1990–1991
Theme: Materializing Culture
sep
18
Open Discussion: “New Times in Cultural Studies”
sep
21
Conference: On Fashion
Angela McRobbie and Jane Gaines
sep
27
Teresa de Lauretis
Lecture: “Film and the Primal Fantasy – One More Time”
oct
12
Lecture: “From Collage to Décollage/From Detail to Fragment”
oct
26
Lecture: “Postmodern Geographies and the Materialization of Culture”
nov
02
Research Seminar: Materializing Culture
with presentations by Phyllis Rackin and Gwynne Kennedy
nov
16
Lecture: “About Windows: The Architecture of the Media”
nov
30
Conference: Adorno and Music
with Bernard Gendron, Robert Hullot-Kentor, Mia Carter, Jamie Owen Daniel, Ulrich Schoenherr, Marcus Bullock, Miriam Hansen, Loren Kruger, Yehuda Yannay
jan
25
Lecture: “Maps and the Colonization of Space”
feb
15
Lecture: “Between Public Culture and Private Lives: Women’s Reading Groups and the Making of the Middle Classes”
apr
03
Yevgeny Yevtushenko and James Ragan
Lecture: “Poetry and Politics”
apr
04-05
Conference: Displacements: Cultural Identities in Question
This conference addressed the questions: What is the relationship between cultural constructions of identity and historical experiences of displacement? How do “home” and “cultural identity” become sites of struggle over place? What are the stakes? What are the relationships among “displacement” as a theoretical signifier, a textual strategy, and a lived experience?
apr
09
Lecture: “Reading Love Stories”
apr
16
Marianne McDonald
Lecture: “Sun to Spotlight: Ancient Greek Tragedy in Modern Plays”
jun
17
Performance Theory: Modern Drama and Postmodern Theater
NEH Summer Seminar for College Teachers
1991–1992
Theme: Visual Culture
sep
20
Norman Bryson
Lecture: “Art History and ‘the Gaze’”
oct
04
Lecture: “Feminism and Nationalism in Modern Dance: Mary Wigman in Germany and the United States”
oct
17
Lecture: “The Revival of the Sublime and Recent Aesthetics”
oct
25
Lecture: “Picture Theory”
nov
07
Mike Featherstone
Lecture: “The Heroic Life and Everyday Life”
nov
08
Edwin London and Yehuda Yannay
Lecture and Performance: “When the Eyes Hear Music, the Ears See the Light”
nov
21
Lecture: “Repression, Revolution, and Higher Education: The Case of Czechoslavakia”
nov
22
Stephen Bann
Lecture: “The Framing of Material: Around Degas’s Bureau de Coton”
dec
06
Lecture: “Codes, Construction, and Cinematic Vision”
feb
21
Lecture: “Psychopathologies of Modern Space”
feb
28
Chris Bratton
Video/Presentation: “‘The Infinite Din of Their Amateur Judgments’: Documentary Forms and Educational Activism”
mar
10 & 13
Seminar: “The Question of the Subaltern in the American Academy”
Lecture: “The Forces of Surfaces: Remarks on Contemporary Chinese Cinema”
mar
27
Lecture: “Family Pictures: Photography and Narratives of Loss”
apr
23-25
Conference: Visual Culture: Film/Photography/History
This conference explored the relationships among film, photography, and historical changes in modes of looking and perception. It was the first film conference held at the Center since 1982.
may
01
Jonathan Coleman
Lecture: “The Art and Responsibility of Literary Journalism”
1992–1993
Theme: Public Private Matters
sep
18
Lecture: “Our Classes, Ourselves”
oct
02
Lecture: “‘Uneasy States’: Politics and Gender in Early Modern France, 1500-1789”
oct
22
Lecture: “Decolonizing Theory:…”
oct
23
Panel: Beyond Exile: Intellectuals Abroad
Ackbar Abbas, Ihab Hassan, Rajagopalan Radhakrishnan
oct
30
Lecture: “’Decoding ‘Dependency’: A Genealogy of a Keyword of the Welfare State”
nov
06
Lecture: “Scotland and the Invention of the USA: The Reception of Gary Will’s Inventing America”
nov
13
Lecture: “Immediate Family”
nov
16-17
Open Discussion and Reading
dec
04
Open Discussion and Reading: Love, Death, and the Changing of the Seasons
feb
05
Panel: Questioning Public and Private: A Point of Interdisciplinary Contact?
