The Humanities Center has scheduled 58 talks to be held on Tuesdays and Wednesdays.
All lectures will be held in 2339 FAB from 12:30-1:30 unless otherwise announced.

Click on a blue link to read an abstract for the presentation.

PDF Schedule

FALL SEMESTER 2008

September 9: Arthur Marotti, Distinguished Professor, English, Saintly Idiocy and Contemplative Empowerment: The Case for Dame Gertrude More

September 10: Daphne W. Ntiri, Associate Professor, Africana Studies, Literacy as a Social Divide: African Americans at the Crossroads

September 16: Robert Sedler, Distinguished Professor, Law, Politics, Religion, and American Constitutional Values

September 17: Khari R. Brown, Assistant Professor, Sociology, Ronald E. Brown, Associate Professor, Political Science, Anthony Daniels, Graduate Student & Phyllis Caruthers, Graduate Student, The Impact of Church-base Politicized Social Capital on Black Political Activism

September 23: David Toews, Professor, Sociology and Anthropology, University of Windsor, Are Immersive Experiences in Virtual Worlds a New Model for Cultural Participation?

September 24: Marilynn Rashid, Lecturer, CMLLC*, The poetry of José Jiménez Lozano: Discussion and reading from the English Translations

September 30: Juana Lidia Coello Tissert, Professor, Humanities, Universidad de Oriente, Santiago de Cuba, The New Cuban University

October 1: Lothar Spang, Librarian IV & Sandra G. Yee, Dean, University Libraries, University Library Outreach in an Urban Setting

October 7: Sandra Claire Hobbs, Assistant Professor, CMLLC*, Native Stereotypes and Quebec Nationalism in Robert Lalonde's The Last Indian Summer

October 8: Robert P. Holley, Professor, Library and Information Sciences, Books, Faculty and the Academic Library

October 14: Anne Duggan, Associate Professor, CMLLC*, Eighteenth-Century Celebrated Cases

October 15: Elizabeth Barton, Assistant Professor, Community Engagement @ Wayne & Monita Mungo, Research Assistant, Honors College, Service-Learning at WSU

October 21: Barry Lyons, Associate Professor, More or Less White: Mestizo Identities and Indian Resurgence in Ecuador

October 22: Anca Vlasopolos, Professor, English, What Migrants Bring

October 28: Dan Frohardt, Professor and Chair, Mathematics, Mathematics in Today's World

October 29: Ross Pudaloff, Associate Professor, English, Science and Violence: The Murder of Clothilde Marchand and The Trials of Lila Jimerson

November 4: Robin Boyle, Professor and Chair, Geography and Urban Planning, The Challenge and Opportunity of an Aging Society

November 5: Anne Rothe, Assistant Professor, CMLLC*, Trauma Sells: Reflections on the Popular Appeal of Trauma Narratives

November 11: Elizabeth Faue, Professor of History and Associate Dean of the Graduate School, Labor and the Memory of Justice

November 12: Ollie Johnson, Assistant Professor, Africana Studies, Promoting Afro-Brazilian Culture and History in a Racial Democracy: An Analysis of the Fundacao Cultural Palmares

November 18: Barrett Watten, Professor, English, Critical Regions of Global Poetics: Shanxing Wang's Economies of Scale

November 19: Michael Scrivener, Professor, English, Two Worlds: Reading Anglo-Jewish Writing

November 25: Stephen Chrisomalis , Assistant Professor, Anthropology, What language is STOP? Language ideology and identity in Montreal's signscape

December 2: Haiyong Liu, Assistant Professor, CMLLC*, and Director, Confucius Institute, Generative Grammar and Chinese Pedagogy

December 3: Karen Liston, Public Services Librarian III, University Libraries, Identifying and Gaining Access to Non-English Language Research Materials

December 9: Howard N. Shapiro, Professor of Engineering and Associate VP for Undergraduate Programs, Provost Office, Energy Sustainability - Politics and the Laws of Thermodynamics

December 10: Annie Higgins, Assistant Professor, CMLLC*, Refugee Creativity: Poetry and Art in Palestinian Refugee Camps

December 16: Guy Stern, Distinguished Professor Emeritus, CMLLC*, and Susanna Piontek, Member, Die Kogge, European Writers' Association, The Short Story as a post-WWII new phenomenon in Germany"

WINTER SEMESTER 2009

January 13: Richard Grusin, Professor and Chair, English, American Water Works

January 14: Susan Vineberg, Associate Professor, Philosophy, Mathematical Representation and Theory Choice

January 20: Caroline Maun, Assistant Professor, English, Phases of the Moon: The Poetry of Charlotte Wilder

January 21: Ellen Barton , Professor, Linguistics, Ethical Issues in Recruitment to Clinical Trials: Undue Influence? Ethical Persuasion?

January 27: Alexander F. Day, Assistant Professor, History, Structuring the World: Politicization of the Peasant in Late Qing China

January 28: Pamela Crespin, Assistant Professor, Anthropology, Contesting the Anthropomorphic Concepts of the Free-Market and Corporate Social Responsibility

February 3: William Harris, Professor, English, Guess Who’s Coming…Booker T. Washington’s Visit to the White House

February 4: Donyale Griffin, Assistant Professor, Communication, Framing Kwame Kilpatrick: Third-Party Response to the Text Message Scandal

February 10: Monica White, Assistant Professor, Sociology,'Fight for the right to fight': Race and Gender in Social Resistance

February 11: David Goldberg, Assistant Professor, Africana Studies, Building Black Power: Independent Unionism, Community Control, and Detroit’s Organizing Tradition, 1967-1970

February 17: Guerin Montilus, Professor, Anthropology, The West African Conception of Person especially among the Adja Fon of Southern Republic of Benin and the Yoruba of Southwestern Nigeria and Its Impact upon Haitian Vodou and Cuban Santería in the Caribbean

February 18: Jorge L. Chinea, Associate Professor, History, and Director, Center for Chicano-Boricua Studies, Enlightening the Plantation System at the Crossroads of the Second Empire: Bureaucratic Proposals for Agricultural Modernisation, Diversification, and Free Labour in Spanish Colonial Puerto Rico, c. 1846-1852

February 24: Russ Miller, Assistant Professor, Music, Suite Justice: A Jazz Setting of the Beatitudes

February 25 1:30-2:30: Victor Figueroa, Assistant Professor, CMLLC*, Deconstructing Trujillo: Junot Díaz’s dilemma in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

March 3: May Seikaly, Associate Professor, CMLLC*, Globalizing Gender in the Arabian Gulf

March 4: Joel Itzkowitz, Associate Professor, CMLLC*, Eumaios and the Case of the Missing Shepherd

March 10: Gordon Neavill, Associate Professor, Library and Information Science, Bibliography and Paratext: Documenting the Transmission and Reception of Literary Works through Time

March 11: Kenneth R. Walters, Associate Professor, CMLLC*, Bearding Brutus, Paradigmatic Pressure and the Rise and Fall of the Roman Republic

March 24: Martha Ratliff, Associate Professor, English, The History of a Southeast Asian Numeral System

March 25: Geoff Nathan, Associate Professor, English & Margaret Winters, Professor and Chair of CMLLC*, The Current State of Yiddish

March 31: Kypros Markou, Professor, Music, The Role of the Conductor: A Creative Artist or a mere Interpreter

April 1: Monica W. Tracey, Associate Professor, Instructional Technology, Education, Learning Through Collaborative Problem Solving

Thursday, April 9: Joseph M. Fitzgerald, Professor, Psychology, Trauma and Identity

April 8: Nicole Elise Trujillo-Pagan, Assistant Professor, Center for Chicano-Boricua Studies and Sociology, Vulnerability and Dignity among Latino Residential Construction Workers in a post-Katrina New Orleans

April 14th: Caroline Maun, Assistant Professor, English, Phases of the Moon: The Poetry of Charlotte Wilder

