CSUS Speaker Series 2009-2010
Fall 2009
Edlie Wong
The Gender of Freedom before Dred Scott
Co-sponsored with the Faculty of Law, University of Toronto, as part of the Law & Literature Workshop Series 2009 - 2010.
Edlie Wong is Associate Professor of English at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, New Brunswick. She is the author of Neither Fugitive nor Free: Atlantic Slavery, Freedom Suits, and the Legal Culture of Travel (NYU, 2009), and has published in American Literature, African American Review, American Quarterly, Prose Studies, and elsewhere.
Please note: This will be a discussion of a pre-circulated paper, which will be available 1-2 weeks in advance. To receive a copy, please email n.gulezko@utoronto.ca. A light lunch will be provided.
FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 18, 2009
12:30-2:00 PM
Falconer House Solarium, Faculty of Law
84 Queen's Park West
Lori Brown
Politicizing the Female Body:
Examining the Space of Abortion Clinics
Lori Brown is Associate Professor of Architecture at Syracuse University, as well as a practicing architect. Her design, speculative work, and teaching seek to broaden the discourse and involvement of architecture in our world. In 2008, Prof. Brown was awarded the American Institute of Architects Diversity Best Practice Honorable Mention, and a commendation for the Milka Bliznakov Prize for her travelling exhibition, feminist practices.
FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 25, 2009
ROOM 108N, 2:00-4:00 PM
Sharon Zukin & Harvey Molotch
Co-sponsored with the Department of Geography, as part of their Intersections lecture series.
City Stuff: The Role of Artifacts in the Study of Urban Life and Form
Drawing on examples from the history of social science, including some of my own more recent work, I try to show how studying artifacts, both everyday and more specialized can further understandings of geographical place and accompanying social lives. Objects in question cover such diverse elements as art works, living room furniture, drug syringes and airport security gates.
FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 25, 2009, 3-5 PM
Sidney Smith Hall, Room 1069
Elspeth Brown
De Meyer and Dolores at Vogue: Commercializing Queer Affect in WWI-Era Fashion Photography
Elspeth H. Brown is Director of the Centre for the Study of the United States and Associate Professor of History at the University of Toronto. She is the author of The Corporate Eye: Photography and the Rationalization of American Commercial Culture, 1884-1929 (Johns Hopkins, 2005), and co-editor of Cultures of Commerce: Representation and American Business Culture, 1877-1960 (Palgrave, 2006).
FRIDAY, OCTOBER 2, 2009
ROOM 208N, 4:00-6:00 PM
PLEASE NOTE CHANGE IN DATE/TIME AND LOCATION
Obama-Watch#1
The first in a series of roundtables, lectures, and workshops that explores the Obama administration's approach to current policy questions.
Obama-Watch: Borders, North and South.
Convened by Professor Ron Pruessen, Department of History, and Professor Ryan Hurl, Department of Political Science.
Speakers:
Matt Farish
Assistant Professor, Dept. of Geography and Planning
Emily Gilbert
Director, Canadian Studies Program, Graduate Program in Geography
Kevin O’Neill
Assistant Professor, Department and Centre for the Study of Religion, Centre for Diaspora and Transnational Studies
THURSDAY, OCTOBER 29, 2009
ROOM 208N, 12 NOON-2:00 PM
David L. Leal
The Latino Vote in U.S. Presidential Elections:
Past, Present, and Future
Co-sponsored by the Canada Research Chair in Immigration and& Governance, the Centre for the Study of the United States, and the Joint Initiative in German and European Studies.
David L. Leal is Associate Professor of Government, Faculty Associate of the Center for Mexican-American Studies, and Director of the Public Policy Institute at the University of Texas at Austin. His primary academic interest is Latino politics, and his work explores a variety of questions involving public opinion, political behaviour, and public policy. He has published over forty articles and book chapters on these and other topics. He is also the co-editor of Beyond the Barrio: Latinos and the 2008 Elections (forthcoming, University of Notre Dame Press), Immigration Policy and Security (2008, Routledge), and Latino Politics: Identity, Mobilization, and Representation (2007, University of Virginia Press). Dr. Leal is a member of the editorial boards of Social Science Quarterly, American Politics Research, and State Politics & Policy Quarterly, and was an American Political Science Association Congressional Fellow. He received his Ph.D. in Political Science from Harvard University in 1998.
