SPEAKER SERIES 2012-2013
Please Note: Registration is required for all events, unless otherwise noted in the event description. To register for an event, please go to <click here>.
All events organized by the Centre for the Study of the United States (CSUS) may be photographed and/or videotaped for webcast. Please note that by registering for this event, the individual grants to the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto (the “Munk School”) the right to: share your personal registration information with our event sponsors and co-organizers; and to reproduce, use, exhibit, display, broadcast, and distribute the photographed images and webcast recording, if any, taken during the event, for use in connection with the activities of the Munk School, or for promoting, publicizing, or explaining the Munk School or its activities on the Internet, including on YouTube and other video broadcast channels.
Winter 2013
Friday, May 10, 2013
OISE, University of Toronto
Symposium:
Black Diaspora Conversations: Gender Sexuality and Queer Thought
Hosted by the Department of Humanities, Social Sciences, and Social Justice Education
Co-sponsored by: Centre for the Study of United States (CSUS); Centre for Integrative Anti-racism (CIARS); Centre for Diaspora and Transnational Studies (CDTS); and Mark Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies (SDS).
This one-day symposium brings together scholars working at the interstices of gender, sexuality, and queer theory in black diaspora studies. Black Diaspora Conversations foregrounds new positions in the debates on gender, sexuality and queer thought from multiple sites of blackness. Four OISE University of Toronto doctoral students will be presenting work in progress from their dissertation projects, which sit at the interstices of gender, queer, black, diaspora, and sexuality studies. As well, two scholars working at the most exciting sites of queer thought will provide keynotes. Speakers: Lamonda Horton-Stallings is Associate Professor of Gender Studies at Indiana University-Bloomington; C. Riley Snorton (School of Communication, Northwestern University). Snorton’s research and teaching focuses on black cultural production, queer theory, and transgender studies.
PAST EVENTS 2012-13
Tuesday, September 11, 5-7 pm
Rooms 208N, Munk School of Global Affairs
Martin F. Manalansan IV
Queer Dwellings: Migrancy, Precarity, and Fabulosity
Co-sponsored by: Women and Gender Studies Institute; Mark S. Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies; Humanities, Social Sciences, and Social Justice Education; Centre for Integrative Anti-Racism Studies,
University of Toronto.
Martin F. Manalansan IV is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Asian American Studies and Conrad Professorial Humanities Scholar at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He is an affiliate faculty in the Gender and Women’s Studies Program, the Global Studies Program and the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory. He is the author of Global Divas: Filipino Gay Men in the Diaspora (2003), which was awarded the Ruth Benedict Prize. He is editor/co-editor of two anthologies namely, Cultural Compass: Ethnographic Explorations of Asian America (2000), and Queer Globalizations: Citizenship and the Afterlife of Colonialism (2002), as well as a special issue of International Migration Review on gender and migration.
For the podcast of this event: <click here>.
Thursday, September 13, 12 noon-1:45 pm
George Ignatieff Theatre
Larkin Building, 15 Devonshire Place
Jacob S. Hacker
Economic Inequality and the 2012 U.S. Elections
Co-sponsored by the United States Consulate General, Toronto, and the Department of Political Science, University of Toronto
Jacob S. Hacker is the Stanley B. Resor Professor of Political Science at Yale University and the Director of Yale’s Institution for Social and Policy Studies. An expert on the politics of U.S. health and social policy, he has written numerous scholarly articles for publications ranging from the American Political Science Review tothe New England Journal of Medicine. He is the author or co-author of five books, most recently, Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer—And Turned Its Back on the Middle Class (September 2010; with Paul Pierson).
Friday, September 14, 2:30-4:30 pm
Room 108N, Munk School of Global Affairs
Sarah E. Igo
The Beginnings of the “End of Privacy” in the Modern United States
Co-sponsored by the Department of Psychology, York University; and The Technoscience Research Unit, Women and Gender Studies Institute, University of Toronto
Sarah E. Igo is an Associate Professor of History at Vanderbilt University who teaches and writes about modern American cultural and intellectual history. Her book, The Averaged American, was an Editor’s Choice selection of The New York Times and one of Slate’s Best Books of 2007. Igo has held fellowships from the Institute for Advanced Study, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Whiting Foundation, the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, and the Mellon Foundation. She also founded and co-directs the National Forum on the Future of Liberal Education, a national-level initiative to promote the liberal arts.
Monday, September 17, 4-5:30 pm
2nd floor lounge, North House
Munk School of Global Affairs
Launch and Reception:
American Studies Undergraduate Journal
Edited by Emily McNally and Maia Muttoo
Design by Nigel Soederhuysen
This is a private event, by invitation only.
Wednesday, September 26, 4-6 pm
Vivian and David Campbell Conference Facility
Munk School of Global Affairs
Larry M. Bartels
The Elusive Mandate: Searching for Meaning in American Presidential Elections
Co-sponsored by the United States Consulate General, Toronto, and the Department of Political Science, University of Toronto
Larry M. Bartels is the May Werthan Shayne Professor of Public Policy and Social Science at Vanderbilt University. He is the author of Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age, Presidential Primaries and the Dynamics of Public Choice, and numerous scholarly articles and commentaries on American politics and democracy. He has served as vice president of the American Political Science Association and chair of the Board of Overseers of the American National Election Studies, and is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Academy of Political and Social Science.
Friday, September 28, 2-4 pm
Room 108N, Munk School of Global Affairs
Sarah Banet-Weiser
Branding Consumer Citizens: Gender and the Emergence of Brand Culture
Co-sponsored by Cinema Studies Institute, Innis College, University of Toronto
Sarah Banet-Weiser is Professor at the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, and the Department of American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California. She is the author of The Most Beautiful Girl in the World: Beauty Pageants and National Identity (1999); Kids Rule! Nickelodeon and Consumer Citizenship (2007); and most recently, Authentic™: The Politics of Ambivalence in a Brand Culture (2012). She is the co-editor of Cable Visions: Television Beyond Broadcasting (2007), and Commodity Activism: Cultural Resistance in Neoliberal Times (2012). Banet-Weiser is the editor of American Quarterly, and co-edits a book series at NYU Press, Critical Cultural Communication Studies.
Wednesday, October 3, 2-4 pm
Room 208N, Munk School of Global Affairs
Sylvia Bashevkin
Motherhood as metaphor: US foreign policy leaders construct their gender identities, 1980-present
Co-sponsored by the Department of Political Science, University of Toronto
Sylvia Bashevkin is Professor of Political Science at the University of Toronto. She is the author of Women, Power, Politics: The Hidden Story of Canada’s Unfinished Democracy (2009); Tales of Two Cities: Women and Municipal Restructuring in London and Toronto (2006); Welfare Hot Buttons: Women, Work and Social Policy Reform (2002); Women on the Defensive: Living through Conservative Times (1998); True Patriot Love: The Politics of Canadian Nationalism (1991); and Toeing the Lines: Women and Party Politics in English Canada (1985, 1993). Bashevkin is also editor of Opening Doors Wider: Women’s Political Engagement in Canada (2009); Women’s Work is Never Done: Comparative Studies in Caregiving, Employment and Social Policy Reform (2002); Women and Politics in Western Europe (1985); and Canadian Political Behaviour (1985).
*NEW LOCATION*
Friday, October 12, 2-4 pm
Jackman Humanities building
St. George Street and Bloor St. West
main floor conference room, JHI 100
Lisa Lowe
The Intimacies of Four Continents
Co-sponsored by the Asian Institute, and Dr. David Chu Programme in Asia Pacific Studies, University of Toronto
Lisa Lowe is currently Professor of European and American Studies in the Department of English at Tufts University. Lowe is the author of Critical Terrains: French and British Orientalisms, and Immigrant Acts: on Asian American Cultural Politics. She is the co-editor of The Politics of Culture in the Shadow of Capital, and a third book, Metaphors of Globalization, is forthcoming. Her current project, The Intimacies of Four Continents, is a study of the convergence of colonialisms in the early Americas as the conditions for modern humanism and humanistic knowledge. Lowe is the 2012-13 F. Ross Johnson Visiting Scholar in American Studies, Centre for the Study of the United States.
Tuesday, October 16, 4-6 pm
Room 208N, Munk School of Global Affairs
Pauline Beange
A Canadian Looks at Campaign Finance in the 2012 U.S. Election
Co-sponsored by the Department of Political Science, University of Toronto
Pauline Beange completed her dissertation in Political Science at the University of Toronto in 2012, investigating approaches to regulating campaign finance in Canada, the U.S., and U.K. She has presented her research in Canada and the United States, and has taught tutorial sections in Comparative Politics and Canadian Politics at the University of Toronto.
