Fall 2007 HRC Events

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Past HRC Events

Spring 2008 Events

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20 September, Thursday, 4:30 p.m.
The Invention of Race in Medieval Romance
117 Humanities Building
Geraldine Heng, Perceval Fellow in Medieval Romance, Historiography, and Culture, University of Texas
Geraldine Heng recently published Empire of Magic: Medieval Romance and the Politics of Cultural Fantasy, on the genesis and genealogy of medieval romance, in which she explores historiography, cultural trauma, the crusades, race, and empire-formation. Co-sponsored by the HRC Medieval Studies Workshop and the Medieval Studies Program.  Contact Jane Chance,  jchance@rice.edu or x2625.

25 September, Tuesday, 12:00 p.m. 
Intervening in Student Learning Abroad: The Georgetown Consortium Study
Kyle Morrow Room, Fondren Library
Michael Vande Berg, Vice President for Academic Affairs and Chief Academic Officer, Council on International Educational Exchange
This talk is part of the Americas Colloquium, and is co-sponsored by the Center on Race, Religious & Urban Life.  Contact Alexander X. Byrd, axb@rice.edu.

26 September, Wednesday, 4 p.m.
Understanding Promises and Agreements 
119 Humanities Building
Rice Faculty Fellow Presentation
Hanoch Sheinman, Assistant Professor of Philosophy, Rice University
Dr. Sheinman examines the nature of promises and agreements, their relation to social practices, and the basis of the obligation to keep them.  Contact Hanoch Sheinman, sheinman@rice.edu or x2718.

2 October, Tuesday, 4 p.m.
From the Electrical Fairy to the Magic Box: An Anthropological Account of Invisible Infrastructures
Technology, Cognition, and Culture Lecture Series
McMurtry Auditorium, Duncan Hall
Genevieve Bell, Director of User Experience, Digital Home Group, Intel Corporation
This series traces the evolution of information technologies and their influence on civilization.  Dr. Bell's team conducts ethnographic research on daily life in homes all over the world in order to improve Intel's technology offerings and strategic planning.  She has helped to introduce the notion of culture as a technology determinant.  Dr. Bell says, “Traditional market research tools, such as market research surveys and demographic profiling are good at telling you what people say they are doing. They don't tell you why they are doing them; they don't tell you how they do them. Nor do they tell you what they actually are doing.” Drawing on a decade's worth of ethnographic research, she re-imagines wireless as one of a sequence of invisible infrastructures over the last century, rather than a brand new technology.Contact CITI, citi@rice.edu or x5823.

5 October, Friday, 4:30 p.m.
Thomas Kuhn and Interdisciplinary Conversation: Why Historians and Philosophers of Science Stopped Talking to One Another 
119 Humanities Building
Jan Golinski, Professor of History and Humanities, University of New Hampshire
Dr. Golinski has published research on the history of chemistry, on the problems of method in the history of science and on the social history of science in Britan in the 18th century.  His most recent book is British Weather and the Climate of Enlightenment.
Sponsored by the History of Philosophy Workshop and the Cultural Studies of Science and Technology Workshop.

13 October, Saturday - 14 October, Sunday 
Conference: Sociology of Music Performance in the Twenty-First Century
Alice Pratt Brown Hall, The Shepherd School of Music
Featured speaker, 13 October, Saturday, 1 p.m.
Young Musicians and Their Careers: Highlights from the Longitudinal Study of Music Involvement, 2001-2007
Duncan Recital Hall, The Shepherd School of Music
Shoshana Dobrow, Assistant Professor of Management Systems, Fordham University
Dr. Dobrow's research addresses the question of why people make seemingly irrational decisions to pursue extraordinarily competitive, challenging music career paths.  This presentation will offer highlights from an ongoing longitudinal survey study of talented young musicians.  Dobrow investigates the nature of subjective orientation - the sense of calling.  Sponsored primarily by the Shepherd School of music.  Contact Janet Rarick, rarick@rice.edu or x4854.

18 October, Thursday, 7 p.m.
The Unitility of Counterfactual Thought: Experiments in History
327 Humanities Building
Mark Grimsley, Associate Professor of History, Ohio State University
This event is part of a lecture series on the American Civil War associated with the presence of the Humanities Research Center Fellow Jacqueline G. Campbell.

22 October, Monday, 4 p.m.
Private Bodies/Public Texts: The Spectacle of Narrative
Karla FC Holloway, William R. Kenan Professor of English, Duke University
Dr. Holloway’s research and teaching interests focus on African American cultural studies, biocultural studies, ethics and law.  She is the author most recently of a memoir BookMarks: Reading in Black and White.
This talk is part of the Americas Colloquium and is co-sponsored by the Center on Race, Religious & Urban Life.  Contact Alexander X. Byrd, axb@rice.edu.

25 October, Thursday, 4 p.m.
Atraidas por la aventura: Gender, Migration, and Mass Culture in Postrevolutionary Mexico
Andrew W. Mellon Post-Doctoral Fellow Presentation
117 Humanities Building
Laura Isabel Serna, Andrew W. Mellon Post-Doctoral Fellow, Rice University 
Dr. Serna's work considers the social function ascribed to the sonsumption of American films in Mexico in the 1920s and the way that American mass culture was integrated into Mexico's post-revolutionary nation-building project.
Contact Laura Isabel Serna, lserna@rice.edu or x2788.

