Select Fridays at 4pm

Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center

341 Delaware Ave.

Map

Free and open to the public

Scholars@Hallwalls continues through April 2013.

Select Fridays between September 2012 and April 2013 the Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center becomes an intellectual salon. Scholars at Hallwalls features eight thought-provoking, award-winning lectures in the humanities, presented in the intellectual and inspiring setting of Hallwalls.

Faculty Fellows will present their cutting-edge humanities research in terms accessible to those in other disciplines and outside academia.  The events will continue to be social occasions as well, with complimentary hors d’oeuvres..

All lectures are free and open to the public.

Friday, September 21, 2012
Tamara Thornton

Professor

History

568 Park Hall

thornton@buffalo.edu

Nathaniel Bowditch and the Science of Business in Nineteenth-Century America

In the first decades of the nineteenth-century, Nathaniel Bowditch was a well-known American mathematician, astronomer, and scientific navigator, but he made his living as a corporate CEO in the nascent financial industry. Bowditch did not just have two parallel careers. His life illuminates the formative--and often controversial--influence of both scientific theories and scientific practices on American capitalism.

Tamara Plakins Thornton focuses on the cultural history of the United States between the Revolution and the Civil War. She is the author of Cultivating Gentlemen: The Meaning of Country Life among the Boston Elite, 1785-1860 (Yale University Press, 1989), and Handwriting in America: A Cultural History (Yale University Press, 1996). She was awarded the Ralph D. Gray Article Prize for an essay published in the Journal of the Early Republic in 2007. Most recently, her essay on "Capitalist Aesthetics: Americans View the London and Liverpool Docks," appeared in an edited collection titled Capitalism Takes Command: The Social Transformation of Nineteenth-Century America (University of Chicago, 2012).

Friday, October 12, 2012
Justin Read

Associate Professor

Romance Languages and Literatures

905 Clemens Hall

jread2@buffalo.edu

Living with Death in Mexico City: Poetics and the Built Environment

In material terms, Mexico City is the largest city in the Western Hemisphere, with a population of between 21-25 million people.  Poetically speaking, Mexico City is a colossal cemetery, with one city built on top of earlier cities below.  Throughout its history, death has been a unifying cultural and political factor in the capital’s civic life.  Whether through human sacrifice or political massacre, the historical transformations of death hold a key to understanding the growth and development of Mexico City over time.  “Living with Death in Mexico City” examines the function of death with respect to the built environment at three key public sites (Zócalo, Tlatelolco, Chapultepec).  These sites are all linked by the city’s main grand avenue, Paseo de la Reforma.  Following the trajectory of Reforma westward will guide the talk to the brand new global city in Mexico at two more key locations (in Polanco and Santa Fe) both built in the 21st century, each of which bears a new relation to public death.  This lecture does not analyze poetry “about” Mexico City.  Rather, it reads Mexico City itself as a poetic object, a megalopolitan memento mori.  

Justin Read is Associate Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures.  He currently researches Latin American modernism in literature and architecture, particularly those of Brazil.  His first book, Modernist Poetry and Hemispheric American Cultural Studies, was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2009.  He co-organized the UB Humanities Institute’s “Fluid Culture” series in 2011-12.

Friday, November 9, 2012
John Jennings

OVPR/HI Fellow

Associate Professor

Visual Studies

202 CFA

jijennin@buffalo.edu

An Ethno-Gothic Graphic Narrative of the Great Migration

John Jennings's Scholars @ Hallwalls lecture will be a process-oriented artist's talk detailing development of his ideas regarding the graphic novel BLUE HAND MOJO. It will investigate the connections between what Jennings terms the EthnoGothic and what has recently been called Afrofuturism and how both deal with notions of racialized trauma experienced by Black Americans.

John Jennings is an accomplished designer, curator, illustrator, cartoonist, and award-winning graphic novelist. His work overlaps into various disciplines including American Studies, African American Studies, Design History, Media Studies, Sociology, Women and Gender Studies, and Literature. His research and teaching focus on the analysis, explication, and disruption of African American stereotypes in popular visual media. His research is concerned with the topics of representation and authenticity, visual culture, visual literacy, social justice, and design pedagogy. Jennings is co-author of the award winning graphic novel The Hole: Consumer Culture and Black Comix: African American Independent Comics Art + Culture.

Friday, November 30, 2012
Krzysztof Ziarek

Professor

Comparative Literature

645 Clemens Hall

kziarek@buffalo.edu

Language After Heidegger

The talk explores Heidegger's thought on language and shows how we must think about language differently after reading his philosophy. Working from newly available texts in Heidegger’s Complete Works, it presents Heidegger at his most radical and demonstrates how the thinker’s daring use of language is an integral part of his philosophical expression. In this context, the talk will also explore the connections between Heidegger and poetry, looking at the work of Susan Howe.