THURSDAY, OCTOBER 29th
ROOM 108N, 5:00-7:00 PM
Rob King
The Art of Diddling: Slapstick, Science, and Antimodernism in the Films of Charley Bowers
Rob King is Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto's Cinema Studies Institute and the Department of History, where he researches and teaches early American film and popular culture, comedy in particular. He is the author of The Fun Factory: The Keystone Film Company and the Emergence of Mass Culture (UC, 2008), and co-editor of Slapstick Comedy (Routledge, forthcoming 2010). Prof. King is currently working on a history of short film comedies and Depression-era US culture.
FRIDAY, OCTOBER 30, 2009
ROOM 108N, 4:00-6:00 PM
Jason Hackworth
The Curious Durability of Faith in American Welfare
Jason Hackworth is Associate Professor in the Department of Geography at the University of Toronto. His research centres on urban and economic issues, primarily in North America. Prof. Hackworth is currently writing a book about religious welfare provision in the United States.
FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 20, 2009
ROOM 108N, 4:00-6:00 PM
Rogers M. Smith
Understanding the American Symbiosis of Rights and Racism
Sponsored by the Department of Political Science; co-sponsored by The Faculty of Law and the Centre for the Study of the United States
Rogers M. Smith is the Christopher H. Browne Distinguished Professor of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania. His research concerns American constitutional law, American political thought, and modern legal and political theory, with special interests in questions of citizenship, race, ethnicity, and gender. He is the author of numerous books and articles, including: Stories of Peoplehood: The Politics and Morals of Political Memberships (Cambridge, 2003); The Unsteady March: The Rise and Decline of Racial Equality in America, with Philip A. Klinkner, (Chicago, 1999); and Civic Ideals: Conflicting Visions of Citizenship in U.S. History (Yale, 1997).
FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 20, 2009, 2:00-4:00 PM
Sidney Smith Hall Room 3130
Obama Watch#2
The second in a series of roundtables, lectures, and workshops that explores the Obama administration's approach to current policy questions.
Obama's Queer Agenda
Convened by Professor Ron Pruessen, Department of History, and Ryan Hurl, Department of Political Science, University of Toronto.
Speakers:
David Rayside, Department of Political Science and Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies
Brenda Cossman, Director, Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies; Faculty of Law
Rinaldo Walcott, Department of Sociology and Equity Studies in Education, OISE; Canada Research Chair for Social Justice and Cultural Studies
Elspeth Brown, Director, Centre for the Study of the United States and American Studies; Department of History
TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 24, 2009
ROOM 108N, 4:00-6:00 PM
Kathryn Lofton
What is an Oprah? Celebrity and Spiritual Capitalism in Modern America
Co-sponsored with the Department and Centre for the Study of Religion, Centre for Diaspora and Transnational Studies
Kathryn Lofton, formerly a long-term fellow at the Center for the Study of Religion at Princeton University, is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies and American Studies at Yale University. The author of Oprah: The Gospel of an Icon (UC, forthcoming), Prof. Lofton is currently working on her second monograph, The Modernity in Mr. Shaw: Modernisms and Fundamentalisms in American Culture. That study examines the formation of sexual identity through the life of John Balcom Shaw (1860-1935), Presbyterian editor of The Fundamentals, who was remitted from the ministry following accusations of sodomy in 1918.
MONDAY, DECEMBER 7, 2009
ROOM 108N, 4:00-6:00 PM
Derek Gregory
AnOther Order of Things: Military Imaginaries and the Middle East
Co-sponsored by the Department of Geography, the Centre for the Study of the United States, the Centre for International Studies, the Trudeau Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies, and the Department of Sociology and Equity Studies in Education, OISE.
Derek Gregory was a Lecturer in Geography at the University of Cambridge for 16 years, before moving to UBC as Professor of Geography in 1989. He is a Fellow of both the British Academy and the Royal Society of Canada, and in 2006, was awarded the Founder's Medal of the Royal Geographical Society in London for his work on social theory and human geography. His most recent book is The Colonial Present: Afghanistan, Palestine, Iraq, described by the Los Angeles Times as "must-read heresy," and his next book will be entitled, War Cultures.
