Baker-Nord Seminar, Fall 2006
"Information" |
During the fall of 2006, the Baker-Nord Center hosted the third of four annual integrated seminar programs supported by Senior Faculty Fellowships, Seminar Scholarships, and distinguished Baker-Nord Seminar Visiting Fellows. Members include scholars, artists, and community leaders drawn from the Case faculty as well as from other University Circle and Cleveland area cultural institutions. The seminar met regularly throughout the semester and was organized around the general theme of “Information.”
We are very pleased to announce the Baker-Nord Seminar Visiting Fellows for Fall 2006: W.J.T. Mitchell (University of Chicago), Avital Ronell (University of California, Berkeley), and S. Brent Rodriguez-Plate (Texas Christian University).
The Baker-Nord Center’s Humanities Week in April 2007 was related to the theme of the fall seminar, and seminar members participated in the planning process for that program. Beyond this, it is our hope that the seminar will lead not only to new scholarly progress for the individual seminar members but also to new collaborative projects. |
Second Annual Anisfield-Wolf/SAGES Lecture:
Rita Dove
Septemer 8, 2006; 12:30 p.m., Severance Hall, 11001 Euclid Avenue, Cleveland
The Baker-Nord Center for the Humanities and SAGES (Seminar Approach to General Education and Scholarship), in conjunction with the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards, which are administered by the Cleveland Foundation, present the 2nd Annual Anisfield-Wolf Lecture. The Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards recognize works that have made important contributions to our understanding of racism or our appreciation of the rich diversity of human cultures. For more information on the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards, visit their website: www.anisfield-wolf.org
Sponsored by the Baker-Nord Center for the Humanities, SAGES (Seminar Approach to General Education and Scholarship), the College of Arts and Sciences, and the Presidential Initiative Fund for the Humanities, made possible with the generous support of The Cleveland Foundation.
Free and open to the public. Reservations recommended.
Doors open at 11:45 a.m. for Case faculty, students, and staff with Case I.D. SAGES students will be seated on the first floor center aisles of the main hall.
Doors open to the general public starting at 12:10 p.m.
Admission tickets not required.
For more information, call 216/368-8961 or email bakernord@case.edu
About Rita Dove
Rita Dove served as Poet Laureate of the United States and Consultant to the Library of Congress from 1993 to 1995 and is currently Poet Laureate of the Commonwealth of Virginia. She has received numerous literary and academic honors, among them the 1987 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry and, more recently, the 2003 Emily Couric Leadership Award, the 2001 Duke Ellington Lifetime Achievement Award, the 1997 Sara Lee Frontrunner Award, the 1997 Barnes & Noble Writers for Writers Award, the 1996 Heinz Award in the Arts and Humanities and the 1996 National Humanities Medal. In 2006 she received the coveted Common Wealth Award of Distinguished Service (together with Anderson Cooper, John Glenn, Mike Nichols and Queen Noor of Jordan.
Ms. Dove was born in Akron, Ohio in 1952. A 1970 Presidential Scholar, she received her B.A. summa cum laude from Miami University of Ohio and her M.F.A. from the University of Iowa. She also held a Fulbright scholarship at the Universität Tübingen in Germany. She has published the poetry collections The Yellow House on the Corner (1980), Museum (1983), Thomas and Beulah (1986), Grace Notes (1989), Selected Poems (1993), Mother Love (1995), On the Bus with Rosa Parks (1999), a book of short stories, Fifth Sunday (1985), the novel Through the Ivory Gate (1992), essays under the title The Poet's World (1995), and the play The Darker Face of the Earth, which had its world premiere in 1996 at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and was subsequently produced at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., the Royal National Theatre in London, and other theatres. Seven for Luck, a song cycle for soprano and orchestra with music by John Williams, was premiered by the Boston Symphony Orchestra at Tanglewood in 1998. For "America's Millennium", the White House's 1999/2000 New Year's celebration, Ms. Dove contributed — in a live reading at the Lincoln Memorial, accompanied by John Williams's music — a poem to Steven Spielberg's documentary The Unfinished Journey. She is the editor of Best American Poetry 2000, and from January 2000 to January 2002 she wrote a weekly column, "Poet's Choice", for The Washington Post. Her latest poetry collection, American Smooth, was published by W.W. Norton & Company in September 2004.
Rita Dove is Commonwealth Professor of English at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, where she lives with her husband, the writer Fred Viebahn. They have a grown daughter, Aviva Dove-Viebahn.
