Lecture Series
- Poet, Writer Classicist Anne Carson presented a Staged Reading of Antigonik for the Tolles Lecture on September 22, 2016.
- “Disembodied Voices: Authority and Identity in Benshi Narration, Wartime Radio Storytelling, and Occupied Japan National Radio Show,” presented by Associate Professor of East Asian Languages and Literature Kyoko Omori on Thursday, February 2, 2017.
- “Memory and African-American History,” presented by Jonathan Scott Holloway, Yale University, on Thursday, February 23, 2017.
- “History as Revelation: the Case of Relations between Judaism, Christianity, and Islam,” presented by David Nirenberg, the Deborah R. and Edgar D. Jannotta Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of Social Thought, Medieval History, Fundamentals, Middle East Studies, Romance Languages and Literatures, at the University of Chicago Department of History, on Thursday, April 13, 2017.
- “Ancient Myth as a Tool for Self-discovery and Activism,” presented by Rhodessa Jones, co-artistic director of the San Francisco performance company Cultural Odyssey, on September 15, 2015. Co-sponsored by the departments of theatre and classics.
- “The Secret History of Wonder Woman,” presented by Jill Lepore, the David Woods Kemper ’41 Professor of American History at Harvard University, on Thursday, September 24, 2015.
Wonder Woman is the most popular female comic-book superhero of all time. Aside from Superman and Batman, no other comic-book character has lasted as long. Like every other superhero, Wonder Woman has a secret identity. Unlike every other superhero, she also has a secret history. In this illustrated lecture, Lepore lifts that veil of secrecy to reveal the surprising origins of Wonder Woman. - “History, Memory, and Trauma: Problems and New Directions,” presented by Dominick LaCapra, the emeritus professor of history and comparative literature at Cornell University, on Thursday, October 8, 2015.
- “Moorish Girls and Cross-Dressing Pages: Chasing the Nymph in Cervantes’s Don Quixote,” presented by Maria Willstedt visiting assistant professor of Hispanic Studies at Hamilton College, on Thursday, November 12, 2015.
- “Four-Dimensional Perception: Memory, Regret, Sex, Knowledge, and a Whole Lot of Other Stuff in Proust,” presented by Peter Rabinowitz, the Carolyn C. and David M. Ellis ’38 Distinguished Teaching Professor of Comparative Literature, on February 11, 2016.
- “Negotiating the Ideal Womanhood: Rewriting the Legend of Mulan in Late Qing and Republican China,” presented by Zhuoyi Wang, Hamilton College Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures, on February 25, 2016.
- “Forgetting Gisèle d'Estoc, presented by Melanie Hawthorne, the Cornerstone Professor of French in the Department of International Studies at Texas A&M University, on March 3, 2016.
Professor Hawthorne received her degrees from Oxford University and the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She is the author of Rachilde and French Women's Authorship: From Decadence to Modernism (University of Nebraska Press, 2001)--which received a national award (the Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for French and Francophone Studies for 2001 given by the Modern Language Association of America)--along with articles, edited books, and translations. Her most recent publication is Finding the Woman Who Didn't Exist: The Curious Life of Gisèle d'Estoc (University of Nebraska Press, 2013).
Hawthorne’s research centers on nineteenth- and twentieth-century French literature, with special emphasis on prose fiction of the « Decadent » period and on women writers. She is interested in how narrative expectations shape the stories we find compelling, and in particular the conventions of life-writing. She is currently engaged in a series of projects related to the work of the Anglo-French writer known as Renée Vivien (Pauline Tarn, 1877-1909).
- “Philosophy and Modern Memory,” presented by Rebecca Copenhaver, professor of philosophy at Lewis and Clark College, on Monday, April 18, 2016.
When we remember, what are we thinking about? Most of us assume that we think about the past, in particular, our past experiences. When we remember where we were when a major event happened, we remember what it was like for us to have the experiences we had then. This is the cinematic picture of remembering: when we remember, we are projected into the perspectives of our past selves.
But if we travel three hundred years into the past, we find two philosophers—John Locke and Thomas Reid—whose theories of memory are very different from this common picture. For Locke, remembering is not mainly about the past, and it includes not just recollection, but also contemplation, attention, reverie, daydreaming, and study. Remembering allows us to contemplate a problem, navigate an environment, attend to a story, or plan for the future. And, according to Reid, we do not remember our past experiences. We remember the past itself. Because we experienced the world in the past, we remember that same world today.
Perhaps Locke and Reid have something to teach us about memory: how it releases us from a persistent specious present that would keep the world always new, yet leave it always alien. Without remembering, the present would be incomprehensible and the future would be unimaginable. Remembering makes the world less strange; it reestablishes connections to things already experienced, helps make sense of the present, and enables a vision of the future.
- “Invisible Waves: Japanese Artists After March 11, 2011,” presented by Keijiro Suga, professor of digital content studies at Meiji University, on Thursday, May 5, 2016.
The Great East Japan Earthquake and the following accidents at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant was probably the gravest trauma since WW II that the Japanese society has undergone. We are still living its aftermath with no way out in sight. Many artists have responded seriously in their work, defying an unexpected horizon looming over them. As a poet, I too have gone through a radical shift in my writing. Here I am taking up some Japanese artists from different genres to discuss the common ground they have to create meaningful works. Artists to be discussed include Hatakeyama Naoya (photography), Katagiri Atsunobu (flower arrangement), Okabe Masao (frottage), and Takayama Akira (theater). Along with a presentation of their works, I will read my own poems that I wrote before and after March 11.