April 15: Danielle Mc Guire, Assistant Professor, History, At the Dark End of the Street: Sexual Violence, Community Mobilization, and the African American Freedom Struggle

April 21: Avis Vidal, Professor, Geography and Urban Planning, Out of the Silos: Developing Healthy Communities

April 22: renee c. hoogland, Associate Professor, English, Neo-Aesthetics and the Possibilities and Limitations of Narrative

April 28: Derek E. Daniels, Assistant Professor, Communication Sciences and Disorders, The Impact of Stuttering on Identity

April 29: Jerry Herron, Professor, English, and Dean, Honors College, TBA

*Department of Classical and Modern, Languages, Literatures and Cultures

ABSTRACTS

Arthur Marotti, Distinguished Professor, English
"Saintly Idiocy and Contemplative Empowerment: The Case for Dame Gertrude More"

This lecture deals with the life and writings of a seventeenth-century English nun who was the great-great granddaughter of Sir Thomas More. At the age of eighteen, Dame Gertrude More went to the Benedictine convent her father helped establish in the Spanish Netherlands, and in which she assumed a leadership role. After an initial period of struggle, in which she could not wholeheartedly accept her life as a cloistered nun, she discovered with the help of her spiritual mentor, Dom Augustine Baker, a form of contemplative prayer that suited and satisfied her—though she opposed the abbess and vicar of the convent who wished to impose on her and the other nuns a Jesuit meditative practice. She died at the age of thirty-three, leaving a body of writing in verse and prose that was later published as The Spiritual Exercises Of the most vertuous and religious D. Gertrude More of the holy order of S. Bennet and English congregation of our Ladies of Comfort in Cambray, she called them. Amor ordinem nescit. And Ideots deuotions. Her only spiritual father and directour the ven. Fa. Baker stiled them. Confessiones Amantis. A louers confessions (Paris, 1658). Although feminist historical scholarship has been slower to recover the devotional writing of early modern Englishwomen than to rediscover the more obviously transgressive, though sometimes quite atypical, texts of such women as Eleanor Davies, Anna Trapnel, and Margaret Cavendish, who functioned more boldly in the public sphere, scholars are beginning see the value of studying the religious writings of other women, especially Catholic nuns, both within the context of gender politics of the time and within the large cultural processes of early modern England and Europe. Dame Gertrude More’s work is the product of an independent intelligence and courageous temperament. She herself was at once humbly pious and boldly assertive, exploiting the surprising possibilities for personal freedom and independence that were possible within a rule-bound, cloistered way of life.

Daphne W. Ntiri, Associate Professor, Africana Studies
"Literacy as a Social Divide: African Americans at the Crossroads"

The United States is in the midst of a literacy crisis. Illiteracy rates, particularly among African Americans and other minority groups, are profoundly troubling and demand innovative solutions. Those solutions must not, however, merely focus on the traditional skills of “reading, writing, and arithmetic” (though these are certainly needed). An effective bridge must be built across America’s social divide – a deep chasm rooted in racism and the excesses of our capitalistic system. Literacy is both a casualty of American social structures and one of our best hopes for altering these structures. In light of this, we are forced to ask the questions, “Why is it that, in one of the world’s most developed nations, illiteracy is so pervasive and literacy is difficult to achieve? And why is its achievement especially difficult for African Americans, a group that has long sought literacy as a means to political and economic empowerment?” This International Literacy Week presentation, Literacy as a Social Divide, will seek to answer two questions that cut to the heart of this burning issue. First, why are literacy disparities between blacks and whites increasing despite growth in literacy access and achievement in past decades particularly in urban centers such as Detroit? Second, why have efforts at literacy improvement on the national and local levels not made a significant impact given the fact that it is a feature on policy makers’ agendas? This presentation will also shed light on Detroit’s current literacy impasse and where the city stands relative to its suburban counterparts.

Robert Sedler, Distinguished Professor, Law
"Politics, Religion, and American Constitutional Values"

In this presentation, Professor Sedler will explore politics and religion from the perspective of constitutional values. Religious freedom is a very important value in the American constitutional system. The First Amendment gives double protection to religious freedom by means of both an Establishment Clause and a Free Exercise Clause. The First Amendment provides strong protection to freedom of speech, which includes, of course, the speech of religious officials and religious institutions. It cannot be doubted that in the United States today, religion is very important to large numbers of Americans, and for this reason religion may be expected to play a role in American politics.

But what should this role be? Professor Sedler maintains that some guidance may be found from the values embodied in a little known provision in the original Constitution, the prohibition of a test oath for holding federal office. Art. VI, sec. 3 provides that, "no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States." Professor Sedler submits that in light of the values embodied in the constitutional prohibition against test oaths, a candidate’s religious beliefs should be deemed irrelevant in the political process. For voters to take a candidate’s religious beliefs into account and to vote against a candidate because the candidate’s religion differs from their own is the equivalent of a religious test for public office and so is inconsistent with the constitutional values embodied in Art. VI, sec. 3. Moreover, the prohibition against religious tests for holding public office also means that candidates who run for public office, and who, when elected, have promised to support the Constitution, must be assumed to be able to separate their own religious beliefs from their constitutional duty to govern impartially in a pluralistic society and religiously neutral governmental system.

Professor Sedler contends that because of the values embodied in the constitutional provision against test oaths, we should be troubled by the fact that some candidates for public office have used a reverse test oath, so to speak. They have run to some extent on their religious beliefs and have made blatant appeals to some religious groups to support them on the basis of shared religious beliefs. The clear implication is that their religious beliefs will shape their views on questions of public policy. Professor Sedler will discuss how the matter of running on religious beliefs has occurred in the past and is playing out in the current election cycle

Finally, Professor Sedler will discuss the role of religious adherents and religious institutions in trying to advance their religious beliefs through political activity. Here he maintains that the constitutional values of religious freedom and freedom of speech interact so that religious people and religious institutions are acting in accordance with constitutional values when they try to advance their religious-based beliefs through political activity. Similarly, it comes within the free exercise of religion for members of the clergy to remind their adherents of the tenets of their faith, and to contend, if they so believe, that as a matter of religious belief, their adherents should support or oppose certain public policies and candidates who support or oppose those policies. The point where constitutional values may come between members of the clergy and adherents of their faith is when members of the clergy demand that their adherents who are holding public office conform their actions to the religious beliefs of their faith. A very recent example of this situation occurred when the Archbishop of Kansas City, Kansas, directed that priests refuse communion to Kansas Governor Katherine Sibelius because of her refusal to sign a law restricting abortion. Such an action is completely inconsistent with the principle that government officials must be able to separate their own religious beliefs from their views on matters of public policy.

Khari R. Brown, Assistant Professor, Sociology, Ronald E. Brown, Associate Professor, Political Science, Anthony Daniels, Graduate Student & Phyllis Caruthers, Graduate Student
"The Impact of Church-base Politicized Social Capital on Black Political Activism"

This study seeks to examine the relationship between church-based politicized social capital resources (e.g. social issues and political messages) and political activism among black Americans. Our results suggest that exposure to social issues (e.g. racism, poverty, immigration, war, and police brutality) in one’s house of worship propels blacks to engage in political activism largely because such issues are politicized so to encourage activism. That is, on average, exposure to social issues in church increases political activism among blacks. However, when exposure to messages that encourage congregants to engage in political activism are also taken into account, only exposure to political messages predicts political activism.

David Toews, Professor, Sociology and Anthropology, University of Windsor
"Are Immersive Experiences in Virtual Worlds a New Model for Cultural Participation?"

Marilynn Rashid, Lecturer, CMLLC*
"The poetry of José Jiménez Lozano: Discussion and reading from the English Translations"

Juana Lidia Coello Tissert, Professor, Humanities, Universidad de Oriente, Santiago de Cuba,
"The New Cuban University"

Tamara Proenza Diaz said that the world is being transformed by a new technological revolution and economic globalization. Thus, the university continues its function to be the privileged social institution dedicated to the management of advanced knowledge. Its main role continues to be to create, develop, disseminate, and use knowledge.

