Current Workshops
Cognition and Language Workshop
The Cognition and Language Workshop creates a thriving community of language researchers by bringing a cognitive perspective to the exchange of new ideas about language. This year, the workshop focuses on the role of prediction in language processing and use. Some of the workshop’s questions include: To what extent do language users predict upcoming linguistic or extra-linguistic information? At what levels of linguistic representation does prediction occur? How do predictions change in response to novel input and learning?
Coodinators
Faculty:
Judith Degen, Dan Lassiter
Graduate Student:
Brandon Waldon
Meeting Schedule: (click to expand)
Cognition and Language Workshop
The Cognition and Language Workshop creates a thriving community of language researchers by bringing a cognitive perspective to the exchange of new ideas about language. This year, the workshop focuses on the role of prediction in language processing and use. Some of the workshop’s questions include: To what extent do language users predict upcoming linguistic or extra-linguistic information? At what levels of linguistic representation does prediction occur? How do predictions change in response to novel input and learning?
Coodinators
Faculty:
Judith Degen, Dan LassiterGraduate Student:
Brandon Waldon- Phonetic Variation in Sounds and Talkers: When do we see adaptation?
Thursday, November 14, 2019. 03:00 PM - 04:30 PM | Building 46, Room 126Beyond Theory of Mind: Learning and Influencing Conventions
Thursday, April 30, 2020. 03:00 PM - 04:30 PM | ZoomEmpirical Perspectives on Human Language, Its Structure, Acquisition, and Processing
Thursday, May 14, 2020. 03:00 PM - 04:30 PM | Zoom
Concerning Violence: A Decolonial Collaborative Research Group
Concerning Violence: A Decolonial Collaborative Research Group challenges the political and economic, ontological, and epistemic violence of coloniality with the goal of rethinking the premises of cultural and literary scholarship towards the practice of transformational knowledge production. The concept of coloniality refers to the logics that empowered modern colonialism and that persist today through material and ideological legacies of violence. These legacies of violence remain integral to our current understandings of culture and literature. Decoloniality, as a mode of thinking, praxis, and sociality, has provided a new generation of intellectuals and activists the tools to uncover the logics that link global political and economic regimes of domination; systems of oppression that target minoritized peoples; and structures privileging Eurocentric knowledge production.
Coodinators
Faculty:
Angela Garcia, José David Saldívar
Graduate Student:
Jameelah Morris
Meeting Schedule: (click to expand)
Concerning Violence: A Decolonial Collaborative Research Group
Concerning Violence: A Decolonial Collaborative Research Group challenges the political and economic, ontological, and epistemic violence of coloniality with the goal of rethinking the premises of cultural and literary scholarship towards the practice of transformational knowledge production. The concept of coloniality refers to the logics that empowered modern colonialism and that persist today through material and ideological legacies of violence. These legacies of violence remain integral to our current understandings of culture and literature. Decoloniality, as a mode of thinking, praxis, and sociality, has provided a new generation of intellectuals and activists the tools to uncover the logics that link global political and economic regimes of domination; systems of oppression that target minoritized peoples; and structures privileging Eurocentric knowledge production.
Coodinators
Faculty:
Angela Garcia, José David SaldívarGraduate Student:
Jameelah Morris- A Decoloniality Workshop with Vanessa Pérez Rosario
Thursday, October 24, 2019. 12:00 PM - 01:30 PM | Building 50, Room 51AEntre el rojo y negro: Black Women in the Sandinista Revolution
Wednesday, February 19, 2020. 04:30 PM - 06:00 PM | Building 50, Room 51AMicrocolonial Desires: Race, Affect, Disaster and (Im)Possible Freedoms in the U.S. Virgin Islands
Tuesday, June 16, 2020. 12:00 PM - 01:30 PM | Zoom
Critical Orientations to Race and Ethnicity
“Race” and “ethnicity” are terms used so commonly throughout American society that their meaning—even among scholars—is often taken for granted. This interdisciplinary workshop interrogates how different academic fields approach these concepts and re-examine the key questions that animate research on race and ethnicity. Through exposure to the latest scholarship and debates in the humanities, social sciences, and interdisciplinary work, this workshop challenges participants to hone analytical approaches to race and ethnicity in their own work.