Paul Brodwin, Kristie Hamilton, and Sylvia Schafer
feb
12
Lecture: “The Muse of Democracy: Modernism and Postmodernism in Spanish Poetry after Franco”
feb
19
Lecture: “Public, Private, and Secret: Secrecy and Individual Rights in Society”
mar
09
Reading: “Mars and Her Children” and “The Kitchen Man”
mar
26
Lecture: “Rethinking the History of the Closet”
mar
30
Lillian Faderman
Lecture: “Naked Amazons and Queer Damoselles: A History of Lesbians in the Military”
apr
15-17
Conference: Pedagogy: The Question of the Personal
This was a three-day conference which explored “the personal” as it appears in the theory and practice of teaching. The conference resulted in a book, Pedagogy: The Question of Impersonation, edited by Jane Gallop.
apr
30
Lecture: “Feminism and the Regulation of Families”
1993–1994
Theme: Aesthetics/Anti-Aesthetics
sep
10
Mark Tansey
Lecture: “Image and Idea”
sep
17
Susan McClary and Robert A. Walser
Lecture: “Does Gender Matter? Theorizing Music by Women Composers”
Lecture: “Clamor and Community in Hip Hop Music”
oct
07
“Is Political Correctness Undermining the University?”
oct
08
Tricia Rose
Lecture: “Soul Sonic Forces: Technology, Orality, and Black Cultural Practice in Rap Music”
oct
29
Christopher Lane and Leo Bersani
Lecture: “Arts of Impoverishment” and “Giacometti’s Immanence and the Anorexic Body”
nov
02
Reading, with Yolanda McPhee
nov
12
Lecture: “What Should We Expect from Reading? (There Are Only Aesthetic Values)”
nov
18-19
dec
03
Lecture: “Indigenous Media in the Late Twentieth Century: ‘Bad Home Movies’ or the Aesthetics of Identity?”
dec
07
Lecture: “Insect Space”
jan
28
Panel: Studies in Musical Culture 3
Susan Cook, Bernard Gendron, and James Miller
feb
01
Derek Jarman
Screenings: Wittgenstein and Blue
feb
02-03
A chamber opera by Morton Subotnick
Directed by Herbert Blau
feb
04
Lecture: “The City in African Film”
feb
08 & 11
Andreas Huyssen
Seminar: “Fascism and Aesthetics”
Lecture: “The Museums as Mass Media”
mar
04
Lecture: “‘Not in the Least American’: The Case of Nineteenth-Century Literary Regionalism”
mar
24
John Koethe and James Soderholm
Research Seminar on Aesthetics/Anti-Aesthetics
Presentations: “Poetry and the Experience of Experience” and “More Substance in Our Enmities: Close Reading and Kissing Cousins”
mar
25
Symposium on Rigoberta Menchú
apr
08
Lecture: “Modernism, Postmodernism, and the Heavenly Jerusalem: How Does (Should) the 20th Century Look at Medieval Architecture?”
