (4) new perspectives on the urban and rural
> communities served by these wireless networks. Each of these practices
> offers a way to understand the difference between commercial offerings
> and subcultural resistance in the production of technology, as well as
> the class and race disparities between those with and without access.
> This work will culminate in a photo essay and a museum exhibit.
>
>
>
>
> Dan Tracy is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of English at UIUC.
>
>
> The Circulation of Culture and the Culture of Circulation:
> Disseminating and Differentiating Modernist Identities
> My project examines the circulation of and desire for modernist
> identity via magazine culture in America (1913-33), and argues that
> the circulation of modernism did not happen as a trickle-down effect
> from elite producers. Instead, as mass magazines took up modernism,
> they invented new versions of if and produced evaluations of modernist
> innovation that reveal their own varying degrees of allegiance to
> cultural prestige and economic profits. Thus I depart from a high/low
> definition of modernism that assumes elite "little reviews" are art's
> primary institutions, and interrogate how market dynamics produced a
> differentiated modernist's subjectivity among competing class
> fractions.
>
>
>
>
> Li-Lin Tseng is a Ph.D. Candidate in Art History in the School of Art
> and Design at UIUC.
>
>
> The Difference between the Development of the Silent Films of D.W.
> Griffith and Zheng Zhengqiu in the 1920s
> This project investigates cinematic spectatorship and the development
> of melodrama in the silent films of D.W. Griffith and Zheng Zhengqui
> in the 1920s. Melodrama was understood in drastically different forms,
> cultures, and histories, the complexity of which is articulated in the
> study of these two filmmakers. I examine two main differences in their
> work: the variations in their film theories and their melodramatic
> strategies (modes of narrative, forms of engagement and
> identification). I also consider Shanghai spectators' response to
> their cinema as debated in magazines, newspapers, and literature.
> Through a case study of Griffith's and Zheng's works, my project will
> analyze the aesthetic values of the film object, which has not been
> previously examined, and will evaluate Chinese cinema as a cultural
> and social institution.
>
>
>
>
> Kerry Wynn is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of History at UIUC.
>
>
> The Embodiment of Citizenship: Sovereignty and Colonialism in the
> Cherokee Nation, 1880-1920
> My dissertation examines the role that the human body played, both
> symbolically and materially, in the radical cultural and political
> changes that occurred between 1880 and 1920, as the United States
> sought to dismantle the Cherokee Nation and integrate Cherokee people
> into the American polity. As a part of this process, Cherokees and
> Americans negotiated meanings for differences that existed within the
> Cherokee Nation and between the Cherokee Nation and the United States.
> Members of both nations alternately reified or obscured differences in
> order to articulate agendas of colonialism and sovereignty.
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> The conference is free and open to the public.
> For more information, visit the IPRH website at www.iprh.uiuc.edu.
>
> --
>
>
> _______________________________________________
>
> Matti Bunzl
>
> Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities
> University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
> 805 West Pennsylvania Avenue
> Urbana, IL 61801
> Tel.: (217) 333-3138
> Fax: (217) 333-9617
> e-mail: bunzl at uiuc.edu
>
> Department of Anthropology
> University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
> 109 Davenport Hall
> 607 South Mathews
> Urbana, IL 61801
> Tel.: (217) 265-4068
> Fax: (217) 244-3490
> e-mail: bunzl at uiuc.edu
>
>
> --
> Richard J. Leskosky Office phone: (217) 244-2704
> Associate Director FAX: (217) 244-4019
> Unit for Cinema Studies <http://www.uiuc.edu/unit/cinema>
> University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
> 3035 Foreign Languages Building
> 707 S. Mathews Avenue
> Urbana, Illinois 61801
>
Al Kagan
Africana Unit, Room 328
University of Illinois Library
1408 W. Gregory Drive
Urbana, IL 61820
USA
tel. 217-333-6519
fax 217-333-2214
akagan at uiuc.edu
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