Wednesday, October 17, 4-6 pm
Room 208N, Munk School of Global Affairs
Steve Herbert
Fear and Loathing in the San Juan Islands: Endangered Orcas and the Legitimacy of Environmental Law
Co-sponsored by the Department of Geography, and the Centre for Criminology and Sociolegal Studies, University of Toronto
Steve Herbert is Professor of Geography and Law, Societies, and Justice (LSJ) at the University of Washington; he currently serves as director of LSJ. His research focuses on the geographies of law and policing. He is the author of three books: "Policing Space" (Minnesota 1997), "Citizens, Cops, and Power" (Chicago, 2006), and (with Katherine Beckett) "Banished: The New Social Control in Urban America" (Oxford, 2009). His current research examines the use of the Endangered Species Act to help preserve a group of orca whales who frequent the Pacific Northwest.
Thursday, October 18, 2-4 pm
Room 208N, Munk School of Global Affairs
Kornel Chang
Managing Race and Empire: Asian Exclusion as Foundation for Anti-Radicalism in the Pacific Northwest Borderlands
Co-sponsored by: Asian Institute, Canadian Studies Programme, Dr. David Chu Distinguished Leaders Program in Asia Pacific Studies, Centre for South Asian Studies
Kornel Chang is assistant professor of History and American Studies at Rutgers University-Newark. His research interests include modern U.S. history, international migration and border controls, Asian diaspora, and the United States in the Pacific world. His current book project is a study of the western U.S.-Canadian borderlands in the Pacific world, examining how the region arose from frontier expansion, the globalizing forces of capital and empire, and the territorializing process of state formation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Friday, October 19, 2-4 pm
Vivian and David Campbell Facility
Munk School of Global Affairs
Theda Skocpol
Obama, the Tea Party, and the Future of American Politics
Co-sponsored by the United States Consulate General, Toronto, and the Department of Political Science, University of Toronto
Theda Skocpol is Victor S. Thomas Professor of Government and Sociology at Harvard University. Her first book, States and Social Revolutions (1979), won two major scholarly awards. In 1985, she co-edited the influential collection Bringing the State Back In (1985). For the last fifteen years, her research has focused on US politics in comparative and historical perspective. Skocpol’s Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States (1992) won five scholarly awards. Her recent books focus on US health reform, civic engagement, the Tea Party movement, and the successes and failures of the Obama administration in changing the direction of US domestic policies.
Tuesday, October 23, 12 noon - 2 pm
Vivian and David Campbell Conference Facility
Munk School of Global Affairs, 1 Devonshire Place
U.S. Ambassador David Jacobson
The U.S. Election: An Insider’s View from the Outside
Co-organized by the Munk School of Global Affairs, the Centre for the Study of the United States, and Fulbright Canada.
Ottawa, ON – As the world’s attention is focused on the Presidential Election in the United States, the U.S. Ambassador to Canada will be at the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto to discuss the election, and its implications for Canada. On Tuesday, October 23, the Centre for the Study of the United States at the Munk School, and Fulbright Canada will present a public lecture featuring Ambassador David Jacobson, who will be delivering a lecture entitled, “The U.S. Election: An Insider’s View from the Outside”. The lecture will be held at 12:00 pm in the Vivian and David Campbell Conference Facility.
Ambassador Jacobson will address differences between the Canadian and the U.S. election processes; historical trends; polling; key states and races; and the impact of the elections on the bilateral relationship.
The lecture is FREE and open to the public. However, as seating is limited, all guests, including those from the media, are required to RSVP to rsvp@fulbright.ca prior to the event.
Operating in over 150 countries worldwide, the Fulbright program has long been regarded as the world’s premiere academic exchange. With the support of the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade Canada and the United States Department of State, Fulbright Canada is the gold standard for academic exchanges and intellectual opportunity.
For more information please visit www.fulbright.ca.
Housed in the Munk School of Global Affairs, the Centre for the Study of the United States (CSUS) represents the largest collection of U.S.-focused scholars in Canada, as well as the greatest concentration of U.S. expertise in Canada’s history. Drawing on the resources of the Munk School, and with over 66 faculty affiliates, it has an unprecedented strength in U.S. expertise and in American Studies, both institutionally and nationally. For more information about CSUS and the Munk School of Global Affairs please visit: www.munkschool.utoronto.ca.
For more information:
Graeme Cunningham
Fulbright Canada
(613) 688-5514,
gcunningham@fulbright.ca
www.fulbright.ca
Monday, October 29, 4-6 pm
Vivian and David Campbell Conference Facility
Munk School of Global Affairs
U.S. ELECTIONS FORECASTING PANEL
James E. Campbell, Douglas A. Hibbs, Jr., Christopher Wlezien, Peter Loewen
Co-sponsored by the Department of Political Science, University of Toronto
Can we know the outcome of elections before they happen? For years, election forecasters have been making their prognostications before ballots are cast. Each forecaster has a different model and their predictions often differ. Who has the best model is a topic of great debate. This event will feature three premiere political forecasters. They will make their predictions and explain their methods. This event will be of interest to anyone looking for some insights to how the 2012 Presidential election could end, and why.
Speakers:
James E. Campbell is the UB Distinguished Professor of Political Science and Chair of the Department of Political Science at the University of Buffalo. He is also past President of Pi Sigma Alpha, The National Political Science Honor Society (2008-10), and Chair of the Political Forecasting Group, a Related Group of the APSA. He is a former APSA Congressional Fellow and a program director at the National Science Foundation. Campbell has published four books, and more than sixty book chapters and articles in political science journals. His most recent book is the second edition of The American Campaign: U.S. Presidential Campaigns and the National Vote, (Texas A&M University Press, 2008). He is also the author of Cheap Seats: The Democratic Party's Advantage in U.S. House Elections and The Presidential Pulse of Congressional Elections. Prior to joining the UB faculty in 1998, he served on the faculties of the University of Georgia (1980-88) and Louisiana State University (1988-98).
Douglas A. Hibbs, Jr. is a career-long academic who retired from a chair as Professor of Economics at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden in 2005, although he maintained an affiliation with the university as a senior fellow at the CEFOS research institute until June 2011. He received his Ph.D. in 1971 from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, but began working as an Instructor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1970. He left MIT as an Associate Professor in 1978, to take a chair at Harvard University as a Professor of Government. At both Harvard and MIT, he specialized in macro-political economy and applied multivariate statistics and econometrics. In the mid-1980s, Hibbs was a Professor of Economics in Europe - mostly in Sweden. However, he frequently visited other European and American universities, including the University of Paris-Sorbonne, the University of Rome-La Sapienza, Central European University, Prague-Budapest, Aarhus University, the University of Copenhagen, University of Trondheim (NTNU), the University of California, Los Angeles, and the University of California, Berkeley.
Christopher Wlezien is Professor of Political Science at Temple University. He joined the faculty from Oxford University, where he was Reader of Comparative Government and a Fellow of Nuffield College. While at Oxford, he co-founded the ESRC-funded Oxford Spring School in Quantitative Methods for Social Research. Previously, he taught at the University of Houston, where he was founding director of the Institute for the Study of Political Economy. He holds or has held visiting positions at Columbia University, European University Institute (Florence), Instituto Empresa (Madrid), Juan March Institute (Madrid), McGill University (Montreal), Sciences Po (Paris), and the University of Manchester (UK). He received his Ph.D. from the University of Iowa in 1989.
Moderator:
Peter Loewen is Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Toronto. Loewen has published articles in Party Politics, West European Politics, Canadian Journal of Political Science, and Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences, as well as numerous chapters. Current research projects include a large survey of Americans matched against extensive genetic information, an experimental survey of legislators in Canada, and a series of experiments exploring behavioural differences between partisans in Canada and Britain. Loewens is currently a collaborator with the Canadian Election Study. He received his Ph.D. from the Université de Montréal.
Wednesday, October 31, 3-5 pm
JHB100a, main floor conference room
Jackman Humanities building, St. George and Bloor St. W.
Roderick Ferguson
Strange Affinities: The Gender and Sexual Politics of Comparative Racialization
Organized by the Women and Gender Studies Institute Research Semianr; co-sponsored by the Centre for the Study of the United States, University of Toronto
Roderick Ferguson is a Professor of American Studies, Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies, and African American & African Studies, at the University of Minnesota.