In this context, Higher Education is essential to create the intellectual capacity to produce and use knowledge and practice to promote lifelong learning that people require to update their knowledge and skills (Miyahira JM, 2007). That is why its mission lies in enhancing the processes of human and professional training, adapting to this new paradigm to successfully face the challenges of the present and the dilemmas that our societies face in the future (Proenza, Tamara, 2008)

Based on these assertions that we strongly support, and the social needs that were emerging in Cuba, it was necessary to design a new project to take university studies to every corner of the country. This project, which is called The Universalization, makes it possible to pursue university studies at the municipality of residence, making the best use of material and human resources and respecting the principle of quality in the training of necessary new faculty as well as academic knowledge of the future professionals as the main guarantee for a real social impact.

This project is also based on some pedagogical, sociological and psychological principles that support its conception.

Lothar Spang, Librarian IV & Sandra G. Yee, Dean, University Libraries,
"University Library Outreach in an Urban Setting"

Outreach programs aimed at diverse populations are an invaluable service that universities located in large urban areas can provide communities.  By partnering with nearby museums and other types of cultural agencies, the library system of Wayne State University (WSU) has created a series of digital programs that is offered free of charge to online users who otherwise, due to expense or distance, might not have access to the services and activities available through these online resources.

Among the libraries partners are the Detroit Public Library, the Detroit Historical Museum, the Detroit Institute of Arts, the Henry Ford Museum/Greenfield Village, Meadowbrook Hall, the Motown Museum, and the Detroit Public Schools. Success with the initial programs have set the stage for partnerships with additional cultural institutions.

Sandra Claire Hobbs, Assistant Professor, CMLLC*
"Native Stereotypes and Quebec Nationalism in Robert Lalonde's The Last Indian Summer"

Stereotyping of Native characters in Quebec fiction began with its origins in the 19th century, and continues to be prevalent today. This stereotype consists of both positive portrayals – where the native is wise, brave, lives in harmony with his environment, and is the faithful guide of the white man as he makes his way in a hostile natural environment – and negative ones, where the Native is violent, unpredictable and hostile to white occupation of his territory. Previously, ideological interpretations were given to the negative and positive aspects of the stereotype, linking the first to demonstrations of superior French Canadian civilization, and the last to the oppressive colonial regime imposed by the British on both Quebec and its Natives. In today's talk, I will be using Homi Bhabha's theory of ambivalence in colonial relations to explore how the stereotyped Native contributes to a nuanced articulation of Québécois nationalism in Robert Lalonde's 1982 novel, The Last Indian Summer . Specifically, I will be showing how the novel's narrator, a Quebec adolescent, both uses the figure of the Native rhetorically to argue for a more inclusive form of nationalism, but ultimately excludes this figure through narrative structures as he reconciles himself with his French Catholic identity.

Robert P. Holley, Professor, Library and Information Sciences,
"Books, Faculty and the Academic Library"

Is the printed scholarly monograph doomed to extinction? The digital revolution for journal articles is over—digital won. The situation for scholarly books is somewhat different, in part because of the difficulty of reading an entire book on computer screens or e-book readers.

Nonetheless, budget pressures, including the need to fund digital resources, have reduced support for book purchases in most academic research libraries. Many university presses have lost their subsidies and publish fewer copies of accepted manuscripts since libraries have less money to buy them. The blurring of lines between in-print and out-of-print in the Internet marketplace for books means that perhaps libraries don't need to purchase scholarly monographs “just in case” but can wait to purchase them “just in time.” Finally, faculty may now depend less on libraries for books because they can often purchase out-of-print copies cheaply, get them in days rather than weeks, mark them up, and keep them forever.

How do all these factors affect scholars in the Humanities? Is the “tenure” book still a reasonable possibility for specialized research topics with limited marketability?

Anne Duggan, Associate Professor, CMLLC*
"Eighteenth-Century Celebrated Cases"

In 1734 François Gayot de Pitaval, a French lawyer originally from Lyon, published what would become the first of 20 volumes of his Celebrated and Interesting Court Cases (1734-43). With his collection of Celebrated Cases, Pitaval launched a trend in literature about crime that spread from France to Germany and England. Such collections remained the fashion well into the nineteenth century.

In this brown bag talk, Professor Duggan will consider Gayot de Pitaval’s Celebrated Court Cases as a form of pedagogical fiction by taking into account the ways in which he frames his collections of cases and transforms legal accounts, looking at the particular case of “The False Martin Guerre,” his first published case. The talk will consider the ways in which legal discourse of the period already was “literary,” and how Pitaval further exploits the literariness of sensationalist court cases to entertain as well as instruct a public consisting not of his peers, but of Parisian socialites. The popularity of the genre cannot be separated from the development of a secular public sphere in which crime was being framed and perceived less and less in terms of sin, magic, and Satan, and in which knowledge of the law was becoming increasingly important.

Elizabeth Barton, Assistant Professor, Community Engagement @ Wayne & Monita Mungo, Research Assistant, Honors College
"Service-Learning at WSU"

Barry Lyons, Associate Professor
"More or Less White: Mestizo Identities and Indian Resurgence in Ecuador"

This talk will explore the impact of Ecuador's indigenous movement on non-indigenous understandings of race and ethnicity. The category of mestizo, as contrasted with indigenous, has become the "more or less white" side of an overarching mestizo vs. indigenous dichotomy. Mestizo was previously one category in an array of non-indigenous categories but has absorbed other categories. This transformation limits the reach of the indigenous movement's challenge to the supremacy of whiteness. Indigenous power and a new discourse of intercultural respect have pushed overt racism out of everyday interactions. However, the shift from older racial discourses to multiculturalism has been deceptively easy. Ironically, this shift has left "less white" mestizos without a discursive basis for linking their experiences of discrimination with indigenous experiences and struggles.

Lee Rodney, Professor, Art History and Visual Culture, University of Windsor
"Reading Detroit as a Border City: Contemporary border politics and bi-national urban space"

Anca Vlasopolos, Professor, English
"What Migrants Bring"

Professor Vlasopolos will be giving a reading of poems from her manuscript collection, What Migrants Bring. She will give an introduction about the title and her concept of migrants and migrations. She will talk informally about the creative method, the way in which she put together a collection of poems, and she will invite the audience to respond to the poems and challenge anything she says. She will also have copies of her published collection, Penguins in a Warming World, for anyone who’s interested.

Dan Frohardt, Professor and Chair, Mathematics
"Mathematics in Today's World "

He will begin his talk with an overview of the goals of our general education course, MAT 1000, describing the choices that were made when designing it. Many people view mathematics as a technical subject with little direct relevance to the lives of ordinary people now that we have software to balance our checkbooks. This contrasts sharply with the view of mathematicians. The wide applicability of mathematics is a powerful attraction for many. At the same time, many are motivated by a strong sense of aesthetics. While aesthetics and applicability are not incompatible, anyone who designs a general education mathematics course needs balance these two impulses.

The first part of the discussion will be mainly at a philosophical level, including, for example, a strong distinction between mathematical and statistical reasoning. During the second part of the talk, he will illustrate the content of the course with examples pertaining to the election and other timely topics.

Ross Pudaloff, Associate Professor, English
"Science and Violence: The Murder of Clothilde Marchand and The Trials of Lila Jimerson"

This paper examines a once-famous murder in Buffalo, New York in 1930 in which a Cayuga Indian, Lila Jimerson, was accused of murdering Clothilde Marchand, wife of Jimerson’s lover, Henri Marchand. Although the murder and subsequent trials were quickly forgotten, at the time they captured the public imagination locally, nationally and internationally. The haste with which the trial was held (it began two weeks after the murder), the dramatic events of the trial itself, the intervention of the United States Attorney for the defense, and extensive coverage in local, national and international newspapers and magazines, all suggest the cultural and political importance felt at that moment.

