Spring 2009
12 January, Monday, 5-7 p.m.
The Folklore and Reality of Supernatural Assault Experiences: Comparativism and the Spiritual
119 Humanities Building
David Hufford, University of Pennsylvania
This talk is organized on behalf of the Mellon Seminar "Comparison in Theory and Practice," but is open to the public. Co-sponsored by the Dean of Humanities.
 |
20 February, Friday, 4 p.m. Nietzsche on Life's Ends 119 Humanities Building John Richardson, Professor of Philosophy, New York University Richardson works primarily in the area of 19th- and 20th-century continental philosophy, in particular Nietzsche and Heidegger. Recently he has explored relations between Nietzsche and recent philosophy of biology and evolutionary theory, and focused on issues concerning teleology. He is the author of Existential Epistemology: A Heideggerian Critique of the Cartesian Project (Oxford, 1986), Nietzsche's System (Oxford, 1996), and Nietzsche's New Darwinism (Oxford, 2004). He is a co-editor of Nietzsche (2001) in the series Oxford Readings in Philosophy. This talk is part of the HRC's History of Philosophy Workshop. Contact Christian Emden at emden@rice.edu. |
23 February, Monday, 4:30-6:30 p.m.
Seeing, Probing, Modeling: Visualizing a Nanoscale Image
125 Herring Hall
Michael Lynch, Cornell University
Dr. Lynch's work aims to identify and distinguish different modes of nano-imaging, as a basis for critically examining, and potentially respecifying, claims about the uniqueness of visualization with probe microscopes. This talk borrows on collaborative work with Cyrus Mody to focus on a particular nano-object: the silicon (111) 7x7 surface, a phenomenon that was the focus of a series of studies in surface science in the late 20th century with a succession of instruments. This talk will draw out some tentative reflections about the distinctive properties of nano-imaging in order to examine analytic arguments about the novelty of nano-imaging and the forms of objectivity associated with it. This talk is part of the HRC's Cultural Studies of Science and Technology Workshop. Contact Cyrus Mody at cm6@rice.edu or x 2553.
 |
23 February, Monday, 5-7 p.m. Robust Pluralism: Understanding Forms of Life Different From One's Own 119 Humanities Building Richard Shweder, University of Chicago This talk is organized on behalf of the Mellon Seminar "Comparison in Theory and Practice," but is open to the public. Co-sponsored by the Dean of Humanities. |
 |
24 February, Tuesday, 4 p.m. Faces of the Sonnet David Mikics, Professor of English, University of Houston 255 Herring Hall (English Department Lounge) Mikics is most recently the author of A New Handbook of Literary Terms (Yale University Press). His new bookThe Art of the Sonnet (co-written with Stephen Burt) is forthcoming from Harvard University Press. This talk is part of the HRC's Poetry and Poetics Workshop. To RSVP and for access to the articles (electronic or otherwise), contact Joseph Campana at jac4@rice.edu or x4316. |
 |
25 February, Wednesday, 4 p.m. El Universal Político 117 Humanities Building Javier Gomá Lanzón, Director of the Juan March Foundation (Madrid, Spain) Gomá Lanzón is the author of Imitación y Experiencia, awarded the 2004 Spanish National Essay Prize, and most recently of Aquiles en el Gineceo (Pre-Textos, 2007). This talk is part of the HRC's Global Hispanism Workshop. Contact Lane Kauffmann at rlk@rice.edu or x5403. |
 |
9 March, Monday, 5-7 p.m. "We Carve Out Order By Leaving the Disorderly Parts Out": The Challenge of Comparison in Religious Studies 119 Humanities Building Kimberley Patton, Harvard Divinity School This talk is organized on behalf of the Mellon Seminar "Comparison in Theory and Practice," but is open to the public. Co-sponsored by the Dean of Humanities. |
 |
9 March, Monday, 12:00 m. Studying Jewish Antiquity Cohen House, Card Room Azzan Yadin, Associate Professor of Jewish Studies, Rutgers University This talk is part of the HRC's Judaic Studies Workshop. Contact Gregory Kaplan at gkaplan@rice.edu or x2778. |
10 March, Tuesday, 7:30 p.m.
Positive Art and Positive Healing
The Menil Collection
Richard Tuttle, contemporary artist
This talk is part of the lecture series "Museums and the Medical Humanities: The Arts of Transformation" coordinated by the HRC Collaborative Research fellow Marcia Brennan. Contact Marcia Brennan at mbrennan@rice.edu.