We ask all participants to read a chapter from Dr. Ferguson’s forthcoming book. A copy is available from Ashifa Rajwani at: ashifa.rajwani@utoronto.ca. To register to attend this event, please email Ashifa Rajwani.
Monday, November 5, 4-6 pm
Room 108N, Munk School of Global Affairs
1 Devonshire Place
Sergei Kapterev
The Uneven Balance: Soviet-American Contacts in the Sphere of Cinema in the 1960s – 1970s
Co-sponsored by the Centre for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies, University of Toronto.
Sergei Kapterev, (Ph.D., Cinema Studies, Tisch School of the Arts, New York University) is Senior Researcher at the Research Institute of Cinema Art in Moscow. He specializes in the stylistic, intellectual, and political interaction between American and Soviet cinema, and is presently writing a monograph on this topic.
Thursday, November 8, 4-6 pm
Room 208N, Munk School of Global Affairs
1 Devonshire Place
Jennifer Evans
Queering the Gays/Gaze: sex, street, and subculture in 1970s queer erotic photography
Co-sponsored by the: Centre for Russian, European, and Eurasian Studies, Joint Initiative in German and European Studies, the Department of History, Sexual Diversity Studies Program, University of Toronto; and the Toronto Photography Seminar.
Jennifer Evans is Associate Professor of History at Carleton University, Ottawa. Her book, Life Among the Ruins: Cityscape and Sexuality in Cold War Berlin (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011) explores the rebirth of the city’s various subcultures in the aftermath of World War II. Her next two research projects are more contemporary in focus. “Hate 2.0: Combating Right-Wing Extremism in the Age of Social Technology” is a collaborative project that analyzes the role and potential of digital media in countering online hate.
Friday, November 9
1-3 pm Lecture/Demonstration in the Robert Gill Theatre (214 College St.: St George St. entrance, 3rd Floor);
7 pm Performance in the Studio Theatre (4 Glen Morris St.)
The evening event is by RSVP only: publicity.graddrama@utoronto.ca
Please note: the Glen Morris Studio Theatre is not wheelchair accessible. Both events are free admission.
Reverend Billy and Savitri D of the Church of Stop Shopping
THE SHOPOCALYPSE IS COMING!
Co-sponsored by Theatre and Performance Studies, University of Toronto Scarborough, and the Centre for Drama, Theatre, and Performance Studies, University of Toronto
Reverend Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping is an interventionist, activist performance group based in New York City, which uses the form of an evangelistic revival meeting to preach about the perils of consumerism, and to advocate for economic justice and environmental sustainability.
For more information, see www.revbilly.com.
Tuesday, November 13, 4-6:30 pm
Room 208N, Munk School of Global Affairs
1 Devonshire Place
Geoffrey Hale
So Near Yet So Far: The Public and Hidden Worlds of Canada-US Relations
Geoffrey Hale is Professor of Political Science at the University of Lethbridge, where he has taught since 1999. Hale has published widely in the fields of public policy and Canada-U.S. relations. His most recent book, So Near Yet So Far: The Public and Hidden Worlds of Canada-U.S. Relations (2012) is an in-depth analysis of the politics and processes of Canada-U.S. relations. He is also author of Uneasy Partnership: The Politics of Business and Government in Canada (2006), and The Politics of Taxation in Canada (2001), and co-editor (with Monica Gattinger) of Borders and Bridges: Canada’s Policy Relations in North America (2010).
His recent book will be available for sale in the 2nd floor lounge, North House, after his lecture.
Thursday, November 15, 4-7 pm
Room 208N, Munk School of Global Affairs
1 Devonshire Place
James Danky
Protest on the Page and the Future of Print, Lecture in Two Parts
Organized by the Toronto Centre for the Book, Book History and Print Culture Collaborative Program, Massey College, University of Toronto
James Danky founded the Center for the History of Print and Digital Culture at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1992, and was director until 2006. Today, Danky directs the Future of Print Project for the Center, and is on the faculty of the School of Journalism and Mass Communication. He is the author/editor of more than thirty books. His last book was Underground Classics: The Transformation of Comics into Comix. For 35 years, he was the Newspapers and Periodicals Librarian for the Wisconsin Historical Society where he developed national collections of alternative press titles.
There will be a reception following this talk in the 2nd floor lounge, North House.
Thursday, November 29, 10 am-12 pm
Room 208N, Munk School of Global Affairs, 1 Devonshire Place
Sanford Levinson
What does the recent election tell us about the importance of the United States and American state constitutions?
Co-sponsored by the Canada Research Chair in Constitutionalism, Democracy, and Development, Faculty of Law, University of Toronto
Sanford Levinson is W. St. John Garwood and W. St. John Garwood Jr. Centennial Chair in Law at the University of Texas Law School, and Professor of Government at the University of Texas at Austin. He is a Visiting Professor at the Harvard Law School during Fall 2012. He is the author of many books and articles on various aspects of American constitutionalism, most recently Framed: America’s 51 Constitutions and the Crisis of Governance (Oxford U. Press, 2012). He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2001, and received the Lifetime Achievement Award of the Law and Courts Section of the American Political Science Association in 2010.
Friday, November 30, 2-4 pm
Room 208N, Munk School of Global Affairs
1 Devonshire Place
Daphne Brooks
"One of these mornings, you're gonna rise up singing": Black Feminist Futurity through "Porgy and Bess"
Co-sponsored by the Department of Theatre, and the Dean of the Faculty of Fine Arts, York University.
Still hailed by many as "America's greatest opera," the Gershwins' "Porgy and Bess" remains an albatross around the neck of many African American performers who have grappled with its complex racial formations. This talk seeks to illuminate the secret history of black feminist performative aesthetics emerging out of a persistently controversial work of American theatre.
Daphne A. Brooks is professor of English and African-American Studies at Princeton University where she teaches courses on African-American literature and culture, performance studies, critical gender studies, and popular music culture. She is the author of two books: Bodies in Dissent: Spectacular Performances of Race and Freedom, 1850-1910 (Durham, NC: Duke UP), winner of the The Errol Hill Award for Outstanding Scholarship on African American Performance from ASTR, and Jeff Buckley's Grace (New York: Continuum, 2005). Brooks is currently working on a new book entitled Subterranean Blues: Black Women and Sound Subcultures—From Minstrelsy through the New Millennium (Harvard University Press, forthcoming). Brooks is also the author of the liner notes for The Complete Tammi Terrell (Universal A&R, 2010), winner of the 2011 ASCAP Deems Taylor Award for outstanding music writing, and Take a Look: Aretha Franklin Complete on Columbia (Sony, 2011).
Thursday, January 17, 2-4 pm
Room 208N, Munk School of Global Affairs
1 Devonshire Place
Simon Jackman
The Unremarkable Re-election of Barack Obama
Co-sponsored by the Department of Political Science, University of Toronto
Simon Jackman is Professor of Political Science and Statistics at Stanford University, and a Visiting Professor, United States Studies Centre, University of Sydney. He is currently one of the Principal Investigators of the American National Election Studies, the most authoritative and longest-running survey-based study of American political behaviour and public opinion. He is the author of Bayesian Analysis for the Social Sciences (2009), and numerous articles in peer-reviewed journals. Jackman is an associate editor of Annual Reviews of Political Science and Political Analysis, and a past-president and Fellow of the Society for Political Methodology.
Friday, January 18, 2-4 pm
Room 208N, Munk School of Global Affairs
1 Devonshire Place
Jon Butler
God in Gotham? Apocalypse and Resurrection in the Capital of American Secularism, 1880-1920
Co-sponsored by the Department and Centre for the Study of Religion, University of Toronto
Jon Butler is Howard R. Lamar Professor Emeritus of American Studies, History, and Religious Studies at Yale University, and Adjunct Research Professor of History at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. He earned his Ph.D. (1972) from the University of Minnesota, where in 2006 he received the honorary degree of Doctor of Science. His books include: Power, Authority, and the Origins of American Denominational Order (1978; 2009), The Huguenots in America: A Refugee People in New World Society (1983; Soloutos Prize and Chinard Prize); Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People (1990; Outler Prize, AHA Beveridge Award for Best Book in American History); Becoming America: The Revolution Before 1776 (2000); and Religion in American Life: A Short History, co-authored with Grant Wacker and Randall Balmer (2003; 2011). He taught at Yale University (1985-2012), where he served as Chair of the American Studies Program (1988-1993), Chair of the Department of History (1999-2004), Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (2004-2010), and Acting University Librarian (2010-2011). In 2010, he received the Byrnes-Sewall Prize for Teaching Excellence in Yale College, and the Edward Bouchet Leadership Award for Diversity and Equal Opportunity. Butler is writing a book about religion in Manhattan from the Gilded Age to the 1960 Kennedy election, God in Gotham.