The murder put more than the alleged murderer on trial; the murder and trials raised questions about the nature and meaning of science, questions in which the authority of modern science was challenged by what it had consigned to the past. One locus of that authority was the new museum of science building which had opened officially only a year prior to the murder; it had been hailed as triumph of civic order and the confluence of intellectual and material progress. In addition to the museum itself, news reports throughout the late 1920s had focused on the work of Henri Marchand, who had been hired to prepare exhibits for the new building. Uniformly described as a world famous artist whose very presence in Buffalo validated the importance of the museum and the city, Marchand and the confluence of art and science in his work were said to demonstrate the triumph of progress and science. In particular, Marchand had created a diorama of “prehistoric Seneca Indians” which featured a bare-breasted woman, the model for which was Lila Jimerson. The diorama had legitimated an evolutionary model of progress, one visible not just in it, but structured into the very design of the museum, a model that made science the guarantor of historical development.

At the same time, however, the murder, trials, and enormous publicity reveal complex and even contradictory ideas about science and the world, in particular about the meaning of evolution. These competing ideas become visible when one traces the history of the museum, a process which includes how the museum came into being, how the building was funded, how it was designed, and how the work of Henri Marchand was described and praised.

Specifically, the arguments for building the museum, the design of the building, the network of relations between the Buffalo museum and other institutions, and the exhibits within the museum offered multiple and competing versions of evolution which become visible through the prism offered by the murder, trial and publicity. Evolution did so in large part because a main means for transmitting evolution to the larger public was through the eugenics movement, itself having one of its homes in science museums. Progress and its handmaiden science were popular and elite, democratic and authoritarian, and inclusive and restrictive. Ultimately, Lila Jimerson was not the sole being on trial.

Robin Boyle, Professor and Chair, Geography and Urban Planning
"The Challenge and Opportunity of an Aging Society"

According to recent data complied by the AARP, nearly ninety-percent of older adults (defined as those over the age of fifty) prefer to age in place.[1] Aging in place is a concept describing the ability of seniors and elderly adults to stay in their homes despite any onset of physical and/or mental health difficulties that may occur during the process of growing older.[2] As a result, aging in place has created a phenomenon known as, naturally occurring retirement communities (NORCs).

First termed by Dr. Michael E. Hunt at the University of Wisconsin, NORCs refer to neighborhoods where a disproportionate number of seniors and elderly reside in the same place.[3] These living environments differ from continuing care retirement communities (CCRCs), such as assisted living facilities, and leisure oriented retirement communities (LORCs), which are planned and developed to specifically cater to seniors of a certain age who move to these communities for health reasons or recreational incentives, respectively. NORCs however are not planned. They are not manufactured neighborhoods or constructed housing developments. NORCs are currently evolving organically, specifically in suburban areas, as the same demographic which helped to generate and define the suburban lifestyle (baby boomers) now chooses to age in place in their homes - within the neighborhoods they built and cherish.

As seniors continue to age in place, the paper will assert that local governments need to prepare for both physical environment adjustments and additional senior service provisions to specifically address the many needs a sizeable aging population will present. This paper will set the national demographic context (current and projected) with a detailed analysis of a large metropolitan area.[4] Framed by existing knowledge and supplemented field research, the study will discuss the community characteristics of successful aging in place. The third part of our paper focuses on a review and assessment of ways in which planning, zoning and design, at the level of the municipality, can be employed to the processes of aging in place and the establishment of successful NORCs.

[1] AARP-Public Policy Institute. 2005. Livable Communities: An Evaluation Guide. (Based on the earlier publication, Livable Communities: An Evaluation Guide by Patricia Baron Pollak, © AARP 2000), Tempe, AZ: Arizona State University, Herberger Center for Design Excellence. www.aarp.org/research/housing-mobility/indliving/d18311_communities.html .

[2] Partners for Livable Communities and the National Association of Area Agencies on Aging. 2006. Livable Communities & Aging In Place: Developing an Elder-Friendly Community.

[3] Hunt, Michael E., D. Arch, and Leonard Ross. “Naturally Occurring Retirement Communities: A Multiattribute Examination of Desirability Factors.” The Gerontologist 30 (1990, 5): 667-74.

[4] U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Administration on Aging, “A Statistical Profile of Older Americans Aged 65+”, November 2006

Anne Rothe, Assistant Professor, CMLLC*
"Trauma Sells: Reflections on the Popular Appeal of Trauma Narratives"

After briefly outlining the book project on "Memory and Trauma as Research Paradigms in Cultural Studies" to contextualize the subject of the presentation, the talk will explore the development of ‘trauma culture’ in which everyone who suffers is (fallaciously) ascribed victim status, victims began to be revered when ascribed the social function of juridico-historical witness yet, since they are also associated with weakness, they are increasingly re-conceptualized as survivors. While depictions of traumatizing victimization are not inherently appealing, when transformed into melodramatic spectacles of violence and/or redemptive-sentimental trauma kitsch and ascribed the capacity to provide moral enlightenment and imbue the audiences with the authenticity they find lacking in their own mundane lives, particularly the new sub-genre of trauma memoirs became so successful that increasingly so-called trauma invention stories are entering the market. The conceptual reflections will be illustrated by a brief analysis of how the popular German Weltbild book catalogue markets trauma kitsch memoirs.

Elizabeth Faue, Professor of History and Associate Dean of the Graduate School
"Labor and the Memory of Justice"

This paper rethinks how social justice was understood in the labor movement and on the U.S. left during the first half of the twentieth century. It examines the active memory of justice in the labor movement and how it shaped the labor movement's struggles in a time of institutional change. Lacking any state means to mediate workplace disputes and community conflicts and subject to the often hostile court judges, working-class activists had to imagine alternative ways to achieve justice for workers and the working class. Labor radical Elizabeth Gurley Flynn articulated such strategies in her memoir, Rebel Girl, when she discussed different legal cases; but she was not alone in understanding the legal system as one in which justice might be earned as well as denied. "Making plans to get justice," to use the words of one worker, also required re-imagining what "justice" might mean outside the machinery of law. Understanding justice,as Flynn understood, involves not only active contemporary observation but also memory.

Ollie Johnson, Assistant Professor, Africana Studies
"Promoting Afro-Brazilian Culture and History in a Racial Democracy: An Analysis of the Fundacao Cultural Palmares"

This lecture will examine the origins and evolution of the Fundação Cultural Palmares/FCP (Palmares Cultural Foundation). On August 22, 1988, the Brazilian government created the FCP to work with educational, governmental, and private institutions to increase public awareness of Afro-Brazilian contributions to Brazilian society and culture. The Palmares foundation publishes materials (books, magazines, and newsletters) by and about Afro-Brazilians. It is the main sponsor of Black cultural and educational events in Brazil. The foundation’s leaders regularly travel throughout the country lecturing on diverse aspects of the Afro-Brazilian experience.

The foundation has always been housed within the Ministry of Culture. When the President of the Republic and the Minister of Culture are supportive, the foundation has more resources and is more active. In other situations, the foundation has struggled and even had to fight for its survival.

The emphasis on culture has been intensely opposed by many Black activists who wanted more focus on improving the socio-economic conditions of Afro-Brazilians. By promoting the explicit inclusion, recognition, and celebration of Afro-Brazilian history and culture, leaders and staffers of the Palmares foundation have challenged the Brazilian myth of racial democracy and helped place Black Movement concerns on the country’s political agenda.

