Calendar of Events
June 17-18 (Wednesday - Thursday), 2009
Instruments in Manufacturing
Founders' Room, Lovett Hall
With support from the University of South Carolina through a major grant from the National Science Foundation, and with additional support from the HRC, this two-day workshop presents and critiques papers to be collected into a published volume. Since 1985, much work has been done on the critical role of instruments in the Scientific Revolution. This collection seeks to continue and correct that effort by focusing on the role of instruments in the Industrial Revolution, a topic thus far neglected, in order to enrich current scholarship on the relationship between science and technology. Organized by Cyrus Mody, assistant professor of history.
September 18, 2009, 8:30 am - 5 pm
Emerging Disciplines
Kyle Morrow Room, Fondren Library
Featuring prominent scholars from across academic disciplines who are shaping important new fields of scholarly inquiry. The international selection of speakers represents a broad range of fields, including music and the mind, neurohistory, cultural economy, broad-spectrum history, cognitive approaches to art history, Judaic studies, and new approaches to Americas studies.
October 1, 2009, 4:30 pm
From the Érudit to the Philosophe: Judicial Culture and Academic Movement in French Englightenment
Mi Gyung Kim, HRC External Faculty Fellow and Associate Professor of History, North Carolina State University
Humanities Building 117
This talk is part of the Cultural Studies of Science and Technology Workshop.
October 30, 2009, 5 pm
Self-Governance and Time
Michael Bratman, the U.G. and Abbie Birch Professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences, and Professor of Philosophy, Stanford University
Humanities Building
Bratman's specialties are the philosophy of action, practical reason,
and shared agency. He is at work on a monograph on shared agency, and
a series of essays on practical rationality. He continues to develop an
approach to self-governance presented in his Structures of Agency (Oxford UP, 2007). This talk is part of the Mellon research seminar "Promises and Agreements."
November 6, 2009, 7 pm
Tone Poems: Poetic Sequence and Poetic Series
James Longenbach, the Joseph Henry Gilmore Professor of English, University of Rochester
Inprint House, 1520 West Main
Poet,
critic, and scholar of modernist poetry, Logenbach draws from Tennyson,
Pound, Eliot, and Susan Howe to address what is poetry and how the idea
of the poetic series depends upon tone. This talk is part of the Poetry and Poetics Workshop and is co-sponsored by Fondren Library's Cherry Lecture Series.
November 13, 2009, 5 pm
Not Just a Truthometer: Taking Oneself Seriously, but not Too Seriously, in Cases of Peer Disagreement
David Enoch, Associate Professor of Philosophy and the Jacob I. Berman Professor of Law, Hebrew University, Jerusalem
Humanities Building 119
Currently a Herrington Fellow at UT Austin, Enoch's specialties are
moral, political, and legal philosophy. He is working on a book, Taking Morality Seriously: A Defense of Robust Realism, under contract with Oxford UP. This talk is part of the Mellon research seminar "Promises and Agreements."
November 16, 2009, 5 pm
Protons and Protoneers: Technology Challenges Hierarchies of Proof in Medical Research
Helen Valier, Coordinator of the Medicine and Society Program, University of Houston
Humanities 119
This talk is part of the Cultural Studies of Science and Technology Workshop. Follow the link for additional information.
November 19-22, 2009
Hindu Transnationalisms: Origins, Ideologies, Networks
This seminar is part of a two-year network project “The Public Representation of a Religion Called Hindusim,” funded largely by the Arts and Humanities Research Council in the UK. At Rice, participants will focus on Hindu nationalist organizations in diaspora, which are at once pluralist and sectarian, and which must tackle two sets of local issues: those that are relevant to migrant communities and those that are relevant in India. This dynamic provides an opportunity for the development of new forms of public Hindu identity. Download the call for papers (deadline June 30, 2009).
November 20, 2009, 2 - 6 pm
Gazing at Bolivar's Body: The Culture and Politics of the Body in Venezuela
Duncan Hall 1049 (Jamail Conference Room)
The body is the privileged site or text where history and politics are currently written. Five speakers will focus on Venezuela in the context of the "Chavez Era." This day-long symposium is part of the Global Hispanism Workshop, where you can find further information about the agenda, the speakers, and their talk titles.