TUESDAY, DECEMBER 8, 2009
ROOM 108N, 5:00-7:00 PM
Winter 2010
Marta Braun
Muybridge's Models
Marta Braun teaches art history, photographic history, and film theory in the Ryerson School of Image Arts. She is an internationally renowned historian of art, film, and photography, and is a noted expert on E.J. Marey and Eadweard Muybridge. In 1994, her book Picturing Time: The Work of Etienne Jules Marey, was shortlisted for Britain's Kraszna-Krausz Award, a prize given bi-annually for the best internationally published book on photography. She won this award in 1999, along with four other authors, for the collection of essays titled, Beauty of Another Order: Photography in Science. Professor Braun has lived and worked in France, and is thoroughly familiar with French language and culture. She was made a Knight of the Order of Academic Palms by the Government of France in 1996, in recognition of her contribution to the cause of French knowledge, culture, scientific progress, and education.
FRIDAY, JANUARY 15, 2010
ROOM 108N, 4:00-6:00 PM
Obama Watch Roundtable #3
The third in a series of roundtables, lectures, and workshops that explores the Obama administration's approach to current policy challenges
FRIDAY, JANUARY 22, 2010
ROOM 108N, 4:00-6:00 PM
DAVID C. ENGERMAN
Knowing the Cold War Enemy
Co-sponsored by the Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology, the Centre for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies, and the Centre for the Study of the United States.
David C. Engerman is Associate Professor of History at Brandeis University, where he has taught since receiving his PhD from the University of California-Berkeley in 1998. His revised dissertation appeared as Modernization from the Other Shore: American Intellectuals and the Romance of Russian Development (Harvard, 2003). He also edited and introduced a new edition of The God That Failed (Columbia, 2001), and co-edited Staging Growth: Modernization, Development, and the Global Cold War (Massachusetts, 2003). Named the Stuart Bernath Lecturer by the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations for 2006, his lecture, “American Knowledge and Global Power,” then appeared in Diplomatic History; other articles have appeared in American Historical Review, Cahiers du Monde russe, Journal of Cold War Studies, Kritika, Modern Intellectual History, and the Cambridge History of the Cold War (Cambridge, 2009). His most recent book, Know Your Enemy: The Rise and Fall of America’s Russia Experts (Oxford, 2009), examined Russian/Soviet Studies in America since 1940. He is currently working on two projects at the intersection of intellectual and international history in the latter half of the twentieth century.
WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 27, 4-6 PM
VICTORIA UNIVERSITY, Room VC323
Atlantic Slavery, Atlantic Freedom: George
Washington, Slavery, and Abolitionism
François Furstenberg teaches American history at the Université de Montréal. He is the author of In The Name of the Father: Washington's Legacy, Slavery, and the Making of a Nation, published in 2006, and is now working on a project connecting French and U.S. history during the late eighteenth century. He is currently a fellow at the Cullman Center for Writers at Scholars at the New York Public Library.
FRIDAY, JANUARY 29, 2010
ROOM 108N, 4:00-6:00 PM
Angela Blake
Fear, Freeways, and Citizens Band Radio in 1970s Los Angeles
Angela Blake is Associate Professor in the Department of History at Ryerson University where she teaches U.S. and Urban History. She is the author of How New York Became American, 1890-1924 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), and is currently working on a book project about the post-1945 soundscapes of New York City and Los Angeles. Her talk is based on a chapter from that project.
FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 5, 2010
ROOM 108N, 4:00-6:00 PM
Neal Dolan
“All the Way Down?” Emerson, Rawls, Puritan Preaching, and Liberal Values.
Neal Dolan is Associate Professor of American Literature at University of Toronto, Scarborough. He earned a B.A. from Yale University in 1986, and a Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1999. He is interested in the nature of liberal culture and the place of literature within it. His book on Emerson and liberal culture, entitled Emerson's Liberalism, was published by University of Wisconsin Press in July 2009.
FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 26, 2010
ROOM 108N, 4:00-6:00 PM
Obama Watch Roundtable #4
The fourth in a series of roundtables, lectures, and workshops that explores the Obama administration's approach to current policy challenges
FRIDAY, MARCH 5, 2010
ROOM 108N, 4:00-6:00 PM
Roseanne Currarino
Reimagining Democracy in Turn-of-the-Century America
Rosanne Currarino is Associate Professor of History at Queen’s University, where she teaches nineteenth century history with a focus on economic and intellectual history. She is the author of the forthcoming book, The Labor Question in America: Economic Democracy in the Gilded Age, and has published articles in the Journal of American History, Labor History, and Men and Masculinities. She has begun work on a new project on economic imagination during the nineteenth century.