Coodinators
Faculty:
Ana Raquel Minian
Graduate Student:
Vannessa Velez
Meeting Schedule: (click to expand)
Critical Orientations to Race and Ethnicity
“Race” and “ethnicity” are terms used so commonly throughout American society that their meaning—even among scholars—is often taken for granted. This interdisciplinary workshop interrogates how different academic fields approach these concepts and re-examine the key questions that animate research on race and ethnicity. Through exposure to the latest scholarship and debates in the humanities, social sciences, and interdisciplinary work, this workshop challenges participants to hone analytical approaches to race and ethnicity in their own work.
Coodinators
Faculty:
Ana Raquel MinianGraduate Student:
Vannessa Velez- "Nothing to Lose but Our Chains": Organizing and Activism in the Black Bay
Friday, November 22, 2019. 03:00 PM - 05:00 PM | Building 50, Room 51ATraveling Theory? Racial Capitalism and the Question of Islam in French Algeria
Friday, April 17, 2020. 02:00 PM | ZoomMary Hicks Presents Captive Cosmopolitans: Black Mariners and the World of South Atlantic Slavery
Thursday, April 30, 2020. 01:00 PM - 03:00 PM | ZoomCirculating Epistemologies: Intersections of Language and Race in the Francophone Caribbean
Friday, May 22, 2020. 11:30 AM - 01:00 PM | Zoom
Digital Aesthetics: Critical Approaches to Computational Culture
From IBM punch cards to digital census forms, from ASCII art to Oculus Rift, how do we think and feel on screens and online, on disk or in the cloud, at the keyboard or off-the-grid? How do digital objects and code blur boundaries between text, image, and performative acts? How do they challenge our understanding of the distinctions between a medium and its content? This workshop hosts conversations about material culture studies, performance theory, technology history, and aesthetics to explore a partnership between engineering and the humanities by bringing technological objects into critical humanities research and introducing new vocabularies into discussions of the design and production of our digital future.
Coodinators
Faculty:
Shane Denson
Graduate Student:
Jeff Nagy
Meeting Schedule: (click to expand)
Digital Aesthetics: Critical Approaches to Computational Culture
From IBM punch cards to digital census forms, from ASCII art to Oculus Rift, how do we think and feel on screens and online, on disk or in the cloud, at the keyboard or off-the-grid? How do digital objects and code blur boundaries between text, image, and performative acts? How do they challenge our understanding of the distinctions between a medium and its content? This workshop hosts conversations about material culture studies, performance theory, technology history, and aesthetics to explore a partnership between engineering and the humanities by bringing technological objects into critical humanities research and introducing new vocabularies into discussions of the design and production of our digital future.
Coodinators
Faculty:
Shane DensonGraduate Student:
Jeff Nagy- Declining Russian Media Theory
Thursday, November 21, 2019. 05:00 PM - 07:00 PM | Humanities Center BoardroomUnclean Interface: On Computing as a Cleanliness Problem
Tuesday, February 11, 2020. 05:00 PM - 07:00 PM | Watt Dining RoomAt the Edges of Sleep - POSTPONED
Monday, March 9, 2020. 05:00 PM - 07:00 PM | Humanities Center BoardroomBehind the Screen: Content Moderation in the Shadows of Social Media
Tuesday, April 21, 2020. 05:00 PM - 07:00 PM | ZoomHow Language Became Data: Speech Recognition Between Likeness and Likelihood
Tuesday, May 26, 2020. 05:00 PM - 07:00 PM | Zoom
Ethics and Politics, Ancient and Modern
The Ethics and Politics, Ancient and Modern (EPAM) workshop explores topics with broad interdisciplinary appeal, especially in the areas of classics, philosophy, and political theory. The workshop examines possibilities for reuniting classical and classically-influenced ideas about ethics with political theorizing that is applicable to the modern world. With a focus on classical moral and political philosophy, this workshop creates a common ground for an interdisciplinary discussion among graduate students and faculty.