Barrett Watten, Professor, English
"Critical Regions of Global Poetics: Shanxing Wang's Economies of Scale"

In this paper, Professor Watten argues that there is an emerging transnational style among postmodern, postnational, avant-garde, and diasporic poets that relies on the accretion of what he terms "radical particulars." Language poetry is just one of these styles. It has been suggested by proponents of Language poetry that a poetics of radical particularity as anti-national and anti-identitarian, as with the earlier model of surrealism, offers a standard for comparability among these differing traditions, even better the possibility of solidarity. He has been arguing, on the other hand, against any such easy transfer from one context, literature, or region to another. To develop this claim he will apply a refunctioned, pluralist concept of "critical regionalism" to new poetic genres in the avant-garde that re-map spaces of the global by means of the negative and differential relation between particular and universal. In developing his argument, he will present a series of eight critical "regions" as re-mappings of theory and history, poetics and region, and then develop a reading New York-based poet Shanxing Wang's first book of experimental poetry, Mad Science in Imperial City. He focuses on the ways Wang's poetics of cultural displacement and cognitive remapping intersect with the political economy of the new China, leading to an economy of scale that connects "radical particularity" and the nonplace of global capitalism. Wang's work thus offers a reflexive, subject-centered account of the ravages of globalization that contrasts with the ironic monumentalism of recently emerging Chinese avant-garde and post-avant artists such as Xu Bing, Ai Wei-Wei, Cai Guoqiang, Yue Mingjun, and Xing Danwen.

Michael Scrivener, Distinguished Professor, English
"Two Worlds: Reading Anglo-Jewish Writing"

If Anglo-Jewish history has been marginalized, as Todd Endelman, David Feldman, and other historians have long lamented, Anglo-Jewish literature has also been marginal.  However, recent critics have argued for expanding the canon to include Anglo-Jewish writers from the Enlightenment and Romantic periods to the end of the nineteenth century and beyond, as David Levi, Emma Lyon, Grace Aguilar, Amy Levy and Israel Zangwill have all received new readings that make visible an Anglo-Jewish literary and intellectual tradition.  The terms on which the Anglo-Jewish texts are brought into the canon are not self-evident and require theoretical clarification.  One can integrate the Anglo-Jewish presence in literature in different ways:  as a minority discourse connected to both the dominant discourse and other minority discourses, as a transhistorical and transnational Jewish literature, and as readable by means of a philo- and anti-Semitic dialectic. Scrivener wants to work toward achieving critical distance from the recent scholarship in Anglo-Jewish writing by returning to previous generations of scholars from David Philipson in the late nineteenth century up through the post-Holocaust work of Edgar Rosenberg and Harold Fisch. Finally, he will illustrate some of the theoretical issues by reading the figure of the Jewish peddler in Romantic-era Britain.  By expanding the emphasis on belletristic literature to include cultural representations in general, one resituates the literary to establish a broader context of meaning.  By interpreting the Jewish peddler in the popular Universal Songster (1825) and the Old Bailey court transcripts, one finds images and meanings that lead one back to belletristic literature like Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice and Wordsworth's The Excursion.

Stephen Chrisomalis, Assistant Professor, Anthropology
"What language is STOP? Language ideology and identity in Montreal's signscape"

The province of Quebec, Canada is noted for high levels of linguistic tension, in particular focusing on written signs, where the use of English is legally restricted and socially stigmatized. Stop signs are a particularly salient aspect of the 'signscape' of Montreal, Quebec, particularly because it has a large, geographically restricted anglophone minority in several of its independent municipalities. A pilot study in 'contemporary epigraphy' examines 2816 stop signs in several of Montreal's anglophone and francophone regions including quantitative analysis, a photographic database, and linguistic content analysis.

Variability in sign texts (STOP, ARRET, ARRET/STOP) overlaps partially but not completely with variability in spoken language. Despite legal  prohibitions on English signs, STOP signs persist through an act of linguistic legerdemain, defined as French, but not 'good French'. Because language ideologies towards bilingualism vary so greatly between anglophone and francophone populations (and between public and private sectors), bilingual stop signs are particularly subject to both civic-oriented manipulation and vandalism that reflect these attitudes.

Haiyong Liu, Assistant Professor, CMLLC*, and Director, Confucius Institute
"Generative Grammar and Chinese Pedagogy"

Although there have always been some conflicts between the research interests of a linguist and the pedagogical concerns of a language teacher, their contributions could be mutually beneficial. As someone who has been studying linguistics and teaching Chinese over the past 12 years, I would like to make efforts to bridge the gap between these two camps and to make the best out of the overlapping of their fields. For example, on the one hand, some understanding of syntactic typology and second language acquisition theories can help a Chinese teacher get in  touch with the underlying difficulties a student has to go through, and to better systemize her teaching. On the other hand, the mistakes made by students can serve as good data for linguists to open up new research fields and to comprehend languages more introspectively. In my current project, I scrutinize the errors I have collected from students learning Chinese and study them with the guidance of linguistic theories. In particular, I argue that, ultimately, the definiteness of nouns, e.g. the apple vs. an apple, and the finiteness of verbs, e.g. to help vs. helped, are responsible for many of the seemingly unrelated challenges a student has to face. My research will benefit people who teach, learn, and do research on Chinese as well as other languages.  

Karen Liston, Public Services Librarian III, University Libraries
"Identifying and Gaining Access to Non-English Language Research Materials"

Although advances in the scholarly computing environment are facilitating the discovery, acquisition, and use of materials in non-English languages, many practical difficulties for the researcher remain.  This presentation aims to better understand those issues, identify current practical solutions to overcome them, and generally expand the user’s toolset to identify, search, and obtain materials in languages other than English.  Research approaches and the techniques to apply them in the worldwide arena will be discussed, as well as specific strategies and resources that can be applied in a variety of disciplines and area studies.  By exploiting technology to expand the horizons of our researchers’  and students’ scholarship, Wayne State University can sustain and further its mission to support world class education in the real world.

Howard N. Shapiro, Professor of Engineering and Associate VP for Undergraduate Programs, Provost Office
"Energy Sustainability - Politics and the Laws of Thermodynamics"

Energy policy is by its very nature influenced heavily by politics and economics.  The recent upsurge of interest in energy, sustainability, environment -  the “Green” revolution - is a societal phenomenon reflective of those influences.  The solutions we seek will be political and economic, but we cannot repeal the laws of Thermodynamics along the way.  This talk will address some of the realities and myths about possible choices  to solve the energy and environmental crises we face.  Public policy on energy and sustainability must not be based on what sounds good, but must be grounded in the realities of how energy is found, transported, and used.  Those realities, though grounded in science, still provide much leeway for possible solutions, but we cannot ignore them and expect to make good public policy.

Annie Higgins, Assistant Professor, CMLLC*
"Refugee Creativity: Poetry and Art in Palestinian Refugee Camps"

A refugee camp may not be the first place one would look for poetry and art, but like any place, it can reveal its treasures, often in surprising ways.

I will begin with a brief photographic tour of informal and formal artwork in the streets of the refugee camp, and in the places to which they lead. One of these places is the literary salon where poets present their work to their peers. While some poems concern the Palestinian nation, delayed dreams, migration, and return home, others appeal to anyone, describing coffee, a blank sheet of paper, a bird’s wing, a rainy day in autumn, sleeplessness, and thoughts on existence. Thus, while born in the refugee camp, these poems relate to a more universal audience.

We will listen in on some poetry reading sessions, focusing on poetry dealing with the nature of poetry itself. What is its source? What is its value? We will see how the written word, the spoken word, and the poetic tradition, complete with innovations, intersect in works of Palestinian poets. The poets see themselves as creating something constructive from their pains and dreams, something that will outlive them.

Baudrillard refers to how body/books repeat the thought/text, “forming paving stones and paths, networks of rationality through the incoherence of the universe” (Symbolic Exchange and Death, 1976, 75). In this manner, these poems form paths moving toward coherence, and leading both inside and outside the refugee camp.

This work was supported by a Fulbright grant on “Elegy and Identity in Palestinian Refugee Camps” in the Diaspora, which I undertook in 2003-2004.

