Past Events
Past Downtown Dialogues on the Humanities Events include:
February 15th, 2011: The Idea of the Environmental Humanities
October 19, 2010 : Crossing Borders. Reflections on Art, Immigration and Public Policy
April 19, 2010 : Considering Space: Photography, Hispanic-Caribbean Theater and Places In-Between
October 19, 2010
Crossing Borders. Reflections on Art, Immigration and Public Policy
Welcome
Dr. Deidre M. Mageean, Vice Chancellor for Research and Graduate Studies
Moderator and Opening Remarks
Dr. Luci Marie Fernandes, Department of Anthropology
Presentations
The Mexican Border Fence: Why it is Broken and What we Can do About it
Putting the human equation first, the author bring more than thirty years of personal observation and investigation to bear on the proposed and highly politicized ″solution″ to border problems: the Fence, all 2,000 miles, in all its iterations, physical and virtual. The author employs inductive methodology based upon participant-observation, interviews, and an analysis of local, state, and federal government documents from 1999 to the present. Interviewed are an array of border residents, educational leaders, rank and file Border Patrol agents, county officials and many others in border organizations and institutions seldom questioned. These include major defense contractors, military leaders, national politicians, environmental activists, and Minutemen.
The new border fence between Mexico and the United States is a fundamental symbol in concrete, steel, microchips, and fiber optics for all that is both right and wrong with contemporary immigration policy, national security, and public safety.
Avoiding preconceived conclusions, the author suggests specific public policies requiring thoughtfulness of the human issues involved, political negotiation, and inevitable compromise.
Dr. Lee Maril is the Founding Director of the Center for Diversity and Inequality Research and Professor of Sociology at ECU. His research focuses on issues of inequality in all its forms including race, class, and gender. He is the author of eight books published by university presses. His recent research was incorporated into two legislative bills initiated in the US House of Representations and one bill in the US Senate. Lee has testified three times before the US Congress on his research, most recently at the Immigration Field Hearings. Lee’s newest book, out in March, 2011, is the first and only ethnography of the new fence separating Mexico and the United States. Its title is The Fence: National Security, Public Safety, and Illegal Immigration along the U.S.-Mexico Border.
Drawing, Undrawing and Redrawing: Symbolic Borders in the Art of Immigrant Women
How are immigrant women artists enriching the United States through their cultural products? What can their lives as border-crossing artists and their artist visions tell us about the social meanings of borders? These questions form the basis of this research presentation by Susan Pearce, who interviewed visual and performing artists working in the United States today who hail from Argentina, Cuba, Haiti, Iran, Vietnam, and other countries. We will meet Lilian, who stood on a Miami street corner and tore one of her paintings into squares and distributed them to onlookers, and Roya, who reproduced an Iranian prison in an Atlanta gallery. Through these and other stories, we will learn about the drawing, undrawing, and redrawing of borders.
Dr. Susan C. Pearce is Assistant Professor of Sociology at East Carolina University. Her research is concerned with the political contexts of culture, with an emphasis on diversity and marginality in the United States and in countries experiencing democratic transformations. Her forthcoming book, Immigration and Women co-authored with Elizabeth J. Clifford and Reena Tandon will be published by New York University Press in 2011. She teaches in the areas of race and ethnic relations, culture, gender, religion, social theory, social movements, qualitative methods, and global understanding. She teaches a regular summer orientation course in Istanbul, Turkey for international recipients of graduate scholarships from the Open Society Institute. Her experience in the nonprofit sector included senior management positions with Catalyst for Women and The Democracy Collaborative, and she founded the human rights network, Global Women of Baltimore.
April 19, 2010
Considering Space: Photography, Hispanic-Caribbean Theater and Places In-Between
Welcome
Dr. Deidre M. Mageean, Vice Chancellor for Research and Graduate Studies
Moderator and Opening Remarks
Dr. Kate LaMere, School of Art and Design
Presentations
Space, Place and the Body: From Rentals to Prisons to Plantation Houses
Presenting several bodies of her photographic images from the past decade, Annie Hogan will examine the relationship between space, place, and the body. She begins with images of low income housing from rural and urban Australia, since they subtly suggest power structures between family members. The empty rooms reveal past events and possible disturbing histories as seen from a child’s-eye view. Next, Hogan discusses portraits of decommissioned prisons. Her images of the prison cells evoke the way architecture is used to exert power over the body. Hogan concludes with her most recent series of interior and exterior images of plantation houses in the American South. Looking at the asymmetrical power structures inherent in “the peculiar institution,” Hogan’s pinhole images juxtapose bare slave quarters and opulent Georgian houses.