Friday, January 25, 2-4 pm
Room 208N, Munk School of Global Affairs
1 Devonshire Place
Alexander Nemerov
“Swimming”: JFK, Thomas Eakins, and November 22, 1963
Co-sponsored by the Department of Art, University of Toronto
Alexander Nemerov is the Carl and Marilynn Thoma Provostial Professor in the Arts and Humanities at Stanford University. He is the author of six books on American visual culture, including most recently, Wartime Kiss: Visions of the Moment in the 1940s (2012), To Make a World: George Ault and 1940s America (2011), and Acting in the Night: “Macbeth” and the Places of the Civil War (2010).
Monday, January 28, 2-4 pm
Room 108N, Munk School of Global Affairs
1 Devonshire Place
Eric Walther
But Could They Build? Secessionists and the Civil War
Co-sponsored by the Centre for the Study of the United States, University of Toronto, and York University
Eric Walther, who is a professor in the Department of History at the University of Houston, is the author of three books, numerous articles and book reviews. Walther’s publication, Shattering of the Union: America in the 1850s won a Choice Magazine book award in 2004. His biography of the foremost leader of secession, William Lowndes Yancey and the Coming of the Civil War, was published by the University of North Carolina Press (2006), and has received the James Rawley Award from the Southern Historical Association and the Jefferson Davis Award from the Museum of the Confederacy.
Wednesday January 30, 2013, 4-6 pm
Room 208N
Laura J. Kwak
Asian-American Imperialism and the Crisis of Raciology
Organized by the Graduate Student Workshop, Centre for the Study of the United States, Munk School of Global Affairs
Two of the most scandalous American nationalist securitization measures in the last decade were architected by Asian Americans. Assistant Attorney General Viet D. Dinh was the chief architect of the US Patriot Act (2001) and Republican White House Attorney, John Yoo’s writings heavily shaped post-9/11 policies, including his “torture memos,” which illegally sanctioned the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib (2002). However, these figures have not been examined by Asian American Studies. The existence of racial conservatives attests to the crisis of “race” and raciology (Gilroy 2000), and the need for politics without guarantee (Hall 1997). The figures examined are not only prominent Asian Americans holding positions of power and influence in the U.S., they are also conservative intellectuals, pundits, and elected politicians. While it appears that they have suddenly emerged onto the political scene, this paper investigates how since the late 1950s, conservative Asian leaders have played key roles in the United States.
Laura J. Kwak is a PhD candidate in the department of Sociology and Equity Studies in Education (SESE) at the University of Toronto. Her dissertation “Globalizing Racial Conservatism: The Making of Asian Conservative Political Figures” looks at the emergence of racial conservatism in Canada, the United States, and the UK, charting how Asian Canadian, American, and British political figures are embedded in shifting racial formations. She has recently won the Anita Affeldt Graduate Award from the Association of Asian American Studies (AAAS), and holds an Ontario Graduate Scholarship (OGS). She has presented her work in Canada, the US, and the UK.
Friday, February 1, 2-4 pm
Room 208N, Munk School of Global Affairs
1 Devonshire Place
Theresa Runstedtler
Graduate Student Workshop
Fighting the Global Colour Line: Black Transnationalism in Unexpected Places
Co-sponsored by Department of Humanities, Social Sciences, and Social Justice Education, and Centre for Integrative Anti-Racism Studies, OISE, University of Toronto
A former professional dancer/actress from Canada, Theresa Runstedtler chose to shift her passion for popular culture from the studio and stage to the classroom. She is Assistant Professor of American Studies at the University at Buffalo (SUNY), and was recently a Mellon post-doctoral fellow at the University of Pennsylvania. Her first book, Jack Johnson, Rebel Sojourner: Boxing in the Shadow of the Global Color Line (2012), explores Johnson’s worldwide legacy as a black sporting hero and anticolonial icon in places as far-flung as Sydney, London, Cape Town, Manila, Paris, Havana, and Mexico City. Her scholarly articles appear in numerous publications including the Radical History Review (Winter 2009), and the Journal of World History (Dec. 2010).
This workshop is open to all Graduate students and university Faculty members.
Friday, February 1, 5-7 pm
Room 208N, Munk School of Global Affairs
1 Devonshire Place
Theresa Runstedtler
Jack Johnson and the Fight against the Global Colour Line
Co-sponsored by Department of Humanities, Social Sciences, and Social Justice Education, and Centre for Integrative Anti-Racism Studies, OISE, University of Toronto
A former professional dancer/actress from Canada, Theresa Runstedtler chose to shift her passion for popular culture from the studio and stage to the classroom. She is Assistant Professor of American Studies at the University at Buffalo (SUNY), and was recently a Mellon post-doctoral fellow at the University of Pennsylvania. Her first book, Jack Johnson, Rebel Sojourner: Boxing in the Shadow of the Global Color Line (2012), explores Johnson’s worldwide legacy as a black sporting hero and anticolonial icon in places as far-flung as Sydney, London, Cape Town, Manila, Paris, Havana, and Mexico City. Her scholarly articles appear in numerous publications including the Radical History Review (Winter 2009), and the Journal of World History (Dec. 2010).
Tuesday, February 5, 3-5 pm
Room 208N, Munk School of Global Affairs
1 Devonshire Place
Geoffrey White
Touring America’s Good War: From Pearl Harbor to D-Day
Co-sponsored by the Asian Institute, University of Toronto
Geoffrey White is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Hawai’i. His research in Solomon Islands and Hawai‘i on the politics of Pacific War memory—The Pacific Theater: Island Representations of World War II (co-edited, 1989), Island Encounters: Black and White Memories of the Pacific War (co-authored, 1990), and Perilous Memories: The Asia Pacific War(s) (co-edited, 2001)—now extends to American war tourism in France.
Friday, February 8, 2-4 pm
Room 208N, Munk School of Global Affairs
1 Devonshire Place
Richard Grusin
Mediashock
Co-sponsored by the Department of English, and the Centre for the Study of Comparative Literature, University of Toronto
Richard Grusin is a Professor of English and Director of the Center for 21st Century Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. He received his Ph.D. from the University of California–Berkeley. Grusin is the author of four books: Transcendentalist Hermeneutics: Institutional Authority and the Higher Criticism of the Bible (1991), Remediation: Understanding New Media (1999), co-authored with Jay David Bolter, Culture, Technology, and the Creation of America’s National Parks (2004), and Premediation: Affect and Mediality After 9/11 (2010).
Wed. February 27, 2-4 pm
Room 108N, Munk School of Global Affairs
David L. Leal
The Case of the Disappearing Latinos: The Consequences of (Non) Ethnic Identification for Understanding Latino Political Participation in the United States
Co-sponsored by the Centre for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies, Munk School of Global Affairs, University of Toronto
David Leal is Associate Professor in the Department of Government, and Director of the Irma Rangel Public Policy Institute, at the University of Texas at Austin. He received his Ph.D. from Harvard University. Dr. Leal’s primary academic interest is Latino politics. His goal is to understand how Latino individuals and communities shape, and are shaped by, politics in the United States. Because these are complex and multifaceted dynamics, his research spans the fields of public policy, political behaviour, and public opinion. His recent publications include: The Politics of Latino Education (with Kenneth J. Meier), Eds. (New York: Teachers College Press, 2011); and “Religion in Latino Political and Civic Lives,” in Alan Wolfe and Ira Katznelson (Eds.), Religion and Democracy in the United States: Danger or Opportunity? (Princeton and New York: Princeton University Press and Russell Sage Foundation, 2010).