 |
13 March, Friday, 4 p.m. The Hut of Poetry Dan Beachy-Quick, Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing, Colorado State University 119 Humanities Building The author of poetry and prose inspired by Melville’s Moby-Dick offers a series of prose meditations on the influences, obsessions, and styles of reading practiced by a poet for whom American literary history is alive and well. After a talk at Rice he will read from his work at Brazos Bookstore at 7:30 p.m. Beachy-Quick is the author of A Whaler's Dictionary (prose) and North True South Bright, Spell, and Mulberry (poetry). This talk is part of the HRC's Poetry and Poetics Workshop. To RSVP, contact Joseph Campana at jac4@rice.edu or x4316. |
16 March, Monday, 4 p.m.
Nudity in the Middle Ages
Sherry Lindquist, Kress Senior Research Fellow, Warburg Institute, University of London
119 Humanities Buildling
Professor Lindquist is a scholar of medieval and Northern Renaissance visual culture with a special interest in artistic identity, gender, theories of perception, illuminated manuscripts, medievalism and the history of museums. Her recent book is Agency, Visuality and Society at the Chartreuse de Champmol (Ashgate Press, 2008).
This talk is part of the Medieval Studies Workshop. Co-sponsored by the Department of Art History. Contact Linda Neagley at lneagley@rice.edu, or x3316.
21 March, Saturday
African Studies Workshop
- David Gordon, HRC External Faculty Fellow
- Allen Roberts, Professor of World Arts & Cultures, UCLA
- Robert Cancel, Associate Professor of African and Comparative Literature, UCSD
27 March, Friday, 4 p.m.
Unquestionable Foundations? Nietzsche and Dennett on the Relationship between Philosophy and Science
119 Humanities Building
Rebecca Bamford, Visting Assistant Professor, CUNY Hunter College
This talk is part of the HRC's History of Philosophy Workshop. Contact Christian Emden at emden@rice.edu.
|
March, Friday, 4 p.m. Tracing Radioisotopes through the Biomedical Complex, 1935-1955: From Gift Exchange to Commodification in the Atomic Age 117 Humanities Building Angela Creager, Associate Professor of History, Princeton University This colloquium examines the transition from the early history of radioisotope production by cyclotrons to their mass-production and distribution for biomedical uses from “X-10,” the first large nuclear reactor built by the Manhattan Project. As hopes for a domestic nuclear power industry faded and the nuclear arms race took off, the U.S. government focused attention on the radioisotope program |
| to show that atoms could cure as well as kill. As I will argue, the intersection of the military development of atomic energy with the commodification of radioisotopes as biomedical tools yielded complex effects, both propelling and constraining efforts to promote nuclear medicine and biology. This talk coincides with the annual meeting of the Lone Star Historians of Science. It is co-sponsored by the Department of History and the HRC's Cultural Studies of Science and Technology Workshop. Contact Cyrus Mody at cyrus.mody@rice.edu. |
|
27 March, Friday , 4 p.m.
Descartes avec Milton: The Automata in the Garden
Scott Maisano, Assistant Professor of English, University of Massachusetts, Boston
Scholars of English Renaissance literature describe Descartes as a deluded narcissist with pretensions to being self-begotten ("I think therefore I am") and a habit of boasting, a la Milton's Satan, that "the mind is its own place." Maisano hopes to show that Milton's Paradise Lost, which appeared some twenty-five years after the publication of Descartes's Meditation on First Philosophy, reveals a hidden truth about Descartes's philosophical project, especially Descartes's decision to "start again right from the foundations" during a six-day retreat - complete with a malicious demon - to total solitude.
This lecture is part of the HRC’s Early Modern Reading Group. Contact Joseph Campana at jac4@rice.edu or x4316.