Annie Hogan is a photographic artist and Samstag Scholar whose interests include interior architectural space, the body and photography’s role in representation. Annie graduated with an MFA in 2004 from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago where she was awarded the Weistein Fellowship. Hogan exhibits nationally and internationally and her works are held in many of the major Australian collections and also private collections in the UK and US. Hogan is Area Coordinator of the Photography program at East Carolina University.
Staging Ancient Myths in New Spaces: Greek Theater in Twentieth-Century Cuba
The concept of space is a fundamental idea in theater given its centrality to the production, creation and understanding of theater. Ancient Greece is considered one of the founding places of theater in the Western World and its plays and myths have influenced countless playwrights. For this reason, it is important to consider this influence on modern theater and to look at how space, through the lens of Ancient Greece, has helped to shape Cuban theater of the twentieth century. How does the portrayal of Electra differ when it takes place in Havana under the harsh Caribbean sun? And how does the story of Iphigenia set in a rave connect with the Cuban immigrant experience in the late twentieth century? By examining the return to the theatrical archive of Ancient Greek theater, this paper examines how these plays use past spaces to innovatively understand the present and point to the future.
Dr. Katherine Ford is Assistant Professor of Hispanic Studies in the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures. Her research focuses on Latin American and Latino theater of the twentieth century. Her work has appeared in such journals as Gestos and Latin American Theatre Review. Her book Politics and Violence in Cuban and Argentine Theater came out in February and considers the use of violence on stage in the 1960s and 70s. She is currently working on a new project that explores the role of revising and re-visioning in theater of the Hispanic Caribbean.
March 16, 2010
Welcome
Dr. Deidre M. Mageean, Vice Chancellor for Research and Graduate Studies
Moderator and Opening Remarks
Dr. Thomas Herron, Department of English
Presentations
Reading Dante’s Book of Nature
Like other medieval poets Dante regarded all things in the universe, animate and inanimate, as both things in themselves and signs of other things. For him the sensible world was permeated by the spiritual and was to be understood sub specie aeternitatis (in the light of eternity). The figures and events described by him in the Commedia are real, not mere empty figurations as in the usual medieval allegories. Dante wishes to involve the reader in his descent into the underworld, the soul, the arduous ascent of the Mountain of Purgatory, and then to the non-representational poetic world of the Paradiso, in order to emerge purified and illumined by divine grace. It is difficult for the modern reader to adapt to this very different world, but it could prove to be a beneficial voyage of discovery.
Dr. Charles Fantazzi’s present research and writing is in the field of Renaissance humanism. He is editor and translator in the Collected Works of Erasmus, University of Toronto Press, general editor of the Selected Works of Juan Luis Vives for Royal Brill Publishers, Leiden, and has edited and translated works for the I Tatti Renaissance Library of Harvard University Press. His studies in the works of Dante were under famous Dantisti: Renato Poggioli at Harvard, and Maria Simonelli and Gianfranco Contini at the University of Florence. He has taught Dante both in the original and in translation for many years.
Shrines so Frail’: Writers, Readers, and their Books in the British Romantic Period
That we are now witnessing the end of the printed book has become a commonplace. Even though it isn’t true, it remains a familiar, even seductive narrative. It goes hand in hand with the idea that there was, at some point, an age when the book was universally revered as an object both material and sacred, a stable, timeless repository of, to paraphrase Matthew Arnold, the best that had been thought and said. If there was ever such a time, it wasn’t during the Romantic period in Britain, when, in the face of an unprecedented explosion of print media, writers both celebrated “the book” and worried about what they saw as a frightening proliferation of print. My presentation addresses the various and surprising ways in which Romantic writers engaged with the idea of the book and with books themselves.
Dr. Anne Mallory is Assistant Professor of English at East Carolina University, where she teaches courses in nineteenth-century literature and culture, with an emphasis on British Romanticism. Her current research examines intersections of performance and sentimentality in the works of Jane Austen and William Makepeace Thackeray. Her article on Edmund Burke, “Burke, Boredom, and Counterrevolution,” appeared in PMLA and was awarded the Modern Language Association’s William Riley Parker.
November 30, 2009
Welcome
Dr. Deidre M. Mageean, Vice Chancellor for Research and Graduate Studies
Moderator and Opening Remarks
Dr. Alice Arnold, School of Art and Design
Presentations
A Watch of Nightingales
This presentation draws on the speaker’s novel, A Watch of Nightingales, as a starting point for reflections on tolerance, and the struggles of living with cultural differences. Set both in present-day Washington D.C., and 1970s Britain, this near autobiography follows the trials of an American, Mara Raynor, and a Pakistani, Kokila Bandasari.