December 8, 2009, 7 pm
Edward A. Snow, the Mary Gibbs Joens Chair for the Humanities and Professor of English, Rice University
Menil Collection, 1414 Sul Ross
Snow, translator of the complete works of Rainer Maria Rilke for FSG, reads from his newly published Selected Rilke, in association with the exhibit of drawings, Cy Twombly: Treatise on the Veil.
This talk is part of the Poetry and Poetics Workshop.
December 10, 2009
Anna Brickhouse, Associate Professor of American Studies and Hemispheric Studies, University of Virginia
This talk is part of the Americas Colloquium. For information, contact Caroline Levander. Dr. Brickhouse will also participate in the conference on humanism and revolution (see below).
December 11-13, 2009
Humanism & Revolution: Eighteenth-Century Europe and its Transatlantic Legacy
Founders' Room, Lovett Hall
Focusing on the legacy of the European Enlightenment on both sides of the Atlantic, this conference sustains international partnerships with scholars at Freie Universität Berlin, Germany, and the University of Cambridge, England. Supported by the School of Humanities at Rice as well as German federal funding and private foundation support from the German Mercator-Foundation, participants will address a rich set of questions prompted by the concept of revolution, which has taken a central place in political and philosophical thought since the eighteenth century and which seems to rely on hopes for historical human progress. Organized by Uwe Steiner, professor of German studies and department chair, and Christian Emden, associate professor of German studies.
February 12, 2010, 4 pm
The State of Exception as a Political and Logical Problem
Andrew Norris, Associate Professor of Political Science, University of California, Santa Barbara
Andrew Norris will present a talk on the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben. Norris is the editor of The Claim to Community (Stanford UP, 2006) and Politics, Metaphysics, and Death: Essays on Giorgio Agamben's "Homo Sacer" (Duke UP, 2005). He has published essays on Agamben, Hannah Arendt, Cavell, Kant, Hegel, Ernesto Laclau, Jean-Luc Nancy, Oakeshott, Carl Schmitt, Thoreau, sovereignty, truth and politics, and the Bush-Cheney use of 9/11. This talk is part of the History of Philosophy Workshop.
February 12, 2010, 4 pm
Poetry is Dead, Long Live Poetry
Maureen McLane, Associate
Professor of English, NYU
Inprint House, 1520 West Main
Maureen McLane is a contributing editor at Boston
Review and winner of the National
Book Critics Circle Balakian Award for Excellence in Book Reviewing. McLane
will speak about the state of the art of contemporary poetry and its relationship to Romanticism, drawing from her
experience as a poetry reviewer. At 7 pm McLane will read from her debut
collection of poetry, Sample Life (FSG, 2009) at Brazos
Bookstore. This talk is part of the Poetry and Poetics Workshop.
February 19, 2010, 9:30 am - 4:30 pm
Museums and the Medical Humanities: Our Continuing Conversation
Kyle Morrow Room, Fondren Library
This symposium advances the discussions generated by the 2008-09 Menil Rice Lectures, "Museums and the Medical Humanities: The Arts of Transformation." The program explores a nexus of themes concerning embodiment, creativity, trauma, diagnosis, medicine, healing, reflection, and transformation. Drawing on their distinctive backgrounds and areas of expertise, speakers will address the ways in which shared issues inform their museum collections or have emerged as salient concerns in their clinical interactions and professional practices. In particular, speakers will consider the ways in which themes of embodiment emerge differently (and similarly) in the contexts of a fine arts museum, a natural science museum, or a medical or hospital setting. In so doing, this program fosters an innovative, transdisciplinary conversation that spans a cross-over audience including the academic community, the museum world, and the Texas Medical Center. The symposium if free and open to the public: students and alumni are warmly encouraged to attend.
- Morning Panel: a distinguished visual artist and three doctors from the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, whose specialties include palliative medicine, oncology, and psychiatry.
- Afternoon Panel: three curators from the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Menil Collection, and the Houston Museum of Natural Science.
- Closing remarks offered by a discussant.