Rita Dove Homepage
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Humanities Week Program 2007
Works-in-Progress Series
Click here for complete information
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Manor House Symposium
Material Religion and Visual Ethics
Rescheduled for April 21-22, 2007
Manor House at Squire Valleevue Farm and Inamori Center for Ethics and Excellence
(private meeting)
Hosted by the Interdisciplinary Initiative on Religion and Culture and the Inamori Center for Ethics and Excellence, this reearch group symposium will explore the emerging field of visual ethics. Co-led by William Ed. Deal, Inamori Professor of Ethics and director of the Inamori Center, Timothy K. Beal, Harkness Professor of Religion and director of the BNC, and S. Brent Plate, Baker-Nord Visiting Fellow and editor of the journal Material Religion.
"Information" Lecture Series:
Featuring public lectures by Baker-Nord Seminar Visiting Fellows Avital Ronnel, S. Brent Rodriguez-Plate, and W.J.T. Mitchell
October 5, 2006
Avital Ronell
"The Test Drive"
11:30 a.m., Clark Hall, Room 206
Part of the Baker-Nord Series on "Information"
Using an historical, philosophical and cultural analysis, Avital Ronnel will explore the prevalent and ubiquitous use of testing in search of the truth. Testing has become more pervasive to determin what is true, probably, or verifiable. What motivates this drive to test? Ronell will explore changes in twentieth-century toward the increased use of testing across a broad range of areas.
Avital Ronell, an internationall acclaimed scholar, is professor of comparitive literature and professor of Germanic languages and literuares at New York University, where she directs the Research in Trauma and Violence Program. She taught an annual seminar in Literature & Philosophy at NYU with Professor Jacques Derrida and has taught with Professor Helene Cixous at Université of Paris VIII. She regularly teaches at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland and in Mexico. She was invited by the Humanities Council to offer a seminar at Princeton University in spring 2006. Her books include: The Uber Reader: Selected Works of Avital Ronell (Ed. Diane Davis. Forthcoming 2006); The Test Drive (2005); Stupidity (2001); (Translations in Progress: Paris: Galilée; Berlin: Brinkmann und Bose); Finitude's Score: Essays for the End of the Millennium (1994); Crack Wars: Literature, Addiction, Mania (1992); The Telephone Book: Technology, Schizophrenia, Electric Speech (2001); Dictations: On Haunted Writing (1986) (paperback with new introduction 1993).
S. Brent Rodriguez-Plate
"Blasphemous Images, Secular Media"
November 16, 2006, 11:30 a.m., Clark Hall, Room 206, 11130 Bellflower Road, Cleveland
Public lecture, free and open to the public.
Part of the Baker-Nord Series on "Information"
Danish newspaper cartoons, the Holy Virgin adorned with dung, and photos of desecrated religous symbols, confront politicians with an axe to grind, priests with an ethical mandate to uphold, rabbis with a tradition to defend. Such religious and cultural ingredients constitute the realm of blasphemy and show the ways blasphemy is a contested, fluid, and dynamic category of meaning. These taboo, controversial, and offensive images serve as powerful components in the making and shaping of society since they reveal a general public's lusts, longings, fears, and repulsions. Emphasizing the visual dimension as potent conveyor of information, this lecture will be heavily illustrated with images from around the world.
Brent Rodriguez-Plate is assistant professor of religion and the visual arts at Texas Christian University, where his courses include, "Religion and Visual Culture" and "Myth and Ritual on Film".
More information on Brent Plate
W. J. T. Mitchell
Cloning Terror:
The War of Images, 9-11 to Abu Ghraib
November 30, 2006
11:30 a.m. (Note time correction) , Clark Hall 206, 11130 Bellflower Road, Cleveland
Public lecture, free and open to the public.
Part of the Baker-Nord Series on "Information"
In the months before September 11, 2001, the cloning debate was the leading issue in American newspapers. After September 11, terrorism dominated the news. Dr. Mitchell will explore the logic that connects cloning and terrorism as the twin phobias of our historical epoch. The clone and the terrorist are cultural icons linked by the fear of the "uncanny double," the mirror image of the self as its own worst enemy. The terrorist is the enemy who doubles as a friend or countryman, pretending to be "one of us." The clone is the figure of biological doubling as such, the inverted, perverted mirror image of a parent organism, an artificial simulation or twin of a natural person. The terrorist is the "evil twin" of the normal, respectable citizen-soldier, and the clone is the "evil twin" as such. The "war on terror" therefore is also a "war of images" that draws its vocabulary from the language of epidemiology, of plagues, sleeper cells, and viruses, on the one hand, and from iconoclasm, iconophobia, and holy wars over images on the other. Tracing the "war of images" in mass media and popular culture from the cloned Schwarzenegger of The Sixth Day to the clone armies of George Lucas, from the destruction of the World Trade Center to the Abu Ghraib torture photographs, this paper explains why the war on terror is actually "cloning terror" by breeding more terrorists.