Dr. Liza Wieland was born in Chicago, IL and grew up in Atlanta, GA. She received her B.A. from Harvard College and her M.A. and Ph.D. from Columbia University, where she studied American Literature and wrote a dissertation on Emily Dickinson. She has published three novels, The Names of the Lost (Southern Methodist University Press, 1992), Bombshell (SMU 2001) and A Watch of Nightingales, (University of Michigan Press, 2009), two collections of short fiction, Discovering America (Random House 1994) and You Can Sleep While I Drive (SMU 1999), as well as a book of poems, Near Alcatraz (Cherry Grove 2005). A third collection of short fiction is forthcoming from SMU next fall. She has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Christopher Isherwood Foundation and the North Carolina Arts Council, and has won two Pushcart Prizes for stories appearing in literary magazines. Before joining the English Department faculty at ECU, she taught briefly at Dickinson College and Colorado College, and was a Professor of English at California State University for 15 years. She lives with her husband and daughter in Greenville and near Oriental, North Carolina.
Composing Inclusivity: Notes on the Path Towards a ‘Socially Conscious’ Art Music paradigm
The art-music tradition relies on more-or-less rigidly drawn hierarchies of taste, competence, and division of labor. Thinking critically about that model, about the myriad alternatives to it, and the implications of deviating from it while still remaining grounded in my role as a composer, has crucially informed my creative and research work of the past decade. Among recent generations of classically trained composers, there has been a general trend toward adopting a variety of vernacular forms (popular, jazz, folk, non-Western, etc,) as part of the expressive vocabulary, yet such moves seldom go far beyond surface hybrid. My goal has been a more deeply considered intermediary musical turf, in which performers from different socio-musical backgrounds are brought together and are challenged to play both within and without their primary comfort zones. I view this endeavor as part of a broader effort to lay bare and question our tacit assumptions about the inherent value of various styles, modes of performance, and individual roles in the making of music. In the Downtown Dialogues presentation, I will provide an overview of my efforts. I will position my work within the context of several centuries of art-music practice and scholarship, including models from the last 50 years of other composers (especially from the experimental tradition) who sought a similar (though not the same) hierarchical breakdown. I will also show examples of the various strategies I have adopted to effectively work with musicians from multiple traditions. Finally, I will offer some thoughts on how this working method represents, for me, a way of making music that concretely manifests my social and political leanings.
Dr. marc faris grew up in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains in Virginia. He holds degrees in composition from the Eastman School of Music (BM) and Duke University (Ph.D.), where he studied with Samuel Adler, Warren Benson, Scott Lindroth, Stephen Jaffe, Robert Morris and Joseph Schwantner. His music has been performed internationally, and he has received awards and commissions from NewMusic@ECU, the Ciompi Quartet, the North Carolina Arts Council, North Carolina Governor’s School, ALEA III, the Chamber Music Conference and Composers Forum of the East, and others. marc’s compositional ethos emerges from inquiry into the social, political and cultural implications of musical style and competence. Equally fluent in art-music, popular and experimental performance traditions, he is committed to making meaningful connections with a broad musical community while still constructing rich, complex artistic statements. marc is also active in sound art, electronic composition and collaborative multimedia work; in research on underground popular music; as an organizer of new-music events; and as an electric guitarist. marc is co-founder and administrative director of pulsoptional, a Durham-based new-music ensemble and composers collective. Prior to his current appointment in the School of Music at ECU, marc was Visiting Assistant Professor of Music at Duke University.
October 27, 2009
Welcome
Dr. Deidre M. Mageean, Vice Chancellor for Research and Graduate Studies
Moderator and Opening Remarks
Dr. Angela Thompson, Department of History
Presentations
Time on the Line: Why Analyzing Temporal Representations Matters on the Border and Beyond
In discussing borders, contemporary U.S. theoretical writings often speak of an abstract “borderlands” and focus on space. As northern Mexican border writers confront concrete realities, they use representations of time to frame the way they address and contribute to struggles over values in the region. Engaging with recent writing from and on critics Jean-Luc Nancy and Henri Lefebvre, this presentation emphasizes the importance of such temporal accounts in the analysis of narratives along the northern Mexican border and beyond. While they do not impose control themselves, depictions of time help structure the institutionalization of power. A given temporal form registers certain events and actions as important, empowered in a society as what is worth noting. As anthropologist Carol Greenhouse affirms, “wherever temporality is given some determinate form, this formalism can be understood as arising from the political need to accommodate multiple formulations of agency within a single regime of legitimacy and accountability.” Thus, what is included in a society’s representations of time reflects the contests over values within that society, marginalizing what is left out. Yet narratives of all types add to the multiplicity of competing societal discourses presenting time both explicitly and implicitly. Referring to texts by authors such as Gabriel Trujillo Muñoz, Rosina Conde, Luis Humberto Crosthwaite, and Rosario Sanmiguel, I argue that the literary narratives written by the northern Mexican border authors represent temporal maneuvers that participate in establishing what counts in their communities.
