Dear Colleagues,
As my previous mails may have already suggested, there is much good news afoot for the Unit for Criticism! Last week we launched our new Criticism & Interpretive Theory fellowship program (deadline 3/2); and our events for this semester include a February 10 winter symposium, The Ends of History, organized with the Trowbridge Office on American Literature, Culture, & Society; as well as a faculty/grad seminar, co-organized with IPRH and faculty in Art History and Sociology (about to begin on Thursday, January 26). The seminar will meet 5 times over the course of the semester for conversations in anticipation of BEYOND UTOPIA? Art, Theory, & the Coming of “Spring,” an April 26-27 conference on aesthetics, politics, and new revolutionary movements, featuring keynote lectures from Bonnie Honig (Northwestern), Saba Mahmood (Berkeley), and Eyal Weizman (Goldsmiths). On behalf of myself, Nicholson Associate Director J. B. Capino and the Unit’s research assistants, Mike Black & mc Anderson, I welcome you to take part in these events as well as to follow some of our doings on Kritik, the Unit’s weblog. I also want to mention that Mad World: Sex, Politics, Style & the 1960s, co-edited by Lilya Kaganovsky, Robert A. Rushing, and me, a project that began with a February 2010 winter symposium, is now in production with Duke University Press.
The Ends of History explores the interaction of formalism and historicism and includes papers by Srinivas Aravamudan (Duke), Stephen Best (Berkeley), Rachel Buurma (Swarthmore), Manu Goswami (NYU) , Heather Love (Penn), and Walter Benn Michaels (UIC) as well as a closing roundtable with Illinois colleagues in American Indian Studies, English, French, and History. The day before the symposium, on Thursday 2/9 at 3:30pm, Aravamudan will lead a seminar on “The Character of the University”: if you would like to register, there are still a few slots open (simply reply to this mail and we will add you on a first-come/first-serve basis). Later in the month we join the Program in Jewish Culture & Society to host a workshop with Eitan Bar Yosef (Ben Gurion) whose work-in-progress on Zionist fantasy and the modern urban landscape, is part of the semester-long BEYOND UTOPIA? series of events.
On Friday March 2, we partner with the Institute of Communications Research in welcoming Lawrence Grossberg (UNC)—one of the Unit for Criticism’s founding members—for a CAS/MillerComm lecture at the Spurlock Museum Auditorium. On Monday 3/12, Unit affiliate Maggie Flinn (French) speaks on “Banlieutopia” in 1930s cinema with a response from Tamara Chaplin (History). March closes with yet another collaboration: on 3/29 we join the Center for Middle Eastern & South Asian Studies in welcoming Joshua Landis (Oklahoma) for “Syria and the Arab Spring”—a second CAS/MillerComm-sponsored lecture at Spurlock. On April 2, Unit assistants Mike & mc host a grad student conference on “Technology in Theory & Practice”—paper proposals are welcome through 2/17.
In addition to the three keynote lectures, the BEYOND UTOPIA? conference includes papers from Mohammed Bamyeh (Pittsburgh), Romand Coles (Northern Arizona), Angelia Haro (Duke), Noha Radwan (Davis), Jeffrey Skoller (Berkeley), Phillip Wegner (Florida), and Rebecca Zorach (Chicago). The readings for the seminar, most of which are ready for downloading from the Unit’s website, include publications from all of these visiting scholars as well as selections from Fredric Jameson, Jacques Rancière, Mike Davis, Bernard Harcourt, and Slavoj Žižek. The seminar is open to all faculty and students and if you have not already “registered” I welcome you to do so by replying to this email. Along with my wonderful co-organizers, JB, Dianne Harris (IPRH/Architecture), Irene Small (Art History), Zsuzsa Gille (Sociology), and Markus Schulz (Sociology), I look forward to your joining us.
Please write to me, JB, Mike, or mc if you have any questions for us or any suggestions concerning the Unit’s present or future programming. It is always a pleasure to hear from you.
Lauren
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Dear Colleagues,
Happy Martin Luther King, Jr. Day and Happy New Year! I hope you are keeping warm and snug, and I know you are keeping busy as we all rev up for another full-throttle semester in Champaign-Urbana. This spring the Unit for Criticism’s organizing theme is “Freedom and Its Discontents” including a faculty/grad seminar that begins on January 25 (a separate announcement will follow with complete details), and a 4/28-4/29 conference co-organized with the Social Dimensions of Environmental Policy initiative (SDEP) and the Program in Arms Control, Disarmament, and International Security (ACDIS). Yet another highlight of the topic is a Nicholson Distinguished Visiting Scholar lecture and seminar with Nancy Fraser (New School) on 2/28-3/1 which SDEP is helping us to organize. As always at this time, we are updating our website with full details and background readings for these and other events and I will write again as we complete the process. But please read on for more detailed information about these and other events.