apr
13 & 15
Tracey Moffatt
Screening: Bedevil
apr
15
Coco Fusco
Screening: The Couple in the Cage
apr
22
Lecture: “Prosthetic Gods”
apr
27
Lecture and Screenings: Wake and Taonga
may
23
Lecture: “Unbecoming White Woman: Queering an Identity”
1994–1995
Theme: Claims of Ethics
sep
30
Alison Jaggar and Julie Ellison
Lecture: “Towards a Feminist Conception of Moral Reasoning” and “The History of Liberal Guilt”
oct
06
Jodi Brooks
Lecture: “Amorous Spectatorship: Walter Benjamin’s Figure of the Collector and Roseanne”
oct
13-14
Lecture: “The Truth is a Murky Path: Peru and US Citizenship Through TV” and “Historical Citizenship and the Fremantle Prison Follies: Frederick Wiseman Comes to Western Australia”
oct
18
Lecture: “Funny Girls: Dykes & Comedy”
oct
20
Nicholas Rand
Lecture: “Renewals of Psychoanalysis: Mourning and Related Issues”
oct
28
Barbara Stafford
Lecture: “The Aesthetics of Medical Ethics”
nov
11
Lecture: “Le Marquis de Sade philosophe et moraliste”
nov
18
Arjun Appadurai
Lecture: “The Prosthetic Gift”
dec
02
Lecture: “The Ethics of Enjoyment: Queering Queer Nationalism”
feb
01
Anson Rabinbach
Lecture: “Metaphors of the Industrial Body: Beyond the Work Centered Society”
feb
08
Informal Research Seminar by Fellows of the Center for Twentieth Century Studies: “On Ethics and Pedagogy”
feb
13
Alexander Gelley
Lecture: “Artwork, Commodity, Fetish: Contexts of the ‘Aesthetic’ in Walter Benjamin”
feb
22
Informal Research Seminar: “On Foucault and the Internet”
mar
01
Informal Research Seminar: “Spirits, Medicine, and Charity: A Brazilian Woman’s Cure for Cancer”
mar
03
Peter Winch
Lecture: “Can We Understand Ourselves?”
mar
03
Lecture: “The Anthropology of Medical Ethics”
mar
08
Informal Research Seminar: “Gendering the Discourse of War”
mar
22
Henri Cole
Reading: The Look of Things (1995)
mar
22
Informal Research Seminar: “On Media and Murder”
mar
24
Duncan Kennedy
Lecture: “The Judicial Icon”
mar
29
Cornel West
Lecture: “Race Matters”
apr
12
Marilyn Hacker
Reading: Winter Numbers: Poems
apr
21
Conference: José Martí, 1895-1995: A Re-Evaluation
apr
26
Informal Research Seminar: “On 18th Century Fairytales”
apr
28
Lecture: “Sovereignty, Rights and Territory: Notes for a Postnational Geography”
1995–1996
Theme: Age Studies
sep
29
Lecture and demonstration
oct
06
Sumita Chakravarty
Lecture: “The Erotics of History: Representing the Third World (as) Body in Film and Literature”
oct
19-20
Lecture: “Alzheimer’s Disease in India” and “The Age of Things: Notes on the Body in Time”
oct
27
Isaac Julien
Screening and Discussion: The Darker Side of Black
nov
10
Susan Squier
Lecture: “Reproductive Technologies and the New Fetal/Maternal Relation”
nov
16
Lecture: “Electric Humanists: Virtual and Other Realities for Humanities Scholars at the End of the Century”
dec
01
Lecture: “Aging, Life History and Madness: A Case of Historical Recovery”
jan
26
Lecture: “Habent sua fata libelli, or Will There Be A READER in This Class?”
feb
09
Margaret Lock
Lecture: “Disputing the Rhetoric of Risk: Women Aging in Japan and North America”
feb
15
Lecture: “Hispanic Gay Literature”
feb
16
Lecture: “The Intellectuals and the Poor”
mar
1
Evan Carton
Lecture: “‘Nous sommes tous des Juifs allemands’: The Holocaust, French Poststructuralist Theory, and the American Literary Academy”
mar
25
Liz Kotz
Lecture: “Queer Photography: Rehabilitating Sentiment?”
mar
27
Anne Balsamo
Lecture: “Science, Technology, and Culture: Popular Knowledges and Forms of Institutionalization”
mar
29
Lecture: “Nation and Narration, Revisited”
apr
18-20
Conference: Women & Aging: Bodies, Cultures, Generations
A book, Figuring Age: Women, Bodies, Generations (1999, edited by Kathleen Woodward) emerged from this conference, which focused on the representation and self-presentation of women in midlife and later years.