FRIDAY, MARCH 12, 2010
ROOM 108N, 4:00-6:00PM
Regina Lee Blaszczyk
American Consumer Society: The Boomer Generation
Regina Lee Blaszczyk, Ph.D. is an independent scholar based in Philadelphia and affiliated with the Department of the History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania. Her interdisciplinary work focuses on the history of consumer society, design and fashion, and corporate innovation. She is the author or editor of six books, including Rohm and Haas: Innovation through Collaboration (2009), and American Consumer Society, 1865-2005: From Hearth to HDTV (2009).
WEDNESDAY, MARCH 17, 2010
ROOM 108N, 4:00-6:00 PM
Gage Averill
Mainstreet USA: Nostalgia and the Unreal Estate at the Heart of Barbershop Singing
Gage Averill is Vice-Principal Academic and Dean of the University of Toronto Mississauga and formerly served as Dean of Music at the University of Toronto and Chair of NYU’s Department of Music. He is currently President of the Society for Ethnomusicology.
Averill is an ethnomusicologist, specializing in popular music of the Caribbean and North American vernacular music. His book on barbershop singing (Four Parts, No Waiting: A Social History of American Barbershop Harmony, Oxford 2003) won best book prizes from the Society for Ethnomusicology and the Society for American Music, and his book on Haitian popular music and power (A Day for the Hunter: A Day for the Prey: Popular Music and Power in Haiti, Chicago 1997) was awarded the best book prize in ethnic and folk research by the Association for Recorded Sound Collections.
FRIDAY, March 19, 2010
ROOM 108N, 4:00-6:00 PM
Martin Berger
In Black and White: Civil Rights Photography and the Politics of Race
Co-sponsored by the Toronto Photography Seminar and the Centre for the Study of the United States.
Martin Berger is Professor and Director of the Visual Studies graduate program at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He is the author of two books: Man Made: Thomas Eakins and the Construction of Gilded Age Manhood (2000), and Sight Unseen: Whiteness and American Visual Culture (2005), the latter of which won the American Culture Association’s John C. Cawelti Award. His current book project on the photography of the black civil rights struggle will be published by the University of California Press in 2011.
THURSDAY, March 25, 2010
ROOM 208N, 4:00-6:00 PM
All events are free and open to the public. Registration is encouraged via http://webapp.mcis.utoronto.ca/Events.aspx (though please note: registration does not guarantee a space, which is available first come, first served). Unless otherwise noted, lectures are given at the Munk Centre for International Studies, University of Toronto, 1 Devonshire Place, Room 108N or 208N, or in Sidney Smith Hall, 100 St. George Street, Toronto. The F. Ross Johnson-Connaught Distinguished Speaker Series in American Studies is coordinated by Prof. Jeannine DeLombard (English) and Prof. Matt Farish (Geography). Questions or comments for any of the events listed here can be directed to Stella Kyriakakis, administrator for CSUS, at 416-946-8972 or csus@utoronto.ca; or contact Elspeth Brown, CSUS Director, at 416-946-8011 or csus.director@utoronto.ca.
The F. Ross Johnson-Connaught Distinguished Speaker Series in American Studies, as well as other events in our series, is made possible through a generous gift the University of Toronto by F. Ross Johnson and by funds from the University of Toronto’s Connaught Fund, designed to support outstanding research at the University. Many thanks to F. Ross Johnson, and to the Connaught Fund, for endowing this series.
About the Centre for the Study of the United States:
CSUS was founded in 1999 at the University of Toronto as an interdisciplinary research and teaching centre devoted to the study of the United States. Housed in the Munk Centre for International Studies, CSUS brings together the research and teaching of more than 75 Americanist scholars at the University of Toronto; runs a vibrant undergraduate American Studies major and minor program; and fosters public programming concerning the United States. For more information, including directions to the Munk Centre, please see our website at http://www.utoronto.ca/csus
Contact Information:
Centre for the Study of the United States
Munk Centre for International Studies
University of Toronto
1 Devonshire Place
Toronto, Ontario
M5S 3K7 CANADA
http://www.utoronto.ca/csus
Elspeth Brown , Director
Munk 326N
Tel: 416 946 8011; Fax: 416 946 8915
csus.director@utoronto.ca
Stella Kyriakakis , Administrator
Munk 327N
Tel: 416 946 8972; fax 416 946 8915
csus@utoronto.ca