Guy Stern, Distinguished Professor Emeritus, CMLLC*, and Susanna Piontek, Member, Die Kogge, European Writers' Association
"The Short Story as a post-WWII new phenomenon in Germany"

Susanna Piontek belongs to a group of post-war German writers, who have concentrated their writing on a form not- or little-employed by their predecessors, the "short story." German authors used it because of its conciseness, set against the effusiveness of past centuries. Piontek and authors such as Günter Grass, Heinrich Böll, and Wolfgang Borchert felt the need to tell their stories and often their social message, in concise, accessible terms. Additionally, Piontek's stories frequently demonstrate the effectiveness of a surprise ending, very much in the tradition of O'Henry and Roald Dahl. She will read several of her stories in English translation, some of them recently published in American magazines. Stern's remarks will place Piontek's stories into the developing emergence of the short story on German and Austrian soil. He will also point out some of the highly individualistic modes of narration of the author.

WINTER SEMESTER 2009

Richard Grusin, Professor and Chair, English
"American Water Works"

Water is unarguably at the center of almost all of the key environmental concerns of our time—or indeed of any time.  According to Irene Klaver, Director of the Philosophy of Water Project at the University of North Texas, “water has always been intrinsically linked with culture.  Virtually all civilizations developed around water:  tribes settled at the shores or on the banks of water bodies, cities originated at the confluence of rivers.” In some sense all human civilizations, cultures, or social groups can be understood as creating water works—complex hydraulic assemblages for the circulation and mediation of water. In this brown bag talk, I will sketch out the contours of a book project I am just undertaking, which focuses on a series of major American “water works” from the 19th and 20th centuries. I employ the phrase “water works” not only to denote such hydraulic engineering projects as dams, aqueducts, mills, canals, water treatment plants, or sanitation systems, but also to account for such cultural projects as literature, paintings, maps, parks and gardens, photographs, films, or television shows.   In “American Water Works,” I intend to put these two different kinds of water works in dialogue, to understand the way in which the history of the United States as a hydraulic civilization has shaped and has been shaped by the history of cultural representations and mediations of water.  In undertaking this project my aim is not only to produce a scholarly work in environmental studies, but also to develop web-based and other resources for the study of American “water works.”  I would be particularly interested in the prospect of collaborating with other humanists, scientists, engineers, or social scientists engaged in water-related research projects.

Susan Vineberg, Associate Professor, Philosophy
"Mathematical Representation and Theory Choice"

Much recent work within the philosophy of science has focused on various features of modeling and the representation of scientific theories.  This paper investigates how the mathematical formulations of scientific theories and the mathematical representation of measurements figure in theory confirmation.  In particular, it is argued that structural features of such representations yield at least a partial response to Thomas Kuhn’s claim that there are no objective grounds for comparing and choosing between different theoretical paradigms.  This reply to Kuhn enjoys several advantages over others in the philosophical literature.  Einstein’s theory of gravitation, and its test via the 1919 eclipse observations, which were regarded as offering support for it over the Newtonian theory, will be discussed as an illustration.  Although the paper concerns the use of mathematics in theory formulation and confirmation, the talk will be relatively non-technical and is intended for a general audience.

Caroline Maun, Assistant Professor, English
"Phases of the Moon: The Poetry of Charlotte Wilder"

Charlotte Wilder (1898-1980) published poetry from 1923 until 1939. Her first volume of poetry, Phases of the Moon, won the Shelley Memorial Award in 1937, and her second volume, Mortal Sequence, appeared in 1939.  The younger sister of the novelist and playwright Thornton Wilder, she taught at Wheaton and Smith Colleges in the 1920s, worked with the Federal Writer's Project, and was arrested for supporting union efforts in Gastonia, North Carolina in 1929.  Individual poems appeared in Atlantic Monthly, Commonweal, The New York Times, The Nation, Poetry, and The Saturday Review of Literature. Wilder achieved authentic experiments in modern poetry, and her work has been almost completely overlooked in criticism with the exception of favorable contemporary reviews of her books.  Her career as a writer was severed after a series of nervous breakdowns and psychiatric surgery. This talk will examine her accomplishment and set it in the context of American modern women's poetry of the 1920s and 1930s. 

From "Invocation"

Sun of the night: if we but saw
    Your planet circle, silver-bound,
Of Being and its elegy
    Illumine our unquickened ground

To something more than shaken lights;
    Or drifting desert spaces, where,
Unshadowed by the lift of moons,
    The fires of oblivion flare.
                                     Phases of the Moon, by Charlotte Wilder

Ellen Barton, Professor, Linguistics
"Ethical Issues in Recruitment to Clinical Trials: Undue Influence? Ethical Persuasion?"

Participation in clinical trials requires the informed consent of patients, and recruitment to trials may be the most highly regulated physician-patient interaction in academic medical centers.  Little is known, however, about the details of this interaction because few studies have been based on data collected from actual recruitment encounters.  Based on such prospective data, the purpose of this study was to describe how physicians present key elements of consent in offers to participate in clinical trials, including offers to minority patients.  A discourse analysis found that oncologists appear to present elements of consent selectively and persuasively, with some differences across ethnicity.  From the perspective of contemporary bioethics, persuasion in offers to participate in clinical trials can be regarded as ethically problematic, perhaps even rising to the standard of undue influence as defined in The Belmont Report and federal regulations (45 CFR 46).  From the perspective of traditional medical ethics, however, persuasion in offers to participate in clinical trials can be regarded as ethically appropriate, perhaps fulfilling the Hippocratic obligation to provide the best possible care to patients.  In this talk, I hope to generate discussion of ethical issues in offers to participate in clinical trials based on naturally-occurring data

Alexander F. Day, Assistant Professor, History
"Structuring the World: The Politicization of the Peasant in Late Qing China "

Chinese intellectuals viewed the peasant in many different ways during the first half of the twentieth century: backwards, ignorant, innocent, holding China back, and even powerful. The focus of this paper, however, is the emergence of the peasant as a political and revolutionary subject within Chinese discourse, an emergence that first took place during the last decade of the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911). This is most clear in the writings of anti-Manchu-activist-turned-anarchist Liu Shipei, who was the first to theorize peasant revolution at the beginning of China's twentieth century and is the subject of this paper. Liu only came to promote the revolutionary potential of the peasantry once he came to see the world as a totality structured by colonial power relations, creating a new way of relating politics to history. Thus began the political sequence of China's short twentieth century (1901-1976). How the figure of the peasant has been located by Chinese intellectuals across that twentieth century is less to do with elite discrimination, the legitimation of power politics, or even state-society relations than the difficult trajectory of China's historical transition in relation to its colonial encounter with capitalist modernity.

Pamela Crespin, Assistant Professor, Anthropology
"Contesting the Anthropomorphic Concepts of the Free-Market and Corporate Social Responsibility"

In October 2008, the US Congress passed the largest corporate welfare bill in history, and governments across the globe soon followed suit.  By exploring the relationship between expanding economic disparity and the assignation of human characteristics—such as freedom and social responsibility—to the economic system, I ask: “Who’s responsible?”  While the easy answer seems to be “greedy” corporations, scholars have long caution against anthropomorphizing the economy and its corporations with essentially human characteristics.  Drawing from Karl Polanyi, Robert Reich and others, I argue that only citizens can exercise the human rights and responsibilities necessary to solve this problem.

William Harris, Professor, English
Guess Who’s Coming…Booker T. Washington’s Visit to the White House

In 1901, Booker T. Washington, the most powerful Negro in the world is invited to dine in the White House with President Teddy Roosevelt, leader of the most powerful nation in the world.  This is the first time a black man entered the official residence in a role other than slave, servant, or entertainer.  The national reaction is immediate and revealing of the time.

In a docu-fictional style, using a 12 beat meter, we follow Washington as he sups with Roosevelt, then walks along Pennsylvania Avenue, before taking a train back to Tuskegee, the institution he founded in Alabama.  In route, he remembers the horrors of his youth as a child laborer in a coalmine, and contemplates the nature of his present position.

