Select Fridays at 4pm

Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center

341 Delaware Ave.

Free and open to the public

Scholars at Hallwalls continues through  April 2012.

Select Fridays between now and April 2012 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.

Friday September 23, 2011 marks the start of this new era for HI.  The venue is new but the format continues the successful model established in three years at the Albright-Knox.  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 and a cash bar.

All lectures are free and open to the public.

Friday, September 23, 2011
David Herzberg

Assistant Professor

History

University at Buffalo

565 Park Hall

herzberg@buffalo.edu

The Drug War in the Medicine Cabinet: Prescription Drug Addiction in the Age of Miracle Pills

Why have vast and growing markets for prescription uppers, downers, and narcotics characterized America’s “war against drugs”?  Licit drug abuse has always dwarfed “street” drug problems, yet drug war scholarship focuses almost exclusively on heroin, cocaine, and marijuana.  I correct this with a history of prescription drug abuse and addiction in the 20th century U.S. focusing on drug providers (manufacturers, marketers, prescribers, and traffickers); drug users; and others engaged with the issue (addiction treatment experts, journalists, politicians, and activists).  Their stories complicate the drug-medicine divide, and provide important context and framing for understanding American drug wars—just as studies of masculinity and whiteness are crucial to understanding gender and race.  They contribute to the history of health and illness by exposing how the modern medical system was built in part by monopolizing the provision of legal drugs.  And they reveal a forgotten—but useful—history of pro- and anti-drug campaigns, cultural tropes of addiction, and treatment programs relatively free of racially-charged drug war politics.  Based on extensive research into published and archival historical documents, this project will be the first sustained look at the long history of the licit drug cultures that are regularly “discovered” as new and ominous social problems

Friday, October 14, 2011
Camilo Trumper

Assistant Professor

American Studies

1010 Clemens Hall

ctrumper@buffalo.edu

Ephemeral Histories: Politics, Public Space and Public Art in Allende's Chile

My book project is a cultural history of political change in 20th century Chile that critically examines the place of urban, visual and material culture in political conflict.  At core, it is a study of the emergence of alternative sites and forms of political debate.  I place urban mobilization at the center of Chilean political history, and argue that ephemeral urban actions and visual sources are critical to the telling of this story.  I propose a cross-disciplinary method of study that takes these tactics and the sources they produced seriously as part of a history of late 20th century political change.  I examine the many ways in which a range of groups historically excluded from the public sphere took advantage of post-war political openings and the embattled Allende regime’s commitment to fluid political contest.  Utilizing an original set of tactics, including land and factory seizures, marches and protests, and public forms of visual art, they claimed city streets and walls and transformed them into arenas of political debate, effectively creating the political public sphere rooted in public space.  My research finds that these newly politicized agents fashioned a novel form of political citizenship not through direct struggles for the state, but in their struggles over equal access to, and ownership of city spaces.  Thus, I propose a political history that recognizes urban practice, architecture and industrial design, and visual and material culture as indispensable sources for the study of political conflict and state making.

Friday, November 18, 2011
Jennifer Gaynor

Inaugural OVPR/HI Fellow

Assistant Professor

History

553 Park Hall

Archipelagic Mobility and Sama Narrative Transformation

Southeast Asia's maritime history, deeply enmeshed with colonialism, also extends behond its temporal reach, both preceding European interest and following movements for national independence.  In this long history of maritime endeavors, the region's coastal people were sometimes captors and sometimes captives.  This project aims to examine and contextualize the taking of one woman from her coastal village of Sama "sea people" in 1950's Indonesia by members of an Islamist rebellion.  While contemporaneous archival documents frame the repercussions of her abduction in nationalist terms, narratives about Sama "history" from coastal localities scattered across the archipelago help illuminate other frames of significance for this incident.  While the project thus speaks to histories of captures, subordination, and translocation, it also foregrounds the analytical relevance of cultural production by those most invested in how this past is retold, and attends to the ways historical and narrative context affect the representation of practices such as capture. 

Friday, December 2, 2011
Sasha Pack

Associate Professor

Department of History

569 Park Hall

sdpack@buffalo.edu

Europe’s Deepest Border: The Making of the Modern Strait of Gibraltar

This study examines the history of the Strait of Gibraltar since roughly 1860. Border security may have become a defining global anxiety of our time, but the concept has long bedeviled the range of kingdoms, empires, alliances, and federations operating in this fluid Euro-African space. By the latter nineteenth century, the Strait’s strategic position bridging continents and seas invited neo-imperial conquest and its attendant rules and technologies, all of which overlay a region that had for five centuries formed the approximate boundary between the Christian and Muslim worlds. As a result, the region became extraordinarily diverse, not only in ethnic and religious terms, but also in the types of polities and borders to be found there. Circulation and cross-border traffic, long major features of the region, became increasingly entangled in imperial and Great Power struggles. From examining police reports, diplomatic cables, and other administrative documents, along with journalistic and literary accounts, a picture emerges of how local patterns of mobility across borders conditioned the actions of and relations among distance centers of sovereign power. Examining this regional dynamic suggests new interpretive directions for the international history of Western Europe and North Africa from the late nineteenth century through the twentieth.