Coodinators
Faculty:
Chris Bobonich, Josiah Ober
Graduate Student:
Jonathan Matthew Amaral
Meeting Schedule: (click to expand)
Ethics and Politics, Ancient and Modern
The Ethics and Politics, Ancient and Modern (EPAM) workshop explores topics with broad interdisciplinary appeal, especially in the areas of classics, philosophy, and political theory. The workshop examines possibilities for reuniting classical and classically-influenced ideas about ethics with political theorizing that is applicable to the modern world. With a focus on classical moral and political philosophy, this workshop creates a common ground for an interdisciplinary discussion among graduate students and faculty.
Coodinators
Faculty:
Chris Bobonich, Josiah OberGraduate Student:
Jonathan Matthew Amaral- Hobbes's State of Nature: A Modern Bayesian Game-Theoretic Analysis
Thursday, November 14, 2019. 04:15 PM - 06:00 PM | Watt Dining RoomUnravelling the Mystery of Thrasymachus' Blush in 'The Republic'
Thursday, January 9, 2020. 04:15 PM - 06:00 PM | Humanities Center BoardroomAgricultural Exploitation and Temple Banking in the Athenian Empire: A New Perspective from the Island of Lemnos
Thursday, January 16, 2020. 04:15 PM - 06:00 PM | Humanities Center BoardroomMedicines Drenched in Honey: Olympiodorus on What Makes Plato's Method Superior
Thursday, January 23, 2020. 04:15 PM - 06:00 PM | Humanities Center BoardroomWhy Plato's Philosopher-Rulers are Good for the City
Thursday, January 30, 2020. 04:15 PM - 06:00 PM | Education, 334The Ethical Aspect of Plato’s Sophist
Thursday, February 6, 2020. 04:15 PM - 06:00 PM | Watt Dining RoomThe Third Annual Stanford Ancient Philosophy Conference: Ancient Ethical Psychology
Friday, February 21, 2020. 02:00 PM - 07:15 PM | Building 110, Room 112The Doctrine of the Mean in the Eudemian Ethics
Wednesday, February 26, 2020. 04:15 PM - 06:00 PM | Building 100, Room 101KAristotelian Continence Reconsidered
Thursday, February 27, 2020. 04:15 PM - 06:00 PM | Humanities Center BoardroomPlato’s Republic on Divinity and the Form of the Good - POSTPONED
Thursday, March 12, 2020. 04:15 PM - 06:00 PM | Humanities Center Boardroom
Eurasian Empires
Eurasian Empires explores the connected and comparative history of early empires from the Mediterranean to China, defining time and space broadly. We focus on themes and problems common to the many empires that asserted control from ancient Greek and Middle Eastern empires to early modern Russian, Ottoman, Safavid/Qajar, Uzbek, Mughal and the Chinese empires from Han to Qing. This year’s thematic focus is Empire, Nature, and Crisis. Workshop questions include: What was the relationship between the imperial organizations of the Medieval and Early-Modern Empires of Asia and Europe and their physical environments? How did environment of the empires shape their social, political, and economic structures? How did merchant, scholar, and spiritual networks operate within and beyond the empires? How was crisis—political, social, institutional, and spiritual—perceived and negotiated by different groups?
Coodinators
Faculty:
Nancy Kollman, Ali Yaycioglu
Graduate Student:
Morgan Tufan
Meeting Schedule: (click to expand)
Eurasian Empires
Eurasian Empires explores the connected and comparative history of early empires from the Mediterranean to China, defining time and space broadly. We focus on themes and problems common to the many empires that asserted control from ancient Greek and Middle Eastern empires to early modern Russian, Ottoman, Safavid/Qajar, Uzbek, Mughal and the Chinese empires from Han to Qing. This year’s thematic focus is Empire, Nature, and Crisis. Workshop questions include: What was the relationship between the imperial organizations of the Medieval and Early-Modern Empires of Asia and Europe and their physical environments? How did environment of the empires shape their social, political, and economic structures? How did merchant, scholar, and spiritual networks operate within and beyond the empires? How was crisis—political, social, institutional, and spiritual—perceived and negotiated by different groups?