26 October, Friday - 27 October, Saturday
Venturing Beyond the Beyond: A Generational Symposium on the Visual Imagery and Mystical Hermeneutics of Elliot R. Wolfson
Kyle Morrow Room, Fondren Library
Programming includes a range of internal and external speakers.  Invited speakers include Professor Emerita Edith Wyschogrod; Steven Wasserstrom of Reed College; and Virginia Burrus of Drew University.   Elliot Wolfsonhimself will offer concluding reflections and remarks on the papers.
The conference will be organized around three major currents of Dr. Wolfson's creative production: hermeneutics, aesthetics, and poetics.  Wolfson is a leading scholar in the field of Jewish Studies and medieval Jewish mysticism, or Kabbalah.  He has demonstrated that hermeneutical activity and mystical practice were more or less identical in medieval Kabbalah, that reading sacred scripture and interpreting texts - often through elaborate techniques that can only be described as creative esoteric (mis)readings - constituted a powerful contemplative practice.  He has also engaged in elaborate theorizations about God's body in Jewish thought (a divine body which cannot be seen, but which is nevertheless seen), the nature of the symbol or image in the aniconic traditions of Judaism, and what we might call the paradox of the veil.  Co-sponsors include the HRC Judaic Studies Workshop, the Departments of Art History and Religious Studies, as well as the Stanford and Joan Alexander Foundation.  Contact Marcia Brennan, mbrennan@rice.edu or x3470 or Jeffrey Kripal, jjkripal@rice.edu or x2238.

30 October, Tuesday, 6 p.m.
Public Humanities Initiative: Mexicans Look at Mexico II: Fine Arts
Baker Hall, James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy
Dr. Teresa Franco, Director of the National Institute of Fine Arts of Mexico
Co-sponsored by the Baker Institute's Latin American Initiative.

5 November, Monday, 4 p.m.
On the Eve of 1492: The Expansion of Japheth and the Aesthetic Beginnings of the Modern/Colonial World
119 Humanities Building 
J. Kameron Carter, Assistant Professor in Theology and Black Church Studies, Duke University Divinity School
Dr. Carter draws on patristic and medieval approaches to theology in engaging the contemporary theological and cultural imagination.  His forthcoming book is Race: A Theological Account, in which he considers the modern construction of race as a theological problem.
This talk is part of the Americas Colloquium and is co-sponsored by the Center on Race, Religious & Urban Life.  For more information on the Americas Colloquium, please contact Alexander X. Byrd at axb@rice.edu.

6 November, Tuesday, 6 p.m.
Public Humanities Initiative: Mexicans Look at Mexico III: Poverty and Development
Baker Hall, James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy
Dr. Miguel Szekely, Undersecretary of Higher Education, formerly Undersecretary of Planning and Evaluation in the Secretariat of Social Development of Mexico
Co-sponsored by the Baker Institute's Latin American Initiative.

9 November, Friday
El Gran Caribe: A View from the Cornfields of Eighteenth-Century Jamaica
Alexander X. Byrd,  Assistant Professor of History, Rice University
This event is part of the Global Hispanism Workshop. Professor Byrd’s area of expertise is Afro-America, especially black life in the Atlantic world and the Jim Crow South. He is presently completing a history of free and forced transatlantic black migration in the period of the American Revolution, a book entitled "Captives & Voyagers"

13 November, Tuesday, 4 p.m.
Blood Miracles and Fire Magic: The Transmutational Arts of Alberto Burri
117 Humanities Building
Rice Faculty Fellow Presentation
Marcia Brennan, Associate Professor of Art History, Rice University
Dr. Brennan examines the ways in which art museums function as numinous sites of aesthetic contemplation within modern and postmodern culture.  Specifically, she explores the work of prominent author and museum director James Johnson Sweeney (1900-1986) who drew on motifs of mysticism in order to emphasize the instrumental capacity of aesthetics to express, and potentially induce, transformational and transcendent states of consciousness.  Sweeney's critical discourses and his museum installations in the nineteen-fifties and sixties presented the works of Italian modernist artist Alberto Burri in paradoxical terms.  Contact Marcia Brennan, mbrennan@rice.edu or x3470.

15 November, Thursday, 7 p.m.
Brave Bummers of the West: Veteran's Memories of Sherman's March
327 Humanities Building
Anne Rubin, Associate Professor of History, University of Maryland
This event is part of a lecture series on the American Civil War associated with the presence of the Humanities Research Center Fellow Jacqueline G. Campbell.

16 November, Friday, 3 p.m.
Identities Gained and Lost: Confederate Nationalism during the Civil War and Reconstruction
117 Humanities Building
Anne Rubin, Associate Professor of History, University of Maryland
This event is part of a lecture series on the American Civil War associated with the presence of the Humanities Research Center Fellow Jacqueline G. Campbell.

21 November, Wednesday, 4 p.m.
117 Humanities Building
Postdoctoral Fellowship Presentation
Pei Pei Koay, Andrew W. Mellon Post-Doctoral Fellow, Rice University
Contact Pei Pei Koay, p2koay@rice.edu or x4226.

27 November, Tuesday, 4 p.m.
An Ordinary, Everyday Crisis: Between Salvation and Survival in Modern Jewish Thought
Rice Faculty Fellow Presentation
117 Humanities Building
Gregory Kaplan, Anna Smith Fine Assistant Professor of Judaic Studies, Rice University
Dr. Kaplan analyzes and evaluates the prominent twentieth-century efforts of Martin Buber and Franz Rosenszweig to re-focus on the central problem of modern Jewish thought on the relation of the sacred to the secular.  Contact Gregory Kaplan, gkaplan@rice.edu or x2778.

3 December, Monday, 7 p.m.
Making a Desert and Calling It Peace: Ideas of Wilderness in the Aftermath of the American Civil War
327 Humanities Building
Lisa Brady, Assistant Professor of History, Boise State University
This event is part of a lecture series on the American Civil War associated with the presence of the Humanities Research Center Fellow Jacqueline G. Campbell.