Wednesday February 27, 2013, 4-6 pm
Room 208N
Alexander Eastwood
Ordinary Endurance: the Aesthetics of Settling in Gertrude Stein’s "Three Lives"
Organized by the Centre for the Study of the United States Graduate Student Workshop
This paper examines the problem of dwelling in the early work of Gertrude Stein in order to critique, more broadly, the reductive association of modernism with cosmopolitan mobility and transgression. The early twentieth century, a time of great epistemological and social upheaval, has typically been affiliated with negativity. Reading against this grain, I posit that the problem of domestic endurance in Three Lives is refracted through sexuality into tropes of wandering and settling Uniting recent queer work on affect and temporality with criticism on the ordinary, the paper reveals how Three Lives is at once invested in exposing the suffocating relationship of working-poor women to the domestic, and yet also in privileging domestic attachment as a valuable mode through which modern subjects bind themselves to the social. Ultimately, the paper identifies modernism’s vexed relationship to American culture’s preoccupation with novelty and self-invention, and the exhaustion and displacement these traditions can produce.
Alexander Eastwood is a Doctoral Candidate in English and Sexual Diversity Studies at the University of Toronto, from which he also holds an Honours B.A. in English. His dissertation, entitled “Strange Dwellings: Sex and Settling in Modern American Literature,” examines the concept of home in American modernism, and the import of somatic experience to the need for privacy and refuge within everyday modern life. He is a Junior Fellow of Massey College, and a Graduate Associate at the Centre for Ethics.
Thursday, February 28, 4-6 pm
Room 208N, Munk School of Global Affairs
1 Devonshire Place
Morag Kersel
Agent of Diplomacy: Archaeology as an element of the Foreign Relations Toolkit
Co-sponsored by The Archaeology Centre, University of Toronto
Archaeology and archaeologists are routinely deployed as “agents of the state”, acting as official and unofficial ambassadors on behalf of their countries of origin. As a result of coalition forces’ failure to protect cultural institutions in Iraq, unwanted operations in Afghanistan and Pakistan and recent inactivity in protecting the cultural resources and people in places like Mali and Syria, it is essential for the US to present a kinder, gentler, caring face. What better way to reconfigure negative perceptions than through archaeology and the conservation and investigation of the common history of humankind? Archaeology and archaeologists can and do play a vital role in furthering diplomatic goals and agendas in countries and areas of the world where an apolitical, non-military appearance is very desirable. Through an examination of various programs at the U.S. Department of State this discussion will assesses the interplay between archaeology and cultural diplomacy in shaping U.S. cultural heritage policy and diplomatic relations in the international arena.
Morag Kersel is Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at DePaul University. She received her Ph.D. from the Department of Archaeology at the University of Cambridge (2006). Her research interests include the consumption and presentation of archaeological artifacts from the Eastern Mediterranean. She has excavated and conducted field research in Canada, Greece, Israel, Jordan, Palestine, and the U.S. She currently co-directs archaeological excavations at the Chalcolithic site of Marj Rabba in the Lower Galilee, and the “Follow the Pots” project in the Dead Sea Plain of Jordan. Kersel (with Christina Luke) are the authors of the recently published US Cultural Diplomacy and Archaeology: Soft Power, Hard Heritage (2012).
Morag Kersel is Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at DePaul University. She received her Ph.D. from the Department of Archaeology at the University of Cambridge (2006). Her research interests include the consumption and presentation of archaeological artifacts from the Eastern Mediterranean. She has excavated and conducted field research in Canada, Greece, Israel, Jordan, Palestine, and the U.S. She currently co-directs archaeological excavations at the Chalcolithic site of Marj Rabba in the Lower Galilee, and the “Follow the Pots” project in the Dead Sea Plain of Jordan. Kersel (with Christina Luke) are the authors of the recently published US Cultural Diplomacy and Archaeology: Soft Power, Hard Heritage (2012).
Friday, March 1, 2-4 pm
Room 208N, Munk School of Global Affairs
1 Devonshire Place
Kara Keeling
Electric Feel: Transduction, Errantry, and the Refrain
Co-sponsored by the Cinema Studies Institute, Innis College, University of Toronto
This talk assesses what certain logics gleaned from selected popular music songs might offer to ongoing efforts to renegotiate bonds, institutions, and political possibilities shaped by the violences characteristic of capitalism, cisgender and white supremacy, neoliberal multiculturalism, and contemporary geopolitics. Making Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s concepts of “the Refrain,” and “music” available as heuristics and technologies to contribute to ongoing explorations of the role that sound plays and yet might play in contemporary Euro-American feminist cultural studies, this talk is animated by what might be called, following Édouard Glissant, a mode of “scholarly errantry.” If feminism were music and feminists musicians, it could be said that feminism’s histories, its preoccupations, its shifting and fluid subjects and debates, its styles, its canonical texts and concepts, are its refrains, the things to which it returns, its territory, the aspects of feminism that exert a force in the world. These have political indices as well as scholarly, creative ones. Insofar as academic feminism traverses disciplines and constitutes itself as such through reference to its narratives and the intellectual lineages that it claims as its own, it has carved out a terrain, a “field,” and a set of constituent, but nonetheless contested, organizations and their stated priorities, interests, and common senses. The present essay asks, what music might contemporary feminisms make when their existing refrains are placed under pressure? How might sound and music offer insightful support for generating and relating concepts to the rapidly changing present circumstances that queer anti-racist feminisms actively participate in shaping. What tales of errantry might such feminisms tell today?
Kara Keeling is Associate Professor of Critical Studies in the School of Cinematic Arts and of African American Studies in the Department of American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California. She is author of The Witch's Flight: The Cinematic, the Black Femme, and the Image of Common Sense (Duke University Press, 2007). She coedited (with Josh Kun) a selection of writings about sound and American Studies entitled Sound Clash: Listening to American Studies (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012), and (with Colin MacCabe and Cornel West) a selection of writings by the late James A. Snead entitled European Pedigrees/African Contagions: Racist Traces and Other Writing (Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). Keeling has also written several articles that have appeared in the journals GLQ, Qui Parle, The Black Scholar, Women and Performance, and elsewhere.
Thursday, March 14, 4-6 pm
Room 119, Emmanuel College
75 Queen’s Park
Rita Felski
An Inspector Calls
Co-sponsored by the Law & Humanities Workshop, Faculty of Law; the Department of English; and the Centre for Comparative Literature, University of Toronto
A chapter from a book in progress on critique and the hermeneutics of suspicion. For related publications, see: "Suspicious Minds," Poetics Today 32 (2011): 215-34; "Critique and the Hermeneutics of Suspicion," M/C Journal 15 (2012). Pre-registration is encouraged, as Professor Felski will be circulating a draft in advance. To receive a copy, and for additional information, please contact please contact Stella Kyriakakis at csus@utoronto.ca.
Rita Felski is William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of English at the University of Virginia. Her current research centres on questions of method and interpretation. Her recent manifesto "The Uses of Literature" is a neo-phenomenological investigation of aesthetic experiences such as recognition, enchantment, and shock. Her work in progress is a book on critique and the hermeneutics of suspicion. She also has longstanding interests in feminist theory, modernity and postmodernity, genre (especially tragedy), and cultural studies.
Registration is required to attend this event. To register: http://munkschool.utoronto.ca/events/
Friday, March 15, 6:30 pm
William Doo Auditorium, 45 Willcocks Street
THE CONTEMPORARY URGENCIES OF AUDRE LORDE’S LEGACY
Film screening: “Audre Lorde: The Berlin Years 1984-1992”
(Directed by Dagmar Schultz)
Followed by a panel discussion with:
Dagmar Schultz, Marion Kraft, Gloria Wekker, M. Jacqui Alexander, Carol Allain, Farrah Khan
Co-sponsored by Women and Gender Studies, Principal’s Initiatives Fund at New College, Equity Studies, Caribbean Studies, Humanities, Social Sciences and Social Justice Education, OISE, Centre for the Study of the United States, Sexual Diversity Studies, Anti-Racism and Diversity, Status of Women, Cinema Studies, and Canadian Studies.
The year 2012 marked the 20th anniversary of Audre Lorde’s passing, the acclaimed Black lesbian feminist poet and activist. Audre Lorde - The Berlin Years 1984 to 1992 explores a little-known chapter of the writer’s prolific life, a period in which she helped ignite the Afro-German Movement while she challenged white German women to acknowledge and constructively use their white privilege. Testimonies from Lorde’s colleagues, students and friends relate the beginnings of these political debates and document Lorde’s lasting legacy in Germany.