The Freedom and Its Discontents faculty/grad seminar—open to all interested Illinois scholars—begins on 1/24 at 8pm in the IPRH Seminar Room (lower-level) with classic readings by J. S. Mill, Hannah Arendt, and Michel Foucault. Four additional meetings are scheduled for 2/7, 3/7, 4/4, and 4/25 including readings by our keynote speakers: Svetlana Boym (Harvard), Audrey Kobayashi (Queen’s College), and Linda Zerilli (University of Chicago), as well as by five additional invited speakers (see below). Your hosts for the seminar—as well as the organizers of the Freedom and Its Discontents conference—are Colin Flint (Geography/ADIS), Elena Delgado (Spanish/GWS/Center for Latin American, Caribbean, and Iberian Studies), Christopher Higgins (Educational Policy), Jesse Ribot (Geography, SDEP), the Unit’s Nicholson Fellow Associate Director, Robert A. Rushing, and me. I want to take this opportunity to thank this wonderful group for their hard work, expertise, and inspiration thus far, and urge you all to join us for what promises to be a most rewarding multi-disciplinary seminar.
In February, the Unit is pleased to join the Trowbridge Office in welcoming Donald E. Pease (Dartmouth) for a 2/14 lecture entitled, “Re-Mapping the Trans-National Turn in American Studies.” (Yes, we know it is Valentine’s Day, and we at the Unit are all for love: so we hope you’ll splurge on chocolates and champagne after the lecture, never stopping to regret what you did for American Studies.) Along with IRPH and the CFA, we are planning a roundtable conversation on Graduate Studies at the University of Illinois for which the tentative date is 2/16—details to come. On February 19, the Unit’s energetic Graduate Assistants, Mike Black and Katherine Skwarczek, will join the British Modernities Group in hosting New British Geographies, a multi-disciplinary one-day graduate student conference. The month will close with Nancy Fraser’s exciting Nicholson lecture, “Marketization, Social Protection, Emancipation: Re-Reading Karl Polanyi in the 21st Century,” beginning with an introduction by Zsuzsa Gille (Sociology/REEEC). On 3/1 Fraser will share her work in progress during a luncheon seminar, which IPRH and SDEP are helping us to organize (details about registration to come). Please write as soon as you wish if you would like the opportunity to spend time with Fraser while she is on campus.
Also in March we are pleased to be co-sponsors of a 3/9 CAS MillerComm visit by Andrew Flinn (University College London), as well the hosts of the Unit’s bi-yearly faculty lecture, by JB Capino (English/Asian American Studies/Media & Cinema Studies). The lecture, “My Brother is Not a Pig: Philippine Cinema against Empire” will include a response by Augusto Espiritu (Asian American Studies/History/Latin American & Caribbean Studies).
In addition to the keynotes by Boym, Kobayashi, and Zerilli, the 4/28-4/29 Freedom and Its Discontents conference includes papers by a number of leading interdisciplinary speakers: Jo-Marie Burt (George Mason), a specialist in state violence, human rights, and social movements in Latin America; David M. Hughes (Rutgers), an anthropologist and geographer of Southern Africa working on the relation of culture, politics, and political economy on environmental and physical landscapes; Elaine Hadley (Chicago), a literary scholar of nineteenth-century liberalism and war; Scott Kurashige (Michigan), a historian of Asian American and African American urban history and social movements; Abdi Samatar (Minnesota), a geographer working on democracy and development in East and South Africa; and our own Cris Mayo (Education Policy), whose multi-faceted research includes a nearly finished project on gay/straight alliances in public schools. I am also absolutely delighted to announce a musical performance which will be part of the Freedom conference by percussionist Jason Finkelman (Dance) and bassist Yosef Ben Israel.
Please feel free to write with any questions about these events, bearing in mind that I will write again with sign-up information and a complete syllabus for the seminar, with word of our updated website, as well as an invitation for guest bloggers on Kritik. If you have not already done so, please have your name added to the Unit’s email listserv and/or consider “friending” our Facebook page. Let me add that, for me, the very best part of all of these events is the chance it gives me to work with so many of you. If I have not yet met you—especially if you have ideas you’d like to propose for the Unit’s future programming—please write to me or introduce yourself at the first opportunity. I am always keen to schedule a coffee with anyone interested in the Unit and its affairs.
With very best wishes for a wonderful 2011.
Lauren
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Dear Colleagues,
Once again it’s my great pleasure to welcome you back after summer and invite you to take part in the Unit’s programming this fall. The Unit has a busy autumn calendar that Associate Director Rob Rushing and I hope you will enjoy. Before I turn to those events, I want to offer an official welcome to Geography and Musicology, the latest programs to affiliate with the Unit for Criticism, as well as our new (2009-10) faculty affiliates: Francis Boyle (Law), Patrick Bray (French), Maggie Flinn (French), Feisal Mohamed (English), Justine Murison (English), Chantal Nadeau (GWS), Lisa Nakamura (Asian American Studies/GWS/ICR), Hina Nazar (English), Yasemin Yildiz (German), Julia Saville (English), and Eleonora Stoppino (Italian). This year Kathy Skwarczek will complete her second term as a Unit Graduate Assistant and be joined by a new assistant, Mike Black (English). We thank Carl Lehnen for his terrific service last year and wish him the best with his dissertation fellowship. I’m also pleased to remind you that the Unit’s most recent publication, a special issue on “Comparative Human Rights: Literature, Art, Politics,” derived from our February 2009 symposium on that topic, appeared this summer in the Journal of Human Rights.