Coodinators
Faculty:
Nancy Kollman, Ali YayciogluGraduate Student:
Morgan Tufan- Ottoman Montology: Environment, Symbiosis and Knowledge ‘in’ an Early Modern Empire
Tuesday, October 29, 2019. 05:30 PM | Humanities Center Boardroom'The Key to the World's Treasures': 'Russian Science,' Local Knowledge, and the Civilizing Mission on the Siberian Steppe
Tuesday, November 12, 2019. 05:30 PM | Humanities Center BoardroomDiplomacy, Politics, and War in Medieval Syria: The Mamluk Ascendancy
Tuesday, January 21, 2020. 05:30 PM - 07:30 PM | Humanities Center BoardroomManchu Archives and the Cartographic Knowledge of the Northeast in the Huangyu Quanlan Tu
Tuesday, February 18, 2020. 05:30 PM | Humanities Center Boardroom
Feminist/Queer Colloquium
This year’s colloquium will cultivate discussions on multiplicity within feminist, queer, and transgender scholarship. Multiplicity activates notions of intersectionality but also makes room to consider discursive threads and methods that run parallel to one another and those that, perhaps, never intersect at all. Through workshops with influential feminist, queer, and transgender scholars and discussions with emerging scholars, participants will be challenged to consider the following questions: In what ways have multiple cultural contexts, time periods, locations, research methods, and the like come together to shape contemporary feminist, queer, and transgender studies? In what ways have they remained separate? Why and to what end? Further, how does the study of these convergences and divergences point to blind spots in current feminist, queer, and transgender history and theory? Finally, how can we, as scholars, use these new insights to expand the limits of feminist, queer, and transgender scholarship in the future?
Coodinators
Faculty:
Adrian Daub
Graduate Student:
Cyle Metzger
Meeting Schedule: (click to expand)
Feminist/Queer Colloquium
This year’s colloquium will cultivate discussions on multiplicity within feminist, queer, and transgender scholarship. Multiplicity activates notions of intersectionality but also makes room to consider discursive threads and methods that run parallel to one another and those that, perhaps, never intersect at all. Through workshops with influential feminist, queer, and transgender scholars and discussions with emerging scholars, participants will be challenged to consider the following questions: In what ways have multiple cultural contexts, time periods, locations, research methods, and the like come together to shape contemporary feminist, queer, and transgender studies? In what ways have they remained separate? Why and to what end? Further, how does the study of these convergences and divergences point to blind spots in current feminist, queer, and transgender history and theory? Finally, how can we, as scholars, use these new insights to expand the limits of feminist, queer, and transgender scholarship in the future?
Coodinators
Faculty:
Adrian DaubGraduate Student:
Cyle Metzger- Indigeneity and the Politics of Space: Gender, Geography, Culture
Monday, October 28, 2019. 06:00 PM - 08:00 PM | Humanities Center BoardroomRabia Belt - Commemorating 100 Years of Women's Suffrage
Monday, November 4, 2019. 06:00 PM - 08:00 PM | Watt Dining RoomDisciplinary Matters: Black Studies, Women’s Studies, and the Neoliberal University
Monday, November 11, 2019. 06:00 PM - 08:00 PM | Humanities Center BoardroomLouise Nevelson: Drag and Drag and Drag
Tuesday, January 21, 2020. 06:00 PM - 08:00 PM | McMurtry Building, Room 7, 355 Roth WayAbundance: On Sexuality and Historiography
Monday, February 3, 2020. 06:00 PM - 08:00 PM | Humanities Center BoardroomLuz Minerva Jiménez Ruvalcaba - CANCELED
Monday, April 27, 2020. 05:00 PM - 06:30 PM | Humanities Center BoardroomIndie A. Choudhury - CANCELED
Monday, May 11, 2020. 05:00 PM - 06:30 PM | Humanities Center Boardroom
History of Political Thought
The History of Political Thought workshop takes an expansive and global view of political thought, including such common concepts as constitutions and political order, rights provisions, suffrage, theories of representation, legislation, legitimate resistance, the role of religion in politics, and the dissolution of government. Instead of a focus on contemporary normative and ethical questions, the historical study of political thought considers ideas and beliefs that are typically no longer current, and sometimes brackets their normative value. This approach has more in common with intellectual history than with political philosophy.