Thomas Dixon, author of Birth of a Nation, Thomas Edison, early film pioneer, Joel Chandler Harris, author of the appropriated Brer Rabbit stories, and Mark Twain, humorist and social critic, are a few of the characters included.  And there is a lynching.

Donyale Griffin, Assistant Professor, Communication
"Framing Kwame Kilpatrick: Third-Party Response to the Text Message Scandal"

The paper Dr. Griffin will be reading from is a textual analysis of third-party response to former Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick’s text message scandal. This research seeks to examine the nature of public or constituency discourse in the aftermath of public scandal and the discussions of blame and forgiveness that often ensue. Further, she examines the influence of these public rhetorics in how public figures re-establish their legitimacy and the restorative factors they use to regain the public trust.

Monica White, Assistant Professor, Sociology
"'Fight for the right to fight': Race and Gender in Social Resistance"

Feminist scholars of color have long articulated the need for an analysis of multiple social locations in the description of social reality.  Social movements provide opportunities to explore experiences based on multiple locations.  This essay explores the internal and external influences that lead to conflict resolution among multiple social locations and discusses how women negotiate multiple locations, thus building on social identity complexity theory. 

Through the analysis of the autobiographies of African American women involved in the Black Panther Party, findings suggest nuanced responses to situations when the exigence is race and when the exigence is gender.  When their experiences with racial oppression led them to perceive race as dangerous, their response was to engage in racial justice organizations.  Through their involvement in these organizations, gender oppression was perceived as competing with that of race.  Their response to gender oppression in black organizations was either to withdraw from the source of conflict or change their organizational alignment. This work continues the process of deconstructing the myth of social movement experiences as monolithic and challenges the notion a single overarching master status with which activists must align.

David Goldberg, Assistant Professor, Africana Studies
"Building Black Power: Independent Unionism, Community Control, and Detroit’s Organizing Tradition, 1967-1970"

Scholars of the “long civil rights movement” have greatly enhanced our understanding of the complexities, scope and grassroots orientation of African American freedom struggles.  Until quite recently, however, “long movement” historians have tended to ignore or downplay the differences that emerged between local civil rights and black power activists. My paper challenges this approach by presenting a case study of efforts to secure community control of federally funded construction projects, urban redevelopment, and labor organizing in Detroit following the 1967 rebellion. Detroit’s Black Power movement developed a grassroots-based organizing tradition in post-rebellion Detroit.  This movement sought to create a means for black workers and communities to independently represent and pursue their own interests and agendas.  In particular, a number of independent organizations and institutions were formed to gain control of all aspects of inner city construction and development.  These efforts, as my paper will show, were part of a much broader effort to wrest control of the local movement away from civil rights unionists and leaders who had increasingly become identified as part of the problem rather than the solution. 

Guerin Montilus, Professor, Anthropology
"The West African Conception of Person especially among the Adja Fon of Southern Republic of Benin and the Yoruba of Southwestern Nigeria and Its Impact upon Haitian Vodou and Cuban Santería in the Caribbean"

The concept of “person” is fundamental to the study of religion. It underlies the cosmology and eschatology of the dogma; myths and rituals, creed and ethos of religious practices. It contributes to the construct of the sacred and profane, their separation and/or intertwining. It sheds light upon spirituality as individual response to dimensions of life considered as transcendent to material contingencies. Person in this regard is a mythical discourse which bridges the gap between various internal and external frontiers and establishes human identity. In the West African cultures, especially among the Adja Fon of southern Benin and the Yoruba of southwestern Nigeria, the body acts as the bedrock of this category of person. The West African pantheon and rituals of Adja Vodou of  southern Benin and Togo, and southeastern Ghana brought to Haiti, and the Yoruba religion of southwestern Nigeria brought to Cuba maintain these fundamental characteristics: the body is the root of religious thought. Both religions on both sides of the ocean, share that common feature. Fieldwork material culture will llustrate the lecture. 

Jorge L. Chinea, Associate Professor, History, and Director, Center for Chicano-Boricua Studies
"Enlightening the Plantation System at the Crossroads of the Second Empire: Bureaucratic Proposals for Agricultural Modernisation, Diversification, and Free Labour in Spanish Colonial Puerto Rico, c. 1846-1852 "

As a result of the independence struggles in Central and South America, by the late 1820s Puerto Rico and Cuba became Spain’s sole colonies in the Americas. From this point forward, metropolitan attention focused on the Spanish Antilles, whose agricultural economies became tightly tied to agro-industrial development and trade in the peninsula, contributing to the emergence of what has come to be known as Spain’s Second Empire.  The mass production of sugar exports by an agricultural sector largely dominated by slave-based plantations was at the forefront of the agrarian boom that both islands experienced during this period. By the 1840s, however, domestic and international forces, such as ecological pressures, fluctuations in the price of tropical commodities, and the abolition of the slave trade, threatened to destabilize the agro-exporting colony.  This paper examines a series of enlightened proposals initiated by the Iberian colonial bureaucracy to reform Puerto Rican agriculture and labour in order to stave off what some of its spokespersons believed were the major shortfalls of the slave-based plantation system.

Russ Miller, Assistant Professor, Music
Suite Justice: A Jazz Setting of the Beatitudes

There are two major steps that serve to move a musical composition from conception to full realization in a performance. The first step is multifaceted and includes the development of a melodic idea based on a given text, realization of the harmonic implications of the melodic idea and application of an appropriate rhythmic accompaniment.  Also, use of various compositional devices and arranging techniques serve to balance and blend the selected forces in such a way as to provide an effective, artistic presentation of the musical idea.  The composer’s dependence on musicians to perform the work makes up the second step in this process and includes the rehearsal that enables the performers to conceptualize the composer’s intent, the reality of the logistics involved in bringing together two groups of musicians - the chorus and the jazz big band - who typically do not perform together, and selection of the appropriate venue. 

Victor Figueroa, Assistant Professor, CMLLC*
"Deconstructing Trujillo: Junot Díaz’s dilemma in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao"

Both in interviews and in his novel, Junot Díaz has tried to distinguish his representation of the Dominican Republic under Trujillo’s regime from the latest, and highly acclaimed, novel on the topic, Mario Vargas Llosa’s La fiesta del chivo. Díaz objects to Vargas Llosa’s somewhat simplistic –in Díaz’s view-- portrayal of Trujillo, and to his seemingly sympathetic presentation of Trujillo's successor, Joaquín Balaguer. I am interested in the strategies Díaz uses in order to attempt his own representation of the complexities of Trujillo’s power, as he focuses on the way authoritarian power is diffused and internalized throughout the whole of society. Díaz, I argue, confronts then his own dilemma: how to deconstruct Trujillo, thereby revealing that power operates in complex ways that go well beyond the actions of one individual, without trivializing the specificity of Trujillo’s tyranny by making it synonymous with all or any abuse of power. 

May Seikaly, Associate Professor, CMLLC*
"Globalizing Gender in the Arabian Gulf"

In this Brown bag presentation, Dr. May Seikaly from CMLLC will discuss her current research in which she investigates the social history of the Arabian Gulf states of Bahrain, Qatar and the UAE (Dubai) through the lens of women’s experience and agency. In addition to written and archival sources, this research has used oral interviews extensively through which both men and women voiced their distinct experience expressing their own understanding of the underpinnings of social change, concepts of gender discourse and regional transformation during the last twenty-five years. This voiced information highlighted the extent to which women’s activities contain a conscious sense of social contribution and commitment as well as expressions of feminism.  The research interrogated the meaning of feminism in a Third World historical context and sought to rework concepts of gender and feminism taking into account indigenous Third World feminism and its particular historical context.