This symposium is also funded through a Faculty Initiatives Fund awarded by the Office of Research to symposium chair Marcia Brennan, associate professor of art history.
February 25, 2010, 4 pm
Philology in a New Key: Information Technology and the Transmission of Culture
Sewall Hall 301
Jerome McGann, the John Stewart Bryan University Professor, University of Virginia
Dr. McGann is the founder of Networked Infrastructure for Nineteenth-Century Electronic Scholarship (NINES), and co-editor with Nicholas Frankel of a seventeen-volume Rice UP series, "Literature by Design." This talk is part of the annual Technology, Cognition & Culture series, co-sponsored by Fondren Library and the Ken Kennedy Institute for Information Technology. Contact the HRC to check out a copy of his book Radiant Textuality: Literature After the World Wide Web (Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), winner of the James Russell Lowell Prize.
February 26, 2010, 5 pm
Intentions and Wrongful Discrimination
Deborah Hellman, the Jacob France Research Professor of Law, University of Maryland
Humanities Building 119
Hellman's book, When is Discrimination Wrong? (Harvard UP, 2009), argues that drawing distinctions
among people is morally wrong if and only if it is demeaning. She also writes
about bioethics (especially clinical medical research), professional role
obligations, and most recently on whether campaign finance laws restrict
speech. This talk is part of the Mellon research seminar "Promises and Agreements."
March 4-7, 2010
Society for Seventeenth-Century Music
Shepherd School of Music - Alice Pratt Brown Hall
Some of the most prominent musicologists in Europe and
America are members of this international society, which has met annually since
1993. The Shepherd School of Music hosts the conference this year in
expectation of strengthening bonds between musical performance and the study of
music as an academic discipline, as well as between the School of Music and the
School of Humanities. Up to one hundred registrants will attend a program of
paper presentations, roundtable discussions, and lecture-recitals, a workshop on seventeenth-century dances from several European traditions, and
concerts by Ensemble Caprice and Ars Lyrica. For information, contact Gregory Barnett, associate professor of musicology: gbarnett@rice.edu
March 14-15, 2010
Farnsworth Pavilion, Ley Student Center
Crossing Borders: Visualizing Jewish/Christian and Jewish/Muslim Relations in Medieval and Early Modern Times
This conference builds on the assumption that the borders between the minority Jews and the dominant cultures in which they lived were permeable, resulting in not only violent persecution but also fruitful cultural exchange. Scholars from a variety of disciplines will examine illustrated chronicles, the Arena Chapel in Padua, coins, architecture, calendars, prints, and lesser-known manuscripts. Additional support comes from the
Departments of Art History, History, and Religious Studies, and the Boniuk
Center for Religious Tolerance. The conference is organized by Diane Wolfthal, the David and Caroline Minter Professor of Art History and department chair.
March 19, 2010, 5 pm
Regarding Doing Being Ordinary
J. David Velleman, Professor of Philosophy, NYU
Humanities Building 119
Velleman teaches ethics and
moral psychology. His book, How we Get Along
(Cambridge UP, 2009), traces the origins of morality to social
interactions understood as improvisational theater. He is at work on
cultural relativism about morality. On the philosophy of action, he has
published Practical Reflection (Princeton UP, 1989) and The Possibility of Practical Reason (Oxford UP, 2000). He is also the author of Self to Self (Cambridge UP, 2006). This talk is part of the Mellon research seminar "Promises and Agreements."
April 15-18 2010
Histories of the Hidden God
The conference will examine esoteric and mystical traditions in the West where the concept of a hidden God is prominent. Papers, to be published in an edited volume of the proceedings, will explore the idea of an absolute being who is "beyond" the conventional gods and our cosmos and the relationship of that being to the universe and humanity. This conference will be held in conjunction with the 2010 Rockwell Lectures in Religious Studies, “Hidden Histories, Hidden God,” whose broader focus will be the recovery and analysis of religious traditions that have been historically marginalized, concealed, or obscured by a variety of religious, social, political and historical forces. This conference is organized by April DeConick, the Isla Carroll and Percy E. Turner Professor of Biblical Studies.