27-29 March, Friday - Sunday
Exploring the Mind through Music
Alice Pratt Brown Hall, Shepherd School of Music
This conference will bring together distinguished scientists and musicians to discuss music's role in human cognition and behavior. Speakers includes: Dr. Jonathan Berger (Stanford), Dr. Anthony Brandt (Rice), Dr. David Eagleman (Baylor College of Medicine), Dr. David Huron (Ohio State), Dr. Fred Lerdahl (Columbia), Dr. Isabelle Peretz (University of Montreal), Sarah Rothenberg (Da Camera of Houston), Dr. Ron Tintner (Methodist Hospital, Houston), Dr. Mark Tramo (Harvard), Dr. Gottfried Schlaug (Harvard) and more.
All events are free and open to the public.
Co-sponsored by Dean Robert Yekovich and The Shepherd School of Music, the Center for Performing Arts Medicine at Methodist Hospital, and Rice University's Office of the President through a grant from the University's Faculty Initiatives Fund awarded to organizer Anthony Brandt, Associate Professor of Composition and Theory at Shepherd School of Music. For more information contact Dr. Brandt at abrandt@rice.edu.
30 March, Monday, 5-7 p.m.
Imagining Evil Conspiracy: From Early Christian Cannibalism to Satanic Ritual Abuse
119 Humanities Building
David Frankfurter, University of New Hampshire
This talk is organized on behalf of the Mellon Seminar "Comparison in Theory and Practice," but is open to the public. Co-sponsored by the Dean of Humanities.
6 April, Wednesday, 4 p.m.
Hospitalization as a Method of Hope: Health Care in Botswana
119 Humanities Building
Julie Livingston, Associate Professor of African History, Rutgers University.
This lecture is part of the HRC’s African Studies Workshop. Contact Kerry Ward at kward@rice.edu or x2443.
 |
6 April , Monday, 4 p.m. |
14 April, Tuesday, 7 p.m.
The Slow Conscious Look: Toward a Pedagogy of Attentiveness
100 Herring Hall
Barbara Maria Stafford, William B. Ogden Distinguished Service
Professor Emerita, University of Chicago.
This talk is part of the lecture series "Museums and the Medical Humanities: The Arts of Transformation" coordinated by the HRC Collaborative Research fellow Marcia Brennan. Contact Marcia Brennan at mbrennan@rice.edu.
16 April, Thursday, 4 p.m.
"La Habana es ya atlántica": Juan Ramón Jiménez, Lezama Lima, Mariá Zambrano y la geopoética de la revista Orígenes
Jorge Brioso, Associate Professor of Spanish, Carlton College
304 Rayzor Hall
"Havana is already atlantic," wrote Guy Pérez Cisneros in the first issue of Orígenes in 1944. What is the meaning of that "atlantic" vocation for understanding the poetics and cultural politics of that journal, especially in light of its hispaniphilic tendency? How does it relate to the Cuban national imaginary that arose in the dialogue between José Lezama Lima and Juan Ramón Jiménez, later to inform the poetics of Orígenes and the work both of María Zambrano and of Lezama Lima as well?
17 April, Friday, 10 a.m. - 3 p.m.
María Zambrano: filosofía, feminismo, exilio
Rockwell Pavilion - MD Anderson Library, University of Houston
- D. Miguel Angel Fernández de Mazarambroz, Cónsul General de Espana en Houston
- Pedro Gutiérrez, University of Houston
- Lane Kauffmann, Rice University
- Roberta Johnson, University of California, Los Angeles
- Madeline Cámara, University of South Florida
These events are sponsored in part by the HRC's Global Hispanism Workshop, and is co-sponsored by the Hispanic Studies Department. Contact Lane Kauffmann at rlk@rice.edu or x5403.
17 April, Friday, 4 p.m.
Observing the World from Africa: Italy and Japan in two Ethiopian Travelogues
Hailu Habtu, Senior Research Scholar, Institute of Ethiopian Studies, Addis Ababa University
119 Humanities Builiding
This lecture is part of the HRC's African Studies Workshop. Contact Elias Bongmba at bongmba@rice.edu or x2759.
17-18 June, Wednesday - Thursday
Instruments in Manufacturing
Founders' Room, Lovett Hall
With 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.