Dr. Paul Fallon Associate Professor of Hispanic Studies at East Carolina, earned his Ph.D. in Spanish from the University of Kansas, where he specialized in 20th Century Latin American Cultural Studies. His research and teaching interests include contemporary narratives of Greater Mexico, border studies, and critical theory. He has published studies on narratives from Galicia and both sides of the Mexico-U.S. border, in journals such asArizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies, Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos, and Bulletin of Hispanic Studies. More recent online expression from border writers has spurred him to examine the rise of electronic media there and to contribute a chapter to the collection Latin American Cyberculture and Cyberliterature (Liverpool UP, 2007). He is revising a book manuscript on temporal representations in northern Mexican border narratives, of which this presentation will form part.
Musical Transculturation in Diasporic Identity and National Imagination
The reconstruction of Afro-Peruvian musical expression, largely derived from “invented” traditions, creates a space for the active engagement of the black community with the national imagination. Recognition of the Afro-Peruvian musical presence as representative of a national culture was facilitated by the music’s audibility among Latino cultures in the US, suggesting validation through visibility. These adaptive expressions are increasingly competing with música criolla as cultural symbols of a displaced national identity. The presentation will explore the promotion of Afro-Peruvian idioms as an expressive diasporic resource for the construction of place-identity, and its significance in the evolving intercultural aesthetics related to the discourse of the “cubanization” of a pan-Latino culture in South Florida. Contextualizing musical performance as spaces in which community solidarities can be expressed vis-à-vis the Cuban musico-cultural hegemony, this social activity provides a sense of comfort to the displaced community as an auditive instance for reconstruction the cultural self and collective memory.
Dr. Mario Rey (Ph.D, Florida State University; M.M., University of South Florida; M.A., Florida Atlantic University) is Associate Professor of Ethnomusicology at the East Carolina University School of Music. He specializes in the traditional, vernacular and art musics of Latin America and the Caribbean. He has published articles in books and professional journals on a variety of topics including issues of bimusicality, immigrant identities, contextualizations of gender, subcultural communities, and African retentions in the musics of Latin America. Dr. Rey teaches world music, ethnomusicology, music theory, and non-Western instruments, and is the director of Zamba Yawar –ECU Afro-Andean ensemble. He has been a past-president of the Society for Ethnomusicology Southeast/Caribbean Chapter, as well as a recipient of both the Board of Governors Distinguished Professor for Outstanding Teaching Award and the ECU Scholar-Teacher Award.
April 21, 2009
Welcome
Dr. Deidre M. Mageean, Vice Chancellor for Research and Graduate Studies
Moderator and Opening Remarks
Dr. Lee Maril, Professor of Sociology and Director of Center on Diversity and Inequity Research
The Americanization/Westernization of Jackie Chan: Shangai Noon as Model Minority Discourse
Dr. Su-ching Huang is assistant professor of English at East Carolina University, where she teaches courses in multi-ethnic U.S. literature and Asian American literature. She’s also developing courses in modern Chinese literature and Chinese film for the Asian Studies Program and the nascent Film Studies Minor. Her current research project involves Chinese-language literature written by US immigrant writers and media representation of Asian Americans. In addition to articles on Asian American literature and feminist theater, she has published a book on Asian American travel narratives, Mobile Homes: Spatial and Cultural Negotiation in Asian American Literature.
What Workers Knew: Autobiographical Responses to Class Inequities in Imperial Germany
Dr. Birgit A. Jensen is Associate Professor of German at East Carolina University. She received her Ph.D. in German Literature from Ohio State University. Her earlier work examined the complexities arising from the nineteenth-century invention of “innocent” childhood as they were filtered through contemporary literary texts. A monograph, Auf der morschen Gartenschaukel: Kindheit als Problem bei Theodor Fontane (1998), focused on the problematization of the concept ‘childhood’ by the Realist Fontane whose texts often depict the contradictions experienced by children in Imperial Germany: the ideological expectations of bourgeois parents placed upon them and their actual social realities as “little uncivilized beasts.” This work was followed by articles on various marginalized figures in German literature, such as the medieval leper, the Jewish insider/outsider turned outsider/insider at a Baroque royal court, and the ostracized, self-alienated son of an exiled Nazi doctor. Currently she is working on texts that have traditionally been excluded from academic canons: German working-class autobiographies of the late nineteenth century. Of special interest are the narrative strategies and rhetorical objectives that working-class authors used to articulate and potentially to rectify problems such as corrosive or pioneering gender roles in laboring families, innovative but ambivalent self-representations, conflicted communities, and demeaning stereotypes of their social class.