Krzysztof Ziarek is Professor of Comparative Literature at the State University of New York at Buffalo.  He is the author of Inflected Language: Toward a Hermeneutics of Nearness (SUNY ), The Historicity of Experience: Modernity, the Avant-Garde, and the Event (Northwestern), and The Force of Art (Stanford). He has also published numerous essays on Clark Coolidge, Susan Howe, Myung Mi Kim, Stein, Stevens, Heidegger, Benjamin, Irigaray, and Levinas, and co-edited two collection of essays, Future Crossings: Literature Between Philosophy and Cultural Studies (Northwestern) and Adorno and Heidegger: Philosophical Questions  (Stanford).  He is the author of two books of poetry in Polish, Zaimejlowane z Polski and Sąd dostateczny.  He is currently working on a manuscript entitled “Language After Heidegger.” His other current work focuses on the “disappearance” of world in the age of globalization and on the post-Heideggerian notion of being human.

Friday, January 25, 2013
Dalia Muller

Assistant Professor

History

563 Park Hall

daliamul@buffalo.edu

Debating Cuban Independence in Mexico in the 1890s

This talk explores the history of inter-American solidarity through the late nineteenth-century Cuban Independence struggle, a national movement that had true international and inter-American resonance. She demonstrates how far-flung yet well-organized Cuban exile communities became anchors for transnational collaboration, particularly through the creation of transnational social and political spaces where Cubans and other Americans came together.

Dalia A. Muller is a historian of Latin America and the Caribbean whose work focuses on travel, exile, and immigration in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries greater Caribbean. She is completing her first book project, which examines the impact of the Cuban independence struggle in nineteenth-century Mexico. Her article, “Latin America and the Question of Cuban Independence” has been recently published in The Americas. She received her Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley.

Friday, February 22, 2013
Graham Hammill

Professor

English

539 Clemens Hall

ghammill@buffalo.edu

Early Modern Rights Talk and the Fictions of the Body Politic

In liberal political thought, rights are often treated as legal fictions that secure individual freedoms. But rights also need bodies. This is why recent scholarship talks about the performative aspect of rights. Rights need physical agents to make them real. This talk will discuss some ways that seventeenth-century political and literary writers navigated rights and the body politic. I focus on three central rights, one concerning security (the right to freedom from harm), another concerning toleration (the right to religious dissent), and the third concerning sexuality (the right to pursue erotic interest), in order to examine the often conflicting understandings of the body politic that each assumes. I also explore some implications from seventeenth-century philosophy for our current understanding of bodies and rights.

Graham Hammill is Professor of English at the University at Buffalo, SUNY. He is the author of Sexuality and Form (Chicago 2000), The Mosaic Constitution: Political Theology and Imagination from Machiavelli to Milton (Chicago 2012), and co-editor of Political Theology and Early Modernity (Chicago 2012). He has published numerous articles on early modern literature, political thought, and the history of sexuality.

Friday, March 29, 2013
Carolyn Korsmeyer

Professor

Philosophy

110 Park Hall

ckors@buffalo.edu

Touching the Past: Genuineness and the "Real Thing"

Does a genuine, original historical artifact have an aesthetic value over and above an excellent reproduction? This question has been explored thoroughly with respect to works of art, and similar issues arise with objects that persist from bygone times, whether small and personal or large and global. She argues that genuineness delivers an aesthetic experience of a unique sort - an encounter that puts us in the presence of the past. She contends that the sense of touch covertly operates in such experiences, as this sense conveys the impression of being in literal contact with the "real thing." Touch seems to operate with a kind of transitivity that conducts the past into the present. However, the foundation for that impression may seem dubious, as it sounds like a version of what has been dubbed "magical thinking." Under these circumstances, is the aesthetic value accorded genuineness justified or irrational? She defends the transitivity of touch by comparing it to features of certain emotions.

Carolyn Korsmeyer is Professor of Philosophy at the University at Buffalo. Her specialties include aesthetics and emotion theory, fields which she combined in her recent book, Savoring Disgust: The Foul and the Fair in Aesthetics (2011). She investigated the sense of taste in Making Sense of Taste: Food and Philosophy (1999) and in the edited collection, The Taste Culture Reader (2005). She is a past president of the American Society of Aesthetics.

Friday, April 19, 2013
Erin Hatton

Assistant Professor

Sociology

464 Park hall

eehatton@buffalo.edu

Nannies, Welfare Recipients, and Prisoners: The Struggle for Workers' Rights

Erin Hatton will talk about her new project, "Invisible Work, Invisible Workers," in which she examines three categories of workers who--to various degrees--do not legally count as “employees”: prisoners, welfare recipients, and nannies. Through in-depth interviews with each of these groups of workers, Erin explores the nature of work and the struggle for worker rights beyond the boundaries of the law.

Hatton is an Assistant Professor of Sociology. She came to UB in 2008 after completing her PhD at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her research falls squarely within the sociology of work, while also extending into the fields of gender, race, labor, political economy, and public policy. Her first book, The Temp Economy: From Kelly Girls to Permatemps in Postwar America (Temple University Press, 2011), brings these themes together in an examination of the temporary help industry and the rise of the new economy. Her new book project, Working But Not Employed, examines the widespread and growing use of “non-employed” workers.