apr
26
Tania Modleski
Lecture: “Gender and the Genre Film”
apr
26
Lecture: “Aging and the Self”
may
03
Lecture: “Val’s Story: An Alternative Narrative of Alzheimer’s Disease”
1996–1997
Theme: Technology, Culture, and the Body
sep
20
Judith Halberstam
Lecture: “Technologies of Masculinity: A Short History of Male Impersonation”
sep
26
Lecture: “The Virtual, the Local, the Story, and Its Archive”
oct
04
David Arnold
Lecture: “Inventing the Tropics: Empire, Medicine, and Environment”
oct
18
Nguyen Huy Thiep
Talk: “Viet History and Vietnamese Literature”
oct
23
Lecture: “Voice, Technology, and the Ventriloquial Sensorium”
oct
25
Lecture: “Bodies Electric; or, The Modern Scholarly Prometheus (Our Hideous Progeny)”
oct
28
Lecture: “Imaginary Ethnographies: The Anthropological Turn in Literary Studies”
nov
15
Simon Penny
Lecture: “Body Knowledge, Digital Prostheses and Cognitive Diversity”
nov
22
Jane Gallop
Lecture: “Sexual Harassment and Intellectual Inquiry: A Case Study”
dec
06
Barbara Katz Rothman
Lecture: “Spoiling the Pregnancy: Introducing Prenatal Diagnosis to the Netherlands”
jan
31
with Christopher Lane, J. Michael Bailey, Daryl J. Bem
Respondent: Jeff King
feb
14
Lecture: “Between Nihilism and Belief: Spirit in Postmodern Times”
feb
28
Margaret Morse
Lecture: “Eloquent Blood: Bodies in Thought”
feb
28
Martina Lopez
Lecture: “A Visual Diary”
mar
14
Lecture: “Close Encounters: Baseball, Aliens, and Thelma and Louise”
apr
04
Candace Vogler
Lecture: “Bad Bodies: The Strange North American Obsession with Female Fat”
apr
10
Lecture: “…To Make All Mankind Aquaintances”
apr
11
Alan Nadel
Lecture: “Black Bodies in White Space: Rodney King and The Fugitive (Slave)”
apr
24-26
Conference: Biotechnology, Culture, and the Body
This conference examined the social and cultural ramifications of reproductive technologies and end-of-life technologies. Many of the papers presented at the conference were later developed in the book Biotechnology and Culture: Bodies, Anxieties, Ethics (2000), edited by Paul Brodwin.
apr
24
Art Installation: The Lost Art of Healing
Eric Avery, Jane Petro, and Lily Pink
1997–1998
Theme: Exhibiting Culture
sep
05
Lecture: “Black War Machines: From Racial Prosthetics to Black Hypochondria”
sep
22
Leni Hoffmann
Lecture: “Exhibiting Culture”
sep
26
Lecture: “Kissing Cousins: Bonobos in our Midst”
oct
11
Screening and Discussion: Murder and murder
oct
17
Herbert Blau
Lecture: “Troubling Over Appearances”
oct
23
Stephen Katz
Lecture: “Fashioning Agehood: Lifestyle Imagery and the Commercial Spirit of Seniors Culture”
oct
31
Lecture: “Art/Nonart and the Culture of the Museum”
nov
03
Leslie Bellavance
Lecture: “Book Culture”
nov
14
Lecture: “Seeing the Signified: Art, Memory, and Representation in France after World War I”
nov
20
Nari Ward
Layton Lecture Series
nov
21
Lecture: “Creation as Reconfiguration”
dec
05
Poetry Reading: “Falling Water”
jan
23
Tony Tasset
Layton Lecture Series
feb
06
Lecture: “Paleoart, Or How the Dinosaurs Broke into MoMA”
feb
20
Jane Desmond
Lecture: “Picturing Hawai’i: The ‘Ideal’ Native and the Origins of Tourism (1880-1915)”
feb
24
Series of Three Seminars on Age Studies
Martha Holstein: “Aging, Culture, and the Framing of Alzheimer’s Disease: A Historical Account”
Teresa Mangum (March 27): “The Victorian Invention of Old Age”
Lawrence Cohen (April 7): “Discourses on the Aging Body”
feb
27
Lecture: “’Shedding the Panty Girdle’: British Women Playwrights and Issues of Feminism”
apr
03
Mark Meadow
Lecture: “Microcosms: Objects of Knowledge (A University Collects)”
apr
16-18
This conference explored the physical sites and structures of exhibition and the conditions of display of art, artifacts, and cultures, as well as the status of the objects of exhibition and collections.