Coodinators
Faculty:
Jonathan Gienapp, Alison McQueen
Graduate Student:
Avashalom Schwartz
Meeting Schedule: (click to expand)
History of Political Thought
The History of Political Thought workshop takes an expansive and global view of political thought, including such common concepts as constitutions and political order, rights provisions, suffrage, theories of representation, legislation, legitimate resistance, the role of religion in politics, and the dissolution of government. Instead of a focus on contemporary normative and ethical questions, the historical study of political thought considers ideas and beliefs that are typically no longer current, and sometimes brackets their normative value. This approach has more in common with intellectual history than with political philosophy.
Coodinators
Faculty:
Jonathan Gienapp, Alison McQueenGraduate Student:
Avashalom Schwartz- Revolution in Political Thought: On Translating Polybius Book VI
Thursday, October 10, 2019. 12:00 PM - 01:30 PM | Humanities CenterComparing Faith: Translation and Religious Relativism in Seventeenth-Century Istanbul
Thursday, October 31, 2019. 12:00 PM - 01:30 PM | Humanities Center BoardroomLouis XIV and Colbert Reconsidered: Politics of Glory and the Birth of Continental Commercial Policy
Wednesday, December 4, 2019. 12:00 PM - 01:30 PM | Humanities Center Board RoomJean-Paul Marat: Prophet of Terror
Thursday, January 23, 2020. 12:00 PM - 01:30 PM | Humanities Center Boardroom'Society' as a Space of Norms in an Agrarian Context
Thursday, February 20, 2020. 12:00 PM - 01:30 PM | Humanities Center Boardroom
Reframing Fashion Studies: Performance, Gender, and the Body
In the 1997 inaugural issue of the academic journal Fashion Theory: Journal of Dress, Body, & Culture, Valerie Steele defined “fashion” as the “cultural construction of an embodied identity.” Two decades later, in their edited volume Thinking Through Fashion, Agnès Rocamora and Anneke Smelik only modestly expanded the definition to identify “fashion as referring to dress, appearance, and style” and “a material culture and symbolic system.” To trouble these constrictive interpretations, this workshop orients fashion within a broader study of the body itself, a discursive site upon which fashion studies and its attendant disciplines of visual culture, anthropology, sociology, and history overlap. Central to this inquiry are theoretical practices more traditionally situated within performance, gender, and critical race studies. The objective is to reconceptualize the field of fashion as something more than a cultural construction by unearthing the interwoven set of corporeal, social, and theoretical operations that structure fashion’s logic and foster its material manifestations.
Coodinators
Faculty:
Usha Iyer, Nancy J. Troy
Graduate Student:
Ann Marguerite Tartsinis
Meeting Schedule: (click to expand)
Reframing Fashion Studies: Performance, Gender, and the Body
In the 1997 inaugural issue of the academic journal Fashion Theory: Journal of Dress, Body, & Culture, Valerie Steele defined “fashion” as the “cultural construction of an embodied identity.” Two decades later, in their edited volume Thinking Through Fashion, Agnès Rocamora and Anneke Smelik only modestly expanded the definition to identify “fashion as referring to dress, appearance, and style” and “a material culture and symbolic system.” To trouble these constrictive interpretations, this workshop orients fashion within a broader study of the body itself, a discursive site upon which fashion studies and its attendant disciplines of visual culture, anthropology, sociology, and history overlap. Central to this inquiry are theoretical practices more traditionally situated within performance, gender, and critical race studies. The objective is to reconceptualize the field of fashion as something more than a cultural construction by unearthing the interwoven set of corporeal, social, and theoretical operations that structure fashion’s logic and foster its material manifestations.