For additional information and to register:
http://www.audrelorde-theberlinyears.com/emails/orgs_english_short.html
Tuesday, March 19, 5-7 pm
Room 108N, Munk School of Global Affairs
1 Devonshire Place
Ethan Nadelmann
The Rise and Fall of the Global Drug Prohibition Regime
Co-sponsored by the Centre for the Study of Religion, University of Toronto
Described by Rolling Stone as "the point man" for drug policy reform efforts, Ethan Nadelmann is widely regarded as the outstanding proponent of drug policy reform both in the United States and abroad. Ethan Nadelmann is the founder and executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance, the leading organization in the United States promoting alternatives to the war on drugs. Nadelmann received his JD and PhD from Harvard University. He then taught politics and public affairs at Princeton University (1987-1994), where his speaking and writings on drug policy attracted international attention. He authored Cops Across Borders, the first scholarly study of the internationalization of U.S. criminal law enforcement, and co-authored another book entitled Policing the Globe: Criminalization and Crime Control in International Relations, (2006). His writings have appeared in numerous outlets such as The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Science, and National Review, and he has appeared on TV and radio programs including Real Time with Bill Maher, the Colbert Report, ABC's Nightline, a Ted Koppel Special Report, NBC's Today Show, NBC Nightly News, CBS's 48 Hours, CBS Morning News, and Larry King Live. In 1994, Nadelmann founded the Lindesmith Center, a drug policy institute created with the philanthropic support of George Soros. Read more about Ethan Nadelmann: http://munkschool.utoronto.ca/event/13536/
“We won't win until the average parent believes drug reform protects kids better than the war on drugs.”
Ethan Nadelmann, Talk to the San Francisco Medical Society on July 25, 2001.
To register for this event, please go to <click here>.
Wednesday March 27, 2013, 4-6 pm
Room 208N, Munk School of Global Affairs
1 Devonshire Place
Brett Story
Hiding in Plain Sight: Spatial Practices of Penal Isolation in the Era of Mass Incarceration
Organized by the Centre for the Study of the United States Graduate Student Workshop
In the U.S. today, more people are sentenced to more time in more prisons and in greater isolation than at any other time in its history. My project investigates how isolation operates within the organization and reproduction of the contemporary American prison system: how it is produced, what effects it has, and the primary arenas or means by which it is contested or undermined. Specifically, I examine penal isolation and its contradictions at four main sites located in the contemporary landscape of the New York State penal system: in the immediate, architectural space of solitary confinement within the prison itself; in the increasingly remote siting of prisons far from prisoner families and communities; from the densely penalized space of the urban “million-dollar block”; and in the spaces of circulation between and within urban and prison space which emerge or persist as social rebuttals to the organization of penal isolation.
Brett Story is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Geography and Program in Planning. Her research focuses on the U.S. prison system, and the shifting relationship between urban and penal space. Brett has also worked extensively as an independent documentary filmmaker and freelance journalist, writing and producing video for publications such as The Nation, The Montreal Mirror, and the Toronto Review of Books. Her latest film, Land of Destiny, is a portrait of a petrochemical town in paralysis in the wake of an epidemic of cancers.
To register for this event, please go to <click here>.
Thursday, March 28, 2-4 pm
Room 108N, Munk School of Global Affairs
1 Devonshire Place
Anjali Arondekar
In the Absence of Reliable Ghosts: Sexuality, Historiography, South Asia
Co-sponsored by the Centre for South Asian Studies, Asian Institute, Dr. David Chu Distinguished Leaders in Asia Pacific Studies, Women and Gender Studies Institute, Mark S. Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies, University of Toronto
Anjali Arondekar is Associate Professor of Feminist Studies and Literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her research engages the poetics and politics of sexuality, colonialism and historiography, with a focus on South Asia. She is the author of For the Record: On Sexuality and the Colonial Archive in India (2009), winner of the Alan Bray Memorial Book Award for best book in lesbian, gay, or queer studies in literature and cultural studies, Modern Language Association (MLA), 2010. Her second book-project, Margins of Desire: Sexuality, Historiography, South Asia, grows out of her interest in the figurations of sexuality, ethics and collectivity in colonial British and Portuguese India.
To register for this event, please go to <click here>.
Thursday, March 28, 5:15-7 pm
Room 616, Jackman Humanities Institute
Jerome Christensen
Disney Derives the Future: Cognitive Capitalism and Brand Realism
Co-sponsored by the Department of English, Centre for Innovation Law and Policy, and the Cinema Studies Institute, Innis College, University of Toronto
Jerome Christensen is Professor of English at the University of California, Irvine where he teaches film studies and romantic literature. He is the author of four books on eighteenth and nineteenth century figures. His most recent book, America’s Corporate Art: Studio Authorship of Hollywood Motion Pictures, was published by Stanford University Press in 2012. Versions of Christensen’s essay, “Delirious Warner Bros.: Studio Authorship and The Fountainhead,” which originally appeared in Velvet Light Trap, have been published in Auteurs and Authorship: A Film Reader, ed. Barry Grant, and Critical Visions in Film Theory, ed. Timothy Corrigan, et. al. He is currently at work on a study of post-millennial Hollywood, and the financialization of American culture.
Tuesday, April 2, 4-6 pm
Room 208N, Munk School of Global Affairs
1 Devonshire Place
Jens Andermann and Kevin Coleman
Manuscript Workshop
Co-sponsored by the Centre for the Study of the United States, the Latin American Studies Program, and the Centre for the Study of Comparative Literature, University of Toronto
Jens Andermann is Professor of Professor of Ibero-Romance Literature, with particular emphasis on non-European literatures, at University of Zurich, Switzerland. He is the editor of the "Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies," "Recent Publications: New Argentine Cinema" (Tauris, 2011), and "The Optic of the State: Visuality and Power in Argentina and Brazil" (Pittsburgh, 2007).
This workshop is open to university faculty members only. It is not open to students or the general public.
Wednesday, April 3, 2-4 pm
Room 208N, Munk School of Global Affairs
1 Devonshire Place
Jens Andermann
Islands, Beaches, Rivers: Latin American Modernity and the Transitional Landscape
Co-sponsored by the Centre for the Study of the United States, the Latin American Studies Program, and the Centre for the Study of Comparative Literature, University of Toronto
Jens Andermann is Professor of Professor of Ibero-Romance Literature, with particular emphasis on non-European literatures, at University of Zurich, Switzerland. He is the editor of the "Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies," "Recent Publications: New Argentine Cinema" (Tauris, 2011), and "The Optic of the State: Visuality and Power in Argentina and Brazil" (Pittsburgh, 2007).
Friday, April 5, 10:00 am to 12 noon
Room 208N, Munk School of Global Affairs
1 Devonshire Place
Lawrence N. Powell
Freedom Papers in an Accidental City
Co-sponsored by the Centre for the Study of the United States, and the Department of History, University of Toronto
Until his retirement in June 2012, Lawrence N. Powell held the James H. Clark Endowed Chair at Tulane University, where he also established and directed the New Orleans Center for the Gulf South. He has written and edited twelve books and numerous articles. His most recent contributions are The Accidental City: Improvising New Orleans (Harvard 2012), George Washington Cable’s New Orleans (LSU 2008), and Troubled Memory: Anne Levy, the Holocaust, and David Duke's Louisiana (UNC Press), which won the Lillian Smith Book Prize from the Southern Regional Council, and the Kemper and Leila Williams Prize from the Louisiana Historical Association, both in 2000.
Rebecca Scott's talk has been postponed to September 27, 2013.
Wednesday April 24, 2013, 4-6 pm
Room 208N, Munk School of Global Affairs
1 Devonshire Place
David K. Seitz
Follow the Family?: The Cultural Politics of Neo-Liberalism in Scott Walker’s Wisconsin
Organized by the Centre for the Study of the United States Graduate Student Workshop
After mass protests against Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker's union-busting measures garnered global attention in 2011, Walker cruised to a stunning recall election victory in 2012. Progressive-Left accounts of Walker's win have focused on the glut of outside corporate campaign donations in his coffers, and Democrats' failure to offer an alternative economic vision. While helpful, these "follow the money" explanations neglect neoliberalism's local inflections and cultural dimensions at their analytical and political peril. Instead of offering a causal explanation of Walker's victory, I explore mainstream labour activists' startling use of the trope of "working Wisconsin families" in pro-union appeals. Building on Wendy Brown's (2010) insight about neoliberalism not only as a mode of economic organization but a "way of making souls," I then point to local Left inflections of family and collectivity that might disturb, or even offer glimmers of alternatives, to neoliberalism's intimate incitements to make exclusive attestations of innocence.