W. J. T. Mitchell is Professor of English and Art History at the University of Chicago. He is editor of the interdisciplinary journal, Critical Inquiry, a quarterly devoted to critical theory in the arts and human sciences. A scholar and theorist of media, visual art, and literature, he is associated with the emergent fields of visual culture and iconology (the study of images across the media). He is known especially for his work on the relations of visual and verbal representations in the context of social and political issues. He has received numerous awards, including the Guggenheim Fellowship, the Morey Prize in art history, and the University of Chicago’s Faculty Award for Excellence in Graduate Teaching. His publications include: “The Pictorial Turn” (in the journal Artforum, 1992); What Do Pictures Want? (2005); The Last Dinosaur Book: The Life and Times of a Cultural Icon (1998); Picture Theory (1994); Art and the Public Sphere (1993); Landscape and Power (1992); Iconology (1987); The Language of Images (1980); On Narrative (1981); and The Politics of Interpretation (1984).
W.J.T. Mitchell's website
February 6, 2007
Rastafari and Reggae: A Marriage Made in Jamaica
Ennis B. Edmonds, Kenyon College
Tuesday, Feb 6, 4:30 pm, Clark 206
11130 Bellflower Road, Cleveland
Free and Open to the Public
Ennis B. Edmonds is assistant professor of African-American religions, American religions at Kenyon College. Formerly, he taught in Sociology and Pan African Studies and directed the Pan African Studies Program at Barnard College, Columbia University. His areas of expertise are African Diaspora Religions, Religion in America, and Sociology of Religion. His research has focused primarily on Rastafari, leading to the recently published Rastafari: From Outcasts to Culture Bearers (Oxford University Press). He also published "Dread 'I' In-a-Babylon: Ideological Resistance and Cultural Revitalization," and "The Structure and Ethos of Rastafari" in Chanting Down Babylon: The Rastafari Reader. His current research interests include the conversion of Rastas to Evangelical Christianity, the Jamaican religious group called Revival Zion, and religion in Afro-Caribbean and African American popular culture and literature.
Professor Edmonds will give a brief overview of Rastafari, then he will talk about the influence of Rastafari on musical character and lyrical content of classic Reggae.
Getting Published:
Special Series for Faculty, Graduate Students, and Academic Writers
February 2 to March 2, 2007
Scholars at every professional stage, from graduate school to retirement, face an overwhelming array of pressures concerning the publication of their scholarship. These pressures are only growing as academic and trade publishers struggle to adapt to new market forces and a rapidly changing landscape of new media technologies. This series of panel discussions brings a range of professional experience to the table – from editors and agents to librarians and deans to authors of books and hypertexts – in order to empower graduate students, faculty members, and other academic writers to survive and thrive in the publishing world.
This series is supported by the Presidential Initiative Fund grant, made possible by the generosity of The Cleveland Foundation.
Each Friday session will be held from 12:30 to 2:00 p.m. in Clark Hall, Room 206; 11130 Bellflower Road, Cleveland.
Sessions are free and open to the public.
February 2, 2007
Publishing with University Presses
Guest speaker: Mary C. Francis
Senior Editor of Music and Cinema Studies
University of California Press
Panelists: Mary E. Davis, Moderator (Music), Jenifer Neils (Art History), Laura Hengehold (Philosophy)
February 9, 2007
Writing and Publishing for Trade
Guest speaker: Andrea Schulz, Senior Editor, Hartcourt Trade
Panelists: Timothy K. Beal, Moderator (Religious Studies), Ted Gup (English), Thrity Umrigar (English)
February 16, 2007
Before you Sign that Contract. . .
Guest speaker: Gail Ross, Esq.
Gail Ross Literary Agency and Lichtman, Trister & Ross
Panelists: Timothy K. Beal, Moderator (Religious Studies), Georgia J. Cowart (Music), Deepak Sarma (Religious Studies)
February 23, 2007
Fair Use, Copyright, and other Nuts and Bolts
Panelists: Anne Helmreich, Moderator (Art History), Raymond Ku (School of Law), Martha Woodmansee (English and Law), Robert Spadoni (English), and Holly Witchey (Director of New Media), Cleveland Museum of Art
March 2, 2007
New Horizons in Digital Publishing
Guest speaker: William Breichner
Journals Publisher, The Johns Hopkins University Press
Panelists: Gary Lee Stonum, Moderator (English), Timothy Robson (Digital Case, Kelvin Smith Library), Brian D. Ballentine (English)
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