Coodinators
Faculty:
Usha Iyer, Nancy J. TroyGraduate Student:
Ann Marguerite Tartsinis- The Governmentality of Updos in Renaissance Florence
Wednesday, November 6, 2019. 06:00 PM - 08:00 PM | Humanities Center BoardroomThe Paris Commune Re(ad)dressed in the Age of the Yellow Vest Protests
Thursday, November 21, 2019. 06:00 PM - 08:00 PM | McMurtry Building, Room 007Visual Loudness: Grace Jones, Richard Bernstein, and the Aesthetics of Disco
Tuesday, December 3, 2019. 06:30 PM - 08:30 PM | Humanities Center Boardroom"Man In a Dress?" Trans of Color Aesthetics in the Afterlife of Colonial Gender
Friday, January 24, 2020. 12:30 PM - 01:30 PM | Humanities Center Board Room“Where the garment gapes”: Embodied Masculinity and the Contours of Fashion in Renaissance Italy
Thursday, January 30, 2020. 06:00 PM - 08:00 PM | McMurtry, 007Extreme Meiji Makeover: (Re)Fashioning Japanese Citizenship, 1853-1889
Thursday, February 6, 2020. 06:00 PM - 08:00 PM | Humanities Center BoardroomThe Orange People: Fashion & Rajneeshi Cult Culture
Wednesday, March 4, 2020. 06:00 PM - 08:00 PM | Humanities Center Boardroom
Renaissance Worldmaking
What is a world? Even today, the question invites conflicting responses from scientific, political, literary, philosophical, and geographic perspectives. How we choose to answer it reveals much about our own self-understanding and sense of place in the world. This workshop situates the Renaissance as a transatlantic, transnational experiment in generating worldmaking concepts—the globe, the world, the human, empire—viewing it as an “early modernity” that is foundational for our present and yet more experimental, less systematic, than the Enlightenment legacy through which modernity is often understood. As such, it is a crucial site not only for understanding and critiquing modernity but also for imagining alternative conceptions of the world. This workshop also explores new definitions of the spatial and temporal boundaries of early modernity, emphasizing the transatlantic and Mediterranean Renaissances alongside the more familiar Florentine and English accounts, while viewing cartography, literature, translation, philosophy, and science as interwoven practices constitutive of Renaissance worldmaking.
Coodinators
Faculty:
Patricia Parker
Graduate Student:
Nicholas Fenech
Meeting Schedule: (click to expand)
Renaissance Worldmaking
What is a world? Even today, the question invites conflicting responses from scientific, political, literary, philosophical, and geographic perspectives. How we choose to answer it reveals much about our own self-understanding and sense of place in the world. This workshop situates the Renaissance as a transatlantic, transnational experiment in generating worldmaking concepts—the globe, the world, the human, empire—viewing it as an “early modernity” that is foundational for our present and yet more experimental, less systematic, than the Enlightenment legacy through which modernity is often understood. As such, it is a crucial site not only for understanding and critiquing modernity but also for imagining alternative conceptions of the world. This workshop also explores new definitions of the spatial and temporal boundaries of early modernity, emphasizing the transatlantic and Mediterranean Renaissances alongside the more familiar Florentine and English accounts, while viewing cartography, literature, translation, philosophy, and science as interwoven practices constitutive of Renaissance worldmaking.
Coodinators
Faculty:
Patricia ParkerGraduate Student:
Nicholas Fenech-
No meetings assigned to this workshop yet.