1998–1999
Theme: Cultures of Knowledge
sep
11
Rey Chow
Lecture: “The Study of China in the Age of Theory”
sep
25
Robert N. Butler
Lecture: “Life in an Older America: The 21st Century”
oct
09
Lecture: “Writing a History of the Modern Fact: Some Reflections on Epistemological History”
oct
23
Lecture: “What’s Happening to Our Class? Can History Tell?”
Respondents: Jennifer Maher and Richard Nanian
oct
30
Lecture: “French DNA”
nov
02
Lecture: “Imaging in Electronic Media”
nov
13
Louise Antony and Sally Haslanger
Lectures: “Objectivity In Situ” and “Defining Knowledge: Feminist Politics and Normative Epistemology”
nov
19
Lecture: “Rhapsodie Cubaine”
feb
11
Lecture: “Childhood, Sentimentality, and Scandal”
feb
12-13
Workshop: Anthropology, Genetic Diversity, and Ethics
Mike Bamshad, Frank Dukepoo, Morris Foster, Jonathan Friedlaender, Henry Greely, Lynn Jorde, Eric Juengst, Frederika Kaestle, Jeffrey Long, Alice Martin, J.M. Naidu, Dennis O’Rourke, Charmaine Royal
Organized by Trudy Turner
mar
24
Question and Answer Session
mar
26
Lecture: “Victims, Witnesses, Observers: Responses to the Holocaust in Polish and American Literature”
Respondents: Daniel Listoe and Gary Weissman
apr
13
Lecture: “If Cahonaboa Learns to Speak… Amerindian Voice in the Discourse of Discovery”
apr
23
Anne Davis Basting and Dick Blau
Lecture: “Time Slips: Storytelling with People with Alzheimer’s”
apr
29
Conference: Knowing Mass Culture/Mediating Knowledge
This conference focused on the production of knowledge within global media culture. It considered not only how scholars have come to know media culture, but how media and mass cultural forms have themselves instituted various forms of knowledge.
1999–2000
Theme: Representing Animals
sep
24
Lecture: “Connecting with Animals”
oct
01
Andrew Ross
Lecture: “Living with the Mouse: A Report from Celebration, Florida”
oct
08
Lecture: “Animal Relatives, Difficult Relations”
oct
12
George Gittoes
Lecture: “Art and Atrocity”
nov
12
Lecture: “Electric Animal: Ontology, Psyche, Film and Wild Technology”
nov
19
Lecture: “Purebreds and Amazons: Saying Things with Horses in Nineteenth-Century France”
dec
01
Matthew Groshek
Lecture: “Design Unleashed?”
dec
03
Lecture: “The Meaning of Life: How People Differ from (Other) Animals”
feb
24
Lecture: “The Invention of Meaning”
mar
04
Time Slips Series Art Exhibit
Dick Blau and Beth Thielen
mar
13
Lecture: “Constructing an Ancestor: The Architecture of the Jin Shrines”
mar
15
Lecture: “Rank and Gender in the Shang Center of Anyang”
mar
29
Time Slips Series Roundtable Discussion: Is There an Art to Healthcare?
Dick Blau and Beth Thielen
apr
11
Lecture: “Holocaust Photographs and the Work of Postmemory”
apr
13-15
Conference: Representing Animals
This conference traced how animals have been represented in different contexts and by different practices over the course of the last two centuries, exploring the connections between our understandings of animals and the historical and cultural conditions in which these understandings have been formed.
Organized by Nigel Rothfels and Andrew Isenberg
apr
17
Lecture: “Imaginary Ethnographies: The Boundaries of the Human”
apr
28
Lecture: “Injustice and Animals”
may
12-20
Play: Time Slips
Written by Anne Basting
Directed by Gülgün Kayim
1970s: Film, Performance, Language, and Technology