Friday, January 27, 2012
Carolyn Higbie

Park Professor

Department of Classics

338 MFAC

chigbie@buffalo.edu

How Did the Ancient Greeks Think About Their Own History?

In Imaginative Memory: the Discovery, Reconstruction, and Forgery of the Greek Past, I examine a neglected part of Greek intellectual history: the importance of the past to Greeks from the fifth century BC through the second century AD, why this past mattered to them and how they reconstructed it. Their past, known often through physical remains both large and small, was so valued that some were inspired to support their version of it through forgeries and fakes. Greeks depended on physical objects--the helmet of Menelaus, the tomb of Alcmene, the Cyclopean walls of Tiryns--to imagine their history, but many of these remains were either fakes or misinterpreted. Surviving documents show us ancient authors arguing over the genuineness of a claim made for an object and these arguments need to be examined. Such debates run parallel to the literary scholarship at the Library in Alexandria which was being developed from the third century BC, where scholars debated the genuineness of works claimed to be by Homer and others. As Anthony Grafton has observed in his elegant book, Forgers and Critics, both those who create fakes and those who attempt to detect them draw on the same assumptions about the object or the text. I use a wide range of scholarship from other fields in my study of Greek forgery. Students of medieval culture, for example, have devoted much energy to the study of forgery of saints’ relics, charters, and texts, developing useful definitions of forgery and concepts like authenticatory devices, whereby a forger attempts to make his fake seem believable. Another area in which much work has been done is in collecting: anthropological studies of modern cultures, Native American and Maori, in particular, provide a starting point for my study of ancient impulses for collecting. Finally, literary forgery and its discovery are subjects long established in Shakespearean scholarship. Their arguments can be fruitfully applied to Greek arguments about the Homeric poems, the biography (or even existence) of Homer, and the physical evidence for the poet’s life.

Friday, February 17, 2012
Hadas Steiner

Associate Professor

Department of Architecture

311 Hayes Hall

hsteiner@buffalo.edu

Architecture's Biological Legacy

The projected manuscript will provide an historical analysis of the evolving use of the terms "habitat," and by extension "ecology," in architectural discourse, from the abortive "Charter of Habitat" proposed by Le Corbusier at the seventh meeting of CIAM in 1949, through the work of John McHale in the 1970's.  It will show how the concepts of habitat and ecology entered the architectural discourse through the biological sciences, and how the understanding of these terms changed throughout the 1950s, 60s and 70s as they were variously reinterpreted and employed by Peter and Alison Smithson, Cedric Price and John McHale respectively.

Today, discussions of habitat and ecology in architecture are largely circumscribed by guidelines for environmental sustainability that evince naïveté with respect to the conceptual evolution of these terms.  In returning to the radical practices that originally addressed issues of habitat and ecology in the architectural context, this study will provide a theoretical foundation upon which contemporary experimental practices can build a more nuanced response to the environmental needs of today.

Friday, March 2, 2012
Trina Hamilton

Assistant Professor

Department of Geography

105 Wilkeson Quad

trinaham@buffalo.edu

Ethics in the Global Diamond Trade

Canada is now the third largest diamond producer in the world and has quickly cornered the ethical diamond market. Producers and retailers have traded on Canada’s reputation as an environmental and human rights leader and utopian visions of a pristine arctic landscape to market Canada as an ethical production space. These purity narratives are often contrasted with blood diamond portrayals of Africa. Ethical markets are subject to continuous contestation, however, and alternative narratives, including an African empowerment narrative backed by hip hop mogul Russell Simmons, are challenging Canada’s purported ethical monopoly. This project aims to identify the multiplicity and evolution of narratives used to market ethical production spaces, as well as the consumer desires and personal narratives that motivate ethical consumption and mediate the consumer-led governance of the global diamond trade. This diversity provides a market for both the more and less fictionalized representations of ethical spaces, with very real consequences for social and environmental standards at production sites.

Friday, April 13, 2012
Ramon Soto-Crespo

Associate Professor

Department of American Studies

1010 Clemens hall

RS55@buffalo.edu

Biotropics: Sexuality in Latino American Culture

Biotropics: The Biopolitics of Sexual Identity in Latino American Writing, is an interdisciplinary study of male-male sexual practices in Spanish America, the Anglophone Caribbean, and among Latino groups in the U.S.  Building on scholarship produced in anthropology, sociology, medicine, history, cinema, art, and gender studies, “Primitive Futures” focuses on the bugarrón, an anomalous sexual type in Latino American culture.  It compares anthropological and health-related studies of HIV transmission, and it shows how state agencies tackle the epidemic by conceptualizing sexual practice in Westernized terms of identity.  Rather than understanding the bugarrón as an identity, I suggest that it be understood in Foucaultian terms as a site of struggle over the politics of life and death at the time of the AIDS pandemic in Latino America.  “Primitive Futures” thus examines literary and cinematic representations of this figure during the cultural phase of its attempted extermination.