Joel Itzkowitz, Associate Professor, CMLLC*
"Eumaios and the Case of the Missing Shepherd"

This talk represents a work in progress.  In it, Professor Itzkowitz seeks to ascertain the importance of Eumaeus’ being a swineherd in Homer’s Odyssey.  He reviews the position of swine in husbandry in the Neolithic and Bronze Ages, as far as archaeology can inform us.  He distinguishes among ruminant livestock and swine, and speculates about the absence of a shepherd as such at Odysseus’ house.  He tries to develop a concept of swine as “other” and see how that might jibe with the isolation of Eumaeus in the world he has constructed for himself.  He will review the “hierarchy” of various herdsmen in Greek literature.

Gordon Neavill, Associate Professor, Library and Information Science
"Bibliography and Paratext: Documenting the Transmission and Reception of Literary Works through Time"

Kenneth R. Walters, Associate Professor, CMLLC*
"Bearding Brutus, Paradigmatic Pressure and the Rise and Fall of the Roman Republic"

Martha Ratliff, Associate Professor, English
"The History of a Southeast Asian Numeral System"

It has been known for a long time that at the oldest stratum, most of the Hmong-Mien lower numerals—with the exception of ‘two’ and ‘three’—were borrowed from some Tibeto-Burman source.  It is therefore not surprising to find that the higher numerals and the ordinals are also loanwords. More surprising is that several basic quantity words, including ‘count’, ‘more’, ‘some’, and ‘half’ also turn out to have been borrowed. Under the assumption that many of these borrowings represent the introduction of novel elements rather than the replacement of pre-existing words in the native lexicon, I attempt to interpret the native core in light of work on the development of number systems in language history as a function of human cognitive abilities.

Geoff Nathan, Associate Professor, English & Margaret Winters, Professor and Chair of CMLLC*
"The Current State of Yiddish"

It is a matter of great importance today that a large number of languages are disappearing.  A recent estimate (Detroit Free Press, Friday 20 February 2009) suggested that some 2,500 languages of an estimated 6,000 world-wide are in danger of becoming extinct in the relatively near future.  Although it is usually an easy matter to identify language death, the case of Yiddish is a special one.  This western Germanic language, which is spoken in Jewish communities in the Americas, Europe, and the Middle East, has functioned in various ways, depending on the culture of the community, especially in regard to its religious stance.  We will discuss the history of Yiddish and its current situation, in order to suggest an answer – or answers - to the question of its hold on life. 

Kypros Markou, Professor, Music
"The Role of the Conductor: A Creative Artist or a mere Interpreter"

Igor Stravinsky, in his “Poetics of Music” speaks of the difference between execution and interpretation of a musical work. He points out that “it is necessary to distinguish two moments, or rather two states of music: potential music and actual music.”  Music is notated by the composer who uses symbols and various performance directions. Music is to a certain degree limited by its notation. By comparison, a dramatic actor has much more flexibility regarding the timing, inflection and manner of delivering of his or her text. The distinguished conductor Bruno Walter believed that a faithful reproduction of a work must include a realization of the feelings and mental images that inspired the composer to write a particular work. This approach was and is shared by many musical performers. However, there is a danger that a conductor may go too far and impose his or her own feelings and ideas on the music, thus distorting the true intent of the composer. Igor Stravinsky acknowledges that  “no matter how scrupulously a piece of music may be notated...it always contains hidden elements that defy definition”.  Stravinsky then states that as a composer he “has the right to seek from the interpreter, in addition to the perfection of his translation into sound, a loving care- which does not mean, be it surreptitious or openly affirmed, a recomposition.”  The presentation will discuss examples of performances that seek to interpret symphonic works and the degree to which they succeed at presenting the composer’s work faithfully and with “loving care.

Monica W. Tracey, Associate Professor, Instructional Technology, Education
"Learning Through Collaborative Problem Solving"

This presentation documents the process and outcomes of a graduate level course designed incorporating problem-based and cooperative learning including the use of a real world project from the instructor’s perspective and reflections from four of the graduate students participating in this experiential course. This presentation will describe the implementation of problem-based learning in the course development, implementation process and products created and lessons learned through the course evaluation and revisions. Utilizing cooperative learning techniques, presenters will describe the team selection, management and evaluation process.

Joseph M. Fitzgerald, Professor, Psychology
"Trauma and Identity"

The representation of trauma and the self has been represented in the work of many humanists. In the 20th century these representations reflected the dominant theories of psychiatry based on a special mechanisms view of memory and the self. My focus is on PTSD, a complex disorder that currently has strict diagnostic criteria based on a special mechanisms theory. This theory claims that PTSD involves some unusual operation of memory, stressing a lack of integration of event representations and the self. The basic systems view hypothesizes that PTSD actually follows a pattern consistent with the normal mechanisms of memory and the self. In support of this view, we find that a strong integration of trauma events into identity is associated with the development of PTSD symptoms.  If humanists have tied their work to the sciences, what happens when the science change?

Nicole Elise Trujillo-Pagan, Assistant Professor, Center for Chicano-Boricua Studies and Sociology
"Vulnerability and Dignity among Latino Residential Construction Workers in a post-Katrina New Orleans"

Latino recovery workers who migrated to New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina were vulnerable to a variety of abuses. Commentators and activists alike struggled to expose the ways Latino workers were exploited, wage fraud and hazardous working conditions. How did these predominantly male construction workers understand their vulnerability? This presentation draws from ethnographic research in New Orleans to discuss the ways recently-arrived Latino workers understood their role in the labor market. It argues that Latino workers defined a collective experience of courage and determination, which tied their work-related vulnerabilities to a sense of dignity. More specifically, this talk looks at how Latinos working in construction manipulated their sense of who they were as a group in order to stabilize otherwise precarious work opportunities, arrangements, and conditions following their recent migration and work within a post-disaster context.

Ken Jackson, Associate Professor, English
"Kierkegaard and Cormac McCarthy's The Road"

Danielle Mc Guire, Assistant Professor, History
"At the Dark End of the Street: Sexual Violence, Community Mobilization, and the African American Freedom Struggle"

At the Dark End of the Street explores how gender, sexuality, and sexualized violence shaped the modern civil rights movement. Between 1940 and 1975, Southern segregationists used sex and sexual brutality to terrorize black women and families, undermine the black freedom struggle and maintain their powerful position atop a racial caste system. African American women fought back by testifying about their brutal assaults in churches, courtrooms and congressional hearings. Their refusal to remain silent helped mobilize community organizations in defense of black womanhood and spurred larger campaigns for human rights in Southern movement centers like Alabama, Florida, Mississippi and North Carolina.

Avis Vidal, Professor, Geography and Urban Planning
"Out of the Silos: Developing Healthy Communities"

This talk explores the practice and programming synergies between community development and public health. While such synergies may hold promise in a variety of settings, both domestic and international, this examination uses the lens of community development practice in U.S. cities to ask two questions: Can adding community health programming to community development practice enhance community development outcomes? and If so, what are the most promising program development opportunities? It is based on a scan of cutting-edge examples in which community development corporations (CDCs) in Boston and Chicago (two cities long known as innovators in the field) have begun to add a wide variety of health-related efforts to their programming. Field research identified collaborations between health and community development institutions in pursuit of eight types of goals; two of these are highlighted as especially promising in view of the constraints facing CDCs at the present time.

renee c. hoogland, Associate Professor, English, Neo-Aesthetics and the Possibilities and Limitations of Narrative

The growing interest in questions of affect in recent critical theorizing, in conjunction with the so-called ethical turn in literary criticism, raises questions about both the objects and the subjects of critical analysis. As part of a larger project investigating the interrelations between aesthetics and ethics in contemporary literature and culture, this talk will explore the possibilities and limitations of narrative in approaching the aesthetic as an event, as a moment, or plane of becoming, without collapsing into either hermeneutic or ethical approaches. Examples of contemporary sculpture and art jewelry will serve to support Professor hoogland’s argument.

Derek E. Daniels, Assistant Professor, Communication Sciences and Disorders
"The Impact of Stuttering on Identity"

Jerry Herron, Professor, English, and Dean, Honors College
TBA