March 24, 2009
The Humanities in the Modern United States: Building Bridges from Research to Real Life
Opening Remarks
Dr. Deidre M. Mageean, Vice Chancellor for Research and Graduate Studies
Dr. Peter M. Green, Whichard Distinguished Visiting Professor in the Humanities
Moderator
Dr. Gerald J. Prokopowicz, Associate Professor of History
Beyond ‘Robin Hood: Men in Tights’ in a Crisis of Wealth
Dr. Jelena Bogdanovic is an Assistant Professor of Architectural History at the School of Art and Design, at East Carolina University. She earned her Ph.D. at Princeton University. She specializes in the architectural history of Byzantine, Slavic (Serbian and Russian), Islamic (Umayyad and Ottoman) and Western European cultures, with an emphasis on cross-cultural and religious themes of architecture and artistic hybridity in the Mediterranean basin (ca. 300-1500). Her interests include concepts of sacred space, cultural and religious appropriations, copies and emulations, destruction and revisionism, anachronisms, and preservation of architectural heritage. She has published articles in Hilandarski Zbornik, Serbian Studies, Athanor, as well as entries for the Encyclopedia of the Hellenic World and the Oxford Dictionary of the Middle Ages. Her current research projects include a chapter on Egyptian art for The Middle East in Focus: Egypt (ed. M. Russel), a collection on Serbian women architects who have marked the profession (with Č. Marinković and D. Ćorović) and the preparation of a manuscript on canopies in the Byzantine ecclesiastical tradition.
Mind, Brains and Cognitive Science
Dr. Nicholas Georgalis is Distinguished Research Professor of Philosophy at East Carolina University. He earned a Ph.D. in Philosophy at the University of Chicago. His area of research interest is primarily in the philosophy of mind, though he has a strong and abiding interest in the philosophy of language, especially where the latter intersects with the former. He has published articles on these topics in journals such as Mind, Synthese, Erkenntnis, Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, and Consciousness and Emotions. Georgalis’ recent book, The Primacy of the Subjective: Foundations for a Unified Theory of Mind and Language (2006), dealt with both aforementioned areas, though primarily with the philosophy of mind. His current research seeks to extend the work begun in his first book to a wide variety of problems and issues in the philosophy of language. Both books argue for the unorthodox view that certain aspects of subjectivity are necessary for an adequate understanding of mind and language. A third book is anticipated in the area of metaphysics.
Why Humanities matter to Scientist: The Case of Religion and Female Circumcision
Dr. Mary Nyangweso Wangila is the J. Woolard and Helen Peel distinguished professor in Religious Studies at East Carolina University. She received her Ph.D. at Drew University in the sociology of religion. Her research examines the influence of religion in the social process, particularly with respect to women’s human rights and social justice. This research is informed by social and ethical theory and is also grounded in ethnography as a method of survey. Wangila has published essays related to religion and the rights of African women, specifically in Kenya, as well as women in circumcision communities. She recently published the book Female Circumcision: the Interplay between Religion, Gender and Culture in Kenya (2007). Her current line of inquiry, entitled “Female Circumcision Comes to America,” analyzes the influence of Indigenous religions upon immigrants in the United States.
Literary Whiteness and the Rhetoric of Racial Passing in Mark Twain and Toni Morrison
Dr. Joyce Irene Middleton is Associate Professor of English and director of Ethnic Studies at East Carolina University. She earned her Ph.D. in English from the University of Maryland at College Park. She has published several articles on Nobel laureate, Toni Morrison, including an essay in New Essays on Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon. Middleton has also published articles on: orality and literacy; race, whiteness, and gender; visual rhetoric and film; and rhetorical listening and silence, in journals such as Rhetoric Review, Journal of Advanced Composition, Cultural Studies, College English, and in anthologies, such as African American Rhetoric(s): Interdisciplinary Perspectives, Calling Cards: Theory and Practice in the Study of Race, Gender, and Culture, and most recently, The Sage Handbook of Rhetorical Studies. She served as a Guest Co-Editor for a special issue on whiteness studies in Rhetoric Review, and she currently edits a bi-weekly blog series called “CCCC Conversations on Diversity” for the Conference on College Composition and Communication. Middleton is writing a book-length manuscript on rhetorical constructions of race, whiteness, ethnicity, and gender in film, popular culture, and post-civil rights American discourse.