David K. Seitz is a Ph.D. student in human geography at the University of Toronto, and participates in the collaborative programs in women and gender studies and sexual diversity studies. His dissertation research explores alternative urban, national and transnational geographies of belonging and critical political community at a predominantly LGBTQ Toronto church. Born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and a graduate of Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota, David also has a longstanding research interest in the cultural politics of race, gender, sexuality and neoliberalism in the Midwestern U.S.
SPEAKER SERIES 2011-2012
Fall 2011
Tuesday, September 13, 5:30-7:00 pm
Vivian and David Campbell Conference Facility
Munk School of Global Affairs
“9/ll” – Ten Reflections after the Passage of Ten Years:
An Opportunity to Contemplate and Remember
Sponsored by the Munk School of Global Affairs and the Centre for the Study of the United States
The Munk School of Global Affairs and the Centre for the Study of the United States are marking the 10th anniversary of “9/11” by providing an opportunity to contemplate the impact of that day’s terrible events and their longer-range importance.
Brief reflections by ten speakers will capture a wide range of perspectives – aiming to enrich understanding and foster insights at a milestone moment. The participants will include some of Canada’s and the University of Toronto’s most respected thinkers – including Michael Ignatieff, Margaret MacMillan, Bill Graham, Natalie Zemon Davis, Ron Diebert, Janice Gross Stein, Ron Levi, Louis Century, Elspeth Brown, and Ron Pruessen.
For additional information and to view the webcast of this event <click here>. To view the article in The Bulletin, please <click here>.
Tuesday, September 20, 11:30-1pm
Jackman Humanities building, Room 617
Scott Herring
Material Deviance: Theorizing Queer Objecthood
Co-sponsored by the Department of English, University of Toronto
Scott Herring is Associate Professor of English, Indiana University. Herring specializes in modern American literature and queer American Studies. While he spends the majority of his time on sexual and social modernity, much of his first book, Queering the Underworld: Slumming, Literature, and the Undoing of Lesbian and Gay History (University of Chicago Press, 2007), tracked how modern artists and writers tweaked the standard formulas of "city mysteries" or "slumming" literatures to undermine the genre’s promise of subcultural revelation. Herring's second book, Another Country: Queer Anti-Urbanism (New York University Press, 2010), winner of the 2011 Lambda Literary Award, tackles a complementary metropolitan narrative—the rural-to-urban flight to the city. It charts how U.S.-based artists use what he terms "rural stylistics" to fashion critiques against lesbian and gay metro norms. Herring is currently crafting a queer theory of material culture entitled, The Hoarders: Material Deviance in Modern America, for the University of Chicago Press.
September 22nd, 5:00-6:30 pm
Second Floor Lounge, North House
Munk School of Global Affairs
The Centre for the Study of the United States and the United States Consulate General of Toronto are pleased to present:
Journal Launch:
University of Toronto Undergraduate Journal of American Studies, 2010-11.
Co-Editors: Emily Debono and Adam Rogers-Green
In attendance will be Scott Walker, Public Affairs Office, United States Consulate General of Toronto, to present the Certificates of Merit to the Editors.
This is a private reception, by invitation only. For additional information, please contact Stella Kyriakakis at: csus@utoronto.ca
Friday, September 23, 2-4 pm
Room 208N, Munk School of Global Affairs
Erika Lee
Hemispheric and Transnational Histories of the Asian Americas
Co-sponsored by the Department of History, University of Toronto
Erika Lee is a Professor of History and the Director of the Asian American Studies Program at the University of Minnesota. She is the author of two award-winning books: At America's Gates: Chinese Immigration during the Exclusion Era, 1882-1943, and Angel Island: Immigrant Gateway to America, as well as several articles on transnational Asian American Studies and the history of immigration law in the United States. She is currently working on a book project titled, Asian Americas: A Transnational History.
To register for this event, please go to: http://webapp.mcis.utoronto.ca/Events.aspx
Thursday, September 29, 8 pm
Robert Gill Theatre
214 College Street, 3rd flr
(use St. George St. entrance)
Ashley Lucas
Doin’ Time: Through the Visiting Glass
Directed by Joseph Megel
Co-sponsored by Latin American Studies, and Graduate Centre for Study of Drama, University of Toronto
Doin' Time is a one-person show about the impact of incarceration on families.
Ashley Lucas is Assistant Professor of Dramatic Art at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is the Producing Artistic Director of UNC’s Teatro Latina/o Series, which hosts lectures, readings, and performances by U.S. Latina/o theatre artists. Together with women’s studies scholar Jodie Lawston, she co-edited Razor Wire Women: Prisoners, Activists, Scholars, and Artists (SUNY Press, 2011), and maintains a blog by the same name: http://razorwirewomen.wordpress.com.
Admission is free of charge. Donations will be collected for Anishnawbe Health Toronto, which offers the Aboriginal community Traditional Healing within a multi-disciplinary health care model. http://www.aht.ca/ Please contact the Graduate Centre for Study of Drama for registration information; Box Office: 416-978-7986. Please contact the Graduate Centre for Study of Drama for registration information. Box Office: 416-978-7986.
Inside-Out got the lead editorial in the Toronto Star, published On Tuesday, December 27 2011:
Tuesday, October 11, 4-6 pm
Room 208N, Munk School of Global Affairs
Alan Ackerman
Launch of two new publications:
Just Words: Lillian Hellman, Mary McCarthy, and the Failure of Public Conversation in America (Yale University Press, 2011); and
Seeing Things, from Shakespeare to Pixar (University of Toronto Press, 2011)
Alan Ackerman is associate professor of English, University of Toronto. His books include Just Words: Lillian Hellman, Mary McCarthy, and the Failure of Public Conversation in America, Seeing Things, from Shakespeare to Pixar, and The Portable Theater: American Literature and the Nineteenth-Century Stage. He is also editor of the journal Modern Drama.
Just Words: Lillian Hellman, Mary McCarthy, and the Failure of Public Conversation in America:
In an appearance on The Dick Cavett Show in 1980, the critic Mary McCarthy glibly remarked that every word author Lillian Hellman wrote was a lie, "including 'and' and 'the.'" Hellman immediately filed a libel suit, charging that McCarthy's comment was not a legitimate conversation on public issues but an attack on her reputation. This intriguing book offers a many-faceted examination of Hellman's infamous suit and explores what it tells us about tensions between privacy and self-expression, freedom and restraint in public language, and what can and cannot be said in public in America.
Seeing Things, from Shakespeare to Pixar:
The storytelling media employed by Pixar Animation Studios, Samuel Beckett, and William Shakespeare differ greatly, yet these creators share a collective fascination with the nebulous boundary between material objects and our imaginative selves. How do the acts of seeing and believing remain linked? Seeing Things demonstrates that the airy nothings of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the Ghost in Hamlet, and soulless bodies in Beckett’s media experiments, alongside Pixar’s digitally animated toys, all serve to illustrate the modern problem of visualizing, as Hamlet put it, “that within which passes show.” The book analyses such ghostly appearances and disappearances across cultural forms and contexts from the early modern period to the present. Seeing Things provides a fresh cultural history through theatrical, verbal, pictorial, and cinematic representations.
This reception is open to faculty and students in the American Studies program and the Department of English only. Please RSVP to: csus@utoronto.ca by October 6th.
Thursday, October 27, 2-4 pm
Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures
Odette Hall, Room 323
50 St. Joseph Street (at Bay St.)
Jeffrey L. Sammons
Yale University
Workshop on German-American Language Mixing
Co-sponsored by Centre for the Study of the United States and American Studies Program, School of Graduate Studies, Joint Initiative in German and European Studies, and Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures, University of Toronto.
Jeffrey L. Sammons is Leavenworth Professor Emeritus of German Language and Literature at Yale University. He is a leading expert of 19th century German literature whose recent work has focused on German-American exchanges.
If you need special accommodation for this event, or to register, please contact german@chass.utoronto.ca by October 24th.
Friday, October 28, 2-4 pm
Room 208N, Munk School of Global Affairs
Dick Hebdige
HOLE… swimming… floating… sinking… drowning: face down in "Noir"
Co-sponsored by the Department of Art, University of Toronto
Dick Hebdige is the current Director of the University of California Santa Barbara Interdisciplinary Humanities Center, while holding a joint faculty appointment in the Department of Art and Film Studies. He has published extensively on popular culture, media and critical theory, and contemporary art, music, and design. Hebdige has been teaching in art schools since the mid-1970s, having served as the Dean of Critical Studies and the Director of the experimental writing program at CalArts, before going to UCSB. He is the author of three seminal books on art and popular culture: Subculture: The Meaning of Style, Cut'n'mix: Culture, Identity and Caribbean Music, and Hiding in the Light: On Images and Things. He received his Master of Arts degree from the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, England.