Our first event this fall, on Monday 9/13, is an 8pm Author’s Roundtable devoted to discussion of Kathleen Woodward’s Statistical Panic: Cultural Politics and Poetics of the Emotions (Duke 2009). Woodward, who is Director of the Simpson Center at the University of Washington, Seattle will be joined by two faculty respondents—Ericka Beckman (Spanish/Comparative Literature) and Jane Desmond (Anthropology/GWS/ International Forum for US Studies)—along with grad student respondent Elizabeth Hoeim (English). The details for these and other fall Unit events, as well as the selections from Statistical Panic, will very soon be available on the Unit’s website—which is being updated at breakneck speed by our trusty GAs.
Also in September we welcome Elaine Freedgood (NYU) who will deliver the Marx lecture for this year's Modern Critical Theory lecture series on Wed. 9/22 at 8pm in English Rm. 104. (The complete schedule for the series will soon be available on our website.) We have arranged for Professor Freedgood’s visit to coincide with the Geographies of Risk conference (9/23-9/24), an interdisciplinary event organized by Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese. Finally on Monday 9/27 we invite graduate students to join us for a pizza night at the IPRH for those wishing to learn more about the Unit’s programs for graduate students.
This October we are excited to host our first-ever Nicholson Distinguished Visiting Scholar, the Italian philosopher Roberto Esposito, author of groundbreaking works including Bios: Biopolitics and Philosophy (2008). Esposito will join us for an 8pm lecture in the Levis Faculty Center on Monday 10/ 4, “The Dispositif of the Person,” and a morning seminar on Tuesday 10/5, co-organized with the IPRH, on the topic “Community and Violence.” I will write again soon with background readings for the lecture and registration information for the seminar. There will also be numerous opportunities to meet with Professor Esposito, so please contact me if you are interested in sharing a meal with him during the 4 days he will spend on our campus.
On Monday 10/11, the Unit welcomes Judith Halberstam (USC) to our campus for a lecture co-organized with the Holocaust, Genocide and Memory Studies Initiative. Halberstam’s 8pm lecture, “The Killer in Me is the Killer in You: Homosexuality and Fascism” will take place at Levis Faculty Center. (Note that our colleagues in the Program in Jewish Culture and Society have also scheduled a Tuesday 10/12 workshop with Halberstam which you can learn about by consulting their website.) Also in October, Todd McGowan (U of Vermont), who will deliver the 10/26 Lacan lecture for the MCT lecture series, will also lead a 10/26 panel, co-organized with Media and Cinema Studies, on the topic “Christopher Nolan’s Dark Worlds.” In yet another exciting October event, the Unit is collaborating with Anna Stenport and Germanic Languages and Literatures for a visit from Toril Moi (Duke). Moi’s 8pm lecture for the Unit, “What Does it Mean to Claim that Sex, Gender and the Body are Socially Constructed?,” will take place on Thursday 10/28 at Levis.
On Friday 11/5 we welcome Amy Kaplan (U Pennsylvania) for a CAS/MillerComm lecture that the Unit has helped to organize in collaboration with the International Forum for U.S. Studies: "Exodus and the Americanization of Zionism." Later in the month Gabriel Solis, Director of Musicology here at Illinois, will deliver “Moving Beyond Preservation: ‘Traditional’ Music, Arts Institutions, and Modernity in Papua New Guinea,” a 10/29 lecture at Levis with a response from Jodi Byrd (American Indian Studies/English).
In December, the Unit hosts Dana Polan (NYU), for a second Author’s Roundtable, on Thursday 12/9, devoted to discussing Julia Child’s The French Chef, forthcoming form Duke UP. Joining Polan for this event will be faculty respondents Larry Schehr (French), James Hay (Media & Cinema Studies/ICR), and grad student respondent Jing Jing Chang (History). Rumor has it that the Unit will plan a Friday 12/10 Dance Party in an as yet undisclosed location to celebrate the end of the semester: we hope you will join us for another demonstration of the physical prowess and overall joie de vivre of the Unit’s faculty and grad students.
And since it is never too early to begin thinking about Spring, please keep open April 28 and 29, the dates of our Spring ‘11 conference, Freedom and its Discontents. Our partners so far in organizing the events and seminar on this topic are Elena Delgado (Spanish/Center for Latin American & Caribbean Studies), Colin Flint (Director of the Program in Arms Control, Disarmament, and International Security/Geography), and Jesse Ribot (Director, Social Dimensions of Environmental Policy/Geography). We are already looking forward to a keynote lecture from geographer Audrey Kobayashi (Queens University) and an associated visit at the end of February from political theorist Nancy Fraser (New School). More news on Freedom and its Discontents as it develops!
Let me take this opportunity to say that the Unit warmly welcomes the participation of all faculty, grad students, and other interested members of the UI community. If you have any questions or suggestions about our programming and other activities please email me or set up an appointment for us to meet. I also welcome emails from individuals wishing to spend time with any of the many interesting scholars we have invited to our campus.
With all best wishes for a productive and stimulating fall semester,
Lauren
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Dear Colleagues,