Standardization in Ancient Economies
This workshop explores standardization in pre-modern economies, particularly in the ancient Mediterranean. It interrogates where, when, and in what forms standardization appears in ancient contexts, and by contrast when diversity advanced economic growth and change. Through this lens, this workshop seeks to identify self-organizing bottom-up processes, top-down impositions, and their complex intersections that generated new economic structures. Our approach examines the social and political landscape of antiquity and draws on case studies from not only traditional fields of classics, but anthropology, history, and art history, bringing in themes from political science, sociology, philosophy, and religious studies. We challenge our colleagues to investigate widely through the humanities, arts, and social sciences, creating the potential for fruitful new avenues of exploration.
Coodinators
Faculty:
Justin Leidwanger
Graduate Student:
Sarah Toby Wilker
Meeting Schedule: (click to expand)
Standardization in Ancient Economies
This workshop explores standardization in pre-modern economies, particularly in the ancient Mediterranean. It interrogates where, when, and in what forms standardization appears in ancient contexts, and by contrast when diversity advanced economic growth and change. Through this lens, this workshop seeks to identify self-organizing bottom-up processes, top-down impositions, and their complex intersections that generated new economic structures. Our approach examines the social and political landscape of antiquity and draws on case studies from not only traditional fields of classics, but anthropology, history, and art history, bringing in themes from political science, sociology, philosophy, and religious studies. We challenge our colleagues to investigate widely through the humanities, arts, and social sciences, creating the potential for fruitful new avenues of exploration.
Coodinators
Faculty:
Justin LeidwangerGraduate Student:
Sarah Toby Wilker- Standardization is a Charade (and that’s ok)
Friday, October 25, 2019. 12:30 PM - 01:30 PM | Building 110, Room 112The Standardization of Pre-Classical Greek Amphoras
Tuesday, November 5, 2019. 05:00 PM - 07:00 PM | Stanford Archaeology CenterComputational Morphological Analysis of Late Roman Transport Ceramics
Tuesday, February 25, 2020. 05:00 PM - 06:30 PM | Building 500Wine, Brandy, and Botijas: Slave-made Alcohol and Ceramics in Viceregal Peru - CANCELED
Tuesday, March 10, 2020. 05:00 PM - 06:30 PM | Building 500"The measure of the sea?": Transport Amphoras from the Archaic Shipwreck at Pabuç Burnu, Turkey - CANCELED
Thursday, June 4, 2020. 11:00 AM - 12:30 PM | Zoom
Varieties of Agency
We know much about action simply by virtue of constantly engaging in it. We act so as to affect changes in ourselves, one another, and the world at large. We also make confident use of reasons for action in deciding, explaining, and assessing actions. Yet closer looks at action, agency, and reasons for them show them to be puzzling. In choosing how to act, do we settle things left unsettled by the causal order prior to our choice? When and how can our interactions with others add up to joint action? How is explaining actions in terms of agential reasons related to explaining it in terms of causes? In what way do we know what we’re doing when doing something intentionally? Disciplines across the humanities and sciences have their own ways of tackling these hard questions about agency; this workshop brings them together for focused collaborative investigation.
Coodinators
Faculty:
Barry Maguire
Graduate Student:
Nathan Hauthaler
Meeting Schedule: (click to expand)
Varieties of Agency
We know much about action simply by virtue of constantly engaging in it. We act so as to affect changes in ourselves, one another, and the world at large. We also make confident use of reasons for action in deciding, explaining, and assessing actions. Yet closer looks at action, agency, and reasons for them show them to be puzzling. In choosing how to act, do we settle things left unsettled by the causal order prior to our choice? When and how can our interactions with others add up to joint action? How is explaining actions in terms of agential reasons related to explaining it in terms of causes? In what way do we know what we’re doing when doing something intentionally? Disciplines across the humanities and sciences have their own ways of tackling these hard questions about agency; this workshop brings them together for focused collaborative investigation.