To register for this event, please go to:
Tuesday, November 1, 3-5 pm
Room 208N, Munk School of Global Affairs
Regarding Queer Affects
Panel Discussion
Organized by the Women and Gender Studies Institute, and the Mark S. Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies, University of Toronto
Speaker: T.L. Cowan, Assistant Professor (on leave), Women’s & Gender Studies Program, Interdisciplinary Centre for Culture & Creativity, and Department of English, University of Saskatchewan
Title: “How it Feels to Hold Several Balls (in the air) at Once: The Dialectical Aesthetics of Feminist & Queer Cabaret”
Speaker: Jessica Fields, Associate Professor, Department of Sociology, San Francisco State University
Title: “A Worried Lot: U.S. Voters and the Affective Grounds of Sex Education for Queer Youth”
Speaker: Trish Salah, Instructor, Women’s & Gender Studies Program, Interdisciplinary Centre for Culture & Creativity, and Department of English, University of Saskatchewan
Title: “Masculine Energy Entering the Room, or A Close Reading of What Trans Misogyny Feels Like”
Speaker: Aparna Mishra Tarc, Assistant Professor of Education, York University, Toronto
Title: “The Queer Character of Race Relations”
For additional information, please go to: http://www.wgsi.utoronto.ca/news-events/regarding-queer-affects. To register for this event, please go to: http://webapp.mcis.utoronto.ca/Events.aspx.
Wednesday, November 9th, 4-6 pm
Room 208N, Munk School of Global Affairs
Warwick Anderson
“Hybridity, race, and science: the voyage of the Zaca, 1934-35”
Co-sponsored by the Department of History, and Women and Gender Studies Institute, University of Toronto
Warwick Anderson holds an appointment as Professorial Research Fellow in the Department of History and the Centre for Values, Ethics, and the Law in Medicine at the University of Sydney. Additionally, he has an affiliation with the Unit for History and Philosophy of Science at Sydney, and is a Professorial Fellow of the Centre for Health and Society at the University of Melbourne. Formerly, Dr. Anderson was Robert Turell Professor of Medical History and Population Health, Professor of the History of Science, and Chair of the Department of Medical History and Bioethics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He has been awarded grants and fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Science Foundation, the Social Science Research Council (US), the Rockefeller Foundation, and a Fellow for the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation in 2007-08.
To register for this event, please go to: http://webapp.mcis.utoronto.ca/Events.aspx
*Please Note: Change in time.*
Friday, November 11, 12 noon-2 pm
Room 208N, Munk School of Global Affairs
Thomas Keenan
Mengele's Skull: Human Rights and Forensic Aesthetics
Organized by the Centre for the Study of the United States, University of Toronto, and the University of Western Ontario.
Thomas Keenan teaches literary and political theory, media and conflict, literature, and human rights at Bard College, New York, where he is Associate Professor of Ccomparative Literature and Director of the Human Rights Project. He is the author of Fables of Responsibility: Aberrations and Predicaments in Ethics and Politics (1997), and co-editor of Thinking in Dark Times: Hannah Arendt on Ethics and Politics (Fordham 2010), New Media, Old Media (Routledge 2005), The End(s) of the Museum (Fundació Antoni Tàpies 1996), Responses: on Paul de Man's Wartime journalism (Nebraska 1989), and Paul de Man, Wartime Journalism (Nebraska 1988). Dr. Keenan has published widely with articles in PMLA, The New York Times, Wired, Aperture, Bidoun, and Political Theory, amongst many others. He has also served on the boards of WITNESS, the Soros Documentary Fund, and The Journal of Human Rights.
To register for this event, please go to: http://webapp.mcis.utoronto.ca/EventDetails.aspx?eventid=10169
Thursday, November 17, 4:15-6 pm
Room 208N, Munk School of Global Affairs
Reception to follow, 2nd floor lounge, North House
Hester Blum
Polar Imprints
Organized by the Toronto Centre for the Book, Book History and Print Culture Program, University of Toronto
Hester Blum is an associate professor of English at Penn State University. She is the author of The View from the Masthead: Maritime Imagination and Antebellum American Sea Narratives (University of North Carolina Press, 2008), which won the John Gardner Maritime Research Award. She is also the editor of William Ray's North African captivity narrative Horrors of Slavery, or, The American Tars in Tripoli (Rutgers University Press, 2008). A co-founder of C19: The Society of Nineteenth-Century Americanists, Blum is currently at work on a new project entitled “Arctic and Antarctic Circles: The Print Culture of Polar Exploration.”
To register for this event, please go to: http://webapp.mcis.utoronto.ca/Events.aspx
Friday, November 18, 2-4 pm
Room 208N, Munk School of Global Affairs
Fred Turner
“The Family of Man" and the Politics of Attention in Cold War America
Fred Turner is Associate Professor of Communication and Director of the Program in Science, Technology, and Society at Stanford University in California. He is the author of From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism, and Echoes of Combat: The Vietnam War in American Memory. Before coming to Stanford, Turner taught Communication at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government and MIT’s Sloan School of Management. He also worked for ten years as a journalist, having written for newspapers and magazines ranging from the Boston Phoenix and the Boston Globe Sunday Magazine, to Nature. He is currently drafting a history of immersive media environments in the decades after World War II.
To register for this event, please go to: http://webapp.mcis.utoronto.ca/Events.aspx
Friday, December 2, 2-4 pm
Room 208N, Munk School of Global Affairs
Russ Castronovo
Ben Franklin and WikiLeaks
Co-sponsored by the Department of English, University of Toronto
Russ Castronovo is the Dorothy Draheim Professor of English and American Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His most recent publications include: Beautiful Democracy: Aesthetics and Anarchy in a Global Era (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007); States of Emergency: The Object of American Studies, co-edited with Susan Gillman(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009); Materializing Democracy: Toward a Revitalized Cultural Politics, co-edited with Dana Nelson (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002); Necro Citizenship: Death, Eroticism, and the Public Sphere in the Nineteenth-Century United States (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001); and Aesthetics and the End(s) of American Cultural Studies: Special Issue of American Literature, co-edited with Chris Castiglia. He is completing a book entitled Propaganda 1776. Castronovo received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Santa Cruz.
To register for this event, please go to: http://webapp.mcis.utoronto.ca/Events.aspx
WINTER 2012
Friday, January 13, 2-4 pm
Room 208N, Munk School of Global Affairs
RICK VALELLY
Veto-Proofing African-American Citizenship: Judicial Review and the Strategic Origins of the U.S. Constitution's Citizenship Clause
Rick Valelly is Claude C. Smith '14 Professor of Political Science at Swarthmore College, a well-known U.S. liberal arts college located near Philadelphia. He is author of The Two Reconstructions: The Struggle for Black Enfranchisement (University of Chicago Press, 2004), which won several professional awards. He is very active in the American Political Science Association. At Swarthmore, Valelly teaches courses on Congress, the U.S. Presidency, political parties, and elections.
To register for this event, please go to: http://webapp.mcis.utoronto.ca/Events.aspx
THURSDAY, JANUARY 26
DOORS AT 6:30 PM, EVENT STARTS AT 7:00PM
ISABEL BADER THEATRE
93 CHARLES ST WEST
War Child Presents:
“The Future of Aid: Our Shared Responsibility”
In partnership with the Canadian International Council and the Trudeau Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of Toronto, and co-sponsored by the Centre for the Study of the United States, University of Toronto.
Join Dr. Samantha Nutt, Founder of War Child and author of Damned Nations: Greed, Guns, Armies and Aid in conversation with leading experts in the fields of development and human rights as they discuss the future of aid in our conflicted world.
Featuring:
Dr. Samantha Nutt, Founder of War Child and author of Damned Nations: Greed, Guns, Armies and Aid
Brian Stewart, Senior Correspondent for CBC and Distinguished Senior Fellow at the Munk School of Global Affairs
Biju Rao, Lead Economist in the Development Research Group of the World Bank
Ian Smillie, Author of Freedom From Want and Chair of the Diamond Development Initiative
Sasha Lezhnev, Policy Consultant, ENOUGH Project
George Roter, CEO and Co-Founder of Engineers Without Borders Canada
TICKETS:
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