Coodinators
Faculty:
Barry MaguireGraduate Student:
Nathan Hauthaler- Skills, Values, and Demands: A map of blame and its psychological surroundings
Thursday, November 21, 2019. 03:30 PM - 05:30 PM | Watt Dining Room
Working Group in Literary & Visual Culture
How do ways of seeing and reading inform our sense of history or place? What is the relationship between close reading, an essential tool for literary critics, and close looking, central to art history? These are some of the animating questions for the Working Group in Literary & Visual Culture. We consider projects that transcend disciplinary boundaries in terms of both content and form, considering materials often overlooked in more conventional scholarship. We engage a wide range of urgent and emerging research agendas, such as the representation of gender and sexuality, race and class, colonial and postcolonial studies, the histories of science and technology, and environmental humanities. We place a strong emphasis on collaboration across fields and historical periods to ensure lively and challenging interchange and path-breaking interdisciplinary work.
Coodinators
Faculty:
Gavin Jones, Marci Kwon
Graduate Student:
Rachel Heise Bolten
Meeting Schedule: (click to expand)
Working Group in Literary & Visual Culture
How do ways of seeing and reading inform our sense of history or place? What is the relationship between close reading, an essential tool for literary critics, and close looking, central to art history? These are some of the animating questions for the Working Group in Literary & Visual Culture. We consider projects that transcend disciplinary boundaries in terms of both content and form, considering materials often overlooked in more conventional scholarship. We engage a wide range of urgent and emerging research agendas, such as the representation of gender and sexuality, race and class, colonial and postcolonial studies, the histories of science and technology, and environmental humanities. We place a strong emphasis on collaboration across fields and historical periods to ensure lively and challenging interchange and path-breaking interdisciplinary work.
Coodinators
Faculty:
Gavin Jones, Marci KwonGraduate Student:
Rachel Heise Bolten- The Body of Work: Corporeal Depictions of the Verbal Arts in Greek Literary Criticism and Material Culture
Tuesday, November 19, 2019. 06:30 PM - 08:30 PM | Humanities Center BoardroomDiagramming Evolution: The Case of Darwin’s Trees
Thursday, December 5, 2019. 06:00 PM - 08:00 PM | Humanities Center Board RoomPOSTPONED: Remediating the Studio System in May 1970: The Firesign Theatre's Don't Crush That Dwarf Hand Me the Pliers
Tuesday, March 3, 2020. 05:00 PM - 06:30 PM | Building 460, Terrace Room"The one from which we ought to learn": What Indian Artists Imagined Latin American Literature Could Do
Wednesday, June 3, 2020. 12:00 PM - 01:15 PM | Zoom
Worlds of Work and the Work of Networks
What is work? What kinds of labor can be registered as work? How is a worker made? In considering these questions, this workshop combines two discrete lines of academic inquiry across social sciences—the burgeoning discourses around networks, nodes and connections in contemporary everyday economic life related to embodied and affective forms of precarious labor, and the transdisciplinary scholarship on how work is refracted by social relations of kinship, ethnicity, religion and caste, and lubricated by networks of migration and mobility. This workshop understands proliferation of networks both as an analytical category, an amalgamation of everyday practices, and self-conscious narratives.
Coodinators
Faculty:
Sharika Thiranagama
Graduate Student:
Nethra Samarawickrema
Meeting Schedule: (click to expand)
Worlds of Work and the Work of Networks
What is work? What kinds of labor can be registered as work? How is a worker made? In considering these questions, this workshop combines two discrete lines of academic inquiry across social sciences—the burgeoning discourses around networks, nodes and connections in contemporary everyday economic life related to embodied and affective forms of precarious labor, and the transdisciplinary scholarship on how work is refracted by social relations of kinship, ethnicity, religion and caste, and lubricated by networks of migration and mobility. This workshop understands proliferation of networks both as an analytical category, an amalgamation of everyday practices, and self-conscious narratives.
Coodinators
Faculty:
Sharika ThiranagamaGraduate Student:
Nethra Samarawickrema- Asia's Blue-Water Highway: History, Environment, and Connection in Sino-Southeast Asia, 600-1600 CE
Thursday, November 14, 2019. 01:00 PM - 02:30 PM | Building 50, Room 51ASuccess? On the Social Infrastructure of Global Cities
Wednesday, January 8, 2020. 12:00 PM - 01:30 PM | Baker Room